The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  Afterwards, when he had fallen asleep, she worked out that he had probably mistaken her emphatic declaration of her need to get to bed for an expression of desire: her voice had certainly been unnatural as she had said it, because she had been embarrassed about deserting her conversational duties as hostess, when he had clearly wanted to go on talking all night. She discovered the next day that this suspicion was correct: in his version of the English language, to go to bed was an active verb, synonymous for going-to-bed-with, and he had truly thought that what she had meant had been, ‘I must go to bed, now, with you.’ And he had duly obliged. This wouldn’t in itself have worried her very much, but Anton, having found such a welcome, was not at all keen to move on, and she didn’t know how to explain that he had got it all wrong without offending him. She contemplated, the next day, a situation in which he would move in permanently, without her ever being able to communicate that he couldn’t: of course it didn’t happen that way, in the end she did manage to explain to him that he had better find somewhere else, citing the children as a reason. But he did tend to come back and hang around waiting for another invitation. She was careful never to mention the word ‘bed’ again. It reminded her of the headmistress at her school, who had told her girls on no account to invite men into rooms where underclothes or stockings were hanging up to dry. They had laughed at her then, but how right she had been (the canny old spinster). The children must have told Christopher about Anton. One could never explain such an absurd situation. She wondered whether to embark on explaining it now, to Simon, but decided it was impossible to tell the story right: however she told it, it would look like an apology, and she did not feel at all apologetic. She hadn’t thought about Anton for months, until she saw his name in the typescript: the thought of him hadn’t crossed her mind. In a sense, the whole thing was Christopher’s fault anyway: she wouldn’t have dared to be so hospitable with so little protest, if she hadn’t been swallowing pills night after night, for fear that Christopher himself would come back and rape her. He had threatened to do this on several occasions, and had once actually done it, the week after the divorce: well, perhaps it hadn’t been rape exactly, because she hadn’t struggled particularly hard because of her fear of waking and upsetting the children. She had hated him for that more than for anything. But she felt she had deserved it. It had seemed, as Christopher himself had yelled at her, an appropriate punishment. And he had never dared to do it again.

  As an adolescent, like most girls, she had had fantasies of rape. How disagreeable fantasies became, when translated into action.

  She thought of Mr Justice Ward, and his worried look. He was a nice man, he wouldn’t have minded that she had slept with Anton and swallowed a few pills. He would surely have understood it all.

  Suddenly she started to laugh.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ said Simon.

  ‘I was just remembering,’ she said, ‘thinking of judges, a song the kids sing. They skip to it, listen.’ And in a quavering, irritating, imitation child’s nasal whine she sang,

  ‘Fudge, Fudge, Call the Judge

  Mother’s got a new born Baby.

  It isn’t a girl, it isn’t a boy

  It’s just a new born Baby.’

  Wrap it up in tissue paper

  Send it down the escalator

  First floor Missed

  Second floor, Missed,

  Third floor, kick it out the door,

  Mother’s got a new born Baby.’

  They both laughed. He nearly took her hand.

  And so they drove, towards Branston Woods, and Christopher, and the children, and the home she had left for ever. She began to recognize landmarks: towns and villages where she had stopped for meals on previous journeys, familiar skyscrapes, pine forests, the cathedral at Norwich. Gables, Flemish architecture. There were a lot of small animals dead on the roads: shrews, hedgehogs, voles, a weasel. Simon remarked on it, and she said, ‘Yes, but there are so many dead because there are so many living, you know, they’re not really being killed off, it’s where you don’t see them on the roads that there aren’t any in the hedges.’ She was remembering, suddenly, a surreptitious visit she had made with Christopher ten years before, not long after their marriage. Then, they had not dared to approach the house. She wondered if she would dare to do so now. Christopher had commented, as Simon had done, on the death rate on the roads. They had climbed over the wall, she and Christopher, like children, like thieves. And now he had a room there, kept for him, and all her things were gone.

  It was well after four when they reached Grimes Graves and Jim’s Diner. She explained to Simon about the graves: not really graves but caves they were, ancient flint mines, a whole network of them under the earth. She had been down, as a child, with a miner’s lamp, but like Maria she had been frightened by the darkness and the narrowness of the tunnels. There were a lot of cars parked on the road that led off the main road to the Graves: it was a day for sightseeing, and the traffic grew heavier as they drove on towards the coast. As their destination approached, slowly, she began to get nervous, having no very clear idea of what they should do when they got there, and when they turned off the main road to cover the last ten miles she wanted the journey not to end. They were driving through woods, no longer the orderly evergreen plantations, but deciduous woods, thick with undergrowth, and she said, suddenly, ‘It’s a pity we can’t stop and get out for a walk, it’s so lovely here.’

  Simon slowed down. He too was not looking forward to the dénouement.

  ‘We could, if you liked,’ he said.

  ‘Would it matter?’ she said, ‘It couldn’t make much difference, half an hour, could it? Would you mind?’

  ‘I’d like to,’ he said. He thought it was unwise, to stop and to waste time, but did not like to say so.

  ‘I’ll show you a good place to stop,’ she said, and in half a mile they pulled up, into a gateway, and got out. On the gate it said, Private Woods, Keep Out. Rose pushed it open and went through. From the gate a broad green lane stretched between the trees. They walked down it, in silence, their feet sinking into the thick grass. Bracken and brambles grew under the trees. After a few minutes Rose turned off, through the trees: she seemed to know her way. He followed her. A hare, startled by their approach, leaped up and raced away from them, huge and bounding: a dislodged pheasant clattered noisily up almost from under their feet, giving them a reproachful look as it took off. In the trees, small birds sang and rustled: she put her hand on his arm, and pointed upwards, to a bird with a pink breast that was creeping up a tree trunk. ‘It’s a nut hatch,’ she said. And then, as they stood still to watch, she said, ‘These woods are mine, you know. All this land south of the house is mine. Those fir trees were all mine. It was put in trust for me, years ago. These woods are going to be replanted, with conifers. They get a big grant from the Forestry Commission, and tax concessions. There’s nothing I can do about it, nothing at all.’

  He did not know what to say. He looked around him, at her property.

  ‘Ridiculous, really,’ she said, ‘that one can’t get rid of what is one’s own.’

  They stood there, and listened to the rustling of the leaves. He thought of the back yard and the geraniums, of his abandoned crazy paving, of Rose’s muddy patch behind her house in Middle Road.

  ‘Why should you wish to get rid of it?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, lightly. ‘Because I can’t enjoy it, I suppose.’

  ‘I was digging my garden this morning, when Emily rang,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t tell whether I was enjoying it or not.’

  ‘You’re very like me,’ she said.

  ‘But for different reasons.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘You have risen in the world, and I have sunk. How curious it is.’

  There was a sentence in his head, which said, ‘If I had been free, I would have asked you to marry me,’ but it did not seem useful to utter it. They stood there a moment longer, listening, and
then they set off back again. The density of the trees, all so various, all to him so unnamed, amazed him: they trod on an immense abundance of small plants, on fungi purple and orange and brown. From a heap of rotting leaves grew a huge thing, a foot tall, with a large head and a curling fringe: she pointed at it, and said, ‘That’s called a lawyer’s wig, that one. They’re said to be edible, but one wouldn’t like to try.’ A little further on, just before they rejoined the green avenue that led to the gate, Rose stopped sharply and gave a cry: she had walked into a dangling stoat, hung from a tree by string. They stood and looked at it: she was trembling, trying to brush the touch of it out of her hair. It dangled there in the slight breeze, dry and stiff, utterly dead, killed twice over, trapped and hung, its wicked face pointing skywards, its long body lengthened by suspension, swinging from its natural gibbet. It was not rotting: it seemed mummified, dried out by exposure, archaic, pagan.

  ‘It frightened me,’ she said, smiling apologetically, tucking her hair back into its pins.

  ‘If I had been free,’ he said, ‘I would have asked you to marry me.’

  They both stared at the little corpse, strung up as a warning.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, gently, tenderly, ‘ah yes. What a nice time we would have had. I too have thought of it, you know.’

  And without looking at each other, they went back to the car.

  When they arrived at the gates of the house – large, ornate iron gates, set between stone gateposts topped by worn sneering stone beasts – they stopped in astonishment and alarm. A great commotion seemed to be taking place: dozens of cars were parked, a man in an overall was directing traffic. Their first thought was that it must be the police and the press, that disaster had preceded them in some way, so utterly unexpected were all the signs of activity, but a moment’s inspection made it clear that it was no such thing. A yellow poster was stuck on to one of the gateposts: it said BRANSTON HALL. WHIT SATURDAY. NATIONAL GARDENS SCHEME. OPEN TO THE PUBLIC BY KIND PERMISSION OF MR AND MRS BRYANSTON. 2.30 – 7.30 P.M. TEAS.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Rose. ‘What an extraordinary thing.’

  ‘What on earth is it?’ said Simon, trying not to catch the eye of the man in uniform, who was beckoning him forward.

  ‘It’s their open day,’ said Rose, ‘I’d no idea. They only do it one day a year. It’s in aid of district nurses. What on earth shall we do now?’

  ‘I didn’t really know what we were going to do anyway,’ said Simon.

  ‘We could just drive in,’ said Rose.

  ‘Do you think the children will be there?’

  ‘Of course they will. How could they be kept away from fun like that?’

  ‘And if they are there,’ said Simon, ‘what are we going to do about them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘We could just steal them away quietly, if we could find them on our own. Or you could have a word with Christopher. Tell him there’s an injunction on the way, or something.’

  ‘You can have a word with Christopher,’ said Simon. ‘He’s your responsibility, not mine.’

  ‘I daren’t,’ said Rose. And they both began to laugh, helplessly.

  ‘I could do with a nice tea,’ said Rose. ‘Do you think we’re too late? I missed my lunch. So did you, more or less.’

  ‘Why don’t we just pay our two bob and go in and have another think? That man won’t let me hang about here much longer, he’s got his eye on me.’

  ‘Why don’t you go in? Nobody would know you, you could do some reconnaissance for me.’

  ‘I won’t go in by myself. I daren’t. Christopher might shoot me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, even if he saw you he wouldn’t know I was here, would he? If you saw him, you could just say you were sightseeing.’

  ‘What on earth would I be sightseeing here on my own for?’

  ‘You might,’ she said, looking at him, smiling, remarkably gay, ‘you might be doing it out of sentiment. Out of affection for me.’

  ‘An unfulfilled passion for you,’ he said.

  ‘More or less,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I won’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not coming in without you.’ He seemed, for the first time in years, to be saying what he meant as he meant it. The sensation was extraordinary, as though a clamp had been taken off his head.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really expect you to, you know. I’ll come with you. Perhaps I could disguise myself. I don’t know why, I always knew I’d come back one day in disguise. What can I do for myself, to make myself look different?’

  ‘You could wear my glasses,’ he said, ‘but I can’t see very well without them. Or there might be some sunglasses of Julie’s somewhere.’ He rummaged in the glove compartment, and produced some sunglasses, and a silk Dior headsquare with orange and brown blobs on it.

  ‘It won’t suit me,’ she said. ‘It won’t go with my things.’

  ‘It’s not like you to be so choosy,’ he said, and she humbly put them on, and inspected herself in the driving mirror.

  ‘Marvellous,’ he said, contemplating the Julie/Rose image. The bright clear orange tan and white looked very strange round Rose’s unassertive, unpainted face: it was made to go with lipstick, and her features inside it looked lost and pale. ‘Marvellous. Your own mother wouldn’t know you.’

  ‘It’s to be hoped she won’t,’ said Rose. ‘We could have a recognition scene, later, in the drawing-room or the library or the rose garden. Come on, let’s go.’

  So he drove up to the man, and gave him his four shillings, and was directed to a parking place just inside the gates.

  ‘I feel a fool,’ said Rose, getting out of the car.

  ‘You can’t imagine how foolish I feel,’ said Simon, and they set off down the drive towards the house. It was a late-eighteenth-century house, described in the leaflet which they had been given as unpretentious, but to Simon it looked pretentious enough. It was built of a lovely yellow beige brick: the front of the house, which they approached, had four bays, with tall slim decorative pilasters, and round arched doorways opening on to a lawn and terrace. The terrace overlooked a sunken garden with a pond and a fountain playing. The house was delicate, weathered, domestic. The windows of the upper storey, the scrolls at the tops of the pillars, the blind arches, the plain pediment, spoke of simplicity and harmony. Rose, as they walked up the drive, took Simon’s arm, and explained to him its history: it had been built when the family was peculiarly prosperous, owing to marriage into a rich slave-trading family – (and now maintained, she said, by another rich marriage, but that was beside the point) – and it had been an act of defiance against its near and monstrous neighbour, Holkham Hall, a building deeply deplored by the locals for its hideous use of white-yellow brick (here so attractive and mellow, there so crude and unnatural), for its folie de grandeur, its marmoreal classicism, its squat Palladian squareness. It had been ungrateful, really, said Rose, to be so rude to the Cokes, because after all they had drained the land, but the Bells had determined that their country house should be all that Holkham was not – elegant, domestic, tree-surrounded, English, charming. No one could call Holkham charming, she said, we must go there one day, but this, this is charming, isn’t it, and look, they’ve even got the fountain to work, it hasn’t played in years. Her voice could not help but take on colour: she clung to his arm. She was happy, she was happy that he liked her at least, and holding his arm she felt, how much I have missed simply this, an arm to hold, a person to walk with. There’s a lovely herb garden, she said, you must see it, in the rain it’s so beautiful, I used to go and sit there in the pouring rain, and you must come and see the stables, you must see it all. And all the time they both looked out nervously for Christopher with a gun, for the children, for police descending in a helicopter.