The Millstone by Margaret Drabble Page B

baby belonging to Joe would turn out like, and anyway he does quite enough propagation, doesn't he?"
    I assured her that it wasn't Joe's and she seemed quite happy. I then asked her how her own creative life was coming along, and she scowled and looked down at the table and with her left eye starting its habitual violent neurotic twitch, said bitterly:
    "Oh, quite quite frightful. I can't get anything to work, I get worse and worse, I've got nothing to say, I've just got nothing to say."
    "If you've got nothing to say," I said, "why try to say it? Why not have a little rest?"
    "I
can't
rest," she said violently, "I can't rest. When I'm not working on something I'm so miserable, I'm so unhappy, I don't exist, I can't do anything, I can't enjoy a thing."
    "It'll pass," I said placating.
    "I don't see why," she said. "Perhaps I'm finished."
    "If you really thought you were, you wouldn't say so."
    "Wouldn't I? Perhaps not. But what about people like Joe though, how do they keep at it, one a year, year in, year out? Where do they get it from?"
    "I thought you didn't like Joe's work."
    "I don't."
    "Then why worry about it?"
    "I can't help worrying. I'd rather write a bad book than nothing."
    "Why don't you write one then?"
    "I can't," she wailed. "I can't. I try to. I begin them but I can't finish. How I envy you, Rosamund, your work is always there, you know what's got to be done, it's all there outside you waiting for you to come and straighten it out and put it together, like a job almost, like a job to be done. I wish I could write a book on something and not just a book. I wish I didn't have to go on dragging it out of
myself like a dirty great spider. I wish I could write a book on Elizabethan poets."
    "There's nothing to stop you," I said, but she sighed heavily and said, chewing savagely at the quick of her nails:
    "Ah, there, I haven't got your education."
    The next time I saw her she told me all about her miscarriage. She started off by saying that she thought I must be crazy to be having the baby, ruining my life, and all the old junk, but she did not mean it seriously, she was merely leading in to what she herself had to say. "I suppose the truth is," she concluded, "that you must really want it. On some level, don't you think?"
    I shrugged my shoulders, for I did not know the answer. Then she went on:
    "It's a funny thing, you know," she said, "but I was pregnant once. It was awful. It was just after the first novel was published, and I came down to London for the first time and I got mixed up with a whole crowd of idiots and slept about all over the place. It was great fun, especially after Doncaster, but I was such a fool in those days, I knew all about everything in theory but practice was another matter and, anyway, after a while I realized what was up. I was determined not to have it, but on the other hand I couldn't bear the thought of having anything scruffy done, being so neurotic and all that I thought it might upset me, so I got this fellow to recommend me this really expensive chap who did everything legally, on psychological grounds and so on, you know what I mean, private nursing home, all that lark. So I made myself an appointment and of? I went to convince this man that if I had this baby I was going to be a mental and physical wreck, which is the wording of that case, you know the one I mean. He was an old fat man and quite nice. He lived on the Bayswater Road. Anyway, he asked me all my life story and I told him the whole lot, which was great fun—ferocious mother,
dad bumped himself off because she bullied him, four-roomed house, squalor, sent to work at sixteen, the whole lot, and I made it sound as lurid as I could, and the whole time I made myself look as neurotic as I possibly could, which was easy enough with the material I've got. By the end of my recital I felt so sorry for myself I nearly burst into tears. He too seemed moved, and I thought I was well away, but when I finished he said he was