Free Raw Silk (9781480463318) by Janet Burroway

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.
    On the other hand, the gloom of my studio didn’t abate and the work was going badly; toward the middle of the month I had only a scrappy rehash of last year’s autumn designs. So when Malcolm suggested I move into the new quarters behind one of the laminated panels, the timing seemed a bit of luck. I thought Oliver’s objections mere petulance.
    “Take a lot of petrol,” he said at one point. It was the first time in my recollection he’d charged me with extravagance.
    “We’ll go in one car, then,” I said. “I can fit my schedule to yours.”
    “That wouldn’t work. I can’t always know where I’m going to be. It’s hard enough …”
    “Look, Oliver, it’s lonely around here.” This was dangerously near the bone, and I raced on before he could pick it up. “They’ve got space for me. What difference does it make to you if I work at the mill?”
    He could never give me an answer, and I concluded that he hadn’t one. I don’t suppose he could have offered me territorial imperative unvarnished. I don’t suppose he could have said that he didn’t want to share East Anglian with me, any more than Heath could say he wants the wogs out of Birmingham.
    The new block wasn’t bad on the inside. It had north light, lots of it, and a shag carpet that invited you to take your shoes off, which I did. My space was divided from Malcolm’s by a sand-glass partition half the width of the room. We were to communicate through a sliding panel—which as it turned out we never closed—with Mom Pollard, the dyestuffs supervisor, and the secretary Dillis Grebe. Everything was some color of white, even the vast blond drawing board that tilted on its leg at the touch of a silver wing nut. I played with this marvel and wondered if I could work on an angle, like a real artist. At home I had a Victorian schooltable.
    “It seems a bit frivolous,” I said.
    Malcolm ogled the clinical walls. “Frivolous!”
    “No, I mean, I’ve got plenty of space to work at home. I mean, I’ll be leaving a ten-room house to Mrs. Coombe and Mr. Wrain.”
    “They’ll love you for it,” Malcolm said. “Anyway, you need company to work.”
    I turned to him, surprised. “I don’t exactly need company. But I think I need something to work against. With Jill there I was always fighting for my privacy. When I don’t have to fight for it, I start thinking about things, and I can’t concentrate.”
    “Of course, mother; it’s a universal law. Why do you think we’ve got four telephones?”
    There was nothing very wonderful about Malcolm’s knowing what I meant, but I’d never have volunteered the same confession to Oliver. Oliver can swivel his attention to anything with instant focus. He can work eighteen hours a day; he never moils. I saw it might be very comfortable, procrastinating in the same room with Malcolm.
    “I’ll be an unconscionable nuisance,” he promised brightly.
    Most of the new block’s decor had been dictated by the architect, but out of some kind of professional tact he had left our interior to us, with the result that we soon had the sloppiest quarters at East Anglian. I tacked up snapshots, portraits of Jill and juvenilia for which the walls at home had seemed in too sacred taste. Malcolm was constitutionally incapable of leaving a blank space blank, so he “did” his walls in innocuous graffiti—telephone numbers, Zen aphorisms, place names he fancied like Pwllheli and Goole. I offered him Two