The Needle's Eye (30 page)

‘Shall I come and find you some dry things, Katey?’ she said, without conviction, not intending to move.

‘No, no, I’ll go,’ said Simon, fishing in his pocket for his steamy wet glasses. ‘I’ll have to go up anyway.’

‘All right,’ said Julie, relapsing from her slightly inclined position of attention: the armchair received her, she was rooted to it.

‘Come on,’ he said to Kate, and they went up in the lift. He remembered to let her push the button. They went into her room first: she was thawing out now, her nose was running, and she complained that her hands were all tingly. She sat down on the bed, and he knelt down to pull her boots off, as she reached for her book: she had got it out of the library downstairs, it was called
The Ship of Adventure
. She was a keen reader, unlike the other two. He pulled off her boots, and her wet woollen socks, and stared in dismay at her white bloodless feet: they were icy, and solid, and a pale waxy yellowy white. She smelt of wet wool: she had no body smell at all yet, her flesh still had the firm self-contained ungiving purity of infancy. Her toenails needed cutting. He held her feet in his warm hands: he felt sorry that he had made her walk so far, that he had been so irritated by her whining. Her feet lay in his hands like separate creatures. She turned a page of her book.

‘Shall I run a warm bath for you?’ he asked her, penitent, but she wasn’t listening. He wriggled her toes, trying to soften her up a bit: her feet looked frail and pathetic, like (he could not help the comparison) the feet so often painted on crucifixions. ‘Kate,’ he repeated, ‘aren’t you cold, don’t you want to warm yourself up?’

‘I’m all right,’ she said, closing her book with a sigh of tolerance. ‘I’m all right, really.’

He got a warm towel, from the heated towel-rail in the bathroom, and rubbed her hair, and her feet, and got her a dry jersey and pinafore dress. She was beginning to revive. She smiled at him. ‘My verruca tickles,’ she said. She was proud of her verruca: she had picked it up at school, in the swimming bath, it was a badge of honour, a true school-age affliction, an initiation into the six-year-old
world. He inspected it, dutifully: there it sat, a little round rather dirty wart, growing and flourishing in the middle of her heel.

‘How’s it coming on?’ he said, and she smiled, sharing his amusement at her pride in it. ‘It’s very well, thank you,’ she said.

‘I had one, when I was at school,’ he said, ‘and I cut it out myself, with a razor.’

He recalled, as he spoke, its stubborn roots, and the perseverance with which he had hacked at it, night after night, and the satisfaction he had felt when, one night, it had dropped out, leaving a neat little hole in the middle of his messy excavations. He had since recognised that it had probably died in the course of nature, as they usually do, and that his self-inflicted surgery had done nothing to aid its final loss of grip. But he continued to remember his efforts with some pleasure.

‘I don’t want mine cut out,’ she said, ‘I like it.’

‘You’re a silly girl,’ he said.

‘No, I’m not,’ she said, and reached for her book, looking up, just before she started reading, to remark, ‘There’s a book of Grandma’s, you know, in the bookcase downstairs, I noticed it.’

‘Is there really?’ he said, but she was away, her thumb in her mouth, her neck sunk in her blue polo-neck jersey, her bare feet dangling.

‘I’m going to get dry myself,’ he said. ‘Put some dry socks on before you go down, won’t you?’

She didn’t answer, so he left her, and went to his own room next door. Somebody had tidied away his papers: he had left them out on the table. They sorrow not as those that have no hope, he said to himself, and had a shower. He wondered if other fathers, like himself, were making a brief obligatory delightful holiday contact with their children, in this very building, here, and all over the country. He thought of Christopher Vassiliou, and Rose, and their dreadful divisions. He had thought, at one point, that he might ring Rose, to see how she was, to see if there was any news: it had seemed a possible, even a probable and expected thing to do, before he set off, he had looked forward to it, but now he felt uneasy about it, he felt it would be unnatural, a breach of an arrangement, an error of
propriety. He knew quite well that he wanted to ring her not at all for her sake, but for his own: that he had been using her anxiety as an excuse for maintaining contact, much as one might use a financial debt or a forgotten briefcase or a family connection. There was no particular reason why he should ring her: in fact there was less reason than ever, for lawyers, like other people, do not operate over Easter weekend, so there was no possibility of any action having taken place. It would be thoughtless, on his part, to inquire. And yet she never seemed to mind his inquiring: she seemed to need it, to like it, to want it. As perhaps, she needed, liked and wanted everyone. Perhaps she had recognized his need: perhaps she, kindly, had used her own troubles as a convenient pretext for alleviating his. Perhaps it was simply all the same to her: perhaps she dismissed no callers on the phone or at her house, as she dismissed no neighbour babies from her knee. Maybe he was, to her, but another obligation, along with other people’s children and unmarried mothers and emergent Africa and Methodist homes for disabled workmen. She had added him, adroitly and knowingly, to such a list, with kindness and undistinguished sympathy. With her, how could one ever tell the difference?

He put his clothes on, and sat down at the table, and opened his briefcase, and stared at his next brief. He did not much like the look of it: he did not much relish re-reading for the thousandth time the Redundancy Payments Act. It was not a particularly interesting brief, he suspected, though inevitably he would get interested in it, once he had started on it. That was how it always was. Instead of this case, he had nearly come away with a case involving one of the subsidiaries of Rose’s father’s company: a claim about some heavy lorries, and whether they had been employed or subcontracted. It had looked quite intriguing, but through some vague sensibility he had refused to handle it, saying that he would prefer not to, for personal reasons. The use of that phrase, ‘personal reasons’, had given him great satisfaction. Perhaps it was in order to use it that he had declined the case. The Head of his Chambers, Jefferson, had got to hear of this, and had been very impertinent about it, in Simon’s view. Simon thought about Jefferson. He was getting distinctly odd
these days: having started off with Simon in a flood of bonhomie and familiarity, comparing, whenever they met, notes on their not too dissimilar backgrounds, full of encouragement and praise, he had gradually become more and more difficult, quibbling about minor points, taking Simon up on trivial incidents, even taking exception, on one occasion, to the colour of his shirt. They had met, one day that winter, as they crossed the courtyard: Jefferson had stopped in his tracks, stared at Simon, pulled several very strange facial expressions, and had finally delivered himself of the sentence, ‘You know, times may have changed, but what if you met somebody important while you were wearing a
pink
shirt?’ And he had frowned, scratched his ear vigorously, and marched off, without waiting for a reply. Simon had been unable to tell whether the remark had been a joke or not, and had given up wearing his only pink shirt. He would not have liked a repetition of the incident, had the remark been either jocular or critical. Other colleagues had complained of similar attacks, so on the whole one could put them down to a general, not a personal state of susceptibility and irritability, but Simon had so long been used to consider himself as the favourite son and honoured heir that he was particularly alarmed by these new eccentricities, and felt particularly obliged to placate or circumvent them. It had got back to him one day that spring, through eager reportage, that Jefferson had said to Baker something to the effect that, ‘It’s no good asking Camish about it, he can’t see the trees for the wood.’ He had puzzled over this endlessly, wondering what it could possibly mean: was it a reference to his method of working, or his intellectual capacity, or his political bias? Jefferson had on various occasions made remarks about the possibility of Simon’s standing for Parliament: ‘You’ve got it all,’ he used to say, ‘you’re a graduate working-class Fabian, what more do you want?’ – and again, Simon had been unable to understand whether these suggestions were made seriously or ironically. It was well known that Jefferson himself had stood, but failed to be elected, in 1946, and had never forgiven the backbiting amongst his own party workers, which, in his view, had ruined his campaign: and since then his attitude to politics had been so heavily ironic that it was almost impossible to tell where his
true affiliations lay. The whole tenor of his work was socialist in principle, and indeed that was why Simon, via his Director of Studies, had found himself in his Chambers in the first place: but despite this his attitude to ‘the workers’, as he described them, was far from benevolent, and he always spoke of them, even while ostensibly defending their interests, with a profound dismissive hostility, and when there were any particularly unsympathetic demonstrations of working-class prejudice, such as the dockers’ parade of support of Enoch Powell, his comments were positively triumphant.

It was almost as though a legitimate desire to be circumspect and not to expect too much of people had fed itself so much on justification that it had become a positive conviction, and had so settled itself into a habit of mind that any evidence contradicting such a low assessment was now regarded as positively unwelcome. And Jefferson now defended himself by irony, by cynicism, by mockery, from the progressive policies and arguments he in fact pursued. He even took pleasure in taking on cases, every now and then, that were fought, as it were, against himself, and against his own previous pleadings, maintaining that by doing so he was demonstrating the inviolable impartiality of the law: a fine enough principle, and one that one could not but approve, but it remained evident that Jefferson’s pleasure in such cases had become far from impartial. Anyway, Simon said to himself as he re-read for the tenth time a sentence about place and capacities of employment, everybody knew that the law was far from impartial, it was one of the most biased professions in the country, and Jefferson ought to know that if ever anyone did. What he had been able to achieve, personally, had been a mere feather on the opposite scales: and it was ridiculous of him to leap from time to time, as he now did, grinning gnomishly and virtuously, into the heavier measure, sitting there cockily amongst the heaps of gold, pretending he had made the leap for the sake of balance. Perhaps, thought Simon, I will write another book, about the class structure of the British legal system, which will put me out of business for life. It would do no good, less good even than a book on comparative trade union practices, but at least it would be interesting.

He was just about to make the effort of lifting a biro to make a note when the telephone rang. He assumed it would be Julie, asking him to bring down her cigarettes or her book, but it wasn’t, it was the girl on reception, telling him she had a London call for him, and when the call was put through, it was Rose.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d give you a ring. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ he said.

‘How are you?’ she said. ‘Is it nice there?’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s quite good.’ And, as she did not immediately continue, he told her that he had been for a walk with Kate, and how he had enjoyed it, and how bad the weather was.

‘What are you doing with yourself, for Easter?’ he asked, then, when she still did not speak.

‘Oh, I’ve been out quite a lot,’ she said. ‘Out to dinner, and things. I’m just going out now. I thought I’d ring you before I went. I didn’t have anything to say, really. I just wanted to talk. What’s the hotel like?’

And he told her about the hotel, and how the less one did the less one became capable of doing, and how odd it was to sit around eating so much. ‘Grotesque, really,’ he finished, on a note of apology.

‘It’s quite nice,’ she said, ‘for a change, though,’ and he agreed that it was quite nice. He couldn’t make out why she had rung him, though when she then said, ‘The children aren’t here, they’ve gone off with Christopher for a day or two,’ he sensed that she was seeking some kind of reassurance: but could not guess at her true anxiety, which was that he would not bring them back, so all he could say was, ‘Is it good, then, to have them off your hands for a day or two?’

‘Yes, in a way,’ she said, and sighed.

‘Where did he take them to?’ he asked, wondering if it could have been them that he had seen, and if so, whether he should say so, and he heard the anxiety content of her voice rise considerably as she replied, ‘Well, that’s it, that’s what I don’t quite like, I’m not quite sure where they are, you see.’

‘He didn’t tell you where he was going?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘And it didn’t seem right to ask.’

‘When will they be back?’

‘In the morning, he said,’ she said.

‘Well, they’ll be back soon,’ he said.

‘Yes, I suppose so. I wish now that I’d asked him. I don’t like not knowing where they are. He might have taken them to my parents. But I don’t know. He sometimes does.’

‘They’ll be back soon,’ he repeated.

‘And when will you be back?’ she said, brightening: her fear, even so obliquely voiced, had been dissipated by being shared. ‘At the end of the week?’

‘On Friday,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a ring when I get back. I’ll come and see you, if I may.’

‘I’d like that,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind my ringing. I wanted to speak to somebody. And the house seemed so empty.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘that I’m pleased that you did. I was thinking of ringing you myself.’

‘Were you really?’ she said, obviously pleased. ‘That would have been nice of you.’

‘I’ll ring you tomorrow evening, shall I, and make sure you’re all safely reassembled?’

‘Yes, please,’ she said ‘that would be nice, if that’s not too much trouble,’ and he could tell from her voice that he had got it right, that this was what she wanted.