Raw Silk (9781480463318) (2 page)

I thought that Oliver was specifically and even obsessively a scientist. I think now that he had an immense fund of energy that could have been paid out in any direction whatsoever. East Anglian saw it more clearly than I and made a salesman of him. I said this to Oliver not long ago, and he agreed with me. “The point is,” he said, “that I make a great salesman. I’d probably have been a dilettante of a scientist.” And probably that is the point. It probably is.

In any case it’s hindsight on both our parts. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I was particularly in rebellion against the business world. England impressed me, and sherry at noon, walled gardens and square cars were part of England. I was too busy with the strangeness of the old to regret what I might have found strangely new in it. Our proximity to the university was culture. The very dreariness of our flat became, in my letters home, a measure of the lofty carelessness about the place I’d traveled to. And there were always, as there always are, temptations that would have made us fools to go back and scrounge in London.

To begin with, before the fourth year was out, East Anglian offered Oliver six months’ travel in Europe. There was, unusually (I suppose Director Nicholson had taken my measure too), provision for my expenses to go with him. We couldn’t turn that down. Oliver loved to travel, and I had never been to Europe. I had the cocktail dresses made, in East Anglian’s polyester crepe. While Oliver talked to businessmen, I spent my days with a sketch pad in Antibes, the Hague, the Jeu de Paume, the Prado. Because Oliver was busy there was no need to sightsee in the usual sense. I spent the days of one whole week with Goya, fretting at the waste in his early commercial portraiture, fretting at my own conviction that his late, mad canvases were worth the war he meant them to expose. In the evening I put the cocktail dresses on, and did my bit for East Anglian, hostess to men who traveled without their wives. It was very peculiar, and rather lovely, to be flying and dining first class, when I’d always imagined us rucksacking over the Alps. I played at it, and thought Oliver was playing too: Oliver was so good at play.

In the second place, I went to work for East Anglian myself. After we married I’d continued to paint, in a desultory sort of way. I didn’t exactly discover that I wasn’t good, but it disturbed me how easily I could be distracted. In the first year I could make the breakfast dishes last till four o’clock. And when I came to paint nothing very much happened. I wanted to paint Goya’s war, or better still, a karate battle. I wanted to paint a translucent, mythical tree in which you would see all at once the seed, the sap running and the ax that cut it down. I wanted to paint exotic things, and nothing exotic had happened to me.

Then Oliver suggested I try fabric design. They had Malcolm Butler for psychedelics, which were just hitting their stride, and he was so good he’d come within one vote of the new Carnaby Award for Innovative Design—a pleasant jolt for East Anglian, which was rarely accused of innovation. But they weren’t satisfied with their line of “staples,” which means the flowers and the subcubic patterns that are bought by women over forty. Oliver set me up with a silk screen to see what I could do. And I tried it, and it worked. Handling the frame and the taut silk put energy back in my hands. The smell of the rubber-dissolving fluid made me high. The sharp outlines of my flowers, cut with a knife in rubber film, made real brute impact, denied the background atmosphere. And I found that my chrysanthemums, which had never been worth wall space, made excellent sense arranged petal point to petal point and repeated upside down. Like Oliver I found myself, if you want to put it that way.

And then, then of course, there was Jill. She was conceived on a pillow the size of a bed, on a bed the size of my room back home, in the red and gold Schloss Mirabel in Vienna, a hotel dedicated to the fruitful intercourse of first-class, international-traveling salesmen. It wouldn’t, honestly, have made much sense that a daughter so conceived and so dedicated should have been carried around Soho in a ten-bob basket.

We called her Gillian and bought a house. (“Gillian?” my mother said.
“Gillian?”
I apologized, “But we’ll call her Jill.”) Oliver charmed two contracts out of Germany, took his bonus in East Anglian shares, and was made an assistant to the director. He charmed the local weavers out of a strike, took his bonus in East Anglian shares, and was made commercial manager at thirty-three. I took over staples altogether, and East Anglian took me to its bosom. I remain odd to them—I’ve never scaled my California gestures down, and nobody trusts me with their Spode—but my oddness is, like Oliver’s originality, well within the range of what an English community bosom can absorb. We moved again.

Our second house—this house—is a Tudor manor many times modernized and subversively half-timbered. The beams are arranged in ten-foot squares, three of them to the level of the lower roof, and the corners of each square are tied together obliquely with another beam which, though it is a square foot of solid oak, had been twisted into the shape of a gigantic S. Local legend has it that the S stands for Stuart. Nothing else of the early history of the house is known. Behind, patently “modernized” in the eighteenth century, is a four-acre garden of symmetrical paths and plots overlooking a meadow that is within cycling distance of the Cambridge Backs. In the spring the students come to this meadow and lie in the buttercups, heaving their bicycles over the kiss-gates and dumping them in the grass. I walk through the garden and along the path with Jill; she swings on the gates and our pointer, pointlessly outraged, barks at her heels. I listen to the bees, whose intentions I know, and the buzzing of the students, curious whether they are plotting seduction, revolution or Nirvana. But I have never spoken to them as I might. I am not, in their terms, a California misfit, but the lady from the manor house with the expensive dog.

The house has only one disadvantage, aside from damp. It falls within the district of a lower form whose headmaster is sixty, and tired of kids. He can’t stand noise, sand, paint pots, Plasticine or half his staff, and apparently there is nothing that can be done about it. By the time he retires, Jill will be eleven.

The fact is that I paid no attention to this when we bought the house. I remember—or rather Oliver has reminded me—that when some fraught local mother warned us, I tossed it off by saying that you never know what’s going to suit a child. My education was all finger paint and self-expression, and I’d wanted to learn Greek. The real reason was that I couldn’t see ahead that far. All I could see was Jill among the peonies. We’d fallen into a routine full of ease and discovery, the end of which was no more real to me than death. If I’d thought about it I might have had another child, but I didn’t think. I designed in the mornings with the satisfaction of increasing control. In the afternoons we went out, whatever the weather, and when we came back Jill painted out of big glass jars, and I painted and painted Jill. The formality of her three-year-old beauty awakened a painful exhilaration in me. There was absolutely no disciplining her. When I scolded her she laughed and when I spanked her she turned on me with blazing blame, “I’m not having you in this house!” and there never seemed to be a middle ground in which she took the lesson. I know, and I can pretty well understand, that some women are worn listless by life with a toddler, but what I mainly wanted to do was to paint Jill: Jill raging, Jill swashbuckling, Jill exasperating, up to her eyes in tempera. And unlike Mr. Glynweather of the local school, I never had to clean up the paint.

There was that precedent, when we came to quarrel about her schooling, that Oliver had been right about the maid. It was when we were entertaining a German, the one whose contract earned Oliver his first promotion. I was skittish about my cooking, frustrated of my evening’s work, pregnant and cross. Oliver said we should have a maid and I told him to fuck off.

“Don’t be so crude. We can afford it.”

“We can afford a Mercedes-Benz. But I’m not going to start lugging status symbols around at my age, thanks.”

“You’re barmy. That is your status symbol, refusing to have a maid.”

“A maid, a
maid,
if you please. She can wear black crepe and a frilly cap.”

“She can wear what she damn well pleases.”

“Like me.”

“If you don’t like what you wear, you can go out and replace everything in your cupboard tomorrow.”

“Can I? Well, what I like to wear is blue jeans and baggy sweaters.”

“Go ahead.”

“Oh, sure. And the first time George Nicholson comes to tea, you’ll get the sack.”

“You know, Virginia, you’re a snob.”

I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t
stand
that, his turning everything upside down like that. I was choked for a minute, during which he said, “Will you just look at your hands.”

There it is, you see, I’m a snob and besides that my hands are unpresentable. As a matter of fact, my hands were a mess not because of any scrubbing but because the dissolving fluid cracked them and the paint ran in the cracks. I wanted to make him see what a phony he was, but I couldn’t speak. So I picked up a wedding present and smashed his collarbone.

He whammed back against the kitchen wall with a whimsical expression on his face, and I stood there with the ashtray. The ashtray wasn’t hurt. That German was up in the guest room eating chocolate creams. I put down the ashtray and began to cry, and Oliver said, quick, he thought it was broken and there, there, don’t carry on, we’d better make up a story and get to the hospital. I was falling apart with remorse and love of Oliver, and even then, I noticed, he was more worried about the German than himself
or
me.

I ran up and said Oliver had fallen down the stairs, and we got him taped up at the hospital and then he had a week in armchairs of the most winning offhand bravery. Come to think of it, maybe East Anglian owes that contract to me.

I couldn’t nurse Oliver
and
the German, so we got a maid. She wore blue jeans and baggy sweaters and her name was Virginia. I liked her better than anybody I’d met since California. And when Jill was born, she freed me to live my life around paint and Jill.

This is Oliver: he’s never made me pay for his collarbone. He could have blackmailed me into groveling pulp by now if he’d wanted to. He comes forevermore back to the argument about my snobbery, but he’s never made use of the fact that the one time before he forced an uppercrust emblem on me, I came round. We haven’t got Virginia anymore. She’s holed up within a stone’s throw of Grosvenor Square with a Maoist from Liverpool—I get apologetic letters from her now and then—and we have got, like the rest of East Anglian, an Old Treasure; but I could no more cope without her than without my hands. Sometimes when I have stood fists clenched and glowering at Oliver’s wonderfully contorted face, I’ve wanted to say, for heaven’s sake, Oliver, you’re missing out your best point. But he has his rules.

Jill began, at five, short days at the local school, and it was awful. She came home tired and sour, full of pent-up anger. I tried for a while to paint it, but that no longer seemed the point. It might have been easier if she hadn’t been so articulate about it. “If I want to put orange grass I don’t see why I can’t and it’s none of their business,” she said, quite reasonably, in my opinion. She came home one afternoon, took a bamboo switch and lopped the heads off all the daffodils in the orchard. Not a few; all of them. Two thousand maybe. A Yellow Massacre.

I went down to the orchard with her. I cared about the daffodils, no use pretending I didn’t, but about Jill I was frantic. I tried to get her to help me put the heads back on, to impress her with the finality of her destruction. But while I pretended surprise and dismay that I couldn’t keep them together, Jill laughed furiously and ground the slit throats in the grass.

We’d have to do something, I said, and Oliver did something. He inquired among the senior members of East Anglian, Ltd., and came up with St. Margaret’s Gothic-abbey boarding school for girls. It was only an hour away by car and she could come home for the first weekend of every month. They had horseback riding, finger painting, new math
and
Greek—the works.

I rejected it out of hand. Obviously our troubles had started when Jill began spending days away from home. The idea of mooning around that garden from week to week without her made my blood run cold. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath!

“She’ll get used to it,” Oliver said. “She’s independent enough to take it.”

“She may be, but I’m not.”

I meant to close the matter. And it might have been closed, aside from an occasional thrust and parry when Jill was in a temper, except that Frankie Billingham opened it on another plane. The Billinghams run a small farm half a mile from here, and they have to contend with six children, a hundred and fifty pigs, and perpetual skirmishes with their neighbors over the smell. They are a violent lot. I have seen Mrs. Billingham herding the children with a pig switch, and I’ve heard the blows being dealt even from the road, though the pig yard lies between the road and the house. I have no evidence, mind you, that Mrs. Billingham ever sent Mr. Billingham to the hospital with an ashtray, but the children’s faces are guerrilla ground, and Frankie lives mostly on the road. He’s been several times on his own to play with Jill, who idolizes the fierceness of him, but he won’t come on invitation, and my attempts to bribe him with ice lollies have been met with arrogant suspicion.

One Saturday in October I was mixing ink on the windowsill while Jill collected colored leaves outside. Frankie came along the road with an older girl, perhaps about seven, perhaps his sister, though I didn’t know her. They made purposefully for our gate and came for Jill. Arranging her leaves, she didn’t see them until they shadowed her, and then, still squatting, she looked up with delight.

“Go on,” the girl said.

Frankie hesitated for a second, then knelt down in front of Jill and began to pound her in the chest.