The Needle's Eye (31 page)

‘I’ll do that, then,’ he said, and they said goodbye, and she rang off, and he was left wondering whether he had acquitted himself adequately, whether there was something else he should have guessed or said, or whether she had rung him after all because she wanted to speak to him. He remembered, now, before Easter, complaining to her rather treacherously about what a drag it was having to go off to a hotel, and how much he disliked sitting around doing nothing when there were so many things he ought to be getting on with: perhaps she had rung to cheer him up. He quite liked the idea. He did not recall that he had given her the name of the hotel: he certainly hadn’t written it down, the most he could have done would have been to mention it in passing, and he wondered what it meant
that she had remembered it. Though she could have found it out, of course, from the au pair girl, left behind to feed the cat. Even so, either way, he was pleased. It was luck that she had been put straight through to him. But perhaps she hadn’t been put straight through to him. Perhaps the receptionist had sent somebody to the lounge to tell Julie there was a woman on the line for her husband. He had better go down and find out.

Julie was waiting to interrogate him, when he got downstairs. ‘Who was that on the phone?’ she said. Taking a chance on the extreme unlikelihood of the receptionist having specified the caller’s sex, he said, mentioning the most boring and likely person he could think of: ‘Hindley.’ Hindley was the Clerk of his Chambers: his name, to Julie, spelled such profound dullness that she would never pick up such a gauntlet.

‘They never leave him alone, even on holidays,’ she said to Sally, with a sigh of curiously mingled contempt and pride.

‘Awful, isn’t it,’ said Sally, not listening. She had begun not to listen to everything that Julie said. How very wise, thought Simon, looked at his watch, and decided it was time to ask everybody if they would like a drink. They did like, of course, and that was the end of another fourteen shillings and sixpence.

Later, after dinner, over coffee, he made a connection he had been trying to make for hours. Ever since he had remembered Jefferson’s remark about not being able to see the trees for the wood, it had plagued him, as it had done when it had first been recounted to him: he’d never known what it meant, and on any level it seemed, when applied to himself, grossly untrue. What he did precisely do was to see trees, not woods: he tackled each bit of life as it came up, he was a devoted believer in empiricism, he was so far from having any final vision or aim in view that he had, perforce, to believe in the necessity of taking each step as it came. Anyone involved in the amazingly complex historical tangle of trades unions and labour legislation would be very foolish to have any other attitude. There was no way of putting the whole thing right, even if one knew what right was, in a capitalist society: there was only the possibility of defending individual and minor points, redundancy payments, hours and
compensations, laws of contract, conditions of work, rights to bargain: there wasn’t such a thing as a wood that one could see, there were trees only, and some of those were no more than little scrubs. All that he and people like himself could do was to defend those trees and scrubs: and even that defence might well be undone by ill-disposed judges or governments driving their bulldozers (or, to use a more classic archaic legal metaphor, their coach and horses) through the plantation. So how could he be accused, politically, of not seeing the trees? He was no idealist, no visionary, no revolutionary. How irritating it was, this habit lawyers had of using clichés, inverted or simple, to illustrate their points: as though the introduction of a metaphor were in itself the signal for applause for ready wit. It was a habit he had himself. How often, in court, had he heard the sycophantic laughter that would follow a turn of phrase so unoriginal, so pedantically unfunny, that it would have been sighed or smiled out of existence in ordinary conversation between friends.

And yet, perhaps it was true that he was biased. There was a connection, a comparison, somewhere, that he was on the verge of grasping. It was true that he aligned himself often irrationally on the side of the employee, even in such absurd cases as this ridiculous twenty-four-hour strike that was going on at the moment at Caxton’s: a strike against the management, it was, but motivated by the fact that other firms, through strikes, were likely to fail to produce the necessary parts. What possible blame attached to Caxton’s management at that point in time it was impossible to see, and he had seen all the workers on the television in the hotel lounge the night before, standing baffled in front of the interviewer, unable to justify their line, mumbling embarrassed and shuffling off, and had heard the rustle of understandable indignation amongst the other hotel viewers. Those inarticulate men in their overalls. They protested against the wrong things, sometimes, and sometimes protested maliciously, he knew all that. Not one of them had even thought of making a case: not one of them mentioned the problem of lay-off pay. One phrase of comprehension of the real meaning of their prospective plight would have been enough, and it had not been forthcoming. What was the point of defending those so stubbornly
unwilling to defend themselves? But perhaps they were not unwilling, perhaps they were incapable, and ah yes, that was it, he had it now, the connection he had been after, and it was the question of his own alignment, his own bias, that it concerned. It was Rose he had been thinking of, yet again, Rose, with the next-door baby on her knee, stating quite simply that it was not possible to refuse such a service because the baby’s grandmother (he had forgotten the details) worked for such and such a small sum, on her knees, scrubbing floors, whereas Rose was sitting safely in her chair and what did one baby more or less upon her knee signify? The issue was of such simplicity. Those that have may not reject those that have not: they may not in any way accuse of greed those that have less than themselves: they may not talk of profits declining while still in their large houses: they may not sit in front of television sets in expensive hotels which cost one man’s weekly wage per person per day and criticize men in overalls who do not understand why they should be laid off next week, through no fault of their own. When profits have so declined that the owners too stand on street corners in their overalls, and sell up their second car and their large house, then they may complain. The naïveté of such a view was as bad as Rose’s, ignoring as it did the demands of the nation and the economy, ignoring, as hers did, her total lack of personal obligation to that particular baby, but it was fundamental, it was a view from which he could never train himself: it was the wood in which the trees grew. May the forests of it cover the earth, he oh so hopelessly desired. Shake down the superfluity. There was nothing else to hope for, any other hope was intolerable, and yet it was so hopeless, it was as though one were to desire the kingdom of heaven. Where the rich may not enter, where greed may perish. Not of this world is the kingdom, but there is no other world. Oh God, he said (staring into his coffee cup, a non-believer), oh God help us to help each other, for if we do not, what are we, and what shall we become?

‘
You’re
very quiet,’ said Julie, suddenly, ‘What are
you
thinking about?’

She broke off her conversation with Sally and her husband to say this, turning to him slightly: there was a menace in her tone, he
drearily noted, she spoke to him with a hostility that boded no good. It was his own fault: he should never have asserted himself by going out for a walk.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she continued, as he smiled weakly and apologetically at them.

‘I was thinking about the strike at Caxton’s,’ he said. He could not think of anything else to say. It was not a politic answer.

‘Whatever for?’ she said. ‘You’re not mixed up in it, are you?’

‘Of course I’m not,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to be mixed up in, from my point of view. I was just thinking about it.’

‘And what fascinating conclusions did you reach?’ she said, with a heavy childish irony.

‘None in particular,’ he said. ‘I suppose I was thinking that it was a pity that public relations are so bad, and that nobody ever explains what’s going on in simple enough terms. That’s all.’

‘Well, please don’t start explaining to
us
,’ said Julie. ‘I’m sure Sally and Howard don’t want to hear about your speculations on the state of the nation. And I’ve heard enough about it to last me a lifetime – you wouldn’t believe what I have to listen to,’ she said, turning back to the others, who smiled and bristled with incipient embarrassment.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Simon, trying to lighten the tone, but quite well aware that it was too late. ‘I don’t know. I keep most of it to myself, you know. I don’t think I’ve given you a lecture about it since the last Ford package deal, have I?’

‘Well, you just started off on it again now,’ said Julie.

‘No, not really,’ said Simon. ‘I was just thinking. And I only told you what I was thinking about because you asked me. You took me by surprise, I didn’t have time to invent an exciting enough alternative. But I will, if you like. Or you could tell me what you were talking about, and I could talk about it too.’

‘You should have been listening,’ said Julie. ‘You can’t just sit there thinking.’

The contempt in her voice was so painful to hear that Sally started to pour out second cups of stone-cold coffee, and her husband reached for a newspaper.

‘There, you see what you’ve done,’ said Julie, her anger heightening dangerously. ‘You’ve ruined everything, Howard’s going to start reading the newspaper because you won’t talk about anything interesting, I know I’m boring but I don’t like sitting around thinking, I do enough of that at home, and anyway, you’ve been out on your own all day, haven’t you, you might at least try to be sociable when you get back.’

‘I wasn’t alone,’ said Simon. ‘I took Kate, if you remember. And you could have come too if you’d wanted.’

‘What, in this weather? You’d have to be mad to go out in this weather. What a dump, it’s appalling.’

‘I thought you liked it here,’ said Simon, resisting the temptation to point out that it was she that had insisted upon it.

‘Why ever should I like it?’ said Julie. ‘I don’t come on holiday to sit alone all day.’

Simon did not want to involve Sally by pointing out that she had been not alone, but with Sally. So he said nothing. She was not appeased. He could tell that she was planning a final blow, and out it came.

‘Though why,’ she said, ‘I’m complaining about you going out I don’t really know. Your company isn’t all that exciting, is it?’

Simon lit a cigarette. It was over, now. It could not get worse so it was sure to get better. Sally smiled nervously. Howard read his paper. Julie sat there, her face flushed with contention. At such moments, and God knows they came round regularly enough, Simon sometimes wondered how far things would go, if he let them. But the truth was that there was no further. This was the limit. And he could live with it, after all.

‘Perhaps the weather will be better, tomorrow,’ said Howard, finally, looking up from his paper and looking round as though he had heard nothing of what had passed.

‘I hope so,’ said Sally, with relief.

‘Then we could all go out,’ said Simon. He jumped in, recklessly. ‘You’d quite like it, you know, Julie, once you got going. You remember that walk we had in Scotland?’

He looked at her: she was sitting there, breathing rather quickly,
leaning slightly forward. Her eyes were unseeing. He waited, anxiously, and suddenly something went out of her, it was almost as though a spirit passed out of her, and she crumbled a little into the chair, and smiled in a disorganized fashion, and said, ‘Yes, yes, that’s true, that was very nice.’ And as though she were putting on a coat, or lipstick, she put on her manner, and leant over to Sally and said, ‘That was a
very
good holiday we had, and guess who was staying in the hotel …’ and Simon listened, and offered confirmation of their past adventures. It was all he was expected to do. Howard also listened, politely. Poor bugger, thought Simon, I bet he’s too nervous to read his paper in case she turns on him next, and asks him what he’s thinking about. The thought gave him some satisfaction. He enjoyed it. Serve him right, he thought, though for what he didn’t know.

The next day the weather was better: there was a little snow on the ground, but the sun shone, and it soon thawed. They all went out for a walk in the afternoon, dragging themselves off after their excessive lunch – at picnics the women drew the line, they said they couldn’t risk eating all the starch in the sandwiches, but they ate so much of what wasn’t sandwiched that it couldn’t have made much difference, Simon thought. Howard walked with Simon and told him about ICI. Simon wouldn’t have admitted it to himself, but he had actually been somewhat deterred by his wife’s indictment of the subject matter of his conversation, so he did not respond in kind, but allowed himself to be gently and informatively bored instead. ‘How interesting,’ he kept saying, with an effort, meaning how dull, the tables turned. In the evening, when he got back, he went straight to the telephone, saying he was going to ring his clerk, and rang Rose. She answered with relief, apologetic for having put him to the trouble: the children were safely back, they had a good time, they had been to Norfolk, Christopher had got a new car and they had been very excited about it. She said this with a desolate goodwill. Now they were back, of course, she was wishing they weren’t, because they were making such a hideous noise, which he could probably hear over the line, but that was life, was it not. The headmaster
had spent his Easter composing an affidavit, perhaps he would like to have a look at it when he got back. How had he been, had he been for another walk? She envied him being in the country, she missed it, and it was impossible to get there, not having a car. She had been on trains, and green line buses, but it was a drag, with the little ones. I’ll take you out one day, he said, we could go out for a day when the weather’s better, if I get some time off – and when he had said this (and it had seemed a natural thing to say) a small silence fell, while they both thought how they would like it, and she said yes, yes, I’d like that very much, let’s do that.