The Needle's Eye (7 page)

‘I can quite see why they are interested,’ he said, looking back at the papers, as though for confirmation. ‘What you have done is, really, rather strange, you know. But I don’t imagine they will get on to this. It will probably come to nothing, anyway. Your husband – wouldn’t tell them, would he?’

‘How well you seem to know him already,’ she said, with a faint wash of despair, that dislodged the cat from her knee. ‘But no, I don’t think so. He would have done, once, but now he’s become far too respectable. And too clever, too, I imagine. He is very good at picking up the proper ways of doing things. You should have seen how quickly he learned about witness boxes. If people did get to know, now, he wouldn’t let it be known that he had told them.’

‘I don’t think, then, that there is much danger’

‘And do you think –’ and here she leant her head back, and shut
her eyes, ‘– do you think that there is any chance, any chance at all, of his getting the children? There isn’t, is there? Could there be?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible,’ he said, quickly, instantly, not allowing himself to think about how to reply. And then, thinking a little more, of something to say – ‘Do you think he really wants them back?’

She shook her head, rocking it backwards and forwards on the back of the chair, not opening her eyes.

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve been asking myself, all day. I don’t know.’

The subject having been opened, he had to go on with it, though he would rather have left it and continued to reassure.

‘Had you any suspicion that this kind of thing would happen? How has he been towards the children since the divorce? He had, I assume –’ and again he pretended to consult the papers on his knee ‘– reasonable access?’

‘Yes. He used to come and take them out. Every other Sunday. And he used to take them on holidays sometimes. He wasn’t really allowed to, I don’t think, but how could I stop him? It was – not very good. He used to spend so much money on them. And with my not having it, and not wanting them to have it, it was … very difficult.’

‘And so you protested?’

‘No, I didn’t protest. I don’t protest. How could I? I could only go on doing what I was doing. I don’t expect everyone else to do the same. I don’t expect it. But sometimes – it becomes impossible to go on doing what one has to do. If other people are determined to prevent one.’ She paused, and sighed. ‘He took them out last Sunday. I wasn’t here. I left them with the woman next door, for him to collect. And he brought them back to her. That’s how it was.’

‘I see,’ he said, this time genuinely consulting the wad of correspondence, ‘that you refused to apply for maintenance, against your solicitor’s advice?’ At this, to his relief, she smiled, with true amusement.

‘Yes, I did, I refused. It would have been too silly, really, me having maintenance from him, wouldn’t it? I simply couldn’t see why they wanted me to apply, it was too absurd, in the circumstances, and
they kept saying it was normal and would make things easier and that if I didn’t want the money I could give it back again or not take it or something. But I’ve had enough of giving money back again.’ She started to laugh. ‘I must have got rid of more money than anyone my age ever has. It’s quite a problem, I can tell you, though so different from most people’s that I never get very much sympathy for it. But when I thought of the terrible time I had getting rid of all those thousands, and what a disaster it all turned out to be, I really couldn’t face claiming ten pounds a week or whatever it would have been from Christopher. It’s not as though I’ve managed to get rid of everything yet. There’s another great lump due in a few years, when I’m thirty-five, that nobody could do anything about, and then I’ve got hundreds of square miles of pine-forest or whatever it is in Norfolk. I must go and have another look at it some day. Not that it brings me anything in, that was the whole point of it, that was why my father bought it, so I wouldn’t be able to touch it, but it’s all there, growing away, and some day somebody’s going to have to do something about it.’

‘Then what, may I ask, do you live on?’

‘You may
ask
,’ she said, still laughing, ‘you may well
ask
, and I might as well tell you that there was a day when I’d have been deeply embarrassed to tell you, I thought it was so embarrassing to be able to live at all, in this world. But I’ve grown up a bit since then, I’m not quite as mad as I used to be, you know. No, the truth is, that when I gave all that money away, eight years ago or whatever it is, I kept enough to give me enough to live on, in income. Or I thought it was enough, the idea was that it would be just enough. It was so farcical, you should have seen me, sitting down and working out what the national average income was, and what the level of national assistance was, and all that kind of thing – so stupid, I always had to do it all myself because no accountant would ever help me, accountants really can’t bear to let one give one’s money away, they simply wouldn’t be a party to such a ridiculous enterprise, so in fact I made some rather strange miscalculations, and I meant to leave myself with fifteen pounds a week and in fact left myself with more like eighteen pounds ten. But even that, as you can well imagine – or as
I can
now
imagine you can imagine, though it’s the kind of calculation I was as bad at as I was bad at investments – that really wasn’t enough, so in fact since Christopher left I’ve been doing a variety of odd jobs. I did dinners at the school, and I supervised the laundrette, and stuff like that – bloody badly paid jobs, they were – once I thought I ought to do something a bit more ambitious and I worked for the publicity man on Act for Racial Harmony, but it was so horrid and everyone pestered me so much that I gave it up. But in fact, you see, one can live quite magnificently on eighteen pounds ten, especially when one has wealthy friends like me. I get asked to so many things, I could live for free, I sometimes think. And I
have
to go to a lot of the things because they’re all good causes, and I can’t say no. And also I have a lot of good friends who are really intelligent like Nick and Diana, who don’t seem to want anything from me, and at the same time are very good at helping me to deal with the rest of the world.

‘So I live quite well. Though some people might not think so.’

He had tried hard to follow this, while she was speaking, but had already recognised that he would have to study her past transactions in peace and quiet if he was ever to understand them: and he truly failed to understand her reference to the intelligence of Nick and Diana, though perhaps it had been an oblique compliment to his own polite attention. Or perhaps she had seriously intended it.

Perhaps she judged Nick and Diana from a standpoint utterly different from his own. Perhaps he had failed, himself, to appreciate them. Though what right had she, suddenly, like this, out of the blue, to imply superior intimacies, superior illuminations? He felt once more, welling up in him, uncontrollably, suspicion, distaste, anger. If Nick and Diana understood her so well, and she them, why had she not stayed behind to talk to them, instead of forcing him into the role of confidant, instead of conning him by her doubtless professional confidences into movements of true sympathy?

One would have had to be hard-hearted enough to resist, as she had quite well known: but then that was what he was: hard-hearted. Hard-hearted and also weak. She had probably seen it at once. He cleared his throat, shuffled the papers back into their battered folder, and said, nastily enough, picking up her last remark, ‘Yes, I daresay
you do manage quite well, but nevertheless I think you ought to get in touch with your solicitor first thing in the morning. I think that’s the best advice I can possibly give.’

She did not look at him: she looked at her hands folded in her lap.

‘Yes,’ she said, evenly. ‘Yes, I am sure you are right. It is very kind of you – to have taken so much trouble.’

And she looked up at him: their eyes met. He could see that the change in his tone had registered profoundly, and he wished, immediately, that it had not.

‘I am so sorry,’ she continued, ‘I ought to never have kept you up so late. But I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you, for having listened to me. I had to talk about it, and it was so kind of you to listen. But one ought not to inflict one’s problems on other people, I suppose, it is very inconsiderate.’

‘Of course not,’ he said, attempting warmth, to no avail. ‘I am very glad that you told me. I am only sorry that I cannot be of more use.’

‘You have been very helpful,’ she said, hopelessly. She had abandoned him, she had cast him out, and it was by his own choice that he had been expelled, from this warm room and intimate, redeeming, cluttered pool of light. She had had no choice: he had demanded it. He saw it very clearly. It was this, his damnation: to know the bias of his nature, to know its dangerous weighting, and to be quite incapable, quite helpless to redress it. He had known he had misjudged her: he had known himself to be neither conned nor trapped but on the contrary trusted: and he had nevertheless rejected trust, and had thus pointlessly hurt her. He struggled: it was too late, but he struggled, he tried to go back, and when he spoke it was to make the only amends he could, the amends of dry justice.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘there is something more that I could do. If I think of anything, I will let you know. Or you could give me a ring, if you needed me. Anyway, I hope you will let me know what happens.’

It would have taken a miraculous generosity to respond to the coldness of this offer, and he hardly expected her to do anything
other than flinch, having once recognized, as she so clearly had, his treacherous withdrawal, and being unable to recognize, as she must surely be, his desire to withdraw his withdrawal: but, amazingly, she looked at him again, and smiled with an extraordinary niceness, and said, warmly, with enthusiasm,

‘You
are
nice, you really are so kind, and I have been so awful, dragging you out here and giving you nothing but a cup of tea. How awful I am, I am so selfish, and I try so hard not to be.’

‘You gave me a very nice piece of cake, too,’ he said, in a neutral, hopeful tone.

‘Did you like it? Have another slice. I made it myself. I like making cakes, it is lovely now that the children will eat them, little children don’t eat cake, you know, whatever people say, only big children eat cake. How old are your children? Have another slice.’

‘I really couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I must go.’

‘I suppose you must,’ she said. ‘Do you have far to go? I hardly dare ask, in case it turns out you live in Dulwich or something dreadful like that.’

‘Nothing like as bad as that,’ he said. ‘Only Hampstead. It’s quite near, really.’

‘Yes, that’s not too bad, that could have been a lot worse. What a relief.’

He rose to his feet, still holding the folder, and said, indicating it, ‘Perhaps I might keep these, for a day or two? I could go through them and see if anything occurs to me? Would you mind?’

‘Not at all, of course I wouldn’t mind. How very nice of you.’ She too rose to her feet, and then said, a little anxiously, ‘You know, you could stay the night if you like. If you don’t feel like driving. I could easily put one of the children in my bed, it wouldn’t be any trouble.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said, meaning it, and managing to sound as though he meant it. ‘But I don’t think I should. I have to be at work early in the morning, so I’d have to get up even earlier and get home to collect my things. It wouldn’t be worth it.’

‘No, I can see that. Oh dear. Oh well, never mind. You will forgive me, won’t you?’

She followed him into the hall, where he unhooked his hat and coat.

‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ he said, about to go. ‘I’m afraid that I too, like other inquisitive lawyers, find such affairs quite interesting. Quite unusual, the whole case, really, you know.’

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ she said, frowning slightly at him. ‘Odd, really, how unusual it all is. When all my life I’ve tried so hard to be normal. But perhaps an abnormal person trying to be normal is bound to produce very unorthodox results, do you think?’

‘I am not yet qualified,’ he said, ‘to express a view, as to your normality or abnormality.’

‘The judge who divorced me,’ said Rose, ‘said I was highly eccentric. I thought that very unkind. You will read that, you have it all there, there’s a copy of the transcript.’

‘I will read it,’ he said, ‘with great interest.’

And so they shook hands, and he left her, and drove back to his empty house. As he drove he thought of the child’s warm bed that he might have slept in. The opportunity was not to recur.

He also thought that perhaps there was a natural progression, an inevitable progression, for people like himself, from his background, who had grown up amidst too much physical intimacy – houses too small, settees too narrow, bedrooms too full, kisses (like his grandparents’) too brutal and forceful – from this world they could only wish to grow apart, into the thinner air of non-touching, into larger rooms and spaces. And having reached this clear, empty space, they would wish once more to find touching, to find chosen, not accidental warmth, to find intimacy and contact. And it would no longer be possible, the world of touch would be lost for ever, and they, the refugees, the sensitive ones who had found the noises and the pushing unendurable and had fought their way out on to a clear drawing-room carpet with empty yards on either side, would eye each other across the spaces, isolated, marooned, unable to approach or touch, or share a bodily warmth, having lost for ever this capacity. He thought of his mother, in the large high rooms of her Victorian boarding-house on the South Coast, living her South Coast life, breathing the unpolluted inhuman air: his sympathies were with
her, for he too had recoiled where she had recoiled (she had taught him to do so), and yet where was she now, where was he now, what had they lost in gaining so much?

He thought, too, of Rose Vassiliou. She had been christened Rose Vertue Bryanston, or so it said on various documents. He wondered where the name Vertue had come from. If he saw her again, he would ask her. He was sure to see her again. Why else had he kept her papers, but as a hostage for that possibility? He was rather frightened by her papers. She should never have let him have them, it was indiscreet and unprofessional of him to have taken them, he felt: though he could not have said why.