The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘We don’t all find it as riveting as you do,’ said Emily. ‘I tried to get worked up about it once, but it didn’t work. Do you remember that dreadful craze you went through, about the London rocket?’

  And both women laughed, again, easily: their recollections amused them.

  ‘Oh God, the London rocket,’ said Rose. ‘It’s all very well, but it’s a very rare plant, the London rocket, it’s got three stars in the book, and as it grows on waste patches I thought we were ideally placed to find it, but we’ve never managed yet.’

  ‘It’s not surprising,’ said Emily. ‘You should just see what it looks like. Even the book describes it as a modest and unattractive little plant. And moreover it’s virtually indistinguishable from the something or other rocket – the common rocket, probably – so we kept having these false alarms, when we found the dull old modest common rocket, and carried it off home, and I thought, Aha, that’ll have cured her, even she will have to admit that even though it’s the real thing it might as well not be, it looks so boring. But it never was.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Rose. ‘You know you got quite keen yourself. You’d have been just as excited as me if we’d managed it.’

  ‘Well, more fool me,’ said Emily. ‘But you should make her show you the pressed flowers, Simon. They’re quite good, really. A pathetic little catalogue of her empty life. I burst into tears the first time I saw them. She brought them to school with her. I told her she’d better hide them quick, if she didn’t want to make herself a laughing-stock. But she stuck it out, she kept showing them to people, and you’d be amazed, how indulgent they were.’

  ‘On page ten,’ said Konstantin, who had been listening, bored with the younger ones, ‘on page ten, there’s a pressed caterpillar.’

  ‘Oh, don’t remind me, don’t remind me,’ said Rose. ‘I didn’t mean it, I really didn’t. It got in by mistake. I was terribly sorry about it.’

  ‘It put her off for a whole year,’ said Konstantin. ‘You can see, from the dates.’

  ‘It’s quite true,’ said Rose. ‘I was so upset I didn’t collect for a year. But then I found this very nice corncockle one day, and it was too good to miss. So I braved the squashed caterpillar, and started again.’

  ‘Mr Rampley says there are bird’s-nest orchids, in the woods at Branston,’ said Konstantin. ‘But I’ve never found any.’

  ‘No,’ said Rose, hesitating, struggling as the shadow fell across her. ‘No, neither have I. Anyway, they wouldn’t press very well. They’re too wet.’

  ‘It would be nice to find them, though,’ said Konstantin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘Yes. Well, you must look for me.’

  ‘There’s a dumped car in Primrose Avenue,’ said Konstantin, suddenly, eager now to undo what he had done – or perhaps, maybe, losing interest, having done enough, having no impulse to pursue, sadistically, the point he had been making. ‘Garry told me.’

  ‘Oh God, not another,’ said Emily.

  ‘Well, you’re not to go near it,’ said Rose, simultaneously: and on such a note they rose to their feet, and set off home, discussing as they went the danger of dumped cars, and the Council’s reluctance to remove them, and the plans for the Alexandra Palace, and roller skating. ‘You must come to the dog show with us one day,’ said Rose, to Simon. ‘They’re really good, the dog shows at the Palace.’

  ‘I’d like to,’ he said: and before him stretched a vista of shabby amusements and moth-eaten modest satisfactions. It would be quite enough for him, if by any chance she really meant it.

  In the evening, Rose sat with Konstantin: he was watching the television, and she was trying to sew a new zip on to an old leather purse. Sometimes it occurred to her that she was growing pathologically mean. She had had the purse for at least four years, she could remember buying it, and it had cost her eight and sixpence. The new zip had cost her two shillings. She pricked her fingers as she sewed, and made holes in her thumb through trying to push the needle through the stiff leather: her thimble had been mislaid the year before, during Maria’s birthday party. Hunt the thimble, the children had played, and one of them had hidden it so well that no hunting would ever reveal it. What objects, she thought, must lie beneath the floorboards of a house like this: where do they go to, all the things that get lost, the needles, the buttons, the nail scissors, the tea spoons? When they had moved in, she and Christopher, they had taken up the old linoleum, and underneath it were newspapers, dated September 1939, covered with yellowing photographs of evacuees, huddled together on railway stations. They had read the newspapers, huddled together themselves for warmth, in the sad despairing communion of dismay that had marked the first years of their marriage, feeling a kinship with those small exiles. Then they had burned the papers, and replaced them with new ones, and replaced the better bits of linoleum. They had wanted to throw it away, but decided (as they grew used to it) that it wasn’t so bad after all, that one could live with it. It was still there, but covered now by an old flowered carpet which Christopher’s mother had given them when she moved from Camden Town.

  She thought about her childhood, and about the pressed flowers, and Emily. She had not thought for some time about her first meetings with Emily: the flowers had brought it back to her. She had loved Emily, because by some amazing stroke she had recognized in those flowers her true history. She remembered the evening of their first conversation, and its happiness, which was still with her. She had been sitting on her bed in the dormitory, alone, a freakish late arrival, faint after only two days with the strain of lessons which she could not follow, rules she did not understand, faces which meant nothing to her, the dank smell of stale wet bread that filled the air: she felt herself both ignorant and elect, being as she was appallingly ill-instructed in any formal sense, and yet having read more, in her solitude, than any other girl in the school. The staff had been unable or unwilling to conceal their surprise at the gaps in her knowledge, and she had just left a dismal session with the headmistress, in which she had been told that if she found it too difficult to remain with her own age group, she should perhaps be moved down a year, or even two years, until she caught up. The threatened disgrace had depressed her, and she had crept up to her bedroom to hide it, and there she sat, on her bed, on the verge of tears, looking at her collection of flowers and recalling (then as now) the mixture of anguish and delight with which she had assembled them: and then Emily came in. She was frightened of Emily, whose reputation had reached her even in so short a space of time: abrupt, eccentric, imitated, and popular, her status was easy to perceive.

  ‘Ah,’ said Emily, entering the room, and throwing her books on to her bed, and herself after them. ‘Ah, it’s you. I was wanting to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’ said Rose, in alarm.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know what about,’ said Emily. ‘I hadn’t thought. Anything. I just thought we might talk. After all, you are a new person. I’ve talked to all the others for years and years and years. What’s that you’ve got there?’

  ‘These are my pressed flowers,’ said Rose, less alarmed.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Emily, leaping to her feet, with the restless violence that afflicts girls in boarding schools. And she came over, and looked.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, when she had turned a few pages. ‘You must have put a few years of your life into assembling this lot. Whatever for?’

  ‘Well,’ said Rose, modestly and truthfully, quite unaware that the pathos could possibly communicate to anyone other than herself, ‘I suppose because I didn’t have much else to do.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Emily. ‘Good God.’ And her eyes filled, promptly, with tears. She sat there, rigid and attentive, her eyes welling.

  ‘What do you mean, what is it?’ said Rose.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Emily. ‘Not much else to do? Whatever do you mean? What a terrible thing to say, do you realize what a terrible thing you’ve just said?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ sai
d Rose, confused. ‘I don’t know. It’s not so terrible, is it?’

  ‘You don’t even know what you’ve said,’ said Emily, who was cheering up now, enjoying her own sensibility. She looked down at the book again, and turned a few more pages, and said, with interest, ‘Your technique’s improved a bit, I must say. The first pages look a bit weedy, you must admit.’

  ‘I suppose they do,’ said Rose. ‘I wasn’t as good at it then or perhaps they are a bit old, after all. I started when I was about six, you know.’

  ‘At six? Are you telling me you’ve had nothing better to do since the age of six?’

  ‘Well, not quite,’ said Rose. ‘What I mean is, I did it for fun when I was six. I was quite happy then, I think. I think. It got worse later.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Emily, ‘it does.’ And then, as though bracing herself for a dissertation, she got up, and started to pace up and down on the wooden floor. ‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘It gets worse and worse and worse. You’re quite right. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who actually admitted it. But shall I tell you something? Shall I tell you something? It doesn’t go on getting worse for ever, there comes a point when it gets better and better. What about that? Eh? What about that?’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Rose.

  ‘Well, that’s pathetic,’ said Emily. ‘Not to believe it. I believe it. Why shouldn’t you believe it? You just wait and see. You’ll be amazed.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Rose, bewildered; for the conversation seemed to her like a conversation in dreams, a made-up daytime reverie, the kind of talk with which she had filled hours of her days, in which herself responded to herself, faithfully, on cue.

  ‘I know,’ said Emily, ‘because I’ve made my mind up. I’m not going to put up with it. You wait and see. And you won’t put up with it either.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Rose, expecting the answer.

  Emily paused, dramatically, in her pacing.

  ‘Because I won’t allow it,’ she said. ‘That’s why. I won’t allow it. See?’

  ‘Ah, well then,’ said Rose, shutting up her book. ‘Ah well. That’s all right, then. That’s fine.’

  And so it was, fine. Emily admitted later, in their endless subsequent midnight discussions in the bathroom, that she had tried the same thing on other people, but had never managed to make it, because she never got a flicker of response. ‘I got sick to death,’ said Emily, ‘of trying it on, and getting nothing.’ ‘I think it was mean of you,’ Rose would say, ‘to try it on, and not to wait for me,’ – and Emily would repent, and admit that she hadn’t got even as far as trying it, so pointless had it seemed after the opening phrase. ‘But with you,’ she would say, ‘with you, it was another matter.’ They had joked enough, bitterly, in the following years, about Emily’s heroic confidence: ‘Christ,’ they would say to each other, clutching small wailing babies, stewing scrag end, wandering dully round the park. ‘Christ, if only we’d known what we had to go through, if only we’d known –’ but in the very saying of it, betrayed (in Emily’s case), bruised (in Rose’s case) and impoverished (in both cases) they had smiled at each other, and laughed, and had experienced happiness. Life had been so much better, and so much worse, than they had expected: what they had not expected was that they were both happy people, incapable of resisting, incapable of failing to discover the gleams of joy. It was no wonder that Christopher had cited infidelity with Emily in his divorce case, and all the more bitterly because there was no sexual element to create offence. How could one not resent the natural flowing of a resilient, indestructible personal joy? Such things must not be spoken of, they must not be admitted. But why are we alive, at all?

  Rose smiled to herself, the zip completed.

  ‘A brilliant invention, the zip, don’t you think?’ she said to Konstantin, whose programme was ending, whose bedtime drew near.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘They get stuck, don’t they?’

  ‘Only if you’re brutal with them,’ said Rose.

  And she chased him off to bed, so that she could watch the news in peace. When she had watched it, she read her book for a while, and then went to bed. She had just got into bed when the telephone rang, downstairs: she was so annoyed at the thought of getting up again that she nearly left it, but of course did not. But when she lifted it to answer, there was no reply. Instead, there was the sound of breathing.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Rose, but nobody answered.

  ‘Who is it?’ she said, again. The person was still there. She knew that it was Christopher; he had done it before. She would not give him the satisfaction of guessing that she knew, and quietly replaced the receiver. It promptly rang again, and this time she picked it up and put it down again without listening. It rang again, so she broke the connection and left the receiver off. Then she sat there, for a moment: her knees were trembling. It had frightened her, it seemed like a punishment for having thought that she could be happy. As now indeed she no longer was.

  She went up to bed, still shaken. There were times when she thought he would come back, and attack her, as he had done in the old days, and at such times the thought of living without his attacks seemed an unreality, an impossibility. She dreamed often that he was threatening her, attacking her with a knife, murdering her, crushing her, trampling on her. She dreamed once that he had set wild animals on her and was watching quietly while they munched her legs, and felt little comforted when she woke to find that she had merely fallen asleep under a pile of heavy books. Once, just after the divorce, she had woken to find a strange man in her bedroom, and had been so relieved to recognize that it was not Christopher that the event, alarming enough in itself, had hardly worried her: the man, who had broken in through a downstairs window, ran off as soon as she awoke, and the police proved as little interested as she was in finding out who had it been, and what he had been after. Now, she remembered these things, and her knees were still trembling under the sheets. It served her right, it served her right, but why she did not know.

  Simon Camish met Christopher Vassiliou at a party. He had known it was coming, so he was not surprised to see him, at the other end of the long room. It was a local party, given by a neighbour whose profession and status had for once managed to interest both Simon and his wife: he was a Junior Minister, and his wife and Julie had become acquainted through sending their children, in years now past, to the same nursery school. One of their children had a paralysed leg, in an iron brace, the result of a spinal injury in infancy; this child had been befriended by his own second child, and so the relationship between the two families had necessarily flourished, though on a slightly uneasy basis, for the other parents tended to be embarrassingly grateful for invitations and attentions that seemed to the children concerned entirely natural. It could not be good for a handi-capped child, he often thought, to be the object of so much deprecation, and the fact was that Julie could take the situation no more naturally than the child’s own mother: there was always constraint, and an atmosphere of excessive delicacy, which overflowed even into adult contacts, so that Simon, now, at this party, felt himself for no good reason especially responsible, especially admitted, cast in the role of protector and support. He had fulfilled this role initially by hovering around helping his host to help the waiter to administer drinks, and had then moved on to chatting to a deaf old man who shouted at him rudely, and a middle-aged lady from the Ministry who proved quite inaudible amidst the noise of other conversations.

  While he tried to guess what she might be talking about, and find suitable expressions to demonstrate his attention, he was thinking of Rose, and of a story she had told him (brought to mind no doubt by his consciousness of the iron brace) about a child she had seen on a bus once, a little boy with a huge birth mark all over his face, and cheap glasses and short hair, sitting with his mother in silence – a cross, dumpy woman the mother was, a Frenchwoman, it had taken place in Paris, this episode, during Rose’s Grand Tour �
�� and Rose had thought to herself poor boy, poor boy, and then the boy had got off at the bus stop outside the Hospital for the Enfants Malades, leaving his mother on the bus, and he had kissed her goodbye, and she had kissed him so tenderly, and he had run off, waving, smiling, radiant, illumined, his mother waving with a tender pride, the boy gawky thin and sparrow-like and marked, the mother no longer cross but smiling quietly to herself, reflectively, and Rose had remembered that sudden change of countenance, that sudden transformation of what she had understood to be a grim relation, and could never think of it without a lifting of the spirit. He had kissed his mother with such affectionate trust, she had waved and smiled with such delight in him. And oddly enough, the day after Rose had told him this story, he had himself been standing in a queue in his local greengrocers doing some weekend shopping for Julie, when he had noticed a boy – quite a large boy, about ten – who was just before him in the queue. The boy was with his father, a sober professional-looking man like Simon himself, his mind intent on his wife’s shopping list – (avocado, melon, French beans, have you any Cos lettuce, it must be Cos, he knew the kind of list) – and the boy was talking, incessantly, in an unnatural strange, high-pitched voice, asking questions, commenting, chatting away. At first he sounded normal enough, apart from the pitch of the voice, which was too distinct and high, but after a while Simon began to notice that the content of the chat was strange: what are those bananas, is that an orange, is this the grocer or the greengrocer, what is that box for, I’ve been in a shop before, have you – and things like this, the boy was saying. The father tried to hush him, aware that others as well as Simon were gradually becoming aware of the child’s peculiarities: hush, Michael, hush, I’m busy, I can’t concentrate, he kept saying, his eyes on his list, meaning not that he could not concentrate but that he did not wish to be betrayed. Simon wanted to speak to the child, he wanted to answer these melancholy bright questions, but he too, like the child’s own father, lacked the natural touch, he did not know how to speak, and it was with a mixture of shame and gratitude that he heard the woman next to him take over the task. A homely woman, she was, and at first she started to talk to the child out of pure chatty gossipy goodwill, saying yes, those were bananas, but gradually her tone changed as she realized what was up, her voice became more tender, more kind, less mechanically jolly: she asked the boy questions, whether he often went shopping, did he like shopping, did he live nearby, questions to which he replied with what was clearly his characteristic note of inconsequence, sometimes hitting a relevant answer, sometimes, wildly off the mark. Then the woman, her purchase completed, left the shop, saying to the boy, Goodbye, perhaps I’ll see you next Saturday, I’m always here. Goodbye, goodbye, said the small fat boy, beaming with enthusiasm. Then he turned to his father, who was still struggling with the purchase of endives, and said, in piercing tones, ‘Did you hear that, Daddy? She talked to me, that lady. What a very nice lady, to talk to me.’ And in a flash the father, saying hush, met Simon’s eye and blushed darkly, Simon looked away in pain, and realized what it was that the child’s odd tone meant: it was the odd mimicked cheerfulness of institutions, he had hit off perfectly, poor parrot, the horrid brightness of Matron, the optimistic parody, the impersonal forced friendliness. Perhaps he would talk like that for ever. He had no other speech.