The Needle's Eye (19 page)

His old father she hated. He had been a fisherman, from down South. Down South meant Bridlington. Most of his family had been wiped out in a storm – all of them in one day, in one boat, brother, brother-in-law, elder son, friend – and so he had travelled up to Teesside with his wife, to her people. There was nothing to keep me there, nothing but bitter memory, he would say, from time to time. Simon had liked to hear him say that, as a child, but had had to agree with his mother that most of the rest of his behaviour was repulsive. He spat, all day long. He chewed tobacco, most of the time, but even when he wasn’t chewing, he spat. When his wife died and he moved in with Mrs Camish, he nearly drove his daughter-in-law mad. It was not surprising that his wife’s people wouldn’t take him in. He disgusted Simon not only by spitting, but also by telling lies. The monstrous lies he told about his fishing days filled Simon with contempt.

It had not been a cheerful household. Mrs Camish had had to work to support them all, through those years while he was at school and at college, and her own high standards, her own aspirations, had made things even more difficult than they need have been. He had suffered, for her labours: indeed, he had hated her for them. He had hated her contempt for more feckless housekeepers, the scorn with which she described women who lived off credit check trading – a scorn, incidentally, which spread with fine logic to Julie’s father, when the time came. She despised his business ethics: she looked down on hire-purchase: she had nothing but scorn for those who got themselves into debt, and for those who enticed others into it. But by then, of course, she had gained a right to despise: she could afford to look down on wealth: she had succeeded, triumphantly: she had pulled it off. She had gained the brighter dawn that had
seemed beyond hope: she was comfortable, even by old standards affluent: she was a success, in her own way a minor celebrity. There was nothing he wanted more, at times, than to drive down to her and to say, simply, I know now what you did, and I love you for it now, though I couldn’t then: but it could not be said, it was too late, she would have to wait till her deathbed for such an acknowledgment. How could he explain to her now, in the present, that he had not realised then what it had meant, to be brought up in a street where the underwear is taken to the pawn shop? Who could blame Mrs Camish for having a pre-Keynsian view of economics? He was not sure that he had not inherited one from her himself.

Her success story was, in its modest way, remarkable. He would have found it more so had she not sold it and told it and altered it and touched it up and cashed it and invested it so often. She had started off by going out to work, in the Town Hall, as a clerk: and then, in her evenings, when she got home, she had started to write. First of all she had written a piece for the local paper, and then a small piece for a regional broadcast, and then she had written a book about her childhood, and a novel about the strikes in Jarrow. She had done it, she had made it, with what cost to herself one could not say. Pin money, she had called it at first, but she had never spent it on pins, and in the end she had given up the job at the Town Hall and had written full-time. He had never known what to think of her books and her broadcasts. In a way they were ridiculous, they were sentimental to the last degree, they could not possibly be taken seriously, and their following was of middle-aged women like herself, who knew the worst and wished to have it made acceptable to them. Her broadcasts – she became a regular on regional
Woman’s Hour
– were about hardship, done in a tone of smug palliation and petty domestic cheeriness in the face of disaster: her public persona was one of cosy, cloying, domestic fortitude. They had seemed to him, as a child and a student, to be composed of such lies that he was bitterly ashamed of her for writing them: it was only recently that he had come to recognize their relation to reality, their relationship with a true transcendence of hardship. The relation was not in the words, nor in the sentiments expressed, but in the fact of expression.
Somewhere between the words she wrote, and the woman that she appeared to be, lay the sum and the being of her.

There is a song that children sing, a game they play, which he had played as a child in the concrete-spiked broken-bottle-walled playground, and in the streets when she had not been watching – (she did not like him to play on the streets, it was vulgar) – and in the region where he had been brought up, they sing

Boatman, boatman, row my boat

Across the stinking dirty clarty water

In other regions, as he had since found, they sing

Boatman, boatman, row my boat

Across the golden river.

His mother had done a radio programme on this once, on regional games, and their differences. She would take anything on, and was good at this kind of thing, because she had a good regional accent, which she had learned to adopt or dismiss at will. She had known there was a golden river elsewhere, and that the yellow detergent-foaming oily canal at the bottom of the street did not manifest the natural condition of water. Brought up in such a district, she had developed a passion for the natural, for gardens, for birds, for trees. Visiting him in Oxford, she had taken such intense delight in its floral corners that he had been quite ashamed. Sitting in a cafe with him for tea, she had told him,
when we were little, we only had an outside lavatory, you know, and I used to go and sit in it for hours to read because it was the only quiet place, and there was a kind of plant on top of the wall that you could see through a crack at the top of the door. I don’t know what it was. Also you could see birds, in that little bit of sky. I don’t know what they were either. We used to call them grey birds. Just like that. Grey birds
. And he had been hideously embarrassed by this confession, by the thought (quite simply) of his mother sitting on a lavatory (for it was unlike her to mention such a thing, and it must have been the impact of Oxford that had shocked her into
doing so) and by the thought of her horribly constricted pleasures. She had always refused to take him to the street where she used to live, she said it was too horrible, but he’d gone there alone, one day, as a child, and she was right, it was too horrible, and where they now lived, 11 Canal Street, was a polite suburb compared with 9 Violet Bank (ironically christened by some malicious council). But the point was, he had writhed with shame at her recollections, although they had been delivered, those words about the lavatory and the grey birds, without any of the sentiment that she would have surrounded them with on the radio: and afterwards he realized what a swine he had been, what a selfish thoughtless swine, to reject, so awkwardly, her confidence. He had been ashamed of her, throughout his Oxford days, because her name, to those who knew it, was a joke name, like Patience Strong or Godfrey Wynn: so he had never taken her part. And yet it was for her, in a sense, that he had become a barrister, for her that he had married Julie, for her that he had accepted that stinking dirty money. He would have done better to feel for her more and consider her less. But what was the point, at all, in such a conclusion?

Violet Bank, in fact, he later found, had not been named maliciously. It had once been a violet bank. He went back there, later, years later, while he was up at Oxford, drawn to it by a fearful interest: it was grim and sunless, and he walked up and down it miserably, knowing himself compelled to knock at the door of the house in which his mother had been born: and he did knock, sick with fear and embarrassment, and an old lady answered, a white mumbling old lady with white hairs sprouting out of her chin and her thin hair tied up in a duster, as thin as a stick she was, her legs like matches under her flowery pinny, the stockings sagging on them, her arms like articulated pins. He hadn’t known what he would say, but seeing her, he said, I just wanted to look inside, my mum used to live here – and she asked him in, and made him a cup of tea so strong that he winced and shivered as he bravely drank it down, and while he looked around at the walls and the sad furniture she told him her life story, the old lady, how she had been born near a farm out beyond Barnham, she’d worked on the farm as a lass, but then she’d got restless,
she’d wanted to see the world, so she’d come into town and got herself a job in the chocolate factory – she laughed, wheezily, a ghostly laugh – and she’d married a fellow and settled down, not far from Violet Bank, and his mother remembered the day when Violet Bank wasn’t built, oh, it was lovely out this way, they used to come out this way on a weekend, picking flowers, you wouldn’t think so to see it now, would you, son – oh yes, times had changed, the farm where she’d been born was all a big factory, now, or so she’d been told, chemicals they made there, or some such thing, though she hadn’t been out that way not for thirty years or more – no, there wasn’t much growing now in the way of violets, but it was a nice name, wasn’t it? It cheers you up, a nice name, said the old lady. Do you ever go to the country, now, he asked: no, she said, it’s too far, really, it’s too much effort, really, though she thought about it a lot, now she was getting older. I often think, she said, about what my Ma – that’s my ma-in-law, I called her Ma and I called me Mum Mum – often think about the things Ma used to tell me. It must’ve been a different world, when she was a child. I got on well with my Ma, she said, her rheumy eyes weeping a little, unemotionally leaking, against her will. It’s not everyone gets on with their ma-in-law.

And, as he escaped into the street once more, and looked up its dark perspective, its pavements, its lamp-posts, its grim walls, its dirty gutters, Simon had a sudden apocalyptic vision, unsolicited, of the day when the world shall turn to grass once more, and the tender flowers will break and buckle the great paving stones. So recent they were, the days of green. Within living memory. And there would flow again the golden river, but there wouldn’t be any people waiting for the boatman. They would have gone, the people. Hell is full of people, but paradise is empty, unpolluted, crystalline, golden, clear.

It had hardly been surprising, really, that he should have been so confused by his mother’s ambitions for him. Nor that he should have repeated the pattern all over again, with Julie. He sometimes thought that it was less for his mother than for Julie that he had accepted the money, and the way of life. How could he ever, now, be certain? Perhaps after all it had been for himself. He had done enough
things for himself, under the guise of doing them for others, and how deplorable it was of him to make others responsible for his aspirations. He had always been a climber, ever since he could remember, and if he now didn’t like some of the things he had ended up with he had nobody to blame but himself. Who was it that had taught him carefully to control his accent, his references, to misrepresent his past, to take on the colouring, first of those boys at school, then of those friends at college, and finally of his colleagues at the Bar? Like Nick, he had developed a real art of misrepresentation: his mother, when he had been obliged to acknowledge her, became in his conversations not at all the woman she was, but somebody quite different, a genteel eccentric, an amusing oddity – an image she might herself have liked to perpetuate, to see perpetuated by him, but what had that to do with it? He had done it for his own ends, through shame of the real penury that had bred both him and her. And although he would never frankly lie about his origins, he certainly did not tell the truth about them, within his profession. His whole life – the clothes he wore, the car he drove, the way he spoke, the house he lived in – was an act of misrepresentation. He must have wanted it or he wouldn’t so consistently have done it. It was all very well for Rose to live in a dump that spoke of his worst fears, because those fears had never been real to her, as they had to him: she could amuse herself with the experience of poverty because it had never seriously threatened her. She had never had to go to school in her father’s cut-down suits, hanging uneasily as they had done around his scraggy adolescent body, nor had she had to present her teacher with explanations of why she could not afford to buy the prefects’ uniform till after half-term. (It always amazed him that a school, like this, which had so prided itself upon its policy of providing a superior education for the gifted poor, had been able to devise so many means for making such gifted poor feel agonizingly uncomfortable. The truth was, it hadn’t really provided for the gifted poor at all, but for the gifted middle class – had it fulfilled its charter, it might have been obliged to be more realistic.) He had had the worst of it all the way along, caught between reality and aspiration – he, for instance, had never been permitted by his mother, while a student,
to take a vacation job, as the majority of his much more affluent friends had done, because such an action would have smelt, to her, of defeat. He hadn’t been allowed to work for the price of eating his dinners – she had done it, more easily it is true as she became more successful. She had insisted on an expensive profession, because it had been the most difficult thing.

So it was not surprising that he had accepted Julie and the money, when they had become available, when they had indeed surrounded themselves with obligations to be accepted. With what a mixture of amazement and dismay had he agreed to purchase this house in which he was now sitting, for a sum that would have bought his mother’s twenty times over. He had no illusions about the professional value of such a background – it had breathed of success, in days when success had needed a great deal of invitation and delicate persuasion. He had known quite well the value of that slight surprise at his surroundings, and had never, except in exceptional circumstances, felt it necessary to explain that he had not come by these things through his own labour or his own inheritance. He felt, most of the time, like a man who drives the firm’s large car and pretends that it is his own and paid for: a pretence useful to both firm and employee, a useful fostering of confidence. And slowly, his own labours had taken over, to a degree: he had grown to fit his surroundings, he had become able to maintain them, though he could never initially have afforded them. Life at the Bar these days, as the Head of his Chambers never tired of telling him, was much easier than it used to be: it was easy for a clever young man like himself to make a good living. But how far, he sometimes asked himself, would he have got, without Julie and what she had brought him? There had been other accidents operating in his favour, it was true – he had been lucky in his tutor at Oxford, who had managed to place him in a Chambers where the work had interested him to such a degree that he had had an incentive to labour, and a natural sympathy with what came his way. Union Law, most of it was, and that again (except that his entry into this world had been accidental) had represented, perhaps, a debt paid to his father. But with what ironies this debt was paid. His father, he was sure, had he been in a fit state to approve of
anything, would have approved of the general tendencies of his efforts, in that he usually represented what his father would have thought of (when he could think) as the right side: but how had he become able to represent it but by turning his back upon all that had made him wish to align himself, in so far as a barrister may, upon one side rather than the other?