It was also no bloody use for dress fabric. It was so strong that any small woman who wore it would be annihilated by it, whereas any big woman would turn into a billboard. There might be a six-foot black-haired flash-eyed wasp-waisted Russian somewhere who could carry it off, but there was nobody the length of Oxford Street I’d trust it to. If I scaled it down to a size that would make it wearable the whole point of its force would be lost. What it really wanted was to be scaled up, printed on a fabric with weight and body, hung over a whole wall of a high-ceilinged room.
I took the original sketch to the opaque projector and flashed it onto the hessian wall triple-sized, then focused it back down to double so that the whole motif was about eighteen inches by twenty-four. I tacked a fresh sheet over the hessian and inked the lines in with a flat three-eighth-inch brush. It was too big now for the duplicator so I had to squint and imagine it in repetition. And I wasn’t sure. For one thing, the ink lost the grainy tentative quality of graphite over pebbled surface, and it was flattened by this, made less organic. I wasn’t sure that even photographic screening could reproduce the nervous texture of the original. I wasn’t sure that even in a large room it wouldn’t be too overwhelming, wouldn’t dwarf furniture and drown conversations.
I mulled and squinted over it, deciding it was spectacular, deciding it was a disaster, annoyed that Malcolm wasn’t there to decide for me, or Dillis to make one of her self-deprecating and incisive judgments. There was nobody there but Clive Tydeman … in Furnishing. Of course.
I left the original but took both the photocopied mock-up and the inked enlargement down the sidewalk to the tapestry section. I rapped half a dozen times on the window before Clive started up, whipped the eye-shade off his bald patch and scuttled to the door.
“Virginia Marbalestier, well, I didn’t know you were a Saturday drudge. C’m in, c’m in.”
“I’ve got a thing here that won’t come right, and I need another eye on it.”
“I know, absolutely, isn’t it a bitch the way they won’t let go of you?”
He led me back to his board where a spray of meticulous forget-me-not was taking shape in a cluster of primula. It would have made fine blouse stuff.
“Just let me clear this nonsense away and spread you out. Divine to see you, really, absolute tomb around here, isn’t it?”
Clive is not more than five foot five, has a sparrow-high lilting voice and an endearing habit of pounding one fist into the other palm just in case anybody should suspect he is not at ease. None of his words precisely begin or end but are strung on a cord of absolutelys, don’t-you-agrees and just-sos as if they might otherwise scatter and roll under the carpet. A lightweight Nicholson in this respect, and more effeminate in his manner by far than Malcolm, though he is known to be, as well as a plodder, both an inveterate flirt and a devoted family man.
“Now let’s see what you’ve got, do me good to look at something else anyway, you know how it is, you go perfectly blind after a while.”
I lay the taped photocopy on his board and watched his face. He’d say it was marvelous in any case (if for no other reason than that I was Marbalestier’s wife) so I had to look for his real reaction.
“Oh my. Yes, my.” He stole a glance at his primula, looked back at this abstract blow to the eye, and sighed. “Well, I mean, it’s splendid, isn’t it. It’s so, my goodness, strong.” He struck the fist in the palm.
“That’s the trouble, you see. It’s no good for us, it’s too strong for dress fabric. You’d have to be seven feet tall and have a twelve-inch rib cage to wear it, if you see what I mean.”
“I do; I do. You are wicked, you know; now you want to come in and take over furnishing fabrics.”
“Well, I don’t know, what do you think?” I lay the enlargement on top of the other. “It ought to be this size for hanging, I think, but then maybe it’s still too stark.”
“N-n-no, it’s not that exactly. Well, it’s not the kind of thing we do, is it? So contemporary.”
“Yes, maybe. Maybe I’ll just scrap it.”
“Well now, no, hang on a minute, you mustn’t do that. There’s little enough, isn’t there? I mean … look, had you thought of a low-contrast color scheme?”
“No, I hadn’t. Let me think.” The black and white of the original, made sharper still in the inked version, had seemed so indigenous to the design that I hadn’t gone as far as planning variations. Now I squinted again and pictured the Rubigo in rubigo colors, red on rust or gray on wheat. It might work. It would mute the blast without destroying the power of the form.
“Or look here, Virginia. I say! This is probably a silly idea …”
“No, what?”
“Well, wouldn’t it be fun—what would you say to damask?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, weave it instead of printing, sort of absolutely the most elegant old-fashioned weave …” He rummaged in a pile of samples and brought out a cutting of a traditional pattern in linen damask, a full-blown silky flower set in depth relief against the rougher background, beige on cream, the colors differing less in pigment than in texture.
“They’ve been doing it for years on the Continent; really, we’re so behind. A really modern sort of pattern in this fine … I mean, it’s got such wonderful body, hasn’t it? And you get this texture mutation that’s so rich, wonderful really.”
“Clive, wrap it up. I’ll take it.” He pounded the fist in the palm, I kissed him on the cheek, we laughed together and set to squabbling over color samples.
“What do you say to ocher and sienna?”
“Too much contrast. Keep the tones as close together as the old damask and let the texture do the work. Ocher and amber, rather. Taupe and mole, brick and rust. And no cool tones. No blues. It isn’t water, it’s growth.”
“But you won’t go in for avocado, will you? Those decorator sort of shades?”
“Christ no. They’ll be having it in motels. We might try a couple of dark rotting greens.”
“Hunter and forest.”
“That’s it. Look, Clive, reverse the warp and weft so the pattern is the rougher texture and lies behind the ground, do you see? You’ll get the sense of the pencil sketch with that, the grainy thing.”
“Oh, yes, my, fantastic. I’ll cut a card and submit it to the office, shall I? You’ll leave it with me?”
I hesitated. “Yes, all right.”
He glanced wistfully at his posies again. “I envy your strength, Virginia, I really do.”
“Well. It’s not the kind of thing I usually do, is it?”
“No, absolutely, it’s more dramatic. Smashing, really. You’re getting better.”
Nobody asked where I’d been. Did this disappoint me? They, Oliver and Jill, had taken Maxine home and gone to pick hazelnuts along Millington Road, and we sat cracking them into a wooden bowl at the kitchen table. It was too late in the season and most of them were black and shriveled. I couldn’t quite place Oliver’s mood. He was no longer angry but he wasn’t conciliatory either. He lounged with a foot on the rung of a chair, holding forth about the superior hazelnuts of his Yorkshire childhood, and the advantages of automated looms. I finally decided that he was: serene. He’d raped me and now he was feeling better, thanks. I tried to hold onto the exhilaration of the day. I read the Times and saw that there was a new exhibition of Goya’s etchings at the Royal Academy, “The Disasters of War,” which I had not seen since early pregnancy at the Prado. I thought perhaps at breakfast I would, serenely, mention that I was spending the day in London.
Not until Jill was in bed did Oliver ask, in a neutral tone, “Did you see Frances?”
“For a while, this morning.”
“And how is she?”
“She’s all right. I spent most of the day at the mill.”
“Oh, yes. You must have had the place all to yourself
“Clive Tydeman and I. He’s trying out a pattern in damask for me.”
“Moving in on furnishing
fabrics, are you?”
“That’s what Clive said.”
But when, presuming on this cool distance, I took my pillow to the guest room, he came after me.
“Come to bed, Virginia. I won’t have you sleeping in here.”
“You won’t have it?”
“I want you to come, then. I have no intention of touching you, I assure you.”
“If you have no intention of touching me, then there’s not much point our sleeping in the same bed, is there?” I waited to hear that it was the principle of the thing.
“I don’t like it. I won’t sleep. Why are you so angry?”
“Why?” But after all I left it at that, picked up my pillow and padded after him. It wasn’t worth quarreling, spoiling the pleasure of my secret. In bed he gave me a proprietary pat on the rump and rolled away.
I said, in a mentioning sort of way, “I thought I’d go down to the Royal Academy tomorrow.” Silence. “Jill might like to come.” A cowardly afterthought.
“You can’t do that. The Nicholsons are here for tea, remember?”
My mouth opened on the suggestion that he could make a pot of tea. Then closed again. It was not a suggestion I could make with serenity. And I supposed I would not go to London, would hand round crustless cress sandwiches, and brioche from that Viennese bakery we were all so lucky to have out here in the hinterlands. Oliver slept at once and it was I who lay awake, considering my strange immobility these several years, I who had defined myself by travel, as a traveler. It was six months since I’d been to London, I hadn’t been out of the country since Jill was born. I had never been back to visit my dad, which God knows I had money enough to do. And I didn’t know why. Out of inertia, partly, the illusion of a pressing life; but, more than that, out of a dread of going backward, westward, in even the most temporary way, as if I should find pieces of myself I couldn’t assimilate. If I ever went to California again I would go over the pole. I was stung with a sudden longing to smell the sea.
To quell which I concentrated on the Rubigo, the fine effect it would have in relief, both bold and vulnerable. I saw the rough and glossy threads against each other, impatient to see the cloth in fact, with that excitement that passes for professional enthusiasm but that, really, has no more dignity than a child’s waiting for Christmas. A Christmas secret this time, which I, who had made a sin of revealing everything but Christmas secrets, could absolutely keep from Frances. I wouldn’t say anything to her until I could come into her room at the hospital, unfurl a three-yard stretch of it over the bed, and say: see, you did that.
And that meant, of course, deliberately keeping it from Oliver, which seemed to have a certain significance because I’d always made such a point of marital honesty. I picked through my memory to see whether I had ever before really lied to him, and the pickings were admirably slim. I was so well brought up. I never had any squandering to conceal, and couldn’t have cheated at cards, let alone at sex. I had written a couple of notes to Jay Mellon that I hadn’t mentioned, but if I had heard from him I’d most likely have said so. Truly my father’s daughter. And then I came across something and, curiously enough, it had obliquely to do with Goya.
I missed my period in Paris, and by Madrid Oliver and I were anxiously confirming hour by hour: so far so good, nothing yet. Trying to suppose I was queasy, I walked around the Prado all week among “The Disasters of War,” the canvases of ghoulish firelit ass heads and the devouring teeth of Saturn, trying to swallow Goya into my retina. Then I moved through the portraits and village scenes, and became intent on finding a connecting thread, some hint in the pastels and pompous uniforms, that Goya must go the way he had into rage and madness. And I found it, in the leering masks of the village fairs, in the cretin cruelty of the “Boys Playing at Soldiers,” in the dry, wry acceptance of the Contessa di Calvianeri, whom the artist had palpably liked, and in the satirical smirk of Ferdinand VII, whom he had not. Still—I was twenty-five, and not yet reconciled to a life in industry—I was uncomfortable with these sentimental and mercenary compromises. I wanted to think of myself as having greater sympathy with the mad pacifist, and I went back again and again to Saturn with the bloody body of his child.
One afternoon when I left the museum, walking near the Alcalá in the harsh sunlight, I found myself in a plaza filled with curious volcanic rocks and twisted trees. That the square housed a fish market in the morning was evident not only from the smell, not only from the piles of shark heads and bonita spines still in the gutters, but from the plethora of lazing, dangling, curled and crawling cats. They lay along the branches and shouldered up the rocks. There were so many that the duller ones were camouflaged until they moved, and this gave the place a jungle sense, of hidden or hiding life. A young man in a soldier’s uniform began to follow me at a little distance.
I ignored him for a while, then lost him by dipping in and out of circumlocutions on the path. Around one corner I came abruptly upon a dark tabby, lying on her side in a clearing, convulsed and caterwauling in the act of birth. Two blind, wet kittens already staggered against her back as she arched, curled, emitted a dark stream of mucus and a furious howl. Other cats skirted her indifferently. I set down my bag and squatted by her, fascinated and a little perplexed, because I had watched cat birth before, and thought it easy. This had the bleak and bloody, sightless senselessness of Goya, who was still powerfully in my mind.
The tabby whipped her head around, glared blindly, whacked the ground with her tail and screeched again; a small black paw struck backward out of the cat cunt, scrabbled for a hold and hung its haunch on the swollen flesh. It was a breech. Again and again the tabby contracted, arched and complained, but though the skinny tail snaked out the other leg was trapped inside. Gingerly I laid a hand on her stomach. She allowed this, so I took aim with my forefinger, and on the next push hooked it inside into the sticky heat and felt for the leg. The mother spat and arched but was too weak to reach me, and on my second tug the leg slipped free. I clamped the two paws together and tugged again; the whole kitten plopped out squalling and clawing at its collapsed sack.
“Señorita.”
Thick-set and sweating, the soldier stood behind me, gesturing apologetically, winding his hand in the air, bowing and smiling.
“Lasceme,” I said, momentarily confused about whether I was in Spain or Italy, where the languages differ only slightly more than the importunities of the wandering men. “Dejame.” But he stayed there, apparently unaware that I was busy, mellifluously cajoling me in a low stream of Castilian of which I understood not a word. I tucked the kitten into the crook of the tabby’s neck and stroked her back. The stroking she suffered, but with her front paw she shoved the kitten away into the dusty grass. I peeled off the slimy sack, then palmed the kitten up toward the mother’s stomach and went back to petting her. Behind me the coaxing nasal voice went on. I caught gatito and malo, and wondered sourly which of us in his small talk was the naughty kitten, but the mother wrenched and struck the black mass out of the way again, with her hind leg this time and with more force.
“Señorita …”
“Look, bugger off, will you?”
“Pero los gatos tienen enfermedades. Cuidado, por favor …” he backed away supplicating, and I finally understood, that he was telling me the cats were diseased and that I shouldn’t touch them.
“Oh, Christ, pardonnez, si si,” I mumbled, rubbing at my hands with a Kleenex and standing, and he tipped his peaked cap to me and turned on his heel.
I found a fountain and washed my hands, turned toward the hotel, but after half a block turned back again. The rejected kitten was panting in the gutter, while the other two clawed among the tits, and the hypocrite bitch lay there actually purring.
No doubt the rejection occurred because I had interfered. If I hadn’t, the mother might have died; but since I had, the kitten surely would. The best thing I could do was drown it in the fountain, but the kitten was sticky and warm and the fountain water thin and cold. Th
e kitten was black and blind as Goya’s pilgrims on their way to San Isidro, and I found that I was no good at doing the best thing I could do. I ran to a drugstore, grumbling to myself that if I was going to get the plague I’d probably already contracted it, and bought a basket with a buckled lid, an eyedropper and a tin of sweet condensed milk.
Oliver, solicitous anyway about my pregnancy, was charmed by the whole affair, even though my efforts to clean the afterbirth with a wrung-out hotel washcloth left the kitten scrawny, wrinkled and matted. I told Oliver about my veterinary debut, but left out the soldier’s warning. And I announced that we were going to smuggle the little pilgrim back to England.
“You’re a crazy lady,” he said.
I called him San Isidro and kept him alive in the basket through seven days of train and limousine journey up the Continent, hiding him from hotel porters, customs officials and conductors. I was perpetually needing a bathroom either to vomit or to feed San Isidro. I would sit on the toilet; he would claw himself up my blouse hunting for the eyedropper till my breasts and belly were pocked with little scabs as from electrolysis. He got more sticky and matted with thick milk, more ratlike and more raucous. I felt like somebody carrying a ticking bomb.
I knew that animals could not enter England without a six-month period of quarantine, but I had no idea what the penalty was for a two-ounce smuggling offense. Nevertheless I told Oliver airily, in case he got cold feet, that we faced the possibility of a ten-pound fine. Oliver didn’t mind my spending money. At Calais I fed San Isidro a few grains of sleeping pill, and he slept through the crossing and the Dover customs: nothing to declare. He slept through the night, and the morning, and half the afternoon, so that by the time he waked I was haggard with what even I realized was absurd anxiety. To the vet I accurately described the breech and the mother cat’s rejection, but let him believe it had happened in a local lane. The vet praised me.
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