The Millstone (12 page)

"Hello, Clare," I said when I reached her. "Buying a pheasant or two, then?"

She looked slightly confused, as well she might, and muttered, playing for time, "I was just buying a few things for dinner tomorrow." She was wearing a dusky pink coat with a fur collar and a hat that made her look twice her age: she cannot be more than twenty-eight and she looks a good forty at times. A good young forty, well-preserved by care and protection from the weather. She is neither pretty nor plain, and she has a mania for cleanliness: on one of our first meetings, when she still thought we might be good friends, she was telling me how many times she had her clothes cleaned. "If there's one thing I can't
stand
" she said with a violent shudder, "it's dirty clothes. Don't you agree?" The remark had astonished me, as I had hardly spared the question a thought till that moment, and certainly could not summon up any violence to support her; I had just said "
Oh
yes, I suppose so," while glancing surreptitiously at the state of my own long unwashed jersey. Since then we had abandoned all pretense at common ground, apart from family matters. I suppose poor Clare had an intellectual inferiority complex; she should have done if she had not, as she was certainly dim. Andrew was not as dim as she was, though he
was not as bright as his two sisters or either of his parents: I suppose this may have been one of the causes of his curious social revolt. Usually I let her take the lead which, inferior or not, she was always quite ready to do, but upon this occasion it was clear to me that I must take the offensive.

"Having some friends round, are you?" I said briskly. "You don't often shop in town, do you?"

"Not very often," she said. "But I was in for the day, having my hair done."

"Oh, really? I'd tell you how nice it looks, but I can't really see with that hat. Where do you have it done?"

"Romain's. Where do you go?"

"I don't," I said. "It takes such a long time. Anyway, I believe in letting nature take its course. I don't like perms. Well, it seems a long time since I saw you; how's Andrew these days? Still as busy as ever?"

"Oh yes."

"Still playing bridge?"

"Yes," she smiled coldly, but meaning to be ingratiating, not cold, and then said bravely, "You must come over again one day. You couldn't make it last time I rang, I remember. It was Christmas, wasn't it, when I rang?"

"Oh," I said, "I'm afraid I'm frightfully busy these days. I doubt if I'll have time before the autumn." It was then February.

She looked away, nervously, with some embarrassment. I, too, was embarrassed but I wasn't going to show it.

"I'd better get on with my shopping," she said. "These dinner parties are a frightful bore."

"They must be," I said. "I don't know why you have them. Well, it has been nice seeing you, Clare. Do give my love to Andrew, won't you? Tell him you saw me, won't you?"

As I said this, I looked at her hard, wondering whether she would tell him what she had seen: she flushed slightly
and did not meet my eyes, but I guessed that she would not tell him and found later that my guess was right. It was not to protect me that she restrained herself, I am sure, but rather to avoid having to take any possible action on my account. She did not like our family, with reason, and the less she saw of us the better she was pleased. As I left her, she was bending over the counter, pointing at a dressed pheasant with a plum-gloved hand: I walked away, thinking of her dinner parties and her endless visits to the dry cleaners and her sessions under the hairdryer. I have never been able to cure myself of the view that people who spend time at the hairdresser's spend it there because they have nothing better to do, and no other way of getting rid of their money: pitiable enough, oh yes, but I was sick of pity, and I preferred the indulgence of dislike. An idle parasite, that's what she is, I said to myself bitterly, as I walked home with my three-pound bag of flour, and I thought of my mother, her mouth full of hairpins, screwing her long thick hair up into its everlasting knot, while at the same time going through her day's reports from the probation center. My mother and Beatrice and I were all prettier than this girl, as well as being brighter: but Oh God, I thought, as I reached the lift and pushed the button, whose fault is that, whose fault, whose virtue, and my dislike ebbed away in a dry withdrawing scraping tide of equity, leaving me as ever on the hard damp shore of sociological pity.

Riches are a dreadful blight, and poor Clare hadn't even got riches: all she had was gentility and inherited voice. I say "poor Clare" so often because she is an unhappy woman, but I am an unhappy woman myself, so she could well say, "poor Rosamund." Sometimes I wonder whether it is not my parents who are to blame, totally to blame, for my inability to see anything in human terms of like and dislike, love and hate: but only in terms of justice, guilt and innocence. Life is not fair: this is the lesson that I took
in with my Kellogg's cornflakes at our family home in Putney. It is unfair on every score and every count and in every particular, and those who, like my parents, attempt to level it out are doomed to failure. Though when I would say this to them, fierce, argumentative, tragic, over the cornflakes, driven almost to tears at times by their hopeless innocence and aspirations, they would smile peaceably and say, Yes, dear, nothing can be done about inequality of brains and beauty, but that's no reason why we shouldn't try to do something about economics, is it?

Of course, by any reasonable standards, we were rich enough ourselves: there was no real money in the family, nothing like what I later met at Cambridge, and with Roger, or even with self-made Joe, but nevertheless we were quite all right. My parents grumbled incessantly, but they did not go without. It took me a very long time to piece together an economic view of my own, owing partly to the anomalies of my upbringing, which had made me believe in the poor without being of them: I went to a very good grammar school, where again I was in the curious position of being the only child who would admit to Labour-voting parents, although my parents were among the poshest and most well-known of all. I knew that this was upside-down and I was confused by it. I remember very clearly the way in which I put together my picture of the rest of the world, the way I accumulated evidence about the way that others lived. There was one incident in particular which I recognized at the time to be a milestone of some kind: I must have been eight or nine and Beatrice a couple of years older. We had gone to a local park, accompanied by a girl whom I hesitate to describe as maid or nanny: she was eighteen or so, and peculiarly incompetent, as were all our domestic staff, and when she took us out she would always take us to the same park as she was having an affair with one of the gardeners. We knew all about this because she told us. She told us some horrific things.
It suited us very well because it left us free to follow our own amusements: our craze at that time was fishing. Armed with a net and a jam jar, we could catch minnows and tadpoles: it was very exciting.

On this spring afternoon, Beatrice and I left Marleen giggling in the shrubbery and made our way to a private little muddy bit of pond that we usually had to ourselves. This time, however, there were some boys there. We looked at them suspiciously, as we were used to being taunted by rough boys, but they seemed busy enough, so we got on with our fishing. We were unusually successful in our work; we caught a large dashing pink and blue stickleback. We greeted our catch with screams of delight, which attracted the attention of the two boys, who came over and inspected the fish as it thrashed frantically round its jar. They admired it and asked us how we got it and advised us to cover the jar. "They jump right out sometimes," one of them said. "They can jump ever so high. Like salmon, they jump." Then, all four of us together, we tried to find another one, while they told us about a female stickleback that they had kept for months in an old bucket. "We let her out in the winter," they said. "We brought her back here and let her out. We thought it might freeze up in our yard."

Beatrice and I were impressed by this evidence of sensibility, unusual in boys: they were nice boys and might well have been middle-class children like ourselves, being clad as we were in rather muddy trousers, jerseys and sandals. We were no experts in accents in those days. We all got on together very well, though we caught no more sticklebacks but only a couple of tiddlers. After an hour or so we were visited by a group of ducks and Beatrice remembered that we had been given some crusts for them: she got out our paper bag and started to hurl lumps into the water but the ducks, fat and overfed, were not interested. Not so, however, the two boys: after two pieces had been inspected and
refused by the ducks, the smaller of the two, who looked endearingly like an illustration in Richmal Crompton said, "I say, can I have a bit?" Beatrice handed him the bag and he and his brother ate the lot. We were unsurprised, having eaten more eccentric things at school in our time; we continued to fish. Five minutes later, however, we heard Marleen calling: she could not see us as we were crouching on a bit of muddy bank, concealed from view by a few sooty, filthy laurels. We groaned and made a few childish jokes about how she'd been getting on with Dick. "That's not your Mum, is it?" asked the larger boy, as Marleen continued to yell our names, though without urgency.

"No, no," I said, horrified by the idea that Marleen could be anybody's mother. "No, she's just the maid." People were called maids in those days, even in our household: I did not think twice about using the word then, though I think twice about putting it in writing now. The two boys looked startled by this remark and one of them said, "Blimey then, are you rich?" Just that, precisely that. Beatrice and I suddenly saw the situation for what it was and looked at each other in alarm, ready to run and duck from any threatening stones; but there were no stones. Beatrice and I started hotly to deny our richness; we did not think ourselves rich, being, as we were, so much poorer than so many other people we knew, businessmen's daughters and such like, but we knew where we stood with these boys, and we were full of fright. But the boys did not mind; they liked us, they had enjoyed the afternoon, they were interested, impressed. They were, as Shaw might have said, the deserving and not the undeserving poor: nice boys, well-brought-up boys. But Beatrice and I knew that for our part, we were not deserving: we had not deserved their kind interest, but their contempt. We told them about Marleen and her boy friend, in hurried relief, and then we left them. "We might see you again," the boys
said, but we knew that we would not. An hour like that in a lifetime is quite as much as one can expect. I have often thought of how they ate those crusts, not famished, not starving, but with eagerness nevertheless. And I had not known; in the future I felt that it would be my duty to know.

Years later, in fact quite recently, I went to stay with Beatrice and her family for a couple of nights: she had only two children then, the eldest four and the younger three. I liked them, though I did not understand them, and I would take them out for walks, and to pick blackberries: it was October. The research establishment where Hallam worked was on top of a hill, and I remember then the whole countryside was parched, bleached and silvery: the fields were full of pale stubble and there was no colour anywhere. They lived on a little mushroom housing estate, rather like an army camp; Beatrice's house was pleasant to live in, though quite uninteresting from without. They had one of the nicer ones. After lunch on the Sunday, Hallam, Beatrice and I were sitting in the drawing room in a tired stupor, amidst the creased and confused pages of several Sunday papers, when we heard a sudden sound of shouting from the garden outside where the children were playing. Beatrice dragged herself to her feet and went and looked through the window: "Oh Lord," she said, "not again," and with an expression of resigned anger went out and through the back door. By this time I too had got up to watch through the window: I saw Beatrice arrive at the front gate, detach from it her own two children, and say crossly to a small child hanging onto the other side of it, "Now then, off you go, be off." As she spoke, her voice lost its customary gentility and took on a certain harshness, the tone in which one might speak to a cat or dog. Then she started to pull her own two children away; they went willingly enough, though with backward glances of mingled triumph and shame. I heard them all three come into
the kitchen and then the sounds of removing of Wellingtons, wiping of hands and so on; meanwhile I continued to watch through the window the small child whose arrival had caused such action and alarm.

She was a perfectly ordinary-looking little girl, clad in a pair of brown corduroy trousers, an old, rather over-washed jersey, and a pair of plastic shoes, the kind that are bad for the feet. She had a square, unexpressive face, and she watched the departure of Nicholas and Alexandra with unperturbed solidity, batting not an eyelid at Beatrice's dismissive tone. She did not go away, however, but continued to hang on the gate, staring into the garden, her face quite blank; until, quite suddenly, she burst into violent screaming tears, her face contorting and turning red as her jersey, her whole body shaking with emotion. I watched this display with some detachment, until her grief found words: then she started to bellow, in a frighteningly loud voice, "I haven't got nobody to play with, I haven't got nobody to play with." She yelled this several times until Beatrice re-emerged from the kitchen and shouted, once more, "Off you go": then she stopped shouting as suddenly as she had started, climbed down off the gate, and ran off.

A few minutes later, when Beatrice had persuaded her two to go upstairs and play in the playroom, she rejoined us in the drawing room; she came in, looking rather worn, and sank down on to the settee. Consumed with curiosity, I asked:

"What on earth was all that about?" and she proceeded to explain that the small child was the daughter of one of the menials connected with the establishment, and that she was forever pestering Nicholas and Alexandra to play with her, which they were not allowed to do.