The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  He was very amused by the Joe-Roger alternation, and clearly thought the worst, a conclusion which gratified my pride. He would make slight clucking private noises of reproof, which amused me. I enjoyed the image of my own imaginary wickedness reflected from his eyes, for he saw what he thought he saw with so entertained an indulgence, exactly the kind of reaction I would have wanted had what he seen been true. One rather fraught summer evening I persuaded Joe to take me to the pub: we were on very bad terms, being engaged in some fruitless dispute about a pound note that we had lent or not lent to a tiresome dud friend the week before. I was very annoyed with Joe, as I have a good memory, and I distinctly remembered the whole occasion: my temper, when we reached the pub, was not improved by the fact that George did not turn up. As the time for his usual arrival passed, I grew increasingly irritable, and in the end Joe flew into a rage and walked out and left me. I sat there grimly for five minutes, pretending to finish my drink, and then I got up to go. I cannot stand sitting in pubs by myself. At the doorway I met George.

  "My goodness me," he said, "all alone tonight, are you?"

  "Just walked out," I said. "Joe just walked out."

  "I know," he said, "I met him on Portland Place. Have another drink."

  "I was just going," I said.

  "Well, stay a while."

  "All right," I said, "I will."

  So George bought me another drink; when he came back from the bar with it he was smiling with gentle malice, and he said, "Well, all you have to do is ring up Roger. How wise you are to have your life so well organized."

  "I don't like Roger much," I said, and laughed. "You don't either, do you?"

  "No, I must confess that I prefer Joe. Personally," said George. And he too laughed.

  "Anyway," I said, "Roger's gone on his summer holidays."

  "Has he really? Amazing how people go on going on summer holidays, don't you think? I gave it up when I was seventeen."

  "How old are you now?"

  "Twenty-nine."

  "Like Joe."

  "So Joe's gone and left you, has he? What had you been on at him about?"

  "Oh, this and that," I said, and told him the story of the pound note. We talked for half an hour more, and then it began to cross my mind that he might have better things to do than to talk to me: that he didn't come into the pub to talk to me, and might well have other aims for the evening: and that he was probably spending so much time on me because he felt sorry for me being left on my own. He was a man much susceptible to the tender emotions of pity and sorrow, I suspected. As soon as these suspicions crossed my mind, they immediately seemed to me to be the simple truth, so I looked at my watch and said, "Good heavens, is that the time, I really must be going."

  "Oh no, not yet," he said. "Let me get you another drink."

  "No, really," I said, "I must be going, I have some work to do before the morning."

  And I picked up my bag and my scarf and started fishing for my shoes which I had lost under the bench.

  "I'll walk you home," he said.

  "Don't be ridiculous," I said with asperity, "I only live just down the road."

  "Now then, now then," he said, soothingly, "I know where you live. I didn't mean to offend you. I know you're quite capable of walking down the road by yourself. Let me walk you home."

  "Why?" I said, wriggling my feet into my shoes. "Don't you want to stay and talk"—I waved my hand disparagingly around the room—"to all your friends?"

  I was still not convinced that he really wanted to walk back with me, but as I wished his company I was prepared to accept his offer without the comfort of total conviction. We set off down the broad dusty street. I was wearing a pair of rather flimsy string-backed high-heeled sandals, which kept coming off as I walked: my unsteady progress in them had not helped Joe's irritable attitude earlier in the evening. When I fell off them for the fifth time, George smiled with a mild reproof and offered me his arm. I took it and was amazed, in hanging on to it, to find how much it was there. I had never touched him before, and had always assumed he would be as insubstantial as grass, or as some thin animal: but he was there, within my grasp. I was a little shocked to find it so. He too seemed somewhat surprised, for he became silent, and we walked along without talking. When we arrived at the front door of my block of flats, we paused and I withdrew my arm with some reluctance; then I said what I had decided, marginally, not to say.

  "Why don't you come up," I said, "and have a drink? Or a cup of coffee or something?"

  He looked at me, suddenly very thin and fey and elusive, then said, in his most defensive tone, "Well, I don't mind if I do. That would be lovely, don't you think?"

  "Yes, lovely," I said, and we went in and I opened the lift door for him, and up we went. I felt unreasonably elated and the familiar details of the building seemed to take on a sudden charm. As he followed me into the kitchen, he seemed a little subdued by the grand parental atmosphere which never quite left the place, and I had a moment of horrid fright: perhaps he wasn't quite up to it, perhaps he wasn't quite up to my kind of thing, perhaps I should never have tried to talk to him for more than five minutes, perhaps we were both about to see each other in an unpleasantly revealing social light which would finish off our distant pleasantries forever. To escape this sense of unease, I started to tell him about my parents while the kettle boiled and why they had let me have the flat, and how I couldn't for shame make money out of it by subletting, and how I didn't like anyone enough to let them live with me for free. "So I have to live alone, you see," I said, as I put the beans into the grinder, and hating my own tone of nervous prattle.

  "You don't like being alone?" he said, and I laughed edgily and said, "Well, who does?"

  "Oh, quite," he said, "quite. We're all human, I suppose," and I looked at him and saw that it was all right after all.

  "You seem to look after yourself, though," he said as I poured the water into the pot. "You seem to keep yourself quite busy."

  "I try my best," I said, and we carried the tray back into the sitting room. "And what about you?" I said as we sat down, I in one of the armchairs and he on the settee.

  "What do you mean?" he said, "what about me?"

  "Tell me about you."

  "What about me?" he said, smiling a deprecating smile, and shrugging his shoulders elaborately with a feminine emphatic diffidence.

  "All about you," I said with real avidity, for at that moment I so much wanted to know, I wanted to know all about him, being interested, caught, intent: but he continued to smile evasively and said:

  "What do you mean, all?"

  "Well," I said, "where do you come from?"

  "Ipswich," he said.

  "I don't know anything about Ipswich."

  "I bet you don't even know where it is."

  "Oh yes I do. It's sort of over there," and I waved my hand meaninglessly at an imaginary map of England, sketched on the drawing-room air. He continued in this vein, telling me nothing at all, but telling it with such an air of confidence that I did not take it amiss: I did not quite dare to ask him about what his father did, or any such pertinent questions, though now I wish to God that I had had more courage, and had kept him at it until I had found out the lot. He resisted the pressure of my interest with expert skill, and this in itself surprised me as I was so used to being given endless unsolicited confidences by those in whom I had no interest at all. It occurred to me then that perhaps alone of my acquaintances he was not entirely obsessed by the grandeur of his soul or his career. He was an unassertive man. The very course of his career, which was all that emerged with any clarity, seemed to prove this: he had been sent to Hong Kong on his National Service, where he had got himself involved with Overseas Broadcasting, and on leaving had stayed on with the BBC, moving round the Middle East for a couple of years and then returning to London. When I asked him if it was boring, announcing boring things day in and day out, he said yes, but that he liked being bored. So I said that something must intere
st him, then, if his work didn't, and he said yes, I did, so why not talk about me.

  I tried to match him in diffidence but, of course, could not manage it. He asked me about my family, a subject on which I found it easy enough to be truthful: I recounted in some detail their extraordinary blend of socialist principle and middle-class scruple, the way they had carried the more painful characteristics of their non-conformist inheritance into their own political and moral attitudes.

  "They have to punish themselves, you see," I said. "They can't just let things get comfortable. All this going to Africa and so on, other people don't do it, other people just say they ought to do it, but my parents, they really go. It was the same with the way they brought us up, they were quite absurd, the way they stuck to their principles, never asking us where we'd been when we got back at three in the morning, sending us to state schools, having everything done on the National Health, letting us pick up horrible cockney accents, making the charlady sit down and dine with us, introducing her to visitors, all that kind of nonsense. My God, they made themselves suffer. And yet at the same time they were so nice, so kind, so gentle, and people aren't nice and kind and gentle, they just aren't. The charlady went off with all the silver cutlery in the end, she despised them, I could see her despising them, and she knew they wouldn't take any steps. And the awful thing is that they weren't even shocked when she did it, they had seen it coming, they said. And my brother went and married a ghastly girl whose father was a colonel, and now he lives in Dorking and spends all his time having absolutely worthless people to dinner and playing bridge. My sister still tries, but she married a scientist and they live on the top of a hill in the middle of the country on a housing estate near an atomic station, and last time I went she was stopping the kids from playing with the kids next door because they'd taught them to say Silly Bugger. It's been a disastrous experiment in education, that's all one can call it."

  "Except for you," said George.

  "What do you mean, except for me? I don't consider myself to be a very fine example of anything."

  "Aren't your parents glad you've gone in for scholarship?"

  "Oh no, not really. Oh, I suppose they're pleased in a way that I did so well, but they think I'm a dilettante, I mean to say, Elizabethan sonnet sequences, it isn't as though I were even doing nineteenth-century novels or something worthy like that. They wanted me to read economics at Cambridge, or at least history. They never said so, but I could tell. There's no moral worth in an Elizabethan sonnet sequence, you know."

  "They must approve, though, of your independence."

  I looked at him uneasily, not sure whether he meant this straight or as a crack of some kind.

  "Won't you have a drink?" I said. "Have a whisky or something."

  "Don't they, though?"

  "I'm not at all sure that I am at all independent," I said, getting up and going to switch on the radio. "But I would like to be, that's true. Because, who knows, one may have to be."

  There was some Mozart on the Third; I left it on.

  "Aren't you working this evening?" I said. "Aren't you supposed to be there, doing a bit of announcing?"

  "Not tonight. It is Friday, isn't it? Why, do you want me to go?"

  "No, not at all. I like you to stay. If you like to stay."

  And I stood there by the radio, looking at him, and he looked back, and seemed to indicate, though not precisely, that I should go and sit by him on the settee. So I did, and he took my hand and held it, and then started to kiss my fingers, one by one. After a while I remembered what was at the back of my mind, and I said, "My mother, you know, was a great feminist. She brought me up to be equal. She made there be no questions, no difference. I was equal. I am equal. You know what her creed was? That thing that Queen Elizabeth said about thanking God that she had such qualities that if she were turned out in her petticoat in any part of Christendom, she would whatever it was that she would do. She used to quote that to us, when we were frightened about exams or going to dances. I have to live up to her, you know."

  And I in my turn raised his hand to my lips: it was so beautiful and cool and thin a hand, and I kissed it with some sadness. At the touch of my mouth, he took me in his arms and kissed me all over the face, and eventually we subsided gently together and lay there quietly. Knowing that he was queer, I was not frightened of him at all, because I thought that he would expect no more from me, and I was so moved and touched and pleased by the thought that he might like me, by the thought that he found me of interest. I was so happy for that hour that we lay there because truly I seemed to see him through the eyes of love, so irrationally valuable did he seem, I look back now with some anguish to each touch and glance, to every changing conjunction of limbs and heads and hands. I have lived it over every day for so long now that I am in danger of forgetting the true shape of how it was, because each time I go over it I wish that I had given a little more here or there, or at the very least said what was in my heart, so that he could have known how much it meant to me. But I was incapable, even when happy, of exposing myself thus far.

  After a while the radio closed down on us, and we were left there in silence, except for the hum of the machine. I started to pull myself upright and said, "I must go and switch that thing off, I can't stand that noise," but he held on to me and said, "No, don't go." I pulled away and said that I must, and before I knew where I was I found myself thinking that I couldn't stop him if he really wanted to, because I liked him so much, and if I stopped him he would believe that I didn't: also that if ever, now: also that it would be good for me. So I shut my eyes, very tight, and waited. It was quite simple, as it was summer and I was wearing very few clothes, and he seemed to know quite well what he was doing: but then of course so did I seem to know, and I didn't. However, I managed to smile bravely, in order not to give offense, despite considerable pain, and I hoped that the true state of affairs would not become obvious. I remember that he stroked my hair, just before, and said in his oh so wonderfully polite and chivalrous way:

  "Is this all right? Are you all right, will this be all right?"

  I knew what he meant and, eyes shut, I smiled and nodded, and then that was it and it was over. Which proves that deception is indeed a tangled web. And I had no one but myself to blame. But it was something that when I opened my eyes again, there was only George: I clutched his head to my bosom and I cried:

  "Oh George, tell me about you, tell me about you," but now it was his turn to shut his eyes and, moaning softly, he buried his face against me while I stroked his hair and the thin brown hollow of his cheek. After a while he did say something which, though hardly distinguishable, I took to be "Oh God, how pointless this is." I was a little perturbed by this statement, though not so much then as later, and after a couple more minutes I got up, switched off the radio, and went off to the bathroom, leaving him enough time to straighten himself up or even, if he so wished, to disappear. I returned, some time later, in my dressing gown, and found him still there, sitting where I had left him, but now upright and with his eyes open.

  "Hello," I said, stopping in the doorway and smiling brightly, willing to show anything rather than the perplexing mass of uncertainties which possessed me.

  "Hello, George, what about a drink?"

  "I wouldn't mind a drink," said George, so off I went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of whisky, or what was left of it, and we both had a large drink. I sat on the floor with my back against his knees, which gave me a sense of touch without contact that I found extremely comforting. He rested one hand heavily on my head, which was comforting too. I drank the drink quickly, and felt a little better. After all, I said to myself, people don't do that to other people just because they think they ought to. Just through sheer politeness because they think they've been invited in to do it. People don't work like that, I said to myself. He must have wanted it a bit. I told myself, or he wouldn't have bothered. However kind he appears to be, he can't be as kind as all that. He mus
t be one of these bisexual people, I thought, or perhaps even he's no more queer than I am promiscuous, or whatever the word is for what I pretend to be. Perhaps we appeal to each other because we're rivals in hypocrisy.

  After some time, George said:

  "Rosamund, I ought to be going."

  "Ought you?" I said.

  "I think so."

  Thinking that he probably wanted to go, I did not quite know whether I ought to suggest that he might stay, for once I had suggested it, kindness and chivalry might have kept him against his will. So I said nothing, but sat there for a moment more, feeling the weight of his hand upon my head, hot and warm and enclosing, like being all of me held in it, and feeling that there was no way to stay there in this momentary illusory safety. Then I stood up and said that it was late, I hoped it was not too late, and that I hoped he would get back where he was going. And even then, even at that moment, I did not have the courage to ask him where he lived, or to ask him what his phone number was, for it would have seemed an intrusion, an assumption that I had a right to know, that a future existed where it would be of use to know. I see, oh yes I see that my diffidence, my desire not to offend looks like enough to coldness, looks like enough to indifference, and perhaps I mean it to, but this is not what it feels like in my head. But I cannot get out and say, Where do you live, give me your number, ring me, can I ring you? In case I am not wanted. In case I am tedious. So I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing. And he said nothing. He could have done. He could have said, when can I see you again? But he didn't. It may be that I manifested enough strangeness and indifference to prevent him. It may be that he did not wish to, which, being the most unpleasant conclusion, was the one that I most readily believed. Or it may have been that, like me, he did not wish to make assumptions.