The Millstone (15 page)

I had expected so little, really. I never expect much. I had been told of the ugliness of newborn children, of their red and wrinkled faces, their waxy covering, their emaciated limbs, their hairy cheeks, their piercing cries. All I can say is that mine was beautiful and in my defense I must add that others said she was beautiful too. She was not red nor even wrinkled, but palely soft, each feature delicately reposed in its right place, and she was not bald but adorned with a thick, startling crop of black hair. One of the nurses fetched a brush and flattened it down and it covered her forehead, lying in a dense fringe that reached to her eyes. And her eyes, that seemed to see me and that looked into mine with deep gravity and charm, were a profound blue, the whites white with the gleam of alarming health. When they asked if they could have her back and put her back in her cradle for the night, I handed her over without reluctance, for the delight of holding her was too much for me. I felt as well as they that such pleasure should be regulated and rationed.

When they had removed her, they wheeled me off to a ward and put me to bed and gave me some sleeping pills and assured me I would fall asleep at once and be out till the morning. But I didn't, I lay awake for two hours, unable to get over my happiness. I was not much used to feeling happiness: satisfaction, perhaps, or triumph, and at times excitement and exhilaration. But happiness was something I had not gone in for for a long time, and it was very nice, too nice to waste in sleep. I dozed off at about half past four but was awakened at half past five with cups of tea and the sight of all the other mothers giving their babies breakfast.

I tried to explain the other day to somebody, no less than Joe Hurt himself in fact, about how happy I had felt, but he was very contemptuous of my descriptions. "What you're talking about," he said, "is one of the most boring commonplaces of the female experience. All women feel exactly that, it's nothing to be proud of, it isn't even worth thinking about."

I denied hotly that all women felt it, as I knew hardly a one who had been as enraptured as I, and then I contradicted my own argument by saying that anyway, if all other women did feel it, then that was precisely what made it so remarkable in my case, as I could not recall a single other instance in my life when I had felt what all other women feel.

But it was no good arguing, Joe was just not interested; just as I was very little interested though occasionally amazed by his lengthy descriptions of the sexual ecstasies of his heroes. It is sad to be boring, but perhaps when I think how often I am bored, not quite as sad as it might be.

My stay in hospital was really quite entertaining. Fortified by the superior beauty and intelligence of my child (the latter manifested in such talents as learning to suck at the first attempt, and not after hours of humiliating struggle), I was able to withstand various irritations, such as having a label at the end of my bed with the initial U, which stood, I was told, for Unmarried, and a perpetual succession of medical students who kept taking my temperature and measuring various parts of me with cold wooden rulers and making feeble jokes. I was highly grateful to Lydia, who certainly did her best for me in broadcasting the news, for on the very first morning I received dozens of bouquets and telegrams, from everyone I had ever known, or rather from everyone that Lydia had ever known that I had known. It was a good time of year for flowers, and daffodils, tulips, roses, azaleas and Lord knows what appeared in vast profusion: I began to grow quite embarrassed, finally, thinking that such excess might annoy the nurse who kept bringing them in to me, or the other less gifted mothers.

In the visiting hour that evening, Lydia turned up, with Joe Hurt himself accompanying her; she was evidently proud of her skill in having got him there, and glowed with varying kinds of satisfaction as she sat on the end of my bed and thumbed her way through my Lydia-instigated pile of congratulations. They made a bizarre and impressive couple, splendidly out of key with the nature of the occasion; she in a black skirt and jersey, black stockings and patent shoes, and the everlasting uncleaned raincoat, he in a peculiar collarless suit and with a more than usually volcanic irregularity in his features. He had recently started appearing on an egghead television program, talking about culture, and some of the mothers recognized him, to his great gratification and, I must admit, to mine, for I felt my stock would rise through the association. They brought me a whole pile of books to read, and half a
bottle of whisky wrapped up in some clean underwear; I was doubtful about accepting it, thinking the baby might not like it, but they told me not to be so foolish, alcohol was good for every system, any doctor would tell me.

I was very pleased to see Joe again; naturally we had met fairly frequently over the past few months, though always by chance, and with nothing like our former regularity. He was a great morale-raiser; he was interested in the setup in the ward and asked me about the nurses and the other mothers and what did we talk about, and laughed gaily over the Unmarried notice on the end of my bed, as though it were the funniest thing he had ever seen. He kept lighting cigarettes, absent-mindedly, and a pretty Kensington blonde nurse, kept specially for visiting-hours display, would rush over each time and tell him it wasn't allowed, he would have to go out if he wanted to smoke. He showed no interest at all in the baby, who was lying by the side of my bed in a little cradle on wheels: Lydia's theory about his paternity must have suffered some shaking from this, as surely any father would volunteer his newborn infant at least a glance. After ten minutes or so, however, when I had told them as many details about my confinement as they could bear to hear, they began to discuss what name I should give the child. I had spared the subject little thought myself, as I do not like to anticipate, to count or name my chickens before they are hatched, and now I had seen her no name seemed good enough. They suggested names endlessly, ranging from the dull to the fantastic; Joe came down finally in favour of January, while Lydia seemed to fancy Charlotte, which I thought pretty but corny. After a long debate, they asked me what name I liked, and I said that I rather fancied Sandra myself. They roared with laughter once more, and all the other quietly muttering mothers and fathers became silent and stared, glad of a distraction, finding us as good as the telly.

In the end I said I would call her Octavia. I said it as a joke, having tried hard to think of some famous woman to call her after, and finding none but Beatrice Webb whom my parents had already used; the name Octavia Hill came into my mind, and I said out loud, I'll call her Octavia. Both of them seemed to approve, though they said she wasn't my eighth at all, and ought rather to be called Prima, though that wasn't so pretty; one might as well call her Ultima, poor child, I said, and have done with it.

"I don't know," said Joe, "if I were you, I'd have a few more. It seems to agree with you, you look astoundingly well."

"I feel well," I said, "but it wouldn't be worth doing it all over again just to feel well."

"Just one more," said Joe. "You're allowed two, you know."

"What do you mean, allowed two? By whom? Allowed by whom?"

"Oh, by authority. The BBC lets you have two before they sack you. So does the Civil Service. It's the orthodox number, two."

"Illegitimate ones, you mean?"

"Naturally. You can have as many as you like of the other ones, until they interfere with your efficiency."

"Why ever two?" I said. "It doesn't seem very reasonable, does it? Surely if they allow you more than one, they ought to allow you an unlimited number? I mean to say, I can understand them allowing one and no more, on the grounds that one might be an innocent mistake, but once you've allowed two, why not five or ten or eighteen? Anyway, is that true? I'm sure it's not true, it's just some rubbish some girl told you."

"A woman died," Lydia said, "last week, in
The Times,
of her twenty-fifth baby, in France."

"Sh," I said, glancing round at my fellow inmates. "You
don't know how many of these are on their twenty-fourth, do you?"

"When are your parents coming back?" said Joe. "Have you told them they've got a grandchild living in their house?"

"They're not due back till next Christmas, not for good," I said.

"It couldn't have been more convenient really, could it?" said Joe. "Anyone would think you'd worked it all out on purpose."

"Perhaps I did," I said. "Didn't you know, I'm one of those Bernard Shaw women who wants children but no husband? It suits me fine, like this."

"It seems to suit you," said Joe kindly. "I said you look extremely well. When you get up, you can get Lydia to baby-sit for us and I'll take you to the cinema."

But I could tell, from the way he was looking at Lydia, that it was she who would be sitting next to him in the back stalls for the next few months. And really, I thought, they went quite well together, balanced as they were delicately on social aspirations, rivalry, fashionability and dislike. They were well suited, I thought.

When they had gone, the woman from the next bed leaned over and said, "Isn't that young man an announcer on the television?"

I said that he wasn't an announcer but that he was on the television.

"I thought I'd seen him," she said. "I thought I'd seen him, that's all I wanted to know."

She was a vacant-faced, prematurely aging woman of thirty or so, in for her fourth child, and she spent most of her time knitting shapeless fancy-stitch cardigans for her mother, and trying to tell the woman on the other side about her other three children and what they ate and what they wouldn't touch. I wondered what she had thought of Joe's program; on the only edition I had seen he had been
talking with some intensity about the dominance of drugs in modern literature to an anonymous, back-head-photographed drug addict. The other editions had been even less interesting than that, comprising such subjects as the future of abstract art and the use of improvisation in avant-garde Paris theater of today (topics on which Joe was quite unqualified to express any views at all).

The woman in the bed beyond the woman who had recognized Joe never listened to the stories of which child liked kippers and which preferred a little cheese on toast: she preferred to tell stories to the woman beyond her, about the best ways of dealing with a large family wash. The woman beyond her had to listen, as she was flanked by a brick wall, and I heard them at one moment engaged in the most exquisite deadlock: Woman B said to Woman C:

"Of course," she said, "there's nothing like soap flakes, that's what I've always said, these detergents are no good for anything, bring me out in spots, they do," to which Woman C retorted that soap flakes were no good in machines.

Woman B conceded the point, but then went on to say that there was nothing like washing by hand, really.

Woman C said that she went to the launderette.

Woman B said that launderettes were a great boon and no mistake, but then went on to expand the point that you never got results as good as when you washed at home by hand. Woman C, however, not perhaps paying as much attention as she might have done, misunderstood her, taking her to say that you never get results
as good when
you wash at home, not as
good as when;
she proceeded to agree with Woman B, or so she thought, producing a great panegyric on the virtues of machinery, the thoroughness of their washing, the frequency of their rinsing, the power of their spin drying, and to denigrate the effort, efficiency and end-product of hand-washing. Woman B, either not noticing her strange logic, or determined to ignore it, went on quite smoothly as soon as she could interrupt:

"Yes, of course, you're quite right, I do agree, and then the wear and tear of those machines is something terrible, you can put things in and they come out in ribbons. Now I can keep things for years. I had some pillowcases, embroidered ones, I'd washed them by hand in pure soap for ten years, and then my sister-in-law persuades me to put them in her machine, and when I get them out they're all frayed down the edges. It just shows you, doesn't it?"

"It certainly does," said Woman C. "I think it must be all that rubbing and scrubbing that does it, when you do it by hand you rub too hard, you know, no wonder things don't last, you can't expect them to last."

And so they might have gone on for hours, running side by side in smooth and never-touching incomprehension, had not Woman A, unable to bear her exclusion any longer, suddenly yelled to both of them, "Do yours eat spinach? You wouldn't believe the trouble I've had getting mine to eat spinach, and my husband, he loves it, but I can't go buying it just for him, can I?"

As it happened, I was the next to youngest in the ward; apart from one cheery teen-ager, all the other fourteen mothers were either nearly thirty or over it. The teen-age girl and I were the only ones in for our first, which seemed a statistical coincidence, but may not have been. She looked so like an unmarried mother that as soon as I was able to get up I made a pretext for hobbling past the end of her bed, but the label on it said M, not U. She really was cheery, the only person apart from me who ever seemed to smile, let alone laugh, with any real enthusiasm; she spent most of her time looking at herself in a small hand mirror, plucking her eyelashes, squeezing invisible blackheads, putting on lipstick, taking it off again, trying a different colour, painting her nails, and putting her hair in curlers so she would look nice for visiting time. Once I had noticed her, I looked out for her husband; he turned out to a sharp-faced little boy who looked and may well have been about sixteen. She and I exchanged glances of mutual curiosity, being the only people there with any pretensions to any physical charm; our beds were too far apart for us to converse, but we met once in the lavatories, where she had gone to smoke a quick cigarette. She offered me one, and I declined it, saying I didn't feel like smoking any more: she laughed, and said it was funny how one went off things, she'd gone right off drink, it had saved them a fortune. We went back into the ward together, and admired each other's babies, before retiring to our beds; she said mine was ever so lovely, though I could see her thinking her a funny, skimpy little thing, and I said hers was beautiful child, though to me he looked fat and bald, and bigger in some way than either of his narrow-faced parents. What we meant was, not that we liked each other's babies, but that we were glad that each other was there, as an ally against the older fatter women, so entirely and tediously submerged.