The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  He wronged her in his mind, wilfully. It gave him some malicious satisfaction.

  He called Kate to him, and sitting uncomfortably on the rock, on its wet gritty edges, they ate their sandwiches and their piece of chicken, and their tomato and their banana. When they had finished, remembering another of the delights of the North Yorkshire coast, they went to look for sea anemones, and found some, clinging and wavering under the water, below the jellied hard censorious blobs of their stranded relatives, and they fed them with bits of left-over ham. The anemones embraced the scraps avidly, and avidly engulfed them. Kate was utterly delighted. He had never seen her so entranced. She had never seen anything so exciting in her life, she said, and he knew what she meant: the way the dark-red muscular flower-like fronds seized and closed in upon the threads of meat was a treat, a spectacle. She would not leave them: she hung around, trying them, when the ham was finished, with bits of bread, but the bread they spat out, crossly, spurning it, and it was spewed forth, along with grit and sand, to disintegrate, soggily, clouding the clear sucking water. ‘They don’t like it, they don’t like it,’ she cried, enchanted by their discrimination, and then, quickly, wishing to perpetuate for ever the delight, ‘can we come here tomorrow, we could buy them some shrimps, can we come here tomorrow and bring them a tin of sardines?’ He knew what she meant: how could one relinquish such a pleasure, once discovered, yet how explain that it might not be so amusing the next day? He diverted the conversation to oysters and pearls.

  After a while they began to get cold, and Simon suggested that they should move on: they could continue onwards, without retracing their steps, up the cliff and on to the next village, and then back to the hotel along the road. Kate was reluctant to move: shivering, damp, her face by now mottled and her lips blue, she was unwilling to leave so rich a treasury, unwilling to abandon the scene of so much emotion, even though the emotion was spent and destroyed by the cold. ‘We’ll come again, one day,’ he said: and she hovered on the verge of accepting the promise, knowing that it was not firm, and that even if it were, another day might find her changed or the scene dried and colourless. In the end she pretended to accept, and followed him. The path upwards was steep and slippery, from so much recent rain: after a while he made her go first, in case she slipped. They were out of breath by the time they reached the top, and he could feel that Kate was about to start whining, but luckily they could see the village ahead: it offered them an objective, and they picked up. Kate started to sing, tunelessly, a French song which she had learned at school, of which she understood not a word: it was an incantation, to her, meaningful because incomprehensible. He was full of hope for her. He ought to have known that it could be like this. They passed one couple, coming towards them, on the way: the man smiled, and raised his hat to Kate, and said good afternoon. The village was further off than it had looked, and for the last quarter of an hour he had to cajole her with promises of sweets: she said that she wanted an icecream, and he said that he couldn’t believe that she really wanted one, on so cold a day, and she stared at him in amazement, unable to understand that the weather could in any way affect so absolute a desire. The first building that they reached, on the cliff top, was a small chapel: they paused by its gate, and Simon, under the influence of those past years of arduous instructional sightseeing, thought that he would go in. She had been a great one for visiting such places, his mother: churches, castles, stately homes, Roman walls, she had taken them all in, leaving his father parked in the small Ford, immobile, gaping at the changeless car-parks of England, like an old grandmother taken for an airing. Kate followed him, nervously, through the arched doorway, and hovered by the postcards and visitor’s book, hoping to be bought a postcard, while he walked slowly round. There was not much to see: it was bleak and empty, and the glass was white. There were plaques to drowned seamen on the walls, and a model of a lifeboat, and a tattered flag, rescued from a wreck two hundred years before. Tattered and threadbare it was, as though a breath would have crumbled it: dark and spined, like a dry leaf or a bat’s wing. There was an eighteenth-century plaque to the squire’s daughter, who had died at the age of twenty-five, unparalleled for her elegant accomplishments, and gentle virtue: discreet marble scrolls and thin sloping gently curled script bore witness to her departure from this life. Beneath the inscription, there was a quotation, in quotation marks, but unacknowledged: it said, ‘They sorrow not as those that have no hope.’ Simon read this, and stopped still, and read it again. It seemed to echo in him, but why he could not say. ‘They sorrow not as those that have no hope.’ What hope had they had, those that had lost her? And what sorrow had they suffered, then, so delicately distinguished from his own? He aligned himself with the hopeless. It was blank verse, the line, iambic pentameter, and perhaps it was from that alone that it drew its authority and its strange reverberations. He thought not. There was more to it than that. He would remember it.

  On the way out, he bought Kate a postcard, a crudely tinted job with a falsely smiling sky and a floral graveyard. She liked it, clung to it, and expressed astonishment that one was trusted to pay: ‘But we could take them all and nobody’d know,’ she said, whispering breathily, amazed at the church’s faith, as he gave her sixpence to slip into the ornamental tin box. ‘Who would want them all?’ he said, as they emerged into the light, and then was sorry he had said it, as he saw her clutch her booty and wince at the suggestion that it was not universally desirable and worthy of theft. He was delighted by her timidity, her sense of honour, her pleasure at so small a price: but his delight suffered slightly when she stopped in front of the first village shop, which was a gift shop, and tried to persuade him to buy her an owl made out of shells or a horrid little sailor boy with joints made out of springs. ‘But they’re horrid,’ he said, without hesitation: and then, seeing her lip tremble and her brows darken, he added hastily, ‘and anyway, it’s Easter Monday, the shop’s shut. Come on, I’ll buy you some sweets.’

  ‘I want an icecream, I want an icecream,’ she wailed, crossly, tired and wet, trailing behind him, luckily not seeing that the shop was in fact, of course, open, in a vain attempt to catch the non-existent Easter tourist trade: she wailed this incessantly till they arrived at the village grocer’s, and he said to her several times that she couldn’t have an icecream but could have sweets, but when they got there she had irritated him to such a degree that he bought her what she wanted, saying, ‘It serves you right if it freezes you to death.’ He then had to stand there watching her eat it, on the pavement, turning bluer at every mouthful, her ungloved hands (she had lost her gloves) turning a shocking shade, her lips a pallid violet, her whole body starting to tremble with chill, and icecream dripping down the front of her anorak. As soon as she had finished it, she started to whimper, afraid to voice the idea but unable to conceal it, ‘I’m cold, I’m cold, I’m cold.’

  ‘There, what did I tell you, I told you so,’ said Simon, crossly: and then as suddenly softened, because the poor creature looked so pathetic standing there, ashamed and defiant, having known all along that an icecream would finish her off, and yet quite unable to resist it: and he took her hands, and rubbed them, and knelt down and folded her inside his coat and tried to warm her up. She cheered up as soon as he relented, and hid her face inside his jacket and breathed warm air round herself. She felt small and wet and bony: she had been quite fat, once, this one, but since starting school the year before had grown long legs and had thinned off into a childish skinniness. He liked her thin: thin, she was more his own.

  ‘We ought to set off back, now,’ he said, when she had warmed herself a little. ‘We’ll both get cold, if we stay here much longer. Shall we go?’

  ‘Yes, let’s go,’ she said, and took his hand. They walked back along the road, a much shorter route than the way they had gone, and from the road, for part of the way, they could see the cliff track below them that they had walked along, and the tiny figures of people walking, bent in the wind that was now gatherin
g force: he thought that snow would soon fall. He pointed out to her the woman and the man who had taken his hat off to her, small and far away: ‘They haven’t got far,’ said Kate, bravely, fighting the numbness in her boots, and wishing she hadn’t got water in them in the rockpool. After a while they came to another footpath down to the cliff track: a large car was parked at the top of it, on the grass, a large expensive car, a Mercedes, not the kind of car for such excursions, and Simon looked to see if he could see who had been in it, and whether they were indeed walking in such weather, abandoning such luxury: and there, half a mile down the footpath, he could see a man and three children. The man was carrying the smallest child, and the two larger children were running ahead, and shouting in excitement. The thin calls of their excitement just reached him, like gulls’ cries, on the wind. He thought that he recognized Konstantin Vassiliou: it was the same blond hair, the same stature, the same movements. He stood still and stared. He was sure it was them. And there was Christopher Vassiliou, walking into the wind with a child on his back. He stared and watched, but the distance was so great that it was impossible to be sure. He had missed them by perhaps a quarter of an hour. It was impossible to be sure: it could have been any blond-headed child running there towards the sea, it was impossible to say why the idea had flashed into his mind that it could be them. He looked back at the large car, parked at the road side, already ten yards away: he could have gone back, he nearly went back to look through its windows, to identify possessions, he would have gone back had he been on his own, but because his daughter was there he could not. He stood there, and shouted: ‘Konstantin,’ he shouted, and the wind, as he had known it would, took the voice from his lips and carried it far inland. Had the wind been blowing the other way, he would not have called: and had the children turned, they would not have known him. They did not turn. They continued to run towards the sea. The man that might have been Christopher stopped, and the child that might have been Maria climbed down off his shoulders and ran after the others. The first flakes of snow fell, obliquely, blown on the wind, eddying. The car still stood there: new, but covered in mud. His eyes were not good, he could not read the number plate, he had taken off his glasses, they were no use in such weather.

  ‘Who was it, Daddy?’ asked Kate, who had stopped with him, obediently, like a dog, subdued by fatigue.

  ‘It’s nobody,’ said Simon, ‘I thought it was somebody I knew. But it wasn’t.’

  ‘It’s starting to snow,’ said Kate.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘We’d better get home quick.’ And he set off at a brisk walk, Kate lagging behind: after a hundred yards she started to whine again, about her wet feet, so he carried her, in imitation of the imaginary Christopher, who had disappeared into the bleak landscape. She was heavy: like the imaginary Christopher, he did not keep the gesture up for long.

  When they got back to the hotel, they found Julie sitting where they had left her, with Sally, in the lounge: they were having tea. He half expected the welcome due to a returning astronaut, after so bracing an excursion, and he could see on Julie’s face the shadow of an impulse to rise, to fuss, to exclaim, to commiserate and complain about wet clothing, the weather, the cold, but indolence conquered it. She had been sitting down for so long that she hadn’t the energy to get up. ‘Hello,’ she said, puffing cigarette smoke. ‘You’re back, are you? Was it nice? Have a cup of tea, I’ll get some more cups. The cakes are awful, I was just saying to Sally, the rest of the food’s so good, it’s amazing they can’t get better cakes.’

  ‘I think we’d better go and get dry,’ he said, unable to resist a faint echo of reproof: she received it, but chose to ignore it.

  ‘Shall I come and find you some dry things, Katey?’ she said, without conviction, not intending to move.

  ‘No, no, I’ll go,’ said Simon, fishing in his pocket for his steamy wet glasses. ‘I’ll have to go up anyway.’

  ‘All right,’ said Julie, relapsing from her slightly inclined position of attention: the armchair received her, she was rooted to it.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Kate, and they went up in the lift. He remembered to let her push the button. They went into her room first: she was thawing out now, her nose was running, and she complained that her hands were all tingly. She sat down on the bed, and he knelt down to pull her boots off, as she reached for her book: she had got it out of the library downstairs, it was called The Ship of Adventure. She was a keen reader, unlike the other two. He pulled off her boots, and her wet woollen socks, and stared in dismay at her white bloodless feet: they were icy, and solid, and a pale waxy yellowy white. She smelt of wet wool: she had no body smell at all yet, her flesh still had the firm self-contained ungiving purity of infancy. Her toenails needed cutting. He held her feet in his warm hands: he felt sorry that he had made her walk so far, that he had been so irritated by her whining. Her feet lay in his hands like separate creatures. She turned a page of her book.

  ‘Shall I run a warm bath for you?’ he asked her, penitent, but she wasn’t listening. He wriggled her toes, trying to soften her up a bit: her feet looked frail and pathetic, like (he could not help the comparison) the feet so often painted on crucifixions. ‘Kate,’ he repeated, ‘aren’t you cold, don’t you want to warm yourself up?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said, closing her book with a sigh of tolerance. ‘I’m all right, really.’

  He got a warm towel, from the heated towel-rail in the bathroom, and rubbed her hair, and her feet, and got her a dry jersey and pinafore dress. She was beginning to revive. She smiled at him. ‘My verruca tickles,’ she said. She was proud of her verruca: she had picked it up at school, in the swimming bath, it was a badge of honour, a true school-age affliction, an initiation into the six-year-old world. He inspected it, dutifully: there it sat, a little round rather dirty wart, growing and flourishing in the middle of her heel.

  ‘How’s it coming on?’ he said, and she smiled, sharing his amusement at her pride in it. ‘It’s very well, thank you,’ she said.

  ‘I had one, when I was at school,’ he said, ‘and I cut it out myself, with a razor.’

  He recalled, as he spoke, its stubborn roots, and the perseverance with which he had hacked at it, night after night, and the satisfaction he had felt when, one night, it had dropped out, leaving a neat little hole in the middle of his messy excavations. He had since recognised that it had probably died in the course of nature, as they usually do, and that his self-inflicted surgery had done nothing to aid its final loss of grip. But he continued to remember his efforts with some pleasure.

  ‘I don’t want mine cut out,’ she said, ‘I like it.’

  ‘You’re a silly girl,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she said, and reached for her book, looking up, just before she started reading, to remark, ‘There’s a book of Grandma’s, you know, in the bookcase downstairs, I noticed it.’

  ‘Is there really?’ he said, but she was away, her thumb in her mouth, her neck sunk in her blue polo-neck jersey, her bare feet dangling.

  ‘I’m going to get dry myself,’ he said. ‘Put some dry socks on before you go down, won’t you?’

  She didn’t answer, so he left her, and went to his own room next door. Somebody had tidied away his papers: he had left them out on the table. They sorrow not as those that have no hope, he said to himself, and had a shower. He wondered if other fathers, like himself, were making a brief obligatory delightful holiday contact with their children, in this very building, here, and all over the country. He thought of Christopher Vassiliou, and Rose, and their dreadful divisions. He had thought, at one point, that he might ring Rose, to see how she was, to see if there was any news: it had seemed a possible, even a probable and expected thing to do, before he set off, he had looked forward to it, but now he felt uneasy about it, he felt it would be unnatural, a breach of an arrangement, an error of propriety. He knew quite well that he wanted to ring her not at all for her sake, but for his own: that he had been usin
g her anxiety as an excuse for maintaining contact, much as one might use a financial debt or a forgotten briefcase or a family connection. There was no particular reason why he should ring her: in fact there was less reason than ever, for lawyers, like other people, do not operate over Easter weekend, so there was no possibility of any action having taken place. It would be thoughtless, on his part, to inquire. And yet she never seemed to mind his inquiring: she seemed to need it, to like it, to want it. As perhaps, she needed, liked and wanted everyone. Perhaps she had recognized his need: perhaps she, kindly, had used her own troubles as a convenient pretext for alleviating his. Perhaps it was simply all the same to her: perhaps she dismissed no callers on the phone or at her house, as she dismissed no neighbour babies from her knee. Maybe he was, to her, but another obligation, along with other people’s children and unmarried mothers and emergent Africa and Methodist homes for disabled workmen. She had added him, adroitly and knowingly, to such a list, with kindness and undistinguished sympathy. With her, how could one ever tell the difference?

  He put his clothes on, and sat down at the table, and opened his briefcase, and stared at his next brief. He did not much like the look of it: he did not much relish re-reading for the thousandth time the Redundancy Payments Act. It was not a particularly interesting brief, he suspected, though inevitably he would get interested in it, once he had started on it. That was how it always was. Instead of this case, he had nearly come away with a case involving one of the subsidiaries of Rose’s father’s company: a claim about some heavy lorries, and whether they had been employed or subcontracted. It had looked quite intriguing, but through some vague sensibility he had refused to handle it, saying that he would prefer not to, for personal reasons. The use of that phrase, ‘personal reasons’, had given him great satisfaction. Perhaps it was in order to use it that he had declined the case. The Head of his Chambers, Jefferson, had got to hear of this, and had been very impertinent about it, in Simon’s view. Simon thought about Jefferson. He was getting distinctly odd these days: having started off with Simon in a flood of bonhomie and familiarity, comparing, whenever they met, notes on their not too dissimilar backgrounds, full of encouragement and praise, he had gradually become more and more difficult, quibbling about minor points, taking Simon up on trivial incidents, even taking exception, on one occasion, to the colour of his shirt. They had met, one day that winter, as they crossed the courtyard: Jefferson had stopped in his tracks, stared at Simon, pulled several very strange facial expressions, and had finally delivered himself of the sentence, ‘You know, times may have changed, but what if you met somebody important while you were wearing a pink shirt?’ And he had frowned, scratched his ear vigorously, and marched off, without waiting for a reply. Simon had been unable to tell whether the remark had been a joke or not, and had given up wearing his only pink shirt. He would not have liked a repetition of the incident, had the remark been either jocular or critical. Other colleagues had complained of similar attacks, so on the whole one could put them down to a general, not a personal state of susceptibility and irritability, but Simon had so long been used to consider himself as the favourite son and honoured heir that he was particularly alarmed by these new eccentricities, and felt particularly obliged to placate or circumvent them. It had got back to him one day that spring, through eager reportage, that Jefferson had said to Baker something to the effect that, ‘It’s no good asking Camish about it, he can’t see the trees for the wood.’ He had puzzled over this endlessly, wondering what it could possibly mean: was it a reference to his method of working, or his intellectual capacity, or his political bias? Jefferson had on various occasions made remarks about the possibility of Simon’s standing for Parliament: ‘You’ve got it all,’ he used to say, ‘you’re a graduate working-class Fabian, what more do you want?’ – and again, Simon had been unable to understand whether these suggestions were made seriously or ironically. It was well known that Jefferson himself had stood, but failed to be elected, in 1946, and had never forgiven the backbiting amongst his own party workers, which, in his view, had ruined his campaign: and since then his attitude to politics had been so heavily ironic that it was almost impossible to tell where his true affiliations lay. The whole tenor of his work was socialist in principle, and indeed that was why Simon, via his Director of Studies, had found himself in his Chambers in the first place: but despite this his attitude to ‘the workers’, as he described them, was far from benevolent, and he always spoke of them, even while ostensibly defending their interests, with a profound dismissive hostility, and when there were any particularly unsympathetic demonstrations of working-class prejudice, such as the dockers’ parade of support of Enoch Powell, his comments were positively triumphant.