“Sometimes it helps to talk.”
“I don’t want help.”
It didn’t occur to me that she might really mean this. “But you’re very unhappy,” I explained, patient for a stupid child. “You can be helped to be less unhappy.”
“Then who would I be?”
I hardly heard her. The difficulty of learning to listen to Frances was that she used words in a stark and tenuous relationship to reality as she saw it, and the reality she saw was an enclosed space where I had never been. She lived on another plane. She talked a different language. She inhabited another sphere. The modes of expressing my exasperation were clichés by contrast with her severe literalness. She had no tact, no humor and no self-image to project. For concealment she used silence, for change action. But I couldn’t know this because I had never known anyone who did not use words for concealment and for change, and at the time I saw us in the very simple relationship of a confused child and a competent woman, who therefore had no option but sympathy.
“Have you always been unhappy?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I was different when I was at home.”
“Can you go home?”
She shook her head and began to cry. She made very little fuss about it. No squinting, no sobbing, just water out of her eyes. I think that crying was as ordinary to her as any other bodily evacuation, as necessary and as controllable. When she had not cried for a time she had to cry, and when she was done she was relieved until she needed to cry again.
“My brother writes me,” she said. “My parents came up once but they don’t know what to do with me. What can they do with me? They feel sorry for me and it makes them angry.”
“I can understand that.”
This unusually long speech seemed to give her impetus for another, and she volunteered, lifting on her heels as she drew breath, “After I dropped out I spent six months in a kibbutz in Israel. My tutor set it up for me. They said I could come back to Cambridge after, but they were wrong. I couldn’t.”
“You liked the kibbutz?” But she didn’t know the answer to this, opened her hands as she had for Dillis and then adjusted them to hide the cuts. “What did you do there?” I asked.
“I picked apples.”
“Was that better? Were you happier picking apples?”
“I picked apples,” she repeated. “I was some … I had a use.”
This seemed to be a clue and I charged in after it. I’m not sure I didn’t think that Frances’s neurosis could be dealt with summarily, by means of a strong dose of common sense. “Well, all right, but think of it in real terms, Frances. To how many people, how often, were the apples useful? You’re useful to us here. Dozens of people need those files.”
“They were apples, though,” she said desperately.
“But this is cloth. People have to cover themselves. Cloth is as necessary as apples. Somebody kept files on the apples.”
“No. Some days, I could see the apple trees.”
“You can see the filing cabinet!” I said, knowing even before she turned her blank gaze on the filing cabinet that this was a silly thing to say, but suddenly infuriated that I was missing a ham salad and a glass of beer in witty company in order to argue the relative merits of filing cabinets and apple trees with a girl so sick she didn’t, by her own admission, want to be helped.
“I know apple trees are more beautiful than filing cabinets,” I said. “It’s got nothing to do with use. How much beauty can you use? I know about apple trees. I’ve got apple trees.”
She turned and grasped my wrist. To be touched by her was a violence, she allowed so little contact, which she seemed to know because she let me go at once.
“Can you see them? Always?”
And suddenly I couldn’t answer in the same tone. It was as if some vague, persistent apprehension had been given focus. Since I gave Jill up I’ve walked my garden blind and cold, dutifully forcing myself to the perimeters and driven to count the strawberry plants in order to remind myself that it is there and mine. I saw, a little, what she meant. And to see even a little of what Frances meant was uncomfortable.
“No, not always.”
Shockingly because this time deliberately, Frances reached with her punished hand to touch my hand.
So I gave up still more of the time I had pleasure in, perhaps three hours a week of it, and three times a week Mom, Dillis and Malcolm would go off to the refectory while I had lunch with Frances. That is, I had lunch, and I brought enough for the two of us, varying the menu inventively in case I might happen on something that she would eat. The only thing I discovered was tomato juice. I argued that if she didn’t eat she’d get sick, but she argued that she got sick when she ate, and that nothing she put down could do her any good if she brought it up again.
All her logic was circular and unanswerable. She lived in effortful apathy, walking against water, always uphill, the monotony broken only by nightmare and despair. But the thing she feared most was an unresisting return to normality because, as she said, all that she knew was her own, was pain. It was the only part of her identity she believed in. Everything else had been attached to her, mosaic bits of her family, religion, society, school. “I know the pain is true. It’s hard and can be trusted. If it leaves me what can I trust?” She still had a few acquaintances at Cambridge, and she went out with them sometimes, drank beer and smoked a little grass. It relieved her. Afterward she paid for it in dry heaves of self-disgust. “They tell jokes and talk cinema and wear things they have bought for so little at a jumble sale. Nobody listens but everybody laughs. There is no reaching out. And I’m enclosed, so if I go and if I laugh, who am I?”
I couldn’t pretend that I saw no truth in this severe analysis. “All right, Frances,” I said, “then that’s the way it is. Look, everybody’s afraid and everybody hates himself a little. Every day you’re dishonest some way or other and every day you forgive yourself. You do what you can, you learn to laugh, and over and over again, you find your balance.”
“You do,” she agreed solemnly. “You find your balance. And then one day you don’t.”
And it was really as simple as that. Nothing terrible had happened to her. She had slept with a few men in seedy digs and found it unpleasant but untraumatic. She had tried pot, speed and LSD but experienced no trip as terrifying as those offered her by simple sleep. She had become an atheist without regret. Only, one day she had been unable to read a book. Because she couldn’t read, she couldn’t write her paper. Not having written her paper, she couldn’t face her tutor. One day she couldn’t eat meat, and she lived on massive quantities of rice and mashed potato until starch gradually became to her as unswallowable as blood. When she came back from the kibbutz she had once tried suicide, but failed so badly that no one noticed, and it left the leaden round of her life unchanged.
“It’s existential anguish, you know,” I said. “It’s very fashionable.”
“All right.” Frances shrugged.
I tried another time. “I’ve always thought it was cruel that you must go to university at the end of your teens. You’ve left one family and haven’t started another. You don’t know where you’re going to live, or who with, or what you’re going to do. It’s hard to study in so much uncertainty. I was unhappy in college too, and didn’t have any idea what direction I wanted to go.” This was not quite true. I had known I wanted to go east.
“But you found your direction,” Frances said.
“I made choices, and I guess the choices found my direction for me.”
“You made the right choices,” she pressed.
“How do I know? Nobody ever knows. I know if I could go back to university now I could concentrate.”
Naturally enough, when I talked about Frances to the others in Design Print, I took the opposite tack. It was they who argued sense and balance, and I who defended her absolute impotence. She should get out more, they said. She should eat three meals a day. She should take an interest in
her looks.
“Of course she should. But where should she get the energy for the effort? People who have no talent should make up for it in industry. But industry is as much a gift as talent. It’s the same with Frances.”
“She wants to suffer.”
“Yes, all right. Wanting to suffer is part of the disease.”
“She should see a psychiatrist.”
“I know, but why? The idea revolts her. Unless she had some little faith it would help her, it wouldn’t help.”
“Well, then what can you do for her?”
“Nothing. I can sit on the floor. I can eat three sandwiches a week. Nothing, maybe. But so what? Suppose she’s terminally mad. When people have cancer or leukemia there’s nothing you can do, but you don’t refuse to change their sheets. You bring books and sweets, you sit there. It’s perfectly futile but you stick to it because as long as they’re alive you have to let them feel they’re part of the living.” Embarrassed by my eloquence, I added, “Some sucker’s got to hold her hand.”
“It’s a bitch,” Malcolm granted.
“It is. And it’s also somehow fine.”
This must be wrong. Obviously Frances was unbalanced, and the unremitting examination of her ego was as useless to anyone else as it was destructive to her. She was a bad influence on me, in the sense of a bad example, because she was of the people I knew the one who had most completely given up, most ceased to try. And yet her self-hatred seemed to me the only thoroughgoing honesty I had witnessed. It spared no crevices; it was the emotional equivalent of my father’s views on theft.
My own honesty was less complete. I shouldn’t have chattered about her to the others. I should have given them, as I gave Oliver, a bare outline of the anecdotal facts, because if she had chosen to extend her tentative contact to them she could easily have done so. So that when I rehearsed in the afternoon the hurt she laid bare at noon, I was betraying her in exactly the way that she understood betrayal. But I had to make a choice; they were curious and they were my friends. They had every precedent to expect I had no secrets from them. I wasn’t willing for Frances’s sake to shut out the people for whom I had an easier affinity. As if it would compensate her for this choice, I aggrandized her intelligence, dignified her suffering. Whereas the lunches themselves were tedious, full of awkward silences and repetitions of the same grim ground, in describing them to Malcolm, Mom and Dillis I left out those parts and gave them only the moving moments, the flashes of perception. I liked Frances better talking about her than talking to her.
The three of them began to treat her more gently, asking trifles of her that would make her feel necessary. It was Malcolm’s habit, when he had a rough sketch he liked, to shove it at us, demanding what was wrong with this color, that line. Now he included Frances: “Would you wear it? Would it go in your crowd?”—ignoring that she always wore the same outfit, that she admitted to no crowd, and that she steadfastly refused to deliver an opinion. Frances was much too sensitive not to notice her new status, yet she never accused me of the obvious thing.
What she did accuse me of was charity. “Don’t think you have to stay with me,” she would weep, bending into the rug again in that attitude of tense abjection. We always sat on the floor, as if our original meeting had relegated us to that spot. I spread the lunch beside me, within her reach but not in front of her, because she was sure to need that space to bend into, to fold over her pain.
“Why do you do that?”
She didn’t know. The position seemed to help. It—she spoke of “it” as if the pain were a thing outside herself that descended on her at will, physical and yet belonging to no particular place—it was better contained in the fetal crouch, as crying helped to let it out.
“You feel obligated,” she accused. “You feel sorry for me.”
For a time I denied this, and then one day, bored with the repetition of denial, I didn’t. “Yes, I feel obligated. I like you and you interest me. But Malcolm’s funnier. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you need me. Since I do think you need me, I’d feel rotten if I didn’t stay. It’s perfectly selfish. I’ve always needed to feel virtuous.”
Her attention was riveted by this. “Altruism,” she offered.
“Sure. What else do you think it means, that virtue is its own reward?”
“All-truism,” she said, which pleased us both.
“So I lunch here because it makes me feel good. If I didn’t care about you a little, I don’t suppose I’d give a shit. Why don’t you accept that little?”
Which of course she did. It was exactly the measure she could accept. Her vulnerability was not an ordinary sort, being as she was more wounded by a fulsome flattery than a stingy truth. I admired her very much for it.
And for some reason, aimlessly, maybe hoping not to dwindle from this point into another silence, I picked up The Young Lady’s Book of Botany. I showed her the fastidious drawings, which I was trying to adapt to my own purposes, and read her a few passages I liked, including one from the chapter “Fungi”:
But it may be asked, how is the case of rubigo, the red rust, or blight on wheat, to be accounted for? On one day, the whole field looks healthy and promising, the straw of a bright golden appearance, and the ears nearly filled; in a few days afterward, the golden hue is altered to a dead white. Instead of the bright gloss, ranks of black lines soil the surface and change it to a dingy shade, checking and exhausting the current of the sap, and robbing the grain of half its bulk.
We searched to see if he had answered his own question, which he had not, except in terms of “night frost” and “stagnant atmosphere,” concluding only, to his apparent satisfaction, that although “our admiration is strongly excited when we contemplate the powers of fungus life, in which nature has been so prodigal,” in this case we could not “reconcile ourselves to contemplate the phenomenon with gratitude” because it was “apparently a misfortune.”
There was no need to explain my pleasure in this author to Frances’s pellucid mind. Though I’d never dared call attention to the scratches on her cheeks, the cuts on her hands, she spread her palms on her diaphragm now (did I imagine to my own credit that the backs were healing, hadn’t been scarified for several weeks?) and said, “I’ve got the red rust.” It relieved her extravagantly to give her hurt a name. She no longer spoke of “it” but of “the rubigo.”
“How’s the rubigo?” I’d greet her conspiratorially, and she’d answer, “So-so,” on good days, with a clench of her eyes on bad. Though when it comes to that, the code was no code, since I had meanwhile entertained Malcolm, Mom and Dillis with the blight on wheat.
9
TO THE DEGREE THAT Frances had forgiven me for feeling obligated to her, my obligation intensified. Jill came home in July for her five-week summer holiday, and I worked at home in that period, back at the routine I’d had before she went away. But twice a week I left Jill with Mrs. Coombe, put a chicken leg and whatever berries the garden was yielding into a paper bag, and did the eighteen miles into Norfolk to “have lunch with” Frances. Usually I stayed to say hello to the others too, and it must have been in the third week that Malcolm brought up the merger.
“What does Oliver think of the Utagawa thing?”
“The what?”
“You know, the merger.”
I shook my head. He blushed and fumbled, which was rather unlike Malcolm. “Well, it’s all over the factory; Admin must have been looking over it for weeks. I thought Oliver, I just reckoned he’d naturally …” He gave an apologetic laugh. “I thought you were keeping it from us.”
“Well,” I said wryly, “apparently not. What’s the deal?”
Syncopated, with a bunch of half-finished gestures that were more in Nicholson’s style than his own, Malcolm told me what he knew. The Japanese textile industry had been thrown into panic by rumors of an incipient American embargo on textile imports, and some companies were casting around for alternative markets. One major firm, Utagawa of Osaka, ha
d approached East Anglian with a “sister company” proposal, by which we would act as distributors for their silks and cottons in the U.K. and supply them with British wool and certain synthetics. They would send us Japanese looms and technicians, now superior in every respect to the home product, and we would initiate them into the so-called secrets of the new British ascendancy in world fashion. Since dress design was the center and substance of this last, Design Print would be intimately affected. But the merger would involve further expansion and personnel exchange between Norfolk and Osaka, and opinion was bitterly divided in the plant. It was bound to mean more money; nobody was averse to money. But local employment was already high to saturation in textiles; expansion would mean an influx of strangers both British and Japanese, cheap estate building and a two-shift day at the looms, which meant women working evenings, which meant altering the life of the villages. Worse, who wanted to relocate to Japan? They’d need administrative staff, technical trainees, card cutters. It was rumored—Malcolm knew all about my troubles at home, but I dragged this from him—that Oliver as well as Tyler Peer was being considered for the directorship of the Osaka operation.
“You mean, to move? That Oliver and I would move to Japan?”
“Jesus, Virginia,” Malcolm said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what you’re sorry for. If it’s all over the mill, I guess it’s time somebody let me in on it.”
“Will you let him … will you wait for him to tell you about it?”
“I don’t know, Malcolm. At the moment I could wring his neck with it.”
Oliver was two hundred yards away at Admin, but I went home. I hadn’t told him I was coming in today, and I felt peculiarly incapable of confronting him on his ground. I also wanted to think, if thinking is the right word for that mixture of chill and churning anger. Images of Oliver over the last few weeks kept flashing through my mind, innocent images of his discussing potato storage with Mr. Wrain, approving my poulet en papillote, reading tales of Elizabeth I to Jill; and I tried to take in that he had been keeping from me news that any weaver would share with her least acquaintance, that was hearsay in the boiler room and policy decision in the echelons that formed our social circle, and that would alter every professional and domestic aspect of my life. I drove with deliberate calm, not using the mini as an effigy this time but as a demonstration of my control, and tried to take it in, that he could do this, that he could fail to, neglect to, not think it worth his while to, that he could live at my table and in my bed and leave to Malcolm the humiliating revelation not of the news itself but of the cold official distance Oliver kept from me. Wild fantasies occurred to me in the guise of explanation: that Oliver was going to Japan without me, that he was going with another woman, that Administration had conspired to keep the news from Oliver himself; but none of them came anywhere near the mundane likelihood that he hadn’t told me because he didn’t choose to.
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