The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble Page B

about them? She lacked all judgement, all reserve: her emotions swung violently, creaking and screeching like a weather vane in uncertain weather. He longed at times to point out that such a young man, such a woman could not possibly be all that she saw them to be, because the facts did not support such a construction, but she refused to listen, trusting what she called her intuition, so he had ceased to comment, and had withdrawn himself. Even with the children he rarely intervened, but would watch her yell at them and indulge them, irrationally, wantonly, destructively: the two girls seemed, miraculously, to have survived this treatment fairly well, and to have adopted a fairly cynical attitude to their mother’s inconsistencies, but the boy, the eldest, had become, he sometimes feared, psychotic. At the age of nine he either could not or would not read: he was destructive, sullen, infantile.
He could not do anything about it. He had tried, but he did not know what to do.
    Her language, now he came to think about it, afflicted him as much as anything about her. He hated the way she talked. He knew that her classy friends, and indeed his, spoke as crudely, but to them the words came naturally, whereas to her they came with an air of defiance and genuine venom. He sometimes thought that if he heard her once more describe the colour of the drawing-room walls as goose-shit he would drop dead upon the carpet, or take off his glasses and fling them at the wall, or kick in the china cupboard door. In vain to tell himself that nobody else minded: that others, in fact, smiled obsequiously when she said such things, and that it was only his own fastidiousness, dubious enough itself, that protested. He did protest. He said nothing, but he eternally protested: he could not accept, he could not reconcile himself. Once he had said to her that he wished she would not spend so much of the day with her hair in curlers, but she had laughed at him, and, later, when she had had time to think about it, reviled him for such a suggestion, saying, truly enough, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with wearing curlers, she always looked fine when she went out, and that it was only because he had seen too many curlers as a child that he now found the sight of them unacceptable. True enough, but if people cannot accommodate each other’s prejudices, then what was the point in attempting to live together? No point at all, and yet it had to be done. It had to be done, and that was that, and there was not much point in thinking about it. And yet how could one resist thinking about it? He really did think he could see it all now: he had been attracted to her because his life with his mother was so appalling, and she to him because he was the only possible acceptable escape from her father – the only escape acceptable
to
her father, that meant, for she would never have had the courage to defy his expressed will. For Simon had been acceptable to Mr Phillips, mysteriously: Mr Phillips had always had faith in him: naïvely, he had liked the idea of his daughter marrying an Oxford man, a barrister. He had given them a lot of money, to set up house. A dowry. Simon had almost been pleased to think that others might assume he was marrying for
money. At least such an assumption concealed the truth. He would, at that age, have preferred to appear as cynic than as fool.
    Who knows, he thought, perhaps when I am fifty I will have forgotten the extreme gloom into which I sank when the engagement was settled, the deep depression I inhabited from that day on, and I will conclude that it was the money I married, after all.
    Perhaps the gloom had been, after all, a fraud. Who knows?
    He had read his Freud, with interest. He particularly liked the description of the lady who had married three husbands, each of whom had subsequently died, shortly afterwards, of a fatal illness contracted after the date of the marriage. Interesting, that was. Interesting, too, that