The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  She stood there, racked by indecision, and began to cry, and finally walked off and caught the bus, because she could not really afford to pay both Eileen and a taxi, even though she had promised to talk about the Urumbi uprising for Dickie, for which she ought to get at least eight guineas: blood money, that, if ever there was such a thing. On the bus she continued to weep because she knew she would be late, and Diana would be upset and not knowing what to do with her supper, and she did so hate causing offence: and she wept also because of her character, because she was always like this, always indecisive, meaning to oblige, but finally, inevitably, causing inconvenience to all. Eileen, for instance, whom she had asked to baby-sit because she needed the cash, was really no longer capable of doing it, and had always been feckless – once she had put Vick on Maria’s bottom when she was a baby, instead of Vaseline, with awful results – and now was so far gone in pregnancy that if Maria fell out of bed, which she did sometimes, Eileen would have the utmost difficulty in heaving her back in again.

  Luckily Maria hadn’t fallen out. This had been the one good thing about the day, thought Rose, as she lay there, holding Marcus’s warm squashy body, as it so gently and regularly heaved. She tried hard not to think about her third grave anxiety, which was that she might lose the children. She did not really believe it possible, but she feared the opening of old wounds, the carving of new ones. Her life had settled down, all things considered, so well, and why could they not leave her alone? She was doing no harm, she was contented, she was even, most of the time, happy. The children too were happy, as far as one could see. Her life had at last become, as she had so long willed it to be, innocuous. She had settled in, after all these sorrows and trials, she had become, slowly, what she had once so long ago willed herself to be: she was settled now, and her nature, though it saddened her at times as it had done this evening, she had on the whole so accepted and understood that she felt she could look at its vagaries quite equably, she could watch it panicking over the choice between taxis and buses with something like a maternal amusement. She was what she was: she had learned to go along with it, she had learned to say yes to Dickie White and to notice that she had been conned and not to object to that perception: she would, instead, go along and do the job. There was no need for them to disturb her any more. She was no longer a threat, she was a quiet person, they could surely, now, leave her alone. She did not think that even if they tortured her, now, she would very amusingly or gratifyingly cry out. She would be more likely, she hoped, to cry rather quietly until they stopped. But how could she tell? One cannot trust oneself too far.

  She lay awake a little while longer, thinking these things, and looking around the dark room. It was dark, but one could see the objects in it quite well, because there was a street lamp outside Mrs Flanagan’s next door, and the light entered the room through the thin cheap floating curtains. There was a flowery pattern on the curtains of which she had grown extremely fond, and she could hardly now believe that she had once disliked them. They had been there long enough, they had come with the house. At first she had been unable to understand why anyone should have bought curtains of such ineffective material, and the light through them had kept her awake. Then she had come to realize that it was a question of expense. Thin materials were cheaper than thick ones, and that was that. It had dawned on her like a slow revelation, and now the light filtered through them with the same revelation perpetually embodied. It satisfied her, it assuaged her. The whole room satisfied her – the wardrobe, also left behind by previous owners, who had been unable to get it through the door, the creaking bed, big enough, now she was on her own, for herself and all the children at once when they wanted to come, the pictures stuck on the walls, the rug that she had made herself, the dark green walls that she had painted herself four years ago, and really ought to do again soon when she could face it. She loved it: it was peaceful, it was safe, it was what she had wanted. She could hardly now believe that she had once lain here in such panic, so terrified of what she had undertaken, so inadequate to take possession of it, so frightened by what had then seemed its wilfully chosen menace. She looked back on those early days, sometimes, and they were a measure of how far she had travelled, how surely, despite all, she had made herself advance into safety. Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey’s end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days. Thinking this, with some comfort, she fell asleep.

  Eleven years before, if questioned, but there was nobody who dared to question her, she would not have been able to describe her image with any fitting confidence. She had herself lost sight of it and, lying in that same room, upon that same bed, she had been cold with the terror of that loss, and more frightened than she could ever have admitted. She had been frightened, in those days, of everything she had found about her: the long drab streets, the hard-faced suspicious old ladies in the shops, the gas works, the bedding factory, the shabby children in the streets, the house itself, which she would have to think of as her home. She hated the house, its very architecture appalled her, she hated its low narrow rooms and its sagging ceilings and its hacked, planed, untrue, ill-fitting doors. It stank of fleas, a dark red smell of blood and of sawdust, and the mattress of the bed, on which she threw herself in despondency, exhaled at her the vicious defeats of generations. Dirt poured into the place through every badly carpentered crack. Decades of what she had first taken for neglect had left the whole building riddled with holes and irregularities: it took her years to realize that it was not neglect that had patched up the sash cords and filled the cracks in the walls with putty and stuck pieces of varnished paper over major structural faults, but on the contrary a yearning, anxious, impoverished solicitude, the solicitude without money that can never rebuild or reconstruct, but can merely patch and cover and stop up each breach as it occurs. The house, far from speaking of despair, spoke of the unflagging efforts of nearly a century: a little cement here, a new bit of wiring there, a new knob on a door (albeit a nasty bakelite one to replace the irreplaceable brass original) – they all bore witness to effort, not to defeat. But how should she have known this, brought up as she had been? She had no eye for such things, and what was around her she could not see. She lay on the bed, sick from her first pregnancy, and thought that there was nothing, nothing in the world that she could do. There was no action possible for her. She had no money, apart from the five pounds that Christopher had given her for a week’s housekeeping; she had not the faintest idea of how to set about earning any. She was almost uneducated, and completely untrained in any useful sense. Without money, there was nothing to do: one could sit, like a tramp in the park, or in the library, but the library was not accommodating. It was not a district that felt much need of libraries. And it was too cold for the park. It was cold enough in the house: she was too frightened of the electricity bill to switch on the electric fire, so in the mornings when Christopher had gone out, she would get back into bed and pull the blanket over her and wonder if she had enough strength to survive. They had married in November, on her twenty-first birthday, as she had always threatened that she would do, but now, because of the cold, she thought it would have been better to have waited until the spring. In the spring, things would surely be more tolerable.

  Later in the morning, at lunch-time, she would go out to the shops, braving the unfamiliarity and hostility, and buy herself something to eat. These excursions braced her, and would bring her to some sense of what she was and what she was doing, because, quite often, as she was buying a tin of beans or a box of eggs, she would see an old lady buying herself a single egg. The grocer would calmly take down a box of half a dozen, and take out one, and put in it a paper bag.

  On one of these expeditions, fortified momentarily by the sight of human distress, she bought herself a packet of a patent cement mix from the do-it-yourself shop on the co
rner, and she went home with it and mixed some of it in a tea cup, and began, herself, to fill in some holes. It was an activity, it soothed her. The holes, when filled, did not look very elegant, but, looking at her work, she began to feel that there was at least a possibility that she might learn.

  Fleas, holes, cold, single eggs. Behind these threatening entities there loomed a shadowy edifice, an inhabited house, a hope for the future: she shivered, she trembled, she flinched, but she persevered, she had faith, she built up brick by brick the holy city of her childhood, the holy city in the shape of that patched subsiding house. It was slow, it was very slow, but gradually the ideal and the real merged and swam together, so that there were times, when, after five years or so, she would sit there not knowing which she inhabited, irritated at one moment beyond measure by the noise of the radio next door and the fraying edge of the carpet and the way the cats had ripped the braid off the armchairs, and the next moment invaded by such visionary peace at her acceptance of and familiarity with these things. Her alliance with the objects around had irradiated her, transformed her. But her friends, or such friends as continued, through loyalty or love or curiosity or desire for profit to make the long journey, continued to think that she was mad. Hardly a gleam of her vision reached them. They would visit her, all her friends but one, and shake their heads, and go home and say that Rose was mad.

  It was difficult not to assume that Rose must be mad, if judged on the evidence of her actions, thought Simon Camish, sitting by himself the following evening in the luxury of an empty house, staring at the papers with which she had so confidently entrusted him. Her parents had clearly considered her dangerously mad, as had her husband and her solicitors: so had the judge in the divorce case, though he had nevertheless found (a little reluctantly) that a passionate desire to rid oneself of one’s money is technically not as grave a matrimonial offence as the inflicting of black-eyes, split lips, cuts and manifold bruises. The judge had not liked his own decisions: it was easy to tell from the tone of his pronouncements. He had not approved the eccentricity of Rose’s behaviour. Simon was not sure how far he approved it himself. There were certain aspects of the case that he did not begin to understand. It seemed clear enough to him, from his reading of the matter and from the bias of his own judgement, that Christopher Vassiliou had married her for her money, and that part at least of the bitter disagreements of their marriage had sprung from her wilful determination to disinherit herself, against his will and expectations: but that did not begin to explain why she had married him. What impulse could have led a woman like Rose to ally herself with the qualities she professed most to despise – avarice, brutality, showiness, ambition? Perhaps they had not appeared as such to her when she was innocent, nineteen and wealthy: perhaps she had then been gullible and in love. Or perhaps, in those days, they had really not been so, perhaps they had not existed: perhaps it was she that had brought them out. He knew all too well the extraordinary facility that people have for marrying, for the wrong reasons, those who appear to possess qualities the very opposite of those with which they are in fact endowed: qualities which gradually reveal themselves in their true light, or are gradually created, by the agency of their new ally, in a form utterly disastrous, utterly opposed to any possible harmony. Christopher might have been all right when she married him: it might have been she herself that had ruined him, by the dizzy height of her ridiculous expectations.

  It was, of course, his own marriage of which he was thinking. It always was. How else could one think of marriage? He was sure, now, as he had not been ten years ago, that he had steered so clear of divorce law largely because of its horrible fascination. He had friends who were drawn to it as a drunkard to a bottle: protesting all the while their innocence, as novelists protest that their characters have no connection with, are in no way drawn from life. He thought of Julie. He had not intended to do so, he did not like to recognise the immensity of the relief of her temporary absence. He had married her for her money, or so it had been said: as Christopher Vassiliou had married Rose Bryanston. That fact in itself should give him some sympathy with Christopher, for he alone knew of his own degree of innocence, his own degree of guilt. Julie too had been an heiress (though on a much more modest scale than Rose, and not an only child), and there was no point in saying that that was not why he had married her, because who would believe him? So he did not bother to say it. Though it was, in fact, true. He knew, by now, more or less exactly why he had married her: he did not expect that the next few years of introspection would lead him radically to alter his opinion on this matter, and if he did, it would not be because of new light, but because of growing forgetfulness. He had not married Julie for her money, directly. He had become involved with her because of it, perhaps – or because of what it represented. It had represented, in her, the very opposite of his own cold, overwrought, conscience-stricken, guilt-ridden childhood, where every mouthful of food had been taken from his mother’s very plate, or torn (figuratively) from her bleeding breast: Julie, at nineteen, had possessed warmth, gaiety, vitality, family feeling, an easy affection, an easy enjoyment, all the things he had never hoped to have – an unquestioning pleasure in food and cars and holidays and comfort, a large house full of endless guests, lavish unthinking expenditure on clothes, meals out, meals for friends, a lavish generosity, charmingly combined with an aptitude for gratitude for the smallest favour, the smallest kindness. He had, he supposed, fallen in love with a way of life. He had found everything about it charming, even the things that he knew to be vulgar, like the thatched cottage and gardens painted on the white walls of Julie’s parents’ dining-room, and the heart-shaped cover on the lavatory seat – objects which made his mother’s impoverished, sensitive heart shudder with alarm. His mother had not approved of Julie, nor of the Phillipses, nor of their house. And that, of course, was in part why he had liked them so much.

  It had become a second home to him, that large mock-Tudor house, scenically situated in splendid isolation at the outer limit of commuter land. The Phillipses could not have taken the country proper, being townsfolk at heart, but they humbly acknowledged that they were now too grand and too rich to live in town itself, and had moved out, obeying the laws of nature, to a spot where they could have their own quaking blue eyesore of a swimming bath and their own tennis court. How Simon loved that hideous swimming bath, and how he lived to repent his early love and all its ill-aimed defiance. Julie’s disapproval of the swimming bath was as intense as his mother’s, at times: she was ashamed of it, she sulked. Simon found such pique amusing, he did not take it seriously, he laughed at it. Julie’s ambition was to go to Art College: there was a very chic Art College in the district, and Julie wanted to disown her swimming bath and go to it and move in the fast set. She had a very clear conception of the fast set: it hung around in the Bongo Basement Club in Newcastle, wearing beards and duffle coats and jeans and large sweaters, and it was there that Simon, in Nick’s company, had first met her. She had blossomed weirdly there in the underground light, glowing in her white fur jacket, her orange silk scarf, her tight black sweater. She was popular in that circle: she could always pay the bill. But she wanted to be more than a hanger-on, a camp follower: she wanted to be a full member of the club, and that was why she wanted to go to Art College.

  It was Mr Phillips’s behaviour over the Art College that gave Simon his first shock about the Phillips ménage, a shock which was to reverberate through the whole of his married life. He had always liked Mr Phillips, if only because Mr Phillips had always seemed to like him, and he had always assumed that Julie could do with him whatever she wanted. He was an indulgent father, ever ready to provide new clothes, a holiday, a lift in the car. Moreover, like many self-made men, he had an exaggerated respect for the powers of culture and education – he forced the children to attend concerts, plays, local events of every kind. He had paid out good money to educate Julie at a boarding school in Yorkshire: the two younger boys (one of whose weddings Ju
lie was now attending in New York) were at that time still at Sedburgh. So it seemed probable that he would view Julie’s request to go to Art College with favour, involving as it did a project combining both culture and education. Julie, however, had clearly sensed trouble, and had waited around for nearly a whole year after leaving school – the year during which she took up with Simon, himself now at Oxford – before daring to broach the subject. Simon could not see what she was nervous about: Mr Phillips was a cheery man, as far as he could see, uncritical, unfussy, easy to amuse, easy to persuade. Simon had enjoyed his hospitality – his bad jokes, his childish pride in his latest gadgets, his continuing satisfaction in being himself, so well set up in life. When Julie confided in him her desire to go to college, he encouraged her, telling her that her father would surely approve, that she must have the courage to ask at once, or she would be too late for the next year’s applications. She looked uneasy, but promised to follow his advice.

  The next time he saw her, she was in tears. Her father had refused, she said, to hear of such a thing. He had flatly refused. He had no intention, he said, of allowing her to go around with those scruffy parasites, and if she didn’t keep out of their way he would come and drag her away by the scruff of her neck.

  The volte-face was total. Mr Phillips meant what he had said. When he calmed down, he explained himself on two counts, at least: the first being that he did not believe in educating women, it was a waste of money, if she wanted to do something she could go to a secretarial college, but that was that, that was all he offered, he had spent more than was good for her already on teaching her things that were going to be no use. The second explanation really explained the first, which must have been triggered off by something: and the something was a scandal at the Art College, of which Julie and Simon knew little, and which they would have been too naïve to consider, had they known. Not so the local press and Mr Phillips, who took such things seriously. It was mild enough, thought Simon, looking back with the insight of more than a decade of student troubles, but it had been a first-class scandal, in those days. Two girls pregnant, a lecturer dismissed, rumours of grouped nude poses (the Young Spartans) and a threat of a withdrawn local grant. The very thought of it had driven the nice, good-natured Mr Phillips into a blind rage. And there lay Julie’s hopes, shattered. She was heartbroken. Her friends in the Coffee Bongo tried to cheer her up, telling her she wasn’t missing much, it was a lousy place, it was no good anyway, but the fact that it had produced a scandal made Julie pine for it all the more. She knew her father wouldn’t dare to stop her associating with her friends, but she had wanted to be one of them, she had wanted to be accepted.