The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And as a result of all that, if you managed to follow it, Christopher’s Ma has now got a very nice residence in Finchley, gaping with empty rooms. But on the other hand she hasn’t got a very moral character to produce in court. Christopher’s side wouldn’t let her speak at the divorce even though she wanted to. Though the funny thing about that house deal was that it was all above board. Or crooks on both sides. It upset me no end. Christopher thought it was funny. But it upset me. I’ve always had such a horror of speculation.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why?’

  ‘What do you mean, why?’

  ‘I mean, why? Not everyone has, you know.’

  ‘Haven’t they? No, I suppose you’re right. What a very basic question. Do you really want an answer?’

  ‘Supposing that you had one.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve got one. I’ve worked it all out, over the years.’

  ‘Tell me, then.’

  ‘Well, all right. But it makes me sound a fool. I am a fool. Did you happen to note that my middle name is Vertue?’

  ‘Yes, I did. One couldn’t miss it.’

  ‘It was quite ordinary, really, for me to be called Vertue, it’s just a family name, everybody is, but when I was a child’ – she started to laugh – ‘when I was a child, I used to take it terribly seriously. I thought it was a special sign. I was a dreadfully religious child, you know. I went through a stage’ – she giggled, nervously – ‘when I thought I was Jesus Christ reincarnated, and everybody would notice it and be nice to me at last. Though that was a silly hope, when one looks at what happened to him. Sad, really, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Very touching. But I don’t see where the speculation comes in.’

  ‘I was coming to that. That was the fault of this woman that looked after me. Actually, I can’t remember now if I was religious before she got hold of me or whether it was her that did it, but anyway, whichever it was, she made things much worse. Noreen, she was called. She came from the village. Awful, she was, she had a dreadful effect on me. Very puritanical. Religion is hot stuff in East Anglia, you know. Why nobody stopped her corrupting me I can’t imagine. They probably never noticed. Anyway, she used to nag me endlessly about the family’s money and my father’s wickedness in being so rich, and usury and interest rates and gambling and shares and the stock market, and I just used to listen and take it. And one day when she took me to church, the sermon was about that text about it’s being easier for camels to get through needles’ eyes than for rich people to get into the kingdom of heaven – and it was an absolutely absurd sermon, all about how Christ hadn’t really meant it, and the eye of a needle not being really an eye of a needle but a Hebrew phrase meaning a gate in the walls of Jerusalem, and of course camels could get through it, or small ones anyway, though it was a bit of a squeeze – casuistry, in fact, that’s what it was, but to me it was like the Road to Damascus, a horribly heavenly light shone upon me and I knew what life was like, endless prevarication and shuffling and squeezing and self-excusing and trying to cram oneself into grace without losing anything on the way – and on the way home I asked Noreen, what did she think of the sermon, and she sniffed and looked down at me – I was very small at the time, only about eight, I think – and said that if I wanted to believe that kind of soft soap then I could. Oh, she was a dreadful woman, Noreen. But she was right.’

  ‘It sounds as though she shouldn’t have been allowed near a small child,’ he said.

  ‘No, maybe not. But as she was right, that wasn’t much of an argument. And since I could take it, I did. How can one say, excuse me, excuse me, I’m only a small child, if one recognizes the truth in one’s bones?’

  ‘It was an odd way to find out.’

  ‘Yes. But I was destined to be some kind of freak anyway. As well that sort as any other. Even by other people’s standards.’

  ‘You don’t think of yourself as a freak.’

  ‘No, of course I don’t. I know I’m right. But I’m not so mad that I don’t notice what other people think, you know.’

  ‘And you really have Noreen to thank for the way you are?’

  ‘No, not wholly. There were other things too. It was very funny, you know, when we got home from church that Sunday after the camel sermon, do you know what my parents were discussing at lunch? Insurance. There’d been a burglary in the neighbourhood, and quite a lot of stuff had been taken, paintings and things, and silver, and my father was telling my mother that it was worth over-insuring, there was such a good risk of being robbed. He loves that kind of conversation. Mother wasn’t listening, she never listens, but I listened. And I remember vowing to myself over the roast beef, I’ll never possess anything, I said to myself, that I fear to lose. It was a very solemn vow. After dinner I went upstairs and made myself a special prayer to God – there wasn’t a suitable one so I cut bits out of other prayers and joined them all together, just like Christopher’s horrible letter, now I come to think of it – and then I went out into the garden and vowed, under a tree that I thought was specially sacred. And that was that.’

  ‘And you actually lived up to it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I gave some money away, but that’s nothing. There are still plenty of things I wouldn’t like to part with. The children, for instance. Cruel, isn’t it, the way one has to keep wanting things.’

  ‘They are hostages to fortune,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s just about it.’

  ‘You won’t lose them,’ he said, ‘don’t worry.’

  ‘I daresay I won’t. But I don’t like the thought that I might. It’s bad enough having to worry about them dying, without this as well.’

  ‘I wish I could see you,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the telephone.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to see me at the moment. I don’t look very nice. My hair is wrapped up in a towel, because I’d just washed it when you rang. But do come and see me, some other time.’

  ‘May I?’

  ‘It would be very kind of you.’

  ‘Not at all. It would be kind of you.’

  ‘When will you come? Come tomorrow.’

  ‘No, tomorrow I can’t come.’ He hesitated, and then he said it. ‘I can’t come tomorrow because my wife is coming home from America.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Then that would not be convenient,’ she said – embracing, encompassing his excuse, so directly, and yet not failing to accept the implications, the fact that he had named his wife in such a context – familiar, she must be, a single woman, with this world of implications, and delicately, carefully, taking no step beyond them. ‘When, then, would be possible?’

  ‘I could come the day after,’ he said, working out that the day after he had a case in Southampton, and that nobody would care much about the time of his return. ‘In the evening.’

  ‘In the evening, that would be very kind. What time could you come?’

  ‘I’m not sure, whenever I get back, I am out for the day and I will come to see you on my way home.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, that would be very kind of you. And now, I suppose, I must let you go to bed.’

  And he agreed, of course, that this might be so, and gave her his Chambers telephone number, and they said good night to one another, politely, and severed their connection. And he, for his part, went to bed and thought about the things that she had told him.

  She, on the other hand, sat up for some time, kneeling on the hearth rug in front of the gas fire and drying her hair. The gas dried it up and frizzled the ends but she didn’t much care. She was thinking about that year when the money had come in, so long ago, when she had been twenty-four. It always distressed her, the callousness with which one discarded one’s past self, the alacrity with which one embraced the wisdom of the present. Looking back upon one’s past, one could disown it, with knowledge, experience, and judgement all augmented: but what if one had once been right and ceased to be so? And what were those
years, if they ceased to exist? Foundation stones, in her better moments she hoped, but what if one were burying beneath rubble some priceless intuition? One thing one could be sure of, that one would never know, because, beneath the rubble, it would be lost for ever: it could no longer be examined. So many passions could never be re-created: better lost, most of them, but either way one would never know, and the distressing thing was that in looking back, some of the necessity seemed to have gone from one’s actions: knowing, as she now did, what had happened to that money and what had been the consequences of her parting with it, she thought that she knew better, would know better next time, would not repeat such a dreadful mistake, such a flamboyant, histrionic, disastrous, ruinous gesture. But at the time, at the age of twenty-four, it had been the only thing to do. She could no longer imagine herself so rash and foolish – sitting there, at that very table, with her dog-eared little cheque book full of meagrely pared electricity payments, writing out with a shilling biro, Pay Akisoferi Nyoka twenty thousand pounds – her hand trembling, her heart beating loudly in her frightened chest, exhilarated beyond bearing by the extremity, the irrevocability of the act, by its irreversible determining quality, by its implications, by its very size. (In much the same spirit she had married Christopher, trembling, afraid, mad and blinkered by a suicidal commitment, haunted by an image that had to be made flesh.) But the fact that she could no longer remember the self that had married Christopher, nor the self that had signed that cheque, did not mean that they had not been necessary: and one had to go on, wearily continuing to make mistakes, believing them to be acts of truth and faith and righteousness, at the time having faith in them, and yet all the time knowing that in ten years one would look back and say, Christ, how could I have done that, believed that, been that, with any conviction? And yet, what about those past selves, what permanence, what validity were they ensured? Foundation stones was an image that had risen to her mind, because she liked the thought of building, but one of those selves, in endeavouring to build, had been quite literally bombed and blasted out of existence, it had gone up in real flames and fire and smoke, and doubtless lay there now in real ruins, real dust and ashes. Those thousands of pounds, donated for the construction of a school in Central Africa, had gone up in smoke: the school had been built, it had stood for some months, and then it had been oblitered in an unfortunate outbreak of civil war. The thousands of pounds had gone, and so had a hundred children or so, but for them Rose knew that she could take no responsibility: they would have died anyway, and the location of their death was the last aspect of it to concern her.

  She knew that, even objectively, even in Brechtian terms of product, the money had provided work for builders, schooling for children, however briefly, however tragically concluded. A few months may be as significant as a building’s natural span, in the scale of eternity. And anyway, that was not the end of it. Rose, despite herself, had to admit that she was much exercised by an ancient orthodoxy, a modern heresy: she believed in faith as well as in works, she believed that giving is not simply for the benefit of the receiver. So perhaps she had not been so foolish, after all. On faith, on works, on spiritual progress, on all these counts she was quits, even by such a disaster.

  She thought of that piece in the Bible, about building on the sand, and about the crumbling plaster (particularly in the lavatory behind the cistern) in her own house, and about Noreen also she thought, connecting her with the Bible, and remembering, also, what she had said of her to Simon Camish. Noreen, really, was at the back of it all. She would have liked to think that the information about Noreen had been imparted for the first time, virginally, but of course it was not so: she was a great spiller of facts, a gossip, no less, she could keep nothing back. But however often she gave Noreen away, the woman remained dourly with her: a gift that nobody would accept, a gift that nobody knew how to accept, an encumbrance, a possession, that had set her apart where she now was, crouched upon this home-made rug. Simon Camish had responded to Noreen more than some: there was either religion or self-denial in his background, she could tell, or he would not at all have known what she was talking about. Funny to think of her still alive, an old woman now, not a witch or a saint but an old woman, perhaps even a little mellowed with age. She hadn’t seen her for years. She remembered her face: long, pale, horse-like; with permed yellowish hair in rigid waves surrounding it, in her memory, as the hair surrounds the face of an out-of-date advertisement, glossy and laminated but dust-collecting, in a small hairdresser’s shop. The hair might have changed by now, in the last twenty years – it was a post-war, austerity image of the woman that she preserved, not having seen her for fifteen years or so. She wondered (for the first time, a novel thought, so there was some purpose in thinking) if it had occurred to any of her family to blame Noreen on the occasion of her marriage, and all its preceding and succeeding sorrows and embarrassments: probably not, because few people would have been able to make the connection between Noreen, grim, evangelical, life-denying, pinched and priggish and retreating, and Christopher, beautiful, dirty, seedy Christopher (as he then was), his hands in his pockets, his dark glasses glinting, his extravagant hair drooping, his aggressive slouch, Christopher, flashily kicking a tin can down Camden High Street, clever, sharp, and foul and bitter, demanding, taking, deceiving, getting: the one discipline as rigorous as the other, and she had wanted him for so many reasons, all directly or perversely Noreen-inspired: because he was sexy and undeniable, and crude about it, and anybody less crude she would have been obliged to deny – but with Christopher one abandoned judgement, one fell, hopelessly, enchanted, into whatever mud or gutter or dark corner or creaking second-hand bed that one could find – that was a perverse reason, a reason that rejected Noreen (as she would have had to be rejected, because she herself, Rose Vertue, could never have made much of a virtue of chastity, as Noreen did, she was not made of the right kind of flesh or spirit) but there were other reasons more directly descended, though Noreen would not have liked to acknowledge them as her offspring. She had, after all, first wanted and meekly followed Christopher because he was one of the dispossessed – doubly so, financially and racially – and Noreen had taught her to despise possessions. She could not, however, have foreseen, as she indoctrinated that small impressionable child so many years ago with a sense of the wickedness of riches, that it would end like that – Rose pale, in tears, confronting solicitor after solicitor, Rose exiled, Rose returning and weeping in the pages of the News of the World, Rose married, Rose locked into bedrooms, beaten up, bleeding, scarred, divorced, threatened, and really very happy now, at last, if only people would allow her to continue with her own admittedly curious theory of living. No, there was no doubt about it, Noreen would not have made much of these developments. She would not have regarded Christopher Vassiliou as one of the meek, the poor in spirit, the lowly. She had had a different, more static and silent and sexless picture of that kind of person. She would not have liked Christopher at all.

  So many thoughts of Christopher were now crowding into her mind, all at once, that she could hardly organize them: they flocked and gathered. Some of them were to do with violence, and some of them were to do with blood, and some of them were to do with the Bible – two of the subjects seemed related but not the third, and she couldn’t work it out, she couldn’t straighten it, until she remembered that scene – in this very room, it had taken place, years ago, one of those scenes about money it had been, and about why Rose had not wanted it, and she herself had been crying and screaming and had finally thrown her plate of fish and chips at his head and missed, yelling all the while, distraught with fury and quite confused, about the rich not getting into heaven, and the needle’s eye, and unless you give all that you have to the poor ye shall not etc. etc., and Christopher had thrown the tomato ketchup bottle at her and it had broken and gone all over, and the children had woken and stood at the top of the stairs shivering, as was their habit on such occasions, and Rose had gone on yelling the
se demented Biblical tags until Christopher, understandably beside himself with rage, had kicked over the table and grabbed at her and said (frightening her into silence), Don’t you quote the fucking Bible at me, they used to quote it to us at school, don’t think I don’t remember that cunt standing up there and telling us the parable of the talents and bloody wrong he got it too, I remember him droning on to this collection of morons and misfits and telling us that no matter how bloody thick we were we all had our little talents and we could use them if we wanted, and nobody was without anything – the idiot, standing there looking at that dim crowd of eleven-year-olds, our last term at primary it was, and he looked at them – and Christ if ever you saw a group of finished dead no-good human beings it was there, and he went on about how we all had good we could do in us, no matter what fools we were, and how people like me who were going on to Grammar needn’t think we were any better than the rest of them, and that our greater gifts we should use to greater good, and then he read that bit, that bit of Bible, and it was all about making money, that’s what it was about, so don’t you quote the Bible at me, and don’t you expect me to sympathize with all the subnormal races of Africa, there’s enough subnormality on the very doorstep here, why don’t you go out and drop fivers from the top of a double-decker bus, you histrionic bitch?

  And then she had tried to get away from him, to comfort the child, knowing he was right, and she had trodden on the broken ketchup bottle, blind as she was with tears and rage and moral confusion, and she had cut her foot, a curious cut between the toes, God knows how it had happened but it bled like nothing on earth, and what with the blood and the ketchup and the damp chips trodden into the carpet she had wished to die, but had gone up instead to comfort the child, and having reached the child Christopher had shouted something at her – oddly enough she could not remember what it was, that had thus proved the last straw, but he could always do it, he could always manage it, with unfailing monotonous regularity, with pre-ordained finality, and this time she had been quite overcome with an upsurge of such violence that she had flung the smaller of the two children down the stairs at him, and he had caught the child but only just, and it too was covered in ketchup and looked as though bleeding, and she had managed, in the end, to comfort the other one, and had retired to bed with it, trembling with shame and self-contempt and a profound, unceasing misery, because she knew – at each of these moments she knew, and forgot now less often in between them – that all was up with herself and Christopher, whom she had so wanted, for whom she had endured so much, and that they had reached a point beyond any hope of repair, they had reached such depths now that the walls behind them – to that flat plateau of mutual co-existence, of occasionally sunny tolerance – were no longer scalable, they were down for ever now, and unless they parted – dirty, dishevelled, undesirable – they would kill each other, perhaps even literally.