The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  He remembered (thinking of fish, and eating chicken bones, and his mother) a tea time, up North, in his schooldays when they had been eating bloaters, bloaters full of bones, and the lights had gone out. The lights had gone out, the electricity had failed, and his mother, furious at first, as she was at any crossing of her purpose, had stumped crossly off to find candles, muttering darkly in the dark of the malice of electricity boards – and then, when she had returned, and illuminated the tea-table with the thick white wax lights she had become suddenly, rarely, gay, cheerful, relaxed. ‘What a very unsuitable meal,’ she had said, (picking the small hairlike bones from her mouth with her soft fingers) ‘what a very unsuitable meal, to eat in the darkness, look at us here, swallowing all these bones in the dark! Anything would have been better than bloaters, anything at all.’ And she giggled, and then said, laughing to herself, choking a little, discreetly, ‘Anything but kippers, I suppose.’ And he had laughed too, a growing clumsy boy, overcome with gratitude at this unusual lightening, at this gleam of joy in the face of adversity. She had used the episode later, his mother, she had incorporated it into a domestic radio chat; all these chats she enlightened with the same glow of nostalgic warmth, the same sense of the shared amusing little trials of motherhood, a sense to which she was on the whole quite alien, a tone that betrayed her material, on nearly all occasions, quite monstrously, for on other occasions things were not at all as she described them, they had been setbacks that she had met dourly and with ill nature, and he would writhe to see them rewritten, touched up, translated into what she would have liked them to have been. And yet, perhaps the bloaters had shown that she might have been capable of living in the style she chose for herself: and if she had not chosen such an image, things might have been worse, there might not have been even those rare moments? Perhaps, after all, his childhood had been in sum more nearly what she had intended than what she had achieved? She had fought herself, valiantly, she had courageously denied the truth of the bleakness which was what she truly had to offer. If she had not aspired she would have sunk or died. Oh Christ, it was exhausting, this living on the will, this denial of nature, this unnatural distortion: but if one’s nature were harsh, what could one do but deny it, and repudiate it in the hope that something better might thereby be? It was for him that she had hoped, and so on, through the generations. And to what end, to what end, to what right end of life, to what gracious form of living, to what possible joy, there was nobody who had achieved it, there was no achieving and no arrival, there was merely a ghastly chain of reiterated disillusions, and each generation discovered a new impossibility, and all the more miserably because it had been given to hope for more. He thought once more of John Stuart Mill and the despair that had seized him: to conceive the right end, and then to despair, that was a fate he had feared often enough for himself, with his petty tinkerings and his niggling readjustments and his dreary slow calculations. Oh yes, he cared for the fate of mankind, he cared for the quality of the living of life, but man had been formed too low in the scale of possibility, with just enough illumination (like Julie and his mother and himself) to suffer for failure, and too little spirit to live in the light, too little strength to reach the light. Or rather, there was no light, or none that man might enter: he could create for himself an ordered darkness, an equality of misery, a justice in the sharing of the darkness, his own hole, by right, in that darkness, and his sense of light, his illuminations, were an evolutionary freak, an artificial glow that had etiolated him into hopeless pale unnatural underground yellow green deformities, a light misreflected through some unintended chink, too far away for such low creatures ever to reach it and flourish by it. He might as well lose his eyes, man. He might as well grow blind, like a fish in a cave, and maunder on through the centuries in his white plated armoury.

  He cut himself a slice of Gruyère. Even such an image, nasty as it was, presupposed the existence of the light. The distortions themselves, they were not arbitrary, after all. They were ugly, but they followed a pattern. They rose, sorrowfully, like plants in a cellar, deprived, but always rising. Plants in a cellar, laid away until the spring. He buttered a biscuit, and restored his attention to Caroline Simpson, who wanted to tell him, for some reason, about another man she had nearly married, this time a ski-instructor, who had fallen passionately in love with her when she had gone at the age of seventeen to Austria on a school outing. She had rejected his overtures, but was happy to report that he had turned out well, this ski-instructor: no ordinary Austrian he, for he had gone off to the Himalayas and had dwelt there for some years in dramatic seclusion, and then had returned to civilization to report upon his experiences (in German, alas) in the form of a best-selling book, and had subsequently become an actor, appearing in films and upon the television. The implication, too clear to avoid, was that anyone who had had the taste to admire her, even at so tender an age, could not but have resources.

  ‘It sounds,’ said Simon, ‘as though, had you married him you might have had rather too exciting a life.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind excitement,’ she said: unwisely, for he then had the satisfaction of seeing her wince at her own crudity, he saw her withdraw from her vulgarity. Because, after all, she operated on a high level, on the whole, this woman: he could see what Antony saw in her perilous overtures. He thought, suddenly, of Rose’s Eileen, who aspired to be a wicked woman. Here, by his side, was a perfection of the type. He thought of Rose, her wrinkled fingers picking fretfully at the stain on her skirt. He thought of Rose. She would be in bed by now, he thought. She would be sleeping (the phrase rose in his mind unsolicited) the sleep of the just.

  It was after midnight before the Houghtons and the Simpsons left. They sat it out, to prove that they were enjoying themselves, to prove that they had forgiven their host his delayed arrival. Having resented their presence during most of the evening, he found himself dreading their departure, knowing that he would have trouble before he was allowed to go to bed. And so he did, for Julie, once the door had closed upon them, turned upon him with an anger that had had four and a half hours to gather and thicken, and which had been not at all assuaged by her original hostilities when he had first entered. He had seen the storm signs during dinner, hung as clearly as a black cone by a bad sea: the violent way she had slopped his chicken onto his plate, the over-forceful way with which she had put that same plate down on the table before him, the way she had pulled her chair sharply to one side when he crossed behind her to get the corkscrew, the noises she made in her throat – sighings, clickings, dismissals – whenever he opened his own mouth. She had not looked at him once during the meal, nor addressed one remark to him indirectly: she had been biding her time: and now she let him have it, all of it, trembling with rage as she denounced his cruelty, his rudeness, his inadequacies as husband and father, his dullness as companion and host and guest. She went back over the whole of their past, raking up ten-year-old offences, divining in their pattern a deliberate plot of destruction, ending up, as so often, yelling at him, her face discoloured with emotion, her hair damp and oddly flying from her face in strange directions.

  ‘What did you marry me for, what for, what for?’

  And, looking at her as she then appeared, what answer could possibly be offered? It seemed, indeed, a mystery. He offered no answer, on principle: he never did. He had sat there quietly and taken it, as the roll call and catalogue of crimes lengthened, the familiar motifs of abuse – (that time you forgot about collecting Kate from the hospital, that time you were late to meet me at King’s Cross, that time you had to go back for the ticket, that time we were held up for three hours at Chambers while you waited for that brief, that time your mother said Dan’s hair needed cutting, that time the men came around about that parking ticket, that time your mother wouldn’t eat the chicken because of the garlic, that time you made a fool of yourself by telling Hart Stanley you didn’t like Hockney, that time you made a fool of yourself telling Carla you did like Magritte, that
time you spilt that wine on Jessica Wainwright’s leg) – and at the final question, what could he be but silent still? He sat there, running one finger round the rim of his empty glass, waiting for her to run down, and wondering, as he waited, if it would have been better, once, to greet these attacks with counter-attacks, to shout back, to deal blow for blow. It was impossible, now to do such a thing, though it might once have been possible; but he had taken the line of no resistance, afraid to lose his temper, afraid to destroy her by losing his temper. That it seemed, now, as though he had destroyed her by keeping his temper was an irony that he had not foreseen: he had wished, perhaps, to preserve his dignity at her expense, and now had no option but to pursue the policy to the end, hoping against hope that his original faith in non-retaliation might one day be vindicated, because he had no other faith.

  When she had run down, she sat down at last – (having been standing over him, her hands at times actually on her hips) – and buried her face in her hands and began to cry. Through her tears she moaned, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’ He stirred, slightly, and put down his glass. It was nearly over. She wept for a couple of minutes, and then stood up and stared at him, blotched and blind, as though she did not know him, and said, ‘I’m going to bed.’ It had all fallen, the ground was flattened, there was nothing left. A curious empty stillness filled the room. She stood there for a moment, as though not knowing where she was, and then turned and left the room, walking as though over a beaten stubble. He sat there, and let her go.

  Alone, he thought at first of nothing, blankly. Then, not wanting yet to join her, he thought about domestic violence, and Rose and Christopher Vassiliou. There were thoughts in his mind about Rose Vassiliou that now, in this lull and emptied heaven, seemed to wish to reassemble themselves, small delicate formations in a feathery washed new sky. He thought about the Easter holidays. He did not want to go away for Easter because he did not wish to leave London because he did not wish to leave Rose. This discovery, this assembly, had to him a pale, hopeless brightness: it shone like the weak light of dawn reflected from the buildings of a silent street. Confusion would fill the street, but not yet. He thought of the time he had spent with Rose that evening: the baby on her knee, the children watching the television, the book she had been looking forward to reading (The Journal of Mungo Park, it had been) and the programme she had been going to watch on the television, after he had left her. Why had she entrusted him with this vision of felicity? Had she known what she was doing, had she known the images that she was slowly forming? No, she had not known: he was sure of it, there had been not a shadow of intention in her. The images that gathered round and above her were emanations, simple risings and gatherings from the soft, full lake of her nature: they were not beckonings or clamourings, they were herself, they did not concern him at all, they would dissolve back into herself as she slept and breathed and woke again and was. There was no point in remarking them, except, indeed, as one might remark the dawn, or other natural manifestations of the self-sufficient natural world.

  He had a friend who was in love with a married woman. She loved him, too, or so his friend said, and he had no reason to doubt him, but that did not mean they had much of a life of it. But he remembered, now, suddenly, that his friend had said to him once, in a rare moment of confidence, ‘I dread the times when she leaves London, you know. Christmas, when she goes to her parents, and the summer holidays, when she and her husband go away. It comes round so often, the years go by and she’s always going away. I don’t know what to do when she’s away.’ ‘But you don’t see much of her when she’s there,’ said Simon, unsympathetic over so vague a loss. ‘Yes, I know,’ his friend had said, ‘but I can’t tell you what a difference it makes, to know she’s there, at least.’ This was the recollection that had been troubling him throughout dinner, from the moment that Julie had started to describe the hotel in Cornwall. Now that he had placed it, it troubled him more than ever. Really, there was no point in evading the conclusion of so much unease. That uncomfortable revelation of himself, through Konstantin’s eyes, as an intruder, that vision (contrasting with so much) of a desirable evening, that pang of anxiety at the thought of going even so far away as Cornwall; there was nothing else that they could mean. Once he acknowledged it, he was amazed that he could have mistaken or ignored the portents for so long. Only a habitually hopeless person like himself could have ignored them. ‘I want her,’ he said to himself. The words walked into his mind and stood about there. They shocked him. They were shocking. He wished instantly, and knew he would continue to wish, that he had never known. ‘I want her,’ himself said again. And then more fully, more decisively repeated, ‘I want what she is.’ That was all there was to it. Of course it was so. How could he not have wanted her? It was over, it was known, it was decided, there was nothing at all, ever, to be done about it. He might as well, now, go to bed.

  So he stood up, put down his empty glass, looked at himself with some curiosity in the mirror, to see if he looked different for having understood, and went up to bed. Julie was lying in bed, not yet asleep: she looked up, as he came in. He could tell, from the way she looked, that it was time for conciliation. It was a duty, that despite all, he always performed with relief.

  ‘Well,’ he said, taking off his shoes, ‘wherever did you find that Caroline Simpson woman? What an amazing creature.’

  ‘Ghastly, isn’t she?’ said Julie. He was overcome with tenderness for her.

  ‘A right bitch,’ he said, pulling at his socks.

  ‘Beautiful, though,’ said Julie. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Is she?’ he said, and Julie, faintly, smiled.

  ‘It was a very good dinner,’ he said. ‘I like that pastry thing.’ (He didn’t like to pronounce the name for it.)

  ‘I know you do. That’s why I make it,’ she said.

  He got into bed by her.

  ‘What kind of a day did you have?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. Then, brightening, ‘Quite nice, really. I went into that new shop near Joy’s, you know, that one with all the long dresses in the window, and there’s a terribly nice woman there running it, do you know, she used to be married to Bill Wakeham, you know’ (as he clearly did not) ‘the one who introduces that programme about pop, and then he left her, or perhaps she left him’ (loyalty had already set in towards this new acquisition) – ‘and she decided she’d have to do something with herself, and first of all she had this boutique in Marylebone High Street, and then she moved up here because she said she had more friends up here, and she’s got some awfully nice things there, really nice and not at all expensive, and so I bought myself a new long dress, I thought it would do for Easter, I needed something for Easter, it’s a lovely colour, a kind of reddy brown, a sort of terra cotta I suppose you could call it, I found a nice bag for Nicole, too. Crochet. It’s her birthday. She was awfully nice, the woman, she said she’d look things out for me if I wanted them. She was really awfully nice.’

  I bet she was, thought Simon, who would not be, to so willing a customer? But at the same time he could not help feeling thankful. He was glad she had had a nice day, and had found a new friend, however short-lived or mercenary the friendship might prove to be. Despite himself, there was still part of him that warmed, from time to time, to her ephemeral enthusiasms, to her wholesale commitment to the feminine pursuit of shopping. Fundamentally it shocked him, this acquisitiveness, this relentless pursuit of unnecessary garments, this desire to buy in order to placate nice, friendly, profiteering, obsequious boutique owners, this obligation to have new garments, new bags, new shoes, new scarves for every trivial expedition or occasion, this giving of gifts on the slightest pretexts, and yet at the same time there lingered in him the emotion that had originally been aroused by this indiscriminate generosity of purchases. He had been accused, from time to time, by intellectual women friends, of antifeminism, because he thought of women as people who spent their time buying luxury goods for
the packaging, and lighting up with desire whenever they saw an attractive window display: and part of him liked (or had liked? perhaps he had, after all, changed?) to think of them so. If they behaved like that, after all, it settled them, it defined them, and (more significantly) meant that they could be kept happy, as long as there was enough flow of money for them to gratify their endless whims. What did Julie want with a new long dress? She had dozens. But he saw, he could even feel, that she was happy with a new one. It made her happy to send flowers, to give drinks, to buy gifts for herself and others. What did it matter, after all? It was nice, it was innocent, to be placated so easily.

  ‘It might be cold at Easter, in Cornwall, I thought,’ said Julie. ‘You’d better take something warm yourself. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will,’ he said, and switched off his bedside light. She shouldn’t have mentioned the word Easter again. She had mentioned it once too often. The thought of the hotel, and the meals, and the boredom, and the waiters, and the other guests, made him feel quite ill. He would probably enjoy it. But he didn’t want to think that he might.

  Rose, also, had fallen asleep thinking of Easter, and with as deep apprehension. She was frightened by it, because she had agreed that Christopher could have the children, over the Easter weekend. He had written to her, saying that he wanted to take them away with him for the three days, and she had agreed. She had not found herself able to protest, because she knew that the children would like it, but once she had agreed she had begun to worry about whether she would ever get them back again. Her solicitor had actually warned her to be careful about letting Christopher see too much of them while the custody case was pending: he was as nervous as she was, by now, and with good cause, about Christopher’s capacity for dramatic and unexpected action. On the other hand, to deny him access at all would have been unwise, he said: and she herself would not have been capable, even if permitted, of so outright a denial. She had taken her stand and could not, in her nature, exceed it. She had to continue to behave as though Christopher were a reasonable person, although she knew that he was not, hoping that he, with as little grounds, would treat her in the same way. Lying there awake, she allowed herself for the first time to imagine that he might actually kidnap them. She had read of such cases: there had been one, only three weeks before, when a father had taken his children out, ostensibly for the day, and had gone off with them on a small boat to France. Who could tell what violent abductions Christopher himself was contemplating? She tossed and turned. The children loved him, and with good cause. She had, at times, wickedly, desperately, shamefully, tried to unknit their love, but the thought of the hideous unravelling, the frightful consequences, had always prevented her from saying too much, too often. And yet, while they loved him, while they were bound to him, she could never be safe. The situation was impossible, insoluble. It was a penalty, it was a judgement. She thought of all those other people, who had done the things that she had done so easily: who had left their husbands and safely remarried, whose ex-husbands had remarried safely themselves. How few fathers displayed so tormenting and dangerous a concern with their children, how many of them simply walked out, with a sigh of relief, and were rarely seen again, except for the odd obligatory Sunday. She had once thought it an indictment upon the whole sex, the ease with which men would abandon their offspring for other women, other lives, and now was forced to wonder what bad luck it was of hers, what fault of hers, that her own husband could not be thus true to type and negligent. Why didn’t he remarry, thoughtlessly, why didn’t he set himself up elsewhere? Was it possible (and this was her worst fear) that she should never have left him? Should she have found in herself the strength to endure their dreadful mutual life? Nobody else had thought so: she had been exonerated, by the courts, by the press, by friends, She could not have taken what she had been expected to take, and so, by leaving him, it must have been the right thing that she had done. And by doing it, she had found happiness, and a life that she could peacefully live, and usefully. But perhaps too much had gone before her to be allowed to live it. Perhaps she would be forced to abandon herself and to return to her non-self, to the self she had been with Christopher, and on his terms, this time, too.