The Needle's Eye (2 page)

Diana had a cut-glass bowl full of marble eggs: she was holding one up now to the light, showing a man whom he thought to be a journalist the way in which the light shone through it, forbidding him, prettily, to admire another egg of a light orange because it was painted, but confessing to an affection for a blue egg – ‘it’s not real either, but it was my first, my very first’ – and permitting him, for sentiment’s sake, to admire it too. ‘But this,’ she said, ‘this –’ diving to the bottom of the bowl, fishing out an egg that looked, from where Simon was sitting, to be quite black, ‘this is the rarest of all. Look, you see those markings? An uncle of mine brought it for me from Afghanistan, it was given to him by …’ and her voice fell and faded, so that he could not hear the history of the egg – a history so characteristic of such gatherings, he knew without hearing it, quaint, charming, fey, old world, entirely pointless. And he knew, as he watched her standing there, her little hands clasping the egg, her head on one side, her face soft and radiant with the effort to please, that she and Nick could be making no great effort in their reunion – (apart from any other reasons, how could they be, when one of them was so thoroughly nice and likeable and desirable a woman) – because they were incapable of any real effort, any unnatural effort, as gracefully incapable as a climbing plant would be of growing erect alone. They had parted because it seemed the easiest thing to do, and because it seemed the easiest thing to do, they had come together again: and so again they would part, should circumstances alter.

What a strange way of living. Perhaps he wronged them. Perhaps they were not like that at all. Significant, though, that this room should be so full of climbing plants: but how silly to say significant, for now he thought of it so was his own house, Julie was always buying them, they must be the fashion.
It will not climb up on an artificial
host
. That was a phrase (he forgot what plant it described) that he had found in his bedside gardening book. Which was Nick, an artificial or a natural host? The idea amused him so much that he turned to the girl sitting by him, thinking he could share it with her, but she, turning simultaneously towards him, embarked upon trade-union reform, no doubt having been pre-informed that he had a professional interest in such matters, so he was obliged to listen to her and to answer her, but he had heard and said it all so often before that he was able to do it all with a very small part of his consciousness, leaving the rest free to continue to inspect the room. He assumed from the size of the gathering that he was nearly the last to arrive: not the last, however, for the numbers were not yet even. There would be another woman expected: another woman for him.

He wondered what they would try on him this time, remembering the last occasion when he had been invited out to dinner without his wife and had found there, like a risen ghost, a woman whom he had once admired for two whole years, hopelessly mildly and unrequited, and produced for him so much too late, laid on his plate like a peach or a slice of pineapple, yet still, even served up, with a ghostlike and sullen aspect, as unwilling and hopeless a prospect as ever, with the added disadvantage (unlike the comparable peach) of being no longer loved and no longer desired. What more useless than an image of a past goal, never attained and no longer wanted? It was an indictment of both past and present, like a dreadful dream he had once had, in which he had found himself in a room full of unread
Dandys
and
Beanos
– hundreds and hundreds of them, piles and piles of them, all virgin, all untouched, and had woken to find himself thirty, and the
Beanos
not even there. Surely she would not arise again, this ghostly creature, expecting to be wooed across such a muddy ditch? He would not put it past Nick and Diana: they knew her, she was unmarried, they were schemers, all of them. And then, as suddenly as the idea had arisen, he dismissed it: it was impossible, they would not wish so gloomy a creature upon their friend Julie his wife, they would be too frightened that they would never hear the end of it from her, they had not invited him with any motive at all, but simply to make up numbers, to fill a gap, because he was
accidentally and conveniently spare, a polite and useful man. Nothing wrong with that either, nothing wrong with that: he was getting paranoid, he must do something about it: and the something that he did was to bend the whole of his attention to the earnest young woman, who was, amazingly enough, trying with an appearance of sincerity at least to persuade him to explain the elements of Rookes
v
. Barnard.

Nick and Diana must have given me a pleasant build-up, he thought, as he started to explain: she listened, intelligently, asking intelligent questions, nodding, smiling, thinking herself very good to be so interested, although so pretty, and he watched her pale oval face and her blinking false lashes – he hated false lashes, he really hated them – he wondered why she bothered. They moved on, shortly, to penal sanctions and contracts and discipline, and in a rash moment he made some analogy between parental and judicial discipline, and he saw her well-intentioned attention waver and struggle and finally lose itself: she had children, and she wanted to talk about children and how one should treat them, so they started to talk about that instead, and whether or not she should threaten her children with punishments that would never be fulfilled and whether such threats had any value: she was overcome with guilt, he drily noted, she had to confess, she had told one of her children before coming out to dinner that if it didn’t shut up and get back into bed she would lock it in its bedroom – ‘I didn’t
mean
it,’ she was saying, ‘I really didn’t
mean
it, but I lost my temper …’ and he knew that she needed condoning, and that she would have wrested any conversation on any topic whatever to this end: so he condoned, politely, confessing to parallel misdemeanours, doing in fact what was required of him, but as he did it he felt suddenly sick with himself, because he did not care, he did not really care, in fact he objected to being used as a confessional, he objected to the whole mechanism of self-denigration and comforting admissions that they were engaged in, because one had no right to cheer oneself up by such means, one had no right to sit so comfortably assuaging one’s conscience and asking for forgiveness. Despite himself, he felt welling up within him an emotion so familiar and so unpleasant that it quite frightened
him: he had not yet learnt how to forestall it, though with time he hoped he might (but what a long discipline ahead) and it was too bad to confess, too bad to share, it was not, like this girl’s loss of temper, pardonable. It was an emotion of hatred. He hated it, he hated feeling it, but the hatred remained. He had come to hate people, even the people that he liked, like Nick and Diana and this pleasant pale girl, and he hated them, ignobly, because they were not his and he could not have them. They might smile and offer him invitations, but he hated them for it. He was filled with resentment, a resentment that respected no distinctions and no loyalties. It was impossible to struggle against it, impossible to remind himself that it was his fault, not theirs – or rather not impossible to remind himself, because he did, constantly, he did, even now – but impossible to
feel
the reminder, impossible to feel sympathy even though he knew quite well the forms and words of it. He felt nothing, nothing but dislike and bitterness; useless to tell himself that the fault was his. It altered nothing, such knowledge. One could order one’s features and one’s responses so that it did not show, so that it caused no positive offence, but that was no salvation: one might behave impeccably, and still, if one had not charity, it would be of no avail. And he no longer had any charity, it had all dried up in him.

Suddenly, as he sat there talking about something quite different, he thought, ‘I am embittered.’

And he knew that what he was was precisely what the word meant, and that it was what he was. When people described other people as embittered, they were describing people like himself – embittered through failure, of one kind or another, and bitterly resenting those more fortunate. He could, as yet, conceal it, but what would happen when he became like those colleagues of his who could not mention a name without a disparaging remark, who saw the whole world as a sour conspiracy to despoil them of any satisfaction or success? And even if he managed to conceal it for ever, what a fate was that, to suffer and not to speak, to subdue one’s resentment by reason, to exhaust oneself in concealment and the forms of charity? The continual suppression of impulse seemed an
unredeeming activity, but he could not think of anything better to do, the impulses being so base.

He could pretend, perhaps, not to recognize them, but a suspension of recognition was beyond him: what had once been honesty, and what was now an unrelenting habit of introspection, denied a simple refusal to admit. He had to admit it: he disliked this girl for smiling at him, he disliked Nick because he was an old friend, and Diana because she was so kind to him, and the financial journalist talking to Diana because he was not married, and that other woman in the long velvet dress because she was divorced, and the man talking to Nick because he was married to the girl talking to him. He disliked them all, childishly, simply for being what they were, and he liked disliking them, he did not want to like them, he did not want people to be pleasant or generous or remarkable, because if they were, they too much condemned his cold heart for not warming to them. They put him in the wrong, either way, by their virtues, by their failings, and he resented them because they aroused his own meanness of spirit: there was a wicked flow from him, a contaminating flow, and all those people, and the pretty room with its candles and fringed shades and oval mirrors and embroidered carpets and peacock feathers was swamped by his ill-will, by his not liking his own liking of it.

But no, the room was not swamped, it was quite unaffected: he must remember that.

It was he himself that was swamped. A bad word, swamped: because what he was, was dry, dry as a bone. And he wanted everything to be as dry as himself so that he would not be reminded of thirst. That woman in the off-licence, how her evening’s plans had rejected and excluded and judged him. There was nothing to be done about it, nothing, there was nothing in himself that could save him: there was nothing to be done in life, but to keep going, keep working – and work, yes, he always came back to this point because work could be done, adequately, even well, and without the need for the justification of tenderness he could still perform the acts – the laborious, technical, tedious, legal acts of care. It wasn’t even the work that he wanted to do, but it was an approximation, it was
satisfactory. He could, anyway, continue to do it, that at least was something. He knew where he had arrived, in his thoughts. He always came to the same place. He was familiar with the journey. And having got there, he said to himself; there is a feeling in me, in my brain, in my heart, so dull, so cold, so persistent, so ancient, that I am growing fond of it, I look to it, I look forward to taking it out, at the end of this journey, I take it out and polish it like an old stone, I warm my hands on its coldness and it grows faintly warm from my hands and its much handling. If it weren’t there, I would have nothing, I would be destitute: if I couldn’t feel it now, as I sit here holding this clinking drink and lighting her cigarette, I would cease to be. It is precious to me, this dull and ordinary stone. It is always there. It is called resolution.

‘How unlike Rose to be so late,’ said Diana, uneasily, half an hour later: and it was evident, immediately, from the tone in which these words were spoken, that Rose was the honoured guest, the star, the sanction for the evening’s gathering, and that her presence, thus transformed into absence, was threatening to turn itself into as great an embarrassment as her arrival would have been a triumph. ‘I can’t think what can have happened, should I give her a ring, Nick?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nick, who was helping himself to another drink, reluctant to allow his wife’s anxiety to spread, but not quite sure, because himself anxious, of how he could contain it. ‘Let’s give her another five minutes, should we?’

‘All right,’ said Diana, brightly, thinking with panic of the cassoulet slowly drying, the salad slowly crumpling into its dressing, and, worst horror, the mousse beginning to sink. She was never very sure about mousse, it was usually all right but she didn’t trust it, nor did she trust herself not to have another drink, out of desperation, and if she did she knew that she would probably start dropping things in the kitchen and burning her hands when she got things out of the oven. One disastrous dinner-party, just before Nick had left her, she had dropped the lid of the iron casserole on her foot, under the influence of a whisky too many, an accident which had proved amazingly painful, and which had in fact precipitated his departure,
because when the guests had gone she had accused him of never helping to carry anything, and they had had a dreadful row, because he had said that when he did carry things she got equally angry with him for not staying and amusing their guests. She couldn’t decide, either, and was becoming increasingly incapable of deciding whether she ought to go and start warming up the soup now, or whether that would ruin the soup too, and moreover make it too clear to Rose, when she did come, if she did come, that she was very late. On the whole she much preferred people not to realize that they were late because it upset her so much when they had to apologize. She ate an olive and tried to sit still. Nick, meanwhile, was embarking on the subject of Rose: she wished he wouldn’t, because if Rose didn’t come it would make them look so silly, like boasting that one had invited the Queen but unfortunately she hadn’t been able to come. Not that Rose’s status was exactly queenly, of course, and she really ought to trust Nick’s instincts in these matters, because he usually did things all right, so she tried to say nothing as she heard him say to Simon, ‘Do you know Rose Vassiliou?’, as she watched Simon’s very sad polite blank smile, as she heard Nick continue confidentially, ‘Rose Bryanston that was, if you remember –’ and watched, so expertly aroused, the faint responsive flicker of recollection in Simon’s eyes – (Simon, surely, no reader of gossip columns, and yet surely not so removed from the world? No, not so removed, for he was replying in the affirmative, admitting his consciousness of Rose’s existence – poor Rose, wherever could she have got to? and what a disaster that she was so late, when her chief card, as a guest, was her perfect unassuming propriety, her calm diligence, her – if one could use so portentous a word – her humility, and to be late was not humble, could not be called so) – and then, after all, she could suddenly sit still no longer, and had to rise up and drift, she hoped unnoticed, off into the kitchen, where she stared at the cold green soup in a mixture of disgust and hungry apprehension, leaving Nick, struggling as he was with a delicate evocation (possibly at any moment to be interrupted by its subject) of Rose’s notorious past, to reflect upon her almost offensive calm and social tact.