Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  “Well, I’m sure I never did any such thing,” said Jeremy. “Nor thought about it either.”

  “It did me no harm. It did me good. I remember her with great affection.”

  They sat awkward for me, each in his own style, Oliver stiff and Mabel fluttery, Jeremy aloof. Finally Oliver, cocking a rigid grin at each of the Jeromes in turn, confided, “Virginia is a liberal.”

  I don’t remember too much about the next half hour. Jeremy told us they were thinking of spending next Easter in Alicante and then told us everything we ever wanted to know about Catholic passion festivals but were afraid to ask. Mabel told us how she was going to tell Louise but not Janice that Polly had said that the reason she Polly didn’t think she Mable liked her was because Alison had said that Mabel had said that Polly had excluded me Virginia from the invitation list of a jumble sale benefit last December, which Mabel did not remember saying but may have said as a joke, which turned out not to be funny in so much as Polly therefore shunned Louise which annoyed Mabel at Alison and threatened to spoil next Saturday. Or something like that. And they left.

  I sloughed my clothes beside the bed, pulled a nightgown over my head and fell onto the pillow. It seemed to me that morning had occurred about the middle of the eighteenth century, and I think I slept at once. I certainly slept, because I was certainly waked by the slap of Oliver’s belt being drawn out of its loops. He was standing over me at the foot of the bed, shirt unbuttoned and shirttail out, weighing the heft of his buckle in his hand. I couldn’t see his expression but I could see the shelf of his forehead in the cold light, and the sweat on it. He was swaying a little, meditative, until he cut at his calf with the belt, and all at once I was awake and sober. He lurched toward the dressing table and laid the belt across the stool with meticulous care, smoothing it lengthwise through two loose fists. It snaked off anyway and clattered against the wastebasket.

  “Bitch,” he said in the direction of the belt.

  I watched through my lashes, possum, while he ripped at his cuffs so one button popped and pinged against my foot. He shouldered himself out of his shirt, shoved his trousers and shorts to the floor and flung the whole bundle after the belt, all in movements of a rolling, significant sort, as if he were a very much more muscular man. He grunted at the effort and turned around saying “Bitch” again, not ambiguously this time. I had a feeling that something important might be taking place, the way I had when he shut me up in the East Anglian lounge, except that I don’t suppose a hard-on offers much in the way of revelation.

  It was shocking all the same. It was against the rules. Our sex takes place under cover by mutual consent; we’ve never been voyeurs even of ourselves. Now he was standing there in the raw, a skinny-pallid tube of a man with a perpendicular handle of a cock that he handled, once; and he looked, precisely, raw. What was he playing at? He clenched his fists and flexed his belly, but at the same time the dim light burnished gooseflesh around the nipple, and his balance was a little stylized. I wanted both to giggle and to run. He stumbled toward me and I gave up the sham of sleep, saying, “Come on, Oliver!” but I didn’t know if I meant “Please don’t” or “Don’t be silly.” If you run into Richard Speck in a dark alley you have a right to expect the worst, but how do you hold up your head if you fall victim to Ray Bolger?

  I did gasp out a giggle. At which he tore the covers down, and the cold air panicked all the surface of my skin. I reached to cover my breasts; I had no impulse to cover my face or my cunt but only, oddly, my breasts, which were as bruisable as bargain fruit.

  “I am afraid of you,” I said, meaning it now, but the qualm in my voice came out as phony as his Tarzan lunge. He dragged at my nightgown and when I let go of one breast to resist he pinned my wrists on the pillow, my hair trapped under them so that my face was stretched back and my neck exposed. I couldn’t swallow and it wasn’t funny anymore. “Don’t,” I began saying, but he ground his teeth against my teeth and his kneecap into my pubic bone. I thrashed but he had me pinned by the hair and the groin and it hurt only me, the skin of my skull yanked back and my nipples stinging. I bit but he was offering nothing to my teeth but teeth, and now I hurt enough to know that I was going to hurt; I was afraid of being hurt and of his contemptible revenge, and above all of my sour unforgiving contempt of it: don’t, I’m afraid of you, you fool.

  He shunted my knees aside with his knees and tore into me dry. It was like cloth being torn. I could feel the fibers snap and the words “blunt instrument” came into my mind with inane clarity, as words, each letter thrust by penstrokes into the cold dark: b-l-u-n-t i-n-s-t-r-u-m-e-n-t. And like blood following a dull blow, mechanically and against my will I began to lubricate for him, so that every angry slam was easier and more humiliating. I will be dry! I will not make it easy! But I did. The hot slop of involuntary submission let him deeper in, and my neck and chest began to sweat for him.

  “Don’t, Oliver.”

  Which made him pull out of me in a cold rush. He took one arm, wrenched it across me and kneed me over, hooking one arm under my belly the way I had picked Jill up the stairs, dragging me toward him on my knees and elbows while I said: don’t. And he said: bitch. My head was too close to the wall so the first thrust from behind sent my skull into it, and he dragged me back once more, which was the only thing I successfully resisted. If he was going to rape me let me crouch like a loony battering my head against the wall. He dug upward inside then, the hell with it; the blunt lump slammed like a shuttle into that space that is not really a space but a displacement of infinitely malleable parts, and I listened to my hair scratch plaster on the rebound.

  He took a long time. He’d had a lot to drink. After a while my head went numb, and then the slapped surface of my thighs, and then the numbness spread up and in until what I mainly felt was the raw sheet grating on my elbows. I was aware of being on all fours ass-upward, whimpering, a cartoon, with a bunch of Biba lace scrunched into my armpits, but I didn’t see there was much I could do about it. They don’t tell you what to do when this happens to you. They tell you to carry a sharp object in your handbag, they tell you to avoid dark places and walk in groups of three or four. They tell you to scream, but they don’t describe to you what your screaming will accomplish if the only people in earshot are two seven-year-old girls. I had a feeling it wasn’t really me this important, trashy thing was happening to, the way you experience something in a film without ever quite losing sight of the fact that the lights will come up on your empty popcorn bag. I didn’t care much about anything but his being done, and then I didn’t care much about that anymore. I thought: well, I’m being fucked, and also: I asked for it, and: nothing will ever be the same again, and: it probably will. And finally he came gritting his teeth against my neck, let himself collapse on me, and rolled off, asleep.

  12

  “IT ISN’T WHAT I mean.”

  “Of course it isn’t what you mean. It’s never what you mean. Do you know what you mean? Do you think what I paint is what I mean, bug guts and flower petals? How should it be what you mean, unless your brain was made up of graphite and linseed oil? It’s a translation.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s a translation of what’s in your mind, into a medium where other people can see it.”

  “No”

  “Yes. It’s only rubble of the idea in your mind. It’s wreckage. But it’s also salvage, good solid broken bricks, and it can be used over again by other minds. It doesn’t matter a damn whether you’ve expressed yourself. All you’ve done is painted, and the painting relieves you. Doesn’t it relieve you?”

  “No.”

  Frances was limp in the overstuffed chair, wearing the pale pajamas and a brown plaid man’s bathrobe that the nurse had dredged up for her somewhere. Too big for her, bulky and worn, it bunched around her in fat folds and she tried to shrink into it like a recoiling tortoise. They had said she could get up, and I had urged her up, to admire the garden which was, in truth, rather barr
en and dismal with the last few leaves twitching spastically on the branches and the flower borders rotting back into themselves. But I thought she should be up. Partly to prevent her going back to bed, I had spread her sketches over the blue coverlet, and demanded that she look at them.

  “You don’t know,” she said. “You can mean.”

  “Frances, I won’t let you do this. You can’t get out of understanding me by pretending I don’t understand you. I am not ignorant and I am not callous. It’s you who are arrogant, if you think that because I can function I can’t feel.”

  “I never said.”

  “Well then, listen to me. I went through it too. More ignorantly, more carelessly if you like, but I went through it, and gave up what I wanted to do in favor of what I can do. I can decorate; but you can move. You have a ‘gift,’ Frances. And a gift carries a responsibility; it’s ingratitude to throw it away.”

  “Words,” she accused faintly, pulling her neck into the soft brown shell.

  “All right then, be angry with me, and paint anger. But paint it out. Outward. At someone. Anyone. Drink your tea.”

  Obediently she picked the cup off the nightstand and lifted it to a limp mouth. She glanced at me and I watched her deliberately. I had sugared it for the sake of the calories, pretending not to know that she took no sugar in the tea she did not drink. I had not thought it my business to tell her that she would be fed intravenously if she didn’t eat, but I was determined to tempt or force her to whatever food I could find. She took a mouthful of the tea; her throat and chin convulsed with the effort of swallowing, and my own throat and stomach mimicked the muscle spasms. She repeated the effort. Again.

  “Try this,” I said. “Your kind of suffering is a matter of being trapped inside yourself. You’re self-centered, very literally; everything spirals down in you toward the knot of pain at the center, and you can’t reach out. Isn’t that somewhere near it?”

  She nodded, attentive and at the same time trying to hide in the folds, behind the cup.

  “But that—sentence on you—isn’t absolute. You have a thing you can do that comes out of yourself onto paper. It isn’t a very good way out, maybe, it seems unconnected and mechanical. But then, all right, it’s mechanical. Think of it as a mechanism. Use it coldly. Or however you can. Because it’s all you’ve got.”

  “I have not got.”

  “Yes, you have. You expect too much. All anybody ever has is work and love. And neither of them is a bargain. Love gives it to you all at once, for free, and then afterward it makes you pay, and pay. Work takes extravagant down payments in advance, and then gives you a little gumball of satisfaction. But that’s all you get. If you turn it down you get nothing, which is what you asked for.”

  “You can be. You can mean,” she said again, more irrelevantly than before. I knew her language and I knew what the syntax masked: you can be mean. And I knew perfectly well what I was doing: I was kicking somebody who had fainted on parade drill. But I felt a perverse exhilaration even in this, that I was adopting Oliver’s tactics to deal with Frances against his will. I felt, in fact, altogether exhilarated, and I remembered hearing, or reading, that humiliation sometimes produces such a reaction. Subjugation of the flesh, is it? I had risen in the dark and left before either Oliver or the girls were awake. I’d walked the Cambridge Backs at dawn, driven aimlessly down farmroads, been at the hospital by ten. And I knew I wasn’t going back until it suited me, even though force of long habit tricked me at every crook in the road, every corner of my brain, that Jill would be bewildered at my absence, that Oliver would not know what to say, that he might need to go out, that he would not know what to do with Maxine. The persistence of these tricks amazed me. How should it ever come about, that a woman stumbles over guilt at leaving her husband the responsibility of one Saturday?

  I picked up the sketch of the crouching nude and held it in front of her, tracing the spine with my finger. “It’s good,” I asserted sternly. I showed her one of her tabbies, the bat with the rabid teeth. “People,” I said, “would like to look at these. Are you so stingy?”

  She hid in the tea again, taking in order to do so a mouthful that went down more easily than the others. Excited, I said, “Suppose I arrange an exhibition of your paintings,” but that was absurd, because even if I should find a gallery willing to exhibit them they were not available. Nobody was going to peel the frescoes from Mrs. Fromkirk’s wall. And it was not likely that anyone would display the pencil sketches of an unknown, done on the cheapest W. H. Smith artist’s block. Still it was the right thing to say. Although her eyes showed the familiar alarm, she stayed silent a moment, considering me and considering this suggestion which therefore existed in the same universe as herself, before she said, “I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t what? You wouldn’t have to do anything. It could be anonymous if you like.”

  “No. Please.”

  “All right,” I relented, “but then let me do this. I want your permission to do this. I want to tack up these sketches at the studio. I’ll say I did them or I’ll invent somebody who did. The others won’t guess they’re yours and I won’t tell them. It’ll be a secret between us, and we’ll see what they say. We’ll see if I’m right, that you can mean, even if it’s not what you mean.”

  “You don’t need to be permitted. They’re yours now.”

  “That’s not the point. I do need to be permitted. Give me the chance to prove I’m not being kind, and that I’m not wrong. Frances, don’t lie to me, don’t lie to yourself; wouldn’t it matter a little, if you turned out to be very good?”

  She lowered herself to the teacup again but it was empty, and both of us registered this with a catch of a laugh in which I emerged Schoolmarm Victorious. Frances set it down and began to cry.

  “I love you, goddammit,” I said. “And I want you to paint your way out of here.”

  “No,” said Frances, hopefully.

  In all these years I had never been to the mill on a weekend. I was impressed by its emptiness, the tarmac lots painted out into car-sized spaces like some acre-long abandoned game, the fluted smokestacks more like spires without their smoke, the silence of the looms that usually penetrated to the highway with their noise. It occurred to me how few countries would now permit such benevolent waste, that so much expensive space and equipment should be laid idle for two days in order that the workers should be home pottering over their bulbs and Yorkshire pud. It also occurred to me that I myself, had formed no opinion on the Japanese merger, and I formed one on the spot. I was against.

  I encountered one light passing the furnishing fabric studio, and peered in to recognize Clive Tydeman bent over a drawing board in a green eyeshade. It seemed significant that he should be the only other Saturday worker, though I knew him no better than the two dozen others at that end of the block, and though perhaps in that mood I could have extracted significance from anything. Clive was, more than myself and at the opposite end of the scale from Frances, someone who fussed at the edge of craft, tenacious of his tiny talent and constantly aspiring by means of diligence and discipline to turn it into something more. Most of his time was spent transferring eighteenth-century hunting tapestries onto Jacquard cards, or inventing new color schemes for William Morris patterns. But occasionally he got a design of his own through the censoring powers, something always exemplary and inoffensive, something for rocking chairs and bedroom windows. I waved in case he should look up and see me, but his focus on the pool of lamplight was absolute.

  I let myself into Design Print and began by clearing a space over my drawing board for Frances’s sketches. The wall here was covered in cream hessian over a porous pressboard so that anything could be tacked anywhere, and I put nearly all of them up at random, pressing a tack between each pair so that the head of it held them without perforating them. Only the Rubigo design and the abstractions that led to it I set aside on my drawing board, because it was important this time not to break trust with Frances. I had fi
nally omitted my own wheat blight pattern—not a very handsome disease—from the spring submissions, but Malcolm, Mom and Dillis had seen it in the various stages of my mulling over it, and just might recognize it in this stronger version. I stepped back to look at the wall, and tried to look objectively. It was possible that my feeling for Frances, or mere surprise, had distorted my judgment in her favor. But I couldn’t see it. They seemed good. Unprofessionally smudged, on unprofessionally chosen paper, in this professional context they still seemed gaunt and strong. I wished it were Monday, or else that my skittish energy would settle down into a mood for work.

  Pretty sure it wouldn’t but not wanting to go, I sat on the stool and swiveled back and forth over the Rubigo pattern. It was hard to know exactly why it was so much stronger than my own. The bold thickness of the lines, partly, but more than that. She had left out the stomate and air cavities, the mere anatomy of the disease, and concentrated on the two main adversary organs. The central form was a taut five-fingered fan, reaching down into a drift of uneven circles that might be mud bubbles, or fish eggs, or sprouting cells. Yet, I could see that the delta shape was given movement, a forward thrust in the random growth, by the distortion of the cells it touched, as if it were pressing nervously into them. Such a form in repetition would give an impression of mobile fecundity that …

  I unlocked the duplicating room and ran a dozen photo-copies of the sketch, which I took back to the board and scissored down to the line edges. I taped them together on the drawing board, three repetitions wide and four high, the first row with the fan thrusting downward, the second up, the third down again. The edges were not perfectly matched for repetition, but by altering only a few strokes I could match them so that the stronger cells toward the bottom of the design slotted into the more delicate top ovals of the next. The upper lines of the central form, its “wrist,” could be turned easily outward to meld into the circles of the pattern above, so that the shape seemed to sprout from the cells into which it threateningly moved, constantly forward, held in tension against the line of shapes beside it, which moved constantly up and back. By shifting the center series a half motif up I made the hand-things almost link, thumb into finger, so that the whole was both in movement and held in check. It was terrific.