The Millstone. Margaret Drabble

a pair of rather flimsy string-backed high-heeled sandals, which kept coming off as I walked: my unsteady progress in them had not helped Joe’s irritable attitude earlier in the evening. When I fell off them for the fifth time, George smiled with a mild reproof and offered me his arm. I took it and was amazed, in hanging on to it, to find how much it was there. I had never touched him before, and had always assumed he would be as insubstantial as grass, or as some thin animal: but he was there, within my grasp. I was a little shocked to find it so. He too seemed somewhat surprised, for he became silent, and we walked along without talking. When we arrived at the front door of my block of flats, we paused and I withdrew my arm with some reluctance; then I said what I had decided, marginally, not to say.

      ‘Why don’t you come up,’ I said, ‘and have a drink? Or a cup of coffee or something?’

      He looked at me, suddenly very thin and fey and elusive, then said, in his most defensive tone, ‘Well, I don’t mind if I do. That would be lovely, don’t you think?’

      ‘Yes, lovely,’ I said, and we went in and I opened the lift door for him, and up we went. I felt unreasonably elated and the familiar details of the building seemed to take on a sudden charm. As he followed me into the kitchen, he seemed a little subdued by the grand parental atmosphere which never quite left the place, and I had a moment of horrid fright: perhaps he wasn’t quite up to it, perhaps he wasn’t quite up to my kind of thing, perhaps I should never have tried to talk to him for more than five minutes, perhaps we were both about to see each other in an unpleasantly revealing social light which would finish off our distant pleasantries forever. To escape this sense of unease, I started to tell him about my parents while the kettle boiled and why they had let me have the flat, and how I couldn’t for shame make money out of it by subletting, and how I didn’t like anyone enough to let them live with me for free. ‘So I have to live alone, you see,’ I said, as I put the beans into the grinder, and hating my own tone of nervous prattle.

      ‘You don’t like being alone?’ he said, and I laughed edgily and said, ‘Well, who does?’

      ‘Oh, quite,’ he said, ‘quite. We’re all human, I suppose,’ and I looked at him and saw that it was all right after all.

      ‘You seem to look after yourself, though,’ he said as I poured the water into the pot. ‘You seem to keep yourself quite busy.’

      ‘I try my best,’ I said, and we carried the tray back into the sitting-room. ‘And what about you?’ I said as we sat down, I in one of the arm-chairs and he on the settee.

      ‘What do you mean?’ he said, ‘what about me?’

      ‘Tell me about you.’

      ‘What about me?’ he said, smiling a deprecating smile, and shrugging his shoulders elaborately with a feminine emphatic diffidence.

      ‘All about you,’ I said with real avidity, for at that moment I so much wanted to know, I wanted to know all about him, being interested, caught, intent: but he continued to smile evasively and said,

      ‘What do you mean, all?’

      ‘Well,’ I said, ‘where do you come from?’

      ‘Ipswich,’ he said.

      ‘I don’t know anything about Ipswich.’

      ‘I bet you don’t even know where it is.’

      ‘Oh yes I do. It’s sort of over there,’ and I waved my hand meaninglessly at an imaginary map of England, sketched on the drawing-room air. He continued in this vein, telling me nothing at all, but telling it with such an air of confidence that I did not take it amiss: I did not quite dare to ask him about what his father did, or any such pertinent questions, though now I wish to God that I had had more courage, and had kept him at it until I had found out the lot. He resisted the pressure of my interest with expert skill, and this in itself surprised me as I was so used to being given endless unsolicited confidences by those in whom I had no interest at all. It occurred to me then that perhaps alone of my acquaintances he was not entirely obsessed by the grandeur of his soul or his career. He was an unassertive man. The very course of his career, which was all that emerged with any clarity, seemed to prove this: he had been sent to Hong Kong on his National Service, where he had got himself involved with Overseas Broadcasting, and on leaving had stayed on with the BBC, moving round the Middle East for a couple of years and then returning to London. When I asked him if it was boring, announcing boring things day in and day out, he said yes, but that he liked being bored. So I said that something must interest him, then, if his work didn’t, and he said yes, I did, so why not talk about me.

      I tried to match him in diffidence but, of course, could not manage it. He asked me about my family, a subject on which I found it easy enough to be truthful: I recounted in some detail their extraordinary blend of socialist principle and middle class scruple, the way they had carried the more painful characteristics of their non-conformist inheritance into their own political and moral attitudes.

      ‘They have to punish themselves, you see,’ I said. ‘They can’t just let things get comfortable. All this going to Africa and so on, other people don’t do it, other people just say they ought to do it, but my parents, they really go. It was the same with the way they brought us up, they were quite absurd, the way they stuck to their principles, never asking us where we’d been when we got back at three in the morning, sending us to state schools, having everything done on the National Health, letting us pick up horrible cockney accents, making the charlady sit down and dine with us, introducing her to visitors, all that kind of nonsense. My God, they made themselves suffer. And yet at the same time they were so nice, so kind, so gentle, and people aren’t nice and kind and gentle, they just aren’t. The charlady went off with all the silver cutlery in the end, she despised them, I could see her despising them, and she knew they wouldn’t take any steps. And the awful thing is that they weren’t even shocked when she did it, they had seen it coming, they said. And my brother went and married a ghastly girl whose father was a colonel, and now he lives in Dorking and spends all his time having absolutely worthless people to dinner and playing bridge. My sister still tries, but she married a scientist and they live on the top of a hill in the middle of the country on a housing estate near an atomic station, and last time I went she was stopping the kids from playing with the kids next door because they’d taught them to say Silly Bugger. It’s been a disastrous experiment in education, that’s all one can call it.’

      ‘Except for you,’ said George.

      ‘What do you mean, except for me? I don’t consider myself to be a very fine example of anything.’

      ‘Aren’t your parents glad you’ve gone in for Scholarship?’

      ‘Oh no, not really. Oh, I suppose they’re pleased in a way that I did so well, but they think I’m a dilettante, I mean to say, Elizabethan sonnet sequences, it isn’t as though I were even doing nineteenth-century novels or something worthy like that. They wanted me to read Economics at Cambridge, or at least History. They never said so, but I could tell. There’s no moral worth in an Elizabethan sonnet sequence, you know.’

      ‘They must approve, though, of your independence.’

      I looked at him uneasily, not sure whether he meant this straight or as a crack of some kind.

      ‘Won’t you have a drink?’ I said. ‘Have a whisky or something.’

      ‘Don’t they, though?’

      ‘I’m not at all sure that I am at all independent,’ I said, getting up and going to switch on the radio. ‘But I would like to be, that’s true. Because, who knows, one may have to be.’

      There was some Mozart on the Third; I left it on.

      ‘Aren’t you working this evening?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be there, doing a bit of announcing?’

      ‘Not tonight. It is Friday, isn’t it? Why, do you want me to go?’

      ‘No, not at all. I like you to stay. If you like to stay.’

      And I stood there by