The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘I feel like a drink,’ he said, after a while, ‘have you got anything in the house?’

  He did not think that a drink would be considered heartless: on the contrary, it would offer proof of suffering.

  ‘Not a drop,’ said Rose, bleakly.

  And thinking of drink, and suffering, brought suddenly for the first time into Simon’s head the memory of his visit to Christopher the night before, and it occurred to him for the first time that the whole thing might be his own fault, or at least as much his fault as Mr Calvacoressi’s. For had he not put the notion of the hopelessness of Christopher’s case firmly into his head? And had it not been that, precisely, which the telegram had deplored?

  In the end he had to get up and make himself a meal. Rose followed him and watched him, listlessly, as he fried a couple of eggs. Suddenly she said, ‘I should never have set the police on him. What will they do, if they get him at the airport?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Simon, and at that moment the phone rang. It was Jeremy Alford, saying that the police wanted to know if Rose knew her husband’s passport number. Simon asked her, but she shook her head dumbly. He had a suspicion that she would not have said, even if she had known. When Alford had rung off, Rose returned to her point. She should not, she repeated, have set the police on him.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Simon sharply. He had seen this coming. ‘Nonsense. The decision was nothing to do with you, it was simply a consequence of his own illegal action. He shouldn’t have taken those children out of the jurisdiction without leave from the court anyway. He hadn’t the right.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose, ‘but whose fault is that? If I hadn’t divorced him he’d have had a right to take them anywhere. So it is my fault, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, it’s not. At the time, you did what you had to do.’

  He turned his eggs, neatly, and fried them on the other side.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did. But I sometimes feel that I ought to have gone on taking it.’ She paused, then went on, hesitantly. ‘You, for instance, you don’t give up, do you? I think about that a lot.’

  It was the first time she had ever said anything of that nature to him. He did not pretend not to know what she meant.

  ‘It’s not so bad for me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not so bad for you because you’re a nicer person than I am.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

  ‘Oh yes I do. And I’ll tell you why you’re so nice. It’s because you never give anything away.’

  By anything, she meant anyone. She was delicate.

  ‘I haven’t got much to give away,’ he said, as he sat down at the table to eat his eggs.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said, and smiled, sharply, sadly.

  They both smiled.

  ‘It’s a pity,’ he said, finally.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not really. It’s a good thing, to be like you. There need to be people like you.’

  ‘I’ve told you before,’ he said, ‘I only act out of a sense of obligation.’

  ‘That’s good enough.’

  ‘Not for me, quite,’ he said.

  ‘Ah yes,’ she said, triumphantly, clinching it. ‘But then you are not what you are thinking of.’

  When he had finished his eggs, she started again.

  ‘There was a letter in The Times,’ she said, ‘the other day. Pointing out that charity is for the sake of the giver, to save the soul of the giver, not the receiver. I couldn’t tell if the letter was serious or not. It’s the classic view, you know. I read it again and again, and I couldn’t tell. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Do you think one could save one’s soul by giving away one’s children? Or would the crime of parting with them be greater than the virtue of the gift?’

  ‘I don’t always follow you,’ he said.

  She laughed.

  ‘I don’t always follow myself,’ she said. ‘You should see what it’s like, inside my head.’

  And the telephone rang. They both started, nervously. Rose got up to answer it, but as she listened, she reached her hand out to Simon, and he went and listened with her: there were pips, then a child’s voice, Konstantin’s voice, calling from a call box.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, darling. How are you?’ She spoke neutrally, calmly, as though to a child on a cliff’s edge or lodged in a high tree.

  ‘I’m fine, Mum, I just wanted to ring to see how you were.’

  ‘I’m fine, love, I’ve just had my lunch …’ she hesitated, then spoke again. ‘Where are you? Are you having a nice time?’

  ‘We’re having a great time, we’ve just been down Grime’s Graves, we haven’t got to Grandpa’s yet,’ said Konstantin, his voice tremulous with responsibility, offering circumstantial evidence – ‘we just went down these great holes to see the flint mines, and it was all little corridors, and Maria didn’t like the ladder and cried, and Daddy had got this torch, and then we came up again and had lunch in this café, and I thought I’d give you a ring to …’ his voice faltered, ‘I thought I’d give you a ring to see how you are, and to tell you we’ll be at Grandpa’s soon. Are you all right, Mummy?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right, it was nice of you to ring …’ Her fingers tightened on Simon’s hand, leaving marks. She spoke again, carefully.

  ‘Where are you, then? Are you in a call box?’

  ‘No, Mum, I’m in the café, the others went out to the car, I just came back again, I said I wanted to go to the Gents, but I thought I’d just give you a ring. It’s that café just beyond Littlewell, Jim’s Diner, we had bacon and eggs and beans and sausages. I’d better go now, I’ll see you tomorrow, Mum.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. All right, darling. Be a good lad, look after the little ones for me.’

  ‘Bye, Mum.’ And he rang off.

  Simon and Rose looked at each other. ‘Christ,’ said Rose.

  ‘Has he ever done that before?’ said Simon, urgently.

  ‘No, not really. He’s rung from Grandpa’s, once or twice, wanting to speak to me. But never like that.’

  ‘Christopher couldn’t have put him up to it, could he?’

  ‘I don’t think so. No, he sounded – oh God, he sounded as though he wanted to reassure me. What an amazing child he is. What a marvellous boy. Quick, let’s ring up Jim’s Diner and see if they were really there. What a child, he even gave me the name. Whatever do you think Christopher told him? Perhaps he didn’t tell him anything, perhaps he just picked it up, he’s so quick, that child, what a life we’ve led him –’

  Simon meanwhile had got the number. They rang the café: the man said that a man with three children in a Jaguar had just left that minute.

  ‘They’re there,’ said Rose. ‘It was them. What a foul bloody liar that bastard is.’ She spoke with affection and relief.

  ‘We’d better ring Jeremy Alford and get him to tell the Home Office,’ said Simon. And they tried to ring him, but the number was perpetually engaged. ‘Perhaps he’s taken the phone off, perhaps he’s had enough of us,’ said Rose, and they both laughed.

  ‘You’re sure it was really Konstantin?’ said Simon.

  ‘Of course it was. Didn’t you hear him?’

  ‘Christopher couldn’t have put him up to it, could he?’

  ‘No, of course not. Anyway, we know it was him, the café man said so. No, Konstantin’s far too sensible to be put up to anything. Try Jeremy again. Perhaps there’s time to stop all the papers.’

  So they rang again, and this time he was in. Simon gave him the news: Jeremy Alford listened in silence.

  ‘Well?’ said Simon, as the silence continued.

  ‘Well what?’ said Jermey Alford, crossly. ‘Look, I’ve got rid of my own children, sent them off to my mother’s for the weekend, and Shirley and I were going to spend a quiet weekend asleep in our deck chairs. And instead I have to spend my time running round in circles after a lunatic.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Simon.

  �
��I was just going to have a large brandy and go to sleep.’

  ‘Really. I am sorry. Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘No. Not really. Just keep Rose quiet, won’t you. Don’t let her do anything silly. No, you leave it to me.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll get moving. Again.’

  ‘All right,’ said Simon, and rang off.

  ‘What did he say?’ said Rose, anxiously.

  ‘He was relieved, of course,’ said Simon. ‘He said he’d look after it. There’s nothing we can do.’

  And they looked at one another. The afternoon sun was falling, obliquely, into the semi-basement room: a children’s mobile, made of cork and straws, turned slowly, dangling between them, from the low ceiling.

  ‘You’ll get them back,’ he said, ‘by the end of the day.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think so.’

  She touched the mobile with her hand: it circled.

  ‘We could go down there ourselves and get them,’ said Simon. The idea had only occurred to him, that instant, but once conceived, it seemed the only thing to do.

  ‘Could we?’ said Rose. ‘Could we really? Would you really take me?’

  ‘I would like to,’ he said. ‘It would be good for us, to get moving. We’ve sat around here too much, today. We need a bit of action.’

  ‘We ought to tell somebody where we’re going,’ she said, ‘just in case.’

  ‘I daren’t ring Jeremy again,’ he said. ‘Let’s ring Emily. We ought to ring her anyway, to tell her what’s happened. And she can ring Jeremy, later on. When we’ve gone.’

  So they rang Emily, told her what had happened, asked her to ring Jeremy Alford in half an hour: tried to ring Jeremy themselves, after all, guiltily, then, and got no reply. Oh well, forget him, said Simon, he’s had enough of us today anyway. And so they set off, in the car, through North London, to the A10. Simon had completely forgotten to ring Julie: Rose reminded him, and made him stop at a call box, and he rang and told her a story, half of which was true, about Francis Morris and the police and an urgent job, and apologized profusely for not being back. She was quite nice about it, attracted as Morris had been by the note of urgency and priority. ‘I’ll tell you about it when I get back,’ he said, and they drove on.

  They even enjoyed the journey. It was the excursion they had once promised themselves. It was a relief to be moving, after sitting for so long in so small a space at the mercy of the telephone. Simon wondered at times whether they had not perhaps acted on foolish impulse, but there had been nothing useful that they could have done, in London. He did not think about what they would do at the other end, if they found the children there: he could not see himself participating in an abduction scene, and hoped it would not come to that. He was not at all clear about the legal position in which he or indeed Rose found themselves: the position was probably not clear in itself. There could not be many precedents for Christopher’s actions. He had perhaps created one. That was what happened, when eccentrics embarked on litigation. The law would tediously unravel, in accordance with its own concepts, the crazy acts of neurosis. He thought of other litigants, other madmen, passionately attached beyond all reason to cases that they had no hope of winning: disputed wills, territorial struggles between embattled neighbours, angry wives suing long-defaulted husbands for shares in homes now given to newer mistresses. Such cases were never ruled by the mercenary instinct, though they might seem at the outset to be so: they sucked in money, sometimes every penny that the participant had, they sucked it into the mud of resentment and emotion, without a hope of final prosperity. There was a case currently being fought in his own field: two unions which had amalgamated years back, were now struggling to disentangle themselves, to the obvious detriment of both. The judge involved had called both parties childish, and so they were, but they were past caring: they hated each other, they did not care if both perished, as long as the point was made. The only difference in Christopher’s case was that he seemed to know what he was doing, he seemed to recognize the grounds of his own behaviour, and had done from the beginning, from the moment when he had chosen to defend his divorce. It was that which made him dangerous. He did not even think he was right. And so it would have been a logical step, to leave the country with the children. Covertly, at a traffic lights, he looked at the AA book. There were no ports from which he could leave, except Yarmouth and Harwich, and when Konstantin had rung he had been far enough from both. Though there had been a case, not so long ago, before Calvacoressi, of a father who had abducted his children, who had set off to sea alone with them in a rowing boat, and had waited there, bobbing idly up and down upon the waves, until the police had picked him up. A few hours of the children he had had, and had thereby lost them for ever. People were mad, people were strange beyond belief, as one could see from reading any newspaper. He had a fleeting picture of Christopher hiding with the children in the woods, or concealing them in the bottom of a flint mine. He put his foot on the accelerator. Norfolk was a huge county, much larger than he had thought, and Rose’s family seat was right at the other end of it. The traffic was bad, too. They would not get there before the early evening.

  Rose, for her part, could not help enjoying the drive. She went out so little: it was months since she had been out in a car. She was sure, now, that she would find the children safely at the other end: she ought to have had faith in Konstantin, she should have known that he would not allow himself to be abducted, he was too considerate, he cared for her too much. Her pride in him was immense. She knew exactly why he had rung her: he had picked up from Christopher some threat or menance – possibly even a spoken threat – and had rung to tell her that it was all right, that all was as it had been planned, that they would be safely at the house as they had said they would be, that he would make sure that it was so. So she sat back, and watched the fields passing. It was a road she knew well, a road she had not travelled for years. She was trying to work out how long it had been, when Simon said, ‘It must be a long time since you came this way.’

  ‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember how long. I’ve only been once or twice since we were married.’

  ‘When did you last see your father?’ he said, and they both laughed at the classic question.

  ‘I can’t even remember,’ she said. ‘It would be strange, to see him again. Perhaps I should. I think my mother is there too. She’s not there often, but she doesn’t mind it, in the good weather. Perhaps I should see them.’

  ‘I meant to go and see my mother this weekend,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t get round to it. I keep thinking, I would like to take you some day to meet my mother. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Do you think she would like me, your mother?’

  ‘She doesn’t like anyone much. I was thinking more that you might like her. She’s an interesting woman. It would be good to find somebody who might like her.’

  ‘I would like it very much,’ said Rose.

  And they were silent again, for a few miles. Rose started to think again about Christopher’s affidavit. It had upset her dreadfully, to see her crimes catalogued. And yet, as with the divorce, she could not help knowing that the crimes which seemed, technically, most serious, had not been so at all. Her only true guilt lay in not having been able, enough, to allow Christopher to be. Whereas the suicide – an event, she knew, which judges must take seriously, as Jeremy Alford had done – had really been a very trivial matter. She had, it is true, in front of the children, swallowed a whole bottle of aspirins, in response to some particularly grinding session of abuse from Christopher: she remembered quite clearly the sequence of events that had made her do it. I can’t bear this, I must leave, she had said to herself. I can’t leave, because of the children, she had then said – Maria being still a baby, at the breast. Then I had better die, she had said, and had swallowed the pills. No, I had better not die, she had then instantly realized: she had gone to the bathroom, stuck her fingers down her throat, vomited up a lot of wh
ite powder, then rung the hospital and requested to have her stomach pumped out, just in case. The ambulance had been round in ten minutes, her stomach pumped within the hour – horrible rubber tubes, she recalled – and she had been back at home cooking supper within a couple of hours. One could not call that irresponsible: it had been a thoroughly practical piece of behaviour. And equally trivial had been her acts of sexual misconduct. She did not know how Christopher had brought himself to mention them. He knew quite well, for instance, that she and Nick hadn’t spent an hour together in years, so the citing of Nick must reveal more about Christopher’s attitude to him than her own. And as for the man called Anton, there perhaps again she had been technically in the wrong, because she had in fact slept with Anton, but only as the result of a most embarrasing misunderstanding, a misunderstanding so much in her own favour that she supposed she would never be able to bring herself to explain it to anybody. And how Christopher knew about it she could not imagine. Anton was a student, a rather elderly student refugee, who had arrived from Prague the year before after some political trouble, speaking very bad English: he had been handed on to her by an old friend, who had asked her to find him somewhere to live, because I know, he had said, that you used to deal in accommodation, didn’t you? Rose, too polite to explain that she had given up dealing in such things years ago, had said she would do what she could, and Anton had arrived on her doorstep one night, filthy dirty and rather drunk, in an old soldier’s uniform. She had never found out what he was doing in uniform. She had asked him in, and given him a meal, and said he could stay the night with her: they had talked, till very late, in a confused mixture of languages, about the reasons for his flight, and as they talked she knew perfectly well that she had not the faintest notion of what he was talking about, and that the language barrier would never permit them to get very much further. But she felt sorry for him: he was a small man, his face white and waxy and gleaming from fatigue, his hair cropped short – this seemed to enrage him more than anything, the indignity of his cropped hair, she did manage to make out that he would never dare to show his face in the glorious streets of decadent London until it had grown a little – and he was also good-humoured, in a bizarre non-verbal way. Every now and then he would roar with laughter and crack a joke to justify his laughter, in Czech or German. She laughed too, pleased to see him in good spirits, but she was amazingly tired herself, and knew she would have to get up in the morning to get the children to school, and was longing to get to sleep. At about three in the morning she could stand it no longer, and got up and said emphatically, ‘I really must go to bed.’ She had already explained to him where he was to sleep – she had given him one of the children’s beds, and put two of them in a bed together – and she had thought he had understood the message. So she said good night, and went up and got into her own bed. Just as she was about to switch off the light, Anton opened the door and came in. She sat up again, about to ask him what he wanted, but was struck dumb when he started to take his clothes off. She said nothing: she lay there and watched, her mouth open in astonishment. She said nothing when he got into the bed, turned off the light, and grabbed her. In confusion, as he got on with it, she thought, Christ, perhaps he’s been propositioning me the whole evening and I’ve been agreeing without being able to understand what he’s been saying. She was far too polite to resist: she didn’t want to offend him, and it didn’t anyway seem very important. In fact, she had to admit to herself that she did find him rather attractive, in some obscene sexy way: his skin was all dirty and slippery, he smelt of railway carriages, and he made love in an exhausted, enthusiastic, noisy manner, mumbling and grunting and reciting bits of poetry in foreign languages and grabbing at her without finesse and laughing suddenly and unpredictably into her neck. It was confusing but somehow irresistible: as before, as downstairs, she never got the jokes, but she could not help laughing, with him and at him and at the absurdity of the occasion. His head was round like a bullet, with its shorn hair, and his body was short and compact like her own, but much more solid. He was a man of middle Europe, a man of cabbages and shabby uniforms and shabby politics, and he bitterly resented it. This was one of the jokes. He would clutch, every now and then, desperately, at his prison crop, and then collapse upon her, trying to demonstrate that his hair would grow, given half a chance. He mumbled of Trotsky and Mick Jagger. It went on and on and on. Rose was amazed. She had never known anything like it. It was all so sudden and so silly, and she could not imagine how it had happened. It was not the kind of thing that usually happened to her at all.