Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  “You what?”

  “The Rubigo. I didn’t design it.”

  “How didn’t ‘design’ it. What is it then?”

  “No, I didn’t. Somebody else.”

  “Body else what?”

  “Designed it.”

  “How?”

  “How?”

  “Who?”

  “Oh. Frances Kean.”

  He studied me warily, half smiling, taking stock. Choosing the strategy to deal with an irrational snag. He pressed me gently by the shoulders into my chair. Very level, he said, “Virginia, Frances Kean did not do that design.”

  “She did. She’s an artist.”

  He backed to his end of the table and sat slowly in his chair. “Start at the beginning,” he suggested.

  “Yes.” But I didn’t know exactly where the beginning was. I thought I should read him the passage on wheat blight from The Young Lady’s Book of Botany, but the book was at the office, and then I thought that perhaps that would not explain anything anyway. “I did do a design called Rubigo,” I finally said, “but it wasn’t any good, so I didn’t submit it. Frances Kean did another. And I submitted that.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “No, well. I didn’t exactly mean to submit it. I went to show it to Clive Tydeman. It presented interesting problems, see? And he had the idea of damask, and between us, we … I got carried away. I thought it would help Frances. I know that will make you all the angrier, but Oliver, she’s very good. Well, as you see. I mean, she won the award. But I couldn’t have put it under her name, Nicholson might not have passed it, but that wasn’t the reason, it was more …”

  “That scheming kid,” Oliver muttered, as if impressed.

  “No. Oh, no, she doesn’t even know. I wanted to present it to her fait accompli, but then she put her hand through the window and Holloway said it was dangerous. And the trouble is that if he was right it’ll be worse now; it’ll make her public. I don’t mean it really will, but she’ll feel that. She’ll feel exposed. I had no right to do it, it was a muddled Lady Bountiful thing to do, but I did want to help her. You’ve no idea how good she is. Was. I don’t know now. They’ve sent her to Dorsetshire.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.”

  I waited, while he put his hand over his face in exasperated bewilderment. Guilt affected my motor control, and I knew that I sat as awkwardly as a schoolgirl, that I sounded like a petulant adolescent, whereas somewhere underneath all this was a dignified someone who could present my case. I had not located her in time. I had appointed my mother’s skittish daughter as counsel for the defense.

  “Now,” said Oliver. “You haven’t thought this through. What you’re telling me is that you plagiarized a design.”

  “It wasn’t meant for plagiarism. It was meant for—I know it sounds stupid—a surprise. I wanted to jolt her into realizing …”

  “But in fact.”

  “All right. I’d realized before today that it amounts to that.”

  “And what is it, exactly, you intend to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve betrayed Frances but in a different way than anyone will understand. It’s like intravenous feeding, do you see?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, what I stole is her power to choose. It’s got nothing to do with the award. And yet the award may be the thing that I can’t steal. Do you see? I could give her the money, of course, but what kind of honesty is that, pretending it’s a gift? No, I think I’ll have to bring it out. To Nicholson, and the Carnaby Commission—I suppose they’ll let her keep the award. I’ll go down to Dorset, and if the doctors let me, I’ll tell Frances. If they won’t I suppose I’ll have to see her family.”

  Oliver listened intently through this fumbling, with the air of someone listening to a half-known language. He rubbed at the furrow between his eyes with both index fingers. Then he said, “You’ll be in disgrace at East Anglian, you realize.” The choice of word seemed to me particularly apt. I felt, precisely, out of grace.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’ll lose your job.”

  “Do you think so? I don’t know. I may.”

  He made half of an exasperated gesture that trailed unfinished onto his knee, and slumped into a long silence that I thought I could not bear. And then I noticed that I could bear it pretty well. Oliver bit at the skin beside his thumb and this trivial gesture turned him, briefly, into someone I could touch. Perhaps Oliver is right; perhaps I can only sympathize with misfits, outcasts, deflation and defeat. At least it’s true that for the length of time he bit distractedly at his thumb, I liked him.

  “I’m sorry, Oliver.”

  “And what is it,” he said, “that you think ‘may’ happen to me?”

  This surprised me. “I don’t see why anything should happen to you. I know it’s embarrassing for you, Oliver. I’m very sorry, I truly am. But they’re hardly going to fire you because your wife is—in disgrace.”

  He pulled the flesh of his face down with both hands and shook his head as if to clear it. “Virginia,” he said carefully, “look where I am. I’ve put myself out on a limb in a negotiation both delicate and explosive. I have steered us into Utagawa without the backing of most of my peers and against an angry labor force that calls me ambitious for it. Now my wife comes along and it turns out she’s been stealing sketches from a file clerk and turning them in as her own work. Can you see what they’ll make of that?”

  I could see. They might not, of course, be as quick as Oliver to see how to exploit every angle. But then again, there was Jake Tremain. They might.

  “Furthermore, I’ve set myself up against Nicholson, and for the moment Nicholson controls my career. He’s too businesslike, and he’s probably too fair, to hold me back over a policy disagreement. But my name gets involved in a scandal that damages the company—and the unions will make sure it gets all the publicity it’s good for—where do you think that leaves me? Next in line for the Japanese operation? Or the directorship? Can you see?”

  I could see. I could see that I’d stumble willy-nilly into betrayal all my life; I was born to it. “I’m so sorry, Oliver. Will you have to give up Utagawa then?”

  He picked up the glass again, took a sip, sat straighter in his chair. “Let’s take a different perspective on it altogether. You did a design called Rubigo. One of your diseases, was it?”

  “One of my diseases.” I tried a limp smile, but he wasn’t interested in irony.

  “Your young friend Frances Kean took the sketch and did something with it.”

  “No, a different design altogether.”

  “Another version. You submitted the second version. Altering it in any way?”

  “I had to make the lines match for repetition. I scaled it up.”

  “Together you and Clive Tydeman translated it into damask.”

  “Well, yes. It was his idea.”

  “You chose the colors, the yarn?”

  “Yes, Clive and I.”

  “Then in fact the end product is yours and Clive’s.”

  “No, Oliver. It’s Frances’s.”

  “Frances is in a mental home in Dorsetshire. Who else knows? Malcolm? Clive?”

  “No. I meant to save it for Frances, but Dr. Holloway …”

  “Holloway knows.”

  “Not even. I was too timid. I asked him in a theoretical way if I could submit one of her drawings.”

  “So nobody knows.”

  “Nobody but you and me.” I saw where he was leading me and I watched him lead me there, because I finally saw that it didn’t matter whether I argued well or badly, whether I defended myself. All that mattered was what I did. My energy was so low that I had to save all of it for the doing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said for the dozenth time, “but I don’t think I can.”

  “Can what, for Christ’s sake? It looks to me as if it’s already done.”

  “Can’t take Frances’s award money. Can’t see it a
nnounced in the bloody Sunday Times. I can’t put on a long dress and go shake Princess Margaret’s hand.”

  He seemed to see the force of this, and slumped back again. “So if you can’t, then what I can do, is just sit and wait for the consequences.”

  “Oliver, it’s Frances I’ve betrayed, it isn’t you.”

  “Not yet it isn’t.”

  At which point the phone made us both jump, shrill even though it was muffled by the distance to the office door. On the second ring Oliver shoved himself from his chair and went for it. I waited, rigid, till he came back with the non-news, “Nicholson.”

  I tried to smile and shrug, but my coordination wasn’t very good, and I felt like a tortoise drawing my head in.

  “Look,” said Oliver. “Look, let me get through tonight before you do anything, can you give me that? Just sleep on it, and let me get through the meeting.”

  It seemed very little to ask, and anyway I was exhausted, I needed to muster strength myself. And then there was something besides that, as peculiar as it may seem; that Oliver was waiting for my reply. That deep quotation mark between his eyes, and his jaw just set askew—I had a full, fine sense of its mattering whether I said yes or no, and I couldn’t remember the last time it had mattered.

  So I went to the phone, and when George was done saying jolly-good-absolutely-splendid-proud-of-you, I replied that I was still a little numb.

  Oliver went on ahead to Migglesly to meet with the Board members and check on the readiness of the hall. I was in that state of distraction that manifests itself in split fingernails and lost car keys. It was nearly seven by the time I took the mini off the charger and got in. Backing out I forgot to avoid a pothole left from the spring rains; as I jolted across it there was a clunk followed by a metallic scrape, and a Hell’s Angels roar revved up at me out of the floorboards. I got out and stooped to look under the car. True to the prophecy of our bloke in Migglesly, the exhaust pipe had rusted through the middle and the two ends of it were hanging in a broken V on the ground. I got back in and crawled up the drive, roaring and clunking, scooping up gravel on the rise, spilling it out again on the slope. I limped at fifteen miles an hour from deserted street to street of Eastley Village, but of course there was no garage open, nor so much as a tobacconist. I stopped at the George’s Head, and a friendly gang of drunken locals took a look. They assured me there was nothing to tie it up to but a rusty hole. One of them suggested that I get a horse, which amused them mightily. I thought of calling Migglesly to say I couldn’t make it, but I wasn’t sure Oliver would believe my reason. So I crawled and clunked on through the country roads, limped loudly on the outside lane of the highway into Migglesly, where a fresh-faced bobby gave me a ticket and told me to get off the streets. It was my criminal day.

  Migglesly was at its bleakest in a brown half light, and an air of a Victorian prison lay over the grimy brick hall. I was late, of course. The porter rushed out to check on my noisy arrival, guided me into a parking space and confided to me that I was dangerous and illegal.

  “So I understand,” I said, “but if it’s all right I can leave it here overnight. I can go home with my husband.”

  He said that would probably be okay, but all the same he’d have a go at splicing it back together if I wanted. I thanked him and made my way into the hall.

  It was packed, both the straight-back benches in front of the stage and the tinny folding chairs that were disarranged from there back to the edge of the hall and into the kitchen alcove. Packed and sweaty, with something in the air that wasn’t so much sweat as dour determination. Once planned as pompous, the hall itself had lapsed into a grim shabbiness, with its dirty plum velvet hangings (the color of the nineteenth century), clotted-cream walls, and floorboards splintering through decayed varnish. Round-toed boots fidgeted over the splinters. Men hunched forward with shiny gabardine elbows on their knees or lounged uneasy in the chairs, tweed against tin, their faces set. Women weavers sat in a bloc on the benches, some of them in the uniform of their trade, some with restless children on their laps. I saw no face more than vaguely familiar until Malcolm materialized at my elbow. “Hey, where you been?”

  “Car trouble,” I whispered back, and he led me to his seat in the alcove where a muscular old man, deferentially insistent, vacated the place beside him.

  Under the plaque of the Migglesly town motto, TRUTH THE WARP, TRUST THE WEFT, the stage was set up as a panel with its cast more or less awry, because Nicholson, who was against the merger, had the part of moderator, whereas Tyler Peer, known to be neutral, was to present the negative case. Oliver and Mrs. Linley (dressed in one of my prints, I noticed with a squeamish pang) sat on the other side. A dozen members of the Board and staff were arranged behind. They had water carafes and a gavel and expressions, all of them, of the most punctilious, reasonable democracy.

  Nicholson was launched into a patriotic history of East Anglian: how the low rolling hills and slow-flowing rivers of Suffolk had spawned the textile trade here in the early Middle Ages, but had proved traitor to progress when the industry mechanized and moved off to clearer and more powerful waters. How the weavers had survived by importing minerals for power and moving, first, to worsteds, and then, with the Cobden Treaty of 1860, to distributing French silks, and from thence to weaving them. Foreign immigration was not new here: you would find Flemish and Scandinavian names in this crowd dating back to the thirteenth century, French names back to the Cobden era, when duty-free silks had threatened to kill textiles altogether and instead had been the birth of this great company. We had run short shifts and breadlines in the thirties, but we’d never laid off a man. We’d done the right thing in taking on spinning and carding in the twenties, the right thing buying American automatics in ’54, the right thing merging with the Long Melford dyers and finishers in ’56, and the right thing moving into man-made fibers. But we’d also clearly done the right thing not to move into knitting the polyesters in the Korean boom, because those who’d done that were necessarily into ready-made knits and stockings by now, and ready-to-wear changed the nature of the trade and of a town. Up to now we’d managed to absorb change without changing the character of our life, and that was what we wanted to maintain. What we had to consider was that textile production is labor intensive; there’s more labor to capital, labor to equipment, and labor to horsepower than in the vast majority of industries. What we had to realize was that cloth was a “footloose” product, with a high value in relation to weight. This meant that transport was low but that trade restrictions and tariffs had an unusually intense effect on price. It also meant that the labor force had a more than usual right to share in policy decisions. We’d always made the decisions together and by the record we’d made the right ones. He had every confidence we would do so now.

  This satisfied nobody. The veiled promise that labor would have a say in the merger enervated the members of the Board, who sat expressionless. For those on the floor the history of East Anglian was a source of pride; it didn’t mean they wanted a lecture on it.

  “I think of East Anglian as a family,” Nicholson said. That Nicholson thought this way was a simple truth, maybe too simple for the seventies. I looked around at the women, some of them wrestling the toddlers on their knees; spotted Jake Tremain behind the block of weavers, elbows on spread thighs, concentrating on the floor. The man who’d given me his seat spat into a corner. Too goddam much like a family maybe. Nicholson took a sip of water.

  “Tonight I have asked Mr. Tyler Peer to give you a detailed account of the proposed procedure for expansion, and Mr. Oliver Marbalestier to outline the profit implications. I’ll call first on Mr. Peer.”

  Tyler got himself up shoulders first and wandered to the apron. Tyler is an elbow-patches kind of man, stockily and strongly formed except for a potbelly that always threatens the middle button of his Harris jackets. He’s not much of a public speaker, and although on the mill floor he can make himself heard over the machines without seeming to r
aise his voice, here his first words came out muffled—he was combing his moustache in short little jabs of his pipe stem—and somebody shouted at once, “Louder!”

  So he took out his pipe and made himself heard, dully and at length. He told us which looms would be scrapped to make way for how many high-powered automatics, what percentage of increase for which kinds of cloth could be expected by what date, how much of which space would be appropriated for administrative expansion, how many setts would be enlarged, how much labor would need to be imported, how double shifts would be implemented in warping and weaving, and where, and who would be likely to be affected. We listened with increasing restlessness until he said, without a change of tone and without transition, “There are a certain number of adjustments and disadvantages to the proposal as I see it,” and then there was a palpable lift of tension in the room, just so much as might be accounted for by, say, the pricking up of a couple of thousand ears.

  “There’s bound to be a period when production falls instead of rises, till we get through the training program for the new automatics, and get used to all the shifting round. And we’ll either have to hire male weavers for the second shift, or else have women coming into the mill at night to work. And there’s bound to be a temporary housing shortage of, I’d guess, in the vicinity of two hundred dwellings. These are all things to be considered.” And he nodded, mumbled “Thank you,” stuck his pipe back in his mouth and turned as if that was all there was to be said on the matter. There was a moment of surprised silence, but by the time Tyler was back at the table preparing to sit down, Jake Tremain was on his feet.

  “Mr. Peer, I wonder if I might ask a question.” Very low key, a model of sobriety, but Tremain had a carrying Speakers’ Corner kind of voice. “Could you tell us who would be the overlookers on the new machines?”

  Half bent to sit, Tyler straightened up unhappily. “The Utagawa Company has some of the most highly skilled mechanical engineers …” he began.