The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  Tea was being served on the terrace. Rose, seeing the woman who was pouring out from the huge tin tea pot, turned away, and said, ‘That’s Mrs Graves, oh dear me.’

  ‘I’ll get you a cup,’ said Simon, and he went off to get cups of tea and sandwiches. Rose sat down on the parapet. She looked down at the sunken garden, and the roses, and the lilies in the water. Two women next to her were talking about the place they had been to the week before, a Jacobean house in Suffolk, where there hadn’t been anything to eat but dry biscuits, though it had advertised Teas. This is what I call a tea, said one of the women, eating scones and rock buns and a ham sandwich. Rose could hardly prevent herself from taking some kind of credit. Simon, returning with a plateful of food, said, ‘I asked your Mrs Graves if the family were at home. And she said yes, they were all here.’

  ‘What did she mean by all?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. I felt as though I were enquiring after royalty.’

  She smiled. ‘You mustn’t hate me for this,’ she said.

  And he suddenly thought of where she lived, and her ironing and the Ally Pally, and Africa, and Eileen’s baby, and the chicken and the armchairs, and the extraordinary nature of her journey, and the distance she had travelled, and he said, ‘No, no. How could I?’ It was not possible that she existed, and there she sat, eating a buttered scone, in a silk headsquare that looked incomparably too rich and too showy for her modest features and her unassuming spirit. Nature had made her that way, nature had made her unremarkable, an ordinary person: fate had capriciously elected her to notoriety: and she had made the painful journey back to nature by herself, alone, guided by nothing but her own knowledge, against the current. There she sat, her bare legs crossed neatly, a Vinyl sandal dangling from the arch of her dusty foot, brushing the crumbs tidily from her brown skirt, a paying guest. He watched her: she was a vision kindly bestowed. She finished her scone, put down her paper plate on the wall beside her, looked up at him, and said, ‘What shall we do? What should we do, now?’

  ‘We’d better go and look, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ she said, slipping down from the wall to join him. ‘Where do you think they would be? Outside or inside? I don’t think we’re allowed inside, they don’t open the house.’

  ‘We could start with the outside,’ he said. ‘They’re more likely to be out, on a day like this. You show me where to go.’

  And they set off together, arm in arm again, through the garden, looking at this and that as they went, listening to snatches of overheard conversation, reluctant to waste the simple pleasure of walking together. There were a lot of people: the fine weather and the Bank Holiday combined had made for a good turn-out. The gardens were looking well, better than Rose had remembered. A special effort had been made for the public, she said. There were plenty of children running about, nagged by mothers to keep off flowerbeds, but none of them were her own. The grounds were extensive: there were plenty of places to look. They tried first the nearer places: the lawns round the house, the rose garden, the herb garden, and then hesitated between a long grass avenue leading between clipped hedges to an undramatic ha-ha, and the kitchen garden, which lay to their right, behind a high brick wall. And as they hesitated, Simon caught sight of the children. There they were, all three of them, miles away, climbing back into the garden over an ill-concealed fence at the far end of the avenue, small with distance and perspective, but unmistakable, the one fair-haired child and the two dark ones.

  ‘There they are,’ he said, ‘look, there they are,’ and they both stopped and stared.

  ‘We’ll go and meet them,’ she said.

  And they walked to meet them, down the green path. The children were running, growing larger as they came, and they did not see Rose until they were within a few yards of her: then they recognized her, and shouted, and ran towards her, and she let go of Simon’s arm and ran towards them. He watched them meet: he watched them come back towards him, clinging on to her, laughing, chattering. She was smiling: apologetic, slightly ashamed, but smiling. They met, at the geometric intersection of two avenues: green roads led off to right and left, before them the false rising perspective, behind them the house and its stone parapet. The meeting seemed to go on for ever, in that exposed spot: or wave after wave of it occurred and reoccurred, as though time had broadened endlessly to describe it. His mind was marked with green stripes: they crossed and crossed it. The high green hedges froze in a crest, about to break: the smell of trodden grass surged and rose and surged again. The planned and geometric grandeur stiffened and oppressed him: it was too much, too much intended. He looked for cover. There was no cover. They were intended to walk, down the very centre, back to the house.

  On the way back, Marcus and Maria told Rose about Grime’s Graves, and how frightening and exciting it had been: Konstantin walked a little apart, quietly, having formally acknowledged Rose’s thanks for his phone call, asking no questions, worrying no doubt about what wheels he might have set in motion. Simon wondered about what they should do next. He had never really expected that they might discreetly escape, but any confrontation was inconceivable. Though the set seemed built, designed centuries ago, for confrontation. This is how the rich plan things, he found himself thinking: they arrange nature, they design it for the grandiose passions, and once a decade, perhaps, they fill in these great designs. Intersections, perspectives, the intolerable pretensions of those who think themselves free to operate. Rose gardens, shrubberies, ornamental lakes, the landscapes of the idle soul. The lake of disaffection, the spring of hope, the alleys of reunion. Once, at Oxford, on a summer night, he had looked out of his bedroom window across the college gardens, awakened by a dry thunderstorm, and there lay the garden, formal, beautiful, carefully maintained, lit by ray after ray of a pale amazing watery green, each leaf picked out, each flower blanched with immortality, everlasting flowers, and through the garden wandered, lit also by these fabulous shafts of light, the oldest fellow of the college, a mad old man in his nineties, wandering alone as he often did, walking off through the trees into the distance, landscape and figure gathered up together in some convulsive effort of significance, some delusive allegory of the soul. Then, deeply moved, he had stirred himself bitterly to rejection, protesting against this mocking beauty, this folly of grandeur, this arbitrary, exclusive illuminating shaft of light: and so now, too, he protested, against the very shape of the trees themselves. For what was the point of any virtue, any grace, if it was not of the common lot, there could be no beauty behind a gate marked Private, let them trample around on the flowerbeds, all of them, any of them: there was a hymn they had sung at school, it came back to him often, it said, The grass is softer to my tread, because it rests unnumbered feet, sweeter to me the wild rose red, because she makes the whole world sweet: and so it was, that was precisely so, as Rose had always known. And Rose’s own rejections – her stumbling, her pallor, her renunciations, her Vinyl sandals – they appeared to him as the human, as the lovely, as the loving, as the stuff of life itself.

  He heard her voice: irritable, querulous, pacifying. She was trying to comfort Maria, who had burst into tears of rage because Marcus was teasing her because she had cried down the flint mine; ‘Don’t be so mean, Marcus,’ she was saying, and ‘Don’t be so silly, Maria’ – plunged back into the everyday, ignoring the high folding clipped hedges, the impressive destination. He listened to her, and they faded away. ‘Maria,’ she said, ‘if you don’t stop yelling I shall hit you.’ And then she turned to him and said privately, ‘Simon, quick, tell me, what on earth are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said.

  ‘Could we just take them home?’ she said.

  ‘We could try,’ he said.

  But it was too late, because there, walking towards them from the house, was Christopher.

  They met him in the rose garden in front of the house. They converged, and met. The children stood about n
ervously. Christopher stood there in his dark glasses and stared at them, saying nothing. Simon did not dare to open his mouth. It was left to Rose to speak. She drew breath to do it, and then gently exhaled it, and started again. There was some line to deliver, she knew, but she could not find it. Finally, she let out a little sound that was half a moan and half a laugh, and said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh well, never mind.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Rose.

  And they all started to move, setting off as though by agreement towards the house.

  ‘Well,’ said Christopher, as they moved forward, ‘as you’re here, you’d better come in, I suppose.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rose. Then she started to laugh, and said, ‘There’s an injunction out against you, you know. Whatever an injunction may be.’

  ‘Is there really?’ said Christopher, pleasantly.

  ‘Oh Christopher,’ she said, ‘what an absolute fool you are.’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ he said, ‘but never mind. It’s all over now.’

  And over it appeared to be. Christopher had given in: his manner perfectly conveyed his concession. As he held open the french window for them, he turned to Rose and said, ‘Why on earth are you wearing those ridiculous glasses?’ and she said, ‘They’re my disguise, they’re Simon’s really, I’ll take them off if you don’t like them,’ and she took them off and put them in her pocket. And there they were in the drawing-room, all six of them.

  ‘Why, look who’s here,’ said Simon in astonishment: and there, sunk into two large chairs, sat Jeremy Alford and his pregnant wife, Shirley, in the gloom at the other end of the room. They were drinking gin and tonic.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ said Jeremy, sounding as though he did not much care.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious, I’d have thought. What about you?’

  ‘Equally obvious.’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about that kind of thing,’ said Christopher, blandly, smiling. ‘Let’s all sit down instead. As I was doing already, with your nice friends, when it was reported that you were in the garden.’

  ‘You have spies.’

  ‘Oh yes, everywhere.’ He was standing by the fireplace: the room seemed dark and murky, after the bright evening outside.

  ‘We could tell the children to go off and play,’ said Christopher, ‘if you trust them out of your sight.’

  ‘I don’t know if I do,’ said Rose.

  ‘You’re all right as long as you can see me,’ said Christopher.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Rose. ‘You might have agents all over the place. I know you. I don’t trust you. You might have a yacht moored in Holkham Bay, for all I know.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Christopher. ‘I hadn’t even thought of it. Too shallow, anyway.’

  ‘What had you thought of, may I ask?’

  ‘Nothing, really. I just wanted to give you a fright.’

  ‘I knew it. I knew it. Well, you’ve really done yourself in this time. With all those injunctions and things. I can’t stop them now, you know. Can I, Jeremy?’ Jeremy smiled, embarrassed.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you can,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘Not really. I’d had it anyway, hadn’t I?’

  Nobody answered him. The children had drifted off to the other end of the long room, sensing trouble. Simon wondered whether he should go away like a child and leave them to it, but did not know where to go to. The absurdity of the situation was so total that he gave up on it, happy to stand there like a stooge, even beginning to hope that Christopher would soon get round to offering him a drink.

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ said Christopher, reading his mind, and knowing he had read it, from the way Simon, relieved, met his glance. So he went over to the sideboard and opened a door and poured some drinks. The children, reassured by this comforting normality, slunk back and started begging for Coca Cola, and were supplied. They all sat down.

  ‘Are my parents here?’ said Rose, after a while.

  ‘Yes, they are. Your father’s somewhere about, he was selling pot plants in the conservatory. You didn’t see him?’

  ‘We didn’t try the conservatory. And where’s mother?’

  ‘She went to lie down. She didn’t like all the people.’

  ‘We were helping with the teas,’ said Konstantin, ‘but Mrs Graves told us to get out of the way, because Maria kept dropping the plates.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Maria, and started to wail again.

  ‘I’d better see them, I suppose,’ said Rose. ‘Do you think they could bear to see me?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Christopher. ‘Why don’t I tell them I was expecting you both? Why don’t you stay the night?’

  Rose looked at Christopher: really, she thought, in the end, one had just got to take him, and that’s that. Her spirit, for the first time in years, moved to acceptance: she felt it embark for that final flight, she imagined it might one day rise and reach and settle in the clearer air.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t stay,’ said Simon. ‘I must get back.’

  ‘You must stay,’ said Rose.

  ‘You must stay,’ said Christopher, ‘you can’t leave us, you daren’t leave us. Why don’t you all stay? Mrs Alford?’

  ‘No, no, we can’t possibly,’ said Jeremy, a note of reluctance in his voice. ‘We really must get back. Mustn’t we, Shirley?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said his wife, pulling herself to her feet. She was a small woman, with small tired features. ‘I daren’t stay too far away from the hospital, at the moment. We must get back.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Christopher, charming, helpful, moving forward to pick up her bag, take her arm, open doors for her – ‘I’m very sorry, to have caused so much inconvenience. Won’t you have another drink, before you go? Do stay a few more minutes, and have another drink.’

  Shirley Alford looked up at him. She looked a mild little woman, her hair a streaky silver yellow, her face soft and drained by pregnancy, frail, like an early daffodil, the delicate tissues of her skin dried by the process of gestation, soft and delicate, little lines round her eyes, blanched like a primrose too much exposed to a rough spring, as she had been too much exposed to exhausting, successive pregnancies, and the arduous life of a middle-class mother with a professional husband, standards to keep up, small children to tend unaided: strained, she looked, and overburdened, docile and fragile, subdued by her condition, but she looked at Christopher with a shrewd knowledge, and she said, in a voice utterly undestroyed, and robust, and decisive, the voice of one who will give birth and recover, with the next season of life, she said, ‘Well, well, well,’ she said, ‘you really have got a bloody cheek. That’s all that I can say.’

  And she turned to her husband, and said, ‘Come on, Jeremy, let’s go.’

  And at the sound of her saying, absolutely out, what they had all been thinking, they all smiled, even Christopher.

  ‘You must forgive me,’ said Christopher, unwilling to admit defeat. ‘I must have ruined your weekend.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Shirley, with dignity. ‘You ruined one day of it, that’s all. I daresay we shall make up for it tomorrow.’

  And she walked firmly out of the room, saying goodbye to Rose as she went. Simon followed them: in the hall, he said to Jeremy, ‘Well? What happened?’

  ‘I served the injunction on him, of course,’ said Jeremy Alford. ‘He didn’t even look at it. He just shoved it in his pocket. I made him get it out again and read it, so at least he knows what it’s about. But I wouldn’t let him out of your sight, if I were you. Did you come up to collect the children?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we did. Was that all right?’

  ‘Very sensible. I was wondering if I ought to take them back to London myself, but Shirley didn’t fancy having them bouncing around in the car.’

 
‘Well, it’s a bit much,’ said Shirley. ‘After all, I’ve got one bouncing around inside. And I went to great lengths to get rid of the other two. So I don’t see why I should spend the time with other people’s.’

  ‘This’ll be your third, will it?’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Shirley Alford, proudly. ‘It’s a good number, three.’

  In the drawing-room, Rose was sitting down, looking out of the window. She turned, as Simon entered.

  ‘You could stay, please,’ said Rose. ‘I’d like to stay. I think I ought to stay. And I can’t, unless you do.’

  ‘Perhaps your parents won’t be very pleased if I do?’ said Simon.

  ‘Oh, they won’t mind,’ said Christopher. ‘Why should they mind?’

  And so he agreed to stay: Rose said she would ring up Julie and explain, and he thought that he might as well let her, as he was incapable of doing it himself, and there seemed to be little point in not burning one’s boats, so clearly had this gathering constituted itself as a finale, as a dénouement, as a conclusion with no prospects. So Rose lifted the receiver and rang: he could hear every word she said, he could hear the note of confidence, of intimacy, of appeal, of gathering friendliness, and into his mind swam shadows of future meetings, rendered now inevitable: Rose and Julie, exchanging domestic secrets, sitting together on the settee, meeting with cries of delight at parties, Rose invited as an asset to dinner, Rose taken over, Rose obliging and willing to be of use, Rose uncritical and innocently pleased. It could have been worse, it could well have been worse.

  Rose put the phone down and turned back to them. ‘She says that’s fine with her,’ she said, ‘she said not to worry at all. She sends you her love.’