The Needle's Eye (45 page)

They even enjoyed the journey. It was the excursion they had once promised themselves. It was a relief to be moving, after sitting for so long in so small a space at the mercy of the telephone. Simon wondered at times whether they had not perhaps acted on foolish impulse, but there had been nothing useful that they could have done, in London. He did not think about what they would do at the other end, if they found the children there: he could not see himself participating in an abduction scene, and hoped it would not come to that. He was not at all clear about the legal position in which he or indeed Rose found themselves: the position was probably not clear
in itself. There could not be many precedents for Christopher’s actions. He had perhaps created one. That was what happened, when eccentrics embarked on litigation. The law would tediously unravel, in accordance with its own concepts, the crazy acts of neurosis. He thought of other litigants, other madmen, passionately attached beyond all reason to cases that they had no hope of winning: disputed wills, territorial struggles between embattled neighbours, angry wives suing long-defaulted husbands for shares in homes now given to newer mistresses. Such cases were never ruled by the mercenary instinct, though they might seem at the outset to be so: they sucked in money, sometimes every penny that the participant had, they sucked it into the mud of resentment and emotion, without a hope of final prosperity. There was a case currently being fought in his own field: two unions which had amalgamated years back, were now struggling to disentangle themselves, to the obvious detriment of both. The judge involved had called both parties childish, and so they were, but they were past caring: they hated each other, they did not care if both perished, as long as the point was made. The only difference in Christopher’s case was that he seemed to know what he was doing, he seemed to recognize the grounds of his own behaviour, and had done from the beginning, from the moment when he had chosen to defend his divorce. It was that which made him dangerous. He did not even think he was right. And so it would have been a logical step, to leave the country with the children. Covertly, at a traffic lights, he looked at the AA book. There were no ports from which he could leave, except Yarmouth and Harwich, and when Konstantin had rung he had been far enough from both. Though there had been a case, not so long ago, before Calvacoressi, of a father who had abducted his children, who had set off to sea alone with them in a rowing boat, and had waited there, bobbing idly up and down upon the waves, until the police had picked him up. A few hours of the children he had had, and had thereby lost them for ever. People were mad, people were strange beyond belief, as one could see from reading any newspaper. He had a fleeting picture of Christopher hiding with the children in the woods, or concealing them in the bottom of a flint mine. He put his
foot on the accelerator. Norfolk was a huge county, much larger than he had thought, and Rose’s family seat was right at the other end of it. The traffic was bad, too. They would not get there before the early evening.

Rose, for her part, could not help enjoying the drive. She went out so little: it was months since she had been out in a car. She was sure, now, that she would find the children safely at the other end: she ought to have had faith in Konstantin, she should have known that he would not allow himself to be abducted, he was too considerate, he cared for her too much. Her pride in him was immense. She knew exactly why he had rung her: he had picked up from Christopher some threat or menance – possibly even a spoken threat – and had rung to tell her that it was all right, that all was as it had been planned, that they would be safely at the house as they had said they would be, that he would make sure that it was so. So she sat back, and watched the fields passing. It was a road she knew well, a road she had not travelled for years. She was trying to work out how long it had been, when Simon said, ‘It must be a long time since you came this way.’

‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember how long. I’ve only been once or twice since we were married.’

‘When did you last see your father?’ he said, and they both laughed at the classic question.

‘I can’t even remember,’ she said. ‘It would be strange, to see him again. Perhaps I should. I think my mother is there too. She’s not there often, but she doesn’t mind it, in the good weather. Perhaps I should see them.’

‘I meant to go and see my mother this weekend,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t get round to it. I keep thinking, I would like to take you some day to meet my mother. I don’t know why.’

‘Do you think she would like me, your mother?’

‘She doesn’t like anyone much. I was thinking more that you might like her. She’s an interesting woman. It would be good to find somebody who might like her.’

‘I would like it very much,’ said Rose.

And they were silent again, for a few miles. Rose started to think
again about Christopher’s affidavit. It had upset her dreadfully, to see her crimes catalogued. And yet, as with the divorce, she could not help knowing that the crimes which seemed, technically, most serious, had not been so at all. Her only true guilt lay in not having been able, enough, to allow Christopher to be. Whereas the suicide – an event, she knew, which judges must take seriously, as Jeremy Alford had done – had really been a very trivial matter. She had, it is true, in front of the children, swallowed a whole bottle of aspirins, in response to some particularly grinding session of abuse from Christopher: she remembered quite clearly the sequence of events that had made her do it. I can’t bear this, I must leave, she had said to herself. I can’t leave, because of the children, she had then said – Maria being still a baby, at the breast. Then I had better die, she had said, and had swallowed the pills. No, I had better not die, she had then instantly realized: she had gone to the bathroom, stuck her fingers down her throat, vomited up a lot of white powder, then rung the hospital and requested to have her stomach pumped out, just in case. The ambulance had been round in ten minutes, her stomach pumped within the hour – horrible rubber tubes, she recalled – and she had been back at home cooking supper within a couple of hours. One could not call that irresponsible: it had been a thoroughly practical piece of behaviour. And equally trivial had been her acts of sexual misconduct. She did not know how Christopher had brought himself to mention them. He knew quite well, for instance, that she and Nick hadn’t spent an hour together in years, so the citing of Nick must reveal more about Christopher’s attitude to him than her own. And as for the man called Anton, there perhaps again she had been technically in the wrong, because she had in fact slept with Anton, but only as the result of a most embarrasing misunderstanding, a misunderstanding so much in her own favour that she supposed she would never be able to bring herself to explain it to anybody. And how Christopher knew about it she could not imagine. Anton was a student, a rather elderly student refugee, who had arrived from Prague the year before after some political trouble, speaking very bad English: he had been handed on to her by an old friend, who had asked her to find him somewhere to live, because I
know, he had said, that you used to deal in accommodation, didn’t you? Rose, too polite to explain that she had given up dealing in such things years ago, had said she would do what she could, and Anton had arrived on her doorstep one night, filthy dirty and rather drunk, in an old soldier’s uniform. She had never found out what he was doing in uniform. She had asked him in, and given him a meal, and said he could stay the night with her: they had talked, till very late, in a confused mixture of languages, about the reasons for his flight, and as they talked she knew perfectly well that she had not the faintest notion of what he was talking about, and that the language barrier would never permit them to get very much further. But she felt sorry for him: he was a small man, his face white and waxy and gleaming from fatigue, his hair cropped short – this seemed to enrage him more than anything, the indignity of his cropped hair, she did manage to make out that he would never dare to show his face in the glorious streets of decadent London until it had grown a little – and he was also good-humoured, in a bizarre non-verbal way. Every now and then he would roar with laughter and crack a joke to justify his laughter, in Czech or German. She laughed too, pleased to see him in good spirits, but she was amazingly tired herself, and knew she would have to get up in the morning to get the children to school, and was longing to get to sleep. At about three in the morning she could stand it no longer, and got up and said emphatically, ‘I really must go to bed.’ She had already explained to him where he was to sleep – she had given him one of the children’s beds, and put two of them in a bed together – and she had thought he had understood the message. So she said good night, and went up and got into her own bed. Just as she was about to switch off the light, Anton opened the door and came in. She sat up again, about to ask him what he wanted, but was struck dumb when he started to take his clothes off. She said nothing: she lay there and watched, her mouth open in astonishment. She said nothing when he got into the bed, turned off the light, and grabbed her. In confusion, as he got on with it, she thought, Christ, perhaps he’s been propositioning me the whole evening and I’ve been agreeing without being able to understand what he’s been saying. She was far too polite to resist: she
didn’t want to offend him, and it didn’t anyway seem very important. In fact, she had to admit to herself that she did find him rather attractive, in some obscene sexy way: his skin was all dirty and slippery, he smelt of railway carriages, and he made love in an exhausted, enthusiastic, noisy manner, mumbling and grunting and reciting bits of poetry in foreign languages and grabbing at her without finesse and laughing suddenly and unpredictably into her neck. It was confusing but somehow irresistible: as before, as downstairs, she never got the jokes, but she could not help laughing, with him and at him and at the absurdity of the occasion. His head was round like a bullet, with its shorn hair, and his body was short and compact like her own, but much more solid. He was a man of middle Europe, a man of cabbages and shabby uniforms and shabby politics, and he bitterly resented it. This was one of the jokes. He would clutch, every now and then, desperately, at his prison crop, and then collapse upon her, trying to demonstrate that his hair would grow, given half a chance. He mumbled of Trotsky and Mick Jagger. It went on and on and on. Rose was amazed. She had never known anything like it. It was all so sudden and so silly, and she could not imagine how it had happened. It was not the kind of thing that usually happened to her at all.

Afterwards, when he had fallen asleep, she worked out that he had probably mistaken her emphatic declaration of her need to get to bed for an expression of desire: her voice had certainly been unnatural as she had said it, because she had been embarrassed about deserting her conversational duties as hostess, when he had clearly wanted to go on talking all night. She discovered the next day that this suspicion was correct: in his version of the English language, to go to bed was an active verb, synonymous for going-to-bed-with, and he had truly thought that what she had meant had been, ‘I must go to bed, now, with you.’ And he had duly obliged. This wouldn’t in itself have worried her very much, but Anton, having found such a welcome, was not at all keen to move on, and she didn’t know how to explain that he had got it all wrong without offending him. She contemplated, the next day, a situation in which he would move in permanently, without her ever being able to communicate that he
couldn’t: of course it didn’t happen that way, in the end she did manage to explain to him that he had better find somewhere else, citing the children as a reason. But he did tend to come back and hang around waiting for another invitation. She was careful never to mention the word ‘bed’ again. It reminded her of the headmistress at her school, who had told her girls on no account to invite men into rooms where underclothes or stockings were hanging up to dry. They had laughed at her then, but how right she had been (the canny old spinster). The children must have told Christopher about Anton. One could never explain such an absurd situation. She wondered whether to embark on explaining it now, to Simon, but decided it was impossible to tell the story right: however she told it, it would look like an apology, and she did not feel at all apologetic. She hadn’t thought about Anton for months, until she saw his name in the typescript: the thought of him hadn’t crossed her mind. In a sense, the whole thing was Christopher’s fault anyway: she wouldn’t have dared to be so hospitable with so little protest, if she hadn’t been swallowing pills night after night, for fear that Christopher himself would come back and rape her. He had threatened to do this on several occasions, and had once actually done it, the week after the divorce: well, perhaps it hadn’t been rape exactly, because she hadn’t struggled particularly hard because of her fear of waking and upsetting the children. She had hated him for that more than for anything. But she felt she had deserved it. It had seemed, as Christopher himself had yelled at her, an appropriate punishment. And he had never dared to do it again.

As an adolescent, like most girls, she had had fantasies of rape. How disagreeable fantasies became, when translated into action.

She thought of Mr Justice Ward, and his worried look. He was a nice man, he wouldn’t have minded that she had slept with Anton and swallowed a few pills. He would surely have understood it all.

Suddenly she started to laugh.

‘What’s the joke?’ said Simon.

‘I was just remembering,’ she said, ‘thinking of judges, a song the kids sing. They skip to it, listen.’ And in a quavering, irritating, imitation child’s nasal whine she sang,

‘Fudge, Fudge, Call the Judge

Mother’s got a new born
Baby
.

It isn’t a girl, it isn’t a boy

It’s just a new born
Baby
.’

Wrap it up in tissue paper

Send it down the escalator

First floor
Missed

Second floor,
Missed
,

Third floor, kick it out the door,

Mother’s got a new born
Baby
.’