The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘It’s awful,’ she said. ‘Awful. Never mind, though. Have some nuts. I’m starving. It’ll be over soon. Or one can always sneak out halfway.’

  He munched some nuts, gratefully. The lights went out, the curtains opened, and a man came on and started making introductory noises. He was quite dreadful. Then the singer came on, and was even worse. She sang protest songs, thinking to honour the spirit of the occasion, and became visibly irritated by the tepid applause that greeted her efforts. She was used to better, from the gullible young, and flounced off the stage with an air of pique. The recitation was not too bad: it was meant to be funny, and nearly was. And then it was time for Rose. The link-man came on again and cracked a few irrelevant and tasteless jokes, and then said a little helplessly, ‘And now I have the pleasure of presenting to you Mrs Rose Vassiliou, a name which is I am sure familiar to you all, who is going to explain to us what we are all doing here.’ And with a wave of the arm towards the wings, he ushered Rose in. At the sight of her, Simon felt a pang of such anguish, remorse and love that he had to look away in pain: because there she was, herself, misjudged, maligned, utterly uncontaminated, agonizingly embarrassed, wandering nervously towards the microphone, as pale as a ghost, as uncomfortable in her role as a small child offering a bouquet, totally lacking in complicity, in address, in the wicked knowingness that informed the whole scene. Histrionics, he said to himself, histrionics, she’s incapable of such a thing: and so she was, for she was inaudible. She spoke, but what she said could hardly be caught. She presented a spectacle, it was true: in the long white dress and flat red shoes in which he had first met her, she stood there, twisting her hands, clearing her throat between each phrase, unable to pursue her sentences through terror. It was a sight, but she was the victim of it, not its engineer. It was not herself that had organized this lamentable appearance: she endured it, rather, in modesty, she submitted herself, with no sideways winks, no deprecating smiles, no effort to ingratiate herself, apologetically, with her audience. She hardly looked at her audience. She forced herself to look ahead, some of the time, but the effort was visible. The audience coughed and rustled, quietly, wanting it to be over.

  She cannot like it, thought Simon. Whatever has been said of her, this kind of thing she cannot like.

  On her way off the stage she tripped over the flex of the microphone and nearly fell: the link-man caught her. The pain in his chest was such that he too had the sensation of having fallen.

  In the bar, five minutes later, he found her. She was talking to Lady Bresson and one or two other people, smiling, trying hard to put at ease those made uneasy on her behalf, and when she saw Simon she moved across to him, as though she had been looking for him, and took the hand which he offered. She caught at him nervously, as though requesting forgiveness. Fortunately he had had the foresight to tell Julie, though belatedly, that he had already met Rose at Nick and Diana’s, in the expectation of such an encounter: but nevertheless he felt uneasy, as he introduced the two women: he felt puzzled and confused, as he saw Rose and Julie shake hands. It was not that he feared indiscretion, on either part, for Rose he trusted, and Julie had nothing to tell. Nor had he ever discussed Julie with Rose: he had even, honourably, for the most part, resisted implications, which had been difficult enough, in view of Rose’s reckless confidences, and in view of the compromising fact that he had been there listening to them at all. So really he had nothing to be uneasy about, he thought, except the treachery of his own emotions, which he could quite well keep to himself.

  But a few minutes later he had to think again. Because, alas, Rose and Julie did not stop talking to each other. They seemed to be getting on far too well. Talking, himself, laboriously, to Lady Bresson, he could hear them at his elbow, chattering away. Too late he remembered Rose’s insatiable friendliness, her quite excessive tolerance. He hadn’t seen her in company since their first meeting, months earlier, and had forgotten her absurd mixture of nervousness and sociability. She was discussing with Julie her horror of appearing on platforms, her panic whenever she found herself doing a radio programme, her clumsiness in tripping over the microphone, and Julie was listening with fascination, offering past embarrassments of her own as consolation. What if they become friends, he suddenly thought. It would be impossible, awful. But why not, after all? He recollected his own meeting with Christopher, which had taken such an unexpected turn. It was too complicated, it was really too dreadful, and it had begun with such simplicity.

  For the second half of the programme, Rose asked if she could come and sit with them: she had been behind the wings for the first half, and now, she said, she could sit out front and relax and enjoy herself. So, when they returned to their seats, he found himself sitting between them, without having had an opportunity to exchange one personal word with Rose. He was annoyed with her for concealing her knowledge of him quite so well, though how could he complain, when he himself presented nothing but indifference? But just after the curtain went up, this time on a woman singing, ‘There was I waiting at the Church’, he saw her take out her packet of Woodbine and start scribbling on it: he waited, and she handed it to him. She had written: what did C. say to you? I must see you tomorrow, it’s urgent. He read it, put it in his pocket, but did not look towards her. She was looking at the stage: he did the same. The songs went on and on, some jolly, some morbid. Some of the audience joined in the choruses: Simon did not. A man recited a Victorian ballad about two children dying in an attic: it was powerful stuff, and under its cover he glanced at Rose, and was not at all surprised to see that her eyes were full of tears. During the next piece, which was a rendering of ‘Ye Banks and braes of bonny Doon,’ she began to weep quite copiously, sniffing hard, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Ye mind me of departed joys,

  Departed never to return,

  the singer sang, and Rose had to get out her handkerchief. At the end of the song, she looked at him, and he at her, and she whispered, ‘Oh goodness me, what an absolute fool I am.’ He agreed, but he liked it.

  At the end of the evening, the Cooksons had invited them back for a drink: he would have had to go anyway, as Julie wanted to, but when he had discovered that Rose was going too, the possibility of driving Rose home had sprung instantly into his mind: he offered her a lift to the Cooksons, as soon as the programme ended, and she accepted it. She and Julie sat in the back of the car together, talking, until they arrived. He could not get a word in. They were talking about their children, discovering common attitudes that he knew for a fact not to exist: at each point, one or the other of them was lying.

  At the Cooksons, they were divided, settled at opposite ends of the room, with two large chairs with people in between them, and he thought he might be able to have a word with Rose, but was again prevented by Herbert Cookson, who advanced upon Simon and started to interrogate him about his last case. They talked about closed shops, and anti-union legislation, and the division of loyalties which Simon had clearly suffered: in a way he was pleased, because the conversation became general and as Rose was listening, he thought she might excuse his recent neglect of her on the grounds that he had been exceptionally preoccupied. He found himself, finally, defending the role of paternalism in politics, a position so illogical that it made him miserable even to think about it, and yet at the same time inevitable: Herbert Cookson, himself a middle-aged middle-class civil servant, had accused him of class treachery in becoming a lawyer at all, and in daring to talk of the Unions with the disrespect with which he had just treated them: ‘It’s all very well for you to criticize,’ he said, ‘You’re exactly the sort of person who ought to be on the inside, if you care as you say you do. The 1944 Education Act ruined the country by removing people like you from the role they ought to have been playing, by creaming them off, by making them spend their lives getting degrees and good jobs …’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Simon, ‘I know all that, I know it’ – and he went on to try to explain his confused feelings abou
t representation, and the fact that one can never represent what one is part of without becoming something other, and the fact that some people are congenitally so stupid that they cannot possibly be represented by their own kind – mental defectives, children – and the way in which democracy had to assume that all are equal, in degree of responsibility, whereas in reality some are wicked and some are gullible, some exploiters and some exploited, and mediation must take place between the two. ‘The law as an institution,’ he ended up saying, ‘as an institution, is admirable, they’ve got it all wrong, it’s the uses to which it is put that are wrong. It isn’t the letter that kills and the spirit that giveth life at all, it’s the other way round. The spirit kills and the letter gives life.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Herbert Cookson, his fat soft fingers closed comfortingly round a squat glass. ‘Ha. You believe in an ideal of public service, Simon. How very unusual, at your age.’

  ‘I see no option but to believe in it.’

  ‘Yes. But public service is a spirit. And people don’t do it in the right spirit, believe you me. The letter survives but not much else. What do you think we all go into it for? For the security. And once we’re in we spend all our time trying to stop other people getting our jobs and our promotions. Where’s the use in that? We don’t get things done because we don’t want them done.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Simon. ‘We may not want them done, for our own reasons. But still, there’s a machinery for doing them. And that’s what matters. That there should be a machinery, for doing the things, so that they get done, by those who can, for those who can’t. It doesn’t matter about the spirit, it doesn’t matter if one believes in the case, so long as the case is represented.’

  And Rose, who had been listening intently, suddenly said, ‘You don’t believe that, Simon. It’s ridiculous, your saying that. You only say it because you care so much that you simply can’t believe that other people don’t. You simply can’t believe that other people don’t do things in the right spirit, you can’t believe they don’t care. You never think of yourself, you don’t know how much other people are always thinking of themselves. If it weren’t for people like you taking an interest in making the machinery there wouldn’t be any. It’s ridiculous to pretend that you don’t care and that it would all work all right if you didn’t. Ridiculous.’

  And she stopped, as abruptly as she had begun. There was a short, giveaway silence. She blushed. She had spoken personally, irritated, with love: a tone that could not have been taken by a stranger to a stranger. It was as certain a betrayal as lipstick, lies, love letters, unexplained telephone calls. It was noticed by everybody but Julie, who, bored by abstraction, had started another conversation with Mrs Cookson about the protest singer. Simon was confused, he did not know what to say. Because after all, there was nothing to betray, except a few illicit conversations. And the satisfaction that she had just given him was more than he had ever expected, more than he had ever had.

  Rose looked down at her knee, and started to fiddle with her bag, a fraying knitted object.

  It was Herbert Cookson that took up the damaged topic, kindly, expertly converting Rose’s attack into a general theme, speaking, as Simon had done, of the exploiters and exploited, and of men of goodwill who cannot believe that men of ill will could positively, vindictively, out of self-interest, pursue such a policy as one which results, for instance, in unemployment. ‘They don’t miscalculate,’ said Cookson, ‘you do them too much credit if you think they miscalculate. They mean it to happen, exactly so.’

  Simon, still confused, watched him speaking, saying nothing.

  He was a short, fat, broad-faced mild man, Herbert Cookson, rather ugly, with a heavily mottled skin and wispy grey hair, prematurely ageing. He had a weathered look, as well he might have: his life was a succession of honourable and successful disasters, which had given him promotion after promotion, without the satisfaction of seeing much results for his labours. He had spent years composing and drafting a Bill to control the sale of land in rural areas, a subject very near his heart, only to find it killed at birth by a change of government: he had then been deflected to the promotion of industrial development on Anglesey, which had been undercut by a new version of his own original Bill. Finally he had had a little more to show for himself with a New Town or two, but they had begun to depress him: having started in faith, he had found the cheeseparing and commercialism of the reality so gloomy that he had almost lost interest in ameliorating what was left in his realm. Still, he was not a gloomy man: the dashing of projects, far from depressing him, had given him a good-humoured benevolent Olympian irony. He expected little, and was pleased with what he got. His wife was a large, quiet, efficient woman, gentle and ruthless: she spent much of her time going round making people pay up their subscriptions for the various committees and bodies which she represented. People paid up quite cheerfully, because she was so nice to them, and managed to make them feel especially favoured by her calls and solicitations. She also wrote detective stories, in her spare time, under a pseudonym. They had two children, one of them still at school, the other in her first year at university: and Mrs Cookson, who had overheard the end of the conversation about closed shops, now drifted over to Simon in her soft flat shoes, settled herself on the arm of a chair, and said, ‘You know, Simon, I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time about Victoria, who seems to have got herself into an awful mess at Northam – she’s at the university there, reading sociology, you know – and one can hardly believe it, but she’s refusing to belong to the Union and there’s been the most frightful row about it. She’s very upset, or at least she sounds as though she is, but then young people exaggerate so much, don’t you think?’

  ‘On what grounds has she refused to belong?’

  ‘I don’t really know. She’s so vague about it. Why did she say it was, Herbert?’

  ‘Wasn’t it because she and some of her friends disapproved of the Union trying to dictate terms about the size of the portions of mashed potato?’

  ‘No, no, don’t be absurd, that was months ago, she didn’t resign over that, I think it was something to do with the Union locking her Director of Studies in his study because he said they couldn’t refuse to submit at least one piece of written work per term. And then they let him out again because he burst into tears and said he had to get home, it was his wedding anniversary. I couldn’t quite make out which Victoria objected to more strongly, the fact that he’d been locked up in the first place, or the fact that they’d let him out again for such a non-political reason. Anyway, she said she didn’t want to be represented by people who did that sort of thing, and resigned. But of course she couldn’t really resign because she’d already paid up for a year, so she went to the Union office and demanded a refund, and they wouldn’t give it her, and so she and some of her friends locked the Union officials into the Union office, and continued to demand their refund with menaces. I always knew she shouldn’t have gone to that place, one could tell there’d be trouble, but I suppose I thought she’d like it.’

  ‘Perhaps she does like it?’

  ‘Perhaps she does. I suppose she could hardly sound as though she were enjoying it, could she? I do really find it all quite deplorable, don’t you?’

  ‘Did she get her money back?’

  ‘No, of course she didn’t, on the contrary, she was threatened with expulsion by her Director of Studies if she went on making a nuisance of herself.’

  ‘Her Director of Studies sounds a curious character.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, she thinks he’s very good, she thought it was quite reasonable to do one piece of written work a term. But it is a bit worrying. Perhaps you could give her a little lecture on Union Security when she gets home.’

  ‘I must admit I’m as disaffected as she is by the idea of Union Security at the moment. And also one must admit that she had a point, in not wanting to associate with a Union who acted so unconstitutionally.’

  ‘But they
don’t believe in constitutions. They believe in direct action.’

  ‘Then they can hardly have much feeling about Union Security can they?’

  ‘I rather gathered that the Union is taking the line that it needn’t offer to protect her, as she had already proffered her resignation. So she said that as they had refused to accept it, they had either to stand up for her or give her her money back. So she was back to square one.’

  ‘You seem remarkably unconcerned.’

  ‘Well, it is all rather comic, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose it might even prove educational? And there’s no real question of expulsion, is there?’

  ‘No, of course there isn’t,’ said Herbert Cookson, who had been listening to this interchange with amusement. ‘Certainly not. I wrote to Bert Hammond, who’s up there, and he said it was all absolute nonsense, nobody took it seriously at all. They just play games, that’s all.’

  ‘She could set up a breakaway union, if she’s got enough support. Send her along to me when she gets back and I’ll tell her how to do it.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’ll even be necessary next year, because the present lot of representatives will be leaving, and the next year isn’t so militant. They’ve all quietened down recently, because they’re doing their finals.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say they still consent to do exams?’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it? They’re such an inconsistent lot, young people. They tell us we’re hypocrites, and so we are, but I’d rather be a hypocrite than a fool.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rose, who had been listening quietly, recovered. ‘I think they’re hypocrites too. There’s this girl I know, she’s about nineteen I suppose, and she comes round to see me sometimes, God knows why, I met her at some meeting or other last year and she sort of latched on to me, and I must say I did suspect it was because I would always cook her a nice meal and let her sleep in one of the children’s beds if things went wrong, and I didn’t really mind, because she’s quite appealing in a way – she sort of drifts around, and doesn’t do anything much, and believes in the abolition of property and money and all the rest of it, and the pointlessness of work, and I thought, that’s fine, there’s even something rather touching about it, and I didn’t really mind her lecturing me on my bourgeois mentality while she gobbled up my bacon and eggs. And then a few weeks ago she went off on a holiday to Scotland with some friends, and I thought good, that’s got rid of her for a bit, but no such thing, because in a couple of days she was back again, with her arm in plaster, because they’d had a car accident on the way up. And guess what she wanted me to do.’