The Silk Factory

by Judith Allnatt

  A minute later she grabbed up one of her boards with stretched paper, rummaged for a bottle of distilled water and mixed a palette of sunset colours. She had an idea, something that Sam would love that might easily have come from one of his beloved storybooks. She painted on a colour wash: a shady grey foreground, a red horizon fading through orange and yellow into a purple and indigo distance. She opened the black Indian ink, dipped in her pen, hesitated, forming the broad composition in her mind. Tentatively at first, she began to draw the distant turrets of a castle and then, with bolder strokes, the sinuous curves of a dragon guarding its treasure. The ink flowed into the wet surface taking unexpected directions and making dark, star-like blobs, challenging her to interpret and incorporate and giving the work a loose, freehand quality that she loved. Soon she was engrossed, using the deepest red patch as a baleful eye, the clots of dark ink in a scribbled foreground as a thicket of brambles grown up around the dragon’s pile of coins. The sounds of children playing next door and the pigeons’ never-ending burbling drifted in through the open window, ebbing and flowing around her, unheeded. A rectangular patch of sunshine moved across the table, unnoticed. She hung suspended in the world of the picture: only the connection between her eyes and her moving hand existed, everything else had fallen away.

  At last she sat back and sound seeped back into her world, music and voices from Tally’s garden, the crackle of the barbecue. She laid down her pen and appraised her work. The picture had a mystical quality – yes, she had definitely captured something. The dragon’s coils twined around its hill of gold, like the fingers of a miser’s fist. One eye was open, just a slit, full of spite and suspicion, as if the viewer had just awoken him. The dark sky loured above and the impenetrable thicket threatened below, but the reds and golds of the creature’s treasure shone through him as though dragon and hoard were becoming indistinguishable, almost one.

  Perhaps it’s too disturbing to give to Sam, she thought, it might give him nightmares. Maybe I’ll save it until he’s a bit older and just give him the inkpot drawing for now. Nonetheless, she was glad she’d done it; it was good, even she could see that. She would frame it and hang it here in the studio.

  The smell of barbecue fuel and grilled steak reached her and she realised she was starving. How long was it since she’d eaten? She didn’t remember having anything for lunch – breakfast then. That often happened when she was painting: time shrank as her mind expanded.

  Filled with the excitement of new creation, she went downstairs and raided the fridge. She’d let it run down as the kids were going to be away but there were eggs, ham and some leftover salad. She made an omelette and, whilst it was cooking, opened the bottle of white that she’d bought ‘for emergencies’. She justified the expense to herself: for treats too, she thought defiantly. She would take as her motto: ‘celebrate every small victory’. She sloshed some wine into a tumbler, laid a tray and took it into the living room. While she ate, her mind was busy with another idea. The delicate cow parsley, creamy white against the dark green of the hedge … perhaps she could use spatters of wax to sketch in the cow parsley and then a colour wash and inks over it, so that the colour of the paper would be retained for the flowers. They would show through with just the right feeling of insubstantiality. She finished her meal feeling buoyant. She would tackle Mum’s papers next. She was ready. It would be fine.

  The bureau was locked. Rosie thought about her mum’s habit, at the cottage, of leaving the house key in a flowerpot in the garage. ‘Third pot along, top shelf,’ she’d always told Rosie. She could hear her voice in her head, ‘In case I’m ever out when you come home.’ Even when Rosie and Josh had been married for more than five years her mum always referred touchingly to her visits as ‘coming home’. On the bureau were the lamp, a photo of Rosie reading a story to the children and a blue and white ginger jar that proved to be empty. Up high on the bookshelf beside her were more knick-knacks. She reached up on tiptoes to run her hand along it. A wave of dizziness hit her as she stretched up and she had to put out a hand to steady herself. I shouldn’t have left it so long without eating, or drunk that wine either, she thought. Bowing her head for a moment she waited for the room to stop whirling. Slowly and more carefully, she reached up again. The third ornament in the row was a flowered china vase and as she took it down, something chinked inside it. She upended it over her hand and the key slid out on to her palm, followed by something pale and soft. Ugh! A moth! She tipped her hand over; the key tinkled against the edge of a shelf as it fell but the moth landed upon it. The thing was alive. It righted itself and began to move slowly along. It was the weirdest moth Rosie had ever seen: cream all over, with a huge swollen body, like a maggot but with tiny wings that were thick rather than delicate and covered with ridges, like lumpy veins. The creature’s head, thorax, even its legs, were covered in fine silky hair and its dark comb-like antennae and blue-bottle eyes, both so much larger than any other moth she knew, gave its head the sinister look of a praying mantis. It dragged itself along the surface, moving its wings feebly.

  Rosie wanted to get rid of it but couldn’t bear the thought of touching it again. She picked up the tumbler from the tray and put it down over it, trapping it inside. It crawled around beneath the glass, vibrating its wings and shivering its feathery antennae, making Rosie shudder.

  She went to the kitchen and washed her hands. She’d never seen an insect like this before. She pulled her phone from her bag, typed in ‘moths’ and scrolled through the images. In moments she’d found Bombycidae, the genus, and Bombyx mori, a species within it – a silk moth, just as she’d guessed at some instinctive level the moment she’d caught sight of it. She looked at more pictures: caterpillars upside down on mulberry leaves, glued there by strands of silk and the tiny hooks around their sucker feet; pale ovoid cocoons stuck all over with shiny lemon-coloured eggs; a male moth, smaller, with a two-inch wingspan, the female larger, fat with her swollen egg sack. She read that neither were able to fly although they could crawl and climb. The worms lived on mulberry leaves. Was it possible that it had come from the tree in the garden? It didn’t seem so; the article said that they could no longer survive in the wild but needed specific temperature and humidity levels and could only live when farmed by Man. She shook her head and picked up a piece of card from the junk mail piled on the table to slip under the glass. Whatever the case, as far as she was concerned, the moth was going outside.

  But when she returned to the upended glass she saw straightaway that it was empty. Stupefied, she lifted it off the shelf, unable to believe her eyes. There was a mere smudge against the wood, a silt of the finest pale powder as though the decay of weeks had taken place in minutes, as if the thing had decomposed in a whisper. She sat down hard on the upright chair at the desk. It had been trapped; it couldn’t have just disappeared! Unless … unless she had imagined the whole thing.

  She rubbed her brow. There had been the dizziness again beforehand, just like the time she’d seen the girl under the tree … and today she’d been about to tackle looking through Mum’s things. Perhaps she wasn’t as ready for this as she’d thought and her subconscious fear had surfaced in this strange way. Yet she had felt the creature in her hand! She picked up the key from the carpet and placed it on her palm – she thought she could recall the sensation of the moth in her hand: the solid body pupa-like, the softer wings. Tally had mentioned that the place used to be a silk factory of course … and she’d mixed wine with tablets again – perhaps that made the side effects worse. Yet it had felt so real!

  Feeling unsettled, she fitted the key into the lock of the bureau but then stopped. She told herself to stop being so suggestible, to be adult about this and get on with the job in hand. She turned the key in the stiff lock with a click, and then paused again. It felt strange to be opening the bureau. She remembered how, as a child, seeing her mother writing letters at the desk, she had wanted to climb up on her knee to see into the little cubbyholes or even be allowed t
o play at tidying it. Mum had told her no, saying that it was her private place for keeping important papers and had bought her a toy Post Office with tiny envelopes and ink stamps to keep her happy. She had been thrilled and accepted that the desk was off limits. After all, growing up, she’d had her own privacies: first the imaginary Arabella and then journals full of teenage crushes and cigarettes cached in a shoebox at the back of her wardrobe. Everyone had secrets. She hesitated again. Surely this sense of the forbidden was just another trick of her mind, a delaying tactic to protect her against going through things so intimately connected with her mother. It had to be done. With a new briskness she pulled out the supports for the fall-front and opened it.

  On either side of three small central drawers were pigeonholes stuffed with papers. In front of them stood a clutter of office paraphernalia: rolls of sellotape, scissors, boxes of drawing pins and elastic bands and a clumsy terracotta clay pot that Rosie remembered making at school and had thought long gone. She cleared the objects to one side and started methodically from the left, taking out each piece of paper and placing aside, in piles, those that needed some action: bills to pay and magazine subscriptions to cancel. She worked on steadily, undisturbed by the occasional shadow as someone went by the window on the way to the pub or by the noise of passing cars. After an hour she had thrown out old receipts and bank statements and reduced the paper to a manageable minimum. So far, so good, she thought as she moved on to look at the contents of the little drawers.

  The first two drawers held mainly photographs: snapshots of their family holidays; a nice picture of her father before he got ill, looking up from hammering in a tent peg with a broad grin on his face; Rosie in a ballet tutu, Rosie sitting in a rowing boat, Rosie as Aladdin in the school play. She paused over a picture of her parents on their wedding day – so young, younger than she was now, her father’s hair curling fashionably over his collar, her mother dark-haired then and with a complicated ‘do’, her eyes kohl-lined and her lipstick pale. Rosie felt sad and thought that she would buy a good album and mount them properly so that she could look at them more easily. She would write down what she could remember of the where and the when and would show them to the children as they got older so that they had an image of their grandparents, so that they wouldn’t be forgotten.

  The next drawer stuck and she had to pull and jiggle it. The reason soon became clear; it contained one large manila envelope, the end of which had got caught at the back of the drawer. She almost gave up and left it for another time but she was intrigued by the fact that it was both bulky and sealed. At last she tugged it free, tearing one corner in the process, and the drawer fell out with a rattle. Written on the front, in her mother’s elegant hand, was the word Keepsakes.

  Rosie picked at the edge of the gummed flap of the envelope and peeled it back. She slipped out a sheaf of papers with the bold coloured frames and distinctive print of official documents. The first was her parents’ marriage certificate, the next her birth certificate:

  When and where born: Fifteenth January 1984, Northampton General Infirmary

  Name: Rose Angela Milford

  Sex: Female

  Father’s name: Michael Milford

  Mother’s name: Helena Milford, née Webster

  Occupation of Father: Curator and conservator

  Underneath was what she first thought was a copy. But the name was wrong. Lily Clarissa Milford, it read, born on the same day, to the same parents.

  She felt as if a kaleidoscope had been turned, shaking her world into a new and dizzying pattern. She placed the two sheets side by side as if by careful comparison she could make sense of the impossible. There had been a sister. No, more than that – a twin. She had had a twin sister. Understanding came upon her like a slow revelation. Beyond the shock, beyond the Rosie who sat pale and still, another Rosie viewed images from her past: lying curled under a patchwork blanket with a cold space beside her where once there had been a solid, matching warmth, a feeling of asymmetry as she walked with her mother holding her hand, playing noughts and crosses with Arabella. She remembered her mother’s migraines after childhood parties, tired eyes behind birthday candles … click went the shutter as each picture came before her. Click: the sound of something falling into place.

  With trembling hands she lifted the papers to see what lay beneath. There was a white folded card with a decorated border of gold flowers and a gold cross in the centre.

  Lily Clarissa Milford

  15th January 1984 ~ 4th August 1987

  Only three years old. ‘No … Oh no,’ she said to the empty room.

  She opened the Order of Service and words jumbled before her eyes: Opening Prayer, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’, Corinthians Chapter 13, ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’, ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’, Commendation and Farewell …

  How had this awful thing happened? She had had a twin; she wasn’t meant to be alone; she had always somehow known it. She had had a twin who had been taken; gone from her so long ago that she had no conscious memory of her, just an awareness of something not right, an absence, as if part of herself was missing. Anger rose up in her against her parents. How could they have kept this from her? What she felt was rage! Not to tell her, to keep it secret and shut her out, as if the loss was all theirs and she had no right to grieve! Was it to protect her? Did they think they could save her from missing her twin? You might as well expect someone not to miss their shadow. She had always thought that there was something wrong with her; she hadn’t understood the deep abiding loneliness that seemed to go far beyond her situation as an only child. Why had they not told her? It was a betrayal.

  The envelope underneath the papers still had some things in it. She fished out a photo: her mother holding two bundles, babies wrapped in soft white blankets, her face open in a way that Rosie had never seen it, her smile full of confidence and fulfilment. The first part of the words ‘Maternity Wing’ showed on the sign in the background. Rosie imagined her father taking the snap outside the hospital – a family about to drive away towards their life together.

  She upended the envelope over the pile of papers and two tiny circlets of plastic fell out. These were pink, not transparent like the identity bracelets that Sam and Cara had worn, but each had the same fastener, the same slip of paper with faded writing. She picked them up and held them, barely as big as the circle made by her finger and thumb: Rose Milford 5.30 a.m. 15/1, Lily Milford 5.40 a.m. 15/1, she read. She was the eldest then.

  She imagined the cold January morning on which they had been born. Had her parents known that they were to have twins? She would never know that now. She imagined them giving the tiny infants names: Rose and Lily, names chosen to differentiate them, the red and the white, yet to treat them fairly as if to say, to us you are both flowers of equal perfection. A pair.

  Every day since she had lost her mum there’d been some ordinary, tiny thing she’d wanted to tell her or to ask her: that Cara had cut another tooth, that she’d read a novel her mother would have liked, how to make the banana muffins that the kids loved, what was the name of the piano teacher she’d had in primary school? Each time it happened, in the instant she remembered her loss, her heart lurched and righted itself, she pulled herself together and carried on. But now, here were huge questions that desperately needed answers; they could not be put aside and she was left like a child calling into a tunnel, receiving only echoes in reply.

  However long it took, however difficult the search, she was going to find out what had happened. She would start by searching the house for letters, diaries, anything that might hold a clue, even though her instinct told her that the envelope in front of her, which had been so carefully sealed and hidden, was likely to be all there was to find. If there was nothing else amongst her mother’s belongings, she would talk to May, try to lead her back to the distant past in the hope that some vestige of memory might remain that would shed light on the tragedy and the reasons for her parents’ silence.
/>   She closed the bands together in her hand and held them tight, her knuckles pressed to her mouth as the sense of loss overwhelmed her.

  SIX

  Rosie was standing in Tally’s kitchen, having brought round a broken dining chair that Rob had offered to glue and clamp for her.

  ‘Let’s have a look at the damage then.’ Rob bent to examine the crack where the back had come away from the seat.

  Tally said, ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Sam jumped up and down on it last night,’ Rosie said ruefully. ‘He got into a complete strop because Cara knocked the table and his Lego model fell off.’ With a pang, she thought of her sharp words when Sam had started shouting. She had lost her temper and yelled back at him: ‘Don’t be such a baby! Cara’s supposed to be the toddler, not you!’ He had thrown a huge tantrum; red-faced and bawling, with his eyes screwed up, he had jumped up and down on the chair as if there was no room left for the feelings inside him and they had to come out in violent motion. Rosie, shocked at her irritability and at his reaction, had stood frozen for a moment, completely at a loss. ‘Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with him. He was beside himself. In the end, I just picked him up and held on tight until he subsided.’

  Tally glanced outside, where the children were playing in the garden, the spaniel, Polly, wandering between them. ‘He seems all right today. It’s probably just all part of dealing with some big changes. I’m sure he’ll settle down.’