The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘How old was I? I was nineteen, and he was twenty-one.

  ‘I loved him. I fell completely in love with him. He completely seduced me. He really knew what he was doing, did Christopher. He was working two nights a week in a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street and I used to go there and sit in the kitchen and wait for him. That’s how it was. I didn’t really – it’s amazing how little I knew about him. I didn’t want to know because I suspected I mightn’t understand. He was no fool, obviously, or I couldn’t have – well, I don’t wish to imply that I wasn’t a fool, because I was, about him, completely, but at least I knew it. He’d been to Grammar School, but when I met him I assumed that he’d started working as soon as he left, and it took me years, well, months at least to realize that he’d actually started off at University but he got kicked out, or dropped it – I think he couldn’t stand it, he genuinely hated being in anything like a traditional institution, he had nothing but contempt for it – I should have put it together earlier, he left it because he was ambitious, not because he was unambitious, and he couldn’t bear to waste three years or so on a student’s grant finding out not very much, and all that van driving and waiting and dealing and double-dealing he used to go in for was really the foundation of something much more lucrative, in the end, for him – well, indeed, for anyone. But Christopher was attractive. Dirty, he was, and he smelt of oil from the van, and he lived on bacon sandwiches, it was something I’d never set eyes on before, and to find that such a person actually seemed to want me –’

  ‘I would have thought that a lot of people might have wanted you. You were a very desirable property.’

  ‘Oh no no, not at all, not any of my and Emily’s friends, anyway, they were far too altruistic, they wanted my money, but only for meals and donations and drinks, and loans and abortions, they never had anything as grandiose as a scheme for marrying me, they simply wouldn’t have thought of it, and I was no beauty, you know, I was a miserable-looking creature in those days, I probably still am for that matter – no, no I don’t think anybody else would have dreamed of having that kind of intention on me. There were – there were kind of official suitors, sort of dynastic suitors, but one couldn’t take them seriously. Or rather, they couldn’t take me seriously. They were far too young to be wised up to that kind of thing.’

  ‘So Christopher and his bacon sandwiches found you a willing victim?’

  ‘He certainly did. Willing and eager.’ She pushed at her hair, and laughed. ‘We used to spend a lot of time in a Greek club. In Camden Town. Its windows were all stuck over with paper, it was very secret. They played card games and billiards, and I sat around and watched. There weren’t many girls allowed in. I was allowed in because I was Christopher’s. It was a real élite I’d hit at last, I used to think. I felt really privileged, sitting around there and drinking cups of coffee. It’s funny, really, looking back on it. Or almost funny. It would be funny, if I could think I had survived it all.’

  ‘You look as though you’ve survived it,’ he said, with meaningless gallantry.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what made you decide to get married? What made you think you wanted to get married?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s hard to know, really. I think I – for my part, this is, I’m speaking only for myself – I wanted to make some kind of declaration. I don’t know. I felt it so much, I wanted to show I was serious. That must be why most people do it, isn’t it? Out of gratitude. Partly. I don’t remember very well how the subject of getting married came up, I think I was saying something about Emily, who’d just got herself engaged to Offenbach, and Christopher said, oh, very politely, perhaps you would think of marrying me. You couldn’t possibly want to, I kept saying, but as soon as he’d suggested it I knew it was irresistible, that I had to do it. And then also you must remember that I was hopelessly in love with him at this stage, I used to trail around after him like a small child. So we decided to get married. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe my luck.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘What did we do? Well, first of all Christopher wrote to my father, and my father wrote back saying you must be joking, and so Christopher and I went to see him, and there was a scene, and Father called Christopher a dirty Greek, and Christopher called father a Jewish swine, knowing quite well Father isn’t Jewish and never has been, and I cried, and then I walked out of the house with Christopher and wouldn’t go home. And then it all started to happen. As a matter of fact I’d been fairly discreet about him up till this point, but now it seemed necessary to assert ourselves, so we started going around together in public or whatever bits of the public we could find – we went to nightclubs, and restaurants, and I took him to all the dreary parties I used to get invited to and never went to, and we made a bit of a stir. It was quite exciting. You look very shocked. You don’t like the idea of making a bit of a stir.’

  ‘I’m not sure that what shocks me most isn’t the idea of your liking to make, as you put it, a bit of a stir.’

  ‘Ah, but I’ve changed, you see. This was many years ago. I have changed.’

  ‘Can one change, so much?’

  ‘That,’ she said, sadly and anxiously, ‘is what I sometimes wonder.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it now,’ he said, regretting what he had said.

  ‘No, all right,’ she said, more cheerfully, ‘I won’t. I must finish this story, mustn’t I? Where was I?’

  ‘You were at the bit where you and Christopher were provoking parental opposition. Where were you living at the time?’

  ‘Well, oddly enough, we were living at that basement where I first met him, I said we’d be caretakers for the magazine because the fellow that lived there moved out without trace, and we used to sleep there on a mattress on the floor amidst a lot of bales of newsprint. It was a nice house, one of those old houses in a little terrace, and nobody knew we were there except people who’d promised not to say. And every day I’d ring up home and ask if they’d changed their minds – Father had got Mother home by this time – and they’d yell at me that they’d get the police on to me and cut me off without a penny and God knows what.’

  ‘And did you make any efforts at conciliation?’

  ‘Yes, of course I did, I said I’d come home as soon as they allowed me to marry Christopher, I said they could cut me off if they liked, I even said I’d wait till I was twenty-one, which would have been a good eight months. I’d known Christopher nearly a year, by this time, you know. A year’s a long time. We couldn’t have been accused of not knowing each other.’

  ‘But the circumstances were hardly normal.’

  ‘No. Hardly. I suppose not.’

  ‘It must have been from this that this cutting dates?’ he said, producing from his pocket a slip of newspaper.

  She took it, and looked at it, with a mixture of pride, disgust, embarrassment and amusement that seemed to him an extraordinarily finely constituted response. ‘Oh Christ,’ she said, ‘wherever did you get this?’

  It was a photograph of herself, and Christopher, many years younger, sitting in a restaurant. Roses and a candle featured. Christopher looked vicious but satisfied, Rose plain and anxious to please. The headline was ‘Tycoon’s Red Daughter Rose with Greek Croupier.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’ she repeated, returning it to him.

  ‘I stole it from a file on you,’ he said. ‘I liked it so much. Why does it say croupier? Was this another career he adopted?’

  ‘No, no, not at all, that was just a mistake, a friend of mine was rung up by the press and said he was a courier, because that was the politest way he could think of saying ‘van-driver’, though actually by this time Christopher had got rid of the van and had got himself a car, with a deposit of my money, of course, and he used to drive American ladies around sightseeing, so perhaps he was a courier after all. Whatever one of those is. But not a croupier, no. Though he’d have been good at
it. He was a really good gambler, was Christopher. Really good. Anyway, that car was the last thing he had out of me because my father shut the bank account. That was the first warning I had that things were turning nasty. I went to the local branch, in Russell Square, and told it to ring up my branch at Marble Arch and let me have some cash and they said no. I couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Were you alarmed?’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ she said, thoughtfully, carefully, ‘I think I was – relieved. Really. Relieved. It sounds silly, but that’s how it was. I was – partly, I suppose, gratified to find that I’d had some effect, and also, oh it sounds absurd, I was glad to have cut myself off from all that stuff. I’d always at the bottom of my heart believed that one couldn’t get rid of money, that it would stick like a leech or a parasite, and breed and breed even if one tried to cut it out – and I was right, that was a real premonition, because look at me now, living here in this little house, it’s nothing but a mockery, you know, in some ways, all right, so I pay my way and live as modestly as I can, but there are always people to ask me out, and newspapers to pay me or at least feed me and give me drinks when I want them, and even my clothes – well, that dress I was wearing when you first met me, I’d had that for twelve years, you know, and I can afford to wear it, I can go around in that kind of thing, but the girls round here, they can’t do it, they couldn’t do it – Oh Lord, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but yes, there’s another thing, it suddenly struck me one day that no matter how energetically I get rid of whatever money comes my way, there’s nothing on earth to prevent my father from leaving it to the children. How can I stop him, after all? They’re his only grandchildren. How can I stop him?’

  ‘Why should you wish to stop him?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘Not unmistakably so. But don’t bother about that now, that’s another issue, go back to the business about the closing of the bank account. And the relief.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I’ve forgotten where I was. The relief. I went out into the road and I looked in my bag and counted what we’d got between us. Fifteen pounds ten, it was. Quite a lot.’

  ‘It wouldn’t last long, though.’

  ‘No, it didn’t, we went straight off to the club to have a game to improve our finances and lost the lot.’

  ‘That was silly.’

  ‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it? It seemed very funny at the time. So we went back to our room to sleep it off, and when we got there there was a man waiting for Christopher and me. And first I thought it was the police raiding the magazine, it was always having that kind of trouble, but it was us he wanted, and he explained to us about me having been made a ward-of-court and Christopher being warned to keep off and all that. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but it seemed deadly serious, and moreover Christopher seemed to take it very seriously, so I agreed to go home and talk things over with my father, and Christopher was driven off by a policeman, and I heard them saying that an injunction had been granted, I think that was the word, and that if he attempted to contact me he’d be jailed for contempt of court. And that was what I couldn’t face, it was the separation, because I really couldn’t live without him, you know, I couldn’t get through the time when he wasn’t there, even an hour without him was like a lifetime. So I didn’t see what I was going to do. Oh God, it was awful, that stretch of time before I knew the worst, I was so lonely, and more or less housebound in that mausoleum of a house – it was like being a child again, ill with boredom waiting to grow up. And yet at the same time I knew that whatever they did they couldn’t make me wait more than eight months. I wanted to write to Christopher, or ring him and tell him I’d wait, but they watched me so closely, it was amazing, it was historic, and I suppose that what really kept me going was the feeling of being martyred. In fact they could hardly have treated me more unwisely, me being what I was, but then I wouldn’t have been what I was if they’d ever known how to handle me. The only positive comfort I had was that my father very unwisely let me know that he’d tried to buy Christopher off, and Christopher had refused whatever he’d been offered, which demonstrated some kind of faith in me, at least.’

  ‘A faith that was not misplaced.’

  ‘No, as it happened. But he couldn’t have been certain of that, could he? Not absolutely certain? He might have lost, mightn’t he? Anyway, what happened was that they decided to send me abroad, until I was twenty-one. Eight whole months of exile. I really thought I wouldn’t be able to bear it. And the worst thing was that I thought I’d have to go without telling Christopher, but I managed to bribe somebody to send him a letter – well, not really bribe exactly, simply persuade, because I’d nothing left to bribe with – and Christopher came round one night and threw stones at a window, and we managed to have half an hour before anyone heard us, and I promised to come back and he promised to wait for me, and then we were interrupted, and my father said he’d send for the police and have him put in prison, and I said if he did that I’d kill myself, and that if he’d leave Christopher alone I’d go meekly off to Paris as I was supposed to, and so I did. I can think of all sorts of things now that we might have done – we could simply have eloped, or I could have said I was having a baby, or something, but I didn’t think of them at that time, and I couldn’t see Christopher to work anything out with him, and that half hour we did get we spent on love and promises, not on plans. We made a mess of it, I suppose. But there wasn’t much – guidance. One simply doesn’t know how to behave in such a situation, one doesn’t know the rules, and I never understood the legal business, although father kept getting his solicitor in, poor fellow, to explain it to me. God, he was embarrassed about it, that poor man, he really couldn’t look me in the eye.’

  ‘So you were sent abroad.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. It was a nightmare. I went with a cousin, more like an aunt she was I suppose, she was so much older, and we dragged around Europe. She watched me all the time, she took her duties very seriously, and we kept moving around without my knowing ever where we were going, so I couldn’t contact Christopher and get him to come out to rescue me, I suppose. She kept my passport in her handbag. It was awful, I was bored like death. I can’t bear to look back on it. Living through those days, without a word. We went to Paris, and Rome, and Amsterdam, Brussels and Prague, and Bavaria. That wretched cousin, what she went through God knows, she must have been bored to death too, though she put on a good show of looking interested. But really she wanted someone to talk to as badly as I did, and as soon as she struck up any kind of acquaintance, in a hotel for instance, she clearly felt it was time to move, in case I started seducing or bribing them. Really, I can’t quite now think why I put up with it, why I didn’t just walk out, except that after a month or two I began to make a virtue of endurance and promise myself I’d stick it out if it killed me. Also, there was nowhere much to walk to, without a passport or any money. I read an awful lot of books. They shouldn’t have sent me to Italy, there were people there who kept reminding me of Christopher. They treated me very badly, you know. One would hardly believe it. Do you know what my father did? For one thing, he vowed quite solemnly that if I did marry Christopher when I was twenty-one he’d completely disinherit me – I didn’t realize then that he couldn’t entirely because of the way the money had been put in trust to save his supertax, he must have kicked himself for his stinginess on that front – but much worse than that was what he did about Christopher. I don’t know if I dare to tell you, it reflects so badly on him. I haven’t told anyone, or only one or two people.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I do want to, I think. What he did was get Christopher followed by a private detective, and he sent reports on all the things he’d been doing that I wouldn’t like. Can you imagine, a mind that would think of that? We were in Salzburg, I think, when I got this report about Christopher and this other woman. There were plenty of other girls, quite enough to upset me, but this
one sounded serious, he spent weeks with her, in that very same basement. I suppose my father thought that would do the trick. God, how I hate abroad. I’ll never go there again as long as I live. It nearly finished me off, but then I thought that for one thing it might not be true, a man capable of setting a detective on one’s lover might be equally capable of cooking the evidence, and also for another thing even if it was true all I would have to do would be to see Christopher and he’d be able to talk me out of it. He was very good at talking me out of things, suspicions and jealousies and so on, he had to be because he was very careless, but then I was good at being talked out of it too because I didn’t really believe I deserved him, part of me at least knew that I was lucky to get any of him, and I used to dream about when I got home and he would talk me out of feeling jealous and betrayed, or make it anyway seem irrelevant. I used to look forward to that. I suppose it did cross my mind – no, what am I talking about, I worried endlessly that when I got back he wouldn’t want me any more, and that I’d have been through it all for nothing, and that my father would have won, but at the same time there must have been something in me that knew that this wasn’t so, that he’d be there waiting for me.’