Raw Silk (9781480463318)
Read Raw Silk (9781480463318) Online
Authors: 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
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
Dry Goods
1
T
HIS 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.
W
E 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.