The Needle's Eye (28 page)

This was something she did not often dare to think of. But the truth was that even if she won her case, even if the children were left with her undisturbed, how would she be able to build upon such a victory? It was not only the fear of loss that alarmed her – a sudden loss, through their disappearance to Switzerland over Easter, or a slow legal loss through the judge’s decision – it was the fear of living with victory, after these painful, clamouring manifestations upon Christopher’s part. What had she done to him, by leaving him? It was not that she thought he would want her back, she was too modest to think such a thing, it was more the fact that she had been made to recognize that her own actions, in divorcing him, in taking the children to herself, had been brutal and cruel. She had resorted to the law, as her father had done before, and now she was a victim of its processes. There was no longer any way of settling out of court, but even a court’s settlements could not end the confusion.

It was not reasonable to suppose that Christopher would disappear with the children over Easter. What would he gain by it? He would put himself in the wrong, which he had no need, yet, to do. And yet the idea of it, once fully conceived, would not leave her. It even crossed her mind, as she lay there awake, that perhaps she herself, not him, should make the children wards-of-court, so that he could not remove them. The notion was grotesque. What would
happen, she wondered, if both she and Christopher simultaneously decided to apply for wardship? What would the lawyers have to say to that? They would probably be so angry with them both that they would take all three children away and put them into care, and neither parent would ever be allowed to visit them again.

She hadn’t dared to tell her solicitor that Christopher was having the children for Easter. She had been afraid to arouse issues that were better left sleeping. She hadn’t told Simon Camish, either. She had been afraid that he would tell her she was a fool, that she shouldn’t have done it. Now she wished that she had asked his advice, because the anxiety, the uncertainty, was dreadful. Her head ached with it. Her head was splitting with anxiety and irresolution. She started to bang it backwards and forwards on the pillow, as she used to do when she was a child, unable, then, to sleep, because she was so bored and lonely and not at all tired either. And the banging, the thudding in her head, the self-inflicted blows, reminded her of those other blows, some of them inflicted in this self-same bed, her head battered against this very bedstead, and she thought, she remembered, that she had divorced Christopher so that there would be an end to blows, because otherwise they would have gone on for ever, being self-perpetuating, but was now realizing that the law too and its processes, far from drawing ends and lines and boundaries, were also self-perpetuating, that they, like blows, answered nothing, they solved none of the confusions of the heart and the demands of the spirit, but instead generated their own course of new offences, new afflictions, new perversions. Even if the judge laughed at Christopher’s claim for custody, as she had at first hoped, it would not be an end of it: he would find some new way of assailing her, or she would of assailing him. There was no solution, through violence of law. She had always known it: she had acted as she had thought wisely, as others acted, reasonably, obeying the world’s decisions and its values, and she had got nowhere. Christopher was still married to her, still with her, the problem was still there with her, her heart was still dark with the shadow of him, she would never cast him off, she would never be single, and simple, and separate, by any processes known to courts and lawyers, by any limits that could be imposed
upon her own expected powers of endurance or tolerance. It was well enough for a man to say, that is enough, you need take no more, you have suffered enough: the spirit is still awake and avid, it can take more, it refuses to be bounded, it refuses to sit within its limits, quietly, and say to itself, well, so be it, into those regions I will no longer go, because I cannot take what I see there. There are no limits, the surrounding darknesses can never be chained off. Not by such means could she find peace and an exemption from the past: there was no exemption, no cancelling of bonds, no forgetting. That dim surging and conflict within her when she thought of him and what they had been through together could not be parcelled out or judged or ended by any means but its own. In its own place it must be decided. Violently she banged her head from side to side, clenching her teeth, unwilling to recognize these endless, eternal, always known claims: caught by terror at the thought of the darknesses, the struggles, the anguished reassessments that lay ahead, and yet at the same time, beneath the terror, on some level rarely visited, exultant, full of exultation, because, after all, in the human spirit there was depth, there was power, there was a force that would not, could not accept any indulgence or any letting off. Struggle on it would, because it could not rest, it could not say, forgive me, I have had enough. She had known it, she had always known it: the divorce court had been a game played by others, custody cases were nothing but a sketch, a diagram of woe, and the full confrontation would take place on other territory. The decisions of judges, even when in her favour, were irrelevant: they chalked up no victory. The confrontation (ah, this was it) could not end in victory, because it was a fight in which there was no winning. Some other resolution would have to be made, in which victory and defeat played no part, in which the boundaries did not enclose the spoils of war, and were not drawn by neutral external treaty and convention. She did not see how it could be done, she despaired at the thought of it, she knew herself incapable of voluntary and true concessions, incapable of sitting calmly at the table, incapable of ceding a square inch of her land, and yet it consoled her, it consoled her, that there could be no other way.

It was a cold Easter, as usual. In Cornwall, snow fell, large white flakes dropping unremarkably into the large grey sea. In the hotel, elderly couples sat in the lounge and read detective stories, middle-aged couples sighed in despair and complained comfortably to one another about the ingratitude of their moping, sour, bored, sulking teenage offspring who used to like it there so much five years ago, and younger children fed endless sixpences into fruit machines, and played endless games of table tennis, quite content, most of them, in their innocent way, with these delightful facilities. Young mothers sat in the bar drinking and competing, mildly and decorously, in the prestige stakes, and Simon sat in his bedroom, when it was not being cleaned out or turned down, and stared gloomily at his Chapter Six and his next brief, wishing he were like the
pères de famille
who led their young ones out, bravely, in boots and anoraks and large jerseys, to walk along the cliffs or along the icy beaches. He admired such energy, and knew he would enjoy it himself if he tried it, but couldn’t find it in himself to face the initial shock. Nor had he the confidence to approach his own children. He feared they would reject his overtures. He felt so cut off from them, most of the time. He watched them guiltily, from a distance. The boy Dan worried him, his disturbances disturbed him, he never knew if he was receiving too much specialist attention or too little. The middle one, Helen, alarmed him: she resembled Julie uncannily. She is so like her mother, people would say, and she and Julie were for ever locked in mortal combat. He dared not interfere. But at times he caught Helen looking at him, for support, as though she felt the trap close. Once she said to him – small, anxious, eight-years-old, in a rare moment of confidence – Dad, she said, can people help what they grow up like, or does it just happen? Of course they help it, he had said, lying bravely. Of course they can. And she had smiled at him, suspicious yet assuaged, before returning to the fray. As for Kate, she was still small. He thought she was canny. He thought she was a survivor. He had hopes, for Kate.

At least Julie liked the hotel. She was happy, and that was something, after all: she had struck up with a woman of her own age, the mother of two young boys, who, he could not help feeling, was exactly what she herself could have been, had she not been so misled
by false images: warm, fat, generous, amusing, immensely pleased by every drink she was offered, every course on the menu, everyone who spoke to her. They shared a table in the evenings, she and her husband and Simon and Julie, and Julie, having no domestic anxieties, and clearly feeling herself (God knows why) an easy winner in smartness and
éclat
, was at her best. She embarrassed him, inevitably, by her insatiable namedropping, but her friend Sally took it in such good part, and was so willing to appear impressed and interested, that even this was not the trial it might have been. The husband, a chemist with ICI, was not at all bad either: he referred to the women as ‘the girls’ and teased them both about their incessant gossip and their large appetites, which seemed to suit them both admirably. Simon tried to emulate his false jollity, but gave it up, after a while, as it came so unnaturally to him: and he felt, as one of his efforts petered into nothing, that Sally’s husband actually gave him a look of sympathy, a look of commiseration, the look of one who knew the problem, admired his inability, and slightly deplored his own success.

On Easter Monday, after nearly three days of confinement, he decided that even he would have to face the outside world: he had been reared on Spartan holidays, a week of shivering in furnished lodgings on the Northumberland or Yorkshire coast, and the ease of sitting around waiting for the next meal while digesting the last one began to generate, as he had known it would, a sense of guilt strong enough to propel him into action. He suggested to the children that they might like to go for a walk with him, but Helen stared at him in alarm at the suggestion of leaving the ping-pong table. Dan refused to leave his two-day-old game of Monopoly, and only the little one, Kate, consented to accompany him. Julie expressed horror at the very thought of going out into the cold, and he knew that it would be impossible to dislodge her, as she had the moral support of Sally, who also shrank from all exertion: the only year when he had been able to persuade Julie to go out had been one year when they had gone to Scotland, when for some reason it had been the thing to do: all the fast set in the hotel, had, freakishly, been keen walkers instead of idlers, and they had persuaded Julie to join them. She had enjoyed
it: she had marched on, healthily, triumphantly, glowing, pleased by the compliments of more practised hikers, remembering her country childhood and the country set she had feared so deeply. She marched them out of her system, all those horse-riding girls. He had been proud of her. She was a healthy woman, Julie. She had not even minded the rain. But now, without so strong a social force to motivate her, inertia conquered, so he set off, in the morning, with Kate and a packed lunch.

It was raining, but not heavily: a fine damp, cold, not uncomfortable drizzle. The hotel was on the cliff tops, and they set off along a walk that led along the top, and gradually down to the sea. The grass underfoot was short and springy, and small alarmed birds flew up from time to time at their approach: in the grey sky seagulls swooped and yelped. Kate ran ahead at first, examining evidence of rabbits, looking, as children should, for flowers and stones, but after a mile or so she tired, and returned to Simon, and took his hand, and started to talk to him, a long monologue, completely vague and unedited, about school, and a friend of hers who had gone to France, and why her mother would never let her look after the school guinea pig in the holidays, and what was a barrister, was it anything to do with bannisters, and if not why not, and did he remember that time they had gone to Scotland and gone to that little old tower and there was that little old lady who kept cod-fish in a pool that was really part of the sea, and when the lady went to feed the cod-fish they came and poked their heads out of the water and the lady stroked them, and she, Kate, had stroked them too, and they had liked it, they were very friendly creatures, and could she keep cod-fish, no, she supposed not, there wasn’t any sea in Hampstead, but could she have a goldfish, they had goldfish at school, and how she had dreamed a terrible dream that Clare wouldn’t let her play Monopoly with her and her friend and when she woke up it was true, and why couldn’t she have dinner in the restaurant, she was fed up with having fish and chips and horrible melty jelly in her bedroom. Simon listened to this, enchanted, flattered by her confidences, wishing he listened to her more often, and all the time the sea thundered and clapped and slapped at the bottom of the cliffs, and the track got narrower and
narrower, and nearer the edge of the cliff, and he moved Kate on to his inland hand, and looked nervously downwards, and had visions of them both slipping and going over, and wondered what the hell he had brought a small child up here for at all, and just as he was about to give up and go back (though going back would have been nasty enough, like climbing down a ladder when one had only just had the nerve to climb up) the track started to descend, and at every foot he thought, well, that’s better, at least if we fall now it’ll only be forty feet, not fifty. But they didn’t fall, they got down there on to the beach quite safely, after crossing a little wooden bridge over a stream full of watercress – he knew it was watercress, it was quite obviously watercress, but all the same he wouldn’t let Kate eat any, because he was afraid it might be a kind of trick poisonous watercress, specially grown for tempting ignorant townsmen like himself, and he remembered something his mother had told him about how one should never eat watercress that hadn’t been artificially cultured as it absorbed through its stems all the badness in the water – (what badness? what watercress flourished, lethally, on those Lethean canals on Teesside?) – and he thought also of his mother and those grey birds glimpsed through the water-closet window, those grey birds whose name she did not know, and he looked round at all the sea gulls, not one species of which he could identify, and remembered that once, as a child, he had written off to Children’s Hour on the radio for a free chart of the names and means of identifying sea birds, and not one of them could he remember, not one, not one. What his mother had said about the watercress was probably true: she was not an ignorant woman, she was always right.