The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  Once I noticed that I was feeling them, I realized that I had been feeling them for quite a long time without paying them much attention. I instantly took them to be what, in fact, they were and was overcome with panic as it seemed such an inconvenient time to have to disturb hospital and ambulance men. It was a quarter past eleven, a time for all good citizens to be asleep. I was in a dilemma: the pains were not yet at all bad and I could clearly hang on at home for some time, but on the other hand the longer I waited the more inconvenient would grow the hour and the more irritable the nurses, midwives and ambulance people that I would have to encounter. I went to the bedroom and got out my little leaflet of instructions which told me to time the contractions and to ring the hospital when they became regular and more frequent than once every quarter of an hour. So I started to time them, and found to my alarm that they were perfectly regular and occurring once every three minutes. At half past eleven I rang the hospital, who told me to take an aspirin or two and ring the ambulance. So I did. Then I got out my suitcase, prepacked to order, put on my coat and waited. The men arrived within ten minutes, at exactly the same moment as Lydia who was returning home rather gay after a party. When she discovered my state and destination, she flung her arms around me, kissed me several times, and accompanied me downstairs in the lift, telling me en route about the party and how she had met Joe Hurt there, and how they had talked about me, and he had yet another book finished, and how fond of me he was, and how concerned, and how perhaps she quite liked him after all, and she would let him know instantly about the baby, whatever it turned out to be: the ambulance men and I listened to her story in solid quiet, but I was glad to have her there to stop my having to say things like It's a fine night, isn't it, or Sorry to disturb you at this hour, to these two silent men. Lydia looked rather weird, as her hair was coming down and she had lipstick all over one cheek: also she was wearing a strange long green lace dress and over it her usual grey mackintosh. She had no other coat. Her preoccupation with the subject of Joe I found illuminating, and I was glad to be able to put together, on new evidence, an attitude of hers that I had never understood.

  I was glad too to be going from so good an address. I felt that by it alone I had bought a little deference and, sure enough, at the bottom of the stairs one of the men turned to Lydia and said, "Would you like to come along, Miss, to see your friend in?" He was rather taken by her, I could see, and her eyes too lit up at the prospect of so strange an excursion, but I said firmly that I would be better off on my own, it was only just down the road, I couldn't dream of disturbing her, what she needed was a good sleep. I did not fancy the idea of the details of my labour becoming available to her professional curiosity: she could have a baby herself, I thought, if she really wanted to know what it was like. She stood on the pavement and waved good-bye, shouting good luck after me as the ambulance drew away; she was an odd and charming sight in her strangely tiered garments.

  On the way to the hospital I thought how unnerving it is, suddenly to see oneself for a moment as others see one, like a glimpse of unexpected profile in an unfamiliar combination of mirrors. I think I know myself better than anyone can know me, and I think this even in cold blood, for too much knowing is my vice; and yet one cannot account for the angles of others. Once at a party I met a boy whom I had known at school, and not seen since; we both had known that the other would be present and I had recognized him at once, but when we met and talked he confessed that when looking out for me he had taken another girl to be me. I asked him which, and he had pointed through the crowd at a tall, skinny girl with too-neat hair and a shut, frightened face: I was amazed and oddly hurt by his near-mistake, for she was so utterly unlike me, so devoid of any of my qualities or defects. And yet she was the same height, the same colouring, and, looking back, I could see that there was enough in me at sixteen that could have developed that way and that in six years sixteen-year-old Rosamund Stacey might well have been her and not me.

  When we arrived at the hospital, I thought with some relief that this would be my last visit, and that at the least the clinic was over with all its eroding grind. I climbed out of the ambulance and started off down the corridor, but one of the men stopped me and said that I had to go in a wheelchair. What do you mean, I said, I can walk.

  "You're not allowed to walk," he said.

  "Why ever not?" I asked, not because I objected to going in a wheelchair, but because I couldn't see why not. "I walked at the other end," I said.

  "Ah yes," said the man, "but at this end you're not allowed to. Come along now, you're our responsibility now, we can't allow you to walk, I'm afraid."

  So I sat down, succumbing to his threat that he would lose his job if I didn't, and they wheeled me off down countless corridors, up in a lift, down a floor in another one, and into a large room where I was told to get up and go and sign a list. Here, it seemed, I was allowed to walk. I had been expecting to see a few familiar faces, such as the thin little Yorkshire nurse, the fat Irish one, or even the smart red-haired midwife; I had, luckily in the event, no grandiose expectations of seeing any doctors or gynecologists. But there was not a face I recognized in sight: a whole new army of people appeared to have taken over, who presumably came out only at night. I was a little disappointed; the other faces had become almost endeared by familiarity. I signed my name on the relevant register; the nurse in charge of it looked up and said, "Well, you're the only one in tonight, we were having a quiet night," and I smiled feebly, unsure whether she was expressing pleasure or annoyance at having something to do.

  Then they took me off to another room and took away all my clothes and put me in a hospital nightgown and asked me how often my contractions were. When I told them, they said Nonsense, but when they investigated they naturally enough found me to be right. Then they did various other unpleasant and compulsory things, found me my book when I asked for it, and left me to it, telling me to ring if I wanted anything. I lay there on this hard high bed for half an hour, trying to read, and then I rang the bell and asked if they couldn't do something about it. Not yet, they said, and off they went. I lay there for another ten minutes and then a quite different nurse came in and said I had to move, somebody else had to have my bed. I lay there and looked at her and said how. Don't you feel like walking, she said, and I said Oh, all right, as she seemed to expect me to, and I heaved myself down off this mountainously high iron bedstead and followed her down a corridor and into another room, where she helped me on to an equally high identical bed. Then I asked once more, politely, if they couldn't do something about it, and she said Oh yes, of course, wasn't it time I had some pethidine, and she would go and find someone to give me an injection.

  A quarter of an hour later about five nurses arrived with the pethidine, which they administered; then they all sat in a row in the corridor outside and started to talk about their boy friends. I listened to their conversations, trying to distract myself from sensations that did not seem quite reasonable or endurable, and after a while the drug began to work: the pain did not diminish but my resistance to it disappeared, and every two minutes regularly it flowed through me as thought I were some other person, and as though I myself, what was left of me, was watching this swell and ebb from many miles away. It was no longer personal and therefore bearable; I just lay there and let it happen, and the voices of the five girls came to me very clearly and purely, the syntax and connections of their dialogue illuminated by a strange pale warm light. One of them started off by telling the others about some character called Frank, against whom the others had apparently been warning her for some time, for when she described the way in which he had squeezed her knee in the cinema, the others began to exclaim with predestined admiring indignation.

  "Honestly, I told you what he was like," one of them said, "I told you what he'd be up to, didn't I? You should have heard what Elaine said about him after the Christmas Ball."

  "Elaine asks for it," said another voice, and they all giggled, and somebody els
e said, "Well, you don't exactly go out of your way to avoid it yourself, do you? I mean to say, what about that dress you had on the other day? If that wasn't a topless dress, I'd like to know what is."

  "Do you know what," said the owner of the dress, "happened to me last time I was wearing it? I had to dash home, it was a Thursday and I hadn't got a late leave, and I just got to the corner of Charles Street at eleven-thirty, and I had to run like anything, and anyway I just got to the door as Bessie was locking up and I got in all right, but who do you think I met on the other side but Mrs. Sammy Spillikins, all in her dressing gown and slippers, and she gave me such a look and said in that voice of hers, you know what she sounds like, Well, well, well, Miss Ellis, she said, you do cut things rather fine, don't you? Are you in the habit of leaving things to the last moment like this? Mean old cow, I'd like to know what it's got to do with her. And she said she wanted a word, and she followed me all the way up to my room, just on the pretext of asking me some question about what Dr. Cohen asked Gillian to do about the new radiator in the waiting room, and she stayed so long I had to take my coat off, and she kept looking and looking at me, and when she left do you know what she said? She said, In my day, with a dress like that, we used to wear modesty vests."

  Once more they all giggled merrily, and then someone volunteered the information that however old Sammy Spillikins looked, she was really only forty-two, which she had on the best of authority, and somebody else described, though as a matter of fact inaccurately, what a modesty vest was, when one of the gathering claimed not to know.

  "How disgusting," the ignorant one said vehemently when enlightened.

  They then told some more anecdotes about their evidently circumscribed love lives before moving on to discuss their trade. They began mildly enough by inquiring how many had been born the night before, and what had happened to the little premature one that was failing earlier in the evening, but after a while the tone really became too extreme for my possible comfort; they described cases of women who had lain in labour for unbelievable lengths of time, of one who had screamed solidly for three hours, of a black woman who had scratched a nurse's face when she tried to give her an enema, of a white woman who had sworn at one of the black nurses and told her to get out, she wasn't having her filthy hands on her nice clean new baby. One of them said, en passant, "I'll be really glad to get out of this ward. I don't really mind the babies, but the mothers are enough to give anyone the creeps." Then one of them started to recount in vivid detail the story of a woman whose labour she had attended a month earlier, who had died because they discovered at the last moment that this that and the other hadn't been properly dealt with; "it was awful," this girl said, "the way they kept on telling her it was all fine, and I could see them getting bluer and bluer, you know how they look when anything really bad starts up." At this I could take it no longer, and I heard my voice yell, from a long way away, "Oh, for God's sake, pack it in, can't you?"

  I don't think they caught what I said despite my unnatural loudness of tone, but two of them came bustling in and said, "What was that, did you call, how are you getting on?"

  "I think this drug thing must be wearing off," I said mildly, "because it seems to be getting worse and worse, can you give me something else please, quick?"

  "Oh no!" they said, "not yet, you've a long time to go yet, we have to leave something to give you later on."

  "Oh," I said feebly, "what a pity."

  "Never mind," they said, "you're coming along nicely," and they turned and went back to their row of seats outside and had just resumed their conversation, though in more muffled tones, when I heard myself start to moan rather violently, and they all came rushing back and within five minutes my child was born.

  Right up to the very last minute, through sensations which though unbelievably violent were now no longer painful but indeed almost a promise of pleasure, I could hear them arguing among themselves, all of them; one had been dispatched for the midwife, one was looking for the gas and air, one was asking the others why they hadn't believed what I said, and another, while delivering the baby, had taken upon herself the task of calmer and soother of my nerves.

  "That's all right," she kept saying, "that's fine, you're coming along fine. Oh, do try not to push."

  There was more panic in her smooth tones than in me; I felt all right now, I felt fine. The child was born in a great rush and hurry, quite uncontrolled and undelivered; they told me afterwards that they only just caught her, and I felt her fall from me and instantly sat up and opened my eyes, and they said, "It's a girl, it's a lovely little girl."

  They told me to lie down again, and I lay down, asking if the baby was all right, expecting suddenly I don't know what, missing arms and fingers, and they said she was all right; so I lay there, happy that it was over, not expecting they would let me see her, and then I heard her cry, a strange loud sobbing cry. The midwife had by now arrived, all smiles and starch, and actually apologized for not having been there. "It was quite a case," she said, "of too many cooks spoil the broth, you know, but you certainly managed to do all right without me, didn't you?" All the nurses too were suddenly humanized; they clustered round, helping to wash me and straighten me out, and telling me how unbelievably quick I'd been, and how I should have made more fuss, and that it was only half past two, and what was I going to call the baby. This last question was hastily silenced by the midwife, who presumably assumed the child would not be mine for long, but I did not care. I felt remarkably well, a usual reaction I believe on such occasions, and I could have got up and walked away. After ten minutes or so, when I had been returned to my own nightdress, a garment covered in Mexican embroidery which Beatrice had sent specially for the occasion, and which drew screams of admiration from the girls, the midwife asked me if I would like to see the child. "Please," I said gratefully, and she went away and came back with my daughter wrapped up in a small grey bloodstained blanket, and with a ticket saying Stacey round her ankle. She put her in my arms and I sat there looking at her, and her great wide blue eyes looked at me with seeming recognition, and what I felt it is pointless to try to describe. Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life.

  I had expected so little, really. I never expect much. I had been told of the ugliness of newborn children, of their red and wrinkled faces, their waxy covering, their emaciated limbs, their hairy cheeks, their piercing cries. All I can say is that mine was beautiful and in my defense I must add that others said she was beautiful too. She was not red nor even wrinkled, but palely soft, each feature delicately reposed in its right place, and she was not bald but adorned with a thick, startling crop of black hair. One of the nurses fetched a brush and flattened it down and it covered her forehead, lying in a dense fringe that reached to her eyes. And her eyes, that seemed to see me and that looked into mine with deep gravity and charm, were a profound blue, the whites white with the gleam of alarming health. When they asked if they could have her back and put her back in her cradle for the night, I handed her over without reluctance, for the delight of holding her was too much for me. I felt as well as they that such pleasure should be regulated and rationed.

  When they had removed her, they wheeled me off to a ward and put me to bed and gave me some sleeping pills and assured me I would fall asleep at once and be out till the morning. But I didn't, I lay awake for two hours, unable to get over my happiness. I was not much used to feeling happiness: satisfaction, perhaps, or triumph, and at times excitement and exhilaration. But happiness was something I had not gone in for for a long time, and it was very nice, too nice to waste in sleep. I dozed off at about half past four but was awakened at half past five with cups of tea and the sight of all the other mothers giving their babies breakfast.

  I tried to explain the other day to somebody, no less than Joe Hurt himself in fact, about how happy I had felt, but he was very contemptuous of my descriptions. "What you're talking about," he said, "is one of the most boring commonplaces of the female
experience. All women feel exactly that, it's nothing to be proud of, it isn't even worth thinking about."

  I denied hotly that all women felt it, as I knew hardly a one who had been as enraptured as I, and then I contradicted my own argument by saying that anyway, if all other women did feel it, then that was precisely what made it so remarkable in my case, as I could not recall a single other instance in my life when I had felt what all other women feel.

  But it was no good arguing, Joe was just not interested; just as I was very little interested though occasionally amazed by his lengthy descriptions of the sexual ecstasies of his heroes. It is sad to be boring, but perhaps when I think how often I am bored, not quite as sad as it might be.

  My stay in hospital was really quite entertaining. Fortified by the superior beauty and intelligence of my child (the latter manifested in such talents as learning to suck at the first attempt, and not after hours of humiliating struggle), I was able to withstand various irritations, such as having a label at the end of my bed with the initial U, which stood, I was told, for Unmarried, and a perpetual succession of medical students who kept taking my temperature and measuring various parts of me with cold wooden rulers and making feeble jokes. I was highly grateful to Lydia, who certainly did her best for me in broadcasting the news, for on the very first morning I received dozens of bouquets and telegrams, from everyone I had ever known, or rather from everyone that Lydia had ever known that I had known. It was a good time of year for flowers, and daffodils, tulips, roses, azaleas and Lord knows what appeared in vast profusion: I began to grow quite embarrassed, finally, thinking that such excess might annoy the nurse who kept bringing them in to me, or the other less gifted mothers.

  In the visiting hour that evening, Lydia turned up, with Joe Hurt himself accompanying her; she was evidently proud of her skill in having got him there, and glowed with varying kinds of satisfaction as she sat on the end of my bed and thumbed her way through my Lydia-instigated pile of congratulations. They made a bizarre and impressive couple, splendidly out of key with the nature of the occasion; she in a black skirt and jersey, black stockings and patent shoes, and the everlasting uncleaned raincoat, he in a peculiar collarless suit and with a more than usually volcanic irregularity in his features. He had recently started appearing on an egghead television program, talking about culture, and some of the mothers recognized him, to his great gratification and, I must admit, to mine, for I felt my stock would rise through the association. They brought me a whole pile of books to read, and half a bottle of whisky wrapped up in some clean underwear; I was doubtful about accepting it, thinking the baby might not like it, but they told me not to be so foolish, alcohol was good for every system, any doctor would tell me.