The Needle's Eye (3 page)

Simon, listening to this highly allusive discourse, began by not
bothering to try to connect with it, so sure was he that Rose Vassiliou was yet another visiting Greek singer or Portuguese actress or American intellectual, whose existence could in no possible way interest his own life (except as material to report to Julie, and that was the kind of obligation he tried to resist, seeing no reason why he should feed too often the passions in her that he disapproved, in much the way that one resents buying as Christmas gifts objects that one intensely dislikes oneself, despite the pleasure that one knows they would give to the recipient). But as Nick continued to explain, evoking the absent Rose’s virtues, he did begin, dimly, almost despite himself, to remember something of what he was being told: from ten years back or more, the story was, when they had all been young, and this Rose herself a little younger than they had been, because she had been under age, and that was what all the fuss had been about: she had been made a ward-of-court, being an heiress to some kind of hard commodity like steel or ships or glass, and having set her heart on marrying an unsuitable man. The results and details of this scandal he had quite forgotten: whether she had married, eloped, or submitted, he no longer knew: but he was aware that her name was still current, that the intervening ten years had not passed quite without event, though he could not work out what her name was now connected with – meths drinkers, prison reform, he vaguely thought it might be something of this kind – and yes, that was it, he had it now, it was all coming back to him, she was the girl who had given all her money away to the poor, or something ridiculous like that. He couldn’t remember the details, but it had been something like that. Rose Vassiliou, yes, that was the name. Though who Vassiliou was, he had no idea – had he been the adventurer, from whom she had been so dramatically protected? The name sounded vaguely adventurous, and he pictured to himself a handsome Greek sailor, seducing a young, pretty, and impressionable heiress: though possibly quite wrongly, he knew, for there was nothing to prove that Vassiliou had not on the contrary been some subsequent shipping magnate, the punitive choice of an angry father. Whoever he was, he was clearly not expected to dinner this evening: he would have made the numbers odd. And Nick and Diana, for all their charming
informality – Nick would never wear a suit, had not been seen in one for years – would never have permitted that.

Simon was speculating about wardship, and the possibility of family relations so bad that such dire acts of legal aggression could take place within them, and penal clauses in industrial relations bills, and the relations of law and goodwill, when the door-bell rang, and Nick, only just able to conceal his extreme relief, abandoned him a moment too hastily to answer it: and when Nick reascended the stairs with the well-heralded Rose, his first thought upon seeing her was a sudden, treacherous recollection of a remark that had been bandied about at the time of her wardship – that it was easy enough to see what the man in question was after, because it was certainly not her beauty. He had remembered the remark, because such remarks always obscurely pained him, making him more aware of his own lack of beauty: having a moral and sophisticated mind, he would endlessly discuss to himself the problem of whether the pain caused by such casual remarks about others was true sympathy, or really a transferred sympathy that was at its dark heart masochistic. And with these anxieties as a background, he was relieved to note that Rose Vassiliou’s plainness – as she advanced towards him, her hand extended – was not pathetic, it did not move the heart to pity or to its sinister reverse: she touched at once something that was more like tenderness. She was small, her hand itself was small, and her face, childish yet anxious, was delicately mazed with the young wrinkles of her age – which, from the accidents of her published past, he could have accurately calculated, placing her in her early thirties, a little younger than himself for he had read of her elopement (was it?) while at Oxford. She frowned as she smiled in greeting, her brow raising itself anxiously, nervously polite, aware that she had been late, remiss; and the wrinkles gathered into the descending thin curls – a row of them, lying straight across her high forehead, and her mouth strained slightly, with its pale lips, as though smiling were an effort of true goodwill rather than a natural effect of pleasure. Her hair was a pale and faded brown, that might once have been blonde, or which might even, prematurely, be a darker brown upon the verge of grey, and her eyes were grey: her whole face was so
affectingly uneccentric, so conscientiously pleasant (so unadorned with lipstick or eye-lashes) that it was some moments before he noticed that her clothes were less complaisant, or if complaisant, then complaisant, to her hosts, in a different sense – for she was wearing a long dress eccentric enough by any standards, a tatty off-white embroidered and beaded dress, with fraying sleeves and an irregular hem line, and on her feet were very old flat red leather shoes, bursting at the seams, and extremely worn. There was nothing dowdy about her dress: on the contrary, he had to recognize, once he noticed it at all, that she had a certain private elegance, an elegance so unworldly that it made the whole room, and all the other beaded dresses and peacock feathers and gold slippers in it, look suddenly too new, too bright, too good: too recent imitations of the gently decayed image that she so unostentatiously presented. She looked, because of age and softness, authentic, as ancient frescoes look in churches, frescoes which in their very dimness offer a promise of truth that a more brilliant (however beautiful) restoration denies. And yet it was almost impossible to resent her curious distinction: impossible even for him, so schooled in resentment: because she carried with her such an air of sadness, of lack of certainty, that to resent it would have been not an act of self-defence, but an act of aggression, of violent reproach. He would never have noticed her, had she not been drawn to his attention, deliberately, by Nick’s carefully designed preamble – Nick, a perfect judge of such matters, had known that she required explanation, that her qualities would not speak for themselves, that an untrained or uninformed eye would never recognize her rarity without a label to point it out. Because she was insignificant. A modest, unremarkable-looking person. So how could one resent a distinction that one might so easily have missed altogether?

Perhaps, astonishingly, she disarmed self-defence: or so he found himself thinking, as she took his hand, and smiled, and turned from him, slightly, to Diana, to accept a drink, and to say, as she drank a large mouthful of it, that she was sorry she was so late, and that she would take her drink in with her to dinner should dinner be ready, as she had delayed everyone, and that she nevertheless had to have the
drink because she was so tired and so overwrought at being so late, though she was feeling better already at the very sight of alcohol and other people’s faces. Diana, at this gesture of permission, disappeared to heat the soup, and Rose Vassiliou had time to expatiate upon her apology, though so delicately that she seemed to convey a sense of true pleasure in having at last arrived – ‘I couldn’t get a taxi, you know, Nick,’ she said, laying her hand on Nick’s sleeve, a hand mazed he could see with fine dry lines – ‘I couldn’t get a taxi because I live in such a ridiculous place –’ and she laughed, expecting Nick to laugh, and turned to Simon, expecting the question which he duly asked. ‘I live in such an absurd place,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t believe. It’s way up behind the Alexandra Palace, have you ever been that way at all? No? Nobody ever has, it’s quite astonishing. The taxi men don’t believe my address when I give it to them, and so they forget to come – they say they’re coming, but they don’t come.’

He knew better, for some reason – for some clue she had given him, some covert signal – than to ask her why she lived where she lived: the interesting fact was interesting only if self-sufficient, it would bear no explaining – and so he had time only to make a comment or so upon the unreliable behaviour of taxis before she was removed from him, and taken to talk to other people – other people who knew her already, he noted, from the tone of the greeting, and then in a moment, before he had time to do more than reflect on the insatiable congregating sociability of misanthropes like himself and people who lived behind Alexandra Palace, Diana appeared to summon them, at last, to dine. He was very hungry, as he had not eaten since lunch: an inadequate and hurried lunch on Fleet Street. And he found himself hoping, as they descended the stairs, that he might perhaps find himself sitting next to Rose Vassiliou.

He had not for so long experienced something like preference, something like a faintly favourable emotion, that he dispelled it from his consciousness most consciously: it would not do to fall too eagerly upon the neck of so shy and rare a visitant. He talked, instead on the way down the stairs, to the man who was a journalist: but nevertheless, at the table, it was beside Rose that he found himself requested to take his place. She was turned from him, as he sat,
towards Nick, on whose right she was seated, and she remained so turned, except for a few brief swervings for salt or bread, until the soup was over: so he concentrated his attention upon his other neighbour, a tall divorced woman who said that she ran an agency for disseminating news upon artistic and social events: ‘an official grapevine, you might say,’ she said to him, flashing at him some very white and even teeth, and he could not tell if she were truly commercial in spirit, which he might have understood if not respected: or whether she truly interested herself in such matters. He suspected the latter, for there was something of the enthusiast in her manner, something both excitable and gullible, that he recognized from his domestic experiences: though this was perhaps merely a front, an attractive shine, upon the harder business of making gossip pay. He contented himself in listening to her, for he had little to say, being well aware that a mention of his own profession, even if offered in a spirit of polite exchange of information, would have created in her a response of instant, pitying boredom: so he listened, and asked questions – being quite well enough informed, alas, to ask the right questions – and from time to time, as he looked down at his green soup, he also looked slightly askance at Rose Vassiliou’s hand, which was crumbling to pieces, with an untiring restless purposeless motion, the brown wholemeal bread on her plate. It interested him, this hand, and he remembered the touch of it in greeting: it had been light and dry, and the back of it was brown and slightly crazed like an old earthenware pot. He could not recollect that he had ever seen so fine a mesh of wrinkles, that had about them no suggestion of age, or of loosening of the skin: they were of the surface, like small scratches. The hand looked not old, but childlike. One nail only had been bitten: a confined neurosis, attached to the index finger. There was a ring on the middle finger with a white stone in it: a sardonyx. The hand hovered over the bread, restlessly plucking and seizing and crumbling, like a friend or a small bird.

When the soup plates had been removed, amidst conventional cries of appreciation, which Diana accepted quite graciously, already convinced that the casserole would prove inedible, Rose Vassiliou turned to Simon, correctly, and smiled a little anxiously – (eyestrain,
perhaps, had caused that look of concentration, those hair-like crowsfeet) – and said to him, ‘You were at college with Nick, I believe?’ and he said that yes, indeed he had been, and at school too, oddly enough: ‘You come from the North, then?’ she said, ‘I would not have known it’ – and he and Nick exchanged glances, and both agreed that they had camouflaged themselves well. ‘The North East, it was,’ said Nick. ‘The North East. Simon never goes back, do you, Simon?’

‘I have no cause to go back,’ said Simon. ‘Everyone has moved. My mother lives near Hastings now, so there is no cause to go back.’

‘You don’t dislike it, then?’ she said, left in dialogue with him because Nick’s other neighbour had claimed his attention: and he replied, ‘No, not particularly, but my wife does, and so we don’t go –’

‘Why does she dislike it?’ said Rose, and then, thinking better of the question, attempted to disguise it by helping herself to some vegetables. But it was too late. He replied, saying that she disliked it because she too was from the same region, and had always hated it with a real passion, and now could hardly be dragged there for any reason. ‘Sad, to hate the place where one was born,’ said Rose, and he agreed that it was sad, but common, and asked her, aware of rashness, where she had been born herself. ‘In the country,’ she said, sighing, as though the phrase explained itself. ‘In the country.’ He found it difficult to interrogate her, aware that there were facts about her that he might have been expected to know, but she continued, after a pause, and after a sip of wine: ‘I was born at our house in Norfolk.’

‘And did you like it there?’ he asked, wondering what violent wave had thrown her thence to the back of Alexandra Palace – a journey so much the reverse of his own, so different a shore upon which, in the middle of life, to find oneself cast – and she said, through a mouthful of beans, ‘Oh yes, I liked it, how could one not like it? That’s the trouble with nice places, one can’t help liking them,’ – and then she smiled, a smile full of a wish to please, and said to him, changing the subject from herself, afraid to bore (a sign he recognized) and said – ‘And you, what do you do here in London? You’re not in television like Nick, are you?’

‘How can you tell I’m not in television?’

‘It’s your suit, I think, it’s too respectable. You’re not offended, are you? I like respectable suits – and your hair, too, no, I can tell you’re not in television. I don’t
want
you to be in television, I want you to tell me about something quite different. You’re not offended, are you?’ – and her hand hovered near his sleeve, placating and gentle, and then returned to its dry crumbs – ‘Tell me what you do,’ she said, managing to sound as though she might almost want to know. ‘Tell me something new.’