It took me some time to realize that I was pregnant: the possibility had of course crossed my mind fairly early on, but I had dismissed it as being too ridiculous and unlikely a symptom of my sense of doom to be worth serious attention. When I was finally obliged to acknowledge my condition, I was for the first time in my life completely at a loss. I remember the moment quite well: I was sitting at my usual desk in the British Museum looking up something on Sir Walter Raleigh, when out of the blue came this sudden suspicion, which hardened instantly as ever into a certainty. I got out my diary and started feverishly checking on dates, which was difficult as I never make a note of anything, let alone of trivial things like the workings of my guts. In the end, however, after much hard memory work, I sorted it out and convinced myself that it must be so. I sat there, and I could see my hand trembling on the desk. And for the first time the prospect before me seemed so appalling that even I, doom-suspecting and creating as I have always been, could not look at it. It was an unfamiliar sensation, the blankness that occupied my mind instead of the usual profuse images of disaster. I remained in this state for some five minutes before, wearily, I set my imagination to work. What it produced for me was very nasty. Gin, psychiatrists, hospitals, accidents, village maidens drowned in duck ponds, tears, pain, humiliations. Nothing, at that stage, resembling a baby. These shocking forebodings occupied me for half an hour or more, and I began to think that I would have to get up and go, or to go out and have a cup of coffee or something. But it was an hour before my usual time for departure, and I could not do it. I so often wanted not to do my full three hours, and had so often resisted the lure of company or distraction in order to complete them, that now I felt myself compelled to sit there, staring at the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, in a mockery of attention. Except that after some time I found myself really attending: my mind, bent from its true obsession with what seemed at first intolerable strain, began to revert almost of its own accord to its more accustomed preoccupations, and by the end of the morning I had covered exactly as much ground as I had planned. It gave me much satisfaction, this fact. Much self-satisfaction. And as I walked down the road to meet Lydia for lunch, I discovered another source of satisfaction: now, at least, I would be compelled to see George. I had an excuse, now, for seeing him.
Later that afternoon I realized that I was going to see George now less than ever. It took some time for the full complexity of the situation to sink in. When I realized the implications of my deceit, it became apparent that I was going to have to keep the whole thing to myself. I could not face the prospect of speculation, anyone’s speculation. So I decided to get on with it by myself as best I could. I have already recounted my ludicrous attempt with the gin: after this I got in touch with a Cambridge friend of mine who had had an abortion, and asked for the address and details, which I obtained. I rang the number once, but it was engaged. After that I went no further. I do not like to look back on those first months, before anyone but me knew what was happening: it seemed too much like a nightmare, like an hallucination, and I kept waking up each morning and thinking it must be a dream, the kind of dream that my non-conformist guilt might be expected to project: I even wondered if all the symptoms from which I suffered might not be purely psychological. In the end it was the fear of being made a fool of by my subconscious that drove me to the doctor.
Seeing the doctor was not as simple an operation as one might have supposed. To begin with, I did not know which doctor to see. It was so many years since I had been unwell that I did not know how to set about it: in fact, I had not been unwell since I had become an adult. I had never had to do it on my own. The only doctor I knew was our old family doctor, who lived near our old but now abandoned family residence in Putney, and he was clearly unsuitable. I supposed that I ought to go to the nearest GP, but how was I to know who he was, or where he lived? Living within two minutes’ walk of Harley Street as I did, I was terrified that I might walk into some private waiting-room by accident, and be charged fifty guineas for what I might and ought to get for nothing. Being my parents’ daughter, the thought outraged me morally as well as financially. On the other hand, it did not seem a good plan to pick a surgery so evidently seedy that it could not exist but on the National Health: though this was in fact what I did. I passed one day, in a small road off George Street, after visiting an exhibition by a very distant friend, a brass plaque on a front door that said Dr H. E. Moffat. There was a globular light over the door, with Surgery painted on it in black letters. It was not the kind of door behind which anyone could be charged fifty guineas, and I made a note of the surgery hours and resolved to return the next day at five thirty.
I visited the doctor the next day. That visit was a revelation: it was an initiation into a new way of life, a way that was thenceforth to be mine forever. An initiation into reality, if you like. The surgery opened at five thirty, and I made a point of going along there quite promptly: I arrived at about twenty-eight minutes to six, thinking that I was in plenty of time, and would have to wait hardly at all. But when I opened that shabby varnished door, I found a waiting-room overflowing with waiting patients, patiently waiting. There were about twenty of them, and I wavered on the threshold, thinking I might change my mind, when a woman in a white nylon overall came in and said irritably,
‘Come on, come along in now and don’t leave the door on the jar, it’s on the bell, it makes a dreadful noise in the back.’
Meekly, I stepped in and shut the door behind me. I had no idea what I ought to do next: whether I should sit down, or give my name to somebody, or what. I felt helpless, exposed, before those silent staring rows of eyes. I stood there for a moment, and then the woman in white, who had been talking to a very old man sitting almost on top of the noisy gas fire, came over to me and said, in a tone of deliberate strained equanimity,
‘Well, are you here to see Dr Moffat? You’re a new patient, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Have you brought your National Health card?’
‘Oh no, I quite forgot, I’m frightfully sorry,’ I said with shame; I had known that I would make some mistake in procedure. I did not know the ropes.
‘Oh dear me,’ she said, and sighed heavily. ‘Do remember to bring it along next time, won’t you? What’s your name?’
‘Stacey,’ I said. ‘Rosamund Stacey.’
‘Mrs or Miss?’
‘Miss.’
‘All right then, take a seat.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I do know the number on my National Health card, if that’s any use.’
‘Oh, do you really?’ She brightened faintly at the news of this extraordinary feat of memory, and I reeled it off, glad to have 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