The Millstone Read Online Free PDF Page B

and dine with us, introducing her to visitors, all that kind of nonsense. My God, they made themselves suffer. And yet at the same time they were so nice, so kind, so gentle, and people aren't nice and kind and gentle, they just aren't. The charlady went off with all the silver cutlery in the end, she despised them, I could see her despising them, and she knew they wouldn't take any steps. And the awful thing is that they weren't even shocked when she did it, they had seen it coming, they said. And my brother went and married a ghastly girl whose father was a colonel, and now he lives in Dorking and spends all his time having absolutely worthless people to dinner and playing bridge. My sister still tries, but she married a scientist and they live on the top of a hill in the middle of the country on a housing estate near an atomic station, and last time I went she was stopping the kids from playing with the kids next door because they'd taught them to say Silly Bugger. It's been a disastrous experiment in education, that's all one can call it."
    "Except for you," said George.
    "What do you mean, except for me? I don't consider myself to be a very fine example of anything."
    "Aren't your parents glad you've gone in for scholarship?"
    "Oh no, not really. Oh, I suppose they're pleased in a way that I did so well, but they think I'm a dilettante, I mean to say, Elizabethan sonnet sequences, it isn't as though I were even doing nineteenth-century novels or something worthy like that. They wanted me to read economics at Cambridge, or at least history. They never said so, but I could tell. There's no moral worth in an Elizabethan sonnet sequence, you know."
    "They must approve, though, of your independence."
    I looked at him uneasily, not sure whether he meant this straight or as a crack of some kind.
    "Won't you have a drink?" I said. "Have a whisky or something."
    "Don't they, though?"
    "I'm not at all sure that I am at all independent," I said, getting up and going to switch on the radio. "But I would like to be, that's true. Because, who knows, one may have to be."
    There was some Mozart on the Third; I left it on.
    "Aren't you working this evening?" I said. "Aren't you supposed to be there, doing a bit of announcing?"
    "Not tonight. It is Friday, isn't it? Why, do you want me to go?"
    "No, not at all. I like you to stay. If you like to stay."
    And I stood there by the radio, looking at him, and he looked back, and seemed to indicate, though not precisely, that I should go and sit by him on the settee. So I did, and he took my hand and held it, and then started to kiss my fingers, one by one. After a while I remembered what was at the back of my mind, and I said, "My mother, you know, was a great feminist. She brought me up to be equal. She made there be no questions, no difference. I was equal. I am equal. You know what her creed was? That thing that Queen Elizabeth said about thanking God that she had such qualities that if she were turned out in her petticoat in any part of Christendom, she would whatever it was that she would do. She used to quote that to us, when we were frightened about exams or going to dances. I have to live up to her, you know."
    And I in my turn raised his hand to my lips: it was so beautiful and cool and thin a hand, and I kissed it with some sadness. At the touch of my mouth, he took me in his arms and kissed me all over the face, and eventually we subsided gently together and lay there quietly. Knowing that he was queer, I was not frightened of him at all, because I thought that he would expect no more from me, and I was so moved and touched and pleased by the thought that he might like me, by the thought that he found me of interest. I was so happy for that hour that we lay there because truly I seemed to see him through the eyes of love, so irrationally valuable did he seem, I look back now with some anguish to each touch and glance, to every changing conjunction of limbs and heads and hands. I have