The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  About some things, on the other hand, her fears had been ludicrously misplaced, and easily dispelled. About birthday parties, for instance, which happened everywhere, throughout the social scale – everywhere, that is, except in her own remembered childhood. Her children went to more birthday parties in a school term than she had been to in a lifetime. This seemed to her particularly significant, a triumphant justification of her own approach. But then, her attitude to birthdays was neurotic. She did not like to look at it too closely. Something lurked there, in her memory, that she did not wish to see. She saw its shadow, each time she bought a gift for a child to take, each time she tried hastily to clean their shoes or find a clean shirt or dress, each time she stood in the doorway collecting, with a row of other mothers, exchanging the idle coin of mothers’ conversation. Neurosis was behind all that, so perhaps she could not truly quote it as an example of the virtues of her own theory of education. She was on safer ground with the education itself. She had had, at times, fears that they might not acquire even an elementary education, but they had all learned to read and write with great facility, and seemed to be progressing, through a maze of projects and binary maths, whatever they were, to some higher forms of knowledge. (Aha, her nasty friends said, that’s because of their heredity, not because they’re well taught, you know. What do you mean, Rose would retort, in pained and deceitful surprise, look at Christopher, he is nothing to boast about as far as heredity goes, he is one of these immigrants who hold things back so much, and as for myself, I am quite stupid, I am totally uneducated, I have never passed an examination in my life.

  You know what we mean, the friends would say.

  No, Rose would say with dignity. It is clear that you know what I mean.) The school was rather good on music, they learned to play a variety of musical instruments, at Harringdon Road, a fact which she had flung often enough at Christopher, until he in turn in a fit of rage had flung Konstantin’s oboe out of the bedroom window. It hadn’t been his really, it had been borrowed from school. There had been a terrible scene with him about it. God, how she repented of her self-righteousness, and how necessary it had seemed.

  But the fact still remained that Konstantin was top of his class. Whether this was a proof of the triumph or failure of her system she did not know. He seemed equally happy, with Emily’s children, or with his own schoolfriends: he never murmured even faintly that he might prefer anything other than what he had got. She had once asked him, rashly, in a suicidal moment, which he liked best, Ben (his closest friend) or Saul (Emily’s eldest) and he had looked at her cannily, sounded her, knowing her through and through, and had thought for a moment, and had then said, ‘What a funny question. I like them both.’ Then he had thought again, and had added, ‘Though Saul is very annoying, sometimes.’ One never knew where one was with Konstantin. At supper the next day he had suddenly said, ‘Mummy, which do you like best, me or Emily?’ and had laughed at her attempts to reply. She sometimes thought she had brainwashed the child, he was so good, so hopeful, so protective of her and all she wanted for him, so loyal to all she had given him, so undemanding about the things of which she deprived him. He was a heroic child, so lovely and good to her on the whole, after all she had inflicted on him, and she wept tears, at times, to see him be all that one could ever wish him to be.

  The week after Christopher left her, Konstantin was appearing at a school concert, and he had to wear a tie. He had asked her to tie it for him, not knowing how to do it himself, and she hadn’t been able to, she hadn’t known how to. In tears, kneeling before him, knowing it to be her own fault that there was no man in the house to do it (for this was one task that Christopher had not considered too menial to undertake), she had waited for him to panic, as she fumbled, she had waited for him to reproach her with the fact that Daddy could have done it, but he didn’t, he even protected her from thinking that he might, by saying, with such kindness, that a lot of the boys couldn’t do their own either and if he took it in his pocket, Mr Bell would do it for him, he was used to it, he had to do it quite often for other boys. She had gone along to the concert, that evening: it was an ambitious little piece, an operetta, the headmaster was keen on music and organized it very well. It was about a turtle and a man who went under the sea and came back and found a hundred years had passed and that all his friends had died. Rose sat there, with Marcus by her side and Maria on her knee chewing Smarties, and had watched Konstantin playing his oboe, and the other little children singing and dancing, and the refrain was:

  O dance upon the silver sand

  And beat the turtle drum

  That youth may last forever

  And sorrow never come*

  and Rose had started to weep, uncontrollably, and whether moved by the thin children’s voices, or the fact that there were so many of them, such different cultures and nationalities, all singing this song of which God forbid that they should have the faintest understanding, or by the fact that Christopher had left her, or simply by the dreadful sentiment expressed, she could not possibly have said. It was more likely, she later thought, that she had been weeping for the knowledge that Konstantin would protect her from herself. She did not feel that she could possibly deserve to be spared the evidence of her own tragic failures. But he spared her: he flourished: he was cheerful, polite in public and horrible, when all was going well, in private, and he was, the headmaster said (though there was another problem), good grammar school material and sure to get a good place.

  The little children she didn’t worry about. They had been born into a world of blows and rows and partings, they didn’t know about anything else. Unlike Konstantin, they had no tender infant images to protect. A friend of hers, a psychiatrist, had said to her once that Konstantin, brought up in reasonable peace for the first three years of his life, would be secure for ever, no matter what storms thenceforward broke over his head, because the foundations of personality were immovable. She wondered about this a great deal, not quite believing it. It did indeed seem that Konstantin had a steadiness of purpose that the smaller two lacked, but it was also a steadiness, she feared, of suffering. Marcus and Maria, endlessly buffeted, had become endlessly resilient: they were emotional, quarrelsome, cheerful, and they forgot about things as soon as they were over. They were adaptable, they were born survivors. But Konstantin, although he could be difficult enough on a trivial level, had a truly alarming capacity for recognizing, seizing, embracing, enduring and surmounting a real sorrow, as he had in the matter of the untied tie and the loss of his father. Perhaps this is what the psychiatrist had meant by an unshakeable personality. If so, Rose was far from sure that it was a blessing. Better not to know, better, at that age, not to be able to distinguish. Time alone, doubtless, would show, which of these children had been most damaged, most affected. She would have to wait for the effect of its operations. But, as it stood, there didn’t seem to be much point in worrying about Marcus and Maria. They were happy, they were all right. When she sat down and cried, as she did more rarely now, thank God, they waited patiently till she had finished, and then asked her to fix their rifles or pour them some orange squash, as though nothing had happened: just as, when Christopher had still been at home, they had listened to those appalling rows, had heard those screams of abuse and self-defence, had witnessed blows and broken glasses, and had waited, with a slight boredom, for it all to end so that they could get on with watching the television. They never seemed to be much disturbed by her troubles: they were far more interested in their own incessant disputes. Perhaps they were repressing the symptoms of their disturbance: how could one know? They did not seem repressed. But perhaps their blank and indifferent silences, their veiled waiting faces, were after all more dangerous signals than Konstantin’s constant anxious surveillance: perhaps they were growing up to be split, to cut out, to refuse all experience that was not immediately acceptable to them. And yet it was not even true to say that they were always as she usually thought of them as being: Marcus was some
times anxious, Maria would sometimes nervously tug at her skirt and clutch her knees and beseech her not to yell at Daddy down the telephone. (Not that she was about to, not that it was, ever, Daddy, on the telephone these days, but Maria had remembered the days when it was, she had not forgotten them, as would have seemed more probable.)

  Impossible, really, to make one’s mind up about any other human person, even one’s own children, whose whole life had unrolled before one’s eyes, whose every influence is known: they were so contradictory, so inconstant, so confusing a mass of shifting characteristics, so that if one went so far as to define, to a friend, Marcus as the one who was good with his hands, he would the next instant be making an appalling bosh of some very simple sellotaping. And whenever she was thinking of Konstantin as being particularly wise and restrained and disciplined, he would at once, as though reading her mind, start to shout, nag, abuse, and behave like the hooligan that she most of the time believed him not to be. How could one ever decide what was happening to them, what one was doing to them, when everything was so uncertain? And yet, nevertheless, she did not worry about Marcus and Maria. They would come to no harm, there was nothing in her that could harm them, she loved them so, their faces and their voices, that she could never harm them, she could transport them to the Pole or enclose them in a collar and they would not be harmed, because of her love. With Konstantin (and this was the truth of the matter) it was different, because there had been a time when she had ceased, almost, to love him, when he had become unacceptable, in some way, to her, when his growing self (repelling kisses, suspicious, ungainly) had been impossible to indulge. They had quarrelled then, he and she (at the worst time, before she made her mind up to divorce Christopher, before the end, worn out with the two demanding babies, unable to cope with an articulate, complex, sulky growing boy) – they had bickered and quarrelled, and she had ceased, secretly, briefly, ceased, physically, to love him. She had stopped going in to his bedroom when she went to bed, to see him asleep. She had ceased to love as she had once loved. The spirit bloweth whither it listeth, with vicious negligence and malice. She had learned, now, to love him again, she loved him again passionately, yearningly, but she would never cease to worry about that gap, that space of time when she had quietly, wearily failed him. He had regained her love: she had not freely given it, he had regained it by his own lovely behaviour, by his own perceptions, his own concessions, his own grace. He had made the truce: he had ceased, of his own free six-year-old will, to pick quarrels with her, to attack her, to goad her. And for this she loved him the more, she reached out to him the more, she loved him for his generosity, as she loved the others for their baby faces and their innocence. But it was a love for ever involved, thenceforward, in anxiety: it could never regain its lost simplicity, its lost continuity. The other two had never forfeited these things, and this was why she did not worry about them. They were redeemed not in themselves, but in her feeling for them. In vain did she tell herself that such failures, as her brief failure with Konstantin, were inevitable: that they were the cross the eldest had to bear: that the failure had not been noticeable to the child but only to her own unnaturally sensitive self. She reproached herself. She did not forgive herself. She was not much good at accepting, in herself, the natural shortcomings of humanity.

  There was not much point in speculating about such things. They were not, anyway, thank God, classifiable. They were not grounds for varying custody orders, after all. She shut the thick divorce book, returned it to its shelf, and set off to do her morning’s shopping. On the way she went into the sweet shop on the corner of Harringdon Road to buy the children the sherbert fountains that she had promised them that morning, thinking that she might as well do it now while she was passing, while she still remembered. It was the school sweet shop, it was full of all the penny and halfpenny sweets – liquorice bootlaces, penny chews, gob stoppers, humbugs, toffee strips – that ignorant adults, who no longer frequent such shops, believe, in their arrogant adulthood, to have vanished from the face of the earth. But the sweets are still there, and Rose had promised either twopenny sherbert fountains with liquorice suckers, or sherbert dabs. To reach the counter, she had to step delicately over the washing operations of Janet from down her road, who was washing the floor, on hands and knees, with a damp rag. Rose trod with care, in order not to spread the dirt – she need not have bothered, Janet was merely spreading the dirt herself, as she never rinsed her rag – and took care also not to acknowledge Janet with more than a nod of the head. Janet, who would talk for hours on the street or sitting on her own front wall, did not like to be caught out washing floors on her hands and knees. The first time Rose had come across her in the sweet shop washing, Rose had greeted her as she would have done elsewhere, but the greeting had been returned with such faintness, such diffidence, such a simulation of not-being-there, that Rose had taken the hint. It was a fairly recent job for Janet. Before she had taken to this, she had minded a black baby called Melissa. But the Council had checked up on her and decided that she was too old and her basement too damp. So there she was on her hands and knees spreading a thin film of mud aimlessly about the lino tiles. Janet wore a faded print apron from another age, and her hair was yellow-white and wispy, and her face trembled like a rabbit, and while she talked she would also mumble. It was quite an art, talking to Janet, because one had to pick the words out of the mumbles. It was an art that everybody in the street had acquired. One had to talk, ruthlessly, through the mumbles, if one wished to respond at all, because she could not keep silent, she could not keep the noises out of her throat. She was mumbling now, as she bent her wispy head, as Rose asked for three sherbert dabs, as Miss Lindley, Infant Teacher, followed Rose into the shop, stepping delicately from the mat to the bit of newspaper in her highheeled fashion boots, in order to buy herself a packet of fags to see her through break, which had just begun. Rose, half-turning her head, saw her courteous avoidance of the symbolically washed floor, and thought, for the hundredth time, what a nice girl she is, Miss Lindley.

  Miss Lindley, seeing Rose, smiled. There was a look of unease in her smile, which at first Rose assumed must be related to a letter which would have arrived or would shortly arrive for the headmaster from her solicitor, suggesting that he and his staff might testify to the solidity of the characters of the Vassiliou children, but when Miss Lindley spoke the shadow was dispelled. (As Miss Lindley had intended that it should be.)

  ‘I shouldn’t really be here,’ said Miss Lindley, ‘I just slipped out for a packet of fags.’

  ‘I was buying sherbert fountains,’ said Rose.

  ‘Much healthier,’ said Miss Lindley.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘They rot the teeth.’

  ‘Your children’s teeth look fine,’ said Miss Lindley. ‘A frightfully healthy lot, your children.’

  ‘Yes, they are, I suppose,’ said Rose modestly.

  ‘So bright, too,’ pursued Miss Lindley, who was generously committed to the topic. ‘Really, they’re a pleasure to have in the class.’

  ‘Don’t you find Maria a bit noisy?’ said Rose.

  ‘They’re all noisy,’ said Miss Lindley, ‘but at least Maria makes a cheerful kind of noise.’

  ‘She talks all the time.’

  ‘Yes, she talks all the time, but only because she’s keen. She knows it all, you know, she keeps telling me, when Marcus was in Class 12 he didn’t do The Little White Elephant, he did The Big Bad Rabbit. And stuff like that.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘She sounds a bit of a nuisance to me,’ said Rose, who did not think so, but expected Miss Lindley to think so.

  ‘She’s not at all,’ said Miss Lindley. ‘It’s nice to know they pay attention.’

  And so, smiling too much at each other to express goodwill, on the threshold of the sweet shop, they parted. And Rose Vassiliou went away thinking, lovely Miss Lindley, she likes all those children so much, she is so energetic and kind and undiscriminating, and w
hat she loves in those children is the returning image of her own cheerfulness, her own affection, her own faith. And Miss Lindley thought, Mrs Vassiliou is such a nice woman, she really doesn’t know what a nice lot her children are because she thinks all children are nice, and all she’ll think if I tell her her own are a particular pleasure to me is that I am being particularly nice to her because she has troubles, poor woman, she’ll never know I mean it. And thus, doing each other rightly more than justice (because it was not a question of justice but of goodwill and faith) they diverged. Lovely Miss Lindley, striding across the asphalt playground in her long boots and her short skirt, her long hair bouncing with the energy of her stride, her face expressing authority, amusement, conviction; tireless, vain, adored by her infants basking radiantly in the warmth of their adoration and her own virtue, reaping each day what she sowed, a whole harvest of smiles and confidences and hands tugging at her rather high hem, and voices saying Miss, Miss (or Mum when they forget it was Miss). Guess what, Miss, you’ll never guess. It was a job she was doing, and she loved it. Lovely Miss Lindley, striding across the asphalt playground to that building that looked like a prison but thanks to her and people like her was not one: let her so forever stride, ask no questions about her future or her past, her motives, her endurance, do not ask when that youthful energy will fail her, but let her walk across that playground in her sexy boots, perfect, accomplished, across and across, again and again, her hair bouncing, a cheerful commitment and dedication in her very step. Do not seek to disbelieve it, do not disturb her with disbelief, because she is, there she walks, towards that ever-waiting classroom, and as she opens the door she will smile, greeting their smiles, she will receive with love that daunting chorus of demands, claims, cries and exhortations. Do not believe that she does not, could not exist. O lovely Miss Lindley. O almost confident apostrophe.