The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  They all got up to wish him goodnight. When he had left the room, Rose looked at the other two, who were already, in the relief of his departure, pouring themselves another drink, and saw that it would be the easiest thing in the world to settle down to an evening of tears, drink, remorse and confessions. Perhaps, she thought, I could even get Simon to talk. And the thought of it, the phrasing of it to herself in those terms, made her shy away out of a delicacy she could not understand or name: she had gone far enough, there was no farther she could safely go. So she too, like her father, declared her intention of going to bed. And went. She had a sense of some appointment more significant than confession, which awaited her upstairs.

  On the way up the stairs – a wide, curved staircase with wooden treads, and an iron handrail, the house’s best feature, which she had rarely ascended as a child, preferring the back staircase – she remembered the last night she had spent in the house. It had been the night before her departure to France with Sonia. Twenty years old she had been, and she had been mad with love and grief. Out of her mind with sorrow. She tucked the fact away into a little shelf of her mind. She would get it out later and have a look at it. It might afford some interest. Meanwhile, it was Noreen that she had on her mind.

  She was to sleep in Noreen’s bedroom. As a child, she had not been allowed in Noreen’s bedroom: it had been like the staff room at school, out of bounds, mysterious, and admission to it signified some signal honour or disaster. Her curiosity about it had become so intense that once, when she knew Noreen had gone down to the village, she had crept in to have a look round. Everything here had seemed so significant, so concealed: the pale-green silky watery bedcover, the sausage-shaped cushion on the bed, the ruched nightie-holder, the green basketwork chair, the green china dog on the mantelpiece, the framed print of a vase of flowers on the wall. She had stayed there only a moment, but her attraction towards it had become so strong that she made a habit of going there whenever she knew Noreen to be safely out of the house: her boldness had increased with her sense of security, and she had taken to opening drawers and gazing in awe at the neatly folded underwear, the silky blouses, the handkerchiefs, inhaling passionately the dry smell of lavender, the smell of moth balls, the indescribable cotton salty hygienic womanly smell of sanitary towels, which lay in a neat blue shoe bag in the bottom drawer.

  Outside the door, now, she paused, standing there on the landing, she paused: recollection assailed her so sharply that she shivered, her feet would not move, she felt that a step more would take her across the threshold of time itself, into the dreadful past.

  The smell was in her nostrils: threatening, attractive, illicit. The green of the basketwork chair assembled itself in her mind: pale, washed, thirties green, and yes, on the green curved edges there were woven scallops, and they were faintly touched, yes, that was it, they were touched with a fading, much rubbed, washed-out gilt. Basket scallops. It was too much to fear that the chair might yet be there: it must have been relegated years ago to an attic, or given away to a maid. Eau de nil, faint and poisonous, a colour that suggested in itself a lethargic indolence, a languorous repose, almost voluptuous, and yet which, in conjunction with Noreen herself, had managed to exhale self-denial, rigour, restraint. It swam before her, shaping itself now into a chair, now into the bedcover, now into the china dog with popping eyes (a powder container, the dog had been, but Noreen wore no powder) now into a dressing-gown of limp loose woven shiny fabric, embroidered in chain-stitch lilies, lilies which had lain, one each, on each of Noreen’s flat sulking breasts, breasts too flat to fall, which had yet fallen, only to rise again, just in time, almost elegantly, on either side, beneath the cross-over sash tied wrap, below the wide lapels. And there stood Noreen, within the green envelope, herself, as she had been twenty years and more ago, a woman of the thirties, herself in her thirties, her permed hair looking like an advertisement in a fly-blown neglected shop window, her lips thin and disapproving, and yet, like her bosom, not quite unattractive, her cold eyes and large high nose with a look of a goose about them, though why one should associate that particular association of features with a goose, that most unanthropomorphic and vicious creature, Rose did not know. Frightened, a little now, by the vividness of the ghost she had summoned, looking with some surprise at the exact spot, half-way down the corridor, her feet firmly on the Turkey carpet, where she had paused to meet it, as though she had expected the present to have dissolved from around her, she thought, almost, of going downstairs again, on the pretext of fetching a book to read; but instead went on, the few yards more, past the door of the room where the children were sleeping, and opened the door of Noreen’s room itself.

  It was, of course, unrecognizable. It had become a junk room, in effect: there was a bed, which had been made up, and clean thick towels had been put out, in the adjoining bathroom, but the bathroom was almost inaccessible, so full was the room of odd bits of furniture, bookcases, chests bulging open with old curtains, little occasional tables, pictures standing on the floor with their faces to the wall. One of Mrs Bryanston’s nightdresses had been laid out upon the bed, an act of gentility which looked out of place amidst so much disorder. Seeing it, Rose was almost waylaid into speculation about why her mother had married her father – family pressure, apathy, greed? – as she sat down on the bed by the empty nylon gown, its stiff arms folded across its empty heart in a pious, neat gesture of prayer, but she could feel this as a false trail, she hesitated at the turning and went on down the corridor of memory, finding a clue in those crossed arms and angled elbows, praying, was it, yes, she used to pray, Noreen had taught her to say her prayers, Our Father which art in heaven, and she still prayed, occasionally, not incessantly as she had done through childhood, but every now and then a natural or man-made calamity would push her imperiously to her knees, a massacre, an earthquake, a drowning, and she would implore justice, mercy, intercession, explanation, not praying any more for herself, as she had once so futilely done, not even aware that she had ceased to do so, wondering even as she knelt whether there were any use in such genuflections, and yet pushed down as certainly as if a hand had descended on her head to thrust her from above, crushing her hair and weighing on her skull. And what it came to was this: did God, despite the fact that Noreen had believed him to exist, exist in fact, or not? Ha, she said to herself, that’s it, I’ve got it: she was nearly there, and yes, she was there, the memory of standing in Noreen’s room, a wicked intruder, silently observing empty clothes and full drawers, had brought back to her yet another act of disobedience, earlier in time than those silent visits, but similar in nature, it had been a day in winter, a wet rainy day, she could not have been more than six at the time, though it is hard to date events, but she remembered the dress she was wearing, a dark blue and red woollen check with a sash sewn into the dress, she had worn it on her sixth birthday. It had been raining all day, wet gusts of rain, squalls and sudden silences, and she had grown tired of watching the rooks rise and swirl from the bare trees in their huge wet eddies; the acute boredom of her childhood had seized her so passionately that she had ached in every bone, and had set off, desperate, to find some act so desperate that it would distract her mind from the dullness of total despair. The thought of going into Noreen’s bedroom had not at that age occurred to her – perhaps Noreen had not yet moved into the house, perhaps she was still living in the village, visiting daily, she could not remember – but she was as strongly tempted by her parents’ rooms, also forbidden ground. They were away from home, her parents: her mother abroad for the winter, her father in London, so there would be nobody to see her, if she crept in quietly. So up she went, and shut herself in, and proceeded to inspect the objects on her mother’s dressing-table – cut-glass powder bowls, silver brushes with bristles too soft and yellow to brush, little pots and jars with silver gilt tops. There was no jewellery about except a broken string of pearls: everything else had been locked away. Rose put the pearls on and pulled a few faces at hers
elf in the glass. She also powdered her nose with a large pink musty-smelling powder puff. Then, feeling boredom creep up behind her again like a wolf in a story, she leapt up with a pretence of eagerness that was really fear (a pretence for herself alone, there being no other spectators) – and made off into the bathroom. There she fiddled with the shower and fingered the face flannels and drank some water out of a tooth mug, and finally drew, mesmerized, closer and closer to her father’s box of razor blades.

  She knew about razor blades. Mrs Amery in the kitchen had a razor blade with which she sharpened pencils to write shopping lists. Rose had often watched the soft curved shavings fall. And she had wanted to have a go herself, but Mrs Amery would never let her: in fact Noreen and Mrs Amery had had words about that razor blade, Noreen contending that it was not a suitable object to leave lying about, even out of reach on the top shelf of the dresser, whereupon Rose had asked why razor blades were so dangerous, and Noreen had replied that such a blade would cut you as soon as look at you. This curious phrase had given the razor blade, to Rose, a peculiarly active potentiality, and she had spent much time gazing up to the shelf where she knew it to lie concealed, hoping it might take it into its head to look at her and leap down. She could not help feeling that Noreen had maligned it, that it could not possibly be as dangerous as Noreen implied – for so many things were not, wet grass was not, for instance, nor fresh bread, nor fruit cake, nor wet socks, nor cold milk, nor reading with a torch under the bedclothes. Being as yet neither blind, rheumatic, nor choked with permanent indigestion, Rose had decided, at the age of six, that Noreen consistently overestimated the dangers of the natural world. And now, finding herself alone with a packet of blades, she decided that she would put Noreen to the test. Carefully, nervously (for after all Noreen might have been right), she opened the box, and took out a single blade wrapped in an envelope of paper. Slowly she unwrapped the paper: it was greasy, the blade inside was covered with the thinnest film of grease, ready for action, delicately preserved. She held it between the flat of her finger and thumb, naked. She watched it. It did not move, it did not tremble. She was, in a way, disappointed: she had half-expected blood to flow as soon as she had unwrapped it, from some unspecified part of her body. She expected it to leap from her hand and attack her, like a magic sword which needs no master. Cut, cut, Noreen would say, rubbing her magic lamp in her cottage in the village, and the blade would fly from between Rose’s small fingers and attack her, at the distant command.

  Instead, it remained disappointingly, reassuringly inert. Rose stared at it. I’m a fool, she thought (which she wasn’t, not nearly as foolish as her fears suggested), of course it can’t cut me if the edge isn’t touching me.

  And so, carefully, she took hold of the blade in a firm grip, and applied it to the ball of the thumb on her left hand. At first she expected blood to leap to meet the blade, as fire leaps from the smokey wick of a candle to meet a lighted match, but what happened was in a way even more startling. The blade touched the thumb, barely touched it, simply rested on it, she could feel nothing, no cut, nothing (and perhaps at this point she pressed a little harder, she could not remember) – and then, suddenly, quite suddenly, blood was flowing, oozing, pouring, dripping from her thumb. She dropped the blade in terror. It was true, it would cut as soon as look. The blood poured. There was no pain, no sensation. She calmly turned on the tap and put her thumb under it, for the wound was nothing in the scale of childhood, which spends most of its time bleeding, bruising, falling, thumping, grazing: and as she stood there, her thumb growing colder and colder, it went thump thump in her head, the pulse of her dying thumb with its little whorls turning whiter, and she knew that it was all true, everything that Noreen said, rheumatism, rotten teeth, blindness, hell fire, devils, torments, betrayals, endless burning, the rack, the wheel and the screw, and oh help, even remembering it now, years later, it all came pumping back, horror after horror, the flaying of Marsyas hanging in the drawing-room, all that bleeding flesh and sinew and Apollo’s grinning face, dead rabbits, a child with its hand caught in its butcher father’s mincing machine, decapitations, My Lai, horror and bleeding and damnation, she had seen nothing on that tour of Europe but horrors, Saint Ursula and her virgins all dying on the shore, blood spouting from their necks, the loving detail of their severed carotid arteries, crucifixions with Christ bleeding and green, twisted on a flaming hillside in the blackness of man’s unutterable wickedness, and worst of all that piece in the Grunig Museum called the Judgement of Cambyses, where a corrupt judge was being flayed alive before Cambyses and his impassive court, mesmerized she had stared at it, the open flesh, how could he have brought himself to paint it, day after day, week after week, the painter, from what model could he have taken such a subject? In the same room had hung David’s Baptism, calm, delightful: in the foreground grew violets and spring flowers, perfect, fragile, hopeful. Christ’s feet in the water, with the gentle water and the yellow flags, but they had crucified him, they had driven nails through those feet.

  So, it had all seemed true. Razors cut, Christ was crucified, man was wicked, Hell was open. It is even true, thought Rose, ruefully, sitting quietly on the bed, it is even true that wet grass gives one rheumatism. She had suffered from rheumatism all her life, a legacy from disobedience, aggravated by the damp of the semi-basement at Middle Road, but surely initiated here, on the damp lawns, in the sodden undergrowth. It had all come about as Noreen had predicted: there had been no appeal from her darker pronouncements. And it being so, thought Rose, sitting there, thinking a thought that had come to her a million times, it being so, what can I do, what can I do to be saved? She smiled even, visibly, as the words came into her head, they were such old familiars, and she had so long abandoned hope of salvation through faith or through works, they had appeared in so many guises, the words, desperate, anguished, weeping, mocking, flippant, or as now rather sad and worn and ghostly: and yet, suddenly, it came back to her, perhaps through the influence of the room, or perhaps through a book in the bookshelf opposite her, on which her eyes must have been vaguely focused, and which now, in a fusion of attention and memory, revealed itself to be the old nursery copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, that fierce companion, that bitter solace. What shall I do to be saved, Pilgrim had said. It had been her favourite book. The journeys, the hazards, the faith-created mirage of a heavenly city. Frightened, a little, she got up off the bed, and went over to the shelf, and took it out: crouching, unwilling to commit herself to sitting down with it, she turned the pages. There they all were, Apollyon, Faithful beheaded, the Slough of Despond, the river, and all the trumpets sounding for him on the other side. Next to the book, stood Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: she got that down and looked at it. That too she had read too often, and there it still was, that dreadful account of neurosis and woe. She had marked passages, as a child, as an adolescent: there were the pencil marks. Bunyan grieving for his sin, praying for grace, worrying old scriptures as a dog worries a bone, worrying whether he could be one of the elect, worrying about the birthright of Esau. She had marked heavily one paragraph: it said: