The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘And he was?’

  ‘Yes, he was. We arrived back in England on the day after my twenty-first birthday, and he was there at Dover, waiting for me. It was quite extraordinary. You can imagine.’

  ‘How did he know when you were coming?’

  ‘Well, I must confess, I fixed it. We spent the night before in Paris, it was my birthday, and by this time I’d got a bit of pressure going on my poor cousin, and she’d got a bit of an eye on her own future, with me, we’d got quite intimate, in a way, one does after eight months of enforced confinement with somebody, and I insisted we had a birthday party in the hotel, and we gave everybody champagne, and there was a journalist there from an English paper – it was an English hotel, full of English people – and he recognized me, and I told him to phone his paper and give them the story, and he did, and somebody on the paper contacted Christopher, and he arrived to meet me, and there he was, and all the journalists, and I was free, and nobody could stop me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen the photographs.’

  ‘Touching, weren’t they?’

  He reflected upon the photographs, and the interviews. They had captions like ‘Weeping heiress reunited with the man she loves’, and ‘Rose returns blooming’, and the smudged pictures showed a terrified-looking Rose clutching an equally terrified Christopher, both of them white (one might imagine) with horror at what they had done and were about to do. In the interviews, when asked her plans, Rose was reported to have said things like ‘We’re going to get married tomorrow we’ve waited long enough,’ and Christopher, when asked how long he would have waited for her, said, ‘I would have waited not eight months but eight years for her to come back to me.’ When asked what they felt about being disinherited, both had replied that they had never wanted money, all they wanted was each other.

  ‘Yes, touching,’ he said. ‘And so you got married?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, we got married. And that was that. And we came to live here, but we only had the top floor then, it was a sort of flat. It took us a long time to buy the whole house. But I’ve told you all that.’ She paused, for a long time, while she cut up into small pieces the rind of her cheese, and then said, ‘It’s a pity, really, after all that trouble, and effort, that Christopher and I didn’t make a bit more of an effort when we got married. Or that’s what most people say. They think it was a waste.’

  ‘Only you could say whether it was a waste or not. I would assume that if you found it necessary, it was necessary.’

  ‘Well, yes, I think that on the whole it was.’

  ‘You seem to have – changed a greal deal, since those days.’

  ‘So have we all, I imagine. Ten years is a long time. More than ten, it is, now. In what ways have I changed?’

  ‘You seem to have quietened down, a little. All this –’ he indicated the room, the windows, the street beyond – ‘all this doesn’t look like an appropriate end for so much drama.’

  ‘I was wrong about drama. I don’t really like drama. I disapprove of it very strongly, don’t you? I’m sure that you do. I rationalize it, by saying that I had to have the drama before I would have all this. It was what you might call a revolution, a personal revolution. It even had a little bloodshed, to prove it. But I’m determined not to make the mistake of most revolutions, I won’t revert to what it was that I was fighting not to be.’

  ‘But what is it, that you are now, that you value so much? What do you like, about what you’re doing now, that you should like it so much? You must forgive me for saying so, but you must know that – well, your life must appear to many people deliberately unattractive. An unattractive district, no husband when you could surely easily acquire one, no money when you of all people could have had it – it seems strange, perhaps, that one should make a revolution, as you put it, to achieve precisely this.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t precisely this, when I set out, it took me a long time to learn what it was about this that I so valued – it’s hard to explain, people are so unsympathetic, and when I describe it it sounds so – so absurd, and dull. I like it here precisely because it is dull, and because I can – oh, I don’t know, clean my own shoes and worry about the electricity bill and look after my own children and collect them from school and take an interest in Cheap Offers in the shops. Oh, I know, people think it’s not real, they think it’s nonsense for me to sit here like I do, they think I’m playing. They tell me that everyone else round here is miserable and all the rest of it. But they don’t know, because they’ve never tried it. I do know. I respond to such ordinary signals in the world. Cut prices and sunshine and babies in prams and talking in the shops. Oh, I can’t describe or defend it, I expect no sympathy. It sounds unnatural to you, I expect.’

  ‘No, not unnatural, exactly. But I’m surprised you can be satisfied with so little. You used to be more active, you used to try and get things done, even after your marriage, I know you did.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘From what other people have said about you.’

  ‘What do other people say about me?’

  ‘That you have withdrawn. That you might have given up.’

  ‘That’s what Nick says.’

  ‘That’s what Nick says.’

  ‘Nick wouldn’t know. It seems to me enough, now, to look after the children. Oh, I haven’t cut myself off completely, I can’t do that, because I can’t resist any of the claims that people make on me, and one can’t lose the life that one had friends in, because they are friends, and so I see them, and I do things for them, even in public from time to time. But all those activities, they’re just part of being human, whereas being here, being myself, is something quite different. It’s taken me so long to learn it and now I can’t lose it. I’m happy in it. It seems to me right. People are so nervous about believing anything to be right. But what else in life should one ever seek for but a sense of being right? I explain myself badly, I put it very badly, I can’t justify myself – but what I feel, now, is,’ and she buried her face in her hands, as though embarrassed by her own declaration, ‘what I feel is that the things I do now, they’re part of me, they’re monotonous, yes, I know, but they’re not boring, I like them, I do them all’ – she hesitated, faintly – ‘I do them all with love. Getting up, drawing the curtains, shopping, going to bed. You know what I mean.’

  ‘How could I know what you mean,’ he said, startlingly, ‘when nothing that I do is done with any love at all?’

  She froze, with her hands there in front of her face. She opened her fingers, dropped them, stared at him. She looked at him for some time. He was staring at the table, with a look of savage melancholy.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, finally. ‘It’s charity, at least, to sit there for so long and listen to me. And charity is a form of love’.

  ‘How do you know?’ he said, looking up at her, and smiling, harshly, a mocking unpleasant smile that delighted her, ‘how do you know that I haven’t been bored stiff? How do you know I haven’t been resenting every moment that I’ve been sitting here?’

  She was ready for it. ‘Because,’ she said, smiling back at him, quickly, sharply, triumphantly, ‘because if you had been resenting it, it would be even kinder of you. Wouldn’t it? Eh?’

  ‘I thought things didn’t count unless one meant them.’

  ‘No, no, not at all.’ She gazed at him with gentle superiority, with kindness. ‘You’ve got it wrong. The clashing of the cymbals and the banging of the something or other, you were thinking of, weren’t you? And not having charity. But the act counts. See? And you’ve sat there and listened. You could have got up and gone away. But, you’ve listened, you’ve even bothered to ask the right questions.’

  ‘My dear girl, I have been asking the right questions of people for long enough to know how to do it, I can assure you, so that nobody could possibly tell the difference. I have a strong sense of obligation. It is on this sense of obligation that I have conducted my whole life.
It is very destructive of the emotions. Had I ever trusted my emotions, I would have led a far less admirable existence, I can assure you.’

  ‘But in what sense, then, can you say that your existence has been admirable?’

  ‘It has been admirable in that I have fulfilled my obligations. As I said. I’ve spent most of my time, I think, doing what on balance it seemed that I ought to do, not what I might have wanted to do, and now there isn’t much that I do want to do. So it’s rather distressing to hear you so confident of the value – or virtue, maybe – of very small activities, when I can hardly work up enough energy to pursue quite large and exhausting bits of life. I am glad that you can enjoy going shopping and taking advantage of Cut Price Offers. I wish that I too could arrive at such a state of grace.’

  ‘I am sorry if I have distressed you.’

  ‘Yes, you probably are. You would be. To them that have it shall be given.’

  ‘What I tried to do was to give away.’

  ‘But it doesn’t work, does it? It stays with you, you said it yourself, you can’t get rid of it, grace or riches, you can’t get rid of them, can you? They increase and multiply.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as that.’

  ‘Oh yes it is. But no, don’t look like that, I really truly don’t want to distress you. Tell me some more, instead, please.’

  ‘And you will listen, dutifully?’

  ‘It’s the best I can do. It’s the best you can do for me. Tell me why you gave that money to that school in Africa. Not why, I mean, why you gave it at all, that’s reasonably easy to imagine, but why you gave it to that particular place. You must have had some problem in choosing, once you’d decided to get rid of it in the first place.’

  ‘You must be tired. You must be wanting to go home. You look tired, you were tired when you arrived.’

  ‘I feel better now. I want to hear. I’m curious, you know. On a quite simple level.’

  ‘Are you? Are you really? That’s nice of you. Oh dear. I can hardly bear to tell you about it, it was so sad, and I behaved like such a fool. The school was in Ujuhudiana, I bet you don’t even know where Ujuhudiana is, do you? It used to be called Juhudiland till it got its independence. It’s a terribly dull place. Nothing much goes on there at all, that’s why I got interested in it, because it was so dull, if you see what I mean. Look, here it is.’ And she got up and got him a book, one in the Mundy and Gross series, with a map, and photographs.

  ‘You see? And I got interested because it seemed a small and peaceful place. I couldn’t cope with the idea of big violent places like the Congo and Nigeria. The country’s not very fertile, most of the people are nomadic, there’s a lot of cattle, well,’ – he was turning the pages of the book – ‘you can see for yourself. So I started to collect cuttings and read books. And then war broke out. You probably don’t even remember. It was a very little civil war – one tribe against another – but there was a lot of violence in the capital, Gbolo, and quite a lot of people were killed and buildings burned. And one day in The Times there was this photograph. I’ll show you. Wait. I’ll show you.’

  And she got up again, and went over to her desk, and took an old crumpled press cutting out of a pigeon-hole. He noticed that she did not herself look at it: she handed it to him with her eyes more or less averted, her other hand fluttering nervously over it as though she didn’t want to catch sight of it, as though she didn’t want it to communicate with her, as though the very touch of it was enough to alarm. He opened it nervously, and looked at it. It showed a town square – not an imposing one, the buildings were low, the road surface poor. In the square lay bodies, nine or ten bodies. The quality of the photograph was poor, few details mercifully could be distinguished. A policeman stood watching. The only part of the picture which was in clear focus was a small child, sitting cross-legged by one of the corpses. Its mother, one could see that the corpse had been. The child was naked. It was sitting naked in the dust, its face lost, its eyes sagging blank with nothingness, its mouth drooping slightly open. It was a remarkable photograph. And Rose, watching Simon look at it, remembering, as he responded to it with a movement of grief, what it had been like, felt as though she were looking at it again for the first time. She could not help it.

  ‘You see?’ she said. ‘I saw that, and I couldn’t get over it. It’s all very well, reading books. It’s better, I know. But that – I don’t know, I don’t know what that did to me. But it was something I had to do something about. And the next week, there was an appeal, I don’t know if you remember, from this man from Urumbi, that’s the Northern province, who’d come over here. Nyoka, his name was. Akisoferi Nyoka. I went to a lecture he gave at the African Institute. He was appealing for funds to build a new school, his had been burned down in the riots. So I sent him the money.’

  ‘Just like that?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right. Just like that.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Well, this was the really depressing part. They built the school, but in another year the war, which had stopped altogether, broke out again much more virulently, and there was a real bloodbath. You wouldn’t believe it. In fact you probably wouldn’t know about it because it was terribly badly reported here. I thought they were a peaceful lot, but there isn’t a peaceful nation on earth. They chopped each other up and floated each other down the rivers. Hundreds and hundreds. Thousands. Nobody knows how many. The Northern bit, there –’ and she pointed at the map – ‘the bit called Urumbi, wanted to cut itself off from this other bit down here, Nchikavu, it wanted to secede. But there wasn’t any point in it, there was no oil, nothing, and nobody cared here, nobody at all. There’s nothing much to choose between those two wretched countries. I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse. Anyway, he built my school all right, did Nyoka, but he also bought himself a huge great white Mercedes. Out of my money. I saw a photo of him sitting in it. Labour must be cheap, over there. And the school was burned down, burned to the ground. A month or two after it was opened. Christopher said I should have expected it, I should have known better, I shouldn’t have trusted that man – and maybe he was right. I didn’t stop to think. I couldn’t have thrown the money away more ineffectively, could I?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But one couldn’t blame you for that. You couldn’t have known.’

  ‘It makes one wonder. If there is anything one can safely do. It makes me quite ill, when one opens a newspaper and sees the causes people are prepared even to die for – did you see that piece about those French schoolboys who killed themselves, burned themselves to death, as a protest against what’s going on in Biafra? As a protest, for Christ’s sake, as a sacrifice to the French oil wells – immolating themselves for French business interests – it’s terrifying to think of them reading those French papers, and not knowing what was beneath it all, and solemnly and so horribly uselessly dying – perhaps they saw a photograph like I saw a photograph. One can’t blame them. Anyway, you could take this story as an explanation of why I’ve given up public causes – and why I think I ought to sit here at home and keep quiet and dig my own garden. Literally dig it, actually. Now that’s the kind of activity that used to seem to me sublimely useless, and now at my age seems a good thing to do. You might well say that that’s all very well for me, which is more or less what you said before –’

  ‘No, no, not exactly,’ he said, protesting, but she brushed his protests aside, politely.

  ‘Oh, I know what you meant,’ she said. ‘It’s a privilege, to be able to learn the lessons I’ve learned. The lessons of the privileged. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn. I refuse to believe I was damned from birth, you know. It would be rather hard, not to allow people to learn. I can’t really believe all that once a lady always a lady, and unto them that have it shall be given, can you?’ She smiled, suddenly cheerful. A sudden ripple of energy went through her, as she sat there: she lifted up a hand, and held it there, the fingers spread out,
mocking, smiling, serious. ‘All alone,’ she said: ‘I arrest the course of nature. I arrest it. I divert the current.’

  ‘It’s very rash of you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, staring at her unnaturally raised hand, tense, the veins standing up in it, like a gesture, a joke. Quickly she crumpled the fingers in and dropped it to her lap, the moment of assertion over.

  ‘You ought to be getting home,’ she said, her nerve gone. ‘I’ve kept you too long, I’ve talked at you too much.’

  ‘I haven’t been much use to you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You listened to me,’ she said. ‘That was kind of you.’

  ‘Not very,’ he said, getting up, preparing to go. ‘It would have been, if it hadn’t been interesting. But it was interesting.’

  ‘I never even got round to telling you about the custody thing, did I, I was so busy telling you everything else. He’s definitely applying for custody to the Divorce Court. So I’ve got to have the Welfare round, and write an affidavit, and all that. Christopher says they shouldn’t be allowed to go to school in this area, you know. That’s his best point, I think. But what does the country have areas like this for, if they’re too bad for children to go to school in?’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry too much, if I were you.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? The judge thinks I’m mad already, you know. You saw what he said about me in the divorce case. And lawyers and people take education terribly seriously, you know. They simply wouldn’t have the faintest conception of what I mean by leaving them where they are. And yet they have no notion whatsoever of where that – that incomprehension leaves them. They just don’t know. They can’t add it up. Christopher knows, he knows all too well, the trouble is he knows and doesn’t like it. If he’d come from where I come from, he wouldn’t have been able to put up half such a good case for himself. But he knows it all, it’s what he was brought up on, it’s what turned him into what he is. Where they are now. One has to admit it, his case is far more reasonable than mine. In terms of how things are, and how things work. All he has to say is, I want them to have the opportunities that I never had, and any judge in England would sympathize with him. Wouldn’t they? You know they would.’