Raw Silk (9781480463318) (25 page)

Instead, I imagined a mural on my living room wall. In this mural Princess Margaret was sitting on my velvet chaise longue in a velvet coat cut twenty years out of fashion, and a hat made out of the stump ends of a peacock tail. She was smiling, with teeth, and holding a dog leash in her lap. The other end of this leash was inserted by means of a hypodermic needle into the soft flesh at the crook of Frances’s elbow. Frances was lying in a loom, and the shuttles were slamming through her breastbone, weaving a coverlet in the pattern of the Rubigo. I was perched on a stool beside her wearing the costume of a novice nun and a look of beneficent beatitude, reading out of a book. What?
Songs of Innocence. Pollyanna.
Sour waves of self-disgust enveloped me. I tried to contain them by putting them into this image which was, I noticed, in something like Frances’s style. I didn’t pretend that I would ever paint the mural, but I concentrated on it as if I had my brush poised, because I did not want to remind myself that I had been impugning Oliver’s motives and morals lately. I had accused him in my mind of ambition, and of seeking advancement at the expense of others. But I would never have supposed him capable of plagiarism. And my motives would not interest him; or rather, that they involved Frances would compound the shock, the shame. So I did not think of that. I mixed gray veins and pink rouge on my smirking face in the mural.

So carefully not thinking, one of the things I didn’t think of was that Nicholson’s copy of the letter would have arrived with mine, and that Oliver might have the news ahead of me. But he came in buoyant; his “Ginia!” was a halloo from the doorstep, he had a bottle of champagne, ready-iced, that bruised my shoulder as he swung me around to kiss me on the mouth.

“Did you get the letter? Good girl, hey, goddam! I figured you’d do it but I didn’t know you’d time it so well!” He was boyish and springing. He fetched glasses and ripped at the foil over the cork while I stood dumb, registering that among the things I must regret, I must regret that Oliver was proud of me. He might begrudge my daily presence in his territory, he might want me as an echo on anything that concerned his own affairs, but there was no jealousy in him for my success. It was a long time since Oliver had been proud of me. I watched him lanky and loose and competent rolling at the foil. I didn’t love him but I grieved that I no longer loved him, and suffered a sense that the emotions are not all that different.

“Don’t open it,” I finally got out.

“What? What’s the matter?”

“I have to turn it down.”

“What are you onto?” He pressed expertly at the cork with his thumb, turning the bottle in his palm. “I swear to God, Virginia, if you pull some modesty thing on me, I’ll turn you over my knee. Nicholson’s pleased as punch. He’ll be calling any time.”

“But it’s not my design.”

The cork popped with a muted resonance and he had the glass ready for the first foamy splash.

“Veuve Clicquot pour madame?”

“Oliver, it’s not my design.”

He heard me that time. He set down the glass. The other Oliver, that running boy, retreated visibly into the executive stranger; if he had begun with hey-good-girl-goddam, any minute he would start into let-us-be-clear-on-one-point and if-I-understand-you-correctly.

“You what?”

“The Rubigo. I didn’t design it.”

“How didn’t ‘design’ it. What is it then?”

“No,
I
didn’t. Somebody else.”

“Body else what?”

“Designed it.”

“How?”

“How?”

“Who?”

“Oh. Frances Kean.”

He studied me warily, half smiling, taking stock. Choosing the strategy to deal with an irrational snag. He pressed me gently by the shoulders into my chair. Very level, he said, “Virginia, Frances Kean did not do that design.”

“She did. She’s an artist.”

He backed to his end of the table and sat slowly in his chair. “Start at the beginning,” he suggested.

“Yes.” But I didn’t know exactly where the beginning was. I thought I should read him the passage on wheat blight from
The Young Lady’s Book of Botany,
but the book was at the office, and then I thought that perhaps that would not explain anything anyway. “I did do a design called Rubigo,” I finally said, “but it wasn’t any good, so I didn’t submit it. Frances Kean did another. And I submitted that.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No, well. I didn’t exactly mean to submit it. I went to show it to Clive Tydeman. It presented interesting problems, see? And he had the idea of damask, and between us, we … I got carried away. I thought it would help Frances. I know that will make you all the angrier, but Oliver, she’s very good. Well, as you see. I mean, she won the award. But I couldn’t have put it under her name, Nicholson might not have passed it, but that wasn’t the reason, it was more …”

“That scheming kid,” Oliver muttered, as if impressed.

“No. Oh, no, she doesn’t even know. I wanted to present it to her
fait accompli,
but then she put her hand through the window and Holloway said it was dangerous. And the trouble is that if he was right it’ll be worse now; it’ll make her public. I don’t mean it really will, but she’ll feel that. She’ll feel exposed. I had no right to do it, it was a muddled Lady Bountiful thing to do, but I did want to help her. You’ve no idea how good she is. Was. I don’t know now. They’ve sent her to Dorsetshire.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.”

I waited, while he put his hand over his face in exasperated bewilderment. Guilt affected my motor control, and I knew that I sat as awkwardly as a schoolgirl, that I sounded like a petulant adolescent, whereas somewhere underneath all this was a dignified someone who could present my case. I had not located her in time. I had appointed my mother’s skittish daughter as counsel for the defense.

“Now,” said Oliver. “You haven’t thought this through. What you’re telling me is that you plagiarized a design.”

“It wasn’t meant for plagiarism. It was meant for—I know it sounds stupid—a surprise. I wanted to jolt her into realizing …”

“But in fact.”

“All right. I’d realized before today that it amounts to that.”

“And what is it, exactly, you intend to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ve betrayed Frances but in a different way than anyone will understand. It’s like intravenous feeding, do you see?”

“No.”

“I mean, what I stole is her power to choose. It’s got nothing to do with the award. And yet the award may be the thing that
I
can’t steal. Do you see? I could give her the money, of course, but what kind of honesty is that, pretending it’s a gift? No, I think I’ll have to bring it out. To Nicholson, and the Carnaby Commission—I suppose they’ll let her keep the award. I’ll go down to Dorset, and if the doctors let me, I’ll tell Frances. If they won’t I suppose I’ll have to see her family.”

Oliver listened intently through this fumbling, with the air of someone listening to a half-known language. He rubbed at the furrow between his eyes with both index fingers. Then he said, “You’ll be in disgrace at East Anglian, you realize.” The choice of word seemed to me particularly apt. I felt, precisely, out of grace.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ll lose your job.”

“Do you think so? I don’t know. I may.”

He made half of an exasperated gesture that trailed unfinished onto his knee, and slumped into a long silence that I thought I could not bear. And then I noticed that I could bear it pretty well. Oliver bit at the skin beside his thumb and this trivial gesture turned him, briefly, into someone I could touch. Perhaps Oliver is right; perhaps I can only sympathize with misfits, outcasts, deflation and defeat. At least it’s true that for the length of time he bit distractedly at his thumb, I liked him.

“I’m sorry, Oliver.”

“And what is it,” he said, “that you think ‘may’ happen to me?”

This surprised me. “I don’t see why anything should happen to you. I know it’s embarrassing for you, Oliver. I’m very sorry, I truly am. But they’re hardly going to fire
you
because your wife is—in disgrace.”

He pulled the flesh of his face down with both hands and shook his head as if to clear it. “Virginia,” he said carefully, “look where I am. I’ve put myself out on a limb in a negotiation both delicate and explosive. I have steered us into Utagawa without the backing of most of my peers and against an angry labor force that calls me ambitious for it. Now my wife comes along and it turns out she’s been stealing sketches from a file clerk and turning them in as her own work. Can you see what they’ll make of that?”

I could see. They might not, of course, be as quick as Oliver to see how to exploit every angle. But then again, there was Jake Tremain. They might.

“Furthermore, I’ve set myself up against Nicholson, and for the moment Nicholson controls my career. He’s too businesslike, and he’s probably too
fair,
to hold me back over a policy disagreement. But my name gets involved in a scandal that damages the company—and the unions will make sure it gets all the publicity it’s good for—where do you think that leaves me? Next in line for the Japanese operation? Or the directorship? Can you
see
?”

I could see. I could see that I’d stumble willy-nilly into betrayal all my life; I was born to it. “I’m so sorry, Oliver. Will you have to give up Utagawa then?”

He picked up the glass again, took a sip, sat straighter in his chair. “Let’s take a different perspective on it altogether. You did a design called Rubigo. One of your diseases, was it?”

“One of my diseases.” I tried a limp smile, but he wasn’t interested in irony.

“Your young friend Frances Kean took the sketch and did something with it.”

“No, a different design altogether.”

“Another version. You submitted the second version. Altering it in any way?”

“I had to make the lines match for repetition. I scaled it up.”

“Together you and Clive Tydeman translated it into damask.”

“Well, yes. It was his idea.”

“You chose the colors, the yarn?”

“Yes, Clive and I.”

“Then in fact the end product is yours and Clive’s.”

“No, Oliver. It’s Frances’s.”

“Frances is in a mental home in Dorsetshire. Who else knows? Malcolm? Clive?”

“No. I meant to save it for Frances, but Dr. Holloway …”

“Holloway knows.”

“Not even. I was too timid. I asked him in a theoretical way if I could submit one of her drawings.”

“So nobody knows.”

“Nobody but you and me.” I saw where he was leading me and I watched him lead me there, because I finally saw that it didn’t matter whether I argued well or badly, whether I defended myself. All that mattered was what I did. My energy was so low that I had to save all of it for the doing.

“I’m sorry,” I said for the dozenth time, “but I don’t think I can.”

“Can what, for Christ’s sake? It looks to me as if it’s already done.”

“Can’t take Frances’s award money. Can’t see it announced in the bloody
Sunday Times.
I can’t put on a long dress and go shake Princess Margaret’s hand.”

He seemed to see the force of this, and slumped back again. “So if you can’t, then what I can do, is just sit and wait for the consequences.”

“Oliver, it’s Frances I’ve betrayed, it isn’t you.”

“Not yet it isn’t.”

At which point the phone made us both jump, shrill even though it was muffled by the distance to the office door. On the second ring Oliver shoved himself from his chair and went for it. I waited, rigid, till he came back with the non-news, “Nicholson.”

I tried to smile and shrug, but my coordination wasn’t very good, and I felt like a tortoise drawing my head in.

“Look,” said Oliver. “Look, let me get through tonight before you do anything, can you give me that? Just sleep on it, and let me get through the meeting.”

It seemed very little to ask, and anyway I was exhausted, I needed to muster strength myself. And then there was something besides that, as peculiar as it may seem; that Oliver was waiting for my reply. That deep quotation mark between his eyes, and his jaw just set askew—I had a full, fine sense of its mattering whether I said yes or no, and I couldn’t remember the last time it had mattered.

So I went to the phone, and when George was done saying jolly-good-absolutely-splendid-proud-of-you, I replied that I was still a little numb.

Oliver went on ahead to Migglesly to meet with the Board members and check on the readiness of the hall. I was in that state of distraction that manifests itself in split fingernails and lost car keys. It was nearly seven by the time I took the mini off the charger and got in. Backing out I forgot to avoid a pothole left from the spring rains; as I jolted across it there was a clunk followed by a metallic scrape, and a Hell’s Angels roar revved up at me out of the floorboards. I got out and stooped to look under the car. True to the prophecy of our bloke in Migglesly, the exhaust pipe had rusted through the middle and the two ends of it were hanging in a broken V on the ground. I got back in and crawled up the drive, roaring and clunking, scooping up gravel on the rise, spilling it out again on the slope. I limped at fifteen miles an hour from deserted street to street of Eastley Village, but of course there was no garage open, nor so much as a tobacconist. I stopped at the George’s Head, and a friendly gang of drunken locals took a look. They assured me there was nothing to tie it up to but a rusty hole. One of them suggested that I get a horse, which amused them mightily. I thought of calling Migglesly to say I couldn’t make it, but I wasn’t sure Oliver would believe my reason. So I crawled and clunked on through the country roads, limped loudly on the outside lane of the highway into Migglesly, where a fresh-faced bobby gave me a ticket and told me to get off the streets. It was my criminal day.

Migglesly was at its bleakest in a brown half light, and an air of a Victorian prison lay over the grimy brick hall. I was late, of course. The porter rushed out to check on my noisy arrival, guided me into a parking space and confided to me that I was dangerous and illegal.

“So I understand,” I said, “but if it’s all right I can leave it here overnight. I can go home with my husband.”