The Millstone by Margaret Drabble Page A

minimum necessary clothes' removal. I learned that one had to bully them about iron pills and vitamin pills, because they would never remember. But it continued to be an ordeal, unillumined by even the most fitful gleams of comfort: my sole aim was to get out as quickly as possible. I hated most of all the chat about birth that went on so continually around me in the queue: everyone recounted their own past experiences, and those of their sisters and mothers and aunts and friends and grandmothers, and everyone else listened, spellbound, including me. The degrading truth was that there was no topic more fascinating to us in that condition; and indeed few topics anywhere, it seems. Birth, pain, fear and hope, these were the subjects that drew us together in gloomy awe, and so strong was the bond that even I, doubly, trebly outcast by my unmarried status, my education, and my class, even I was drawn in from time to time, and compelled to proffer some anecdote of my own, such as the choice story of my sister who gave birth to her second in an ambulance in a snow storm. Indeed, so strong became the pull of nature that by the end of the six months' attendance I felt more in common with the ladies at the clinic than with my own acquaintances.
    Pregnancy revealed to me several interesting points, of which I had not before been aware. It was quite amazing, for instance, how many pregnant women there suddenly seemed to be in the world. The streets were crawling with them, and I never remembered having noticed them before. Even the British Museum, and I came to think most particularly the British Museum, was full of earnest intellectual women like myself, propping themselves or their unborn babies against the desk as they worked. The same discovery was to be made later with the babies. Also, I came to realize how totally I depended on the casual salute as my sole means of sexual gratification: now, of course, I was having to learn how to do without it, as men do not
lean out of car windows to shout and whistle at expectant mothers, nor do they stare at them intently on tube trains, nor make pointed remarks about them in cafés or shops. In my time I had received much of this kind of attention, being tall and well-built and somehow noticeable, and it had given me much pleasure. The more tenuous a link, the more pleasure it would give me, as I could no longer fail to admit: after all, my affair with George must have been as tenuous as any contact likely to produce such a positive result could possibly have been. George, George, I thought of George, and sometimes I switched on the radio to listen to his voice announcing this and that: I still could not believe that I was going to get through it without telling him, but I could not see that I was going to tell him either. I would have the odd two minutes when I would think of him, and such grief and regret and love would pour down my spine that I tried not to think.
    My acquaintances took it pretty much as one would have expected, with a mixture of curiosity, admiration, pity and indifference. There must have been some speculation as to whose the child was, but I did not know any group of people well enough to be asked to my face-except in the most frivolous, easy-to-parry terms. I tried to convey, without saying anything, that there was a man somewhere whom none of them knew anything about, and that everything was all right really. The only person, however, who was truly fascinated by the event was Lydia Reynolds, my novelist friend. I used to meet Lydia for lunch from time to time as she worked near the British Museum in an art gallery which specialized in water colours. She would sometimes come to the Museum, too, to type in the typing room, but had not been for some time, so I assumed her work was going badly. When she first learned of my condition, somewhere round the end of the fourth month, all she said was:
    "It's not Joe's, is it? I hope to God it isn't Joe's. I can't
think what a