The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘I’m enjoying it already,’ he said.

  There was a strong smell of dog. Under her guidance, he had seen other events there – a jumble sale, a chess competition, a roller skating competition, a London Festival Drama for Schools Exhibition – but never yet a dog show. There were all the dogs, in the big hall, standing around rather carelessly with their owners. Most of them were Alsatians. ‘Don’t for Christ’s sake walk on the dog shit,’ said Emily, yanking a child firmly to one side, as it was about to put its foot in it. The dogs looked bored and angry. So did their owners. Emily had been too late with one of the children: scraping its shoe crossly on a step, she told them about Iceland where dogs were illegal, Reykjavik, the only civilized capital city in the world. ‘All dogs should be shot,’ said Emily, loudly, and the children bristled and whispered and giggled, thrilled by her audacity, shocked and embarrassed by it at the same time, half expecting the dogs or their provoked owners to leap angrily at her throat, half proud of her evident heroic disdain.

  In fact, it became obvious, when they had wandered around for a quarter of an hour or so, that there wasn’t much going on. It was a very second-rate dog show. There were some quite interesting small dogs in cages: Maria and Simon’s youngest managed to work up a little fake enthusiasm for some malevolent Pekinese, but were easily corrupted by the elder ones, who wanted to go and look for something to eat. ‘I can’t face it, I can’t face it,’ said Rose, wanly, as they drifted off.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Simon, politely, ‘I’ll go and cope with them.’

  ‘They can look after themselves,’ said Emily. ‘For God’s sake.’ And she led them off firmly, leaving the children in the cafeteria, to the other end of the large hall, and sat down and got her newspaper out of her pocket, and started to read. ‘Peace and quiet,’ she said, ‘we might as well enjoy it while we can.’

  The back of the hall was banked with steps. Wooden steps, thick with dust, reached upwards. It must once, Simon thought, have been some kind of auditorium. Emily was sitting on the bottom step, indifferent to the dirt. Rose looked around her, looked upwards.

  ‘Let’s go and sit at the top, up there,’ she said. ‘It might look more interesting, from up there. You never know.’

  Emily did not look up from her paper. She was reading about how to peel whole oranges and stew them in caramelized sauce. Emily hated cooking, and she always read recipes, to enrage herself. She could get quite emotional about recipes. She took them as personal affronts.

  ‘Come on,’ said Rose to Simon, as she started to climb. The steps were steeply banked. He followed her. The room grew lighter, as they climbed up: there were windows in the dome of the hall, letting in superior light. With each step the dog scene fell into shape below them. The dogs and their owners, harmlessly employed. Simon looked up at Rose. The light fell from the windows, the winter sun fell on to her pale hair, shafts and slanting planes of it, and he could see all the dusty motes in the bright air, and her hair itself, falling on to the points of her fur collar, fell into a thousand bright individual fiery sparks, the hair and the fur meeting, radiant, luminous, catching whatever fell from the sun upon them, stirring like living threads in the sea into a phosphorescent life, turning and lifting, alive on the slight breeze of her walking, a million lives from the dead beasts, a million from her living head, haloed there, a million shining in a bright and dazzling outline, a million in one. She walked ahead, encircled by brightness, she walked, and turned and stopped.

  ‘Let’s sit down here,’ she said.

  And she sat there, in the thick dust, and he sat by her, and they looked down at the hall beneath them, with its wooden boards and its traditional amusements.

  ‘It’s a bit shabby,’ she said, ‘isn’t it?’ – leaning forwards, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands.

  ‘I like it,’ he said.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘that day when we went to see the chickens and the armchair? I said we could come to a dog show then, I remember.’

  ‘It’s good,’ he said, ‘that we did what we said we would do.’

  ‘One doesn’t always,’ she said, frowning. ‘Things don’t always work out as one expects,’ she said.

  She was thinking of Christopher. She had never spoken of Christopher to Simon, since his return to her: she had maintained an honourable silence. There were many things that she had wanted to say – now, as she sat there watching the dogs below she thought of some of them – but she had never been able to say them. She wanted Simon to understand. She wanted him to think well of her, not to judge her harshly, but could not state her own case without treachery. She could not acquire his esteem without begging for it, and thereby forfeiting a right to it. So she kept silent, hoping that he would do her justice, in his mind. She desired his approbation, passionately. It was her strongest emotional need, and one that by its very nature she could take no move to satisfy. And the greatest threat to his fair judgement of her was one of the qualities in him that she most loved, which made her trust him, which made her admire him and seek his friendship: for it was his own diffidence: a man like him, how could he ever guess, correctly, at what she truly felt – and why, in any case, should she want him to know it? Since Christopher’s return, she had lived in various kinds of misery, but she knew that nobody, not even Simon, would credit her distress. He would credit, perhaps, her sense of loss, because he had seemed to acknowledge what it was that she had, on her own, her way of life, her peace of mind, but she suspected that he, like others, would think that she had gained more than she had lost. He will think, she thought bitterly, he will think, as everyone thinks, that I am lucky to have Christopher back again, that I wanted him all the time, that I played my cards and won, that he came back to me ostensibly on my terms to vindicate me, but in fact on his own, to support me. She was ashamed, she was humiliated, by the thought that others might think so of her – that they had seen her as a deserted wife, humbly and gratefully accepting her husband’s return, chastened, accepting, glad to re-admit him to her house and her life and her body. She knew how the world saw Christopher: she knew how Simon must inevitably see Christopher: the successful man, the delicately achieved man, the man who cannot be rejected, the man whose power overcomes more rational hesitations, the man who awarded blows through love, the man who cannot be denied. They saw her, in consequence, as the woman who had tried to do without him, who resisted him on one level to succumb more deeply on another, to accept him more fully for his transgressions. She hated this picture of herself. The picture of Christopher she did not mind, for it bestowed on him a little of the dignity that she truly, deep within herself, feared that he might lack. She would connive with the world to protect him: but why should her good name suffer, in her connivance? She saw no way out. She had taken him back because she could not bear to keep the children from him: why should she be so silenced, so, compromised, by her own act? And it was not only in silence that she suffered. Her whole nature was being corrupted by her deep resistance to Christopher, by the endless, sickening struggle to preserve something of her own. She had become irritable, nagging, shrewish, difficult: she quarrelled with Christopher, in public, over the least issue, and at home, though she was able to prevent herself from becoming violent, she could not bring herself to be pleasant or placid. She had never made that leap into the clearer air. She looked back with bitter regret to those exhausting days of peace, when she was on her own, alone, lonely, when she would put the children to bed and then sit up herself a little while with a book, and then go quietly to bed. They seemed endowed, those days, with a spiritual calm that it had been a crime to lose. And now she lived in dispute and in squalor, for the sake of charity and of love. She had ruined her own nature against her own judgement, for Christopher’s sake, for the children’s sake. She had sold for them her own soul, but it had not been a downright transaction, over and done with, the soul handed over like a little parcel as St Catherine’s was, to purchase food for the flock – no, the p
rice she had to pay was the price of her own living death, her own conscious dying, her own lapsing, surely, slowly, from grace, as heaven (where only those with souls may enter) was taken slowly from her, as its bright gleams faded. Oh yes, she knew it had been narrow, her conception of grace, it had been solitary, it had admitted no others, it had been without community. That made its loss no less real to her. At times she tried to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that her decision to live with Christopher was not only right but also, beneath all her resistance, satisfactory to her: at times she came near to persuading herself that this was so, that she enjoyed strife or would not endure it, that she enjoyed his bullying or would not condone it. But she could not keep up this pretence for long: she would catch herself out. As she had done, now this week – for when he had said he was going abroad on business for a fortnight, she had not been able to conceal from herself the waves of relief, of physical and mental relief that swept through her. No Freudian subtlety on earth could have persuaded her to mistake that relief for dismay. The relief at the thought of two weeks without him had been overwhelming, shaming, vindicating, triumphant. For fourteen days she could go to bed in innocence, and get up without fear. And if this was so, if this was how it was, then her decision to take Christopher back (measured, thus, in terms of anguish, of suffering, of justifying pain) must have been right. She had been right to take him: no ulterior weakness of her own, no sexual craving, had prompted her to do so, she had done it in the dry light of arid generosity, she had done it for others. Her duty, that was what she had done. For others. For him, for the children.

  Though that, of course, was another matter. Since Christopher had come back she had been much less pleasant to the children. She had shouted more, she had made an issue out of everything, she had lost her temper several times a day. Really, there was no knowing what one should do. To yell at the children, angrily, I’m doing this for you, you fools, could hardly be good for them. Perhaps she would grow out of it. Perhaps in the end she would settle down. Live through it. Get over it. It was so embarrassing, seeing people like Simon register her ill-temper. He never missed a thing. He was over-sensitized, poor Simon, to displays such as her own. She wished she could tell him that she was feeling better this week, because Christopher was away. But how could she commit such an indiscretion, how could she betray one man to another? So many times, she had wanted to ring him, had wanted to complain, of something Christopher had said to her, of something he had done – she had wanted to reinstate herself, through complaint, through exposure. But of course it could not be done. She and Christopher were together now, husband and wife, unable to bear witness the one against the other.

  She turned to Simon. He was lighting himself a cigarette, absentmindedly: he offered her one. She declined. She had had a bad throat, for the last week.

  ‘What do you think, Simon,’ she said, ‘do you think one can sell one’s own soul, in a good cause?’

  ‘You have some archaic concepts,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. She had seen her soul, suddenly, as she spoke: it was dark and crying and bloody, like a bat or an embryo, and it was not very nice at all, not an agreeable thing, and it flapped and squeaked inside her angrily whenever Christopher touched or spoke to her. Let it go, let it go, strangle it, burn it. The warm daylight of love she would aspire to, oh she would make it, though her nails were torn, her knees barked with hanging on; and the harsh clanging of her own voice, the sounding of righteous brass and the clanging of the symbols of her upright faith demented ideologies, she would silence them all, she would learn to do so. The sun fell and the dust danced in it, and the smoke from Simon’s cigarette turned in it.

  ‘I often think I’m a foul bitch, you know,’ she said, pleasantly, conversationally.

  From the hall below them, a dog barked, irritably. Another answered, then another: barks, followed by long-drawn-out slow echoing moans and howling. They both laughed, at the ridiculous melancholy sounds. Then they got up, disturbed, slightly, by the uproar, thinking of children and rabies and babies savaged in their prams by fierce Doberman Pinschers – not that they had any babies, either of them, they were long past the baby stage, but nevertheless one could not really rely on the good sense even of ten-year-olds. They stood for a moment, looking downwards, then started to descend, together, and as they went Rose told Simon about a job that she had been offered, and how pleased she was, it was a British Council job looking after all the Ujuhudanians who came to Britain and vice versa, and he wasn’t to laugh at her for being so enthusiastic, she knew it must sound dull to him, but it was interesting to her, and not to mention it to Christopher yet because she hadn’t dared to tell him because he was sure to laugh even if Simon was polite enough not to, she really was very pleased and looking forward to it, she hadn’t even applied, she’d been offered it, through Jenny Ward, who worked at the Home Office. Ujuhudiana was becoming an interesting place at last, she said: they’d discovered copper there, but of course they couldn’t afford to mine the stuff themselves, they’d have to get the South Africans and Chinese and Americans and God knows who else in to do it for them, but they’d get royalties off it, at least, and there were people coming over already, to study engineering, hoping they’d be able to join in when they got down there, in a few years time. I might even get over there myself at last, she said. What do you think, Simon, she said, do you think it’s a good idea, looking at him earnestly, pale and washed out now she had descended from the sunny regions, her hair as dull as the dead fur round her neck, and he did not know if she meant the job itself, or her whole life, but he said yes, yes, it seemed all right to him, it seemed a good idea, an excellent idea, he would look forward to hearing about it, and he meant exactly that, he would look forward to hearing, over the months and years, the things that she would have to say.

  And so they went down, to collect the children, and Emily. Emily stood up and folded up her newspaper: her coat was thick with dust, and she hit at it, viciously, with the folded paper. She had moved on from the recipes: she had been reading a piece that had upset her, about population explosions and car accidents and lemmings running into the sea. The thick yellow brown dust clung to the black fabric, and she stared at it, and said, as they moved to meet the children, who were waiting for them in the doorway with their bags of pop corn and crisps, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal, dust thou art to dust returneth was not spoken of the soul. It’s all very well,’ she continued, thinking of Malthus, looking with distaste at the dogs and their owners, ‘but the whole world is turning into dust. People are like rats. Look at them, rats. We’ll start living in the sewers, soon.’

  They moved out, on to the high terrace round the building. The cold wind had dropped: the sun shone. The huge yellow building stood behind them, mad, shoddy, decayed. The children begged for a two-pence to look through the telescope, and Simon gave them one. They stood there, the three adults, on the parapet, and looked at the view, and looked back at the Palace, with its odd shabby Corinthian pillar, its peeling plaster caryatid, its yellow bricks, its ugly Italian parodies, its bathos, its demotic despair, and then looked back at the view, where houses stretched, and tower blocks, and lakes of sewage gleaming to the sky, and gas works, and railway lines, effluence and influence, in every direction, all around, as far as the eye could see. It seemed that Emily was right. They felt the cold chill of her reading, and she said, leaning on the stone by the eroded perfunctory sphinx, ‘It’s not the dogs that should be shot, it’s the people. Look at it. Just look.’

  ‘We’ve got no right to talk,’ said Simon. ‘We’ve got three children each. We should be the first to go.’

  Rose was silent. She edged along the wall, a little, away from them. She did not want to speak, she did not want to offer her hope to their scorn, she did not dare, and she did not like talk of shooting, even from Emily. They were probably right, she was almost certainly wrong.
There was no knowing. I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven come hell. Like a rat, swimming through the dirty lake to a distant unknown shore. She shivered, the cold wind blew, her throat ached. She looked along the wall: one of the lions had been broken, since her last visit. She went up to it, to see closer. It was hollow, the lion: shabby, weathered, crudely cast in a cheap mould. Half of its head was missing. It was hollow inside. She peered inside the hole: there were two concrete struts instead of intestines, and somebody had placed carefully inside it a Coca Cola bottle, a beer can, and a few old straws. She was glad there was nothing worse. A few straws lay crossed before its noble feet. She remembered the beasts on the gateposts at Branston: elevated, distinguished, aristocratic, hand carved, unique, with curled sneering lips and bared fangs. She looked back at the shabby mass-produced creature before her: it was one with the houses, the streets, the dog show, the people. Half its head had gone. It was one of many. Somebody had written on it, years ago, in red paint: SPURS, they had written, and the red paint had dripped and run, spattering its heavy jowl like old blood. But it was a toothless lion, any boy could draw on it. She peered at it, closely. It was grey, it looked as though it were made of grey brawn – small specks and lumps of whiteness stood out in the darker background, diamond-shaped flecks. She wondered what it was that it was made of – cement, concrete, plaster. And the Palace itself. What a mess, what a terrible mess. She looked back at it. It was comic, dreadful, grotesque. A fun palace of yellow brick. She liked it. She liked it very much. She liked the lion. She lay her hand on it. It was gritty and cold, a beast of the people. Mass-produced it had been, but it had weathered into identity. And this, she hoped, for every human soul.