Free The Millstone by Margaret Drabble Page A

wrote it."
    "Certainly, certainly," he said, with a look of brazen complicit apology, and got his essay out of his briefcase and started to read it: it was very good but in reading it aloud he treated it with a certain mockery, as though he could equally well have written anything else on the subject. He
was only eighteen and so sharp, as they say, that one day he would cut himself. I did not mind that he knew that I knew that he knew. He laughed, and did not feel sorry and offered to lift tables for me because he wished to provoke and not because he wished to display his sympathy. From him, too, my poverty must have been concealed.
     
    When I went to see the doctor again, he said that he had managed to book me a bed in St. Andrew's Hospital which, as he expected me to know, was on Marylebone Road. From the way in which he told me, I could see that he expected gratitude and that he considered he had done more for me than might have been expected of him. I was duly grateful, though on what grounds I was not quite sure: later I thought of three possible reasons for his air of achievement. It was quite clever of him to have got me a bed at all, in view of the shortage of maternity beds, and very clever of him to have got me one so close, and in a teaching hospital with an excellent reputation. After telling me that he had made this booking, he then washed his hands of me with undisguised relief. "You can go to the clinic at the hospital," he said, "and they'll look after you there."
    "Yes, of course," I said, as though I understood the whole procedure, though I wanted to ask him a dozen things, about when to go, and where to go, and whom to ask for: but he was a busy man and there was a long queue in the surgery outside, so I got up to leave.
    "Thank you very much," I said for the tenth time, and set off to the door: but he called me back and said, "Now then, you don't want to go without your letter of introduction, do you?"
    "Oh no, of course not," I said, as though it had just momentarily slipped my mind, and he handed over an envelope addressed to the Ante-Natal Clinic, St. Andrew's Hospital. It was a sealed envelope. I wondered what it said
inside. I felt slightly better leaving with that in my pocket as at least I now knew the name of the clinic which I was expected to attend: in those days I was so innocent that I did not even know what a clinic was.
    My first visit to that clinic was a memorable experience. I had ascertained the day and the time by telephone, a piece of forethought of which I felt moderately proud, and I duly presented myself on Wednesday afternoon. The hospital was easy enough to find, being a large sprawling building occupying a large area of ground on the north side of the Marylebone Road, not far from that elegant favourite of mine, Castrol House. St. Andrew's could not rival this latter building in architectural distinction; the central block appeared to be early eighteenth-century and had regularity if nothing else, but it was surrounded and overlapped and encroached upon by a hideous medley of neo-Gothic, nineteen-thirties, and nineteen-sixties excrescences, all of which had been added entirely at random, from the visual point of view at least. I was alarmed, not so much because the building was an eyesore, for my visual taste is very weak, but because I did not know how to get into it, nor which part to attack. There were innumerable doors and entrances, and I had a sense that the main door was certainly not the appropriate one. In the end, however, it was that one which I chose, as I thought there might at least be a reception desk inside it. Luckily, there was. I presented myself and my incriminating envelope and was told to go out again and find the Out Patients entrance, which the girl said was down a side street. So I went out and found the Out Patients and entered the building once more. Here, as I had suspected, there was no reception desk and no indication of any direction: there was a