Raw Silk (9781480463318) (24 page)

“I don’t know, it just looks like it could get nasty to me; they’ve got it in their heads Oliver’s on the side of big money. He could end up the scapegoat. Can’t you talk to him, Virginia?”

“Not much, to tell you the truth.”

In fact, Oliver now talked incessantly about the merger and its virtues. He’d always liked watching the outline strategy of a company fray. Now interest gave way to partisan passion, with no detectable whimsy. He was farsighted, and he foresaw that if East Anglian didn’t hook up with Oriental manufacture now, it would be too late. Asiatic cloth had been eating into British trade for most of this century, and East Anglian had survived, twice by merger, only because it had the size and capital to sit it out. After all, the mill went into rayon in 1913 just when Japanese cotton exports topped Britain’s—how much opposition must there have been to that, and where would we be if we hadn’t? If we hadn’t gone vertical in the fifties and taken on dyeing and finishing we’d have gone under instead. The weavers were griping about double shifts, but they’d talk out of the other side of their mouths if the mill collapsed on top of them. And he wasn’t talking about the year 2000, either. The Common Market was working against us because we were competing on unfavorable terms with Europe at the same time as Taiwanese and Philippine cloth was expanding. Japan was just a foothold, because Japan had the technical brilliance but no longer had the cheapest labor. We’d have to branch out everywhere, get into every nook and cranny of Near and Far Eastern trade.

Dillis’s worries were more local and more immediate. “D’you know what he’s saying? That we ought to give up silk altogether. D’you know what that sounds like to them? Like gutting your grandmother.”

One afternoon in April when both Mom and Malcolm happened to be out, Dillis had a dizzy spell and had to sag into a butterfly chair.

“Okay. I’m pregnant.” She wrinkled her nose, grinning.

“Christ, Dillis. Is it Jake’s?”

“Pretty heavy odds on it.”

“What are you going to do?”

She sobered and shouldered her puffed sleeves. “Well, I’m not going to chuck it down the drain, am I? After all this. To tell you the truth it’s not exactly a surprise. I’ve taken some precautions.”

“Precautions!”

“Um, I know, but I mean, by sleeping with Mark now and again. I’ve told him about it. He’s chuffed as a rooster.”

“What about Jake?”

“He doesn’t know. Look, Jake’s not to live with, is he? It’s not as if I’m his own true love. Even if he wanted me to leave Mark, he’d be out and about among the dolly birds in a few months. No, I’ve had a good time …” She stopped and her eyes went somewhere into the rug, taking a look at the good time. “I’ve had a good time,” she repeated longingly, and rolled her puffs again. “I’ve got what I always wanted out of it, after all. I’ll tell him I’ve changed my mind and settle back down to Mark.”

“But can you live with it, a deception like that, year after year?”

“I’ve had practice lately, a’n’t I? I expect I can live with it. The only thing …”

“What?”

“I hope you don’t have to live with it as well. I don’t know but what Jake’s likely to drown his sorrows in a little rabble-rousing. He likes to do the jilting himself; he’ll be mad. Can’t you get through to Oliver?”

But Oliver orated. I was a backboard, an assembly hall. If I tried to warn him of the workers’ mood he downed me as he would a heckler.

“Whose side are you
on
?”

“Don’t be angry with
me
,” I complained.

“I am not angry with
you
.”

But he was the angrier for my having suggested that he was. I sat still and let him talk. He was intense and preoccupied, he scarcely noticed when Jill was at home. I kept out of his way and I began to feel that there was not a single moment in his presence, in the laying of a plate, the exchange of daily news, the brushing of my hair, the receiving of a perfunctory kiss, that I was not holding myself in essential and dishonest check.

In May things turned slightly nastier. A radical young vicar in Brickleby Park began a series of impassioned sermons on the text of “The Needle’s Eye.” He made no reference to local events, but his parishioners, all working class, found their feelings given celestial sanction about the evils of big money. As if in sinister parody of this respectable bigotry, anti-Japanese leaflets began to appear about the High Streets. They opened old war wounds, dredged up tired tales of POW camps, invoked the whole hot subject of British immigration, bounced insinuations off everybody’s movie impressions of the inscrutable East. A confrontation, called an “open meeting,” was scheduled for mid-July in the Migglesly town hall.

The mini broke down again and again I spoke to Oliver about another car. Again he said we would think about it. I realized that it suited him very well for me to be home, away from East Anglian. The Migglesly garage patched it up again, and our bloke assured me I was “pouring thrup’ny bits in a florin sieve.”

“It’s not exactly a death trap,” he said. “But give it a few months’ time.”

I thanked him and asked if I could make the check for twenty pounds over. When he had cashed it, I falsified the bill.

I conceived a new series of designs that were almost an industrial in-joke. The woof of the Rubigo fabric had looked, as Clive said, so much like linen that it occurred to me to compare the thread to linen under the microscope. The structure of the polyester was not interesting, but the twists and tendrils on the nap of the flax had a convoluted beauty of their own. So I did a number of designs in which the microscopic pattern of the original fiber was printed on its synthetic substitute: flax on polyester linen, silk on acetate pongee, cotton on polyester twill, wool on nylon brush knits. They were handsome, and their academic insularity dryly pleased me. They were passed unhesitatingly for production, but at the same time it was clear that I was no longer fulfilling the function for which I had been hired, the providing of “staple” flower patterns for the conservative taste. A pleasant side result of this was that several of Clive Tydeman’s posy rings were included in the autumn line.

I continued to call Miss Gavin, who continued to elude me. In May I found her more hesitant, less forthcoming than ever.

“Miss Gavin, how
is
Frances, please?”

“Well, she’s had a bad bit. She hasn’t been able to eat very much.”

“They’re feeding her intravenously, aren’t they?”

“They have to feed her somehow.”

“I thought they wouldn’t do it there.”

“It’s only for a few weeks. They’ve got a place for her in Dorsetshire next month.”

“Does she struggle?”

“Oh, no, she’s under …” the little-girl voice stopped on a sucked breath.

“Under sedation,” I finished for her, but Miss Gavin sugared on, “Just a little something to calm her. I’m sure she knows it’s best.”

“I’m sure. Miss Gavin, I want to see her.”

“Well, she’s not allowed visitors, you see.” I said nothing. “I’ll tell you, I could ask Dr. Holloway and call you back.”

“Do that.”

But she didn’t call back, and when I called she hadn’t managed to speak yet to Holloway, and the next three times I called she was mysteriously off duty. By the time I reached her in the middle of the following week Frances was gone.

“They found a place for her at Bly,” she said brightly. “I was going to call you about that. They sent her down in an ambulance. Would you mind very much packing up her things? We’d send them on.”

“Not at all,” I said minding enough that I hoped she would hear the sarcasm, even though I understood that Miss Gavin was as innocent in these machinations as a passive pawn can be innocent.

I went to Mrs. Fromkirk’s with two tea chests and one week’s rent. Frances’s belongings were so scant that I only needed one of the chests. Most of her was left on the walls, on the loom, in the eye, in the dying frog. I cried, and cuddled a cat. I took flash snaps of the walls. Mrs. Fromkirk brought me a cup of tea, ingratiatingly sour, and pocketed the eight pounds ten.

“To give you time to put it right for the new renter,” I said. “Frances has gone back to Dorsetshire.”

“Well, I’ll have to be painting the walls, you know,” she said indignantly.

“Yes, I expect you will.”

I delivered the tea chest to the reception desk at Migglesly Victoria, addressed to Frances. I turned to go and then on impulse turned again and climbed the stairs. Nobody stopped me or spoke to me, and it’s very possible that I could have done the same at any time in the previous three months. The door to Frances’s room was open, and the windows, onto a freshening spring breeze; and a herniated fat man lay under her calico coverlet. He was holding both hands to his gut as if strapping himself together, but he called cheerily enough, “Hello, dear. Can I do you something?”

“No thank you,” I said. “I think I’m in the wrong place.”

The time seemed sapless. I was like a cornstalk in a drought. I worked hard, but the only time I had any sense of purpose was on the weekends when Jill came home. As a result I began to spoil her, not in a usual way, but by taking care to behave like a St. Margaret’s mother. I closed the doors, dressed decently, spoke properly, gave her a spoon with her tea. I knew I was doing this, and that as with Oliver I was giving away bits and pieces of myself. But what Jill gave me back was all, at the moment, I was certain I valued, and we had long walks and conversations sometimes silly and sometimes solemn that I looked forward to for the whole month. I found myself passing on to her small tricks of the domestic trade that I had had from my own mother. She watched me, for instance, rolling a lemon under the heel of my hand on the countertop, and asked why I did that. I remembered my mother doing the same on the little square of Formica in the trailer, and how she had pleased me by saying as I did now, “It’s to yield the juice out of the pulp. Look, you can do it this way too.” I threw the lemon on the floor. Jill laughed delightedly, and throwing lemons became her responsibility. Another time I found her fishing a piece of bent toast out of the toaster with a fork, and I pulled the plug and gave her a lecture on conductors of electricity. “Ah, I see,” she said seriously, and it seemed to me that the passing on of these homey wisdoms was as much of a function as I was likely to command.

So that when it was suggested that she should spend her summer vacation in Spain with the Jeromes, I was desolate. I felt myself singled out for the bitter little thwartings of mischance. Not that I put it this way to Oliver, who thought it a fine idea: get her some sun, put some color in her cheeks, damn nice of the Jeromes.

“I’ll miss her, Oliver.”

“Oh, come on, Virginia. She’ll be back the end of July. You’re the one who loves to travel; you wouldn’t want to do her out of a chance like this, would you?”

“Couldn’t we go to Spain ourselves? We haven’t had a real vacation for so long.”

“What, in the middle of this Utagawa thing? You have a hope. No, you call the Jeromes, and tell them we’ll do the same for Maxine sometime.”

“When, Oliver?”

“When all this is over.”

“What do you consider ‘all this’?”

“You know what I mean. Call them.”

I called them, and took Jill to London to buy summer clothes. I took her to the London zoo, too, on the top of a double-decker bus, and, though she was tired after that, to the Geological Museum to stand in the earthquake room, trying to crowd the stolen vacation into a single day. Trying jealously, I suppose, to compete with the Jeromes for the novelties they’d offer her in Spain. At the end of the day I took her to the American Embassy and applied for her passport. I had not mentioned to Oliver that I would do this. When she was born, I had registered her as an American citizen as a matter of course and a matter of practicality, and with Oliver’s approval. But a passport seemed another matter to me, and might have seemed another matter to Oliver; I made the application out with a conspiratorial sense of laying a claim on her, explaining in details far beyond her curiosity why it was sensible to keep her citizenship active. Explaining how sensible it was, I renewed my own defunct document as well, and then fidgeted for most of the weekend lest she should pass the explanations on.

But she talked to Oliver, when he’d listen, of the earthquake and the giraffes, and when her passport arrived two weeks later, though she danced into him with it and spread it out for him to display the seal, he scarcely looked up from his report to tell her, my, what a big girl she was now. And she went to Spain, and though I was used to being without her I was more without her when she was in Spain; she was more gone in Spain than she was at St. Margaret’s, just as Frances was more gone in Dorsetshire, and as gone as if she had never been.

In the third week of July, on the afternoon of the scheduled meeting in Migglesly town hall, I came home about four and picked the mail up off the welcome mat. I fixed myself a stiff early drink and carried it to the living room. A few bills, a catalogue, a letter in shaky characters from my dad, and a pompous large envelope like yellow parchment. Curious, I opened this first.

Dear Mrs. Marbalestier,

The Carnaby Commission takes great pleasure in informing you that your design for damask, Rubigo, has been selected for the Carnaby Award for Innovative Design. The award carries a stipend of one thousand pounds (£1,000.00), which is to be presented at a ceremony at the Worshipful Company of Drapers, Throgmorton Avenue, on 4th August at 7:30
P.M.
Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, Patron of the Company, will make the award. You and your husband are most cordially requested to be there.

Congratulations!

Yours sincerely,

NEVILLE MARKHAM

for the Carnaby Commission

cc. Mr. George Nicholson

H.R.H. Princess Margaret

T
HERE’S NOTHING WORSE THAN
being caught. I mean, for us leftover Calvinists who keep alive the Great Guilt Trade. There’s no outrage of which we can believe ourselves the victims that we would not rather endure than the most minute reminder of Judgment Day. I sat and stood, unable to sit or stand, gooseflesh puckering as if it were blasted by alternate gusts of hot and freezing wind, waiting for Oliver. I tried not to think of the alternatives. I knew what they were and that I would have to present them to Oliver; I knew what he would say and that I would have to hear it; so I tried not to think of it, not to live it more than once.