The Millstone

by Margaret Drabble

  I put on my hat and coat and took a last look at Octavia, who was sleeping as though nothing could rouse her; then I went downstairs, leaving the door on the latch. I rang the bell of the dependable family, and the man answered with remarkable promptness; he seemed to have been waiting for it to ring. As indeed he had; from noises within, I could tell that they were having a party.

  "Excuse me," I said nervously, peering past him into his flowery papered hall, "I'm from the flat upstairs, I wondered if I could possibly ask you a favour."

  "Come in, come in," said the ill-natured-looking man cheerily, "come in and let us know what we can do."

  "Oh no, I can't come in," I said, "I was just going out for a few moments, I have to go down to the chemist's, and the thing is, I have to leave the baby alone for a few minutes, and I wondered if you could possibly..." I hesitated, not knowing what they could possibly do..."if you could possibly just keep an eye on her?"

  "Certainly, certainly," he said, more jovially than ever. "I'll get my wife to pop up and have a look at her, shall I?"

  "Oh no, there's no need for that," I said hastily, "there's no need to do anything, there's no need to go to any trouble. She won't wake, I know she won't wake, she never does. It's just in case."

  I didn't like to say, bluntly, just in case the house catches fire, it sounded so silly, but astonishingly he took the words out of my mouth.

  "All right," he said, "don't you worry, if the place goes up in smoke, I'll go and rescue her myself."

  "Oh, thank you,' I said, "thank you so much. I won't be a minute, I just didn't want to leave her and nobody knowing she was there ... I left the door unlocked; that's so very nice of you."

  I was about to start backing humbly away when the man's wife materialized in the background, whereupon he started to recount to her the whole story. She was looking gay and cheery, a basket-shaped brooch of diamonds sparkling on her dark green lapel, and she too started to assure me of her earnest solicitude.

  "I'll pop up myself," she said, "and just have a little listen, shall I?"

  "There's no need," I said once more.

  "And how is your little baby?" she went on, "she's been so ill, hasn't she? I was so worried about you both, and I was glad when she came back again safe and sound. She's quite well again now, is she?"

  "Oh yes, quite well," I said, then added for good measure, "I just have to be careful with her, that's all."

  "Oh yes, of course," said the woman knowingly, as though she knew every detail of my afflictions.

  "I must get off to the chemist's now," I said, and started to edge away; this precipitated a renewed flow of invitation from them both, who begged me to come in for a drink, to come and join the party when I got back. So astonished was I that I think I might have accepted had I not been conscious that my hair inside my hat was still wet from its washing, for I doubted if they would continue to take me to their bosoms if I confronted them with it. So I said good night and thanked them for their kindness, and they wished me a Merry Christmas, and I wished them one, and so we parted. As I went down the remaining floors in the lift, I wondered why they had been so obliging, and the thought crossed my mind that they must both have been a little drunk; but it occurred to me later that it was largely the fact that I had asked them a favour that had so warmed their demeanour. I had admitted need, and there is no prospect so warming as the sight of another's need, when we can supply it without effort to ourselves. I do not belittle their kindness, for they were kind, and the woman had been genuinely concerned about Octavia, though how or why she had interested herself in the matter I cannot imagine; for it is true that ever after this evening they treated me with the greatest kindliness and consideration, asking after the baby and my work, and even buying a copy of my book and asking me to autograph it for them when it finally emerged, though sixteenth-century poetry can hardly have been their favourite reading matter. They bought it through sheer kindness to me, as they asked me in for a drink that Christmas Eve. If I asked more favours of people, I would find people more kind.

  It was cold and slightly foggy out; the parked cars were gleaming with a thin layer of frost. I walked briskly, for I did not wish to be long. I was feeling happy rather than not, cheered that I had so successfully braved my neighbours, and confident now I was on the move that Octavia was suffering from no more than teeth and a slight snuffle. I like going to all-night chemists, for they share the irregular glamour of all-night cafés, bars, airports and launderettes. There was a queue inside when I got there, inevitably I suppose, so I queued in the gloomy light, then handed in my prescription, then went to sit down and wait while it was made up. In the center of the large dim waiting room there is a tank of tropical fish, surrounded by a circular bench; I sat and watched the fish, endlessly and soothingly drifting around their glass cage, and I wondered if fish ever sleep. I watched them for some minutes, and then, just as I looked away, I heard somebody say "Rosamund," and I looked up, and it was George.

  He was standing over me, smiling gently and diffidently, and I tried to rise to my feet but my legs would not hold me. I think I did not speak quickly enough, though I did finally manage to say:

  "Why, it's George."

  For so long now I had not seen him that I was bereft of all power, so great was my amazement, so many my thoughts, so troubled my heart. I sat there, dumb, and looked at him, and my mouth smiled, for I was terrified that he would go once more and leave me, that he was on his way elsewhere, that he would not wish to stop. I wanted to detain him: I wanted to say, stay with me, but my mouth was so dry I could not speak. So I gazed at him and smiled.

  "Rosamund," he said. "It's so long since I saw you, I thought you must have moved. It must be two years since I saw you."

  "Almost," I said.

  "Are you waiting for something?" he asked, and I nodded and whispered, "Yes, I'm waiting for a prescription."

  "I'm waiting too," he said, and sat down by my side. He sat there by me and of his own free will. I recovered, very slightly, the power of speech, and I said:

  "Are you ill, then?"

  "No, I'm not ill," he said, "not really ill. I've got this bad throat, that's all. I have to get some things for it."

  "You're working over Christmas, are you?" I asked.

  "That's right," he said.

  "I knew you hadn't moved," I said, "although I hadn't seen you. I hear you on the radio. I knew you must still be there."

  "I did see you once, actually," he said, "but I couldn't speak to you. It was on the tube, you were in a different carriage, but I could just see you through the glass doors. I waved but you wouldn't look."

  "I didn't see you," I said.

  "I thought you didn't."

  We both fell silent once more and I began to think that it was about time that my prescription might be ready.

  "I'd better go," I said, "and see if my thing's done."

  "You're not ill, are you?" he said, and then added quickly, so that I need not answer, "Not that one should ever ask a lady what she wants in a chemist's, I'm quite well aware of that."

  "No, I'm not ill," I said, and stood up, and stood there looking down at him, and the coloured fish swimming patiently behind his narrow head.

  "You're not in a hurry, are you, Rosamund?" he then said. "We could go and have a drink somewhere, couldn't we? To celebrate Christmas?"

  I paused, strung delightfully onto the future, connected for an instant by hope of what was to come.

  "I can't come and have a drink," I said, and then went on, partly to excuse myself and partly to pave the way for further negotiation, "I have to get back to the baby, you see."

  I had made this excuse so often to others that I did not realize its import in such a place to such a person; I had not meant to reveal myself in this way, though how else I had never satisfactorily considered.

  "You've got a baby, have you," said George. "I didn't even know you were married."

  "I'm not," I said, and smiled, this time with tr
ue confidence; for here I was, safely back in my old role, the girl with alternating lovers, the girl with stray babies, the girl who does what she wants and does not suffer for it. He took it, as ever before, wonderfully as I offered it, and he pulled a face and said in his most camp tones, camp, vulgar, ladylike tones, that filled me with extreme delight:

  "I say, Rosamund, you are a one."

  "It's a very nice baby," I continued, gaiety mounting irresistibly in my heart.

  "I'm sure it is," he said. "Any baby of yours must be quite delightful, I'm sure of that."

  "Why don't you come round and have a look at her?" I said. "Come round for a drink. I've got to get back because there's no one else in the flat, but it would be nice if you would come."

  I knew he would accept, from the way he was looking at me, or I would not have asked.

  "I should be most happy to come," he said. "How nice of you to ask me. After all this time."

  And he looked at me, oblique, slanted, his words full of implications yet so mild and harmless, so much on my side, so little against me, so little a threat that I felt weak with relief. I thought, looking at him, that he was almost very handsome; with a little more weight he might have been a Handsome man.

  "You're looking very beautiful tonight, Rosamund," he said, speaking, I felt, as I was listening, only for the pleasure of it. "More beautiful than ever, if I may say so."

  "It's so dark in here," I said, "that you can't possibly tell. By daylight I look haggard."

  "Do you really? I'm beginning to look rather old myself."

  "I don't think you would ever look old," I said. "You've not got the kind of face that gets old."

  "You can't see," he said, "in this light."

  "I must go and collect my prescription. It must be ready by now. Wait for me."

  "You'll have to wait for me," he said. "Mine isn't ready yet. Come back and wait with me."

  "All right," I said. I would always rather wait than be awaited. So I went up to the counter and collected Octavia's penicillin, then went back to sit and wait with George.

  "How old is your baby?" was the first thing that he said to me when I returned. Quickly, surprisingly quickly for one so bad at dates, I realized that it would be better and less committing to give a wrong age, so I lied and said that she was eleven months old, although she was still a long way off this ripe age. As soon as I had said it, I wondered if I had done the right thing, for it would be difficult to retract should I ever wish to do so; also, if Octavia really had been eleven months old, then I would have been already pregnant when I had slept with George. The whole business was too complicated for me; the truth seemed somewhere during the intervening months to have lost itself forever. I looked at George, and wondered if it had ever really happened; he did not look capable of it, he looked as mild and frail and non-masculine as he had appeared at our first meeting, when I had been so sure that it was Joe he fancied. I had had this sensation of disbelief before with other men, though to a lesser degree, naturally; Hamish, for instance, my first love, I had met after a couple of years' total absence, since when I had seen him frequently, for he, too, worked in the British Museum from time to time. The first time I saw him I had been shocked and amazed, for we had parted on poor terms, but after a coffee together we had quickly established an acquaintance from which to discuss poets and old friends. I had never, however, managed to get over the fact that we had once known and loved each other so thoroughly; sitting talking to him and his wife over coffee and Danish pastries, I would suddenly be assailed by sharp memories of his lips and teeth and naked flesh. They were not memories of desire, for I no longer desired him; rather they were shocking, anti-social disruptive memories, something akin to those impulses to strip oneself in crowded tube trains, to throw oneself from theater balconies. Images of fear, not of desire. Other people do not feel this way about old lovers, I know. It must be just another instance of my total maladjustment with regard to sex.

  When George had collected his pills for his throat, we set off back towards the flat. It was too cold to walk slowly, and when I walk quickly I have not enough breath left for talking, so we did not talk. In the lift on the way up to my floor, George suddenly said:

  "I kept thinking I would see you, but I never did."

  I wondered if this was said as apology or as accusation, but it was impossible from his tone to tell. Like me, he veiled his intention until there was nothing of it left.

  "You really didn't know about my baby?" I said, as a rejoinder.

  "How should I have known?" he said. "Who would have told me?" And I realized another factor in our delicate situation; if indeed he assumed that I had been pregnant at the time of our last fatal encounter, then that would have been an excellent reason for my not having wanted to go on seeing him. Regardless of him, and whether I liked him and what he had done to me. And assuming that the avoidance had truly been more on my side than on his. Assuming so many things. I shook my head to myself, sadly bewildered, and opened the lift door. I wished above anything that I could know what he thought. I would have liked to have looked inside his head and seen what was going on there. But who knows, there may have been the same dependent, interlocking uncertain confusion in his head as in mine, and no enlightenment at all.

  I spent a long time looking for my doorkey, as I had forgotten that I had left the door unlocked. When I finally remembered and pushed it open, I left George in the sitting room while I went to look at Octavia, who was still sleeping sweetly, and with now no trace of either cold or cough. I wondered if I should take George to see her. I wondered if the call of blood would reveal to him as in a fairy story that she was his child. I thought not. I do not know whether at that moment I meant to tell him; I think I did not, I think I was waiting to see what became of us both. I tucked her blue airy blankets in more closely and went back to George. He was sitting looking at the proofs of an article of mine on an article on a book on Spenser and courtly love, and he looked up at me as I entered and said:

  "You seem to do quite a lot of writing these days. I see things with your name on quite often."

  "Do you really?" I said, surprised, for I very rarely published anything in any publication with a circulation outside the profession. "You must read a lot," I said.

  "Yes, I suppose I do," he said, and left it at that.

  "I have to write now," I said, "for the money, I used to try not to, I don't really approve of that kind of thing, but money is money. It keeps her in zinc and castor oil ointment. They make one do a lot of things, babies, that one doesn't really approve of."

  I went over to the corner cupboard and started to get out Lydia's Christmas drink and some glasses. There was a new bottle of whisky; I poured us both a glass and went to sit down.

  "It suits you, having a baby," he said. "You look well on it. Even in proper electric light."

  "I'm glad you think so."

  "I saw Joe Hurt not so long ago. You still see something of him?"

  "Quite a lot, one way and another. He's going out with the girl who shares my flat."

  "Oh, really. You've gone off him, have you?"

  "I was never really on him, to tell you the truth." I might as well, after all, tell him a bit of the truth, I thought. "Not really. I like him, though."

  "You never used to share the flat. You had it to yourself."

  "There again, you see, things have altered. I had to take a lodger. For the baby-sitting."

  "And for the money."

  "Yes, and for the money. Though I'm not too badly off, you know." And lest he should form any lurid pictures of my financial plight, I started to tell him about my thesis, and my new job, and my bright prospects. Having told him about the progress of my career, I felt entitled to ask him about his, so I did, but he proved as cagey as ever.

  "Oh, I'm still doing more or less the same routine," he said evasively, in answer to my queries.

  "Why don't you have a change?" I said, unable to prevent myself. "Why don't you do somet
hing different? Aren't you bored?"

  "You said that last time I saw you," he said. "I don't see why I should be bored. For what it is, my job is extremely well paid. I don't see why I should change."

  "You could get a job on the television," I said. "That must be better paid, isn't it?"

  "Not spectacularly," said George. "And anyway, I don't want to be on the television."

  "You'd be so good on the television," I said, unable to let the notion drop. "You'd look so wonderful on the television. You've got just the right kind of face for it, all lean and bony. You'd look wonderful on it. Then I could sit and watch you as well as hearing you."

  I meant this, too, although he could never have guessed it; I would have liked to have done just that.

  "I don't really want to be on the television," he repeated patiently. "It makes your life a misery, that machine. Wherever you go, you pay for it. Why are you so keen for me to be on it?"

  "I told you," I said truthfully. "So I could sit and watch you."

  "Well, why don't you go and be on it then? And then I could sit and watch you."