Raw Silk (9781480463318) (22 page)

“You tell me.”

“Mickey Mantis!” She sailed away shrieking with laughter, tripped on a rock and went down on her gray flannel hem in an ice-crusted puddle. The carrier bag split.

“Mickey Monster,” I said. “Mickey fucking muckup.” We giggled together while I swiped at her skirt with my handkerchief and then my coat. One of her braids came undone and she smeared her face pushing it back. We were both muddy and askew and wildly pleased with each other. When a line of cars crawled past us, held in check by a loaded poultry van, we made only minimally serious attempts to stop them. I cradled the burst carrier bag in my arms and held it out to the van. “Penny for the Guy!”

“Mickey Monster!” Jill shouted after him.

“Mickey Michaelmas!”

“Mickey Monkey!”

The cars shied past, furtive glances out the windows. They left a wake of icicle exhaust.

“Jill, this is nuts. We’ll freeze out here. We’ve got to pull ourselves together.”

“Why don’t they stop?”

“Because they think we’re a couple of escaped loonies. I think so myself. Here, hold the bag while I tie my scarf around it.”

In the end we were picked up by a 1947 maroon Rolls-Royce taxi with pigskin seats. It came over the hill, snooty-grilled and grunting comfortably against the wind, very like a Walt Disney version of a miracle.

“I don’t believe it,” I said to Jill.

“I don’t believe it,” I said to the septuagenarian driver who wafted to a stop and loaded our bags in the plush-lined boot.

“Oh, ay,” he answered mildly, “I’m often round about here in the mornings.” Mr. J. G. Hartley, he was, who’d passed our stranded car a bit back and had an eye out for us; who’d had his Rolls as a bequest of Lady Morris-Grigson at her demise; who’d been her chauffeur man and boy for fifty years, and now got by quite tolerably trundling folk back and forth between the villages.

“I think we must lead a charmed life,” I insisted, settling muddily back against the leather. Nevertheless the charm in the atmosphere receded. Jill and I fell silent while Mr. Hartley entertained us toward St. Margaret’s with goings-on in the old days at the Morris-Grigson manor. The closer we got the more aware I became that it was a full year since I’d first brought Jill to boarding school, and that I was no more settled in my mind about it now than I was then. There was something symbolic about our arriving this time so unkempt in so royal a conveyance, but what it might be symbolic of I couldn’t decide. The heat comforted us, then made us drowsy. Jill slumped in the seat studying her hands, closing a fist now and again to watch the cracks in the drying dirt.

There were no girls on horseback in the village, but as we passed the stone cottages with their impeccable thatched roofs and tidy gardens Jill raised her stare to those, nodding at each one, frowning slightly.

“They read our letters,” she said out the window, at the houses.

“They what, baby?”

“They read what we put, in our letters home.”

“Oh.”

“They make us write every week, and then Miss Meridene reads them.”

“Well. Do you want to say things you don’t want her to see sometimes?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes. I wanted to put when Penny Mountjoy broke my riding crop.”

“Miss Meridene wouldn’t have minded your telling me about that.”

“No,” she agreed indifferently. But it was not the point.

“You can call me anytime you want to.”

“Okay.” But it was not the point. She stared at the distorted lifeline in the film of dirt on her palm, unable to convey, as I was unable to acknowledge, that she had a sense of privacy beyond the closing of bathroom doors, which St. Margaret’s unaccountably ignored.

“Jill,” I said rashly, with a sudden single hard pound of heart muscle, “do you want to come back and live at home, and go to school in Eastley Village?”

“Oh, no.” She turned to me quite blank, quite bewildered at this illogical leap. “Why, no, Mummy, I
love
St. Margaret’s.”

And we drew up into a gaggle of uniforms streaming out of assembly hall; we unwound into their giggles, the comical pair with the paper bag in the tourniquet and the thistles in their socks; disheveled out of the purple pumpkin into the arms of Miss Meridene: “You poor
dears
! Come straight in and get warm by the fire!”

Mr. Hartley drove me all the way home, stopping in Plunkton Green to arrange for a tow truck and repairs. The garage called next day, collect, to say that they could put it right for a hundred pounds. Oliver didn’t trust them; he had more faith in our bloke in Migglesly, who duly towed the mini from Plunkton Green. Our bloke in Migglesly said I needed brake shoes, carburetor cleaning, clutch assembly, a whole exhaust system, a new starter motor, a battery and two tires. He could do it for a hundred and eighty, but if I didn’t mind his saying so, it wasn’t worth it. If I didn’t mind his saying so, it was time Mrs. Marbalestier had a new car. I put the alternatives to Oliver, who said we’d have to give it some thought. I gave it some thought by scanning the classifieds for a mini a few years younger. Oliver gave it some thought by bringing home brochures on new Rovers and Volvos.

“I don’t need anything wonderful, I just need something to get me from here to there.”

“You don’t want to be running around in an old crate.”

“I’ve been running around in an old crate for five years.”

“We’ll have to give it some thought.”

All this consumed ten days. On the first of them I rode into East Anglian with Oliver, but he made it so evident that this was a trial to him—he’d be in Tippet in the afternoon and could have gone straight back from there—that at the end of the day I packed a portfolio and prepared to work at home for the duration. Once I took a taxi into Migglesly to see Frances, but I was not anxious to press my luck on concealed expenses, so I explained to her about the car and said I might not be back till it was fixed. She looked at the television screen and said she understood. She hid her hands under the covers and said it didn’t matter.

I called her every afternoon but telephone conversation was predictably impossible, and after the first couple of days we tacitly agreed on a minimal exchange of nonnews and pleasantries. I worked at home, badly, and felt as isolated as a mountaineer. Finally I called our bloke in Migglesly and told him to do the absolute minimum, which he agreed to with the assurance that in a few months’ time I’d be sending good money after bad.

But the parts didn’t come, and one of the mechanics got the flu, and it was February before I was mobile again. As soon as I was, I pushed the poor patched mini to East Anglian and dumped my stuff into Design Print.

“I thought I’d die without you!”

“We’ve been hitting the bottle ourselves,” Malcolm said. “Where you off to now?”

“Gotta see Clive Tydeman. Put on the kettle, I’ll be right back.”

Clive jumped up from his drawing board—paisley with lilies of the valley—and took me by both hands.

“They told me you’d been away. Come see, come see.”

He drew me out and along the walk toward the tapestry weaving barn. “You haven’t missed a lot, we’ve only got one color running so far. Wouldn’t you know we’d have
four
broken slab stocks all at once, and it took forever to get them down from Gorringer’s.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I’ve been three weeks getting a starter motor and a couple of tires.”

“Well, but wait till you see. The texture reverse is better than I thought, and they’ve got a new polyester fiber that you’d swear to God came out of the flax fields of Flanders. Absolute linen to the life, except that it won’t scrunch up and you can throw it in the washer …”

He said something else, but by now we were into the noise of the machines. He rolled his eyes at the roar and led me back to where one of the newest looms, the kind with two shuttles meeting at the center, was throwing itself thread by thread into the pattern of Frances’s Rubigo. It was in the pale scheme, a slightly luminous eggshell ground with the rougher beige design set deep in it. It fed from the loom bed in lazy folds like foam over the edge of a dam, and laid itself richly back and forth at our feet.

“You like?” he shouted.

I nodded, covering my mouth for pleasure and wishing Frances were here, to see it come this way weighty and authoritative toward her, an object arguably useful, arguably handsome as an apple tree.

“Can I have a cutting?”

I took a three-yard piece back to Design Print to spread out for the others.

“Before anybody suggests that I’m trying to take over furnishing fabrics, let me suggest that I’m trying to take over furnishing fabrics.”

“Wow,” said Dillis.

“No, actually, it’s a one-shot,” I said. “I just didn’t think it’d do for dress print.”

“Oh, mother, that’s something.” Malcolm ran a forefinger over it, crushed a corner in his palm and smelled it. “Superfine gorgeous. Hey, isn’t it that whatsit you didn’t use?”

“The Rubigo, yes.”

“But what’d you do to it?”

“It’s another version.”

“I’ll say. Thought through again from scratch, eh?”

“Pretty well thought through from scratch.”

“Oh, you had a call,” said Dillis.

Mom held the swath against the wall and pinched it deftly into curtain folds. “Whatever made you think of doing this?” she asked. “Isn’t it old damask weave?”

“It was Clive Tydeman’s idea.”

“Here it is; Miss Gavin at Migglesly hospital. She said to call her back.”

Miss Gavin was the nurse in the pony tail. I called apprehensively. Well, nobody had told her to get in touch with me, she was calling on her own, but she thought I’d want to know that Miss Kean had put her fist through the hospital window.

The curtains were drawn for deliberate gloom. She was propped up in bed staring at the blank television screen. Her right hand, this time, was bandaged, this time voluminously, into a clumsy paw shape.

“Oh, Frances.” I sat down beside her. She looked at me from beetled brows and grunted nasally. I could see both that she was sedated and that it wasn’t working very well.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here for so long. I’d have come if you’d let me know.”

“Know what? Know what? Know, know, know, know. Nobody
knows
.”

“Tell me then.”

“I thought I could. Do.”

“Could tell me?”

“No, do. Something.”

I waited. Even in the half light I could see that her gaunt features were losing their stylishness. A haggard fold hung over her cheekbones, her forehead was marked with tension. She was twenty-one and she was aging.

“What did you think you could do?”

“A thing. An action, see?”

“No, I don’t see. Explain to me.”

“I was, he. Holloway.”

“Yes?”

“He was surprised I’m good.”

She peered at me urgently. She grunted. “See?”

“Frances, please try to tell me.”

“See, here.” She reached to the nightstand and brought the sketch pad to her knees, turning the pages by pushing roughly at them with the ball of bandage. Page after page was covered with the jelly fetuses, set now in alabaster eggs, now in steel, now in woodgrain, now in flint. They varied in nothing but texture: grain and veining and density.

“See? This is obsidian.”

“What happened?”

“Dr. Holloway said he would look at them. He thought he might learn from them, about me, but it. Was not. That. He was,
surprised.
”

“He was impressed.”

“Im-pressed. Im-pression. They made a pressure on him.”

“And that pleased you very much.”

“I came back here. He says I wanted to punish my hand. The other times all right. But not then. They say I wanted to be sorried for. The other times, but not then. I am not fantasizing!”

“I believe you.”

“I felt I could do. And I have not done. For so long I could not take, you see, you see, you see, you see, an action.”

“Yes.”

“So I went to the window and I broke the pane.” She clenched her face to me, rocking her torso with the effort to be understood. “I broke the pane. I broke the pane!”

“You broke the pain. Your pain.”

“Yes! Yes!” sung whining from her and she gulped mouthfuls of wet air. She shook her arms at me, fingers of the free hand flapping. She pushed at the sketchbook pages and I saw that blood was seeping through the bandage. “But he says. And he says he does not believe I am trying to be born. I am trying to be born! But I can’t be born if I am unbearable!”

“Oh, Frances.”

Her shouting had brought Miss Gavin, and an older nurse with a tray of pills.

“Don’t leave me!” Frances reached for me.

“Just pop this in your mouth, that’s a good girl.”

“No! Don’t let them make me!”

“Please,” I said, “give her a minute. She’ll calm down. I shouldn’t have asked her …”

“That’s the girl.” The nurse bustled between us and put a firm hand on the nape of Frances’s neck. “You don’t want to make me give you an injection now, do you.” She picked up a cup of water and gestured to Miss Gavin to hold her arms.

“I won’t! Won’t!” Frances struggled and looked imploringly at me, but the nurse performed some sleight of hand with the pill and the water, on which Frances gagged; water dribbled off her chin and the pill was down.

“There now. That’s much better.”

Frances huddled and sobbed. They said I would have to go.

I knocked on the door of Dr. Holloway’s cubicle and pushed in. It was little larger than a linen cupboard and had shelves to the ceiling stacked with meticulous files like laundered sheets. I sat without being asked and took out one of my emergency cigarettes.

“Ah, Mrs. Marbalestier. You’ve been to see Miss Kean, no doubt.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I upset her.”

“I shouldn’t worry about it too much. She’s in an excitable state.”

“I could see that.”

He was writing something on a stenciled form, and had scarcely glanced up from it. Now he signed it, folded it into a manila envelope and took out an ashtray, which he squared on the desk in front of me.

“Well,” he said, and smiled, which made the fleshfolds on either side of his mouth swell with apparent sympathy. I took a drag and cleared my throat.