The Millstone. Margaret Drabble

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 offence. 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 judgement.

      Oddly enough, I never thought it was a judgement upon me for that one evening with George, but rather for all those other evenings of abstinence with Hamish and his successors. I was guilty of a crime, all right, but it was a brand new, twentieth-century crime, not the good old traditional one of lust and greed. My crime was my suspicion, my fear, my apprehensive terror of the very idea of sex. I liked men, and was forever in and out of love for years, but the thought of sex frightened the life out of me, and the more I didn’t do it and the more I read and heard about how I ought to do it the more frightened I became. It must have been the physical thing itself that frightened me, for I did not at all object to its social implications, to my name on hotel registers, my name bandied about at parties, nor to the emotional upheavals which I imagined to be its companions: but the act itself I could neither make nor contemplate. I would go so far, and no farther. I have thought of all kinds of possible causes for this curious characteristic of mine – the over-healthy, businesslike attitude of my family, my isolation (through superiority of intellect) as a child, my selfish, self-preserving hatred of being pushed around – but none of these imagined causes came anywhere near to explaining the massive obduracy of the effect. Naturally enough my virtuous reluctance made me very miserable, as it makes girls on the back page of every woman’s magazine, for, like them, I enjoyed being in love and being kissed on the doorstep and, like them, I hated to be alone. I had the additional disadvantage of being unable to approve my own conduct; being a child of the age, I knew how wrong and how misguided it was. I walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon my bosom, visible enough in the end, but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery. In the end I even came to believe that I got it thus, my punishment, because I had dallied and hesitated and trembled for so long. Had I rushed in regardless, at eighteen, full of generous passion, as other girls do, I would have got away with it too. But being at heart a Victorian, I paid the Victorian penalty.

      Luckily, I paid for the more shaming details in secret. Nobody ever knew quite how odd my sexual life was and nobody, not even the men I deluded, would have been prepared to entertain the idea of my virginity. Except, of course, Hamish who, being the first, knew quite well. However, even Hamish must have assumed that I got round to it later, as he himself did. He is now married and has two children. It did not take me long to realize, however, that I couldn’t have everything; if I wished to decline, I would have to pay for it. It took me some time to work out what, from others, I needed most, and finally I decided, after some sad experiments, that the one thing I could not dispense with was company. After much trial and error, I managed to construct an excellent system, which combined, I considered, fairness to others, with the maximum possible benefit to myself.

      My system worked for about a year, and while it lasted it was most satisfactory; I look back on it now as on some distant romantic idyll. What happened was this. I went out with two people at once, one Joe Hurt, the other Roger Anderson, and Joe thought I was sleeping with Roger and Roger thought I was sleeping with Joe. In this way I managed to receive from each just about as much attention as I could take, such as the odd squeeze of the hand in the cinema, without having to expose myself to their crusading chivalrous sexual zeal which, had it known the true state of affairs, would have felt itself obliged for honour’s sake to try to seduce me and to reveal to me the true pleasures of life. Clearly neither of them was very interested in me, or they would not have been content with this arrangement. All I had to sacrifice was interest and love. I could do without these things. Both Joe and Roger were sleeping with other girls, I suppose: Joe was reputed to have a wife somewhere, but Roger, now I come to think of it, more probably separated his sexual from his social interests. Roger was in many ways rather a nasty young man, being all that my parents had brought me up to despise and condemn; he was a wealthy well-descended Tory accountant person, clearly set for a career that would be aided more by personality than ability. He had many habits that my parents had always called vulgar, but which were no such thing, except by a total falsification of the word’s meaning; for instance, he talked very loudly in public places and was uncivil to waiters who kept him waiting and people who tried to tell him about parking his car. He was not unintelligent and had a flair, connected no doubt with his profession, for picking out the main points from a book or play without reading it right through or listening to it very closely: he had a crudeness of judgement that appealed to me, as it was not ignorant, but merely impatient and unimpressed. He liked me, I think, partly because I was well-behaved and talkative, and handy to take around, but mostly because I represented for him a raffish seedy literary milieu that appealed to his desire to get to know the world. He himself appealed to exactly this same desire in me, of course; it fascinated me that such people existed. He liked the idea that I was sleeping with Joe Hurt; it gave me a seedy status in his eyes. He had a smooth face and nice suits, did Roger; his skin was like a child’s, clean and well-nurtured and warm with a cool inner warmth.

      Joe, too, oddly enough, liked the idea that I was sleeping with Roger, though he loathed Roger, and abused him frequently to me with violent flows of vituperative eloquence. Joe was quite the opposite from Roger, in skin texture at least: where Roger was smooth, Joe was horribly scooped and pitted and decayed, as though by smallpox. Joe was a horrific-looking person; he was well over six feet tall, and walked with a perpetual slouch, once no doubt the product of embarrassment, but now a manifestation of insolent ill-will. He was appallingly attractive: at first sight one thought him the ugliest man one had ever set eyes on, but in no time at all one found oneself considering with a quite painful admiration all the angles of his beauty. As a boy he had no doubt been ugly with an unredeemed and oppressive ugliness, and he retained many defensive aggressive symptoms from that era, but by the time I met him he must have been for years aware of his magnetic charms. As a consequence he had an attitude of defiant pleasure in his own successes: for years so unacceptable, his acceptability came to him