The Millstone (11 page)

"It's so
posh
round here," she said, "and you're so posh, and I do have such a thing about being posh."

"I bet you move out," I said, "when the baby arrives. Babies aren't posh at all, you know."

"Rubbish," she said, "I agree that ordinary babies aren't much of a status symbol, but illegitimate ones are just about the last word."

We celebrated our agreement with the remains of a bottle of very sour wine and some bacon and eggs, then Lydia rang up all her friends to tell them where she was, which precipitated some discussion about the phone bill. Then she said where was the television, and I said I didn't have a television and would on no account have one in the house, I had too much work to do. She didn't think much of that and asked if she could borrow a nightie, she wanted to go to bed. So I found her a nightie and we made up the bed, and then we had a long discussion about Joe Hurt, whom Lydia had seen the week before. Eventually we stopped talking and I too went to bed, where I fell asleep more happily than I had done for months, relieved, and without any of the weakness of intervention, of the oppressive loneliness that had been worrying me for some time. I liked Lydia: she was intelligent and self-reliant and interesting, and she had wanted of her own accord to come and live with me. The following week she acquired a rented television, which I made her put in her bedroom and I would go and sit on her bed with her and watch it: she had started another novel and would type noisely through all the programs, so I made her move it back into the sitting room but then she came and typed in the sitting room because, she said, the noise of the machine helped her to concentrate.

Housekeeping with Lydia worked quite well and after a fortnight of it I felt I should make other steps towards setting my house in order. I had been intending for some
time to write and tell my sister of the situation: I did not mean to inform my brother at all, as he would have been heartily outraged by my behaviour, and as I have said it did not seem worth upsetting quite needlessly my parents. My sister, however, I was sure would be sympathetic, as she had always sung to me the praises of motherhood and domesticity: I used to accuse her of the reverse principle of sour grapes, of the desire to trap others in her own snare, by praising the pleasures of confinement, because there could be no doubt that she did suffer for her choice. Like me, she was very much our parents' daughter: educated to be independent and to consider herself the equal of anyone alive, she had a streak of practical earnestness that reminded me very much of my mother. She, too, had been to university, though to Oxford, not Cambridge, and she had moved in slightly more solidly intellectual and committed circles than I had ever discovered. She had met there her future husband, a scientist called Hallam who had then been a junior fellow: she herself read economics, so they had some meeting ground. They got married shortly after she came down, whereupon Hallam promptly took up a job on an atomic research station and carried her off to a deserted spot in the Midlands populated only by other atomic scientists, their wives, tradesmen and engineers. Beatrice had immediately had three children and made a virtue of necessity: but I often felt that she suffered strongly from a graduate sense that she was not using her degree to its best advantage. Her conscience was doubtless appeased by the unpleasantness of her social life and the rigour of rearing three small children: it was not, after all, as though she had got out of economics in order to idle her life away at the hairdresser's.

Ideologically, poor Beatrice was in an unfortunate position: unlike any of the rest of the family, she was a confirmed pacifist, or had been at Oxford. She must have found living on an atomic research station extremely trying: Hallam luckily shared her political views and assured her continually that knowledge was the only way to safety, and that he was thus furthering, to the best of his ability, the cause of world peace. He may have been right, though that was clearly not his motive for doing his work. Having swallowed this, Beatrice began to take the line of realistic compromise all along, and to frown slightly on our parents' singleness of mind. The question of pacifism still preyed on her mind, however: she wrote to me once and told me that their oldest boy, Nicholas, had reached the violent age, and was forever playing at guns, soldiers, cowboys, and, worst of all, bombs. "Whenever I tell him to finish his pudding," she wrote plaintively, "he turns on me and makes a horrible noise and says 'Bang, you're dead.'" One day, enraged beyond endurance by this inevitable and infuriating response, she had clouted him hard on the side of his head: "which," she said, "is
completely
against my principles, and anyway makes complete nonsense of the principle of passive resistance, don't you think? It was like a world war in miniature, if you know what I mean." The wretched child claimed that he had developed earache as a result of her unprecedented attack and she had suffered torments of remorse until it cleared up and proved to be nothing at all, just spite.

Anyway, when I wrote and told Beatrice about the baby, it was with every expectation of receiving goodwill and sympathy by return of post: and I was looking forward to it, for I felt I had lived without sympathy for long enough. I was quite proud of the way that I had managed, and I might even have expected some kind of congratulations upon my restraint. The letter that I received, however, was this.

My dear Rosamund,

I can't tell you how worried and upset we were by your news. I am quite amazed that you didn't let us know earlier; from what you say I gather that the baby is due in four
months. I do think you should have let us know. You say not to tell the parents, but you must know they are bound to find out sooner or later, and surely you can't intend to go on living in the flat without letting them know. Obviously they'll be very upset but you know what they're like, they would never hold anything against you—since you say not to tell them, of course I won't, but I do wish you would. And what about Andrew? I know you never see him and I don't blame you, but what if you were to run into him or something, or if any of his friends were to see you in the street? It would be awful if they heard through him because he wouldn't think twice.

Don't think I'm not sympathetic, I am; I think it's quite frightful for you, I don't know how you can stick it. I'm glad your work isn't suffering, anyway.

I must say you didn't go into many details about the whole thing, but from what you said I gathered you were intending to keep the child. I feel I must tell you that I think this is the most dreadful mistake, and would be frightful for both you and the child—just think, if you had it adopted you could forget about the whole business in six months and carry on exactly where you left off. That would be much better for you, don't you think? You can have no conception of what it means to have a child, of the responsibility and the worries and the financial anxiety and the not being able to get out or do anything without planning. Believe me, I know. I just can't see you adapting yourself to the demands it would make on you, you've always been so set on your independence and having your own way. You can have no idea of what it means to have to think of someone else, twenty-four hours of every day, and not for a year or two but for ever, more or less. However, it isn't just you that I'm thinking of. It would be bad enough for you but it would be far, far worse for the child. Through no fault of its own it would have to have the slur of illegitimacy all its life, and I can't tell you how odiously cruel and vicious children can be to each other, once they get hold of something like that. A baby isn't just something you can have just because you feel you ought. Because you oughtn't, and that's that. It's your duty to have it adopted by some couple who really want a child, and who are probably in a far more favourable position for bringing one up. I know that ideally, in a decent society, no child ought to suffer because of this kind of handicap, but this isn't a decent society, and I can't bear the thought of what your baby would have to go through, and what you would have to go through on its account. Do please think about this and try to take a long terra view. And if I can give you a piece of warning, when you decide to have it adopted, for God's sake don't let yourself see too much of it. You have to keep them for a certain amount of time, I think, don't you, but for God's sake don't let yourself get involved with it. It's a quite meaningless kind of involvement at that age and you'll be the only one to suffer. Another thing is that you don't even mention the father in your letter, so I assume he's somebody you don't want or can't associate yourself with, so presumably you wouldn't want to ask him for financial help, would you? If you do want some money, do let us know and we'll see what we can do. But think how frightful it would be to see the child of someone one didn't like growing up in one's home. It's bad enough when it's the child of someone you
do
like. Poor Rosamund, how absolutely rotten for you. I wish I could come and give you a hand, but I'm so tired at the moment, and they've all got frightful colds. It sounds a good hospital anyway, which is something. The whole business of being pushed around is quite horrid but one just has to grit one's teeth. Anyway, both of us send you all our love, and do keep in touch. And look after yourself, for goodness sake, don't rush around too much, will you.

Best love,
Beatrice

I read this letter, as can be imagined, with some dismay. I could see that she was writing out of genuinely strong concern but nevertheless I was indignant and annoyed. It seemed to me that nobody had the faintest right to offer me any advice about my own child: I had not asked for advice, I was quite capable of advising myself. Her letter did in fact serve one purpose: it revealed to me the depth of my determination to keep the baby. The determination
at this stage cannot have been based, as it later was, on love, for I felt no love and little hope of feeling it: it was based rather on an extraordinary confidence in myself, in a conviction, quite irrational, that no adoptive parents could ever be as excellent as I myself would be. At the same time, the prospect of motherhood frightened me; I experienced the usual doubts about whether my child would like me, whether I would like my child, and so on, but simultaneously with these doubts I experienced absolute certainty. I knew for a fact that the child would be mine and that I would have it. Whatever Beatrice said, I would have felt it a cowardly betrayal to abandon it to the unknown, well-meaning ignorance of anyone else in Britain.

One result of her letter Beatrice cannot have foreseen. Her reference to living with the child of a man one did not like suggested to me for the first time the picture of a baby like George. I found the picture painfully vivid and felt a dangerous impulse to ring him up and tell him that instant: I did not, of course, but that evening I switched on the radio, a luxury I had not permitted myself for some time, and listened to his voice. He sounded so civil and so innocent that once more I could not imagine that I could ever have dreamed that I might encumber him with embarrassment and anxiety. I looked back once more over everything that he had ever said to me and I would have given a good deal if I could have heard him say, just once more, in his camp and gentle tone, "Well, well, my goodness me, Rosamund, and aren't we looking pretty this evening." Though we never did look at all pretty these days, we had to admit.

When I was young, I used to be so good-natured. I used to see the best in everyone, to excuse all faults, to put all malice and shortcoming down to environment: in short, to take all blame upon myself. But for the child, I might have gone on like that forever and, who knows, I might have
been the better and nicer for it in the kindness of my innocence. I repeat; not being blind, I saw faults but I excused them. Now I felt less and less like finding excuses. I still cringed politely and smiled when doors slammed in my face, but I felt resentment in my heart. For instance, when I was five months pregnant, though not admittedly in my winter coat looking it, I was sitting in a tube train when two middle-aged women got on: there were no more seats so they stood in front of me, strap hanging, and proceeded to grumble, very pointedly, about the ill manners of the young. As I happened to be the youngest person in the compartment, I could not but take this personally. They clearly meant to be overheard, for they went on and on in refined, mean, grating tones: looking back, I can see that they were nuts, and sad ones at that, but what I felt as I listened to them was fury. I had been reared to stand for the elderly on public transport; and after a while I could bear it no longer, and I heaved myself to my feet and offered one of them my place. I made the gesture with extreme ill-feeling and indeed malice, but the woman took my seat without a word of thanks but with a tired, reproving pursing of the lips, and as I stood there it became clear that she did not notice my condition. It was the only time that I wished I were as huge as a house as some women are: though in fact size is meaningless, as one feels worst in the first three months when nothing is on view. I stood there and watched her sitting, and I was full of hate. I wanted to faint on the floor, to show her. But then, who knows, she must have had her afflictions too.

For my brother and his wife, too, I used to make excuses: I used to try to see them in perspective and to regard not them but what had made them what they were. I suppose I felt ashamed of an emotion as irrational as dislike. I did not see them very often: dutifully, perhaps, twice a year. I had thought they would be easy enough to avoid; unlike Beatrice, I had no fears that I would meet them idly
in the street. But then, of course, I went and did precisely that: I met her, anyway. I was in Selfridge's Food Market, buying a bag of wholemeal flour, as Lydia and I were in the middle of a highly temporary craze for baking our own bread, and there she was, staring earnestly at the delicious rows of stuffed and larded game birds, no doubt shopping for one of her excruciating dinners. When I saw her, I instantly turned and started to walk away but she must have looked up at the same moment, for I heard her call, in piercing Kensington tones, "Rosamund, Rosamund." I turned and walked slowly back towards her and her eyes took in my state.