The Needle's Eye (20 page)

Julie hated the nature of his work. She wished that he were doing something more interesting. She had shown the faintest glimmer of interest when he and an academic friend had started to combine to produce a book, because books were exciting, but had quickly lost enthusiasm when she discovered the intense dullness of the book, and the fact that his contributions were to remain, through professional discretion, almost anonymous. If there was one thing Julie couldn’t be doing with, it was anonymity. He often thought she would have been better married to a personality of some kind. She liked personalities. Whereas law reports she could not bring herself to read. He thought about their new car. She had wanted him to buy a big car. She liked big cars. He had said that he could not afford one, and she had said, never mind I’ll pay. So he had bought one, because he too liked big cars. And now he drove it around as though it were his, and people looked at it and registered its presence as though it were his. He had bought it to humour Julie, because what right had he to deny her the very few things in life that seemed to amuse her? What fault of his was it if her aims and needs were childish? And yet, driving it, he knew that this was what he himself would call corruption. With a faint sudden recurring shock of astonishment he would recognize, in his own behaviour, an eternal human pattern of corruption. This is it, he would think to himself, this is I, doing what all men do, I am enacting those old and preordained movements of the spirit, those ancient patterns of decay, I, who had thought myself different. I, who had (surely) other intentions. Corrupt, humanly corrupt if not professionally so, and humanly embittered. And his spirit would struggle feebly within the net that held it, and he would imagine some pure evasion, some massive rent through which he could emerge. But there was no action possible that would not involve destruction, violence, treachery, of those to whom he had
pledged himself, and of the only useful actions of his life. And of those, there were some. There were even many. He was caught. And his spirit would hunch its feathered bony shoulders, and grip its branch, and fold itself up and shrink within itself, until it could no longer brush against the net, until it could no longer entangle itself, painfully, in that surrounding circumstantial mesh.

Having pursued these reflections to their usual end, having arrived, as usual, at the usual bleak perch – a perch becoming less bleak, at times he thought, through familiarity, his hunched posture less painful as his bones learned to expect it – he finished his Ovaltine, and decided that he had better go to bed. He took the cup back into the kitchen and put it on the shelf, and looked once more at his son’s note.

There was some other point that he was trying to remember, a last point. Yes. The real point about the whole of Rose’s case was the question of how the children were. That was what the question was. If she could be quite sure that they were better with her, that they had in no way suffered from being alone with her, then he was fairly sure that she had nothing to worry about. He thought of the two smaller ones, rolling on the floor. They had looked all right, what he had been able to bring himself to see of them. And the eldest child, Konstantin, culturally playing his oboe, had looked, from the judicial point of view, more than all right: civil, intelligent, almost a public-school product. But there might be more to it than that. He looked at his son’s laborious handwriting. There was always more to it than that. But with any luck, one could always conceal evidence that ought not to be seen.

Julie was asleep when he went upstairs. With relief, he got into bed quietly, and tried to sleep himself.

Rose, waking up the following morning, had immediately the sense that there was something unpleasant that she had promised herself that she would do. While she gave the children their breakfast and drank a cup of tea, she tried to work out what it could be – unearthing accidentally, as she did so, a whole heaped cupboardful of nasty
obligations, such as shoe-buying and glazier-visiting, and of nagging guilts, about people she should have rung back and hadn’t, people she should have written to and hadn’t, birthday presents unbought and promises unfulfilled. But it was for none of these pointlessly exhumed anxieties that she had been looking. Finally, as she pulled up Maria’s socks, found Konstantin’s football boots, failed to find Marcus’s soccer cards, and kicked all three, in one continuous movement, out through the front door and down the road to school, she worked out what it was. She had promised herself (waking up, restless, in the middle of the night) that she would make herself go down to the library and look it all up. She would look it all up, in one of those dreadful law books. It was no good asking her solicitor, it was no good even asking Simon Camish, because nobody would tell her the truth: they were all too anxious to placate and to soothe. If she wanted to find out what it was all about, she would have to go and do it for herself. Having come to this conclusion, she sat down, rather weakly, and poured herself another cup of tea. She had been through all this before. Twice before. The first time, when she had herself been made a ward, she had been too ignorant even to put together the little information she had been able to acquire: having been more or less incarcerated in her father’s house, she had had to rely on whatever books were lying around there, and they’d been an unhelpful selection. The nearest she had got had been
Iolanthe
and
Bleak House
, neither of which had been exactly relevant, though the latter had filled her with a quite justified apprehension. But the apprehension had been shapeless, formless, completely lacking in detail, a terror of her own helplessness and confusion. When she came to the divorce, when she became aware that after all she was going to have to divorce Christopher out of self-protection, the situation had been very different. Then, she had known what she ought to find out, though she still had little idea of how to set about it. She had gone down to the public library, with Maria still under school age amusing herself by pushing all the books, thud thud, to the backs of the shelves, and she had tried to find some useful books.
Everyman’s Lawyer, Law for the Layman
, a book on divorce statistics. She had tried to educate herself gently, her mind dazed by even the
simplest terms, and had in the end to admit that there was nothing for it but to try the heavy stuff. She hadn’t been allowed to take Rayden home with her, as it was in the reference section, so she had had to pore over it anxiously with half her attention on a bored, trouble-making Maria: while she read, with extreme pain, of matrimonial offences and maintenance problems and definitions of cruelty and desertion. It had been a horrible experience, made worse by the fact that she seemed to understand so little of what she read, that she had to convict herself, as she struggled, of real stupidity. It would have been easier for her, perhaps, to go straight to the solicitors, but that was was not how she was, she wanted to know for herself, she could not trust herself to a solicitor. Solicitors had not, after all, been much on her side, and delicacy prevented her from approaching one without a certainty of the nature of her case. She could not, had never been able, to grasp the fact that a solicitor engaged by her would have her interests at heart. She expected to be judged, and harshly. Even finding a solicitor had been a major problem, as she clearly could not use Christopher’s, or her family’s, and had been too embarrassed, at first, to ask her friends. She had, in the end, asked Emily, who had been as vague as herself, but had managed to recommend her one nevertheless.

She would use him again, she supposed, she would have to, but she wanted to know for herself where she was. So she put on her coat and her wellington boots, and set off to the library. She’d thought at first she would go to the main library, because it was less personal and she would feel less conspicuous there, but decided as she set off that she hadn’t the energy, and might as well go to the local branch. It was a branch that she disliked, as it was run by a peculiarly snappy and short-tempered woman, a woman nearly as unpleasant as the one in the post-office, who would on principle reject parcels as being ill-wrapped, and Family Allowance signatures as being illegible.

She walked down the dark streets, past the shops, and the rain dripped unpleasantly. She thought of the post-office woman. The week before she had been waiting in the queue to buy some stamps, and a girl in front of her had been trying to post a parcel. She was a
nice girl, a timid girl, and she said very politely, as she stuck the stamps on, ‘Do you think it will get there by the end of the week?’ ‘Don’t ask me,’ the post-office lady replied, crossly. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the girl, immediately apologetic, sorry to have annoyed her: whereupon the post-office lady glowered ferociously through the grille (which took on the aspect, suddenly, of a restraining cage) and said, ‘Look here, you’re asking me for a cast-iron guarantee, aren’t you, a cast-iron guarantee about whether that parcel of yours will get there by the end of the week. Well, I’m not going to give you one, it’s not my job. I don’t give cast-iron guarantees to no one.’ The girl looked shattered by this attack, as well she might: but a sense of pride and justice compelled her to assert, as she moved away, ‘I wasn’t asking for a guarantee, I only asked.’ The post-office woman sniffed, and turned to the next customer: he had come to inquire about a registered letter he had sent to his family in Nigeria. What shall I do, he said, reasonably, they haven’t received my letter. How do you know, said the woman. Because they haven’t replied, and it was urgent, he said. Well, she said, you can’t claim till I’ve got it in writing from them you sent it to that they didn’t get it. But how can I get it in writing from them that they don’t get my letters, if they don’t get my letters? he said. That’s your problem, she said. No claim without written confirmation from recipient that post was not received, she said.

Thinking back over this, Rose could not help laughing. It had been too awful to be true. In fact, she had laughed as she stood there in the queue, and other people had known what she was laughing at, because they had joined in. It had cheered her up, that.

She walked past the school, a huge Victorian edifice that loomed up, complete with bell and weathercock, against the dirty sky, and felt some satisfaction at the thought that all her children were safely in there, being educated. On the school windows, pasted from inside, there were cut-out butterflies, and doily patterns, and shoals of fish. The friezes of Christmas trees, and stuck-on blobs of cotton wool from last term had disappeared. She remembered how the sight of this school had alarmed her, years before, when she had first seen it, when Konstantin had been a baby: and of how it had gradually
transformed itself through connection and familiarity. Like the streets she walked upon. She turned the corner, into a dingy terraced residential road, and there was the library, a modern building of spectacular ugliness, a low, inadequate building, disgraced by its surroundings as it disgraced them. In the spring, sometimes, it looked all right, when there were some flowers on the tree planted in the concrete. But now it was not yet spring.

There was nobody much inside the library. There rarely was. Two elderly ladies were looking at the Light Romance section. She disapproved of a library that actually classified books under Light Romance. A black man and an Indian were sitting at tables trying to work. The tables were clearly not designed for working on, and she had once heard the librarian point this out. And now, as she stood there waiting to return two of the children’s long-overdue books, she heard something even worse. In front of her there was a man – a Ghanaian, she thought, though even after some experience she was not very good at these assessments – and he was asking the librarian about a book. Reasonably enough, one might think. Rose listened to what he was saying. He was asking her if the library had a copy of
Animal Farm
. It was quite true that his accent was not as distinct as it might have been, but she had herself understood him perfectly, and she was quite astonished to hear the librarian snap back that no, of course they hadn’t, the library didn’t stock zoology text books, if he wanted that kind of thing he’d better try the main branch. She wondered if the man would retort, but no, he mildly raised his eyebrows, and returned to consult the catalogue once more. Handing over her children’s books, and paying the fine that more enlightened libraries no longer exact from children, she wondered whether she should remonstrate, or whether she should go and try to help the man wrestle with the catalogue, but of course did neither. She wondered, as she made her way to the legal section, whether the librarian had spoken through ignorance or malice, and which would have been more deplorable. It was the man’s look of polite patience that had most distressed her. What must life be like, in its daily texture, when such incidents were a daily fare? Some of these misunderstandings, as she well knew, were inevitable, because they were caused by the
language problem, not even by the culture problem. It was something that people would never admit: nobody would admit that so many immigrants, inevitably, verged in speech upon the incomprehensible. She knew it herself all too well from those days when she had answered the telephone for the Anti-Discrimination Co-operative Accommodation Scheme, because the chief worry (apart from the inevitable shortage of accommodation available) had been the basic inability to communicate to most of the people who rang her up. It was worse on the telephone than in person, of course, and she had become quite frantic at times as she listened to lengthy explanations of which she could understand but one word in ten. It was, in fact, not unlike reading legal language: the details and refinements of the explanation remained totally obscure, and it was only by an immense effort of the will that one could understand the main drift. One could understand it, if one stuck at it, but the strain was dreadful, and in the end she had had to give it up. The organizers of the scheme had persisted, despite her constant denials, in the belief that she could understand Greek, being married to Christopher, and how could she explain to them that Christopher himself, on principle, could understand hardly a word, and would certainly never speak a word, of his own language? Battered by gales of Greek, she had tried to learn it herself, and had failed dismally. There was a Greek family who lived next door to her, on the other side from the Flanagans, who spoke little English, but they had been keener to learn from her than to teach her. Christopher’s family despised this family, and they, for their part, hated Christopher’s. After he had left her, they had tried to explain to her that the Vassilious were exploiters, that the house they lived in belonged to just such a family, who charged them an exorbitant rent. Traitors to their own kind, they would have said, had they been familiar with such a phrase. They had not needed the phrase. Rose had got the message anyway. As she had got the message that awful day last summer, when she had gone out to sit on the front steps, and had found there the black-dressed grandmother from next door, who had pointed to the sky and muttered in Greek about something or other. Looking at the blue sky, Rose had said (not knowing what to say, smiling cheerfully, pleased with the sun),
Yes, it’s a lovely day, isn’t it. And the woman had continued to gesticulate sadly towards the heavens, and Rose had continued to praise the sun’s benevolence, until Mrs Flanagan, drawn also onto her front steps by the activity outside, had informed her that the old lady’s husband had departed heavenwards during the night, and that her pointed finger was indicating his spiritual ascent. How Mrs Flanagan had discovered this, Rose did not know, perhaps she had a better instinct about such things. It had remained a lovely day, the sun had continued to shine, Rose and the old lady had continued to sit on their steps and nod at one another. The old lady had not taken her incomprehension amiss. Rose wondered whether she herself would have been so tolerant.