The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘There’s a whole box in the back,’ he said, and she reached for it, and then sat there, pulling pieces out and dabbing and recommencing.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said, with admiration. ‘You really do know how to cry, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s a special talent,’ she said. ‘Very good for me, and I always feel much better after it, but it makes everything terribly wet.’

  ‘Come on, now,’ he said, starting forward from some wet and gleaming traffic lights. ‘Tell me. When were you divorced, who divorced whom for what, and what did the court say about the children?’

  ‘How business-like you are,’ she said, gratefully. ‘Say all that again.’

  ‘Who divorced whom for what?’

  ‘I divorced him. For cruelty.’

  ‘Did he defend it?’

  ‘He did, actually. It was a horrible scandal.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know that you might feel that I ought to know. But I never read much about scandals.’

  ‘Don’t you really? I read every divorce case I ever see. And every custody case. Whenever they reach the papers. I must have known it, you see, I must have been expecting this all the time …’

  ‘Why did he defend it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why do people? Out of vindictiveness. Out of outrage. I don’t know, but he was quite right, something always sticks, however innocent one is, and anyway, he knew how to make me suffer, I can’t really blame him for wanting to make me suffer, can I?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t know much about it yet.’

  She smiled at him, suddenly, very nicely.

  ‘You poor thing, I bet you don’t want to, either, do you? I bet you wish you were safely home in bed, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I can’t deny that you’re upsetting me, but then you probably wouldn’t like it much if I were quite indifferent, would you?’

  ‘No, not really. But you needn’t get too upset, after all, it’s such an accident that it’s you here and not anyone else, isn’t it?’

  He was silent at that, not quite sure that he cared for her diminishing of his arbitrary role, especially as its accidental nature seemed in no way to restrain her from the most violent onslaught upon his sympathy – a claim, a demand, politely and diffidently enough expressed, but evidently quite relentless and insatiable. And she, sensing his reserve, continued.

  ‘Of course, I would like you to be sympathetic, but I wanted you to know that I see that you have to be. I wouldn’t like you to think that I am in the habit of making a nuisance of myself. Though perhaps I am, really, perhaps I am. And also –’ and here her voice stuck, as though she couldn’t get the sentence out, and it came out very coldly and a little high, ‘– Also, I am aware that there are different points of view, there are two sides to every case. You might not necessarily agree with my way of looking at it at all. And if you don’t agree, you must say so.’

  ‘My dear lady,’ he said (for some unknown reason), ‘you needn’t feel that I will be interested in seeing any side of the case but yours. Why should I? But if you were to bring yourself to tell me a few facts, I might be able to offer you a more useful form of sympathy, don’t you think?’

  ‘In the form of legal advice, you mean? I’m terrified of lawyers, you know, when you said you were a barrister at that dinner I nearly fainted, I thought – I don’t know what I thought, I thought you’d been planted there by him, or else that Nick and Diana somehow knew all about it and had invited you for just such a purpose as this, and then I told myself not to be so silly, it only happened today, nobody could possibly know, and then that journalist as well, I don’t trust journalists either.’

  ‘You’ll have to start giving me directions soon,’ he said, looking ahead at the unfamiliar streets. ‘I don’t know this part of London.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nobody does.’ She started to laugh. ‘That’s one of the things everyone’s got against me, they think I’m mad to live in such a place, but I like it, I really like it. Left, here.’

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Ever since I was married. Eleven years. We came here at the beginning. I couldn’t leave, now. Next on the right.’

  ‘Don’t you find it depressing?’ he said, depressed himself by the rows of identical houses, the endless curving streets, the ugly squat inelegantly gabled terraces, the dark breath of urban uniformity, petty eccentricity and decay.

  ‘Depressing? No, not at all. I know it, you see.’

  ‘And that makes a difference?’

  ‘Of course it makes a difference. I hated it at first, I hated it for years, but I believed in it, and now I love it.’ She gestured, suddenly, with her small light hand towards the passing streets and said, ‘All this, you see, I created it for myself. Stone by stone and step by step. I carved it out, I created it by faith, I believed in it, and then very slowly, it began to exist. And now it exists. It’s like God. It requires faith.’

  He was silenced. Listening to his silence, she said, equally suddenly and quite diffidently, as though used to defeat, ‘If you see what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t see what you mean,’ he said, ‘but it’s quite astonishing to hear you say it.’

  ‘I’m not boring you?’ she said, anxiously, but without any real fear. ‘It is interesting, isn’t it? And anyway, even if it isn’t, you must listen to me. Please.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the next turning on the left,’ she said. ‘Number eighteen.’

  The house, inside, was not what he had expected: it could not have been, for he had expected nothing, his mind having ceased to project any images upon this woman, who dealt him so lavishly such an alarming series of blows, who offered him so generously such surprising gifts. Gifts, her words were, her confidences. They could not be rejected: he sat there, in the shabby armchair, quite burdened with them, holding a cup of tea and a piece of fruit cake and copies of her various legal wrangles. He could hardly concentrate on these latter objects, so taken was he with everything else about him, with Rose herself sitting in a rocking-chair with a mangy cat upon her knee, with the flowered walls and litter of teddy bears and unwashed cups, with the crocheted tea-cosy on the teapot, with the peculiar objects upon the mantlepiece. He couldn’t at first work out why the room was at once so strange and so familiar: it was so entirely unlike his own home, or the homes of any of his friends or colleagues, but at the same time he recognized it, it was a known landscape, its very dimensions – for it was small, low, overcrowded with furniture – were reminiscent of somewhere intensely remembered. He sat there, his eyes resting blankly upon the names of Christopher Vassiliou and Rose Bryanston, and their painful efforts to engage and disengage themselves, and suddenly he had it: it reminded him, this room, of his grandmother’s house. The tea-cosy, the bundle of knitting, the ticking clock, the armchairs, the round tin tray, they were all objects that he had not seen for years, and here they all were, well worn, well used, lived with. He could not have said why the similarity, or rather the perception and recognition of it, so pleased him, as he had never cared for his grandmother’s house after very early infancy: he had found it cramped, oppressive, smelling of cats and bad cooking, and too full of deadly whiskery unfeeling menacing embraces. Perhaps it was the absence of embraces that made Rose’s house, in contrast, so soothing: she for sure was not going to seize his head and pinch his cheek and grind his nose upon her buttoned cardigan, and he did not see that he was called upon to make towards her advances that would have been only slightly less shocking. Sitting there in her rocking-chair she looked untouchable in some way that at this stage was a vast relief: she looked contained within herself, her body – hands, arms, head, neatly crossed legs – all a part of its own self, not reaching out or pleading in any direction. She was miserable, it was true, and had, in the car, been almost distraught: she had moreover appealed for assistance and thrown herself upon his goodwill in a way that should have been disquieting, bu
t the fact remained that there was nothing unquiet about her, and he could sense nothing underground or subversive in her appeal. Some people, simply by existing, struck him as subversive, and he recoiled from them in alarm, knowing himself quite unable to respond to their dark calls and silent conspiracies – unable, unwilling, he was never sure which, and it was this uncertainty that he disliked most of all. But this woman, although in a sense imposing quite brazenly upon his time at this time of night, was in some other sense most reassuring: her tears in the car, which he had found distressing at the time, were now completely over, and she felt, as she had said she would, clearly better for them. Her distress, her sorrow, her embarrassing confessions were not embarrassing at all, because it was as though she had so come to terms with them that she could afford to sit there, rocking gently backwards and forwards, while he read or pretended to read these painful documents about her private life. Her manner in distress, like her lack of beauty, held no threat, no offence, no violence. He envied her: sometimes he thought that his very appearance was an affront to others, as that of others was to him.

  And then again, he said to himself, how useless are these speculations: perhaps I am merely rationalizing to myself the relief of finding that I am not expected to make a pass at her. It was so difficult to know, these days, as a man, what was expected of one: he had little sympathy with women who would moan at him from time to time that they found themselves living in a world without rules, because the one rule that seemed quite clearly to remain was the rule that instructed a man to make the first move. The circumstances in which the move could be made had altered vastly, it was true, and took some learning, but then in his case they would have taken some learning anyway, so different were all the circumstances in London from those in which he had been reared. It would have been as difficult, or as easy, for him to have learned the rules of Victorian or Edwardian London as those by which Nick and Diana and other such friends appeared to conduct their lives. It did not often happen to him to find himself driving a woman home from parties, but when, occasionally, he did, he found it little use to know that one might casually embrace any single, divorced, separated or accidentally solitary person – because that solitary person, for any mixture of reasons, including simple reluctance and dislike, might quite easily refuse the embrace in a quite painful way. Not that he had ever tried it, but he knew himself well enough to know that women must find him as unquieting and ambivalent and underhand in intention as he found them. He had quite often wanted to try it, but had never done so, afraid both that he might like it and might not like it if they said yes, and knowing that he would quite disproportionately hate it if they said no. Even Diana, an old friend and wife of an older friend, afflicted him in this manner: it was not for a moment that he expected that she expected or wanted him to make any step towards her, it was just that he felt in her such an area of dissatisfaction, at times, such a pull of inadmissable emotional craving, that he could not be at ease with her. Nor, he knew, could she with him, because he was the same as she was: dissatisfied, uncontained. He repressed these dissatisfactions more rigorously than most, but feared that the repression made him even worse company. Because he disliked the lack of ease. Some people, he knew, thrived on it, and could not support any relationship that was not uneasy, tense, unfulfilled. But he, denied both peace and pleasure in lack of peace, was obliged to live in negation. It was not very good for him. But he did not see what else he could do. There was nothing else he could do. And it was for these reasons that he felt something unusually like contentment as he sat there, fulfilling a legitimate need, helpfully attempting to apply his mind to Rose Vassiliou’s problems: problems that seemed to him, the more he read of her papers, to be quite severe. It was a wonder that she could sit there so calmly, without fidgeting, calmly stroking her dirty grey cat.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ she said, when, finally, he looked up. ‘Do you make anything of it? It’s a bit late to get one’s mind round that kind of thing, I suppose.’

  ‘It is a bit late,’ he said, ‘and also very complicated. I should have to think about it, before I could really say anything helpful.’

  ‘But I ought to do something, oughtn’t I, about that letter that came today?’

  ‘You should really have handed it straight over to your solicitors. You’d better send it round in the morning.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I should. I can’t really face them again, but I suppose I’ll have to.’

  ‘They seem to me,’ he said, ‘to have looked after you quite well. They’re a good firm, you know.’

  ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘I know Jeremy Alford, slightly. Do you get on with him all right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She waved her hand about and then started to tug anxiously at an escaping lock of hair.

  ‘It’s just,’ she said, ‘that one does hate to bother them again. They were so helpful and nice, it seems awful to start bothering them all over again.’

  ‘But that’s absurd, you mustn’t look at it like that. That’s what they’re there for, it’s their living, it’s their bread and butter, that’s how they keep going. It’s money to them, you know, not trouble.’ He looked at her, and then, hoping he had got her right, taking a slight chance, said, ‘In fact, you know, this kind of thing, I’m afraid to say, lawyers find peculiarly interesting. They actually enjoy an interesting case like this. It’s not very nice of them, in one way, but quite useful, in another.’

  She brightened: he had been right. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did use to notice that other people enjoyed it. The barrister thought my divorce case was frightfully interesting, it made me feel much less of a nuisance, in a way. At least somebody was getting something out of it. Like doctors and rare diseases, I suppose.’

  ‘They’ll probably be delighted to hear from you again. In their sadistic way.’ She smiled, amused. ‘It will be to them,’ he said, presuming on success, ‘like the sequel in some particularly thrilling serial.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose that they might quite reasonably look at it like that. That’s quite comforting. I only hope –’ and she hesitated, at some genuine anxiety – ‘that the press don’t come to look at it that way. There’s no reason why they should get to hear of it, is there? They are always so interested in everything I do, for some reason.’

  ‘I can quite see why they are interested,’ he said, looking back at the papers, as though for confirmation. ‘What you have done is, really, rather strange, you know. But I don’t imagine they will get on to this. It will probably come to nothing, anyway. Your husband – wouldn’t tell them, would he?’

  ‘How well you seem to know him already,’ she said, with a faint wash of despair, that dislodged the cat from her knee. ‘But no, I don’t think so. He would have done, once, but now he’s become far too respectable. And too clever, too, I imagine. He is very good at picking up the proper ways of doing things. You should have seen how quickly he learned about witness boxes. If people did get to know, now, he wouldn’t let it be known that he had told them.’

  ‘I don’t think, then, that there is much danger’

  ‘And do you think –’ and here she leant her head back, and shut her eyes, ‘– do you think that there is any chance, any chance at all, of his getting the children? There isn’t, is there? Could there be?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible,’ he said, quickly, instantly, not allowing himself to think about how to reply. And then, thinking a little more, of something to say – ‘Do you think he really wants them back?’

  She shook her head, rocking it backwards and forwards on the back of the chair, not opening her eyes.

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve been asking myself, all day. I don’t know.’

  The subject having been opened, he had to go on with it, though he would rather have left it and continued to reassure.

  ‘Had you any suspicion that this kind of thing would happen? How
has he been towards the children since the divorce? He had, I assume –’ and again he pretended to consult the papers on his knee ‘– reasonable access?’

  ‘Yes. He used to come and take them out. Every other Sunday. And he used to take them on holidays sometimes. He wasn’t really allowed to, I don’t think, but how could I stop him? It was – not very good. He used to spend so much money on them. And with my not having it, and not wanting them to have it, it was … very difficult.’

  ‘And so you protested?’

  ‘No, I didn’t protest. I don’t protest. How could I? I could only go on doing what I was doing. I don’t expect everyone else to do the same. I don’t expect it. But sometimes – it becomes impossible to go on doing what one has to do. If other people are determined to prevent one.’ She paused, and sighed. ‘He took them out last Sunday. I wasn’t here. I left them with the woman next door, for him to collect. And he brought them back to her. That’s how it was.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, this time genuinely consulting the wad of correspondence, ‘that you refused to apply for maintenance, against your solicitor’s advice?’ At this, to his relief, she smiled, with true amusement.

  ‘Yes, I did, I refused. It would have been too silly, really, me having maintenance from him, wouldn’t it? I simply couldn’t see why they wanted me to apply, it was too absurd, in the circumstances, and they kept saying it was normal and would make things easier and that if I didn’t want the money I could give it back again or not take it or something. But I’ve had enough of giving money back again.’ She started to laugh. ‘I must have got rid of more money than anyone my age ever has. It’s quite a problem, I can tell you, though so different from most people’s that I never get very much sympathy for it. But when I thought of the terrible time I had getting rid of all those thousands, and what a disaster it all turned out to be, I really couldn’t face claiming ten pounds a week or whatever it would have been from Christopher. It’s not as though I’ve managed to get rid of everything yet. There’s another great lump due in a few years, when I’m thirty-five, that nobody could do anything about, and then I’ve got hundreds of square miles of pine-forest or whatever it is in Norfolk. I must go and have another look at it some day. Not that it brings me anything in, that was the whole point of it, that was why my father bought it, so I wouldn’t be able to touch it, but it’s all there, growing away, and some day somebody’s going to have to do something about it.’