The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Ah,’ said Simon.

  ‘Have another drink,’ said Christopher, ‘and I’ll go and look for my father-in-law.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Rose. ‘Send Konstantin. Konstantin, go and look for Grandpa. He can’t still be in the conservatory, can he?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Christopher, ‘he gets quite carried away by this kind of thing.’

  ‘But everyone’s leaving,’ said Rose, crossing to the window and looking out. ‘Everyone’s going home.’

  ‘He’ll be somewhere about,’ said Christopher, and the children went to look.

  ‘What a curious room this is,’ said Simon, finding time to look round him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose, looking round herself. ‘You can see why they don’t let the public in the house, can’t you? Amazing bad taste, my family have always had. Or rather non-taste. They just keep what they’ve got and shove it where it fits. The pictures are supposed to be quite good, but they somehow don’t look very nice, do they?’

  Simon looked at the pictures. A large Canaletto hung gloomily over the mantelpiece, flanked by a Gainsborough, a Claude, and a large painting of a cottage garden. The cottage garden dominated strikingly, sucking the others into its style in a curiously persuasive way. On the wall between the two long windows hung an Italianate crucifixion and a painting of the flaying of Marsyas, of sickening realism. On the end walls were family portraits, the older ones of some distinction, the more recent ones of monstrous banality. Rose as a small girl stood in pastels holding a small dog in front of a Wendy house. By her hung a framed dingy sampler by an ancestress of hers, one Cassandra Vertue, aged eight in 1810: the cloth was grey brown and greasy and damp with age, the flowers faded, and the motto in dirty yellow cross stitch said sadly but triumphantly; after Horace: QUOD POTUI, PERFECI.

  The furniture showed the same eclectic principle of selection. Sheraton and mock-Jacobean huddled together in an overcrowded way: the settee and chairs were modern Maples, and the wall-light fittings were plastic mock candles with plastic dripping wax, and looked as though they had come out of Woolworths. The central chandelier was too large to have come out of Woolworths, but it suffered from proximity. On the mantelpiece stood a varied assortment of objects – some rather fine silver gilt candlesticks, a wooden troll, a pottery jug with flowers in it, an Asprey’s clock, a china dancing-girl, and a Dr Barnado’s collecting box of some antiquity. The carpet was densely patterned and a little worn. It was impossible to tell, in such surroundings, whether it was quite pleasant or quite appalling.

  ‘It hasn’t changed much,’ said Rose. ‘I wasn’t really allowed in here, when I was little.’

  ‘They let the children in now,’ said Christopher.

  ‘So I’m told,’ said Rose. ‘I used to wonder why.’

  ‘It’s because I insist,’ said Christopher. And then, with a new thought, he turned to Simon, and said, ‘Look, about this injunction. What is it supposed to make me do?’

  ‘An injunction is to stop you doing something,’ said Simon, stiffly.

  ‘Ah yes. That’s right. I had one to stop me seeing Rose.’

  ‘Pity you didn’t obey it,’ said Rose.

  ‘And this one is to stop me taking the children out of the jurisdiction, is that right?’

  ‘That’s the idea. They’re waiting to serve it on you in all the ports and airports of the country.’

  ‘You exaggerate, surely.’

  ‘Yes, I probably do. It’s not really my field, you might say. Though at times I feel I’m becoming quite a specialist in it.’

  ‘And what will they do with this injunction, when I tell them I’ve no intention of taking the children anywhere?’

  ‘I think you have to appear in court. And give an undertaking.’

  ‘And what will happen to my lovely custody case?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You mean it’ll just grind slowly on?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘I thought I might hurry things along a little.’

  ‘No, I doubt it.’ Simon was too polite to mention that he had lost the case decisively by his action.

  ‘Amazing, really. The processes of law. So unruffled and so unperturbed. They just go on and on, with the same basic data, no matter what happens after the case is set in motion. One can’t stop them until they’ve ground up the last little bit. And it’s no good telling them that things have changed, that there are all sorts of new circumstances, they just carry on, then start again!’

  ‘In that,’ said Rose, sharply, swilling a little whisky crossly round and round in the bottom of a glass, ‘in that, they rather strikingly resemble you.’

  ‘Neither of those statements is really quite accurate,’ said Simon.

  ‘No, maybe not,’ said Rose. ‘But you must admit, he’s created the law in his own image. You heard him.’

  ‘I have a natural passion for justice,’ said Christopher, refilling his glass, smiling blandly. His shirt was of white and blue stripes, in an embossed silky material, with small flowers raised in the pattern. He looked very relaxed, he had plimsolls on his feet and moved about silently.

  ‘Ha. Justice,’ said Rose. ‘May you lose every case you ever embark on.’

  ‘I probably will. And that will doubtless be justice. But I do like things to be gone into thoroughly. Don’t you?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Rose. She finished her drink in one swallow. ‘No, I can’t say I do.’ She began to pace up and down, turning from the window in time for them to surprise a look of anxiety on her face as she heard the door open. And there was Konstantin, leading her father by the hand.

  Simon had seen photographs of him, in business sections of newspapers, but had not been prepared for the fact that he was so small. He looked little taller than his grandson: he also looked very unhappy at the prospect of an encounter with his censorious and prodigal daughter. His face, squarish and red veined, had an unnaturally deep flush: he looked stubborn and angry, the last person to be able to handle the scene with any grace. At this point Simon would have given anything just to disappear, but it was too late. He looked at Rose: she was still standing by the window, blushing painfully, unable to move or speak. Her father looked at her, grunted, nodded curtly at Simon, and moved over to Christopher, who poured him a drink. He took the drink, sniffed at it, then put it down and said, ‘I don’t want that, thank you,’ in a tone of indignation. Christopher seemed used to such treatment. In a way Simon was relieved by his manner: it would have been worse to find Mr Bryanston pleasant and reasonable, it would have been too much a judgement of Rose, and he had been apprehensive, on this score, for since knowing Rose he had heard, he had listened for stories of Mr Bryanston, and many of them had made him out to be a jolly old fellow, a card, a joker, a philanthropist, even. He had been suspicious of the stories, knowing the way that they gather around the wealthy and the great, with little regard to truth, invented to soothe the conscience or aggrandize the teller: but nevertheless he had worried. He did not want to picture Rose, even in her distant childhood, even pardonably, as wilful and capricious. He wanted her to have told him the truth. He need not have worried. The reality, this time, justified her, as the reality of Christopher had not. Mr Bryanston was clearly a mean and rude old man. He waited for what he would say next, and after a moment or two he growled, roughly in Rose’s direction,

  ‘You won’t have seen your mother yet. She’s lying down.’

  ‘No,’ said Rose, moving an inch or two forward into the room. ‘I hope she’s well.’

  ‘What’s it to you if she’s well or ill?’ said her father.

  ‘Perhaps we’ve come on an inconvenient day,’ said Rose, politely.

  ‘You might have given us a bit of warning,’ said her father. ‘What do you expect me to do now? Kill the fatted calf, eh?’

  ‘It was me that persuaded her to come,’ said Christopher. ‘Don’t blame Rose, it was me that persuaded her.’

  ‘Very nice of you, I’m su
re,’ said Mr Bryanston, and went back to the table and picked up the drink he had so abruptly rejected.

  ‘This is a friend of mine, Simon Camish, Father,’ said Rose. ‘He very kindly drove me up.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr Bryanston. The accent of the Midlands was pronounced in his speech. He shook Simon’s hand, then sat himself down on the Maples settee.

  ‘I hoped they might stay the night, Pa,’ said Christopher. His manner towards his father-in-law was ingratiating in the extreme, but underneath the subserviance he had a curious dominating confidence. He had no expectation of being refused.

  ‘They can do what they like as far as I’m concerned,’ said Mr Bryanston, putting his short legs up on a wooden footstool. He had clearly no intention whatsoever of trying to accommodate the drama of years: that job could be done by others. He was used to having jobs done for him. Remembering the way he had treated his daughter, Simon felt that a note of apology would not have been out of place, but it was clear that one could wait for it for ever. Rose, for her part, moved forward, and herself sat down.

  ‘The garden’s looking very nice,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll all be trampled into mud,’ he replied.

  ‘How did the pot plants go?’ said Christopher. He, alone of all of them, looked amused. He was enjoying himself, he knew he could play them: and indeed he managed it, within ten minutes he had them all talking about gardens and gardeners, the price of rebuilding walls, estate duties, forestry commissions, tax concessions. Mr Bryanston, having discovered that Simon was a lawyer, started to interrogate him about his views on investments, trusts, and bequests, a subject that seemed peculiarly unfortunate in the circumstances: after a while Rose got up and left the room, ostensibly to go and explain about dinner to the cook, and Simon found himself, far from condemning her, sympathizing with her more and more. If this was the kind of conversation she had overheard throughout her childhood, it was hardly surprising that she had found a way out. And yet it was, perhaps, not ill meant: he thought it more than likely that her father was a man of such limited human feeling and imagination that it simply had not occurred to him to ask himself how such a conversation, at such a time, would strike her. Rose had said to him once, speaking of her father, insensitivity beyond a certain point is sadism, and he had disagreed, thinking that people cannot help their natures: but perhaps she had been right. On the other hand, this man clearly needed people to talk to, he needed to ramble on about his financial affairs, it was a matter of emotion to him, and perhaps it was sadism in Rose, to refuse her participation? Rose thought there was a law above the human law, and that the indulgence of one’s father was not a primal duty.

  Christopher, on the other hand, participated all too well; curiosity as to how he had managed to reinstate himself so thoroughly, after such a bad beginning, was completely satisfied by the sight of him in action, eagerly, mystically intent on the subject of tax-deductible investments, doing quick calculations on the corner of the newspaper, discussing with passionate attachment proposed government policies for stimulating investment in overseas projects. The real world, this is, thought Simon, thinking of the money coursing like sap through the veins of England, and yet Christopher managed to transform it into a moonlit jungle. An extraordinary talent, he had, for transforming the most obdurate facts into a dense forest of personalised intentions and heroic achievements. The balance of payments blossomed into beauty beneath his fingers. No wonder his father-in-law liked him. Who could help liking somebody so attached to one’s own interests, so helpfully enthusiastic, so redeemingly involved? After Rose, what a support he must have become. His father-in-law ate out of his hand.

  Dinner that night was one of the most curious meals that Simon had ever sat through. Mrs Bryanston arrived at the last moment, pale, sharp featured, wrapped up in a beige camel-hair dressing-gown, a woman so compellingly negative that it was an effort to force oneself to speak to her at all. She greeted Rose with such indifference that one might have supposed they had seen each other regularly once a week. Her husband ignored her completely, and when, occasionally, she spoke to him, he did not even reply. She asserted herself once during the evening, ringing a little bell that stood by her plate to summon the woman who waited on them: when the woman arrived, Mrs Bryanston said querulously, ‘What did you give me this for?’ and handed back a perfectly unexceptionable plate of apple pie and cream, of which she had already eaten half. There was no explanation: the woman meekly removed the plate, as though used to such behaviour. Rose from time to time tried to speak to her, but achieved little response. So the conversation continued between the three men, with Rose quietly eating: Simon glanced at her from time to time, her head bent over her plate, her dry fingers pulling at a piece of bread, submissive, quiet. Where had she come from, how had it happened? People do not grow out of nothing, they do not spring from the earth. Somewhere in this house, in these two disagreeable ageing people, in this dingy dining-room, lay the grounds for her fantastic notions. He felt almost as though there must be some spirit, some clue, hovering in the air around them. Perhaps it was the spirit of desolation that hovered with dark wings and a vacant spiritual gaze over the polished wooden dining-table. It had brooded over her, as a small child, it had blessed her and inspired her. He tried to imagine what it must have been like, as a child, living in such a place, with such parents. He had little idea of what might be expected to happen to lonely girls reared in country houses: perhaps Rose was not the first to nourish delusions of virtue. Her history was singular, freakish, whereas his own seemed to represent a common lot. And he thought, suddenly, how strange it is, that here I sit, in the kind of house that my mother used to take me round on an entrance ticket, insatiable sightseer that she was, here I sit, and I am actually condemning the meal as ill cooked, the decor as ugly and depressing, as though I had a right to judge, as though I knew better.

  When the meal was over, Mrs Bryanston retired immediately to bed. Her lack of interest in life had afflicted them all: it was a disease, a mildew, which oppressed even strangers. Simon noticed that even Christopher had more or less given her up, though he had managed to get a faint flicker of a smile once or twice during the meal. He remembered Rose saying that she only appeared to be animated when really ill: once she had had an operation, which had excited her, and once she had broken her arm, a drama which she had enjoyed even more. But her norm of ill health was too monotonous to afford her any satisfaction: she had cried wolf so often that her claims for attention were treated with little respect.

  Her withdrawal from the scene had the immediate effect of cheering everybody else up: even Rose’s father blossomed into something like joviality, at the prospect of a drink in the drawing-room without her. He became positively hospitable, asking Christopher several times if suitable arrangements had been made for Rose and Simon, asking Simon to stay on for a few days, telling Rose that she should come more often and that Konstantin ought to have his hair cut. His bonhomie, it was true, was somewhat sadistic in nature: he took pleasure in expressing concern for Rose by pointing out that the hem of her dress was coming down, and in telling her that she had been a fool to divorce Christopher. The delicacy of this latter subject deterred him not at all: he told her she was a fool to leave a man who would do and was doing so well for himself. She listened, and offered no defence: it would have been difficult to do so, for the case was not argued, it was flatly stated, with what Simon considered amazing, gross effrontery. They listened, the three of them, politely, to his discourse on human relations: he was clearly a man accustomed to delivering monologues, for when anyone tried to agree with him or question him, he ignored the contribution completely, starting to talk again through it as soon as he could think of anything else to say. Simon suddenly remembered whose manner it was that he recalled: it was a judge, now dead, whom Simon had had the misfortune to meet at a professional dinner, and whose pace of conversation had been deliberately designed to embarrass and wound the younger men around
him. Simon had hardly been able to believe his ears when a senior colleague had said, on the old fellow’s departure to the lavatory, ‘Ah, he’s a wonderful man, what a character, he’s one of the most humane people I’ve ever worked with.’ If that had been humanity, thought Simon, then God help the rest of the profession.

  Mr Bryanston moved shortly from human relations to industrial relations, a subject which stirred him even more. Simon listened with growing satisfaction. Living as he did in a self-consciously progressive world, exposed only incidentally, in hotels and trains, to the voice of opposition, he found it reassuring to hear it, in all its glory. So many industrialists expressed themselves with such urbanity, demonstrating what was after all a historic connection between civility and exploitation, that it was a relief to hear the undisguised truth. At least one could thus see that it was a real division of interests at stake. Some men, even self-made men like Rose’s father, had so picked up the tones of reason that it was hard to believe that it was not the national interest alone that they had at heart. But Mr Bryanston gave himself away. He spoke of the workers as though he were a mill-owner in a nineteenth-century novel, even delivering himself of the classic view that the fact that he himself had started work collecting scrap metal in a handcart was a perfectly adequate reason why workers deserved no sympathy at all – a view which showed a mental leap so precarious, so ibex-like, from crest of unreason to crest of unreason, that one could not but sit back and admire his magnificent, gravity-defying arrival. He spoke of strikes, of which two were notably in progress, one amongst the makers of surgical equipment, the other amongst the makers of certain bits of machinery which were impeding Mr Bryanston’s own productivity: Simon, used to the emotive cries of sympathy for those about to perish for lack of a scalpel, was pleased to note that Mr Bryanston did not care twopence for such innocent victims, and that all his sympathy was reserved for his own loss of profits. He did, it is true, try to elevate this personal concern to the level of national interest – and indeed it probably was a matter of national interest, it was hard to deny it – but it was gratifying to see the roots of his concern so unselfconsciously laid bare. Healthy, tenacious roots they were, too, deep sunk, able to survive a little soil erosion. No amount of exposure impeded such force. After a while, Simon, unable to resist stirring it a little, asked Mr Bryanston what he thought of the surgical equipment pay-claim: Mr Bryanston stopped, snorted, grunted, unwilling to bend his mind away from his own affairs, but equally unable to refuse such an invitation, and finally said, ‘Wicked, that’s what I call it, downright wicked. Utterly selfish. If I had my way they’d all be deprived of medical attention for the rest of their lives.’ Simon enjoyed this reply immensely: surprisingly, Mr Bryanston noticed his enjoyment, and reverted instantly to the safer topic of the way he had settled or failed to settle his own wage claims. As he went on, Simon found himself thinking with real affection of his own father-in-law, a genuinely modest man and a genuine exploiter, a man still so much of his own background that he knew how to get money from it with a perfect artistry. He had preserved a fellow feeling for his victims. He knew how to play on them because he was of them, he designed his brochures for them with a knowing eye. He was humble, because knowingly corrupt: he would never boast that others could simply choose to do likewise if they had the wit, he knew the others too well to claim it. Mr Bryanston had forgotten what the others were like, if he had ever known or cared. His memory was full of holes, and that perhaps was why he was perched up there on his solitary eminence, his Alpine peak of national interest, on a nasty snowy little rock of illogic. While down below, abandoned by thought, unjustified by human concern or even, at this stage, by personal ambition, the machinery ground away, the objects rolled off the conveyor belts, the profits ebbed and flowed, the shop stewards wrangled, the workmen carried on working, and every now and then somebody fell into a ladle of molten slag.