The Millstone. Margaret Drabble

any point had any intention of going to a doctor: I had not been ill for so many years that I was unaware even of the procedure for visiting one, and felt that even if I did get round to it I would be reprimanded like a schoolchild for my state. I did not feel much in the mood for reproof. So I kept it to myself, and thought that I would try at least to deal with it by myself. It took me some time to summon up the courage: I sat for a whole day in the British Museum, damp with fear, staring blankly at the open pages of Samuel Daniel, and thinking about gin. I knew vaguely about gin, that it was supposed to do something or other to the womb, quinine or something I believe, and that combined with a hot bath it sometimes works, so I decided that other girls had gone through with it, so why not me. One might be lucky. I had no idea how much gin one was supposed to consume, but I had a nasty feeling that it was a whole bottle: the prospect of this upset me both physically and financially. I grudged the thought of two pounds on a bottle of gin, just to make myself ill. However, I couldn’t pretend that I couldn’t afford it, and it was relatively cheap compared with other methods, so I grimly turned the pages of Daniel and decided that I would give it a try. As I turned the pages, a very handy image, thesis-wise, caught my attention, and I noted it down. Lucky in work, unlucky in love. Love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’tis woman’s whole existence, as Byron mistakenly remarked.

      On the way home I called in at Unwin’s and bought a bottle of gin. As the man handed it to me over the counter, wrapped in its white tissue paper, I wished that I were purchasing it for some more festive reason. I walked down Marylebone High Street with it, looking in the shop windows and feeling rather as though I were looking my last on the expensive vegetables and the chocolate rabbits and the cosy antiques. I would not have minded looking my last on the maternity clothes: it was unfortunate, in view of subsequent events, that the region I then inhabited was positively crammed with maternity shops and boutiques for babies, so that I could not walk down the street without being confronted by the reproachful image of a well-dressed, flat-bellied model standing and displaying with studied grace and white glass hair some chic and classy garment. The sight of them that night made me clutch the neck of my gin bottle all the more tightly, and I turned off towards the street I lived in with determination in my heart.

      I was living at that time in a flat that belonged to my parents, which dangerously misrepresented my status. My parents were in Africa for a couple of years; my father had gone to a new University as Professor of Economics, to put them on the right track. He was on the right track himself, or he would not have been invited. They had their flat on a fifteen year lease, and they said that while they were away I could have it, which was kind of them as they could have let it for a lot of money. They disapproved very strongly, however, of the property situation, and were unwilling to become involved in it except on a suffering and sacrificial basis: so their attitude was not pure kindness, but partly at least a selfish abstinence from guilt. I profited, anyway: it was a nice flat, on the fourth floor of a large block of an early twentieth-century building, and in very easy reach of Regent’s Park, Oxford Circus, Marylebone High Street, Harley Street, and anywhere else useful that one can think of. The only disadvantage was that people would insist on assuming that because I lived there I was rather rich: which by any human standards I was, having about five hundred a year in various research grants and endowments: but this, of course, was not at all rich in the eyes of the people who habitually made such assumptions. In fact, had they known the truth they would have classed me on the starvation line, and would have ceased to make remarks about the extreme oldness of my shoes. My parents did not support me at all, beyond the rent-free accommodation, though they could have afforded to do so: but they believed in independence. They had drummed the idea of self-reliance into me so thoroughly that I believed dependence to be a fatal sin. Emancipated woman, this was me: gin bottle in hand, opening my own door with my own latchkey.

      When I found myself alone in the flat, I began to feel really frightened. It seemed a violent and alarming thing to do, almost as violent and alarming as the act which had engendered this necessity, and, moreover, this time I had no company. This time I was on my own. In a way that made it better: at least nobody could see. I put the bottle on the kitchen dresser with the other bottles, most of which were empty except for half an inch or so, and looked at my watch. It was half past six. I did not feel that I ought to start at half past six, and yet there did not seem to be anything else to do: I could not see myself settling down to a couple of hours’ work. Nor did I think I should have anything to eat, though I was rather hungry. So I walked up and down the hall corridor for a while, and was just going into the bedroom to get undressed when the doorbell rang. I started nervously, as though caught out in an act of crime, and yet with a reprieved relief, anything being slightly better than what I was contemplating: and the people I found at the door were really quite a lot better. As soon as I saw them, I knew how very pleased I was to see them, and asked them in with cheerful goodwill.

      ‘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 into 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