The Needle's Eye (29 page)

The beach was a pebbly small bay, with caves and rocks projecting into the water, and large waves crashed threateningly. It was not unoccupied: there were two other families there, hardy families: one father saluted him with a comradely self-congratulation. Simon sat down on a rock, to watch the water come and go, while Kate scrabbled around, looking for stones with their delusive watery colours and astonishing ephemeral gleams. Mussels and limpets clung to the base of the rock on which he sat. He watched Kate, small against the large scenery, in her Austrian braided anorak, with her black hair in
rats-tails and her cheeks red with the wind. He did not really know his children at all. He had gone too far in non-intervention, he had abandoned them to their fate, and it was too late now to take their part. He had thought once that they would return to him, in adolescence, trustingly, recognizing the reasons for which he had kept himself apart: but why should they, why should they ever? What had he ever done for them but exist? Perhaps, he said to himself, sitting there on a rock and watching the Atlantic and wondering what was in his picnic lunch, perhaps I am so bad a father because I had no father, because I considered fathers dispensable, because I had no image to pursue, no pattern for the life I should create around me. But there was a difference, because my mother, say what one might of her, reject her as one might, she was at least a serious person, she made a life, she set herself problems, she took life earnestly: whereas Julie spreads nothing but uncertainty, she wants nothing but that they should play ping-pong and not trouble her, at no matter what price. She does not really like them. She looks maternal, but she does not like children. They are useful adjuncts at times, she would be embarrassed not to have them, but what she really wants is fun, is youth, the friends I could not keep for her, the confidence I have taken from her, and she will never make up for these losses, never, and there is nothing left over from such a person for children. Nothing, because she herself is so unsatisfied.

He wronged her in his mind, wilfully. It gave him some malicious satisfaction.

He called Kate to him, and sitting uncomfortably on the rock, on its wet gritty edges, they ate their sandwiches and their piece of chicken, and their tomato and their banana. When they had finished, remembering another of the delights of the North Yorkshire coast, they went to look for sea anemones, and found some, clinging and wavering under the water, below the jellied hard censorious blobs of their stranded relatives, and they fed them with bits of left-over ham. The anemones embraced the scraps avidly, and avidly engulfed them. Kate was utterly delighted. He had never seen her so entranced. She had never seen anything so exciting in her life, she said, and he knew what she meant: the way the dark-red muscular flower-like
fronds seized and closed in upon the threads of meat was a treat, a spectacle. She would not leave them: she hung around, trying them, when the ham was finished, with bits of bread, but the bread they spat out, crossly, spurning it, and it was spewed forth, along with grit and sand, to disintegrate, soggily, clouding the clear sucking water. ‘They don’t
like
it, they don’t
like
it,’ she cried, enchanted by their discrimination, and then, quickly, wishing to perpetuate for ever the delight, ‘can we come here tomorrow, we could buy them some shrimps, can we come here tomorrow and bring them a tin of sardines?’ He knew what she meant: how could one relinquish such a pleasure, once discovered, yet how explain that it might not be so amusing the next day? He diverted the conversation to oysters and pearls.

After a while they began to get cold, and Simon suggested that they should move on: they could continue onwards, without retracing their steps, up the cliff and on to the next village, and then back to the hotel along the road. Kate was reluctant to move: shivering, damp, her face by now mottled and her lips blue, she was unwilling to leave so rich a treasury, unwilling to abandon the scene of so much emotion, even though the emotion was spent and destroyed by the cold. ‘We’ll come again, one day,’ he said: and she hovered on the verge of accepting the promise, knowing that it was not firm, and that even if it were, another day might find her changed or the scene dried and colourless. In the end she pretended to accept, and followed him. The path upwards was steep and slippery, from so much recent rain: after a while he made her go first, in case she slipped. They were out of breath by the time they reached the top, and he could feel that Kate was about to start whining, but luckily they could see the village ahead: it offered them an objective, and they picked up. Kate started to sing, tunelessly, a French song which she had learned at school, of which she understood not a word: it was an incantation, to her, meaningful because incomprehensible. He was full of hope for her. He ought to have known that it could be like this. They passed one couple, coming towards them, on the way: the man smiled, and raised his hat to Kate, and said good afternoon. The village was further off than it had looked, and for the last quarter of an hour he had to cajole her with promises of sweets: she
said that she wanted an icecream, and he said that he couldn’t believe that she really wanted one, on so cold a day, and she stared at him in amazement, unable to understand that the weather could in any way affect so absolute a desire. The first building that they reached, on the cliff top, was a small chapel: they paused by its gate, and Simon, under the influence of those past years of arduous instructional sightseeing, thought that he would go in. She had been a great one for visiting such places, his mother: churches, castles, stately homes, Roman walls, she had taken them all in, leaving his father parked in the small Ford, immobile, gaping at the changeless car-parks of England, like an old grandmother taken for an airing. Kate followed him, nervously, through the arched doorway, and hovered by the postcards and visitor’s book, hoping to be bought a postcard, while he walked slowly round. There was not much to see: it was bleak and empty, and the glass was white. There were plaques to drowned seamen on the walls, and a model of a lifeboat, and a tattered flag, rescued from a wreck two hundred years before. Tattered and threadbare it was, as though a breath would have crumbled it: dark and spined, like a dry leaf or a bat’s wing. There was an eighteenth-century plaque to the squire’s daughter, who had died at the age of twenty-five, unparalleled for her elegant accomplishments, and gentle virtue: discreet marble scrolls and thin sloping gently curled script bore witness to her departure from this life. Beneath the inscription, there was a quotation, in quotation marks, but unacknowledged: it said, ‘They sorrow not as those that have no hope.’ Simon read this, and stopped still, and read it again. It seemed to echo in him, but why he could not say. ‘They sorrow not as those that have no hope.’ What hope had they had, those that had lost her? And what sorrow had they suffered, then, so delicately distinguished from his own? He aligned himself with the hopeless. It was blank verse, the line, iambic pentameter, and perhaps it was from that alone that it drew its authority and its strange reverberations. He thought not. There was more to it than that. He would remember it.

On the way out, he bought Kate a postcard, a crudely tinted job with a falsely smiling sky and a floral graveyard. She liked it, clung to it, and expressed astonishment that one was trusted to pay: ‘But we
could take them
all
and nobody’d
know
,’ she said, whispering breathily, amazed at the church’s faith, as he gave her sixpence to slip into the ornamental tin box. ‘Who would want them
all
?’ he said, as they emerged into the light, and then was sorry he had said it, as he saw her clutch her booty and wince at the suggestion that it was not universally desirable and worthy of theft. He was delighted by her timidity, her sense of honour, her pleasure at so small a price: but his delight suffered slightly when she stopped in front of the first village shop, which was a gift shop, and tried to persuade him to buy her an owl made out of shells or a horrid little sailor boy with joints made out of springs. ‘But they’re horrid,’ he said, without hesitation: and then, seeing her lip tremble and her brows darken, he added hastily, ‘and anyway, it’s Easter Monday, the shop’s shut. Come on, I’ll buy you some sweets.’

‘I want an icecream, I want an icecream,’ she wailed, crossly, tired and wet, trailing behind him, luckily not seeing that the shop was in fact, of course, open, in a vain attempt to catch the non-existent Easter tourist trade: she wailed this incessantly till they arrived at the village grocer’s, and he said to her several times that she couldn’t have an icecream but could have sweets, but when they got there she had irritated him to such a degree that he bought her what she wanted, saying, ‘It serves you right if it freezes you to death.’ He then had to stand there watching her eat it, on the pavement, turning bluer at every mouthful, her ungloved hands (she had lost her gloves) turning a shocking shade, her lips a pallid violet, her whole body starting to tremble with chill, and icecream dripping down the front of her anorak. As soon as she had finished it, she started to whimper, afraid to voice the idea but unable to conceal it, ‘I’m cold, I’m cold, I’m cold.’

‘There, what did I tell you, I told you so,’ said Simon, crossly: and then as suddenly softened, because the poor creature looked so pathetic standing there, ashamed and defiant, having known all along that an icecream would finish her off, and yet quite unable to resist it: and he took her hands, and rubbed them, and knelt down and folded her inside his coat and tried to warm her up. She cheered up as soon as he relented, and hid her face inside his jacket and breathed
warm air round herself. She felt small and wet and bony: she had been quite fat, once, this one, but since starting school the year before had grown long legs and had thinned off into a childish skinniness. He liked her thin: thin, she was more his own.

‘We ought to set off back, now,’ he said, when she had warmed herself a little. ‘We’ll both get cold, if we stay here much longer. Shall we go?’

‘Yes, let’s go,’ she said, and took his hand. They walked back along the road, a much shorter route than the way they had gone, and from the road, for part of the way, they could see the cliff track below them that they had walked along, and the tiny figures of people walking, bent in the wind that was now gathering force: he thought that snow would soon fall. He pointed out to her the woman and the man who had taken his hat off to her, small and far away: ‘
They
haven’t got far,’ said Kate, bravely, fighting the numbness in her boots, and wishing she hadn’t got water in them in the rockpool. After a while they came to another footpath down to the cliff track: a large car was parked at the top of it, on the grass, a large expensive car, a Mercedes, not the kind of car for such excursions, and Simon looked to see if he could see who had been in it, and whether they were indeed walking in such weather, abandoning such luxury: and there, half a mile down the footpath, he could see a man and three children. The man was carrying the smallest child, and the two larger children were running ahead, and shouting in excitement. The thin calls of their excitement just reached him, like gulls’ cries, on the wind. He thought that he recognized Konstantin Vassiliou: it was the same blond hair, the same stature, the same movements. He stood still and stared. He was sure it was them. And there was Christopher Vassiliou, walking into the wind with a child on his back. He stared and watched, but the distance was so great that it was impossible to be sure. He had missed them by perhaps a quarter of an hour. It was impossible to be sure: it could have been any blond-headed child running there towards the sea, it was impossible to say why the idea had flashed into his mind that it could be them. He looked back at the large car, parked at the road side, already ten yards away: he could have gone back, he nearly went back to look
through its windows, to identify possessions, he would have gone back had he been on his own, but because his daughter was there he could not. He stood there, and shouted: ‘Konstantin,’ he shouted, and the wind, as he had known it would, took the voice from his lips and carried it far inland. Had the wind been blowing the other way, he would not have called: and had the children turned, they would not have known him. They did not turn. They continued to run towards the sea. The man that might have been Christopher stopped, and the child that might have been Maria climbed down off his shoulders and ran after the others. The first flakes of snow fell, obliquely, blown on the wind, eddying. The car still stood there: new, but covered in mud. His eyes were not good, he could not read the number plate, he had taken off his glasses, they were no use in such weather.

‘Who was it, Daddy?’ asked Kate, who had stopped with him, obediently, like a dog, subdued by fatigue.

‘It’s nobody,’ said Simon, ‘I thought it was somebody I knew. But it wasn’t.’

‘It’s starting to snow,’ said Kate.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘We’d better get home quick.’ And he set off at a brisk walk, Kate lagging behind: after a hundred yards she started to whine again, about her wet feet, so he carried her, in imitation of the imaginary Christopher, who had disappeared into the bleak landscape. She was heavy: like the imaginary Christopher, he did not keep the gesture up for long.

When they got back to the hotel, they found Julie sitting where they had left her, with Sally, in the lounge: they were having tea. He half expected the welcome due to a returning astronaut, after so bracing an excursion, and he could see on Julie’s face the shadow of an impulse to rise, to fuss, to exclaim, to commiserate and complain about wet clothing, the weather, the cold, but indolence conquered it. She had been sitting down for so long that she hadn’t the energy to get up. ‘Hello,’ she said, puffing cigarette smoke. ‘You’re back, are you? Was it nice? Have a cup of tea, I’ll get some more cups. The cakes are awful, I was just saying to Sally, the rest of the food’s so good, it’s amazing they can’t get better cakes.’

‘I think we’d better go and get dry,’ he said, unable to resist a faint echo of reproof: she received it, but chose to ignore it.