The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble Read Free Book Online Page B

wards-of-court.’
    ‘To make them what?’ he said, hardly able to believe that he had heard aright.
    ‘Wards-of-court,’ she repeated. And as she said no more, he was left to comment.
    ‘It’s not possible,’ he said, inadequately. And then, more helpfully, ‘It can’t be serious, it must be some kind of threat.’
    ‘That’s what I try to tell myself,’ she said. ‘But it might be serious, after all. You don’t know my husband. The kind of things he does.’
    This was so evidently true that he did not think himself equipped to comment. So there was silence again, until she continued.
    ‘The letters were sent round,’ she said, ‘by messenger. Which made it seem serious. And also urgent. But I haven’t done anything. I didn’t know what to do.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘it was just an impulse?’
    ‘It probably was,’ she agreed. ‘But you have no idea how he persists in his impulses. Once he has had one he is so loyal to it, it is quite terrifying. Once these things have been set in motion there is
no stopping them. They go on and on, and everything is quite caught up in the process.’
    ‘A lot of people,’ he said, without much faith, ‘make gestures. Start things they have no intention of finishing. They threaten something they have no wish whatsoever to do. Or so I have often found.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know some people are like that. But we have never been like that, we have always pursued everything to the bitter end. It’s something about the law, it makes it so hard to stop once one has started. I sometimes fear …’ – and her voice, which had up to this point been remarkably steady, began now to thicken and dampen – ‘I sometimes fear that we have gone too far ever to restrain ourselves from anything. For him, every threat becomes immediately a reality. There seems to him no point in not doing anything. He is not reasonable.’ She began to cry. ‘I am afraid,’ she said, ‘that he actually likes it now. The solicitors. The letters. The publicity. He is determined to win, in the end. Oh dear, oh help, I am so sorry to cry like this, I feel so sorry for you, I knew I was going to do this to you the moment you offered me a lift home, in fact quite considerably before because it was obvious much earlier that you were going to have to offer me a lift, and there I sat knowing that the moment I got away from Nick’s I’d start to cry all over the place. I can’t help it, I always tell everybody everything, it’s a terrible habit, it really is.’
    ‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind.’
    ‘You probably do mind,’ she said, ‘but you’re too polite to say so and I quite frankly am too miserable to care.’
    She blew her nose, and looked at him, the tears pouring down her cheeks quite copiously. ‘Well, no,’ she said, amending her last statement as she briefly met his eye, ‘I’m not too miserable to care, but I’m too miserable to stop. And I really am sorry. But I must tell somebody, I had to tell somebody, and I couldn’t there, with all those people there.’
    ‘I don’t mind,’ he said again, foolishly, but this time she took him up on it, saying almost eagerly, as though it were some rare generosity that had prompted him, ‘Don’t you really? That is so kind of you.’
    Then there was a silence: she was still weeping, and in fact her
sobs seemed to be gathering momentum, not slackening, so he said, a little late perhaps, as though he had sensed at once, though dimly, the length, if not the sorrow or delights of what lay ahead, knowing as he sat there that he must give himself over to it, that he must allow it to happen, this quite accidental connection – he said, ‘You’d better tell me all about it.’
    ‘Would you mind very much if I did? Perhaps we could wait until we got back and then I could show you the letter and you can tell me what you think of it.’
    ‘That would seem a sensible thing to do,’ he said. ‘And