The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  (Odd, during the whole business, thought Simon, that he had not once bothered to ask himself whether or not she had any talent. He had simply assumed that she had not. And he had been wrong in that, as in so many other things.)

  After her disappointment over the Art College, Julie had seemed to depend upon Simon more and more. And it was at this point, long before their marriage, that he began to feel himself trapped. He had thought her gay, insensitive, extrovert: he found her increasingly vulnerable, suffering, suspicious. He would willingly, at this point, have ditched her, swimming bath, tennis court, wealthy father and all, but it was too late. She wouldn’t let him go. She knew, somehow, with the horrible knowledge of one’s own limitations, that she couldn’t make the grade of those nonchalant dirty young men, that it was no good trying to get off with Mike Boyd or Johnny Featherstone: she knew that Simon Camish, with his Adam’s apple and his poor eyesight, was in her range. And so she clung to him and blackmailed him. Simon alone knew the truth of her manoeuvres, and he was too chivalrous to impart it: so there he stood, indicted, judged, condemned by his own actions of mercenary motives. He well might feel for Christopher Vassiliou.

  Time threw up some amusing patterns, though, in all the dirt. One of those bearded boys had made good, he had become a big name, a real pop hero: one of his works glowered now at Simon from the wall, across the room. He had made good and gone to the States, where he was doing even better. Julie had visited him, last week: he had taken her out to dinner, he had been delighted to see her again, she had been one of his first buyers.

  It was all very well knowing now, about Julie, about oneself. It was then that one had needed to know. He had thought Julie warm and open: she had proved, like her father, irrational, bigoted and cold. The gaiety had revealed itself as a manic fear of solitude, the gregariousness as an inability to make any friends at all, the desire for a fast life as a symptom of a profound, irremediable crippling social ambition, founded on the insecurity of her own provincial background. It took Simon some time to work out what she must have suffered, at boarding school, as she trained her accent successfully to bridge the gap between her own and her father’s, as she tried to emulate the graces of more polished homes. Ironically, he had loved in her family the vulgarity that she had been set to leave. And she had left it with a vengeance. She had insisted that they should live in London, despite his plea that he could practise more fruitfully and usefully elsewhere: she had surrounded them with friends whose lack of friendship or any other kind of appeal had driven him out of the house for more evenings than he could count: she had spent money – at first her own, and then, gradually, as he had begun to acquire it, his – with an ease that made his hair stand on end. Whatever she had wished to reject in her background, it had not been its affluence. He really judged himself, now, for having ever admired the easy spending of money. A golden mean there might be, in such matters as in all, but the longer he lived the surer he was that the golden mean had more to do with meanness than with extravagance. And with all this, she was profoundly, painfully, evidently unhappy. He had thought her a naturally happy person, once. And now she was as profoundly miserable as anyone he knew. Her state afflicted him beyond bearing. He could not, he supposed, be entirely responsible for her unhappiness, but he felt himself to be so: he had failed her, he had been inadequate, he had not even been able to satisfy her simple needs, and now he would have to go on and on failing her, because there was no way out, and he would have to go on and on helplessly witnessing the deterioration of her temper and her manner. If she could herself have been happy with the life she had imposed on him, then he would, obviously, have resented it less: it was the pointlessness of his loyalty to her that most depressed him. She needed him, he was indispensable to her, and that was that: there was no joy in it and no reciprocation, and no possibility of release. He fulfilled, for her, the highest attainable point of the acceptable – way, way below the desirable, way below anything that her voracious nature would have desired for its satisfaction – and as such, too adequate to be rejected, but utterly unsatisfactory to her, he would have to continue to exist. She did not dare to reject him. She knew she would never get anything that more closely resembled what she wanted. He should have known that she was forcing herself to accept him, as second best, in those distant days up North, when he had been forcing himself, out of pity and compromise, to accept her. No. That was not it. He had known. And it was because he had known that there had been the pity. He had sacrificed himself to her needs.

  She had been completely perverted, poor Julie, somewhere, by someone, given desires that could never be assuaged, given the knowledge to know what she was missing, the sensitivity to suffer at the loss. Like talentless artists or writers, whose lack of talent in no way kindly diminishes their insatiable craving to succeed, she was doomed to disappointment. He was too moved by her to betray her. A stronger man than himself would not, in the first place, have married her, as he had done, but at least he had the strength to stick it out.

  Her looks had not deteriorated as much as her temper, however. She still looked quite presentable. He thought of her, as a girl, in that white jacket, her reddish hair all bouncy round her face. Now, as a woman, shiny with good health and lipstick, driving along in her big fat car. Julie on the telephone, giggling like a schoolgirl to her so-called friends: Julie betrayed by those same friends, furious about the betrayal, abusing them as wantonly as she had praised them, resorting to the gross terms of childhood – ‘Stinking bitch,’ she would say, violently, ‘Great fat old cow –’ referring to some smart young woman who had withdrawn her attendance or stood her up at some lunch date in favour of a more profitable, wealthier, more sophisticated host. And the childish crudity of these terms would horrify him: they reminded him of his own grandfather, if of anything, and of his mother’s pained wincing and refined agonies beneath such abuse – abuse directed not at her, because his grandfather was afraid of his mother, as who would not be, but at all the undistinguished world around. There was in Julie a coarseness and a lack of discrimination that must have attracted him to her, as one is attracted, compelled, to approach one’s own doom, to live out one’s own hereditary destiny: coarseness she had from his grandfather, coldness from his mother, and their good qualities she lacked. She must have good qualities of her own, he would tell himself, but he was too deeply entrenched in her, in his own past, to perceive them. He grieved for her: her disappointments and childish enthusiasms grieved him: but what could one do about them? She lacked all judgement, all reserve: her emotions swung violently, creaking and screeching like a weather vane in uncertain weather. He longed at times to point out that such a young man, such a woman could not possibly be all that she saw them to be, because the facts did not support such a construction, but she refused to listen, trusting what she called her intuition, so he had ceased to comment, and had withdrawn himself. Even with the children he rarely intervened, but would watch her yell at them and indulge them, irrationally, wantonly, destructively: the two girls seemed, miraculously, to have survived this treatment fairly well, and to have adopted a fairly cynical attitude to their mother’s inconsistencies, but the boy, the eldest, had become, he sometimes feared, psychotic. At the age of nine he either could not or would not read: he was destructive, sullen, infantile. He could not do anything about it. He had tried, but he did not know what to do.

  Her language, now he came to think about it, afflicted him as much as anything about her. He hated the way she talked. He knew that her classy friends, and indeed his, spoke as crudely, but to them the words came naturally, whereas to her they came with an air of defiance and genuine venom. He sometimes thought that if he heard her once more describe the colour of the drawing-room walls as goose-shit he would drop dead upon the carpet, or take off his glasses and fling them at the wall, or kick in the china cupboard door. In vain to tell himself that nobody else minded: that others, in fact, smiled obsequiously when she said such things, and that it was only his
own fastidiousness, dubious enough itself, that protested. He did protest. He said nothing, but he eternally protested: he could not accept, he could not reconcile himself. Once he had said to her that he wished she would not spend so much of the day with her hair in curlers, but she had laughed at him, and, later, when she had had time to think about it, reviled him for such a suggestion, saying, truly enough, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with wearing curlers, she always looked fine when she went out, and that it was only because he had seen too many curlers as a child that he now found the sight of them unacceptable. True enough, but if people cannot accommodate each other’s prejudices, then what was the point in attempting to live together? No point at all, and yet it had to be done. It had to be done, and that was that, and there was not much point in thinking about it. And yet how could one resist thinking about it? He really did think he could see it all now: he had been attracted to her because his life with his mother was so appalling, and she to him because he was the only possible acceptable escape from her father – the only escape acceptable to her father, that meant, for she would never have had the courage to defy his expressed will. For Simon had been acceptable to Mr Phillips, mysteriously: Mr Phillips had always had faith in him: naïvely, he had liked the idea of his daughter marrying an Oxford man, a barrister. He had given them a lot of money, to set up house. A dowry. Simon had almost been pleased to think that others might assume he was marrying for money. At least such an assumption concealed the truth. He would, at that age, have preferred to appear as cynic than as fool.

  Who knows, he thought, perhaps when I am fifty I will have forgotten the extreme gloom into which I sank when the engagement was settled, the deep depression I inhabited from that day on, and I will conclude that it was the money I married, after all.

  Perhaps the gloom had been, after all, a fraud. Who knows?

  He had read his Freud, with interest. He particularly liked the description of the lady who had married three husbands, each of whom had subsequently died, shortly afterwards, of a fatal illness contracted after the date of the marriage. Interesting, that was. Interesting, too, that one could always tell which of one’s friends were being analysed or seeing too much of psychiatric friends by the way in which they would suddenly, out of the blue, for no reason at all, start abusing their mothers. One really had to watch that kind of thing. The time element was the catch. As Proust and Bergson said. At times he thought that he could sort the whole thing out if only he could formulate it in some kind of Proustian concept: as by saying: he had been drawn to Julie, mistakenly, by what he had mistakenly taken her to be, not by what she in fact was, which had, in the fullness of time, attached him to her in a much more serious manner: for he, when young, could not truly have wanted what he had thought he had wanted, he had wanted instead the underlying doom, the concealed and underlying reality, which alone could have presented an appearance attractive and possible to him, as he then was, in a manner that reality could never have achieved, being too far from him as beholder, him as participant.

  Which made it all come down to the same thing, and excused everybody, except himself, acquitting everybody of deceit, and his mother of guilt. Very satisfactory. And yet none of that made any difference to the fact that he had known, when, at that point in time when, he had offered to marry Julie, that he ought not to have done so, and that by doing so he was condemning himself and her to unhappiness. Why, then, had he done it? He had wondered even then, but there had seemed no possible choice. Inevitability had held him in its grip: psychological determinism had really got its claws into him, on that day when he had stood in front of her father, in his so-called study. He was sitting in a crushed gold armchair, Mr Phillips, with his legs up on his fox-and-pheasant embossed brass fender, contemplating a magnificent irridescently rainbow-gleaming electric fire, smoking a cigarette, his grey moustache puffing with emotion, his kindly little eyes glittering hard with friendliness and bonhomie. That’s fine by me, my boy, he had said, I’ve been expecting you to come up with something like this, you know. I bet you bloody well have, said Simon to himself, as he drearily embarked on his speech about being poor but hard-working: he had sensed well enough, though never witnessed, Julie’s appalling domestic behaviour since her failure over Art College. She had sulked and moaned and made herself intolerable to live with. Mr Phillips was glad to get rid of her so easily: he could hardly conceal his relief. Simon, who had as yet seen Julie only on her best outdoors behaviour, was frightened to witness thus the faint reflections of her true self, in her father’s shifting looks. And as he tried to explain his prospects to Mr Phillips, he felt all the life drain out of him, out through the soles of his shoes, in a most boring dreary way, as though he at that instant resigned himself to the future. His father-in-law, realizing perhaps that it would not be wise to allow Simon to dwell in too much detail on the realities ahead, cut short his speech, with a gruff ‘That’s all very well, that’s all very well, there’s no need for all that’ – and had then led Simon, grotesquely, off to the bathroom to inspect his latest acquisition. It was startling, it was alarming, the speed of the transition. The purchase was a white plastic pillow, with a blue frill round it, that stuck on to the end of the bath by suction pads.

  ‘It’s a new line, you see,’ said Pa Phillips. ‘You lie in the bath – I read a lot in the bath, I’m a great reader, you know – you lie in the bath and you rest your head on it. Ideal for reading. Get it?’

  Simon did indeed get it. He nodded, stupefied. The plastic pillow took on a symbolic significance: like a ring, it cemented the contract, it embodied his engagement to Julie, and was never more to be dissociated from that moment – though it was still there, that pillow, more than a decade later, the very same one, a little less plump perhaps, a little less ridiculous, but still there, witness to many a reading of many a Financial Times. ‘Get it?’ repeated Mr Phillips, and Simon nodded yet more vigorously, afraid that its proud owner, now gazing at it in solemn pleasure, might suddenly turn gay and jokey, as he was wont to do, and leap into the empty bath to give a demonstration. He did not know how to forestall this demonstration, should it be truly threatened, so he continued to nod and smile: one of the difficulties of his father-in-law was that he always elicited a violent response, was never satisfied with a mild assent, insisted upon an almost physical reaction to every question he asked – and as the questions were for the most part of the unanswerable quality of that particular ‘Get it?’, Simon found it very hard to provide satisfaction, and would be subjected to an endless battery of ‘Hey? what do you say? That’s right, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I?’ Some people, notably his business associates, had learned to deal with his technique by thumping him violently on the back at each of these queries, but Simon had never managed that, so he was always left, as then, laughing somewhat foolishly, grinning over-eagerly, nodding his head on his long neck until it ached with motion. He had never got much better at it, through all these years. Then, staring at that pillow, nodding like an automaton, or like a toy dog in the back of a car, he had not known whether he wanted to laugh or cry. But he knew that he had had it.

  And now Julie had three children, and had gone with them and her parents to New York for the wedding of her youngest brother. And, such was the effect of time, he suspected that despite her protestations she had been quite looking forward to a bit of the vulgar old parental life, in posh hotels, for a few days, especially as she was managing to thin it out with a few more chic engagements of her own. She hadn’t been away without him for a long time: a few days’ reversion to the life she had so hated, when she had had it, might be quite enjoyable. She might even come home in a better temper. Though that was a great deal to hope for. Too much, probably. He sighed, got up, shut his desk, and began to walk restlessly round the room. He was tired of sitting still, and worrying.

  It was, really, in many ways, a nice room. Even the goose-shit walls were attractive enough. She had a flair for these things. It was spotless, smart,
and trendy, full of plants and attractive little knick-knacks. (That, he was sure, was not what she would have called them, but that was what they nevertheless were.) It was a nice house, in a nice district of Hampstead, a period house, bought at a period when prices must surely have reached an all-time height: a house in a pretty, elegant, fashionable terrace. As a house, he had nothing against it. He could see why she liked it: brought up as she had been in that vast bulging ugly stockbroker’s mansion, she had longed for the support of a terrace of elegant neighbours in an acceptable district of town. She had caught the colouring of her surroundings well enough: when she took her curlers out she even looked right in herself. Khaki, mustard and a dark greeny-brown predominated, and he knew that these colours were right because even people like Diana, who knew about such things, admired them with a genuine admiration, and did not seem to notice that some underlying coldness or some hidden crime, undetectable to the eye, must surely destroy the whole effect. A house built upon sand, he said to himself crossly and peevishly, will not stand, though his didn’t do much in the way of crumbling, so lavishly propped, repaired, pointed and maintained it had been: and he went and poured himself a drink. He very rarely drank anything when alone and the action unnerved him slightly. He thought of his mother, reared in a dark terrace: a detached house down south was what she had wanted, and she had got it, a detached boarding-house on the bleak South Coast, where the cold waves flung handfuls of pebbles angrily at her windows and rotting façade, day after day, night after night, in endless, everlasting, moaning attrition. She had made a north country of her own in that desolate spot. Amazing, the power of the spirit over the waves and mists and elements. His mother, by a divining instinct, had sought and drawn towards her those batteries of grit.