The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  On the way home Rose bought herself a piece of cheese for lunch, and various other items for supper, at the Co-op, and deplored once more that the Co-op had descended to the vulgarity of giving stamps. ‘It’s a real shame,’ said the woman at the desk, for the tenth time, sniffing with contempt at the working classes, ‘but if you can’t beat them you’ve got to join them.’

  ‘I used to like giving my number,’ said Rose, plaintively, also for the tenth time.

  ‘People these days, they haven’t got the brain to remember their numbers,’ said the lady at the desk, quite untruthfully, but perhaps truthfully expressing sorrow at the decay of commercial standards.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Rose, ‘never mind,’ – shoving the blue stamps into her purse. She had heard this same woman agreeing with various other customers that stamps were a good idea because then you could see what you were getting, but with a number how could you be sure your number had ever got through? It would be interesting to know which of these views she really held. Perhaps she held both views simultaneously and with equal conviction. That was how most people were.

  When she got home the second post was waiting for her on the doormat. She did not like the look of it, there was one letter that looked even from a distance as though it was from her solicitors. She put her shopping away in the kitchen and came back to pick it up, and it was. She sighed and opened it. Luckily it was not very interesting: it simply said (though not in such simple language) that since Rose was so reluctant to answer her post or her telephone, perhaps she might find time to go to the office to talk her problems over. She sighed again, heavily. It was the last thing she wanted to do, but she saw that she would have to. She had an uneasy feeling that her solicitor was much keener to talk to her than she was to talk to him. He was really just a little bit too interested in her affairs. She couldn’t blame him for this, it was good of him in a way, but she found it embarrassing. In fact, she didn’t see how it could be anything other than an embarrassing relationship, in view of all the things that he inevitably knew about her. He was too kind, too human, too involved – and it was precisely for these qualities, of course, that he had been recommended to her. But she’d never been able to accept his kindness very easily: she had, in fact, she had to admit, felt more at ease in the divorce case with the barrister who had seemed to assume that divorce was a sophisticated mental exercise, not intended to touch too closely on the realities of conflict. Her solicitor, Mr Alford, on the other hand, had attempted sophistication (thinking her, at first sight perhaps, that kind of person) but had been unable to maintain it, he was so genuinely upset by some of the things that had happened to her. At least with the divorce he had known what to be upset about, poor man: he was a gentle, diffident, courteous English person who did not like the thought of a woman being knocked about or locked up in her bedroom. (He had tried, bravely and dutifully, to question her about sexual irregularities on Christopher’s part, assuming an uneasy bravado, but both he and she had found it so painful that they had abandoned the investigation and had agreed to miss such matters out of the evidence completely. Not that she could have borne, anyway, in conscience and honour, to complain about things that Christopher had done that she had quite enjoyed at the time.) But with the custody of the children she was on different grounds altogether. He had been terribly upset to have to tell her that she would have to be investigated by the Welfare, much more upset than she had been – (though she had been a bit rattled, and had gone to the lengths of pulling out the sideboard to see if there were still any of those big black beetles nesting behind it) – and had hardly been able to bring himself to ask her what she thought the grounds for her husband’s sudden accusations were, in case it emerged that she had been drinking herself into a stupor or sleeping with every man in the street. She had reassured him on these points, but she still hadn’t been able to explain to him why it was that she lived where she did and as she did in any way that he could understand. She had got used to people not understanding her. And at least Jeremy Alford was polite about his incomprehension. Some of her friends had been positively abusive. She had been quite amazed. You’re being very selfish, they used to tell her – though surely they must have meant masochistic rather than selfish, if the thought of living as she did filled them with such alarm? They had produced all kinds of arguments against her, those hard realists with their central heating and their fitted carpets and their ambitions, and how could she persuade them that her life was as pleasant to her as a fitted carpet: to walk down the street, greeting this person here and this person there, to call in the sweet shop, the chemist, the greengrocer, the launderette (especially the launderette, because she knew all about it having worked there once) – to do all these things was a pleasure to her, and a profound satisfaction. There were some disagreeable people around, it was true, like the librarian and the woman in the post-office and the old couple on the corner who went round sticking racist posters on walls and lampposts, but on the whole they were people, just people, that one liked because one liked people, and because they were there. And perhaps one liked them all the more because one had not at first been able to get to know them. She didn’t think (as her critics, of course, hinted) that she liked them out of pride and arrogance, because of the difficulty of forcing herself to do so: on the contrary, she sometimes thought that she’d like anyone who liked her, even that couple of old racists. She didn’t want to lose it all. It was where she belonged. Quite simply, like many unreasonable slum dwellers, she didn’t want to be rehoused. She liked to be with people who were quiet and minded their own business and didn’t try to upset one another. They had watched her carried from the house in an ambulance, that day when she had swallowed a bottleful of aspirins, and they had said nothing. They had made no difference towards her. They had watched her dripping blood down the front steps from her gashed wrist – huge red wet drops the size of pennies – and they had never mentioned the sight again, though they had watched it carefully through their lace curtains. She liked them because they were not officious. She liked them because they did not know what to do. These really were the poor in spirit, these people. She had gone out one evening last summer, to sit on her front steps, and on the front steps next door had been assembled the whole of the Greek family, its cousins from across the road, and its various children. They were sitting there, looking vaguely worried, but doing nothing much. After a few minutes, as Rose sat there reading and watching her own children play hopscotch, the father of the family addressed her, saying, what do you think, Mrs Vassiliou, do you think we should do anything, my brother’s little girl has just eaten a bottle of those orange aspirins, do you think we need to do anything? What, Rose had cried, leaping to her feet, scattering her paper and cigarettes, what, tell me about it. And they had told her, again, quietly, without urgency. You must ring the hospital at once, Rose said, at once. They will think we are making a fuss, said the man, nervously. Not at all, not at all, said Rose, supplying in her manner the missing urgency. The telephone box on the corner is broken, as usual, said the man. Use mine, said Rose. Oh no, they all said, we cannot bother you, we should not trouble you. So Rose had tried to convince them it was a serious matter, and had succeeded, and had rung the hospital, and the ambulance had arrived. The whole incident had moved her profoundly. It was impossible to convict these people of negligence, or of criminal irresponsibility: they had been anxious, concerned, but they had not known what to do. It had been much the same when Mrs Flanagan had been called as witness in the divorce case. Mrs Flanagan was a solid woman, a respected person, an elderly matriarch, safe enough in her own confines: she had stood by Rose, discreetly and without much personal approval, over the years, helping her once out of a bedroom window, letting her in once when she had been locked out of the house in her nightdress, and she had overheard over the years through the thin partition walls the birth pangs of Marcus and Maria, the breaking of crockery, the screams of anguish, the solitary moans of Rose in despair. She had tak
en all this very calmly, and had through sexual loyalty taken Rose’s part, so had been a natural witness to call: but when she arrived at the court on the morning of the event, her voice had vanished. It had quite simply vanished. Confronted by alien articulations, she had retreated into silence. She stood there in the witness box, croaking and muttering inaudibly, quite unable to answer the simplest question. Christopher remarked maliciously that this was an unprecedented development for Mrs Flanagan, who was vocal enough at home, and suggested that perhaps her curious impediment was the expression of a subconscious wish not to perjure herself. The judge was evidently inclined to take this line too, as he was very short with her. The loss of voice persisted, quite genuinely, for three days.

  How could one explain that one wished to live in a house because the neighbours on one side let their small child swallow a bottle of aspirins, and because the woman on the other side lost her voice when she needed it?

  There was something more than the daily pleasures of streets well trodden, faces well known, small moments of architectural madness and felicity amidst acres of monotony. There was some inexplicable grace, in living so. Useless it probably was, like living in a closed order. Irrelevant, unproductive. But, as a nun attaches significance to arbitrary vows, so she had attached it to this place that she inhabited. Like a nun, she had recklessly committed herself, expecting perhaps little, expecting doubt and even despair to persist, but the rewards of faith had been hers, the sun whose existence she had merely supposed, through faith (because if it were not there, why live?), had shone forcefully upon her, it had illumined her and the relations that she had, in theory, supposed to have existed. They were there: so bright, so lit, she could not suppose that she had invented them.

  What sort of defence would this make in a court of law? And who was to set about reducing it to an affidavit?

  The rest of her second post was less interesting. There was one library reminder, for the books she had just returned, and two appeals from charities. The number of these appeals had reached such a point, at one stage, that she had been forced to write back, in unstamped envelopes, being unable to afford the postage. Most people had taken the hint, but on the other hand a lot of people knew that she was going to come into some more money sometime soon, and they wanted to keep reminding her of the worthiness of their claims. Most of their claims were very worthy, though she had become cynical, over the years, about the ability of many of the smaller organizations to fulfil their obligations. She had known too many of them fold up, through bad management or ill will on committee level or conflicts of aims with other bodies. Some of the collapses were tragic. There was an appeal now, to rehouse a disbanded group of disabled people who had fallen through the mesh of any other organization: a Methodist minister had persuaded a local council to lease him a house for them, where they had been set up in cottage industries of various sorts, but now the lease had expired and would not be renewed because the local residents had complained that the disabled people were unsightly and lowered the tone of the neighbourhood and frightened the local children. The Methodist described this meanness with passion and fire, and appealed to Rose and all the other people on his mailing list to raise funds to purchase a freehold dwelling where his protégés would be free from such selfish interference. She thought of her bombed school, and wondered whether people were worse off, if helped and then abandoned, than if they had never been helped at all. The other appeal was for a new extreme left-wing splinter group magazine of anarchic tendencies: a hangover hope that she would respond to solicitations from her early years. She looked at it, and read its manifesto, with extreme distaste. Some of the friends of her non-student days had been mad enough, God knows, but none of them ever as mad as this, and they had moreover been gentle people. Perhaps these young people, who seemed to see the world through the red blood of their own eyelids, were nice and gentle too, it was just that she was too old to know them, perhaps they merely wrote like homicidal maniacs because they weren’t very good at writing. She wasn’t to know, she was too old. It wasn’t worth finding out. Better to do no very evident good than to do harm. She threw both letters in the bin, and went upstairs to make the beds. It was the divorce judge’s fault that she got these letters every day. It was entirely his fault that she had become widely known as a dispenser of large sums of money. The matter of her African donation had been raised, naturally, during the case, but the papers wouldn’t have been able to report it with such glee if the judge hadn’t gone on about it in his summing up. They wouldn’t have been allowed to. But as it was, they could really go to town on it. She’d managed to keep it quiet till then, but once it was out it was out, and she was inundated with telephone calls, begging letters, photographers, journalists. She wondered, sometimes, if this was what the judge had intended, if this was the price she had to pay for her decree. Because the judge hadn’t approved of the folly of her largesse, it had been easy to see. And if it was to be (as seemed probable) the same judge dealing with the custody case, he would be given a second chance to show his disapproval.

  PART TWO

  As the weeks passed, and a late spring came slowly on, and the solicitors lost all sense, in endless delays, of their initial urgency, Rose Vassiliou and Simon Camish continued their communications. At first, she would ring him up to ask him things: he had a suspicion that there were many people she rang, and that she was merely adding him to a list. But he responded, nevertheless, and came to anticipate her calls. As he assumed he had been cast in the role of legal adviser, he responded, on the whole, in terms of legal advice, a convenient formula. He looked things up for her, he explained things for her, and she thanked him politely for his interest, while appearing, delicately, at the same time, to find it quite natural. He wondered himself how natural it was. It was a long time since he had concerned himself with the affairs of another person in such a way, but then it was also a long time since anyone had appealed to him in such a way. He thought about her, he was quite well aware, more than strict necessity warranted, and worked out one day (while considering this) that he had formed with her possibly the first new connection in his married life, the first new relationship in years. He had been obliged to keep, for years, his professional and social life separate, as Julie so disliked having anything to do with lawyers, and he was uncomfortably aware of the fact that his connection with Rose was entirely surreptitious. She rang him, always, at his chambers, and eventually, inconvenienced by this, he took to ringing her instead. This arrangement gave their connection a disagreeably secret and pleasantly intimate nature. He valued this, but had no means of knowing what it might signify to her. On the whole he thought that she spoke to him because he was fixed and harmless. He was aware that in her position, as a woman alone, she was exposed to attentions of which she sometimes, allusively, complained, and thought it likely that his own manner, lacking as it clearly did any sense of expectation, was a relief to her, on this most negative level. If so, he did not much mind having found a practical use for his own self-negations. He could not have coped with anything more. It was almost impossible, really, to think of her as a woman, so entirely did she manage to present herself in a neutral light. He admired this presentation. In such a way, he, too, had always presented himself not as a man, but as something less dangerous. She had, she once sighed, had quite enough of men, gallantly implying that he was acquitted of the crime of belonging to this rejected category. Perhaps it was the only way to talk to anybody. He did not regret it.

  Oddly enough, wherever he went now, he heard her name. He wondered how he had avoided it for so long. As a new word, once acquired, presents itself in every piece of print, so her name arose in every social gathering. Everybody seemed to know her, or to have heard of her, and to have views about her. In a way he judged her for the evident promiscuity of her interests, for having put herself in a position where she would be talked of. She had brought it upon herself, and there was no point in defending too much the honour or privacy of somebody
who had exposed herself as she had exposed herself. But at the same time, he flattered himself that he had some personal access to her private nature. Perhaps, he thought, everybody who speaks of her assumes just such a privileged knowledge, so careful is she to relate, so anxious is she not to cause offence, so anxious is she to be liked and not condemned. And yet, nevertheless, he continued to believe that she bestowed upon him an especial light, an especial favour. He liked her, he truly liked her. If he was deceived, he was willingly deceived. He did not believe that she put down the phone after speaking to him, only to lift it again to ring up another comforter, seeking the same reassurances, imparting the same woes and same amusements. He thought he understood her. He wished to understand. Such a modicum of good will (for so he thought it) was nothing less than a re-birth in his nature. As such he valued it, and wondered from time to time if she suspected how exclusively she claimed his interest.