The Needle's Eye (34 page)

‘There, you see,’ said Emily, sitting herself down on the low wall, turning to Simon as though in triumphant possession of the scene. ‘Isn’t it nice, isn’t it lovely?’

Rose and Simon sat too, and watched the chickens scavenging and scrabbling. The armchair was rotting and mouldy; grass and weeds grew out of its guts. The sun was warm. Rose leant her head back against the wire and shut her eyes. The children ran up and down, poking in the gutter, climbing along the walls, picking up bits and pieces.

‘I don’t know
why
it’s so nice here,’ said Rose, as though paying tribute to the eccentricity of the outing, ‘but it is nice, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ said Simon, ‘it is.’

And it was. So great and innocent a peace possessed him that it seemed like a new contract, like the rainbow after the flood. He could feel it, on his bare hands and face. It lay upon him. It was like happiness.

They sat there, and chatted, idly: after a while, the children, who had run off down the street, returned, with their collection of findings. They had got two lollypop sticks, an old Nescafé tin, a milk bottle top, a scrap of blue velvet, a hunk of red rusty metal, a train ticket, a little toy plastic car without wheels, a sad flanged little thing
like a dead beetle, a few bits of weed, an old paint tin still half full, but sealed over with a thick impregnable skin, and a french letter. Rose threw the french letter hastily to the chickens, who did not much care for it either, and they all laughed feebly while the children insisted that they be told what it was, without success.

‘It’s all our fault,’ said Emily, when she had stopped laughing, ‘it’s all our fault, that they go round picking things up like that. We used to tell them to go on treasure hunts, didn’t we, Rose, when we wanted to talk and they wouldn’t let us, and now they’ve got into the habit of it, you should
see
some of the stuff they pick up.’

‘This is quite a nice little collection,’ said Rose, looking down at the row of objects on the wall. ‘I like the paint tin. Quite a find, that is. No, don’t stir it up, Marcus, you’ll get it all over yourself – and look, that’s spurge, that is.’ She turned over a bit of greenery, a pale yellow brilliant green, with round leaves. ‘Spurge. There’s a poem about spurge, by Rossetti. It says something like,

The woodspurge has a cup of three,

After long grief and misery

This is all that is left to me

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

‘No, that can’t be right, I must have remembered it wrong, because it’s a nice poem, and my version’s awful, but it’s something like that, isn’t it interesting the memory, that one can remember something is good, a poem or a painting, but not remember it at all, in detail?’

‘How do you know about such things?’ said Simon. ‘About the names of things?’ He was thinking about the seagulls in Cornwall.

‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘It’s interesting, that’s why. And I used to learn it, in the country. When there was nothing else to do. You should see my pressed-flower collection. Actually, to tell you the truth I thought it was bloody boring at the time, when I was a child, but it staved off the even worse boredom of doing nothing at all. And now I find it absolutely fascinating. So you see. Everything pays off.’

‘We don’t all find it as riveting as you do,’ said Emily. ‘I tried to get
worked up about it once, but it didn’t work. Do you remember that dreadful craze you went through, about the London rocket?’

And both women laughed, again, easily: their recollections amused them.

‘Oh God, the London rocket,’ said Rose. ‘It’s all very well, but it’s a very rare plant, the London rocket, it’s got three stars in the book, and as it grows on waste patches I thought we were ideally placed to find it, but we’ve never managed yet.’

‘It’s not surprising,’ said Emily. ‘You should just see what it looks like. Even the book describes it as a modest and unattractive little plant. And moreover it’s virtually indistinguishable from the something or other rocket – the common rocket, probably – so we kept having these false alarms, when we found the dull old modest common rocket, and carried it off home, and I thought, Aha, that’ll have cured her, even she will have to admit that even though it’s the real thing it might as well not be, it looks so boring. But it never was.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Rose. ‘You know you got quite keen yourself. You’d have been just as excited as me if we’d managed it.’

‘Well, more fool me,’ said Emily. ‘But you should make her show you the pressed flowers, Simon. They’re quite good, really. A pathetic little catalogue of her empty life. I burst into tears the first time I saw them. She brought them to school with her. I told her she’d better hide them quick, if she didn’t want to make herself a laughing-stock. But she stuck it out, she kept showing them to people, and you’d be amazed, how indulgent they were.’

‘On page ten,’ said Konstantin, who had been listening, bored with the younger ones, ‘on page ten, there’s a pressed caterpillar.’

‘Oh, don’t remind me, don’t remind me,’ said Rose. ‘I didn’t mean it, I really didn’t. It got in by mistake. I was terribly sorry about it.’

‘It put her off for a whole year,’ said Konstantin. ‘You can see, from the dates.’

‘It’s quite true,’ said Rose. ‘I was so upset I didn’t collect for a year. But then I found this very nice corncockle one day, and it was too good to miss. So I braved the squashed caterpillar, and started again.’

‘Mr Rampley says there are bird’s-nest orchids, in the woods at Branston,’ said Konstantin. ‘But I’ve never found any.’

‘No,’ said Rose, hesitating, struggling as the shadow fell across her. ‘No, neither have I. Anyway, they wouldn’t press very well. They’re too wet.’

‘It would be nice to find them, though,’ said Konstantin.

‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘Yes. Well, you must look for me.’

‘There’s a dumped car in Primrose Avenue,’ said Konstantin, suddenly, eager now to undo what he had done – or perhaps, maybe, losing interest, having done enough, having no impulse to pursue, sadistically, the point he had been making. ‘Garry told me.’

‘Oh God, not another,’ said Emily.

‘Well, you’re
not
to go
near
it,’ said Rose, simultaneously: and on such a note they rose to their feet, and set off home, discussing as they went the danger of dumped cars, and the Council’s reluctance to remove them, and the plans for the Alexandra Palace, and roller skating. ‘You must come to the dog show with us one day,’ said Rose, to Simon. ‘They’re really good, the dog shows at the Palace.’

‘I’d like to,’ he said: and before him stretched a vista of shabby amusements and moth-eaten modest satisfactions. It would be quite enough for him, if by any chance she really meant it.

In the evening, Rose sat with Konstantin: he was watching the television, and she was trying to sew a new zip on to an old leather purse. Sometimes it occurred to her that she was growing pathologically mean. She had had the purse for at least four years, she could remember buying it, and it had cost her eight and sixpence. The new zip had cost her two shillings. She pricked her fingers as she sewed, and made holes in her thumb through trying to push the needle through the stiff leather: her thimble had been mislaid the year before, during Maria’s birthday party. Hunt the thimble, the children had played, and one of them had hidden it so well that no hunting would ever reveal it. What objects, she thought, must lie beneath the floorboards of a house like this: where do they go to, all the things that get lost, the needles, the buttons, the nail scissors, the tea
spoons? When they had moved in, she and Christopher, they had taken up the old linoleum, and underneath it were newspapers, dated September 1939, covered with yellowing photographs of evacuees, huddled together on railway stations. They had read the newspapers, huddled together themselves for warmth, in the sad despairing communion of dismay that had marked the first years of their marriage, feeling a kinship with those small exiles. Then they had burned the papers, and replaced them with new ones, and replaced the better bits of linoleum. They had wanted to throw it away, but decided (as they grew used to it) that it wasn’t so bad after all, that one could live with it. It was still there, but covered now by an old flowered carpet which Christopher’s mother had given them when she moved from Camden Town.

She thought about her childhood, and about the pressed flowers, and Emily. She had not thought for some time about her first meetings with Emily: the flowers had brought it back to her. She had loved Emily, because by some amazing stroke she had recognized in those flowers her true history. She remembered the evening of their first conversation, and its happiness, which was still with her. She had been sitting on her bed in the dormitory, alone, a freakish late arrival, faint after only two days with the strain of lessons which she could not follow, rules she did not understand, faces which meant nothing to her, the dank smell of stale wet bread that filled the air: she felt herself both ignorant and elect, being as she was appallingly ill-instructed in any formal sense, and yet having read more, in her solitude, than any other girl in the school. The staff had been unable or unwilling to conceal their surprise at the gaps in her knowledge, and she had just left a dismal session with the headmistress, in which she had been told that if she found it too difficult to remain with her own age group, she should perhaps be moved down a year, or even two years, until she caught up. The threatened disgrace had depressed her, and she had crept up to her bedroom to hide it, and there she sat, on her bed, on the verge of tears, looking at her collection of flowers and recalling (then as now) the mixture of anguish and delight with which she had assembled them: and then Emily came
in. She was frightened of Emily, whose reputation had reached her even in so short a space of time: abrupt, eccentric, imitated, and popular, her status was easy to perceive.

‘Ah,’ said Emily, entering the room, and throwing her books on to her bed, and herself after them. ‘Ah, it’s you. I was wanting to talk to you.’

‘What about?’ said Rose, in alarm.

‘Oh, I don’t know what
about
,’ said Emily. ‘I hadn’t thought. Anything. I just thought we might talk. After all, you are a new person. I’ve talked to all the others for years and years and years. What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘These are my pressed flowers,’ said Rose, less alarmed.

‘Let’s have a look,’ said Emily, leaping to her feet, with the restless violence that afflicts girls in boarding schools. And she came over, and looked.

‘Jesus,’ she said, when she had turned a few pages. ‘You must have put a few years of your life into assembling this lot. Whatever for?’

‘Well,’ said Rose, modestly and truthfully, quite unaware that the pathos could possibly communicate to anyone other than herself, ‘I suppose because I didn’t have much else to do.’

‘Good God,’ said Emily. ‘Good God.’ And her eyes filled, promptly, with tears. She sat there, rigid and attentive, her eyes welling.

‘What do you mean, what is it?’ said Rose.

‘What do
you
mean?’ said Emily. ‘Not much else to do? Whatever do you mean? What a terrible thing to say, do you realize what a terrible thing you’ve just said?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rose, confused. ‘I don’t know. It’s not so terrible, is it?’

‘You don’t even
know
what you’ve said,’ said Emily, who was cheering up now, enjoying her own sensibility. She looked down at the book again, and turned a few more pages, and said, with interest, ‘Your technique’s improved a bit, I must say. The first pages look a bit weedy, you must admit.’

‘I suppose they do,’ said Rose. ‘I wasn’t as good at it then or perhaps they are a bit old, after all. I started when I was about six, you know.’

‘At
six
? Are you telling me you’ve had nothing better to do since the age of
six
?’

‘Well, not quite,’ said Rose. ‘What I mean is, I did it for fun when I was six. I was quite happy then, I think. I think. It got worse later.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Emily, ‘it does.’ And then, as though bracing herself for a dissertation, she got up, and started to pace up and down on the wooden floor. ‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘It gets worse and worse and worse. You’re quite right. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who actually
admitted
it. But shall I tell you something? Shall I tell you something? It doesn’t go on getting worse for ever, there comes a point when it gets better and better. What about that? Eh? What about that?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Rose.

‘Well, that’s pathetic,’ said Emily. ‘Not to believe it. I believe it. Why shouldn’t you believe it? You just wait and see. You’ll be amazed.’

‘How do you know?’ said Rose, bewildered; for the conversation seemed to her like a conversation in dreams, a made-up daytime reverie, the kind of talk with which she had filled hours of her days, in which herself responded to herself, faithfully, on cue.

‘I know,’ said Emily, ‘because I’ve made my mind up. I’m not going to put up with it. You wait and see. And you won’t put up with it either.’

‘How do you know?’ said Rose, expecting the answer.

Emily paused, dramatically, in her pacing.

‘Because I won’t allow it,’ she said. ‘That’s why. I won’t allow it. See?’

‘Ah, well then,’ said Rose, shutting up her book. ‘Ah well. That’s all right, then. That’s fine.’

And so it was, fine. Emily admitted later, in their endless subsequent midnight discussions in the bathroom, that she had tried the same thing on other people, but had never managed to make it, because she never got a flicker of response. ‘I got sick to death,’ said Emily, ‘of trying it on, and getting nothing.’ ‘I think it was mean of you,’ Rose would say, ‘to try it on, and not to wait for me,’ – and Emily would repent, and admit that she hadn’t got even as far as
trying it, so pointless had it seemed after the opening phrase. ‘But with you,’ she would say, ‘with you, it was another matter.’ They had joked enough, bitterly, in the following years, about Emily’s heroic confidence: ‘Christ,’ they would say to each other, clutching small wailing babies, stewing scrag end, wandering dully round the park. ‘Christ, if only we’d
known
what we had to
go
through, if only we’d known –’ but in the very saying of it, betrayed (in Emily’s case), bruised (in Rose’s case) and impoverished (in both cases) they had smiled at each other, and laughed, and had experienced happiness. Life had been so much better, and so much worse, than they had expected: what they had not expected was that they were both happy people, incapable of resisting, incapable of failing to discover the gleams of joy. It was no wonder that Christopher had cited infidelity with Emily in his divorce case, and all the more bitterly because there was no sexual element to create offence. How could one not resent the natural flowing of a resilient, indestructible personal joy? Such things must not be spoken of, they must not be admitted. But why are we alive, at all?