The Needle's Eye (21 page)

As she got out Rayden on divorce from the reference shelf, and a useful-looking work by Thomas E. James called
Child Law
, she suddenly remembered a bit she had read in the paper that week about a woman who had taken home the
Gnomes of Zurich
, thinking it was a children’s book, and who had been surprised to find her children reject it. Inspired, she went to the children’s section, and there, sure enough, under O for Orwell, was
Animal Farm
. She got it out, and took it to the man, who was still struggling with the catalogue. He looked at it with surprise, and then with gratitude. He smiled. She smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Not at all,’ she said, and then she went and sat down with her law books again.

The very names of the chapters were enough to give one a headache. She persevered. She had known, anyway, that her divorce having been defended and heard in the High Court, she would have to go back to the High Court, and could therefore miss out all the bits about magistrates, but she was not sure why, because some of them looked relevant. What on earth was statutory authority? At least she found a sentence that seemed not to be disqualified, that said, quite bleakly, ‘Variations of an order of the Divorce Division as to custody can therefore be made at any time, but only in very exceptional circumstances if the child is over sixteen years of age.’ Apart from the strange ‘therefore’, the antecedents of which she could not trace, this seemed to make relevant and not very encouraging sense. It seemed to mean that Christopher had every right to apply for the
custody order to be varied. She looked, anxiously, for something about the ground on which such orders should be varied, but (through stupidity, probably) couldn’t find very much except a slightly more comforting sentence which said that the discretion of the court to grant custody of a child is subject to its welfare being a paramount consideration. ‘The misconduct,’ it said, ‘of either of the parties is not the guiding principle in this respect.’ So presumably she had to prove that it was in the interests of the children’s welfare that they should remain with her? And Christopher would have to prove that it wasn’t? It seemed, either way, a very unpleasant business, as bad as getting divorced all over again. She wondered, not for the first time, what he could possibly be doing it for. Not because he really wanted the children, surely? She did not give him such credit. One of the things that had so corrupted their marriage, while it had existed, had been his attitude to children. He had felt that they should be brought up by the mother, that they were women’s work, and she had thought this fair enough at the beginning when he had been working hard to keep them alive: it had seemed not exactly just, that she should struggle endlessly to make herself get out of bed in the middle of the night, and cook meals with children hanging round her knees crying, and drag herself down to the shops with a raging temperature, through the rain, pushing a pram, simply in order that he should not have to endure the technical dismay of finding himself babyminding, but she had done it with a reasonable grace. She used to tell herself, in those early days, he comes from a different world, he objects to the principle of the thing, it’s his history, but as time had worn on and she had discovered that (inevitably) he used history to suit himself, and was able to find himself quite liberated from racial and historical prejudices when it was convenient for him, she began to lose patience, her efforts to adapt herself to the role of obliging Greek wife became less and less convincing, she began to think (in the normal course of marriage) that it was time he did a bit of adapting. He even called it ‘minding the baby’, if she tried to leave him alone in the house with a child sleeping in bed upstairs while she went to the launderette with his shirts and socks. (That was how she put it: there were other people’s shirts and socks
in the bundle as well, naturally.) He was good enough with the children when she was there also being good with them, but there was little point in that: overtaxed, overstrained, physically exhausted, she had found herself no longer able to resist the movements of violent rejection and resentment within her, and it was this, perhaps, that had led to those worst degradations, those insults to his race, to his family, to his whole being. How inconceivable they would have seemed at the beginning, and how impossible to stop them, once she had started. It was his rejection of the role of ordinary English father that had made her, forcibly, making a virtue of necessity, draw the children to herself, take them entirely upon herself, set up, even while he was still there, a solitary life with them, in which she took sole charge, sole responsibility. He had not cared, when Konstantin was five, which school Konstantin should go to: it was she that had made the enquiries, it was she that had braved, alone, that grim Victorian edifice. And how could he now permit himself the luxury of criticism and complaint? He should have started to care earlier, if he had meant to care at all. It was no wonder that she had ended up alone with the children: she had been forced to take them on alone, she had strengthened herself on those hard years, she had developed the muscle to deal with them, she had learned to love the hardship of dealing with them, she had made them a life from which he had voluntarily abstracted himself. It was a life she could not change or abandon, because it was her only one, and it had been acquired through too much labour to be relinquished. In the last year or two, when Christopher had been making money, he had started to propose alterations – a new house, a better district, a washing machine – but by then it was too late, she had become what she was, she had wanted to continue to be it, she could not have it taken from her. And the thought of his wishing to take on the children, without her, appeared to her ludicrous, she could not see it other than as an effect of malice, she could not see that it could express a real intention or even a real concern. But knowing Christopher, and the brutalities he had after all endured for her, how could she be sure that malice alone would not carry him the whole way?

The children had suffered from all this. Of that she had no doubt.
She had taken them from him, because he had wanted her to have them: she had prevented him from attempting to repent. She had not allowed him to re-enter the small world she had made for them. She had (he said) poisoned their minds against him. And it was true. She had tried not to, but it was true. When he had made efforts towards the end, to reassert his authority over them, she had undermined him, she had persuaded the children to reject the interests he offered them, she had ignobly set up herself against his forfeited power. She had been ashamed of it, she had despised herself for it, but she had been incapable, totally incapable of doing otherwise. Now, when they came back from their days out with him, loaded with unsuitable gifts and subversive views and accounts of what they had done with him, she tried to keep her mouth shut, in the silence of the victor. But it was too late for justice, too late for an uneasy peace.

She shut the book on child law, and braced herself to look again at Rayden, that miserable catalogue of human misery and strife. She knew, by instinct, or perhaps by some dim sense that she had pieced together from previous bits of information, that she would find something there that would justify all her forebodings and apprehensions. It took her a long time to find it, because, again, most of what she could find on custody seemed either irrelevant or inconclusive, but in the end, there it was, as she had suspected. It was a small sub-section on education. She read it, and felt her hair rise on the back of her neck. There it was, clearly enough. It said: ‘On the question of education, the Court considers the welfare of the children from the point of view of their religious education (a), or worldly career (b) and their general upbringing (c).’ She sat there, and considered this statement. She knew that it meant trouble. The religious education bit one could safely dismiss, as nobody could suppose that Christopher could plausibly now develop a belated passion for the Greek Orthodox Church, but the other two factors seemed quite terrifyingly relevant. The general wellbeing of children was a vague enough concept, and she could imagine herself arguing reasonably enough that their general wellbeing might consist precisely in staying where they were, without interruption or distraction, at Harringdon
Road School, but the phrase ‘worldly career’ was another matter. What could it possibly mean except exactly what she was not offering them, and what Christopher thought they ought to have? She looked at the small print at the bottom of the section, and found that the only case quoted was Symington
v.
Symington in 1875, whereas there was a case on upbringing as recent as April 1958. Perhaps the concept of worldly career was not invoked these days, but how could one be sure? And if it were, what judge would ever have the nerve to identify worldly careers with Harringdon Road? Times had changed a little in the world since 1875, but not in the world of judges. They would have little sympathy with the Plowden Report, and bubblegum cards, and a nature table littered with the eloquent scourings of waste lots and Alexandra Park. And (more horribly, sitting there, her faith shaking at the prospect of attack) how much real faith had she? Oh, she had declared it, she had maintained it, she had lived by it, but she, like everybody else, had worried about it, she had had her doubts. Necessity (a forced, unnatural, voluntary necessity) had kept her at it, but God knows she had had her anxieties, her moments of real panic. She had seen herself, surely enough, and knew that others would see her, as a crazed woman, denying her children for the thin glamour of an idea, like a Jehovah’s witness or a Christian Scientist denying them their life blood in the operating theatre for the sake of a delusion, a principle so vague and abstract that even she could not properly define it. She was prepared to take this, she was prepared to endure even her own doubts, but at the same time she uneasily knew quite well that her position was false, whatever it was, and that she could only maintain it through certain kinds of cheating. She could afford to leave them there because she had a house with books in it, because she herself pursued a rigorous life that she knew she must (perhaps even too much) transmit, because she had friends whose children were more like the kind of children her own would normally – though what for her could have been normal? – have known. She had worried, in the early years, that her children would not get asked to birthday parties, nor have friends with intellectual interests, friends who would be of use in later life.
(Use? In what sense of use? It did not bear too much investigation which was her best defence against Symington
v.
Symington). She had relied heavily, for instance, on their friendship with Emily’s children, dirty, scruffy, jumble-sale-dressed little intellectuals, full of precocious views on the nature of God, the extent of the solar system, and the practicability of free public transport in Inner London. They had provided what Harringdon Road could not, therefore she was cheating, intellectually, as she had cheated financially.

About some things, on the other hand, her fears had been ludicrously misplaced, and easily dispelled. About birthday parties, for instance, which happened everywhere, throughout the social scale – everywhere, that is, except in her own remembered childhood. Her children went to more birthday parties in a school term than she had been to in a lifetime. This seemed to her particularly significant, a triumphant justification of her own approach. But then, her attitude to birthdays was neurotic. She did not like to look at it too closely. Something lurked there, in her memory, that she did not wish to see. She saw its shadow, each time she bought a gift for a child to take, each time she tried hastily to clean their shoes or find a clean shirt or dress, each time she stood in the doorway collecting, with a row of other mothers, exchanging the idle coin of mothers’ conversation. Neurosis was behind all that, so perhaps she could not truly quote it as an example of the virtues of her own theory of education. She was on safer ground with the education itself. She had had, at times, fears that they might not acquire even an elementary education, but they had all learned to read and write with great facility, and seemed to be progressing, through a maze of projects and binary maths, whatever they were, to some higher forms of knowledge. (Aha, her nasty friends said, that’s because of their heredity, not because they’re well taught, you know. What do you mean, Rose would retort, in pained and deceitful surprise, look at Christopher, he is nothing to boast about as far as heredity goes, he is one of these immigrants who hold things back so much, and as for myself, I am quite stupid, I am totally uneducated, I have never passed an examination in my life.

You know what we mean, the friends would say.

No, Rose would say with dignity. It is clear that
you
know what
I
mean.) The school was rather good on music, they learned to play a variety of musical instruments, at Harringdon Road, a fact which she had flung often enough at Christopher, until he in turn in a fit of rage had flung Konstantin’s oboe out of the bedroom window. It hadn’t been his really, it had been borrowed from school. There had been a terrible scene with him about it. God, how she repented of her self-righteousness, and how necessary it had seemed.

But the fact still remained that Konstantin was top of his class. Whether this was a proof of the triumph or failure of her system she did not know. He seemed equally happy, with Emily’s children, or with his own schoolfriends: he never murmured even faintly that he might prefer anything other than what he had got. She had once asked him, rashly, in a suicidal moment, which he liked best, Ben (his closest friend) or Saul (Emily’s eldest) and he had looked at her cannily, sounded her, knowing her through and through, and had thought for a moment, and had then said, ‘What a funny question. I like them both.’ Then he had thought again, and had added, ‘Though Saul is very annoying, sometimes.’ One never knew where one was with Konstantin. At supper the next day he had suddenly said, ‘Mummy, which do you like best, me or Emily?’ and had laughed at her attempts to reply. She sometimes thought she had brainwashed the child, he was so good, so hopeful, so protective of her and all she wanted for him, so loyal to all she had given him, so undemanding about the things of which she deprived him. He was a heroic child, so lovely and good to her on the whole, after all she had inflicted on him, and she wept tears, at times, to see him be all that one could ever wish him to be.