Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  “It’s perfectly remarkable. Nine days! I should think he’s past danger by now.”

  The next day he died.

  Oliver said it was perfectly natural I should carry on so, my thoughts being as they were full of childbirth and maternal instinct. He said that women were always sentimental about small dependent creatures, and he for one was glad this was the case.

  I had prevaricated about the soldier’s warning and the smuggling penalty, but those were not the lie. The lie was that I accepted Oliver’s comfort without letting him know how it shocked me. Until he suggested it I had never connected San Isidro with my pregnancy. On the contrary I had thought of the kitten as tough and illegal, Goya-grotesque, a survivor of brute animal indifference. I had seen myself as flouting authority, taking a willful risk. I had seen it, however obscurely, as a protest against our pompous pastel life. I guess I was lucky nobody caught the plague.

  13

  “SUPERLATIVE BRIOCHE, GINNY.”

  “Yes, aren’t they? They come from the Zukerhut on Lennox Square.”

  “We are lucky, really,” Margaret Nicholson said plumply, “to have a Viennese patisserie out here in the hinterlands.”

  Jill in her brushed and glossy mood sat on the chaise longue, patent leather hanging pigeon-toed. When Mrs. Nicholson’s plate was empty she hopped up and passed the cake plate round again.

  “Do try the éclairs, Mrs. Nicholson. They’re lovely, really.” Mrs. Nicholson tried the éclairs, shaking a sugary smile at me over Jill’s head. Obscurely grieved, I sent her to the kitchen to boil the kettle up again.

  “I say.” George leaned in as soon as she was gone. “Did you hear about Frances Kean?”

  “Yes, I saw her at the hospital yesterday.” Nicholson looked surprised. I glanced at Oliver and justified, “She works in our office.”

  “Oh, so she does, so she does indeed. Pitiful case, that, really you are awfully kind to pop round and see her.”

  “I must do so, I suppose,” Mrs. Nicholson sighed.

  “I expect they’ll be fetching her back to Dorset,” said Oliver. “Best thing all around.”

  “Uh-uh-uh,” George agreed.

  “Why should they do that?”

  “So her family can look after her, of course.”

  “But she’s of age. Surely they’re bound to keep it from her family if she doesn’t want it known.”

  “That’s absurd, Virginia.”

  “It’s the Hippocratic Oath.”

  “Of course she’ll want her family.”

  “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Nicholson clucking her tongue. “Ellie Glover Kean never had any luck with her children. The older boy Barry lying about his age to go off into the navy. And heaven only knows what the younger one will be getting into; children these days. And yet I’m sure you never saw a better mother than Ellie. Children are such a source of suffering, aren’t they?” She sighed with satisfaction. The Nicholsons had no children. “Present company excepted, naturally! Really, you must bless your stars for such a little lady as you have.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Oliver. “We haven’t had her into adolescence yet.”

  “That’s it, uh, absolutely,” chuckled George. “Just wait till you have the hordes on your doorstep after her, eh? I should say.”

  I peered despairingly into the teapot and wished Jill back again. I was curious to know more about Ellie Glover Kean, but not anxious to show that I was curious. So instead I asked George about Utagawa and the progress of the merger plans.

  “Ah, well, now, bit of a dilemma there.” His hand went to the emblem of the Worshipful Company of Drapers. “Uh, it looks terribly good on paper, especially if the Americans do go through with this textile tariff, you see; why, the Japanese are going to work all kinds of trade deals, and we might be able to give the old economy a bit of a boost, eh?”

  “Especially our economy,” Oliver said.

  “Yes, now, that’s the way it looks on paper, but it’s a mite of a risk, you know. I mean, suppose we expand and then we hit trouble with the Arabs?”

  “Would you have to build a lot?”

  “Well, no, that’s the thing, you see, we could go on to double shifts and make way for the new machines just by scrapping one barn’s worth of old looms. I’ve just been reading the scheme, it’s amazing really, we could nearly double production without laying a brick. But the thing of it is—I dare say this would sound daft to a Yank like yourself, Ginny—the thing of it is, the weavers’ locals just aren’t going to go for it. You’d think they’d want the overtime and the bonuses, but these folks don’t want better machines, they like the old ones where they can show their skill. And our people are very tenacious about their village life. I’ll tell you, I had a woman in the other day, she said to me, ‘If you think I’m coming in to the loom just when my kids get home for tea, you’ve got another think due you, Director Nicholson.’ And she’s been in tie silk for fourteen years, straight out of school. The truth is, I’m a bit wary of the whole thing. I expect that sounds like a load of old rot to you.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I was at the mill yesterday, and I was thinking what a nice thing it was, that everybody was home taking care of their gardens.”

  “That’s the sort of thing, absolutely.”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll all die of starvation if you put the people before the machines.”

  “Why, Ginny, I believe we’ve made a bit of a Briton of you after all.”

  I thought that after they had gone Oliver might scold me for admitting to having seen Frances. I have no skill whatever at knowing what my sins are.

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said, “if you’d keep your opinions to yourself on the Utagawa merger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t go encouraging Nicholson in his reactionary schemes.”

  “I thought it was you who wanted to see ‘which way Nicholson swings.’”

  “So I did. But Nicholson’s one thing and the Board of Directors is another. You don’t think the stockholders are going to let him pass up a plum like this, do you?”

  “But if Nicholson tangles with the Board it’s going to get ugly, isn’t it? What if the unions come out against it?”

  “The unions have come out before.”

  “And do you think they’re wrong? What do you think about it?”

  “I think that Nicholson is sixty-six.”

  “Oh, Oliver, he’s perfectly competent.”

  “I don’t mean he’s senile, my darling, I mean he’s four years off retirement. At which point it will do no harm to have sided with the Board. So just keep quiet, will you? Let me do all the talking.”

  It’s hard to know what reaction Malcolm, Mom and Dillis might have had to Frances’s sketches that wouldn’t have disappointed me. They were impressed, even enthusiastic, but having no reason to suppose they knew the artist, their enthusiasm was of a detached sort. I had credited the drawings to “a young art student I know,” ready to specify a twenty-two-year-old at the Brighton College of Art, which was far enough away that they wouldn’t expect to meet her, if they evinced any curiosity. But they didn’t.

  “Super textures,” Dillis said.

  “Yes,” I urged them. “Look at the bat; have you ever seen anything so poisonous?”

  “Terrifically talented fellow,” Malcolm agreed, but like someone who has known a lot of terrifically talented fellows. “Tell him to get some decent paper.”

  I delivered their compliments to Frances, together with tomato soup and jam tarts. She had little appetite for either.

  “It’s interesting that Malcolm assumed you were a man; I can understand that. It’s a question of strength.”

  “Strength,” she said bitterly.

  But I was better prepared to be disappointed by Frances, and I had will power ready for it; I knew her progress would be slow. I brought her some decent paper. She was crying again, which may have been a good sign, and she would turn away in tears eve
ry time I entered, every time I changed chairs, offered her food. She ate a little, and from time to time she would show me something she had drawn. The new efforts weren’t very good, and I sadly understood that she was trying to please me, that whatever internal need she had to paint was in temporary check. She did ink sketches on a sketching block not meant for ink, slapdash abstracts that had anger in them but no containment, none of the tense control that had given the others their power. I said so, gently, but I needn’t have bothered to be gentle; she didn’t care.

  Most of the time she did nothing. The television set was always on without the sound. At first I rationalized that there might be a constructive purpose in this, an impulse to concentrate on images. But I couldn’t believe that for long, and it began to get on my nerves, the way she used the screen to avoid talking, let her eyes slide to fix on it, taking nothing in. We would sit this way for an hour or so, but when I got up to go she would lean after me, suddenly talkative and clinging. The next day she would sit indifferent as before, watching or pretending to watch the screen.

  “Don’t you want to hear the story?” I asked one day, but she just shook her head, dazedly watching the characters of Crossroads flicker, gesticulate and mouth their mundane troubles. “Why do you do that?” I persisted, and Frances turned to me and said, “Because I am not sound.” I felt cheated by this, a poor pun contrived on her own vocabulary of madness, as if she were playing with me.

  Then she began to change again, under the care of Dr. Stuart Holloway. Having resisted psychiatric help for so long, and having now trapped herself into it by her suicide attempt, Frances did the next logical thing and fell in love with her psychiatrist. Holloway was a square, rather sallow man, with sheepdog folds of flesh at the mouth which gave him an air of perpetual sympathy. I thought this was an accident of feature rather than any bodying-forth of character, because he seemed to me to treat Frances inhumanly. When her weight fell below seven stone he refused to see her, though she sat through the afternoon on a hard chair outside his office door, quietly weeping, wringing clumps of hair in her hands. When she ate and vomited, he said that if she really wanted to nourish herself she would keep it down. When she revealed to him that she painted—the first person to whom she had ever confessed it—he said something to the effect that art was long and he doubted she had the persistence for it. In spite of, or because of, these humiliations, Frances had an interest at last. She began to talk again, putting his name lingeringly into the air. She altered the jargon of insanity toward the jargon of its cure.

  “Dr. Holloway says that I am not in touch with my feelings, and I can feel this. Touch. Feel. I can feel that I cannot touch. In my formative years I was taught not to touch, and I have learned it too well; it is … my form.”

  “You can change.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Wringing her hands, hiding her eyes. “I want, he, I don’t know what I want but I do know that I want, which is more than I knew before.”

  “Much more, Frances.”

  “But the nothingness is so … creeps over everything. Dr. Holloway will tire of trying for me before I can see out.”

  “He must, of all people, know that it takes a long time.”

  “It is not the time, it is the trying. I don’t try well. He will abandon me. He said …” She looked up despairingly at this fresh, incomprehensible deviousness in her hateful self. “… that I want him to abandon me. To punish myself.”

  I didn’t know what to say. And to Holloway I could say nothing at all. We exchanged a few inanities when we passed each other in the hall; he showed so little inclination to discuss Frances with me that I felt rather like the Gray Lady, bringing round the charity cart. Perhaps I was jealous, but if the feeling was jealousy I was “not in touch” with it. I felt simply cowed by him, unable to ask an explanation of his lofty brutalities, to express an opinion or so much as a hope, since I was neither family nor trained to cope with disease.

  And perhaps his cruelty was therapeutic. At any rate it’s clear that it brought Frances round to the only thing I could understand as therapy. One afternoon when she had been with him, dredging up childhood fears of the extremes of light and dark, she showed me a page of her sketchbook. She had covered it in drawings, almost identical, and so minute that they could have been painted on the stone of a Victorian brooch. Each oval contained a curled fetus in too early a stage to recognize as human, a blind blob whose bones were still soft, muscles still jelly. Each was straining, arching fitfully against the granite egg that held it in.

  Here is a portrait of Oliver in this period: he is happy. He is waking earlier than usual, often before daylight, and he gets out of bed by inching himself to the edge and slipping to the floor half horizontal, so as not to wake me, who am known to sleep the sleep of the innocent. He goes to the window and stretches himself a few times, or touches his toes, greeting whatever there is of the morning. He opens the double wardrobe and slides his suits one by one along the rack as if he were thinking of buying one. He consults the window again, and if the mist is gray and dense he selects the Austin Reed charcoal herringbone or the Jaeger black pin-stripe three-piece with the pleated pants. If the mist is red, meaning it is likely to burn off later, he takes the light brown Donegal with the lime and rust flecks or the blue polyester two-button or even the maroon hopsack Nehru jacket. He drapes the suit over the chair and considers the tie rack. If there is a board meeting he picks a dark rep, if there is a staff meeting he takes one of the East Anglian miniature-motif embroidereds, if he is traveling he goes light-hearted with a madras or a paisley foulard. He exits to the bathroom and shaves, splashing a good deal, not singing because he has never been a bathroom singer, but now and then humming a bar of something with the cadence of “Mr. Chairman/Ladies and Gentlemen,” or else, “In the beginning/Was the Word.” I don’t know which. He holds the last note for a very long time. He comes back in his shirt and underpants and puts the suit on in front of the mirror, being particularly crisp at the jerking of his cuff out from his suit sleeve. He brushes his hair vigorously and adjusts the curvature of the locks behind his ears. He puts his palms to his face and smells his hands. He breathes deeply so that his chest inflates a good distance. Then he joggles my shoulder and goes downstairs.

  I put on my dressing gown and shuffle down to grind the coffee. Oliver is displeased that I have not brushed my hair, but this is not a thing he would confront me with, whereas if I did not go down to grind his coffee, he would confront me. All I want is to avoid confrontation. Oliver is sitting at the table with the morning paper, wearing the trouser creases of a very important man. He makes conversation, occasionally on the subject of North Sea gas or the world monetary crisis, but most often, nearly always, on topics concerning the Utagawa Company of Osaka and its potential relations with East Anglian Textiles, Ltd. This is the biggest proposed change since he has been with the company, the biggest since the takeover of the Long Melford Dyers and Finishers in 1956. Oliver is on the side of the stockholders and he perceives this to be the winning side. This makes him happy and his happiness makes him cordial to me; his cordiality to me makes him happy.

  I also have new pleasures. They remind me of the time Oliver introduced me to sweet-and-sour pork in my first Chinese restaurant in New York City. No, they don’t; but they remind me of the name of sweet-and-sour pork. I have pleasure of knowing within a narrow margin of error which ties Oliver will choose to wear. I have pleasure of knowing that if it is raining he will say at least two ungenerous things about Tyler Peer or the Amalgamated Engineers. I have pleasure of knowing that when we go out in the evening Oliver will begin dressing while I am clearing the dinner table, and will then complain that women are never ready on time, and will then ask, “How do I look?” His moments of predictability fill me with a pungent pleasure. Very often I would like to take a plate of fried eggs and fling it full into the four-in-hand of Oliver’s miniature-motif embroidered tie, and this desire makes beads of sweat stand out along the hair
line of my unbrushed hair, but even this is pleasurable. Perhaps it is the most pleasurable of all, although there is no longer any question whatever of my flinging a plate because it is one of the exigencies of martyrdom that one should remain absolutely innocent. Innocently, I undersalt the eggs, and am delighted when Oliver frowns and says, “Tsk,” reaching for the salt. When he is gone I stand over the sink, feeling closer to my mother than ever in my life before. This is not so pleasurable.

  I didn’t tell Oliver that I went to see Frances, though I assume he knew. All I wanted was to avoid confrontation. Clive Tydeman had the Rubigo okayed for production—a less formal matter in furnishings than in dress fabrics, since they didn’t work to a strictly seasonal line—and promised to have it in the looms by January. This promise sustained me while we headed for desolate Christmas.

  I had always made a girlish fuss over the holidays—one of the less sinister legacies of my “formative years”—and Oliver, who delighted in anything childish or childlike in me, had always encouraged it. Nothing pleased him more than being wheedled for a gift or money, and I suppose it satisfied him very much that this one time a year I could be counted on to produce an extravagant budget over which he might then play the cautious counselor.

  One mid-December evening I was wrapping presents in my studio: a pin-tucked Parisian chemise for Jill, yet another Swiss cotton shirt and silk foulard for Oliver’s overstuffed wardrobe. Then a porcelain horse for Jill, a Beswick palomino, which Jill could be counted on to love, but was not really a present for a child. Beswick models were advertised in Queen; collectors bought them.