The Millstone (16 page)

After the birth, the muscles of my belly snapped back into place without a mark, but some of the women looked as big as they had looked before. I am haunted even now by a memory of the way they walked, large and tied into shapeless dressing gowns, padding softly and stiffly, careful not to disturb the pain that still lay between the legs.

On my sixth day, the gynecologist came round, accompanied by his attendant students. They prodded me and questioned me and talked about me, and I felt oddly offended, for I was beginning to feel whole again and resented their interference, until the gynecologist said to his students, "Notice the resilience of the muscles here. This is the case that Hargreaves said would have an exceptionally small baby, but you see how wrong he was, it weighed a good six and a half pounds. He was taken in by the exceptional firmness of the muscle."

Then he turned to me and smiled and said, "Were you by any chance a professional dancer?"

I was taken so unawares by this direct question that I did not at first think that he was addressing me, and had to be startled out of my reverie by a repetition of the question.

"Good heavens no," I said, "nothing like that."

"You must have some athletic pursuits," he said.

"No, none at all," I said. "None at all."

"Then you must be just made that way," he said, and smiled and passed on. I glowed with satisfaction for half an hour afterwards, as though a medal for good conduct had been pinned to my lapel.

Lydia came to see me every evening, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by some friend to whom she had been able to sell the idea of a hospital visit as an evening's entertainment. My bedside was always more animated than those of the others, more like a party, and my gratitude to her for it was unlimited. On my last, ninth evening, however, she could not make it; she rang during the afternoon to leave a message, and I thought that I would not mind, but when the visiting time came and the shuffling, silent husbands arrived, I drew my flimsy curtain and turned my head into the pillow and wept. I kept telling myself as I wept that it was nothing, just reaction, that magic excuse for all affliction, and it probably was too, but none the less painful for that. I wanted to fish Octavia out of her small white cot and hold her, to comfort me, but it was not feeding time and I did not dare. I had been taught to get her out only at the correct intervals, and although I knew this method to be outdated, I did not like to break the rules. Also, the baby was asleep, and I did not see why I should wake her for my own comfort. So I put my head in the pillow, like a child anxious not to disturb its parents, and I cried.

Authority, the war, Truby King. I was reared to believe that the endurance of privation is a virtue, and the result is that I believe it to this day.

Actually, surprisingly enough, my stay in hospital was one of the more cheerful and sociable patches of my life. Except for that last evening, I did not for a moment feel lost or abandoned; nor, owing perhaps to my delight in the baby, did I feel that I was on the receiving end of pity and sympathy. I have always rather fancied the idea of holding a salon, of lying on a couch and dispensing charm and conversation to some favoured and intimate circle, though I have never made any approach towards it as a way of life, being a solitary, I suppose, a gregarious solitary, and those ten days, surrounded by flowers, and receiving much correspondence and many visitors every day, I felt as near to belonging to a circle as I have ever done. My ways and my acquaintances were defined, made more precious and more themselves, by contrast with those of the other women in the ward, and I could not but think that Beatrice had been ludicrously mistaken by her fears for the social position of my child. It seemed to me that anyone that I might be likely to know would be equally likely to take the situation without batting an eyelid. And here I must make clear that had I not been who I am, and born and reared as I was, I would probably never have dared: I only thought I could get away with it, to put it briefly, because those ambulance men collected me from a good address, and not from a bed-sitter in Tottenham or from a basement in ever-weeping Paddington. So, in a way, I was cashing in on the foibles of a society which I have always distrusted; by pretending to be above its strictures, I was merely turning its anomalies to my own use. I would not recommend my course of action to anyone with a shade less advantage in the world than myself. Though recommendation in such cases is luckily likely to have no effect whatsoever.

There is another point to be considered in my choice, and that is that I was equipped to earn my own living, forever, and in a trade that could be employed as well in a hospital bed as anywhere, or almost as well. Also, although I am diffident about the particulars of my qualifications, I suppose I must have a rock-like confidence in my own talent, for I simply did not believe that the handicap of one small illegitimate baby would make a scrap of difference to my career: I was in such a strong position by nature that were a situation to arise in which there were any choice to make between me and another, I would win, through the evident superiority of my mind. I felt that I was good enough to get away with it, and so far I must say that I have not been disproved. I finished my thesis in excellent time, it was published and praised in the right quarters, and thought much of by those who control my economic situation. And, moreover, I am a good teacher, having enthusiasm, yet expecting only what can be done. All this too is unfair, though perhaps less unfair than possessing an address in Marylebone, for I am industrious as well as equipped.

I left hospital in a taxi on the tenth day with Octavia in my arms and Lydia by my side. I was excited at the thought of getting home and having my baby to myself, but the cold of the outside air must have startled her, for she began to scream and screech violently in the taxi, and when we got home I did not quite know what to do. In hospital she had always been so quiet and sweet. I laid her down in her basket, but the mattress was a different shape from the hospital cot, and she looked strange and uncomfortable and screamed all the more fiercely. She looked odd, too, in her own Viyella nighties, after the regulation garments she had worn all her life until that afternoon. She went on and on crying, and I began to think that she would never adapt to real life. Lydia was getting almost as worried as I was, and after a while she said, as we both sat
miserably and watched this small furious person, "Why don't you feed her? That would shut her up, wouldn't it?"

I looked at my watch; it was half past four.

"It's not time to feed her yet," I said. "In hospital, we had to feed them on the dot at five."

"Oh," said Lydia, "half an hour one way or the other can't make much difference."

"Don't you think so?" I said. "But then she'll wake half an hour early at the next feed, and the next, and the next, and then what will I do?"

"It wouldn't matter, would it?"

"I don't know. I somehow feel things would get all muddled and never get straight again. She was good and reasonable in hospital. And then she'll get confused, and how will she ever know when it's nighttime? How will she ever learn that it's night?"

"I should feed her," said Lydia. "It looks to me as though she's going to have a fit."

I didn't think she would have a fit, but I couldn't stand the sound of her crying, so I picked her out and fed her, and she became quiet at once, and fell asleep afterwards looking as though her mattress and nightdress were very comfortable after all. On the other hand, she did wake half an hour early at the next feed, and went on and on waking earlier, until we worked right back round the clock, for the truth was that she never went four hours but only three and a half. Looking back on it, it doesn't seem to matter at all, but it seemed very important at the time, I remember. It took her ages, moreover, to learn about night and day, and in the end I concluded that they had been giving her secret bottles in the night at the hospital.

However, on the whole, things worked out very well. I had a subsidized home help to begin with, and after a fortnight or so this woman whom Lydia had discovered, an amiable fat lady named Mrs. Jennings, came in two days a
week while I dashed off to the library between feeds. Mrs. Jennings adored babies, and I found that all her chat about little darling tiny thingies, and where's her little tootsie wootsies, fell quite naturally and indeed gratefully upon my ears. I very shortly gave up feeding Octavia myself, as to my amazement I found the process quite infuriating and nervewracking: I stuck it for six weeks, hoping that as the more modern books said it would become a pleasure, or at least less of a drag, and the baby certainly seemed to enjoy it, but in the end I could stand it no longer and gave up. I didn't find the act itself disgusting, or anything like that, but the consequences were extremely messy; I grew frantic at the way my clothes got covered in milk, and in fact those six weeks have had a permanent effect on my life, for now I am as fussy as Clare about dirt, and am forever washing my clothes before they need it, sending things to the cleaners when I can't afford it, and paying secret nocturnal visits to the launderette. Also, despite evidence to the contrary, I could never believe that there was really anything there, that the baby was really getting anything at all to drink. What the eye doesn't see, I don't believe in, and the first time I gave her a bottle and watched the milk-level descending, ounce by careful ounce, I was overcome with relief, and I think I counted that as the first real meal of her life. Unnatural, I suppose, and I daresay we would have survived together in the desert, but just the same I was glad I had an alternative. Anyway, only posh middle-class mothers nurse these days, on principle, and I don't believe in principle. I believe in instinct, on principle.

Octavia was an extraordinarily beautiful child. Everyone said so, in shops and on buses and in the park, wherever we went. I took her to Regent's Park as often as I could face getting the pram up and down in the lift. It was a tolerable summer, and we both got quite brown. I was continually amazed by the way in which I could watch for
hours nothing but the small movements of her hands, and the fleeting expressions of her face. She was a very happy child, and once she learned to smile, she never stopped; at first she would smile at anything, at parking meters and dogs and strangers, but as she grew older she began to favour me, and nothing gave me more delight than her evident preference. I suppose I had not really expected her to dislike and resent me from birth, though I was quite prepared for resentment to follow later on, but I certainly had not anticipated such wreathing, dazzling gaiety of affection from her whenever I happened to catch her eye. Gradually I began to realize that she liked me, that she had no option to liking me, and that unless I took great pains to alienate her she would go on liking me, for a couple of years at least. It was very pleasant to receive such uncritical love, because it left me free to bestow love; my kisses were met by small warm rubbery unrejecting cheeks and soft dovey mumblings of delight.

Indeed, it must have been in expectation of this love that I had insisted upon having her, or rather refrained from not having her: something in me had clearly known before I did that there would be compensations. I was not of course treated to that phrase which greets all reluctant married mothers, "I bet you wouldn't be without her now," so often repeated after the event, in the full confidence of nature, because I suppose people feared I might turn on them and say, Yes I certainly would, which would be mutually distressing for questioner and me. And in many ways I thought that I certainly would prefer to be without her, as one might reasonably prefer to lack beauty or intelligence or riches, or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about life with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and
loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice. So the best one could do was to put a good face on it, and to avoid adding to the large and largely discussed number of sad warnings that abounded in the part of the world that I knew. I managed very well, and the general verdict was, Extraordinary Rosamund, she really seems happy, she must have really wanted one after all.

I had thought, dimly, that after the birth I would once more become interested in men, as such, but nothing like this seemed to happen. I did from time to time think that it would be comforting to have a little adult affection, but in some strange way I did not seem to like anyone enough any more. I felt curiously disenchanted, almost as I might have felt had I been truly betrayed and deceived and abandoned. The only person of whom I thought with any tenderness, apart from my small pliant daughter, was George. I still listened to his voice on the radio, comforted to know he was still so near, however pointlessly, and wondering what he was doing. Occasionally, when roused to a pitch of peculiar transport by Octavia's charm, I felt like ringing him up and telling him about her, but I never did; I fancied that I knew enough about human nature to know that no amount of charm could possibly balance the quite unjustified sense of obligation, financial, personal, and emotional, that such a revelation would instantly set to work. So I spared him and myself. Sometimes I thought I saw a likeness to him in Octavia, and more often I thought I caught a glimpse of George himself, but it was never him, it was always smooth young men selling things in antique shops or expensive tailors, who might have been him.

And so the summer wore away, and autumn set in, and the baby started to sit up, and I finished my thesis, and Lydia seemed to be on the verge of finishing her novel, though hampered by an affair with Joe, and I began to worry about what would happen at Christmas when my
parents came home. This last problem worried me a good deal and I reached the point where I thought that I had only had the baby because I had had the flat. Autumn also brought other problems, such as the cold. I had never noticed the cold before, being healthy and energetic, but this year there was an unusually bitter October, with rain, fog, damp, and frost at nights. I did not mind for myself, but I did not know how to keep the baby warm; when I put gloves on her, she chewed them, and then had to ride around in her pram with icy wet hands. She dribbled, too, and her chest was always damp. She resisted for some time, but in the end she caught a cold. At first it did not seem to worry her, but then she started to wake coughing in the night, and when she breathed she wheezed terribly like an old sheep. I did not know what to do with her, as I hated going to the doctor; I had thought to have finished with my dreary, time-wasting association with the Health Service at her birth, though I had already discovered that there was an unending succession of injections, inspections, vaccinations and immunizations yet to be endured. But up to this point, everything had been routine, and not a matter of choice. Now, watching Octavia's nose run unbecomingly, and hearing her heavy spluttering, I knew I would have to decide to take her, and I found myself amazingly resistant to the idea. My reasons, I knew, were an inextricable mass of the selfish and the childishly diffident: I did not want to bother the busy doctor unnecessarily, having a great fear of bothering people, though perhaps more of a fear of being told that I am a nuisance, and I did not want to wait for two hours in a freezing cold waiting room with an active baby bouncing on my frail knee. It was not a simple choice between comfort and duty, and moreover it was not even my own health that was in question, but Octavia's. Had it been my own, I would never have gone.