The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  The other three were a little difficult. One was an Indian, one a Greek, and one a Methodist minister. The first two were both hoping, quite vainly I thought, to get into university, and the Methodist minister just wanted to brush up his English literature by taking it at advanced level. The Indian, I regret to say, was really a dead loss, as I knew from the moment I set eyes on him: he was over thirty, I am sure, and had gold teeth and a dark brown suit. It was my initial despair at the sight of him, coupled with his insistence, that made me take him on, for I could not bear the thought that I might be mistaken. He arrived one morning to discuss the possibility of taking lessons, and I tried to ask him sensible questions about when he hoped to take his entrance examinations, and which college he hoped to apply for, and what was his experience of English literature; he replied with a pathetically confused and garbled account of his past career, full of references to Bombay University, which meant less than nothing to me, and then went on to say that he hoped to go to Jesus Christ's College at Cambridge, because that famous poet Wordsworth had been there. Oddly enough, I happened to know that Wordsworth had been at John's. I wished I had not known, for the awareness rattled me. Then I said what English literature had he studied, and he said that famous poet Harrison, or so I thought, until I realized that he must have said Henryson. I hastily made it quite clear that I knew nothing about Henryson at all, and that he had better find someone who knew more about the period than I did. Whereat he said plaintively that he had tried everyone else, and I thought yes, I bet you have. Even so, I managed for almost the first time in my life to say No, but he kept ringing me up, and in the end I thought I must give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he had heard of Henryson, which was clever in itself, and if he knew anything about Henryson, then he would know more about him than me. And, who knows, all that rigmarole about Bombay University might have been true, and many a gold tooth shines above a heart of gold, and so on: so I took him on. It was a mistake. It was a useless task: we ploughed through the entrance syllabus and I actually organized him sufficiently to make him write off to Bursars for entrance papers, but he had no more hope of getting in than a child of ten. I could not decide whether it would be good for him to fail his exams and come to terms with reality, or whether it would have been better for him to have lived on forever convinced that he could have made it if only he could have found a tutor. Not that that could have been my decision anyway: the choice was not mine. But I did my best and I felt he was my responsibility.

  The Greek was a very different case. He was a young lad called Spiro who also wanted to get into Oxford or Cambridge: he was only eighteen which, for a start, put his chances higher than the Indian's. He clearly came from an affluent family which he seemed to have mislaid somewhere on the Continent; one parent was usually in Rome and the other in Spain, though they shifted from time to time. I started on him about three weeks after I started on the Indian, and was expecting like despair, but he quickly convinced me that he had at least a superficial brightness and intelligence. His English was excellent, which helped. It was months, however, before I realized the truth about him. It is alarming to see how strong one's prejudices are and how convinced one is (or I am) that no foreigner can ever have quite the same standard of intelligence as products of the English educational system. I do not mean that I think foreigners are stupid; merely that I always doubt if they can do it on quite the same ground. But after a few weeks I realized that Spiro could. He was quite outstandingly gifted, so gifted that he could even beat the examination system and eighteen years of unhelpful inheritance. He had always told me what a fantastic prodigy he was, but the more he had said it the more I distrusted him, until with a little practice and very little guidance, he started to turn out weekly essays of the most excellent, orthodox practical criticism, which would have been a credit to any first-year scholar anywhere. I was amazed, delighted, and a little crestfallen to find how narrowly my judgment operated. I tried not to let him see how much my opinion of his chances had improved, but I knew he could tell. He was a shockingly self-confident, conceited boy, but he was only eighteen, and he had a right to be.

  The Methodist minister was a quiet, diffident and charming man whose one anxiety was lest he should embarrass me by obtruding his religious opinions. He felt it his duty to do such set authors as Milton and T. S. Eliot, but his passion was for Wordsworth, whom he admired for all the reasons which I found most suspect. He would clearly pass A Level with ease, being much better read than most schoolboys, but his essays were not very well organized as he was out of practice, and knew little of critical vocabulary. Since he was only doing the course for pleasure and would get through the exams anyway, I just did not know whether I should press him about his weaknesses or not. I did not want to confuse his pleasure with technicalities, though that perhaps was precisely what he was paying me to do. So my corrections were always very tentative, as tentative as his references to God, which were bound to creep in on any discussion of Milton.

  When the third month of my pregnancy drew to an end. I began to worry myself to death about these four dependants. My instinct was to tell them all I was ill and unable to continue the course, but I felt some guilt about doing this midway to the exams, when they would find it very difficult to get a replacement, and certainly not a replacement with anything like my cheapness or qualifications. One minute I would tell myself that it was none of their business if I had a baby or not, and the next I would be driven to tears by the sheer embarrassment and absurdity of the situation, which I did not think I had the stamina to bear. I knew that I would have to come to some decision, through the pressure of time and the growth of my belly; I had heard of people who had disguised their condition till six months or later, but I did not fancy such evasion. On the other hand, how could I possibly put the thing into words?

  In the end the only one that I told was Spiro. I let the others draw their own conclusions. My schoolgirl, Sally Hitchins, certainly noticed, but did not dare to ask: she seemed rather admiring, and had indeed no right to be otherwise, in view of what she had let drop about her own stormy record and the reasons for her expulsion. The Indian did not see. He just did not notice or, if he did, it meant nothing to him. But for my Methodist minister I took to wearing a wedding ring; not a real wedding ring, needless to say, but the identical curtain ring which I had flashed round that disreputable hotel for Hamish so many years before. He was the only person for whom I ever stooped to such measures, and I tell myself that I did it for his sake and not for my own. I don't know what he thought of it: I suppose he must have concluded that I had contracted a hasty shotgun wedding as the wedding ring appeared so late in the proceedings, but perhaps he was too kind and Christian for such conjecture. A situation like mine certainly makes clear how little we know of each other's ignorances and illuminations.

  I told Spiro, or rather one might say that Spiro told me. It was about a fortnight after my last evening with Roger. I was wearing a large grey man's sweater that I had had for years, over a skirt that I had let out with a piece of string; I did not look too bad, though obvious enough to the discerning eye, and Spiro was discerning enough. He had just arrived and I went into the kitchen to make us both a cup of coffee: I returned with the tray, which I put down on top of the bookcase while I went to pick up the little coffee table, intending to place it in a convenient position between our two seats, but Spiro dashed forward and wrenched the table from my grasp, saying, "No, no, no, you mustn't go carrying heavy things any more, allow me, allow me."

  "Whatever do you mean?" I said, pulling the table firmly back from him: it weighed nothing anyway, being about two feet high and two feet square, and made of ugly canework, like a garden chair. I put the thing down where I had originally intended, then looked back at Spiro. But he was laughing. I knew that he knew and I was annoyed with him for laughing at me.

  "There's nothing funny about it," I said crossly, and he pulled a ridiculous mock-serious face and said:

 
"No, no, I quite agree, I quite agree."

  "Sit down," I said, "and read me your essay on Donne. If you ever wrote it."

  "Certainly, certainly," he said, with a look of brazen complicit apology, and got his essay out of his briefcase and started to read it: it was very good but in reading it aloud he treated it with a certain mockery, as though he could equally well have written anything else on the subject. He was only eighteen and so sharp, as they say, that one day he would cut himself. I did not mind that he knew that I knew that he knew. He laughed, and did not feel sorry and offered to lift tables for me because he wished to provoke and not because he wished to display his sympathy. From him, too, my poverty must have been concealed.

  When I went to see the doctor again, he said that he had managed to book me a bed in St. Andrew's Hospital which, as he expected me to know, was on Marylebone Road. From the way in which he told me, I could see that he expected gratitude and that he considered he had done more for me than might have been expected of him. I was duly grateful, though on what grounds I was not quite sure: later I thought of three possible reasons for his air of achievement. It was quite clever of him to have got me a bed at all, in view of the shortage of maternity beds, and very clever of him to have got me one so close, and in a teaching hospital with an excellent reputation. After telling me that he had made this booking, he then washed his hands of me with undisguised relief. "You can go to the clinic at the hospital," he said, "and they'll look after you there."

  "Yes, of course," I said, as though I understood the whole procedure, though I wanted to ask him a dozen things, about when to go, and where to go, and whom to ask for: but he was a busy man and there was a long queue in the surgery outside, so I got up to leave.

  "Thank you very much," I said for the tenth time, and set off to the door: but he called me back and said, "Now then, you don't want to go without your letter of introduction, do you?"

  "Oh no, of course not," I said, as though it had just momentarily slipped my mind, and he handed over an envelope addressed to the Ante-Natal Clinic, St. Andrew's Hospital. It was a sealed envelope. I wondered what it said inside. I felt slightly better leaving with that in my pocket as at least I now knew the name of the clinic which I was expected to attend: in those days I was so innocent that I did not even know what a clinic was.

  My first visit to that clinic was a memorable experience. I had ascertained the day and the time by telephone, a piece of forethought of which I felt moderately proud, and I duly presented myself on Wednesday afternoon. The hospital was easy enough to find, being a large sprawling building occupying a large area of ground on the north side of the Marylebone Road, not far from that elegant favourite of mine, Castrol House. St. Andrew's could not rival this latter building in architectural distinction; the central block appeared to be early eighteenth-century and had regularity if nothing else, but it was surrounded and overlapped and encroached upon by a hideous medley of neo-Gothic, nineteen-thirties, and nineteen-sixties excrescences, all of which had been added entirely at random, from the visual point of view at least. I was alarmed, not so much because the building was an eyesore, for my visual taste is very weak, but because I did not know how to get into it, nor which part to attack. There were innumerable doors and entrances, and I had a sense that the main door was certainly not the appropriate one. In the end, however, it was that one which I chose, as I thought there might at least be a reception desk inside it. Luckily, there was. I presented myself and my incriminating envelope and was told to go out again and find the Out Patients entrance, which the girl said was down a side street. So I went out and found the Out Patients and entered the building once more. Here, as I had suspected, there was no reception desk and no indication of any direction: there was a door marked HAEMOTOLOGY and a lot of dark gloss cream corridors. I stood there irresolute, feeling acutely ashamed at my own ignorance: it was an emotion that I had experienced often enough before, on my first day at school, for instance, or my first day at Cambridge, but then with some mixed pleasurable anticipation, and now with nothing for foreboding.

  I was rescued from immobility by the arrival of another woman, very evidently pregnant, who came briskly through the doors from the street and set off with an air of speed and purpose down one of the cream corridors. I put two and two together, and followed her. Sure enough, she led me straight to the ante-natal clinic, which turned out to be a large hall with various small rooms leading off it, full of rows of chairs and waiting pregnant women. There was still five minutes to go before the clinic officially opened, for I had at least grown wise to the inevitable queueing, but the room was crowded already and there were only three or four chairs left. I occupied one of them and prepared to wait, and while I waited I had a good look at those who were waiting with me.

  They had one thing in common, of course, though their conditions varied from the invisible to the grossly inflated. As at the doctor's, I was reduced almost to tears by the variety of human misery that presented itself. Perhaps I was in no mood for finding people cheering, attractive or encouraging, but the truth is that they looked to me an unbelievably depressed and miserable lot. One hears much, though mostly from the interested male, about the beauty of a woman with child, ships in full sail, and all that kind of metaphorical euphemism, and I suppose that from time to time on the faces of well-fed, well-bred young ladies I have seen a certain peaceful glow, but the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. Anemia and exhaustion were written on most countenances: the clothes were dreadful, the legs swollen, the bodies heavy and unbalanced. There were a few cases of striking wear: a huge middle-aged woman, who could walk only with a stick, a pale thin creature with varicose veins and a two-year-old child in tow, and a black woman who sat there not with the peasant acceptance of physical life of which one hears, but with a look of wide-eyed dilating terror. She was moaning to herself softly, and muttering, almost as though she were already in labour: perhaps, like me, she was more frightened of the hospital than of anything else. Even those who had no evident complaints, and who might well have been expected to be full of conventional joy, were looking cross and tired, possibly at the prospect of such a tedious afternoon: there was a couple of young girls in the row in front of me, the kind of girls who chatter and giggle on buses and in cafés, but they were not giggling, they were complaining at great length about how their backs ached and how they felt sick and how they'd never get their figures back. It seemed a shame. And there we all were, and it struck me that I felt nothing in common with any of these people, that I disliked the look of them, that I felt a stranger and a foreigner there, and yet I was one of them, I was like that too, I was trapped in a human limit for the first time in my life, and I was going to have to learn how to live inside it.

  After some time, various nurses arrived and things started to happen and the queue began to move. People disappeared, in a completely mystifying order, to have their blood pressure taken, and to be weighed, and to see Doctor This and Doctor That and the midwife. I sat there for a while wondering if anyone would come and ask me for my card, and when they didn't I decided I would have to find someone to give it to; eventually, afraid that I would be accused of queue-jumping, I rose tentatively to my feet and went in search of authority. I found a nurse who took my envelope and told me to go and sit down again, so I did, and prepared myself for an endless wait, but within a few minutes my name too was mysteriously called. "Mrs. Stacey," said the mechanical voice, "Mrs. Rosamund Stacey." I got up once more and found the nurse who had taken my letter. She turned to me and said, What do you want? I said they'd just called my name out, what should I do? Go see the midwife, said the nurse. Where? I said, almost sharply, for I could see no possible reason why I or anyone else should be expected to know by instinct where midwives were. Oh, don't you know? she said, and pointed to a door leading off the hall in the far right-hand corner. I walked up to it, knocked and went in.

  The midwife was a pretty lady with smart ginger hair and small fe
atures and blue eyes. "Hello, Mrs. Stacey," she said warmly, extending her hand from behind her desk, "I'm Sister Hammond, how do you do?"

  "How do you do?" I said, thinking I had reached civilization at last, but feeling nonetheless impelled to continue, "but I'm not Mrs. Stacey, I'm Miss."

  "Yes, yes," she smiled, coldly and sweetly, "but we call everyone Mrs. here. As a courtesy title, don't you think?"

  She was a civilized lady and she could see that I was civilized, so I too smiled frostily, though I did not think much of the idea. We had some chat about how she didn't believe in natural childbirth, and the overcrowding of the maternity service, and then she made me fill in interminable forms and documents, giving details of all past illnesses and of my domestic accommodation. When I said that I had a flat with five rooms, kitchen and bathroom all to myself, her smile became even more courteous and cold: I could see that she saw me, and without wild inaccuracy, as one of these rich dissolute young girls about town, and I was rather relieved that her profession prevented her from inquiring why I had not done the sensible and expected thing and gone and had an expensive abortion. I did not like her, but I felt on safe ground with her, as I did not feel with all those bloated human people outside. Safe, chartered, professional, articulate ground.

  When she had finished her interrogation, she said, "Well, Mrs. Stacey, that's all for now, I'll be seeing you again in a month's time."