Raw Silk (9781480463318)

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF JANET BURROWAY

  “Superb … Enormously enjoyable.” —The New Yorker on Raw Silk

  “A moving account of the alienation of two people and the disjunction of a marriage… . What sets Raw Silk apart is Janet Burroway’s superb stylistic gifts… . She combines wit, intelligence and a coolly detached sense of nuance to heighten her prose.” —The New York Times

  “[Raw Silk] sings as much from lightness of spirit and whimsy of perception as it does from intelligence of insight and mastery of craft. Janet Burroway is a writer singularly in control—of emotion, of intellect, of language… . One is tempted to call it a masterpiece.” —Ms. Magazine

  “Many things to admire: the subtlety with which Burroway weaves the many threads—the polarities of East and West, aggression and passivity, the layered levels of betrayal, the complexities of male-female relationships carries Raw Silk to an inevitable and honest ending, and her luminous style will engage and delight.” —The Washington Post

  “One of the best novels of its kind.” —Glamour on Raw Silk

  “She writes like a robust angel.” —The Guardian

  Raw Silk

  A Novel

  Janet Burroway

  for Dolly, Bernie, Blair and Julia

  If your friend leaves you, and seeks a residence in Patagonia, make a niche for him in your memory, and keep him there as warm as you may. Perchance he may return from Patagonia, and the old joys may be repeated. But never think that those joys can be maintained by the assistance of ocean postage, let it be at never so cheap a rate.

  —Anthony Trollope

  —and in loving memory of Hilary

  Contents

  Dry Goods

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Raveling

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Bolt

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dry Goods

  1

  THIS MORNING I ABANDONED my only child. She is, at six, a laser-beam blue-eyed anarchist with long bones that even now promise an out-at-elbows adolescence like my own. She also has long feet, which were, when I last saw them, dressed in new wet-look leather and engaged in barking the shins of a certain Miss Meridene of St. Margaret’s Boarding School for Girls. “Don’t leave me!” Jill screamed. But I smiled at Miss Meridene, and I left her. To four Gothic arches and a life of jodhpurs and rice pudding.

  I meant it for total submission (but mine, not Jill’s; not Jill’s!). The reason for it, which has nothing to do with the “reasons” Oliver and I have bandied and bounced and flung at each other like crockery these eight months, is good and sufficient. I’ve explored the reason scientifically and with astonishment. It’s so odd that the common tulip tree should be made up of nodes and epidermis, xylem and phloem and matrices; it’s only a way among many of looking at a tree, but it can’t fail to make a tree more strange and precious. I’ve been looking at my marriage like that, and waiting for, even looking forward to, the moment when I’d leave Jill at St. Margaret’s. And then I spoiled it, nearly changed my mind, and left her with a cliché. It’s a habit of mine.

  I’m Virginia Grant Marbalestier, wife of Oliver Marbalestier of East Anglian Textiles, Ltd. Commercial manager thereof, though I had no intention of marrying a commercial manager, and had it been suggested to me eleven years ago that I was doing so, would scornfully have rejected, not Oliver, but the idea. He was a scientist then. Now it would not displease him immoderately to be called a tycoon. I don’t know exactly how much money we have, and that’s peculiar, because I grew up in a trailer, the only daughter of a California jobbing carpenter, and spent my childhood in a rage against the turning off of taps and the apportioning of nickels for ice cream cones. Such childhoods as mine are famous in America. There’s one behind every third bank manager, every other President, and nine in ten inventors. And I had wonderful fantasies of buying out the five-and-dime, so it might be expected that I would take an interest in our money. These things don’t always follow the accepted pattern.

  I don’t remember why I married Oliver—by accident, like most people, I guess—but I can with a certain amount of effort remember what he was like. Oliver was a tall, wiry boy with a noticeable face that was very much the sum of its parts. That is, he had two ears and each of them had a lobe which was attached to a jawline converging at a chin above which was a mouth composed of two lips with teeth and tongue between on the principle of a sandwich. It would get the idea across better if I said that his eyes were humorously intense and his features mobile, but the point is, his features were so mobile that I sometimes counted them to make sure there were no more than the usual number. He used his face to marvelous effect. People remembered being listened to by Oliver.

  I met him in New York, and in that context he was exotically English. He was whimsical, a quality I never otherwise encountered in New York, and he had an enthusiasm for the minutiae of Yankeedom that was at once a parody and an instruction. When we were broke we used to walk along Upper Broadway from restaurant to restaurant, and Oliver would read me the names of the sandwiches. I was extremely solemn myself, after the manner of carpenters’ daughters from California; I felt personally implicated in a Denver Egg-and-Brains Club. Or he would stand on a street corner in a stance of unabashed tourism and read, in his flat North Country accent, the Bible verses and the Pepsi ads that hung out over our heads from upstairs tenements. He taught me to look for gargoyles in unlikely places, like the corners of bus depots and public toilets; he took me down to Twenty-third Street to hear Norman Vincent Peale, and polished off American religion for me, just by listening, with his whole face; and once on an upstate turnpike, when we passed a hamburger stand that had a popping and rocketing neon sunburst saying “Four Million Sold,” Oliver braked down to a stop from his 80 mph and sprinted in to shake the hand of the waiter kid in the paper hat. “That’s marvelous. That’s bloody marvelous!” he said. “Keep it up, will you?”

  Well, I needed all that. I’ve learned lately from Tom Wolfe and the London Sundays that my home state houses a vast subculture of teenage hot-rodders, unlettered sign designers and inarticulate singers, and that these people are in rebellion against the Anglo-European establishment, which ignores them. This is very interesting to me. I spent eighteen years in California, and all that time I thought the hot-rodders and the sign designers and the pop singers were the establishment. I was trying to have an Anglo-European rebellion on my own, and I found it heavy going.

  So Oliver’s way of looking at us liberated me. When we came to England I was astonished to hear Oliver defending America. Our efficiency, our generosity, our barbecue pits, our politics. I think we had our first fights over it, the first real shouting and flinging fights. I didn’t understand it for years. I didn’t understand it until I was chattering on one day at a business conference, to a wife in a celluloid badge, about how I’d seen some students on the Cambridge Backs carrying an American flag and a can of kerosene, and a porter rushed up to them and said, “Are you going to burn that flag?” and they said, “Yes, sir,” and he said, “Don’t do it on the grass, will you?” and they said, “No, sir.” And while I giggled the wife began to get jowly and red and said to me, “If you don’t like it here why don’t you go home?” I felt myself
spluttering and sickening in the pit of my stomach, my eyes stupid with tears. “But I love it here.” And bumbling, rushing on, making it worse, I tried to tell her about the ruckled faces of the farmers in East Anglia, and the way the birds come to pick worms out of the fresh furrows so that the tractors look as if they were dragging a train of a thousand wings, and the old flint walls, and the hedgerows. “This is my home,” I said, but it was no good. The lady in the celluloid badge had no need, as I had had, to see her roots exposed. And I’d never really mastered Oliver’s whimsy.

  Oliver’s enthusiasm had another turn, without the whimsy. He was doing graduate research in Material Chemistry, and I was studying art, though my paintings were mostly vague strivings after atmosphere, and it was Oliver who saw the nature of a thing through its shape and color. He looked at everything under the microscope with an artist’s eye. The molecular structures of Dacron and Daz were beautiful to him. “Look at that; look at that,” he would say, and it made me look. I think it’s true; I think he had that, then; the kind of eye that makes every ordinary thing a miracle. I kept on painting pale chrysanthemums in Oriental vases, but even they began to improve under the tutelage of Oliver’s eye for form.

  I remember the occasion of my deflowering. We had begun as friends, with a disinterested delight in each other, and only gradually got round to saying it in flesh. And I was more or less a virgin at twenty-one, which is very shocking in retrospect but was, I still believe, a common condition even in New York in those days.

  I was taking, to keep Oliver company, a night course in botany. It seemed relevant to my chrysanthemums, and I liked the idea of a link between our disciplines. There was no scientist in me, but the lecturer was interested enough to be interesting, and I liked covering my notebook with shaded patterns of the vacuoles and cytoplasmic membranes on the blackboard. One night after class Oliver went back to his apartment and I detoured on some errand before going to meet him there. It was spring—my second, for I hadn’t ever seen a season before I came to New York—and those tired old trees on Riverside Drive were breaking out in brilliant leaf, all the more brilliant for being flashed at by the Broadway signs. I picked a leaf and went rushing up the stairs to Oliver with it. “Look at that; look at that,” I said, shoving it stem end up between our faces. “What is it?” Oliver asked, ready to be impressed. “It’s vascular bundles,” I whispered, and Oliver took me to bed.

  2

  WE WERE MARRIED IN 1958—oddly, Oliver insisted on being married in a church—and came to Cambridgeshire. Oliver’s year in America had been paid for by East Anglian Textiles, Ltd., and he was committed to them for four years more. I regarded this mortgaging of half his twenties with a pious horror, like the draft, but Oliver refused to be horrified. He found interest enough in anything to keep him oiled and running, and saw no reason he shouldn’t find it in East Anglian Textiles, Ltd.

  And he did. His eagerness for structures overflowed the lab, and he took up screen prints, boilfast dyes, nylon chips, unions, unit trusts and advertising. His quickness to see the outline of a thing, and his real gift for listening, made him a valuable conference man. Oliver was an original and no mistaking. It hadn’t occurred to me that his originality was of a kind to endear him to wheeler-dealers and profit-hatchers. I’d always assumed that at the end of four years Oliver would go back to chemical research, and although we began to acquire things I schooled myself not to feel affluent, against the time we would be student-poor again. We scrapped about that, because we were beginning to spend weekends with Director and Mrs. So-and-so and evenings with Lord Somebody of the Board, and I didn’t see much point in buying clothes for their sort of gathering. If my New York dirndls were out of fashion in Cambridgeshire, it was nothing to what Mrs. So-and-so’s brocades would have been in Cartwright Gardens. It disappointed Oliver. Not that I was “letting myself go”—in fact, my looks were at their peak then—but that I wasn’t, like him, willing to spend every effort on the moment.

  I thought that Oliver was specifically and even obsessively a scientist. I think now that he had an immense fund of energy that could have been paid out in any direction whatsoever. East Anglian saw it more clearly than I and made a salesman of him. I said this to Oliver not long ago, and he agreed with me. “The point is,” he said, “that I make a great salesman. I’d probably have been a dilettante of a scientist.” And probably that is the point. It probably is.

  In any case it’s hindsight on both our parts. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I was particularly in rebellion against the business world. England impressed me, and sherry at noon, walled gardens and square cars were part of England. I was too busy with the strangeness of the old to regret what I might have found strangely new in it. Our proximity to the university was culture. The very dreariness of our flat became, in my letters home, a measure of the lofty carelessness about the place I’d traveled to. And there were always, as there always are, temptations that would have made us fools to go back and scrounge in London.

  To begin with, before the fourth year was out, East Anglian offered Oliver six months’ travel in Europe. There was, unusually (I suppose Director Nicholson had taken my measure too), provision for my expenses to go with him. We couldn’t turn that down. Oliver loved to travel, and I had never been to Europe. I had the cocktail dresses made, in East Anglian’s polyester crepe. While Oliver talked to businessmen, I spent my days with a sketch pad in Antibes, the Hague, the Jeu de Paume, the Prado. Because Oliver was busy there was no need to sightsee in the usual sense. I spent the days of one whole week with Goya, fretting at the waste in his early commercial portraiture, fretting at my own conviction that his late, mad canvases were worth the war he meant them to expose. In the evening I put the cocktail dresses on, and did my bit for East Anglian, hostess to men who traveled without their wives. It was very peculiar, and rather lovely, to be flying and dining first class, when I’d always imagined us rucksacking over the Alps. I played at it, and thought Oliver was playing too: Oliver was so good at play.

  In the second place, I went to work for East Anglian myself. After we married I’d continued to paint, in a desultory sort of way. I didn’t exactly discover that I wasn’t good, but it disturbed me how easily I could be distracted. In the first year I could make the breakfast dishes last till four o’clock. And when I came to paint nothing very much happened. I wanted to paint Goya’s war, or better still, a karate battle. I wanted to paint a translucent, mythical tree in which you would see all at once the seed, the sap running and the ax that cut it down. I wanted to paint exotic things, and nothing exotic had happened to me.

  Then Oliver suggested I try fabric design. They had Malcolm Butler for psychedelics, which were just hitting their stride, and he was so good he’d come within one vote of the new Carnaby Award for Innovative Design—a pleasant jolt for East Anglian, which was rarely accused of innovation. But they weren’t satisfied with their line of “staples,” which means the flowers and the subcubic patterns that are bought by women over forty. Oliver set me up with a silk screen to see what I could do. And I tried it, and it worked. Handling the frame and the taut silk put energy back in my hands. The smell of the rubber-dissolving fluid made me high. The sharp outlines of my flowers, cut with a knife in rubber film, made real brute impact, denied the background atmosphere. And I found that my chrysanthemums, which had never been worth wall space, made excellent sense arranged petal point to petal point and repeated upside down. Like Oliver I found myself, if you want to put it that way.

  And then, then of course, there was Jill. She was conceived on a pillow the size of a bed, on a bed the size of my room back home, in the red and gold Schloss Mirabel in Vienna, a hotel dedicated to the fruitful intercourse of first-class, international-traveling salesmen. It wouldn’t, honestly, have made much sense that a daughter so conceived and so dedicated should have been carried around Soho in a ten-bob basket.

  We called her Gillian and bought a house. (“Gillian?” my mother said. “G
illian?” I apologized, “But we’ll call her Jill.”) Oliver charmed two contracts out of Germany, took his bonus in East Anglian shares, and was made an assistant to the director. He charmed the local weavers out of a strike, took his bonus in East Anglian shares, and was made commercial manager at thirty-three. I took over staples altogether, and East Anglian took me to its bosom. I remain odd to them—I’ve never scaled my California gestures down, and nobody trusts me with their Spode—but my oddness is, like Oliver’s originality, well within the range of what an English community bosom can absorb. We moved again.

  Our second house—this house—is a Tudor manor many times modernized and subversively half-timbered. The beams are arranged in ten-foot squares, three of them to the level of the lower roof, and the corners of each square are tied together obliquely with another beam which, though it is a square foot of solid oak, had been twisted into the shape of a gigantic S. Local legend has it that the S stands for Stuart. Nothing else of the early history of the house is known. Behind, patently “modernized” in the eighteenth century, is a four-acre garden of symmetrical paths and plots overlooking a meadow that is within cycling distance of the Cambridge Backs. In the spring the students come to this meadow and lie in the buttercups, heaving their bicycles over the kiss-gates and dumping them in the grass. I walk through the garden and along the path with Jill; she swings on the gates and our pointer, pointlessly outraged, barks at her heels. I listen to the bees, whose intentions I know, and the buzzing of the students, curious whether they are plotting seduction, revolution or Nirvana. But I have never spoken to them as I might. I am not, in their terms, a California misfit, but the lady from the manor house with the expensive dog.

  The house has only one disadvantage, aside from damp. It falls within the district of a lower form whose headmaster is sixty, and tired of kids. He can’t stand noise, sand, paint pots, Plasticine or half his staff, and apparently there is nothing that can be done about it. By the time he retires, Jill will be eleven.