The Needle's Eye Read Free

buying them, they must be the fashion.
It will not climb up on an artificial
host
. That was a phrase (he forgot what plant it described) that he had found in his bedside gardening book. Which was Nick, an artificial or a natural host? The idea amused him so much that he turned to the girl sitting by him, thinking he could share it with her, but she, turning simultaneously towards him, embarked upon trade-union reform, no doubt having been pre-informed that he had a professional interest in such matters, so he was obliged to listen to her and to answer her, but he had heard and said it all so often before that he was able to do it all with a very small part of his consciousness, leaving the rest free to continue to inspect the room. He assumed from the size of the gathering that he was nearly the last to arrive: not the last, however, for the numbers were not yet even. There would be another woman expected: another woman for him.
    He wondered what they would try on him this time, remembering the last occasion when he had been invited out to dinner without his wife and had found there, like a risen ghost, a woman whom he had once admired for two whole years, hopelessly mildly and unrequited, and produced for him so much too late, laid on his plate like a peach or a slice of pineapple, yet still, even served up, with a ghostlike and sullen aspect, as unwilling and hopeless a prospect as ever, with the added disadvantage (unlike the comparable peach) of being no longer loved and no longer desired. What more useless than an image of a past goal, never attained and no longer wanted? It was an indictment of both past and present, like a dreadful dream he had once had, in which he had found himself in a room full of unread
Dandys
and
Beanos
– hundreds and hundreds of them, piles and piles of them, all virgin, all untouched, and had woken to find himself thirty, and the
Beanos
not even there. Surely she would not arise again, this ghostly creature, expecting to be wooed across such a muddy ditch? He would not put it past Nick and Diana: they knew her, she was unmarried, they were schemers, all of them. And then, as suddenly as the idea had arisen, he dismissed it: it was impossible, they would not wish so gloomy a creature upon their friend Julie his wife, they would be too frightened that they would never hear the end of it from her, they had not invited him with any motive at all, but simply to make up numbers, to fill a gap, because he was
accidentally and conveniently spare, a polite and useful man. Nothing wrong with that either, nothing wrong with that: he was getting paranoid, he must do something about it: and the something that he did was to bend the whole of his attention to the earnest young woman, who was, amazingly enough, trying with an appearance of sincerity at least to persuade him to explain the elements of Rookes
v
. Barnard.
    Nick and Diana must have given me a pleasant build-up, he thought, as he started to explain: she listened, intelligently, asking intelligent questions, nodding, smiling, thinking herself very good to be so interested, although so pretty, and he watched her pale oval face and her blinking false lashes – he hated false lashes, he really hated them – he wondered why she bothered. They moved on, shortly, to penal sanctions and contracts and discipline, and in a rash moment he made some analogy between parental and judicial discipline, and he saw her well-intentioned attention waver and struggle and finally lose itself: she had children, and she wanted to talk about children and how one should treat them, so they started to talk about that instead, and whether or not she should threaten her children with punishments that would never be fulfilled and whether such threats had any value: she was overcome with guilt, he drily noted, she had to confess, she had told one of her children before coming out to dinner that if it didn’t shut up and get back into bed she would lock it in its bedroom