The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  She would use him again, she supposed, she would have to, but she wanted to know for herself where she was. So she put on her coat and her wellington boots, and set off to the library. She’d thought at first she would go to the main library, because it was less personal and she would feel less conspicuous there, but decided as she set off that she hadn’t the energy, and might as well go to the local branch. It was a branch that she disliked, as it was run by a peculiarly snappy and short-tempered woman, a woman nearly as unpleasant as the one in the post-office, who would on principle reject parcels as being ill-wrapped, and Family Allowance signatures as being illegible.

  She walked down the dark streets, past the shops, and the rain dripped unpleasantly. She thought of the post-office woman. The week before she had been waiting in the queue to buy some stamps, and a girl in front of her had been trying to post a parcel. She was a nice girl, a timid girl, and she said very politely, as she stuck the stamps on, ‘Do you think it will get there by the end of the week?’ ‘Don’t ask me,’ the post-office lady replied, crossly. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the girl, immediately apologetic, sorry to have annoyed her: whereupon the post-office lady glowered ferociously through the grille (which took on the aspect, suddenly, of a restraining cage) and said, ‘Look here, you’re asking me for a cast-iron guarantee, aren’t you, a cast-iron guarantee about whether that parcel of yours will get there by the end of the week. Well, I’m not going to give you one, it’s not my job. I don’t give cast-iron guarantees to no one.’ The girl looked shattered by this attack, as well she might: but a sense of pride and justice compelled her to assert, as she moved away, ‘I wasn’t asking for a guarantee, I only asked.’ The post-office woman sniffed, and turned to the next customer: he had come to inquire about a registered letter he had sent to his family in Nigeria. What shall I do, he said, reasonably, they haven’t received my letter. How do you know, said the woman. Because they haven’t replied, and it was urgent, he said. Well, she said, you can’t claim till I’ve got it in writing from them you sent it to that they didn’t get it. But how can I get it in writing from them that they don’t get my letters, if they don’t get my letters? he said. That’s your problem, she said. No claim without written confirmation from recipient that post was not received, she said.

  Thinking back over this, Rose could not help laughing. It had been too awful to be true. In fact, she had laughed as she stood there in the queue, and other people had known what she was laughing at, because they had joined in. It had cheered her up, that.

  She walked past the school, a huge Victorian edifice that loomed up, complete with bell and weathercock, against the dirty sky, and felt some satisfaction at the thought that all her children were safely in there, being educated. On the school windows, pasted from inside, there were cut-out butterflies, and doily patterns, and shoals of fish. The friezes of Christmas trees, and stuck-on blobs of cotton wool from last term had disappeared. She remembered how the sight of this school had alarmed her, years before, when she had first seen it, when Konstantin had been a baby: and of how it had gradually transformed itself through connection and familiarity. Like the streets she walked upon. She turned the corner, into a dingy terraced residential road, and there was the library, a modern building of spectacular ugliness, a low, inadequate building, disgraced by its surroundings as it disgraced them. In the spring, sometimes, it looked all right, when there were some flowers on the tree planted in the concrete. But now it was not yet spring.

  There was nobody much inside the library. There rarely was. Two elderly ladies were looking at the Light Romance section. She disapproved of a library that actually classified books under Light Romance. A black man and an Indian were sitting at tables trying to work. The tables were clearly not designed for working on, and she had once heard the librarian point this out. And now, as she stood there waiting to return two of the children’s long-overdue books, she heard something even worse. In front of her there was a man – a Ghanaian, she thought, though even after some experience she was not very good at these assessments – and he was asking the librarian about a book. Reasonably enough, one might think. Rose listened to what he was saying. He was asking her if the library had a copy of Animal Farm. It was quite true that his accent was not as distinct as it might have been, but she had herself understood him perfectly, and she was quite astonished to hear the librarian snap back that no, of course they hadn’t, the library didn’t stock zoology text books, if he wanted that kind of thing he’d better try the main branch. She wondered if the man would retort, but no, he mildly raised his eyebrows, and returned to consult the catalogue once more. Handing over her children’s books, and paying the fine that more enlightened libraries no longer exact from children, she wondered whether she should remonstrate, or whether she should go and try to help the man wrestle with the catalogue, but of course did neither. She wondered, as she made her way to the legal section, whether the librarian had spoken through ignorance or malice, and which would have been more deplorable. It was the man’s look of polite patience that had most distressed her. What must life be like, in its daily texture, when such incidents were a daily fare? Some of these misunderstandings, as she well knew, were inevitable, because they were caused by the language problem, not even by the culture problem. It was something that people would never admit: nobody would admit that so many immigrants, inevitably, verged in speech upon the incomprehensible. She knew it herself all too well from those days when she had answered the telephone for the Anti-Discrimination Co-operative Accommodation Scheme, because the chief worry (apart from the inevitable shortage of accommodation available) had been the basic inability to communicate to most of the people who rang her up. It was worse on the telephone than in person, of course, and she had become quite frantic at times as she listened to lengthy explanations of which she could understand but one word in ten. It was, in fact, not unlike reading legal language: the details and refinements of the explanation remained totally obscure, and it was only by an immense effort of the will that one could understand the main drift. One could understand it, if one stuck at it, but the strain was dreadful, and in the end she had had to give it up. The organizers of the scheme had persisted, despite her constant denials, in the belief that she could understand Greek, being married to Christopher, and how could she explain to them that Christopher himself, on principle, could understand hardly a word, and would certainly never speak a word, of his own language? Battered by gales of Greek, she had tried to learn it herself, and had failed dismally. There was a Greek family who lived next door to her, on the other side from the Flanagans, who spoke little English, but they had been keener to learn from her than to teach her. Christopher’s family despised this family, and they, for their part, hated Christopher’s. After he had left her, they had tried to explain to her that the Vassilious were exploiters, that the house they lived in belonged to just such a family, who charged them an exorbitant rent. Traitors to their own kind, they would have said, had they been familiar with such a phrase. They had not needed the phrase. Rose had got the message anyway. As she had got the message that awful day last summer, when she had gone out to sit on the front steps, and had found there the black-dressed grandmother from next door, who had pointed to the sky and muttered in Greek about something or other. Looking at the blue sky, Rose had said (not knowing what to say, smiling cheerfully, pleased with the sun), Yes, it’s a lovely day, isn’t it. And the woman had continued to gesticulate sadly towards the heavens, and Rose had continued to praise the sun’s benevolence, until Mrs Flanagan, drawn also onto her front steps by the activity outside, had informed her that the old lady’s husband had departed heavenwards during the night, and that her pointed finger was indicating his spiritual ascent. How Mrs Flanagan had discovered this, Rose did not know, perhaps she had a better instinct about such things. It had remained a lovely day, the sun had continued to shine, Rose and the old lady had continued to sit on their steps and nod at one another. The old lady had not taken her
incomprehension amiss. Rose wondered whether she herself would have been so tolerant.

  As she got out Rayden on divorce from the reference shelf, and a useful-looking work by Thomas E. James called Child Law, she suddenly remembered a bit she had read in the paper that week about a woman who had taken home the Gnomes of Zurich, thinking it was a children’s book, and who had been surprised to find her children reject it. Inspired, she went to the children’s section, and there, sure enough, under O for Orwell, was Animal Farm. She got it out, and took it to the man, who was still struggling with the catalogue. He looked at it with surprise, and then with gratitude. He smiled. She smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Not at all,’ she said, and then she went and sat down with her law books again.

  The very names of the chapters were enough to give one a headache. She persevered. She had known, anyway, that her divorce having been defended and heard in the High Court, she would have to go back to the High Court, and could therefore miss out all the bits about magistrates, but she was not sure why, because some of them looked relevant. What on earth was statutory authority? At least she found a sentence that seemed not to be disqualified, that said, quite bleakly, ‘Variations of an order of the Divorce Division as to custody can therefore be made at any time, but only in very exceptional circumstances if the child is over sixteen years of age.’ Apart from the strange ‘therefore’, the antecedents of which she could not trace, this seemed to make relevant and not very encouraging sense. It seemed to mean that Christopher had every right to apply for the custody order to be varied. She looked, anxiously, for something about the ground on which such orders should be varied, but (through stupidity, probably) couldn’t find very much except a slightly more comforting sentence which said that the discretion of the court to grant custody of a child is subject to its welfare being a paramount consideration. ‘The misconduct,’ it said, ‘of either of the parties is not the guiding principle in this respect.’ So presumably she had to prove that it was in the interests of the children’s welfare that they should remain with her? And Christopher would have to prove that it wasn’t? It seemed, either way, a very unpleasant business, as bad as getting divorced all over again. She wondered, not for the first time, what he could possibly be doing it for. Not because he really wanted the children, surely? She did not give him such credit. One of the things that had so corrupted their marriage, while it had existed, had been his attitude to children. He had felt that they should be brought up by the mother, that they were women’s work, and she had thought this fair enough at the beginning when he had been working hard to keep them alive: it had seemed not exactly just, that she should struggle endlessly to make herself get out of bed in the middle of the night, and cook meals with children hanging round her knees crying, and drag herself down to the shops with a raging temperature, through the rain, pushing a pram, simply in order that he should not have to endure the technical dismay of finding himself babyminding, but she had done it with a reasonable grace. She used to tell herself, in those early days, he comes from a different world, he objects to the principle of the thing, it’s his history, but as time had worn on and she had discovered that (inevitably) he used history to suit himself, and was able to find himself quite liberated from racial and historical prejudices when it was convenient for him, she began to lose patience, her efforts to adapt herself to the role of obliging Greek wife became less and less convincing, she began to think (in the normal course of marriage) that it was time he did a bit of adapting. He even called it ‘minding the baby’, if she tried to leave him alone in the house with a child sleeping in bed upstairs while she went to the launderette with his shirts and socks. (That was how she put it: there were other people’s shirts and socks in the bundle as well, naturally.) He was good enough with the children when she was there also being good with them, but there was little point in that: overtaxed, overstrained, physically exhausted, she had found herself no longer able to resist the movements of violent rejection and resentment within her, and it was this, perhaps, that had led to those worst degradations, those insults to his race, to his family, to his whole being. How inconceivable they would have seemed at the beginning, and how impossible to stop them, once she had started. It was his rejection of the role of ordinary English father that had made her, forcibly, making a virtue of necessity, draw the children to herself, take them entirely upon herself, set up, even while he was still there, a solitary life with them, in which she took sole charge, sole responsibility. He had not cared, when Konstantin was five, which school Konstantin should go to: it was she that had made the enquiries, it was she that had braved, alone, that grim Victorian edifice. And how could he now permit himself the luxury of criticism and complaint? He should have started to care earlier, if he had meant to care at all. It was no wonder that she had ended up alone with the children: she had been forced to take them on alone, she had strengthened herself on those hard years, she had developed the muscle to deal with them, she had learned to love the hardship of dealing with them, she had made them a life from which he had voluntarily abstracted himself. It was a life she could not change or abandon, because it was her only one, and it had been acquired through too much labour to be relinquished. In the last year or two, when Christopher had been making money, he had started to propose alterations – a new house, a better district, a washing machine – but by then it was too late, she had become what she was, she had wanted to continue to be it, she could not have it taken from her. And the thought of his wishing to take on the children, without her, appeared to her ludicrous, she could not see it other than as an effect of malice, she could not see that it could express a real intention or even a real concern. But knowing Christopher, and the brutalities he had after all endured for her, how could she be sure that malice alone would not carry him the whole way?

  The children had suffered from all this. Of that she had no doubt. She had taken them from him, because he had wanted her to have them: she had prevented him from attempting to repent. She had not allowed him to re-enter the small world she had made for them. She had (he said) poisoned their minds against him. And it was true. She had tried not to, but it was true. When he had made efforts towards the end, to reassert his authority over them, she had undermined him, she had persuaded the children to reject the interests he offered them, she had ignobly set up herself against his forfeited power. She had been ashamed of it, she had despised herself for it, but she had been incapable, totally incapable of doing otherwise. Now, when they came back from their days out with him, loaded with unsuitable gifts and subversive views and accounts of what they had done with him, she tried to keep her mouth shut, in the silence of the victor. But it was too late for justice, too late for an uneasy peace.

  She shut the book on child law, and braced herself to look again at Rayden, that miserable catalogue of human misery and strife. She knew, by instinct, or perhaps by some dim sense that she had pieced together from previous bits of information, that she would find something there that would justify all her forebodings and apprehensions. It took her a long time to find it, because, again, most of what she could find on custody seemed either irrelevant or inconclusive, but in the end, there it was, as she had suspected. It was a small sub-section on education. She read it, and felt her hair rise on the back of her neck. There it was, clearly enough. It said: ‘On the question of education, the Court considers the welfare of the children from the point of view of their religious education (a), or worldly career (b) and their general upbringing (c).’ She sat there, and considered this statement. She knew that it meant trouble. The religious education bit one could safely dismiss, as nobody could suppose that Christopher could plausibly now develop a belated passion for the Greek Orthodox Church, but the other two factors seemed quite terrifyingly relevant. The general wellbeing of children was a vague enough concept, and she could imagine herself arguing reasonably enough that their general wellbeing might consist precisely in staying where they were, without interruption or distraction, at
Harringdon Road School, but the phrase ‘worldly career’ was another matter. What could it possibly mean except exactly what she was not offering them, and what Christopher thought they ought to have? She looked at the small print at the bottom of the section, and found that the only case quoted was Symington v. Symington in 1875, whereas there was a case on upbringing as recent as April 1958. Perhaps the concept of worldly career was not invoked these days, but how could one be sure? And if it were, what judge would ever have the nerve to identify worldly careers with Harringdon Road? Times had changed a little in the world since 1875, but not in the world of judges. They would have little sympathy with the Plowden Report, and bubblegum cards, and a nature table littered with the eloquent scourings of waste lots and Alexandra Park. And (more horribly, sitting there, her faith shaking at the prospect of attack) how much real faith had she? Oh, she had declared it, she had maintained it, she had lived by it, but she, like everybody else, had worried about it, she had had her doubts. Necessity (a forced, unnatural, voluntary necessity) had kept her at it, but God knows she had had her anxieties, her moments of real panic. She had seen herself, surely enough, and knew that others would see her, as a crazed woman, denying her children for the thin glamour of an idea, like a Jehovah’s witness or a Christian Scientist denying them their life blood in the operating theatre for the sake of a delusion, a principle so vague and abstract that even she could not properly define it. She was prepared to take this, she was prepared to endure even her own doubts, but at the same time she uneasily knew quite well that her position was false, whatever it was, and that she could only maintain it through certain kinds of cheating. She could afford to leave them there because she had a house with books in it, because she herself pursued a rigorous life that she knew she must (perhaps even too much) transmit, because she had friends whose children were more like the kind of children her own would normally – though what for her could have been normal? – have known. She had worried, in the early years, that her children would not get asked to birthday parties, nor have friends with intellectual interests, friends who would be of use in later life. (Use? In what sense of use? It did not bear too much investigation which was her best defence against Symington v. Symington). She had relied heavily, for instance, on their friendship with Emily’s children, dirty, scruffy, jumble-sale-dressed little intellectuals, full of precocious views on the nature of God, the extent of the solar system, and the practicability of free public transport in Inner London. They had provided what Harringdon Road could not, therefore she was cheating, intellectually, as she had cheated financially.