Free The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble

professional confidences into movements of true sympathy?
    One would have had to be hard-hearted enough to resist, as she had quite well known: but then that was what he was: hard-hearted. Hard-hearted and also weak. She had probably seen it at once. He cleared his throat, shuffled the papers back into their battered folder, and said, nastily enough, picking up her last remark, ‘Yes, I daresay
you do manage quite well, but nevertheless I think you ought to get in touch with your solicitor first thing in the morning. I think that’s the best advice I can possibly give.’
    She did not look at him: she looked at her hands folded in her lap.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, evenly. ‘Yes, I am sure you are right. It is very kind of you – to have taken so much trouble.’
    And she looked up at him: their eyes met. He could see that the change in his tone had registered profoundly, and he wished, immediately, that it had not.
    ‘I am so sorry,’ she continued, ‘I ought to never have kept you up so late. But I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you, for having listened to me. I had to talk about it, and it was so kind of you to listen. But one ought not to inflict one’s problems on other people, I suppose, it is very inconsiderate.’
    ‘Of course not,’ he said, attempting warmth, to no avail. ‘I am very glad that you told me. I am only sorry that I cannot be of more use.’
    ‘You have been very helpful,’ she said, hopelessly. She had abandoned him, she had cast him out, and it was by his own choice that he had been expelled, from this warm room and intimate, redeeming, cluttered pool of light. She had had no choice: he had demanded it. He saw it very clearly. It was this, his damnation: to know the bias of his nature, to know its dangerous weighting, and to be quite incapable, quite helpless to redress it. He had known he had misjudged her: he had known himself to be neither conned nor trapped but on the contrary trusted: and he had nevertheless rejected trust, and had thus pointlessly hurt her. He struggled: it was too late, but he struggled, he tried to go back, and when he spoke it was to make the only amends he could, the amends of dry justice.
    ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘there is something more that I could do. If I think of anything, I will let you know. Or you could give me a ring, if you needed me. Anyway, I hope you will let me know what happens.’
    It would have taken a miraculous generosity to respond to the coldness of this offer, and he hardly expected her to do anything
other than flinch, having once recognized, as she so clearly had, his treacherous withdrawal, and being unable to recognize, as she must surely be, his desire to withdraw his withdrawal: but, amazingly, she looked at him again, and smiled with an extraordinary niceness, and said, warmly, with enthusiasm,
    ‘You
are
nice, you really are so kind, and I have been so awful, dragging you out here and giving you nothing but a cup of tea. How awful I am, I am so selfish, and I try so hard not to be.’
    ‘You gave me a very nice piece of cake, too,’ he said, in a neutral, hopeful tone.
    ‘Did you like it? Have another slice. I made it myself. I like making cakes, it is lovely now that the children will eat them, little children don’t eat cake, you know, whatever people say, only big children eat cake. How old are your children? Have another slice.’
    ‘I really couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I must go.’
    ‘I suppose you must,’ she said. ‘Do you have far to go? I hardly dare ask, in case it turns out you live in Dulwich or something dreadful like that.’
    ‘Nothing like as bad as that,’ he said. ‘Only Hampstead. It’s quite near, really.’
    ‘Yes, that’s not too bad, that could have been a lot worse. What a relief.’
    He rose to his feet, still holding the folder, and said, indicating it, ‘Perhaps I might keep these, for a day or two? I could go through them and see if anything occurs to me? Would you mind?’
    ‘Not at