The Silk Factory

by Judith Allnatt

  At length, Corinne asked, ‘How are things financially? Will you be able to keep up the bit of supply work you were doing?’

  Rosie looked weary. ‘Difficult without Mum there to hold the fort.’

  ‘Can you afford a childminder?’

  Rosie shook her head. ‘Too pricey. Anyway, I don’t want a stranger. Sam’s a bit stirred up by it all; he can be difficult sometimes.’ She frowned. ‘I’ll just have to pull in my horns.’ Rosie’s settlement had included the flat when she and Josh split but she had soon found that she couldn’t manage the mortgage payments on her own and had been forced to make a quick sale. The buyer’s surveyor had found dry rot and pushed her right down on price so that she’d made hardly anything on it. She’d had to move to a cheaper area and now rented a flat in Streatham: a tiny place on the second floor above a coffee shop and the landlord’s first-floor flat. The noise of the high street and the lack of a garden meant it was a lot cheaper but she still found herself struggling by the end of each month.

  Corinne, as always, took her side. ‘I don’t suppose bloody Josh could up the maintenance to help out?’

  Rosie snorted. ‘I could be dressing the kids in the curtains like a regular family von Trapp before he’d even notice.’

  Corinne gave her a hug. ‘Do you want to stay over tonight?’

  ‘Better not. I’m trying to keep the kids in as much of a routine as I can. Anyway, it would only be putting off the evil hour.’

  She had piled the kids into the car, driven home and carted Cara’s buggy up two flights. As she turned the key in the door of the flat, she’d gritted her teeth and stepped into quiet emptiness, the children trailing behind her.

  Rosie had sunk for a while, hiding away from the world. After moving flats, she gradually fell out of touch with her other friends and colleagues apart from Corinne. She found herself unable to work up enough interest to reply to emails full of staffroom gossip that she no longer felt part of, and felt that they would have no interest in her everyday round of childcare. She couldn’t seem to muster any energy and did no more than the bare essentials at the flat. Her doctor prescribed anti-depressants. They made her feel muzzy; they gave her dizzy spells and sometimes blurred her vision or resulted in vicious headaches that left her drowsy and washed out the day after. But when she went back for her review he had shrugged these off as common minor side effects, telling her that it would take a few weeks before she started to feel better and impressing upon her that she was not to come off them without consultation.

  She took the children to the park, as her mum used to on her regular visits to help out, pushed swings and spun roundabouts, her arms going through the motions, her mind blank. Corinne came over once a week after work and they ate takeaway and drank a bottle of wine together. Rosie gave vent to her feelings about Josh and Tania – Tania of the impeccably tailored suits and impossibly slim waist, Josh’s one-time colleague, one-time mistress and now full-time partner. Corinne told her the latest on her complicated relationship with Luc, who she hoped would come and join her in England but who seemed wedded to Paris and his job. Corinne brought things from the outside world: books and games for the children, stories and laughter, but when she left it felt even lonelier than before.

  Sometimes Rosie cried at night, quietly, so that the children wouldn’t hear. She visited the cemetery and replaced flowers that had dried brittle-brown in the heat. Standing at the foot of the grave she tried to tell her mother how much she missed her. It was no good; her mother wasn’t there.

  Rosie passed her hands over her face and roused herself. She would make a cup of tea and then go and cuddle up with the children on the sofa. She felt the need of their soft, warm bodies against her. As she ran the water into the kettle, she looked once more at the garden through the old small-paned window. She thought again about the stranger child, still bewildered about how she could have got in. A breeze had risen and was stirring the leaves of the shrubs and the heads of the Michaelmas daisies. She peered at the shapes, blurring and clearing in the old glass.

  Daisies … Her mind flew back to another garden, another time, when she was a child: her mother sunbathing on a tartan rug; she, Rosie, sitting on a rusty swing, legs dangling. She remembered muttering under her breath while she was stringing daisy chains: one for her, one for her mother and one for her imaginary friend. For a year or two Rosie had taken her imaginary friend everywhere, summoning her to life as an only child’s talisman against isolation, picturing her sharing her meals, walking beside her to school, playing hopscotch with her and listening when she read aloud.

  Rosie had thought that her mother was asleep but she suddenly opened her eyes and asked her who she was talking to.

  ‘Only Arabella,’ Rosie said without thinking, engrossed in splitting a thin green stalk and threading another one through.

  ‘Who’s Arabella?’ Her mother propped herself up on one elbow, her attention now keenly focused on Rosie, making her stop threading and drop her hands into her lap.

  ‘She’s just a girl I talk to sometimes.’

  ‘People will think you’re strange if you go round talking to someone who isn’t real, Rosie. If you want someone to talk to, why don’t I phone one of the girls from your class and invite them round to tea?’

  ‘They’ll be at the park. They like playing outside,’ Rosie said sulkily. She had been trying for ages to get her mother to let her join in with the other children but it was always ‘too near teatime’ or ‘too late’ or ‘too rough’.

  Her mother wouldn’t be drawn.

  ‘I’d rather play with Arabella anyway. She’s just like me – the same age and everything,’ she said petulantly.

  Her mother sat right up and stared at her and something in her look made Rosie feel uncomfortable.

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘I told you, she’s exactly like me,’ Rosie said.

  Her mother’s face became red and angry. ‘That’s rude and you shouldn’t make up such stories.’ She got to her feet and stood over Rosie. ‘Don’t you know that it’s wicked to tell lies?’

  Rosie, alarmed by the sudden change in her mother’s mood, hadn’t known what to say and had shrugged and looked sullen.

  ‘Go indoors,’ her mother had said. ‘Go and do your homework.’

  Rosie had slipped off the swing, and trailed indoors leaving the daisy chains to wilt and shrink where they had fallen on the scuffed earth.

  Remembering the conversation, Rosie felt the familiar tug of regret that she had often found it difficult to understand her mother, who had suffered strange moods and unpredictable changes in temper so that they had often been at cross purposes.

  From a very early age, long before the conversation at the swing, she had been a secretive child, her mother’s tension making her careful, afraid of setting off her touchiness. If she ever broke anything she would try to hide it rather than tell her mother. The first hazy memory she had of this was when she had broken a garden ornament. She must have been around three years old. She had been playing alone in a garden while the grown-ups talked indoors and she’d found, peeping out from a lavender bush, a china hare, modelled with its ears laid flat against its back, looking up as if to the moon. Attracted by the smoothness of the sandy biscuit ware she had put her chubby hands around its body and lifted it up. Underneath, something dark was moving, a mass of woodlice disturbed and scattering, some breaking off from the heap and moving towards her feet … She dropped the china hare on to the hard slabs of the path and its head broke clean from its body and rolled, chipping eye and ear, to the side of the path. Aghast at what she’d done and terrified of the creepy crawlies, she had stuffed the ornament into the bushes, pulling the leaves around it. It made her sad now to think that this guilty concealment was her earliest memory.

  Over the years, whenever she had an accident she’d kept it from her mother: a cracked glass pushed to the back of a cupboard, a book with a broken spine wedged back into the shelf, even cuts
and grazes from biking disasters hidden under jeans rather than have Mum ‘make a fuss’ as her father used to put it. She had never doubted her mother’s love for her but had been wary about expressing her own, afraid of risking too much openness in the face of responses that were sometimes prickly, sometimes baffling. Now that it was too late she wished that she had been braver and talked it out with her. Now she would never know what lay at the root of it. And she would never be able to take that risk and say the loving words she should have said.

  The kettle boiled and she poured the water into a mug. She stood at the window, stirring the teabag round and round, lost in thought. She saw with sudden clarity what a lonely child she had been. She had been blessed with a vivid imagination and had responded as imaginative children do by drawing on her own resources, creating Arabella, the companion that she longed for. She wondered fleetingly whether the awfulness of the last year: the final break-up with Josh, and then losing her mum, had triggered some weird throwback response. Maybe she had simply dreamt up the girl in the garden, experienced some strange vision brought on by the displacement of being in a strange place, by grief for the loss of a parent, by being so truly alone.

  TWO

  A month after her mother’s death, Rosie had made a huge effort and taken a day trip from London to Northampton to visit her mother’s solicitor. She had been baffled to learn that she’d inherited the house. ‘But it’s Aunt May’s house!’ she’d said to Mr Marriott as he passed a copy of the will across an acre of pale ash desk.

  ‘Well, no. Actually it belonged to your mother and father but they allowed Miss Webster – May – to have occupancy while she had need of it. Of course, now she’s accommodated elsewhere.’ A slim young man with a pair of black-framed reading glasses on the end of his nose, he looked at her over them with a lugubrious expression that was at odds with his good looks and which she felt sure he affected in order to appear older and wiser than his years.

  ‘I see,’ Rosie said, looking at him in blank bewilderment. She settled Cara more comfortably on her lap, who turned sleepily in against her chest and began to suck her thumb.

  ‘Now that your mother has passed away – your father having predeceased her – the property at Weedon Bec passes to you,’ he explained again. ‘I take it you know the area fairly well?’

  Rosie shook her head. ‘We never visited. Aunt May occasionally came to us but not often. I remember May and my father used to argue about it. May was always trying to persuade them to come but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. I never knew why.’

  Mr Marriott nodded sagely, as if nothing about the peculiarities of families could possibly surprise him. ‘I understand that your father’s work as a conservator at Highcross House meant that the family had a property provided whilst he was living?’

  Rosie nodded.

  ‘But your mother had been living at the Weedon address recently, I believe?’

  ‘Yes. After Dad died, Mum rented a cottage in Somerset, but when May got ill and went into the home she wanted to be able to visit regularly so it made sense to move into the house up here.’ Rosie hesitated. ‘It was more than that though,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘She told me that she wanted to go back to her roots, that it was the village that her family came from and she didn’t …’ She felt a catch in her throat and paused for a moment. ‘She said she didn’t want to end up in some anonymous sheltered housing,’ she said, all in a rush. ‘She said she was going home to her native place.’

  Mr Marriott pressed his fingertips together and looked down at them to give her a moment to recover herself.

  Rosie took a deep breath. From the secretary’s office behind her she could hear Sam asking for another piece of paper for his drawing. She was relieved that he was behaving himself. ‘I still can’t really take it in,’ she said. ‘How long have they owned the house?’

  Mr Marriott handed across a piece of thick, folded paper. ‘These are the title deeds. The house has been in the family since 1930. It was your grandparents’ house and apparently they moved there from another house a few streets away that was owned by your great-grandfather so it appears that your mother did indeed have roots there. Her family seems to have lived in the village for several generations.’

  Rosie took the wad of paper in her hand. The house was hers! She would be able to sell it and get some financial security for herself and the children at last. She would probably need to do some work on it; Mum had told her that May hadn’t had anything done to the place for years. It would take time but if she did it up she would get a better price – and some independence from Josh; that would be priceless. She was sick of chasing him for maintenance money and she hated asking for his help. She stopped. What about Aunt May? It had been her home. Mum had said that May was never coming back, that she would never be able to live independently again, but what about all her things, a lifetime of possessions? She couldn’t just clear the house and throw them out. And her mother’s things, what was she to do with them? She wouldn’t be able to bear to part with them but there was barely room in her flat for the children’s toys as it was. She slowed her racing mind right down; she would have to go through everything and maybe store the things that were May’s, and Mum’s special things. She wouldn’t rush. She would do what her father had always told her: take time; take stock.

  The solicitor was leaning forward towards her. ‘I was saying that there might be other assets, savings or bonds, but also maybe liabilities of your mother’s that need attention. I would suggest that you go through your mother’s finances to establish the extent of the estate and then we can progress things further.’

  ‘Yes, yes, thank you,’ Rosie said.

  ‘And of course you’ll take on the power of attorney that your mother had over your aunt’s financial affairs. Not much to do there except make sure that the care home gets paid on time.’ He passed her an envelope. ‘The costs are defrayed from Miss Webster’s savings – all the details are there.’

  He rose, shook Rosie’s hand and walked with her into the secretary’s office where Sam was covering a length of computer printout with pictures of aliens and explosions. As if his professional persona evaporated at the threshold of his office, Mr Marriott’s whole demeanour changed. He retrieved Cara’s buggy for her, unfolded it and clicked on the brake. ‘I know all about these; they tip up if you put too many bags on the back,’ he said conversationally. He opened the door and helped Rosie lift it down the steps. ‘Safe journey; see you soon.’

  The house was the middle one of five, in a tall redbrick terrace that wholly overshadowed the dainty Victorian cottages on the other side of the quiet street. Built on three storeys, each floor had a row of casement windows framed by brick arches giving the building as a whole the look of an institution, which was further borne out by a large date stone above Rosie’s door that read ‘1771’. Rosie wondered what the original use of the property had been. There was something austere about its external aspect although the number of windows and the high ceilings inside meant that the rooms were full of light.

  The whole village was unusual, Rosie thought. She’d felt it from the moment she’d arrived. It had been late in the evening when she’d turned off the main road on to a lane that squeezed under the narrow arch of first one old bridge then another, one carrying the railway line and the other the canal. Ahead of her, as the road bent left to descend into the village, was the most monumental brick wall she had ever seen, a block of deeper darkness against the greying sky. Stretching away uphill to the right, solid and as high as a house, broken only by a gatehouse and a huge set of iron gates, it reminded her of a prison wall and she had shivered as she rounded the bend and drew away towards the centre of the village. She passed a playing field, and drove carefully over the single-track bridge that crossed the infant River Nene and on past houses and chapel. Reaching the crossroads at the centre she found a pub, shops and the higgledy-piggledy roofline of houses built over centuries: rounded thatch, high angular gables, tall chimneys
and finally the bulky height of the terrace of houses, lamps lit in the windows on either side of the central house, which stood dark and empty-eyed.

  Leaving the children asleep in the car she had steeled herself and gone in, switched on the hall light, and found herself facing her mum’s camel coat hanging on the coat stand, her bike leaning against the banister rail. She gave a little cry, stepped forward and gathered the coat up, burying her face in the rough wool and soft fur collar. Mum! Mum! She called for her in her mind, a child’s call of distress; no message or thought beyond the expression of longing to draw her mother to her. She breathed in her mother’s scent, clenching the fabric in her hands, then let it fall back to hang from the peg, smoothed down its folds and stepped away, standing for a moment with her head bowed. She let out a shuddering sigh and then propped the door wide open with the heavy Chinese jar used for umbrellas and began methodically unpacking the car, looking neither right nor left in case she should be hijacked by some other object redolent of her mother’s scent or touch. She brought in food and stocked fridge and cupboards. Upstairs, she switched on only a bedside light. Ignoring the dimmer recesses of the room, she carried the children in, warm and heavy, and laid them in the double bed where they would all sleep.

  Locking up the car, she looked back along the street to the pub with its lighted windows and babble of voices and music. She noticed its illuminated sign: ‘The Plume of Feathers’ and the image of a soldier’s helmet stirred something in her mind. As she wearily climbed the stairs she dredged up a memory of her mother telling her, when she first moved in at May’s, that the village had a military history. She hadn’t really listened at the time; struggling with the aftermath of her break-up with Josh, she’d had no energy left to be interested in the outside world. What was it Mum had spoken of? The barracks and arsenal, that was it, a huge site that had once housed hundreds of soldiers, with a parade ground and a hospital and rows of vast buildings to house stores of cannon and rifles, gunpowder and shot. She took off her clothes and left them where they fell. As she got into bed beside the curled forms of the children and settled to sleep, she wondered whether the building in which she lay, with its uniform dormitory-like windows, had once been something to do with the soldiery.