The Needle's Eye (14 page)

‘When I was a child I was lonely, of course, but then we were
most of the time in the country, and I liked the country, I used to find things to do. And then, suddenly, when I was fifteen, they took it into their heads to send me off to boarding school – God knows why they didn’t send me earlier, you’d have thought they would have been glad to have me out of the house, perhaps they just didn’t think of it. I hated it at first when I got there, but then I made this friend, Emily, I still see a lot of her, and things began to look up. She used to take me about, and look after me, and said why didn’t I do some exams and go up to University with her, but it was far too late by then because I was far too ignorant, but it was nice that she’d thought of it … I cheered up so easily, once I met Emily. She went to London University, and while she was there I used to live more and more in the London house, and met her friends, and went out with some of her men, and they all used to tell me what to do with my life – they were very left wing, all of them, perhaps all students are, but it was odd really because Emily has never had the slightest interest in politics, in fact Emily’s a bit of a fascist, I’ve always thought. But anyway, there were all these friends of hers, telling me what to do with my money.

‘I had quite a lot of money, you know, they gave me a massive allowance, for a girl of my age I had an enormous amount of cash, and I used to pay for everything wherever we went, it was always me that paid, so they were always pleased to have me about, and they used to work out for me what I ought to do with my money, and what I ought to give it to, and that’s when the trouble really started because I gave quite a large sum to a political magazine, it wasn’t really a student one, it was a semi-professional job, but somehow the story got into the papers and my father was extremely angry. They printed some story about strikes, actually, the magazine did and he thought I’d given them the information, though where he thinks I’d have got hold of it one can’t imagine, but I remember he asked to see me one evening – oh, it was too frightening, not what he said, but the total unacknowledgement of me as he looked at me, and I remember saying, “But what do you think I
do
, how do you imagine I get through the days, I have to do something,” and he said, why. And I said I hadn’t thought he would mind, I hadn’t thought he
would care, and he said he didn’t care as long as I kept my name out of the papers, but that if I was going to waste my money on anarchists then I couldn’t have any more. So he cut my allowance, but the poor man, he really didn’t know, he cut it by half and I was still doing fine. Perhaps he thought I bought clothes, or something. Perhaps he thought that was the kind of thing women had to do. And then he asked the only shrewd question he’d ever asked me, which was if I’d joined the Party, and I said no, which was the truth, though I’d thought of it. I think, after that, he’d have liked to keep me at home, to stop me going about, but he couldn’t do anything about it, he was so used to letting me go my own way, to ignoring me in fact, he couldn’t set up any mechanism for stopping me, he didn’t know how to, mother being so useless and disinterested, and anyway she was in Nice at the time. She was in Nice quite a lot. Her health wasn’t very good. It never has been.’

And here she seemed to run down, obliging him to employ more than the encouraging interjections with which he had punctuated this monologue.

‘And it was with these students that you met your husband, was it?’

‘Christopher? No, it wasn’t, not really. Well yes, in a sense it was, because I was there when I met him, I was in the office of that magazine, it wasn’t really an office, it was more a basement room, in Bloomsbury, that was also somebody’s flat, but they used it for an office. You know, to tell you the truth about that strike story, I did give it to them, but I hadn’t meant to, I simply didn’t realize the implications of what I was saying – but still, anyway, to get back to Christopher, I was sitting in this dump listening to a friend going on about something or other, South Africa I think it was, when Christopher arrived with a whole load of printed stickers. He had a van, he was driving a van, in those days. Amongst other things. And this friend of mine, taking one look at Christopher, said have a cup of coffee, in his comradely way, because he thought Christopher looked like a potential comrade, and because he was a nice-looking fellow, and because it made him feel good to give cups of coffee to people who drive vans, and because it was the kind of office where clearly
not much else went on’ – (Simon, listening to this last sentence, was astonished by something so familiar in others and so odd in Rose, and took some time to work out that it was merely a breath of simple malice) – ‘and so Christopher had a cup of coffee, and I watched him, and I suppose he watched me, because when I said I had to be going he said, naturally enough, that he’d give me a lift. Naturally, having the van, I mean. And so I went off with him, and I hadn’t really anywhere I ought to be going, I never had, in those days, so he drove me home, and I asked him in because there was nobody there, and we had some tea, and then we had a drink and then I went out with him and had some supper with him, and so it went on.

‘How old was I? I was nineteen, and he was twenty-one.

‘I loved him. I fell completely in love with him. He completely seduced me. He really knew what he was doing, did Christopher. He was working two nights a week in a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street and I used to go there and sit in the kitchen and wait for him. That’s how it was. I didn’t really – it’s amazing how little I knew about him. I didn’t want to know because I suspected I mightn’t understand. He was no fool, obviously, or I couldn’t have – well, I don’t wish to imply that I wasn’t a fool, because I was, about him, completely, but at least I knew it. He’d been to Grammar School, but when I met him I assumed that he’d started working as soon as he left, and it took me years, well, months at least to realize that he’d actually started off at University but he got kicked out, or dropped it – I think he couldn’t stand it, he genuinely hated being in anything like a traditional institution, he had nothing but contempt for it – I should have put it together earlier, he left it because he was ambitious, not because he was unambitious, and he couldn’t bear to waste three years or so on a student’s grant finding out not very much, and all that van driving and waiting and dealing and double-dealing he used to go in for was really the foundation of something much more lucrative, in the end, for him – well, indeed, for anyone. But Christopher was attractive. Dirty, he was, and he smelt of oil from the van, and he lived on bacon sandwiches, it was something I’d never set eyes on before, and to find that such a person actually seemed to want me –’

‘I would have thought that a lot of people might have wanted you. You were a very desirable property.’

‘Oh no no, not at all, not any of my and Emily’s friends, anyway, they were far too altruistic, they wanted my money, but only for meals and donations and drinks, and loans and abortions, they never had anything as grandiose as a scheme for marrying me, they simply wouldn’t have thought of it, and I was no beauty, you know, I was a miserable-looking creature in those days, I probably still am for that matter – no, no I don’t think anybody else would have dreamed of having that kind of intention on me. There were – there were kind of official suitors, sort of dynastic suitors, but one couldn’t take them seriously. Or rather, they couldn’t take me seriously. They were far too young to be wised up to that kind of thing.’

‘So Christopher and his bacon sandwiches found you a willing victim?’

‘He certainly did. Willing and eager.’ She pushed at her hair, and laughed. ‘We used to spend a lot of time in a Greek club. In Camden Town. Its windows were all stuck over with paper, it was very secret. They played card games and billiards, and I sat around and watched. There weren’t many girls allowed in. I was allowed in because I was Christopher’s. It was a real élite I’d hit at last, I used to think. I felt really privileged, sitting around there and drinking cups of coffee. It’s funny, really, looking back on it. Or almost funny. It would be funny, if I could think I had survived it all.’

‘You look as though you’ve survived it,’ he said, with meaningless gallantry.

‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what made you decide to get married? What made you think you wanted to get married?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s hard to know, really. I think I – for my part, this is, I’m speaking only for myself – I wanted to make some kind of declaration. I don’t know. I felt it so much, I wanted to show I was serious. That must be why most people do it, isn’t it? Out of gratitude. Partly. I don’t remember very well how the subject of getting married came up, I think I was saying something about Emily, who’d just got herself engaged to Offenbach, and Christopher said, oh,
very politely, perhaps you would think of marrying me. You couldn’t possibly want to, I kept saying, but as soon as he’d suggested it I knew it was irresistible, that I had to do it. And then also you must remember that I was hopelessly in love with him at this stage, I used to trail around after him like a small child. So we decided to get married. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe my luck.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘What did we do? Well, first of all Christopher wrote to my father, and my father wrote back saying you must be joking, and so Christopher and I went to see him, and there was a scene, and Father called Christopher a dirty Greek, and Christopher called father a Jewish swine, knowing quite well Father isn’t Jewish and never has been, and I cried, and then I walked out of the house with Christopher and wouldn’t go home. And then it all started to happen. As a matter of fact I’d been fairly discreet about him up till this point, but now it seemed necessary to assert ourselves, so we started going around together in public or whatever bits of the public we could find – we went to nightclubs, and restaurants, and I took him to all the dreary parties I used to get invited to and never went to, and we made a bit of a stir. It was quite exciting. You look very shocked. You don’t like the idea of making a bit of a stir.’

‘I’m not sure that what shocks me most isn’t the idea of
your
liking to make, as you put it, a bit of a stir.’

‘Ah, but I’ve changed, you see. This was many years ago. I have changed.’

‘Can one change, so much?’

‘That,’ she said, sadly and anxiously, ‘is what I sometimes wonder.’

‘Don’t worry about it now,’ he said, regretting what he had said.

‘No, all right,’ she said, more cheerfully, ‘I won’t. I must finish this story, mustn’t I? Where was I?’

‘You were at the bit where you and Christopher were provoking parental opposition. Where were you living at the time?’

‘Well, oddly enough, we were living at that basement where I first met him, I said we’d be caretakers for the magazine because the fellow that lived there moved out without trace, and we used to
sleep there on a mattress on the floor amidst a lot of bales of newsprint. It was a nice house, one of those old houses in a little terrace, and nobody knew we were there except people who’d promised not to say. And every day I’d ring up home and ask if they’d changed their minds – Father had got Mother home by this time – and they’d yell at me that they’d get the police on to me and cut me off without a penny and God knows what.’

‘And did you make any efforts at conciliation?’

‘Yes, of course I did, I said I’d come home as soon as they allowed me to marry Christopher, I said they could cut me off if they liked, I even said I’d wait till I was twenty-one, which would have been a good eight months. I’d known Christopher nearly a year, by this time, you know. A year’s a long time. We couldn’t have been accused of not knowing each other.’

‘But the circumstances were hardly normal.’

‘No. Hardly. I suppose not.’

‘It must have been from this that this cutting dates?’ he said, producing from his pocket a slip of newspaper.

She took it, and looked at it, with a mixture of pride, disgust, embarrassment and amusement that seemed to him an extraordinarily finely constituted response. ‘Oh Christ,’ she said, ‘wherever did you get this?’

It was a photograph of herself, and Christopher, many years younger, sitting in a restaurant. Roses and a candle featured. Christopher looked vicious but satisfied, Rose plain and anxious to please. The headline was ‘Tycoon’s Red Daughter Rose with Greek Croupier.’

‘Where did you get it?’ she repeated, returning it to him.

‘I stole it from a file on you,’ he said. ‘I liked it so much. Why does it say croupier? Was this another career he adopted?’

‘No, no, not at all, that was just a mistake, a friend of mine was rung up by the press and said he was a courier, because that was the politest way he could think of saying ‘van-driver’, though actually by this time Christopher had got rid of the van and had got himself a car, with a deposit of my money, of course, and he used to drive American ladies around sightseeing, so perhaps he was a courier after all. Whatever one of those is. But not a croupier, no. Though he’d
have been good at it. He was a really good gambler, was Christopher. Really good. Anyway, that car was the last thing he had out of me because my father shut the bank account. That was the first warning I had that things were turning nasty. I went to the local branch, in Russell Square, and told it to ring up my branch at Marble Arch and let me have some cash and they said no. I couldn’t believe it.’

‘Were you alarmed?’

‘To tell you the truth,’ she said, thoughtfully, carefully, ‘I think I was – relieved. Really. Relieved. It sounds silly, but that’s how it was. I was – partly, I suppose, gratified to find that I’d had some effect, and also, oh it sounds absurd, I was glad to have cut myself off from all that stuff. I’d always at the bottom of my heart believed that one couldn’t get rid of money, that it would stick like a leech or a parasite, and breed and breed even if one tried to cut it out – and I was right, that was a real premonition, because look at me now, living here in this little house, it’s nothing but a mockery, you know, in some ways, all right, so I pay my way and live as modestly as I can, but there are always people to ask me out, and newspapers to pay me or at least feed me and give me drinks when I want them, and even my clothes – well, that dress I was wearing when you first met me, I’d had that for twelve years, you know, and I can
afford
to wear it, I can go around in that kind of thing, but the girls round here, they can’t do it, they couldn’t do it – Oh Lord, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but yes, there’s another thing, it suddenly struck me one day that no matter how energetically I get rid of whatever money comes my way, there’s nothing on earth to prevent my father from leaving it to the children. How can I stop him, after all? They’re his only grandchildren. How can I stop him?’