The Millstone Read Online Free PDF

were both about to see each other in an unpleasantly revealing social light which would finish off our distant pleasantries forever. To escape this sense of unease, I started to tell him about my parents while the
kettle boiled and why they had let me have the flat, and how I couldn't for shame make money out of it by subletting, and how I didn't like anyone enough to let them live with me for free. "So I have to live alone, you see," I said, as I put the beans into the grinder, and hating my own tone of nervous prattle.
    "You don't like being alone?" he said, and I laughed edgily and said, "Well, who does?"
    "Oh, quite," he said, "quite. We're all human, I suppose," and I looked at him and saw that it was all right after all.
    "You seem to look after yourself, though," he said as I poured the water into the pot. "You seem to keep yourself quite busy."
    "I try my best," I said, and we carried the tray back into the sitting room. "And what about you?" I said as we sat down, I in one of the armchairs and he on the settee.
    "What do you mean?" he said, "what about me?"
    "Tell me about you."
    "What about me?" he said, smiling a deprecating smile, and shrugging his shoulders elaborately with a feminine emphatic diffidence.
    "All about you," I said with real avidity, for at that moment I so much wanted to know, I wanted to know all about him, being interested, caught, intent: but he continued to smile evasively and said:
    "What do you mean, all?"
    "Well," I said, "where do you come from?"
    "Ipswich," he said.
    "I don't know anything about Ipswich."
    "I bet you don't even know where it is."
    "Oh yes I do. It's sort of over there," and I waved my hand meaninglessly at an imaginary map of England, sketched on the drawing-room air. He continued in this vein, telling me nothing at all, but telling it with such an air of confidence that I did not take it amiss: I did not
quite dare to ask him about what his father did, or any such pertinent questions, though now I wish to God that I had had more courage, and had kept him at it until I had found out the lot. He resisted the pressure of my interest with expert skill, and this in itself surprised me as I was so used to being given endless unsolicited confidences by those in whom I had no interest at all. It occurred to me then that perhaps alone of my acquaintances he was not entirely obsessed by the grandeur of his soul or his career. He was an unassertive man. The very course of his career, which was all that emerged with any clarity, seemed to prove this: he had been sent to Hong Kong on his National Service, where he had got himself involved with Overseas Broadcasting, and on leaving had stayed on with the BBC, moving round the Middle East for a couple of years and then returning to London. When I asked him if it was boring, announcing boring things day in and day out, he said yes, but that he liked being bored. So I said that something must interest him, then, if his work didn't, and he said yes, I did, so why not talk about me.
    I tried to match him in diffidence but, of course, could not manage it. He asked me about my family, a subject on which I found it easy enough to be truthful: I recounted in some detail their extraordinary blend of socialist principle and middle-class scruple, the way they had carried the more painful characteristics of their non-conformist inheritance into their own political and moral attitudes.
    "They have to punish themselves, you see," I said. "They can't just let things get comfortable. All this going to Africa and so on, other people don't do it, other people just say they ought to do it, but my parents, they really go. It was the same with the way they brought us up, they were quite absurd, the way they stuck to their principles, never asking us where we'd been when we got back at three in the morning, sending us to state schools, having everything done on the National Health, letting us pick
up horrible cockney accents, making the charlady sit down