The Needle's Eye (16 page)

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, finally. ‘It’s charity, at least, to sit there for so long and listen to me. And charity is a form of love’.

‘How do you know?’ he said, looking up at her, and smiling, harshly, a mocking unpleasant smile that delighted her, ‘how do you know that I haven’t been bored stiff? How do you know I haven’t been resenting every moment that I’ve been sitting here?’

She was ready for it. ‘Because,’ she said, smiling back at him, quickly, sharply, triumphantly, ‘because if you had been resenting it, it would be even kinder of you. Wouldn’t it? Eh?’

‘I thought things didn’t count unless one meant them.’

‘No, no, not at all.’ She gazed at him with gentle superiority, with kindness. ‘You’ve got it wrong. The clashing of the cymbals and the banging of the something or other, you were thinking of, weren’t you? And not having charity. But the act counts. See? And you’ve sat there and listened. You could have got up and gone away. But, you’ve listened, you’ve even bothered to ask the right questions.’

‘My dear girl, I have been asking the right questions of people for long enough to know how to do it, I can assure you, so that nobody could possibly tell the difference. I have a strong sense of obligation. It is on this sense of obligation that I have conducted my whole life. It is very destructive of the emotions. Had I ever trusted my emotions, I would have led a far less admirable existence, I can assure you.’

‘But in what sense, then, can you say that your existence has been admirable?’

‘It has been admirable in that I have fulfilled my obligations. As I said. I’ve spent most of my time, I think, doing what on balance it seemed that I ought to do, not what I might have wanted to do, and now there isn’t much that I do want to do. So it’s rather distressing to hear you so confident of the value – or virtue, maybe – of very small activities, when I can hardly work up enough energy to pursue quite large and exhausting bits of life. I am glad that you can enjoy going shopping and taking advantage of Cut Price Offers. I wish that I too could arrive at such a state of grace.’

‘I am sorry if I have distressed you.’

‘Yes, you probably are. You would be. To them that have it shall be given.’

‘What I tried to do was to give away.’

‘But it doesn’t work, does it? It stays with you, you said it yourself, you can’t get rid of it, grace or riches, you can’t get rid of them, can you? They increase and multiply.’

‘It’s not as bad as that.’

‘Oh yes it is. But no, don’t look like that, I really truly don’t want to distress you. Tell me some more, instead, please.’

‘And you will listen, dutifully?’

‘It’s the best I can do. It’s the best you can do for me. Tell me why you gave that money to that school in Africa. Not why, I mean, why you gave it at all, that’s reasonably easy to imagine, but why you gave it to that particular place. You must have had some problem in choosing, once you’d decided to get rid of it in the first place.’

‘You must be tired. You must be wanting to go home. You look tired, you were tired when you arrived.’

‘I feel better now. I want to hear. I’m curious, you know. On a quite simple level.’

‘Are you? Are you really? That’s nice of you. Oh dear. I can hardly bear to tell you about it, it was so sad, and I behaved like such a fool. The school was in Ujuhudiana, I bet you don’t even know where Ujuhudiana is, do you? It used to be called Juhudiland till it got its independence. It’s a terribly dull place. Nothing much goes on there
at all, that’s why I got interested in it, because it was so dull, if you see what I mean. Look, here it is.’ And she got up and got him a book, one in the Mundy and Gross series, with a map, and photographs.

‘You see? And I got interested because it seemed a small and peaceful place. I couldn’t cope with the idea of big violent places like the Congo and Nigeria. The country’s not very fertile, most of the people are nomadic, there’s a lot of cattle, well,’ – he was turning the pages of the book – ‘you can see for yourself. So I started to collect cuttings and read books. And then war broke out. You probably don’t even remember. It was a very little civil war – one tribe against another – but there was a lot of violence in the capital, Gbolo, and quite a lot of people were killed and buildings burned. And one day in
The Times
there was this photograph. I’ll show you. Wait. I’ll show you.’

And she got up again, and went over to her desk, and took an old crumpled press cutting out of a pigeon-hole. He noticed that she did not herself look at it: she handed it to him with her eyes more or less averted, her other hand fluttering nervously over it as though she didn’t want to catch sight of it, as though she didn’t want it to communicate with her, as though the very touch of it was enough to alarm. He opened it nervously, and looked at it. It showed a town square – not an imposing one, the buildings were low, the road surface poor. In the square lay bodies, nine or ten bodies. The quality of the photograph was poor, few details mercifully could be distinguished. A policeman stood watching. The only part of the picture which was in clear focus was a small child, sitting cross-legged by one of the corpses. Its mother, one could see that the corpse had been. The child was naked. It was sitting naked in the dust, its face lost, its eyes sagging blank with nothingness, its mouth drooping slightly open. It was a remarkable photograph. And Rose, watching Simon look at it, remembering, as he responded to it with a movement of grief, what it had been like, felt as though she were looking at it again for the first time. She could not help it.

‘You see?’ she said. ‘I saw that, and I couldn’t get over it. It’s all very well, reading books. It’s better, I know. But that – I don’t know, I don’t know what that did to me. But it was something I had to do
something about. And the next week, there was an appeal, I don’t know if you remember, from this man from Urumbi, that’s the Northern province, who’d come over here. Nyoka, his name was. Akisoferi Nyoka. I went to a lecture he gave at the African Institute. He was appealing for funds to build a new school, his had been burned down in the riots. So I sent him the money.’

‘Just like that?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right. Just like that.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘Well, this
was
the really depressing part. They built the school, but in another year the war, which had stopped altogether, broke out again much more virulently, and there was a real bloodbath. You wouldn’t believe it. In fact you probably wouldn’t know about it because it was terribly badly reported here. I thought they were a peaceful lot, but there isn’t a peaceful nation on earth. They chopped each other up and floated each other down the rivers. Hundreds and hundreds. Thousands. Nobody knows how many. The Northern bit, there –’ and she pointed at the map – ‘the bit called Urumbi, wanted to cut itself off from this other bit down here, Nchikavu, it wanted to secede. But there wasn’t any point in it, there was no oil, nothing, and nobody cared here, nobody at all. There’s nothing much to choose between those two wretched countries. I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse. Anyway, he built my school all right, did Nyoka, but he also bought himself a huge great white Mercedes. Out of my money. I saw a photo of him sitting in it. Labour must be cheap, over there. And the school was burned down, burned to the ground. A month or two after it was opened. Christopher said I should have expected it, I should have known better, I shouldn’t have trusted that man – and maybe he was right. I didn’t stop to think. I couldn’t have thrown the money away more ineffectively, could I?’

‘No, I suppose not. But one couldn’t blame you for that. You couldn’t have known.’

‘It makes one wonder. If there is anything one can safely do. It makes me quite ill, when one opens a newspaper and sees the causes people are prepared even to die for – did you see that piece about those French schoolboys who killed themselves, burned themselves
to death, as a protest against what’s going on in Biafra? As a protest, for Christ’s sake, as a sacrifice to the French oil wells – immolating themselves for French business interests – it’s terrifying to think of them reading those French papers, and not knowing what was beneath it all, and solemnly and so horribly uselessly dying – perhaps they saw a photograph like I saw a photograph. One can’t blame them. Anyway, you could take this story as an explanation of why I’ve given up public causes – and why I think I ought to sit here at home and keep quiet and dig my own garden. Literally dig it, actually. Now that’s the kind of activity that used to seem to me sublimely useless, and now at my age seems a good thing to do. You might well say that that’s all very well for me, which is more or less what you said before –’

‘No, no, not exactly,’ he said, protesting, but she brushed his protests aside, politely.

‘Oh, I know what you meant,’ she said. ‘It’s a privilege, to be able to learn the lessons I’ve learned. The lessons of the privileged. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn. I refuse to believe I was damned from birth, you know. It would be rather hard, not to allow people to learn. I can’t really believe all that once a lady always a lady, and unto them that have it shall be given, can you?’ She smiled, suddenly cheerful. A sudden ripple of energy went through her, as she sat there: she lifted up a hand, and held it there, the fingers spread out, mocking, smiling, serious. ‘All alone,’ she said: ‘I arrest the course of nature. I arrest it. I divert the current.’

‘It’s very rash of you,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, staring at her unnaturally raised hand, tense, the veins standing up in it, like a gesture, a joke. Quickly she crumpled the fingers in and dropped it to her lap, the moment of assertion over.

‘You ought to be getting home,’ she said, her nerve gone. ‘I’ve kept you too long, I’ve talked at you too much.’

‘I haven’t been much use to you, I’m afraid.’

‘You listened to me,’ she said. ‘That was kind of you.’

‘Not very,’ he said, getting up, preparing to go. ‘It would have been, if it hadn’t been interesting. But it was interesting.’

‘I never even got round to telling you about the custody thing, did I, I was so busy telling you everything else. He’s definitely applying for custody to the Divorce Court. So I’ve got to have the Welfare round, and write an affidavit, and all that. Christopher says they shouldn’t be allowed to go to school in this area, you know. That’s his best point, I think. But what does the country have areas like this for, if they’re too bad for children to go to school in?’

‘I wouldn’t worry too much, if I were you.’

‘Wouldn’t you? The judge thinks I’m mad already, you know. You saw what he said about me in the divorce case. And lawyers and people take education terribly seriously, you know. They simply wouldn’t have the faintest conception of what I mean by leaving them where they are. And yet they have no notion whatsoever of where that – that incomprehension leaves them. They just don’t know. They can’t add it up. Christopher knows, he knows all too well, the trouble is he knows and doesn’t like it. If he’d come from where I come from, he wouldn’t have been able to put up half such a good case for himself. But he knows it all, it’s what he was brought up on, it’s what turned him into what he is. Where they are now. One has to admit it, his case is far more reasonable than mine. In terms of how things are, and how things work. All he has to say is, I want them to have the opportunities that I never had, and any judge in England would sympathize with him. Wouldn’t they? You know they would.’

‘They might have a natural sympathy in that direction, yes. A natural inclination. But they have been known to set their inclinations aside.’

‘Yes, I know. But only for good reasons. Like the fact that Christopher used to beat me black and blue and lock me in the bedroom. I sometimes wonder if really he learned all that kind of behaviour from my father. Or whether I’d bring it out in anybody. But no, the point is, nobody could prove that Christopher beats the children black and blue because he doesn’t, he’s very good with them, he gives them all the things I won’t give them.’

‘But you don’t beat them either.’

‘No, of course I don’t. I simply deprive them. Or so he’ll say.’

‘But you deprive them of some things in order to offer them others. Or so I imagine.’

‘But do I, do I? What, after all, do I offer them but myself? And why should I of all people be able to believe that that’s such a big deal?’

‘You are their mother.’

‘Yes, I know. And so is he their father.’

He sighed, and buttoned his coat.

‘There’s no easy answer, in such cases.’

‘I must let you go.’

‘Yes, I must go, they will be wondering where I am.’ She wondered, listening, how often she had heard this delicate plural: they, meaning she. And wondered also, as she saw him off, receiving his assurances that he would look things up for her, and contact her, and give her any help he could, why he had made her so little uneasy, as some such men did. She was exposed to men, being a friendly woman, and living alone. A lot of them upset her, more because of the brutality (as it seemed to her) with which she had to treat them, than because of any offence committed by them against her. But Simon Camish, although the kind of person that ought to disseminate unease, for some reason did not. He was so angular, and thin, and jerky, that he ought to communicate restlessness. Perhaps he didn’t because he was there on her invitation, and because one could confidently rely on him not to make any kind of pass. Because the need involved was hers, not his. Or perhaps it was because he was so quick. She didn’t mind people being jerky if they were also quick.

As she went into the kitchen to do the washing-up, which she always did, these days, carefully, before going to bed, in careful repudiation of those years when she and Christopher had collapsed in drink or bitterness or fury amongst a sea of crying bodies, dirty plates, and glasses, she thought over the things she had said to him. Impossible, really, not to plead one’s cause, not to lie in one’s own defence. One became, in any dispute, incurably partisan, and she could not help but be so now that it seemed to her that it was the whole of herself and the whole of her past that were on trial. It was a matter of all that she had believed in, so she was bound to plead for
those beliefs. Perhaps there was no truth to be told. She rinsed the plates, carefully, and put them on the rack to drain.