The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  I was very pleased to see Joe again; naturally we had met fairly frequently over the past few months, though always by chance, and with nothing like our former regularity. He was a great morale-raiser; he was interested in the setup in the ward and asked me about the nurses and the other mothers and what did we talk about, and laughed gaily over the Unmarried notice on the end of my bed, as though it were the funniest thing he had ever seen. He kept lighting cigarettes, absent-mindedly, and a pretty Kensington blonde nurse, kept specially for visiting-hours display, would rush over each time and tell him it wasn't allowed, he would have to go out if he wanted to smoke. He showed no interest at all in the baby, who was lying by the side of my bed in a little cradle on wheels: Lydia's theory about his paternity must have suffered some shaking from this, as surely any father would volunteer his newborn infant at least a glance. After ten minutes or so, however, when I had told them as many details about my confinement as they could bear to hear, they began to discuss what name I should give the child. I had spared the subject little thought myself, as I do not like to anticipate, to count or name my chickens before they are hatched, and now I had seen her no name seemed good enough. They suggested names endlessly, ranging from the dull to the fantastic; Joe came down finally in favour of January, while Lydia seemed to fancy Charlotte, which I thought pretty but corny. After a long debate, they asked me what name I liked, and I said that I rather fancied Sandra myself. They roared with laughter once more, and all the other quietly muttering mothers and fathers became silent and stared, glad of a distraction, finding us as good as the telly.

  In the end I said I would call her Octavia. I said it as a joke, having tried hard to think of some famous woman to call her after, and finding none but Beatrice Webb whom my parents had already used; the name Octavia Hill came into my mind, and I said out loud, I'll call her Octavia. Both of them seemed to approve, though they said she wasn't my eighth at all, and ought rather to be called Prima, though that wasn't so pretty; one might as well call her Ultima, poor child, I said, and have done with it.

  "I don't know," said Joe, "if I were you, I'd have a few more. It seems to agree with you, you look astoundingly well."

  "I feel well," I said, "but it wouldn't be worth doing it all over again just to feel well."

  "Just one more," said Joe. "You're allowed two, you know."

  "What do you mean, allowed two? By whom? Allowed by whom?"

  "Oh, by authority. The BBC lets you have two before they sack you. So does the Civil Service. It's the orthodox number, two."

  "Illegitimate ones, you mean?"

  "Naturally. You can have as many as you like of the other ones, until they interfere with your efficiency."

  "Why ever two?" I said. "It doesn't seem very reasonable, does it? Surely if they allow you more than one, they ought to allow you an unlimited number? I mean to say, I can understand them allowing one and no more, on the grounds that one might be an innocent mistake, but once you've allowed two, why not five or ten or eighteen? Anyway, is that true? I'm sure it's not true, it's just some rubbish some girl told you."

  "A woman died," Lydia said, "last week, in The Times, of her twenty-fifth baby, in France."

  "Sh," I said, glancing round at my fellow inmates. "You don't know how many of these are on their twenty-fourth, do you?"

  "When are your parents coming back?" said Joe. "Have you told them they've got a grandchild living in their house?"

  "They're not due back till next Christmas, not for good," I said.

  "It couldn't have been more convenient really, could it?" said Joe. "Anyone would think you'd worked it all out on purpose."

  "Perhaps I did," I said. "Didn't you know, I'm one of those Bernard Shaw women who wants children but no husband? It suits me fine, like this."

  "It seems to suit you," said Joe kindly. "I said you look extremely well. When you get up, you can get Lydia to baby-sit for us and I'll take you to the cinema."

  But I could tell, from the way he was looking at Lydia, that it was she who would be sitting next to him in the back stalls for the next few months. And really, I thought, they went quite well together, balanced as they were delicately on social aspirations, rivalry, fashionability and dislike. They were well suited, I thought.

  When they had gone, the woman from the next bed leaned over and said, "Isn't that young man an announcer on the television?"

  I said that he wasn't an announcer but that he was on the television.

  "I thought I'd seen him," she said. "I thought I'd seen him, that's all I wanted to know."

  She was a vacant-faced, prematurely aging woman of thirty or so, in for her fourth child, and she spent most of her time knitting shapeless fancy-stitch cardigans for her mother, and trying to tell the woman on the other side about her other three children and what they ate and what they wouldn't touch. I wondered what she had thought of Joe's program; on the only edition I had seen he had been talking with some intensity about the dominance of drugs in modern literature to an anonymous, back-head-photographed drug addict. The other editions had been even less interesting than that, comprising such subjects as the future of abstract art and the use of improvisation in avant-garde Paris theater of today (topics on which Joe was quite unqualified to express any views at all).

  The woman in the bed beyond the woman who had recognized Joe never listened to the stories of which child liked kippers and which preferred a little cheese on toast: she preferred to tell stories to the woman beyond her, about the best ways of dealing with a large family wash. The woman beyond her had to listen, as she was flanked by a brick wall, and I heard them at one moment engaged in the most exquisite deadlock: Woman B said to Woman C:

  "Of course," she said, "there's nothing like soap flakes, that's what I've always said, these detergents are no good for anything, bring me out in spots, they do," to which Woman C retorted that soap flakes were no good in machines.

  Woman B conceded the point, but then went on to say that there was nothing like washing by hand, really.

  Woman C said that she went to the launderette.

  Woman B said that launderettes were a great boon and no mistake, but then went on to expand the point that you never got results as good as when you washed at home by hand. Woman C, however, not perhaps paying as much attention as she might have done, misunderstood her, taking her to say that you never get results as good when you wash at home, not as good as when; she proceeded to agree with Woman B, or so she thought, producing a great panegyric on the virtues of machinery, the thoroughness of their washing, the frequency of their rinsing, the power of their spin drying, and to denigrate the effort, efficiency and end-product of hand-washing. Woman B, either not noticing her strange logic, or determined to ignore it, went on quite smoothly as soon as she could interrupt:

  "Yes, of course, you're quite right, I do agree, and then the wear and tear of those machines is something terrible, you can put things in and they come out in ribbons. Now I can keep things for years. I had some pillowcases, embroidered ones, I'd washed them by hand in pure soap for ten years, and then my sister-in-law persuades me to put them in her machine, and when I get them out they're all frayed down the edges. It just shows you, doesn't it?"

  "It certainly does," said Woman C. "I think it must be all that rubbing and scrubbing that does it, when you do it by hand you rub too hard, you know, no wonder things don't last, you can't expect them to last."

  And so they might have gone on for hours, running side by side in smooth and never-touching incomprehension, had not Woman A, unable to bear her exclusion any longer, suddenly yelled to both of them, "Do yours eat spinach? You wouldn't believe the trouble I've had getting mine to eat spinach, and my husband, he loves it, but I can't go buying it just for him, can I?"

  As it happened, I was the next to youngest in the ward; apart from one cheery teen-ager, all the other fourteen mothers were either nearly thirty or over it. The teen-age girl and I were the only ones in for our first, which seemed a stat
istical coincidence, but may not have been. She looked so like an unmarried mother that as soon as I was able to get up I made a pretext for hobbling past the end of her bed, but the label on it said M, not U. She really was cheery, the only person apart from me who ever seemed to smile, let alone laugh, with any real enthusiasm; she spent most of her time looking at herself in a small hand mirror, plucking her eyelashes, squeezing invisible blackheads, putting on lipstick, taking it off again, trying a different colour, painting her nails, and putting her hair in curlers so she would look nice for visiting time. Once I had noticed her, I looked out for her husband; he turned out to a sharp-faced little boy who looked and may well have been about sixteen. She and I exchanged glances of mutual curiosity, being the only people there with any pretensions to any physical charm; our beds were too far apart for us to converse, but we met once in the lavatories, where she had gone to smoke a quick cigarette. She offered me one, and I declined it, saying I didn't feel like smoking any more: she laughed, and said it was funny how one went off things, she'd gone right off drink, it had saved them a fortune. We went back into the ward together, and admired each other's babies, before retiring to our beds; she said mine was ever so lovely, though I could see her thinking her a funny, skimpy little thing, and I said hers was beautiful child, though to me he looked fat and bald, and bigger in some way than either of his narrow-faced parents. What we meant was, not that we liked each other's babies, but that we were glad that each other was there, as an ally against the older fatter women, so entirely and tediously submerged.

  After the birth, the muscles of my belly snapped back into place without a mark, but some of the women looked as big as they had looked before. I am haunted even now by a memory of the way they walked, large and tied into shapeless dressing gowns, padding softly and stiffly, careful not to disturb the pain that still lay between the legs.

  On my sixth day, the gynecologist came round, accompanied by his attendant students. They prodded me and questioned me and talked about me, and I felt oddly offended, for I was beginning to feel whole again and resented their interference, until the gynecologist said to his students, "Notice the resilience of the muscles here. This is the case that Hargreaves said would have an exceptionally small baby, but you see how wrong he was, it weighed a good six and a half pounds. He was taken in by the exceptional firmness of the muscle."

  Then he turned to me and smiled and said, "Were you by any chance a professional dancer?"

  I was taken so unawares by this direct question that I did not at first think that he was addressing me, and had to be startled out of my reverie by a repetition of the question.

  "Good heavens no," I said, "nothing like that."

  "You must have some athletic pursuits," he said.

  "No, none at all," I said. "None at all."

  "Then you must be just made that way," he said, and smiled and passed on. I glowed with satisfaction for half an hour afterwards, as though a medal for good conduct had been pinned to my lapel.

  Lydia came to see me every evening, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by some friend to whom she had been able to sell the idea of a hospital visit as an evening's entertainment. My bedside was always more animated than those of the others, more like a party, and my gratitude to her for it was unlimited. On my last, ninth evening, however, she could not make it; she rang during the afternoon to leave a message, and I thought that I would not mind, but when the visiting time came and the shuffling, silent husbands arrived, I drew my flimsy curtain and turned my head into the pillow and wept. I kept telling myself as I wept that it was nothing, just reaction, that magic excuse for all affliction, and it probably was too, but none the less painful for that. I wanted to fish Octavia out of her small white cot and hold her, to comfort me, but it was not feeding time and I did not dare. I had been taught to get her out only at the correct intervals, and although I knew this method to be outdated, I did not like to break the rules. Also, the baby was asleep, and I did not see why I should wake her for my own comfort. So I put my head in the pillow, like a child anxious not to disturb its parents, and I cried.

  Authority, the war, Truby King. I was reared to believe that the endurance of privation is a virtue, and the result is that I believe it to this day.

  Actually, surprisingly enough, my stay in hospital was one of the more cheerful and sociable patches of my life. Except for that last evening, I did not for a moment feel lost or abandoned; nor, owing perhaps to my delight in the baby, did I feel that I was on the receiving end of pity and sympathy. I have always rather fancied the idea of holding a salon, of lying on a couch and dispensing charm and conversation to some favoured and intimate circle, though I have never made any approach towards it as a way of life, being a solitary, I suppose, a gregarious solitary, and those ten days, surrounded by flowers, and receiving much correspondence and many visitors every day, I felt as near to belonging to a circle as I have ever done. My ways and my acquaintances were defined, made more precious and more themselves, by contrast with those of the other women in the ward, and I could not but think that Beatrice had been ludicrously mistaken by her fears for the social position of my child. It seemed to me that anyone that I might be likely to know would be equally likely to take the situation without batting an eyelid. And here I must make clear that had I not been who I am, and born and reared as I was, I would probably never have dared: I only thought I could get away with it, to put it briefly, because those ambulance men collected me from a good address, and not from a bed-sitter in Tottenham or from a basement in ever-weeping Paddington. So, in a way, I was cashing in on the foibles of a society which I have always distrusted; by pretending to be above its strictures, I was merely turning its anomalies to my own use. I would not recommend my course of action to anyone with a shade less advantage in the world than myself. Though recommendation in such cases is luckily likely to have no effect whatsoever.

  There is another point to be considered in my choice, and that is that I was equipped to earn my own living, forever, and in a trade that could be employed as well in a hospital bed as anywhere, or almost as well. Also, although I am diffident about the particulars of my qualifications, I suppose I must have a rock-like confidence in my own talent, for I simply did not believe that the handicap of one small illegitimate baby would make a scrap of difference to my career: I was in such a strong position by nature that were a situation to arise in which there were any choice to make between me and another, I would win, through the evident superiority of my mind. I felt that I was good enough to get away with it, and so far I must say that I have not been disproved. I finished my thesis in excellent time, it was published and praised in the right quarters, and thought much of by those who control my economic situation. And, moreover, I am a good teacher, having enthusiasm, yet expecting only what can be done. All this too is unfair, though perhaps less unfair than possessing an address in Marylebone, for I am industrious as well as equipped.

  I left hospital in a taxi on the tenth day with Octavia in my arms and Lydia by my side. I was excited at the thought of getting home and having my baby to myself, but the cold of the outside air must have startled her, for she began to scream and screech violently in the taxi, and when we got home I did not quite know what to do. In hospital she had always been so quiet and sweet. I laid her down in her basket, but the mattress was a different shape from the hospital cot, and she looked strange and uncomfortable and screamed all the more fiercely. She looked odd, too, in her own Viyella nighties, after the regulation garments she had worn all her life until that afternoon. She went on and on crying, and I began to think that she would never adapt to real life. Lydia was getting almost as worried as I was, and after a while she said, as we both sat miserably and watched this small furious person, "Why don't you feed her? That would shut her up, wouldn't it?"

  I looked at my watch; it was half past four.

  "It's not time to feed her yet," I said. "In hospital, we had to feed them on the dot at five."


  "Oh," said Lydia, "half an hour one way or the other can't make much difference."

  "Don't you think so?" I said. "But then she'll wake half an hour early at the next feed, and the next, and the next, and then what will I do?"

  "It wouldn't matter, would it?"

  "I don't know. I somehow feel things would get all muddled and never get straight again. She was good and reasonable in hospital. And then she'll get confused, and how will she ever know when it's nighttime? How will she ever learn that it's night?"

  "I should feed her," said Lydia. "It looks to me as though she's going to have a fit."

  I didn't think she would have a fit, but I couldn't stand the sound of her crying, so I picked her out and fed her, and she became quiet at once, and fell asleep afterwards looking as though her mattress and nightdress were very comfortable after all. On the other hand, she did wake half an hour early at the next feed, and went on and on waking earlier, until we worked right back round the clock, for the truth was that she never went four hours but only three and a half. Looking back on it, it doesn't seem to matter at all, but it seemed very important at the time, I remember. It took her ages, moreover, to learn about night and day, and in the end I concluded that they had been giving her secret bottles in the night at the hospital.