Raw Silk (9781480463318) (6 page)

“Hear, hear,” said a couple of gentlemen, tapping signet rings on the mahogany.

Director Nicholson deployed a few more statistics and flatteries in a similar eulogy of “Our Ginny,” and then the portfolios came out and the designs went round. Malcolm is good, very good. His designs are romantic without any of the hint of doom that used to be romantic. There is no cheer in nature that he can’t abstract and catch. He knows about hair, waves, clouds and tendrils, he knows about water, light and flight. His heliotropes and periwinkles are meant to move; on a body his grass greens and laburnum yellows curl and stretch, they buoy chiffon like helium. Malcolm tried once to tell me that his colors were erotic, but when I challenged him he conceded they were mainly pretty.

I’m good too, but I work mostly by denial. I like to take a delicate blossom and contradict it with a murky color. Or often, still thinking of that tree I never painted, I fill the background with the texture of the relevant bark, or with magnified cross sections of the stem and seed. The result is formal and at best dramatic. Anybody looking at our sketches with an honest eye could see that I’m the female, but Malcolm is the
girl.

We explained our intentions a little, mostly in answer to questions from the gentlemen, sharing a surface nervousness for the performance, not the designs. Malcolm charmed them with a sunny hypocrisy, denying that he understood anything about what he was doing except when he got it right. I tickled them by knowing the scientific names for the cellular structures I had lodged between my blooms. We make a good duo down to the physical contrast, because Malcolm is short and plump and dark. Except from Oliver, who is ipso facto embarrassed by my having the floor, the affection coming toward us was as palpable as money, and I enjoyed the sense that both of us had, Malcolm in his love life and I alone in my mind, an area of experience their imaginations wouldn’t buy. Malcolm sent the same message to me in a sideways slide of his eyes when Tyler Peer leaned across to Winnie Binkle, withdrew his pipe through a path in his moustache, and said, “Malcolm certainly knows what pleases the ladies, Miss Binkle, eh?”

But Tyler was only being kind, and alone in my mind I’ve never had a kind thought for Winnie Binkle, and for no better reason than that she wears tweeds and twin sets, and there was Jill where I’d left her among the Petits Beurres, and I was suddenly depressed. Nicholson held up one of my sketches—blood-brown dogwood blooms behind a network of their twigs—and said, “Ginny, are you a Japanophile by any chance?” I felt a little as if he’d snatched my cover; as if, while I tried to collect my scattered selves, he’d stumbled on a link I wanted hidden.

“I d’know.”

“It’s often struck me that there’s something Oriental about your designs.” It was clever of him, because although the Orient is big right now, there are more obvious ways of using it than mine.

“I’ve never been there,” I stumbled, “but I had a history teacher who did once. Went.”

“Art history,” he amplified.

“No, not art, he wasn’t an art teacher. He just went.”

“He influenced you,” Director Nicholson explained. I glanced at Oliver to see if he was more than usually uneasy at my unease, but it was impossible to tell. He sat aloof with his chin in his hand, studying space, the one person in the room who clearly had no doings with me. “He influenced you,” Nicholson repeated.

I agreed, confused, and he added, “Isn’t it amazing, absolutely, the way you, uh, keep going back to your childhood. Things, you know, that hardly struck you as mattering one iota at the time. Now my mother used to weave rugs, and it—weaving, you see—just seemed to me one of the boring things my mother did.”

The gentlemen chuckled appreciatively, as if this grim discovery of the source of self were a matter for moderate congratulation.

The meeting dispersed toward the bar while Malcolm and I wrapped up our sketches, and when we were left alone he said, “You’re suddenly depressed.”

“You’re suddenly psychic,” I replied.

“I’m always psychic.” And it’s true that for a placid soul Malcolm is uncannily sensitive to mood.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m getting too old to play the ingénue.”

“Nonsense, daughter. I’ll buy you a drink.” He swung our portfolios off the table and stacked them against the wall. “It’s wonderful being women,” he said. “We get equal pay
and
the doors held open for us.” He held the door for me. “Look, I’ll tell you something that’s got to cheer you up. We’ve been getting cut off from the switchboard every other call for the last six weeks, and the telephone people have been around four times. This morning the engineer came in and took the whole thing apart and laid it out on my desk. And you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Sir, there is nuffink phys-i-cally wrong with this telephone.’” He danced ahead of me to make sure that I was laughing. What difference does it make to Malcolm if I’m laughing?

“You’re a honey,” I said, feeling tears somewhere, but farther back than my eyes, and Malcolm camped into the lift. “Well, I do know what the ladies like.”

What I’d like at the moment, he thought, was a Campari, and he went to the bar to get it while I joined Oliver and Tyler at the window. I was surprised, passing a cluster of board members around Nicholson, to see the big dumpy girl from the tie silk shed. No cat in her now—she was backed into the wall staring down into a glass of the plasma they sell for tomato juice.

“Who’s that girl?” I asked Oliver.

“Who? Oh, that’s Frances Kean. New file clerk in Records.”

“Oh?” That was funny. The class system is carefully maintained at East Anglian, and it’s rare for a secretary to show up in the executive bar, except by way of flirtatious invitation. This one didn’t look a likely prospect for that.

Oliver caught my look because he said, impatiently, “She’s some relative of Nicholson’s or something.”

“Oh.”

“She’s a hysterical cow.”

The bar in Admin is of the comfortable maroon-plush kind, halfheartedly modernized with fake wood and swivel stools. They’ve also taken out the leaded glass and installed two picture windows with a panorama of the car parks. In one of these there was a caravan, not unlike the trailer where I grew up, which serves as a canteen for the construction workers. The area around it was unusually full for a cold day, and something about the way the men lounged over the MGs and a Rolls or two suggested militancy even at this distance. I could pick out the carpenter Jake Tremain gesticulating to a group that faced him.

“What’s up down there?” Malcolm asked, joining us, and Oliver grimaced. “Strikes brewing, looks like.”

“I thought they just had a strike.”

“This one’s not for money.” Tyler Peer knew about it. “One of the fitters went up to Edinburgh for his mother’s funeral. He’d already used up his vacation, so they docked him four days for it.”

“They’re daft,” said Malcolm. “Why do they ask for trouble? Everybody’s only got one mother.”

“That may be,” Tyler said jollily, combing at his walrus brush with his pipe stem, “but you’d be surprised how many favorite aunts die off among the working classes.” When we didn’t particularly laugh he added in defensive reflex, “It’s the principle.”

Tremain punched a fist in a palm and I could see his forearm muscles flex, though it was really too far to see. The groups reformed, and he took in a wider audience with a flung, flat-handed gesture. My dad, who’s a Taft Republican, has a gesture like that when he’s angry, and his spatulate fingers are stronger than most wood.

I said, “I know some down there I wouldn’t put in charge of compassion.”

Malcolm stared. “You surprise me, mother. Are you politically on the right?”

“No,” I said, “I’m politically in the wrong.”

And then a thing happened, so disconnected to the plush, the trailer in the lot, the ice in my Campari, that I have to say it came from nowhere. I don’t know where else to say. Oliver looked up and his face performed an instant of its mobile magic, eyebrows crawling over the bone shelf toward the sockets of his eyes, his mouth bared back over fully twenty of his teeth—I thought he must have been struck with a pain. He said, “Shut up!”

The least moment of social disaster, like a tape recorder, makes minute sounds audible. Conversations around us faltered in their rhythm. Malcolm’s pocket change rang once. Tyler’s expensive pigskin shoes roared a few inches across the carpet. I swallowed plumbingly.

“It’s stupid to put yourself down like that. You always do it!”

I do, of course. Of course I do. I’m sorry, everybody, I don’t mean to apologize, but you see, my mother thought it gracious. It’s very stupid of me to make myself out as stupid, but you see … you see, I am employed in a marriage of which the first axiom is that emotion is private. I didn’t choose it, I might have been half of a pair that snapped or snuggled in company. But that is the given ground rule, the absolute. You see, when a man who won’t kiss his wife in the doorway of a boardroom, or acknowledge the source of a broken collarbone, when such a man silences his wife in public, it has the ring of authenticity.

“Well, no, now, certainly no reason to put you down, Ginny, eh?” Tyler tried, but it didn’t work. I began to sweat in the awkward silence. A hot flash. I remember thinking, menopause.

So then I set my hair on fire. I fumbled for a cigarette—I don’t ordinarily smoke but I carry a pack around in case I need a straw to clutch at—I pulled it out and was digging for matches when Malcolm whipped out a lighter and stuck it forward; I bent to it, the flame leaped up about two inches at the same time as a heavy lock fell forward and went up in a single clean crackling stink of yellow flame, taking a couple of eyelashes with it for good measure.

“My dear, good God,” gasped Tyler and Malcolm, but by the time I clamped my hand to it it was out. I said how silly of me it was nothing, and did they know that singeing was actually beneficial to the hair?—and we stood grinning at each other in that penetrating
eau de crematorium.

“We put Jill in St. Margaret’s today,” I said loudly, which Malcolm and Tyler took for a change of subject. I stared at Oliver, daring him to know it was not a change of subject. But now his famous features gave back nothing.

Tyler predictably extolled St. Margaret’s record in the 11-plus, Malcolm predictably assured us of the best of all possible worlds, and I predictably looked for some way to get out of there. As soon as I could I excused myself, flapped a good-bye to Nicholson—the big girl was gone—skirted the meeting in the car park and took my empty car to my empty house. Mrs. Coombe had left me a late lunch and a note with the suggestion that I heat the soup. This seemed fairly sensible, so I heated it, and then left it on the kitchen table.

I changed into slacks and sheepskin and walked for an hour, trying to warm myself in the cold garden. Phaideaux, grateful for the long outing, unearthed his whole cache of balls for me. He would race across the lawn with the grace of the Queen’s own thoroughbred, and then drop one of the slimy things on my shoe and stand thumping his hindquarters idiotically. A regal oaf. I don’t love him much, but it’s not his fault. He was bred to look that way. Someone spent doggy generations coaxing out an imitation of a fetlock and giving his head a haughty tilt. The oaf survives inside.

We went to the orchard and spoke a few words to Mr. Wrain, whose garden this really is, and who tolerates my inferior woman’s sort of love for flowers.

“We’ve got the birds again,” said gentle Mr. Wrain maliciously, with a vague gesture to the meadow from which they come to steal our buds. I think he suspects that I balk his instructions and put my scraps outside, but I do not. I have far too much instinctive respect for authority for that.

“You can’t have both plants and birds,” he warned me for the hundredth time.

“Mrs. Coombe tells me you can’t love both birds and cats,” I said lightly, but Mr. Wrain only shook his head, to mean, that’s as may be. I wanted to suggest that, presumably, you can love both plants and cats if you dislike birds enough, but that’s not to say to Mr. Wrain, it’s to say to Oliver. Oliver’s “Shut up!” hung in my ears. Mr. Wrain replaced his cap and returned to his shovel, and Phaideaux and I went on.

In England, in January, the dead things think it’s spring. The daffodils are impudent, an inch and a half high in the hard ground. I went to spy on the raspberries and the little gray bushes like whiskers—I haven’t learned their names—and the apple trees, that all have the buds of their leaves. And I stared at the peony sprouts exposing themselves along the southern wall. They’ll have spoiled for me the delicate blossoms in the water colors of Kanõ Sanraku, but that is not their problem. They shove the rocks and the rot of their old leaves aside; their angry red phalluses rupture the ground.

How did I come to be the mistress of an English garden, with symmetrical stone paths and the rosebushes planted in a chessboard pattern of pink and red? And a half-timbered manor house with pipes outside and old nests protruding from the eaves like leftover thatch? I dreamed greedily of such houses as a child, but the greed was for the dream. They existed in a haze of Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm; I never even idly wanted to own one, in detail. At the back door is a metal arch planted in a concrete slab, with a bar across on which to clean my Wellingtons. The bar fits into the heel and scrapes mud forward off the sole, and the sides of the arch swipe clean one side and the other. How many miles have I come from sand and crabgrass to make myself familiar with, deft at, such an operation? We have modernized the house, but its alterations of me are structural.

I have thought that we ought to regard all this with a little ecological awe, because surely we are the last generation that will be able to buy, young, into real land. If my grandchildren can’t see other windows from their windows it will mean that they’ve inherited, or that they’ve spent fifty years at getting rich. Jill’s grandchildren will tell their grandchildren that we walked on
grass.
I have thought that such an awe might represent a claim on an English garden, for someone who never knew a garden as a child. The fact is that I had one claim, and I have sent her away. The compost heap stinks of the absence of Jill.