Raw Silk (9781480463318) (21 page)

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 hairline 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.

Worse was Oliver’s trolley car. It was an old tradition with us, for which I was entirely responsible, that as Oliver had been cheated by war and postwar penury out of mechanical toys in his childhood, I would make it up to him year by year. In our early marriage, especially when we were short of money, I had spent solemn hours among windup monkeys and music boxes. Now the tradition was as empty to me as a Baptist communion, but I could no more give it up than Oliver could let me sleep in the guest room. So here was a battery-operated trolley car that buzzed and lit up, backed off from obstacles and changed directions. It was vulgarly painted in primary colors and had cost about half of what Mrs. Coombe lived on for a week. Grimly I boxed Oliver’s toy and Jill’s objet d’art. I was taping the paper around them when Oliver knocked.

“All right to come in?”

“All safe.”

“Virginia, what is this?”

I finished smoothing a corner and taping it down before I looked. Oliver had a fistful of canceled checks, and the top one he held out to me was made in the amount of thirty-six pounds to Mrs. Lena Fromkirk. I started and felt the heat rising, addressed myself to the other end of the package and knocked the roll of tape on the floor. I remember thinking as I bent to it that I’d already registered guilt, that it was going to come out now; and it was without any forethought or inspiration whatsoever that I straightened up, pouted and heard myself saying, “You’re not to ask.”

“You and your Christmases.” Oliver shook his head, only partly mollified, but bound as I was by our rituals to leave it at that.

The simplicity of it staggered me. All I had to do was cover the debt. The next morning I cashed an unusually large housekeeping check, bought a length of Harris tweed on sale at Ryder’s in Cambridge, and took it to a local tailor to be made into a sport jacket. The total cost would be twenty-two pounds. Five days later I cashed another check, and in the meantime took to complaining of the rising prices, real enough, of candles, Christmas trees, nuts and ribbons—an occupational indignation that I had always found extremely boring. But it was easy enough to carry over into grass seed and toilet paper. I found that I could substitute New Zealand lamb for English, and as long as I lied firmly enough, nobody would know the difference. I could cut down on French cheeses and take Genoa salami instead of Ardennes. I could wear holey tights under trousers and buy two ounces less of everything. I found, in fact, that although (because?) I was indifferent to our money, I wasted a good deal of it, and at this late date I found out what economy was.

On Christmas morning I gave Oliver the sport jacket and praised the tailoring skills of the Mrs. Fromkirk I had found. Notice especially the pocket detail and the cut of the armholes. Oliver was delighted. Well, it was a nice jacket. A few days later I went back to Mrs. Fromkirk with a month’s rent hoarded out of the housekeeping and the holiday budget. She was delighted too, both at having an empty room paid for and at being paid in undeclarable cash.

“These taxes,” she confided.

I bought a Marks and Spencer sweater and sewed a Harrods label into it. To Oliver I bitched of the promised January rise in eggs and petrol. I saw no reason I could not continue in this way indefinitely, and I registered with no little wonder how easy it is to steal one’s own money.

T
HE MINI BROKE DOWN
on the way back to St. Margaret’s. It had been coughing and stalling for a few weeks, scarily sluggish passing on an uphill grade, corroding gangrenously at the points and in need of nightly transfusion from the recharger. But this time it quit dead. I’d pulled out around an empty farm truck to find myself facing an articulated lorry lumbering over the rise. There was time to get back but not through, which ought to have been evident to the farmer; it was not. He leaned on his brakes, which meant I had to slam mine, pump at them and snake back behind his swinging tailgate. I overshot and stalled on the grass verge, and the mini wouldn’t start again.

“The battery’s dead,” Jill opined.

“It can’t be. We’ve been on the road for twenty miles, and that recharges it, see? It’s more likely to go dead when it’s been sitting.”

“We’re out of gas?”

“Filled it yesterday.” I pumped, choked and revved, let it sit in case I’d flooded it, then pumped and revved again until the battery ran down like a record player and came finally round to Jill’s first opinion.

“It doesn’t want to,” she emended now.

“Honey, I think you’re right.”

I raised the bonnet, a purely formal matter, since I did not really expect to see more than a mucky maze of inert guts.

“Well, it looks to me like we’re going to hitch. Are you up to it?”

“Sure.”

There was a choice to make. We were four or five miles from the village of Plunkton Green and fifteen from St. Margaret’s. We could either take the bags and hitch ponderously all the way, or we could leave them and go just as far as a tow truck. I put it to Jill.

“I’d miss assembly if we wait to get it fixed, wouldn’t I?”

“You may miss it anyway, but we can try if you like.”

“Yes, please.”

I slammed the bonnet and dragged out the two-suiter, the overnighter and the carrier bag. “Look, honey, do you
mind
missing assembly, or do you just think you ought to be there?”

She considered, one toe scratching an ankle, pigtails hanging like streamers from the monk-ugly shape of the St. Margaret’s hat. “I’d be embarrassed,” she conceded. “So I’d mind.” A real answer.

“Let’s go, then.” I took the suitcases and she the bag, and we started off through brown furze that was alternately bristly and puddly. At the first rise I dug out clean socks and Wellingtons for Jill, but I had no change of shoes, and began to feel the foam lining of my loafers squish like cold sponge. It did not seem to me a matter for serious belief that passing drivers, of whom there were a dozen in ten minutes, should race on by the spectacle of a fraught matron trying to close a suitcase on a country stile, and a uniformed gamin in plaits waving a Wellington boot. But then I was raised in California.

“Sod bugger!” I yelled after the dozenth. Jill ignored me and pulled on the boot. For a while there was no traffic and we walked on; it was better to walk than stand in the freezing wind. The suitcases dragged at my arms and jostled gorse and holly. The wind grew fangs. Jill trudged more equably than I, getting pink, chattering.

“You’re supposed to hold with your knees but I forget. But I like galloping best.”

She ran to a fence to exchange stares with a cow who sniffed her carrier bag and ground its cud. She raced back to me asking, “Do you know what Donald Duck was before he was a duck?”

“No, what?”

“A cow.”

“No, that’s news to me. Did you make it up?”

“No, it’s true! Well, the artist, I forget his name, I read it in a book.”

“Walt Disney?”

“No,
no.
Somebody that worked at Walt Disney. He was looking for something and he tried a cow but it wasn’t right, you know? And then he thought of a duck and that was Donald Duck. Forever after.”

“Amen,” I laughed, watching her nipped nose wrinkle with the excitement of pure information. She hopped and swung the bag, limber against the wind.

“It’s true!”

“Oh, I believe you. I have the same trouble all the time myself.”

“You don’t do Donald Duck.”

“No, but I mean, I have to work at my ideas until I find the right shape for them. It’s the same thing, I try a butterfly and I really need a praying mantis.”

“Huh. I never thought of that.” She thought of it, bounced her palm on a dry gorse bush and turned back to me mischievously. “Do you know what Mickey Mouse was before he was a mouse?”