The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  He knew better, for some reason – for some clue she had given him, some covert signal – than to ask her why she lived where she lived: the interesting fact was interesting only if self-sufficient, it would bear no explaining – and so he had time only to make a comment or so upon the unreliable behaviour of taxis before she was removed from him, and taken to talk to other people – other people who knew her already, he noted, from the tone of the greeting, and then in a moment, before he had time to do more than reflect on the insatiable congregating sociability of misanthropes like himself and people who lived behind Alexandra Palace, Diana appeared to summon them, at last, to dine. He was very hungry, as he had not eaten since lunch: an inadequate and hurried lunch on Fleet Street. And he found himself hoping, as they descended the stairs, that he might perhaps find himself sitting next to Rose Vassiliou.

  He had not for so long experienced something like preference, something like a faintly favourable emotion, that he dispelled it from his consciousness most consciously: it would not do to fall too eagerly upon the neck of so shy and rare a visitant. He talked, instead on the way down the stairs, to the man who was a journalist: but nevertheless, at the table, it was beside Rose that he found himself requested to take his place. She was turned from him, as he sat, towards Nick, on whose right she was seated, and she remained so turned, except for a few brief swervings for salt or bread, until the soup was over: so he concentrated his attention upon his other neighbour, a tall divorced woman who said that she ran an agency for disseminating news upon artistic and social events: ‘an official grapevine, you might say,’ she said to him, flashing at him some very white and even teeth, and he could not tell if she were truly commercial in spirit, which he might have understood if not respected: or whether she truly interested herself in such matters. He suspected the latter, for there was something of the enthusiast in her manner, something both excitable and gullible, that he recognized from his domestic experiences: though this was perhaps merely a front, an attractive shine, upon the harder business of making gossip pay. He contented himself in listening to her, for he had little to say, being well aware that a mention of his own profession, even if offered in a spirit of polite exchange of information, would have created in her a response of instant, pitying boredom: so he listened, and asked questions – being quite well enough informed, alas, to ask the right questions – and from time to time, as he looked down at his green soup, he also looked slightly askance at Rose Vassiliou’s hand, which was crumbling to pieces, with an untiring restless purposeless motion, the brown wholemeal bread on her plate. It interested him, this hand, and he remembered the touch of it in greeting: it had been light and dry, and the back of it was brown and slightly crazed like an old earthenware pot. He could not recollect that he had ever seen so fine a mesh of wrinkles, that had about them no suggestion of age, or of loosening of the skin: they were of the surface, like small scratches. The hand looked not old, but childlike. One nail only had been bitten: a confined neurosis, attached to the index finger. There was a ring on the middle finger with a white stone in it: a sardonyx. The hand hovered over the bread, restlessly plucking and seizing and crumbling, like a friend or a small bird.

  When the soup plates had been removed, amidst conventional cries of appreciation, which Diana accepted quite graciously, already convinced that the casserole would prove inedible, Rose Vassiliou turned to Simon, correctly, and smiled a little anxiously – (eyestrain, perhaps, had caused that look of concentration, those hair-like crowsfeet) – and said to him, ‘You were at college with Nick, I believe?’ and he said that yes, indeed he had been, and at school too, oddly enough: ‘You come from the North, then?’ she said, ‘I would not have known it’ – and he and Nick exchanged glances, and both agreed that they had camouflaged themselves well. ‘The North East, it was,’ said Nick. ‘The North East. Simon never goes back, do you, Simon?’

  ‘I have no cause to go back,’ said Simon. ‘Everyone has moved. My mother lives near Hastings now, so there is no cause to go back.’

  ‘You don’t dislike it, then?’ she said, left in dialogue with him because Nick’s other neighbour had claimed his attention: and he replied, ‘No, not particularly, but my wife does, and so we don’t go –’

  ‘Why does she dislike it?’ said Rose, and then, thinking better of the question, attempted to disguise it by helping herself to some vegetables. But it was too late. He replied, saying that she disliked it because she too was from the same region, and had always hated it with a real passion, and now could hardly be dragged there for any reason. ‘Sad, to hate the place where one was born,’ said Rose, and he agreed that it was sad, but common, and asked her, aware of rashness, where she had been born herself. ‘In the country,’ she said, sighing, as though the phrase explained itself. ‘In the country.’ He found it difficult to interrogate her, aware that there were facts about her that he might have been expected to know, but she continued, after a pause, and after a sip of wine: ‘I was born at our house in Norfolk.’

  ‘And did you like it there?’ he asked, wondering what violent wave had thrown her thence to the back of Alexandra Palace – a journey so much the reverse of his own, so different a shore upon which, in the middle of life, to find oneself cast – and she said, through a mouthful of beans, ‘Oh yes, I liked it, how could one not like it? That’s the trouble with nice places, one can’t help liking them,’ – and then she smiled, a smile full of a wish to please, and said to him, changing the subject from herself, afraid to bore (a sign he recognized) and said – ‘And you, what do you do here in London? You’re not in television like Nick, are you?’

  ‘How can you tell I’m not in television?’

  ‘It’s your suit, I think, it’s too respectable. You’re not offended, are you? I like respectable suits – and your hair, too, no, I can tell you’re not in television. I don’t want you to be in television, I want you to tell me about something quite different. You’re not offended, are you?’ – and her hand hovered near his sleeve, placating and gentle, and then returned to its dry crumbs – ‘Tell me what you do,’ she said, managing to sound as though she might almost want to know. ‘Tell me something new.’

  ‘I could tell you about Trades Union legislation,’ he said, ‘for instance. I tried to explain it to somebody before you arrived, but she found it as dull as I’m sure you would.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ she said, ‘I am most interested in Trades Unions, I am even not uninformed on the subject – but you’re not a Trades Union man, are you? Surely not?’

  ‘What will you allow me to be?’ he said, watching her profile as she ate, watching her as she turned back to him, quite unusually susceptible to her interest, hardly yet beginning to guard himself against its ease, so careful was its expression: ‘Why, you can be what you like,’ she said, laughing, gesticulating with her free hand, ‘you can be what you like, but tell me what you are, and in exchange I will tell you the story of my many careers –’ and he, lured on by this truly interesting bargain, said, ‘Well’ (for how could such a statement go unprefaced) – ‘well, I’m a barrister.’ And her smiling face, turned towards him, flickered and flinched as though a bright light had suddenly dazzled her fading eyes. It was unmistakable: he saw it happen. She looked down at her plate, and he saw the food through her gaze suddenly unpalatable, though she had been eating with hunger until that moment: she pushed petulantly at a lump of chicken skin, she prodded a bean, she struggled quietly, and then she looked up again, chewing a piece of sausage the texture of which communicated itself to his own mouth, and said ‘Ah yes, a barrister, that I wouldn’t have guessed. And what have barristers to do with Trades Unions?’

  It was so quick a transition, so cool a recovery, so useful an assumption of quite spurious naïveté, that he in turn wanted to lay his hand upon her sleeve, but he was not given to such gestures, so he made his own: and his own consisted of explaining quite seriously his own connections with industrial law. She listened, gravely, assent
ing now and then to some query, but so quietly that he could not tell whether or not she appeared to agree with him through politeness, through a genuine similarity of conviction, or because she was thinking about something else, about that something else into which the name of his profession had obtruded so disturbingly. He could still sense in her a whole area of sensitivity that he had unwittingly exposed and was now afraid to touch, so it was with some relief that he enlisted Nick’s help – having seen Nick’s head turn slightly as he heard the word ‘compensation’ – and Nick, sure enough, was quite happy to turn round and recount the only piece of litigation that had ever interested him, which was the consequence of an accident that his aunt had had while bicycling to work at a biscuit factory near Tynemouth in 1938.

  Simon had heard the story many times before, but one could not deny that Nick recounted it with real wit: his aunt’s pride in her important position, her delight at finding herself a precedent, her Cuttings Book of all the newspaper reports on her case, made a good anecdote. Simon always enjoyed it twice over – once, because he was the only person there who really appreciated the technical details and significance of the case – and then all over again, maliciously, because again, he was the only person there who knew exactly what this particular aunt meant in Nick’s delicate social presentation of himself. Nick’s social background was simple enough to describe in real terms: his father was a dispensing chemist in a miserable working-class district in Gateshead, and as such had enjoyed considerable local prestige, being, comparatively, a man of substance and learning. His mother had been a dressmaker, and her four sisters, of whom the bicycling aunt was one, had all been factory workers. Nick, throughout grammar school, where Simon had first met him, had laboured endlessly to upgrade his own background: the aunts were concealed, rejected, utterly denied. The more affluent aspects of his home life were peddled mercilessly: he had done a good trade, Nick had, during the war, at primary school, with Horlicks tablets, soda bombs, vitamin sweets, and other such lures for sweet-rationed youth. By the time he reached grammar school, he had stopped trading in sweets, officially, and started trading in his father’s interest in nuclear disarmament, an interest which his schoolfriends found amazingly avant-garde and chic, for a father. Then he arrived at Oxford, sized the situation up in a trice, dropped his emancipated father, and started to trade in his working-class aunts. They were invaluable to him. He flaunted them at debates, bandied them about at parties, flung them at insolent girls at balls, crushed friends with them over a quiet drink in the pub. They were never, of course, allowed near the place: they worked better from afar. Simon was the only person who had ever met any of them. He wondered, sometimes, how Nick could bear to know what Simon knew about him. Was it connivance? For there were things that Nick knew about Simon as well, perhaps.

  From industrial compensation, the conversation moved vaguely and generally on to the validity of cherished grievances: the North versus the South, workman and employer, Arabs and Israel, Northern Ireland, the rights of women. The journalist, who was sitting next to Diana, defended most ably the view that one canot endure more than what passes in one’s own lifetime, and that any claim to hereditary woe is a luxury: it was so much what Simon had once believed, and better put than he could have put it, that he listened with real interest. It was a good subject, the conversation was good, and yet at the back of his mind nagged the knowledge that he no longer thought it to be true, the line taken, and that people endure not one lifetime but many, layers and layers of evolved suffering handed down, worse than anything Freud had ever proposed in the way of predestination, and into his mind, as he tried, inadequately, to formulate something of this conviction, came a whole recollection so vivid that it startled him – his mother, standing next to him in church, looking down at him when she saw what the psalm for the day was, and saying to him crossly and primly and vehemently, her brow wrinkled with outrage, her hat bobbing insecurely as she bent to his low level – ‘Pay no attention to this psalm, it’s wicked, it’s ungodly, Simon. They shouldn’t sing it in this day and age, they shouldn’t really.’ The psalm was the 137th Psalm, about the waters of Babylon, and its message was that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, and that the brains of the children of one’s enemy should be dashed out upon the rocks. He too had believed the psalm wicked: wicked it was: but true. She had tried to undo it for him, his mother, she had tried to break the chain and untie the knot, but how uselessly, to what avail.

  There was another dissertation on the same theme, in Ezekiel. She had pointed it out to him. Ezekiel too had tried to arrest the course of destruction. Thousands of years ago. Ezekiel had said, ‘What do you mean, by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”? As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine, the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine!’ He had made a brave attempt, that ancient prophet. The sour grapes, the crushing of grapes, and the battering of babies’ soft skulls. Israel and Egypt, from generation unto generation.

  When they had finished talking about Israel, he asked them what they understood by the term radical. What does it have to do with roots, he wanted to know – a cutting of roots, a planting of roots, a discovery of roots? They picked it up with interest, and went over it: he sat back and listened. Carrots and turnips, Cobbett and Burke, he was no historian, but it did seem to him that he and Nick had travelled rather too far too quickly. A radical ought to believe, must believe it possible to convert a nation within a generation, but could that ever be so? Where would he have been if his mother had not fed him pelican-like with her own blood? It was all very well, free higher education, education acts, grammar schools – was it not significant that of all the people round this table, he and Nick (Nick only by maternal descent) were the only two who might with any justice be called working class, and that they had arrived there because their parents – Nick’s father, his own mother – had bent on thier sons the peculiar weight of their own thwarted ambitions? From generation unto generation. Men do not spring out of the earth like soldiers from dragons’ teeth, nor do they spring into and out of grammar schools with such abandon.

  He found himself thinking like this more often these days. A sign of age, no doubt.

  The others round this table, no doubt about it, had all had it made from birth. Some more than others, but they had all been born into possibility, into affluence. It was easy enough to tell. He was good at picking out masqueraders, being one himself. It was less easy with women, it was true – he saw less well the shades of their past, their pursuing furies, for they were obscured to him by their nice clothes and their nice bodies. But one could still tell.

  So what, therefore, did it mean, that their views were so correct, so liberal, so progressive: what did it mean, that hardly a breath of dissension ruffled their faith in the progress of equality? Only the journalist demurred, and he was an economist, and therefore obliged, these days, it would seem, to breathe a note of sober pessimism: economists, Simon could not help noticing, had moved slowly to the right over the last year or so, like a moving backcloth, against which he stood, himself a stationary object: they rippled past, row after row, or so he thought, but maybe it was not so, maybe he met different people these days, or maybe, it was not inconceivable, maybe he had himself moved imperceptibly, without noticing it, towards the left? That could not be so, surely, one became reactionary with age. It must be the acceleration of the warned and the wise, fleeing some real or imagined disaster, that had left him standing. But he was in good company. All the rest of them, save the economist, were with him: there they sat, well-dressed, liberal, enlightened on the massive National Debt. Would it ever sink beneath them? There seemed little danger of such an event.

  And he and Nick, two from amongst all those millions, had made it, after all.

  The conversation fell to pieces when the wom
an who ran an agency could not resist introducing the fact (while they were on the subject of roots) that there was to be a new production of Roots at the Oxford next month with of all people Myra Hallam in the lead, could one imagine: no, one could not imagine, yes, one would quite like some chocolate mousse, thank you very much, and did she know that Richard Boot was signed up to play the lead in Miroslav’s new film? Simon tipped some cream on to his mousse and felt himself, unhappily, at home: so much at home that he even contributed some transatlantic news of the same nature, relayed to him the night before by his wife, news pertaining not to the theatrical but to the artistic world (could one distinguish, on such a level of operation, the two) and he was quite glad that the news, such as it was, had managed to find a more suitable resting place than his own memory. Little did he care what Adam had said to Julie about Paolo, or what prices were being asked for Cather’s new pieces, or why Hannah set up on her own: but others cared or appeared to care, and he noticed with a faint rustle of apprehension that Rose Vassiliou, nibbling delicately at a leaf of watercress salad, its stalk pinched between two fingers like a flower, attached herself with as much curiosity to such news as anyone round the table: he had lost in her an ally, and yet he knew quite well that he would have been yet more alarmed had she withdrawn herself and silently denounced the tone of the conversation, for who had introduced it but himself? And how was she to know, how was anyone to know, that the kind of pleasure that he had once taken in such subjects had been converted, long ago and thoroughly, into an irretrievable boredom, in view of the fact that he spent a lot of energy in trying to conceal just such an impression? He concealed it too well by half, perhaps: a good job well done, and to his own undoing. But there was no harm in appearing to be interested in such cultural junk as was now being discussed avidly: it hurt nobody but himself. It was even an act of loyalty to absent Julie. He might as well demonstrate himself a husband in her absence as in her presence: in her presence, anyway, the act was no longer very effective, as she had learned to see through him, had indeed heard too many of his real views in private, to be taken in by a politely assumed attention. She knew perfectly well by now that his attitude towards many of her interests amounted to loathing: he loathed pop art, modern plays, television, owners of art galleries, interior decorators and modern furnishings with an almost undiscriminating passion. He loathed, in fact, people like this agency woman, facing him across the table with her dreadful braying toothridden bosom-shaking laughter: and as he sat there, politely, at dinner, eating the last mouthful of his chocolate mousse, and trying to smile at some name-dropping tale about a well-known actress, he felt himself plunging into misanthropy, as a drunken man plunges suddenly into an awareness of being drunk. He tried hard to stop it, and its inevitable distortions, as a drunken man tries to still the waverings of trees and stony walls and picture rails and cornices: knowing it to spring from himself, ignobly: but such visitations are beyond the realm of the will, he could do nothing, he was helpless, he lowered his eyes to his plate and sat there, and it was with a sensation of profound physical relief that he saw Diana rise to her feet, and lead the way up the stairs.