“Then the overlookers would be Japanese.”
“Until we’ve effected the transition to …”
Jake said, “Thank you,” and sat down. I think it was a signal. Four women were on their feet, but one of the overlookers from Tapestries cut in ahead of them, loud like Jake and with more control in his tone than in the words.
“Does that mean we’re going to have training school again like in fifty-four, and learn our job all over again from these Japs?”
“There’s no way you can learn weaving,” one of the women put in. “You catch it, like the measles.” A few scattered and appreciative laughs.
“Aren’t you planning to drop silk?”
“No, at the present time there are no plans for dropping …”
“What are you going to do for warps? You know there isn’t enough now.”
“That’s right, you get a stock on the floor and they’re taken straight up by a heavy fell.”
“And then it’s the nonautos that get lost in the queue.”
The speakers jack-in-the-boxed from one side and the other of the hall, more orderly than orderly, almost as if they’d been rehearsed.
“Ask anybody here, you don’t run autos, they run you.”
“It used to be you could help another weaver on a bad smash, but with the autos, you don’t have time.”
“They’ve got no flexibility, they’ve got no tolerance.”
These nonquestions went on while Tyler blinked into them, puffed at them, not trying to answer, and he was right. They were not meant for questions nor for discussion either, but a rhetorical orchestration. All he had to do was wait until they came to a two-bar rest, and Nicholson got up to say, “Let’s hear from Mr. Marbalestier on the profit implications, and then no doubt we’ll have time for discussion.”
Tyler sat down. The crowd sat back, disgruntled but prepared to wait. Nicholson nodded his thanks to Tyler and gestured to Oliver, and I saw quite clearly then that the chronology of the program had been rigged so as to give Oliver the last word. And that the fact it had been so rigged meant that the merger was already decided. And that this last-word arrangement wasn’t going to accomplish much in the way of pacification, because the workers knew it. They sat at bay, not clever enough to win but too clever to be fooled, patches on their anger, dues-paying members of the Amalgamated Unconsulted. I saw that, where I sat, I was a member too.
We are not here to be heard but to reinforce the great principle of free speech. We are here to make a hero of Jake Tremain, who is impotent on the issue but can nevertheless show off his balls. I see Dillis sitting behind him a little to his right with her husband Mark; Dillis ambivalent and edgy, her swelling belly attesting to Jake Tremain’s balls.
And although I am not in a very humorous mood, there is something flickering in this dreariness like mica specks in asphalt, because it is clear that everyone here is powerless to do a single thing except to become a sister to the Utagawa Company of Osaka. That is what we are here to discuss but that has already been decided, not by the workers but not exactly by the Board of Directors either, who can’t afford to “pass up a plum like this” when Utagawa has dropped it in their laps; nor by the Utagawa Company, which is acting out of terror of the American embargo; nor by the American government which is acting out of fear for its own textile industry and fear of its own unions’ anger; but by …. who, then? The U.S. unions? Some craft local in North Carolina? Some labor boss in the Old South who has had the power to force this merger, domino style, three-quarters of the way round the world into Migglesly town hall?
There was a general shuffling and shifting while Oliver unwound himself from his chair and stood up to lounge against the table, sorting notes. A lump in my stomach told me, before my brain had registered it, that he was going to be all wrong. He was overtired. He was nervous, and when he was nervous he had a way of exaggerating his nonchalance. There used to be a time that this worked; there used to be a time that it had a friendly frankness about it, even though it was an act. But now when he settled a hip on the table edge and hitched the crease over his knee it registered, even to me, as an affront to a man in coveralls.
“Mr. Nicholson,” he began, and took too long a pause, so that it drifted out into some hint of satire, or contempt. I looked down at my wedding ring and twisted it. “Mr. Nicholson has recalled to you several precedents for survival in our history. I think we should be clear that what we are discussing here tonight is not a choice between two viable alternatives, but once more a question of survival.” This contrasted peculiarly with Tyler Peer’s dispassionate statistics. It might have been all right if the smile had not been all wrong. He smiled like a boy scout master teaching square knots.
“Whose survival did you have in mind?” somebody said, but was shushed by a gesture from Jake Tremain.
“Fundamentally, the history of our industry is a history of technical change. Assimilating change is vital to the company itself and to the fabric of our national society.” Somebody didn’t like “fabric”; he booed and was answered with a few muted laughs.
“Britain was the first country to industrialize the textile trade, the first to lower exportation costs, the first to use power machinery. As Mr. Nicholson suggests, the geography of our area has not always been amenable to such changes, but the vision and farsightedness of the management at East Anglian has always kept this company not only alive but expanding.”
A sullen silence.
“Now we are faced with a situation whose implications are not understood in this room.”
I glanced up from where I’d been staring at my hands in my lap, shocked to see that he was still smiling as he lectured them, still lounging, swinging a shiny shoe.
“In the past month the Textile Council has authorized an abolition of Japanese quotas in favor of tariffs on cotton import, which will be implemented within the next year. If we import Japanese machines and yarn, we take advantage of this quota abolition. If we do not, we will be in competition with Japan. It is as simple as that. I assure you, it is as simple as that.”
Malcolm drew in a breath beside me, and when I looked at him he clacked his teeth. He felt it too: Oliver managed to make “simple” sound like an accusation of “simple-minded.”
“We have the striking good fortune to be offered a sister-company proposal by one of the great textile mills of Japan, and we would be fools to turn it down.” He launched, finally, into a series of statistics on cotton content, output and projected profits, but the word “fools” hung over it with more force than the largest numbers he mentioned. He kept performing a graceful shrug as if nothing could be easier than all this, nobody could have any rational objections to it.
“Why is he badgering them?” Malcolm whispered.
I shook my head. “Nervous.”
Then in a tone heavy with cajoling sentiment he declared that East Anglian had a natural affinity with the Utagawa Company, which had like us moved from silk weaving through rayon and nylon to more sophisticated synthetics; and he harked back again to the Flemish immigrants of the thirteenth century, the French of the nineteenth. He appealed facetiously to the Van Wycks and Tremains in the crowd that they find room for a few Isshus and Fujiwaras. Jake Tremain stood up.
“I would like a point of information from Mr. Marbalestier.”
“Certainly,” smiled Oliver.
“Mr. Marbalestier, as I understand it, it is your feeling that the East Anglian profit margin is more important than the general quality of life for people at the mill.”
Oliver grimaced and his voice came out at a slightly higher pitch. “There’s not going to be any life if we have to compete with Japan.”
“Yes, well, my point of information is, could you tell us how many shares of East Anglian stock you own yourself?”
Rattled, Oliver took a deep breath and a couple of beats before he answered through set teeth, “It is a matter of public record if you wish to look it up.”
“Thank you,
sir,” said Tremain, and sat again. The hubbub rose, the women raucous above the rest.
A horse-faced woman from the silk shed stood up shaking her tweedy hair. “Mister Marbalestier,” she boomed, “you’ve told us something we don’t understand about pro-fits and pro-duction. Well, my grandmother filled pirns in this mill before immigrants such as yourself were born, and I’ll tell you something you don’t know about weaving. I went off my manual in fifty-nine, and I haven’t had a day’s satisfaction since. I used to have my sett of six, and when they were fixing to balk, they’d let me know and I’d tell the overlooker. Now all’s I do is walk around my twenty-four, I can go back and forth and not see anything wrong and yet there’s a bad fault in the packet. The overlooker has to tell me. You get cloth out of me, Mister Marbalestier, but I get nothing but backache filling batteries all day long. I don’t doubt but what there’s more money in automatics, but you ask me my profession, I’m a walker and a watcher. I haven’t been a weaver since nineteen and fifty-nine.”
She sat down in a murmur of approval.
“You won’t be a weaver if this company goes under to Japanese competition either,” Oliver said heatedly, but he was drowned out. Nicholson stood and rapped the gavel.
“It’s Mr. Peer who has studied the disadvantages of the expansion operation …”
Tremain again. “Nobody’s studied the disadvantages like these people. I suggest we hear from Mr. Collingworth on his study of the disadvantages.”
Collingworth, a feisty overlooker in a cowlick and a lumber jacket, picked up the cue before Nicholson could reply. “Yes, well, I’m an immigrant here myself.” Laughter and claps. “I immigrated from Radbourne when they went onto double shifts in forty-eight, and I can tell you I’ll immigrate myself straight out if you do it here. I got no objection to autos except they don’t ever need to stop, and I do. I don’t want another bunch coming in and mucking them about at night.”
“I was on shifts at Oakroyd,” a woman added, “and my oppo was always forgetting to fasten the reed on the last warp he gated. Funny, i’n’t it? He’s on bonus and he’s not interested how the next shift goes, he doesn’t straighten his selvages, does he, as long as the loom is running.”
“It breaks things down.”
“The person you depend on most, you don’t ever see him except to hand over the sett. It makes bad blood.”
“Listen.” The tweed-haired woman took over again. “You’re talking geography, let me tell you the autos mess up the geography of the shed. With a sett of six you’re near to the other weavers and you get to know them. You might not think we could pass the time of day in that racket, but we get pretty good at lip reading.”
She turned to the weavers’ benches and demonstrated, yawping obscenely; I could see the mouthing of “Marbalestier”—the rest I couldn’t catch but hardly needed to. The weavers laughed and there were scattered claps. Nicholson rapped and tried to get attention.
“Please, ladies and gentlemen! I think these remarks would be better addressed to Mr. Peer, who has made a study …”
“Study me ass!” shouted the man who had given me his seat. “Marbalestier’s the one that wants the quantity. Ask him why he put us on hooters, and what he studied that time.”
“Order!” Nicholson pounded the gavel but it was too far gone. Half the room was on its feet, including some Board members behind Oliver, calling for quiet.
“Extra shifts make extra meals.”
“When am I suppose to see my kids?”
“I’m not going to scrap my marriage to turn out your cloth at night.”
“It’s worse for singles, you get no evening.”
“You get less sleep on shifts.”
“When’s it going to end? Aren’t you going to have us on three shifts next?”
I took Malcolm’s hand, thought better of it, and went back to twisting my ring. It’s a strange thing to sit listening to a thousand people hate your husband. I was glad I was on the audience side, not identified with him. And when the guilt welled up for thinking that, I let it go, and watched it go. Oliver, when I dared to look at him, looked pompous and belligerent. He looked that way to me, which was the way he looked to them. I felt about him as they felt, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. Protective but justified. I’d been hating him for just those qualities, but I guess you always half discount a merely marital hate. Now they were shouting at him, for me, and I wondered, about the way Oliver is and the way he’s changed—is it possible that I was, simply … right?
The noise wore itself down a little; Nicholson finally put some force behind the gavel and knocked it back to a murmur.
“Please. We will entertain questions one at a time.”
Tweed-hair and her commanding bosom had the floor again. “I’d just like to point out to Mis-ter Marbalestier,” her stentorian voice rang out, “that it’s a different matter up there in Admin and your man-or houses. I work my sett, and my Pete was overlooker twenty-eight years before he died. Now my first girl’s a spooler and I got two more coming up for it in the next three years. At our place we eat East Anglian cloth, we sleep it, we brush our teeth with it. It’s all right for you, you don’t have your whole family wrapped up in the mill like us.”
Nicholson half rose but Oliver could take this one on himself. He leaned over the apron edge glowering into the weavers’ bench.
“I think that you have a distorted impression of life in A … Administration. I think you forget that my wife works right along beside me at East Anglian. As a matter of fact …”
He turned back to Nicholson, as if in appeal, and I think I understand very clearly what went on in the next few seconds. He turned in appeal to Nicholson, and Nicholson completed his rise. Then Oliver tumbled to what he was doing and put out a restraining hand. Nicholson cocked him a quizzical look as the hand fell on his arm. Oliver left it there a second and then took it off again. He turned away, away from George but also away from the house, and Nicholson walked down to the edge.
“As a matter of fact”—he beamed—“I think you all know Ginny Marbalestier, who works down in Design Print. It’s a great pleasure to be able to tell you, we had word this afternoon, that Ginny has won the Carnaby Award for Innovative Design. It’s a great honor for East Anglian. Let’s have a round of applause for Ginny Marbalestier! Where is she?”
There I was. I stood on stiff legs; Malcolm said, “Hey, mother!” and a begrudging scatter of clapping broke the rhythm of the meeting. That’s all it did, it broke the rhythm; it didn’t change a single mind. It brought the meeting to an end, I guess, a piffling, a piecemeal sort of dwindle. But if Oliver thought, in the minute between putting his restraining hand on George’s arm, and taking it off, that it would do any more for him than that, well then I guess it has to be said that he sacrificed me on a miscalculation.
Nicholson went into a statement of profound gratitude for the “open airing,” and assured the crowd again that their feelings would be taken into account. The workers rose and milled, a few women I knew nodded congratulations but no one wanted to come over to me, for which I was thankful. Malcolm began to enthuse, but I asked him please to save it, and he saw I meant it.
“What’s up?”
“Just save it, will you? I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
As the hall began to empty the porter came up to us, hat in hand. “I wouldn’t advise you to drive it, Mrs. Marbalestier. I can’t do anything with it.”
“No. Thanks. No, I’ll go home with my husband.”
“Do you want a lift, Ginia?” Malcolm peered puzzled at me.
“No, go on, okay? I’ll give you a ring tomorrow.”
“It’ll be all right, you know. They’ll merge, and the workers will take it all right. When they’re riled you think they won’t, but they always do.” He patted my arm. “And the funny thing is, you know, they’ll send Tyler Peer to Japan. I’m pretty sure of that. Nicholson will want Oliver to mend his fences. He’ll want a
n eye on him.”
“You think so?”
“I do. And I hope so, ’cause we need you around here, babes.”
“Thanks, Malcolm.”
“Call me tomorrow.”
He left with the muttering stragglers. I went up and hung around in front of the stage behind Oliver and the members. They were huddling up there, Ian Kitto and Mrs. Linley and a half a dozen others, discreetly slapping each other on the shoulders and the backs. I loitered. I figured when I faced Oliver there was going to be a “moment.” The truth is, I felt a little overtired for a recognition scene. Then they started down the steps; Mrs. Linley squashed my hand in her doughy ones.
“What splendid news, my dear!” and Oliver headed down toward me.
He looked me straight in the eye. “I think it went pretty well, don’t you?” he said. “What do you think?”
I didn’t know the answer to this. So I said, “My exhaust pipe broke.”
He said, “I think they’ll come round, don’t you?”
I said, “My exhaust pipe broke. I’ll leave it here and go home with you.”
Ian and Tyler came round to praise me. Oliver said, “I’m just going to take Mrs. Linley to the station. I’ll be home soon.”
I said, “Oliver, my car broke down. It’s illegal. I already got a ticket.”
“I’ll just take Mrs. Linley to the station,” he said. “I’ll meet you home in an hour or so.”
I don’t think I was there. I walked out and got into my car; I thought maybe he would hear a busted exhaust. I started and roared up in front of the Board of Directors, which was just coming out the door, Oliver and the members and their controlling interest. They looked up at my roar. The porter started toward us from the back of the parking lot. I idled.
“I’m going home now,” I said to Oliver. “I’m going home.”
17
I WENT HOME THE way I’d come, in ten o’clock twilight. This time I saw no cops. I kept the speedometer steady at fifteen, and after a while I got used to my monotonous noise, which even began to absorb my attention, something like the rhythm of the looms, putting a barrier between me and the still streets, the peaked roofs and spires of Migglesly. My slightest pressure on the accelerator produced a ferocious roar, a lift of my foot toned it down again: illusion of control. That must be the attraction of a motorcycle, that illusion of command. At that speed it was a very long drive. Still, I kept noticing landmarks and not remembering how I’d got there. Hempton Mill appeared on my right before I remembered passing the Gatford roundabout. I didn’t register Eastley turnoff until I passed the George’s Head. I knew Oliver had not followed me, and yet every time I saw a headlight behind me I slowed to ten miles an hour until it passed. I could see from a long ways along the lane from Eastley Village that the house was dark, and the garage as I had left it, empty and open.
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