The Needle's Eye Read Free Page A

– ‘I didn’t
mean
it,’ she was saying, ‘I really didn’t
mean
it, but I lost my temper …’ and he knew that she needed condoning, and that she would have wrested any conversation on any topic whatever to this end: so he condoned, politely, confessing to parallel misdemeanours, doing in fact what was required of him, but as he did it he felt suddenly sick with himself, because he did not care, he did not really care, in fact he objected to being used as a confessional, he objected to the whole mechanism of self-denigration and comforting admissions that they were engaged in, because one had no right to cheer oneself up by such means, one had no right to sit so comfortably assuaging one’s conscience and asking for forgiveness. Despite himself, he felt welling up within him an emotion so familiar and so unpleasant that it quite frightened
him: he had not yet learnt how to forestall it, though with time he hoped he might (but what a long discipline ahead) and it was too bad to confess, too bad to share, it was not, like this girl’s loss of temper, pardonable. It was an emotion of hatred. He hated it, he hated feeling it, but the hatred remained. He had come to hate people, even the people that he liked, like Nick and Diana and this pleasant pale girl, and he hated them, ignobly, because they were not his and he could not have them. They might smile and offer him invitations, but he hated them for it. He was filled with resentment, a resentment that respected no distinctions and no loyalties. It was impossible to struggle against it, impossible to remind himself that it was his fault, not theirs – or rather not impossible to remind himself, because he did, constantly, he did, even now – but impossible to
feel
the reminder, impossible to feel sympathy even though he knew quite well the forms and words of it. He felt nothing, nothing but dislike and bitterness; useless to tell himself that the fault was his. It altered nothing, such knowledge. One could order one’s features and one’s responses so that it did not show, so that it caused no positive offence, but that was no salvation: one might behave impeccably, and still, if one had not charity, it would be of no avail. And he no longer had any charity, it had all dried up in him.
    Suddenly, as he sat there talking about something quite different, he thought, ‘I am embittered.’
    And he knew that what he was was precisely what the word meant, and that it was what he was. When people described other people as embittered, they were describing people like himself – embittered through failure, of one kind or another, and bitterly resenting those more fortunate. He could, as yet, conceal it, but what would happen when he became like those colleagues of his who could not mention a name without a disparaging remark, who saw the whole world as a sour conspiracy to despoil them of any satisfaction or success? And even if he managed to conceal it for ever, what a fate was that, to suffer and not to speak, to subdue one’s resentment by reason, to exhaust oneself in concealment and the forms of charity? The continual suppression of impulse seemed an
unredeeming activity, but he could not think of anything better to do, the impulses being so base.
    He could pretend, perhaps, not to recognize them, but a suspension of recognition was beyond him: what had once been honesty, and what was now an unrelenting habit of introspection, denied a simple refusal to admit. He had to admit it: he disliked this girl for smiling at him, he disliked Nick because he was an old friend, and Diana because she was so kind to him, and the financial journalist talking to Diana because he was not married, and that other woman in the long velvet dress because she was divorced, and the man talking to Nick because he was married to the girl talking to him. He disliked them all, childishly, simply for being what they were, and he liked disliking them, he did not want to like them, he did not