Raw Silk (9781480463318) (15 page)

“My walls are the same place. You know everywhere there is with me.” Did she credit me, then, with some sort of imagination that I ought, as an artist, to have had? Frances’s room was very bare, furnished only in the stripped bed, a deal table, a basin, a set of shelves, and paintings. Everywhere. There were unframed canvases and posterboards tacked up, but most of them were on the walls themselves, thrust into every available space—under the basin, between the shelves—fierce brushstrokes that overshot the cornices and corners. Even so I stood confused, adjusting my eyes and mind to the realization that Frances, who did nothing, who could not drink a cup of tea or comb her hair, that Frances had painted these things, and she could paint.

She could paint. I closed the door behind me and sat down, instinctively, because that’s where I sat with Frances, on the floor. Across from me a life-sized mural of an old East Anglian loom incorporated the window into its breastbeam and reached with the frame bed toward the room. The warp threads were metallic black, transforming them into bars, and behind them a stippling of ash gray and ocher suggested eyes and mouths, features dislocated and half finished, waiting in the wall. On the bed of the loom, under a blur of ponderous shuttle, bodies and faces were taking form, and where the fabric poured from the edge it became a flood of umber, burgundy, hunter, madder—poison colors. Dumb hollow-eyed people were drowning there, vindictive and suffering, hands flailing for a hold beyond their reach. The technique was hot and harsh but had that inexplicable accuracy of eye that makes distortion pass for realism: a muscle under such strain, a skin texture so precisely caught, that you could feel the deformed nostril breathe. The wall to my left was dominated by an enormous eye, the iris contorted so that its tessellations became a spider web, the pupil trapped at its own sticky center. Around that, randomly, were studies of the heads and bodies on the loom: a stretched neck, with the head bent back so there was no face but mouth; cavernous eyes on an otherwise featureless face; skeletons straining through skin; insect parts sprouting from human infants—some of these scribbled over with a half-inch brush. A frog dying of no visible wound ballooned its throat membrane toward a murderous water lily.

Technique does not produce such forms. I know; I have technique. There were lines I could have improved on with a Del Sartean ease; a foreshortening wrongly caught, a distortion strained, a highlight out of place. But unease was her subject. I couldn’t have bettered it, and felt a pang of envy.

Restless like me, the cats sniffed at the floor and rubbed the bedpost while I paced back and forth. On the table I found her sketchbook and confirmed there, what I had already sensed from the violated walls, that she could draw with photographic realism when she chose to. There were minute sketches of buds, bugs, leaves that I might have done. Études of shuttles, slab stocks, pirns and spools. Portraits of the tabbies with a pencil stroke for every hair; one, yawning, with a feel for the slippery interior of its mouth as if the graphite were saliva. But also a bat, the perfection of whose copying did not account for the authentic venom in its teeth. Nudes whose accuracy of line did not explain their terror. One of these was hunched over, elbows to the ground: Frances’s crouch on the office floor but with the pain bared, finally explained, in the sick suck of the stomach muscles toward the knuckled vertebrae, the perfectly sinewed hands too large for the rest of the figure. Succeeding pages studied one of these hands, first intricately and then with increasing simplicity of line, until on the last used page she had transformed it into the Rubigo. The design bore a superficial resemblance to my own. Like mine it was pure pattern; no one who had not seen it on the microscope slide would have recognized a form from nature. But where my design was fussy and slight, this one was stark and strong; once more Frances’s fingers, the disease itself scarred and grasping for its life through the fat cells.

There was no nightgown. I took her toothbrush, hairbrush, a drawing pad and a box of paints. On the floor of her closet I found a pile of books and took those too. Goya; of course. Francis Bacon, of course. Orozco, Octave Landuyt. I took the sketch pad, feeling that I had no right, that I’d drop it out the car door, drop it in the mud, but also that it was something I had to hang on to, had to take in. On Migglesly High Street I parked, put the sketch pad under the seat and locked the door, then unlocked it and took the pad with me into a dour hole-in-the-wall old-fashioned shop smelling of linsey-woolsey, where I bought a pair of plain pajamas. It seemed a dumb gift, like taking a dishtowel to a famine. But I felt trivial, capable of only trivial offerings, and it might be right, not to let the nurses know she had no nightgown.

Migglesly Victoria Hospital is one of those unmitigated goods thrown up out of the rambling and gasping inefficiency of the welfare state. You’ll run across them now and then—an MP who resigns on a matter of principle, a doctor who has never thought of emigrating to an American country club, a provincial rep actor who turns down a Michael Winner film. MVH oozes the atmosphere between its bricks, a do-goodery in which a high percentage of good is actually done, out of no detectable motive of greed or guilt. It is tree-shaded, gingerbreaded and gabled like an overgrown gatehouse, and the walls inside are a warm pink-beige. There are no private toilets: one to a corridor for the private rooms, and one to a ward. Whenever the walls need paint or the plumbing goes wrong it is threatened with extinction, but the township of Migglesly and the surrounding villages always manage to scratch enough money together to keep it going. Jill was born here; she was brought to me ten minutes old in a gingham shirt of my own making. My mother, horrified by mail at this indifference to germs, couldn’t see the value of it. I didn’t mention that the nurse was called a midwife, or that Oliver brought champagne with my postnatal dinner.

They had given Frances one of the little private rooms on the second floor. Calico curtains and a tufted blue bedspread. Except for the crank at the foot of the bed and a disconnected plasma apparatus beside it, it could have been any middle-class girl’s retreat. Malcolm and Dillis were sitting by her in fireside chairs; Frances hadn’t waked. She was breathing heavily, slowly, with a little raggedness on the intake. Her hands were folded formally over the counterpane, bandaged one on top; and over the side of the bed, out from under the covers, out of that hospital still life, hung one of her feet. Awkward, it must have been, from the angle of the rest of her, limp as a puppet limb. Limp and also impudent, as if she betrayed, in the face of the strongest evidence yet to the contrary, an adolescent girl in herself who might sling a foot over the side of a bed. It reminded me of Jill’s foot, Jill’s long-boned, long-toed, habitually shod and therefore baby-white and blue-veined foot.

Was that it? That Frances had taken Jill’s place for me?

“It’s not clear how much of it she meant to do,” Malcolm told me. “She cut her leg and her wrist, but she’s always cutting herself. The psychiatrist says it’s probably partly self-punishment and partly a plea for help.”

I slipped my armload of things into the night stand. I sat down at the foot of the bed and found out I was shaking. In a general sort of way, not exactly because I had seen into her through her paintings, but out of a sense of the vulnerability of things. Because inattention, ignorance, mistake, wreak as much havoc as hatred or ambition.

“There’s a psychiatrist then.”

“Oh, she won’t get out of that now. He belongs to Cambridge but keeps an office here. He seems okay. You know: calm and control; it’s all in a day’s psychosis. But he said she could stay here a while and I think that’s good.”

“Yes. Did he say how long?”

“Nuh-uh. I suppose that depends what kind of progress he thinks she’s making.”

Dillis smoothed Frances’s hair and crooned, “Poor Frances, sweet Frances. Oh, isn’t it awful? Isn’t it a waste?” Then the student nurse came in for a pulse check, and Malcolm and Dillis left me with her.

The nurse went deftly about her ministrations, tucked Frances’s foot under the covers, wrote things down, saying as she smoothed the covers where I’d been sitting, “She’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she?” I was extravagantly grateful at this, although Frances is not little and her gaunt translucence has nothing to do with prettiness. The nurse, when I looked at her face between the starched wing cap and collar, was prettier; a perfect oval face symmetrically freckled and symmetrically framed by pale red hair pulled back on her neck. I am always rather daunted by the vacuous sweetness of the nurse-girls, who go out to do battle with disease armed with a stopwatch, an enamel tray, a ball of cotton wool. They are attached by safety pins to immense authority.

Awkward for something to do, I brought out the toothbrush and pajamas, hugged the sketch pad to myself and sat in one of the chairs.

“Do you think they’ll let her stay here until she can cope again?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say, but I don’t see why not. We’re not overfull.”

“I love this place,” I gushed, wanting to intercede, on Frances’s behalf, with this eminence in the pony tail.

“My daughter was born here. I had the little room on the third floor next to the kitchen, and in a whole week I never heard an unkind word about a patient.”

“Well, no,” she said, but pleased. “Why should you?” And then leaning toward me with a furtive glance at the door, “But she’ll have to eat. If she doesn’t weigh seven stone Dr. Holloway won’t see her. They’ll feed her intravenously, and they won’t do that here.”

“Oh, she’ll eat!” I assured her ardently, without the least reason to believe it. “She tries very hard. I’m sure she’ll eat.”

“That’s all right then,” the girl smiled happily, clipped her page of hieroglyphics more firmly onto her board, and left. I was pretty sick of myself, being such a clown. I went through Frances’s sketch pad again, wanting to understand what it would be like to feel the things these drawings revealed she felt, and yet to sit and draw them. But I wasn’t up to much of this.

There was a battered television set with a plaque under its knobs,
DONATED BY MIGGLESLY MOTHERS’ CORPS
. I turned it on low, onto a snowy picture, and settled myself to wait. I watched a soap opera that took place in a plainer hospital than this one, in which a woman more coherently grieving than myself articulated herself to a series of handsome doctors over the bed of a young man wrapped like a mummy. The doctors listened to the woman; in soap operas, the men listen to the women, and that is the success secret of soap opera. After that there was a half-hour special on starvation in Biafra, in which an old man banged an empty bowl dementedly against a tree, and women with distended bellies and deep eyes sat in apathetic rows along the roadside, live and dead children in their laps, flies around their breasts. After that a garden’s worth of very shiny toddlers ran around chanting a jingle and reaching with their plump arms up to a hailstorm of Smarties chocolate buttons. I found all of these things moving, especially the last. Especially the plump insolence of the three-year-old cheeks full of half-masticated candy buttons, knowing perfectly well that these children had pushy mothers with shrill voices who dragged them from auditions to tap dance lessons, and that the garden and the chocolate hailstorm were devised by a cynical man in a gray office building for the precise purpose of creating a specious link between my maternal instinct and the manufacturers of Smarties chocolate buttons. Nevertheless my eyes misted. I was inevitably and involuntarily suffused with the memory of Jill’s birth, which had been rather awful in its way. Because I had begun labor at breakfast, and in spite of my “kinesthetic” training I did not recognize the labor as labor but only knew I was sullen and aching. I snapped at Oliver who slammed out in a huff. So it was Virginia who called the cab and tucked me off to hospital alone, and after that things happened so fast that Oliver, who was meant to be there, missed Jill’s birth. And when I next saw him he was intensely concerned over the choice of script for the announcement and never referred to it, never acknowledged that we had muffed an irretrievable moment.

But it did not matter. It was bearable because it turned out that birth was bearable. It was the only pain I’d ever known that was worth going through at the time, and in the middle of an intense spasm I remembered that labor pain was supposed to be amnesiac and pridefully resolved that I
would
remember, I did not need to forget, I could handle it. I breathed as I had been taught, I did not lose control even in the last fiercest pressures; my baby was not delivered, I delivered her. The midwife said, “You see that hook on the picture rail? You just aim the baby’s head at that and
push.
You’re nearly high and dry.” And in the contraction itself I giggled and did exactly as I was told, and there was Jill’s head waxy and squalling before she got her shoulders out, a damp cap of dark tendrils, bloody ears, clenched eyes, shrieking at the outrage of daylight. I loved having a baby. I loved
having
a baby. So why then had I not had another? Because I didn’t think to. Because the occasion did not arise. Because of inattention, ignorance, mistake. And now the possibility of having another baby had slipped out of my life because I had inattentively submitted to Oliver on a matter of which I had mistaken the importance, and so begun the long process by which I made a stranger not only of my daughter but of Oliver too.

I thought of the Biafran women and of Frances, and I decided I would believe that the quality of suffering is not dependent upon its source. Frances starving because there was no food might have suffered less than Frances starving because her body recoiled and rejected food. I decided I would believe this; it was, politically, a confused decision, the decision of a wealthy woman. It ought to have been Oliver who believed in genteel anguish, I who claimed Frances had “no right to make such a fuss.” But Frances knew something about the eye sockets of the starving, and I knew something about the losing of a child, and I decided I would believe that the right to be unhappy is, like the pursuit of happiness, an inalienable right. It does not need a sanction.