The Millstone by Margaret Drabble Read Free Book Online Page A

helped, but rather confused by my eccentricity. I had been forced to learn the number by a ferocious matron at school when I had forgotten to take my card along to one of those routine knee-knocking inspections to which schoolgirls are periodically subjected. I had never since had occasion to use it. Everything comes in some day, I suppose. She noted it down, and said once more "Do take a seat," then disappeared behind a small hardboard partition in a corner of the room. I tried to follow her advice but there was not a space left: I was preparing to prop myself up against the wall by the door when two women shuffled up along the bench to make a grudging gap for me. I sat down and prepared to wait.
    I waited for one hour fourteen minutes precisely: I timed it. And during that time I had plenty of leisure to observe my companions in endurance. The people that I was used to seeing on my home ground were a mixed enough lot, but they were a smart, expensive mixed lot, apart from the occasional freak, beggar or road worker: but here, gathered in this room, were representatives of a population whose existence I had hardly noticed. There
were a few foreigners; a West Indian, a Pakistani, two Greeks. There were several old people, most of them respectably shabby, though one old woman was worse than shabby. She was grossly fat and her clothes were held around her by safety pins: a grostesquely old and mangy fur coat fell open to reveal layers of fraying, loose-stitched, hand-knitted cardigans in shades of maroon, dark blue and khaki. Her legs, covered in thick lisle stockings, were painfully swollen, and overflowed at the ankles over her soft cracked flat black shoes. She was talking to herself all the time, a low pitiable monologue of petty persecution. Nobody listened. Then there were a couple of young secretaries or waitresses who were sitting together and looking at pictures in a magazine and giggling: my eyes kept going back to them as they were the only people in the room who did not look depressed and oppressed. Those who looked worst of all were, ominously enough, the mothers: there were four mothers there with young children, and they looked uniformly worn out. One held a small baby on her knee, at which she smiled from time to time with tired affection and anxiety. The others had larger children, two of which were romping around the room; they were doing no harm, apart from disturbing the magazines, and nobody minded them except their mothers, who kept grabbing them and slapping them and shouting at them in a vain and indeed provoking effort to make them sit down and keep quiet. It was a saddening sight. I wondered where all the others had gone: the bright young women in emerald green coats with fur collars, the young men in leather jackets, the middle-aged women with dogs on leads, the gay mothers with their Christopher Robin children, the men with umbrellas against the rain. Sitting in Harley Street, no doubt, just along the road.
    By the time my turn to see the doctor came, my complaint seemed so trivial in comparison with the ills of age and worry and penury that I had doubts about presenting
it at all. Reason told me, however, that I must do so, and I did. The woman in white showed me into the surgery: Dr. Moffatt was a harassed, keen-looking young man, with pale ginger receding hair. I felt sorry for him: he must have had a more unpleasant hour and a quarter than I had had. He told me to sit down and asked me what he could do for me, and I said that I thought I was pregnant, and he said how long had I been married, and I said that I was not married. It was quite simple. He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger, and said did my parents know. I said Yes, thinking it would be easier to say yes, and not wishing to embark on explaining about their being in Africa. He said were they sympathetic, and I smiled my bright, meaningless smile and said Fairly. Then we worked out dates and he said it would be due in March.