The Needle's Eye (18 page)

On the boat, on the way back over the Channel, that last time, she had foreseen something of this, so she had not been entirely faithful. If she had been entirely faithful, surely she could have subdued her fears? But she had knelt there, in the first-class bar, looking through the round window, and the sky had been a dull dove grey, and the sea had been a dull grey, and they had met, softly, dimly, the sea and the sky, with no noticeable collision, a dim pall of neither air nor water seeming to separate, join and combine them, a pallid heavy uniformity, and she had known that she was afraid, and that Christopher, waiting bravely for her, was afraid too, but that he like her was stubborn, obstinate to the last degree, that he would never admit defeat, and that he would meet her and take her and keep her, for better or worse. For worse, as it so happened.

The journalist she had met in the hotel, on her twenty-first birthday party the night before, had been on the boat too. On purpose, to see what happened. He was an amiable, amusing fellow, and he had made light, with infinite courtesy, of any of her apprehensions, by delicately assuming that she could have none. He had bought her a double brandy, and Sonia too, and she had turned from that dim
prophetic pall of sky to take it from him, and drink it. Sonia had giggled and wished her luck. Everybody had wished her luck, even the barman. She had wished herself luck. And the boat had docked, creaking into the dank wall, and there was Christopher, surrounded by photographers, nervous in his dark glasses, and she had walked down the gang plank, a free woman, a mature woman, into what had once been the safety of his arms.

There were many kinds of evidence that were not of much use in court. The court, for instance, would not have been much interested in the colour of that sky. Nor would Simon Camish, which is why she had not told him. This was justice.

Simon Camish, returning home, tried to think of some reason why he could have been so late. He could not, as he was an inconveniently truthful man, and any fabrication seemed to him ludicrous in the extreme. He tried to think of the least ludicrous, which was that he had been so depressed by losing his case that he had stayed on to have a drink and then, unintentionally, a meal in Southampton with his opponent, an old acquaintance, and one who luckily bored Julie to tears and who would therefore never have an opportunity to betray him. This, for some reason, seemed far from plausible, though it was exactly what he would have done had he not been intending to see Rose. But in fact, by the time he got home, Julie was already in bed. He took the liberty of assuming that since the light was off, she must be asleep, and stayed downstairs to make himself a milk drink. In the kitchen there was a message for him from his delinquent son, who had been watching soccer on the television, an interest which Simon had successfully deluded the child into believing that he shared. It said, ‘Great, Dad, we did it, we beat them 3–0, 4–3 on aggregate.’ He was pleased by this message, not so much by its content as by its confidence and the marked improvement in spelling and writing that it displayed. He propped it up, neatly, behind the Ovaltine jar, and took his beaker of Ovaltine into the drawing-room, and sat down. He thought how agreeable it was that the house was so quiet, with everybody in it asleep. Julie had been tired since her
return from New York: she had clearly been rushing around and drinking too much over there, as most people seemed to do. He had never been. He had not the slightest desire to go. It had been a very good thing for Julie to go on her own, without him there to spoil her on the whole (he supposed) quite innocent and childish fun. He had no real ethical objection to drinking, or to art galleries, or to weddings, and lush hotels and so forth, but he found them less and less interesting. And he did have a very real objection to the sheer expense of Julie’s ideas of amusement. It had once delighted him, the simplicity with which she had been able to delight herself with a new coat, a new pair of shoes, a new hairstyle, but what he hadn’t realized in those days was that the objects were delightful only if new, that their sole charm was in their novelty. Getting and spending we lay waste our time. She was a typical consumer, only momentarily assuaged by a purchase or a new idea or a new friend. And such a way of life was, naturally, hideously expensive. And the trouble was that he had no real right to protest, as so much of the money was by right hers.

He had never really understood his own attitude to the money, though he had spent a good deal of time thinking about it. Listening to Rose describe her own attitudes to the inheritance of wealth had shaken him more than Rose, not knowing his situation, could have suspected. He could, he supposed, see, from what she had said, where she had got her notions from, but only her own self could account for the extraordinary fidelity with which she had pursued her notions. He had been not at all faithful. The sums of money involved were not, of course, comparable, Mr Bryanston being in every way a much bigger operator than his own father-in-law, but then on that scale the difference, in tens of thousands, was not really very significant. Mr Phillips would have taken Simon into the business, had he so wanted, but he hadn’t wanted, having been unable to picture a life for himself running a large mail-order firm, and anyway Julie would never have forgiven him, would probably not have married him, if he had. And Mr Phillips had probably been more pleased for his son-in-law to practise as a barrister (such a respectable, professional, life) than he would have been had he been able to buy him over. He wondered how much, if at all, Rose had been
made aware of her deficiency in sex as a business asset. She had not seemed at all concerned with it. The curious thing was that Christopher Vassiliou, who had, one must admit, at first sight seemed a classically undesirable son-in-law, had in fact become deeply involved with his ex-father-in-law, and was now working for him in apparently successful and energetic high-powered financial harmony. Rose was the only person who would not fit.

He wondered if he himself should have made more efforts not to fit. He had a wild vision of himself, refusing all financial backing, and insisting that Julie live with him on the proceeds of his income alone. The vision had no reality whatsoever, it would have been simply impossible. And yet he had had scruples, he had, bitterly at times, reproached himself for the pusillanimity with which he had accepted what was, in effect, a dowry and a sizeable allowance for his wife. It was all very well to say that he had done it for her, that she would not have been able to survive on what he had had to offer her: she had not survived very gracefully on parental subsidy, either. And the sources of the money itself (this is what he could never admit, except to himself, having accepted what he had accepted) were not at all pretty. Perhaps the sources of big money never were. So stinkingly depending, he sometimes said to himself, in Shakespearian phrase: and another reference that ran in the mind was that strange inheritance of Chad in
The Ambassadors
, which was based upon some article of domestic manufacture too base for heroic mention. (Or had James simply understood too little of money to describe it?) He himself understood all too well the sources of Mr Phillips’s wealth, and he did not really like them. In fact, as a lawyer, they increasingly repelled him, he could swallow them less and less, and yet here he was, gagged and stifled (with them down his throat presumably) unable to speak out. Not that there was anything illegal about Mr Phillips’s success, it was nothing as dramatic as that, it was simply, in Simon’s admittedly puritanical view, unethical.

He had started off, innocently enough, with a rapidly prospering furniture and hardware retail business in Darlington, which expanded rapidly between the wars: and after the second war he had moved, massively, into hire purchase and mail order, and now most of his
very healthy profits were from the mail order business. He dealt in all domestic commodities – clothes, hardware, furniture, and even, nowadays, the most recent development, package holidays. There was nothing in itself wrong in this, but the methods of salesmanship were, in Simon’s view, highly suspect. The business seemed to involve an enormous amount of sales, at highly favourable terms, to the dimmest, least credit-worthy, and most easily exploited section of the community, a section which would doubtless soon be swollen by thousands and thousands of eighteen-year-olds, now able to contract debts quite safely all on their own. The number of defections and judgement summonses was quite hair-raising: the county courts were grossly over-employed trying to operate Mr Phillips’s business for him, in the role of debt collector. The mail order brochures had become increasingly fallacious in their implications, if not in their actual wording, being now liberally peppered with the words ‘free’, ‘guarantee’, ‘money back if no satisfaction’, ‘free easy credit’ and ‘generous commission’. Up and down the country unfortunate women were finding themselves obliged, to their amazement, to refund money for large expensive catalogues, and to make themselves responsible for the debts of their neighbours to whom they had acted as agent – agent, a word which the majority of them could not conceivably have understood. The current brochure had a detachable coupon on it, and a lot of meaningless verbiage surrounding the proud words ‘This coupon is worth five pounds, treasure it’. He was embarrassed to look at it. Luckily, most of Julie’s friends (and indeed Julie herself) had no conception of what a mail order firm was: they probably thought it was like the systems operated by smart little boutiques that specialized in selling, by post from Knightsbridge, pricey little children’s dresses with names like ‘Little Birds and Fledglings’, or small firms that delivered papier-mâché chairs and dolls houses, or nursery gardens that delivered little trimmed dwarf Japanese bonsai trees. Or perhaps they thought Julie’s father owned a business that dealt in bulk postal orders of lavatory paper, and cat food, and electric light bulbs, a wholly admirable system, and one much patronized by the wives of his thriftier colleagues, and by people like Diana, who had said to him once that she had been
buying lavatory paper by post for so long now that she would faint with embarrassment, as though buying male contraceptives, if she had to ask for a roll in a shop. In a way he hoped that they did think these things, all his acquaintances, and that their eyes would never alight upon phrases like ‘Your orders delivered immediately for 1/- in the £ per week – save ££££ now!’ What would they have thought of paying for their Japanese trees at a shilling in the pound per week? To them, the implications of the offer would have been quite lost.

It would be interesting to know how much Rose knew about the stinking dependence of her own family business. It was hard to tell how much she knew about anything. That mention of strikes, for instance: was that meant to be a polite indication of the fact that she was quite well aware of the disastrous labour relations that had been threatening her father’s business for the last few years? Not that profits, on that scale, could ever be particularly threatened, as the strikers themselves were all too aware. There was something else that she had said that had been nagging at him ever since she had said it: he got up and walked softly up and down the room, on the thick green carpet, while he tried to remember it. It had been something to do with her father, with the fact that the business was a family business, hardly in its second generation. How great a defection must his only daughter’s seem, in view of that, but that was only part of what he had been thinking. He had some sympathy, misplaced maybe, with that father, resorting to law in desperation. It was, ah yes, it was to do with his sense of social inadequacy, heightened by his superior wife, at which she had delicately hinted.

Social inadequacy was an emotion he understood: he could hardly help understanding it, so hard had he worked to overcome it, so meaninglessly, such a hideous compulsive labour. He thought back to his childhood – to his disabled father, to his driving, neurotic, refined mother, who had worked so hard for him, who had insisted so on his rights, who had pushed him and pushed him to where he now was, though Junior School and Direct Grant Grammar School and through Oxford and on, whether he liked it or not, to the Bar. He had done it for her. He had hated her for so many years, that he had had to do it for her. The two major decisions of his life, his
career and his marriage, had both been made through default, through guilt, through a desire to appease and placate, brought on by a lack of spontaneous love. He loved his mother now, he had come round to loving her, or as near as he would ever come to loving so repelling a woman, but he had done what she wanted out of appeasement. To appease her for those years and years of pain and embarrassment and ingratitude. There was no point in going back over it. There was no pride that could be taken in recalling those years of misery, when he had been obliged (by her) to take home from school for tea more affluent, charming, easy-going school-friends, confronting them, accustomed to their comfortable suburban houses, with the traumatic shock of his father dribbling in his wheelchair, his mother taut and anxious, his horrid little house, his luxury salmon-sandwich tea, the dreadful prospect out the back over the canal and the gas works. What dignity could he possibly find in the remembered anguish of clothes that did not fit, of parsimony over pocket money and excursions, of lists of expenditure laboriously drawn up, every evening, by his mother, to the last halfpenny, on those bits of card that separate the Weetabix in Weetabix packets? His poor, poor, clever mother, unlovely in her efforts to survive, agonized in her efforts for his survival, repaid over years by nothing but his shrinking flesh and mean reluctance and base avoidance? She had been a gifted woman, his mother, a grammar school product herself, and she had never asked for love, she had not expected love. She had done her best for him, wanting nothing but his escape. She had nourished dreams of escape herself, once: she had looked forward to a brighter dawn. A good socialist she had been, as a young woman, though it was hard to remember it now. She had met his father at Night School in a WEA class, studying economics. It was impossible to imagine what they could both have been like, how they could have got together. Simon could remember nothing of his father before the accident: he tried to reconstruct him, from the evidence, from his mother’s recollections, from family recollections but it was no good, it was hopeless. Had he been a working-class intellectual, grey, hard-working, undernourished? Had he been an activist, a rebel? There was no way of knowing. At the time of the
accident he had been shop steward: Mrs Camish always maintained that he had been a brilliant thinker, that all Simon’s brains came from him, and who could contradict her? Whatever he had been, what was certain was that she had pushed him, as she had pushed her son. She had been ambitious for him. But it had done her no good. The accident had happened, and she had been left, with a miserly (and disputed) amount of compensation, to look after him, his old father, her own parents, and Simon himself.