The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, and counted the estate of everything that God had made far better than this dreadful state of mine and such as my companions was: yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of a dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weights of hell for sin, as mine was like to do … I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it …’ and she had written, see page 59, and looking, obeying her past self, she saw that she had underlined

  ‘… and after long musing, I lifted up my head, but methought I saw as if the sun that shineth in the very heavens did grudge to give light, and as if the very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against me; methought they all combined together to banish me out of the world; I was unfit to dwell among them. Oh, how happy now, was every creature over what I was; for they stood fast and kept their station, but I was gone and lost.’

  Gone and lost, gone and lost. Yes, that was the way it had been. How easy it was to underestimate what had been endured. Oh, how happy now was every creature. For years of my life, Rose thought, I remember it now, I would have changed place with any living thing. One forgets the dreadful pain, the conviction that one is marked. I used to wake in the mornings, at the age of what – nine, ten? – and pray to fall asleep, pray to die in my sleep, pray to be utterly deprived of consciousness. The very stones I envied, for they were innocent, and could neither do nor suffer wrong. How slowly I learned to live, to make myself forget.

  Grace Abounding. She stared at it. It still frightened her, there was something in it still, some power for pain, even though she had confronted the words that Bunyan wrote – suppressed words, no doubt about it, she had suppressed them, wisely enough, because seeing them again now she knew that she knew them by heart. But had not thought of them for years. The mind, as well as its own torments, has its own remissions. She turned the pages again: and there it was, the final blow, the lurking horror, as disagreeable as the caterpillar she had once pressed by accident in her flower book. But this was no caterpillar, it looked innocent enough, it was a birthday card, used, one might think, as a bookmark, marking the lines, I was bound, but he was free: if God come not in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven come hell, Lord Jesus, if thou will catch me, do, if not, I will venture for thy name – a statement of heroic neurotic nonchalance that expressed more or less Rose’s present theological position. The card, in marked contrast to the text, was cheerful and floral: it showed a bowl of flowers in a cottage window. Rose, seeing it, blushed. She felt the blood in her face, her hair gently rising. It was a card she had bought for herself, to send to herself, on her fifteenth birthday, when she was away at school for the first time. The misery, the humiliation. Birthdays had been a big thing at her boarding school: there was a special tea, for each birthday child, and the whole school would sing ‘Happy Birthday’. The child was allowed to put her cards on her dressing-table (usually denied ornament) and to open her gifts in the morning, after breakfast, instead of going straight to class. This system, agreeable enough in some ways, had produced a ferocious atmosphere of competition: girls boasted of the quantity of post, the lavishness of gifts, the warmth of ovation from the school. Rose dreaded the approach of her birthday from the first week there. Impossible to conceal the date, as she had once thought of doing: birthdays, in the dearth of other interesting topics, were a subject for endless discussion, and were easily discovered from the school register. She dreaded it. Even the least conspicuous, least friended girls received a respectable pile of post on their birthdays, from family, from friends at home. Rose knew that she would receive nothing. For weeks she lay awake at night, wondering how she could endure the humiliation, the surprised glances, the tactful enquiries, the sadistic sympathy. She lost her appetite, she could neither eat nor sleep, and her hair began to drop out. She developed a huge bald patch in the middle of her head: Sister said it was alopecia and asked Rose if anything was worrying her. No, said Rose, and brushed her hair over the patch so that it did not show. One night, lying awake, she thought, I could buy myself a card, and write in it a false name, and post it, and that would make sure that I had at least one card on my birthday. The idea had seemed brilliant and corrupt. I can’t do a thing like that, she told herself, I can’t, I really can’t: and when, on their weekly visit to the shops, she found herself secretly buying the floral card, she told herself that it was not for herself but for a friend. As the days passed before her birthday, she struggled with temptation: she felt it behind her, as Bunyan did, pulling at her clothes. It would be so simple, to send the card, to claim a friend in the town, to be mysterious and discreet about her: it was surely an act morally neutral, a legitimate act of self-protection, a reasonable compensation for a sin in no way her own? Who would blame her, who would not pity her, if they knew the truth? Why should she suffer, needlessly? It was not as though one card would rescue her: she would still, receiving one card only be an object of contempt, she would have achieved no dramatic success by fraud, she would have deceived nobody.

  But, finally, she did not send it. She could not bring herself to do it. Honour, pride and honesty prevented her. Never mind, she said to herself the night before, trying to get her feet warm in the icy bed, never mind, never mind, never mind, it is only you that will suffer, Rose Bryanston, think of that, let that be your comfort. And it had comforted her, to a degree. To those that suffer is given the strength to endure suffering, she said to herself.

  In the morning, in fact, she did get one card. It was from her parents. It had never crossed her mind that they would think of sending her one. Later, she wondered why she should ever have supposed that they would not.

  Her hair grew in again, after this episode. Quite quickly. It was as though, having endured exposure, having endured exposure of all those bitter years, and having survived it, she had somehow won some shadowy victory. She had been right not to send herself the card. Bunyan, like Noreen, had been right. One has to keep on watch, while eating, while chopping sticks, while refilling one’s fountain pen. Strait is the gate.

  It had all worked out all right, after all. Amazingly enough. She had been miserable enough in these last thirteen years or so, she had been through some bad moments and some long trials – literally long trials, now she thought about it – but had never since her childhood felt that blind horror and despair. Never, since the age of eighteen, had she woken in the morning and wished to have died. She had wished to die, but that was another matter. A state of grace, in comparison. Never, since she first met Christopher.

  Ah, Christopher. One could think what one might think about Christopher, but at the very least he had filled in the time. He knew how to stave off boredom, did Christopher, he knew how to keep things on the go. Even separation and divorce he had rendered more intimate than many marriages. Ever since she had first set eyes on him, in that paper-filled Bloomsbury basement. She had loved him, certainly – that last night she had slept in this house, her last night in England, she had been ill with love, ill with longing, she had wandered round the garden in the evening, surveyed from the house suspiciously by discreet embarrassed custodians, gazing at the flowers, pale and ominous and swollen in the dusk, gazing at the high hedges, at the muddy water in the pond and the leprous goldfish, not gold, but an unpleasant pale pink, like mullet on a slab they were in the evening light, wandering aimlessly in a static frozen garden, knowing that the time would never pass until she should see him again, coming at one point to a standstill, transfixed, gazing at a flowering currant bush by the garage, each flower dripping red blood like a bleeding heart or a strawberry fruit pastille, she had turned to ice, it too, the bush, burning like a message, had frozen, each flower, each leaf, each twig instinct with eternity, a horrible hush, a horrible pause, a silence, a stopping of the blood in the middle of the evening, before it all began sluggishly, wearily to flow again, infinitely slowly, but at last wearily m
oving like the sluggish fish, and a slight breeze had moved the flowers of the currant bush, disturbing their spectacular significance – oh yes, she had loved him, certainly, that had been it, that had been love. But there had been more to it than that, he had not let her slip away, and when love had perished in its usual fashion he had kindly replaced it with all other kinds of distractions. Amazing, really. It was so obvious that she herself had been the kind of child to grow up incapable of relating: insecure, cold, undeveloped, guilt-ridden. What freakish providence had given her Christopher, so obsessed by the thought of possession that he refused to let her reject him? His desire to grab – herself, children, money, even parents-in-law – had proved too strong for her will to renounce. Interesting, really.

  She began to get undressed. Getting undressed and thinking of Christopher had made her suddenly nervous. It was the first time she had slept under the same roof with him since the divorce. What if he wandered along in the night and attacked her? What if he took it into his head to drive off with the children in the small hours? He seemed to have taken his defeat quietly, even amicably, but one could not be sure. She stopped getting undressed, and put on her mother’s nightdress over most of her underwear. The more she thought about it, the more extremely likely it seemed that he would make some kind of overture. He had stayed downstairs drinking with Simon: they were both probably drunk by now, Christopher through remorse, and Simon through nerves, poor thing. She looked at her watch: it was very late, they could not both still be down there, they must have come up to bed. What a pity, really, that she could not marry Simon. She had had visions, herself, of marrying Simon and going off with him to other places and trying to be the person that she might have been. The touch of his arm, his stiff chest as she had leant against it, the silk of his wife’s scarf had interested her. It was satisfactory, that he, a serious person, had thought of marriage too. Such satisfaction would have to be enough.

  It annoyed her, to think that Simon and Christopher might become friends. It amused her, to find herself annoyed. It made her feel much better, to find herself amused: and in a moment of confidence, she jumped out of bed, thinking that she would go and see if the children were all asleep, and have a look round to see how their room had been decorated. She had been wanting to do that all evening, on one level, on her most ordinary functional level, but had been too depressed and waylaid by Bunyan. To hell with Bunyan, she said to herself, as she opened the door; then repenting, no, no, not to hell, poor Bunyan, the last place for him, too dreadful, and thinking of the hideous possibility of a hell in which an actual Bunyan might actually for ever roast, she made her way along the corridor to the children’s room, smiling to herself and at the same time ludicrously sorry that she had had such an awful thought. The children were sleeping in the old schoolroom, which looked over the stables: a pretty room it had been, where Rose and ill-equipped governesses had stared at one another in paroxysms of yawning and boredom. One of them used to give her throat sweets, little hard black pellets. Sometimes she used to get three or four in a morning. What a thrill they had been, what huge excitements, what momentous events, how they had alleviated the monotony, black stars in a white waste of text-book dullness.

  Outside the door, Rose paused. She didn’t really want to wake them, but they were all going through a good phase, from the sleeping point of view, so she pushed open the door and went in. There they all were, Marcus and Konstantin in twin beds, side by side, Maria in what had been her own old bed – painted with roses and rabbits, it was – under the window. Maria, as usual, was flung about all over the place, her legs sticking out, her arms widely distributed, her head falling off the bed, her mouth open. Rose pushed her back. Konstantin had almost disappeared from view under the sheet and a blanket: even in hot weather he liked to be well covered up. Marcus was lying quite sweetly, with his head on the pillow where a head ought to be. There was a smell of socks. They had clearly profited from the evening’s unusual drama by going to bed without a wash. Their clothes were all in a heap on the floor: she picked a few of them up, looking round as she did so at the new white paint, the posters on the walls (Christopher’s taste, all informative ones, a taste securely affected by her own), the curtains with stars on, the gummed irridescent stars, faintly luminous, that had been stuck on the ceiling. It was nice. It had been done nicely. One could not blame them for liking it. Their swimming things had been laid out in a row on the chest. They must be intending to go for a swim in the morning. She hoped it would be a fine day again.

  She was just about to leave the room, curiosity satisfied, when she had a moment of panic, thinking she could hear somebody in the corridor outside. She stood still and listened. There was certainly somebody out there. It could, of course, be anyone – her father, checking on the locks, as he sometimes did, her mother, wandering aimlessly about, one of the staff. No reason to suppose it was Christopher. But still, she preferred to wait a few moments, with the children as chaperones. Whoever it was had bare feet or slippers, and was walking very quietly. The footsteps stopped, and she had the impression that whoever it was had also stopped to listen. Very quietly, she took a few steps forward, till she could see through the crack in the door hinge. At first she could see nothing of interest: only the long corridor, with doors opening off it, and only a thin segment of that. The landing light was on: she had switched it on herself, on leaving her bedroom. But she was certain somebody was there, she sensed it. She pushed the door slightly, to widen the angle of the crack, feeling slightly foolish in her caution: the manipulation, the quiet, the sound of the children’s breathing, reminded her of those days when they were small babies, when she would creep out of the room on hands and knees, having rocked them to sleep in their cradles, terrified of rousing them again. Konstantin and Maria had been the worst: Marcus, the desirable middle baby, had always slept well. If she pushed the door just a little further, she would be able to see the whole corridor: she pushed, risking a creak. And there was Christopher, as she had suspected, bare foot, in his trousers, and a black vest. But he was not standing outside her door. He was standing outside Simon’s. Listening.

  She watched him. At first she could not think what on earth he was doing there, but it came to her in a flash, after a moment or two of speculation. He was listening to find out if she was herself in there with Simon. It was logical. He might have tried her room first and found it empty, or he might have leapt to conclusions and gone to Simon’s first. Either way, it was her he was listening for. She wondered how long he would stand there, before giving up and going away. It was clear that she herself could not risk going back to her own bed: she could always get in with Marcus, if it came to it, she was thinking, when suddenly she saw Christopher recoil, quickly, from his station, in a flurry of movement, but not quickly enough, for Simon flung the door open, and Christopher had not had time to get away. Simon was still fully dressed. Like herself, he had not risked undressing. He had had no intention, like Christopher, of being seen without his trousers, and had had the good sense to note that the night was not yet over. What an acute man he is, she thought. I really like him.

  Simon, in his doorway, stared at Christopher. Christopher, though no longer with his ear to the keyhole, looked not particularly pleased at his discovery, and was not quick enough to pretend that he had just been walking along the corridor on the way to a bathroom or bed. He looked, in short, guilty, which provoked Simon to say, ‘Where on earth are you going?’

  Christopher looked aggrieved, thought hard, and then said, ‘I might ask the same of you.’

  It was quick, but not quick enough.

  ‘I wasn’t going anywhere,’ said Simon. ‘I heard you scuffling about out there, so I came to see.’

  ‘You must have been listening bloody hard,’ said Christopher, relaxing slightly, recovering from the slight inelegance that had overtaken him.

  ‘I was,’ said Simon.

  ‘What were you listening for?’ said Christopher.

  ‘I
don’t know,’ said Simon, and smiled. ‘What were you?’

  ‘Ha,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Well you were wrong, weren’t you?’ said Simon.

  ‘She’s not in her room,’ Christopher started to say, but Rose had divined his words, with an accuracy of instinct that surprised her, and stepped innocently out into the corridor, judging that so far she could pretend to have heard nothing, but not for much longer. Both their heads turned sharply at the sound of the door, in comic alarm and unison. Smiling bravely, happy in the opacity of her mother’s nightdress, she advanced upon them.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, confronting them. ‘What are you two doing? I thought you’d gone to bed hours ago.’

  ‘What were you doing?’ said Christopher. And Rose, fully intending to say, looking at the children of course – a reply at once plausible, creditable, and true – suddenly, for no accountable reason, speaking out of some unpremeditated, mad, lying part of herself – the part that had made rows and hurled insults and ruined her marriage – found herself looking at Christopher and saying, ‘I was avoiding you, of course.’ As soon as she had said it, she repented: her reply had hurt Simon, and had both annoyed and gratified Christopher, none of which had been her intention. It had been a fatal admission – fatal to admit that she was aware that he might have been looking for her, fatal to admit that even so dim a connection might still exist. And having said such a thing, she could not think quickly enough to see what she could possibly do next. Clearly she could not return to her own room, but where else could she go? She could not stand in the corridor all night.