The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble [Drabble, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

My baby was due in early March: I amused myself by trying to finish my thesis before my baby. It was in fact somewhat of a hopeless task, as I was not even expected to finish it before the following Christmas, but I have always been a quick worker and now I had very little else to distract me. As the winter wore on, and spring set in, I felt less and less like going out, even as far as to the British Museum, and I organized myself so that I could do a good deal of work at home. It was less entertaining than working in the library, but I could at least get on with it. It was all shaping up quite nicely; my director of studies, a don in Cambridge, had approved my synopsis, rough draft, first chapter, and other indications of the final product, and had been most encouraging. I felt happy about it; I had got it all into shape in my head and knew more or less exactly what I was going to say and what ground I had to cover. Then, towards the end of January, I began to flag. Although I would not admit it, I felt at times too tired to read. I ate more and more iron pills but they did not seem to have much effect. In the end I decided that I had merely got stale through too much concentration on too few things, and that I ought to branch out a little. It was, however, impossible to find anything amusing to do; I did not enjoy walking any more, public transport was a continual trial, I could not sit comfortably through a full-length picture, and I could not eat anything interesting without suffering for it afterwards. I felt thoroughly annoyed; I could understand, in this condition, why women are, as they certainly are, such perpetual complaining bores. I was discussing my problem with Lydia one evening; she suggested all sorts of occupations, like knitting, or rug-making, or basketwork, or weaving, but I rejected all these pseudo-useful employments with contempt. Then she said, finally, why don't you do jigsaw puzzles: and they were what I took up.

One can, if one tries, buy extremely complicated jigsaw puzzles with a thousand interlocking pieces, and pictures by old masters, or of ships at sea, and heaven knows what: also puzzles in the shape of maps of Europe, square puzzles, circular puzzles, star-shaped puzzles, reversible puzzles, anything one can imagine in the way of puzzles. I became addicted and would spend hours over them; it was a soothing, time-consuming process, and when I went to bed I would dream not of George, nor of babies locked away from me where I couldn't feed them, nor even of childbirth, but of pieces of blue sky edged with bits of tree, or small blue irregular shapes composing the cloak of the Virgin Mary. Lydia had an irritating habit of coming in at the end

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