The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  Hitherto in my life I had most successfully avoided the bond that links man to man, though I had paid it some lip service; the closest and most serious connections I had ever known had been with people like Joe, Roger, and indeed George, connections which seem trivial enough to recount but upon which I had expended a good deal of attention as idle, refined, educated single girls will: and, fool that I was, I thought that this was what life was about. I was never fool enough to think that one can get something for nothing; I knew one had to pay one's way and I considered that I had paid mine by the wit of my conversation, by a certain inherited prestige, by having a nice flat for parties, and by possessing a fine pair of legs. These things were as nothing compared with the bonds that bind parent and child, husband and wife, child and aged parent, where money and responsibility are all that count, but I did not find that out until much later. However, it did occur to me one day, quite early on, that although I recognized the principle of payment, I had some basic deficiency when it came to taking appropriate goods in exchange.

  It occurred to me one day in the clinic, when I was five months gone, and feeling rather well, as one does at that stage. I was sitting patiently waiting, having arrived unavoidably late, and was leafing through Rosamund Tuve, when somebody came and sat down on the chair next to me. The chair groaned under her weight, but I did not look up immediately, having reached an interesting point about George Herbert: after a minute or so, however, I became aware that a small child was standing on my foot, so I looked at it, ready to make disapproving shufflings. It was a small boy, about two, wearing corduroy trousers of considerable dirty shabbiness, a brown jacket, and a grey knitted balaclava helmet. He looked tired and pathetic and I glanced at his mother with curiosity. She was a large, short woman with dark hair and an old green coat, and there was a foreignness in her features: she could have been Italian, or half-Italian, and her face had an expressionless, solid immobility as though none of it would or could move. On her knee was a baby, asleep: it was large and fat, and looked about nine months old or so to my inexpert eyes. She never looked at the little boy at all: when I had dislodged him from my feet, he wandered off to the other end of the room and started climbing on the empty chairs, trying the door handles of the changing cubicles, and kicking the radiators, with a face as expressionless as his mother's. She just stared straight ahead and the word that was written on her was endurance.

  After a while, the nurse came and called her name. "Mrs. Sullivan," she called in her thin shallow voice, and the woman next to me stirred and responded, but did not get up: she looked around her for the boy and then looked at me and said, in a flat tone, "Would you hold the little one for me? It doesn't seem fair, like, to wake him up, and he plays up something shocking if he doesn't have his sleep out. Would you have him for a few ticks for me, duck?"

  I could not have said No, though I was afraid of my charge, and she handed over to me the large and sleeping infant, and rose to her feet: I saw with alarm that she must be at least six months pregnant, even allowing for natural lapse of the figure through two successive births. She made her way off to the midwife's room and I sat there with this huge and monstrously heavy child sitting warm and limp upon my knee, his nose slightly running and his mouth open to breathe. I was amazed by his weight; my legs felt quite crushed under it. I also realized that he was not only warm but damp; his knitted leggings were leaking quite copiously onto my knee. I shifted him around but did not dare to move much for fear of waking him and having to put up with his playing up something shocking: I was worried about whether the damp patch would show on my coat, and hoped it would not. I sat there for a good ten minutes with this child upon my lap; it was the first time I had ever held a baby and after a while, simultaneously with preoccupations about damp on my coat, a sense of the infant crept through me, its small warmness, its wide soft cheeks, and above all its quiet, snuffly breathing. I held it tighter and closed my arms around it.

  Before its mother and brother returned, however, my name too was called: I was due to see the gynecologist that week, not the midwife. "Mrs. Stacey," the nurse called, and then again, "Mrs. Stacey," and there I was, trapped there with this child upon my knee, afraid to move, afraid to miss my turn, afraid of annoying the nurse. I could not pass the child along the row like a parcel: I was beginning to panic when the woman re-emerged from the midwife's office and I was able to return her child without too much delay.

  The gynecologist did not keep me long: apparently I was the most normal of cases, not worth the attention of his students. I left as ever with relief, and started off, tolerably light of foot, along the Marylebone Road towards Ulster Place, where I was going to have tea with some old college friends. On the way, only a couple of blocks along, I overtook the woman with her two children. She was going painfully slowly along the other side of the road: the elder child was stopping to look in every litter bin and to run up the steps of every building, and she did not hurry him along but paused to wait for him, hardly looking at what he was doing but standing still, eyes fixed, the smaller child slung, legs astride, over the swelling of the next. There was a solemnity about her imperceptible progress that impressed me deeply: she stood there, patiently waiting, like a warning, like a portent, like a figure from another world. Five months earlier I would have passed her without another glance, but now the weight of her child was heavy in my arms and my coat still damp from his dampness. I do not know how she could get along that road. Nor could I feel that weight till my own arms had tested it.

  When I reached my friends, I thought I might tell them about the child and how I had held it, so that I could laugh it away; they were nice girls, three of them sharing a flat, one now an actress, one a civil servant, and one like me doing research, and at Cambridge we had recounted for a laugh our most intimate defeats. I started off now on the woman in green, and they began to listen with a tender interest: but I could not be bothered to tell them because as soon as I started to speak I realized that I had not taken it in, I had not got it into a state fit for anecdote, as Lydia had not arranged her miscarriage sufficiently for fiction. I did not find out what it had meant to me until after the birth of my own child: though part of it I made out sooner, as I left their flat for home. I saw that from now on I, like that woman, was going to have to ask for help, and from strangers too: I who could not even ask for love or friendship.

  As I walked home, I thought seriously for the first time about what I was going to do, with a child in my arms and work to do. So averse was I to help of any kind that I could not put up with any form of domestic assistance: I could not pay anyone to do dirty work that I could do myself. I had my upbringing to thank for this attitude, though I know it is not technically good socialism, and my parents themselves were not so ludicrously obstinate about such details; but it has always been my fault to be too scrupulous. It is not virtue, it is not morality: by my scruples I was denying some woman four bob an hour for as many hours as it would have taken to rescue that large flat from the squalor into which it was forever threatening to sink. With a baby, though, I could not afford such scruples. Also, I would have to go to the library to work, and one cannot take babies to libraries. Something would have to be done, plans would have to be made. I could feel that my own personal morality was threatened: I was going to have to do things that I couldn't do. Not things that were wrong, nothing as dramatic as that, but things that were against the grain of my nature.

  When I got home, I sat down with The Times, and started to go through the Domestic Advertisements. I was bewildered by the social connotations of phrases like Mother's Help, Au Pair girl, Nanny, Housekeeper. It seemed that I neither wanted nor could afford any of these things: I made myself look at the problem and was just concluding that the most and least I could put up with would be a child minder for so many hours per day per week, when the doorbell rang. I got up to answer it: sometimes, from the unease with which I rose to answer such unexpected calls, I would wonder if I had so thoroughly abando
ned all expectation of ever seeing George again. Occasionally, even now, I would picture to myself scenes in which he would arrive on my doorstep and greet me with phrases like "Rosamund, I've tried to live without you and I can't" or "Rosamund, I've loved you ever since I set eyes on you": occasionally, with shame, I would go through the whole romantic paraphernalia of meetings at the ends of long corridors, of embraces at the top of wide staircases, of passionate encounters at Oxford Circus. I would tell myself in reproof that these images were born of fear, not love, and so they doubtless were. Anyway, when I answered the door this time it was Lydia Reynolds.

  "I am sorry to trouble you," she said, when I let her in, "but I've just had a series of minor disasters and the long and the short of it is that I've got to ask you if you can put me up for the night. You will say no, won't you, if it's not convenient?"

  "It's perfectly convenient," I said as we went and sat down in the sitting room. "Tell me about the disasters."

  "I couldn't possibly refrain from telling you about the disasters," said Lydia, and launched into them forthwith. It seemed that the girl whose flat she had been sharing had been rejoined by her husband, who had been absent for some months, and had reclaimed his right to residence: the wife had been reluctant to part with Lydia and her rent, as she placed no reliance on her husband's permanence in the ménage, so for a few days they had all struggled along together, in two rooms and a kitchen, with Lydia sleeping on the settee. The husband had then become irritated by Lydia's continual presence and had told her to get out, whereupon the wife had burst into tears over the breakfast table and had said that she preferred Lydia to him, and she wished he would get out instead. Lydia had realized that she should have left at this point, in order not to confuse other people's matrimonial problems, "but," she said, "I just couldn't face the thought of finding myself a new place and moving all my stuff out, especially when anyone could see they wouldn't last the month, so I hung on and I'd have stuck it out only last night I got in very late and was undressing very quietly and considerately when the wretched man emerged from the bathroom and made a grab at me, so after that I felt I was non grata on all counts, so I left this morning."

  "Well," I said, "you might as well stay here until he leaves."

  "Perhaps he won't leave," said Lydia. "Just to spite me after what I said to him last night. The awful thing was that he was rather attractive. The only justification for his existence, I expect. I used to like out-and-out bastards like that, but I've right gone off them recently. Give me nice timid decent little men like Alex; they're the kind I really get on with."

  "Does she like him?"

  "I suppose she must. Or must have done. I'm not so sure that she hasn't gone off him too. And there's another thing. I lost my job this week."

  "Oh dear," I said mildly. "Why?"

  "I kept on not going," said Lydia plaintively, "and in the end they said I'd not gone once too often. I don't blame them either. But the result of all this is that I'm broke."

  "Oh," I said, "perhaps I could lend you..."

  "Oh no," she said, "nothing like that. I've got a bit here and there, it was just that I was going to ask you a favour and since you suggested it yourself, I mean to say it's not as though ... anyway, what about my moving in with you? I could baby-sit for you and all that. I'd pay you rent of course, but it'd have to be fairly nominal, you know what I mean. I'd be very useful to you, don't you think? I could pick things up for you, and carry your shopping basket. That is, if it's not too much trouble. I mean, you haven't got anyone else living here, have you?"

  Clearly she was referring to my prospective child's elusive father: I shook my head and denied any other lodgers. The more I thought about the scheme, the more hopeful it seemed, because there was plenty of room, and the thought of having to ring alone for the ambulance had begun to haunt me slightly: though the greatest point in its favour was that she had suggested it as a favour to herself and that I had not had to ask. To put myself totally in the clear and upper position, I insisted that she should pay no rent, explaining that as I paid none myself, and as my parents had let me have the flat so that none should be paid, I could not dream of taking anything off her, though we could split the electricity bills. She heaved a sigh of relief and seemed genuinely elated by the prospect.

  "It's so posh round here," she said, "and you're so posh, and I do have such a thing about being posh."

  "I bet you move out," I said, "when the baby arrives. Babies aren't posh at all, you know."

  "Rubbish," she said, "I agree that ordinary babies aren't much of a status symbol, but illegitimate ones are just about the last word."

  We celebrated our agreement with the remains of a bottle of very sour wine and some bacon and eggs, then Lydia rang up all her friends to tell them where she was, which precipitated some discussion about the phone bill. Then she said where was the television, and I said I didn't have a television and would on no account have one in the house, I had too much work to do. She didn't think much of that and asked if she could borrow a nightie, she wanted to go to bed. So I found her a nightie and we made up the bed, and then we had a long discussion about Joe Hurt, whom Lydia had seen the week before. Eventually we stopped talking and I too went to bed, where I fell asleep more happily than I had done for months, relieved, and without any of the weakness of intervention, of the oppressive loneliness that had been worrying me for some time. I liked Lydia: she was intelligent and self-reliant and interesting, and she had wanted of her own accord to come and live with me. The following week she acquired a rented television, which I made her put in her bedroom and I would go and sit on her bed with her and watch it: she had started another novel and would type noisely through all the programs, so I made her move it back into the sitting room but then she came and typed in the sitting room because, she said, the noise of the machine helped her to concentrate.

  Housekeeping with Lydia worked quite well and after a fortnight of it I felt I should make other steps towards setting my house in order. I had been intending for some time to write and tell my sister of the situation: I did not mean to inform my brother at all, as he would have been heartily outraged by my behaviour, and as I have said it did not seem worth upsetting quite needlessly my parents. My sister, however, I was sure would be sympathetic, as she had always sung to me the praises of motherhood and domesticity: I used to accuse her of the reverse principle of sour grapes, of the desire to trap others in her own snare, by praising the pleasures of confinement, because there could be no doubt that she did suffer for her choice. Like me, she was very much our parents' daughter: educated to be independent and to consider herself the equal of anyone alive, she had a streak of practical earnestness that reminded me very much of my mother. She, too, had been to university, though to Oxford, not Cambridge, and she had moved in slightly more solidly intellectual and committed circles than I had ever discovered. She had met there her future husband, a scientist called Hallam who had then been a junior fellow: she herself read economics, so they had some meeting ground. They got married shortly after she came down, whereupon Hallam promptly took up a job on an atomic research station and carried her off to a deserted spot in the Midlands populated only by other atomic scientists, their wives, tradesmen and engineers. Beatrice had immediately had three children and made a virtue of necessity: but I often felt that she suffered strongly from a graduate sense that she was not using her degree to its best advantage. Her conscience was doubtless appeased by the unpleasantness of her social life and the rigour of rearing three small children: it was not, after all, as though she had got out of economics in order to idle her life away at the hairdresser's.

  Ideologically, poor Beatrice was in an unfortunate position: unlike any of the rest of the family, she was a confirmed pacifist, or had been at Oxford. She must have found living on an atomic research station extremely trying: Hallam luckily shared her political views and assured her continually that knowledge was the only way to safety, and that he was thus furthering,
to the best of his ability, the cause of world peace. He may have been right, though that was clearly not his motive for doing his work. Having swallowed this, Beatrice began to take the line of realistic compromise all along, and to frown slightly on our parents' singleness of mind. The question of pacifism still preyed on her mind, however: she wrote to me once and told me that their oldest boy, Nicholas, had reached the violent age, and was forever playing at guns, soldiers, cowboys, and, worst of all, bombs. "Whenever I tell him to finish his pudding," she wrote plaintively, "he turns on me and makes a horrible noise and says 'Bang, you're dead.'" One day, enraged beyond endurance by this inevitable and infuriating response, she had clouted him hard on the side of his head: "which," she said, "is completely against my principles, and anyway makes complete nonsense of the principle of passive resistance, don't you think? It was like a world war in miniature, if you know what I mean." The wretched child claimed that he had developed earache as a result of her unprecedented attack and she had suffered torments of remorse until it cleared up and proved to be nothing at all, just spite.

  Anyway, when I wrote and told Beatrice about the baby, it was with every expectation of receiving goodwill and sympathy by return of post: and I was looking forward to it, for I felt I had lived without sympathy for long enough. I was quite proud of the way that I had managed, and I might even have expected some kind of congratulations upon my restraint. The letter that I received, however, was this.

  My dear Rosamund,

  I can't tell you how worried and upset we were by your news. I am quite amazed that you didn't let us know earlier; from what you say I gather that the baby is due in four months. I do think you should have let us know. You say not to tell the parents, but you must know they are bound to find out sooner or later, and surely you can't intend to go on living in the flat without letting them know. Obviously they'll be very upset but you know what they're like, they would never hold anything against you—since you say not to tell them, of course I won't, but I do wish you would. And what about Andrew? I know you never see him and I don't blame you, but what if you were to run into him or something, or if any of his friends were to see you in the street? It would be awful if they heard through him because he wouldn't think twice.