The Millstone Read Free Page B

rooms, and back again, and on and on and on, banging into the walls on the way. As I walked I thought about having a baby, and in that state of total inebriation it seemed to me that a baby might be no such bad thing, however impractical and impossible. My sister had babies, nice babies, and seemed to like them. My friends had babies. There was no reason why I shouldn't have one either, it would serve me right, I thought, for having been born a woman in the first place. I couldn't pretend that I wasn't a woman, could I, however much I might try from day to day to avoid the issue? I might as well pay, mightn't I, if other people had to pay? I tried to feel bitter about it all, as I usually did when sober: and indeed recently worse than bitter, positively suicidal: but I could not make it. The gin kept me gay and undespairing, and I thought that I might ring up George and tell him about it. It seemed possible then that I might. I did not have his number, or I might have rung. And there again I was trapped by that first abstinence, for having survived one such temptation to ring George, there was no reason why I should ever succumb, no reason why a point at which I could no longer bear my silence should ever arrive. Had I known my nature better then I would have rung up and found his number and told him, then and there. But I didn't. And perhaps it was better that I didn't. Better for him, I mean.
     
    I never told anybody that George was the father of my child. People would have been highly astonished had I told them, as he was so incidental to my life that nobody even knew that I knew him. They would have asked me if I was sure of my facts. I was sure enough, having indeed a foolproof case in favour of George's paternity, for he was the only man I had ever in my life slept with, and then only once. The whole business was utterly accidental from start to finish: in fact, one of my most painful indignations in those painful months was the sheer unlikelihood of it all. It wasn't, after all, as though I had asked for it: I had asked for it as little as anyone who had ever got it. One reads such comforting stories of women unable to conceive for years and years, but there are of course the other stories, which I have always wished to discount because of their overhanging grim tones of retribution, their association with scarlet letters, their eye-for-an-eye and Bunyanesque attention to the detail of offense. Nowadays one tends to class these tales as fantasies of repressed imaginations, and it is extraordinarily hard to convince people that it is even possible to conceive at the first attempt; though if one thinks about it, it would be odd if it were not possible. Anyway, I know it is possible, because it happened to me, as in the best moral fable for young women, and unluckily
there was much in me that was all too ready to suspect it was a judgment.
    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