Raw Silk (9781480463318) (5 page)

Miss Meridene came toward us from the arch. I opened the door and picked Jill up, carrying her awkwardly backward out of the little car, my skirt caught up between us so that I presented a length of black lace thigh to Miss Meridene.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” I said, and after that it was over with alarming suddenness. The arrangements had all been made, there was not so much as a paper to sign. Miss Meridene carried the bags and I carried Jill, who had begun to kick. Miss Meridene unbuttoned Jill’s coat and was furiously attacked.

From “Please don’t leave me” Jill went to “Won’t!” She screamed this one word over and over as she scratched and battered Miss Meridene. When I tried to help, she flung me off and reached for a shelf overhead, I think to get more leverage for her kicking. Her hand struck a biscuit tin which overturned a cardboard box, and a small cascade of Petits Beurres fell crumbling into the nape of Miss Meridene’s neck.

“It will be better for you if I go,” I said, and Miss Meridene, smiling bravely over the thrashing arms, said, “Much.” I was panicked to find that, having suggested it, I must do it.

I lurched to the car and sat fighting back the sobs. I could still hear Jill screaming, “Won’t! Won’t!” and I found myself saying, “Don’t, then!” I was furiously, passionately proud of her, proud of the rebellion in her. I could see her being expelled in an avalanche of Petits Beurres. I could see her blowing the stable up, razing St. Margaret’s to the ground.

And I could see that I wasn’t, after all, done with Jay.

I
SPED OUT OF
the drive and through the village, dipping out of my way to hit a puddle as I passed the horses. I fed myself on the stark birch trees, filling them with aspen leaves and the birds that belong to cacti. “Jay and Jill went up the hill,” I sang to myself, climbing, knowing that I was hysterical but not minding. I thought: Jay, you weren’t too old for me. I was too old for you. You weren’t encumbered with your family, I was encumbered. Too late now. But my daughter, now. Just keep an eye on my daughter.

I stopped for coffee at a little inn. Flowered plates and scones with clotted cream. I had to be at East Anglian by eleven, but there was time. I prayed for Jill: dear God, let my little girl be happy, and excused myself for praying on the ground that Jill believes in God. I stared out of the window and explained myself to Jay.

I’ve written to him at the university in Tucson once or twice, “Please Forward,” but the letters were returned, “Unknown.” I said nothing in those letters, but the old fear attached to them, so that I hid the envelopes when they came back. I don’t want to change anything, I don’t want to alter or trouble my life. I’d just like to sit with him, in some hot, slightly seedy bar, and let him know that I recognized the debt. His patience, the generosity of his terms, and that the adventure he offered me was also a possible life.

“It wasn’t that you were too old for me, it was almost the other way around. I had to have a degree, a wedding, a baby, a house, I had to do all the things girls do before I could understand that I didn’t need to do them after all. If you’d seduced me, it would have destroyed my life. I want you to know that I’ve finally got round to regretting what we missed. Regret enfeebles me. That’s the way I pay the debt.”

He reaches across and touches my hand with fire. He’s an old man.

“You could pay it a better way.” Laconically. Detonation under glass. His hand slides up my arm. I’m not sure we can get out, carry our things, pay for the beer. Did you feel all that, in the yellow gorge, gently stroking my complacent face?

“Two scones and a coffee, is it?”

I paid and got back in the car.

“When you suggested we were star-crossed lovers the romance of it made me swoon. But I didn’t believe in star-crossed lovers—love undiminished over an ocean and an ocean of time, even though the beacon fails and the lovers are thwarted of a single message. Do you know that I can still wake with the memory of your mouth?”

“Hush. Come to me. Come.”

I left the country roads at Migglesly, passed the county line into Norfolk and joined the dual carriageway, adjusting my frame of mind. I drove more slowly, even slow, letting the hustling 1100s recognize a woman driver. Stale council houses with the highway cutting them off from their garden plots, a tessellation of dead ends at the industrial estate, flat fields again, and East Anglian’s complex. I was in good time. I parked some distance from Admin. I fixed my face in the car mirror and thought I didn’t look too bad, for January. At both ends of the day I can see how slim my assets might have been if I’d been born when makeup was the devil’s work. As it is, my eyes are good and I can double the size of them with a brush. Cheekbones worth a highlight, and my hair hasn’t changed since I was seventeen, basically light brown but coarsened by salt and bleached by sun right down to its source of color. Maybe it’s a genuine mutation because Jill has got it too. Strawberry straw, says Oliver. I flipped a brush through it, dusted my boots.

They are building again at East Anglian, in a sprawl worthy of outer L.A. Administration sits in the center with little turrets of stone meringue, and played out from that are the dye barns and weaving sheds, mostly brick, with a few fluted smokestacks trying to look like the Parthenon. Then the first ring of car parks, and beyond them these with-it new blocks, steel skeletons with laminated panels in colors like Hallucination Aquamarine and Demo Red. The only really handsome thing in sight was a giant crane rejecting plastic panels down onto the site like a fastidious … oh yes: crane.

I tucked my portfolio under my arm and walked up among the builders’ shacks, and on the way I saw an amazing thing. In one of those clapboard dollhouses hung a real Petty calendar. The calendar was new—1969 in curlicues—but the girl was a real one out of the forties, exactly like the ones that used to hang on my dad’s bench. I could almost recognize her. A transparent ice-skating outfit with fur around the bum, one leg drawn up and clamped to the other, and tilted tits too creamy-innocent to admit a nipple. How amazing. I’d have thought workmen’s calendars would be all kinks and whips by now. It hung on a rough post over a bench, where there was a wood block in a vise and a plane turned over on its side in a pile of shavings. The smell of pine resin stung me with my childhood, a sense of belonging in that exact spot, so strong that for a minute I was totally disoriented. The window was open and I could have reached in and hung a wood shaving in my hair. I started to do it, but I was encumbered with portfolio and bag, and the gesture was no more than a pointless flex of muscle.

I turned and saw the carpenter heading toward me, Jake Tremain, a pleasant jock, all jokes and biceps. It was forty degrees but he was in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow.

“Good morning, madam,” he said. “Can I do anything for you?”

Madam. That jolted me, rather, so I laughed. “I was just having a look at your calendar.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, guarded. “The lumber mills send them round at Christmastime. Mr. Marbalestier knows we put them up.”

For heaven’s sake! “N-n-no,” I stuttered. “You don’t understand. It reminded me of when I was a little girl. In California. My father used to get them.”

“Oh, yes,” he said again. But I couldn’t stop now. I never can.

“He was a builder too. Like you. But not on anything like your scale. Very small time, houses and hamburger stands. I used to go with him and hang wood shavings in my hair.”

“Did you?” he asked, making no effort to believe me.

“I suppose kids still do that.”

“Yes, they do,” he affirmed politely across the great gap that separates the working class from the establishment, and he passed into the shack and swept the wood shavings with his bare forearm off the bench.

I stood awkward for a minute, shifted my portfolio and headed for Admin. But the encounter had rattled me as if my pocket had been picked. I stepped into the tie silk shed and backed for a minute against the wall.

I come here sometimes. The rhythm of the place is so strong it overcomes my own syncopated nerves. A hundred massive looms pour tie silk slowly off their beds, with a woman to every half a dozen, watching, never touching them, except to ward off tangles. The looms are of three ages and the oldest, Victorian, ones slough their shuttles ponderously across with a resonant wooden whack at each selvage, where the thread is drawn neatly back into itself. The machines from the thirties fling their shuttles at twice the speed and with a higher, harder, more ambitious pitch. The 1950s automatics work almost faster than the eye. They have two shuttles that meet in the middle like angry hands, one grabbing the woof thread from the other and snapping it at the far edge, so that the selvage is a ragged fringe. Their power is such that if I put my hand on the bed of the loom, I have no doubt they would weave the cloth right through it.

The Jacquard cards that dictate the pattern of the cloth ride by on tracks above the warp clicking like castanets, and the composite noise is something like standing ear to amplifier under a rock band. In fact I have seen the weavers—though they didn’t do it today—break into song as if compelled by the rhythm. And yet they move casually, loose, their hair tucked back on their necks for safety. There is one of them standing not far from me, weight hung comfortably on one hip, who as a girl wove the lining for the Queen’s coronation robe. When an interviewer from a London glossy asked why she had been so honored, she gave him a blank look—the gap that sets apart the working class—and replied, “It’s what I do, in’t it?” I watch her watching her machines. She taps a lever, sweeps the warp. I like her proprietorial calm over the shuttles, which for all their murderous force are feeding out at her feet, millimeter by delicate millimeter, a sheet of silk minutely embroidered with the insignia of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. I try to hold myself, like her, deliberately calm, in the face of the violent process by which such fragile things are made.

But I’d better go. I reached for my portfolio where I’d leaned it against a spoolrack, and as I did so my glance encountered a tennis shoe, and I realized I wasn’t the only watcher. A heavy, pale, bob-haired girl was sitting on the floor between the spools, her back dumped against the wall and her palms limp in her lap, staring fixedly into the looms. “Excuse me,” I said automatically, but even if she could have heard me above the roar I doubt she would have. There was something arresting about her, the lumpish dullness of the way she sat and the hollow intensity of her eyes, as if a rag doll had been crossed with a cat. I took up my things and went to find Oliver.

And did so, I think, with a certain fillip of female hope that what I hadn’t been able to do for myself he’d do for me. I mean, leave Jill finally at St. Margaret’s. I wasn’t going to describe the parting melodrama for him. He’d been anxious when we left, so I’d play it down, and he’d be relieved, possibly even grateful, and then the thing would be miraculously done. I found him in the hall outside the boardroom.

“Hi, love,” I said.

“I thought you weren’t going to make it.” He zipped a folder into his case. “Have you got your stuff?”

“She’s fine,” I said.

He looked at me; his zipper stopped a couple of inches short of shut. “How’s Jill?”

And although—because—Oliver doesn’t touch me at East Anglian, as if he’s afraid someone will mention nepotism, I reached and kissed him sweetly on the cheek.

“She’ll survive. I’m not so sure about St. Margaret’s.” I was pleased when Malcolm Butler plumped past, saying, “None of that, you two,” and I pressed my face in Oliver’s tense lemon-scented neck.

We went on into the boardroom, where the members were stowing charts and figures away in manila folders, chatting easily and lighting their cigars. The real business of the day was over and Malcolm Butler and I were doing the sideshow: the Million-Pound Psychedelic Poof and the Miniskirted Dolly with the Mind. Nobody calls me madam in the boardroom. There were only two other women there, Mrs. Linley who has Money and carries it in a pelican-pouch under her chin, and an executive assistant by the name of Winnie Binkle. The contrast was soothing, after my recent downfall.

Also, I like English businessmen. They are the most articulate and self-effacing in the world, and the reason is that they are not, basically, interested in money. They can quote you shares and fiber prices with the best of them, but they have no deep abiding faith that the value of a thing is what people are willing to pay for it. This is inconvenient for those who wish to buy things, and the economy of the country is collapsing because of it, but it suits my didactic turn of mind. The driving ambition of Director Nicholson, to my left, is to restore East Anglian to the position of textile eminence it had in the 1800s, before weaving and wool went north. There is Ian Kitto to the right, who makes it a point of honor to keep Britain abreast of mechanization, and Oliver next to him, who really only cares about the way things work. Then Tyler Peer: if you tell him exports have dropped, he’s worried, but if you tell him the art of hand-looming is dying out in Donegal, he gets the shakes. And these men are making polyester, so God knows what it’s like at Harris Tweeds.

Chairman Nicholson stood and called the meeting back to order with a staccato clearing of his throat. Nicholson is a tall lank man, nervously good-willed, who carries himself fob-foremost as if he aspired to portliness. He vibrated a few little bows settling into this gubernatorial swayback, and said it was scarcely necessary to introduce me and Malcolm. Malcolm wrinkled his nose at me, meaning that we were going to be introduced.

“As you all know, Malcolm made an absolutely splendid showing at the Carnaby Awards this year, and I haven’t the slightest doubt that next time he’ll pick up the vote that will take him over the top. Malcolm has been with us for seven years, and in that time our sales figures show a steady increase of sixteen to eighteen percent per year for prints. The national print demand increase is little better than half of that. Some of our colleagues in Yorkshire have got in on the coattails of Mary Quant, but I think it is fair to say that, thanks to Malcolm, we have been one jump ahead of the hippies all the way.”