Raw Silk (9781480463318) (9 page)

“I doubt Modigliani could’ve done your face,” said Dillis.

“That’s not the point. The point is form! The point is fashion!” Malcolm shouted, fisted the table and slopped coffee on his knees. His need to aggrandize fashion into a fifth dimension and a First Cause undercut everything he said, but he was right about me. I was attracted to it exactly by his evangelical fire.

“I think,” I said all the same, “that you’re talking contradictory crap.”

“Of course, mother.” He got up cheerfully and headed for the drawing board. “Contradictory crap is the style of our times.”

The immediate outcome of this conversation was that I went into bugs. I guess I had enough artistic conceit in me to think it’d be worth being wrong if I could market some unacceptable subject. Bugs was a cautious choice, of course, and I went at it cautiously, starting with butterfly wings and backing them, in my old style, with highly abstracted pupae and larvae. Then I went on to the more delicate wing tracery of the
urocerus flavicornis,
on whose digestive tract I did considerable research before I saw the handsome lines that connected the stomodeum to the mesenteron. After that I discarded wings altogether and dealt in free strokes and rich October colors with the visceral and ventral patterns of familiar insects. The variety of these was dazzling; their beauty took hold of me by both hands. Director Nicholson, who did not necessarily know he was looking at the anal tract of the common housefly, said my new style was “absolutely grand.”

I
RAN INTO NICHOLSON
outside the design office on a Friday early in April. I was in good spirits. We were having the first clear weather of spring and I was leaving early to pick up Jill. Her March weekend had gone as easily as the first, the autumn designs had been highly praised, my days were full and full of camaraderie. If Oliver and I seemed to have less and less to say to each other, speaking mainly of what was for dinner tonight and who was for dinner Saturday, this was not particularly uncomfortable. At least now I, like him, spent my days in talk, and was glad enough for a quiet evening. I had ventured, even, to suggest that I had a new perspective on tired husbands, though he had not seemed to find this especially amusing.

At any rate I said good-bye shortly after two that Friday and headed for the car park, when I saw Nicholson striding down the walk, sun glinting from his forehead and his watch fob. Nicholson has a manner of furtive benevolence. Everything is absolutely delightful to him except the very few things that unfortunately require being dismissed as damned rot, but he apologizes for his tendency to superlative with an anxious bobbing of his lank torso and a chorus of smiling uh-uh-uhs like a stutter with the consonants left off. He waved at me cheerily now and called, “I was just coming round to see you.” But having said this, he uhhed, put his hand to his watch pocket, drew out the watch, glanced at me and uhhed again to deny that this was an admonitory gesture, replaced the watch without looking at it and went for his handkerchief instead. I explained my errand—not that he gave a damn really what time I left—and he put the handkerchief back also without carrying it to his nose.

“Well, actually I was coming to see you all. We’ve got a bit of a switch round in the secretarial staff.”

“You’re not taking Dillis away, I hope.”

“Good gracious no. What would you do without? Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“That’s good,” I said, and waited. He patted at the fob emblem of the Worshipful Company of Drapers.

“We’ve got a new file clerk for you, part time, coming round on Monday morning.”

“Oh, fine. I’m sure Dillis can use her.”

“Yes, well. I’m sure. That is.” He bobbled a few times on his heels, beaming at the general condition of the universe. “She’s a bit mental, I’m sorry to have to say. Not the most efficient—that is, she’s a very intelligent girl, very bright indeed. Cambridge, as a matter of fact.”

“Is she? Graduate?”

“No, now. Had a little problem with her nerves and had to let it go. The thing is, she has a bit of a tendency to weep, and the girls up in the office have found that rather a bore.”

“Oh, well, do you have to keep her?”

“I’ll tell you, the thing of it is …” he leaned to me slightly, “… she’s a cousin’s girl, on the wife’s side.” He rocked back, beaming again at this very satisfactory delineation of his familial duty. I didn’t see that Design Print had any concomitant obligation to the director’s wife’s cousin’s dropout nutcase daughter, but I said, like a blueblood bred to the niceties of nepotism, “Ah! Of course.”

This business concluded so absolutely splendidly, Nicholson smiled and, smiling, said, “I’m afraid she’s a hysterical cow,” and passed on in.

Jill had fallen in love, twice; once with a horse and once with a math mistress. The horse, I gathered, was very gentle and the teacher was very
hard.
Miss Hyde-Jones (this and Miss Hyde-Jones that) gave them a hundred sums a day, and if you didn’t finish in time you didn’t get out to the paddock before all the best horses were picked already and you didn’t have a chance of Prince. This draconian power of Miss Hyde-Jones over her rival seemed to Jill a further case for admiration. Miss Hyde-Jones didn’t
believe
in erasers (I supposed that unlike Malcolm she didn’t believe in tossing your errors over your shoulder either), so you had to get it right first time or you’d be sitting there till tea.

But she curled into my side as we drove, Prince such-and-such and Miss Hyde-Jones that, and hung on my arm with a tenacity that made it clear she’d been saving these wonders up for me, and my God, how many mothers of hyperactive six-year-olds wouldn’t opt for three weeks off while they dabble in insect guts they don’t need the money for? I was feeling fine.

The next morning I left the breakfast dishes and took Jill into Cambridge for her first pair of jodhpurs. If my mother had been told the channel was in flood, she’d have done the dishes before evacuating. But when you leave the dishes five days a week for somebody else to do, a Saturday defection isn’t difficult. Since my innate sloppiness has always been at war with the work ethic of my upbringing, I was inclined to credit wealth and England for this minor liberation. We also decided on a crop, boots and a riding cap.

And the fact is, Jill looked terrific, excitedly pink-cheeked and pigtail-tossing in the triple mirror.

“Oh, Mummy, it’s just the ticket! It’s absolutely smashing!” my daughter said.

She wanted to wear it, there was no reason not to, so she went swinging the street with me, tapping her crop on her riding boot. We met Oliver for lunch and then the three of us dawdled in the open market, pawing at trays of Victorian jetsam, a pendant watch, a filigree buckle, a stickpin with a cherub’s face. A dull green volume no bigger than a pocket dictionary caught my eye, and turned out to be
The Young Lady’s Book of Botany,
dense with text and scattered with fine hand-tinted drawings. It was dated 1888, I deciphered with some difficulty out of the Roman numerals, and credited to no author at all, but when I turned to the opening “Advertisement” I found “That the mental constitution of the fair sex is such as to render them peculiarly susceptible of whatever is delicate, lovely and beautiful in nature and art cannot, we think, be controverted. …” I thought it well worth five shillings to be in possession of such an opinion, however anonymous, and I paid for it and tucked it into my sheepskin pocket.

I suggested a punt on the Cam, but Jill was alarmed at the prospect of falling in with her new outfit, so we wandered the Backs admiring the first few crocuses and the impeccable families of student sons. Oliver told Jill that if she were
very
clever she could enroll at Cambridge herself one day, and Jill said that’d be nice. I said, or maybe she could go to Reed or Oberlin in America, and Jill, with a fine-tuned consistency of indifference, said that’d be nice, and I thought it just possible that Oliver and I shared a second of long-disused irony. We turned toward the Cam and leaned over the stone balls on the balustrade of Clare Bridge to stare at the sunlit scum. The sun had been veiled since October: everything lay stunned at its sudden nudity. The contrast of mass and texture, the gritty shine of square Clare College, the millions of minute unfisting leaves on stolid branches, reminded me of the heavy silk looms and their fragile output. After a few minutes Oliver put his arm around me. I held myself absolutely still—I may have held my breath—feeling myself incontrovertibly susceptible of whatever is delicate, lovely and beautiful in nature and in art; but also, in a spasm of the disease congenital to image-makers, viewing us from a little distance, fixing the composition of the good moment in my mind.

“Isn’t she terrific, now?” Oliver demanded.

“Terrific,” I agreed, but noticing a little at his “now” that the mutuality had gone out of these exchanges. He squeezed my shoulder and we wandered off to see where Jill had wandered.

We spotted her in a clearing not far from the bridge, swinging a lazy arc with her riding crop, her head bent back to stare up into the branches of a still-bald oak. Her mouth was open, her pupils pinpoints in a pale blue disk, lost in a concentration without content. We watched her swinging like half the revolution of a spool as she gradually wound her lowering head from side to side, until she was looking at the ground and, with sudden force behind her backswing, whipped the heads off a batch of crocuses.

“Jill!”

“Gillian!”

She snapped to attention, shaking. If a choirboy could be said violently to fold his hands, that is what she did. “Gillian Marbalestier, come here!” Oliver said. She came. She cowered into her collarbone in the most outrageous performance of terrified humility I hope to see. Frankie Billingham didn’t have a look-in. She did us a dog, an Oliver Twist, a Jane Eyre.

“Do they
whip
you in that school?” I demanded, amazed.

“No, ma’am.”

Oliver shouted, “You keep out of this!”

“You go to hell!” I shouted back, grabbed Jill’s hand and pulled her toward the car. She loped along meekly and held the tears, but the bloom was off the day, and I didn’t know which was worse, the reminder of the daffodils or the obedient violence of her guilt.

We drove home in silence. Jill focused her attention entirely on the handle of her whip, and by this expedient attained a certain distance from our enmity.

“What we need,” I said with the conviction of a TV ad, “is a nice cup of tea.” And removing the most offensive of the six-hour-old egg crust and coagulated bacon fat from the table, I set out a pot of Earl Grey, which smells of Band-Aids. Jill hung her cap neatly on the back of her chair and sat, her composure entirely recovered. I pushed the milk pitcher and the nearest available utensil toward her.

“There you go.”

“This is a fork, though,” Jill adjudged, and held it up in evidence.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can’t stir tea with a fork.”

“I don’t think I understand you,” I said evenly.

“Well, you
can’t
stir
tea
with a
fork.
”

I took the fork from her, grasped it firmly in my fist, and stirred her tea.

“Thank you, Galileo,” Oliver said. “Now get her a spoon.”

How does it happen that when I took a blunt instrument and aimed it with premeditated intent at my husband’s chest, the event was assimilated within the hour; whereas now the coherence of a family trembled on the tines of a piece of Gorham sterling out of what was in my adolescence still referred to as a hope chest? What hope was that anyway? The hope of being spared the stressful trivia of spinsterhood?

“She can walk,” I said but I didn’t say it well. It was no surprise that Oliver repeated in the same tone, “Get her a spoon.”

God knows I had meant unconditional surrender. I wonder if a prisoner of war, handing up his rifle butt-end foremost in a paroxysm of relief, also neglects to observe that this gesture is only the first in a daily ritual of surrender. I don’t suppose there’s any such thing as “unconditional” either. Because surely in the feeblest of the defeated there remains some pocket of resistance, some incipient contempt for the victor and his victory. I didn’t know how my intention had so miscarried that I sat outflanked on both sides at the kitchen table, wondering if I could dig a foxhole with a fork. Listen, I am recounting this. I am telling a story, okay? You can get a war story out of anybody that comes back neither dead nor mad. I took the measure of their strength, and I went to the sink, and I brought a spoon.

Among the various branches of human knowledge [declared
the Young Lady’s Book
], not one is more interesting, or productive of more rational amusement and gratification, than the science of Botany.

While the Entomologist is impaling his victims in lengthened ranks in his cabinets—while the Chemist is experimenting amid vapours, and dust and ashes; and the Anatomist among the faded forms and defunct remains of frail mortality—the Botanist is ranging in the salubrious air, inhaling fragrance from living beauties, which are ever rising around in the garden, as well as in every field, and in every forest.

Perhaps because I needed to salvage something out of the day that was my own, I read the nameless botanist most of that night and most of the next. The leisure of his sentences soothed me. I envied his certainty. The absurdity of his judgments on every point did not amuse me; on the contrary, I longed wistfully for a time and a turn of mind that would make it possible to pass such judgments: women are incontrovertibly so, this science is provably more life-enhancing than all the rest. He was much given to such oracular phrasings of fact, as, “There are no natural scars upon a plant, except those from which leaves or fruit have fallen.” These sentences seemed to me luminous with concealed significance, concealed perhaps deliberately from the frail mental constitution of the fair sex. Did he secretly mean, for example, that there is something in the human condition which renders it, by contrast with the plant world, natural for people to bear a multitude of scars?