The Millstone. Margaret Drabble

considered herself a creative artist. I myself was wholly uncreative, and spent my life on thorough and tedious collating of certain sixteenth-century poetic data, a task which enthralled me, but which was generally considered to be useless. However, I was also acknowledged to have a good critical mind in other spheres, and did from time to time a little reviewing and a good deal of reading of friends’ plays and poems and novels and correspondence. Dick, for example, had entrusted to me one or two of his works, hitherto unpublished and, in my opinion, unpublishable. One was a novel, of great incidental charm and talent, but totally defective in plot and, even worse, in time scheme: I do not care very much for plots myself, but I do like to have a sequence of events. His characters had no relationship with time at all: it was impossible to tell what event preceded what, and whether a particular scene lasted for hours or days, or whether it occurred hours, days or years later than the preceding scene – or indeed perhaps before it, one simply could not tell. I pointed this out to Dick and he was startled and alarmed because he could not see what I meant, which implied that the defect must have been integral and not technical. He earned his living by writing something or other for a television company, but he was not wholly committed to his work. Alex, on the other hand, was as committed as I was: he was working for an advertising agency, writing copy, and was thoroughly enraptured by his job. He was at heart rather a serious puritanical young man, and I think it gave him great pleasure to live in such a wicked warm atmosphere, all jokes and deceitfulness, prostituting his talent. He had a great flair for copy, too, and was forever reading aloud his better slogans from stray magazines and papers. He wrote poetry on the quiet, and actually published a piece or two once every two years. Lydia was the only one who had really made it: she had published a couple of novels, but had now for some time been mooching around London moaning that she had nothing else to say. Nobody sympathized with her at all, understandably: she was only twenty-six, so what had she to worry about?

      In view of her state, she seized with delight upon any stories of the atrocity of other people’s latest books, of which we managed to offer a kindly few.

      ‘It’s no good, anyway,’ said Dick, after dismissing Joe Hurt’s latest with a derisive sneer, ‘churning them out like that, one a year. Mechanical, that’s what it is.’

      ‘A bit more mechanism wouldn’t hurt you,’ I said gaily. I was on my second large gin.

      Lydia, who had hitherto been accepting our devious comfort, suddenly turned on us with a wail of despondency.

      ‘I don’t care what you say,’ she said, ‘it’s better to write bad books than no books, it really is. Writing nothing is – is nothing, just nothing. It’s wonderful to turn out one a year, I think Joe Hurt is wonderful, I admire it, I admire that kind of thing.’

      ‘You haven’t read it,’ said Dick.

      ‘That’s not the point,’ said Lydia, ‘it’s the effort, that’s the point.’

      ‘Why don’t you write a bad book then?’ I asked. ‘I bet you could write a bad book if you wanted to. Couldn’t you?’

      ‘Not if I knew it was bad while I was writing it. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get it done.’

      ‘What a romantic view of literary creation,’ said Dick.

      ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Lydia crossly. ‘Get yours published, and then start calling me romantic. Pass the gin, Rosie, there’s a darling.’

      ‘Anyway,’ said Alex, who had by now eaten half his loaf, ‘if you ask me, Joe Hurt knew quite well how bad his book was while he was writing it. It reeks of conscious badness on every page. Don’t you think so, Rosie?’

      ‘I haven’t read it,’ I said. ‘But you know what Joe always says. Nobody ever wrote a masterpiece before the age of thirty-five, Joe says, so that gives me another six years, says Joe.’

      ‘Still going out with Joe, Rosie?’

      ‘I’m still seeing him. Do stop calling me Rosie, who gave you that idea?’

      ‘Lydia. She called you Rosie just now.’

      ‘She likes diminishing people. It makes her feel better, doesn’t it, Lyd?’

      At this we all laughed loudly, and I reached for the gin and noticed with horror and dismay that it was half gone, more than half gone. Sudden pressing memories of what I had never quite forgotten came upon me, and I looked at my watch and said that wasn’t it time they all went off to see their Fellini film. They were not at all easy to dislodge, having sunk down very thoroughly and chattily into my parents’ extra-comfortable old deep chairs, where they had an air of being held like animals in the warmth of the central heating: they waved their arms and said they would rather stay and talk, and I almost hoped they might, and might indeed have sunk back into my chair myself, taking as ever the short-term view, the easy quiet way, when Alex suddenly had a thought. I knew what it was as soon as he sat upright and looked worried and uneasy: he thought that I had been hurt by what they had said about Hurt, as I well might have been, though in fact was not. I knew, however, as soon as I saw the reflection of this possibility upon his face, that they would go: and go they did, scrupulous as ever about personal relationships, just as they were unscrupulous about gin. I kept them talking for five minutes on the threshold, gazing anxiously from one to the other; pretty, tendril-haired Dick; hatchet-headed Alex with his stooping stork shoulders; and pale, cross, nail-chewing, eye-twitching, beautiful Lydia Reynolds, in her dirty Aquascutum macintosh. I wondered if I could ask any of them to stay and share my ordeal, and it crossed my mind later that they would actually have enjoyed such a request, all three of them together: they would have leaped with alacrity at the prospect of such a sordid, stirring, copy-providing evening. But then, my thoughts obscured by need, I did not see it that way, and I let them go and see Fellini without me.

      When they had gone I wandered back into the sitting-room and sat down on the hearth rug and looked once more at the contents of my bottle of gin. There was not very much left. Not enough, I thought. Not enough, I hoped. I felt rather odd already; my head was swimming, and I felt slightly but unnaturally gay. Drink always cheers me up. I almost felt that I might abandon the whole project and go to bed instead, or cook myself some bacon and eggs, or listen to the radio: but I knew that I would have to go through with it, having once thought that I might, and regardless of its possible effectiveness. It would be so unpleasant, and I could not let myself off. So I picked up the bottle and carried it into my bedroom where I undressed, and put on my dressing-gown. On my way to the bathroom I tripped over the flex of the Hoover, which had been standing in the hall all week, and missed the bathroom door knob the first time I aimed at it. I remembered that I had not eaten since lunch. But it was when I tried to run the bath that the measure of my state was brought home to me. All the hot water in the flat was run from a gas heater in the bathroom: it could be got to run at a fierce enough heat, if one managed to control the flow of the water with sufficient care: there was a very intimate relationship between the volume of water coming from the tap and the strength of the gas jet. With too much water, the temperature would drop to tepid: with too little, the gas would extinguish itself entirely and the bath would run icy cold. It was difficult enough to regulate at the best of times, but that evening I just could not get it to work at all. I sat on the bathroom stool, letting the water run, and testing it with my finger, and trying again: eventually I thought I had got it right, so I put the plug in and while I waited I drank the rest of the bottle off, neat. It was so thoroughly nasty undiluted that I felt the act of drinking was some kind of penance for the immorality of my behaviour. It had an instantaneous effect: I felt immediately so drunk that I nearly fell into the bath in my dressing-gown. However, I managed to stand up and get it off and drop it on the floor: then I climbed into the water.

      I climbed out again at once, for the water was stone cold. I had erred on the side of too little volume and everything had gone out but the pilot light. Shivering, I stood there and gazed, defeated, at the hot tap. Perhaps, I thought, the shock to my system would have the same effect as the heat might have done. My unnatural cheerfulness increased as I became aware of the absurdity of the situation: I managed to struggle back into my dressing-gown, and then tottered back along the corridor to the bedroom, where I collapsed upon the bed. I felt so