The Millstone (3 page)

Oddly enough, I never thought it was a judgment 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 Henderson, 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 barrister 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 judgment 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."