The Needle's Eye (26 page)

‘Oh, really?’ said Simon, in a panic thinking irrationally and guiltily of Rose (he would reject her if her catholic tastes extended this far, and anyway the last thing he wanted was to be acknowledged in public as her friend) – but he was safe enough, for the moment, for she went on, ‘A colleague of yours, I think he is, Antony Mitchell, you know him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, indeed I do,’ he said, trying to smile in some more or less natural way, but anticipating trouble enough on this front too. Because once he heard Antony’s name he knew what it was about: poor Antony, he had always a disastrous leaning towards precisely this kind of woman, he could see it all in a glance.

‘You’re working with him, I think,’ said Caroline Simpson, and he could tell that her husband had stopped concentrating on Mrs Houghton’s thrilling account of her pre-marital sexual experiences in the United States in order to overhear (as had been intended) whatever Caroline Simpson had to say. ‘He told me so, when I had lunch with him the other day,’ said Caroline.

‘Yes,’ said Simon, neutrally. ‘Yes, we’re working on a book together.’

‘He told me,’ said Caroline, ‘that you’d had a little setback, that you’re going to have to do some rewriting, is that so?’

And she smiled at him, sweetly, intently, desperately. Bloody fool, Simon thought to himself, telling her anything at all, but what he said was ‘Yes, that’s right. It’s not too serious, though, we should be able to straighten it out without too many problems.’

‘He seemed
quite
put out,’ continued Caroline, ‘but then, he’s very easily put out, isn’t he? I was half an hour late for lunch, you know, last week, and by the time I got there he was really in
quite
a state. I mean, half an hour is
nothing
, is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I always try to be punctual myself. Though one might hardly believe it on this evening’s evidence.’

She was not, however, to be deflected: she hadn’t yet had enough of the subject of Antony’s anxiety on her behalf.

‘And then,’ she went on, ‘there was a time, not so long ago, when I couldn’t make it at all, and he was awfully annoyed about it. He’s a bit of a rigid thinker, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps all lawyers are, would you say?’

‘Maybe,’ he said, thinking, what bloody fools women are, does she really think she can ingratiate herself with me by knocking and exposing Antony, bloody fool though he may also be? And anyway, what on earth does she want to ingratiate herself for, what on earth does she want with me, it can’t simply be that she wants to take advantage of Julie, can it, or would she do it to anyone? Perhaps she was doing it to Houghton before I came in.

‘I nearly married a lawyer once,’ she continued, and he felt her husband stiffen: she gazed at him, preparing to tell him the story of her lawyer, her dark eyes fixing him in an almost comic effort at hypnosis, or an effort that would have been comic if it hadn’t been so singularly effective, and he struggled desperately, trying to think of some means of avoiding the story of this hapless lawyer – (he bet she had nearly married one out of each profession according to audience, did she really think that men liked this kind of approach, manifesting as it did such deplorable weakness of character?) – and
was, fortunately, saved by Julie’s arrival upon the scene, with a summons to dinner.

‘We can go and eat now,’ said Julie, ‘what is left of the meal.’

And off they went to eat: he was able to bear her commands to open the wine with equanimity and even grace, knowing he had been reprieved from worse. Not that the reprieve lasted for long: during dinner he had to endure the sight of Caroline Simpson turning her food over and over on her plate with a look of disgust (and it hadn’t been ruined, thank God, it was perfectly good, as Julie’s meals always were) and the knowledge that she wouldn’t have dared to mess about with it in that disdainful manner if she hadn’t sensed, with what was probably the only part of her intelligence, that he and Julie were hardly the most united of couples. Though there, of course, she in a sense sensed wrong: for united was precisely what he and Julie were, and this might even, he thought, as the meal continued, have got through to her, because she did lower the tone a little, she even transferred her attention a little to Houghton. But he wouldn’t forgive her for the way she had smiled when asked if she would like more quiche: a little dry knowing smile of contempt it had been, as she declined, as she pushed eloquently at her untouched pastry shell (and it was a good pastry, it was not as though Julie ever let it sog or harden) – a smile that indicated superior discrimination, the non-eating smile of the Victorian exhibitionist, a smile that embraced Julie’s thickening arms and slightly overheated face (and naturally she was overheated, she’d been bending over the oven, hadn’t she?) and Houghton’s receding hair and his girl’s frills and doubtless his own scraggy neck, and deficiencies on her elegant husband’s part that were too profound to manifest themselves.

The conversation turned, mercifully, from obscenity to country cottages and Easter holidays. The Houghtons had a country cottage in the Cotswolds, the Simpsons had one in Norfolk. Good luck to them, thought Simon, chewing on his coq au vin, that lets me out. But Easter holidays as such were another matter. He and Julie and the children were going to a hotel in Cornwall for Easter, and he had to listen to Julie describing their arrangements in some detail. The reminder of this approaching excursion filled him with an indefinable
unease: he couldn’t locate it, he would have to return to it later. As it was, he sat there, and spoke from time to time, and tried to avoid the silvery glimmer of Caroline Simpson’s bosom, and wondered, whose fault it was, that he should spend so much time like this, with people he really deeply disliked, talking about things that bored him rigid. It would have been better if he could have felt that the others were enjoying themselves, but from every soul there seemed to him to rise a cry of mute anguish and lonely fear: ugly cries, like the wails and squawks of sea gulls, hovered over the surfacing wine bottles and the wreckage of cutlery and the white napkins, and on Julie’s face (he watched it anxiously) there were such lines (in the roundness), engravings of a quite inappropriate suffering, marks of suffering unsuited to her physique or to her nature. She picked up, as he watched her, a chicken bone from her plate, and held it in her fingers, and started to gnaw at it with an inelegant greed, speaking as she ate, of the reputation for good food that this Easter hotel possessed, and as she spoke she reached into her mouth with her fingers and abstracted a lump of chewed tendon, which she deposited, quite unselfconsciously, upon the side of her plate. It lay there, transparent, repellent, an indictment. He loathed such habits in her, and loathed himself for loathing them; there was no way out. She was not built for dinner parties. He hated his own shrinking, and sitting there he thought of his mother, from whom he had inherited these excessive delicacies: his mother’s house stank of cleanliness, it stank of bleach and disinfectant, the lavatory in her house was unusably hygienic from noxious poisonous fumes of purity, and yet he was, no doubt about it, his mother’s son. He had been trained up early, by her wincings and shudderings: at every word his grandfather spoke she installed in him disapprobation. He recalled her, when his grandfather hawked and spat (a healthy habit, after all, and a skill he sometimes wished he had inherited) – he recalled her averting her eyes, shivering, making little noises in her own refined throat. And he had married Julie to escape these delicacies. And he had tried, God help him, uselessly to cast off these deadly niceties and cruel rejections, and here he was, playing in a sense his mother’s role, repelled, silent, disapproving, a superior sensibility. He disliked such
an inheritance. His mother, she had aspired to evade her environment, she had purged it with Domestos and Pine Fluid, she had reached upwards – never very high upwards, it was true, tinned salmon remained for her a delicacy, her aspirations had not risen to quiche lorraine, and the truth was that he still rather liked tinned salmon himself, he liked the pink violent delectable chunks of it with their tinned crumbly assimilated bones, he would rather have it than smoked salmon any day.

He and Julie had over-reached themselves, they had set their sights too high, and therefore it was that they clashed and bled, and that their faces were lined with the furrows of an unsuitable strain. Julie had been made for a life so different, so much simpler (if one could have a concept of simplicity) and yet at the same time she had had in her some spark too of aspiration, a minimal artistic talent, a talent wickedly too small for the burdens her wealth and his intelligence had laid on it: she would have been happier without it, but how could one say that happiness was what one should have, as a woman or as a man? What was one human for, but to aspire, and where had it gone wrong, what was it that had condemned them? There were no virtues, moral or aesthetic, in tinned salmon or in hawking and spitting or in denying even the most minimal gleamings of a higher intellectual or social existence: but there was something hopelessly wrong with a life where a child sat in a kitchen eating a fried egg in terror, watched by a hostile alien, while adults in the drawing-room gulped down alcohol and displayed their unlovely hypocrisies. There must have been, there might have been, a right life for them, a possible life, which might have embodied a little warmth and beauty: a natural life, for them, for people, to which it would not have been a mockery to aspire. One had to suppose a good life and a happy resolution, or was that childish simplicity? Exhausted, embittered, he no longer knew. Perhaps there was only the point of time in which one lived, and its accompanying ills. But nevertheless, he would swear, there had hovered before Julie herself a higher image, a legitimate hope: she had miscreated and deformed it, but it had been there, and it had fatally lured her on into this chattering of monkeys.

He remembered (thinking of fish, and eating chicken bones, and his mother) a tea time, up North, in his schooldays when they had been eating bloaters, bloaters full of bones, and the lights had gone out. The lights had gone out, the electricity had failed, and his mother, furious at first, as she was at any crossing of her purpose, had stumped crossly off to find candles, muttering darkly in the dark of the malice of electricity boards – and then, when she had returned, and illuminated the tea-table with the thick white wax lights she had become suddenly, rarely, gay, cheerful, relaxed. ‘What a very
unsuitable
meal,’ she had said, (picking the small hairlike bones from her mouth with her soft fingers) ‘what a very unsuitable meal, to eat in the darkness, look at us here, swallowing all these bones in the dark!
Anything
would have been better than bloaters, anything at all.’ And she giggled, and then said, laughing to herself, choking a little, discreetly, ‘Anything but
kippers
, I suppose.’ And he had laughed too, a growing clumsy boy, overcome with gratitude at this unusual lightening, at this gleam of joy in the face of adversity. She had used the episode later, his mother, she had incorporated it into a domestic radio chat; all these chats she enlightened with the same glow of nostalgic warmth, the same sense of the shared amusing little trials of motherhood, a sense to which she was on the whole quite alien, a tone that betrayed her material, on nearly all occasions, quite monstrously, for on other occasions things were not at all as she described them, they had been setbacks that she had met dourly and with ill nature, and he would writhe to see them rewritten, touched up, translated into what she would have liked them to have been. And yet, perhaps the bloaters had shown that she might have been capable of living in the style she chose for herself: and if she had not chosen such an image, things might have been worse, there might not have been even those rare moments? Perhaps, after all, his childhood had been in sum more nearly what she had intended than what she had achieved? She had fought herself, valiantly, she had courageously denied the truth of the bleakness which was what she truly had to offer. If she had not aspired she would have sunk or died. Oh Christ, it was exhausting, this living on the will, this denial of nature, this unnatural distortion: but if one’s nature were harsh, what could
one do but deny it, and repudiate it in the hope that something better might thereby be? It was for him that she had hoped, and so on, through the generations. And to what end, to what end, to what right end of life, to what gracious form of living, to what possible joy, there was nobody who had achieved it, there was no achieving and no arrival, there was merely a ghastly chain of reiterated disillusions, and each generation discovered a new impossibility, and all the more miserably because it had been given to hope for more. He thought once more of John Stuart Mill and the despair that had seized him: to conceive the right end, and then to despair, that was a fate he had feared often enough for himself, with his petty tinkerings and his niggling readjustments and his dreary slow calculations. Oh yes, he cared for the fate of mankind, he cared for the quality of the living of life, but man had been formed too low in the scale of possibility, with just enough illumination (like Julie and his mother and himself) to suffer for failure, and too little spirit to live in the light, too little strength to reach the light. Or rather, there was no light, or none that man might enter: he could create for himself an ordered darkness, an equality of misery, a justice in the sharing of the darkness, his own hole, by right, in that darkness, and his sense of light, his illuminations, were an evolutionary freak, an artificial glow that had etiolated him into hopeless pale unnatural underground yellow green deformities, a light misreflected through some unintended chink, too far away for such low creatures ever to reach it and flourish by it. He might as well lose his eyes, man. He might as well grow blind, like a fish in a cave, and maunder on through the centuries in his white plated armoury.

He cut himself a slice of Gruyère. Even such an image, nasty as it was, presupposed the existence of the light. The distortions themselves, they were not arbitrary, after all. They were ugly, but they followed a pattern. They rose, sorrowfully, like plants in a cellar, deprived, but always rising. Plants in a cellar, laid away until the spring. He buttered a biscuit, and restored his attention to Caroline Simpson, who wanted to tell him, for some reason, about another man she had nearly married, this time a ski-instructor, who had fallen passionately in love with her when she had gone at the age of
seventeen to Austria on a school outing. She had rejected his overtures, but was happy to report that he had turned out well, this ski-instructor: no ordinary Austrian he, for he had gone off to the Himalayas and had dwelt there for some years in dramatic seclusion, and then had returned to civilization to report upon his experiences (in German, alas) in the form of a best-selling book, and had subsequently become an actor, appearing in films and upon the television. The implication, too clear to avoid, was that anyone who had had the taste to admire her, even at so tender an age, could not but have resources.