Raw Silk (9781480463318) (29 page)

Now he told me we were about to order a new hyperautomated silk-screening process from Utagawa, which would treble our output in both dress and furnishing fabrics. There would be an expansion of design staff for which our higgledy-piggledy organization was inadequate. But the Kyoto Design Center of the Utagawa Company was a smooth-running operation of a hundred and fifty people. We needed to know how it’s done. It had been suggested (Cunliffe never takes the credit for his own ideas; even his facts come from impeccable sources) that I should go spend a few weeks in the Kyoto Center.

“Just hang around for a few weeks, feel yourself into it.”

I remember that when he trundled this sentence out, I began to sweat. I moved my hand and left a palm print on the cover of my notebook. My guts started skipping, and I got mad. Cunliffe was sitting there taking little popping puffs on his cigar. He’d got no right to flick Japan at me nonchalant as a piece of ash. My life was in perfect order. I had not given a moment’s thought to being in Japan since Tyler Peer was posted there, and it was clear that there was not anything on earth I wanted more than to go to Japan. It was the only thing I’d ever wanted. All my life I had never wanted anything but to go to Japan. Alone.

So I refused. I told Cunliffe that I had no organizational skills whatever and was unteachable, In fact, I probably could not organize my itinerary and would get lost in the back streets of Nagoya. I suggested he send one of our new fags in Design Print, who are extremely well organized. (I didn’t call them fags to Cunliffe; that’s what I call them in my letters to Malcolm.) No, not me; I was the wrong choice altogether.

Look, I don’t understand the workings of the human mind and I have no intention of finding out about it. I think there are those of us who have a positive obligation not to be psychoanalyzed. I don’t think artistic theory should be put into words because it turns art into something else, and I don’t think the subconscious should be untangled for the same reason. The subconscious is a tangle; that’s its nature; leave it be. All I know is that from the moment Cunliffe waved his magic Schimmelpenninck I began saying one thing and doing another, announcing plans I had no intention of carrying out, and doing other things several seconds before they occurred to me. All I know is that in the space of the phrase “feel yourself into it,” I made some sort of decision deep in the layers of my nerve; some sort of decision came into being full grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. But I was unable to act on it because I did not inform myself of the decision. I went, you may say, to superhuman lengths to keep myself from knowing, and maybe I had good reason. Every time I have faced a dilemma straight on I have opted out; every time I have made a deliberate decision I have rescinded it. Maybe I wanted to be gone before I admitted I was going.

So I told Cunliffe, “I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Send someone else.”

Cunliffe, as I might have expected, tried to get Oliver to convince me to go. Oliver, as I had no reason to expect, tried to convince me to go. I had already determined to go and so I declared it impossible. Oliver was appalled at the notion I should go and so he insisted that I should. We had some peculiar conversations.

“I won’t be able to finish the spring line if I do.”

“The company’s taken that into account or they wouldn’t have asked you. Obviously Cunliffe thinks this is more important.”

“But what about me? What about what I think is important?”

“Nonsense. It’ll give you a whole new set of ideas.”

“I don’t want a new set of ideas.”

“You’re completely irrational.”

Actually, I wasn’t irrational at all, I was just lying. Oliver was the irrational one, and he was lying too. The conversations got more and more peculiar without ever turning into quarrels. On the contrary, we began to slip back into a kind of urgent bantering we hadn’t used for years.

“I can’t leave the house to run itself,” I said one night when I was standing at the kitchen sink. Oliver was forking out an olive for his martini.

“Whatever are you talking about?” he twitted me. “The house has run itself for years.” And he jabbed my belly playfully with the fork. It left four small perfect puncture marks that I treasured until they faded two days later. It occurred to me a long time after, that Oliver had poked me with a fork to see if I was done.

“I’ll give it some thought,” I said.

As soon as I said this other things fell into place. Jill was invited to spend the summer vacation in La Jolla with the Jeromes. (We never made good our promise to take Maxine anywhere but the Jeromes don’t give a damn, they’re Californians; they have no European sense of social exchange as an
exchange
.) I didn’t want to be separated from Jill for another summer, but as Oliver pointed out, if I took an extra two weeks with her in Japan she could fly on by herself to Los Angeles and return to London with the Jeromes, around the world in seven weeks and a lot of money of which, again, I have got more than I can put to use. Jill was dazzled by the idea of going around the world, which nobody else at St. Margaret’s could lay claim to.

When I allowed myself to see it this way I also saw that, our precarious cold war having been shot to hell by Cunliffe’s suggestion, I would be better off out of it in Japan. Six weeks off, I said to myself; it seemed to me I was due for six weeks off. It’s true that I found myself packing objects of personal value and no conceivable use to a tourist—Jill’s silver baby spoon, for instance; Frances’s sketchbook—but I took them out again. It’s also true that I engaged in an extensive discussion of Japanese divorce with one of the Utagawa overlookers. But then I read up on
bonsai
and
ukiyo-e;
evidence, merely, of avid tourism.

It’s more difficult to explain why I went to Dorsetshire. I had wanted to do so for two years but had lacked the energy (courage is only the energy to do what you prefer). Now the velleity became a necessity, as if I knew my plane would crash and I would have no other chance, and I said I had to go to London to do some shopping for my trip. I dare say this constitutes a lie in the old style but, as I say, it no longer seems a significant sort of lie.

So I made a shopping list, filled it in a morning and caught the stopping train for Bly. And I visited Frances in the bracken of Dorset, in the black brick hospital called the County Home, in the grease-green minimum-security ward called Recreational Therapy, which reminded me less of Bedlam or padded cells than it reminded me of the basement hall of the Long Beach Methodist Church where once a year I went with my mother for the ecumenical conference of the Women’s Society for Christian Service and where my mother, speaking for the Baptist delegation—my mother, who believed that Nazarenes were poor white trash and Seventh-Day Adventists had runny brains and Catholic priests performed unnatural acts upon novice nuns by holy candlelight—spoke with tears in her eyes of the oneness of God and the brotherhood of all Christian souls, everywhere.

It is clear that they are better equipped to deal with Frances’s illness here. She sits at a long deal table among a dozen other docile women, making little turkeys out of shells. The women who are not sitting at the table sit in chipped wicker chairs with a look of captive distraction, nursing chips of wicker with their fingers. The women who sit at the table display intense concentration, but their movements are too slow. One woman lifts a strand of string and lays it over another strand of string as if this were a movement of surgical precision. There is a smell of disinfectant mingled with whatever it is that disinfectant abrogates: infection, a deterioration of disused cells.

Frances sits at the table. She is still skin and bone but she is not muscle or sinew or tendon. She is not nerves. She is wearing a clean white shirt with a peter pan collar and an alice band of macramé. Her hair is down to her waist and her skirt is above her knees, and the veneer of childlike sweetness sits strangely on facial bones gone brittle to the marrow. The hand that she put through the window is puffy around the jagged triangle scar, but there are no fresh cuts.

“Hello, Frances.”

“Hello,” she says. She seems not to know me and for a moment I don’t exist; but when she recognizes me it is without surprise. She says it’s nice of me to come and offers me a seat. She introduces me to the women at her table, who look up from their baskets and their pot holders and say hello, hello, it’s nice to meet you, and look down again. She shows me the things she’s making, little turkeys with a periwinkle for a face and clam shells for a tail, on pipe cleaner legs stuck in a shell-encrusted piece of cork.

“See this one?” she asks, and puts another, identical, beside it. “See this one?” and takes another from her box. “Gobble-gobble, gobble-gobble. This one has a broken tail.” I admire them, one after the other, perhaps a dozen, and then she pulls her box of shells to me and invites me to look at the shells. The Rubigo has been used in the conference room of the new Libyan Embassy in London and in air terminals in Dar es Salaam and the Seychelles. Frances treats me as indifferently as if I had visited her yesterday and the day before, although her focus seems to settle at my ear.

“They get them in Weymouth on the beach, and when we’re done they put them in a shop.”

“How have you been, Frances?”

“Well. Well. We get to spend the money at the commissary.”

“We miss you at the mill. There have been a lot of changes since you left.”

“Have there? We have a new shuffleboard, but I haven’t been down there.” Having said this she glances at me suspiciously, once, then alters the look to a dazzlingly empty smile. “Turkeys say gobble, but we gobble them,” she says, and laughs cleverly.

“Do our parents come to see you much?”

“Sometimes. Do you see how the whole periwinkles make a butterfly? Their real name is coquinas.”

The woman sitting next to her, a plump woman with her cardigan buttoned wrong, whose left cheek collapses every few seconds in a tic, leans toward me over her box of shells and confides, “Frances is the best. She does the best,” to which Frances replies, “Now, Minnie, that’s not true,” which may represent a pathological inability to receive a compliment, but if so I have seen many pathologically incapacitated women who hold jobs and raise families and make speeches at ecumenical conferences of the Women’s Society for Christian Service.

“Minnie is good too,” says Frances.

She shows me around the dining hall, the porch, the commissary. Her conversation is less erratic than most of the conversation I run into in a working day. It deals entirely with the hall, the porch, the commissary.

“Do you ever hear from Dr. Holloway?”

“No, no, I have Dr. Revier now.”

“And do you like him?”

“Her. Everybody likes her. This is where they keep the magazines.”

I see where they keep the Ping-Pong nets, the playing cards, the glue and the construction paper. I see where they sit for breakfast, tea and television. I see the pot holders they make, the macramé plant hangers, the clay ashtrays, the samplers, the baskets, the cushion covers, the oven gloves, the earrings, the tote bags and the toilet roll covers crocheted in the shape of poodles. I see three dozen objects for which Mrs. Lena Fromkirk would denude her pension book. I see everything there is to see, and I see no screaming, keening, rocking, urinating, murder, rage or anguish. The nearest thing to horror that I see is a woman with a tic in her left cheek. Truly, Mrs. Marbalestier, the public has a distorted impression of these institutions.

“Do you ever paint, Frances?”

“I do the turkeys. They get the shells from Weymouth, from the beach.”

When I have seen everything there is to see she walks me to the door. But she will not come over the threshold onto the screened porch, and I do not realize this until I have continued on out to the steps and turn to see her hovering back into the green shade of Recreational Therapy, and I hang there a moment not understanding until she pitches her body clumsily forward in the doorframe and contracts immediately; and then I close the screen door and go back to her and say it was nice to see her and she, shying back from the doorframe rolling clumps of her skirt in her hands, says how nice it was to see me and won’t I come again.

“We miss you at the mill,” I say deliberately. “And if you ever feel like coming back there’ll be a place for you.”

“Thank you,” she says nervously, seeing that I have seen that she will not come from the room. Then making her first and only effort toward me—they will have to inject her when I am gone—she says, “It would be hard to leave here now.”

“But if you do.”

“I like it here,” says Frances. “I have so many friends.”

Leaving me, I suppose, exonerated. Free to board an Aeroflot for Japan.

T
HE WHEELS HAD NOT
yet lifted off the ground when I began the luxury of being alone. You understand that the company of a nine-year-old is no impediment to solitude. Adults and very small babies bind you with demands like wires, but a nine-year-old is private, malleable and self-sufficient.

And yet that first day I was afraid of her. I had not been alone with her for so long. I had never been alone with her for two weeks, never in a foreign place. I was afraid that she would dislike me, that I would dislike her. She had undergone radical transformation in a barber shop a couple of days before, having decided that braids—“pigtails” she called them with her face screwed up—were not suitable either to going on ten or to California. Her hair had been cropped to the nape and suddenly tumbled and swung. She had always tossed her braids; now the toss was weightless, and from time to time she took a stance charged with incipient adolescence that alarmed me.

If Jill found the Russian hostesses harsh and clumpy it is because they were harsh and clumpy. It is my own inverted bigotry that generalized her displeasure into an attitude toward foreigners. Nevertheless it made me nervous. I entertained her with a few inspiring stories of the 1919 revolution that have stuck with me ever since Jay Mellon first revealed that underside of possibility; and got her to taste caviar, on which of course she gagged.