The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  He was on bad ground, he didn’t like it, but she began to laugh, and said, ‘Extra opportunities, extra opportunities. Perhaps I should start Maria off on ballet. It makes me feel quite ill, small children doing ballet, I don’t know why. Perhaps I should take the judge off to see their favourite spare-time activity, which is larking about on Thursday evenings at the Club. You should see the Club, what a dump, it’s in the downstairs bit of the Clinic, which is horrid enough by any standards, and this Club, they get an hour and a half and some biscuits for twopence a time, and you should see the kids, no socks, no pants, what a sight, and there’s a horrible bully of a man who organizes it, and yells at them all the time. Mine love it, God knows why. It’s like a monkey house, I’d feel really guilty, I really would feel guilty if I made them go to that, but they love it. Children are very odd. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose they are.’ He folded the affidavit up neatly and put it back behind the clock. He thought of Kate in the church.

  ‘I had an invitation,’ he said, ‘to an event where you are supposed to be speaking. Do you do much of that kind of thing?’

  She put the iron down, brushed away her hair from her forehead, and looked at him. She was blushing: the blood had crept faintly into her pale uncoloured faded face.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t. I try not to. What was it for?’

  ‘It was something to do with raising funds for a home for disabled workmen, I think.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Yes. How awful. I am sorry. It wasn’t me that put you on the mailing list, you know. I wouldn’t do a thing like that to anyone I knew.’

  ‘No,’ he said, quickly, this aspect of the case not having occurred to him, anxious to reassure her that he had not been suspicious, ‘No, I know it wasn’t you, it came through my wife, really, a neighbour got her to buy a ticket, perhaps you know the neighbour, Mrs Cookson her name is, she’s the wife of Herbert Cookson.’

  ‘I don’t know her, no. I know who you mean, though. Oh dear. I hate that kind of thing. And it’s my fault, really. He wrote to me, the man that runs the place, and asked me what to do about raising money, and I said why didn’t he have an evening – no, really, I hate that kind of charity, six-guinea tickets to hear a really lousy programme, but I couldn’t think what else to say, and it would be a pity if he lost his place, because he’s done a good job with it, he really got it going, so I told him to get in touch with Lady Bresson, and so it all went on from there. And then I could hardly say I wouldn’t turn up myself, could I? I didn’t realize they were selling the tickets already. They haven’t got my name on them, have they?’

  ‘I’m afraid they have,’ he said. He thought of the ticket, standing on his mantelshelf: Julie liked to have it there, because it said in Lady Bresson’s handwriting, ‘So glad you are coming, look forward to seeing you there, many thanks, Margaret.’ And he liked to have it there because Rose’s name was upon it, and it was almost as though it brought her presence into his house, and he liked the thought that nobody knew that when he looked in its direction, he looked with emotion.

  ‘Shall you go?’ she said, unplugging the iron.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was going to ask you.’

  ‘It’s not for another month,’ she said. ‘Is it?’

  ‘It would be quite nice,’ he said, ‘to see you socially.’

  ‘It’s quite nice here,’ she said.

  She stood there, the iron in her hand. He sat, and looked at the iron.

  ‘No, I’d like you to go,’ she said. ‘Though I speak so badly, I’m inaudible. And I hate that kind of function. But what else can one do?’

  ‘I could buy you a drink, for the good of the cause,’ he said. ‘In the interval.’

  ‘Oh dear me, how embarrassing,’ she said. ‘But never mind. Never mind. They were going to have folk singing or something, or have they changed their minds?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Folk singing.’

  ‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter, I suppose. I wish Emily would come, it’s such a nice day, and we’re missing it in here.’

  And, as she spoke, they heard the sounds of Emily’s arrival: children shouting, feet on the stairs, and the clop clop of shoes as Emily descended. She entered in full speech, a child dragging on her skirt, a shopping basket in her hand – ‘Just wait, just wait,’ she was saying, ‘I brought one for everyone, you don’t think I can’t count, do you, just give me half a chance, if you tear me to pieces how can I possibly find it?’ – and she dropped her basket into a chair, and rummaged in her pocket, and found it, the last gobstopper, and shoved it into Maria’s mouth as though putting a coin into a slot. ‘Aha, silence,’ she said. ‘Wonderful. Silence’ – and sank into a chair.

  ‘Don’t sit down,’ said Rose. ‘I thought we’d go out for a walk. Emily, this is Simon Camish.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Emily. ‘Give me a chance. Let me get my breath back. What a marvellous day, they’re all running around in their vests up there, you know, they’ve shoved all their shirts through the letter box. It’s beautiful out. It’s like spring.’

  ‘It is spring,’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. But one doesn’t expect it, somehow. It’s cold in here, it’s much nicer out.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Rose. ‘It’s damp, down here. It’s lovely, in the summer. It smells like a cellar. But it’s nicer out, at this time of year.’

  ‘All right, all right, in a minute,’ said Emily. ‘I’ll just have a fag. How are you, anyway? What about Easter? What was it like at the Sendacks?’

  And Simon sat there, and listened, while the two women exchanged information: it poured out of them both, news of any description, books they had read, things they had seen, people they had heard from, things the children had said, twinges in ankles and premonitions of sudden death, dreams about cabbage plantations, what they had had in the morning’s post, and all of this punctuated with absurdly perfunctory remarks thrown in Simon’s direction – ‘Oh God, how boring for you,’ or ‘We’ve nearly finished, we’ll have finished in a minute,’ they cried from time to time, without the slightest conviction. Simon listened with indulgence, noted that he was doing so, and took this for a serious sign. Thereafter he listened more carefully, and watched also, wondering what it was in the conversation that he did not dislike. Other people’s conversations often annoyed him quite disproportionately, particularly if they betrayed signs of intimacy: women especially had a habit of making short-cuts to intimacy, of displaying the manner without the content, of discussing personal triviality at a first encounter, that never failed to irritate. Emily and Rose he could at least absolve from that. A vainer man would have assumed that their animation was in part at least assumed for his benefit, that their jokes were directed largely at him: but a vainer man would have been wrong. For once Simon had got it right.

  Rose had told him a good deal about Emily, in an intermittent desultory fashion: an old schoolfriend she was, a schoolmaster’s daughter, who had been sent to Rose’s not very good and expensive school on a scholarship, and had there proved to be something of a trial to the authorities, through her too great profit from the largesse so kindly extended to her. She had done too well, she had shown people up, she had been rather bad for the system, she had latched on to it a little too well. She was married now, to a man who taught in an art school: or rather he had done so, until he had lost his job through a vague fit of militancy, which had swept across him disastrously and fashionably, as such things do, without enough conviction on his part to make the subsequent unemployment tolerable. Simon seemed to remember that Rose had said that Emily did not much approve of his stand. With three children, one not yet of school age, no particular money-earning capacity, and no money, she could not afford to earn, so she spent her time making ends meet, looking after a man who had chosen not to look after himself, and wondering what she could do about it. When the little one’s at school, she would threaten: but what would s
he do then? She had lost the relevant years of her life: the idea of a second-best, inevitably part-time job did not appeal to her. From this account, Simon had expected to see discontent and resentment flourishing in her face, but there were no signs of them. On the contrary, if anything blossomed there, it was good will. She was dark, very dark, with long black hair tied up inadequately, escaping round her face: her clothes were so dull and frayed as to present the idea of an old, never-quitted uniform. Her features were pronounced and animated, her face thin, the kind of face that aged well, and the deep lines round her mouth and eyes which might have looked like the marks of sorrow, in repose, were quite clearly the lines of laughter. It was her smile that they fitted. There was about her something scrappy, tough and restless. She was not what one might call attractive: and yet, thought Simon, looking at her and at Rose, how agreeable, how extremely agreeable the two women looked. They looked – he found it hard to explain it to himself – they looked complete, they looked like people. So many women, he found, did not look like people at all: they aspired after some image other than the personal. These were the women, though he did not like to think of it, that peopled his fantasies – smooth, shiny, made-up sexy women, wearing underwear under their clothes, provocative, female, other. He dreamed of such women, and what they would do to him, and he to them, and he disliked them for it, and himself. There is nothing he would have more disliked than the realization of his fantasies. The very thought of it made him feel quite ill. It was all very well for his mind to project for him an image of himself and a woman in black lacy underclothes, and for his intellect to tell him that this was what his subconscious desired: his subconscious might well desire it, perhaps one had to concede that it did, but all he could say was that the rest of him rejected it utterly, and knew quite well that in reality he would find such a situation, such contact, as disagreeable as being forced to eat avocado pears (his least favourite food), and as tediously embarrassing as a three-hour tête-à-tête with his father-in-law. Perhaps he found Rose and Emily so agreeable, as a spectacle, because, precisely, he did not find them attractive. It seemed an odd conclusion, especially as he had decided that he loved Rose, in so far as he considered himself capable of love, and that her company was what he most desired. ‘I love her,’ he said to himself, to try it out, but the words sounded very strange in his head: not untrue, but strange. He looked at her, to see how she responded to the formulation, and there she sat, her pale, anxious, nervous face smiling, her hands behind her head as she leant back in the chair, her dry frizzy greeny-yellow hair, her grey-checked Viyella shirt, her flat chest lifting only very slightly, as there was so little of it, and it struck him suddenly, painfully, that it was a dreadful audacity to think of loving a whole person like that, a whole person so entirely there and so fully existing, a person with a history survived, a person who had made herself so carefully. It was astonishing, it was remarkable. It had amazing and interesting possibilities.

  ‘Come on,’ said Rose. ‘Let’s go out, before it’s time to come back again. Let’s go to the Pally.’

  ‘Oh no, for God’s sake,’ said Emily, ‘not the Pally. I’m bored with the Pally.’

  ‘There’s nowhere else to go,’ said Rose.

  ‘Let’s just go for a walk,’ said Emily.

  ‘We could go somewhere in the car,’ said Simon, but they didn’t want to go in the car.

  ‘I know,’ said Emily. ‘Let’s go and see the chickens and the armchair. It’s a nice walk, to the chickens and the armchair. Simon would like it.’

  And both women started to laugh, again.

  ‘All right,’ said Rose. ‘I haven’t been that way this year. They might not still be there, the poor chickens.’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ said Emily, ‘it’s our duty to check up on them. They’ll feel neglected. I’ll round the children up.’

  And she shouted, suddenly, with startling volume. ‘Jimmy,’ she yelled. ‘Jimmy. Get the little ones, we’re going out.’

  There was no response.

  ‘They can’t hear you,’ said Rose. ‘Never mind, we’ll collect them as we go out.’

  And so they set off, and there were all the children out on the street, running around, as Emily had said, without their shirts on, in their vests: Maria’s vest, a hand-on, had huge holes under the armpits.

  ‘Look at them, look at them,’ said Emily, pausing on the steps, ‘Our little vested interests,’ – and up they came, with all their followers. ‘No, no,’ said Emily, shooing all the others away, waving her arms, ‘Not you lot, we’re not taking any extras, we’ve quite enough of our own, go on, buzz off, all of you –’ and the strange children meekly disappeared, slouching off to watch from somebody else’s doorway, as they set off. On the way, Rose explained to Simon about the chickens and the armchair: it had been a favourite walk the summer before, it was only a few blocks away, she was sure he would like it, it was quite lovely there. And he nodded and agreed, wondering if they were teasing him, not caring if they were. It was hardly what one might have described as a pretty walk: they passed rows of houses, dingy little street-corner shops, a little warehouse or two, a small factory, a railway siding. He tried to look at it with her eyes, to see in odd little efforts at decoration – carved leaves and grapes, scrolls, silly little gables – the charm and endeavour that she said she saw there, but it was hard to discern anything but an impoverished, placating, mean mass-production, a perfunctory and insulting shortchanging by the jerry-building profiteers of the last century. Once more, he found himself thinking, she wouldn’t like it so much if she’d seen what I’ve seen. And yet, despite this, the walk did have charm: the buildings shone, gloriously washed by the heavy rain of the week before, plants were growing in the gutters, the six children were happy and excited, people were cleaning their windows as though inspired by the sudden sunshine, old men were repairing their front gates, young mothers chatted on street corners with prams full of babies. The road they were walking along rose steeply: it was a hilly district.

  ‘I always think,’ said Rose, ‘I don’t know why, on days like this, that this road’s like the seaside, do you know what I mean? I’m sure that the sea will be over the top. You know what I mean?’

  And they did know, and discussed the phenomenon of déjà-vu, and the way that, in a strange place, from the configuration of the landscape, one can know what is there, what is beyond the horizon or round the corner: and then they had arrived at their destination, for there were the chickens. They were in a waste lot, a steep bombed site: the house that adjoined the bombsite had appropriated a small plot of land, doubtless unofficially, and had fenced it off with wire, and in it were these hens. The wall that fronted on to the site still showed vestiges of the bombed building that had stood there: the remains of a fireplace one storey up, a few scraps of wallpaper. In the fenced-off plot stood an armchair. In the armchair sat a feathery dusty old hen.

  ‘There, you see,’ said Emily, sitting herself down on the low wall, turning to Simon as though in triumphant possession of the scene. ‘Isn’t it nice, isn’t it lovely?’

  Rose and Simon sat too, and watched the chickens scavenging and scrabbling. The armchair was rotting and mouldy; grass and weeds grew out of its guts. The sun was warm. Rose leant her head back against the wire and shut her eyes. The children ran up and down, poking in the gutter, climbing along the walls, picking up bits and pieces.

  ‘I don’t know why it’s so nice here,’ said Rose, as though paying tribute to the eccentricity of the outing, ‘but it is nice, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, ‘it is.’

  And it was. So great and innocent a peace possessed him that it seemed like a new contract, like the rainbow after the flood. He could feel it, on his bare hands and face. It lay upon him. It was like happiness.

  They sat there, and chatted, idly: after a while, the children, who had run off down the street, returned, with their collection of findings. They had got two lollypop sticks, an old N
escafé tin, a milk bottle top, a scrap of blue velvet, a hunk of red rusty metal, a train ticket, a little toy plastic car without wheels, a sad flanged little thing like a dead beetle, a few bits of weed, an old paint tin still half full, but sealed over with a thick impregnable skin, and a french letter. Rose threw the french letter hastily to the chickens, who did not much care for it either, and they all laughed feebly while the children insisted that they be told what it was, without success.

  ‘It’s all our fault,’ said Emily, when she had stopped laughing, ‘it’s all our fault, that they go round picking things up like that. We used to tell them to go on treasure hunts, didn’t we, Rose, when we wanted to talk and they wouldn’t let us, and now they’ve got into the habit of it, you should see some of the stuff they pick up.’

  ‘This is quite a nice little collection,’ said Rose, looking down at the row of objects on the wall. ‘I like the paint tin. Quite a find, that is. No, don’t stir it up, Marcus, you’ll get it all over yourself – and look, that’s spurge, that is.’ She turned over a bit of greenery, a pale yellow brilliant green, with round leaves. ‘Spurge. There’s a poem about spurge, by Rossetti. It says something like,

  The woodspurge has a cup of three,

  After long grief and misery

  This is all that is left to me

  The woodspurge has a cup of three.

  ‘No, that can’t be right, I must have remembered it wrong, because it’s a nice poem, and my version’s awful, but it’s something like that, isn’t it interesting the memory, that one can remember something is good, a poem or a painting, but not remember it at all, in detail?’

  ‘How do you know about such things?’ said Simon. ‘About the names of things?’ He was thinking about the seagulls in Cornwall.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘It’s interesting, that’s why. And I used to learn it, in the country. When there was nothing else to do. You should see my pressed-flower collection. Actually, to tell you the truth I thought it was bloody boring at the time, when I was a child, but it staved off the even worse boredom of doing nothing at all. And now I find it absolutely fascinating. So you see. Everything pays off.’