The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  "Do you mean that's all for now?" I said, getting up with relief, but she said:

  "Oh no, I'm afraid not altogether. I'm afraid you'll have to wait now to see Dr. Esmond."

  "Oh, I see," I said. "I'm afraid I don't quite understand the routine here."

  "Oh," she said, rising dismissively, all clean starch and coolness, "oh, you'll soon find your way around. People don't take long to find their way around."

  So I went out and waited for Dr. Esmond, and I waited for him till the bitter end, when everyone else had gone. It was the first time that I had ever been examined, and I could have put up with Dr. Esmond, who was a grey-haired old man with rimless glasses, but I was not prepared for being examined by five medical students, one after the other. I lay there, my eyes shut, and quietly smiling to conceal my outrage, because I knew that these things must happen, and that doctors must be trained, and that medical students must pass examinations; and he asked them questions about the height of the fundus, and could they estimate the length of pregnancy, and what about the pelvis. They all said I had a narrow pelvis, and I lay there and listened to them and felt them, with no more protest than if I had been a corpse examined by budding pathologists for the cause of death. But I was not dead, I was alive twice over.

  As Sister Hammond had prophesied, I got used to it. I learned what time to arrive and where to slip my attendance card in the pile so that I would get called early in the queue: they were so unsystematic that one could not really beat their system, but one could win occasionally on the odd point. I learned to read the notes upside down in the file that said Not to be Shown to the Patient. I learned how to present myself for inspection, with the minimum necessary clothes' removal. I learned that one had to bully them about iron pills and vitamin pills, because they would never remember. But it continued to be an ordeal, unillumined by even the most fitful gleams of comfort: my sole aim was to get out as quickly as possible. I hated most of all the chat about birth that went on so continually around me in the queue: everyone recounted their own past experiences, and those of their sisters and mothers and aunts and friends and grandmothers, and everyone else listened, spellbound, including me. The degrading truth was that there was no topic more fascinating to us in that condition; and indeed few topics anywhere, it seems. Birth, pain, fear and hope, these were the subjects that drew us together in gloomy awe, and so strong was the bond that even I, doubly, trebly outcast by my unmarried status, my education, and my class, even I was drawn in from time to time, and compelled to proffer some anecdote of my own, such as the choice story of my sister who gave birth to her second in an ambulance in a snow storm. Indeed, so strong became the pull of nature that by the end of the six months' attendance I felt more in common with the ladies at the clinic than with my own acquaintances.

  Pregnancy revealed to me several interesting points, of which I had not before been aware. It was quite amazing, for instance, how many pregnant women there suddenly seemed to be in the world. The streets were crawling with them, and I never remembered having noticed them before. Even the British Museum, and I came to think most particularly the British Museum, was full of earnest intellectual women like myself, propping themselves or their unborn babies against the desk as they worked. The same discovery was to be made later with the babies. Also, I came to realize how totally I depended on the casual salute as my sole means of sexual gratification: now, of course, I was having to learn how to do without it, as men do not lean out of car windows to shout and whistle at expectant mothers, nor do they stare at them intently on tube trains, nor make pointed remarks about them in cafés or shops. In my time I had received much of this kind of attention, being tall and well-built and somehow noticeable, and it had given me much pleasure. The more tenuous a link, the more pleasure it would give me, as I could no longer fail to admit: after all, my affair with George must have been as tenuous as any contact likely to produce such a positive result could possibly have been. George, George, I thought of George, and sometimes I switched on the radio to listen to his voice announcing this and that: I still could not believe that I was going to get through it without telling him, but I could not see that I was going to tell him either. I would have the odd two minutes when I would think of him, and such grief and regret and love would pour down my spine that I tried not to think.

  My acquaintances took it pretty much as one would have expected, with a mixture of curiosity, admiration, pity and indifference. There must have been some speculation as to whose the child was, but I did not know any group of people well enough to be asked to my face-except in the most frivolous, easy-to-parry terms. I tried to convey, without saying anything, that there was a man somewhere whom none of them knew anything about, and that everything was all right really. The only person, however, who was truly fascinated by the event was Lydia Reynolds, my novelist friend. I used to meet Lydia for lunch from time to time as she worked near the British Museum in an art gallery which specialized in water colours. She would sometimes come to the Museum, too, to type in the typing room, but had not been for some time, so I assumed her work was going badly. When she first learned of my condition, somewhere round the end of the fourth month, all she said was:

  "It's not Joe's, is it? I hope to God it isn't Joe's. I can't think what a baby belonging to Joe would turn out like, and anyway he does quite enough propagation, doesn't he?"

  I assured her that it wasn't Joe's and she seemed quite happy. I then asked her how her own creative life was coming along, and she scowled and looked down at the table and with her left eye starting its habitual violent neurotic twitch, said bitterly:

  "Oh, quite quite frightful. I can't get anything to work, I get worse and worse, I've got nothing to say, I've just got nothing to say."

  "If you've got nothing to say," I said, "why try to say it? Why not have a little rest?"

  "I can't rest," she said violently, "I can't rest. When I'm not working on something I'm so miserable, I'm so unhappy, I don't exist, I can't do anything, I can't enjoy a thing."

  "It'll pass," I said placating.

  "I don't see why," she said. "Perhaps I'm finished."

  "If you really thought you were, you wouldn't say so."

  "Wouldn't I? Perhaps not. But what about people like Joe though, how do they keep at it, one a year, year in, year out? Where do they get it from?"

  "I thought you didn't like Joe's work."

  "I don't."

  "Then why worry about it?"

  "I can't help worrying. I'd rather write a bad book than nothing."

  "Why don't you write one then?"

  "I can't," she wailed. "I can't. I try to. I begin them but I can't finish. How I envy you, Rosamund, your work is always there, you know what's got to be done, it's all there outside you waiting for you to come and straighten it out and put it together, like a job almost, like a job to be done. I wish I could write a book on something and not just a book. I wish I didn't have to go on dragging it out of myself like a dirty great spider. I wish I could write a book on Elizabethan poets."

  "There's nothing to stop you," I said, but she sighed heavily and said, chewing savagely at the quick of her nails:

  "Ah, there, I haven't got your education."

  The next time I saw her she told me all about her miscarriage. She started off by saying that she thought I must be crazy to be having the baby, ruining my life, and all the old junk, but she did not mean it seriously, she was merely leading in to what she herself had to say. "I suppose the truth is," she concluded, "that you must really want it. On some level, don't you think?"

  I shrugged my shoulders, for I did not know the answer. Then she went on:

  "It's a funny thing, you know," she said, "but I was pregnant once. It was awful. It was just after the first novel was published, and I came down to London for the first time and I got mixed up with a whole crowd of idiots and slept about all over the place. It was great fun, especially after Doncaster, but I was such a fool in those days, I knew all about ever
ything in theory but practice was another matter and, anyway, after a while I realized what was up. I was determined not to have it, but on the other hand I couldn't bear the thought of having anything scruffy done, being so neurotic and all that I thought it might upset me, so I got this fellow to recommend me this really expensive chap who did everything legally, on psychological grounds and so on, you know what I mean, private nursing home, all that lark. So I made myself an appointment and of? I went to convince this man that if I had this baby I was going to be a mental and physical wreck, which is the wording of that case, you know the one I mean. He was an old fat man and quite nice. He lived on the Bayswater Road. Anyway, he asked me all my life story and I told him the whole lot, which was great fun—ferocious mother, dad bumped himself off because she bullied him, four-roomed house, squalor, sent to work at sixteen, the whole lot, and I made it sound as lurid as I could, and the whole time I made myself look as neurotic as I possibly could, which was easy enough with the material I've got. By the end of my recital I felt so sorry for myself I nearly burst into tears. He too seemed moved, and I thought I was well away, but when I finished he said he was very sorry but in my case he was afraid that he couldn't possibly recommend termination of the pregnancy. He said I was too sensitive and impressionable and conscientious, and that in cases like mine termination was far more likely to lead to a breakdown than going to full term. I tried to explain that I certainly wouldn't have a breakdown anyway, and he said that if I wasn't going to have a breakdown anyway then what was I there for. There didn't seem to be any way out of it: he would only recommend termination for people who were so insensitive that they wouldn't break down because of it, yet presumably if they were so insensitive then they wouldn't be going to see him in the first place. The whole thing was a real waste of time, he was quite the wrong kind of person altogether; I don't know where this chap got him from. In the end I didn't know whether to try to persuade him that I was perfectly well-balanced and totally indifferent to all the moral issues, or whether I ought to convince him that I was so far over the edge that he had to rescue me before too late."

  "What on earth did you do?" I asked, feeling some relief that I had not tried this confusing course myself.

  "Oh, in the end I walked out, I could see we weren't getting anywhere. He was the wrong kind of man; he was some perfectly serious psychiatrist who had happened to write some article on Abortion Law Reform, and this chap of mine who recommended him had got hold of the wrong end of the stick."

  "So what did you do?"

  "Well, this is the funny bit. I walked out, and I was feeling rather indignant and wrapped up in my own thoughts and what I should do, and would I have to go to some awful butcher, and how I was going to give Lawrence hell when I got hold of him, and the long and the short of it is that I was so upset that I walked straight across the Bayswater Road and got knocked down by a bus. I wasn't really hurt, but the fright did the trick and without any effort at all on my part. Right outside his front door too. I'd swear he was watching from his window when the ambulance came and picked me up."

  "What a stroke of luck," I said.

  "Yes, it was, wasn't it? And nobody ever suggested that I'd done it on purpose because it wasn't the kind of accident that one could possibly plan, I mean one would have been more likely to be killed than to miscarry. I really felt providence was on my side. It was the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me, I think."

  "Why don't you put it in a book?" I said. "That would give you something to write about."

  "Oh, I couldn't possibly," said Lydia. "It's so unconvincing. Far too unrealistic for my kind of novel. It sounds like something out of Hardy's Life's Little Ironies."

  "I've always thought Life's Little Ironies had rather a profound attitude to life," I said truthfully.

  "Have you really?" said Lydia. "I don't find it profound at all. It's so mechanical. Not real."

  "But it was real. It happened to you."

  "Ah yes," said Lydia, "but there's a difference between what happens to one in real life and what one can make real in art. That happened to me, I agree it happened to me, but I'm not convinced by it, it hasn't got the kind of stamp of reality on it to me. I don't write about that kind of thing, I couldn't. And anyway I don't like accidents in books. Who was it who said: The moving accident is not my trade? It's not mine either."

  "Wordsworth."

  "Was it really? I didn't know I knew any Wordsworth."

  "So you don't think that because something happens, that makes it true?" I said.

  "No, not at all," said Lydia. "Do you?"

  "I suppose I must," I said.

  In bed that night I thought for some time about life's little ironies, for the truth was, as I had told Lydia, that they always moved me out of all proportion to their significance in any respectable philosophic scheme. I have always been stirred, sometimes profoundly, by newspaper comments such as Killed While Adjusting Safety Belt, or Collapsed Night Before Wedding. I used to think that my interest in such cases sprang from some absurd belief in a malicious deity: but now, lying there in bed with my hands folded over my stirring, unknown baby, it occurred to me that my interest had been a premonition of a different, non-rational order of things. My present predicament would certainly qualify, I thought, as one of life's little ironies, and yet it did not seem to be a mere accident, nor the effect of divine malevolence. Had it belonged to the realm of mere accident I would have surely got rid of it, for though I am a coward about operations and hospitals, even then I could see that I was letting myself in for more hospitals and more unpleasantness by continuing than I would have done by termination. But it did not seem the kind of thing one could have removed, like a wart or a corn. It seemed to have meaning. It seemed to be the kind of event to which, however accidental its cause, one could not say No.

  At the same time it did not seem to be totally the product of malevolence. I did not feel, as Hardy felt for Tess, that events had conspired maliciously against my innocence. Perhaps I did not wish to feel this, for it was a view dangerous to my dignity and difficult to live with for the years which were to come. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that my state must have some meaning, that it must, however haphazard and unexpected and unasked, be connected to some sequence, to some significant development of my life. These were the things I thought before the child was born, of course, for a child once born is significant enough in itself: but the point is that before the birth I did not know this and was puzzled as by hints and warnings of what was to be. My state was curious; it was as though I were waiting for some link to be revealed to me that would make sense of disconnections, though I had no evidence at all that it existed. At times I had a vague and complicated sense that this pregnancy had been sent to me in order to reveal to me a scheme of things totally different from the scheme which I inhabited, totally removed from academic enthusiasms, social consciousness, etiolated undefined emotional connections, and the exercise of free will. It was as though for too long I had been living in one way, on one plane, and the way I had ignored had been forced thus abruptly and violently to assert itself. Really, it was a question of free will; up to this point in my life I had always had the illusion at least of choice, and now for the first time I seemed to become aware of the operation of forces not totally explicable, and not therefore necessarily blinder, smaller, less kind or more ignorant than myself.

  These were forces which I had always derided when they had been mentioned in conversation by others; irrational self-justification, I had called them. They had always been dragged up in connection with such dicy topics as marriage and maternity, in which luck or blind chance play a large part. My sister in particular had been particularly prone to comments of this nature. All three of her pregnancies had been accidental, as the saying is, and she had commented thus: "You don't decide to have children. They decide to be born."

  She had also made several ludicrous remarks of a less portentous nature, while expec
ting her third child, all of which seemed to spring from this hinterland of unwilled consequences and confused values.

  "Honestly," she said once, and with sincerity, not flippancy, "I'm delighted about this, now I'll be able to use up all my baby clothes. I've got so many, I was dreading having to pack them up to send them to Oxfam, I so hate making parcels."

  And at some other juncture she had said to me, "Do you know, at least a week before I could possibly have known about this baby, I went into Marks for some new underwear and quite by accident bought myself a couple of pairs of WX pants that had got mixed up on the ordinary counter, and when I got them home I actually said to myself, these would come in handy if ever I were pregnant again, which of course I had no intention of being, even though I actually was." These things seemed to weigh as nothing in the balance compared with the life of a child, nor could I imagine to myself in cold blood a diety however obscure rearranging the underwear in a department store; yet, I began to see, somehow, what she had meant.

  I do not wish to suggest, as perhaps I seem to be suggesting, that the irrational was taking its famed feminine grip upon me. My Elizabethan poets did not begin to pale into insignificance in comparison with the thought of buying nappies. On the contrary, I found I was working extremely well at this time and with great concentration and clarity. I thought continually and with relief that I was as sure about the Elizabethan poets as I was sure that I liked baked potatoes. I did not go over from the camp of logic to the camp of intuition; it was rather that I became aware of the facts that I had not recognized or even noticed before. There is nothing logical about ignorance. I am sure that my discoveries were common discoveries; if they were not, they would not be worth recording. The only curious feature in my case is that the facts that I now discovered were precisely the same facts that my admirable parents had always so firmly presented to our childish eyes: facts of inequality, of limitation, of separation, of the impossible, heartbreaking uneven hardship of the human lot. I had always felt for others in theory and pitied the blows of fate and circumstance under which they suffered; but now, myself no longer free, myself suffering, I may say that I felt it in my heart.