The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  The whisky was going down quite well. He looked out at the dark garden, and decided to stop thinking about Julie. He would think, instead, once more, about Rose Vassiliou. He knew a great deal more about her now than he had done upon meeting her: he knew even the day and date of her birth. In 1937 she had been born, daughter of Janice and William Bryanston, in Norfolk, where her mother’s family had lived for generations in rural dignity. Her father had made a fortune in scrap metal, cranes, bulldozers, heavy plant of every sort: his company now had interests in building, contracting, property development all over Europe. His father had owned a garage in Leicester. Rose had been brought up (most inadequately, it seemed) by a succession of nannies and governesses: her schooling had been highly irregular. She had engaged herself at the age of twenty, without her parents’ consent, to a Greek from Camden Town, Christopher Vassiliou. She had threatened to marry without her parents’ consent if they wouldn’t give it, which they wouldn’t: whereupon she was made a ward-of-court, and Christopher was forbidden to see her. She undertook not to see Vassiliou, and the wardship was lifted: nevertheless she was sent abroad for several months. When she came back – she was by this time twenty-one – she was met by Vassiliou and married him in Camden Register Office. Her father then disowned and disinherited her, as thoroughly as he could – but alas, owing to his own foresight and desire to evade paying unnecessary tax, he could not prevent certain trust funds coming to her, though the first of them was not due to mature for another couple of years. So for a couple of years she and her husband had lived in comparative poverty in a flat in a house belonging to his uncle, in Middle Road, behind Alexandra Palace. Vassiliou worked at first in his father’s travel agency, then set up a small travel business of his own. Rose had three children, Konstantin, Marcus, and Maria – the youngest now aged five. After three years of marriage she had inherited part of a Trust Fund, amounting to thirty thousand pounds, which her father, despite every effort (his ill-will had not faded with time and the birth of a grandchild) had been unable to alienate from her. Most of this sum she had given away, within months, in a lump donation, to an African charity. In the divorce proceedings much was made of the donation of this sum of money, Vassiliou claiming, in reasonable and measured language – he had been a good witness, the judge had been impressed by his manner – that she had had no right, in the circumstances, to alienate so large a sum of money from her children and his. However, in the following years Vassiliou’s fortunes had improved considerably: he had begun to earn a very respectable income. In 1967 he had left her – he claimed in the proceedings that she had driven him out of the house. She had decided, after some months, to divorce him, and was granted a decree at the end of the following year. The grounds were cruelty, with the usual complaints of physical violence (medical evidence produced, neighbour’s evidence, and a permanent scar on Rose’s wrist), abusive language, violent and unreasonable demands, incessant and unmotivated jealousy. Vassiliou, in defence, said that it was his wife that was violent and abusive: and that moreover she was a thoroughly unreasonable person. By this he meant that she had refused to move house when he wanted her to, and had refused to reconcile herself with her family even when, through his agency, reconciliation was offered. Vassiliou, oddly enough, had by this stage managed to get on good terms with her family, and had even called several members of it to witness to his wife’s unnatural obstinacy. There had been a great deal of sympathy for him – the judge clearly felt that it was hard luck, to have been through so much for so little – but it was decided that he had over-reached himself. His aims had been reasonable, in trying to make his wife live as he wanted, but his methods unfortunately not. And so he had lost the case. Neither side had cited adultery. Vassiliou’s jealousy, which had manifested itself by ringing his wife every hour from work to see that she was where she said she was, or by locking her in the house from time to time, had been completely generalized, attaching itself, for lack of a better object, to a woman friend called Emily Offenbach with whom Rose used to go for walks in the park with the children. Rose, for her part, had not accused her husband of any form of infidelity. This was one of the points that Vassiliou seized upon with some force. ‘I know,’ he said in the witness box, ‘that as a young man I was not a sensible person, but I have reformed myself, since I married her I have been entirely devoted to her and to my family. If a man is to be judged by what he was ten years ago, where would we all be?’ It is not up to you to ask questions, said Rose’s counsel, predictably enough, but the point had been made: and made even to me, Simon thought, as he reflected upon this curious fact.

  Perhaps, of course, there had been adultery, and Rose had not had evidence, or had not wished to call it: she might well have been more sensitive towards it than towards the violence, which would have been enough, as she had rightly been advised, to win her the case. All the same, the omission was interesting. It was impossible to tell, from the evidence, what the nature of their relationship had been. They had been through enough for it. Was it true, as Rose’s barrister had implied, that he had married her simply for the money, and had ceased to interest himself in her when he found he could not get it? It could not after all be as simple as that, because the whole thing had happened so slowly, over so many years. And was still going on. He suddenly knew, or felt that he knew, why this man had written her such a letter; it was to keep things going. Why should he want his children back? They had not featured largely in his defence during the divorce, beyond the conventional pleas for the preservation of family life, and he had seemed satisfied with an arrangement for reasonable access. But perhaps, after all, whatever she had said, she had not allowed him reasonable access? He ought to have asked her, though perhaps she would not have said. Difficult, to ask such things, and yet she had seemed in a sense to request interrogation. Why else should she have trusted him with her affairs?

  Why else, indeed, and how could he, how should he respond? He was not good at responses, so many had he of necessity curbed. The dark garden lay out there beyond the glass, and he stared into it. He was struck, as his thoughts suddenly collapsed softly and mutely, like a pack of cards, in his head, by the house’s unnatural silence. He had not spent so long alone in it since they had bought it. There were not even any sleeping children upstairs. There was nobody but himself. He could do anything, this evening, unobserved. But of course there was nothing to do. He could have another drink, he supposed. But it did not seem a very exciting idea. He could switch on the radio, or go to bed. He stared out into the darkness, and suddenly it came to him that he would go into the garden. The idea dropped into his mind: mild, harmless, eccentric. An adequate substitute for whatever else he vaguely yearned for. He went down the stairs, to the garden floor, and opened the back kitchen door. It was January: he had not been out in the garden, save to retrieve a rotting chair and a child’s bicycle, for months. He was not a keen gardener; he tried to teach himself, from books, as he taught himself most things, but had no natural aptitude. The air, as he stood there on the back step, met him with a mild soft damp tenderness: it was a warm night. He went out. It was not a large garden: paved with old stone for the most part, and in the spring surrounded with a border of plants that flowered and trees that blossomed. Somebody had cared for it, once. Over the low wall at the other end of it was another much larger garden with tall trees.

  The night was not dark. The light from the house illuminated the garden, and the sky itself, although a winter sky, was not black but luminous with stars and a faint pale grey glow overhead: low over the horizon, through the tree tops, there was that familiar pink radiance, the source of which he had never been able to identify. As a child, his mother had told him that this red glow was the glow of the fires of factories, where men toiled all through the night, and perhaps it had been, up in Newcastle, but it looked just the same down here, and as far as he knew there were no blazing furnaces on Hampstead Heath. Much more likely, he supposed, that it was the reflected glow of the lights of the ci
ty, the accumulation of fluorescence.

  He walked down to the end, to the wall; the earth and stones breathed, for they would fulfil again their ancient bargain. He listened to their breath. At his feet were the green shoots and grey flat spears of bulbs, and the foliage of such small-leaved plants as never perish, plants so modest that they never die. He did not know the names of them, but he stood carefully, on the earthy border, so that they should not be crushed. By his shoulder nodded a ghostly white crumpled bud of a rose: it had been there for weeks, he had noticed it through the window, through frost and snow, frozen into an everlasting flower, never to open, never to die, a witness, a signal, a heroic pledge. The mildness of the air astonished him, as, each year, did the year’s relenting. A perpetual winter was what he expected: he would, he felt, experience no surprise should, one spring, the trees refuse to bud, and the flowers to blossom. Why should those branches not remain for ever bare, the earth for ever hard and inhospitable? By what grace did these green hopes and gentle exhalations perpetually recur? He had done nothing to deserve so munificent a resurgence. He touched, with his hand, the damp, raw, pitted cells of the brick wall, themselves weathered into a semblance of organic life, and the smoky leaves of the ivy: in acknowledgement. Then he went back into the house and looked for her number, and telephoned.

  She answered, at the third ring.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Is that Mrs Vassiliou? This is Simon Camish here.’

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, nicely. ‘I was hoping you might ring.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, me, I’m fine –’ and she gathered breath, and continued, ‘but I’ve been feeling so guilty, so awful about imposing all that on you last night, when you must have been so tired, I meant to ring you to say I was sorry but I felt so sorry I couldn’t, and anyway I was hoping you might ring me.’

  ‘It didn’t matter,’ he said, ‘it didn’t matter at all.’

  ‘Then tell me,’ she said, ‘what did you think? What did you think about it all?’

  ‘You must tell me, first, what happened to you today.’

  ‘Today? Oh yes, I see what you mean. It seems a long time ago. Well, I rang the solicitors, as you said, and they rang his solicitors, and everybody said there was no need to do anything about anything for the moment. Apparently he’s forgetting about the wards-of-court bit and is only applying for custody. Would that be right?’

  ‘I imagine that would be right. Have you any idea, yet, what made him do it?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘You weren’t, for instance, planning to take the children abroad, were you? Or get married again? Or do anything decisive like that?’

  She laughed. ‘Good heavens no. Nothing like that at all. Why should I?’

  ‘You can’t think of any other reason?’

  ‘No, I really can’t.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you think it matters?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s just that when people start behaving foolishly for no reason they are quite likely to go on. It would be convenient if one could think of a reason.’ He too, in his turn, hesitated. ‘You hadn’t, for instance, been preventing him from seeing the children, had you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no I haven’t. It was difficult at times, you know. But he saw them whenever he wanted to. More often than he was supposed to, in fact. I never liked to say no.’

  ‘Then we needn’t worry about that.’

  ‘No, I don’t think it was that.’ She paused, again, on the verge of confidence. ‘There have been other things, though,’ she said, ‘that he hasn’t liked. About the way I bring them up. He might be able to make out some kind of case. I can’t deny it. What do you think, they don’t ever take the children away from the mother, do they?’

  ‘No, hardly ever,’ he said, not quite truthfully, remembering a few nasty precedents.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t know.’ And then suddenly she gathered courage, and came out with it. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I do know why he made the solicitors write that letter. I know what started it all off. I had another letter from him myself this morning. Well, it wasn’t really a letter, it was more a sort of collage. He must have been reading lots of old stuff. He’s got a whole suitcase of it. Letters from me, letters from my father, bits of the divorce case, press cuttings. And I think he must have spent the evening reading it. Because he sent me this thing, with bits cut out and all stuck together.’

  ‘What was it meant to convey?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said, miserably. ‘What an incompetent I am. And how I let him down. And what he went through for me. I think he’d been brooding over how furious he was with my father about all that scene before we got married.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t he take it out on your father?’

  ‘God knows. He really gets on with my father these days. He works for him now, you know.’

  ‘But why should going back over all that make him want the children back, all of a sudden?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he really does think I’m incompetent. Or perhaps he didn’t like sitting on his own and reading about it.’

  ‘He probably doesn’t really want them at all. The more I hear of it, the more it sounds to me as though he’s just doing it out of ill will. And if that’s so, you needn’t worry. Not that you need worry for a moment anyway, because he couldn’t possibly get custody – he hasn’t got a suitable home to offer them, has he? What on earth would he do with them if he did get them?’

  ‘What would he do with them? Christ only knows. Let them lounge around in bed all day reading comics, and then one day he’d suddenly leap up and pack them all off to Eton, or Harrow, or Rugby, or something.’ She laughed: and how could he not assume affection, in so appealing a description. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘it’s quite out of the question, he lives in a quite unsuitable flat in somebody else’s house, they’d never have the kids as well as him, I should think they’re getting pretty fed-up with him by now.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, lowering her voice as though she might be overheard, ‘he lives just down the road from you. I took the liberty of looking you up in the phone book when I got worried about sending you off with all those documents, and I saw that you lived just up the road from him. Odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘odd.’

  ‘I’ve just thought,’ she said. ‘He might be planning to take them to his mother’s. He couldn’t, could he? He couldn’t do such a thing?’

  ‘What’s wrong with his mother?’

  ‘More or less everything. She hates me. She thinks I drag him down.’

  ‘And where does she live? Would she have the accommodation to take them in?’

  ‘What a very practical mind you have. I would never have thought of things like that. I’d somehow pictured all three of them snatched from their beds and all crowded in a row into Christopher’s boot cupboard. I suppose the law wouldn’t let a thing like that happen, would it?’

  ‘No, certainly not. The law takes a serious view of things like accommodation.’

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it, things that the law takes seriously. Like bruises and adultery. It’s a kind of code, I suppose, for what really goes on.’

  ‘One has to have a code.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes, that’s one of the things I’ve learned. So you think the fact that I’ve got three bedrooms, even in this desolate dump, will be in my favour? My mother-in-law’s got three bedrooms too, but come to think of it he’d never dare introduce her into a court of law again, not after what I know about her.’

  ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Too much by half. Christopher’s parents are in fact crooks, you know. I don’t think any other word would cover all their activities. It’s amusing, when I first knew Christopher I used rather to hope that they were, because it seemed an exciting idea, and then when I found out what they used to get up to I was absolutely horrified. But now I’ve got used to it. It seems normal, now. Christopher’s
father runs a travel agency and he made a packet out of getting people out of Cyprus in various rather shady ways. There was a wine fiddle too. I think the new thing is trafficking in computer trainees – you won’t tell anyone else all this, will you? When I first met Christopher they’d hardly got going, but you could see they thought big, you know, second-hand Jags and nightclubs and things, and then they made some kind of big deal in 1959, just before Independence. And there was another thing about selling a house. They’d got this seedy house just north of the Euston Road, crammed full of lodgers and relations, and Christopher’s uncle wised up to the fact that the whole district was being bought up by private buyers for a big property company, and so he refused to sell, and kept on raising the price and in the end he got thirty thousand for it. Amazing, isn’t it?’