The Needle's Eye (49 page)

When the meal was over, Mrs Bryanston retired immediately to bed. Her lack of interest in life had afflicted them all: it was a disease, a mildew, which oppressed even strangers. Simon noticed that even Christopher had more or less given her up, though he had managed to get a faint flicker of a smile once or twice during the meal. He remembered Rose saying that she only appeared to be animated when really ill: once she had had an operation, which had excited her, and once she had broken her arm, a drama which she had enjoyed even more. But her norm of ill health was too monotonous to afford her any satisfaction: she had cried wolf so often that her claims for attention were treated with little respect.

Her withdrawal from the scene had the immediate effect of cheering everybody else up: even Rose’s father blossomed into something like joviality, at the prospect of a drink in the drawing-room without her. He became positively hospitable, asking Christopher several times if suitable arrangements had been made for Rose and Simon, asking Simon to stay on for a few days, telling Rose that she should come more often and that Konstantin ought to have his hair cut. His bonhomie, it was true, was somewhat sadistic in nature: he took pleasure in expressing concern for Rose by
pointing out that the hem of her dress was coming down, and in telling her that she had been a fool to divorce Christopher. The delicacy of this latter subject deterred him not at all: he told her she was a fool to leave a man who would do and was doing so well for himself. She listened, and offered no defence: it would have been difficult to do so, for the case was not argued, it was flatly stated, with what Simon considered amazing, gross effrontery. They listened, the three of them, politely, to his discourse on human relations: he was clearly a man accustomed to delivering monologues, for when anyone tried to agree with him or question him, he ignored the contribution completely, starting to talk again through it as soon as he could think of anything else to say. Simon suddenly remembered whose manner it was that he recalled: it was a judge, now dead, whom Simon had had the misfortune to meet at a professional dinner, and whose pace of conversation had been deliberately designed to embarrass and wound the younger men around him. Simon had hardly been able to believe his ears when a senior colleague had said, on the old fellow’s departure to the lavatory, ‘Ah, he’s a wonderful man, what a character, he’s one of the most humane people I’ve ever worked with.’ If that had been humanity, thought Simon, then God help the rest of the profession.

Mr Bryanston moved shortly from human relations to industrial relations, a subject which stirred him even more. Simon listened with growing satisfaction. Living as he did in a self-consciously progressive world, exposed only incidentally, in hotels and trains, to the voice of opposition, he found it reassuring to hear it, in all its glory. So many industrialists expressed themselves with such urbanity, demonstrating what was after all a historic connection between civility and exploitation, that it was a relief to hear the undisguised truth. At least one could thus see that it was a real division of interests at stake. Some men, even self-made men like Rose’s father, had so picked up the tones of reason that it was hard to believe that it was not the national interest alone that they had at heart. But Mr Bryanston gave himself away. He spoke of the workers as though he were a mill-owner in a nineteenth-century novel, even delivering himself of the classic view that the fact that he himself had started
work collecting scrap metal in a handcart was a perfectly adequate reason why workers deserved no sympathy at all – a view which showed a mental leap so precarious, so ibex-like, from crest of unreason to crest of unreason, that one could not but sit back and admire his magnificent, gravity-defying arrival. He spoke of strikes, of which two were notably in progress, one amongst the makers of surgical equipment, the other amongst the makers of certain bits of machinery which were impeding Mr Bryanston’s own productivity: Simon, used to the emotive cries of sympathy for those about to perish for lack of a scalpel, was pleased to note that Mr Bryanston did not care twopence for such innocent victims, and that all his sympathy was reserved for his own loss of profits. He did, it is true, try to elevate this personal concern to the level of national interest – and indeed it probably was a matter of national interest, it was hard to deny it – but it was gratifying to see the roots of his concern so unselfconsciously laid bare. Healthy, tenacious roots they were, too, deep sunk, able to survive a little soil erosion. No amount of exposure impeded such force. After a while, Simon, unable to resist stirring it a little, asked Mr Bryanston what he thought of the surgical equipment pay-claim: Mr Bryanston stopped, snorted, grunted, unwilling to bend his mind away from his own affairs, but equally unable to refuse such an invitation, and finally said, ‘Wicked, that’s what I call it, downright wicked. Utterly selfish. If I had my way they’d all be deprived of medical attention for the rest of their lives.’ Simon enjoyed this reply immensely: surprisingly, Mr Bryanston noticed his enjoyment, and reverted instantly to the safer topic of the way he had settled or failed to settle his own wage claims. As he went on, Simon found himself thinking with real affection of his own father-in-law, a genuinely modest man and a genuine exploiter, a man still so much of his own background that he knew how to get money from it with a perfect artistry. He had preserved a fellow feeling for his victims. He knew how to play on them because he was of them, he designed his brochures for them with a knowing eye. He was humble, because knowingly corrupt: he would never boast that others could simply choose to do likewise if they had the wit, he knew the others too well to claim it. Mr Bryanston had forgotten
what the others were like, if he had ever known or cared. His memory was full of holes, and that perhaps was why he was perched up there on his solitary eminence, his Alpine peak of national interest, on a nasty snowy little rock of illogic. While down below, abandoned by thought, unjustified by human concern or even, at this stage, by personal ambition, the machinery ground away, the objects rolled off the conveyor belts, the profits ebbed and flowed, the shop stewards wrangled, the workmen carried on working, and every now and then somebody fell into a ladle of molten slag.

And yet, for all that, one couldn’t help thinking that Mr Bryanston, after Mrs Bryanston, was rather a relief. At least he had something to say for himself, even though it was rather shocking. He was something rather than nothing, and after Mrs Bryanston in her dressing-gown this was a considerable step up in the scale of humanity. He ate, he drank, he had held his grandchild’s hand and tried to sell a few pot plants for the district nurses in his conservatory: he had even, once, at dinner, passed Simon the salt. I’ve eaten his salt, thought Simon, I’d better stop judging him and worrying about him, there’s no point in trying to relate wealth to personality, I have known that for years. Nearly a century and a half stand between me and the possibility of understanding such a relation, I had better give it up. So he finished his drink, quietly, as Rose was doing, and looked at Rose instead. He wondered what she was thinking, and if, ever, in her thoughts, she included him.

Rose, herself, was thinking that nothing had changed. It was all as it had been, dreary, oppressive, painful beyond belief. Hearing her father talk business was like hearing some old record replayed. How Christopher puts up with it I cannot imagine, she thought, quelling in herself the faint hope that Christopher might have discovered something tolerable, that he might be able to translate for her, into terms that she could understand, some aspects of grace. She would never have admitted it, but the fact that Christopher, whom she had once loved, had become close to her father, had not condemned Christopher, but had on the contrary given to her father’s image a pale gleam of hope. She felt now that it had been illusory. She
remembered the one act of imagination that her father had even directed towards her – when, all those years ago, he had summoned her to his study in the London house and asked her if she had got herself involved with the Communist Party. She had thought then, perhaps after all he knows who I am, perhaps he would recognize me if he met me on the street. She had later recognized, humbly, that his concern on this score could hardly by any light have been construed as affection. But it had nevertheless cheered her: better to be recognized as a link in a chain than not to be recognized at all. Sometimes she worried about the nature of the link – not that she had joined the Party, not that she had ever had much to do with it – but it was a link all the same, the simple link of reaction. She had reacted against what she had heard, as a child: she had become other. And where therefore was the transcendence? (Others might have been interested in the credit, but she was not: it was justification she sought, not gratitude.) Whence had come illumination, and why to her? At times she tried to trace a more natural connection between herself and her parentage, discovering in herself her mother’s hypochondria with every sore throat, her father’s inhumanity with her own preference for the total as opposed to the individual. I, like him, she would say to herself, am stubborn beyond belief, I too am partisan, it is simply that accident has forced me to take the other part.

But she did not believe these reasonings. Transcendence loomed over her head like a great owl.

Once, the winter before, crossing the park, a jay had creaked slowly across her path, noisily, heavy, flying low, from tree to tree, a few feet away, its plumage dull pink and barred and ominous, its flight heavy with cold. So exiled it had looked, so blundering.

The reaction, of course, had not been entirely unaided. There was always Noreen to be remembered. Somewhere about this house, so long unvisited, hovered the memory of Noreen, the witch-woman, with her unwanted, dour true revelation, that revelation which had become almost sweet with time. Later, that night, she would go and trace it. Somewhere must lie the relics of the past, in the bottom of a cupboard or a wardrobe, in a broom closet, in a tea chest or a suitcase or an old box. The children had found, over the
years, some of her things, and had brought back to her sad objects, old paintboxes, scrap-books, some wooden hens pecking on a board, a broken weather-house, a cross-stitch purse full of little plastic rabbits. Upstairs, there would be something that would bring back Noreen and her illuminations. The rooms were all different, now, of course – her own old room had been made over to Christopher, and the children slept all three in what had been the schoolroom. She had been put for the night in what had been Noreen’s room, at the end of the corridor, while Simon was in the best guest room. Mrs Graves had told Rose this, in the kitchen, when Rose had gone to ask about dinner. Asking about dinner had made Rose feel so miserable, in so familiar a way: she knew that it would make no difference to the people in the kitchen, to be asked to provide an extra two meals, to be asked to make up a couple more beds, she knew that they were paid to do such things, that they could leave if they wanted to, that they were often asked to do much worse things with less notice and in less polite a manner, and yet nevertheless such a wash of embarrassment had poured over her, as she stood here clumsily and nervously, ill at ease, that it had transported her back twenty years, to the humiliation of being half-employer, half servile child, treated by the staff with a mocking deference, and yet at the same time privileged to hear their complaints, their moans about her parents and the employing class in general, a tenant of both worlds, belonging to neither, recipient of the confidences of each about the other, and therefore all too painfully aware of the mutual contempt that reigned beween them. It was these years, perhaps, that had made her so neurotically incapable of relying on the services of others: she recalled the relief that had filled her when she had discovered that it was possible to get through life cleaning one’s own shoes, cooking one’s own meals, washing one’s own pants, that it was not a law of nature that decreed her to suffer for ever the humiliation of having these things done for her by people who despised her. She had met enough people, now, to know that others did not necessarily feel as she did, and that only lack of finance prevented a great many more women from employing each other to wash each other’s underwear and make each other’s beds. At first
she had found this incredible, impossible: she could not believe that people of her own generation, nice people like Diana, really meant it when they sighed over the colonial life at dinner-parties, sympathizing with returning members of the British council, or Shell, or OUP representatives, for their diminished staff. Nor would she believe the rueful, courageous complaints of these returning ladies – ‘Ah well, I suppose I’ll get used to doing my own cooking,’ these women said, smiling bravely, knowing that the women at home would not be pleased by too great a show of reluctance – but Rose herself so deeply assumed that these women
must
,
could only be
pleased to have got rid of the dreadful burden of shoe-cleaners and houseboys and nannies and ayahs (or whatever the word was) that it took her years to notice that it was the tone of regret that was in fact genuine, not the somewhat forced courage, and that the sighs of the Dianas of this world were not uttered through politeness to guests from different climes, understandably out of touch with the moral codes of Europe, but through genuine and sincere envy. Diana too would employ eight women at ten shillings a week if she could: Diana too would relinquish gladly those lovely jobs, the ironing and the cooking and the gardening, to anyone whom she could afford to pay to do them.

There had been one occasion on which she had found somebody to agree with her attitude, an occasion which at first sight seemed to bear out her suspicion that it was at root historical, neurotic. At dinner one night, talking to a group of women about au pair girls and charladies and their strange ways, one of the guests (sensing, perhaps, Rose’s silent dissent) had turned to Rose, quietly, and said, you know, the trouble is, I can’t employ this woman I’ve got now, any longer, I can’t bear it. She looks like my own grandmother. She was in service, my grandmother, and when I see this woman on her knees in my kitchen, I feel as though I’ve put my grandmother down there to scrub my floor. I’ll have to do without. Rose, to this, had revealed her own hesitations, trying to produce neurotic reasons for them as this other woman had done, each trying to condemn herself for abnormality, but they did not manage it. Uneasily and yet reassured they eyed each other, knowing the truth, relieved to find at
least one to share it, meeting in the middle, one who had seen too much domestic employment from the upper side, and one who had seen too much from the lower, and both of them knowing that there was no justice in it and not enough pay. It had been an interesting meeting.