The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Then what, may I ask, do you live on?’

  ‘You may ask,’ she said, still laughing, ‘you may well ask, and I might as well tell you that there was a day when I’d have been deeply embarrassed to tell you, I thought it was so embarrassing to be able to live at all, in this world. But I’ve grown up a bit since then, I’m not quite as mad as I used to be, you know. No, the truth is, that when I gave all that money away, eight years ago or whatever it is, I kept enough to give me enough to live on, in income. Or I thought it was enough, the idea was that it would be just enough. It was so farcical, you should have seen me, sitting down and working out what the national average income was, and what the level of national assistance was, and all that kind of thing – so stupid, I always had to do it all myself because no accountant would ever help me, accountants really can’t bear to let one give one’s money away, they simply wouldn’t be a party to such a ridiculous enterprise, so in fact I made some rather strange miscalculations, and I meant to leave myself with fifteen pounds a week and in fact left myself with more like eighteen pounds ten. But even that, as you can well imagine – or as I can now imagine you can imagine, though it’s the kind of calculation I was as bad at as I was bad at investments – that really wasn’t enough, so in fact since Christopher left I’ve been doing a variety of odd jobs. I did dinners at the school, and I supervised the laundrette, and stuff like that – bloody badly paid jobs, they were – once I thought I ought to do something a bit more ambitious and I worked for the publicity man on Act for Racial Harmony, but it was so horrid and everyone pestered me so much that I gave it up. But in fact, you see, one can live quite magnificently on eighteen pounds ten, especially when one has wealthy friends like me. I get asked to so many things, I could live for free, I sometimes think. And I have to go to a lot of the things because they’re all good causes, and I can’t say no. And also I have a lot of good friends who are really intelligent like Nick and Diana, who don’t seem to want anything from me, and at the same time are very good at helping me to deal with the rest of the world.

  ‘So I live quite well. Though some people might not think so.’

  He had tried hard to follow this, while she was speaking, but had already recognised that he would have to study her past transactions in peace and quiet if he was ever to understand them: and he truly failed to understand her reference to the intelligence of Nick and Diana, though perhaps it had been an oblique compliment to his own polite attention. Or perhaps she had seriously intended it.

  Perhaps she judged Nick and Diana from a standpoint utterly different from his own. Perhaps he had failed, himself, to appreciate them. Though what right had she, suddenly, like this, out of the blue, to imply superior intimacies, superior illuminations? He felt once more, welling up in him, uncontrollably, suspicion, distaste, anger. If Nick and Diana understood her so well, and she them, why had she not stayed behind to talk to them, instead of forcing him into the role of confidant, instead of conning him by her doubtless professional confidences into movements of true sympathy?

  One would have had to be hard-hearted enough to resist, as she had quite well known: but then that was what he was: hard-hearted. Hard-hearted and also weak. She had probably seen it at once. He cleared his throat, shuffled the papers back into their battered folder, and said, nastily enough, picking up her last remark, ‘Yes, I daresay you do manage quite well, but nevertheless I think you ought to get in touch with your solicitor first thing in the morning. I think that’s the best advice I can possibly give.’

  She did not look at him: she looked at her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, evenly. ‘Yes, I am sure you are right. It is very kind of you – to have taken so much trouble.’

  And she looked up at him: their eyes met. He could see that the change in his tone had registered profoundly, and he wished, immediately, that it had not.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ she continued, ‘I ought to never have kept you up so late. But I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you, for having listened to me. I had to talk about it, and it was so kind of you to listen. But one ought not to inflict one’s problems on other people, I suppose, it is very inconsiderate.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, attempting warmth, to no avail. ‘I am very glad that you told me. I am only sorry that I cannot be of more use.’

  ‘You have been very helpful,’ she said, hopelessly. She had abandoned him, she had cast him out, and it was by his own choice that he had been expelled, from this warm room and intimate, redeeming, cluttered pool of light. She had had no choice: he had demanded it. He saw it very clearly. It was this, his damnation: to know the bias of his nature, to know its dangerous weighting, and to be quite incapable, quite helpless to redress it. He had known he had misjudged her: he had known himself to be neither conned nor trapped but on the contrary trusted: and he had nevertheless rejected trust, and had thus pointlessly hurt her. He struggled: it was too late, but he struggled, he tried to go back, and when he spoke it was to make the only amends he could, the amends of dry justice.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘there is something more that I could do. If I think of anything, I will let you know. Or you could give me a ring, if you needed me. Anyway, I hope you will let me know what happens.’

  It would have taken a miraculous generosity to respond to the coldness of this offer, and he hardly expected her to do anything other than flinch, having once recognized, as she so clearly had, his treacherous withdrawal, and being unable to recognize, as she must surely be, his desire to withdraw his withdrawal: but, amazingly, she looked at him again, and smiled with an extraordinary niceness, and said, warmly, with enthusiasm,

  ‘You are nice, you really are so kind, and I have been so awful, dragging you out here and giving you nothing but a cup of tea. How awful I am, I am so selfish, and I try so hard not to be.’

  ‘You gave me a very nice piece of cake, too,’ he said, in a neutral, hopeful tone.

  ‘Did you like it? Have another slice. I made it myself. I like making cakes, it is lovely now that the children will eat them, little children don’t eat cake, you know, whatever people say, only big children eat cake. How old are your children? Have another slice.’

  ‘I really couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I must go.’

  ‘I suppose you must,’ she said. ‘Do you have far to go? I hardly dare ask, in case it turns out you live in Dulwich or something dreadful like that.’

  ‘Nothing like as bad as that,’ he said. ‘Only Hampstead. It’s quite near, really.’

  ‘Yes, that’s not too bad, that could have been a lot worse. What a relief.’

  He rose to his feet, still holding the folder, and said, indicating it, ‘Perhaps I might keep these, for a day or two? I could go through them and see if anything occurs to me? Would you mind?’

  ‘Not at all, of course I wouldn’t mind. How very nice of you.’ She too rose to her feet, and then said, a little anxiously, ‘You know, you could stay the night if you like. If you don’t feel like driving. I could easily put one of the children in my bed, it wouldn’t be any trouble.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said, meaning it, and managing to sound as though he meant it. ‘But I don’t think I should. I have to be at work early in the morning, so I’d have to get up even earlier and get home to collect my things. It wouldn’t be worth it.’

  ‘No, I can see that. Oh dear. Oh well, never mind. You will forgive me, won’t you?’

  She followed him into the hall, where he unhooked his hat and coat.

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ he said, about to go. ‘I’m afraid that I too, like other inquisitive lawyers, find such affairs quite interesting. Quite unusual, the whole case, really, you know.’

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ she said, frowning slightly at him. ‘Odd, really, how unusual it all is. When all my life I’ve tried so hard to be normal. But perhaps an abnormal person trying to be normal is bound to produce very unorthodox results, do you think?’


  ‘I am not yet qualified,’ he said, ‘to express a view, as to your normality or abnormality.’

  ‘The judge who divorced me,’ said Rose, ‘said I was highly eccentric. I thought that very unkind. You will read that, you have it all there, there’s a copy of the transcript.’

  ‘I will read it,’ he said, ‘with great interest.’

  And so they shook hands, and he left her, and drove back to his empty house. As he drove he thought of the child’s warm bed that he might have slept in. The opportunity was not to recur.

  He also thought that perhaps there was a natural progression, an inevitable progression, for people like himself, from his background, who had grown up amidst too much physical intimacy – houses too small, settees too narrow, bedrooms too full, kisses (like his grandparents’) too brutal and forceful – from this world they could only wish to grow apart, into the thinner air of non-touching, into larger rooms and spaces. And having reached this clear, empty space, they would wish once more to find touching, to find chosen, not accidental warmth, to find intimacy and contact. And it would no longer be possible, the world of touch would be lost for ever, and they, the refugees, the sensitive ones who had found the noises and the pushing unendurable and had fought their way out on to a clear drawing-room carpet with empty yards on either side, would eye each other across the spaces, isolated, marooned, unable to approach or touch, or share a bodily warmth, having lost for ever this capacity. He thought of his mother, in the large high rooms of her Victorian boarding-house on the South Coast, living her South Coast life, breathing the unpolluted inhuman air: his sympathies were with her, for he too had recoiled where she had recoiled (she had taught him to do so), and yet where was she now, where was he now, what had they lost in gaining so much?

  He thought, too, of Rose Vassiliou. She had been christened Rose Vertue Bryanston, or so it said on various documents. He wondered where the name Vertue had come from. If he saw her again, he would ask her. He was sure to see her again. Why else had he kept her papers, but as a hostage for that possibility? He was rather frightened by her papers. She should never have let him have them, it was indiscreet and unprofessional of him to have taken them, he felt: though he could not have said why.

  When he got home he locked them away in a drawer and pretended for a whole day that they were not there.

  Rose, lying awake in bed after Simon Camish had left, got up in the end and got a child and took it into bed with her. It was the middle child of the three, the one that never woke. She held on to it both for comfort for herself and to protect it. She was worried to death about three things and she did not know which worried her most, as two of them were serious and one was not, but the non-serious one being the most recent was naturally uppermost in her mind, out of all proportion to its gravity. She was dreadfully worried about the man called Simon Camish and the dreadful way she had inflicted her problems upon him, and the entirely stupid way she had let him go off with her papers when she could see that he had only offered to take them because he was afraid that otherwise she would think that he was not interested (which he probably was not). If he was interested, that was dreadful, because he would be able to work out all the very bad things about her and Christopher and all the reasons why she might lose the children, and if he was not, then that was worse. Anyway, it had been incredibly foolish to tell such things to a total stranger (however well known to Nick and Diana, and however often discussed by them, and however obviously trustworthy and reliable, quite agonizingly reliable, from Diana’s accounts). Whatever Nick and Diana thought of him, and she could see that they thought a lot, the fact remained that to her he was a total stranger who had been bullied unmercifully into driving her home and listening to her difficulties and reading her incredibly boring and confusing and incomprehensible documents. There was no excuse, she should not have done it, it had been not at all kind of her, and very stupid of her to have assumed so simply that he would see her point, would be on her side. She ought to have learned by then that many people found it very difficult to see her point. It was far more common, she reflected, for people to see her husband’s point, when they thought about it: but then she herself did not reflect or think enough, she was hopelessly impulsive, and thinking about this and the reasons for it brought her onto her second and more serious anxiety, which was the complete and hopeless irredeemability of her own nature. She was so weak, she was so shockingly weak and trusting and shallow, spilling herself like that to any stranger who did not firmly enough drive away: she was simply incapable, and had always been so, of behaving in a rational and considered manner. The events of the whole day had borne witness to this: first of all she had been so silly about the child next door, when Mrs Flanagan had asked her to mind it, she should have said straight out, No, I’m sorry I can’t, I’ve got to take Maria to buy some new shoes, but instead as usual she’d said Oh yes, fine, and had found herself dragging around with Maria moaning and the Flanagan baby yelling and the result had been that she’d had to leave the shoe shop without buying anything, and Maria’s laceups had got holes in the toes, real holes. And then Dickie White had rung her, the moment she got back, from Bush House, and asked her if she’d go and take part in a discussion about the Urumbi uprising, and she’d said no, and he’d said oh dear I’d been counting on you this time, you couldn’t do it last time I asked you, and so she had said yes, and when she put the phone down and started to think about it she had realized that in fact last time Dickie had rung she had in fact said yes, because he had used exactly the same line on her, and had clearly found it totally effective. Then, just as she was cooking the lunch, the letter had arrived from the solicitors, and she had tried for hours without success to pretend that she had neither received nor read it, shoving it behind the plant on the mantelpiece and willing it not to be there, but it was there, and when the children were watching Huckleberry Hound and were quite busily occupied she had furtively got it down again and read it again, and it seemed suddenly very serious, and she knew quite well (as Simon Camish had said) that she should communicate immediately with her solicitors, but she hadn’t dared, so instead she had rung up Emily and had told her all about it, and Emily had been as kind, witty, sympathetic and practically useless as ever – in fact even more useless because by the time Rose had got off the phone to her the solicitors were shut, though she supposed it was also true that even had she not rung Emily or had she talked to Emily for less long, she would still have taken great care not to ring the solicitors until too late, as she could not really face speaking to them at all. So she had then braced herself to re-read yet again the letter from Dawson, Mead and Woodbrooke, and had found this time, what she had not noticed before, which was that their client (meaning her husband) had simply instructed them that he wished the question of custody to be reconsidered. The wards-of-court threat was in Christopher’s letter only, and he was not reliable. So there was some time left, perhaps, to think about it. She wondered if Dawson, Mead and Woodbrooke had enjoyed writing this letter. She thought, from what Simon Camish had said, that they would be sure to have advised against it, but perhaps solicitors have to do what they are told, and that is why they use the word ‘instructed’, to avoid responsibility. They never say ‘we would like to’ or even ‘we must’ but always ‘we are instructed’. She recalled her father’s solicitors, who had not at all liked doing to her what he had made them do: in fact the younger Mr Sykes of Sykes and Son had been moved almost to tears by her plight, when she had confronted him, at twenty years of age, robed in her hideous discredited shaming certainties. They must have been beautiful then, or he would not have been so kind, he would not have blown his nose so often and told her to be brave and sensible as he was sure she really was, in quite that tone of voice. Poor Mr Sykes, she hoped he had not grieved too much over her fate, perhaps she should go and see him again to show him how well she was, how well she was doing, despite all.

  And then, after she had re-read the letter, and found that it was not
quite as bad as she feared, that the children were not to be ripped from her by bailiffs or children’s officers, for some reason she began to get sadder and sadder: bathing the little child and chasing the big ones up to bed was even more of an ordeal than usual, because added to the usual irritations was the panic fear of losing these irritations, which made her, she was aware, behave quite oddly, and her behaving quite oddly made the children behave quite oddly, too, and so, as ever with children the process was cumulative and self-perpetuating, and by the time Mrs Sharkey’s Eileen arrived to baby-sit they were all resolutely refusing to go to bed at all. And Mrs Sharkey’s Eileen was quite incapable of organizing them, as well as being very pregnant and miserable and betrayed and talkative, so Rose had been very late getting out of the house at all. And when she had got out she had to face another character problem: knowing herself already late for Nick and Diana’s, where she could hardly bring herself to go, so dreadfully worried was she, she knew that she ought to get a taxi, and she had been half-thinking in her characteristic way that she might, but as soon as she emerged into the street she knew that it was out of the question, in a way, because she would never pick one up in that district in a hundred years (as she should well know, having inhabited it for eleven) and that she had not the energy to walk to the nearest place where she might pick one up, which was a good quarter of an hour away, and even then not certain. On the other hand, the bus could not fail to take less than forty minutes, which would make her embarrassingly late, and she hated causing inconvenience. So she stood there on the pavement at the end of her road, hesitating, not knowing which way to go, whether towards the bus and certain lateness, or towards the taxi road, and a long walk, and possible speed and possible even greater lateness.