The Millstone (21 page)

I told Octavia the good news, and she smiled and waved at me from her high chair, and offered me a small wet piece of rusk as a reciprocal effort at communication. When I declined it, she dropped it on the floor, and I
thought with relief that I had at least another year to clear up the mess and squalor that she had inflicted on the once elegant flat. I got her out of the chair, and put her to crawl along the corridor while I went to see if Lydia was in; I had not heard her come in the night before, but if she was in I wanted to tell her about what my father had said, and to discuss its moral quality with her. I knocked on her door and there was no answer; as it was past ten, I pushed it open to see if she was there, which she was not. I went back to the kitchen and did a little washing and tidying up, and then went into the sitting room and got out my typewriter to write a review of a book on Daniel Defoe for a very unimportant magazine. It was a task for which I was ill-equipped, and not a very profitable task at that, if one takes hours per pound into consideration, for to review this one book I had felt it necessary to read the works of Defoe himself. Such was my ignorance of the man that I had managed to read the whole of the
Journal of the Plague Year
without realizing that it was a fictional and not a factual account of the horrible events, which says much for Defoe but little for me. I was extremely put out when I found that it wasn't, as they say, true, and even more put out that I was put out, as I have always maintained that I hold an Aristotelian and not a Platonic view of fact and fiction. I had just written and counted my first hundred words when I remembered Octavia; I could hear her making small happy noises somewhere along the corridor, but felt it time I should go and see if she was doing something destructive, like unravelling the frayed end of the hall carpet. She was remarkably persistent in destruction for her age.

I was rather dismayed when I realized she was in Lydia's room and that I must have left the door open, for Lydia's room was always full of nasty objects like aspirins, safety razors and bottles of ink: I rushed along to rescue her and the sight that met my eyes when I opened the door was
enough to make anyone quake. She had her back to the door and was sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by a sea of torn, strewed, chewed paper. I stood there transfixed, watching the neat small back of her head and her thin stalk-like neck and flowery curls: suddenly she gave a great screech of delight and ripped another sheet of paper. "Octavia," I said in horror, and she started guiltily, and looked round at me with a charming deprecating smile: her mouth, I could see, was wedged full of wads of Lydia's new novel.

I picked her up and fished the bits out and laid them carefully on the bedside table with what was left of the typescript;
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seemed to have survived. The rest was in varying stages of dissolution: some pages were entire but badly crumpled, some were in large pieces, some in small pieces, and some, as I have said, were chewed up. The damage was not, in fact, as great as it appeared at first sight to be, for babies, though persistent, are not thorough: but at first sight it was frightful. I hardly knew where to begin, so I did not begin: I went out and firmly shut the door. Then I carried Octavia back with me into the sitting room, and sat down and thought. In a way it was clearly the most awful thing for which I had ever been responsible, but as I watched Octavia crawl around the sitting room looking for more work to do, I almost wanted to laugh. It seemed so absurd, to have this small living extension of myself, so dangerous, so vulnerable, for whose injuries and crimes I alone had to suffer. It was truly a case of the right hand not seeing what the left hand was doing, for both good and ill. Let my keen knife see not the wound it makes. It really was a terrible thing, I realized this, especially as by constant nattering I had at last persuaded Lydia of the necessity for keeping her door shut: and yet in comparison with Octavia being so sweet and so alive it did not seem so very terrible.

I wondered what to say to Lydia when she returned.
There was one possibility of innocence left to me: I could pretend that she had left the door open herself the day before, for she would surely not recollect her movements clearly enough to dispute the point. This would to a certain extent absolve me: I would thus be guilty of failing to keep an eye on the baby, but not of opening the door to let her in. As a very small child I frequently made this kind of lie, because I found the prospect of admitting guilt so intolerable: which perhaps proves that I feared the smirch on my character more than the crime itself. As an older child, honour always made me confess, and I could see that honour would bring me to it this time. I tried to imagine what she would say. I wondered what I would have said if somebody had ripped up my thesis. I was fairly sure that Lydia never had carbon copies of anything, because I remembered hearing her complain to Joe, who always made three copies of everything, even correspondence, that his attitude bespoke not efficiency but arrogance. I tried to remember whether she had said that she had actually finished the work or not: it had taken her long enough, well over a year, because she had been considerably hampered by the Joe affair. I thought she had reached the last chapter from what she had said last time I had paid her any attention: I wondered if this would make her more or less angry. She had, incidentally, never confessed to the subject matter of this work, and it occurred to me that there was a certain poetic justice in having an exposition of me and Octavia ripped up by Octavia herself.

There was some parallel historic instance of this offense haunting my mind which I could not at first place; I wrote another hundred words on Defoe while trying to remember it, for I knew that it would soothe me if I could recollect. At the end of the hundred words the baby started to moan, so I took her back to her cot for her morning nap, and as I lowered her in over the bars it suddenly came to me. Carlyle's
History of the French Revolution,
that was
it. He had lent it to the unfortunate John Stuart Mill to have a quick read, and John Stuart Mill's maid had lit the fire with it. The whole first volume had been completely destroyed, and he had to rewrite the lot. I remembered reading of how Mill and his wife had honourably got in a cab and driven straight off to Carlyle's to confess, but what Carlyle had said I had never discovered. Perhaps history has not recorded his words. This incident had always captured my imagination in a peculiarly forceful way, perhaps because it seemed to be a perfect illustration of an enormous and unwitting wrong done to another, in which the guilt of the agent (carelessness, surely, at most?) bore no relation to the injury sustained by the plaintiff. My mind had always boggled at what Mill had said to Carlyle, at what Carlyle had said to Mill: well, now I had done it. Now I would find out.

I spent the rest of the morning anxiously waiting for the sound of Lydia's key in the door; her movements were always unpredictable, and she might well have arrived at any moment. However, she did not. Octavia and I had our lunch in peace and safety, and after lunch we had to go out to a friend's for tea. I wondered whether or not to leave a note for Lydia, or whether to leave the facts to speak for themselves. In the end I left the facts: I could not think of what to put on a note. We had a very agreeable tea party; my friend had a baby more or less the same age as mine, so the rooms were mercifully devoid of breakable ashtrays, unguarded fires, novels in typescript and other such hazards. My friend had been at Cambridge with me and was now, to her great annoyance, nothing but a wife and mother, and really I felt I was the better off of the two. So cheered was I by an hour or so of comforting literary and maternal and malicious chat that I even recounted, with much gusto, Octavia's awful exploit of the morning, and we both, believe it or not, laughed gaily at what she had done. Sarah was not, however, unimpressed by the gravity
of the offense, and when she had stopped laughing she expressed suitable concern over my plight. "What will she say," she said, "what will she say? Will she be angry?"

"I just don't know," I said truthfully. "She never is angry, but then I don't know anyone who is angry. Do you?"

"No, I don't, really," she agreed. "I know people who are angry about people, and behind people's backs, but not anyone who is angry at people. The only person I ever get angry at is my husband."

"If she really is angry," I said, "she might go away and then I wouldn't have anyone to baby-sit for me any more. Not that she does now, very often. But she always will if I catch her in time."

"If you ask me," said Sarah, "it would be a very good thing if she went. Then you could get yourself a proper tenant and charge them a proper rent. It's ridiculous, giving away accommodation in your situation."

"I suppose it is, in a way. But she won't be angry enough to go."

"She might be," said Sarah. "You never know, she might be."

Octavia and I went home by bus, and got back at six. There was still no sign of Lydia. I gave Octavia her bottle and put her to bed, then switched on a concert and sat down to wait. It occurred to me that she and Joe might arrive together, as they frequently did, which would make my confession quite insupportable, for I had always prided myself on regarding Joe from a position of dignity and control. It meant a lot to me, the safety of my attitude. Just after eight, however, Joe phoned and asked if Lydia was in yet; I said not, and was he expecting her to be in. He said that he was, and that she would be arriving shortly, and could I tell her that he'd be round to pick her up at nine, and would she make sure to be changed and ready. The thought of her imminent arrival filled me with sudden
panic and I found myself, to my own surprise, starting to relate the whole story once again to Joe. He listened in silence, and when I had finished all he said was:

"Well, well, you really have gone and done it. She's so inefficient, she'll never get round to patching it up. And she loathes rewriting, you know."

"That's very cold comfort," I said. "Will she be very cross?"

"Cross? No, I don't imagine so. Shall I come round straightaway and tell her and hold your hand?"

"No, don't bother, I'd better do it by myself," I said. "I hope you're going somewhere nice this evening, to cheer her up and distract her."

"We were going to a party," he said, "but after a tragedy like this perhaps she won't want to go. I'll take you instead if you like."

"I don't think that would be very tactful," I said.

"No, I suppose not," said Joe. "Never mind. I'll be round at nine to pick up the pieces. Remember exactly what she says for me, will you? I might use it some day."

"So might I," I said. "Or so might she. Let's all write a book about it."

"All right," said Joe. "I'll be seeing you."

"Fine," I said, and rang off. I could not escape the impression that Joe had been distinctly pleased by the news of Lydia's professional setback; he really hated anyone except himself to publish anything, unless it got atrocious reviews and ruined the reputation of its author. I wondered, in view of this, why I liked him. Because I did, and do.

At twenty to nine, Lydia arrived. She rushed in, evidently in a hurry, calling in the sitting room only to say that she had to go out again quick. Feeling a little sick, I followed her along the corridor to her room and arrested her at the door by saying feebly:

"Joe rang."

"Oh, did he?" she said, her hand on the knob. "What for?"

"He said to tell you he'd be round for you at nine."

"Oh hell," said Lydia. "I'm late, I know," and she started to turn the knob.

"Lydia," I said bravely, "Lydia, the most terrible thing happened today. Really terrible. I don't know how to explain to you."

"What do you mean?" she said, turning to me and turning the knob at the same time, so that the door opened, revealing the mess within to me but not to her. I realized that there was no need to put my offense into words, so I pointed to the scraps of paper and said:

"Look. Just look at that. Octavia did it."

She looked. I was curiously satisfied, on some level, that she actually blenched. She said nothing at all but went in and started to inspect the damage, picking up a few of the more undestroyed sheets and putting them on the bedside table, with a bemused expression on her face. Then she gave up but did not look at me.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "I can't tell you how upset I am. It's all my fault, I went into your room this morning to see if you were there, to tell you something, and I must have left the door open. I don't remember, but I must have done. And Octavia got in. I can't tell you how sorry I am."

She sat down on the bed, weakly. I thought for a moment she was going to cry, but she didn't. She said, after a long pause,

"Oh dear. Never mind, I suppose I can patch it together again."

"I didn't touch it," I said, "after I'd found it. I thought I might do more harm than good."

"You mean you didn't look at it? You didn't read any of it?" she said, with some faint growing signs of animation.

"No, no," I assured her. "Not at all. I just shut the door. I was so horrified."

"Oh well, that's just as well," she said. Then she knelt down amongst the scraps and said, quite cheerfully:

"I'm sure I can put it together again. And if I do have to rewrite a few bits, that'll be good for me, because things are always better the second time, I'm just too lazy to do it, that's all. It'll probably be good for me, going through it again."

She started to pick up the bits, trying to put them in numerical order: I stood in the doorway watching her. After a moment or two she lost patience and said:

"Oh God, I can't be bothered with it now, I'd better get changed or Joe'll come and be angry with me. He's got a frightful temper, Joe has."

And she started to undo her mackintosh and then took off her skirt and jersey and wandered over to the wardrobe in her petticoat and started to look for something to wear.

She might have been able to leave it at that, but I was not.