The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble [Drabble, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141969596
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

‘No, that can’t be right, I must have remembered it wrong, because it’s a nice poem, and my version’s awful, but it’s something like that, isn’t it interesting the memory, that one can remember something is good, a poem or a painting, but not remember it at all, in detail?’

‘How do you know about such things?’ said Simon. ‘About the names of things?’ He was thinking about the seagulls in Cornwall.

‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘It’s interesting, that’s why. And I used to learn it, in the country. When there was nothing else to do. You should see my pressed-flower collection. Actually, to tell you the truth I thought it was bloody boring at the time, when I was a child, but it staved off the even worse boredom of doing nothing at all. And now I find it absolutely fascinating. So you see. Everything pays off.’

‘We don’t all find it as riveting as you do,’ said Emily. ‘I tried to get worked up about it once, but it didn’t work. Do you remember that dreadful craze you went through, about the London rocket?’

And both women laughed, again, easily: their recollections amused them.

‘Oh God, the London rocket,’ said Rose. ‘It’s all very well, but it’s a very rare plant, the London rocket, it’s got three stars in the book, and as it grows on waste patches I thought we were ideally placed to find it, but we’ve never managed yet.’

‘It’s not surprising,’ said Emily. ‘You should just see what it looks like. Even the book describes it as a modest and unattractive little plant. And moreover it’s virtually indistinguishable from the something or other rocket – the common rocket, probably – so we kept having these false alarms, when we found the dull old modest common rocket, and carried it off home, and I thought, Aha, that’ll have cured her, even she will have to admit that even though it’s the real thing it might as well not be, it looks so boring. But it never was.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Rose. ‘You know you got quite keen yourself. You’d have been just as excited as me if we’d managed it.’

‘Well, more fool me,’ said Emily. ‘But you should make her show you the pressed flowers, Simon. They’re quite good, really. A pathetic little catalogue of her empty life. I burst into tears the first time I saw them. She brought them to school with her. I told her she’d better hide them quick, if she didn’t want to make herself a laughing-stock. But she stuck it out, she kept showing them to people, and you’d be amazed, how indulgent they were.’

‘On page ten,’ said Konstantin, who had been listening, bored with the younger ones, ‘on page ten, there’s a pressed caterpillar.’

‘Oh, don’t remind me, don’t remind me,’ said Rose. ‘I didn’t mean it, I really didn’t. It got in by mistake. I was terribly sorry about it.’

‘It put her off for a whole year,’ said Konstantin. ‘You can see, from the dates.

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