The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  Nick and Diana must have given me a pleasant build-up, he thought, as he started to explain: she listened, intelligently, asking intelligent questions, nodding, smiling, thinking herself very good to be so interested, although so pretty, and he watched her pale oval face and her blinking false lashes – he hated false lashes, he really hated them – he wondered why she bothered. They moved on, shortly, to penal sanctions and contracts and discipline, and in a rash moment he made some analogy between parental and judicial discipline, and he saw her well-intentioned attention waver and struggle and finally lose itself: she had children, and she wanted to talk about children and how one should treat them, so they started to talk about that instead, and whether or not she should threaten her children with punishments that would never be fulfilled and whether such threats had any value: she was overcome with guilt, he drily noted, she had to confess, she had told one of her children before coming out to dinner that if it didn’t shut up and get back into bed she would lock it in its bedroom – ‘I didn’t mean it,’ she was saying, ‘I really didn’t mean it, but I lost my temper …’ and he knew that she needed condoning, and that she would have wrested any conversation on any topic whatever to this end: so he condoned, politely, confessing to parallel misdemeanours, doing in fact what was required of him, but as he did it he felt suddenly sick with himself, because he did not care, he did not really care, in fact he objected to being used as a confessional, he objected to the whole mechanism of self-denigration and comforting admissions that they were engaged in, because one had no right to cheer oneself up by such means, one had no right to sit so comfortably assuaging one’s conscience and asking for forgiveness. Despite himself, he felt welling up within him an emotion so familiar and so unpleasant that it quite frightened him: he had not yet learnt how to forestall it, though with time he hoped he might (but what a long discipline ahead) and it was too bad to confess, too bad to share, it was not, like this girl’s loss of temper, pardonable. It was an emotion of hatred. He hated it, he hated feeling it, but the hatred remained. He had come to hate people, even the people that he liked, like Nick and Diana and this pleasant pale girl, and he hated them, ignobly, because they were not his and he could not have them. They might smile and offer him invitations, but he hated them for it. He was filled with resentment, a resentment that respected no distinctions and no loyalties. It was impossible to struggle against it, impossible to remind himself that it was his fault, not theirs – or rather not impossible to remind himself, because he did, constantly, he did, even now – but impossible to feel the reminder, impossible to feel sympathy even though he knew quite well the forms and words of it. He felt nothing, nothing but dislike and bitterness; useless to tell himself that the fault was his. It altered nothing, such knowledge. One could order one’s features and one’s responses so that it did not show, so that it caused no positive offence, but that was no salvation: one might behave impeccably, and still, if one had not charity, it would be of no avail. And he no longer had any charity, it had all dried up in him.

  Suddenly, as he sat there talking about something quite different, he thought, ‘I am embittered.’

  And he knew that what he was was precisely what the word meant, and that it was what he was. When people described other people as embittered, they were describing people like himself – embittered through failure, of one kind or another, and bitterly resenting those more fortunate. He could, as yet, conceal it, but what would happen when he became like those colleagues of his who could not mention a name without a disparaging remark, who saw the whole world as a sour conspiracy to despoil them of any satisfaction or success? And even if he managed to conceal it for ever, what a fate was that, to suffer and not to speak, to subdue one’s resentment by reason, to exhaust oneself in concealment and the forms of charity? The continual suppression of impulse seemed an unredeeming activity, but he could not think of anything better to do, the impulses being so base.

  He could pretend, perhaps, not to recognize them, but a suspension of recognition was beyond him: what had once been honesty, and what was now an unrelenting habit of introspection, denied a simple refusal to admit. He had to admit it: he disliked this girl for smiling at him, he disliked Nick because he was an old friend, and Diana because she was so kind to him, and the financial journalist talking to Diana because he was not married, and that other woman in the long velvet dress because she was divorced, and the man talking to Nick because he was married to the girl talking to him. He disliked them all, childishly, simply for being what they were, and he liked disliking them, he did not want to like them, he did not want people to be pleasant or generous or remarkable, because if they were, they too much condemned his cold heart for not warming to them. They put him in the wrong, either way, by their virtues, by their failings, and he resented them because they aroused his own meanness of spirit: there was a wicked flow from him, a contaminating flow, and all those people, and the pretty room with its candles and fringed shades and oval mirrors and embroidered carpets and peacock feathers was swamped by his ill-will, by his not liking his own liking of it.

  But no, the room was not swamped, it was quite unaffected: he must remember that.

  It was he himself that was swamped. A bad word, swamped: because what he was, was dry, dry as a bone. And he wanted everything to be as dry as himself so that he would not be reminded of thirst. That woman in the off-licence, how her evening’s plans had rejected and excluded and judged him. There was nothing to be done about it, nothing, there was nothing in himself that could save him: there was nothing to be done in life, but to keep going, keep working – and work, yes, he always came back to this point because work could be done, adequately, even well, and without the need for the justification of tenderness he could still perform the acts – the laborious, technical, tedious, legal acts of care. It wasn’t even the work that he wanted to do, but it was an approximation, it was satisfactory. He could, anyway, continue to do it, that at least was something. He knew where he had arrived, in his thoughts. He always came to the same place. He was familiar with the journey. And having got there, he said to himself; there is a feeling in me, in my brain, in my heart, so dull, so cold, so persistent, so ancient, that I am growing fond of it, I look to it, I look forward to taking it out, at the end of this journey, I take it out and polish it like an old stone, I warm my hands on its coldness and it grows faintly warm from my hands and its much handling. If it weren’t there, I would have nothing, I would be destitute: if I couldn’t feel it now, as I sit here holding this clinking drink and lighting her cigarette, I would cease to be. It is precious to me, this dull and ordinary stone. It is always there. It is called resolution.

  ‘How unlike Rose to be so late,’ said Diana, uneasily, half an hour later: and it was evident, immediately, from the tone in which these words were spoken, that Rose was the honoured guest, the star, the sanction for the evening’s gathering, and that her presence, thus transformed into absence, was threatening to turn itself into as great an embarrassment as her arrival would have been a triumph. ‘I can’t think what can have happened, should I give her a ring, Nick?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nick, who was helping himself to another drink, reluctant to allow his wife’s anxiety to spread, but not quite sure, because himself anxious, of how he could contain it. ‘Let’s give her another five minutes, should we?’

  ‘All right,’ said Diana, brightly, thinking with panic of the cassoulet slowly drying, the salad slowly crumpling into its dressing, and, worst horror, the mousse beginning to sink. She was never very sure about mousse, it was usually all right but she didn’t trust it, nor did she trust herself not to have another drink, out of desperation, and if she did she knew that she would probably start dropping things in the kitchen and burning her hands when she got things out of the oven. One disastrous dinner-party, just before Nick had left her, she had dropped the lid of the iron casserole on her foot, under the influence of a whisky too many, an accident which had proved amazingl
y painful, and which had in fact precipitated his departure, because when the guests had gone she had accused him of never helping to carry anything, and they had had a dreadful row, because he had said that when he did carry things she got equally angry with him for not staying and amusing their guests. She couldn’t decide, either, and was becoming increasingly incapable of deciding whether she ought to go and start warming up the soup now, or whether that would ruin the soup too, and moreover make it too clear to Rose, when she did come, if she did come, that she was very late. On the whole she much preferred people not to realize that they were late because it upset her so much when they had to apologize. She ate an olive and tried to sit still. Nick, meanwhile, was embarking on the subject of Rose: she wished he wouldn’t, because if Rose didn’t come it would make them look so silly, like boasting that one had invited the Queen but unfortunately she hadn’t been able to come. Not that Rose’s status was exactly queenly, of course, and she really ought to trust Nick’s instincts in these matters, because he usually did things all right, so she tried to say nothing as she heard him say to Simon, ‘Do you know Rose Vassiliou?’, as she watched Simon’s very sad polite blank smile, as she heard Nick continue confidentially, ‘Rose Bryanston that was, if you remember –’ and watched, so expertly aroused, the faint responsive flicker of recollection in Simon’s eyes – (Simon, surely, no reader of gossip columns, and yet surely not so removed from the world? No, not so removed, for he was replying in the affirmative, admitting his consciousness of Rose’s existence – poor Rose, wherever could she have got to? and what a disaster that she was so late, when her chief card, as a guest, was her perfect unassuming propriety, her calm diligence, her – if one could use so portentous a word – her humility, and to be late was not humble, could not be called so) – and then, after all, she could suddenly sit still no longer, and had to rise up and drift, she hoped unnoticed, off into the kitchen, where she stared at the cold green soup in a mixture of disgust and hungry apprehension, leaving Nick, struggling as he was with a delicate evocation (possibly at any moment to be interrupted by its subject) of Rose’s notorious past, to reflect upon her almost offensive calm and social tact.

  Simon, listening to this highly allusive discourse, began by not bothering to try to connect with it, so sure was he that Rose Vassiliou was yet another visiting Greek singer or Portuguese actress or American intellectual, whose existence could in no possible way interest his own life (except as material to report to Julie, and that was the kind of obligation he tried to resist, seeing no reason why he should feed too often the passions in her that he disapproved, in much the way that one resents buying as Christmas gifts objects that one intensely dislikes oneself, despite the pleasure that one knows they would give to the recipient). But as Nick continued to explain, evoking the absent Rose’s virtues, he did begin, dimly, almost despite himself, to remember something of what he was being told: from ten years back or more, the story was, when they had all been young, and this Rose herself a little younger than they had been, because she had been under age, and that was what all the fuss had been about: she had been made a ward-of-court, being an heiress to some kind of hard commodity like steel or ships or glass, and having set her heart on marrying an unsuitable man. The results and details of this scandal he had quite forgotten: whether she had married, eloped, or submitted, he no longer knew: but he was aware that her name was still current, that the intervening ten years had not passed quite without event, though he could not work out what her name was now connected with – meths drinkers, prison reform, he vaguely thought it might be something of this kind – and yes, that was it, he had it now, it was all coming back to him, she was the girl who had given all her money away to the poor, or something ridiculous like that. He couldn’t remember the details, but it had been something like that. Rose Vassiliou, yes, that was the name. Though who Vassiliou was, he had no idea – had he been the adventurer, from whom she had been so dramatically protected? The name sounded vaguely adventurous, and he pictured to himself a handsome Greek sailor, seducing a young, pretty, and impressionable heiress: though possibly quite wrongly, he knew, for there was nothing to prove that Vassiliou had not on the contrary been some subsequent shipping magnate, the punitive choice of an angry father. Whoever he was, he was clearly not expected to dinner this evening: he would have made the numbers odd. And Nick and Diana, for all their charming informality – Nick would never wear a suit, had not been seen in one for years – would never have permitted that.

  Simon was speculating about wardship, and the possibility of family relations so bad that such dire acts of legal aggression could take place within them, and penal clauses in industrial relations bills, and the relations of law and goodwill, when the door-bell rang, and Nick, only just able to conceal his extreme relief, abandoned him a moment too hastily to answer it: and when Nick reascended the stairs with the well-heralded Rose, his first thought upon seeing her was a sudden, treacherous recollection of a remark that had been bandied about at the time of her wardship – that it was easy enough to see what the man in question was after, because it was certainly not her beauty. He had remembered the remark, because such remarks always obscurely pained him, making him more aware of his own lack of beauty: having a moral and sophisticated mind, he would endlessly discuss to himself the problem of whether the pain caused by such casual remarks about others was true sympathy, or really a transferred sympathy that was at its dark heart masochistic. And with these anxieties as a background, he was relieved to note that Rose Vassiliou’s plainness – as she advanced towards him, her hand extended – was not pathetic, it did not move the heart to pity or to its sinister reverse: she touched at once something that was more like tenderness. She was small, her hand itself was small, and her face, childish yet anxious, was delicately mazed with the young wrinkles of her age – which, from the accidents of her published past, he could have accurately calculated, placing her in her early thirties, a little younger than himself for he had read of her elopement (was it?) while at Oxford. She frowned as she smiled in greeting, her brow raising itself anxiously, nervously polite, aware that she had been late, remiss; and the wrinkles gathered into the descending thin curls – a row of them, lying straight across her high forehead, and her mouth strained slightly, with its pale lips, as though smiling were an effort of true goodwill rather than a natural effect of pleasure. Her hair was a pale and faded brown, that might once have been blonde, or which might even, prematurely, be a darker brown upon the verge of grey, and her eyes were grey: her whole face was so affectingly uneccentric, so conscientiously pleasant (so unadorned with lipstick or eye-lashes) that it was some moments before he noticed that her clothes were less complaisant, or if complaisant, then complaisant, to her hosts, in a different sense – for she was wearing a long dress eccentric enough by any standards, a tatty off-white embroidered and beaded dress, with fraying sleeves and an irregular hem line, and on her feet were very old flat red leather shoes, bursting at the seams, and extremely worn. There was nothing dowdy about her dress: on the contrary, he had to recognize, once he noticed it at all, that she had a certain private elegance, an elegance so unworldly that it made the whole room, and all the other beaded dresses and peacock feathers and gold slippers in it, look suddenly too new, too bright, too good: too recent imitations of the gently decayed image that she so unostentatiously presented. She looked, because of age and softness, authentic, as ancient frescoes look in churches, frescoes which in their very dimness offer a promise of truth that a more brilliant (however beautiful) restoration denies. And yet it was almost impossible to resent her curious distinction: impossible even for him, so schooled in resentment: because she carried with her such an air of sadness, of lack of certainty, that to resent it would have been not an act of self-defence, but an act of aggression, of violent reproach. He would never have noticed her, had she not been drawn to his attention, deliberately, by Nick’s carefully designed preamble – Nick, a perfect judge of such matters, had known
that she required explanation, that her qualities would not speak for themselves, that an untrained or uninformed eye would never recognize her rarity without a label to point it out. Because she was insignificant. A modest, unremarkable-looking person. So how could one resent a distinction that one might so easily have missed altogether?

  Perhaps, astonishingly, she disarmed self-defence: or so he found himself thinking, as she took his hand, and smiled, and turned from him, slightly, to Diana, to accept a drink, and to say, as she drank a large mouthful of it, that she was sorry she was so late, and that she would take her drink in with her to dinner should dinner be ready, as she had delayed everyone, and that she nevertheless had to have the drink because she was so tired and so overwrought at being so late, though she was feeling better already at the very sight of alcohol and other people’s faces. Diana, at this gesture of permission, disappeared to heat the soup, and Rose Vassiliou had time to expatiate upon her apology, though so delicately that she seemed to convey a sense of true pleasure in having at last arrived – ‘I couldn’t get a taxi, you know, Nick,’ she said, laying her hand on Nick’s sleeve, a hand mazed he could see with fine dry lines – ‘I couldn’t get a taxi because I live in such a ridiculous place –’ and she laughed, expecting Nick to laugh, and turned to Simon, expecting the question which he duly asked. ‘I live in such an absurd place,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t believe. It’s way up behind the Alexandra Palace, have you ever been that way at all? No? Nobody ever has, it’s quite astonishing. The taxi men don’t believe my address when I give it to them, and so they forget to come – they say they’re coming, but they don’t come.’