The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘There must be other things you could do.’

  ‘I could go back to Christopher. I could move house. It would come to the same thing. But that’s all. That’s the only other thing I could do. It’s simple. Either he has the children, or I have them, or we both have them. It’s unendurable for me to keep them. He’s made it impossible. It would be impossible to go back to him. So there is only one answer.’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider,’ he said (surreptitiously consulting the affidavit) ‘compromising? By moving house?’

  ‘How can I move house? It’s my whole being that’s there.’

  ‘It’s arbitrary. That it happens to be there.’

  ‘Yes. It’s arbitrary. But it’s so. Can you imagine me, in a nice house in a nice district? Can you imagine it?’ She was looking out of the window as she spoke: she turned on him, again aggressively, and said, ‘I can’t afford this case. I can’t pay my solicitors. It’ll ruin me. I can’t afford to defend myself. Financially, spiritually, either way, I can’t afford it. I’ll have to get out. That’s all there is to it. I won’t give, so I’ll have to go.’

  He was dazed by her ugly, meaningless logic. He wanted to ask her to marry him, immediately. He even thought of getting down upon his knees. Instead, he said, ‘Look, Rose, you mustn’t give up so easily. Why don’t you try talking to Christopher about it? Why don’t I try and talk to him for you? He can’t mean this, he can’t mean to have done this to you. He wouldn’t know what to do with the children if you gave them to him.’

  ‘You mustn’t talk to him,’ she said. ‘Please. I know what he’s like, he’s as stubborn as I am, you’ll never get him to change anything. He’s fixed, he’s set. And if he says he wants them, he’ll make himself have them. Like the divorce. He didn’t want me, he hated me, but he wouldn’t let me go. He’ll take them from me, he’ll take them, whether he wants them or not.’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ he repeated, with a fitting note of exasperation, ‘that no judge in the country would let him take them?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ she said, gazing at him, with a mysterious, mad, perverse, elevated smile upon her face, a smile quite awful in its unnatural dignity, ‘ah yes, but I give them, you remember, I give them.’

  And there she stood, pale, irradiated. Then, as suddenly, she moaned, and started to toss her head about, and her hands flew to her hair, and started to tug at it. He leapt to his feet, left his desk, went across to her, took her arms, and gently dissuaded her: her arms were as stiff as sticks, her hair where she had pulled at it stood in clumps, she was not there in the flesh. He held her arm, through her raincoat, and propelled her to the chair, and sat her down: she stumbled clumsily, as though disconnected, and sat as though the joints in her legs had been folded together by his propulsion, like the blades of a penknife. He stood by her, a hand on her shoulder: she stared ahead, unseeing. He did not know what to do with her: she had gone quite out of reach. He would have offered her a drink, if he had had one, but could not risk leaving the room in search of one, so he did nothing but stand there, trying to think of something to say to her. He was helpless, there was nothing he could offer, reason she had rejected, and he couldn’t follow her in her non-reasoning. What was she seeing, with those blank eyes?

  Whatever she saw, she did not begin to tell him, because the telephone rang. He had asked the girl not to put calls through, but he could not leave it ringing. It was Jefferson, wanting to see him, or so he said, urgently. I can’t come at the moment, I’m busy, said Simon, but while he was trying to explain that he would come later he saw Rose get to her feet, and start mechanically to flatten down her hair, preparing to leave: before he got off the phone she was at the door, and had opened it. It opened on to the outer office: the secretary was watching.

  ‘Don’t go yet,’ he said. ‘Don’t go, I’m sure there’s something we can do.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ said Rose, dully. ‘I’m sorry I troubled you. I’m sorry.’

  He couldn’t make a scene, he couldn’t detain her. She smiled at him, a little frozen smile.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  Anyone else he would have accused of taking pleasure from his helplessness.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ll get in touch with me, before you do anything.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, absently, ‘oh yes.’

  And off she went. He watched her go: he went to his window and watched her cross the courtyard below. The distance ached and widened, as she shrunk and withered from his sight. He could have recalled her, he could have shouted, he could not comprehend how he had let her go: and relentlessly, inevitably, she grew smaller, and went away. It was not optical, the impression of her going: it was more that she shrank on his grasp, as her bony shoulder had sunk like a dead bird beneath his hand. He had failed her, he had done nothing for her, and now she turned the corner, her plastic bag slung over her wrist, her hands deep in her pockets, her head bent as though walking into a wind. Hunched and private. He knew that way of walking, a posture of indifferent pain, a shrugged confronting of a hostile element. It was his own.

  It was a cold day, for June. A light rain fell. Looking out of the window still, herself gone, he was surprised to see no leaves falling for the light was autumnal. He thought of Easter, and the snow in Cornwall, and the man who had not been Christopher, bearing the child upon his shoulders through the gathering blizzard: he thought of Rose, and Emily, and their children running around in vests, and the chickens and the armchair. It was a Friday: the next day was the beginning of the Whitsun weekend, another unwelcome holiday, and it was about this that Jefferson had so inopportunely wished to consult him: some case that might require attention during the vacation. If he had not rung at that moment, perhaps some saving word would have come to his lips? Perhaps he would have kept her there with him, have thought of some way of convincing her? Perhaps, perhaps. It was not likely. How dreadful it is, he thought suddenly, that children are born of two parents, that they are the property of two parents with equal claim, that they do not spring fully grown from the brain, as Athene sprang from Zeus. What a ghastly mistake in evolution, for man to have attached such significance to identity, when he is condemned for survival to partition. Because, like Rose, he could not convince himself that the children were hers alone. He remembered them in the car with Christopher, laughing: later, proudly describing its gadgets. Christopher himself, alone, plotting, brooding, playing legal games in a mockery of the care of which he was deprived. He thought of the judgement of Solomon. A chancery judge, in despair over an impossible case, had invoked the ghost of Solomon: in genuine misery, a kindly old grandfather, he had said, I have not his wisdom, and the newspapers had derided him for a decision taken in the darkness of impossibility. But a decision had had to be taken. And so Rose, the true mother perhaps, would leave the baby kicking there, in the chalk circle, unable to resist a rival claim.

  Rose walked. She was not sure where she was going, she walked blindly, through unfamiliar streets. Her head ached and stormed. She had known it would come, she had felt it coming for months, and here it was: quietly she repeated herself, I will live through it, I will live through it. But it was bad, it was worse than she could have imagined. Her head split. If someone had taken a hatchet and split my skull, she thought, I could not suffer more. I feel the blood running in my brain, from this internal wound. My brain is wet with blood. It pours through where my mind is, I bleed, I bleed, I bleed. Let them not tell me we are material beings, it is in the spirit that we know pain, it is in my head, my spirit, it is there, I feel it. I am cut into two by the axe. I bleed, she said, I will live through it, she said, as her feet followed one another on the wet pavement.

  She emerged upon the Kingsway, and walked into a coffee shop. It was one where she had been with Konstantin: he had called it the Snake Café, because he had thought that its sign, portraying a swirl of smoke arising from a cup, had been a picture of a snake. She queued, shuffling, as though unable to lift h
er feet: took a salad, a cup of coffee, sat down at a glass-topped table on a high uncomfortable stool. She stared into space at the street outside. She saw not the street, but an airport. The airport was in Africa, in Gbolo: it was where she was. She had just got off the plane, and she sat there in the lounge, with nowhere to go, sick and ill from the journey. She saw herself there, as from a distance: herself, sitting there in her mackintosh, with a suitcase at her feet. It was a vision so strong, so real, that she knew she must do it, that there she would be. But how could she be there? She should never have allowed herself to admit this image, it had formed itself slowly and dreadfully, the details gathered round it inexorably: she had tried to blot it out, she had reasoned with it, but its power was stronger than she was. The passport, the plane, the money, the ticket, the departure, the objects in that suitcase. It was a vision, and how could she know whether it was a temptation of God or the Devil? Twice before she had had these visions, and they had been made flesh. She had seen herself marrying Christopher, in defiance of all reason, and it was vision that had walked her to the registry office: the image of herself doing it had been too strong for her. Then again, later, she had seen herself signing the cheque. She had seen her hand writing her signature. God, she thought, had held her hand. He had propelled her fingers. Rose Vertue Vassiliou, he had written: and the oblong piece of paper had been taken from her, had gone up in smoke and fire. She had thought to have no more such visions, she had thought that she had found a humble way to survive them. She had thought, I am too old for these hallucinations, my next house I will not build upon the sand. But it too had crumbled. What is it, what is it, she asked herself, as her coffee grew colder, what is it that forms these acts for me, and what can I do, since they come to me, but submit to their promptings?

  She worked it out: she would plan it in detail. She would consult the flights, the necessity for injections. She would find reasons. I will go there, she said, I will live there quietly till the money comes through, I will take a job if I can get one, and by the time the money comes through I will know what to do with it. I will be sensible, this time, I won’t let it be burned, I’ll find out first where it’s needed, where it can be used. And then I will have done what I must do. And by then, I will know how to make myself useful. And by then, also, I will have travelled further than I will ever travel here, the ways of loneliness and extremity, I will voyage into that dark interior, I will satisfy this spiritual craving, I will see what it is like, that other world, the world of destitution, I was made for it, and there, in that hideous dark misery, which now, here, I cannot imagine, but which there could not deny itself to me – for what else would there be, nothing, nothingness – there I should see it, the unimaginable. It is there, it calls me, I have only to walk towards it, I myself. It is in me to go that journey, so how can I refuse it? Chosen, I was, to go those ways, or they would not so call to me, they would not lie open before me. If I do not go, I will wither and perish for not having gone. I cannot survive my own rejection of this image. It gathers in the darkness of my soul. It is my only chance to appease God himself, who so pursues me with these suggestions, who sends after me his fierce angels with their clattering wings. It is sacrifices that God has always demanded. He demanded Isaac. On the hilltop, the innocent. He shall have my children. On that dingy airport, where I shall be ill, and wretched, and lonely, he shall have myself. And there I shall find him. It is the only way to find him. There he will be, in that loss and solitude, in those nights of anguish. There I shall go. Not many people go there, but to that land I shall go.

  She contemplated the vision. It seemed real, it seemed solid, it breathed life. And then, to test it, she conjured up the image of her children. They too seemed real and living. Incompatible, incompatible. She could not make them lose colour, her children, their faces would not fade on her, they were as real, as insistently real. Her mind started to divide again, sickeningly: the pain started up again. She had read once that the mind is indeed in two halves, and that some people have the halves divided, so that the right hand truly does not know what the left hand is doing. She experienced division. But the two sides did not obliterate each other, they collided, they continued to co-exist. It was unendurable. She could feel a cold sweat standing out on her skin. She prayed for the angel that appeared to Jacob. Oh God, oh God, she prayed, release me, be merciful, send me an angel with a sword, tell me what I must do. Restore me, restore me, I cannot endure a moment longer. They will cry if I leave them, God, they will cry for me, I love them, they love me. Take away your message. Take it away.

  But God was not particularly merciful. All he sent to her was another tag, leading to the desert.

  (It was largely desert, Ujuhudiana, an unfruitful land. Cracking plains of mud, dryness, dust, where small people had washed themselves humbly like saints in their own urine, stinking, defenceless. And over the border slouched Man the Murderer, swinging his long arms.)

  If ye will not give up wife and mother and children to follow me, he said, unhelpfully, cruelly, ye shall in nowise enter into the kingdom of heaven.

  I must be mad, thought Rose, shaking her head, eating a mouthful of lettuce. I should see a psychiatrist.

  I don’t want this vision, she thought, crossly. I really don’t want it. It’s silly and useless. What good is twenty thousand pounds to an economy like that? My other vision was quite good enough. Living in Middle Road, like a quiet person. What was wrong with it? Was it that it had got too agreeable? Was it not melodramatic enough? Perhaps it is the melodrama that is the temptation, after all. Could I not convince myself that it is my own neurosis that prompts me? Be reasonable, now, you know it is neurosis. What else could it be? Look at your background, woman. Look at the spectacular uselessness of every gesture you have ever made. Why do you think this new one will be any better? It is nothing, it is part of the pattern. You could break the pattern now, if you tried. You could sit it out, as Simon said. You could resist. You could, now you are a grown woman, refuse to listen. Blot it out.

  The woman in the airport paid no attention. She sat there grimly, refusing to be dislodged.

  You realize, of course, what you’ve done, said Rose, mother of three children, to that unpleasant martyr, that faithless missionary. You’ve simply constructed for yourself the most horrible renunciation your mind can conceive. That’s all you’ve done. It’s silly, it’s pointless.

  But the woman in the airport looked up from her dusty shoes, with a tight dismissive smile of contempt, and said No, no. I didn’t construct it. Christopher and God constructed it, they connived at it, they left me nothing else to do, don’t you remember?

  I don’t believe you, said Rose.

  Ah, said the woman. Refuse to believe. Abandon me. The choice is yours.

  Oh God, said Rose, munching her salad angrily. I don’t care. You can die for all I care. I’m going to go back now, and soon I can collect Maria and Marcus from school.

  And the woman rose to her feet, white and wailing. In Rose’s mind she wailed, like a soul in hell. On the bottom right-hand corner of the day of judgement she wept and wrung her hands, across the continents.

  On Friday evening, Simon sat at home. The evening seemed endless. The children were sitting up late, as there was no school the next day: he had promised the boy that he could watch the late sports programme. The girls were bickering, monotonously, over a packet of felt pens, each claiming it as her own, neither sure whose in fact it was, and whose had been lost. Julie was watching a play on the television, and doing some crochet work. It was much in vogue, crochet. Simon himself was trying to reply to a letter of his mother’s: she had written to him the week before, which she rarely did, expressing interest in the USTK case, a desire that the family would visit her for a few days in the summer, complaints about the bad weather, assurances (which could only mean the opposite) that she was in good health. He could not concentrate on his reply, because the atmosphere in the room was restless. Julie had wanted to go away for Whit
sun, and he had refused, saying it would be too expensive, so soon after Easter, but she knew as well as he did that the refusal was arbitrary, and in revenge she had been difficult about the possibility of visiting his mother. Her irritation conveyed itself to them all, without words. He sat there, staring at the sheet of paper on his desk, at the words: Dearest Mum, Thank you so much for your letter, I was glad to hear … He was thinking of Rose, and of the cowardly and utterly characteristic way in which he had let her go. He was insistent enough on some occasions: he had won a case he should have lost, when his sympathies had been engaged (he might as well now admit it) the other way. His sympathies had been engaged with Rose too: was that why he had let her go? Because the truth was that he had known what she had been talking about. Nonsense it had been in some terms, but it had made sense to him. He had had no right to answer his telephone and to allow her to escape. He should have taken her hand from the door and shut it. He should have declared himself. Irrelevant it might have been, his declaration of interest, for what could Rose want with his affection at such a time, but nevertheless he should have done it, because that was what he had been prompted to do. There was no point in behaving reasonably on such occasions. She had not behaved reasonably in looking to him for assistance and advice. She had wanted him to say something to her. She had shown some form of trust and he had betrayed it.

  He wondered what would have happened if he had spoken. He constructed, shamefully, a situation in which he had done so. A fantasy, it was, an image. He had done it before. He said to her, in this fantasy: I love you, I admire you. And she responded, if not with emotion at least with relief, with pleasure, with some feeling. And then they would hold together, after this declaration: they would marry, they would set up house together, they would eat and talk and watch the television and discuss the world together. Where the children were in this fantasy he did not know: sometimes they were with them, all six of them, sometimes they had disappeared, along with Julie and Christopher, into the outer darkness. He saw only episodes, as though picked out by the unnatural spotlight of hope: himself and Rose sitting together quietly in her dingy house, or walking in the country, or visiting his mother (why this returned so insistently he did not know) or going together to a dinner or a party. Talking over the headlines in the paper. Discussing his cases. Africa. Trades Unions. Politics. Students. Other people. The future. And the ironic thing about these visions was that they were not at all, in terms of character, in terms of their own selves, improbable. He and Rose were similar, he knew it. She was not one of those sexual fantasy women in vulgar black underwear: she was, in person, no less and no more attractive than he was himself. And in character, in interests, they were alike. There was nothing visionary about an image of their conjunction. It was sober, real, possible. It would even be productive and useful. They would be a good combination, good companions. He thought of the marriages he knew, marriages that he admired and envied, based on a community of interest, a common purpose. Most of them were second marriages, one had to admit. And there was the fatal flaw. For how could one soberly, quietly, responsibly, ever build such a thing upon destruction? Upon dead Julie, dead Christopher, upon the weeping of infants? The Mexicans (he thought it was the Mexicans) used to cement the foundations of their edifices with the blood of slaughtered children, for their greater security. And that was a logic which he did not wish to pursue. Nevertheless, beyond some gap in time and action, he and Rose sat down to supper together, with books perhaps beside their plates upon the table, looking up from time to time to compare notes, smiling as they pushed each other the butter, salt or bread.