Read The Millstone for Free Online Page A

have kept him against his will. So I said nothing, but sat there for a moment more, feeling the weight of his hand upon my head, hot and warm and enclosing, like being all of me held in it, and feeling that there was no way to stay there in this momentary illusory safety. Then I stood up and said that it was late, I hoped it was not too late, and that I hoped he would get back where he was going. And even then, even at that moment, I did not have the courage to ask him where he lived, or to ask him what his phone number was, for it would have seemed an intrusion, an assumption that I had a right to know, that a future existed where it would be of use to know. I see, oh yes I see that my diffidence, my desire not to offend looks like enough to coldness, looks like enough to indifference, and perhaps I mean it to, but this is not what it feels like in my head. But I cannot get out and say, Where do you live, give me your number, ring me, can I ring you? In case I am not wanted. In case I am tedious. So I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing. And he said nothing. He could have done. He could have said, when can I see you again? But he didn't. It may be that I manifested enough strangeness and indifference to prevent him. It may be that he did not wish to, which, being the most unpleasant conclusion, was the one that I most readily believed. Or it may have been that, like me, he did not wish to make assumptions.
    When he had gone, I went to bed and lay there for some time thinking over what we had said and done. I could not get to sleep. For the first hour I was more happy than not, but as the night wore on and I came no nearer to sleep my mind became wracked by suspicion and by doubt. It was not that I felt guilt or regret for the one irreversible thing that had happened: about that I continued to feel nothing but relief. But such things do not happen in the abstract, and the circumstances worried me. I went back over every word George had said, and the more I looked back, the clearer it seemed that he had expressed no liking or affection for me at all. He had said I interested him, but he had said that only as a ploy, as a gambit. And anyway, what ground was interest on which to enact the event that had taken place? As I tossed and turned and tried to find a cool place for my cheek on the pillow, it became increasingly clear to me that he had made no overture at all: that I myself had made the decisive move, in going to sit next to him on the settee after switching on the radio, and that what I had taken to be a look inviting me to do just that had probably been nothing of the sort. I had offered myself, and thinking what he did of me he had accepted, through kindliness or curiosity or embarrassment; not in any case through anything like the tender emotions that had prompted me. The more I thought of it, the more hopeless it seemed: had he liked me, he would surely have made some suggestion that he might see me again?
    I ended up by convincing myself, almost, that the worst must be true: yet at the same time I knew it was not true, I knew that he would ring me, and that he had liked me, and that he would be happy to go on liking me. But I had to prepare for the worst. I did not wish to be deceived, I did not wish to be taken by surprise.
     
    George did not ring. After a week I knew that he was not going to, and I abandoned the idea. I could have seen him, easily enough, by calling at his pub or even by walking down Portland Place and Upper Regent Street on the off-chance, at some likely hour, but pride restrained me. If he does not want to see me, I thought, I do not want to see him. So I kept resolutely away from anywhere where I might be remotely likely to bump into him: I even took a different route to the British Museum each morning, and on one occasion when I was