Free The Millstone by Margaret Drabble Page B

door marked HAEMOTOLOGY and a lot of dark gloss cream corridors. I stood there irresolute, feeling acutely ashamed at my own ignorance: it was an emotion that I had experienced often enough before, on my first day at
school, for instance, or my first day at Cambridge, but then with some mixed pleasurable anticipation, and now with nothing for foreboding.
    I was rescued from immobility by the arrival of another woman, very evidently pregnant, who came briskly through the doors from the street and set off with an air of speed and purpose down one of the cream corridors. I put two and two together, and followed her. Sure enough, she led me straight to the ante-natal clinic, which turned out to be a large hall with various small rooms leading off it, full of rows of chairs and waiting pregnant women. There was still five minutes to go before the clinic officially opened, for I had at least grown wise to the inevitable queueing, but the room was crowded already and there were only three or four chairs left. I occupied one of them and prepared to wait, and while I waited I had a good look at those who were waiting with me.
    They had one thing in common, of course, though their conditions varied from the invisible to the grossly inflated. As at the doctor's, I was reduced almost to tears by the variety of human misery that presented itself. Perhaps I was in no mood for finding people cheering, attractive or encouraging, but the truth is that they looked to me an unbelievably depressed and miserable lot. One hears much, though mostly from the interested male, about the beauty of a woman with child, ships in full sail, and all that kind of metaphorical euphemism, and I suppose that from time to time on the faces of well-fed, well-bred young ladies I have seen a certain peaceful glow, but the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. Anemia and exhaustion were written on most countenances: the clothes were dreadful, the legs swollen, the bodies heavy and unbalanced. There were a few cases of striking wear: a huge middle-aged woman, who could walk only with a stick, a pale thin creature with varicose veins and a two-year-old child in tow, and a black woman who sat there not
with the peasant acceptance of physical life of which one hears, but with a look of wide-eyed dilating terror. She was moaning to herself softly, and muttering, almost as though she were already in labour: perhaps, like me, she was more frightened of the hospital than of anything else. Even those who had no evident complaints, and who might well have been expected to be full of conventional joy, were looking cross and tired, possibly at the prospect of such a tedious afternoon: there was a couple of young girls in the row in front of me, the kind of girls who chatter and giggle on buses and in cafés, but they were not giggling, they were complaining at great length about how their backs ached and how they felt sick and how they'd never get their figures back. It seemed a shame. And there we all were, and it struck me that I felt nothing in common with any of these people, that I disliked the look of them, that I felt a stranger and a foreigner there, and yet I was one of them, I was like that too, I was trapped in a human limit for the first time in my life, and I was going to have to learn how to live inside it.
    After some time, various nurses arrived and things started to happen and the queue began to move. People disappeared, in a completely mystifying order, to have their blood pressure taken, and to be weighed, and to see Doctor This and Doctor That and the midwife. I sat there for a while wondering if anyone would come and ask me for my card, and when they didn't I decided I would have to find someone to give it to; eventually, afraid that I would be accused of queue-jumping, I rose tentatively to my feet and went in search of authority. I found a nurse who took my envelope and told me to go and sit down again, so I did, and prepared myself for