Raw Silk (9781480463318) by Janet Burroway Read Free Book Online

and backed for a minute against the wall.
    I come here sometimes. The rhythm of the place is so strong it overcomes my own syncopated nerves. A hundred massive looms pour tie silk slowly off their beds, with a woman to every half a dozen, watching, never touching them, except to ward off tangles. The looms are of three ages and the oldest, Victorian, ones slough their shuttles ponderously across with a resonant wooden whack at each selvage, where the thread is drawn neatly back into itself. The machines from the thirties fling their shuttles at twice the speed and with a higher, harder, more ambitious pitch. The 1950s automatics work almost faster than the eye. They have two shuttles that meet in the middle like angry hands, one grabbing the woof thread from the other and snapping it at the far edge, so that the selvage is a ragged fringe. Their power is such that if I put my hand on the bed of the loom, I have no doubt they would weave the cloth right through it.
    The Jacquard cards that dictate the pattern of the cloth ride by on tracks above the warp clicking like castanets, and the composite noise is something like standing ear to amplifier under a rock band. In fact I have seen the weavers—though they didn’t do it today—break into song as if compelled by the rhythm. And yet they move casually, loose, their hair tucked back on their necks for safety. There is one of them standing not far from me, weight hung comfortably on one hip, who as a girl wove the lining for the Queen’s coronation robe. When an interviewer from a London glossy asked why she had been so honored, she gave him a blank look—the gap that sets apart the working class—and replied, “It’s what I do, in’t it?” I watch her watching her machines. She taps a lever, sweeps the warp. I like her proprietorial calm over the shuttles, which for all their murderous force are feeding out at her feet, millimeter by delicate millimeter, a sheet of silk minutely embroidered with the insignia of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. I try to hold myself, like her, deliberately calm, in the face of the violent process by which such fragile things are made.
    But I’d better go. I reached for my portfolio where I’d leaned it against a spoolrack, and as I did so my glance encountered a tennis shoe, and I realized I wasn’t the only watcher. A heavy, pale, bob-haired girl was sitting on the floor between the spools, her back dumped against the wall and her palms limp in her lap, staring fixedly into the looms. “Excuse me,” I said automatically, but even if she could have heard me above the roar I doubt she would have. There was something arresting about her, the lumpish dullness of the way she sat and the hollow intensity of her eyes, as if a rag doll had been crossed with a cat. I took up my things and went to find Oliver.
    And did so, I think, with a certain fillip of female hope that what I hadn’t been able to do for myself he’d do for me. I mean, leave Jill finally at St. Margaret’s. I wasn’t going to describe the parting melodrama for him. He’d been anxious when we left, so I’d play it down, and he’d be relieved, possibly even grateful, and then the thing would be miraculously done. I found him in the hall outside the boardroom.
    “Hi, love,” I said.
    “I thought you weren’t going to make it.” He zipped a folder into his case. “Have you got your stuff?”
    “She’s fine,” I said.
    He looked at me; his zipper stopped a couple of inches short of shut. “How’s Jill?”
    And although—because—Oliver doesn’t touch me at East Anglian, as if he’s afraid someone will mention nepotism, I reached and kissed him sweetly on the cheek.
    “She’ll survive. I’m not so sure about St. Margaret’s.” I was pleased when Malcolm Butler plumped past, saying, “None of that, you two,” and I pressed my face in Oliver’s tense lemon-scented neck.
    We went on into the boardroom, where the members were stowing charts and figures away