The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  It was almost as though a legitimate desire to be circumspect and not to expect too much of people had fed itself so much on justification that it had become a positive conviction, and had so settled itself into a habit of mind that any evidence contradicting such a low assessment was now regarded as positively unwelcome. And Jefferson now defended himself by irony, by cynicism, by mockery, from the progressive policies and arguments he in fact pursued. He even took pleasure in taking on cases, every now and then, that were fought, as it were, against himself, and against his own previous pleadings, maintaining that by doing so he was demonstrating the inviolable impartiality of the law: a fine enough principle, and one that one could not but approve, but it remained evident that Jefferson’s pleasure in such cases had become far from impartial. Anyway, Simon said to himself as he re-read for the tenth time a sentence about place and capacities of employment, everybody knew that the law was far from impartial, it was one of the most biased professions in the country, and Jefferson ought to know that if ever anyone did. What he had been able to achieve, personally, had been a mere feather on the opposite scales: and it was ridiculous of him to leap from time to time, as he now did, grinning gnomishly and virtuously, into the heavier measure, sitting there cockily amongst the heaps of gold, pretending he had made the leap for the sake of balance. Perhaps, thought Simon, I will write another book, about the class structure of the British legal system, which will put me out of business for life. It would do no good, less good even than a book on comparative trade union practices, but at least it would be interesting.

  He was just about to make the effort of lifting a biro to make a note when the telephone rang. He assumed it would be Julie, asking him to bring down her cigarettes or her book, but it wasn’t, it was the girl on reception, telling him she had a London call for him, and when the call was put through, it was Rose.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d give you a ring. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘How are you?’ she said. ‘Is it nice there?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s quite good.’ And, as she did not immediately continue, he told her that he had been for a walk with Kate, and how he had enjoyed it, and how bad the weather was.

  ‘What are you doing with yourself, for Easter?’ he asked, then, when she still did not speak.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been out quite a lot,’ she said. ‘Out to dinner, and things. I’m just going out now. I thought I’d ring you before I went. I didn’t have anything to say, really. I just wanted to talk. What’s the hotel like?’

  And he told her about the hotel, and how the less one did the less one became capable of doing, and how odd it was to sit around eating so much. ‘Grotesque, really,’ he finished, on a note of apology.

  ‘It’s quite nice,’ she said, ‘for a change, though,’ and he agreed that it was quite nice. He couldn’t make out why she had rung him, though when she then said, ‘The children aren’t here, they’ve gone off with Christopher for a day or two,’ he sensed that she was seeking some kind of reassurance: but could not guess at her true anxiety, which was that he would not bring them back, so all he could say was, ‘Is it good, then, to have them off your hands for a day or two?’

  ‘Yes, in a way,’ she said, and sighed.

  ‘Where did he take them to?’ he asked, wondering if it could have been them that he had seen, and if so, whether he should say so, and he heard the anxiety content of her voice rise considerably as she replied, ‘Well, that’s it, that’s what I don’t quite like, I’m not quite sure where they are, you see.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you where he was going?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And it didn’t seem right to ask.’

  ‘When will they be back?’

  ‘In the morning, he said,’ she said.

  ‘Well, they’ll be back soon,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I wish now that I’d asked him. I don’t like not knowing where they are. He might have taken them to my parents. But I don’t know. He sometimes does.’

  ‘They’ll be back soon,’ he repeated.

  ‘And when will you be back?’ she said, brightening: her fear, even so obliquely voiced, had been dissipated by being shared. ‘At the end of the week?’

  ‘On Friday,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a ring when I get back. I’ll come and see you, if I may.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind my ringing. I wanted to speak to somebody. And the house seemed so empty.’

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that I’m pleased that you did. I was thinking of ringing you myself.’

  ‘Were you really?’ she said, obviously pleased. ‘That would have been nice of you.’

  ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow evening, shall I, and make sure you’re all safely reassembled?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said ‘that would be nice, if that’s not too much trouble,’ and he could tell from her voice that he had got it right, that this was what she wanted.

  ‘I’ll do that, then,’ he said, and they said goodbye, and she rang off, and he was left wondering whether he had acquitted himself adequately, whether there was something else he should have guessed or said, or whether she had rung him after all because she wanted to speak to him. He remembered, now, before Easter, complaining to her rather treacherously about what a drag it was having to go off to a hotel, and how much he disliked sitting around doing nothing when there were so many things he ought to be getting on with: perhaps she had rung to cheer him up. He quite liked the idea. He did not recall that he had given her the name of the hotel: he certainly hadn’t written it down, the most he could have done would have been to mention it in passing, and he wondered what it meant that she had remembered it. Though she could have found it out, of course, from the au pair girl, left behind to feed the cat. Even so, either way, he was pleased. It was luck that she had been put straight through to him. But perhaps she hadn’t been put straight through to him. Perhaps the receptionist had sent somebody to the lounge to tell Julie there was a woman on the line for her husband. He had better go down and find out.

  Julie was waiting to interrogate him, when he got downstairs. ‘Who was that on the phone?’ she said. Taking a chance on the extreme unlikelihood of the receptionist having specified the caller’s sex, he said, mentioning the most boring and likely person he could think of: ‘Hindley.’ Hindley was the Clerk of his Chambers: his name, to Julie, spelled such profound dullness that she would never pick up such a gauntlet.

  ‘They never leave him alone, even on holidays,’ she said to Sally, with a sigh of curiously mingled contempt and pride.

  ‘Awful, isn’t it,’ said Sally, not listening. She had begun not to listen to everything that Julie said. How very wise, thought Simon, looked at his watch, and decided it was time to ask everybody if they would like a drink. They did like, of course, and that was the end of another fourteen shillings and sixpence.

  Later, after dinner, over coffee, he made a connection he had been trying to make for hours. Ever since he had remembered Jefferson’s remark about not being able to see the trees for the wood, it had plagued him, as it had done when it had first been recounted to him: he’d never known what it meant, and on any level it seemed, when applied to himself, grossly untrue. What he did precisely do was to see trees, not woods: he tackled each bit of life as it came up, he was a devoted believer in empiricism, he was so far from having any final vision or aim in view that he had, perforce, to believe in the necessity of taking each step as it came. Anyone involved in the amazingly complex historical tangle of trades unions and labour legislation would be very foolish to have any other attitude. There was no way of putting the whole thing right, even if one knew what right was, in a capitalist society: there was only the possibility of defending individual and minor points, redundancy payments, hours and compensations, laws of contract, conditions of work, rights to bargain: there wasn’t such a thing as a
wood that one could see, there were trees only, and some of those were no more than little scrubs. All that he and people like himself could do was to defend those trees and scrubs: and even that defence might well be undone by ill-disposed judges or governments driving their bulldozers (or, to use a more classic archaic legal metaphor, their coach and horses) through the plantation. So how could he be accused, politically, of not seeing the trees? He was no idealist, no visionary, no revolutionary. How irritating it was, this habit lawyers had of using clichés, inverted or simple, to illustrate their points: as though the introduction of a metaphor were in itself the signal for applause for ready wit. It was a habit he had himself. How often, in court, had he heard the sycophantic laughter that would follow a turn of phrase so unoriginal, so pedantically unfunny, that it would have been sighed or smiled out of existence in ordinary conversation between friends.

  And yet, perhaps it was true that he was biased. There was a connection, a comparison, somewhere, that he was on the verge of grasping. It was true that he aligned himself often irrationally on the side of the employee, even in such absurd cases as this ridiculous twenty-four-hour strike that was going on at the moment at Caxton’s: a strike against the management, it was, but motivated by the fact that other firms, through strikes, were likely to fail to produce the necessary parts. What possible blame attached to Caxton’s management at that point in time it was impossible to see, and he had seen all the workers on the television in the hotel lounge the night before, standing baffled in front of the interviewer, unable to justify their line, mumbling embarrassed and shuffling off, and had heard the rustle of understandable indignation amongst the other hotel viewers. Those inarticulate men in their overalls. They protested against the wrong things, sometimes, and sometimes protested maliciously, he knew all that. Not one of them had even thought of making a case: not one of them mentioned the problem of lay-off pay. One phrase of comprehension of the real meaning of their prospective plight would have been enough, and it had not been forthcoming. What was the point of defending those so stubbornly unwilling to defend themselves? But perhaps they were not unwilling, perhaps they were incapable, and ah yes, that was it, he had it now, the connection he had been after, and it was the question of his own alignment, his own bias, that it concerned. It was Rose he had been thinking of, yet again, Rose, with the next-door baby on her knee, stating quite simply that it was not possible to refuse such a service because the baby’s grandmother (he had forgotten the details) worked for such and such a small sum, on her knees, scrubbing floors, whereas Rose was sitting safely in her chair and what did one baby more or less upon her knee signify? The issue was of such simplicity. Those that have may not reject those that have not: they may not in any way accuse of greed those that have less than themselves: they may not talk of profits declining while still in their large houses: they may not sit in front of television sets in expensive hotels which cost one man’s weekly wage per person per day and criticize men in overalls who do not understand why they should be laid off next week, through no fault of their own. When profits have so declined that the owners too stand on street corners in their overalls, and sell up their second car and their large house, then they may complain. The naïveté of such a view was as bad as Rose’s, ignoring as it did the demands of the nation and the economy, ignoring, as hers did, her total lack of personal obligation to that particular baby, but it was fundamental, it was a view from which he could never train himself: it was the wood in which the trees grew. May the forests of it cover the earth, he oh so hopelessly desired. Shake down the superfluity. There was nothing else to hope for, any other hope was intolerable, and yet it was so hopeless, it was as though one were to desire the kingdom of heaven. Where the rich may not enter, where greed may perish. Not of this world is the kingdom, but there is no other world. Oh God, he said (staring into his coffee cup, a non-believer), oh God help us to help each other, for if we do not, what are we, and what shall we become?

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Julie, suddenly, ‘What are you thinking about?’

  She broke off her conversation with Sally and her husband to say this, turning to him slightly: there was a menace in her tone, he drearily noted, she spoke to him with a hostility that boded no good. It was his own fault: he should never have asserted himself by going out for a walk.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she continued, as he smiled weakly and apologetically at them.

  ‘I was thinking about the strike at Caxton’s,’ he said. He could not think of anything else to say. It was not a politic answer.

  ‘Whatever for?’ she said. ‘You’re not mixed up in it, are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to be mixed up in, from my point of view. I was just thinking about it.’

  ‘And what fascinating conclusions did you reach?’ she said, with a heavy childish irony.

  ‘None in particular,’ he said. ‘I suppose I was thinking that it was a pity that public relations are so bad, and that nobody ever explains what’s going on in simple enough terms. That’s all.’

  ‘Well, please don’t start explaining to us,’ said Julie. ‘I’m sure Sally and Howard don’t want to hear about your speculations on the state of the nation. And I’ve heard enough about it to last me a lifetime – you wouldn’t believe what I have to listen to,’ she said, turning back to the others, who smiled and bristled with incipient embarrassment.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Simon, trying to lighten the tone, but quite well aware that it was too late. ‘I don’t know. I keep most of it to myself, you know. I don’t think I’ve given you a lecture about it since the last Ford package deal, have I?’

  ‘Well, you just started off on it again now,’ said Julie.

  ‘No, not really,’ said Simon. ‘I was just thinking. And I only told you what I was thinking about because you asked me. You took me by surprise, I didn’t have time to invent an exciting enough alternative. But I will, if you like. Or you could tell me what you were talking about, and I could talk about it too.’

  ‘You should have been listening,’ said Julie. ‘You can’t just sit there thinking.’

  The contempt in her voice was so painful to hear that Sally started to pour out second cups of stone-cold coffee, and her husband reached for a newspaper.

  ‘There, you see what you’ve done,’ said Julie, her anger heightening dangerously. ‘You’ve ruined everything, Howard’s going to start reading the newspaper because you won’t talk about anything interesting, I know I’m boring but I don’t like sitting around thinking, I do enough of that at home, and anyway, you’ve been out on your own all day, haven’t you, you might at least try to be sociable when you get back.’