The Needle's Eye Read Online Free PDF

sip of wine: ‘I was born at our house in Norfolk.’
    ‘And did you like it there?’ he asked, wondering what violent wave had thrown her thence to the back of Alexandra Palace – a journey so much the reverse of his own, so different a shore upon which, in the middle of life, to find oneself cast – and she said, through a mouthful of beans, ‘Oh yes, I liked it, how could one not like it? That’s the trouble with nice places, one can’t help liking them,’ – and then she smiled, a smile full of a wish to please, and said to him, changing the subject from herself, afraid to bore (a sign he recognized) and said – ‘And you, what do you do here in London? You’re not in television like Nick, are you?’
    ‘How can you tell I’m not in television?’
    ‘It’s your suit, I think, it’s too respectable. You’re not offended, are you? I like respectable suits – and your hair, too, no, I can tell you’re not in television. I don’t
want
you to be in television, I want you to tell me about something quite different. You’re not offended, are you?’ – and her hand hovered near his sleeve, placating and gentle, and then returned to its dry crumbs – ‘Tell me what you do,’ she said, managing to sound as though she might almost want to know. ‘Tell me something new.’
    ‘I could tell you about Trades Union legislation,’ he said, ‘for instance. I tried to explain it to somebody before you arrived, but she found it as dull as I’m sure you would.’
    ‘Not at all, not at all,’ she said, ‘I am most interested in Trades Unions, I am even not uninformed on the subject – but you’re not a Trades Union man, are you? Surely not?’
    ‘What will you allow me to be?’ he said, watching her profile as she ate, watching her as she turned back to him, quite unusually susceptible to her interest, hardly yet beginning to guard himself against its ease, so careful was its expression: ‘Why, you can be what you like,’ she said, laughing, gesticulating with her free hand, ‘you can be what you like, but tell me what you are, and in exchange I will tell you the story of my many careers –’ and he, lured on by this truly interesting bargain, said, ‘Well’ (for how could such a statement go unprefaced) – ‘well, I’m a barrister.’ And her smiling face, turned towards him, flickered and flinched as though a bright light had suddenly dazzled her fading eyes. It was unmistakable: he saw it happen. She looked down at her plate, and he saw the food through her gaze suddenly unpalatable, though she had been eating with hunger until that moment: she pushed petulantly at a lump of chicken skin, she prodded a bean, she struggled quietly, and then she looked up again, chewing a piece of sausage the texture of which communicated itself to his own mouth, and said ‘Ah yes, a barrister, that I wouldn’t have guessed. And what have barristers to do with Trades Unions?’
    It was so quick a transition, so cool a recovery, so useful an assumption of quite spurious naïveté, that he in turn wanted to lay his hand upon her sleeve, but he was not given to such gestures, so
he made his own: and his own consisted of explaining quite seriously his own connections with industrial law. She listened, gravely, assenting now and then to some query, but so quietly that he could not tell whether or not she appeared to agree with him through politeness, through a genuine similarity of conviction, or because she was thinking about something else, about that something else into which the name of his profession had obtruded so disturbingly. He could still sense in her a whole area of sensitivity that he had unwittingly exposed and was now afraid to touch, so it was with some relief that he enlisted Nick’s help – having seen Nick’s head turn slightly as he heard the word ‘compensation’ – and Nick, sure enough, was quite happy to turn round and recount the only piece of litigation that had ever interested him,