The Millstone Read Online Free

of my family, my isolation (through superiority of intellect) as a child, my selfish, self-preserving hatred of being pushed around—but none of these imagined causes came anywhere near to explaining the massive obduracy of the effect. Naturally enough my virtuous reluctance made me very miserable, as it makes girls on the back page of every woman's magazine, for, like them, I enjoyed being in love and being kissed on the doorstep and, like them, I hated to be alone. I had the additional disadvantage of being unable to approve my own conduct; being a child of the age, I knew how wrong and how misguided it was. I walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon my bosom, visible enough in the end, but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery. In the end I even came to believe that I got it thus, my punishment, because I had
dallied and hesitated and trembled for so long. Had I rushed in regardless, at eighteen, full of generous passion, as other girls do, I would have got away with it too. But being at heart a Victorian, I paid the Victorian penalty.
    Luckily, I paid for the more shaming details in secret. Nobody ever knew quite how odd my sexual life was and nobody, not even the men I deluded, would have been prepared to entertain the idea of my virginity. Except, of course, Hamish who, being the first, knew quite well. However, even Hamish must have assumed that I got round to it later, as he himself did. He is now married and has two children. It did not take me long to realize, however, that I couldn't have everything; if I wished to decline, I would have to pay for it. It took me some time to work out what, from others, I needed most, and finally I decided, after some sad experiments, that the one thing I could not dispense with was company. After much trial and error, I managed to construct an excellent system, which combined, I considered, fairness to others, with the maximum possible benefit to myself.
    My system worked for about a year, and while it lasted it was most satisfactory; I look back on it now as on some distant romantic idyll. What happened was this. I went out with two people at once, one Joe Hurt, the other Roger Henderson, and Joe thought I was sleeping with Roger and Roger thought I was sleeping with Joe. In this way I managed to receive from each just about as much attention as I could take, such as the odd squeeze of the hand in the cinema, without having to expose myself to their crusading chivalrous sexual zeal which, had it known the true state of affairs, would have felt itself obliged for honour's sake to try to seduce me and to reveal to me the true pleasures of life. Clearly neither of them was very interested in me, or they would not have been content with this arrangement All I had to sacrifice was interest and love. I could do without these things. Both Joe and Roger were sleeping
with other girls, I suppose: Joe was reputed to have a wife somewhere, but Roger, now I come to think of it, more probably separated his sexual from his social interests. Roger was in many ways rather a nasty young man, being all that my parents had brought me up to despise and condemn; he was a wealthy well-descended Tory barrister person, clearly set for a career that would be aided more by personality than ability. He had many habits that my parents had always called vulgar, but which were no such thing, except by a total falsification of the word's meaning; for instance, he talked very loudly in public places and was uncivil to waiters who kept him waiting and people who tried to tell him about parking his car. He was not unintelligent and had a flair, connected no doubt with his profession, for picking out the main points from a book or play without reading it right through or listening to it very closely: he had a crudeness of judgment that appealed to me, as it was not ignorant, but merely impatient and unimpressed. He liked me, I think, partly because I was well-behaved and talkative, and handy to