The Millstone by Margaret Drabble Read Free Book Online

once, but it was engaged. After that I went no further. I do not like to look back on those first months, before anyone but me knew what was happening: it seemed too much like a nightmare, like an hallucination, and I kept waking up each morning and thinking it must be a dream, the kind of dream that my non-conformist guilt might be expected to project: I even wondered if all the symptoms from which I suffered might not be purely psychological. In the end it was the fear of being made a fool of by my subconscious that drove me to the doctor.
    Seeing the doctor was not as simple an operation as one might have supposed. To begin with, I did not know which doctor to see. It was so many years since I had been unwell that I did not know how to set about it: in fact, I had not been unwell since I had become an adult I had never had to do it on my own. The only doctor I knew was our old family doctor, who lived near our old but now abandoned family residence in Putney, and he was clearly unsuitable. I supposed that I ought to go to the nearest GP, but how was I to know who he was, or where he lived? living within two minutes' walk of Harley Street as I did, I was terrified that I might walk into some private waiting room by accident, and be charged fifty guineas for what I might and ought to get for nothing. Being my parents' daughter, the thought outraged me morally as well as financially. On the other hand, it did not seem a good plan to pick a surgery so evidently seedy that it could not exist
but on the National Health: though this was in fact what I did. I passed one day, in a small road off George Street, after visiting an exhibition by a very distant friend, a brass plaque on a front door that said Dr. H. E. Moffatt. There was a globular light over the door, with SURGERY painted on it in black letters. It was not the kind of door behind which anyone could be charged fifty guineas, and I made a note of the surgery hours and resolved to return the next day at five-thirty.
    I visited the doctor the next day. That visit was a revelation: it was an initiation into a new way of life, a way that was thenceforth to be mine forever. An initiation into reality, if you like. The surgery opened at five-thirty, and I made a point of going along there quite promptly: I arrived at about twenty-eight minutes to six, thinking that I was in plenty of time, and would have to wait hardly at all. But when I opened that shabby varnished door, I found a waiting room overflowing with waiting patients, patiently waiting. There were about twenty of them, and I wavered on the threshold, thinking I might change my mind, when a woman in a white nylon overall came in and said irritably:
    "Come on, come along in now and don't leave the door on the jar, it's on the bell, it makes a dreadful noise in the back."
    Meekly, I stepped in and shut the door behind me. I had no idea what I ought to do next: whether I should sit down, or give my name to somebody, or what. I felt helpless, exposed, before those silent staring rows of eyes. I stood there for a moment, and then the woman in white, who had been talking to a very old man sitting almost on top of the noisy gas fire, came over to me and said, in a tone of deliberate strained equanimity:
    "Well, are you here to see Dr. Moffatt? You're a new patient, aren't you?"
    "Yes," I said.
    "Have you brought your National Health card?"
    "Oh no, I quite forgot, I'm frightfully sorry," I said with shame; I had known that I would make some mistake in procedure. I did not know the ropes.
    "Oh dear me," she said, and sighed heavily. "Do remember to bring it along next time, won't you? What's your name?"
    "Stacey," I said. "Rosamund Stacey."
    "Mrs. or Miss?"
    "Miss."
    "All right then, take a seat."
    "As a matter of fact," I said, "I do know the
number
on my National Health card, if that's any use."
    "Oh, do you really?" She brightened faintly at the news of this extraordinary feat of memory, and I reeled it off, glad to have