Years later, in fact quite recently, I went to stay with Beatrice and her family for a couple of nights: she had only two children then, the eldest four and the younger three. I liked them, though I did not understand them, and I would take them out for walks, and to pick blackberries: it was October. The research establishment where Hallam worked was on top of a hill, and I remember then the whole countryside was parched, bleached and silvery: the fields were full of pale stubble and there was no colour anywhere. They lived on a little mushroom housing estate, rather like an army camp; Beatrice's house was pleasant to live in, though quite uninteresting from without. They had one of the nicer ones. After lunch on the Sunday, Hallam, Beatrice and I were sitting in the drawing room in a tired stupor, amidst the creased and confused pages of several Sunday papers, when we heard a sudden sound of shouting from the garden outside where the children were playing. Beatrice dragged herself to her feet and went and looked through the window: "Oh Lord," she said, "not again," and with an expression of resigned anger went out and through the back door. By this time I too had got up to watch through the window: I saw Beatrice arrive at the front gate, detach from it her own two children, and say crossly to a small child hanging onto the other side of it, "Now then, off you go, be off." As she spoke, her voice lost its customary gentility and took on a certain harshness, the tone in which one might speak to a cat or dog. Then she started to pull her own two children away; they went willingly enough, though with backward glances of mingled triumph and shame. I heard them all three come into the kitchen and then the sounds of removing of Wellingtons, wiping of hands and so on; meanwhile I continued to watch through the window the small child whose arrival had caused such action and alarm.
She was a perfectly ordinary-looking little girl, clad in a pair of brown corduroy trousers, an old, rather over-washed jersey, and a pair of plastic shoes, the kind that are bad for the feet. She had a square, unexpressive face, and she watched the departure of Nicholas and Alexandra with unperturbed solidity, batting not an eyelid at Beatrice's dismissive tone. She did not go away, however, but continued to hang on the gate, staring into the garden, her face quite blank; until, quite suddenly, she burst into violent screaming tears, her face contorting and turning red as her jersey, her whole body shaking with emotion. I watched this display with some detachment, until her grief found words: then she started to bellow, in a frighteningly loud voice, "I haven't got nobody to play with, I haven't got nobody to play with." She yelled this several times until Beatrice re-emerged from the kitchen and shouted, once more, "Off you go": then she stopped shouting as suddenly as she had started, climbed down off the gate, and ran off.
A few minutes later, when Beatrice had persuaded her two to go upstairs and play in the playroom, she rejoined us in the drawing room; she came in, looking rather worn, and sank down on to the settee. Consumed with curiosity, I asked:
"What on earth was all that about?" and she proceeded to explain that the small child was the daughter of one of the menials connected with the establishment, and that she was forever pestering Nicholas and Alexandra to play with her, which they were not allowed to do.
"Why ever not?" I asked, and there was doubtless a note of accusation in my voice, for Beatrice replied crossly:
"Oh, it's all very well, but it really is quite impossible. I let them play at first but it was just out of the question, you've no idea of the kinds of things they got up to."
"No, you're too right, I haven't," I said, even more curious. "Do tell me."
"Well," she said, "I suppose I don't really mind accents and things, at least in theory, though that child is quite incomprehensible, she speaks in such an extraordinary fashion, but it's all the other things really that I just can't stand."
"Such as what?" I said.
"Oh, things like playing in the outside lavatory. I could never get them out of it. I was having to chase them out all the time. What they used to get up to in there God alone knows, I don't like to think. And then she taught them such frightful words; they had one wonderful game which consisted of swinging on the garden gate and yelling Silly Bugger at everyone that went by."
I laughed, and so did Beatrice, but she then went on, "It's all very well, but people don't like it, and then they teach it to other children, and so on, and in the end our kids won't have anyone left to play with but her, because the other parents won't put up with it even if I do, and I can hardly have mine ostracized for the sake of that, can I? Anyway, I don't mind 'silly bugger' so much, I've heard those particular words used by some quite respectable people in my time, it's all the other silly words I can't stand."
"What words?" I said, but Beatrice waved her hands dismissively and would not tell. I pressed her a little but all she would say was:
"Oh, they're not bad words, not the real shockers that all one's classy friends use, the ones the Lord Chamberlain doesn't like, just silly horrid childish vulgar words, and they think they're so funny and they shout them out and then go into fits of giggles."
It did sound peculiarly irritating, even to one as unconcerned as myself, but I felt myself constrained to say:
"They'd grow out of it, wouldn't they?"
"I suppose so," said Beatrice, "but in the meantime I've got to live."
"Even so," I said, "I think it ought to be against your principles. I'm sure upper-class children are just as silly and vulgar and horrid, aren't they?"
"Well, actually, they are, but they're silly in a way I can deal with, and I know how to stop them. I can't do anything with that child but shout at her."
"Why is she so keen to play with yours?"
"I don't know, really, I suppose it must be because all the bigger children go to the village school, and she's just too young, so there's no one left for her to play with round here. It's quite a different thing in the school holidays, then all the little toughs line up outside our gate, with her among them, and chuck stones at my kids. So what can I do? I don't see what I can do."
"What's her name?" I asked, and she said, with deep feeling:
"Sandra. Her name's Sandra. I really don't see what else I could do."
I didn't see what she could have done, either, though I think I might have tried to stick it out myself: and I often thought of Sandra, square and yelling, and thought what a pity it was that resentments should breed so near the cradle, that people should so have had it from birth.
My baby was due in early March: I amused myself by trying to finish my thesis before my baby. It was in fact somewhat of a hopeless task, as I was not even expected to finish it before the following Christmas, but I have always been a quick worker and now I had very little else to distract me. As the winter wore on, and spring set in, I felt less and less like going out, even as far as to the British Museum, and I organized myself so that I could do a good deal of work at home. It was less entertaining than working in the library, but I could at least get on with it. It was all shaping up quite nicely; my director of studies, a don in Cambridge, had approved my synopsis, rough draft, first chapter, and other indications of the final product, and had been most encouraging. I felt happy about it; I had got it all into shape in my head and knew more or less exactly what I was going to say and what ground I had to cover. Then, towards the end of January, I began to flag. Although I would not admit it, I felt at times too tired to read. I ate more and more iron pills but they did not seem to have much effect. In the end I decided that I had merely got stale through too much concentration on too few things, and that I ought to branch out a little. It was, however, impossible to find anything amusing to do; I did not enjoy walking any more, public transport was a continual trial, I could not sit comfortably through a full-length picture, and I could not eat anything interesting without suffering for it afterwards. I felt thoroughly annoyed; I could understand, in this condition, why women are, as they certainly are, such perpetual complaining bores. I was discussing my problem with Lydia one evening; she suggested all sorts of occupations, like knitting, or
rug-making, or basketwork, or weaving, but I rejected all these pseudo-useful employments with contempt. Then she said, finally, why don't you do jigsaw puzzles: and they were what I took up.
One can, if one tries, buy extremely complicated jigsaw puzzles with a thousand interlocking pieces, and pictures by old masters, or of ships at sea, and heaven knows what: also puzzles in the shape of maps of Europe, square puzzles, circular puzzles, star-shaped puzzles, reversible puzzles, anything one can imagine in the way of puzzles. I became addicted and would spend hours over them; it was a soothing, time-consuming process, and when I went to bed I would dream not of George, nor of babies locked away from me where I couldn't feed them, nor even of childbirth, but of pieces of blue sky edged with bits of tree, or small blue irregular shapes composing the cloak of the Virgin Mary. Lydia had an irritating habit of coming in at the end of an evening, just when I had mastered the most difficult part of a puzzle, and putting in all the easy obvious middle pieces; I got very annoyed with her. As a therapy, it worked extremely well; I found I could write my book and do a puzzle for alternate hours without getting unduly bored by either.
I suppose the end of anyone's first pregnancy is frightening. I cannot quite remember how frightened I was, because it is one of the horrible tricks of nature to make one forget instantly after childbirth all that one had feared and suffered, presumably so that one will carry on gaily with the next. In the same way one will protect with the utmost care an unborn child which one does not want and would prefer to lose, and which indeed as in my case may even have taken some steps, however feeble and ill-informed, towards losing; in January, after a party, I slipped on the stairs going down from a friend's flat and would certainly have fallen had I been in anything like my normal state of balance: but as it was I clutched and hung on to the banisters like grim death and got away with a mere twisted ankle. And thus, unwillingly, I have forgotten how worried I must have been, because it now seems so long ago and to have so little importance. I was worried partly through ignorance, as I had deliberately found nothing out about the subject at all, and had steered clear of all natural childbirth classes, film strips of deliveries, and helpful diagrams, convinced that I had only to go near a natural childbirth class in order to call down upon myself the most phenomenally unnatural birth of all time. There was no point in tempting providence, I thought; one might as well expect the worst as one would probably get it anyway.
I remember, however, the night before it was born with some clarity. It was not due for another week so I was not particularly worried; I boiled myself a couple of eggs, then went to eat them in the sitting room at about half past eight, and got out my typewriter at the same time in order to read over the last page of thesis that I had left inside it. When I opened the typewriter, however, it was not a page of discussion on Drayton's use of irony that met my eyes, but a page of something quite different, and not written by me at all. I knocked the top off my egg and started to read it, assuming, and rightly, that it was something of Lydia's; she had been complaining for weeks that her machine was going wrong. It was indeed something of Lydia's; it was a page from her next novel, which she had started shortly after moving in with me and which she had been working on, intermittently, ever since. I read the page with fascinated alarm; it was in the first person, and it was about a girl having an illegitimate baby. When I had finished the page, I abandoned my eggs and went into Lydia's bedroom to look for more. I found it, in a heap of loose leaves by her bed, and carried it back with me and sat down on the settee and started to read it.
I read the whole lot straight off, or what there was of it; it was not finished. It was nothing more nor less than my life story, with a few minor alterations here and there, and a few interesting false assumptions amongst the alterations. Clearly Lydia, for instance, had always assumed that Joe was the father of the child; there was an interesting though cleverly concealed portrait of Joe, and an absorbing scene in which the character that was me quarrelled violently with him and left him forever. Her motives for this I thought a little farfetched; she had apparently discovered that he was still sleeping with his mislaid wife, whom she had had the privilege of meeting, which was more than I had. This discovery had enraged her to such an extent that she had broken with him and refused any financial assistance from him. She had been planning to have the child only on the assumption that she and the Joe-character would live together and bring it up between them. Far-fetched as the theory seemed with regard to me, who did not know what the word jealousy meant, and indeed suffered from its opposite, if it has one, it certainly explained a possible line of conduct: it amused me to think of Lydia sitting there racking her brains trying to work out why I was having the child, and why I hadn't got rid of it. She had been inefficient enough on that score herself, by her own account, but then one never suspects that others share one's own degree of incompetence in such matters.
At first, for the first few chapters, I flattered myself that I emerged rather well—independent, strong-willed, and very worldly and au fait with sexual problems. An attractive girl, I thought. But then, as the chapters wore on, I began to have my doubts. Like myself, the character was engaged in academic research, an activity which Lydia appeared to regard with thorough contempt: she had invented for me a peculiarly meaningless and abstruse research subject, in fact none less than the ill-famed Henryson. I remembered I had told Lydia about my Indian in some detail and she had laughed with me about him. I could not, however, be too indignant as I have always been aware that the Elizabethans, except for Shakespeare, are somewhat of a luxury subject, unlike nineteenth-century novelists or prolific Augustan poets. However, I did object very strongly to the way, subtle enough technically, that she hinted that the Rosamund character's obsession with scholarly detail and discovery was nothing more nor less than an escape route, an attempt to evade the personal crises of her life and the realities of life in general. She drew a very persuasive picture of the academic ivory tower; whenever anything unpleasant happened to this character, as in the course of the extant ten chapters was too frequently the case, she would retire to bed or the British Museum with a pile of books, as others retire perhaps with a bottle of gin. There was also a long discussion on this very topic between the girl and a friend of hers, who presumably represented vitality, modernity, honesty and so on; I was not malicious enough to consider this a self-portrait of Lydia, for it clearly was not, as the girl friend in question was not like anyone I have ever met. She accused the me-character of having a jigsaw puzzle mind, a nasty crack in the circumstances, I thought; she herself was busy frittering her life away in vital pursuits like serving in a theater bar, working on a magazine, and having an affair with a television producer.
All in all, by the time I had finished this work I was both annoyed and upset. I did not think this view of scholarship at all justifiable; I could not produce my reasons for believing in its value, but in a way I was all the surer for that, for I knew it for a fact. Scholarship is a skill and I am good at it, and even if one rated it no higher than that it is still worth doing. Whether I used it as an escape or not was a different matter, and did not seem to me to be as relevant It was work, and I did it, and reasons did not come into it; il faut cultiver notre jar din, as Voltaire so admirably said. Apart, however, from being annoyed by this attack on my livelihood, I was also very annoyed by the thought that Lydia had been living in my house for nothing and writing all this about me without saying a word. She had compared herself once to a spider, an image not wholly new, drawing material from its own entrails, but this seemed to me to be a somewhat more parasitic pursuit.
After rereading certain passages, I put the whole lot back by her bed, including the sheet that had been in my typewriter; I had no intention of saying anything to her but I thought it possible she might remember where she had left it and suffer from her own conclusions. Then I went back and sat down by the fire and switched on the radio, just in time to hear George talking about next Sunday's concert. I thoug
ht how odd it was that I had bumped into Clare at Selfridge's but had not even set eyes in the last eight months on George. I switched off again when he had finished announcing as my thoughts kept reverting to Lydia, with decreasing anger. After all, I thought, she had been making herself very useful recently, doing all the heavy shopping, even the odd few minutes' Hoovering, and had, moreover, acquired through a friend of hers a woman who had volunteered to come in and mind the baby two days a week when I was well enough to go out. In fact, lately I had even come to think myself slightly in her debt, despite the disadvantageous rent situation: and here, at least, in those pages of typescript had been proof that I was still the donor, she still the recipient. More than ever now I had the upper hand; she had got her money's worth but of me. Do not think I resented this: on the contrary, looking at our relationship in this light, I felt much happier, for I saw that we had maintained a basis of mutual profit. Having arrived at this conclusion, I thought I would go to bed, and when I got up I found I was suffering from distinct pains in the back.
The Millstone Page 10
