The Needle's Eye (24 page)

Oddly enough, wherever he went now, he heard her name. He wondered how he had avoided it for so long. As a new word, once acquired, presents itself in every piece of print, so her name arose in every social gathering. Everybody seemed to know her, or to have heard of her, and to have views about her. In a way he judged her for the evident promiscuity of her interests, for having put herself in a position where she would be talked of. She had brought it upon herself, and there was no point in defending too much the honour or privacy of somebody who had exposed herself as she had exposed herself. But at the same time, he flattered himself that he had some personal access to her private nature. Perhaps, he thought, everybody who speaks of her assumes just such a privileged knowledge, so careful is she to relate, so anxious is she not to cause offence, so anxious is she to be liked and not condemned. And yet, nevertheless, he continued to believe that she bestowed upon him an especial light, an especial favour. He liked her, he truly liked her. If he was deceived, he was willingly deceived. He did not believe that she put down the phone after speaking to him, only to lift it again to ring up another comforter, seeking the same reassurances, imparting the same woes and same amusements. He thought he understood her. He wished to understand. Such a modicum of good will (for so he thought it) was nothing less than a re-birth in his nature. As such he
valued it, and wondered from time to time if she suspected how exclusively she claimed his interest.

She did not, in point of fact, claim much of his time: his time was consumed by work and by placating his wife. A phone call or two or week, and the odd visit, were hardly the structure of a mutual life. It was only in the surrounding barrenness that they appeared so. (He believed her life to be empty, wished it indeed to be so, wished her to sit there in that house with those children, but did not expect that that was what she did.) In fact, that spring his attention was more than usually claimed by work, as the book which he and an acquaintance had been combining to write and had nearly completed had suddenly become subject to an unexpected amount of revision. The book was about International Labour Law, and the inconvenience of such a subject was that it did not, alas, remain static. They had been hoping to get it out before anything too dramatic happened, but unfortunately two bits of legislation, both in Western Europe, had been passed at such a point in time that their implications could not possibly be excluded, so Chapters Eight and Eleven had to be extensively re-written. His fury at the threat of this legislation and its subsequent enactment was not lessened by the fact that it embodied principles of which he himself thoroughly approved, and which he had been gloomily prophesying that no government would ever support. They had been supported, to his personal expense to the tune of several thousand new words. It’s all very well, he and his friend Antony said, sadly piling cigarette ends into the ashtray, it’s all very well, very sound and all that, but they might have waited till we’d got the book off to the printers. The publishers were sympathetic, but would not let them off. Simon felt some of the despondency that John Stuart Mill felt when, having comfortably worked out the amelioration of the human lot, he began to suspect that life so ameliorated wouldn’t be worth living for him personally, for ameliorator John Stuart Mill. Rebels without a cause, that’s what we’re going to look like if we’re not careful, he said to Antony, and they looked at each other crossly and thought of their publisher’s advance. Oh, I don’t know, said Antony, one government or another is going to bring in some marvellous Industrial Relations Bill in the
next year or two, that’ll keep you and me happy with rage for years. And they laughed, and sat down to write it all again.

Julie was furious. She had fixed up some interesting diversions, in the form of dinner parties, theatre parties, God knows what, extending as they always did, frivolously and tediously, well plotted, over the six weeks in which he was going to have to rewrite. She had no intention of letting him off, she needed him. She didn’t make it any better by saying, you might have known this was going to happen – which was true, in a way, though she had no possible means of knowing it was true.

For some reason (for he did not often speak of his own affairs) he told this story to Rose. He told her on one of the few occasions when he actually saw her: he had gone round there to see her after work, having finished unusually early, and had found her, as he always chose to imagine her, sitting in her sitting-room watching television, but somehow unexpectedly holding a very small baby on her knee.

‘It’s not my baby,’ she said, ‘it’s Eileen’s, that girl who used to sit around here, you remember.’

‘And where’s Eileen?’ said Simon, looking at the infant with some alarm.

‘Nobody knows,’ said Rose. ‘She cleared off. Awful, isn’t it?’

‘She didn’t by any chance leave you in charge of it?’

‘No, no, God no, nothing as ghastly as that, she left it with her mother. She’ll probably be back. It was probably a bit of a shock to her, having a baby. Her mother thinks she went to look for its father. I’m just looking after it for a bit till Mrs Sharkey gets back. Here, have a look at it. What do you think?’

‘What do you mean, what do I think?’

‘Do you think it looks – well, do you think it looks a bit kind of
dark
?’

‘Black, you mean?’ he said, peering at the baby, thinking that it indeed did look rather black in colour and in feature.

‘Well, what do you think?’

‘Yes, it does, a bit.’

Rose sighed. ‘Awful, isn’t it? I’m sure that’s why she cleared off.’

‘It would be the father, I suppose?’ said Simon.

‘I suppose so,’ said Rose, and sighed. ‘She really is a dreadful girl, Eileen, she had real ambitions, you know, she used to dress up and daydream, she even used to borrow books off me sometimes, I don’t know why, she never read them, but she had ambitions, you know, and that’s why she was so awful and sulky, and her mother is really such a good woman, so terribly hardworking, five children she had, and worked awfully hard for them, and the rest of them turned out a real credit, as she said, but poor old Eileen is a real bad lot. And the thing is, one can’t help rather sympathizing with Eileen. Even her mother can’t help sympathizing with her. One can’t help in some way admiring her for being a bad lot.’

‘I don’t see anything very admirable,’ said Simon, ‘in walking off and leaving you and her mother holding the baby.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Rose. ‘No, you’re right, of course. But it must have been rather awful for her, with all those ambitions she had.’

‘Whatever sort of ambitions were they?’

‘Oh, God knows, I’m sure she didn’t know. She wanted to be a Spanish duchess, or a wicked woman, or a make-up girl at the BBC. And she hadn’t a hope in hell of being any of them. It’s enough to make anybody sulky. She’ll be back, I expect. She’ll stay away a day or two, and then she’ll be back.’

‘Who was the father?’

‘She wouldn’t tell. Well, actually, she did tell, she told me, but
I
promised not to tell. But I don’t suppose telling you would count, would it? She’d probably like to think of me telling someone like you. He’s a boy in a garage in Stoke Newington.’

‘Why don’t they get married?’

‘He’s married already. So she says he says. He probably isn’t at all. He probably just doesn’t want to marry Eileen. You can’t blame him, can you? Look, would you like to hold the baby for a minute, and I’ll go and make you a cup of tea, or coffee, or something.’

‘No thank you,’ he said, sincerely. ‘Please don’t bother.’

The baby heaved, and spat. A glob of milk landed on Rose’s skirt. She wiped at it ineffectually with its own nightdress skirt.

‘Poor thing,’ she said, sadly. ‘Poor little thing. It’s got something quite disgusting called projectile vomiting. Dreadful, isn’t it?’

She bent her head over the child, wiping its face. When she looked up again, her eyes were red.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, feeling he had to speak.

‘Nothing,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Nothing. Everything. It’s just so sad, that’s all. Life.’ She blew her nose.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said again.

‘Nothing,’ she repeated. ‘Nothing. I’m so lonely, sometimes. It was nice of you to come and see me.’

Astonished, he stared at her, then looked the other way.

‘I’m just depressed,’ she said, ‘that’s all. You don’t look so cheerful yourself. You probably know what I mean.’

‘I am depressed,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. But it’s no good deducing it from the way I look, because I always look depressed. So I’m told.’

‘What about?’ she said: and, to the background of
Bonanza
, he told her about his book.

‘It isn’t even,’ he said, having finished the story, ‘as though I’ve any right to be depressed. Logically, I ought to be pleased.’

‘Oh, Lord no,’ she said, ‘that would be expecting too much of yourself. Really. For goodness ’sake. How long is it going to take you to rewrite?’

‘One can’t quite be sure. The problem is that Antony and I are supposed to be collaborating on it, and there’s so little time when we’re both free.’

‘You don’t actually write it together, do you?’

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact we do. It sounds mad, as a scheme, but in fact we don’t get on too badly once we get down to it. And we neither of us have the will power to sit down and do it on our own. It’s not as though it’s going to be a masterpiece of prose, you know.’

‘Will it be readable? I mean, will people like me be able to understand it?’

‘I don’t know quite what you mean by people like you, but if you mean is it written for the layman – well, no, I suppose it’s not, really.
It’s more an academic text book, I suppose. It’s in a series that Jacobs and Mayer are doing, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the other titles, you may have done – there’s one on Urban Development, I think, and one on Women’s Employment, and one on Penal Reform.’

‘It sounds very interesting,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what most people say when I tell them about it, and even while they’re saying it their faces stiffen with the effort not to start yawning.’

‘I
mean
it sounds interesting,’ she said, plaintively, possibly even slightly hurt: and proceeded to interrogate him further, to prove her good faith. He had in fact forgotten that she had some possibly genuine interest in the subject, through her father’s business, and despite himself, as she questioned him, he began to warm to the topic, because after all he
was
interested himself, of course he was, he might as well admit it, that’s what he was doing it for, however he might try to disguise the project as a ruse for getting out of his own house and into Antony’s or as a means of making money, or as a furthering of his career. He was writing the thing really because he was interested in it, and because he wanted it to be written by somebody like himself, whose views he agreed with. So he expounded his line, and described one or two of the points on which he and Antony had had some difference of opinion, and forgot for a while to be surprised by her appearance of enthusiasm. In fact, however unlikely, it did seem to be more than an appearance, for if she had been listening without paying any attention (as most people did) she wouldn’t have been able to ask any relevant questions. And when they got to the peculiar problems of industrial growth in Africa, she actually knew what she was talking about; though all her information came from a very small area: ‘You see,’ she said modestly, ‘the thing is, I’m sure now that I chose to become interested in Ujuhudiana precisely because it
is
such a tiny place, population-wise, I mean, it’s only got one and a half million inhabitants, and I thought if I could get my mind round what one and a half million people were doing then it would help me to understand what goes on on a larger scale, if you see what I mean? But of course it doesn’t really work like that,
because here the problem of density is in itself the problem, and there isn’t any parallel at all between the building of a factory in Gbolo and say the idea even of building a factory in Anglesey. They developed a sort of Trades Union for this new Gbolo factory, you know, but it was really most extraordinary, because most of the men had never been employed in industry before, and a lot of them thought –’ but what the men of Gbolo thought about Trades Unions was lost (unfortunately, as Simon Camish had been so interested that he was in his head composing a new footnote) by the arrival of the baby’s grandmother, who appeared, slightly out of breath and full of apologies, to collect the infant, whose presence both he and Rose had more or less forgotten, as it had fallen quietly asleep.

‘Any news from Eileen?’ said Rose, as she handed over her charge.

‘Not a word,’ said Mrs Sharkey, who would have liked to have stayed to chat and to relieve her feelings by abusing the absent Eileen, but who was not prepared to do so in front of a stranger, for the sake of family pride. ‘She’ll be back tomorrow, I don’t doubt, as large as life and twice as useless.’

‘I hope so,’ said Rose, ushering her out into the corridor.

‘And if she’s not back, Mrs Vassiliou,’ Simon heard her say, lowering her tone discreetly by the front door, ‘if she’s not back, you wouldn’t be able to have Sharon again, would you? I’d be ever so grateful, it’s only for an hour tomorrow, it’s my day at the Home, you know, I only do an hour there on a Friday evening, I’d be back by six, but I’m that worried about this baby, and the money, I daren’t stay home, you know what I mean, every little helps …’

Her voice trailed off, and he heard Rose reply, soothingly, ‘No, no, don’t you worry, that’s quite all right, of course I’ll have her, I like having her, it’s nice to have a baby in the house, you know …’

She sounded quite placating as she spoke, but when she came back into the room she looked distinctly unnerved, and indeed angry: she yelled at the two little children to go to bed, which, hearing the tone in her voice (a tone which he had never heard before), they meekly did. She then walked up and down the small room once or twice, and then flung herself crossly down in a chair and said, ‘Well, really, bugger that.’