The Needle's Eye (15 page)

‘Why should you wish to stop him?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Not unmistakably so. But don’t bother about that now, that’s another issue, go back to the business about the closing of the bank account. And the relief.’

‘Yes. Well. I’ve forgotten where I was. The relief. I went out into the road and I looked in my bag and counted what we’d got between us. Fifteen pounds ten, it was. Quite a lot.’

‘It wouldn’t last long, though.’

‘No, it didn’t, we went straight off to the club to have a game to improve our finances and lost the lot.’

‘That was silly.’

‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it? It seemed very funny at the time. So we went back to our room to sleep it off, and when we got there there was a man waiting for Christopher and me. And first I thought it was the police raiding the magazine, it was always having that kind of trouble, but it was us he wanted, and he explained to us about me having been made a ward-of-court and Christopher being warned to keep off and all that. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but it seemed deadly serious, and moreover Christopher seemed to take it very seriously, so I agreed to go home and talk things over with my father, and Christopher was driven off by a policeman, and I heard them saying that an injunction had been granted, I think that was the word, and that if he attempted to contact me he’d be jailed for contempt of court. And that was what I couldn’t face, it was the separation, because I really couldn’t live without him, you know, I couldn’t get through the time when he wasn’t there, even an hour without him was like a lifetime. So I didn’t see what I was going to do. Oh God, it was awful, that stretch of time before I knew the worst, I was so lonely, and more or less housebound in that mausoleum of a house – it was like being a child again, ill with boredom waiting to grow up. And yet at the same time I knew that whatever they did they couldn’t make me wait more than eight months. I wanted to write to Christopher, or ring him and tell him I’d wait, but they watched me so closely, it was amazing, it was historic, and I suppose that what really kept me going was the feeling of being martyred. In fact they could hardly have treated me more unwisely, me being what I was, but then I wouldn’t have been what I was if they’d ever known how to handle me. The only positive comfort I had was that my father very unwisely let me know that he’d tried to buy Christopher off, and Christopher had refused whatever he’d been offered, which demonstrated some kind of faith in me, at least.’

‘A faith that was not misplaced.’

‘No, as it happened. But he couldn’t have been certain of that, could he? Not absolutely certain? He might have lost, mightn’t he? Anyway, what happened was that they decided to send me abroad, until I was twenty-one. Eight whole months of exile. I really thought I wouldn’t be able to bear it. And the worst thing was that I thought I’d have to go without telling Christopher, but I managed to bribe somebody to send him a letter – well, not really bribe exactly, simply persuade, because I’d nothing left to bribe with – and Christopher came round one night and threw stones at a window, and we managed to have half an hour before anyone heard us, and I promised to come back and he promised to wait for me, and then we were interrupted, and my father said he’d send for the police and have him put in prison, and I said if he did that I’d kill myself, and that if he’d leave Christopher alone I’d go meekly off to Paris as I was supposed to, and so I did. I can think of all sorts of things now that we might have done – we could simply have eloped, or I could have said I was having a baby, or something, but I didn’t think of them at that time, and I couldn’t see Christopher to work anything out with him, and that half hour we did get we spent on love and promises, not on plans. We made a mess of it, I suppose. But there wasn’t much – guidance. One simply doesn’t know how to behave in such a situation, one doesn’t know the rules, and I never understood the legal business, although father kept getting his solicitor in, poor fellow, to explain it to me. God, he was embarrassed about it, that poor man, he really couldn’t look me in the eye.’

‘So you were sent abroad.’

‘Yes. That’s right. It was a nightmare. I went with a cousin, more like an aunt she was I suppose, she was so much older, and we dragged around Europe. She watched me all the time, she took her duties very seriously, and we kept moving around without my knowing ever where we were going, so I couldn’t contact Christopher and get him to come out to rescue me, I suppose. She kept my passport in her handbag. It was awful, I was bored like death. I can’t bear to look back on it. Living through those days, without a word. We went to Paris, and Rome, and Amsterdam, Brussels and Prague, and Bavaria. That wretched cousin, what she went through God knows,
she must have been bored to death too, though she put on a good show of looking interested. But really she wanted someone to talk to as badly as I did, and as soon as she struck up any kind of acquaintance, in a hotel for instance, she clearly felt it was time to move, in case I started seducing or bribing them. Really, I can’t quite now think why I put up with it, why I didn’t just walk out, except that after a month or two I began to make a virtue of endurance and promise myself I’d stick it out if it killed me. Also, there was nowhere much to walk to, without a passport or any money. I read an awful lot of books. They shouldn’t have sent me to Italy, there were people there who kept reminding me of Christopher. They treated me very badly, you know. One would hardly believe it. Do you know what my father did? For one thing, he vowed quite solemnly that if I did marry Christopher when I was twenty-one he’d completely disinherit me – I didn’t realize then that he couldn’t entirely because of the way the money had been put in trust to save his supertax, he must have kicked himself for his stinginess on that front – but much worse than that was what he did about Christopher. I don’t know if I dare to tell you, it reflects so badly on him. I haven’t told anyone, or only one or two people.’

‘Don’t tell me, if you don’t want to.’

‘I do want to, I think. What he did was get Christopher followed by a private detective, and he sent reports on all the things he’d been doing that I wouldn’t like. Can you imagine, a mind that would think of that? We were in Salzburg, I think, when I got this report about Christopher and this other woman. There were plenty of other girls, quite enough to upset me, but this one sounded serious, he spent weeks with her, in that very same basement. I suppose my father thought that would do the trick. God, how I hate abroad. I’ll never go there again as long as I live. It nearly finished me off, but then I thought that for one thing it might not be true, a man capable of setting a detective on one’s lover might be equally capable of cooking the evidence, and also for another thing even if it was true all I would have to do would be to see Christopher and he’d be able to talk me out of it. He was very good at talking me out of things, suspicions and jealousies and so on, he had to be because he was
very careless, but then I was good at being talked out of it too because I didn’t really believe I deserved him, part of me at least knew that I was lucky to get any of him, and I used to dream about when I got home and he would talk me out of feeling jealous and betrayed, or make it anyway seem irrelevant. I used to look forward to that. I suppose it did cross my mind – no, what am I talking about, I worried endlessly that when I got back he wouldn’t want me any more, and that I’d have been through it all for nothing, and that my father would have won, but at the same time there must have been something in me that knew that this wasn’t so, that he’d be there waiting for me.’

‘And he was?’

‘Yes, he was. We arrived back in England on the day after my twenty-first birthday, and he was there at Dover, waiting for me. It was quite extraordinary. You can imagine.’

‘How did he know when you were coming?’

‘Well, I must confess, I fixed it. We spent the night before in Paris, it was my birthday, and by this time I’d got a bit of pressure going on my poor cousin, and she’d got a bit of an eye on her own future, with me, we’d got quite intimate, in a way, one does after eight months of enforced confinement with somebody, and I insisted we had a birthday party in the hotel, and we gave everybody champagne, and there was a journalist there from an English paper – it was an English hotel, full of English people – and he recognized me, and I told him to phone his paper and give them the story, and he did, and somebody on the paper contacted Christopher, and he arrived to meet me, and there he was, and all the journalists, and I was free, and nobody could stop me.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen the photographs.’

‘Touching, weren’t they?’

He reflected upon the photographs, and the interviews. They had captions like ‘Weeping heiress reunited with the man she loves’, and ‘Rose returns blooming’, and the smudged pictures showed a terrified-looking Rose clutching an equally terrified Christopher, both of them white (one might imagine) with horror at what they had done and were about to do. In the interviews, when asked her
plans, Rose was reported to have said things like ‘We’re going to get married tomorrow we’ve waited long enough,’ and Christopher, when asked how long he would have waited for her, said, ‘I would have waited not eight months but eight years for her to come back to me.’ When asked what they felt about being disinherited, both had replied that they had never wanted money, all they wanted was each other.

‘Yes, touching,’ he said. ‘And so you got married?’

‘Yes, that’s right, we got married. And that was that. And we came to live here, but we only had the top floor then, it was a sort of flat. It took us a long time to buy the whole house. But I’ve told you all that.’ She paused, for a long time, while she cut up into small pieces the rind of her cheese, and then said, ‘It’s a pity, really, after all that trouble, and effort, that Christopher and I didn’t make a bit more of an effort when we got married. Or that’s what most people say. They think it was a waste.’

‘Only you could say whether it was a waste or not. I would assume that if you found it necessary, it was necessary.’

‘Well, yes, I think that on the whole it was.’

‘You seem to have – changed a greal deal, since those days.’

‘So have we all, I imagine. Ten years is a long time. More than ten, it is, now. In what ways have I changed?’

‘You seem to have quietened down, a little. All this –’ he indicated the room, the windows, the street beyond – ‘all this doesn’t look like an appropriate end for so much drama.’

‘I was wrong about drama. I don’t really like drama. I disapprove of it very strongly, don’t you? I’m sure that you do. I rationalize it, by saying that I had to have the drama before I would have all this. It was what you might call a revolution, a personal revolution. It even had a little bloodshed, to prove it. But I’m determined not to make the mistake of most revolutions, I won’t revert to what it was that I was fighting not to be.’

‘But what is it, that you are now, that you value so much? What do you like, about what you’re doing now, that you should like it so much? You must forgive me for saying so, but you must know that – well, your life must appear to many people deliberately unattractive.
An unattractive district, no husband when you could surely easily acquire one, no money when you of all people could have had it – it seems strange, perhaps, that one should make a revolution, as you put it, to achieve precisely this.’

‘Well, it wasn’t precisely this, when I set out, it took me a long time to learn what it was about this that I so valued – it’s hard to explain, people are so unsympathetic, and when I describe it it sounds so – so absurd, and dull. I like it here precisely because it is dull, and because I can – oh, I don’t know, clean my own shoes and worry about the electricity bill and look after my own children and collect them from school and take an interest in Cheap Offers in the shops. Oh, I know, people think it’s not real, they think it’s nonsense for me to sit here like I do, they think I’m playing. They tell me that everyone else round here is miserable and all the rest of it. But they don’t know, because they’ve never tried it. I do know. I respond to such ordinary signals in the world. Cut prices and sunshine and babies in prams and talking in the shops. Oh, I can’t describe or defend it, I expect no sympathy. It sounds unnatural to you, I expect.’

‘No, not unnatural, exactly. But I’m surprised you can be satisfied with so little. You used to be more active, you used to try and get things done, even after your marriage, I know you did.’

‘How do you know?’

‘From what other people have said about you.’

‘What do other people say about me?’

‘That you have withdrawn. That you might have given up.’

‘That’s what Nick says.’

‘That’s what Nick says.’

‘Nick wouldn’t know. It seems to me enough, now, to look after the children. Oh, I haven’t cut myself off completely, I can’t do that, because I can’t resist any of the claims that people make on me, and one can’t lose the life that one had friends in, because they are friends, and so I see them, and I do things for them, even in public from time to time. But all those activities, they’re just part of being human, whereas being here, being myself, is something quite different. It’s taken me so long to learn it and now I can’t lose it. I’m happy in it. It
seems to me right. People are so nervous about believing anything to be right. But what else in life should one ever seek for but a sense of being right? I explain myself badly, I put it very badly, I can’t justify myself – but what I feel, now, is,’ and she buried her face in her hands, as though embarrassed by her own declaration, ‘what I feel is that the things I do now, they’re part of me, they’re monotonous, yes, I know, but they’re not boring, I like them, I do them all’ – she hesitated, faintly – ‘I do them all with love. Getting up, drawing the curtains, shopping, going to bed. You know what I mean.’

‘How could I know what you mean,’ he said, startlingly, ‘when nothing that I do is done with any love at all?’

She froze, with her hands there in front of her face. She opened her fingers, dropped them, stared at him. She looked at him for some time. He was staring at the table, with a look of savage melancholy.