The Needle's Eye (25 page)

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, obligingly.

‘It’s that bloody baby,’ said Rose. ‘I can see I’m going to get lumbered with it if I’m not careful. That’s what comes of being sympathetic.’

‘You could have said no,’ said Simon.

‘Oh no I couldn’t, that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Rose. ‘How could I possibly say no? It doesn’t really hurt me to have a baby hanging around, though in fact I’ve got to go out tomorrow night and it’s always tricky getting the children off to bed when I’m going out, but no, the point is, I can’t possibly say no, I’ve put myself in a position where of course I’ve got to say yes, it serves me right. I really didn’t want that baby this evening, you know, I really didn’t want it, the poor thing, all that vomiting’ (and she dabbed at her stained skirt) ‘and I’d been looking forward to having a drink and reading my book, and I know a baby doesn’t really get in the way, so I felt really mean not wanting to have it, in fact I think I
am
really mean, I really resent it when people ask me to do things for them. That’s what I was really so cross about when you arrived, I think, my own horrible meanness. And now I’ve got it again tomorrow. It really is too much.’

‘You must be mad,’ he observed, pleasantly, ‘to consider yourself mean.’

‘Oh yes, I know it all looks all right, I do the right things most of the time, but it’s not because I really want to, you know, it’s just because I don’t know how to say no. Quite frankly, I haven’t the face to say no, when I know that Mrs Sharkey is going to spend that hour tomorrow on her hands and knees scrubbing the cloakrooms at the Mental Home for five and sixpence, while I’ll just be sitting here like a cabbage with a baby on my knee drinking a cup of tea and watching telly and waiting to go out for dinner. I mean, Christ. One would have to be really mean to say no.’

‘A lot of people,’ he said, ‘are really mean.’

‘But they wouldn’t say no, in a case like that?’

‘You’re being very innocent,’ he said. ‘Of course they wouldn’t say no, because nobody would ever ask them. Mean people broadcast around by secret messages that it’s no good asking them to do
things, they make quite sure that they never expose themselves to the embarrassment of refusal, they never let it get that far. But nice people like you are recognized a mile off. Aha, people say to themselves, she won’t mind, we’ll ask her.’

‘I’m a fool,’ said Rose. ‘That’s what I am. I don’t even like babies any more. Now mine are grown up I don’t even like babies. I just pretend to. They bore me stiff, really. And they’re repulsive. I mean, one must be honest, they are repulsive, aren’t they?’

‘Was I repulsive, Mummy?’ said Konstantin, suddenly, looking up from what looked like old-world homework, and Rose smiled at him, and said, ‘No, darling, you were quite beautiful, you were lovely, you were a
gloriously
beautiful baby,’ and Konstantin looked at her shrewdly and said, ‘That’s just what you said about Eileen’s baby, that’s just what you say about all babies. Do you know what you are, Mummy, you’re – a whited sepulchre!’

‘A
what?
’ said Rose.

‘A whited sepulchre,’ said Konstantin, firmly. ‘We had them this morning. Mummy, while you’re paying me a bit of attention, perhaps you might tell me what the difference between continual and continuous is, would you?’

‘I haven’t the foggiest notion,’ said Rose, crossly. ‘And don’t be so rude. Go to bed.’

‘Do you know, please, Simon, about continual and continuous?’ said Konstantin: and as Simon tried to explain, he knew quite well that both he and Rose were attached not to the grammatical point that he was making, but to the social effort – so nearly concealed, so painfully adult – with which the child had pronounced Simon’s Christian name. He had hesitated at the hurdle, he had nearly shied at it, his eyes widening a little in alarm, as it approached, but he had taken it, bravely, he had cleared it, and all that one could say was that at such an age he should not be required to take such shadowy leaps. Much better, of course, that he should be crossing shadow barriers rather than real ones: but perhaps after all there were real ones, perhaps Simon himself was in the shadow of, was the shadow of, some more substantial obstacle? (He found himself remembering, ominously in this context, phrases from other people’s affidavits – phrases
in which children had described the false uncles that frequented their mother’s houses, false uncles, undesirable influences, co-respondents, or worse still, not even co-respondents, but unknown interlopers. But then again, these interlopers, perhaps they were shadows not in the child’s mind nor in the woman’s life, but of the husband’s jealousy? How could one know what Christopher Vassiliou said to these children when he got them alone at a weekend, how could one know what questions he asked them, what notions he fed into their innocent but suspicious hearts? Thinking of this, taking it this far, he grieved all the more for Rose, for her predicament: he acquitted her, he credited her, he preferred to blame the man he did not know, the absent father. And yet the child, in his divided loyalties, might not like such blame?)

‘Make up a sentence for me, then,’ said Konstantin, having listened to the explanation of continuous and continual, ‘to illustrate the difference.’

‘Perhaps you should do that yourself,’ said Simon, thinking himself pompous as he said it, but saying it nevertheless.

‘Yes,’ said Rose, ‘Simon’s quite right, you can’t expect us to do your homework for you, you must do it for yourself. And you must go to bed now.’

How easy it is, thought Simon, watching the child go off with his exercise book, to support a woman who is not one’s wife, a man who is not one’s husband. How easy, to talk to a child who is not one’s own. But what he said was, ‘That’s a very intelligent child.’

‘Yes, I think he is,’ said Rose, ‘God help him.’ And she smiled, feebly: she had run down in some way, she had all ebbed away, she was no longer making any effort, and he remembered the first time he had seen her, and the impression which she had given, at that dinner party, of overcoming an almost deadly fatigue. She seemed so tired: her life, for all that she said she liked it, must be a hard one, he thought.

‘You should go to bed early,’ he said. ‘You look so tired.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m going to. I’m going to sit up and watch a documentary about Dahomey and then I’m going to bed. Why don’t you stay and watch it with me?’

It sounded so attractive an evening that he was tempted to consent: but, looking at his watch, remembered with a horrible sudden misgiving that he was supposed to be home, that people were coming to dinner, that he had completely forgotten he had said he would be at home early in time to receive his wife’s guests. So he said, as calmly as he could, that he wouldn’t stay, that he had to be off, that he would ring again next week to see how she was, to see if there were any developments (their usual pretext) and so he took his leave. She came to the door, to see him off, and stood there on the steps as he got into his car. She was still standing there, in the falling darkness, as he drove away.

By the time he got home, he was filled with a quite genuine sense of apology, and of foreboding: he ought to know better, by now, than to be late, knowing what the consequences of his lateness usually were. It was eight fifteen already, and he had promised to try to be home by half past seven. As he drove the car into the garage, he tried to remember who the guests were supposed to be, but couldn’t for the life of him recall: he was worried that he wouldn’t even know their names when he saw them, he had a shocking memory for names, and however hard he tried to explain it away he knew quite well that it meant exactly what people, offended, always took it to mean: a total lack of real interest. He went in through the kitchen door, hoping to gain a few moments’ warning, or even to brief himself from the notes on the kitchen calendar, but the kitchen was occupied by their au pair girl, who was sitting on a chair reading a hideous teenage magazine, in total silence, watching, or rather not watching, his eldest child eat a fried egg. The damp, cold, silent atmosphere in the room filled him with rage. His heart was full of rage, for the child abandoned. The child looked up and said, ‘Hello, Daddy,’ then looked down again and went on eating. Not a flicker of recognition had showed in his eyes: they had been veiled by fear, by a premonition of the disapproval that flooded angrily towards him from the front of the house.

‘Hello, Dan,’ he said, quite unable to offer anything to replace or colour the reception he had been given. The au pair girl did not even look up at him as he entered. She went on reading about how to
stick plastic flowers on her nipples under her see-through blouses. She never wore see-through blouses: she was a thin, neurotic, weepy girl, who never went out anywhere because she was afraid of going on public transport.

Bracing himself, he went through: putting his briefcase on the hall table, hanging his coat where he was not intended to hang it, on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. A hum of voices from the drawing-room met him, and he opened the door: a polite silence fell, to greet his entrance. Julie, who was sitting by the drinks table, put down her drink loudly, and said, loudly, ‘Well, look who’s here.’

The politeness of the silence intensified into embarrassment.

‘Well,’ repeated Julie, ‘look who’s here. Wherever have you been?’

‘I was held up,’ said Simon. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not at the office you weren’t,’ said Julie, ‘because I rang Hindley and he said you’d finished at five.’

‘I had to go and view a site, with a client,’ said Simon. Mildly. He never rose: it was never worth rising.

‘Nice of you to turn up at all,’ said Julie. She couldn’t help it, he said to himself, she really couldn’t help it. And the silence, he felt, became no longer embarrassed, but positively sadistic. That was the effect that Julie had upon people: they were breathless, waiting hopefully to see how far she would go.

‘I really am sorry,’ said Simon, crossing to the table to pour himself a drink, and trying to work out who else was in the room: one of the couples he could recognize, there was a prematurely balding man called Houghton and a girl who was possibly his wife. The other couple he did not recollect that he had ever seen before: he smiled vaguely round, hoping he might be mercifully enlightened. He was.

‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ said the girl, sitting there on his settee, swilling a gin and tonic round in her glass, introducing herself (he immediately recognized) in order to put Julie in the wrong for not having done it gracefully and at once. Julie was forced to respond: her rudeness never embraced anybody but himself.

‘This is Caroline,’ she said. ‘Caroline and Hugh Simpson.’ And
they shook hands, and resumed conversation, as best they could after such a shock. Julie did her best to disrupt this reassumption of normal behaviour by rising abruptly to her feet, after a couple of minutes, and saying very loudly, ‘Well now that
he’s
back, I’d better go and have a look at the dinner. If it isn’t all burned to a cinder by now. You must forgive me,’ she said, turning and smiling fearfully at her guests, ‘if the dinner is quite ruined, we will all know who to blame if it is, won’t we?’ – and so she made her exit, leaving Simon to pour more drinks (which seemed the only thing to do) and to try and piece together what was going on. The Houghton man, he now recalled, was a gallery owner, who had recently achieved notoriety by having his gallery raided by the police on the grounds of obscenity, and his raid appeared to be the subject of the conversation. Hugh Simpson revealed himself as an art-critic or art-historian: he was a young-looking, over-healthy, worldly mannered man in his forties, considerably older than his wife, and Simon suspected that in other circumstances he might have been quite tolerable, but as it was he was being constrained by the pre-existing tone to talk in a manner that Simon found profoundly offensive. He found them all profoundly offensive. They were discussing obscenity in a way that he found (there was no other word for it) obscene. The language was not such as he expected to hear of an evening at dinner, though these days he seemed to hear little else: he was sick to death of hearing the young middle-aged discuss sex with such a mixture of self-congratulation, envy, yearning and nosy vulgar curiosity. God knows he had little sympathy with the arbitrary and undiscriminating activities of the police, and a great deal of sympathy with a few of the victims of their malice – but these were not victims, they were profiteers, they made a really shocking defence of their to him not particularly interesting cause. Perhaps they’re drunk, he said to himself, trying to excuse them, perhaps they got drunk waiting for me because I was so late and because Julie was making things so difficult for them. The only one of them who wasn’t participating was the Caroline Simpson woman, who was evidently, for some perverse reason of her own, biding her time to pay him a bit of attention, and he rather dreaded the quality of her attention. He didn’t like the
look of her. She was an exceptionally handsome woman, pale and very tall and delicately featured, with long limp red hair, and she was wearing a long silvery dress. From her emanated such gales of dissatisfaction and destruction that he flinched, knowing that he could hardly face dealing with her if she turned on him. And turn on him she did: he knew she couldn’t help it, she was the kind of person who would turn on any man, no matter how quietly he tried to sit and mind his own business. Every time her husband spoke she shivered, gently, like a tree, with dissociation: she was trying to recommend herself by these faint tremors, but it was no good, she couldn’t hit the real cause of his own dissociation, she could not recommend herself to him (though he could see she wished to) by condemning the tone of the conversation, because she couldn’t see what was wrong with it, he was fairly sure – or if she did object, her objections were aesthetic, she probably didn’t like Julian Houghton’s bald head or his wife’s flouncy dress. She turned on him, when she did so, quite deliberately: she got up from her chair and came to sit by him, and said to him, as he waited for the attack, ‘I think you’re friend of a friend of mine.’