The Needle's Eye Read Free Page B

want people to be pleasant or generous or remarkable, because if they were, they too much condemned his cold heart for not warming to them. They put him in the wrong, either way, by their virtues, by their failings, and he resented them because they aroused his own meanness of spirit: there was a wicked flow from him, a contaminating flow, and all those people, and the pretty room with its candles and fringed shades and oval mirrors and embroidered carpets and peacock feathers was swamped by his ill-will, by his not liking his own liking of it.
    But no, the room was not swamped, it was quite unaffected: he must remember that.
    It was he himself that was swamped. A bad word, swamped: because what he was, was dry, dry as a bone. And he wanted everything to be as dry as himself so that he would not be reminded of thirst. That woman in the off-licence, how her evening’s plans had rejected and excluded and judged him. There was nothing to be done about it, nothing, there was nothing in himself that could save him: there was nothing to be done in life, but to keep going, keep working – and work, yes, he always came back to this point because work could be done, adequately, even well, and without the need for the justification of tenderness he could still perform the acts – the laborious, technical, tedious, legal acts of care. It wasn’t even the work that he wanted to do, but it was an approximation, it was
satisfactory. He could, anyway, continue to do it, that at least was something. He knew where he had arrived, in his thoughts. He always came to the same place. He was familiar with the journey. And having got there, he said to himself; there is a feeling in me, in my brain, in my heart, so dull, so cold, so persistent, so ancient, that I am growing fond of it, I look to it, I look forward to taking it out, at the end of this journey, I take it out and polish it like an old stone, I warm my hands on its coldness and it grows faintly warm from my hands and its much handling. If it weren’t there, I would have nothing, I would be destitute: if I couldn’t feel it now, as I sit here holding this clinking drink and lighting her cigarette, I would cease to be. It is precious to me, this dull and ordinary stone. It is always there. It is called resolution.
    ‘How unlike Rose to be so late,’ said Diana, uneasily, half an hour later: and it was evident, immediately, from the tone in which these words were spoken, that Rose was the honoured guest, the star, the sanction for the evening’s gathering, and that her presence, thus transformed into absence, was threatening to turn itself into as great an embarrassment as her arrival would have been a triumph. ‘I can’t think what can have happened, should I give her a ring, Nick?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Nick, who was helping himself to another drink, reluctant to allow his wife’s anxiety to spread, but not quite sure, because himself anxious, of how he could contain it. ‘Let’s give her another five minutes, should we?’
    ‘All right,’ said Diana, brightly, thinking with panic of the cassoulet slowly drying, the salad slowly crumpling into its dressing, and, worst horror, the mousse beginning to sink. She was never very sure about mousse, it was usually all right but she didn’t trust it, nor did she trust herself not to have another drink, out of desperation, and if she did she knew that she would probably start dropping things in the kitchen and burning her hands when she got things out of the oven. One disastrous dinner-party, just before Nick had left her, she had dropped the lid of the iron casserole on her foot, under the influence of a whisky too many, an accident which had proved amazingly painful, and which had in fact precipitated his departure,
because when the guests had gone she had accused him of never helping to carry anything, and they had had a dreadful row, because he had said that when he did carry things she got equally angry with him for