The Needle's Eye (10 page)

She had been completely perverted, poor Julie, somewhere, by someone, given desires that could never be assuaged, given the knowledge to know what she was missing, the sensitivity to suffer at the loss. Like talentless artists or writers, whose lack of talent in no way kindly diminishes their insatiable craving to succeed, she was doomed to disappointment. He was too moved by her to betray her. A stronger man than himself would not, in the first place, have married her, as he had done, but at least he had the strength to stick it out.

Her looks had not deteriorated as much as her temper, however. She still looked quite presentable. He thought of her, as a girl, in that
white jacket, her reddish hair all bouncy round her face. Now, as a woman, shiny with good health and lipstick, driving along in her big fat car. Julie on the telephone, giggling like a schoolgirl to her so-called friends: Julie betrayed by those same friends, furious about the betrayal, abusing them as wantonly as she had praised them, resorting to the gross terms of childhood – ‘Stinking bitch,’ she would say, violently, ‘Great fat old cow –’ referring to some smart young woman who had withdrawn her attendance or stood her up at some lunch date in favour of a more profitable, wealthier, more sophisticated host. And the childish crudity of these terms would horrify him: they reminded him of his own grandfather, if of anything, and of his mother’s pained wincing and refined agonies beneath such abuse – abuse directed not at her, because his grandfather was afraid of his mother, as who would not be, but at all the undistinguished world around. There was in Julie a coarseness and a lack of discrimination that must have attracted him to her, as one is attracted, compelled, to approach one’s own doom, to live out one’s own hereditary destiny: coarseness she had from his grandfather, coldness from his mother, and their good qualities she lacked. She must have good qualities of her own, he would tell himself, but he was too deeply entrenched in her, in his own past, to perceive them. He grieved for her: her disappointments and childish enthusiasms grieved him: but what could one do about them? She lacked all judgement, all reserve: her emotions swung violently, creaking and screeching like a weather vane in uncertain weather. He longed at times to point out that such a young man, such a woman could not possibly be all that she saw them to be, because the facts did not support such a construction, but she refused to listen, trusting what she called her intuition, so he had ceased to comment, and had withdrawn himself. Even with the children he rarely intervened, but would watch her yell at them and indulge them, irrationally, wantonly, destructively: the two girls seemed, miraculously, to have survived this treatment fairly well, and to have adopted a fairly cynical attitude to their mother’s inconsistencies, but the boy, the eldest, had become, he sometimes feared, psychotic. At the age of nine he either could not or would not read: he was destructive, sullen, infantile.
He could not do anything about it. He had tried, but he did not know what to do.

Her language, now he came to think about it, afflicted him as much as anything about her. He hated the way she talked. He knew that her classy friends, and indeed his, spoke as crudely, but to them the words came naturally, whereas to her they came with an air of defiance and genuine venom. He sometimes thought that if he heard her once more describe the colour of the drawing-room walls as goose-shit he would drop dead upon the carpet, or take off his glasses and fling them at the wall, or kick in the china cupboard door. In vain to tell himself that nobody else minded: that others, in fact, smiled obsequiously when she said such things, and that it was only his own fastidiousness, dubious enough itself, that protested. He did protest. He said nothing, but he eternally protested: he could not accept, he could not reconcile himself. Once he had said to her that he wished she would not spend so much of the day with her hair in curlers, but she had laughed at him, and, later, when she had had time to think about it, reviled him for such a suggestion, saying, truly enough, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with wearing curlers, she always looked fine when she went out, and that it was only because he had seen too many curlers as a child that he now found the sight of them unacceptable. True enough, but if people cannot accommodate each other’s prejudices, then what was the point in attempting to live together? No point at all, and yet it had to be done. It had to be done, and that was that, and there was not much point in thinking about it. And yet how could one resist thinking about it? He really did think he could see it all now: he had been attracted to her because his life with his mother was so appalling, and she to him because he was the only possible acceptable escape from her father – the only escape acceptable
to
her father, that meant, for she would never have had the courage to defy his expressed will. For Simon had been acceptable to Mr Phillips, mysteriously: Mr Phillips had always had faith in him: naïvely, he had liked the idea of his daughter marrying an Oxford man, a barrister. He had given them a lot of money, to set up house. A dowry. Simon had almost been pleased to think that others might assume he was marrying for
money. At least such an assumption concealed the truth. He would, at that age, have preferred to appear as cynic than as fool.

Who knows, he thought, perhaps when I am fifty I will have forgotten the extreme gloom into which I sank when the engagement was settled, the deep depression I inhabited from that day on, and I will conclude that it was the money I married, after all.

Perhaps the gloom had been, after all, a fraud. Who knows?

He had read his Freud, with interest. He particularly liked the description of the lady who had married three husbands, each of whom had subsequently died, shortly afterwards, of a fatal illness contracted after the date of the marriage. Interesting, that was. Interesting, too, that one could always tell which of one’s friends were being analysed or seeing too much of psychiatric friends by the way in which they would suddenly, out of the blue, for no reason at all, start abusing their mothers. One really had to watch that kind of thing. The time element was the catch. As Proust and Bergson said. At times he thought that he could sort the whole thing out if only he could formulate it in some kind of Proustian concept: as by saying: he had been drawn to Julie, mistakenly, by what he had mistakenly taken her to be, not by what she in fact was, which had, in the fullness of time, attached him to her in a much more serious manner: for he, when young, could not truly have wanted what he had thought he had wanted, he had wanted instead the underlying doom, the concealed and underlying reality, which alone could have presented an appearance attractive and possible to him, as he then was, in a manner that reality could never have achieved, being too far from him as beholder, him as participant.

Which made it all come down to the same thing, and excused everybody, except himself, acquitting everybody of deceit, and his mother of guilt. Very satisfactory. And yet none of that made any difference to the fact that he had known, when,
at that point in time when
, he had offered to marry Julie, that he ought not to have done so, and that by doing so he was condemning himself and her to unhappiness. Why, then, had he done it? He had wondered even then, but there had seemed no possible choice. Inevitability had held him in its grip: psychological determinism had really got its claws
into him, on that day when he had stood in front of her father, in his so-called study. He was sitting in a crushed gold armchair, Mr Phillips, with his legs up on his fox-and-pheasant embossed brass fender, contemplating a magnificent irridescently rainbow-gleaming electric fire, smoking a cigarette, his grey moustache puffing with emotion, his kindly little eyes glittering hard with friendliness and bonhomie. That’s fine by me, my boy, he had said, I’ve been expecting you to come up with something like this, you know. I bet you bloody well have, said Simon to himself, as he drearily embarked on his speech about being poor but hard-working: he had sensed well enough, though never witnessed, Julie’s appalling domestic behaviour since her failure over Art College. She had sulked and moaned and made herself intolerable to live with. Mr Phillips was glad to get rid of her so easily: he could hardly conceal his relief. Simon, who had as yet seen Julie only on her best outdoors behaviour, was frightened to witness thus the faint reflections of her true self, in her father’s shifting looks. And as he tried to explain his prospects to Mr Phillips, he felt all the life drain out of him, out through the soles of his shoes, in a most boring dreary way, as though he at that instant resigned himself to the future. His father-in-law, realizing perhaps that it would not be wise to allow Simon to dwell in too much detail on the realities ahead, cut short his speech, with a gruff ‘That’s all very well, that’s all very well, there’s no need for all that’ – and had then led Simon, grotesquely, off to the bathroom to inspect his latest acquisition. It was startling, it was alarming, the speed of the transition. The purchase was a white plastic pillow, with a blue frill round it, that stuck on to the end of the bath by suction pads.

‘It’s a new line, you see,’ said Pa Phillips. ‘You lie in the bath – I read a lot in the bath, I’m a great reader, you know – you lie in the bath and you rest your head on it. Ideal for reading. Get it?’

Simon did indeed get it. He nodded, stupefied. The plastic pillow took on a symbolic significance: like a ring, it cemented the contract, it embodied his engagement to Julie, and was never more to be dissociated from that moment – though it was still there, that pillow, more than a decade later, the very same one, a little less plump perhaps, a little less ridiculous, but still there, witness to many a reading
of many a
Financial Times
. ‘Get it?’ repeated Mr Phillips, and Simon nodded yet more vigorously, afraid that its proud owner, now gazing at it in solemn pleasure, might suddenly turn gay and jokey, as he was wont to do, and leap into the empty bath to give a demonstration. He did not know how to forestall this demonstration, should it be truly threatened, so he continued to nod and smile: one of the difficulties of his father-in-law was that he always elicited a violent response, was never satisfied with a mild assent, insisted upon an almost physical reaction to every question he asked – and as the questions were for the most part of the unanswerable quality of that particular ‘Get it?’, Simon found it very hard to provide satisfaction, and would be subjected to an endless battery of ‘Hey? what do you say? That’s right, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I?’ Some people, notably his business associates, had learned to deal with his technique by thumping him violently on the back at each of these queries, but Simon had never managed that, so he was always left, as then, laughing somewhat foolishly, grinning over-eagerly, nodding his head on his long neck until it ached with motion. He had never got much better at it, through all these years. Then, staring at that pillow, nodding like an automaton, or like a toy dog in the back of a car, he had not known whether he wanted to laugh or cry. But he knew that he had had it.

And now Julie had three children, and had gone with them and her parents to New York for the wedding of her youngest brother. And, such was the effect of time, he suspected that despite her protestations she had been quite looking forward to a bit of the vulgar old parental life, in posh hotels, for a few days, especially as she was managing to thin it out with a few more chic engagements of her own. She hadn’t been away without him for a long time: a few days’ reversion to the life she had so hated, when she had had it, might be quite enjoyable. She might even come home in a better temper. Though that was a great deal to hope for. Too much, probably. He sighed, got up, shut his desk, and began to walk restlessly round the room. He was tired of sitting still, and worrying.

It was, really, in many ways, a nice room. Even the goose-shit walls were attractive enough. She had a flair for these things. It was
spotless, smart, and trendy, full of plants and attractive little knick-knacks. (That, he was sure, was not what she would have called them, but that was what they nevertheless were.) It was a nice house, in a nice district of Hampstead, a period house, bought at a period when prices must surely have reached an all-time height: a house in a pretty, elegant, fashionable terrace. As a house, he had nothing against it. He could see why she liked it: brought up as she had been in that vast bulging ugly stockbroker’s mansion, she had longed for the support of a terrace of elegant neighbours in an acceptable district of town. She had caught the colouring of her surroundings well enough: when she took her curlers out she even looked right in herself. Khaki, mustard and a dark greeny-brown predominated, and he knew that these colours were right because even people like Diana, who knew about such things, admired them with a genuine admiration, and did not seem to notice that some underlying coldness or some hidden crime, undetectable to the eye, must surely destroy the whole effect. A house built upon sand, he said to himself crossly and peevishly, will not stand, though his didn’t do much in the way of crumbling, so lavishly propped, repaired, pointed and maintained it had been: and he went and poured himself a drink. He very rarely drank anything when alone and the action unnerved him slightly. He thought of his mother, reared in a dark terrace: a detached house down south was what she had wanted, and she had got it, a detached boarding-house on the bleak South Coast, where the cold waves flung handfuls of pebbles angrily at her windows and rotting façade, day after day, night after night, in endless, everlasting, moaning attrition. She had made a north country of her own in that desolate spot. Amazing, the power of the spirit over the waves and mists and elements. His mother, by a divining instinct, had sought and drawn towards her those batteries of grit.

The whisky was going down quite well. He looked out at the dark garden, and decided to stop thinking about Julie. He would think, instead, once more, about Rose Vassiliou. He knew a great deal more about her now than he had done upon meeting her: he knew even the day and date of her birth. In 1937 she had been born, daughter of Janice and William Bryanston, in Norfolk, where her
mother’s family had lived for generations in rural dignity. Her father had made a fortune in scrap metal, cranes, bulldozers, heavy plant of every sort: his company now had interests in building, contracting, property development all over Europe. His father had owned a garage in Leicester. Rose had been brought up (most inadequately, it seemed) by a succession of nannies and governesses: her schooling had been highly irregular. She had engaged herself at the age of twenty, without her parents’ consent, to a Greek from Camden Town, Christopher Vassiliou. She had threatened to marry without her parents’ consent if they wouldn’t give it, which they wouldn’t: whereupon she was made a ward-of-court, and Christopher was forbidden to see her. She undertook not to see Vassiliou, and the wardship was lifted: nevertheless she was sent abroad for several months. When she came back – she was by this time twenty-one – she was met by Vassiliou and married him in Camden Register Office. Her father then disowned and disinherited her, as thoroughly as he could – but alas, owing to his own foresight and desire to evade paying unnecessary tax, he could not prevent certain trust funds coming to her, though the first of them was not due to mature for another couple of years. So for a couple of years she and her husband had lived in comparative poverty in a flat in a house belonging to his uncle, in Middle Road, behind Alexandra Palace. Vassiliou worked at first in his father’s travel agency, then set up a small travel business of his own. Rose had three children, Konstantin, Marcus, and Maria – the youngest now aged five. After three years of marriage she had inherited part of a Trust Fund, amounting to thirty thousand pounds, which her father, despite every effort (his ill-will had not faded with time and the birth of a grandchild) had been unable to alienate from her. Most of this sum she had given away, within months, in a lump donation, to an African charity. In the divorce proceedings much was made of the donation of this sum of money, Vassiliou claiming, in reasonable and measured language – he had been a good witness, the judge had been impressed by his manner – that she had had no right, in the circumstances, to alienate so large a sum of money from her children and his. However, in the following years Vassiliou’s fortunes had improved considerably: he
had begun to earn a very respectable income. In 1967 he had left her – he claimed in the proceedings that she had driven him out of the house. She had decided, after some months, to divorce him, and was granted a decree at the end of the following year. The grounds were cruelty, with the usual complaints of physical violence (medical evidence produced, neighbour’s evidence, and a permanent scar on Rose’s wrist), abusive language, violent and unreasonable demands, incessant and unmotivated jealousy. Vassiliou, in defence, said that it was his wife that was violent and abusive: and that moreover she was a thoroughly unreasonable person. By this he meant that she had refused to move house when he wanted her to, and had refused to reconcile herself with her family even when, through his agency, reconciliation was offered. Vassiliou, oddly enough, had by this stage managed to get on good terms with her family, and had even called several members of it to witness to his wife’s unnatural obstinacy. There had been a great deal of sympathy for him – the judge clearly felt that it was hard luck, to have been through so much for so little – but it was decided that he had over-reached himself. His aims had been reasonable, in trying to make his wife live as he wanted, but his methods unfortunately not. And so he had lost the case. Neither side had cited adultery. Vassiliou’s jealousy, which had manifested itself by ringing his wife every hour from work to see that she was where she said she was, or by locking her in the house from time to time, had been completely generalized, attaching itself, for lack of a better object, to a woman friend called Emily Offenbach with whom Rose used to go for walks in the park with the children. Rose, for her part, had not accused her husband of any form of infidelity. This was one of the points that Vassiliou seized upon with some force. ‘I know,’ he said in the witness box, ‘that as a young man I was not a sensible person, but I have reformed myself, since I married her I have been entirely devoted to her and to my family. If a man is to be judged by what he was ten years ago, where would we all be?’ It is not up to you to ask questions, said Rose’s counsel, predictably enough, but the point had been made: and made even to me, Simon thought, as he reflected upon this curious fact.