The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  There was a long silence.

  ‘She shouldn’t have divorced me,’ said Christopher. ‘She had no right to divorce me. And she knows it. And if she’s happy now, as you say she is, she has no right to be. That’s why I’m going to go on making trouble for her. Because she has no right to be happy. And I won’t let her be so. You can’t make happiness out of destroying the lives of other people.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Simon, ‘That’s exactly what a lot of people seem to do.’

  ‘They may seem to,’ said Christopher, ‘but they don’t.’

  Walking home, Simon realized that what had disturbed him so much was not so much what had been said – he had expected an attack, and the other side of any story is always disquieting – as the attitude behind it. The last thing he had expected had been a morality, a set of judgements, a structure as unrealistic and unworldly as Rose’s own. All the accusations which he could, upon Rose’s behalf, have levelled against Christopher, had been undone by the level of the attack. Of course she should not have divorced him. It was evident, both from what she had said of him, and he of her. It was as simple as that. If she had not done so, if she had not committed such an offence, there would have been no case. It was obvious. One should have known that intolerable effects, such as custody cases, were not likely to be thrown up by tolerable situations. The recognition excluded him totally. Meyer had pulled off more than he had intended. Simon, who had contemplated with some pleasure the prospect of an unrequited and undeclared affection, found himself denied even such an indulgence.

  Meyer had in fact intended nothing very much. He never did. Reporting by phone, to Emily, later that night, the meeting of Christopher Vassiliou and Simon Camish, he had no sense whatsoever of making trouble, of taking the offensive. This was because he could in no way conceive of himself as an offender. The role, he firmly believed, was beyond his capacity. He considered himself a victim, having been brought up in circumstances that had indeed made of his weapon, the intellect, a dangerous weakness. Although the circumstances had changed, although he was no longer the crumpled, battered victim of his own talents, hiding in a corner from brutal scorn and malice and miserable taunts, he had become incapable of considering himself in any other light: as a boy he had been ineffective, so ineffective he must remain, and all his attempts to wound others were no more than an effort to redress an impossible balance. Himself bleeding, himself wounded incurably, savagely maimed from infancy, bayed by dogs and baited like a bear, he attempted (as he saw it) feebly, to scratch the invulnerable, to pinch and tease them a little, just to reassure himself, to comfort himself a little that if pricked, they too would bleed, never intending to cause anything other than the most minor irritation, and believing himself impotent even to do so little. He was incapable of apology, even when the evidence of offence was plain to all: he considered himself harmless. Not knowing his own strength, he did not know when to stop, he had no conception of victory, and it was not uncommon to see him, crow-like, standing on the battlefield on the corpses of dead victims, black, murderous, croaking angrily, pecking and tearing, with no notion that it was the slain that he fed upon, with no notion that he was doing other than fighting, still, for his life. People were terrified of him, and when he caught glimpses of this terror he took it as an insult, a mockery, for was it not evident, he thought, that any silly little student, any dumb wife or foolish old man, was better armed than he?

  Emily had suffered from him for years, but she knew what he was up to. She knew, because she did it herself. She refused to bleed, she refused to become a sacrifice: instead, she returned blow for blow. He did not mind: from her he got what he expected; she justified uniquely his picture of the world and of himself. It was the only form of love which reached him. She had not loved him at first; for years she had thought such a thing impossible; and then one day she had said to herself, well, this is something, this exists, and love might as well be the name that I give to it. So she had said that she loved him – to herself, not to him – and had felt much better thereafter. There is a lot in a word, she would say to herself. And in the name of love she slandered him behind his back, attacked him to his face, tormented him with her affection for others, and reported to him, maliciously, the ill-natured descriptions of him that she provoked wherever she went. In the name of love, these acts took on some grace.

  ‘It’s no use asking me what I think of Simon Camish,’ she said now, crossly, late at night, pulling Oh-God-it’s-Meyer faces at her husband, who was pulling inquisitorial, disapproving, bedtime faces at her. ‘I don’t know the man, I’ve only met him once in my life, what should I think about him? I don’t think anything about him. What do you think about him?’

  ‘He’s got a ghastly wife,’ said Meyer.

  ‘He looked rather as though he had a ghastly wife, but then who hasn’t? What’s she like, then?’

  ‘A blowsy nagging cow,’ said Meyer, with satisfaction.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ said Emily. ‘How very sad. Whatever did he marry her for, then? He looked quite a sensible person, I thought.’

  ‘He married her for her money,’ said Meyer. ‘She’s a wealthy woman, or so I’m told. Like your friend Rose. He must have an eye for it.’

  ‘You keep Rose out of it. Anyway, what do you mean, he must have an eye for it? He’s got nothing to do with Rose.’

  ‘You should have seen him when he met Christopher. He looked as though he were meeting Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be childish, I don’t believe it. He’s just a friend, that’s all. A perfectly innocent sort of person, I thought he was, and quite nice, too.’

  ‘All Rose’s friends look innocent. It’s a trick of hers.’

  ‘Now look, I’ve warned you, lay off Rose. You don’t know her, you don’t know the first thing about her.’

  ‘On the contrary, I’ve had some very long and intimate discussions with Rose in my time.’

  ‘Well, that just shows what a nice tolerant person she is. She has long and intimate discussions with all sorts of people because she doesn’t want to hurt their feelings. It doesn’t mean anything, with her.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why I object to her so strongly.’

  ‘Perhaps it is. You prefer nasty people like yourself.’ She nearly said, nasty people like me, and would have done, had her husband not been listening. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘Tell me about Christopher. He’s nasty enough for anybody. How is he?’

  ‘He seems well. He and Simon Camish went off together.’

  ‘Oh, really.’ Despite herself, she betrayed interest. ‘Did they really? How very odd. People are odd.’

  ‘They seemed quite to take to each other.’

  ‘It’s very easy to take to Christopher. I rather take to him myself. I rather fancy Christopher.’

  ‘I thought you thought he was a nasty bit of work.’

  ‘Yes, I do, but that doesn’t stop me fancying him, does it? If one only fancied nice people, where would one be?’ At this point Emily’s husband got up and left the room, and so she continued, ‘If one only fancied nice people, where would you be?’

  ‘He’s gone, has he?’ said Meyer, used to these changes of tone.

  ‘Yes,’ said Emily.

  And so the conversation degenerated, from gossip to a more mutual and personal form of abuse. Nevertheless, when Emily finally rang off, it was Christopher she was thinking of, and not Meyer, and Meyer knew it. She was thinking that she had indeed, for years, fancied Christopher, despite – or possibly because? – she had heard the worst version of him, the worst indictments made by the best qualified authority, his wife. She had known all too well that it was a combination of boredom and masochism that had attracted her to Christopher, but the knowledge had been of little use to her: she had suffered just the same. She had, in total concealment, watched him, and waited for his comings and goings, and listened to accounts of his misdemeanours: she had treated him with the off-hand contempt with which she treated most men,
and listened with sympathy and love to Rose’s misery, and all the time she had been thinking that she could herself have asked for no greater happiness than to be hit on the head by one of his vicious blows, the effects of which caused her so much genuine sorrow when manifested, in bruises and black eyes, upon Rose’s body. She would have died happily from his violence, she would have lain down and asked for it. And all this she had hidden, of necessity, until it had quietly perished from suffocation, of its own accord. It was gone now, she felt nothing of it, except a nostalgic amazement that she ever had felt so much in so poor a cause, against her better judgements. She should feel pleased, she told herself, that she had successfully persuaded both Rose and Christopher that she regarded Christopher with nothing but disapproval and loyal, transferred indignation: she should feel even more pleased that she did now indeed regard him with little more. She had behaved well, she had kept quiet, she had silently murdered her own inappropriate emotions, so that now they were indeed dead, beyond revival: attention from Christopher now she would have found merely embarrassing, a humiliating reminder of what a fool she had once been. But it was sad, it was sad, that people should be like this. She stood up, and smoothed out her black woollen skirt, and sighed, and took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. It was too difficult, she was tired, she was getting older. She knew herself too well. There was no longer any excuse for behaving badly, and it was no longer a struggle to behave well. She had won some dreary victory. Even Meyer she had transformed from a threat into a family jester, a licensed irritant. One could not even regret the victory, for there could have been nothing better. She sighed again, and stretched, and went to bed.

  Simon heard nothing from Rose for weeks, and did not contact her. He felt as though he had lost her. At first he thought that he had resigned her, to Christopher’s greater claim – he could not get Christopher out of his mind, his muttered, monotonous complaint, his tale of woe, his plateful of fried eggs, his wretched goldfish, his air of desertion – and then he began to fear that he had too well taken in what Christopher had said of her, that he had been convinced, as might a judge or jury, that Rose was not what she appeared, that her apparent virtue was truly a dim reflex of the voracious self, that she had been corrupting, not abused. Fortunately he was able to deflect himself by work: a case which he had been promised at Easter had come up, a case of such interest that it absorbed him completely. It was a closed-shop case, in which he found himself representing the Union. The Union had behaved extremely badly, having refused renewal of membership to the plaintiff for highly dubious reasons. He had never had any dealings with this particular union before: it was a small, tightly knit, not particularly powerful one, and the more he inspected it the less democratic its methods appeared. Its shop stewards were, it turned out, more or less in the pockets of the management. They told their members what to do and what not to do, according to the shifts of managerial favour. Simon was amazed that they had not been challenged before. The man who had now challenged them was one Herbert Alfred Jowitt, who had tried to organize some rival breakaway group of representation: he had unfortunately, while doing this, allowed his membership of the original union to lapse, and had thus lost his job, without having been able to set up any viable alternative. The Union was refusing to allow him to rejoin. Simon, investigating the ostensible reasons for their refusal, found them to be unfortunately perfectly valid. It was very difficult to argue that they were not, as Mr Jowitt soon discovered. Simon, studying various other recent breakaways, such as the Ambulance one, found that on every count poor Mr Jowitt had the virtue of having acted with perfect good faith and under some provocation. There were no skeletons in his cupboard. But alas, his case had been taken up by members of Parliament, by the Press, by television pundits, and it was being treated not as an internal affair, concerning the running of the Union itself, but as a matter of principle. The closed shop was under bitter attack. Why should a man not be free to work where he wants, clamoured certain sections of the Press. The Tyranny of the Unions, shouted others. FREEDOM TO WORK, MAN’S BASIC RIGHT, one hypocritically declared. A real Union hunt was on. And that was not the point at all. Mr Jowitt had wanted not no Union – he was a keen Union man – but a better one. He had mistimed his operations, that was all. It was because he hadn’t a proper Union that he now found himself where he was. And Simon, representing the Union, in fact found himself representing the management, who were delighted at the dismissal of the troublesome Mr Jowitt. On the other hand, it was a case that could not be lost. Simon could not afford to lose it. Because this is how it is in this case, he patiently explained to angry ill-informed friends, is of no relevance whatsoever. It is the principle which we must support.

  The principle is doing an innocent man out of a job, he was told.

  That’s not my affair, said Simon.

  You’re defending the wrong cause for the right reason, he was told.

  That’s right, he would say. That’s how it is.

  And of course, the bigger the clamour, the more important it became not to lose. The reinstatement of Mr Jowitt would have been a disaster. The triumph of the Union-bashers would have been as great as the chagrin of his employers, who had no desire whatsoever to employ any non-union labour. It would have been far too expensive for them. They kept very quiet, the employers. Not so employers in other fields, where unions had made more successful attempts at representing their membership. It was a glorious collision. Simon applied himself vigorously. His industry and his eloquence paid off. He won his case, and Herbert Alfred Jowitt had to leave the scene. Later, looking back more calmly, Simon saw that he could hardly have lost it, unless he had played his cards very badly. Whatever the pressure of public opinion, whatever the true facts of the case, the Union had had a perfect legal right to get rid of Jowitt. It had exercised its right, quite correctly. Its right to do so was vindicated. Everything had worked out satisfactorily. The Union remained corrupt and Simon pocketed his fee. He hoped that the publicity would have created a few more Jowitts, who would set about the Union with more circumspection. He resolved never to work for the Union again. And that, as far as he was concerned, was that. But he emerged from the case a little battered. It had not been easy, trying to hold on to the thread in such a maze. At times, indeed, he had wondered if there was a thread at all. But looking back, from the daylight on the other side, he could see that without it he might well have lost, and been lost. The wood and the trees, as Jefferson had said. Jefferson congratulated him, warmly, upon his handling of the matter, I couldn’t have done it myself, he said, grinning ambiguously.

  One of the by-products of the case was that Julie, for the first time, recognized that there might be something in being a lawyer after all. It had been so widely reported that it was familiar even to those who do not read law reports, and Simon was quite touched to see Julie’s limited imagination blossom under the sun of publicity. Belatedly, she began to work out the possibilities before her husband, possibilities which had exercised him surreptitiously for years: she shamefully saw him on the Bench, she saw him as Lord Chancellor, she saw him robed and celebrated, she saw herself dining out with Prime Ministers, whose social cachet would compensate for the tedium and lack of style of their conversation. She became quite friendly, and he had the unfamiliar satisfaction of hearing her discuss his interests and attitudes with friends and acquaintances, as though she were proud of them, instead of bored by and indifferent to them. He had come to expect so little from her that he was pleased by this small relief. Coming into the house one night, he heard her on the phone, saying, ‘Yes, of course we’ll be there – I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch for so long, Simon’s been so busy, you know, with this USTK case –’ (she had even got the initials off, she dropped them casually, as though dropping a tip) – ‘that we really haven’t been able to get out much. But of course we’ll be there, yes, we’re looking forward to it –’ And she rang off, and turned to him, smiling, almost welcoming.

  ‘Tha
t was Clare Cookson, reminding us we’re supposed to be going to this concert at the Town Hall tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ he said: though, amazingly, he had. It was the meeting at which Rose was due to speak, and he had dropped it from his mind as he had dropped her. The recollection, and the fact that he had had to be reminded, disturbed him: but nevertheless, he found himself there the following night, having made no effort to get out of it. It was the kind of event that inspires more tolerant hearts than Simon Camish’s with a violent disgust for the human race: there could be few there, he thought, complacent enough to endure it without a touch of mortification, though some, perhaps, were hardened in charity. There they sat, the affluent, in six-guinea seats: perhaps, Christ knows, he thought, they were actually patting themselves on the back for being there, perhaps they do not realize what a condemnation it is to be on such a mailing list. Come the Revolution, he thought, looking up and down the glittering rows and nodding and smiling at friends – he spotted Nick and Diana, amongst others – come the Revolution, here are a few heads that will roll. It was quite comforting, to be able to dislike so many people all at once, after the confusing loyalties of the past few weeks’ work. We will all be strung up from lamp-posts, he thought, amused by the very idea of it: though he couldn’t see the U.S.T.K. doing much in the way of stringing.

  He inspected his programme. It informed him that there would be one interval: before it there would be folk songs by the well-known socially conscious singer Jenny Page, a recitation by the well-known TV personality Edgar Edwards, and an address by Mrs Rose Vassiliou: during the interval there would be drinks at the Bar: and afterwards there would be Old Time Music Hall songs in which it was hoped the distinguished audience would participate. He read this, carefully, then turned to his neighbour, who was the wife of a well-known socially conscious TV commentator, and said, ‘Pretty decadent, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’ She snorted crossly, and offered him some peanuts out of a bag.