Don't think I'm not sympathetic, I am; I think it's quite frightful for you, I don't know how you can stick it. I'm glad your work isn't suffering, anyway.
I must say you didn't go into many details about the whole thing, but from what you said I gathered you were intending to keep the child. I feel I must tell you that I think this is the most dreadful mistake, and would be frightful for both you and the child—just think, if you had it adopted you could forget about the whole business in six months and carry on exactly where you left off. That would be much better for you, don't you think? You can have no conception of what it means to have a child, of the responsibility and the worries and the financial anxiety and the not being able to get out or do anything without planning. Believe me, I know. I just can't see you adapting yourself to the demands it would make on you, you've always been so set on your independence and having your own way. You can have no idea of what it means to have to think of someone else, twenty-four hours of every day, and not for a year or two but for ever, more or less. However, it isn't just you that I'm thinking of. It would be bad enough for you but it would be far, far worse for the child. Through no fault of its own it would have to have the slur of illegitimacy all its life, and I can't tell you how odiously cruel and vicious children can be to each other, once they get hold of something like that. A baby isn't just something you can have just because you feel you ought. Because you oughtn't, and that's that. It's your duty to have it adopted by some couple who really want a child, and who are probably in a far more favourable position for bringing one up. I know that ideally, in a decent society, no child ought to suffer because of this kind of handicap, but this isn't a decent society, and I can't bear the thought of what your baby would have to go through, and what you would have to go through on its account. Do please think about this and try to take a long terra view. And if I can give you a piece of warning, when you decide to have it adopted, for God's sake don't let yourself see too much of it. You have to keep them for a certain amount of time, I think, don't you, but for God's sake don't let yourself get involved with it. It's a quite meaningless kind of involvement at that age and you'll be the only one to suffer. Another thing is that you don't even mention the father in your letter, so I assume he's somebody you don't want or can't associate yourself with, so presumably you wouldn't want to ask him for financial help, would you? If you do want some money, do let us know and we'll see what we can do. But think how frightful it would be to see the child of someone one didn't like growing up in one's home. It's bad enough when it's the child of someone you do like. Poor Rosamund, how absolutely rotten for you. I wish I could come and give you a hand, but I'm so tired at the moment, and they've all got frightful colds. It sounds a good hospital anyway, which is something. The whole business of being pushed around is quite horrid but one just has to grit one's teeth. Anyway, both of us send you all our love, and do keep in touch. And look after yourself, for goodness sake, don't rush around too much, will you.
Best love,
Beatrice
I read this letter, as can be imagined, with some dismay. I could see that she was writing out of genuinely strong concern but nevertheless I was indignant and annoyed. It seemed to me that nobody had the faintest right to offer me any advice about my own child: I had not asked for advice, I was quite capable of advising myself. Her letter did in fact serve one purpose: it revealed to me the depth of my determination to keep the baby. The determination at this stage cannot have been based, as it later was, on love, for I felt no love and little hope of feeling it: it was based rather on an extraordinary confidence in myself, in a conviction, quite irrational, that no adoptive parents could ever be as excellent as I myself would be. At the same time, the prospect of motherhood frightened me; I experienced the usual doubts about whether my child would like me, whether I would like my child, and so on, but simultaneously with these doubts I experienced absolute certainty. I knew for a fact that the child would be mine and that I would have it. Whatever Beatrice said, I would have felt it a cowardly betrayal to abandon it to the unknown, well-meaning ignorance of anyone else in Britain.
One result of her letter Beatrice cannot have foreseen. Her reference to living with the child of a man one did not like suggested to me for the first time the picture of a baby like George. I found the picture painfully vivid and felt a dangerous impulse to ring him up and tell him that instant: I did not, of course, but that evening I switched on the radio, a luxury I had not permitted myself for some time, and listened to his voice. He sounded so civil and so innocent that once more I could not imagine that I could ever have dreamed that I might encumber him with embarrassment and anxiety. I looked back once more over everything that he had ever said to me and I would have given a good deal if I could have heard him say, just once more, in his camp and gentle tone, "Well, well, my goodness me, Rosamund, and aren't we looking pretty this evening." Though we never did look at all pretty these days, we had to admit.
When I was young, I used to be so good-natured. I used to see the best in everyone, to excuse all faults, to put all malice and shortcoming down to environment: in short, to take all blame upon myself. But for the child, I might have gone on like that forever and, who knows, I might have been the better and nicer for it in the kindness of my innocence. I repeat; not being blind, I saw faults but I excused them. Now I felt less and less like finding excuses. I still cringed politely and smiled when doors slammed in my face, but I felt resentment in my heart. For instance, when I was five months pregnant, though not admittedly in my winter coat looking it, I was sitting in a tube train when two middle-aged women got on: there were no more seats so they stood in front of me, strap hanging, and proceeded to grumble, very pointedly, about the ill manners of the young. As I happened to be the youngest person in the compartment, I could not but take this personally. They clearly meant to be overheard, for they went on and on in refined, mean, grating tones: looking back, I can see that they were nuts, and sad ones at that, but what I felt as I listened to them was fury. I had been reared to stand for the elderly on public transport; and after a while I could bear it no longer, and I heaved myself to my feet and offered one of them my place. I made the gesture with extreme ill-feeling and indeed malice, but the woman took my seat without a word of thanks but with a tired, reproving pursing of the lips, and as I stood there it became clear that she did not notice my condition. It was the only time that I wished I were as huge as a house as some women are: though in fact size is meaningless, as one feels worst in the first three months when nothing is on view. I stood there and watched her sitting, and I was full of hate. I wanted to faint on the floor, to show her. But then, who knows, she must have had her afflictions too.
For my brother and his wife, too, I used to make excuses: I used to try to see them in perspective and to regard not them but what had made them what they were. I suppose I felt ashamed of an emotion as irrational as dislike. I did not see them very often: dutifully, perhaps, twice a year. I had thought they would be easy enough to avoid; unlike Beatrice, I had no fears that I would meet them idly in the street. But then, of course, I went and did precisely that: I met her, anyway. I was in Selfridge's Food Market, buying a bag of wholemeal flour, as Lydia and I were in the middle of a highly temporary craze for baking our own bread, and there she was, staring earnestly at the delicious rows of stuffed and larded game birds, no doubt shopping for one of her excruciating dinners. When I saw her, I instantly turned and started to walk away but she must have looked up at the same moment, for I heard her call, in piercing Kensington tones, "Rosamund, Rosamund." I turned and walked slowly back towards her and her eyes took in my state.
"Hello, Clare," I said when I reached her. "Buying a pheasant or two, then?"
She looked slightly confused, as well she might, and muttered, playing for time, "I was just buying a few things for dinner tomorrow." She was wearing a dusky pink coat with a fur collar and a hat that made her look twice her age: she cannot be more than twenty-eight a
nd she looks a good forty at times. A good young forty, well-preserved by care and protection from the weather. She is neither pretty nor plain, and she has a mania for cleanliness: on one of our first meetings, when she still thought we might be good friends, she was telling me how many times she had her clothes cleaned. "If there's one thing I can't stand" she said with a violent shudder, "it's dirty clothes. Don't you agree?" The remark had astonished me, as I had hardly spared the question a thought till that moment, and certainly could not summon up any violence to support her; I had just said "Oh yes, I suppose so," while glancing surreptitiously at the state of my own long unwashed jersey. Since then we had abandoned all pretense at common ground, apart from family matters. I suppose poor Clare had an intellectual inferiority complex; she should have done if she had not, as she was certainly dim. Andrew was not as dim as she was, though he was not as bright as his two sisters or either of his parents: I suppose this may have been one of the causes of his curious social revolt. Usually I let her take the lead which, inferior or not, she was always quite ready to do, but upon this occasion it was clear to me that I must take the offensive.
"Having some friends round, are you?" I said briskly. "You don't often shop in town, do you?"
"Not very often," she said. "But I was in for the day, having my hair done."
"Oh, really? I'd tell you how nice it looks, but I can't really see with that hat. Where do you have it done?"
"Romain's. Where do you go?"
"I don't," I said. "It takes such a long time. Anyway, I believe in letting nature take its course. I don't like perms. Well, it seems a long time since I saw you; how's Andrew these days? Still as busy as ever?"
"Oh yes."
"Still playing bridge?"
"Yes," she smiled coldly, but meaning to be ingratiating, not cold, and then said bravely, "You must come over again one day. You couldn't make it last time I rang, I remember. It was Christmas, wasn't it, when I rang?"
"Oh," I said, "I'm afraid I'm frightfully busy these days. I doubt if I'll have time before the autumn." It was then February.
She looked away, nervously, with some embarrassment. I, too, was embarrassed but I wasn't going to show it.
"I'd better get on with my shopping," she said. "These dinner parties are a frightful bore."
"They must be," I said. "I don't know why you have them. Well, it has been nice seeing you, Clare. Do give my love to Andrew, won't you? Tell him you saw me, won't you?"
As I said this, I looked at her hard, wondering whether she would tell him what she had seen: she flushed slightly and did not meet my eyes, but I guessed that she would not tell him and found later that my guess was right. It was not to protect me that she restrained herself, I am sure, but rather to avoid having to take any possible action on my account. She did not like our family, with reason, and the less she saw of us the better she was pleased. As I left her, she was bending over the counter, pointing at a dressed pheasant with a plum-gloved hand: I walked away, thinking of her dinner parties and her endless visits to the dry cleaners and her sessions under the hairdryer. I have never been able to cure myself of the view that people who spend time at the hairdresser's spend it there because they have nothing better to do, and no other way of getting rid of their money: pitiable enough, oh yes, but I was sick of pity, and I preferred the indulgence of dislike. An idle parasite, that's what she is, I said to myself bitterly, as I walked home with my three-pound bag of flour, and I thought of my mother, her mouth full of hairpins, screwing her long thick hair up into its everlasting knot, while at the same time going through her day's reports from the probation center. My mother and Beatrice and I were all prettier than this girl, as well as being brighter: but Oh God, I thought, as I reached the lift and pushed the button, whose fault is that, whose fault, whose virtue, and my dislike ebbed away in a dry withdrawing scraping tide of equity, leaving me as ever on the hard damp shore of sociological pity.
Riches are a dreadful blight, and poor Clare hadn't even got riches: all she had was gentility and inherited voice. I say "poor Clare" so often because she is an unhappy woman, but I am an unhappy woman myself, so she could well say, "poor Rosamund." Sometimes I wonder whether it is not my parents who are to blame, totally to blame, for my inability to see anything in human terms of like and dislike, love and hate: but only in terms of justice, guilt and innocence. Life is not fair: this is the lesson that I took in with my Kellogg's cornflakes at our family home in Putney. It is unfair on every score and every count and in every particular, and those who, like my parents, attempt to level it out are doomed to failure. Though when I would say this to them, fierce, argumentative, tragic, over the cornflakes, driven almost to tears at times by their hopeless innocence and aspirations, they would smile peaceably and say, Yes, dear, nothing can be done about inequality of brains and beauty, but that's no reason why we shouldn't try to do something about economics, is it?
Of course, by any reasonable standards, we were rich enough ourselves: there was no real money in the family, nothing like what I later met at Cambridge, and with Roger, or even with self-made Joe, but nevertheless we were quite all right. My parents grumbled incessantly, but they did not go without. It took me a very long time to piece together an economic view of my own, owing partly to the anomalies of my upbringing, which had made me believe in the poor without being of them: I went to a very good grammar school, where again I was in the curious position of being the only child who would admit to Labour-voting parents, although my parents were among the poshest and most well-known of all. I knew that this was upside-down and I was confused by it. I remember very clearly the way in which I put together my picture of the rest of the world, the way I accumulated evidence about the way that others lived. There was one incident in particular which I recognized at the time to be a milestone of some kind: I must have been eight or nine and Beatrice a couple of years older. We had gone to a local park, accompanied by a girl whom I hesitate to describe as maid or nanny: she was eighteen or so, and peculiarly incompetent, as were all our domestic staff, and when she took us out she would always take us to the same park as she was having an affair with one of the gardeners. We knew all about this because she told us. She told us some horrific things. It suited us very well because it left us free to follow our own amusements: our craze at that time was fishing. Armed with a net and a jam jar, we could catch minnows and tadpoles: it was very exciting.
On this spring afternoon, Beatrice and I left Marleen giggling in the shrubbery and made our way to a private little muddy bit of pond that we usually had to ourselves. This time, however, there were some boys there. We looked at them suspiciously, as we were used to being taunted by rough boys, but they seemed busy enough, so we got on with our fishing. We were unusually successful in our work; we caught a large dashing pink and blue stickleback. We greeted our catch with screams of delight, which attracted the attention of the two boys, who came over and inspected the fish as it thrashed frantically round its jar. They admired it and asked us how we got it and advised us to cover the jar. "They jump right out sometimes," one of them said. "They can jump ever so high. Like salmon, they jump." Then, all four of us together, we tried to find another one, while they told us about a female stickleback that they had kept for months in an old bucket. "We let her out in the winter," they said. "We brought her back here and let her out. We thought it might freeze up in our yard."
Beatrice and I were impressed by this evidence of sensibility, unusual in boys: they were nice boys and might well have been middle-class children like ourselves, being clad as we were in rather muddy trousers, jerseys and sandals. We were no experts in accents in those days. We all got on together very well, though we caught no more sticklebacks but only a couple of tiddlers. After an hour or so we were visited by a group of ducks and Beatrice remembered that we had been given some crusts for them: she got out our paper bag and started to hurl lumps into the water but the ducks, fat and overfed, were not interested. Not so, however, the two boys
: after two pieces had been inspected and refused by the ducks, the smaller of the two, who looked endearingly like an illustration in Richmal Crompton said, "I say, can I have a bit?" Beatrice handed him the bag and he and his brother ate the lot. We were unsurprised, having eaten more eccentric things at school in our time; we continued to fish. Five minutes later, however, we heard Marleen calling: she could not see us as we were crouching on a bit of muddy bank, concealed from view by a few sooty, filthy laurels. We groaned and made a few childish jokes about how she'd been getting on with Dick. "That's not your Mum, is it?" asked the larger boy, as Marleen continued to yell our names, though without urgency.
"No, no," I said, horrified by the idea that Marleen could be anybody's mother. "No, she's just the maid." People were called maids in those days, even in our household: I did not think twice about using the word then, though I think twice about putting it in writing now. The two boys looked startled by this remark and one of them said, "Blimey then, are you rich?" Just that, precisely that. Beatrice and I suddenly saw the situation for what it was and looked at each other in alarm, ready to run and duck from any threatening stones; but there were no stones. Beatrice and I started hotly to deny our richness; we did not think ourselves rich, being, as we were, so much poorer than so many other people we knew, businessmen's daughters and such like, but we knew where we stood with these boys, and we were full of fright. But the boys did not mind; they liked us, they had enjoyed the afternoon, they were interested, impressed. They were, as Shaw might have said, the deserving and not the undeserving poor: nice boys, well-brought-up boys. But Beatrice and I knew that for our part, we were not deserving: we had not deserved their kind interest, but their contempt. We told them about Marleen and her boy friend, in hurried relief, and then we left them. "We might see you again," the boys said, but we knew that we would not. An hour like that in a lifetime is quite as much as one can expect. I have often thought of how they ate those crusts, not famished, not starving, but with eagerness nevertheless. And I had not known; in the future I felt that it would be my duty to know.
The Millstone Page 9
