The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  "Good-bye," she said.

  "Good-bye," I said. And she went.

  It was about a week later that I was able to take Octavia home. She was by this time quite gay and mobile once more, and seemingly unaffected, apart from loss of weight, by her ordeal. I arrived on the morning of her release with a small suitcase full of real clothes for her to wear; I had been looking forward to dressing her in something other than the white institutional nighties the hospital provided. In fact, I had whiled away some of my vigil by her cotside by making her some new dresses; I had been taught at school to smock, an accomplishment I had never thought to use, but I do not like to let anything be wasted, and I had made her some very pretty small garments in various dark smart shades of Viyella. It had given me much satisfaction to make them; it was more profitable than jigsaws, for it actually saved money, while at the same time gratifying the need to do something mechanical with my hands, which otherwise occupied themselves by ripping holes in my cuticles or tearing strips off the wicker-seated chair I had finally acquired. I put her in my masterpiece to take her home: it was dark blue with a very small check. She looked very charming in it and jumped happily on my knee. I shook hands with all the nurses and even with Sister, who was glad to see me go. I got into the waiting taxi and off we went: I remembered the last time she and I had left the place together in this way, when she had been ten days old. I now knew better than to hope I would never have to go back again, for I knew that at the best she and I were in for a lifetime of checks and examinations, but nevertheless it seemed to me that I was more happy and more fortunate now than I had been then.

  It was the middle of the afternoon: owing to the curious nature of the one-way street system, the quickest way to approach the flat was to go round Queens Crescent and then to the right off Portland Place. The air was bright and clear, and as we drove past the formal determined structure of the Crescent, ever-demolished, ever-renewed, I suddenly thought that perhaps I could take it and survive. I had thought this before when drunk but never when sober; up till that moment I had been inwardly convinced that too much worry would rot my nature beyond any hope of fruit or even of flower. But then, however fleetingly, I felt that I could take what I had been given to take. I felt, for the first time since Octavia's birth, a sense of adequacy. Like Job, I had been threatened with the worst and, like Job, I had kept my shape. I knew something now of the quality of life, and anything in the way of happiness that I should hereafter receive would be based on fact and not on hope.

  When we got back home and settled in, Octavia and I, I found that my initial relief was quickly replaced by new anxieties. I had foreseen this, so was not alarmed or taken by surprise; but nevertheless, it would have been nice to have had a little time off. Now that I was no longer concerned by immediate life or death, the minor details of health began to obsess me: I had been warned that it would be dangerous for the baby to contract the most insignificant ailments, and that any cold or scratch must be instantly counteracted by penicillin. Consequently, I spent my time watching her anxiously and hardly dared to leave her to the care of Mrs. Jennings, despite her eagerness to have her. All the normal preoccupations of motherhood were in me hideously enlarged, and I dreamed of them at nights.

  I also began to worry about where I would live when my parents got back. They wrote to me about once a month, and when they wrote they always made vague references to being back for Christmas: not knowing my situation, they clearly did not think it necessary to go into any detail. I had made no plans: it was not in me to tempt fate by arranging in advance accommodation for myself and a child who might well not exist, who might well by Christmas have been as though she had never existed. Now, though, it seemed that she was going to go on being there, and that I would not be able to present my parents with a desolate flat, carefully emptied of all nappies, bootees, plastic ducks and orange-juice bottles. The other possibility was that I should not move. I could always have stayed there and faced them, and asked if I could go on living there. There would have been room and they would have said Yes. But it was not in my nature to ask favours, and anyway I would not have liked to live with them, despite the advantages. Without the flat, my economic situation would be grave: when I got Octavia home, I made a gesture towards action by writing off to all my friends on magazines, to the firm of tutors I had taught for, and to various educational agencies, in search of extra work.

  As it turned out, I need not have bothered. At the end of the first week of December I had a letter from my father, saying that they had decided to go to India for the year, at the invitation of the government. "Being so near anyway," he wrote, "I thought that we might as well continue on our way, without the expense of a return journey. We shall be sorry, of course, not to see you and Beatrice and the children, but you all sound very busy and happy, and can do quite well without us, I am sure." As I read this, I was overcome with relief at the unexpected reprieve. I had a whole year's grace, and who knows what might have happened at the end of a year? For one thing, my thesis would be finished and published, and with any luck I would have a reputable university appointment to confront them with by the autumn, as well as a small baby. I continued the letter, overcome with unashamed relief; my father went on to speak of his work in Africa, of various problems they had encountered, of the climate, and then, quite casually, in the last paragraph, the last sentence even, he said, "I had a letter from our old friend Dick Protheroe last week, who says he has been seeing something of you." Nothing more: just that. After this all-revealing remark, he quietly signed himself off in his usual manner; yours ever, Papa.

  I sat and looked at the letter for some time, pursuing its implications. It was quite clear to me, as it might not have been to others, that Mr. Protheroe had told my parents the whole story of Octavia's existence, and of her illness, and that by this apparently chance remark my father had meant to let me know that he knew. There was nothing amazing in itself in the fact that they had found out: news reaches even Africa, and sooner or later they would have got to know. I was more surprised, in a sense, that they had remained in the dark for so long: it proved that neither Beatrice nor Clare had told on me. Beatrice's reticence did not surprise me, as it is an ineradicable family trait, but I had had my suspicions about Clare and also about various stray acquaintances whom I had glimpsed from time to time in passing cars and in cinema queues. However, it had been left to Mr. Protheroe, who had considered it honourable to inform on me.

  When I looked at the consequences of his information, I could not find it in me to regret it. For, extraordinary as it may seem, I was and am convinced that my parents decided to go to India and to refrain from revisiting England largely because they did not want to upset me and my domestic arrangements. I can see, objectively, how extraordinary it is to read such mighty meanings into what my father wrote, but nevertheless, knowing my parents, I am sure that I was right. They did not wish to cause me or themselves pain, embarrassment, or even mere inconvenience by their return, so they went to India instead. I think, too, that they wished me to understand this, or they would have gone, just gone, without mentioning Protheroe's name. His name was there to give me the terms of their departure: perhaps as the mildest of reproaches, but more likely as an indication of the seriousness of their intent. Their behaviour seemed natural to me, for I am their child, but I have speculated endlessly about whether or not they were right. Such tact, such withdrawal, such avoidance. Such fear of causing pain, such willingness to receive and take pains. It is a morality, all right, a well-established, traditional, English morality, moreover it is my morality, whether I like it or not. But there are things in me that cannot take it, and when they have to assert themselves the result is violence, screaming, ugliness, and Lord knows what yet to come.

  As a child, I used to endure any discomfort rather than cause offense. I would eat things I loathed, freeze to death in underheated sitting rooms, roast under hair dryers, drink in cafés from chipped and filthy cups, rather than offend ho
sts, waitresses, hairdressers. To me the pain of causing trouble was greater than anything that I myself within myself could endure. But as I grow older, I find myself changing a little. Partly it is because, with Octavia, I cannot inflict all hardship on myself alone: what I take for myself, she gets too. And so I was glad that my parents went to India; the physical comfort of their absence was greater to me than the mental disquiet of considering that they had taken so large a decision on my account. There was a time when this would not have been so; I sat at the kitchen table with the letter still open in front of me, and contemplated my growing selfishness, and thought that this was probably maturity. My parents are still children, maybe: they think that they can remain innocent. Or that is one way of looking at it. From another point of view, a more warm and fleshly point, they are perhaps as dangerous and cruel as that father in Washington Square.

  I told Octavia the good news, and she smiled and waved at me from her high chair, and offered me a small wet piece of rusk as a reciprocal effort at communication. When I declined it, she dropped it on the floor, and I thought with relief that I had at least another year to clear up the mess and squalor that she had inflicted on the once elegant flat. I got her out of the chair, and put her to crawl along the corridor while I went to see if Lydia was in; I had not heard her come in the night before, but if she was in I wanted to tell her about what my father had said, and to discuss its moral quality with her. I knocked on her door and there was no answer; as it was past ten, I pushed it open to see if she was there, which she was not. I went back to the kitchen and did a little washing and tidying up, and then went into the sitting room and got out my typewriter to write a review of a book on Daniel Defoe for a very unimportant magazine. It was a task for which I was ill-equipped, and not a very profitable task at that, if one takes hours per pound into consideration, for to review this one book I had felt it necessary to read the works of Defoe himself. Such was my ignorance of the man that I had managed to read the whole of the Journal of the Plague Year without realizing that it was a fictional and not a factual account of the horrible events, which says much for Defoe but little for me. I was extremely put out when I found that it wasn't, as they say, true, and even more put out that I was put out, as I have always maintained that I hold an Aristotelian and not a Platonic view of fact and fiction. I had just written and counted my first hundred words when I remembered Octavia; I could hear her making small happy noises somewhere along the corridor, but felt it time I should go and see if she was doing something destructive, like unravelling the frayed end of the hall carpet. She was remarkably persistent in destruction for her age.

  I was rather dismayed when I realized she was in Lydia's room and that I must have left the door open, for Lydia's room was always full of nasty objects like aspirins, safety razors and bottles of ink: I rushed along to rescue her and the sight that met my eyes when I opened the door was enough to make anyone quake. She had her back to the door and was sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by a sea of torn, strewed, chewed paper. I stood there transfixed, watching the neat small back of her head and her thin stalk-like neck and flowery curls: suddenly she gave a great screech of delight and ripped another sheet of paper. "Octavia," I said in horror, and she started guiltily, and looked round at me with a charming deprecating smile: her mouth, I could see, was wedged full of wads of Lydia's new novel.

  I picked her up and fished the bits out and laid them carefully on the bedside table with what was left of the typescript; [>] to [>] seemed to have survived. The rest was in varying stages of dissolution: some pages were entire but badly crumpled, some were in large pieces, some in small pieces, and some, as I have said, were chewed up. The damage was not, in fact, as great as it appeared at first sight to be, for babies, though persistent, are not thorough: but at first sight it was frightful. I hardly knew where to begin, so I did not begin: I went out and firmly shut the door. Then I carried Octavia back with me into the sitting room, and sat down and thought. In a way it was clearly the most awful thing for which I had ever been responsible, but as I watched Octavia crawl around the sitting room looking for more work to do, I almost wanted to laugh. It seemed so absurd, to have this small living extension of myself, so dangerous, so vulnerable, for whose injuries and crimes I alone had to suffer. It was truly a case of the right hand not seeing what the left hand was doing, for both good and ill. Let my keen knife see not the wound it makes. It really was a terrible thing, I realized this, especially as by constant nattering I had at last persuaded Lydia of the necessity for keeping her door shut: and yet in comparison with Octavia being so sweet and so alive it did not seem so very terrible.

  I wondered what to say to Lydia when she returned. There was one possibility of innocence left to me: I could pretend that she had left the door open herself the day before, for she would surely not recollect her movements clearly enough to dispute the point. This would to a certain extent absolve me: I would thus be guilty of failing to keep an eye on the baby, but not of opening the door to let her in. As a very small child I frequently made this kind of lie, because I found the prospect of admitting guilt so intolerable: which perhaps proves that I feared the smirch on my character more than the crime itself. As an older child, honour always made me confess, and I could see that honour would bring me to it this time. I tried to imagine what she would say. I wondered what I would have said if somebody had ripped up my thesis. I was fairly sure that Lydia never had carbon copies of anything, because I remembered hearing her complain to Joe, who always made three copies of everything, even correspondence, that his attitude bespoke not efficiency but arrogance. I tried to remember whether she had said that she had actually finished the work or not: it had taken her long enough, well over a year, because she had been considerably hampered by the Joe affair. I thought she had reached the last chapter from what she had said last time I had paid her any attention: I wondered if this would make her more or less angry. She had, incidentally, never confessed to the subject matter of this work, and it occurred to me that there was a certain poetic justice in having an exposition of me and Octavia ripped up by Octavia herself.

  There was some parallel historic instance of this offense haunting my mind which I could not at first place; I wrote another hundred words on Defoe while trying to remember it, for I knew that it would soothe me if I could recollect. At the end of the hundred words the baby started to moan, so I took her back to her cot for her morning nap, and as I lowered her in over the bars it suddenly came to me. Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, that was it. He had lent it to the unfortunate John Stuart Mill to have a quick read, and John Stuart Mill's maid had lit the fire with it. The whole first volume had been completely destroyed, and he had to rewrite the lot. I remembered reading of how Mill and his wife had honourably got in a cab and driven straight off to Carlyle's to confess, but what Carlyle had said I had never discovered. Perhaps history has not recorded his words. This incident had always captured my imagination in a peculiarly forceful way, perhaps because it seemed to be a perfect illustration of an enormous and unwitting wrong done to another, in which the guilt of the agent (carelessness, surely, at most?) bore no relation to the injury sustained by the plaintiff. My mind had always boggled at what Mill had said to Carlyle, at what Carlyle had said to Mill: well, now I had done it. Now I would find out.

  I spent the rest of the morning anxiously waiting for the sound of Lydia's key in the door; her movements were always unpredictable, and she might well have arrived at any moment. However, she did not. Octavia and I had our lunch in peace and safety, and after lunch we had to go out to a friend's for tea. I wondered whether or not to leave a note for Lydia, or whether to leave the facts to speak for themselves. In the end I left the facts: I could not think of what to put on a note. We had a very agreeable tea party; my friend had a baby more or less the same age as mine, so the rooms were mercifully devoid of breakable ashtrays, unguarded fires, novels in typescript and other such hazards. My friend had been
at Cambridge with me and was now, to her great annoyance, nothing but a wife and mother, and really I felt I was the better off of the two. So cheered was I by an hour or so of comforting literary and maternal and malicious chat that I even recounted, with much gusto, Octavia's awful exploit of the morning, and we both, believe it or not, laughed gaily at what she had done. Sarah was not, however, unimpressed by the gravity of the offense, and when she had stopped laughing she expressed suitable concern over my plight. "What will she say," she said, "what will she say? Will she be angry?"

  "I just don't know," I said truthfully. "She never is angry, but then I don't know anyone who is angry. Do you?"

  "No, I don't, really," she agreed. "I know people who are angry about people, and behind people's backs, but not anyone who is angry at people. The only person I ever get angry at is my husband."

  "If she really is angry," I said, "she might go away and then I wouldn't have anyone to baby-sit for me any more. Not that she does now, very often. But she always will if I catch her in time."

  "If you ask me," said Sarah, "it would be a very good thing if she went. Then you could get yourself a proper tenant and charge them a proper rent. It's ridiculous, giving away accommodation in your situation."