The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose, ‘Simon’s quite right, you can’t expect us to do your homework for you, you must do it for yourself. And you must go to bed now.’

  How easy it is, thought Simon, watching the child go off with his exercise book, to support a woman who is not one’s wife, a man who is not one’s husband. How easy, to talk to a child who is not one’s own. But what he said was, ‘That’s a very intelligent child.’

  ‘Yes, I think he is,’ said Rose, ‘God help him.’ And she smiled, feebly: she had run down in some way, she had all ebbed away, she was no longer making any effort, and he remembered the first time he had seen her, and the impression which she had given, at that dinner party, of overcoming an almost deadly fatigue. She seemed so tired: her life, for all that she said she liked it, must be a hard one, he thought.

  ‘You should go to bed early,’ he said. ‘You look so tired.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m going to. I’m going to sit up and watch a documentary about Dahomey and then I’m going to bed. Why don’t you stay and watch it with me?’

  It sounded so attractive an evening that he was tempted to consent: but, looking at his watch, remembered with a horrible sudden misgiving that he was supposed to be home, that people were coming to dinner, that he had completely forgotten he had said he would be at home early in time to receive his wife’s guests. So he said, as calmly as he could, that he wouldn’t stay, that he had to be off, that he would ring again next week to see how she was, to see if there were any developments (their usual pretext) and so he took his leave. She came to the door, to see him off, and stood there on the steps as he got into his car. She was still standing there, in the falling darkness, as he drove away.

  By the time he got home, he was filled with a quite genuine sense of apology, and of foreboding: he ought to know better, by now, than to be late, knowing what the consequences of his lateness usually were. It was eight fifteen already, and he had promised to try to be home by half past seven. As he drove the car into the garage, he tried to remember who the guests were supposed to be, but couldn’t for the life of him recall: he was worried that he wouldn’t even know their names when he saw them, he had a shocking memory for names, and however hard he tried to explain it away he knew quite well that it meant exactly what people, offended, always took it to mean: a total lack of real interest. He went in through the kitchen door, hoping to gain a few moments’ warning, or even to brief himself from the notes on the kitchen calendar, but the kitchen was occupied by their au pair girl, who was sitting on a chair reading a hideous teenage magazine, in total silence, watching, or rather not watching, his eldest child eat a fried egg. The damp, cold, silent atmosphere in the room filled him with rage. His heart was full of rage, for the child abandoned. The child looked up and said, ‘Hello, Daddy,’ then looked down again and went on eating. Not a flicker of recognition had showed in his eyes: they had been veiled by fear, by a premonition of the disapproval that flooded angrily towards him from the front of the house.

  ‘Hello, Dan,’ he said, quite unable to offer anything to replace or colour the reception he had been given. The au pair girl did not even look up at him as he entered. She went on reading about how to stick plastic flowers on her nipples under her see-through blouses. She never wore see-through blouses: she was a thin, neurotic, weepy girl, who never went out anywhere because she was afraid of going on public transport.

  Bracing himself, he went through: putting his briefcase on the hall table, hanging his coat where he was not intended to hang it, on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. A hum of voices from the drawing-room met him, and he opened the door: a polite silence fell, to greet his entrance. Julie, who was sitting by the drinks table, put down her drink loudly, and said, loudly, ‘Well, look who’s here.’

  The politeness of the silence intensified into embarrassment.

  ‘Well,’ repeated Julie, ‘look who’s here. Wherever have you been?’

  ‘I was held up,’ said Simon. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not at the office you weren’t,’ said Julie, ‘because I rang Hindley and he said you’d finished at five.’

  ‘I had to go and view a site, with a client,’ said Simon. Mildly. He never rose: it was never worth rising.

  ‘Nice of you to turn up at all,’ said Julie. She couldn’t help it, he said to himself, she really couldn’t help it. And the silence, he felt, became no longer embarrassed, but positively sadistic. That was the effect that Julie had upon people: they were breathless, waiting hopefully to see how far she would go.

  ‘I really am sorry,’ said Simon, crossing to the table to pour himself a drink, and trying to work out who else was in the room: one of the couples he could recognize, there was a prematurely balding man called Houghton and a girl who was possibly his wife. The other couple he did not recollect that he had ever seen before: he smiled vaguely round, hoping he might be mercifully enlightened. He was.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ said the girl, sitting there on his settee, swilling a gin and tonic round in her glass, introducing herself (he immediately recognized) in order to put Julie in the wrong for not having done it gracefully and at once. Julie was forced to respond: her rudeness never embraced anybody but himself.

  ‘This is Caroline,’ she said. ‘Caroline and Hugh Simpson.’ And they shook hands, and resumed conversation, as best they could after such a shock. Julie did her best to disrupt this reassumption of normal behaviour by rising abruptly to her feet, after a couple of minutes, and saying very loudly, ‘Well now that he’s back, I’d better go and have a look at the dinner. If it isn’t all burned to a cinder by now. You must forgive me,’ she said, turning and smiling fearfully at her guests, ‘if the dinner is quite ruined, we will all know who to blame if it is, won’t we?’ – and so she made her exit, leaving Simon to pour more drinks (which seemed the only thing to do) and to try and piece together what was going on. The Houghton man, he now recalled, was a gallery owner, who had recently achieved notoriety by having his gallery raided by the police on the grounds of obscenity, and his raid appeared to be the subject of the conversation. Hugh Simpson revealed himself as an art-critic or art-historian: he was a young-looking, over-healthy, worldly mannered man in his forties, considerably older than his wife, and Simon suspected that in other circumstances he might have been quite tolerable, but as it was he was being constrained by the pre-existing tone to talk in a manner that Simon found profoundly offensive. He found them all profoundly offensive. They were discussing obscenity in a way that he found (there was no other word for it) obscene. The language was not such as he expected to hear of an evening at dinner, though these days he seemed to hear little else: he was sick to death of hearing the young middle-aged discuss sex with such a mixture of self-congratulation, envy, yearning and nosy vulgar curiosity. God knows he had little sympathy with the arbitrary and undiscriminating activities of the police, and a great deal of sympathy with a few of the victims of their malice – but these were not victims, they were profiteers, they made a really shocking defence of their to him not particularly interesting cause. Perhaps they’re drunk, he said to himself, trying to excuse them, perhaps they got drunk waiting for me because I was so late and because Julie was making things so difficult for them. The only one of them who wasn’t participating was the Caroline Simpson woman, who was evidently, for some perverse reason of her own, biding her time to pay him a bit of attention, and he rather dreaded the quality of her attention. He didn’t like the look of her. She was an exceptionally handsome woman, pale and very tall and delicately featured, with long limp red hair, and she was wearing a long silvery dress. From her emanated such gales of dissatisfaction and destruction that he flinched, knowing that he could hardly face dealing with her if she turned on him. And turn on him she did: he knew she couldn’t help it, she was the kind of person who would turn on any man, no matter how quietly he tried to sit and mind his own business. Every time her husband spoke she shivered, gently, like a tree, with di
ssociation: she was trying to recommend herself by these faint tremors, but it was no good, she couldn’t hit the real cause of his own dissociation, she could not recommend herself to him (though he could see she wished to) by condemning the tone of the conversation, because she couldn’t see what was wrong with it, he was fairly sure – or if she did object, her objections were aesthetic, she probably didn’t like Julian Houghton’s bald head or his wife’s flouncy dress. She turned on him, when she did so, quite deliberately: she got up from her chair and came to sit by him, and said to him, as he waited for the attack, ‘I think you’re friend of a friend of mine.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Simon, in a panic thinking irrationally and guiltily of Rose (he would reject her if her catholic tastes extended this far, and anyway the last thing he wanted was to be acknowledged in public as her friend) – but he was safe enough, for the moment, for she went on, ‘A colleague of yours, I think he is, Antony Mitchell, you know him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, indeed I do,’ he said, trying to smile in some more or less natural way, but anticipating trouble enough on this front too. Because once he heard Antony’s name he knew what it was about: poor Antony, he had always a disastrous leaning towards precisely this kind of woman, he could see it all in a glance.

  ‘You’re working with him, I think,’ said Caroline Simpson, and he could tell that her husband had stopped concentrating on Mrs Houghton’s thrilling account of her pre-marital sexual experiences in the United States in order to overhear (as had been intended) whatever Caroline Simpson had to say. ‘He told me so, when I had lunch with him the other day,’ said Caroline.

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, neutrally. ‘Yes, we’re working on a book together.’

  ‘He told me,’ said Caroline, ‘that you’d had a little setback, that you’re going to have to do some rewriting, is that so?’

  And she smiled at him, sweetly, intently, desperately. Bloody fool, Simon thought to himself, telling her anything at all, but what he said was ‘Yes, that’s right. It’s not too serious, though, we should be able to straighten it out without too many problems.’

  ‘He seemed quite put out,’ continued Caroline, ‘but then, he’s very easily put out, isn’t he? I was half an hour late for lunch, you know, last week, and by the time I got there he was really in quite a state. I mean, half an hour is nothing, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I always try to be punctual myself. Though one might hardly believe it on this evening’s evidence.’

  She was not, however, to be deflected: she hadn’t yet had enough of the subject of Antony’s anxiety on her behalf.

  ‘And then,’ she went on, ‘there was a time, not so long ago, when I couldn’t make it at all, and he was awfully annoyed about it. He’s a bit of a rigid thinker, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps all lawyers are, would you say?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, thinking, what bloody fools women are, does she really think she can ingratiate herself with me by knocking and exposing Antony, bloody fool though he may also be? And anyway, what on earth does she want to ingratiate herself for, what on earth does she want with me, it can’t simply be that she wants to take advantage of Julie, can it, or would she do it to anyone? Perhaps she was doing it to Houghton before I came in.

  ‘I nearly married a lawyer once,’ she continued, and he felt her husband stiffen: she gazed at him, preparing to tell him the story of her lawyer, her dark eyes fixing him in an almost comic effort at hypnosis, or an effort that would have been comic if it hadn’t been so singularly effective, and he struggled desperately, trying to think of some means of avoiding the story of this hapless lawyer – (he bet she had nearly married one out of each profession according to audience, did she really think that men liked this kind of approach, manifesting as it did such deplorable weakness of character?) – and was, fortunately, saved by Julie’s arrival upon the scene, with a summons to dinner.

  ‘We can go and eat now,’ said Julie, ‘what is left of the meal.’

  And off they went to eat: he was able to bear her commands to open the wine with equanimity and even grace, knowing he had been reprieved from worse. Not that the reprieve lasted for long: during dinner he had to endure the sight of Caroline Simpson turning her food over and over on her plate with a look of disgust (and it hadn’t been ruined, thank God, it was perfectly good, as Julie’s meals always were) and the knowledge that she wouldn’t have dared to mess about with it in that disdainful manner if she hadn’t sensed, with what was probably the only part of her intelligence, that he and Julie were hardly the most united of couples. Though there, of course, she in a sense sensed wrong: for united was precisely what he and Julie were, and this might even, he thought, as the meal continued, have got through to her, because she did lower the tone a little, she even transferred her attention a little to Houghton. But he wouldn’t forgive her for the way she had smiled when asked if she would like more quiche: a little dry knowing smile of contempt it had been, as she declined, as she pushed eloquently at her untouched pastry shell (and it was a good pastry, it was not as though Julie ever let it sog or harden) – a smile that indicated superior discrimination, the non-eating smile of the Victorian exhibitionist, a smile that embraced Julie’s thickening arms and slightly overheated face (and naturally she was overheated, she’d been bending over the oven, hadn’t she?) and Houghton’s receding hair and his girl’s frills and doubtless his own scraggy neck, and deficiencies on her elegant husband’s part that were too profound to manifest themselves.

  The conversation turned, mercifully, from obscenity to country cottages and Easter holidays. The Houghtons had a country cottage in the Cotswolds, the Simpsons had one in Norfolk. Good luck to them, thought Simon, chewing on his coq au vin, that lets me out. But Easter holidays as such were another matter. He and Julie and the children were going to a hotel in Cornwall for Easter, and he had to listen to Julie describing their arrangements in some detail. The reminder of this approaching excursion filled him with an indefinable unease: he couldn’t locate it, he would have to return to it later. As it was, he sat there, and spoke from time to time, and tried to avoid the silvery glimmer of Caroline Simpson’s bosom, and wondered, whose fault it was, that he should spend so much time like this, with people he really deeply disliked, talking about things that bored him rigid. It would have been better if he could have felt that the others were enjoying themselves, but from every soul there seemed to him to rise a cry of mute anguish and lonely fear: ugly cries, like the wails and squawks of sea gulls, hovered over the surfacing wine bottles and the wreckage of cutlery and the white napkins, and on Julie’s face (he watched it anxiously) there were such lines (in the roundness), engravings of a quite inappropriate suffering, marks of suffering unsuited to her physique or to her nature. She picked up, as he watched her, a chicken bone from her plate, and held it in her fingers, and started to gnaw at it with an inelegant greed, speaking as she ate, of the reputation for good food that this Easter hotel possessed, and as she spoke she reached into her mouth with her fingers and abstracted a lump of chewed tendon, which she deposited, quite unselfconsciously, upon the side of her plate. It lay there, transparent, repellent, an indictment. He loathed such habits in her, and loathed himself for loathing them; there was no way out. She was not built for dinner parties. He hated his own shrinking, and sitting there he thought of his mother, from whom he had inherited these excessive delicacies: his mother’s house stank of cleanliness, it stank of bleach and disinfectant, the lavatory in her house was unusably hygienic from noxious poisonous fumes of purity, and yet he was, no doubt about it, his mother’s son. He had been trained up early, by her wincings and shudderings: at every word his grandfather spoke she installed in him disapprobation. He recalled her, when his grandfather hawked and spat (a healthy habit, after all, and a skill he sometimes wished he had inherited) – he recalled her averting her eyes, shivering, making little noises in her own refined throat. And he had married Julie to escape these delicacies. And he had tried, God h
elp him, uselessly to cast off these deadly niceties and cruel rejections, and here he was, playing in a sense his mother’s role, repelled, silent, disapproving, a superior sensibility. He disliked such an inheritance. His mother, she had aspired to evade her environment, she had purged it with Domestos and Pine Fluid, she had reached upwards – never very high upwards, it was true, tinned salmon remained for her a delicacy, her aspirations had not risen to quiche lorraine, and the truth was that he still rather liked tinned salmon himself, he liked the pink violent delectable chunks of it with their tinned crumbly assimilated bones, he would rather have it than smoked salmon any day.

  He and Julie had over-reached themselves, they had set their sights too high, and therefore it was that they clashed and bled, and that their faces were lined with the furrows of an unsuitable strain. Julie had been made for a life so different, so much simpler (if one could have a concept of simplicity) and yet at the same time she had had in her some spark too of aspiration, a minimal artistic talent, a talent wickedly too small for the burdens her wealth and his intelligence had laid on it: she would have been happier without it, but how could one say that happiness was what one should have, as a woman or as a man? What was one human for, but to aspire, and where had it gone wrong, what was it that had condemned them? There were no virtues, moral or aesthetic, in tinned salmon or in hawking and spitting or in denying even the most minimal gleamings of a higher intellectual or social existence: but there was something hopelessly wrong with a life where a child sat in a kitchen eating a fried egg in terror, watched by a hostile alien, while adults in the drawing-room gulped down alcohol and displayed their unlovely hypocrisies. There must have been, there might have been, a right life for them, a possible life, which might have embodied a little warmth and beauty: a natural life, for them, for people, to which it would not have been a mockery to aspire. One had to suppose a good life and a happy resolution, or was that childish simplicity? Exhausted, embittered, he no longer knew. Perhaps there was only the point of time in which one lived, and its accompanying ills. But nevertheless, he would swear, there had hovered before Julie herself a higher image, a legitimate hope: she had miscreated and deformed it, but it had been there, and it had fatally lured her on into this chattering of monkeys.