The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Hell,’ she said, rather crossly. Christopher was looking at her in a way she did not at all like. She had even thought of throwing herself on Simon’s hospitality, wondering if it would be unkind to him to do such a thing, when Simon himself spoke.

  ‘Why don’t you both come in for a bit?’ he said, ‘since none of us seems to feel like sleeping. I’ve never had such a splendid bedroom to invite people into before, it seems a pity to waste the opportunity.’

  Rose accepted gratefully, Christopher with a nod of the head. They went in. It was, as Simon said, a splendid room, the best guest-room. Rose had forgotten how splendid it was. It was papered with an original hand-painted paper, covered in Chinese foliage and birds and flowers and butterflies: there was a story that the artist, unsatisfied with his first attempts, had returned time after time to add extra items, until he had finally gone too far. Too far he had gone, perhaps, from the strictly aesthetic viewpoint, but the results were certainly interesting. There was a large bed with hangings, and some agreeable furniture, lacquer and inlay, which actually went with the wallpaper. By what miracle of neglect it had been allowed to remain there Rose did not know, but there it still was. Rose sat herself down on a couch by the bed, Simon and Christopher both sat on the bed.

  ‘You could even have a drink, if you wanted,’ said Simon. ‘Look. I’ve never seen that before. I’ve read about it in books, but I’ve never seen it.’

  And he pointed at the table by the bed. On it stood a cut-glass decanter, on a silver tray, accompanied by a Wedgewood biscuit barrel with a silver lid. The glass was not quite up to standard, but the general effect was pleasing.

  ‘He must have liked you,’ said Rose. ‘Pa, I mean. He wouldn’t do that for everyone. Did you give him some useful legal advice?’

  ‘Not a word,’ said Simon. ‘I just listened.’

  ‘Ah well, that would do. You look so intelligent, when you listen.’

  ‘Would you like a drink? Either of you?’

  ‘What is it? Brandy or whisky?’

  Simon reached over, took the top off the decanter, and sniffed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to say.’ And he handed it to Christopher.

  ‘Whisky poured into a brandy decanter, I’d say,’ said Christopher. ‘Typical. Never mind. It all does the same job.’

  So, irresistibly, inevitably, they all settled down for a drink.

  An hour or two later, they ate all the biscuits, with such avidity that Christopher went down to look for some more: while he was out of the room both Simon and Rose thought of saying to each other that Rose could on no account be left alone with Christopher, and did not bother to say it, for each realized that the other must be aware that this was so. Rose had already decided on her plan for getting through the night: she would fall asleep, there, where she was, her feet tucked up on the couch, her head resting quite comfortably on a petit-point cushion. She would let Simon and Christopher talk, and she would fall unobtrusively asleep. They were quite happy to talk. Christopher she knew well enough; once under way as he now was, he would not stop, he would talk till the morning if given a chance. And Simon, though possessed of less natural energy, would probably not mind doing it for once. It was, after all, Sunday in the morning. No work, no school. Her eyelids drooped. The wallpaper was predominantly red, on a white background – a thin, dark wine red, hard and deep, like the red of the new wood of dogwood or sumac, a colour in nature that filled her with delight. Red trees, thinly branching, red flowers with red butterflies and red birds perched delicately around, defying gravity. Once she had seen a heron alight on a treetop, elegantly, and the thin tree – a sapling it was, only – had bent and crumpled under the bird’s weight, and the bird had had to flap up, clumsily, with an angry flutter, like the angry backward look of a man whose chair has collapsed beneath him. These painted birds were far too large for their elongated reedy insubstantial painted perches. But they would never fall. Silly, really. She yawned, and Christopher came back with a packet of Garibaldi biscuits and the remains of the apple pie from dinner, and he and Simon launched once more, relentlessly, into their discussion of which had been worse, poverty in the North East with a paralysed father and a genteel mother, or poverty in Camden Town with a crooked father and a Greek name. Both claimed immense sufferings, agonizing humiliations. Rose listened, yawned again, and shut her eyes. Whatever they had endured, Simon and Christopher, they were real survivors, they had a winning ticket. As she had herself. There was no need to worry about either of them. And this thought, in itself consoling, led her inevitably to the nameless multitudes. They still implored. But she was too tired to attend them. And so, to a detailed description of working-class diet – oatmeal stew, bread and dripping, bloaters, tripe – she fell, at four in the morning, asleep.

  The next day, Rose felt surprisingly well. She woke early, to find the decanter empty, and Simon asleep, still dressed, on top of the large double bed. Christopher had disappeared: she assumed he had gone back to his own room to sleep, then wondered if he had run off with the children. But he had not, for she could already hear them, having their breakfast downstairs. She went back to her room and washed quickly, noting that the towels were too thick to be serviceable – she hated a really thick fluffy towel, they left bits all over her, she much preferred the threadbare ones she had at home, fraying and hard and rubby. She dressed and went downstairs, feeling the curious weightless airiness that often possessed her after lack of sleep or excess of drink. It was most agreeable. Christopher was down already, helping the children: he too was cheerful, and claimed to have been up for hours. After a while Mr Bryanston and Simon also descended: Mr Bryanston was inclined to be annoyed about the absence of Sunday papers, and complained for some time about the erratic delivery of the local paper boy, who sometimes forgot them altogether. ‘It’s probably a strike,’ said Simon, ‘they’re always striking these days.’

  Well, it’s annoying, said Mr Bryanston, I wanted to read about Wilshaw. And then he cheered himself up by telling them all about Wilshaw, a friend of his who had made a fortune in Ready-mix concrete, and who, not content with that, had expanded into the building world with disastrous results. He had crashed, spectacularly, the week before. I knew it was coming, I knew it was coming, said Mr Bryanston, unable to conceal his delight: he had reached the stage of life where news of the disaster of friends, like news of their deaths, is no longer a gloomy reminder of mortality, frightening in its sudden shadow, but a cause for self-congratulation, for gratitude for one’s own personal survival. He engaged Simon and Christopher for some time in reminiscences about his old friend Wilshaw, now so satisfactorily bankrupt: I’ve known him for forty years, he said, and I always knew he’d come unstuck somewhere. From this subject, he could slip easily into his favourite discussion, which consisted of speculation as to whether it is harder to make one’s first hundred, one’s first thousand, one’s first ten thousand, or one’s first fifty thousand. Rose had heard this often, but not for so long that it had almost the charm of novelty. Christopher was a real sucker for it, he was mesmerized by it, he could not let it go. Even Simon seemed mildly gripped, and suggested that it would make a good board game, like Monopoly. Mr Bryanston was delighted with the suggestion, his mind flying already to marketing possibilities.

  He was so delighted by the attention he was receiving from Simon and Christopher that he then, without much logical connection, moved on to his other favourite discussion – perhaps they were only linked in his mind by the pleasure which he took in each – which was a pondering upon the infinite variety of human physiognomy. All these millions and millions of people in the world, he said, and no two of them alike. The thought clearly awed him. It was a metaphysical concept which intrigued and perplexed and excited him. Rose had never forgotten this theme. As a child it had seemed to her banal and boring beyond belief, as any topic introduced by her father must be, and she had been irritated by the endless repetition of the same phrases, the indisputable nature of the
argument, the lack of originality in the thought. Though human noses, eyes, teeth, chins and so on might be endlessly various, the thoughts of Mr Bryanston were not. But there was no doubting the sincerity of his awe, in face of the multiplicity and differentiation of human souls. It was as sincere as her own was, when she contemplated the ending of space. And, hearing him say it all again, now, after so long, she could not help but think that after all her father was right. It was a staggering thought. So many people in the world, and no two alike. It was indeed a fact of true philosophic significance. Snowflakes, she heard, had the same quality. But atoms presumably not? Molecules not? She did not know. Konstantin started to argue with his grandfather about identical twins and genes, and they would have been there all morning, had not Marcus and Maria insisted that it had been promised that they could go down to the sea and collect cockles and have a swim.

  So they went to the sea. Simon protested at first, saying he should get home, but it was decided that he should drive Rose and the children down in the afternoon. Christopher accepted this without objection: he seemed to have lost all interest in his attempts to create trouble. He mildly offered to drive them all to the sea, on the grounds that Simon would be driving all afternoon, and because, he said, his car was bigger. It was bigger. Simon sat in the front, and Rose and all the children sat in the back, and there wasn’t even a squash. Simon was wearing an old pair of trousers of Christopher’s, and boots: he had been warned that it was muddy. Rose was wearing some boots of Konstantin’s: their feet were the same size, though would not be for long. The road was quite busy, as it was Whit Sunday, but they turned off it, eventually, through a gate, and the big car bumped over the muddy furrows of a field, towards the sea. Christopher parked, at the far end of the field, and they all got out. The sea lay ahead, but inaccessibly distant, across acres and acres of green marshy flats. Beyond the green, miles away, one could see the yellow deserted sweep of the sand. There was nobody in sight, except two figures, small with distance, picking their way through the marsh.

  ‘However do we get across all that?’ said Simon, gazing at the vast expanse.

  ‘We walk,’ said Rose, smiling. ‘It’s all right, really. It’s lovely. When you get to the sands, there’s nobody else there at all, it’s lovely.’

  After half an hour’s walk, Simon could see exactly why there would be nobody else there at all, at the other end. It was very heavy going. At first it was reasonably dry underfoot, though the little track they followed was crossed by innumerable little ditches and dykes, some bridged by planks, encrusted with red mud, others left to the improvisation of the pedestrian. But as they progressed, it got wetter and wetter: the dykes filled up, presumably from the tidal flow of the sea, and the texture of the solid ground itself became damp and boggy. It would have been easy enough for an unencumbered adult, alone, but they seemed to have a lot of equipment with them: bathing things, buckets, a picnic, a primus stove. And moreover the children kept falling into holes, even Konstantin, who was big enough to know better – it was ambition that trapped Konstantin, for he kept trying to jump over ditches and ponds, miscalculating, and falling in. Maria and Marcus, after the first twenty minutes, were in a state of extreme misery, yelling, moaning, begging to be carried, saying they were frightened of the crabs, of which there were indeed a great number at large, saying they wanted to go home, saying their feet were wet and that their legs ached, and in general behaving like children. It was in vain for Rose to yell at them irritably that it was they that had wanted to come in the first place: the children yelled back, with extreme simplicity, that they had changed their minds. Too late to go back, shouted Rose. Then Rose started to shout at Christopher, blaming him for the children’s behaviour, for the route chosen, for the gear with which they were burdened: Christopher in turn yelled back that it was her fault for making them town children, whose fault was it if they couldn’t face a bit of mud, certainly not his. It was all very domestic. They floundered on: Simon finally ending up well in front with Konstantin, which seemed as useful a place to be as any, for he was able to keep up Konstantin’s morale by asking useful questions about crabs, cockles, purple flowers, and other interesting aspects of the journey.

  ‘You see this green stuff,’ said Konstantin, pointing at the greenery through which they were walking.

  ‘I do indeed,’ said Simon. ‘It would be hard not to, there is so much of it, and one has to pay such close attention to the ground, on this kind of terrain.’

  ‘That’s samphire,’ said Konstantin. ‘We’re having it for lunch.’

  ‘Really? Is it edible?’

  ‘Of course it is. You just boil it up, that’s all. It’s delicious. Samphire sandwiches, we’re going to have. You needn’t, if you don’t want to. But you ought to try it.’

  Simon bent down and picked a few sprigs. Now that he thought about it, he had heard of samphire: it came in King Lear. There was a man in King Lear who gathered samphire. A dreadful trade, Shakespeare said it was, and Simon had always assumed it was dreadful in the sense of dangerous, like collecting birds’ eggs off cliffs, but he now saw it was dreadful more in the sense of muddy and disgusting. It was quite interesting stuff, extremely green, and branched and succulent. It was, in fact, so piercingly green that it was almost luminous with greenness: it glowed with colour. He nibbled a bit, experimentally. Konstantin, looking back, caught him at it, and said, ‘It’s not nice raw, it just tastes of salt, raw.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, in complete accord.

  ‘Don’t give up, Simon,’ said Konstantin, cheeringly. ‘We’re nearly there. Just over this next ridged bit, and it turns into beach.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Simon.

  He trudged on. Renewed wails from Maria caught his ear: looking back, he saw that Christopher had at last given in and picked her up. She was sitting on his shoulders, her muddy boots dripping down the front of his shirt. Rose was chivying Marcus, who had dropped his towel in the mud, and who was complaining about having to carry it now that it was so dirty.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody feeble, you awful child,’ she was yelling at him, ‘no of course I’m not going to carry it for you, you can carry it yourself, it’s not my fault you dropped it, is it? Come on, for God’s sake, we’re nearly there, come on, can’t you.’

  ‘It’s all muddy,’ Marcus said, for the fifth time.

  ‘Oh shut up,’ said Rose, and strode on, leaving him.

  Simon looked ahead again, and carried on. Konstantin was by now at the top of the ridge, outlined against the blue sky. Simon was just thinking that the part of the picnic he was carrying was excessively heavy, and that he would have preferred to fast than carry it, when Konstantin gave a shriek of delight, shouted, ‘We’re here, we’re here,’ and disappeared out of sight over the top. Inspired, Simon scrambled after him, and up to the top of the bank. And there, at last, was the sea, which had been lost to sight, through a trick of the landscape, for the last hundred yards. And all the swelling empty beach, yellow and brown and reflecting the blue sky from large swirls and washed and watery inlets. The sea was miles away still: the beach was enormous, miles of it extending around them, vast, ahead and on either side, untrodden, beautiful. Standing on the top of the bank, Simon turned and beckoned to the others, shouting, ‘We’re here, we’re here’ – and one by one they arrived, and took in the landscape, and shed their ill temper as though walking into a fabled land, where children will cry no more, and adults will no more wrangle. They put down their burdens, and the children capered off, running wildly, and they stood and stretched and smiled, and took off their boots, and felt the wet firm sand.

  Such a mood could not last unbroken – there was dispute about the exact location of the picnic site, some of them feeling it feeble to sit down so close to the frontier, some refusing to move an inch further. Marcus managed to enrage Konstantin by flapping at him with his muddy towel: Konstantin hit Marcus, Christopher hit Konstantin for hitting Marcus, Rose shouted at Christopher for hitting K
onstantin, and then at Maria for smiling so smugly because the other two children were in trouble. They were all hungry. In the end they tramped for another ten minutes, towards the sea, and settled themselves down on a high bank by a wooden post. The beach was strange, undulating, full of curves, crossed by inexplicable dips and channels, here hard and flat to the feet, there dipped and rippled in lumps that rose painfully against the instep. Rose, opening the packets, beginning to distribute the picnic, explained that it was one of the best beaches in the district for cockles, but that few people used it, because it was so inaccessible. Miles away, on the horizon, they saw the two tiny figures of the men who had preceded them: they were cockling, bending and stooping in the hot sun at the eye’s limit. We’ll get some ourselves after lunch, she said, or they can while we have a sleep. She was beginning to feel tired: the sun, the sandwiches, the fresh air, the lack of sleep the night before, were all telling on her. She roused herself enough to boil up the samphire, a job done to amuse the children, bending over the primus, watching it green and bubbling: Simon, watching her, thought of the holiday in Cornwall, and the watercress that had grown in the stream by the sea, and his mother’s views of watercress. His mother would not like the idea of eating samphire unwashed, either. He was not at all sure that he did himself, it was one thing to nibble the stuff experimentally, it was another to treat it as a foodstuff, and put butter on it, as Rose was now doing.

  ‘It’s quite like asparagus,’ she said, proudly, as she handed him his portion.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and ate it up. It wasn’t bad, eventually. But he was relieved to learn that the cockles, as they required soaking, would not be cooked and consumed on the spot.

  When they had all finished eating, the children went off with their buckets to look for a cockle bank, unable to sit still for one moment except while in the act of feeding themselves. Their bitter complaints of fatigue had been entirely forgotten: so too had their ill-will. Rose, Simon and Christopher took off some of their clothes and lay out in the sun, staring up at the sky. Simon was thinking, how like children adults are, they squabble and fight because they are hungry or tired or cold, but they lose the faculty for forgetting, forgiving. They nourish their resentments. The thought was banal, it did not quite satisfy him. What I am really thinking, he said to himself, is that there is nothing much wrong between Rose and Christopher. She accepts him, now.