The Needle's Eye (8 page)

When he got home he locked them away in a drawer and pretended for a whole day that they were not there.

Rose, lying awake in bed after Simon Camish had left, got up in the end and got a child and took it into bed with her. It was the middle child of the three, the one that never woke. She held on to it both for comfort for herself and to protect it. She was worried to death about three things and she did not know which worried her most, as two of them were serious and one was not, but the non-serious one being the most recent was naturally uppermost in her mind, out of all proportion to its gravity. She was dreadfully worried about the man called Simon Camish and the dreadful way she had inflicted her problems upon him, and the entirely stupid way she had let him go off with her papers when she could see that he had only offered to take them because he was afraid that otherwise she would think that he was not interested (which he probably was not). If he was interested, that was dreadful, because he would be able to work out all the very bad things about her and Christopher and all the reasons why she might lose the children, and if he was not, then that was worse. Anyway, it had been incredibly foolish to tell such things to a total stranger (however well known to Nick and Diana, and however often discussed by them, and however obviously trustworthy and reliable, quite agonizingly reliable, from Diana’s accounts). Whatever Nick and Diana thought of him, and she could see that they thought a lot, the fact remained that to her he was a total stranger
who had been bullied unmercifully into driving her home and listening to her difficulties and reading her incredibly boring and confusing and incomprehensible documents. There was no excuse, she should not have done it, it had been not at all kind of her, and very stupid of her to have assumed so simply that he would see her point, would be on her side. She ought to have learned by then that many people found it very difficult to see her point. It was far more common, she reflected, for people to see her husband’s point, when they thought about it: but then she herself did not reflect or think enough, she was hopelessly impulsive, and thinking about this and the reasons for it brought her onto her second and more serious anxiety, which was the complete and hopeless irredeemability of her own nature. She was so weak, she was so shockingly weak and trusting and shallow, spilling herself like that to any stranger who did not firmly enough drive away: she was simply incapable, and had always been so, of behaving in a rational and considered manner. The events of the whole day had borne witness to this: first of all she had been so silly about the child next door, when Mrs Flanagan had asked her to mind it, she should have said straight out, No, I’m sorry I can’t, I’ve got to take Maria to buy some new shoes, but instead as usual she’d said Oh yes, fine, and had found herself dragging around with Maria moaning and the Flanagan baby yelling and the result had been that she’d had to leave the shoe shop without buying anything, and Maria’s laceups had got holes in the toes, real holes. And then Dickie White had rung her, the moment she got back, from Bush House, and asked her if she’d go and take part in a discussion about the Urumbi uprising, and she’d said no, and he’d said oh dear I’d been counting on you this time, you couldn’t do it last time I asked you, and so she had said yes, and when she put the phone down and started to think about it she had realized that in fact last time Dickie had rung she had in fact said yes, because he had used exactly the same line on her, and had clearly found it totally effective. Then, just as she was cooking the lunch, the letter had arrived from the solicitors, and she had tried for hours without success to pretend that she had neither received nor read it, shoving it behind the plant on the mantelpiece and willing it not to be there, but it was
there, and when the children were watching Huckleberry Hound and were quite busily occupied she had furtively got it down again and read it again, and it seemed suddenly very serious, and she knew quite well (as Simon Camish had said) that she should communicate immediately with her solicitors, but she hadn’t dared, so instead she had rung up Emily and had told her all about it, and Emily had been as kind, witty, sympathetic and practically useless as ever – in fact even more useless because by the time Rose had got off the phone to her the solicitors were shut, though she supposed it was also true that even had she not rung Emily or had she talked to Emily for less long, she would still have taken great care not to ring the solicitors until too late, as she could not really face speaking to them at all. So she had then braced herself to re-read yet again the letter from Dawson, Mead and Woodbrooke, and had found this time, what she had not noticed before, which was that their client (meaning her husband) had simply instructed them that he wished the question of custody to be reconsidered. The wards-of-court threat was in Christopher’s letter only, and he was not reliable. So there was some time left, perhaps, to think about it. She wondered if Dawson, Mead and Woodbrooke had enjoyed writing this letter. She thought, from what Simon Camish had said, that they would be sure to have advised against it, but perhaps solicitors have to do what they are told, and that is why they use the word ‘instructed’, to avoid responsibility. They never say ‘we would like to’ or even ‘we must’ but always ‘we are instructed’. She recalled her father’s solicitors, who had not at all liked doing to her what he had made them do: in fact the younger Mr Sykes of Sykes and Son had been moved almost to tears by her plight, when she had confronted him, at twenty years of age, robed in her hideous discredited shaming certainties. They must have been beautiful then, or he would not have been so kind, he would not have blown his nose so often and told her to be brave and sensible as he was sure she really was, in quite that tone of voice. Poor Mr Sykes, she hoped he had not grieved too much over her fate, perhaps she should go and see him again to show him how well she was, how well she was doing, despite all.

And then, after she had re-read the letter, and found that it was
not quite as bad as she feared, that the children were not to be ripped from her by bailiffs or children’s officers, for some reason she began to get sadder and sadder: bathing the little child and chasing the big ones up to bed was even more of an ordeal than usual, because added to the usual irritations was the panic fear of losing these irritations, which made her, she was aware, behave quite oddly, and her behaving quite oddly made the children behave quite oddly, too, and so, as ever with children the process was cumulative and self-perpetuating, and by the time Mrs Sharkey’s Eileen arrived to baby-sit they were all resolutely refusing to go to bed at all. And Mrs Sharkey’s Eileen was quite incapable of organizing them, as well as being very pregnant and miserable and betrayed and talkative, so Rose had been very late getting out of the house at all. And when she had got out she had to face another character problem: knowing herself already late for Nick and Diana’s, where she could hardly bring herself to go, so dreadfully worried was she, she knew that she ought to get a taxi, and she had been half-thinking in her characteristic way that she might, but as soon as she emerged into the street she knew that it was out of the question, in a way, because she would never pick one up in that district in a hundred years (as she should well know, having inhabited it for eleven) and that she had not the energy to walk to the nearest place where she might pick one up, which was a good quarter of an hour away, and even then not certain. On the other hand, the bus could not fail to take less than forty minutes, which would make her embarrassingly late, and she hated causing inconvenience. So she stood there on the pavement at the end of her road, hesitating, not knowing which way to go, whether towards the bus and certain lateness, or towards the taxi road, and a long walk, and possible speed and possible even greater lateness.

She stood there, racked by indecision, and began to cry, and finally walked off and caught the bus, because she could not really afford to pay both Eileen and a taxi, even though she had promised to talk about the Urumbi uprising for Dickie, for which she ought to get at least eight guineas: blood money, that, if ever there was such a thing. On the bus she continued to weep because she knew she would be late, and Diana would be upset and not knowing what to
do with her supper, and she did so hate causing offence: and she wept also because of her character, because she was always like this, always indecisive, meaning to oblige, but finally, inevitably, causing inconvenience to all. Eileen, for instance, whom she had asked to baby-sit because she needed the cash, was really no longer capable of doing it, and had always been feckless – once she had put Vick on Maria’s bottom when she was a baby, instead of Vaseline, with awful results – and now was so far gone in pregnancy that if Maria fell out of bed, which she did sometimes, Eileen would have the utmost difficulty in heaving her back in again.

Luckily Maria hadn’t fallen out. This had been the one good thing about the day, thought Rose, as she lay there, holding Marcus’s warm squashy body, as it so gently and regularly heaved. She tried hard not to think about her third grave anxiety, which was that she might lose the children. She did not really believe it possible, but she feared the opening of old wounds, the carving of new ones. Her life had settled down, all things considered, so well, and why could they not leave her alone? She was doing no harm, she was contented, she was even, most of the time, happy. The children too were happy, as far as one could see. Her life had at last become, as she had so long willed it to be, innocuous. She had settled in, after all these sorrows and trials, she had become, slowly, what she had once so long ago willed herself to be: she was settled now, and her nature, though it saddened her at times as it had done this evening, she had on the whole so accepted and understood that she felt she could look at its vagaries quite equably, she could watch it panicking over the choice between taxis and buses with something like a maternal amusement. She was what she was: she had learned to go along with it, she had learned to say yes to Dickie White and to notice that she had been conned and not to object to that perception: she would, instead, go along and do the job. There was no need for them to disturb her any more. She was no longer a threat, she was a quiet person, they could surely, now, leave her alone. She did not think that even if they tortured her, now, she would very amusingly or gratifyingly cry out. She would be more likely, she hoped, to cry rather quietly until they stopped. But how could she tell? One cannot trust oneself too far.

She lay awake a little while longer, thinking these things, and looking around the dark room. It was dark, but one could see the objects in it quite well, because there was a street lamp outside Mrs Flanagan’s next door, and the light entered the room through the thin cheap floating curtains. There was a flowery pattern on the curtains of which she had grown extremely fond, and she could hardly now believe that she had once disliked them. They had been there long enough, they had come with the house. At first she had been unable to understand why anyone should have bought curtains of such ineffective material, and the light through them had kept her awake. Then she had come to realize that it was a question of expense. Thin materials were cheaper than thick ones, and that was that. It had dawned on her like a slow revelation, and now the light filtered through them with the same revelation perpetually embodied. It satisfied her, it assuaged her. The whole room satisfied her – the wardrobe, also left behind by previous owners, who had been unable to get it through the door, the creaking bed, big enough, now she was on her own, for herself and all the children at once when they wanted to come, the pictures stuck on the walls, the rug that she had made herself, the dark green walls that she had painted herself four years ago, and really ought to do again soon when she could face it. She loved it: it was peaceful, it was safe, it was what she had wanted. She could hardly now believe that she had once lain here in such panic, so terrified of what she had undertaken, so inadequate to take possession of it, so frightened by what had then seemed its wilfully chosen menace. She looked back on those early days, sometimes, and they were a measure of how far she had travelled, how surely, despite all, she had made herself advance into safety. Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey’s end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days. Thinking this, with some comfort, she fell asleep.

Eleven years before, if questioned, but there was nobody who dared to question her, she would not have been able to describe her image
with any fitting confidence. She had herself lost sight of it and, lying in that same room, upon that same bed, she had been cold with the terror of that loss, and more frightened than she could ever have admitted. She had been frightened, in those days, of everything she had found about her: the long drab streets, the hard-faced suspicious old ladies in the shops, the gas works, the bedding factory, the shabby children in the streets, the house itself, which she would have to think of as her home. She hated the house, its very architecture appalled her, she hated its low narrow rooms and its sagging ceilings and its hacked, planed, untrue, ill-fitting doors. It stank of fleas, a dark red smell of blood and of sawdust, and the mattress of the bed, on which she threw herself in despondency, exhaled at her the vicious defeats of generations. Dirt poured into the place through every badly carpentered crack. Decades of what she had first taken for neglect had left the whole building riddled with holes and irregularities: it took her years to realize that it was not neglect that had patched up the sash cords and filled the cracks in the walls with putty and stuck pieces of varnished paper over major structural faults, but on the contrary a yearning, anxious, impoverished solicitude, the solicitude without money that can never rebuild or reconstruct, but can merely patch and cover and stop up each breach as it occurs. The house, far from speaking of despair, spoke of the unflagging efforts of nearly a century: a little cement here, a new bit of wiring there, a new knob on a door (albeit a nasty bakelite one to replace the irreplaceable brass original) – they all bore witness to effort, not to defeat. But how should she have known this, brought up as she had been? She had no eye for such things, and what was around her she could not see. She lay on the bed, sick from her first pregnancy, and thought that there was nothing, nothing in the world that she could do. There was no action possible for her. She had no money, apart from the five pounds that Christopher had given her for a week’s housekeeping; she had not the faintest idea of how to set about earning any. She was almost uneducated, and completely untrained in any useful sense. Without money, there was nothing to do: one could sit, like a tramp in the park, or in the library, but the library was not accommodating. It was not a district that felt much need of libraries.
And it was too cold for the park. It was cold enough in the house: she was too frightened of the electricity bill to switch on the electric fire, so in the mornings when Christopher had gone out, she would get back into bed and pull the blanket over her and wonder if she had enough strength to survive. They had married in November, on her twenty-first birthday, as she had always threatened that she would do, but now, because of the cold, she thought it would have been better to have waited until the spring. In the spring, things would surely be more tolerable.