The Needle's Eye (36 page)

‘It’s obvious why I’m doing it,’ said Christopher. ‘I’m doing it because I want them. I want them back. They’re mine, I’m their father, I want them. I don’t like living without them. I want them back.’

While he said these words, he stared at the carpet.

‘Yes, but even so,’ said Simon, ‘it’s pointless to set out by a method that won’t achieve anything. You won’t achieve anything this way, you’ll only make it worse.’

‘What other way am I supposed to employ? There is no other way. The only thing left for me to do is to sit around and keep my mouth shut. You should try that as a way of life.’

‘I rather think I do, for different reasons,’ said Simon.

‘That’s your affair,’ said Christopher, but amicably, indeed with appreciation. ‘That’s your affair. But in my position, I’ve got to show something. I can’t just take it. What would they think of me, if I just took it? The children, I mean. What would they think of me?’

‘They can’t much like what’s going on now,’ said Simon.

‘Why should they like it? That’s not the point. It’s not their happiness I’m interested in.’

‘What are you interested in, then?’

‘I’m interested in them.’

‘I doubt if the law will think so. I doubt if the law will consider your – activities express the right kind of interest.’

‘That’s because the law’s got a bloody funny notion of human relations,’ said Christopher.

‘Some people might think it was you that had,’ said Simon.

‘But you don’t think so, do you? I can tell that you don’t think so.’

‘I don’t know what I think,’ said Simon, truthfully.

‘That’s because she’s got hold of you. She’s brainwashed you,’ he said, smiling pleasantly. ‘She can put up a pretty good case for herself, that woman. She learned a few things from me, before she left me.’

‘I thought you left her.’

‘Ha. You see what I mean.’

‘I’m not at all sure that I want to hear your side of the story.’

‘You may not want to,’ said Christopher, ‘but you’re going to have to. Because I’m going to tell it to you. Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll go round to my place.’

‘I can’t,’ said Simon.

‘Why not?’ said Christopher.

‘There’s my wife somewhere around, I can’t leave her.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Christopher. ‘She’s perfectly safe here, she’ll come to no harm here.’

‘No, I suppose you’re right. Yes, of course you’re right. I’ll go and tell her I’m leaving,’ said Simon: and indeed went and did exactly that. She did not seem perturbed: slightly drunk, very gay, she was too deeply engrossed in conversation to pay much attention to his departure. And so he set off with Christopher Vassiliou, through the spring dusk. They walked in silence, down the road and round the corner. Christopher had a top-floor flat in a large family house. Simon had not known what to expect from it, and from Rose’s comments about her husband’s aspirations he had perhaps composed in his mind a glossy penthouse, full of the corrupt luxury articles that Rose herself so scornfully avoided, with copies of
Playboy
and motoring magazines lying on glass-topped tables. It was not like that at all. It was rather bare, as though little attention had been paid to it, and the furniture looked as though it had been provided by the parents of the family downstairs: there was a large carved mahogany sideboard with a mirror, a settee and chairs with wicker backs and claw feet, a glass-fronted inlaid cupboard with china in it, a couple of small odd useless tables, with twisty barley-sugar legs. The carpet alone, a long-haired thick white stringy woolly object, looked as though it might have been purchased expressly in a fit of deep depression. Simon, settling himself down with a glass of whisky,
looked round, and could not at first place what it was that the room exhaled, so surprising was it. For it was unexpected: it was like Rose’s: it was intimate. It was a brown and shadowy room, comfortable and curiously homely. Two long-finned, long-tailed goldfish swam in a large tank, confirming the domestic note. Rows of books stood on an arrangement of bricks and planks, an arrangement such as he had not seen since his student days. Evidently Christopher’s aspirations, whatever they might be, were not as simple as he had hoped.

Nor, of course (though he had known this would be so, from the first moment of encounter) was his account of his marriage and its subsequent problems. Christopher did not embark upon discussion until he had provided them both with a plateful of food: they sat there, each eating bacon and baked beans and fried eggs and slices of bread, and then Christopher began. The tone of his voice, like the tone of the room, was low, and unlike the tone of most men it was obsessively personal: mumbling, low, monotonous, Christopher offered no explanations of externals, he behaved as though they did not exist, it seemed to be the underlying connections that he was after, it seemed to be the truth that he was after. And listening to him, listening to his endless rambling dissertation on Rose’s iniquity, on her selfishness, on her histrionics, on her desire to degrade Christopher by proving to him her own estimate of his own motives, it became clear to Simon that he would have to abandon, for ever, his hope, which had once been as strong as a certainty: his hope, that Christopher had married Rose for her money, simply, and would as simply, one day, forfeit her. Christopher, evidently, had no interest in the money at all. He had no guilt about it, either. It meant nothing to him. What he was interested in was power, and motivation, and emotion, and love. Listening to him was like listening to Rose. It was as crazed, as unworldly, as immediately comprehensible. Simon had known it for some time. He had known it for certain, when he had seen the false Christopher with the child on his shoulders, in Cornwall. How could he have supposed such an image to represent Christopher, if he had not been afraid of the very truth? And later,
on his return, seeing the real Christopher with the children in his car, he had known it all, in his heart.

‘She undermined me,’ Christopher was saying, staring intently at the rows of books, ‘she undermined me, she has done from the beginning, she had no trust in me, she panicked as soon as she married me, she only did it to give herself a real fright, and then she couldn’t face it when I turned out all right, when I was loyal to her, I’m telling you, she could have taken anything in me except my efforts at good behaviour, and I did try, I nearly killed myself trying, I ruined myself for her …’

And Simon watched the fish go round and round, and some flowers in a vase, and drank his drink, and his head turned like the fish in the bowl. After a while Christopher got on to the subject of the children: Rose’s obstinacy, the dreadful school they went to, her childish obstinacy in keeping them there, her ignorance of what really went on in schools like that, her ignorance of what it was like to have suffered, the way she had taken the children from him, and tried to stop him teaching them to roller-skate, her unrealistic attitudes, her stubborn perverse wicked refusal to give them a chance in life. She’s demented, he said, she’s demented, I don’t mind what she does with herself, she can sit in a bus shelter for the rest of her life if she wants to, but I’m damned if I’ll leave those children to sit there with her. And anyway, I know her, she’ll not be satisfied with sitting in that dump for another ten years, she’s brewing something else up, I know she is, she’ll get used to it there and she’ll want something worse, she’ll be dragging them off to a leper hospital with her before the year’s out, just you wait and see, if I don’t do something about it to stop her. You’ve no idea, said Christopher, how absolutely wicked and selfish people are when they get hold of this idea of being good. They destroy everything about them. They end up in a burning desert. You know what I mean.

Yes, I know what you mean, said Simon, too depressed for words.

So you see, said Christopher, I want to rescue the children. That’s all. What do you think will happen to them, if I don’t? When they
reach the age of twenty-one. What do you think they’ll do, with all the money they come in to? Give it all away, to black Africa?

I don’t know, said Simon.

They’ll go to pieces, said Christopher. You know they will.

Miserably, Simon shifted in his chair. He had to speak up for her, but did not dare, he had not the confidence, he did not know how to phrase his faith in her, he wondered if it had not been destroyed.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, finally. Christopher had run down into silence. ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated, a little more firmly. ‘I don’t think they will necessarily go to pieces. I think you underestimate what she is doing for them. I think it will mean something to them. Even when things are very different.’

He wanted to explain that he had never had much respect for the view that one’s children will not thank one for sacrificing them to a principle. He had begun to think, on the contrary, that children will not forgive one for sacrificing principles to them. But it was too late in the evening, he could not work it out. What he did say was, in support of Rose, ‘And I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that Rose had any intention of going off to a leper colony. She seems very well settled where she is,’ he said, with more confidence.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Christopher. ‘She’s just biding her time. Once every five years or so, she breaks out.’

‘Perhaps she’s changed,’ said Simon.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Christopher. ‘People don’t change. I don’t believe that people change.’

‘You have changed,’ said Simon. ‘From your own account, one would imagine that you had changed.’

‘No, I haven’t changed,’ said Christopher. ‘I’ve just put on a bit of weight and had my hair cut. I haven’t changed.’

‘If people don’t change,’ said Simon, finishing his second glass of whisky, ‘then why is it that they cease to care for each other?’

‘They don’t,’ said Christopher. He paused, lit himself his tenth cigarette, and said, ‘they don’t. Sometimes they get each other wrong and find out about it. But they don’t stop caring.’

There was a long silence.

‘She shouldn’t have divorced me,’ said Christopher. ‘She had no right to divorce me. And she knows it. And if she’s happy now, as you say she is, she has no right to be. That’s why I’m going to go on making trouble for her. Because she has no right to be happy. And I won’t let her be so. You can’t make happiness out of destroying the lives of other people.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Simon, ‘That’s exactly what a lot of people seem to do.’

‘They may seem to,’ said Christopher, ‘but they don’t.’

Walking home, Simon realized that what had disturbed him so much was not so much what had been said – he had expected an attack, and the other side of any story is always disquieting – as the attitude behind it. The last thing he had expected had been a morality, a set of judgements, a structure as unrealistic and unworldly as Rose’s own. All the accusations which he could, upon Rose’s behalf, have levelled against Christopher, had been undone by the level of the attack. Of course she should not have divorced him. It was evident, both from what she had said of him, and he of her. It was as simple as that. If she had not done so, if she had not committed such an offence, there would have been no case. It was obvious. One should have known that intolerable effects, such as custody cases, were not likely to be thrown up by tolerable situations. The recognition excluded him totally. Meyer had pulled off more than he had intended. Simon, who had contemplated with some pleasure the prospect of an unrequited and undeclared affection, found himself denied even such an indulgence.

Meyer had in fact intended nothing very much. He never did. Reporting by phone, to Emily, later that night, the meeting of Christopher Vassiliou and Simon Camish, he had no sense whatsoever of making trouble, of taking the offensive. This was because he could in no way conceive of himself as an offender. The role, he firmly believed, was beyond his capacity. He considered himself a victim, having been brought up in circumstances that had indeed made of his weapon,
the intellect, a dangerous weakness. Although the circumstances had changed, although he was no longer the crumpled, battered victim of his own talents, hiding in a corner from brutal scorn and malice and miserable taunts, he had become incapable of considering himself in any other light: as a boy he had been ineffective, so ineffective he must remain, and all his attempts to wound others were no more than an effort to redress an impossible balance. Himself bleeding, himself wounded incurably, savagely maimed from infancy, bayed by dogs and baited like a bear, he attempted (as he saw it) feebly, to scratch the invulnerable, to pinch and tease them a little, just to reassure himself, to comfort himself a little that if pricked, they too would bleed, never intending to cause anything other than the most minor irritation, and believing himself impotent even to do so little. He was incapable of apology, even when the evidence of offence was plain to all: he considered himself harmless. Not knowing his own strength, he did not know when to stop, he had no conception of victory, and it was not uncommon to see him, crow-like, standing on the battlefield on the corpses of dead victims, black, murderous, croaking angrily, pecking and tearing, with no notion that it was the slain that he fed upon, with no notion that he was doing other than fighting, still, for his life. People were terrified of him, and when he caught glimpses of this terror he took it as an insult, a mockery, for was it not evident, he thought, that any silly little student, any dumb wife or foolish old man, was better armed than he?

Emily had suffered from him for years, but she knew what he was up to. She knew, because she did it herself. She refused to bleed, she refused to become a sacrifice: instead, she returned blow for blow. He did not mind: from her he got what he expected; she justified uniquely his picture of the world and of himself. It was the only form of love which reached him. She had not loved him at first; for years she had thought such a thing impossible; and then one day she had said to herself, well, this is something, this exists, and love might as well be the name that I give to it. So she had said that she loved him – to herself, not to him – and had felt much better thereafter. There is a lot in a word, she would say to herself. And in the name of love she slandered him behind his back, attacked him to his face,
tormented him with her affection for others, and reported to him, maliciously, the ill-natured descriptions of him that she provoked wherever she went. In the name of love, these acts took on some grace.