The Needle's Eye (56 page)

In her brushed nylon turquoise frilled nightgown, she had sat there, with one jug of flowers by her bed, the queen of the estate. Her dark skin lowered under the pale pretty frills, decorated, satisfied. And she and Rose, looking at each other, had recognized together that her fate had not neglected her, that God was not as careless as he had at times seemed to be: he had sought her out and marked her down, as though she had been worth his personal attention. Mrs Sharkey didn’t see it that way. But even Mrs Sharkey had
found Eileen weigh less heavily on her mind, since the accident. At least now I know what I’m worrying
about
, was how she put it to Rose. Rose knew exactly what she meant.

And so it seemed, perhaps, as though fate itself had intervened on Rose’s behalf and saved her from being rehoused. Christopher could hardly object to Middle Road as it now was. Even Harringdon Road school had gone up in the world: inspired by Rose’s example, one or two middle-class mothers had risked entrusting their children to its unknown dangers, and Maria had quite a little entourage of fashionable friends. Miss Lindley had left: times had changed, Miss Lindley’s skirts had dropped from the top of her thighs to her ankles, and Miss Lindley had moved on, out and on, to darker regions, more primitive lands of conquest. She was now assistant head of a school in Finsbury Park: she spent her evenings running a language centre for parents of immigrant children. Tireless, she was. Rose had lost touch with her. She had not time for Rose.

Simon watched, anxiously. He saw Rose’s house repainted on the outside, he saw Rose taken off for a summer holiday in Italy, he saw her depart for weekends in Norfolk, he saw her offer him drinks as though whisky were not three pounds a bottle. He heard reports of her remarks at dinner-tables not his own, he heard that she had been seen gambling with Christopher at Emilio’s, he heard that she had been seen laughing at the theatre, at a charity concert asleep, at a Private View drunk. He even read a letter from her in a weekly, about Women’s Liberation, protesting against some comment about a friend of hers, saying that women seemed incapable of taking into consideration the fact that men (not women only, but men) were naturally fond of their own children, and questioning the virtues of the new matriarchy. (It hurt him a great deal, that letter: not only the implications of its sentiments, but the indelicacy, so unlike her in so many ways, of having written it at all.) He saw her drawn into a new life, unable to reject her new neighbours, as tediously involved in their different deprivations as she had been in Mrs Sharkey’s, and more mercilessly, because more intelligently exploited by them. He saw her fight to send Konstantin to a state school – fight, bitterly, disagreeably, crazily, and win. (Simon’s own eldest had started at
Bedales. What could he do? The child was impossible, the child was psychotic.) He saw Konstantin flourish, politely, watchfully. He saw Rose’s hair turn paler and tarnish, like old metal. He watched. He watched like a hawk, for signs of cracking, for signs of ruin, for signs of decay. He needed her, he needed her more than ever. He watched her clothes, to see if she would spend money on herself. He watched her hair, to see if she would have it done, at three guineas a time. He watched her face, and the lines of it, to see if she would betray him. He watched for scars and bruises, but all he saw was the tightening of the skin on her cheekbones, the whitening of it round her eyes, a new maze of crow’s feet when she smiled. If she was bruised, it was in the soft flesh he could not see, the soft flesh he had never seen. If she bled, she bled internally.

Nobody ever mentioned the next instalment of the money due to Rose, the next thirty thousand pounds that would eventually come her way. It was as though it did not exist. Occasionally he thought of it. It hung over her, a threat as vague as death and as real and as trying, and one could no more ask, what will you do with it, than one could ask, how will you die, what will be the manner of your dying, do you hope to die in a state of grace. There was nothing to do but wait.

He watched the inside of her house, the rooms of it, the rooms she lived in. Breathlessly, over the years, he watched. They changed, a little. They did not change much. Such love, such salvation, he felt, at the sight of each object that remained in its place. The tea caddy. The tin tray. The armchair. The shabby cat. Sometimes things went – the settee, she decided one day, was past bearing, and he stood with her and Emily all one Saturday afternoon, waiting for the rag-and-bone-man with his painted cart. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it a moment longer, said Rose, laughing weakly, hysterically, looking at her watch, pummelling the awful old thing with its black and brown and orange patterned unbelievably filthy bulging ripped shiny prickly covering, hitting it till dust a century old flew out of it, the dust of North London, sacred and creaking, horsehair poking out of it, wadding seeping out of it – it’s foul, she cried, I can’t stand it, get it out, get it out, committing sacrilege, of course, giving in, she the
unconquerable, betraying disgust, she the unshockable – get it out, there he is, she said, and there he was, they heard his cryptic cry, his mysterious wail, and there was his shabby pony outside the window, his cart hand-painted, oh, the age was dying, and in those dingy corners you could hear its death rattle, as Rose Vassiliou and Emily Offenbach and Simon Camish opened the basement window, and heaved the ancient settee out into the area, because it was too big to go through the door, because it had been in that room for generations. The old man didn’t want it, they had to give him five bob to take it away, and oh, well rid of it at the price said Rose, looking round the room, that now looked empty, empty without it.

What on earth shall we
sit
on, now, she said, some minutes later. And being penitent, it was some time before she replaced the old settee.

Simon, suspicious, calling that winter (a Tory government, a new Industrial Relations Bill, decimal coinage, a new world later), calling on another Saturday, remembering the clouds of dust rising into the summer air, found them there, Rose and Emily, sitting on the new Habitat settee. And his suspicions glared, gathered. She was wearing a new fur coat, Rose was. What would she do, would she comment, would she apologize? A child had opened the door to him: they were to go out, he had brought two of his children, he was late, Rose and Emily were waiting for him, Julie had gone to the cinema. Christopher was abroad on business, and he and Rose and Emily were to go to the dog show at Alexandra Palace. And there was Rose, sitting on her new settee in a new fur coat. She looked up, and he came into the room, as the children opened the door for him, she looked up and smiled at him. ‘Simon,’ she said, ‘hello, how are you, how are things?’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, I’m sorry I’m late.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Rose. ‘There’s no hurry.’

And he looked at her, at her treachery. He looked at Emily. Emily had grown so beautiful with the years that it was now almost unbearable, one could hardly bear to gaze at her, so moving were the marks of time and beauty. Her hair had streaked, had turned grey and
white: it was thick and heavy, she wore it untidily pinned up, a brown pin holding it, coarse and drooping, sinking from the pin with the weight of years, and her skin, once brown and sallow, had faded and whitened, her lips were almost blue, so had the pink retreated, her eyes were etched in red and blue lines of amazing splendour, her whole face was lined and carved and withered into beauty, her hands too were marked with age, their veins courageously upstanding, their nails blue with a fine withdrawal. She seemed the image of time, triumphant, vindicated, conquering but conquered. Beside her Rose looked pale and delicate. They could not have survived without each other, and they had admitted him to their secrets. He looked back at Rose, and of course there she was, her coat a moth-eaten old thing she had picked up at a jumble sale, and as she rose to her feet, as she shouted for the children, as they gathered themselves together, bags and baskets and children and hats and scarves and boots, she turned to him and said, ‘What d’you think of my new coat, Simon? Smart, isn’t it? I found it in a cupboard at Branston and it seemed a pity to
waste
it, and then I got worried because I think I once signed a pledge about rare creatures, but it’s so incredibly old and dead, one couldn’t really call it a rare creature, do you think?’

‘Christopher says it’s
wolf
skin,’ she said, as they went through the door and up the steps, ‘but I think it’s more likely rabbit. Wouldn’t you?’

They went up to the Palace. Even the Palace had changed. There was an artificial ski slope now, on one of the hills, and there was talk of all sorts of developments – holds, art centres, God knows what. The view was still the same, except for a few new tall buildings, like the one housing Mrs Sharkey. There it all lay, London, the roof tops, Hackney marshes, the railway lines, the fair delusive green spongy fields of sewage. ‘Bloody cold, isn’t it,’ said Marcus, casting a perfunctory glance at the panorama, and they agreed, and went in.

Rose had been promising Simon a dog show for years. With immense satisfaction he formulated to himself that sentence. For years, now, she had been promising to take him to a dog show at the Palace. He had known her for years. There she was, slightly ahead, a child dragging on one arm, her hair tumbling on to her fur coat
shoulders. She turned to him, she smiled. ‘I’ve been meaning to bring you to one of these for
years
,’ she said, ‘but don’t expect too much fun, will you? It’s an awful bore, really.’

‘I’m enjoying it already,’ he said.

There was a strong smell of dog. Under her guidance, he had seen other events there – a jumble sale, a chess competition, a roller skating competition, a London Festival Drama for Schools Exhibition – but never yet a dog show. There were all the dogs, in the big hall, standing around rather carelessly with their owners. Most of them were Alsatians. ‘Don’t for Christ’s sake walk on the dog shit,’ said Emily, yanking a child firmly to one side, as it was about to put its foot in it. The dogs looked bored and angry. So did their owners. Emily had been too late with one of the children: scraping its shoe crossly on a step, she told them about Iceland where dogs were illegal, Reykjavik, the only civilized capital city in the world. ‘All dogs should be shot,’ said Emily, loudly, and the children bristled and whispered and giggled, thrilled by her audacity, shocked and embarrassed by it at the same time, half expecting the dogs or their provoked owners to leap angrily at her throat, half proud of her evident heroic disdain.

In fact, it became obvious, when they had wandered around for a quarter of an hour or so, that there wasn’t much going on. It was a very second-rate dog show. There were some quite interesting small dogs in cages: Maria and Simon’s youngest managed to work up a little fake enthusiasm for some malevolent Pekinese, but were easily corrupted by the elder ones, who wanted to go and look for something to eat. ‘I can’t face it, I can’t face it,’ said Rose, wanly, as they drifted off.

‘I’ll go,’ said Simon, politely, ‘I’ll go and cope with them.’

‘They can look after themselves,’ said Emily. ‘For God’s sake.’ And she led them off firmly, leaving the children in the cafeteria, to the other end of the large hall, and sat down and got her newspaper out of her pocket, and started to read. ‘Peace and quiet,’ she said, ‘we might as well enjoy it while we can.’

The back of the hall was banked with steps. Wooden steps, thick with dust, reached upwards. It must once, Simon thought, have been
some kind of auditorium. Emily was sitting on the bottom step, indifferent to the dirt. Rose looked around her, looked upwards.

‘Let’s go and sit at the top, up there,’ she said. ‘It might look more interesting, from up there. You never know.’

Emily did not look up from her paper. She was reading about how to peel whole oranges and stew them in caramelized sauce. Emily hated cooking, and she always read recipes, to enrage herself. She could get quite emotional about recipes. She took them as personal affronts.

‘Come on,’ said Rose to Simon, as she started to climb. The steps were steeply banked. He followed her. The room grew lighter, as they climbed up: there were windows in the dome of the hall, letting in superior light. With each step the dog scene fell into shape below them. The dogs and their owners, harmlessly employed. Simon looked up at Rose. The light fell from the windows, the winter sun fell on to her pale hair, shafts and slanting planes of it, and he could see all the dusty motes in the bright air, and her hair itself, falling on to the points of her fur collar, fell into a thousand bright individual fiery sparks, the hair and the fur meeting, radiant, luminous, catching whatever fell from the sun upon them, stirring like living threads in the sea into a phosphorescent life, turning and lifting, alive on the slight breeze of her walking, a million lives from the dead beasts, a million from her living head, haloed there, a million shining in a bright and dazzling outline, a million in one. She walked ahead, encircled by brightness, she walked, and turned and stopped.

‘Let’s sit down here,’ she said.

And she sat there, in the thick dust, and he sat by her, and they looked down at the hall beneath them, with its wooden boards and its traditional amusements.

‘It’s a bit shabby,’ she said, ‘isn’t it?’ – leaning forwards, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands.

‘I like it,’ he said.

‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘that day when we went to see the chickens and the armchair? I said we could come to a dog show then, I remember.’

‘It’s good,’ he said, ‘that we did what we said we would do.’

‘One doesn’t always,’ she said, frowning. ‘Things don’t always work out as one expects,’ she said.

She was thinking of Christopher. She had never spoken of Christopher to Simon, since his return to her: she had maintained an honourable silence. There were many things that she had wanted to say – now, as she sat there watching the dogs below she thought of some of them – but she had never been able to say them. She wanted Simon to understand. She wanted him to think well of her, not to judge her harshly, but could not state her own case without treachery. She could not acquire his esteem without begging for it, and thereby forfeiting a right to it. So she kept silent, hoping that he would do her justice, in his mind. She desired his approbation, passionately. It was her strongest emotional need, and one that by its very nature she could take no move to satisfy. And the greatest threat to his fair judgement of her was one of the qualities in him that she most loved, which made her trust him, which made her admire him and seek his friendship: for it was his own diffidence: a man like him, how could he ever guess, correctly, at what she truly felt – and why, in any case, should she want him to know it? Since Christopher’s return, she had lived in various kinds of misery, but she knew that nobody, not even Simon, would credit her distress. He would credit, perhaps, her sense of loss, because he had seemed to acknowledge what it was that she had, on her own, her way of life, her peace of mind, but she suspected that he, like others, would think that she had gained more than she had lost. He will think, she thought bitterly, he will think, as everyone thinks, that I am lucky to have Christopher back again, that I wanted him all the time, that I played my cards and won, that he came back to me ostensibly on my terms to vindicate me, but in fact on his own, to support me. She was ashamed, she was humiliated, by the thought that others might think so of her – that they had seen her as a deserted wife, humbly and gratefully accepting her husband’s return, chastened, accepting, glad to re-admit him to her house and her life and her body. She knew how the world saw Christopher: she knew how Simon must inevitably see Christopher: the successful man, the delicately
achieved man, the man who cannot be rejected, the man whose power overcomes more rational hesitations, the man who awarded blows through love, the man who cannot be denied. They saw her, in consequence, as the woman who had tried to do without him, who resisted him on one level to succumb more deeply on another, to accept him more fully for his transgressions. She hated this picture of herself. The picture of Christopher she did not mind, for it bestowed on him a little of the dignity that she truly, deep within herself, feared that he might lack. She would connive with the world to protect him: but why should her good name suffer, in her connivance? She saw no way out. She had taken him back because she could not bear to keep the children from him: why should she be so silenced, so, compromised, by her own act? And it was not only in silence that she suffered. Her whole nature was being corrupted by her deep resistance to Christopher, by the endless, sickening struggle to preserve something of her own. She had become irritable, nagging, shrewish, difficult: she quarrelled with Christopher, in public, over the least issue, and at home, though she was able to prevent herself from becoming violent, she could not bring herself to be pleasant or placid. She had never made that leap into the clearer air. She looked back with bitter regret to those exhausting days of peace, when she was on her own, alone, lonely, when she would put the children to bed and then sit up herself a little while with a book, and then go quietly to bed. They seemed endowed, those days, with a spiritual calm that it had been a crime to lose. And now she lived in dispute and in squalor, for the sake of charity and of love. She had ruined her own nature against her own judgement, for Christopher’s sake, for the children’s sake. She had sold for them her own soul, but it had not been a downright transaction, over and done with, the soul handed over like a little parcel as St Catherine’s was, to purchase food for the flock – no, the price she had to pay was the price of her own living death, her own conscious dying, her own lapsing, surely, slowly, from grace, as heaven (where only those with souls may enter) was taken slowly from her, as its bright gleams faded. Oh yes, she knew it had been narrow, her conception of grace, it had been solitary, it had admitted no others, it had been without community.
That made its loss no less real to her. At times she tried to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that her decision to live with Christopher was not only right but also, beneath all her resistance, satisfactory to her: at times she came near to persuading herself that this was so, that she enjoyed strife or would not endure it, that she enjoyed his bullying or would not condone it. But she could not keep up this pretence for long: she would catch herself out. As she had done, now this week – for when he had said he was going abroad on business for a fortnight, she had not been able to conceal from herself the waves of relief, of physical and mental relief that swept through her. No Freudian subtlety on earth could have persuaded her to mistake that relief for dismay. The relief at the thought of two weeks without him had been overwhelming, shaming, vindicating, triumphant. For fourteen days she could go to bed in innocence, and get up without fear. And if this was so, if this was how it was, then her decision to take Christopher back (measured, thus, in terms of anguish, of suffering, of justifying pain) must have been right. She had been right to take him: no ulterior weakness of her own, no sexual craving, had prompted her to do so, she had done it in the dry light of arid generosity, she had done it for others. Her duty, that was what she had done. For others. For him, for the children.