6
PART OF THE TROUBLE is that I’ve never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don’t all land like a child out of an apple tree. I remember perfectly well that I thought it was a disaster when Jill began at St. Margaret’s, but I also remember that I thought the disaster had occurred. I missed her. I felt cheated of her. The rest was just a way of compensating for the loss.
Unluckily, it was a period of professional calm for me. With the summer designs in, I wouldn’t be under pressure again till March. For a few days I cleaned brushes, sorted sketches, doodled an occasional autumn leaf. When I found myself squeezing paint tubes into neater cylinders, I noticed I had run out of things to do. But outside my studio I was ill at ease, as if, except as a mother in pursuit, I had no right to step over the vacuum hose of a woman with real work to do. Jill was my deed to the property, which I now held in fief from Mr. Wrain and Mrs. Coombe, cutting flowers by his permission, taking water from the tap by hers. Yet when Mrs. Coombe stuffed her slippers into her capacious bag and took the bus at three, when the early crepuscule began to thicken in, starting as a fen mist in the orchard as if the dark seeped out of the ground, my unease took on another quality. There was something unnatural about a place where night fell at four. I was cold. I had to defend myself against the black oak beams and the dark paneling of a house with a history. I was an interloper, a unsurper, newfangled, nouveau riche, a foreigner in the only place familiar to me. Once or twice by an early fire I heard the baby crying, and rose automatically before I remembered I was alone. A sheep bleating in a neighboring field, no doubt, but I went checking doors and window locks, knowing perfectly well that whatever I dreaded was not outside, and that the effect of my rounds was to lock myself tighter in.
The thing to do was to talk to Oliver. But the thing I had to talk about was forbidden. I learned very quickly that any attempt to convey an irrational fear—the catch in my gut when I came across Jill’s toys, my absurd constraint in the presence of Mrs. Coombe—would be read by Oliver as an accusation. I learned a little less quickly that he read it right.
We sat in the evening over coffee, he with his paper, I with a book, in wing chairs beside the fire at opposite ends of the coffee table. We have a handsome Chesterfield and a deep-buttoned velvet chaise longue, but in order to sit in these you must be wearing a cameo brooch and eating a cucumber sandwich; there’s no place two people could sprawl together and explore each other’s organs. And the coffee table is scaled to the room, not to intimacy. I bought it as a cobweb-crusted rectory table for two pounds five at a country auction. I brought it home in the high triumph of a bargain finder, and scrubbed it down while Oliver sawed the legs off. Oliver, himself, with a saw in his hands, cut the lion heads off the top of the legs and the claw feet off the bottom and screwed the plain part of the legs back on with L-brackets and a screwdriver. In his hands. Amazing! I sighted down the polished grain and thought that Oliver was a very long ways away and wondered why it was so difficult to think of Oliver with a saw in his hands.
“Do you remember when we got the coffee table?”
“Why?” An accusation.
“Jill loved the lion heads.” Another. End of conversation. I squinted over my book and took stock of my husband and his anger. He had begun to let his hair grow a little, in deference to a fashion filtering backward through the classes. It was dark and glossy and curled discreetly round his ears, just clearing the houndstooth collar of his ten-pound Jaeger shirt. He would age well, his features lightly knitted by their lines, his energy mellowing, cohering toward an air of authority, a man who liked nearly everybody and only slightly disliked his wife, because her days were empty on his account. People who owe you money don’t thank you for it, my mother used to say.
It seemed to me that I knew about as much of Oliver’s inner life as I knew of Jill’s from her neatly recopied letters: We are doing subtraction. A horse is named Prince. Love, Jill. The impulse to get it out in the open stirred in me, lethargically, out of habit. I could say I hoped he’d like me better for giving in, and I felt betrayed. I could say: it’s unfair to close up on me, it’s more irrational than my spooks. I could say: isn’t it pretty peculiar we can’t talk about our daughter anymore? Isn’t it pretty bloody odd that you take it as a complaint that I miss her? The things I could say had me breathing hard. If we fought I’d put myself in the hysterical-female wrong; besides, if we keep on fighting, what was the point of Jill’s going away?
The embargo on Jill as a topic lifted when we entertained, and we entertained a lot those days. It kept me off the streets. I’d learned to be a good cook as soon as I stopped having to do dishes, though I never learned to think it mattered much. I was never able to accept it as a requisite of culture, that in order for six or eight people to have a discussion, one of them should spend twelve hours doing something with a foreign name to a frozen chicken. I did it, though; for the Nicholsons, Malcolm, the Kittos, the Tyler Peers, for an American sculptor named Jeremy Jerome who had a daughter at St. Margaret’s. Our dinner conversations ranged as dinner conversations range, over old wine, new books, politics from assassination (U.S.) to assignation (U.K.); but at some point during the evening, when the marchand de vin sauce was coagulating on the sideboard, over the gopher hills of salt where the Beaujolais had spilled, Oliver and I began to develop a parental routine. He liked to rehearse the sins of the local school. I could make effective irony out of the Frankie incident. We could whip up between us, in a fragrant emanation of marital accord, an irrefutable apologia for sending our daughter away to school.
I acquiesced in this number; I conspired excitedly. He would run through the leave-taking of the dolls, I’d offer the descent of the Petits Beurres, each of us cartooning with the other’s blessing in order not to bore our guests. More often than not this palpable evidence of our union moved me deeply, in a blur of brandy and relief. And only once or twice, looking round a ring of friendly faces, people I enjoyed and who valued me chiefly for my openness, I thought: this is not what’s going on.
After this hair shirt of a month, Jill’s first weekend fell as high holiday. She was voluble and silly and self-evidently happy. She brought us a carton of tempera fantasies from which it was clear that nobody had forbidden orange grass. She showed us the rudiments of her new horsemanship, and there was no danger of hauteur with Phaideaux as a surrogate mount. If she called me “Ma’am” instead of “Mum” and closed the bathroom door on me once or twice, it was no more than I was prepared for. It was hardly her ruination. When I drove her back she cried again, as Miss Meridene had promised, but rather distractedly, one eye on the games room, with more Margaret O’Brien than Angela Davis about her. “You see?” said Oliver. “You see?” I saw and said I saw and he partly forgave me as I did him, and in February we fucked again.
On the other hand, the gloom of my studio didn’t abate and the work was going badly; toward the middle of the month I had only a scrappy rehash of last year’s autumn designs. So when Malcolm suggested I move into the new quarters behind one of the laminated panels, the timing seemed a bit of luck. I thought Oliver’s objections mere petulance.
“Take a lot of petrol,” he said at one point. It was the first time in my recollection he’d charged me with extravagance.
“We’ll go in one car, then,” I said. “I can fit my schedule to yours.”
“That wouldn’t work. I can’t always know where I’m going to be. It’s hard enough …”
“Look, Oliver, it’s lonely around here.” This was dangerously near the bone, and I raced on before he could pick it up. “They’ve got space for me. What difference does it make to you if I work at the mill?”
He could never give me an answer, and I concluded that he hadn’t one. I don’t suppose he could have offered me territorial imperative unvarnished. I don’t suppose he could have said that he didn’t want to share East Anglian with me, any more than Heath could say he wants the wogs out of Birmingham.
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sp; The new block wasn’t bad on the inside. It had north light, lots of it, and a shag carpet that invited you to take your shoes off, which I did. My space was divided from Malcolm’s by a sand-glass partition half the width of the room. We were to communicate through a sliding panel—which as it turned out we never closed—with Mom Pollard, the dyestuffs supervisor, and the secretary Dillis Grebe. Everything was some color of white, even the vast blond drawing board that tilted on its leg at the touch of a silver wing nut. I played with this marvel and wondered if I could work on an angle, like a real artist. At home I had a Victorian schooltable.
“It seems a bit frivolous,” I said.
Malcolm ogled the clinical walls. “Frivolous!”
“No, I mean, I’ve got plenty of space to work at home. I mean, I’ll be leaving a ten-room house to Mrs. Coombe and Mr. Wrain.”
“They’ll love you for it,” Malcolm said. “Anyway, you need company to work.”
I turned to him, surprised. “I don’t exactly need company. But I think I need something to work against. With Jill there I was always fighting for my privacy. When I don’t have to fight for it, I start thinking about things, and I can’t concentrate.”
“Of course, mother; it’s a universal law. Why do you think we’ve got four telephones?”
There was nothing very wonderful about Malcolm’s knowing what I meant, but I’d never have volunteered the same confession to Oliver. Oliver can swivel his attention to anything with instant focus. He can work eighteen hours a day; he never moils. I saw it might be very comfortable, procrastinating in the same room with Malcolm.
“I’ll be an unconscionable nuisance,” he promised brightly.
Most of the new block’s decor had been dictated by the architect, but out of some kind of professional tact he had left our interior to us, with the result that we soon had the sloppiest quarters at East Anglian. I tacked up snapshots, portraits of Jill and juvenilia for which the walls at home had seemed in too sacred taste. Malcolm was constitutionally incapable of leaving a blank space blank, so he “did” his walls in innocuous graffiti—telephone numbers, Zen aphorisms, place names he fancied like Pwllheli and Goole. I offered him Two Egg, Florida, and East Jesus, South Dakota, but he said I was a friggin’ immigrant, and the next day my drawing board was a Union Jack. Malcolm didn’t believe in erasers. When he made a mistake he jammed the enemy page up and slung it over his shoulder. Sometimes at the end of the day he’d take a liking to a crumpled sheet, tape it to the skirting, pick up a brush and emphasize its contours into a hunched torso. Then he’d cartoon a face above it on the wall, with a hand reaching up to grasp the windowsill or a leg locked around the doorstop. The Survivors, he called these creatures, which were nevertheless swept out on Fridays while the wall grew dense with amputations and decapitations.
On the other side of Mom Pollard and Dillis Grebe was a further panel that led to drapery design, and beyond that to the Jacquard card cutters, then to woven stuffs, tapestry design and plaids. Someone or other was always coming through to get our opinion of a color, or Mom’s advice on a technical problem; secretaries from Admin came to rifle the files for some mysteriously needed correspondence of six years ago; PR arrived two or three times a week to show us off to a batch of students, tourists or prospective investors. And Malcom was an unconscionable nuisance. I raged and railed against the interruptions, fumed at the scum on my pots in the too-efficient heating, toyed incessantly with the wing nut of my drawing board looking for the magic angle that would let me work. I ordered a microscope, on company funds, and procrastinated whole mornings in nearby fields picking specimens for cross sections that I never used. I indulged myself, angry with guilt, to eight coffee breaks a day. I always seemed to be cleaning up yesterday’s mistakes or flailing headlong into some sappy rubble of the idea in my mind, with never any satisfaction, never any sense of purpose. My style got looser, so I could no longer reproduce my brush strokes with a knife in the film, and I had to waste several days learning photographic screening. In short, I’ve never worked so well.
Maybe I’d needed company. From the look of it we were an odd lot—a boyish queer with a mop of dark curls always ready to flop in affirmation, a mountain of a self-appointed Cockney mother figure, a California adolescent of thirty-odd, and a secretary we might have picked up in an Oxford Street boutique. We had among us a fair gamut of domestic worries, and Malcolm, Mom and Dillis had developed a rueful ease at intimacy into which I was absorbed at a single slurp. “You remember,” they’d say, forgetting, of some story shared a year ago. “You know.”
Malcolm’s domestic arrangements were at the moment the least troubled example of whatever it was they were the least troubled example of, part of the trouble being that this had no name. He had been whatever he had been, to or with, a King’s College history don named Gary Blenwasser for four years. But what? Married? They shared every aspect of that state except the official seal by which it earns its definition, and the social pressure to keep being it that is the inert cohesive force of marriages when they hit the rough.
“I’m his what? Wife?” Malcolm complained. “Consort? Roommate? ‘How do you do, this is my symbiot Gary Blenwasser?’ Let me tell you, there’s little enough to keep a homosexual relationship together without hiding it from the goddam dictionary.”
Malcolm had, at fourteen, confessed his bewildering tenderness for other boys to the family GP (“There are homosexuals that like men, and there are homosexuals that hate women; look you learn to distinguish them, m’dears, because you’re dealing with two separate species”), and had learned by the succeeding furor at home that his condition was excludable from the Hippocratic Oath. This experience left him paranoid in the one isolated area, whereas his (what? swain?) Gary was paranoid in a general they’re-after-me-today sort of way, heavy on the historical allusions. Consequently Malcolm and Gary kept their social lives distinct, each among his own professional colleagues, as if they were not prey to the jealousies, anxieties and resentments of a more conventionally cohabiting couple. However, they were in love.
“You poor old thing,” Dillis bitched at him benignly. “Nothing keeping you together but passion, and we have all the glory of the Institution.”
Dillis, whom strangers always took for “the artist” because of her startling eyes and drapable bones, wore the square gold rims that were back in fashion and jersey dresses that slipped around her little frame like glaze. I’d never exchanged a nonprofessional word with her before, and supposed she was about nineteen. In fact she was twenty-eight, and was married to an architectural engineer both sterile and inclined to assign the blame for it. On Migglesly Victoria Gynecological Unit, scungy test tubes, barren test rabbits, the medical community at large or, preferably, Dillis. She dealt with this scourge in a dollybird version of the old muddle-through. “I’m off early today, to the gynecology lab. Gotta check up the charts and take home some kind of proof there’s something wrong with me.”
“Why do you do that to yourself?” I asked. Dillis had a rabbit-wrinkling nose that was her only visible concession to emotion.
“Well, I’m not a rebel,” she said. “What options have I got? I either make the best of it or go out and rip up paving stones, you know what I mean?” I knew what she meant. “I like my work all right.” She pumped me for stories of Jill with an open sentimentality, out from under which her feelings burst now and again in a petulant, “But you’ve got her once a month!”
Mom Pollard, on the other hand, lived in a family extended beyond the bounds of reason, with generations insufficiently at gap, where the youngest of one was always younger than the eldest of the following; a renovated farmhouse so compounded of past and future shock that a certain aunt had once administered smelling salts to a twelve-year-old unconscious from sniffing glue. “We got a wog household and that’s a fact,” Mom said.
All the same, I observed once over the coffee and biscuits, we were an effete crew because not one of us worked primarily for money. D
illis and I were here to escape empty houses, Mom a house too full. Malcolm’s Gary would rather have preferred to keep him than otherwise.
“You work for your independence’s sake, “ I said.
“Independence is a side effect,” said Malcolm. “It’s my work. If I did it at home for nothing, it’d still be my work.”
“Maybe so,” I conceded, “but I don’t think it’s mine. I’d never have gone into design if it hadn’t been for Oliver. I wanted to paint.”
“You do paint!” He gestured exasperation. “What is it you think you do? Let’s face it, your best stuff comes off a microscope slide. Your eye isn’t scaled to canvas. You do fine where you are.”
“All right, I understand that, but you’ve got to let me see it as a compromise. Grant me a little nostalgia for the time I was going to shake the world.”
“You Americans. Such a pack of aristocrats.”
“You’d better run that one by me,” Dillis murmured.
“Two things essential to an aristocrat,” Malcolm said, warming up. He sat in a canvas chair, scattering shortbread crumbs every time he took a bite, and flicking them from his trousers with finesse. “Two things: a passion for the best, and an unshakable conviction that the best comes out of the past. Now the past you get all your grandeur from is straight talk and simple truth. That’s your tradition, your empire. That’s your crest: plain folks rampant on a sock in the jaw, argent.”
I saw what he meant. There’s a kind of honesty dead and dying that Truman carried into the presidency in a cracker barrel, but which was daily fare in homes like mine: I won’t do a botch, that’s what it matters.
“Yes, okay,” I said. “My dad is ready to tell you that the difference between stealing a penny and stealing a million bucks is a matter of the number of pennies involved.”
“The only trouble is, when the plain folks lose their wit and the truth’s not simple, you haven’t got much in the way of style to fall back on. You get bald corruption.”
Raw Silk (9781480463318) Page 6