The Millstone. Margaret Drabble

at some University, but nobody ever saw her. He wrote novels, and since his return to England had abandoned his attempts at an academic career, and was now dabbling in films and adaptations and so forth, whilst still turning out his novel a year. His books were compulsively readable, but I felt him forever teetering on some artistic brink: he had the talent to write really well, and he maintained that one day he was going to do it, but the more efficient and readable he got the more his friends jeered and prophesied and foresaw his doom. I myself did not know what I thought about it, because his weaknesses and his strengths seemed to be so closely combined: he was naturally prolific, as I was naturally chaste. Or unnaturally, do I mean? Anyway, he would take me seriously when I made remarks (not intended seriously) like ‘Well, Henry James was very creative’ or ‘Shakespeare wrote more plays than any of his contemporaries’: so his desires must have been grandiose enough. It was rather touching, the way one had to cheer him up for his every success. He and Roger clearly did not know each other at all well; they had a few acquaintances in common, such as myself, and met occasionally at the more undiscriminating kind of social gathering. Each considered the other to have a kind of worldliness that was lacking in himself, and despised and revered each other accordingly. They were both right, too. I suppose Joe was far more the kind of person I might have been expected to like than Roger was, for we shared many interests, and enjoyed arguing about books and films and people and attitudes. Like Roger, he found it handy to have a second-string girl, and I found it handy to be one. It was an excellent system.

      It was upon George that the whole delicate unnatural system was wrecked. Dear George, lovely George, kind and camp and unpretentious George. Thinking of George, I even now permit myself some tenderness, now so much too late. It was in Joe’s company that I first met George: he was a radio announcer, and I met him very deviously in the canteen at the BBC, whither I had gone to accompany Joe, who was being interviewed about his latest work. Joe did not know George, but a friend of Joe’s who was sitting at the table with us did, and he introduced us. George was at first sight rather unnoticeable, being unaggressive and indeed unassertive in manner, a quality rare enough in my acquaintance, but he had a kind of unobtrusive gentle attention that made its point in time. He had a thin and decorative face, a pleasant BBC voice and quietly effeminate clothes, and from time to time he perverted his normal speaking voice in order to make small camp jokes. Not, one might think, a dangerous or threatening character, nor one likely to inspire great passion. He had nothing, for instance, on Joe Hurt, who sat there chewing his yellow fingers with their huge buckled, cracking yellow nails, and winding his legs ferociously round the tubular steel legs of the table, while discoursing in a loudly inaudible voice about the tediousness of experimental novels. The eyes of every girl in the room kept creeping meekly and with shame back to Joe. He always had such an effect on any assembly. George listened to Joe, and he too seemed impressed, though he would make the odd sided comment and joke, as I have said. I distinctly thought he fancied Joe. Joe attracted everyone, even those who concealed their attraction by the violence of their abuse.

      After that meeting, I came across George intermittently, about once a week on an average. Sometimes in the street; living where I did, so near Broadcasting House, we were forever crossing paths in Upper Regent Street or along Wigmore Street. Sometimes we met in a pub of which he was clearly an habitué, and which Joe and I took to for a while. It was a nice pub, so I took Roger there too one night. Once we met, George and I, to our mutual surprise, at a party. I used to enjoy meeting him, because he always seemed pleased to see me, and used to make lovely remarks. ‘You’re looking very lovely this evening, Rosamunda,’ he would say as I entered the Bear and Baculus, or ‘And how did you get on with Astrophel and Stella today?’ He seemed oddly conversant with the poets; I could not place his background or education at all, which intrigued me, naturally. His accent betrayed no locality, for when it slipped from the BBC tone, it slipped not into its origins but into this universal camp parlance. There was something about his hair, oddly enough, that made one think he might not be quite as refined as he otherwise appeared. It did not lie flat, in the usual way: it had an odd sideways angle to it that made him in certain lights look almost raffish and smart. I liked it. I liked him, altogether, and after a few weeks I would persuade Joe and Roger to take me to his pub just so that I could talk to him for a few minutes.

      He was very amused by the Joe-Roger alternation, and clearly thought the worst, a conclusion which gratified my pride. He would make slight clucking private noises of reproof, which amused me. I enjoyed the image of my own imaginary wickedness reflected from his eyes, for he saw what he thought he saw with so entertained an indulgence, exactly the kind of reaction I would have wanted had what he seen been true. One rather fraught summer evening I persuaded Joe to take me to the pub: we were on very bad terms, being engaged in some fruitless dispute about a pound note that we had lent or not lent to a tiresome dud friend the week before. I was very annoyed with Joe, as I have a good memory, and I distinctly remembered the whole occasion: my temper, when we reached the pub, was not improved by the fact that George did not turn up. As the time for his usual arrival passed, I grew increasingly irritable, and in the end Joe flew into a rage and walked out and left me. I sat there grimly for five minutes, pretending to finish my drink, and then I got up to go. I cannot stand sitting in pubs by myself. At the doorway I met George.

      ‘My goodness me,’ he said, ‘all alone tonight, are you?’

      ‘Just walked out,’ I said. ‘Joe just walked out.’

      ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I met him on Portland Place. Have another drink.’

      ‘I was just going,’ I said.

      ‘Well, stay a while.’

      ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I will.’

      So George bought me another drink; when he came back from the bar with it he was smiling with gentle malice, and he said, ‘Well, all you have to do is ring up Roger. How wise you are to have your life so well organized.’

      ‘I don’t like Roger much,’ I said, and laughed. ‘You don’t either, do you?’

      ‘No, I must confess that I prefer Joe. Personally,’ said George. And he too laughed.

      ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘Roger’s gone on his summer holidays.’

      ‘Has he really? Amazing how people go on going on summer holidays, don’t you think? I gave it up when I was seventeen.’

      ‘How old are you now?’

      ‘Twenty-nine.’

      ‘Like Joe.’

      ‘So Joe’s gone and left you, has he? What had you been on at him about?’

      ‘Oh, this and that,’ I said, and told him the story of the pound note. We talked for half an hour more, and then it began to cross my mind that he might have better things to do than to talk to me: that he didn’t come into the pub to talk to me, and might well have other aims for the evening: and that he was probably spending so much time on me because he felt sorry for me being left on my own. He was a man much susceptible to the tender emotions of pity and sorrow, I suspected. As soon as these suspicions crossed my mind, they immediately seemed to me to be the simple truth, so I looked at my watch and said, ‘Good heavens, is that the time, I really must be going.’

      ‘Oh no, not yet,’ he said. ‘Let me get you another drink.’

      ‘No, really,’ I said, ‘I must be going, I have some work to do before the morning.’

      And I picked up my bag and my scarf and started fishing for my shoes which I had lost under the bench.

      ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said.

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said with asperity, ‘I only live just down the road.’

      ‘Now then, now then,’ he said, soothingly, ‘I know where you live. I didn’t mean to offend you. I know you’re quite capable of walking down the road by yourself. Let me walk you home.’

      ‘Why?’ I said, wriggling my feet into my shoes. ‘Don’t you want to stay and talk’ – I waved my hand disparagingly around the room – ‘to all your friends? ’

      I