Raw Silk (9781480463318) (12 page)

The three of them began to treat her more gently, asking trifles of her that would make her feel necessary. It was Malcolm’s habit, when he had a rough sketch he liked, to shove it at us, demanding what was wrong with this color, that line. Now he included Frances: “Would you wear it? Would it go in your crowd?”—ignoring that she always wore the same outfit, that she admitted to no crowd, and that she steadfastly refused to deliver an opinion. Frances was much too sensitive not to notice her new status, yet she never accused me of the obvious thing.

What she did accuse me of was charity. “Don’t think you have to stay with me,” she would weep, bending into the rug again in that attitude of tense abjection. We always sat on the floor, as if our original meeting had relegated us to that spot. I spread the lunch beside me, within her reach but not in front of her, because she was sure to need that space to bend into, to fold over her pain.

“Why do you do that?”

She didn’t know. The position seemed to help. It—she spoke of “it” as if the pain were a thing outside herself that descended on her at will, physical and yet belonging to no particular place—it was better contained in the fetal crouch, as crying helped to let it out.

“You feel obligated,” she accused. “You feel sorry for me.”

For a time I denied this, and then one day, bored with the repetition of denial, I didn’t. “Yes, I feel obligated. I like you and you interest me. But Malcolm’s funnier. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you need me. Since I do think you need me, I’d feel rotten if I didn’t stay. It’s perfectly selfish. I’ve always needed to feel virtuous.”

Her attention was riveted by this. “Altruism,” she offered.

“Sure. What else do you think it means, that virtue is its own reward?”

“All-truism,” she said, which pleased us both.

“So I lunch here because it makes me feel good. If I didn’t care about you a little, I don’t suppose I’d give a shit. Why don’t you accept that little?”

Which of course she did. It was exactly the measure she could accept. Her vulnerability was not an ordinary sort, being as she was more wounded by a fulsome flattery than a stingy truth. I admired her very much for it.

And for some reason, aimlessly, maybe hoping not to dwindle from this point into another silence, I picked up
The Young Lady’s Book of Botany.
I showed her the fastidious drawings, which I was trying to adapt to my own purposes, and read her a few passages I liked, including one from the chapter “Fungi”:

But it may be asked, how is the case of
rubigo,
the red rust, or blight on wheat, to be accounted for? On one day, the whole field looks healthy and promising, the straw of a bright golden appearance, and the ears nearly filled; in a few days afterward, the golden hue is altered to a dead white. Instead of the bright gloss, ranks of black lines soil the surface and change it to a dingy shade, checking and exhausting the current of the sap, and robbing the grain of half its bulk.

We searched to see if he had answered his own question, which he had not, except in terms of “night frost” and “stagnant atmosphere,” concluding only, to his apparent satisfaction, that although “our admiration is strongly excited when we contemplate the powers of fungus life, in which nature has been so prodigal,” in this case we could not “reconcile ourselves to contemplate the phenomenon with gratitude” because it was “apparently a misfortune.”

There was no need to explain my pleasure in this author to Frances’s pellucid mind. Though I’d never dared call attention to the scratches on her cheeks, the cuts on her hands, she spread her palms on her diaphragm now (did I imagine to my own credit that the backs were healing, hadn’t been scarified for several weeks?) and said, “I’ve got the red rust.” It relieved her extravagantly to give her hurt a name. She no longer spoke of “it” but of “the rubigo.”

“How’s the rubigo?” I’d greet her conspiratorially, and she’d answer, “So-so,” on good days, with a clench of her eyes on bad. Though when it comes to that, the code was no code, since I had meanwhile entertained Malcolm, Mom and Dillis with the blight on wheat.

T
O THE DEGREE THAT
Frances had forgiven me for feeling obligated to her, my obligation intensified. Jill came home in July for her five-week summer holiday, and I worked at home in that period, back at the routine I’d had before she went away. But twice a week I left Jill with Mrs. Coombe, put a chicken leg and whatever berries the garden was yielding into a paper bag, and did the eighteen miles into Norfolk to “have lunch with” Frances. Usually I stayed to say hello to the others too, and it must have been in the third week that Malcolm brought up the merger.

“What does Oliver think of the Utagawa thing?”

“The what?”

“You know, the merger.”

I shook my head. He blushed and fumbled, which was rather unlike Malcolm. “Well, it’s all over the factory; Admin must have been looking over it for weeks. I thought Oliver, I just reckoned he’d naturally …” He gave an apologetic laugh. “I thought you were keeping it from us.”

“Well,” I said wryly, “apparently not. What’s the deal?”

Syncopated, with a bunch of half-finished gestures that were more in Nicholson’s style than his own, Malcolm told me what he knew. The Japanese textile industry had been thrown into panic by rumors of an incipient American embargo on textile imports, and some companies were casting around for alternative markets. One major firm, Utagawa of Osaka, had approached East Anglian with a “sister company” proposal, by which we would act as distributors for their silks and cottons in the U.K. and supply them with British wool and certain synthetics. They would send us Japanese looms and technicians, now superior in every respect to the home product, and we would initiate them into the so-called secrets of the new British ascendancy in world fashion. Since dress design was the center and substance of this last, Design Print would be intimately affected. But the merger would involve further expansion and personnel exchange between Norfolk and Osaka, and opinion was bitterly divided in the plant. It was bound to mean more money; nobody was averse to money. But local employment was already high to saturation in textiles; expansion would mean an influx of strangers both British and Japanese, cheap estate building and a two-shift day at the looms, which meant women working evenings, which meant altering the life of the villages. Worse, who wanted to relocate to Japan? They’d need administrative staff, technical trainees, card cutters. It was rumored—Malcolm knew all about my troubles at home, but I dragged this from him—that Oliver as well as Tyler Peer was being considered for the directorship of the Osaka operation.

“You mean, to move? That Oliver and I would
move
to Japan?”

“Jesus, Virginia,” Malcolm said. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what you’re sorry for. If it’s all over the mill, I guess it’s time somebody let me in on it.”

“Will you let him … will you wait for him to tell you about it?”

“I don’t know, Malcolm. At the moment I could wring his neck with it.”

Oliver was two hundred yards away at Admin, but I went home. I hadn’t told him I was coming in today, and I felt peculiarly incapable of confronting him on his ground. I also wanted to think, if thinking is the right word for that mixture of chill and churning anger. Images of Oliver over the last few weeks kept flashing through my mind, innocent images of his discussing potato storage with Mr. Wrain, approving my
poulet en papillote,
reading tales of Elizabeth I to Jill; and I tried to take in that he had been keeping from me news that any weaver would share with her least acquaintance, that was hearsay in the boiler room and policy decision in the echelons that formed our social circle, and that would alter every professional and domestic aspect of my life. I drove with deliberate calm, not using the mini as an effigy this time but as a demonstration of my control, and tried to take it in, that he could do this, that he could fail to, neglect to, not think it worth his while to, that he could live at my table and in my bed and leave to Malcolm the humiliating revelation not of the news itself but of the cold official distance Oliver kept from me. Wild fantasies occurred to me in the guise of explanation: that Oliver was going to Japan without me, that he was going with another woman, that Administration had conspired to keep the news from Oliver himself; but none of them came anywhere near the mundane likelihood that he hadn’t told me because he didn’t choose to.

We were going to fight. We hadn’t fought for so long that our bitching and battering first eleven years had seemed permanently past, as if we had come to mutual agreement that they didn’t work, and passed on to maturer forms of enmity. But this time we were going to fight, and I looked forward to it with fear and exhilaration. There’s no use pretending I didn’t welcome it. Because I held the belief, unfocused but profound, that if I once succeeded in proving to Oliver how unfair he was, if I once laid out incontestable evidence he was wrong, he would love me again. I don’t apologize for this; I think half the bitterness of the world feeds on such beliefs.

But it wouldn’t have been that easy even if it had been that easy. I came home to the conspicuous mass absence of Jill, Mrs. Coombe, Mr. Wrain and Mr. Wrain’s truck. There was no precedent, no note, and nothing to go on except the picture of broken limbs and car crashes that mothers keep ready in their minds. For an hour I paced between this agitation and the other, half looking for evidence of an accident but finding none. I called the Cambridge hospital but they weren’t there. I wasn’t going to call Oliver. By the time I thought of dialing the hospital in Migglesly they were back, Jill limping importantly and Mrs. Coombe and Mr. Wrain competing to tell the story. Jill had stepped on a nail in a board in the tool shed such as went
right through
her foot. Only the fleshy bit outside the bone, said Mr. Wrain. But a rusty nail all the same, said Mrs. Coombe, as everybody knows is the best way to get lockjaw, and if anybody wanted to take the responsibility for that she was sure they were welcome, but it wouldn’t be
her.
So they went for a tetanus shot. I assured her she had done right. Well, yes, but she tried to call Oliver and he wasn’t in his office, and she didn’t know where I was as I hadn’t said where I was going, only “out,” and she hadn’t thought to go up to Cambridge because Migglesly was her own hospital, her council estate being as it was on that side of the county line, and she being, she supposed, upset and not thinking as clear as she might. Mr. Wrain asserted that they had tetanus shots and to spare at Migglesly Victoria. That was so, but they also had a Pakistani doctor in Casualty, which she didn’t know
how
Mrs. Marbalestier would feel about that, and they had to wait for Jill’s records to be called from Cambridge, although Jill had behaved herself patient as could be, like a little lady, and didn’t let out a peep only when they disinfected her foot and not again till they stuck the needle in. Jill, on my lap, displayed a lollipop and a sixpence.

I thanked Mr. Wrain, who gave Jill a hug and took his leave, placidly refusing to be paid for his time or his petrol. Mrs. Coombe had missed two buses and I offered to drive her home, but she wouldn’t hear of that either, she’d wait for the six o’clock. I didn’t insist because I could see she did want to stay. The break in her humdrum routine among my paraphernalia had caused her enough real anxiety to make her breath come short, her swollen fingers jiggle on the kitchen table. Now she very properly wanted her due: my reiterated assurance she had done well, and a chance to perfect the telling of the crisis for when she arrived interestingly late at home. We sat over cups of tea exchanging recollections of infant danger while Jill limped around the kitchen for us wearing one of Oliver’s socks, remembering new details of the adventure like the rocking horse in the waiting room or the floor shift of Mr. Wrain’s truck. When Oliver got home we switched to sherry, and Mrs. Coombe went over it for him, at greater length and with a ballooning sense of averted catastrophe. Then she caught her bus, and Jill, exhausted by the excitement, allowed herself to be fed early and put to bed.

I came back down to the kitchen and mixed two drinks. The other crisis had been eroded, my anger had lost its edge. Now there would be a cold confrontation, or possibly a reasonable discussion, even if the knockdown drag-out would have relieved me more. In that other mood, for instance, it would clearly not have been my impulse to carry a Scotch in and set it waitresslike on a paper napkin at Oliver’s end of the coffee table. I went to my chair and sat for a minute collecting my distracted feelings, trying to pick the best opening.

So I was caught off balance by Oliver’s offensive. He carefully folded his paper and took a sip of his drink, then set it down with a gravel rap. “Why were you at the plant?”

“Why what? Why was I what?”

“Why were you at the mill and not at home?”

I sat bewildered. My righteousness began to bubble inside again. “I don’t stay home all day every day; that’s what Mrs. Coombe is for. It would have happened just the same if I’d been here. Do you think I follow her into the tool shed looking for rusty nails?”

“I asked why you went to the plant.”

“I had things to deliver. I had things to pick up. What difference does it make?” I didn’t know exactly why guilt was mixing into my rage, or rather not mixing, but swirling like oil and water in my gut.

“Then why didn’t you take Jill with you? That would have been a reasonable thing to do. And in that case, Virginia, if I may observe, it would not have happened.”

His sarcasm struck me as prissy. I figured out what it was I’d been avoiding saying, so I said it. “Because I went in to have lunch with Frances Kean. I didn’t think that’d be a particularly edifying experience for Jill, or a very easy one for Frances. But I did get pretty well edified myself, Oliver. I found out I was the only person in the whole company that hadn’t heard about a Japanese merger!”

To my astonishment he ignored this altogether. “That’s exactly my point, you went in to have lunch with Frances Kean, when Nicholson’s specifically said that he doesn’t want you getting mixed up with her.”