Читать книгу The Millstone - Margaret Drabble - Страница 5

My career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say, made by it. Take, for instance, the first time I tried spending a night with a man in a hotel. I was nineteen at the time, an age appropriate for such adventures, and needless to say I was not married. I am still not married, a fact of some significance, but more of that later. The name of the boy, if I remember rightly, was Hamish. I do remember rightly. I really must try not to be deprecating. Confidence, not cowardice, is the part of myself which I admire, after all.

Hamish and I had just come down from Cambridge at the end of the Christmas term: we had conceived our plan well in advance, and had each informed our parents that term ended a day later than it actually did, knowing quite well that they would not be interested enough to check, nor sufficiently au fait to ascertain the value of their information if they did. So we arrived in London together in the late afternoon, and took a taxi from the station to our destined hotel. We had worked everything out, and had even booked our room, which would probably not have been necessary, as the hotel we had selected was one of those large central cheap-smart ones, specially designed for adventures such as ours. I was wearing a gold curtain ring on the relevant finger. We had decided to stick to Hamish’s own name, which, being Andrews, was unmemorable enough, and less confusing than having to think up a pseudonym. We were well educated, the two of us, in the pitfalls of such occasions, having both of us read at one time in our lives a good deal of cheap fiction, and indeed we both carried ourselves with considerable aplomb. We arrived, unloaded our suitably-labelled suitcases, and called at the desk for our key. It was here that I made my mistake. For some reason I was requested to sign the register: I now know that it is by no means customary for wives to sign hotel registers, and can only assume that I was made to do so because of the status of the hotel, or because I was hanging around guiltily waiting to be asked. Anyway, when I got to it, I signed it in my maiden name: Rosamund Stacey, I wrote, as large as can be, in my huge childish hand, underneath a neatly illegible Hamish Andrews. I did not even see what I had done until I handed it back to the girl, who looked at my signature, gave a sigh of irritation, and said, ‘Now then, what do you mean by this?’

She did not say this with amusement, or with venom, or with reprobation: but with a weary crossness. I was making work for her, I could see that at a glance: I was stopping the machinery, because I had accidentally told the truth. I had meant to lie, and she had expected me to lie, but for some deeply rooted Freudian reason I had forgotten to do so. While she was drawing Hamish’s attention to my error, I stood there overcome with a kind of bleak apologetic despair. I had not meant to make things difficult. Hamish got out of it as best he could, cracking a few jokes about the recentness of our wedding: she did not smile at them, but took them for what they were, and when he had finished she picked up the register and said,

‘Oh well, I’ll have to go and ask.’

Then she disappeared through a door at the back of her reception box, leaving Hamish and me side by side but not particularly looking at each other.

‘Oh hell,’ I said, after a while. ‘I’m so sorry, dearest, I just wasn’t thinking.’

‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he said.

And of course it did not matter: after a couple of minutes the girl returned, expressionless as ever, without the register, and said that that was all right, and gave us our key. I suppose my name is still there. And its inscription there in all that suspect company is as misleading and hypocritical as everything else about me and my situation, for Hamish and I were not even sleeping together, though every day for a year or so we thought we might be about to. We took rooms in hotels and spent nights in each other’s colleges, partly for fun and partly because we liked each other’s company. In those days, at that age, such things seemed possible and permissible: and as I did them, I thought that I was creating love and the terms of love in my own way and in my own time. I did not realize the dreadful facts of life. I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us. In ignorance and innocence I built my own confines, and by the time I was old enough to know what I had done, there was no longer time to undo it.

When Hamish and I loved each other for a whole year without making love, I did not realize that I had set the mould of my whole life. One could find endless reasons for our abstinence – fear, virtue, ignorance, perversion – but the fact remains that the Hamish pattern was to be endlessly repeated, and with increasing velocity and lack of depth, so that eventually the idea of love ended in me almost the day that it began. Nothing succeeds, they say, like success, and certainly nothing fails like failure. I was successful in my work, so I suppose other successes were too much to hope for. I can remember Hamish well enough: though I cannot now quite recollect the events of our parting. It happened, that is all. Anyway, it is of no interest, except as an example of my incompetence, both practical and emotional. My attempts at anything other than my work have always been abortive. My attempt at abortion, for instance, must be a quite classic illustration of something: of myself, if of nothing else.

When, some years after the Hamish episode, I found that I was pregnant, I went through slightly more than the usual degrees of incredulity and shock, for reasons which I doubtless shall be unable to restrain myself from recounting: there was nobody to tell, nobody to ask, so I was obliged once more to fall back on the dimly reported experiences of friends and information I had gleaned through the years from cheap fiction. I never at 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 proved a fruitful topic, as all of us there had some pretensions to writing of one kind or another, though Lydia was the only one who would have considered herself a creative artist. I myself was wholly uncreative, and spent my life on thorough and tedious collating of certain sixteenth-century poetic data, a task which enthralled me, but which was generally considered to be useless. However, I was also acknowledged to have a good critical mind in other spheres, and did from time to time a little reviewing and a good deal of reading of friends’ plays and poems and novels and correspondence. Dick, for example, had entrusted to me one or two of his works, hitherto unpublished and, in my opinion, unpublishable. One was a novel, of great incidental charm and talent, but totally defective in plot and, even worse, in time scheme: I do not care very much for plots myself, but I do like to have a sequence of events. His characters had no relationship with time at all: it was impossible to tell what event preceded what, and whether a particular scene lasted for hours or days, or whether it occurred hours, days or years later than the preceding scene – or indeed perhaps before it, one simply could not tell. I pointed this out to Dick and he was startled and alarmed because he could not see what I meant, which implied that the defect must have been integral and not technical. He earned his living by writing something or other for a television company, but he was not wholly committed to his work. Alex, on the other hand, was as committed as I was: he was working for an advertising agency, writing copy, and was thoroughly enraptured by his job. He was at heart rather a serious puritanical young man, and I think it gave him great pleasure to live in such a wicked warm atmosphere, all jokes and deceitfulness, prostituting his talent. He had a great flair for copy, too, and was forever reading aloud his better slogans from stray magazines and papers. He wrote poetry on the quiet, and actually published a piece or two once every two years. Lydia was the only one who had really made it: she had published a couple of novels, but had now for some time been mooching around London moaning that she had nothing else to say. Nobody sympathized with her at all, understandably: she was only twenty-six, so what had she to worry about?

In view of her state, she seized with delight upon any stories of the atrocity of other people’s latest books, of which we managed to offer a kindly few.

‘It’s no good, anyway,’ said Dick, after dismissing Joe Hurt’s latest with a derisive sneer, ‘churning them out like that, one a year. Mechanical, that’s what it is.’

‘A bit more mechanism wouldn’t hurt you,’ I said gaily. I was on my second large gin.

Lydia, who had hitherto been accepting our devious comfort, suddenly turned on us with a wail of despondency.

‘I don’t care what you say,’ she said, ‘it’s better to write bad books than no books, it really is. Writing nothing is – is nothing, just nothing. It’s wonderful to turn out one a year, I think Joe Hurt is wonderful, I admire it, I admire that kind of thing.’

‘You haven’t read it,’ said Dick.

‘That’s not the point,’ said Lydia, ‘it’s the effort, that’s the point.’

‘Why don’t you write a bad book then?’ I asked. ‘I bet you could write a bad book if you wanted to. Couldn’t you?’

‘Not if I knew it was bad while I was writing it. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get it done.’

‘What a romantic view of literary creation,’ said Dick.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Lydia crossly. ‘Get yours published, and then start calling me romantic. Pass the gin, Rosie, there’s a darling.’

‘Anyway,’ said Alex, who had by now eaten half his loaf, ‘if you ask me, Joe Hurt knew quite well how bad his book was while he was writing it. It reeks of conscious badness on every page. Don’t you think so, Rosie?’

‘I haven’t read it,’ I said. ‘But you know what Joe always says. Nobody ever wrote a masterpiece before the age of thirty-five, Joe says, so that gives me another six years, says Joe.’

‘Still going out with Joe, Rosie?’

‘I’m still seeing him. Do stop calling me Rosie, who gave you that idea?’

‘Lydia. She called you Rosie just now.’

‘She likes diminishing people. It makes her feel better, doesn’t it, Lyd?’

At this we all laughed loudly, and I reached for the gin and noticed with horror and dismay that it was half gone, more than half gone. Sudden pressing memories of what I had never quite forgotten came upon me, and I looked at my watch and said that wasn’t it time they all went off to see their Fellini film. They were not at all easy to dislodge, having sunk down very thoroughly and chattily into my parents’ extra-comfortable old deep chairs, where they had an air of being held like animals in the warmth of the central heating: they waved their arms and said they would rather stay and talk, and I almost hoped they might, and might indeed have sunk back into my chair myself, taking as ever the short-term view, the easy quiet way, when Alex suddenly had a thought. I knew what it was as soon as he sat upright and looked worried and uneasy: he thought that I had been hurt by what they had said about Hurt, as I well might have been, though in fact was not. I knew, however, as soon as I saw the reflection of this possibility upon his face, that they would go: and go they did, scrupulous as ever about personal relationships, just as they were unscrupulous about gin. I kept them talking for five minutes on the threshold, gazing anxiously from one to the other; pretty, tendril-haired Dick; hatchet-headed Alex with his stooping stork shoulders; and pale, cross, nail-chewing, eye-twitching, beautiful Lydia Reynolds, in her dirty Aquascutum macintosh. I wondered if I could ask any of them to stay and share my ordeal, and it crossed my mind later that they would actually have enjoyed such a request, all three of them together: they would have leaped with alacrity at the prospect of such a sordid, stirring, copy-providing evening. But then, my thoughts obscured by need, I did not see it that way, and I let them go and see Fellini without me.

When they had gone I wandered back into the sitting-room and sat down on the hearth rug and looked once more at the contents of my bottle of gin. There was not very much left. Not enough, I thought. Not enough, I hoped. I felt rather odd already; my head was swimming, and I felt slightly but unnaturally gay. Drink always cheers me up. I almost felt that I might abandon the whole project and go to bed instead, or cook myself some bacon and eggs, or listen to the radio: but I knew that I would have to go through with it, having once thought that I might, and regardless of its possible effectiveness. It would be so unpleasant, and I could not let myself off. So I picked up the bottle and carried it into my bedroom where I undressed, and put on my dressing-gown. On my way to the bathroom I tripped over the flex of the Hoover, which had been standing in the hall all week, and missed the bathroom door knob the first time I aimed at it. I remembered that I had not eaten since lunch. But it was when I tried to run the bath that the measure of my state was brought home to me. All the hot water in the flat was run from a gas heater in the bathroom: it could be got to run at a fierce enough heat, if one managed to control the flow of the water with sufficient care: there was a very intimate relationship between the volume of water coming from the tap and the strength of the gas jet. With too much water, the temperature would drop to tepid: with too little, the gas would extinguish itself entirely and the bath would run icy cold. It was difficult enough to regulate at the best of times, but that evening I just could not get it to work at all. I sat on the bathroom stool, letting the water run, and testing it with my finger, and trying again: eventually I thought I had got it right, so I put the plug in and while I waited I drank the rest of the bottle off, neat. It was so thoroughly nasty undiluted that I felt the act of drinking was some kind of penance for the immorality of my behaviour. It had an instantaneous effect: I felt immediately so drunk that I nearly fell into the bath in my dressing-gown. However, I managed to stand up and get it off and drop it on the floor: then I climbed into the water.

I climbed out again at once, for the water was stone cold. I had erred on the side of too little volume and everything had gone out but the pilot light. Shivering, I stood there and gazed, defeated, at the hot tap. Perhaps, I thought, the shock to my system would have the same effect as the heat might have done. My unnatural cheerfulness increased as I became aware of the absurdity of the situation: I managed to struggle back into my dressing-gown, and then tottered back along the corridor to the bedroom, where I collapsed upon the bed. I felt so sick when I sat down that I stood 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 not like Roger’s as a birthright, as a given starting-point, but as a challenge to be met. His wife was an American, whom he was said to have picked up while doing a couple of years over there 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 was still not convinced that he really wanted to walk back with me, but as I wished his company I was prepared to accept his offer without the comfort of total conviction. We set off down the broad dusty street. I was wearing 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 the radio, looking at him, and he looked back, and seemed to indicate, though not precisely, that I should go and sit by him on the settee. So I did, and he took my hand and held it, and then started to kiss my fingers, one by one. After a while I remembered what was at the back of my mind, and I said, ‘My mother, you know, was a great feminist. She brought me up to be equal. She made there be no questions, no difference. I was equal. I am equal. You know what her creed was? That thing that Queen Elizabeth said about thanking God that she had such qualities that if she were turned out in her petticoat in any part of Christendom, she would whatever it was that she would do. She used to quote that to us, when we were frightened about exams or going to dances. I have to live up to her, you know.’

And I in my turn raised his hand to my lips: it was so beautiful and cool and thin a hand, and I kissed it with some sadness. At the touch of my mouth, he took me in his arms and kissed me all over the face, and eventually we subsided gently together and lay there quietly. Knowing that he was queer, I was not frightened of him at all, because I thought that he would expect no more from me, and I was so moved and touched and pleased by the thought that he might like me, by the thought that he found me of interest. I was so happy for that hour that we lay there because truly I seemed to see him through the eyes of love, so irrationally valuable did he seem. I look back now with some anguish to each touch and glance, to every changing conjunction of limbs and heads and hands. I have lived it over every day for so long now that I am in danger of forgetting the true shape of how it was, because each time I go over it I wish that I had given a little more here or there, or at the very least said what was in my heart, so that he could have known how much it meant to me. But I was incapable, even when happy, of exposing myself thus far.

After a while the radio closed down on us, and we were left there in silence, except for the hum of the machine. I started to pull myself upright and said, ‘I must go and switch that thing off, I can’t stand that noise,’ but he held on to me and said, ‘No, don’t go.’ I pulled away and said that I must, and before I knew where I was I found myself thinking that I couldn’t stop him if he really wanted to, because I liked him so much, and if I stopped him he would believe that I didn’t: also that if ever, now: also that it would be good for me. So I shut my eyes, very tight, and waited. It was quite simple, as it was summer and I was wearing very few clothes, and he seemed to know quite well what he was doing: but then of course so did I seem to know, and I didn’t. However, I managed to smile bravely, in order not to give offence, despite considerable pain, and I hoped that the true state of affairs would not become obvious. I remember that he stroked my hair, just before, and said in his oh so wonderfully polite and chivalrous way,

‘Is this all right? Are you all right, will this be all right?’

I knew what he meant and, eyes shut, I smiled and nodded, and then that was it and it was over. Which proves that deception is indeed a tangled web. And I had no one but myself to blame. But it was something that when I opened my eyes again, there was only George: I clutched his head to my bosom and I cried,

‘Oh George, tell me about you, tell me about you,’ but now it was his turn to shut his eyes and, moaning softly, he buried his face against me while I stroked his hair and the thin brown hollow of his cheek. After a while he did say something which, though hardly distinguishable, I took to be ‘Oh God, how pointless this is’. I was a little perturbed by this statement, though not so much then as later, and after a couple more minutes I got up, switched off the radio, and went off to the bathroom, leaving him enough time to straighten himself up or even, if he so wished, to disappear. I returned, some time later, in my dressing-gown, and found him still there, sitting where I had left him, but now upright and with his eyes open.

‘Hello,’ I said, stopping in the doorway and smiling brightly, willing to show anything rather than the perplexing mass of uncertainties which possessed me.

‘Hello, George, what about a drink?’

‘I wouldn’t mind a drink,’ said George, so off I went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of whisky, or what was left of it, and we both had a large drink. I sat on the floor with my back against his knees, which gave me a sense of touch without contact that I found extremely comforting. He rested one hand heavily on my head, which was comforting too. I drank the drink quickly, and felt a little better. After all, I said to myself, people don’t do that to other people just because they think they ought to. Just through sheer politeness because they think they’ve been invited in to do it. People don’t work like that, I said to myself. He must have wanted it a bit, I told myself, or he wouldn’t have bothered. However kind he appears to be, he can’t be as kind as all that. He must be one of these bisexual people, I thought, or perhaps even he’s no more queer than I am promiscuous, or whatever the word is for what I pretend to be. Perhaps we appeal to each other because we’re rivals in hypocrisy.

After some time, George said,

‘Rosamund, I ought to be going.’

‘Ought you?’ I said.

‘I think so.’

Thinking that he probably wanted to go, I did not quite know whether I ought to suggest that he might stay, for once I had suggested it, kindness and chivalry might have kept him against his will. So I said nothing, but sat there for a moment more, feeling the weight of his hand upon my head, hot and warm and enclosing, like being all of me held in it, and feeling that there was no way to stay there in this momentary illusory safety. Then I stood up and said that it was late, I hoped it was not too late, and that I hoped he would get back where he was going. And even then, even at that moment, I did not have the courage to ask him where he lived, or to ask him what his phone number was, for it would have seemed an intrusion, an assumption that I had a right to know, that a future existed where it would be of use to know. I see, oh yes I see that my diffidence, my desire not to offend looks like enough to coldness, looks like enough to indifference, and perhaps I mean it to, but this is not what it feels like in my head. But I cannot get out and say, Where do you live, give me your number, ring me, can I ring you? In case I am not wanted. In case I am tedious. So I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing. And he said nothing. He could have done. He could have said, when can I see you again? But he didn’t. It may be that I manifested enough strangeness and indifference to prevent him. It may be that he did not wish to, which, being the most unpleasant conclusion, was the one that I most readily believed. Or it may have been that, like me, he did not wish to make assumptions.

When he had gone, I went to bed and lay there for some time thinking over what we had said and done. I could not get to sleep. For the first hour I was more happy than not, but as the night wore on and I came no nearer to sleep my mind became wracked by suspicion and by doubt. It was not that I felt guilt or regret for the one irreversible thing that had happened: about that I continued to feel nothing but relief. But such things do not happen in the abstract, and the circumstances worried me. I went back over every word George had said, and the more I looked back, the clearer it seemed that he had expressed no liking or affection for me at all. He had said I interested him, but he had said that only as a ploy, as a gambit. And anyway, what ground was interest on which to enact the event that had taken place? As I tossed and turned and tried to find a cool place for my cheek on the pillow, it became increasingly clear to me that he had made no overture at all: that I myself had made the decisive move, in going to sit next to him on the settee after switching on the radio, and that what I had taken to be a look inviting me to do just that had probably been nothing of the sort. I had offered myself, and thinking what he did of me he had accepted, through kindliness or curiosity or embarrassment; not in any case through anything like the tender emotions that had prompted me. The more I thought of it, the more hopeless it seemed: had he liked me, he would surely have made some suggestion that he might see me again?

I ended up by convincing myself, almost, that the worst must be true: yet at the same time I knew it was not true, I knew that he would ring me, and that he had liked me, and that he would be happy to go on liking me. But I had to prepare for the worst. I did not wish to be deceived, I did not wish to be taken by surprise.

George did not ring. After a week I knew that he was not going to, and I abandoned the idea. I could have seen him, easily enough, by calling at his pub or even by walking down Portland Place and Upper Regent Street on the offchance, at some likely hour, but pride restrained me. If he does not want to see me, I thought, I do not want to see him. So I kept resolutely away from anywhere where I might be remotely likely to bump into him: I even took a different route to the British Museum each morning, and on one occasion when I was obliged to accompany a friend along Wigmore Street I found myself trembling with fearful expectation. But it is easy to avoid people in London, and I managed it well enough. The geography of the locality took on, however, a fearful moral significance: it became a map of my weaknesses and my strengths, a landscape full of petty sloughs and pitfalls, like the one which Bunyan traversed. I avoided each place where we had ever met, and each place which I had even heard him mention: one day I found myself pretending that I was obliged to go and buy a certain article from Peter Robinson’s on Oxford Circus, and I only just caught myself out in time. I stuck to it and, of course, as the week lengthened into a fortnight, and the fortnight into a month, it became increasingly impossible to change my line of retreat.

It took me some time to realize that I was pregnant: the possibility had of course crossed my mind fairly early on, but I had dismissed it as being too ridiculous and unlikely a symptom of my sense of doom to be worth serious attention. When I was finally obliged to acknowledge my condition, I was for the first time in my life completely at a loss. I remember the moment quite well: I was sitting at my usual desk in the British Museum looking up something on Sir Walter Raleigh, when out of the blue came this sudden suspicion, which hardened instantly as ever into a certainty. I got out my diary and started feverishly checking on dates, which was difficult as I never make a note of anything, let alone of trivial things like the workings of my guts. In the end, however, after much hard memory work, I sorted it out and convinced myself that it must be so. I sat there, and I could see my hand trembling on the desk. And for the first time the prospect before me seemed so appalling that even I, doom-suspecting and creating as I have always been, could not look at it. It was an unfamiliar sensation, the blankness that occupied my mind instead of the usual profuse images of disaster. I remained in this state for some five minutes before, wearily, I set my imagination to work. What it produced for me was very nasty. Gin, psychiatrists, hospitals, accidents, village maidens drowned in duck ponds, tears, pain, humiliations. Nothing, at that stage, resembling a baby. These shocking forebodings occupied me for half an hour or more, and I began to think that I would have to get up and go, or to go out and have a cup of coffee or something. But it was an hour before my usual time for departure, and I could not do it. I so often wanted not to do my full three hours, and had so often resisted the lure of company or distraction in order to complete them, that now I felt myself compelled to sit there, staring at the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, in a mockery of attention. Except that after some time I found myself really attending: my mind, bent from its true obsession with what seemed at first intolerable strain, began to revert almost of its own accord to its more accustomed preoccupations, and by the end of the morning I had covered exactly as much ground as I had planned. It gave me much satisfaction, this fact. Much self-satisfaction. And as I walked down the road to meet Lydia for lunch, I discovered another source of satisfaction: now, at least, I would be compelled to see George. I had an excuse, now, for seeing him.

Later that afternoon I realized that I was going to see George now less than ever. It took some time for the full complexity of the situation to sink in. When I realized the implications of my deceit, it became apparent that I was going to have to keep the whole thing to myself. I could not face the prospect of speculation, anyone’s speculation. So I decided to get on with it by myself as best I could. I have already recounted my ludicrous attempt with the gin: after this I got in touch with a Cambridge friend of mine who had had an abortion, and asked for the address and details, which I obtained. I rang the number once, but it was engaged. After that I went no further. I do not like to look back on those first months, before anyone but me knew what was happening: it seemed too much like a nightmare, like an hallucination, and I kept waking up each morning and thinking it must be a dream, the kind of dream that my non-conformist guilt might be expected to project: I even wondered if all the symptoms from which I suffered might not be purely psychological. In the end it was the fear of being made a fool of by my subconscious that drove me to the doctor.

Seeing the doctor was not as simple an operation as one might have supposed. To begin with, I did not know which doctor to see. It was so many years since I had been unwell that I did not know how to set about it: in fact, I had not been unwell since I had become an adult. I had never had to do it on my own. The only doctor I knew was our old family doctor, who lived near our old but now abandoned family residence in Putney, and he was clearly unsuitable. I supposed that I ought to go to the nearest GP, but how was I to know who he was, or where he lived? Living within two minutes’ walk of Harley Street as I did, I was terrified that I might walk into some private waiting-room by accident, and be charged fifty guineas for what I might and ought to get for nothing. Being my parents’ daughter, the thought outraged me morally as well as financially. On the other hand, it did not seem a good plan to pick a surgery so evidently seedy that it could not exist but on the National Health: though this was in fact what I did. I passed one day, in a small road off George Street, after visiting an exhibition by a very distant friend, a brass plaque on a front door that said Dr H. E. Moffat. There was a globular light over the door, with Surgery painted on it in black letters. It was not the kind of door behind which anyone could be charged fifty guineas, and I made a note of the surgery hours and resolved to return the next day at five thirty.

I visited the doctor the next day. That visit was a revelation: it was an initiation into a new way of life, a way that was thenceforth to be mine forever. An initiation into reality, if you like. The surgery opened at five thirty, and I made a point of going along there quite promptly: I arrived at about twenty-eight minutes to six, thinking that I was in plenty of time, and would have to wait hardly at all. But when I opened that shabby varnished door, I found a waiting-room overflowing with waiting patients, patiently waiting. There were about twenty of them, and I wavered on the threshold, thinking I might change my mind, when a woman in a white nylon overall came in and said irritably,

‘Come on, come along in now and don’t leave the door on the jar, it’s on the bell, it makes a dreadful noise in the back.’

Meekly, I stepped in and shut the door behind me. I had no idea what I ought to do next: whether I should sit down, or give my name to somebody, or what. I felt helpless, exposed, before those silent staring rows of eyes. I stood there for a moment, and then the woman in white, who had been talking to a very old man sitting almost on top of the noisy gas fire, came over to me and said, in a tone of deliberate strained equanimity,

‘Well, are you here to see Dr Moffat? You’re a new patient, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Have you brought your National Health card?’

‘Oh no, I quite forgot, I’m frightfully sorry,’ I said with shame; I had known that I would make some mistake in procedure. I did not know the ropes.

‘Oh dear me,’ she said, and sighed heavily. ‘Do remember to bring it along next time, won’t you? What’s your name?’

‘Stacey,’ I said. ‘Rosamund Stacey.’

‘Mrs or Miss?’

‘Miss.’

‘All right then, take a seat.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I do know the number on my National Health card, if that’s any use.’

‘Oh, do you really?’ She brightened faintly at the news of this extraordinary feat of memory, and I reeled it off, glad to have helped, but rather confused by my eccentricity. I had been forced to learn the number by a ferocious matron at school when I had forgotten to take my card along to one of those routine knee-knocking inspections to which schoolgirls are periodically subjected. I had never since had occasion to use it. Everything comes in some day, I suppose. She noted it down, and said once more ‘Do take a seat’, then disappeared behind a small hardboard partition in a corner of the room. I tried to follow her advice but there was not a space left: I was preparing to prop myself up against the wall by the door when two women shuffled up along the bench to make a grudging gap for me. I sat down and prepared to wait.

I waited for one hour fourteen minutes precisely: I timed it. And during that time I had plenty of leisure to observe my companions in endurance. The people that I was used to seeing on my home ground were a mixed enough lot, but they were a smart, expensive mixed lot, apart from the occasional freak, beggar or road worker: but here, gathered in this room, were representatives of a population whose existence I had hardly noticed. There were a few foreigners; a West Indian, a Pakistani, two Greeks. There were several old people, most of them respectably shabby, though one old woman was worse than shabby. She was grossly fat and her clothes were held around her by safety pins: a grotesquely old and mangy fur coat fell open to reveal layers of fraying, loose-stitched, hand-knitted cardigans in shades of maroon, dark blue and khaki. Her legs, covered in thick lisle stockings, were painfully swollen, and overflowed at the ankles over her soft cracked flat black shoes. She was talking to herself all the time, a low pitiable monologue of petty persecution. Nobody listened. Then there were a couple of young secretaries or waitresses, who were sitting together and looking at pictures in a magazine and giggling: my eyes kept going back to them as they were the only people in the room who did not look depressed and oppressed. Those who looked worst of all were, ominously enough, the mothers: there were four mothers there with young children, and they looked uniformly worn out. One held a small baby on her knee, at which she smiled from time to time with tired affection and anxiety. The others had larger children, two of which were romping around the room; they were doing no harm, apart from disturbing the magazines, and nobody minded them except their mothers, who kept grabbing them and slapping them and shouting at them in a vain and indeed provoking effort to make them sit down and keep quiet. It was a saddening sight. I wondered where all the others had gone: the bright young women in emerald green coats with fur collars, the young men in leather jackets, the middle-aged women with dogs on leads, the gay mothers with their Christopher Robin children, the men with umbrellas against the rain. Sitting in Harley Street, no doubt, just along the road.

By the time my turn to see the doctor came, my complaint seemed so trivial in comparison with the ills of age and worry and penury that I had doubts about presenting it at all. Reason told me, however, that I must do so, and I did. The woman in white showed me into the surgery: Dr Moffat was a harassed, keen-looking young man, with pale ginger receding hair. I felt sorry for him: he must have had a more unpleasant hour and a quarter than I had had. He told me to sit down and asked me what he could do for me, and I said that I thought I was pregnant, and he said how long had I been married, and I said that I was not married. It was quite simple. He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger, and said did my parents know. I said yes, thinking it would be easier to say yes, and not wishing to embark on explaining about their being in Africa. He said were they sympathetic, and I smiled my bright, meaningless smile and said Fairly. Then we worked out dates and he said it would be due in March. Then he said he would try to get me a hospital bed, though I must understand there was a great shortage, and this and that, and had he got my address. I gave it, and he said was I living with my family and I said No, alone. He said did I know about the Unmarried Mothers people in Kentish Town, and I said Yes. They were very nice and very helpful about adoption and things, he said. Then he said that he would let me know about the hospital bed, and would I come back in a fortnight. And that was that.

I walked out into the cold evening air and wandered aimlessly up towards Marylebone Road, worrying not because it seemed that I was really going to have this baby, but because I had been so surprised and annoyed that I had to wait so long. Everyone else there had looked resigned; they had expected to wait, they had known they would have to wait. I was the only one who had not known. I wondered on how many other serious scores I would find myself ignorant. There were things that I had not needed to know, and now I did need to know them. I emerged upon Marylebone Road and walked towards the lovely coloured gleaming spire of Castrol House. I felt threatened. I felt my independence threatened: I did not see how I was going to get by on my own.

Once I had thus decided to have the baby – or rather failed to decide not to have it – I had to face the problem of publicity. It was not the kind of event one can conceal forever, and I was already over three months gone. The absence of my parents was certainly handy from that point of view: there was nobody else in the family that I saw at all regularly. My brother in Dorking I saw dutifully about once every four months, but he would be easy enough to evade. My sister, on the other hand, I thought I might tell at some point as she had three children of her own and I thought she might be sympathetic. We got on quite well together, as sisters go. Nevertheless, I delayed writing; I could not bear the idea of the fuss. I hate to cause trouble.

My own friends were another matter. I simply could not make my mind up about Joe and Roger; I did not much fancy going around with them while expecting somebody else’s child, nor did I think they would much fancy it themselves, though one can never tell. On the other hand, I did not relish the thought of all the spare evenings I would be left with if I disposed of them both. It was difficult enough to keep myself from getting depressed as it was, without having even more solitary time on my hands. Also, I did not know quite how to set about imparting the news: should I leave it till it became evident to the naked eye? Surely not. Therefore I would have to tell them before it became evident, which did not leave me much time. Already I could not fasten my skirts or get into my brassières. I rehearsed each scene a hundred times in my head, but could never even in my imagination manipulate the data with anything like grace, skill, tact or credit to myself. I thought Joe would be the easier proposition, being more familiar, and I plunged into the subject one night almost unintentionally, prompted by a chance remark of his made as we were walking along Park Lane.

‘Did you ever see,’ he said, ‘that Bergman film about a maternity ward? The one where all the wrong people kept having miscarriages?’

‘Don’t talk to me about maternity wards,’ I said, almost without thinking.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Does it upset you? You don’t like all that kind of thing, do you? A very unwomanly woman, that’s what you are.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Just don’t talk about maternity wards, that’s all. All too soon I’m going to find myself in one.’

‘What?’ said Joe.

‘I’m pregnant,’ I said crossly.

‘Oh,’ said Joe, and kept on walking. After a few yards he said, ‘You’re not going to have it, are you?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

‘Whatever for?’

‘Why not? I don’t see why I shouldn’t, do you?’

‘I can think of a hundred reasons why you shouldn’t. I think it’s an utterly ridiculous romantic stupid nonsensical idea. I think you’re out of your mind.’

‘I don’t see why,’ I stubbornly repeated.

‘What does he say, anyway?’ continued Joe. ‘It’s his fault, it’s his job to get you out of it. He’s rich enough, isn’t he? Why don’t you make him pay and go off and have it done in comfort?’

‘Roger, you mean,’ I said faintly.

‘Well, yes, Roger. Why don’t you get married? No, for God’s sake, don’t bother to tell me. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to marry a selfish well-dressed lump of mediocrity like him. Still, if you don’t marry him, you might as well do something about it.’

‘I don’t want to do anything about it.’

‘Don’t tell me you want to have a baby.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

‘What does he think about it, anyway? If he does think.’

‘I haven’t told him yet,’ I said truthfully.

‘You haven’t told him? You really must be out of your mind. Whyever not?’

‘I just haven’t got round to it.’

‘Oh Christ. I give up. What have you done about it?’

‘I went to the doctor,’ I said with some pride, ‘and he’s booking me a hospital bed.’

‘God,’ he said to himself, staring up at the black sky through the neon-lit trees, ‘she means it, she’s going to have it.’ He was rattled, poor Joe; I could feel him being rattled. He didn’t like the idea at all.

‘You can’t,’ he said, after another few yards of silence. ‘You just can’t. I forbid you. It’ll ruin your life. If you want some money, I’ll lend you some. How much do you want? A hundred? Two hundred? How much do you need?’

‘Thank you very much, Joe,’ I said, touched, ‘but I don’t need anything. It’s too late now, anyway.’

I said this with some authority, though I did not know the facts, as I had not known the facts about gin or doctor’s waiting-rooms; but he did not know the facts either and he believed me.

‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘if you want to make a fool of yourself. Don’t tell me, you’ve probably been longing to have a baby all your life. You won’t be able to keep it, though. They won’t let you keep it. So you’ll go and get yourself all upset about nothing, the whole thing’ll be a complete waste of time and emotion.’

I could not work out my response to this immediately, as I was highly offended by both its implications: first, that I was the kind of person who had always had a secret yearning for maternal fulfilment, and second, that some unknown authority would start interfering with my decisions by removing this hypothetical child. I decided to tackle the first one first.

‘Of course I haven’t always been longing to have a baby,’ I said, ‘I can’t think of anything that has ever crossed my mind less. The thought of a baby leaves me absolutely stone cold.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Joe. ‘All women want babies. To give them a sense of purpose.’

‘What utter rubbish,’ I said, with incipient fury, ‘what absolutely stupid reactionary childish rubbish. Don’t tell me that any human being ever endured the physical discomforts of babies for something as vague and pointless as a sense of purpose.’

‘What does it feel like?’ said Joe, momentarily distracted.

‘Nothing much. One can’t really tell much difference,’ I replied untruthfully. ‘Yet.’

‘Anyway,’ said Joe, ‘so I believe you, so you’ve never thought much about having babies, but just the same, I bet you’d be pretty annoyed if somebody told you you couldn’t have one, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said staunchly, ‘I would be highly relieved. There is nothing that I would rather hear.’ Though, as a matter of fact, he was quite right and I was in some perverse and painful way quite proud of my evident fertility.

‘In that case,’ said Joe, ‘I don’t see why you didn’t have something done about it.’

I was silent because I did not see why not either. We had by this time reached Marble Arch: there had been a suggestion at an earlier point in the evening that Joe should here catch the Tube home, and we paused by its entrance, and I said,

‘Well, I think we ought to stop going around together, or whatever it is that we do.’

‘Why?’ said Joe.

A complete silence fell, and I suddenly felt quite overcome with weakness and misery. At that moment I could not envisage any kind of future at all, and the complete lack of any sense of control or direction scared and alarmed me. All I knew was that I must get rid of Joe quick, before he sensed my poverty, because even Joe was capable of pity and of kindness.

‘I don’t know why,’ I said brightly. ‘I just don’t kind of fancy the idea of going out much any more. Anyway, think how embarrassing it would be, taking around a pregnant woman. Everyone would think it was yours, wouldn’t they, and get on at you about it. You know how incredulous people are of the finer points of any relationship.’

‘You’d better tell Roger,’ said Joe, staring moodily at the ground.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, thinking that however convenient I really could not allow this misapprehension to flourish, ‘it isn’t Roger’s.’

‘Not Roger’s?’

‘No. Not Roger’s.’

‘Oh.’

‘So you see, things aren’t quite what they might be.’ I made this remark with a wealth of bogus implication that must have convinced him completely, because all he said was, ‘Oh well, I do see.’ Which in the nature of things he could not possibly have done. However, on the basis of this totally meaningless understanding he took my hand and gave it a fatherly squeeze and said,

‘Look after yourself, anyway, Rosamund.’

‘Oh, I will,’ I said.

‘I suppose we’ll see each other around, anyway.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

And so we parted. As I walked home, I wondered what he could possibly have imagined the real situation to be, as the truth itself was far too unlikely, far too veiled by deception to hit upon: perhaps, I finally concluded, he had thought that I had another permanent man about, whom I refused to marry or discuss through some perfectly characteristic quirk of principle. I hoped that he had thought that. It was the kindest conclusion to my vanity and to his.

Having thus successfully disposed of Joe, I knew I would have to dispose of Roger. I relished this task even less than the former one, for whereas Joe and I shared a certain area of moral background, Roger and I shared nothing at all. As it turned out, however, the evening on which I divulged my state to him was far pleasanter than the one I had spent with Joe, which had been marked by rather too much walking and chilly night air. Roger did not believe in walking: he would drive for miles and miles round his destination looking for parking places rather than park five minutes’ walk away and continue on foot. I did not approve of this, being made of sterner stuff myself, but I enjoyed it.