The Needle's Eye

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by Margaret Drabble


  Boatman, boatman, row my boat

  Across the stinking dirty clarty water

  In other regions, as he had since found, they sing

  Boatman, boatman, row my boat

  Across the golden river.

  His mother had done a radio programme on this once, on regional games, and their differences. She would take anything on, and was good at this kind of thing, because she had a good regional accent, which she had learned to adopt or dismiss at will. She had known there was a golden river elsewhere, and that the yellow detergent-foaming oily canal at the bottom of the street did not manifest the natural condition of water. Brought up in such a district, she had developed a passion for the natural, for gardens, for birds, for trees. Visiting him in Oxford, she had taken such intense delight in its floral corners that he had been quite ashamed. Sitting in a cafe with him for tea, she had told him, when we were little, we only had an outside lavatory, you know, and I used to go and sit in it for hours to read because it was the only quiet place, and there was a kind of plant on top of the wall that you could see through a crack at the top of the door. I don’t know what it was. Also you could see birds, in that little bit of sky. I don’t know what they were either. We used to call them grey birds. Just like that. Grey birds. And he had been hideously embarrassed by this confession, by the thought (quite simply) of his mother sitting on a lavatory (for it was unlike her to mention such a thing, and it must have been the impact of Oxford that had shocked her into doing so) and by the thought of her horribly constricted pleasures. She had always refused to take him to the street where she used to live, she said it was too horrible, but he’d gone there alone, one day, as a child, and she was right, it was too horrible, and where they now lived, 11 Canal Street, was a polite suburb compared with 9 Violet Bank (ironically christened by some malicious council). But the point was, he had writhed with shame at her recollections, although they had been delivered, those words about the lavatory and the grey birds, without any of the sentiment that she would have surrounded them with on the radio: and afterwards he realized what a swine he had been, what a selfish thoughtless swine, to reject, so awkwardly, her confidence. He had been ashamed of her, throughout his Oxford days, because her name, to those who knew it, was a joke name, like Patience Strong or Godfrey Wynn: so he had never taken her part. And yet it was for her, in a sense, that he had become a barrister, for her that he had married Julie, for her that he had accepted that stinking dirty money. He would have done better to feel for her more and consider her less. But what was the point, at all, in such a conclusion?

  Violet Bank, in fact, he later found, had not been named maliciously. It had once been a violet bank. He went back there, later, years later, while he was up at Oxford, drawn to it by a fearful interest: it was grim and sunless, and he walked up and down it miserably, knowing himself compelled to knock at the door of the house in which his mother had been born: and he did knock, sick with fear and embarrassment, and an old lady answered, a white mumbling old lady with white hairs sprouting out of her chin and her thin hair tied up in a duster, as thin as a stick she was, her legs like matches under her flowery pinny, the stockings sagging on them, her arms like articulated pins. He hadn’t known what he would say, but seeing her, he said, I just wanted to look inside, my mum used to live here – and she asked him in, and made him a cup of tea so strong that he winced and shivered as he bravely drank it down, and while he looked around at the walls and the sad furniture she told him her life story, the old lady, how she had been born near a farm out beyond Barnham, she’d worked on the farm as a lass, but then she’d got restless, she’d wanted to see the world, so she’d come into town and got herself a job in the chocolate factory – she laughed, wheezily, a ghostly laugh – and she’d married a fellow and settled down, not far from Violet Bank, and his mother remembered the day when Violet Bank wasn’t built, oh, it was lovely out this way, they used to come out this way on a weekend, picking flowers, you wouldn’t think so to see it now, would you, son – oh yes, times had changed, the farm where she’d been born was all a big factory, now, or so she’d been told, chemicals they made there, or some such thing, though she hadn’t been out that way not for thirty years or more – no, there wasn’t much growing now in the way of violets, but it was a nice name, wasn’t it? It cheers you up, a nice name, said the old lady. Do you ever go to the country, now, he asked: no, she said, it’s too far, really, it’s too much effort, really, though she thought about it a lot, now she was getting older. I often think, she said, about what my Ma – that’s my ma-in-law, I called her Ma and I called me Mum Mum – often think about the things Ma used to tell me. It must’ve been a different world, when she was a child. I got on well with my Ma, she said, her rheumy eyes weeping a little, unemotionally leaking, against her will. It’s not everyone gets on with their ma-in-law.

  And, as he escaped into the street once more, and looked up its dark perspective, its pavements, its lamp-posts, its grim walls, its dirty gutters, Simon had a sudden apocalyptic vision, unsolicited, of the day when the world shall turn to grass once more, and the tender flowers will break and buckle the great paving stones. So recent they were, the days of green. Within living memory. And there would flow again the golden river, but there wouldn’t be any people waiting for the boatman. They would have gone, the people. Hell is full of people, but paradise is empty, unpolluted, crystalline, golden, clear.

  It had hardly been surprising, really, that he should have been so confused by his mother’s ambitions for him. Nor that he should have repeated the pattern all over again, with Julie. He sometimes thought that it was less for his mother than for Julie that he had accepted the money, and the way of life. How could he ever, now, be certain? Perhaps after all it had been for himself. He had done enough things for himself, under the guise of doing them for others, and how deplorable it was of him to make others responsible for his aspirations. He had always been a climber, ever since he could remember, and if he now didn’t like some of the things he had ended up with he had nobody to blame but himself. Who was it that had taught him carefully to control his accent, his references, to misrepresent his past, to take on the colouring, first of those boys at school, then of those friends at college, and finally of his colleagues at the Bar? Like Nick, he had developed a real art of misrepresentation: his mother, when he had been obliged to acknowledge her, became in his conversations not at all the woman she was, but somebody quite different, a genteel eccentric, an amusing oddity – an image she might herself have liked to perpetuate, to see perpetuated by him, but what had that to do with it? He had done it for his own ends, through shame of the real penury that had bred both him and her. And although he would never frankly lie about his origins, he certainly did not tell the truth about them, within his profession. His whole life – the clothes he wore, the car he drove, the way he spoke, the house he lived in – was an act of misrepresentation. He must have wanted it or he wouldn’t so consistently have done it. It was all very well for Rose to live in a dump that spoke of his worst fears, because those fears had never been real to her, as they had to him: she could amuse herself with the experience of poverty because it had never seriously threatened her. She had never had to go to school in her father’s cut-down suits, hanging uneasily as they had done around his scraggy adolescent body, nor had she had to present her teacher with explanations of why she could not afford to buy the prefects’ uniform till after half-term. (It always amazed him that a school, like this, which had so prided itself upon its policy of providing a superior education for the gifted poor, had been able to devise so many means for making such gifted poor feel agonizingly uncomfortable. The truth was, it hadn’t really provided for the gifted poor at all, but for the gifted middle class – had it fulfilled its charter, it might have been obliged to be more realistic.) He had had the worst of it all the way along, caught between reality and aspiration – he, for instance, had never been permitted by his mother, while a student, to take a vacation job,
as the majority of his much more affluent friends had done, because such an action would have smelt, to her, of defeat. He hadn’t been allowed to work for the price of eating his dinners – she had done it, more easily it is true as she became more successful. She had insisted on an expensive profession, because it had been the most difficult thing.

  So it was not surprising that he had accepted Julie and the money, when they had become available, when they had indeed surrounded themselves with obligations to be accepted. With what a mixture of amazement and dismay had he agreed to purchase this house in which he was now sitting, for a sum that would have bought his mother’s twenty times over. He had no illusions about the professional value of such a background – it had breathed of success, in days when success had needed a great deal of invitation and delicate persuasion. He had known quite well the value of that slight surprise at his surroundings, and had never, except in exceptional circumstances, felt it necessary to explain that he had not come by these things through his own labour or his own inheritance. He felt, most of the time, like a man who drives the firm’s large car and pretends that it is his own and paid for: a pretence useful to both firm and employee, a useful fostering of confidence. And slowly, his own labours had taken over, to a degree: he had grown to fit his surroundings, he had become able to maintain them, though he could never initially have afforded them. Life at the Bar these days, as the Head of his Chambers never tired of telling him, was much easier than it used to be: it was easy for a clever young man like himself to make a good living. But how far, he sometimes asked himself, would he have got, without Julie and what she had brought him? There had been other accidents operating in his favour, it was true – he had been lucky in his tutor at Oxford, who had managed to place him in a Chambers where the work had interested him to such a degree that he had had an incentive to labour, and a natural sympathy with what came his way. Union Law, most of it was, and that again (except that his entry into this world had been accidental) had represented, perhaps, a debt paid to his father. But with what ironies this debt was paid. His father, he was sure, had he been in a fit state to approve of anything, would have approved of the general tendencies of his efforts, in that he usually represented what his father would have thought of (when he could think) as the right side: but how had he become able to represent it but by turning his back upon all that had made him wish to align himself, in so far as a barrister may, upon one side rather than the other?

  Julie hated the nature of his work. She wished that he were doing something more interesting. She had shown the faintest glimmer of interest when he and an academic friend had started to combine to produce a book, because books were exciting, but had quickly lost enthusiasm when she discovered the intense dullness of the book, and the fact that his contributions were to remain, through professional discretion, almost anonymous. If there was one thing Julie couldn’t be doing with, it was anonymity. He often thought she would have been better married to a personality of some kind. She liked personalities. Whereas law reports she could not bring herself to read. He thought about their new car. She had wanted him to buy a big car. She liked big cars. He had said that he could not afford one, and she had said, never mind I’ll pay. So he had bought one, because he too liked big cars. And now he drove it around as though it were his, and people looked at it and registered its presence as though it were his. He had bought it to humour Julie, because what right had he to deny her the very few things in life that seemed to amuse her? What fault of his was it if her aims and needs were childish? And yet, driving it, he knew that this was what he himself would call corruption. With a faint sudden recurring shock of astonishment he would recognize, in his own behaviour, an eternal human pattern of corruption. This is it, he would think to himself, this is I, doing what all men do, I am enacting those old and preordained movements of the spirit, those ancient patterns of decay, I, who had thought myself different. I, who had (surely) other intentions. Corrupt, humanly corrupt if not professionally so, and humanly embittered. And his spirit would struggle feebly within the net that held it, and he would imagine some pure evasion, some massive rent through which he could emerge. But there was no action possible that would not involve destruction, violence, treachery, of those to whom he had pledged himself, and of the only useful actions of his life. And of those, there were some. There were even many. He was caught. And his spirit would hunch its feathered bony shoulders, and grip its branch, and fold itself up and shrink within itself, until it could no longer brush against the net, until it could no longer entangle itself, painfully, in that surrounding circumstantial mesh.

  Having pursued these reflections to their usual end, having arrived, as usual, at the usual bleak perch – a perch becoming less bleak, at times he thought, through familiarity, his hunched posture less painful as his bones learned to expect it – he finished his Ovaltine, and decided that he had better go to bed. He took the cup back into the kitchen and put it on the shelf, and looked once more at his son’s note.

  There was some other point that he was trying to remember, a last point. Yes. The real point about the whole of Rose’s case was the question of how the children were. That was what the question was. If she could be quite sure that they were better with her, that they had in no way suffered from being alone with her, then he was fairly sure that she had nothing to worry about. He thought of the two smaller ones, rolling on the floor. They had looked all right, what he had been able to bring himself to see of them. And the eldest child, Konstantin, culturally playing his oboe, had looked, from the judicial point of view, more than all right: civil, intelligent, almost a public-school product. But there might be more to it than that. He looked at his son’s laborious handwriting. There was always more to it than that. But with any luck, one could always conceal evidence that ought not to be seen.

  Julie was asleep when he went upstairs. With relief, he got into bed quietly, and tried to sleep himself.

  Rose, waking up the following morning, had immediately the sense that there was something unpleasant that she had promised herself that she would do. While she gave the children their breakfast and drank a cup of tea, she tried to work out what it could be – unearthing accidentally, as she did so, a whole heaped cupboardful of nasty obligations, such as shoe-buying and glazier-visiting, and of nagging guilts, about people she should have rung back and hadn’t, people she should have written to and hadn’t, birthday presents unbought and promises unfulfilled. But it was for none of these pointlessly exhumed anxieties that she had been looking. Finally, as she pulled up Maria’s socks, found Konstantin’s football boots, failed to find Marcus’s soccer cards, and kicked all three, in one continuous movement, out through the front door and down the road to school, she worked out what it was. She had promised herself (waking up, restless, in the middle of the night) that she would make herself go down to the library and look it all up. She would look it all up, in one of those dreadful law books. It was no good asking her solicitor, it was no good even asking Simon Camish, because nobody would tell her the truth: they were all too anxious to placate and to soothe. If she wanted to find out what it was all about, she would have to go and do it for herself. Having come to this conclusion, she sat down, rather weakly, and poured herself another cup of tea. She had been through all this before. Twice before. The first time, when she had herself been made a ward, she had been too ignorant even to put together the little information she had been able to acquire: having been more or less incarcerated in her father’s house, she had had to rely on whatever books were lying around there, and they’d been an unhelpful selection. The nearest she had got had been Iolanthe and Bleak House, neither of which had been exactly relevant, though the latter had filled her with a quite justified apprehension. But the apprehension had been shapeless, formless, completely lacking in detail, a terror of her own helplessness and confusion. When she came to the divorce, when she became aware that after all she was going to have to divorce Christopher out of self-protection, the situ
ation had been very different. Then, she had known what she ought to find out, though she still had little idea of how to set about it. She had gone down to the public library, with Maria still under school age amusing herself by pushing all the books, thud thud, to the backs of the shelves, and she had tried to find some useful books. Everyman’s Lawyer, Law for the Layman, a book on divorce statistics. She had tried to educate herself gently, her mind dazed by even the simplest terms, and had in the end to admit that there was nothing for it but to try the heavy stuff. She hadn’t been allowed to take Rayden home with her, as it was in the reference section, so she had had to pore over it anxiously with half her attention on a bored, trouble-making Maria: while she read, with extreme pain, of matrimonial offences and maintenance problems and definitions of cruelty and desertion. It had been a horrible experience, made worse by the fact that she seemed to understand so little of what she read, that she had to convict herself, as she struggled, of real stupidity. It would have been easier for her, perhaps, to go straight to the solicitors, but that was was not how she was, she wanted to know for herself, she could not trust herself to a solicitor. Solicitors had not, after all, been much on her side, and delicacy prevented her from approaching one without a certainty of the nature of her case. She could not, had never been able, to grasp the fact that a solicitor engaged by her would have her interests at heart. She expected to be judged, and harshly. Even finding a solicitor had been a major problem, as she clearly could not use Christopher’s, or her family’s, and had been too embarrassed, at first, to ask her friends. She had, in the end, asked Emily, who had been as vague as herself, but had managed to recommend her one nevertheless.

 

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