The Needle's Eye (9 page)

Later in the morning, at lunch-time, she would go out to the shops, braving the unfamiliarity and hostility, and buy herself something to eat. These excursions braced her, and would bring her to some sense of what she was and what she was doing, because, quite often, as she was buying a tin of beans or a box of eggs, she would see an old lady buying herself a single egg. The grocer would calmly take down a box of half a dozen, and take out one, and put in it a paper bag.

On one of these expeditions, fortified momentarily by the sight of human distress, she bought herself a packet of a patent cement mix from the do-it-yourself shop on the corner, and she went home with it and mixed some of it in a tea cup, and began, herself, to fill in some holes. It was an activity, it soothed her. The holes, when filled, did not look very elegant, but, looking at her work, she began to feel that there was at least a possibility that she might learn.

Fleas, holes, cold, single eggs. Behind these threatening entities there loomed a shadowy edifice, an inhabited house, a hope for the future: she shivered, she trembled, she flinched, but she persevered, she had faith, she built up brick by brick the holy city of her childhood, the holy city in the shape of that patched subsiding house. It was slow, it was very slow, but gradually the ideal and the real merged and swam together, so that there were times, when, after five years or so, she would sit there not knowing which she inhabited, irritated at one moment beyond measure by the noise of the radio next door and the fraying edge of the carpet and the way the cats had ripped the braid off the armchairs, and the next moment invaded by such visionary peace at her acceptance of and familiarity with
these things. Her alliance with the objects around had irradiated her, transformed her. But her friends, or such friends as continued, through loyalty or love or curiosity or desire for profit to make the long journey, continued to think that she was mad. Hardly a gleam of her vision reached them. They would visit her, all her friends but one, and shake their heads, and go home and say that Rose was mad.

It was difficult not to assume that Rose must be mad, if judged on the evidence of her actions, thought Simon Camish, sitting by himself the following evening in the luxury of an empty house, staring at the papers with which she had so confidently entrusted him. Her parents had clearly considered her dangerously mad, as had her husband and her solicitors: so had the judge in the divorce case, though he had nevertheless found (a little reluctantly) that a passionate desire to rid oneself of one’s money is technically not as grave a matrimonial offence as the inflicting of black-eyes, split lips, cuts and manifold bruises. The judge had not liked his own decisions: it was easy to tell from the tone of his pronouncements. He had not approved the eccentricity of Rose’s behaviour. Simon was not sure how far he approved it himself. There were certain aspects of the case that he did not begin to understand. It seemed clear enough to him, from his reading of the matter and from the bias of his own judgement, that Christopher Vassiliou had married her for her money, and that part at least of the bitter disagreements of their marriage had sprung from her wilful determination to disinherit herself, against his will and expectations: but that did not begin to explain why she had married him. What impulse could have led a woman like Rose to ally herself with the qualities she professed most to despise – avarice, brutality, showiness, ambition? Perhaps they had not appeared as such to her when she was innocent, nineteen and wealthy: perhaps she had then been gullible and in love. Or perhaps, in those days, they had really not been so, perhaps they had not existed: perhaps it was she that had brought them out. He knew all too well the extraordinary facility that people have for marrying, for the wrong reasons, those who appear to possess qualities the very
opposite of those with which they are in fact endowed: qualities which gradually reveal themselves in their true light, or are gradually created, by the agency of their new ally, in a form utterly disastrous, utterly opposed to any possible harmony. Christopher might have been all right when she married him: it might have been she herself that had ruined him, by the dizzy height of her ridiculous expectations.

It was, of course, his own marriage of which he was thinking. It always was. How else could one think of marriage? He was sure, now, as he had not been ten years ago, that he had steered so clear of divorce law largely because of its horrible fascination. He had friends who were drawn to it as a drunkard to a bottle: protesting all the while their innocence, as novelists protest that their characters have no connection with, are in no way drawn from life. He thought of Julie. He had not intended to do so, he did not like to recognise the immensity of the relief of her temporary absence. He had married her for her money, or so it had been said: as Christopher Vassiliou had married Rose Bryanston. That fact in itself should give him some sympathy with Christopher, for he alone knew of his own degree of innocence, his own degree of guilt. Julie too had been an heiress (though on a much more modest scale than Rose, and not an only child), and there was no point in saying that that was not why he had married her, because who would believe him? So he did not bother to say it. Though it was, in fact, true. He knew, by now, more or less exactly why he had married her: he did not expect that the next few years of introspection would lead him radically to alter his opinion on this matter, and if he did, it would not be because of new light, but because of growing forgetfulness. He had not married Julie for her money, directly. He had become involved with her because of it, perhaps – or because of what it represented. It had represented, in her, the very opposite of his own cold, overwrought, conscience-stricken, guilt-ridden childhood, where every mouthful of food had been taken from his mother’s very plate, or torn (figuratively) from her bleeding breast: Julie, at nineteen, had possessed warmth, gaiety, vitality, family feeling, an easy affection, an easy enjoyment, all the things he had never hoped to have – an
unquestioning pleasure in food and cars and holidays and comfort, a large house full of endless guests, lavish unthinking expenditure on clothes, meals out, meals for friends, a lavish generosity, charmingly combined with an aptitude for gratitude for the smallest favour, the smallest kindness. He had, he supposed, fallen in love with a way of life. He had found everything about it charming, even the things that he knew to be vulgar, like the thatched cottage and gardens painted on the white walls of Julie’s parents’ dining-room, and the heart-shaped cover on the lavatory seat – objects which made his mother’s impoverished, sensitive heart shudder with alarm. His mother had not approved of Julie, nor of the Phillipses, nor of their house. And that, of course, was in part why he had liked them so much.

It had become a second home to him, that large mock-Tudor house, scenically situated in splendid isolation at the outer limit of commuter land. The Phillipses could not have taken the country proper, being townsfolk at heart, but they humbly acknowledged that they were now too grand and too rich to live in town itself, and had moved out, obeying the laws of nature, to a spot where they could have their own quaking blue eyesore of a swimming bath and their own tennis court. How Simon loved that hideous swimming bath, and how he lived to repent his early love and all its ill-aimed defiance. Julie’s disapproval of the swimming bath was as intense as his mother’s, at times: she was ashamed of it, she sulked. Simon found such pique amusing, he did not take it seriously, he laughed at it. Julie’s ambition was to go to Art College: there was a very chic Art College in the district, and Julie wanted to disown her swimming bath and go to it and move in the fast set. She had a very clear conception of the fast set: it hung around in the Bongo Basement Club in Newcastle, wearing beards and duffle coats and jeans and large sweaters, and it was there that Simon, in Nick’s company, had first met her. She had blossomed weirdly there in the underground light, glowing in her white fur jacket, her orange silk scarf, her tight black sweater. She was popular in that circle: she could always pay the bill. But she wanted to be more than a hanger-on, a camp follower: she wanted to be a full member of the club, and that was why she wanted to go to Art College.

It was Mr Phillips’s behaviour over the Art College that gave Simon his first shock about the Phillips ménage, a shock which was to reverberate through the whole of his married life. He had always liked Mr Phillips, if only because Mr Phillips had always seemed to like him, and he had always assumed that Julie could do with him whatever she wanted. He was an indulgent father, ever ready to provide new clothes, a holiday, a lift in the car. Moreover, like many self-made men, he had an exaggerated respect for the powers of culture and education – he forced the children to attend concerts, plays, local events of every kind. He had paid out good money to educate Julie at a boarding school in Yorkshire: the two younger boys (one of whose weddings Julie was now attending in New York) were at that time still at Sedburgh. So it seemed probable that he would view Julie’s request to go to Art College with favour, involving as it did a project combining both culture and education. Julie, however, had clearly sensed trouble, and had waited around for nearly a whole year after leaving school – the year during which she took up with Simon, himself now at Oxford – before daring to broach the subject. Simon could not see what she was nervous about: Mr Phillips was a cheery man, as far as he could see, uncritical, unfussy, easy to amuse, easy to persuade. Simon had enjoyed his hospitality – his bad jokes, his childish pride in his latest gadgets, his continuing satisfaction in being himself, so well set up in life. When Julie confided in him her desire to go to college, he encouraged her, telling her that her father would surely approve, that she must have the courage to ask at once, or she would be too late for the next year’s applications. She looked uneasy, but promised to follow his advice.

The next time he saw her, she was in tears. Her father had refused, she said, to hear of such a thing. He had flatly refused. He had no intention, he said, of allowing her to go around with those scruffy parasites, and if she didn’t keep out of their way he would come and drag her away by the scruff of her neck.

The volte-face was total. Mr Phillips meant what he had said. When he calmed down, he explained himself on two counts, at least: the first being that he did not believe in educating women, it was a waste of money, if she wanted to do something she could go
to a secretarial college, but that was that, that was all he offered, he had spent more than was good for her already on teaching her things that were going to be no use. The second explanation really explained the first, which must have been triggered off by something: and the something was a scandal at the Art College, of which Julie and Simon knew little, and which they would have been too naïve to consider, had they known. Not so the local press and Mr Phillips, who took such things seriously. It was mild enough, thought Simon, looking back with the insight of more than a decade of student troubles, but it had been a first-class scandal, in those days. Two girls pregnant, a lecturer dismissed, rumours of grouped nude poses (the Young Spartans) and a threat of a withdrawn local grant. The very thought of it had driven the nice, good-natured Mr Phillips into a blind rage. And there lay Julie’s hopes, shattered. She was heartbroken. Her friends in the Coffee Bongo tried to cheer her up, telling her she wasn’t missing much, it was a lousy place, it was no good anyway, but the fact that it had produced a scandal made Julie pine for it all the more. She knew her father wouldn’t dare to stop her associating with her friends, but she had wanted to be one of them, she had wanted to be accepted.

(Odd, during the whole business, thought Simon, that he had not once bothered to ask himself whether or not she had any talent. He had simply assumed that she had not. And he had been wrong in that, as in so many other things.)

After her disappointment over the Art College, Julie had seemed to depend upon Simon more and more. And it was at this point, long before their marriage, that he began to feel himself trapped. He had thought her gay, insensitive, extrovert: he found her increasingly vulnerable, suffering, suspicious. He would willingly, at this point, have ditched her, swimming bath, tennis court, wealthy father and all, but it was too late. She wouldn’t let him go. She knew, somehow, with the horrible knowledge of one’s own limitations, that she couldn’t make the grade of those nonchalant dirty young men, that it was no good trying to get off with Mike Boyd or Johnny Featherstone: she knew that Simon Camish, with his Adam’s apple and his poor eyesight, was in her range. And so she clung to him and blackmailed
him. Simon alone knew the truth of her manoeuvres, and he was too chivalrous to impart it: so there he stood, indicted, judged, condemned by his own actions of mercenary motives. He well might feel for Christopher Vassiliou.

Time threw up some amusing patterns, though, in all the dirt. One of those bearded boys had made good, he had become a big name, a real pop hero: one of his works glowered now at Simon from the wall, across the room. He had made good and gone to the States, where he was doing even better. Julie had visited him, last week: he had taken her out to dinner, he had been delighted to see her again, she had been one of his first buyers.

It was all very well knowing now, about Julie, about oneself. It was then that one had needed to know. He had thought Julie warm and open: she had proved, like her father, irrational, bigoted and cold. The gaiety had revealed itself as a manic fear of solitude, the gregariousness as an inability to make any friends at all, the desire for a fast life as a symptom of a profound, irremediable crippling social ambition, founded on the insecurity of her own provincial background. It took Simon some time to work out what she must have suffered, at boarding school, as she trained her accent successfully to bridge the gap between her own and her father’s, as she tried to emulate the graces of more polished homes. Ironically, he had loved in her family the vulgarity that she had been set to leave. And she had left it with a vengeance. She had insisted that they should live in London, despite his plea that he could practise more fruitfully and usefully elsewhere: she had surrounded them with friends whose lack of friendship or any other kind of appeal had driven him out of the house for more evenings than he could count: she had spent money – at first her own, and then, gradually, as he had begun to acquire it, his – with an ease that made his hair stand on end. Whatever she had wished to reject in her background, it had not been its affluence. He really judged himself, now, for having ever admired the easy spending of money. A golden mean there might be, in such matters as in all, but the longer he lived the surer he was that the golden mean had more to do with meanness than with extravagance. And with all this, she was profoundly, painfully,
evidently unhappy. He had thought her a naturally happy person, once. And now she was as profoundly miserable as anyone he knew. Her state afflicted him beyond bearing. He could not, he supposed, be entirely responsible for her unhappiness, but he felt himself to be so: he had failed her, he had been inadequate, he had not even been able to satisfy her simple needs, and now he would have to go on and on failing her, because there was no way out, and he would have to go on and on helplessly witnessing the deterioration of her temper and her manner. If she could herself have been happy with the life she had imposed on him, then he would, obviously, have resented it less: it was the pointlessness of his loyalty to her that most depressed him. She needed him, he was indispensable to her, and that was that: there was no joy in it and no reciprocation, and no possibility of release. He fulfilled, for her, the highest attainable point of the acceptable – way, way below the desirable, way below anything that her voracious nature would have desired for its satisfaction – and as such, too adequate to be rejected, but utterly unsatisfactory to her, he would have to continue to exist. She did not dare to reject him. She knew she would never get anything that more closely resembled what she wanted. He should have known that she was forcing herself to accept him, as second best, in those distant days up North, when he had been forcing himself, out of pity and compromise, to accept her. No. That was not it. He had known. And it was because he had known that there had been the pity. He had sacrificed himself to her needs.