The Millstone (8 page)

In the end the only one that I told was Spiro. I let the others draw their own conclusions. My schoolgirl, Sally Hitchins, certainly noticed, but did not dare to ask: she seemed rather admiring, and had indeed no right to be otherwise, in view of what she had let drop about her own stormy record and the reasons for her expulsion. The Indian did not see. He just did not notice or, if he did, it meant nothing to him. But for my Methodist minister I took to wearing a wedding ring; not a real wedding ring, needless to say, but the identical curtain ring which I had flashed round that disreputable hotel for Hamish so many years before. He was the only person for whom I ever stooped to such measures, and I tell myself that I did it for his sake and not for my own. I don't know what he thought of it: I suppose he must have concluded that I had
contracted a hasty shotgun wedding as the wedding ring appeared so late in the proceedings, but perhaps he was too kind and Christian for such conjecture. A situation like mine certainly makes clear how little we know of each other's ignorances and illuminations.

I told Spiro, or rather one might say that Spiro told me. It was about a fortnight after my last evening with Roger. I was wearing a large grey man's sweater that I had had for years, over a skirt that I had let out with a piece of string; I did not look too bad, though obvious enough to the discerning eye, and Spiro was discerning enough. He had just arrived and I went into the kitchen to make us both a cup of coffee: I returned with the tray, which I put down on top of the bookcase while I went to pick up the little coffee table, intending to place it in a convenient position between our two seats, but Spiro dashed forward and wrenched the table from my grasp, saying, "No, no, no, you mustn't go carrying heavy things any more, allow me, allow me."

"Whatever do you mean?" I said, pulling the table firmly back from him: it weighed nothing anyway, being about two feet high and two feet square, and made of ugly canework, like a garden chair. I put the thing down where I had originally intended, then looked back at Spiro. But he was laughing. I knew that he knew and I was annoyed with him for laughing at me.

"There's nothing funny about it," I said crossly, and he pulled a ridiculous mock-serious face and said:

"No, no, I quite agree, I quite agree."

"Sit down," I said, "and read me your essay on Donne. If you ever wrote it."

"Certainly, certainly," he said, with a look of brazen complicit apology, and got his essay out of his briefcase and started to read it: it was very good but in reading it aloud he treated it with a certain mockery, as though he could equally well have written anything else on the subject. He
was only eighteen and so sharp, as they say, that one day he would cut himself. I did not mind that he knew that I knew that he knew. He laughed, and did not feel sorry and offered to lift tables for me because he wished to provoke and not because he wished to display his sympathy. From him, too, my poverty must have been concealed.

When I went to see the doctor again, he said that he had managed to book me a bed in St. Andrew's Hospital which, as he expected me to know, was on Marylebone Road. From the way in which he told me, I could see that he expected gratitude and that he considered he had done more for me than might have been expected of him. I was duly grateful, though on what grounds I was not quite sure: later I thought of three possible reasons for his air of achievement. It was quite clever of him to have got me a bed at all, in view of the shortage of maternity beds, and very clever of him to have got me one so close, and in a teaching hospital with an excellent reputation. After telling me that he had made this booking, he then washed his hands of me with undisguised relief. "You can go to the clinic at the hospital," he said, "and they'll look after you there."

"Yes, of course," I said, as though I understood the whole procedure, though I wanted to ask him a dozen things, about when to go, and where to go, and whom to ask for: but he was a busy man and there was a long queue in the surgery outside, so I got up to leave.

"Thank you very much," I said for the tenth time, and set off to the door: but he called me back and said, "Now then, you don't want to go without your letter of introduction, do you?"

"Oh no, of course not," I said, as though it had just momentarily slipped my mind, and he handed over an envelope addressed to the Ante-Natal Clinic, St. Andrew's Hospital. It was a sealed envelope. I wondered what it said
inside. I felt slightly better leaving with that in my pocket as at least I now knew the name of the clinic which I was expected to attend: in those days I was so innocent that I did not even know what a clinic was.

My first visit to that clinic was a memorable experience. I had ascertained the day and the time by telephone, a piece of forethought of which I felt moderately proud, and I duly presented myself on Wednesday afternoon. The hospital was easy enough to find, being a large sprawling building occupying a large area of ground on the north side of the Marylebone Road, not far from that elegant favourite of mine, Castrol House. St. Andrew's could not rival this latter building in architectural distinction; the central block appeared to be early eighteenth-century and had regularity if nothing else, but it was surrounded and overlapped and encroached upon by a hideous medley of neo-Gothic, nineteen-thirties, and nineteen-sixties excrescences, all of which had been added entirely at random, from the visual point of view at least. I was alarmed, not so much because the building was an eyesore, for my visual taste is very weak, but because I did not know how to get into it, nor which part to attack. There were innumerable doors and entrances, and I had a sense that the main door was certainly not the appropriate one. In the end, however, it was that one which I chose, as I thought there might at least be a reception desk inside it. Luckily, there was. I presented myself and my incriminating envelope and was told to go out again and find the Out Patients entrance, which the girl said was down a side street. So I went out and found the Out Patients and entered the building once more. Here, as I had suspected, there was no reception desk and no indication of any direction: there was a door marked
HAEMOTOLOGY
and a lot of dark gloss cream corridors. I stood there irresolute, feeling acutely ashamed at my own ignorance: it was an emotion that I had experienced often enough before, on my first day at
school, for instance, or my first day at Cambridge, but then with some mixed pleasurable anticipation, and now with nothing for foreboding.

I was rescued from immobility by the arrival of another woman, very evidently pregnant, who came briskly through the doors from the street and set off with an air of speed and purpose down one of the cream corridors. I put two and two together, and followed her. Sure enough, she led me straight to the ante-natal clinic, which turned out to be a large hall with various small rooms leading off it, full of rows of chairs and waiting pregnant women. There was still five minutes to go before the clinic officially opened, for I had at least grown wise to the inevitable queueing, but the room was crowded already and there were only three or four chairs left. I occupied one of them and prepared to wait, and while I waited I had a good look at those who were waiting with me.

They had one thing in common, of course, though their conditions varied from the invisible to the grossly inflated. As at the doctor's, I was reduced almost to tears by the variety of human misery that presented itself. Perhaps I was in no mood for finding people cheering, attractive or encouraging, but the truth is that they looked to me an unbelievably depressed and miserable lot. One hears much, though mostly from the interested male, about the beauty of a woman with child, ships in full sail, and all that kind of metaphorical euphemism, and I suppose that from time to time on the faces of well-fed, well-bred young ladies I have seen a certain peaceful glow, but the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. Anemia and exhaustion were written on most countenances: the clothes were dreadful, the legs swollen, the bodies heavy and unbalanced. There were a few cases of striking wear: a huge middle-aged woman, who could walk only with a stick, a pale thin creature with varicose veins and a two-year-old child in tow, and a black woman who sat there not
with the peasant acceptance of physical life of which one hears, but with a look of wide-eyed dilating terror. She was moaning to herself softly, and muttering, almost as though she were already in labour: perhaps, like me, she was more frightened of the hospital than of anything else. Even those who had no evident complaints, and who might well have been expected to be full of conventional joy, were looking cross and tired, possibly at the prospect of such a tedious afternoon: there was a couple of young girls in the row in front of me, the kind of girls who chatter and giggle on buses and in cafés, but they were not giggling, they were complaining at great length about how their backs ached and how they felt sick and how they'd never get their figures back. It seemed a shame. And there we all were, and it struck me that I felt nothing in common with any of these people, that I disliked the look of them, that I felt a stranger and a foreigner there, and yet I was one of them, I was like that too, I was trapped in a human limit for the first time in my life, and I was going to have to learn how to live inside it.

After some time, various nurses arrived and things started to happen and the queue began to move. People disappeared, in a completely mystifying order, to have their blood pressure taken, and to be weighed, and to see Doctor This and Doctor That and the midwife. I sat there for a while wondering if anyone would come and ask me for my card, and when they didn't I decided I would have to find someone to give it to; eventually, afraid that I would be accused of queue-jumping, I rose tentatively to my feet and went in search of authority. I found a nurse who took my envelope and told me to go and sit down again, so I did, and prepared myself for an endless wait, but within a few minutes my name too was mysteriously called. "Mrs. Stacey," said the mechanical voice, "Mrs. Rosamund Stacey." I got up once more and found the nurse who had taken my letter. She turned to me and said,
What do you want? I said they'd just called my name out, what should I do? Go see the midwife, said the nurse. Where? I said, almost sharply, for I could see no possible reason why I or anyone else should be expected to know by instinct where midwives were. Oh, don't you know? she said, and pointed to a door leading off the hall in the far right-hand corner. I walked up to it, knocked and went in.

The midwife was a pretty lady with smart ginger hair and small features and blue eyes. "Hello, Mrs. Stacey," she said warmly, extending her hand from behind her desk, "I'm Sister Hammond, how do you do?"

"How do you do?" I said, thinking I had reached civilization at last, but feeling nonetheless impelled to continue, "but I'm not Mrs. Stacey, I'm Miss."

"Yes, yes," she smiled, coldly and sweetly, "but we call everyone Mrs. here. As a courtesy title, don't you think?"

She was a civilized lady and she could see that I was civilized, so I too smiled frostily, though I did not think much of the idea. We had some chat about how she didn't believe in natural childbirth, and the overcrowding of the maternity service, and then she made me fill in interminable forms and documents, giving details of all past illnesses and of my domestic accommodation. When I said that I had a flat with five rooms, kitchen and bathroom all to myself, her smile became even more courteous and cold: I could see that she saw me, and without wild inaccuracy, as one of these rich dissolute young girls about town, and I was rather relieved that her profession prevented her from inquiring why I had not done the sensible and expected thing and gone and had an expensive abortion. I did not like her, but I felt on safe ground with her, as I did not feel with all those bloated human people outside. Safe, chartered, professional, articulate ground.

When she had finished her interrogation, she said,
"Well, Mrs. Stacey, that's all for now, I'll be seeing you again in a month's time."

"Do you mean that's all for now?" I said, getting up with relief, but she said:

"Oh no, I'm afraid not altogether. I'm afraid you'll have to wait now to see Dr. Esmond."

"Oh, I see," I said. "I'm afraid I don't quite understand the routine here."

"Oh," she said, rising dismissively, all clean starch and coolness, "oh, you'll soon find your way around. People don't take long to find their way around."

So I went out and waited for Dr. Esmond, and I waited for him till the bitter end, when everyone else had gone. It was the first time that I had ever been examined, and I could have put up with Dr. Esmond, who was a grey-haired old man with rimless glasses, but I was not prepared for being examined by five medical students, one after the other. I lay there, my eyes shut, and quietly smiling to conceal my outrage, because I knew that these things must happen, and that doctors must be trained, and that medical students must pass examinations; and he asked them questions about the height of the fundus, and could they estimate the length of pregnancy, and what about the pelvis. They all said I had a narrow pelvis, and I lay there and listened to them and felt them, with no more protest than if I had been a corpse examined by budding pathologists for the cause of death. But I was not dead, I was alive twice over.

As Sister Hammond had prophesied, I got used to it. I learned what time to arrive and where to slip my attendance card in the pile so that I would get called early in the queue: they were so unsystematic that one could not really beat their system, but one could win occasionally on the odd point. I learned to read the notes upside down in the file that said Not to be Shown to the Patient. I learned
how to present myself for inspection, with the minimum necessary clothes' removal. I learned that one had to bully them about iron pills and vitamin pills, because they would never remember. But it continued to be an ordeal, unillumined by even the most fitful gleams of comfort: my sole aim was to get out as quickly as possible. I hated most of all the chat about birth that went on so continually around me in the queue: everyone recounted their own past experiences, and those of their sisters and mothers and aunts and friends and grandmothers, and everyone else listened, spellbound, including me. The degrading truth was that there was no topic more fascinating to us in that condition; and indeed few topics anywhere, it seems. Birth, pain, fear and hope, these were the subjects that drew us together in gloomy awe, and so strong was the bond that even I, doubly, trebly outcast by my unmarried status, my education, and my class, even I was drawn in from time to time, and compelled to proffer some anecdote of my own, such as the choice story of my sister who gave birth to her second in an ambulance in a snow storm. Indeed, so strong became the pull of nature that by the end of the six months' attendance I felt more in common with the ladies at the clinic than with my own acquaintances.