Raw Silk (9781480463318) (7 page)

I came in, laid the fire and had tea with Phaideaux. At five o’clock I called Miss Meridene. She said that little girls often scream the first, even the second and third times their mothers leave them. Jill promised to settle in beautifully, she said. And indeed, she said, she was at that moment having her second helping of rice pudding in the dining hall.

J
ILL IS AWAY. FRANCES
is committed. East Anglian has merged with the Utagawa Company and Tyler Peer is headed for Osaka. Oliver was passed over for the job. My dad is dead in Seal Beach and it’s as remote to me as somebody else’s earthquake.

But why I am sitting in bed half deaf with minor lacerations, major bruises and a ringing lump on my left temple perplexes me. The official explanation is that I had a car accident, and since I could see them from my window, the mini exposing its broken underbelly from the ditch, all fours helpless in the air while bobbies directed traffic around the tow truck, this explanation has a certain force of credibility. I try to resist it. My sheet is littered with rejected hydrangea designs, and Mrs. Coombe has just brought me a cup of Earl Grey in a Limoges cup, so I don’t suppose I look like the victim of a street brawl, but the image keeps belching up into my mind.

Question: Were you much affected by your father’s death?

Answer: I came out in a blue bruise and went deaf on the left side.

But I didn’t yet know my dad was dead when the bruise came out. And my attitude has none of the saving selflessness of grief. Everybody knows that a blow on the ear affects your balance, though Dr. Rockforth offered this news to me as if it were fresh from the computer. In fact I wouldn’t need to be in bed at all except that when I stand I tend to lurch in the direction of my lump, and as Dr. Rockforth says, what we must avoid at all costs is a further blow. He raised his forefinger, saying this. From a position of disequilibrium I was inclined to take it as a lodestar, the only fixed point in a shifting firmament. At all costs, avoid a further blow.

My hydrangeas look lopsided to me, though whether I have drawn them lopsided and am seeing them accurately, or have drawn them accurately and am seeing them lopsided, I can’t decide. Perspective is something I mastered early, and to feel it slipping makes me want to thrash and scatter the pages on the floor. I don’t.

The day I learned to draw a cube I had exiled myself to the railway trestle beside the channel because the folks were quarreling. There’s no room to avoid a quarrel in a trailer. I’d tried to play Monopoly with Jerry-Mick outside, but the channel breeze was fitful, and keeping the money under rocks got to be a bore. Anyway, Jerry-Mick cheated. I heard Mom say, “What
does
it matter?” And Daddy, “I won’t do a botch, that’s what it matters. I won’t do a Jap job. They can get somebody else.” I guess they did.

I blew on the dice and daydreamed a princess whose dress was blue cobwebs, who got doubles and bought Park Place and got snake eyes and bought Boardwalk and passed Go and landed on Chance, which said Advance to Go.

Jerry-Mick said, “I haven’t got all day.”

Mom said, “She’s seven years old and she’s never slept in a bed that’s a real bed!”

I scooped the game together and sent Jerry-Mick home, and I went down to the trestle, where I puffed at twigs held between my index and middle fingers like Jerry-Mick’s godforsaken mother. Dollar crabs scuttled from rock to rock. The fact is that I liked my hide-a-bed well enough, but I was infected by my mother’s martyrdom, and inclined for the moment to link myself to the war-homeless waifs of London. I sighted down the channel to the horizon and imagined myself sitting crosslegged on the ocean looking east to the next horizon, and so on to the next, and the next, which was like trying to imagine eternity except that sooner or later you’d sight land, and with the next hop you’d hit flat up against the coast of the Enemy.

Daddy came plump and owl-eyed in his steel rims to sit with me. He always carried a yellow tablet and a sanding block in his pocket, and when he felt at odds with himself he honed an Eagle Alpha No. 2 to a brittle point.

“How do you make a box?” I demanded.

He showed me how to draw a rectangle, superimpose another on it slightly lower, and connect the corners. I could do it the first time, and my self-esteem increased. But Dad himself didn’t need the rectangles; he could sketch a house front and then extend its walls deep into the distance of the flat paper. What he was drawing now was our trailer, with some sort of slant-roofed extension over it.

“I tell you what I seen a fellow do in Capistrano the other week. He built himself a sort of a redwood carport over his trailer. So.”

He added a bougainvillea vine, ornamental concrete blocks, and one of those plaster plaques of a horse head that they sold down along the highway. “You could get a fair-sized living room on one side, and a little bedroom on the other, eh?”

I nodded, coveting a real bed.

“But if you wanted to move on, all’s you’d have to do is hitch up and drive out from under it.”

This was a familiar argument; I was able to contribute. “If we wanted, we could park at Curry Cones and have mile-high cones for breakfast.”

“Sure. We could set off anywhere it took our fancy.”

But we never did. He wrote me just before he died that the bougainvillea had knitted the aerial to the port roof, and that the hydrangeas were up to the window-sill. The “mobile home” stayed where it was, and it was the ocean they moved—dredged out the channel and dug a bay on the other side for a marina. “That’s California for you,” I tell the English.

I have long understood that my father’s illusion of mobility, in which I implicitly believed, is what gave me the impetus to travel. But I don’t think I realized that while I traveled the trailer was holding America down for me, anchoring it to its rightful place on the globe. It’s arranged that Mr. Beckelstein, who owns the trailer court, will handle the funeral and inherit the trailer in exchange. Dad’s ashes go into the channel, and when they do, America will drift off somewhere as vague as Katmandu.

When I first came to live in England I understood very well that the news doesn’t give the character of a place. I read about American strikes and riots and thought, well, but life in Seal Beach is all surfboards and roller rinks. And then I guess in the early sixties it began to change. I knew I’d never be English, I knew the Sunday supplements were no more accurate to the texture of life than before, but I began to lose the sense of what it was like at home. Home wasn’t
there
anymore. Kennedy went and Watts erupted, the National Guard moved into Berkeley. I began to realize that I’d grown up in California in the great calm between the Depression and the Awful Affluence while England was under blitz, that I was sitting in an English rose garden while California burned. I’d settled myself, by accident, out of the range of real violence … and that’s, maybe, why I’m half deaf from a blow on the side of the head?

When they opened my dad up for a kidney stone they found out he had no liver. My dad was a Baptist; he never had a drink.

P
ART OF THE TROUBLE
is that I’ve never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don’t all land like a child out of an apple tree. I remember perfectly well that I thought it was a disaster when Jill began at St. Margaret’s, but I also remember that I thought the disaster had
occurred.
I missed her. I felt cheated of her. The rest was just a way of compensating for the loss.

Unluckily, it was a period of professional calm for me. With the summer designs in, I wouldn’t be under pressure again till March. For a few days I cleaned brushes, sorted sketches, doodled an occasional autumn leaf. When I found myself squeezing paint tubes into neater cylinders, I noticed I had run out of things to do. But outside my studio I was ill at ease, as if, except as a mother in pursuit, I had no right to step over the vacuum hose of a woman with real work to do. Jill was my deed to the property, which I now held in fief from Mr. Wrain and Mrs. Coombe, cutting flowers by his permission, taking water from the tap by hers. Yet when Mrs. Coombe stuffed her slippers into her capacious bag and took the bus at three, when the early crepuscule began to thicken in, starting as a fen mist in the orchard as if the dark seeped out of the ground, my unease took on another quality. There was something unnatural about a place where night fell at four. I was cold. I had to defend myself against the black oak beams and the dark paneling of a house with a history. I was an interloper, a unsurper, newfangled, nouveau riche, a foreigner in the only place familiar to me. Once or twice by an early fire I
heard the baby crying,
and rose automatically before I remembered I was alone. A sheep bleating in a neighboring field, no doubt, but I went checking doors and window locks, knowing perfectly well that whatever I dreaded was not outside, and that the effect of my rounds was to lock myself tighter in.

The thing to do was to talk to Oliver. But the thing I had to talk about was forbidden. I learned very quickly that any attempt to convey an irrational fear—the catch in my gut when I came across Jill’s toys, my absurd constraint in the presence of Mrs. Coombe—would be read by Oliver as an accusation. I learned a little less quickly that he read it right.

We sat in the evening over coffee, he with his paper, I with a book, in wing chairs beside the fire at opposite ends of the coffee table. We have a handsome Chesterfield and a deep-buttoned velvet chaise longue, but in order to sit in these you must be wearing a cameo brooch and eating a cucumber sandwich; there’s no place two people could sprawl together and explore each other’s organs. And the coffee table is scaled to the room, not to intimacy. I bought it as a cobweb-crusted rectory table for two pounds five at a country auction. I brought it home in the high triumph of a bargain finder, and scrubbed it down while Oliver sawed the legs off. Oliver, himself, with a saw in his hands, cut the lion heads off the top of the legs and the claw feet off the bottom and screwed the plain part of the legs back on with L-brackets and a screwdriver. In his hands. Amazing! I sighted down the polished grain and thought that Oliver was a very long ways away and wondered why it was so difficult to think of Oliver with a saw in his hands.

“Do you remember when we got the coffee table?”

“Why?” An accusation.

“Jill loved the lion heads.” Another. End of conversation. I squinted over my book and took stock of my husband and his anger. He had begun to let his hair grow a little, in deference to a fashion filtering backward through the classes. It was dark and glossy and curled discreetly round his ears, just clearing the houndstooth collar of his ten-pound Jaeger shirt. He would age well, his features lightly knitted by their lines, his energy mellowing, cohering toward an air of authority, a man who liked nearly everybody and only slightly disliked his wife, because her days were empty on his account. People who owe you money don’t thank you for it, my mother used to say.

It seemed to me that I knew about as much of Oliver’s inner life as I knew of Jill’s from her neatly recopied letters: We are doing subtraction. A horse is named Prince. Love, Jill. The impulse to get it out in the open stirred in me, lethargically, out of habit. I could say I hoped he’d like me better for giving in, and I felt betrayed. I could say: it’s unfair to close up on me, it’s more irrational than my spooks. I could say: isn’t it pretty peculiar we can’t
talk
about our daughter anymore? Isn’t it pretty bloody odd that you take it as a complaint that I miss her? The things I could say had me breathing hard. If we fought I’d put myself in the hysterical-female wrong; besides, if we keep on fighting, what was the point of Jill’s going away?

The embargo on Jill as a topic lifted when we entertained, and we entertained a lot those days. It kept me off the streets. I’d learned to be a good cook as soon as I stopped having to do dishes, though I never learned to think it mattered much. I was never able to accept it as a requisite of culture, that in order for six or eight people to have a discussion, one of them should spend twelve hours doing something with a foreign name to a frozen chicken. I did it, though; for the Nicholsons, Malcolm, the Kittos, the Tyler Peers, for an American sculptor named Jeremy Jerome who had a daughter at St. Margaret’s. Our dinner conversations ranged as dinner conversations range, over old wine, new books, politics from assassination (U.S.) to assignation (U.K.); but at some point during the evening, when the
marchand de vin
sauce was coagulating on the sideboard, over the gopher hills of salt where the Beaujolais had spilled, Oliver and I began to develop a parental routine. He liked to rehearse the sins of the local school. I could make effective irony out of the Frankie incident. We could whip up between us, in a fragrant emanation of marital accord, an irrefutable apologia for sending our daughter away to school.

I acquiesced in this number; I conspired excitedly. He would run through the leave-taking of the dolls, I’d offer the descent of the Petits Beurres, each of us cartooning with the other’s blessing in order not to bore our guests. More often than not this palpable evidence of our union moved me deeply, in a blur of brandy and relief. And only once or twice, looking round a ring of friendly faces, people I enjoyed and who valued me chiefly for my openness, I thought: this is
not
what’s going
on.

After this hair shirt of a month, Jill’s first weekend fell as high holiday. She was voluble and silly and self-evidently happy. She brought us a carton of tempera fantasies from which it was clear that nobody had forbidden orange grass. She showed us the rudiments of her new horsemanship, and there was no danger of hauteur with Phaideaux as a surrogate mount. If she called me “Ma’am” instead of “Mum” and closed the bathroom door on me once or twice, it was no more than I was prepared for. It was hardly her ruination. When I drove her back she cried again, as Miss Meridene had promised, but rather distractedly, one eye on the games room, with more Margaret O’Brien than Angela Davis about her. “You see?” said Oliver. “You see?” I saw and said I saw and he partly forgave me as I did him, and in February we fucked again.