The Millstone (2 page)

"You weren't just about to go out, were you, Rosamund?" said Dick, walking into the kitchen and sitting on the table. "One never can tell with you. You lead such a secret life. We thought we might take you to see the new Fellini. But you probably saw it weeks ago."

"What a kind thought," I said.

"Have you seen it?" asked Lydia. "If you have, don't say a word, as I feel I want to like it, and I shan't like it if you didn't. Or if you did, come to that. So express no opinions, please."

"I haven't seen it," I said. "Where's it on?"

"At the Cameo-Poly. Regent Street."

"Oh," I said. "No, I'm not going there. I don't go down Regent Street any more."

"Why ever not?"

"I just don't, that's all," I said. It was the truth, too, and it gave me some comfort to tell them so, when they could not know the reason, or care for it had they known it.

"More of your secret life," said Dick. "Won't you really come, then?"

"No, I really won't. I've got some work to do this evening."

"Seen Mike lately?" said Dick quickly, who was always afraid, quite without precedent or reason, that I was about to lecture him on the Elizabethan sonnet sequences.

"Not for weeks," I said.

Alex, who had hitherto been silently pulling bits off a loaf of bread he was carrying, suddenly remarked:

"Why don't we all go out and have a drink "

I was well brought up. Immediately, without a second thought, I said "Oh no, why don't you have a drink here?" and as Dick, Lydia and Alex all fitted into the category of those who overrated my means, they all accepted instantly. As soon as I had said the words, I realized that they had had their eyes on my bottle of gin anyway: they had probably followed me from the shop. I poured them a glass each, and then decided that there was no point in abstaining myself, and poured another for me. Then we all went and sat down in the sitting room and talked. Dick talked about a parcel he had tried to post earlier that day, and how first the post office had said it was too heavy, and then they said the string was wrong, and then they had gone and shut while he was straightening out the string. We said what was in the parcel, and he said some bricks for his nephew's birthday. Then Lydia told us about how when she had sent off her first novel to her first publisher's she had handed it in to the post office and said politely, in her would-be modest, middle-class voice, Could I register this, please, expecting the answer Yes, certainly, ma'am: but the man had said, quite simply, No. This, too, had turned out to be a question of sealing wax and string, but she had taken it for some more prophetic assessment of her packet's worth, and had indeed been so shaken by its unexpected rejection that she had taken it back home with her and put it in a drawer for another three months. "Then," she said, "when I finally did post it off, the letter inside was three months old, so by the time they got round to reading it, it was six months old, so when I rang up after three months and told them they'd had it six months they believed me. If you see what I mean."

We didn't, quite, but we laughed, and had some more gin, and told some more stories, this time about the literary achievements of our various acquaintances. This proved a fruitful topic, as all of us there had some pretensions to writing of one kind or another, though Lydia was the only one who would have considered herself a creative
artist.
I myself was wholly uncreative, and spent my life on thorough and tedious collating of certain sixteenth-century poetic data, a task which enthralled me, but which was generally considered to be useless. However, I was also acknowledged to have a good critical mind in other spheres, and did from time to time a little reviewing and a good deal of reading of friends' plays and poems and novels and correspondence. Dick, for example, had entrusted to me one or two of his works, hitherto unpublished and, in my opinion, unpublishable. One was a novel, of great incidental charm and talent, but totally defective in plot and, even worse, in time scheme: I do not care very much for plots myself, but I do like to have a sequence of events. His characters had no relationship with time at all: it was impossible to tell what event preceded what, and whether a particular scene lasted for hours or days, or whether it occurred hours, days or years later than the preceding scene—or indeed perhaps before it, one simply could not tell. I pointed this out to Dick and he was startled and alarmed because he could not see what I meant, which implied that the defect must have been integral and not technical. He earned his living by writing something or other for a television company, but he was not wholly committed to his work. Alex, on the other hand, was as committed as I was: he was working for an advertising agency, writing copy, and was thoroughly enraptured by his job. He was at heart rather a serious puritanical young man, and I think it gave him great pleasure to live in such a wicked warm atmosphere, all jokes and deceitfulness, prostituting his talent. He had a great flair for copy, too, and was forever reading aloud his better slogans from stray magazines and papers. He wrote poetry on the quiet, and actually published a piece or two once every two years. Lydia was the only one who had really made it: she had published a couple of novels, but had now for some time been mooching around London moaning that she had nothing else to say. Nobody sympathized
with her at all, understandably: she was only twenty-six, so what had she to worry about?

In view of her state, she seized with delight upon any stories of the atrocity of other people's latest books, of which we managed to offer a kindly few.

"It's no good, anyway," said Dick, after dismissing Joe Hurt's latest with a derisive sneer, "churning them out like that, one a year. Mechanical, that's what it is."

"A bit more mechanism wouldn't hurt you," I said gaily. I was on my second large gin.

Lydia, who had hitherto been accepting our devious comfort, suddenly turned on us with a wail of despondency.

"I don't care
what
you say," she said, "it's better to write bad books than no books, it really is. Writing nothing is—is nothing, just nothing. It's wonderful to turn out one a year, I think Joe Hurt is wonderful, I admire it, I admire that kind of thing."

"You haven't read it," said Dick.

"That's not the point," said Lydia, "it's the effort, that's the point."

"Why don't you write a bad book then?" I asked. "I bet you could write a bad book if you wanted to. Couldn't you?"

"Not if I
knew
it was bad while I was writing it. I couldn't do it. I couldn't get it done."

"What a romantic view of literary creation," said Dick.

"Speak for yourself," said Lydia crossly. "Get yours published, and then start calling me romantic. Pass the gin, Rosie, there's a darling."

"Anyway," said Alex, who had by now eaten half his loaf, "if you ask me, Joe Hurt knew quite well how bad his book was while he was writing it. It reeks of conscious badness on every page. Don't you think so, Rosie?"

"I haven't read it," I said. "But you know what Joe
always says. Nobody ever wrote a masterpiece before the age of thirty-five, Joe says, so that gives me another six years, says Joe."

"Still going out with Joe, Rosie?"

"I'm still seeing him. Do stop calling me Rosie, who gave you that idea?"

"Lydia. She called you Rosie just now."

"She likes diminishing people. It makes her feel better, doesn't it, Lyd?"

At this we all laughed loudly, and I reached for the gin and noticed with horror and dismay that it was half gone, more than half gone. Sudden pressing memories of what I had never quite forgotten came upon me, and I looked at my watch and said that wasn't it time they all went off to see their Fellini film. They were not at all easy to dislodge, having sunk down very thoroughly and chattily into my parent's extra-comfortable old deep chairs, where they had an air of being held like animals in the warmth of the central heating: they waved their arms and said they would rather stay and talk, and I almost hoped they might, and might indeed have sunk back into my chair myself, taking as ever the short-term view, the easy quiet way, when Alex suddenly had a thought. I knew what it was as soon as he sat upright and looked worried and uneasy: he thought that I had been hurt by what they had said about Hurt, as I well might have been, though in fact was not. I knew, however, as soon as I saw the reflection of this possibility upon his face, that they would go: and go they did, scrupulous as ever about personal relationships, just as they were unscrupulous about gin. I kept them talking for five minutes on the threshold, gazing anxiously from one to the other; pretty, tendril-haired Dick; hatchet-headed Alex with his stooping stork shoulders; and pale, cross, nail-chewing, eye-twitching, beautiful Lydia Reynolds, in her dirty Aquascutum mackintosh. I wondered if I could ask any of them to stay and share my ordeal, and it crossed my
mind later that they would actually have enjoyed such a request, all three of them together: they would have leaped with alacrity at the prospect of such a sordid, stirring, copy-providing evening. But then, my thoughts obscured by need, I did not see it that way, and I let them go and see Fellini without me.

When they had gone I wandered back into the sitting room and sat down on the hearth rug and looked once more at the contents of my bottle of gin. There was not very much left. Not enough, I thought. Not enough, I hoped. I felt rather odd already; my head was swimming, and I felt slightly but unnaturally gay. Drink always cheers me up. I almost felt that I might abandon the whole project and go to bed instead, or cook myself some bacon and eggs, or listen to the radio: but I knew that I would have to go through with it, having once thought that I might, and regardless of its possible effectiveness. It would be so unpleasant, and I could not let myself off. So I picked up the bottle and carried it into my bedroom where I undressed, and put on my dressing gown. On my way to the bathroom I tripped over the flex of the Hoover, which had been standing in the hall all week, and missed the bathroom door knob the first time I aimed at it. I remembered that I had not eaten since lunch. But it was when I tried to run the bath that the measure of my state was brought home to me. All the hot water in the flat was run from a gas heater in the bathroom: it could be got to run at a fierce enough heat, if one managed to control the flow of the water with sufficient care: there was a very intimate relationship between the volume of water coming from the tap and the strength of the gas jet. With too much water, the temperature would drop to tepid: with too little, the gas would extinguish itself entirely and the bath would run icy cold. It was difficult enough to regulate at the best of times, but that evening I just could not get it to work at all. I sat on the bathroom stool, letting the water run, and
testing it with my finger, and trying again: eventually I thought I had got it right, so I put the plug in and while I waited I drank the rest of the bottle off, neat. It was so thoroughly nasty undiluted that I felt the act of drinking was some kind of penance for the immorality of my behaviour. It had an instantaneous effect: I felt immediately so drunk that I nearly fell into the bath in my dressing gown. However, I managed to stand up and get it off and drop it on the floor: then I climbed into the water.

I climbed out again at once, for the water was stone cold. I had erred on the side of too little volume and everything had gone out but the pilot light. Shivering, I stood there and gazed, defeated, at the hot tap. Perhaps, I thought, the shock to my system would have the same effect as the heat might have done. My unnatural cheerfulness increased as I became aware of the absurdity of the situation: I managed to struggle back into my dressing gown, and then tottered back along the corridor to the bedroom, where I collapsed upon the bed. I felt so sick when I sat down that I stood up once more and decided that I would have to try to walk it off: so I walked up and down the hall and round all the rooms, and back again, and on and on and on, banging into the walls on the way. As I walked I thought about having a baby, and in that state of total inebriation it seemed to me that a baby might be no such bad thing, however impractical and impossible. My sister had babies, nice babies, and seemed to like them. My friends had babies. There was no reason why I shouldn't have one either, it would serve me right, I thought, for having been born a woman in the first place. I couldn't pretend that I wasn't a woman, could I, however much I might try from day to day to avoid the issue? I might as well pay, mightn't I, if other people had to pay? I tried to feel bitter about it all, as I usually did when sober: and indeed recently worse than bitter, positively suicidal: but I could not make it. The gin kept me gay and undespairing, and I thought that I might ring up George and tell him about it. It seemed possible then that I might. I did not have his number, or I might have rung. And there again I was trapped by that first abstinence, for having survived one such temptation to ring George, there was no reason why I should ever succumb, no reason why a point at which I could no longer bear my silence should ever arrive. Had I known my nature better then I would have rung up and found his number and told him, then and there. But I didn't. And perhaps it was better that I didn't. Better for him, I mean.

I never told anybody that George was the father of my child. People would have been highly astonished had I told them, as he was so incidental to my life that nobody even knew that I knew him. They would have asked me if I was sure of my facts. I was sure enough, having indeed a foolproof case in favour of George's paternity, for he was the only man I had ever in my life slept with, and then only once. The whole business was utterly accidental from start to finish: in fact, one of my most painful indignations in those painful months was the sheer unlikelihood of it all. It wasn't, after all, as though I had asked for it: I had asked for it as little as anyone who had ever got it. One reads such comforting stories of women unable to conceive for years and years, but there are of course the other stories, which I have always wished to discount because of their overhanging grim tones of retribution, their association with scarlet letters, their eye-for-an-eye and Bunyanesque attention to the detail of offense. Nowadays one tends to class these tales as fantasies of repressed imaginations, and it is extraordinarily hard to convince people that it is even possible to conceive at the first attempt; though if one thinks about it, it would be odd if it were not possible. Anyway, I know it is possible, because it happened to me, as in the best moral fable for young women, and unluckily
there was much in me that was all too ready to suspect it was a judgment.