The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  And yet, for all that, one couldn’t help thinking that Mr Bryanston, after Mrs Bryanston, was rather a relief. At least he had something to say for himself, even though it was rather shocking. He was something rather than nothing, and after Mrs Bryanston in her dressing-gown this was a considerable step up in the scale of humanity. He ate, he drank, he had held his grandchild’s hand and tried to sell a few pot plants for the district nurses in his conservatory: he had even, once, at dinner, passed Simon the salt. I’ve eaten his salt, thought Simon, I’d better stop judging him and worrying about him, there’s no point in trying to relate wealth to personality, I have known that for years. Nearly a century and a half stand between me and the possibility of understanding such a relation, I had better give it up. So he finished his drink, quietly, as Rose was doing, and looked at Rose instead. He wondered what she was thinking, and if, ever, in her thoughts, she included him.

  Rose, herself, was thinking that nothing had changed. It was all as it had been, dreary, oppressive, painful beyond belief. Hearing her father talk business was like hearing some old record replayed. How Christopher puts up with it I cannot imagine, she thought, quelling in herself the faint hope that Christopher might have discovered something tolerable, that he might be able to translate for her, into terms that she could understand, some aspects of grace. She would never have admitted it, but the fact that Christopher, whom she had once loved, had become close to her father, had not condemned Christopher, but had on the contrary given to her father’s image a pale gleam of hope. She felt now that it had been illusory. She remembered the one act of imagination that her father had even directed towards her – when, all those years ago, he had summoned her to his study in the London house and asked her if she had got herself involved with the Communist Party. She had thought then, perhaps after all he knows who I am, perhaps he would recognize me if he met me on the street. She had later recognized, humbly, that his concern on this score could hardly by any light have been construed as affection. But it had nevertheless cheered her: better to be recognized as a link in a chain than not to be recognized at all. Sometimes she worried about the nature of the link – not that she had joined the Party, not that she had ever had much to do with it – but it was a link all the same, the simple link of reaction. She had reacted against what she had heard, as a child: she had become other. And where therefore was the transcendence? (Others might have been interested in the credit, but she was not: it was justification she sought, not gratitude.) Whence had come illumination, and why to her? At times she tried to trace a more natural connection between herself and her parentage, discovering in herself her mother’s hypochondria with every sore throat, her father’s inhumanity with her own preference for the total as opposed to the individual. I, like him, she would say to herself, am stubborn beyond belief, I too am partisan, it is simply that accident has forced me to take the other part.

  But she did not believe these reasonings. Transcendence loomed over her head like a great owl.

  Once, the winter before, crossing the park, a jay had creaked slowly across her path, noisily, heavy, flying low, from tree to tree, a few feet away, its plumage dull pink and barred and ominous, its flight heavy with cold. So exiled it had looked, so blundering.

  The reaction, of course, had not been entirely unaided. There was always Noreen to be remembered. Somewhere about this house, so long unvisited, hovered the memory of Noreen, the witch-woman, with her unwanted, dour true revelation, that revelation which had become almost sweet with time. Later, that night, she would go and trace it. Somewhere must lie the relics of the past, in the bottom of a cupboard or a wardrobe, in a broom closet, in a tea chest or a suitcase or an old box. The children had found, over the years, some of her things, and had brought back to her sad objects, old paintboxes, scrap-books, some wooden hens pecking on a board, a broken weather-house, a cross-stitch purse full of little plastic rabbits. Upstairs, there would be something that would bring back Noreen and her illuminations. The rooms were all different, now, of course – her own old room had been made over to Christopher, and the children slept all three in what had been the schoolroom. She had been put for the night in what had been Noreen’s room, at the end of the corridor, while Simon was in the best guest room. Mrs Graves had told Rose this, in the kitchen, when Rose had gone to ask about dinner. Asking about dinner had made Rose feel so miserable, in so familiar a way: she knew that it would make no difference to the people in the kitchen, to be asked to provide an extra two meals, to be asked to make up a couple more beds, she knew that they were paid to do such things, that they could leave if they wanted to, that they were often asked to do much worse things with less notice and in less polite a manner, and yet nevertheless such a wash of embarrassment had poured over her, as she stood here clumsily and nervously, ill at ease, that it had transported her back twenty years, to the humiliation of being half-employer, half servile child, treated by the staff with a mocking deference, and yet at the same time privileged to hear their complaints, their moans about her parents and the employing class in general, a tenant of both worlds, belonging to neither, recipient of the confidences of each about the other, and therefore all too painfully aware of the mutual contempt that reigned beween them. It was these years, perhaps, that had made her so neurotically incapable of relying on the services of others: she recalled the relief that had filled her when she had discovered that it was possible to get through life cleaning one’s own shoes, cooking one’s own meals, washing one’s own pants, that it was not a law of nature that decreed her to suffer for ever the humiliation of having these things done for her by people who despised her. She had met enough people, now, to know that others did not necessarily feel as she did, and that only lack of finance prevented a great many more women from employing each other to wash each other’s underwear and make each other’s beds. At first she had found this incredible, impossible: she could not believe that people of her own generation, nice people like Diana, really meant it when they sighed over the colonial life at dinner-parties, sympathizing with returning members of the British council, or Shell, or OUP representatives, for their diminished staff. Nor would she believe the rueful, courageous complaints of these returning ladies – ‘Ah well, I suppose I’ll get used to doing my own cooking,’ these women said, smiling bravely, knowing that the women at home would not be pleased by too great a show of reluctance – but Rose herself so deeply assumed that these women must, could only be pleased to have got rid of the dreadful burden of shoe-cleaners and houseboys and nannies and ayahs (or whatever the word was) that it took her years to notice that it was the tone of regret that was in fact genuine, not the somewhat forced courage, and that the sighs of the Dianas of this world were not uttered through politeness to guests from different climes, understandably out of touch with the moral codes of Europe, but through genuine and sincere envy. Diana too would employ eight women at ten shillings a week if she could: Diana too would relinquish gladly those lovely jobs, the ironing and the cooking and the gardening, to anyone whom she could afford to pay to do them.

  There had been one occasion on which she had found somebody to agree with her attitude, an occasion which at first sight seemed to bear out her suspicion that it was at root historical, neurotic. At dinner one night, talking to a group of women about au pair girls and charladies and their strange ways, one of the guests (sensing, perhaps, Rose’s silent dissent) had turned to Rose, quietly, and said, you know, the trouble is, I can’t employ this woman I’ve got now, any longer, I can’t bear it. She looks like my own grandmother. She was in service, my grandmother, and when I see this woman on her knees in my kitchen, I feel as though I’ve put my grandmother down there to scrub my floor. I’ll have to do without. Rose, to this, had revealed her own hesitations, trying to produce neurotic reasons for them as this other woman had done, each trying to condemn herself for abnormality, but they did not manage it. Uneasily and yet reassured they eyed each other, knowing the truth, relieved to find at least o
ne to share it, meeting in the middle, one who had seen too much domestic employment from the upper side, and one who had seen too much from the lower, and both of them knowing that there was no justice in it and not enough pay. It had been an interesting meeting.

  It was possible, of course, that the staff at Branston House had been a peculiarly dissatisfied lot. Rose’s parents had never been very agreeable to work for. The gardener alone had any enthusiasm for the place, and carried on resolutely with his tasks, coming into the kitchen for a cup of tea every now and then. Rose would have liked him, had she not been so frightened of him: she liked to watch him doing things, digging, planting, trimming, and would hang around, afraid all the time that she was in the way. He, for his part, would have liked to talk to her, if she hadn’t been such a sheepish little thing. But whenever he spoke to her, she started and would then run off, as though afraid to be noticed. When she was older, a mooching adolescent, she would pluck up more courage, and would ask to be allowed to help: he didn’t really like imparting his mysteries, having a deep suspicion of Mr Bryanston’s horticultural notions, but he felt sorry for Rose, recognizing that she was hardly on her father’s side, and would invent little jobs for her to do. Once he came across her in the stables with her pressed-flower book: she showed him, politely. ‘Ah, they’re weeds,’ he said, which was all he could think of to say, but he was impressed nevertheless, and used to look things out for her occasionally. She, by this time, knew as much about it as he did, and had to be kind to him when he produced, triumphantly, some specimen she had collected years before. Oh thank you, Mr Cooke, she would say, how nice. They both liked these almost mute transactions.

  But apart from the gardener, the rest of the staff found their chief pleasure in grumbling. They did not even aspire to the mock, paid cheerfulness which some personal servants consider their duty: they soon found out it was not called for. There were times when Rose, at her lowest, would admit to herself that she would willingly, like a despot, have paid for a little kindness, for a little interest, a little flattery. Some of the most humiliating recollections of her life were memories of having tried to bully Noreen into showing a little tenderness. (Later, she thought it had been a blessing, not to have been offered substitutes. She had preserved at least the ability to distinguish.) Only once or twice in her life had she ever submitted to a servile, professional emotional approach: she recalled one of them now, with amusement and embarrassment, as she watched Christopher across the room, talking to her father about strikes and Industrial Relations, for Christopher had been there at the time, it had been just after the birth of Maria, at home in her own bed. Her cousin Sonia, who still preserved a certain affection for herself and Christopher, related largely to the gallant way in which Christopher had handled her on Folkstone quay, had sent them as a gift for the baby a large maternity nurse with a little dog, to look after mother and child for a fortnight. Rose had been horrified, for there was no room in her little house to establish so large a lady, and no possibility of being able to provide for her the standard of living to which she was accustomed, but she had been too weak and too polite to send her away again, and had struggled bravely, from her bed, to placate the nurse and Christopher and the dog and the larger two children, saying to herself, please God, please God let her go away soon and let me hold my baby.

  The nurse, to be fair to her, had accepted the amazing domestic scene with the sang-froid of one constantly parcelled from house to house, and said cheerily from time to time that she had seen stranger sights in her time; she did her best to cope, unlike Christopher, who lost his temper and sulked. He did not want this strange woman in his house, he kept saying crossly and in earshot: she filled the place up, one couldn’t turn round without banging into her, she was a complete waste of money. I’m not paying, said Rose. No, but she eats, doesn’t she, said Christopher, you should see what she eats. Don’t be such a mean bugger, said Rose, and burst into tears, weak from childbirth, from the endless reminiscences of Nurse Williams, from the frustration of not being allowed to hold her own new lovely daughter except to feed her – and even when she was feeding her, Nurse Williams would be there, sitting in the rocking-chair, telling her how to do it (as though she hadn’t reared two on her own already), telling her about impacted breast ulcers, asking her questions, and then telling her not to talk because of upsetting the flow of the milk when she struggled, occasionally, to answer. It had, to Rose, been a beautiful illustration of what people suffer at the hands of their own laziness. The interchange about Nurse Williams eating too much had been overheard by Nurse, who had been hanging around outside the bedroom door: she burst in, to make it clear that she had overheard, and found Rose weeping. Now then, now then, Mr Vassiliou, she said, what are you doing, upsetting a nursing mother, we can’t have that, can we: and Christopher had sworn, and said he was leaving the house if he couldn’t have a chat to his own wife in his own bedroom without strange women barging in, and had then gone out.

  At his departure Rose had continued to weep, largely through fury at being left alone with Nurse Williams, but Nurse, in some quite extraordinary manner, so utterly professional and capable that Rose would never afterwards quite credit that such subtlety had come out of such a hulk, had managed to persuade Rose that it was rage with her husband that had made her cry, that men were like that, that husbands were really incredibly selfish, notoriously ill-mannered, that all wives were long suffering, that she, Nurse Williams, had seen it all, and that Rose had every right to weep her heart out when treated so badly by so boorish a man. And Rose, to her utter amazement, found herself as though hypnotized, reaching out her arms to this large woman, and being clasped to her uniformed bosom, where she wept like a child: she, who never touched except those she loved, she, who had never been allowed to weep, had never wept on a maternal bosom in her life. When Christopher came back, finally, drunk, she had told him about it, giggling, at midnight, describing the starched and glossy swell that had met her hot cheek, and the sense of corruption that had overcome her as she succumbed to so gross and yet so subtly manipulated a manoeuvre. We’ll get rid of her, said Christopher. No, no, don’t do that. She is going soon anyway, said Rose, cutting her toe nails, thinking how nice it was to be able to reach them so easily again, now that the baby was born. Put up with her, Christopher, please put up with her. She was on bad terms with Christopher, at this stage in her marriage, and all the insults that Nurse Williams could have thought to heap upon him, as a representative of the race of husbands, would probably have fallen short of the lurid truth, but nevertheless she felt tenderly towards him, for a day or two, tenderly, for having betrayed him in a nurse’s arms.

  She smiled to herself, remembering this. Christopher, bored by her father, caught the smile, and said, ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ said Rose, ‘I was just remembering Nurse Williams. I don’t know why. And how glorious it was when she left.’

  ‘Why on earth were you thinking of her?’ said Christopher, and Rose, whose thought processes had been in fact quite different, suddenly wondered if she had perhaps remembered that incident because then, as now, she had felt a similar softening, at a time when she had no cause to feel it. She ought, perhaps, at this moment, to be at the depth of her outrage and indignation: he had behaved appallingly, dreadfully, irresponsibly: and yet, ever since meeting him in the garden, she had been feeling (in the peace of victory) a slight forgiveness.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rose, untruthfully. ‘Wasn’t she amazing? Do you remember that horrid little dog? Nurse Williams,’ she said, turning to Simon, ‘Nurse Williams was this woman who came round when Maria was born, I can’t tell you what a strange person she was …’

  And she continued to describe Nurse Williams, and Simon was able to contribute reminiscences of his own, about a maternity nurse that Julie had engaged, in all seriousness, for her first child, though not for subsequent births, for she had subsequently found that Hampstead, unlike Newcastle,
did not consider such adjuncts either necessary or chic, and had thereafter relied on the Nappy Service, a baby-sitting agency, the local clinic, a useless au pair girl, and a tame family doctor. Mr Bryanston listened to these domestic anecdotes with some impatience, though he tried to smile at the story of the day when Nurse Williams tried to air the baby clothes in the oven and forgot about them: he made a few attempts to bring the subject more within his range, but finally gave up, rather sadly, to let the young people talk. Rose noticed his face fall, as he lapsed into silence, and was surprised to note that she had even noticed: he must have been enjoying his talk with Christopher and Simon, he must have been thinking that he was making a good impression, he could not like the suspicion that they were relieved to turn from him to Rose. This attempt at insight startled Rose: she could not remember that she had ever seen him as a separate person before, and although it was not surprising that she should do so now, for the first time, after so long an absence, it nevertheless gave her a faint shock, a shock which was intensified and made distinct when he rose to his feet (a small elevation, it is true, what a little man he was, and he seemed to be shrinking) and said, ‘Well, I’d better get to bed. Can’t sit up all night.’ He said this in a tone of deep dissatisfaction, locking his hands behind his back, rocking on his feet, staring at them all nastily, and Rose remembered that these were the very words, unchanged, identical, with which he had announced his departure on every evening that she had ever spent with him: it had always enraged her, the malignant gloom with which he would survey the room he was about to leave, the suggestion of accusation towards whoever else were there, as though they had been forcing him to stay up against his will, the note of command, which implied that everybody else had better follow suit immediately and do likewise. In fact, Mrs Bryanston, when she had been at home, had always risen at this announcement and silently left the room: so, too, had Rose, until one day in her last year at school she thought that she would try to sit it out. So she remained seated, her head bent over her book. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ her father had said, surprised, and Rose had shaken her head, without looking up. And that had been that. She always stayed up after that, on principle, and her father’s only gesture of protest was to switch off all the lights in the room except the one on the table where she sat. But he continued, every night, to repeat his parting shot; and Rose had continued, every night, to tremble and shiver inwardly as she heard the repeated words. And suddenly, this evening, after so many years, hearing them yet again, unchanged, it occurred to her that he said them possibly not out of ill will, but because he could not think of any other way to leave the room. A thousand times one can suffer and resent, but the thousand and first time monotony, however staunchly resisted, becomes endearing after all. Really, thought Rose, whatever has come over me, I sit here forgiving them all, have I been wrong all this time, or is it that I have got tired of resentment?