Raw Silk (9781480463318) (26 page)

He said that would probably be okay, but all the same he’d have a go at splicing it back together if I wanted. I thanked him and made my way into the hall.

It was packed, both the straight-back benches in front of the stage and the tinny folding chairs that were disarranged from there back to the edge of the hall and into the kitchen alcove. Packed and sweaty, with something in the air that wasn’t so much sweat as dour determination. Once planned as pompous, the hall itself had lapsed into a grim shabbiness, with its dirty plum velvet hangings (the color of the nineteenth century), clotted-cream walls, and floorboards splintering through decayed varnish. Round-toed boots fidgeted over the splinters. Men hunched forward with shiny gabardine elbows on their knees or lounged uneasy in the chairs, tweed against tin, their faces set. Women weavers sat in a bloc on the benches, some of them in the uniform of their trade, some with restless children on their laps. I saw no face more than vaguely familiar until Malcolm materialized at my elbow. “Hey, where you been?”

“Car trouble,” I whispered back, and he led me to his seat in the alcove where a muscular old man, deferentially insistent, vacated the place beside him.

Under the plaque of the Migglesly town motto,
TRUTH THE WARP, TRUST THE WEFT
, the stage was set up as a panel with its cast more or less awry, because Nicholson, who was against the merger, had the part of moderator, whereas Tyler Peer, known to be neutral, was to present the negative case. Oliver and Mrs. Linley (dressed in one of my prints, I noticed with a squeamish pang) sat on the other side. A dozen members of the Board and staff were arranged behind. They had water carafes and a gavel and expressions, all of them, of the most punctilious, reasonable democracy.

Nicholson was launched into a patriotic history of East Anglian: how the low rolling hills and slow-flowing rivers of Suffolk had spawned the textile trade here in the early Middle Ages, but had proved traitor to progress when the industry mechanized and moved off to clearer and more powerful waters. How the weavers had survived by importing minerals for power and moving, first, to worsteds, and then, with the Cobden Treaty of 1860, to distributing French silks, and from thence to weaving them. Foreign immigration was not new here: you would find Flemish and Scandinavian names in this crowd dating back to the thirteenth century, French names back to the Cobden era, when duty-free silks had threatened to kill textiles altogether and instead had been the birth of this great company. We had run short shifts and breadlines in the thirties, but we’d never laid off a man. We’d done the right thing in taking on spinning and carding in the twenties, the right thing buying American automatics in ’54, the right thing merging with the Long Melford dyers and finishers in ’56, and the right thing moving into man-made fibers. But we’d also clearly done the right thing
not
to move into knitting the polyesters in the Korean boom, because those who’d done that were necessarily into ready-made knits and stockings by now, and ready-to-wear changed the nature of the trade and of a town. Up to now we’d managed to absorb change without changing the character of our life, and that was what we wanted to maintain. What we had to consider was that textile production is labor intensive; there’s more labor to capital, labor to equipment, and labor to horsepower than in the vast majority of industries. What we had to realize was that cloth was a “footloose” product, with a high value in relation to weight. This meant that transport was low but that trade restrictions and tariffs had an unusually intense effect on price. It also meant that the labor force had a more than usual right to share in policy decisions. We’d always made the decisions together and by the record we’d made the right ones. He had every confidence we would do so now.

This satisfied nobody. The veiled promise that labor would have a say in the merger enervated the members of the Board, who sat expressionless. For those on the floor the history of East Anglian was a source of pride; it didn’t mean they wanted a lecture on it.

“I think of East Anglian as a family,” Nicholson said. That Nicholson thought this way was a simple truth, maybe too simple for the seventies. I looked around at the women, some of them wrestling the toddlers on their knees; spotted Jake Tremain behind the block of weavers, elbows on spread thighs, concentrating on the floor. The man who’d given me his seat spat into a corner. Too goddam much like a family maybe. Nicholson took a sip of water.

“Tonight I have asked Mr. Tyler Peer to give you a detailed account of the proposed procedure for expansion, and Mr. Oliver Marbalestier to outline the profit implications. I’ll call first on Mr. Peer.”

Tyler got himself up shoulders first and wandered to the apron. Tyler is an elbow-patches kind of man, stockily and strongly formed except for a potbelly that always threatens the middle button of his Harris jackets. He’s not much of a public speaker, and although on the mill floor he can make himself heard over the machines without seeming to raise his voice, here his first words came out muffled—he was combing his moustache in short little jabs of his pipe stem—and somebody shouted at once, “Louder!”

So he took out his pipe and made himself heard, dully and at length. He told us which looms would be scrapped to make way for how many high-powered automatics, what percentage of increase for which kinds of cloth could be expected by what date, how much of which space would be appropriated for administrative expansion, how many setts would be enlarged, how much labor would need to be imported, how double shifts would be implemented in warping and weaving, and where, and who would be likely to be affected. We listened with increasing restlessness until he said, without a change of tone and without transition, “There are a certain number of adjustments and disadvantages to the proposal as I see it,” and then there was a palpable lift of tension in the room, just so much as might be accounted for by, say, the pricking up of a couple of thousand ears.

“There’s bound to be a period when production falls instead of rises, till we get through the training program for the new automatics, and get used to all the shifting round. And we’ll either have to hire male weavers for the second shift, or else have women coming into the mill at night to work. And there’s bound to be a temporary housing shortage of, I’d guess, in the vicinity of two hundred dwellings. These are all things to be considered.” And he nodded, mumbled “Thank you,” stuck his pipe back in his mouth and turned as if that was all there was to be said on the matter. There was a moment of surprised silence, but by the time Tyler was back at the table preparing to sit down, Jake Tremain was on his feet.

“Mr. Peer, I wonder if I might ask a question.” Very low key, a model of sobriety, but Tremain had a carrying Speakers’ Corner kind of voice. “Could you tell us who would be the overlookers on the new machines?”

Half bent to sit, Tyler straightened up unhappily. “The Utagawa Company has some of the most highly skilled mechanical engineers …” he began.

“Then the overlookers would be Japanese.”

“Until we’ve effected the transition to …”

Jake said, “Thank you,” and sat down. I think it was a signal. Four women were on their feet, but one of the overlookers from Tapestries cut in ahead of them, loud like Jake and with more control in his tone than in the words.

“Does that mean we’re going to have training school again like in fifty-four, and learn our job all over again from these Japs?”

“There’s no way you can learn weaving,” one of the women put in. “You catch it, like the measles.” A few scattered and appreciative laughs.

“Aren’t you planning to drop silk?”

“No, at the present time there are no plans for dropping …”

“What are you going to do for warps? You know there isn’t enough now.”

“That’s right, you get a stock on the floor and they’re taken straight up by a heavy fell.”

“And then it’s the nonautos that get lost in the queue.”

The speakers jack-in-the-boxed from one side and the other of the hall, more orderly than orderly, almost as if they’d been rehearsed.

“Ask anybody here, you don’t run autos, they run you.”

“It used to be you could help another weaver on a bad smash, but with the autos, you don’t have time.”

“They’ve got no flexibility, they’ve got no tolerance.”

These nonquestions went on while Tyler blinked into them, puffed at them, not trying to answer, and he was right. They were not meant for questions nor for discussion either, but a rhetorical orchestration. All he had to do was wait until they came to a two-bar rest, and Nicholson got up to say, “Let’s hear from Mr. Marbalestier on the profit implications, and then no doubt we’ll have time for discussion.”

Tyler sat down. The crowd sat back, disgruntled but prepared to wait. Nicholson nodded his thanks to Tyler and gestured to Oliver, and I saw quite clearly then that the chronology of the program had been rigged so as to give Oliver the last word. And that the fact it had been so rigged meant that the merger was already decided. And that this last-word arrangement wasn’t going to accomplish much in the way of pacification, because the workers knew it. They sat at bay, not clever enough to win but too clever to be fooled, patches on their anger, dues-paying members of the Amalgamated Unconsulted. I saw that, where I sat, I was a member too.

We are not here to be heard but to reinforce the great principle of free speech. We are here to make a hero of Jake Tremain, who is impotent on the issue but can nevertheless show off his balls. I see Dillis sitting behind him a little to his right with her husband Mark; Dillis ambivalent and edgy, her swelling belly attesting to Jake Tremain’s balls.

And although I am not in a very humorous mood, there is something flickering in this dreariness like mica specks in asphalt, because it is clear that everyone here is powerless to do a single thing except to become a sister to the Utagawa Company of Osaka. That is what we are here to discuss but that has already been decided, not by the workers but not exactly by the Board of Directors either, who can’t afford to “pass up a plum like this” when Utagawa has dropped it in their laps; nor by the Utagawa Company, which is acting out of terror of the American embargo; nor by the American government which is acting out of fear for its own textile industry and fear of its own unions’ anger; but by …. who, then? The U.S. unions? Some craft local in North Carolina? Some labor boss in the Old South who has had the power to force this merger, domino style, three-quarters of the way round the world into Migglesly town hall?

There was a general shuffling and shifting while Oliver unwound himself from his chair and stood up to lounge against the table, sorting notes. A lump in my stomach told me, before my brain had registered it, that he was going to be all wrong. He was overtired. He was nervous, and when he was nervous he had a way of exaggerating his nonchalance. There used to be a time that this worked; there used to be a time that it had a friendly frankness about it, even though it was an act. But now when he settled a hip on the table edge and hitched the crease over his knee it registered, even to me, as an affront to a man in coveralls.

“Mr. Nicholson,” he began, and took too long a pause, so that it drifted out into some hint of satire, or contempt. I looked down at my wedding ring and twisted it. “Mr. Nicholson has recalled to you several precedents for survival in our history. I think we should be clear that what we are discussing here tonight is not a choice between two viable alternatives, but once more a question of survival.” This contrasted peculiarly with Tyler Peer’s dispassionate statistics. It might have been all right if the smile had not been all wrong. He smiled like a boy scout master teaching square knots.

“Whose survival did you have in mind?” somebody said, but was shushed by a gesture from Jake Tremain.

“Fundamentally, the history of our industry is a history of technical change. Assimilating change is vital to the company itself and to the fabric of our national society.” Somebody didn’t like “fabric”; he booed and was answered with a few muted laughs.

“Britain was the first country to industrialize the textile trade, the first to lower exportation costs, the first to use power machinery. As Mr. Nicholson suggests, the geography of our area has not always been amenable to such changes, but the vision and farsightedness of the management at East Anglian has always kept this company not only alive but expanding.”

A sullen silence.

“Now we are faced with a situation whose implications are not understood in this room.”

I glanced up from where I’d been staring at my hands in my lap, shocked to see that he was still smiling as he lectured them, still lounging, swinging a shiny shoe.

“In the past month the Textile Council has authorized an abolition of Japanese quotas in favor of tariffs on cotton import, which will be implemented within the next year. If we import Japanese machines and yarn, we take advantage of this quota abolition. If we do not, we will be in competition with Japan. It is as simple as that. I assure you, it is as simple as that.”

Malcolm drew in a breath beside me, and when I looked at him he clacked his teeth. He felt it too: Oliver managed to make “simple” sound like an accusation of “simple-minded.”

“We have the striking good fortune to be offered a sister-company proposal by one of the great textile mills of Japan, and we would be
fools
to turn it down.” He launched, finally, into a series of statistics on cotton content, output and projected profits, but the word “fools” hung over it with more force than the largest numbers he mentioned. He kept performing a graceful shrug as if nothing could be easier than all this, nobody could have any rational objections to it.

“Why is he badgering them?” Malcolm whispered.

I shook my head. “Nervous.”

Then in a tone heavy with cajoling sentiment he declared that East Anglian had a natural affinity with the Utagawa Company, which had like us moved from silk weaving through rayon and nylon to more sophisticated synthetics; and he harked back again to the Flemish immigrants of the thirteenth century, the French of the nineteenth. He appealed facetiously to the Van Wycks and Tremains in the crowd that they find room for a few Isshus and Fujiwaras. Jake Tremain stood up.