The Needle's Eye

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘You’ll have no more trouble from Christopher,’ said Jeremy Alford, again, standing there on the pavement, hailing a taxi with his umbrella, a strong wind tugging at his raincoat.

  But within a year, Christopher had moved back into the house in Middle Road.

  In a way, Simon said to himself, eighteen months later, when he had got used to it, we ought to have expected it. What else were they to do? It had not much surprised him, even at the time. Looking back, he took comfort in recalling his lack of surprise.

  The new situation even had its conveniences, from his own point of view. It was not as though Rose and Christopher were happily reconciled, warmly reunited. They still had their problems, and one of the results of their new arrangement was that they seemed to need company and support. The two families, the Camishes and the Vassilious, saw quite a lot of each other. This improved the quality of Simon’s domestic life immensely. Julie invited the Vassilious to dinner constantly, and they often accepted. They also met, with the children, at weekends, from time to time, and organized an occasional excursion to Kew Gardens or Hampton Court. Christopher taught the Camish children to roller skate. Julie taught Rose to crochet. Rose seemed genuinely fond of Julie, and Julie, responding to affection, merged a little more happily in Simon’s mind with the image he had once had of her.

  In fact, in some ways Julie seemed to be becoming what he had once taken her to be: as she grew older her mannerisms began to suit her better, she became better looking, it seemed that she had managed to achieve her childhood ambitions, she had managed to become smart, and generous, and worldly. She had become an attractive woman. He caught glances directed towards her, at dinner-parties, and could now see that they expressed admiration. Perhaps they had always done so, and he alone, guiltily, had misinterpreted them. It was he alone that had thought, when people had thanked her for gifts or hospitality, that the thanks contained an element of mockery. It had not been so, perhaps. People liked her. They liked her company. Rose liked her. They would talk together on the telephone for hours, like real women, and Julie would come back to him and report what Rose had said.

  Things were better, domestically, than he had ever hoped. He even began to enjoy his social life, now that one or two of his own friends were included in it; Julie had become more gracious towards his interests.

  Indeed, the new regime was so successful that Diana, who had in a sense initiated the whole thing, was heard to remark in exasperation that it was all Simon Camish’s fault that the Vassilious had gone back to each other. He couldn’t have stood the strain of the real thing, she said, but he’s quite happy propping them up and watching and helping and acting as mediator. Well, let them be, said Nick. He had given Rose up long ago. But Diana could not quite let them be. Her relinquishing of Simon was more recent, she did not like to see Rose playing so successfully the role in which she had cast herself. It’s a great mistake, she said, a kind person aggrieved as much by her own pique as by her cause for pique, it’ll do them no good, you wait and see, you wait.

  And of course there was some truth in what she said. It worried Simon greatly. Julie had improved, in his mind, it was true, but Rose had deteriorated. Christopher’s effect upon her was not for the good: she became increasingly querulous, strained, irritable. She and Christopher would quarrel, even in public, for no reason, idly, bitterly, tiresomely, and Rose always emerged from these disputes without credit. She appeared, she was, petty, vindictive, resentful. Simon had thought, at one time, that these evidences of her unhappiness would have gratified him, but as he watched, he knew that he was losing more than he could gain in secret pleasurable knowledge. He was losing her: she was being destroyed, before his eyes. And yet he accepted what she had done. He accepted her terms, completely. What else could she have done?

  He waited, patiently, as everyone else waited, for Rose to announce that she and Christopher were buying a new house. It was inevitable that they should: they could not go on living where they were. And with the announcement, thought Simon, I will know that that is it: she will really have made the sacrifice, she will have lost.

  He waited, but the announcement never came. At first, as the months passed, he thought, she is winning some victory in there, behind those threadbare curtains. She is sticking it out, meaninglessly faithful she is loyal to her vows. But then he began to notice that things were changing. It was not only Rose herself that was changing, it was the whole district she lived in. By some freak of fashion, it was coming up in the world. The process was at first so slow that it was almost imperceptible: but once noticed, the signs were clear, they multiplied, the change accelerated. Sale notices appeared on house fronts: whole streets were bought up, painted up, resold. Property prices soared. Rose’s own house tripled in value, while she did nothing but sit in it. The less traditional branches of the middle classes moved in: an actor, a journalist, a publisher, a civil servant, a lecturer in sociology, an antiquarian bookseller. Front doors were painted black and khaki and ochre and sage. Lace curtains and decorative little wrought iron gates disappeared: the prams on the street got shabbier, the windows dirtier, the glimpses of wallpaper more expensive, and the shop on the corner began to sell French cigarettes. Some of the Greeks stuck it out: there were still a few houses with the bricks painted red and the pointing picked out in other colours, but their number was not increasing, as it had been. But then the Greeks were on the whole fortunate enough to own their own houses, so they could not be dislodged. It was the tenants who began to disappear. Once the landlords latched on to what was happening, out they went, all those who could be legally evicted. Mrs Sharkey’s tenancy was protected by law for the first year of the improvements, but she knew she was going to have to get out in the end. ‘I can’t complain,’ she said, ‘I’ve only been paying a pound a week for the whole house. That’s why the roof leaks. There’s fungus as big as my fist growing out of the ceiling upstairs. You can’t complain, at a pound a week, can you?’ Mrs Sharkey was lucky, she was on the list for a council flat and was given one when her rent was increased. It was on the tenth floor, and she moved in there with her two sons, her daughter Eileen, and her granddaughter. At first she was quite thrilled with it: Rose, visiting her, was vaguely depressed by her enthusiasm for the new kitchen and the small square rooms and the mini-balcony where she was not allowed to hang her clothes or keep budgies. Then, being Rose, she reproached herself for this mean, romantic response. I’m a fool, I’m a fool, said Rose to herself. But after six months Mrs Sharkey was fed up with the flat: the plaster was cracking, the lift never worked, she missed talking on the front steps, she missed her neighbours, she missed Rose. Rose felt reassured. She sat there and watched the baby, bumbling about in a caged, listless way, now getting on for three years old, and listened to the story of the flat’s disadvantages, and the drama of Eileen. Eileen, despite her lack of scope and her boring job in the bedding factory, had managed to go even more to the bad. Rose found this exhilarating, though she could not have said why. Eileen had got herself mixed up with a group of flashy would-be pop-singing would-be Hells Angels boys who hung around in the pub on the council estate. A modern pub it was, called, for some reason, Prester John. It was a depressing spot, though one could see that the architect had made every attempt to integrate it into the landscape. It had a forecourt, where stone mushrooms served as seats, and plants grew out of pots from a topsoil of fag ends. Sitting in this forecourt on a stone mushroom one summer evening, Eileen had been shot in the leg. She had not been aimed at: the youth responsible had been aiming at Terry Monk from the Balls Pond Road. But he had been a bad shot, and Eileen had received the bullet in her thigh. It had cheered her up no end. She had been in hospital for weeks: Rose, visiting her, had found her elated, transported, her heavy face deeply transfigured by pain and notoriety.

  In her brushed nylon turquoise frilled nightgown, she had sat there, with one jug of flowers by her bed, the queen of the estate. Her dark skin lowered under the pale pretty frills, decor
ated, satisfied. And she and Rose, looking at each other, had recognized together that her fate had not neglected her, that God was not as careless as he had at times seemed to be: he had sought her out and marked her down, as though she had been worth his personal attention. Mrs Sharkey didn’t see it that way. But even Mrs Sharkey had found Eileen weigh less heavily on her mind, since the accident. At least now I know what I’m worrying about, was how she put it to Rose. Rose knew exactly what she meant.

  And so it seemed, perhaps, as though fate itself had intervened on Rose’s behalf and saved her from being rehoused. Christopher could hardly object to Middle Road as it now was. Even Harringdon Road school had gone up in the world: inspired by Rose’s example, one or two middle-class mothers had risked entrusting their children to its unknown dangers, and Maria had quite a little entourage of fashionable friends. Miss Lindley had left: times had changed, Miss Lindley’s skirts had dropped from the top of her thighs to her ankles, and Miss Lindley had moved on, out and on, to darker regions, more primitive lands of conquest. She was now assistant head of a school in Finsbury Park: she spent her evenings running a language centre for parents of immigrant children. Tireless, she was. Rose had lost touch with her. She had not time for Rose.

  Simon watched, anxiously. He saw Rose’s house repainted on the outside, he saw Rose taken off for a summer holiday in Italy, he saw her depart for weekends in Norfolk, he saw her offer him drinks as though whisky were not three pounds a bottle. He heard reports of her remarks at dinner-tables not his own, he heard that she had been seen gambling with Christopher at Emilio’s, he heard that she had been seen laughing at the theatre, at a charity concert asleep, at a Private View drunk. He even read a letter from her in a weekly, about Women’s Liberation, protesting against some comment about a friend of hers, saying that women seemed incapable of taking into consideration the fact that men (not women only, but men) were naturally fond of their own children, and questioning the virtues of the new matriarchy. (It hurt him a great deal, that letter: not only the implications of its sentiments, but the indelicacy, so unlike her in so many ways, of having written it at all.) He saw her drawn into a new life, unable to reject her new neighbours, as tediously involved in their different deprivations as she had been in Mrs Sharkey’s, and more mercilessly, because more intelligently exploited by them. He saw her fight to send Konstantin to a state school – fight, bitterly, disagreeably, crazily, and win. (Simon’s own eldest had started at Bedales. What could he do? The child was impossible, the child was psychotic.) He saw Konstantin flourish, politely, watchfully. He saw Rose’s hair turn paler and tarnish, like old metal. He watched. He watched like a hawk, for signs of cracking, for signs of ruin, for signs of decay. He needed her, he needed her more than ever. He watched her clothes, to see if she would spend money on herself. He watched her hair, to see if she would have it done, at three guineas a time. He watched her face, and the lines of it, to see if she would betray him. He watched for scars and bruises, but all he saw was the tightening of the skin on her cheekbones, the whitening of it round her eyes, a new maze of crow’s feet when she smiled. If she was bruised, it was in the soft flesh he could not see, the soft flesh he had never seen. If she bled, she bled internally.

  Nobody ever mentioned the next instalment of the money due to Rose, the next thirty thousand pounds that would eventually come her way. It was as though it did not exist. Occasionally he thought of it. It hung over her, a threat as vague as death and as real and as trying, and one could no more ask, what will you do with it, than one could ask, how will you die, what will be the manner of your dying, do you hope to die in a state of grace. There was nothing to do but wait.

  He watched the inside of her house, the rooms of it, the rooms she lived in. Breathlessly, over the years, he watched. They changed, a little. They did not change much. Such love, such salvation, he felt, at the sight of each object that remained in its place. The tea caddy. The tin tray. The armchair. The shabby cat. Sometimes things went – the settee, she decided one day, was past bearing, and he stood with her and Emily all one Saturday afternoon, waiting for the rag-and-bone-man with his painted cart. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it a moment longer, said Rose, laughing weakly, hysterically, looking at her watch, pummelling the awful old thing with its black and brown and orange patterned unbelievably filthy bulging ripped shiny prickly covering, hitting it till dust a century old flew out of it, the dust of North London, sacred and creaking, horsehair poking out of it, wadding seeping out of it – it’s foul, she cried, I can’t stand it, get it out, get it out, committing sacrilege, of course, giving in, she the unconquerable, betraying disgust, she the unshockable – get it out, there he is, she said, and there he was, they heard his cryptic cry, his mysterious wail, and there was his shabby pony outside the window, his cart hand-painted, oh, the age was dying, and in those dingy corners you could hear its death rattle, as Rose Vassiliou and Emily Offenbach and Simon Camish opened the basement window, and heaved the ancient settee out into the area, because it was too big to go through the door, because it had been in that room for generations. The old man didn’t want it, they had to give him five bob to take it away, and oh, well rid of it at the price said Rose, looking round the room, that now looked empty, empty without it.

  What on earth shall we sit on, now, she said, some minutes later. And being penitent, it was some time before she replaced the old settee.

  Simon, suspicious, calling that winter (a Tory government, a new Industrial Relations Bill, decimal coinage, a new world later), calling on another Saturday, remembering the clouds of dust rising into the summer air, found them there, Rose and Emily, sitting on the new Habitat settee. And his suspicions glared, gathered. She was wearing a new fur coat, Rose was. What would she do, would she comment, would she apologize? A child had opened the door to him: they were to go out, he had brought two of his children, he was late, Rose and Emily were waiting for him, Julie had gone to the cinema. Christopher was abroad on business, and he and Rose and Emily were to go to the dog show at Alexandra Palace. And there was Rose, sitting on her new settee in a new fur coat. She looked up, and he came into the room, as the children opened the door for him, she looked up and smiled at him. ‘Simon,’ she said, ‘hello, how are you, how are things?’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, I’m sorry I’m late.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Rose. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  And he looked at her, at her treachery. He looked at Emily. Emily had grown so beautiful with the years that it was now almost unbearable, one could hardly bear to gaze at her, so moving were the marks of time and beauty. Her hair had streaked, had turned grey and white: it was thick and heavy, she wore it untidily pinned up, a brown pin holding it, coarse and drooping, sinking from the pin with the weight of years, and her skin, once brown and sallow, had faded and whitened, her lips were almost blue, so had the pink retreated, her eyes were etched in red and blue lines of amazing splendour, her whole face was lined and carved and withered into beauty, her hands too were marked with age, their veins courageously upstanding, their nails blue with a fine withdrawal. She seemed the image of time, triumphant, vindicated, conquering but conquered. Beside her Rose looked pale and delicate. They could not have survived without each other, and they had admitted him to their secrets. He looked back at Rose, and of course there she was, her coat a moth-eaten old thing she had picked up at a jumble sale, and as she rose to her feet, as she shouted for the children, as they gathered themselves together, bags and baskets and children and hats and scarves and boots, she turned to him and said, ‘What d’you think of my new coat, Simon? Smart, isn’t it? I found it in a cupboard at Branston and it seemed a pity to waste it, and then I got worried because I think I once signed a pledge about rare creatures, but it’s so incredibly old and dead, one couldn’t really call it a rare creature, do you think?’

  ‘Christopher says it’s wolf skin,’ she said, as they went through the door and up the steps, ‘but I thin
k it’s more likely rabbit. Wouldn’t you?’

  They went up to the Palace. Even the Palace had changed. There was an artificial ski slope now, on one of the hills, and there was talk of all sorts of developments – holds, art centres, God knows what. The view was still the same, except for a few new tall buildings, like the one housing Mrs Sharkey. There it all lay, London, the roof tops, Hackney marshes, the railway lines, the fair delusive green spongy fields of sewage. ‘Bloody cold, isn’t it,’ said Marcus, casting a perfunctory glance at the panorama, and they agreed, and went in.

  Rose had been promising Simon a dog show for years. With immense satisfaction he formulated to himself that sentence. For years, now, she had been promising to take him to a dog show at the Palace. He had known her for years. There she was, slightly ahead, a child dragging on one arm, her hair tumbling on to her fur coat shoulders. She turned to him, she smiled. ‘I’ve been meaning to bring you to one of these for years,’ she said, ‘but don’t expect too much fun, will you? It’s an awful bore, really.’