The Silk Factory

by Judith Allnatt

  Rosie turned to the window. Tally’s girls had taken their guinea pigs out of the hutch and were showing Cara how to stroke them. Sam was sitting in the sandpit with his back to them, flattening an area in which to line up his trucks. Amy brought her guinea pig over to him, a ginger and black one with a white patch over one eye. She squatted down beside him and held the creature out to him. Rosie willed him to take it, to say something, to join in. He glanced up for a moment as if annoyed by the interruption and then returned to his task, Amy’s friendly gesture barely ruffling the surface of his consciousness. Amy took her pet back again, cradled it in her arms and wandered off to the border in search of couch grass to feed it. Rosie sighed.

  Rob rummaged in his tool box and fished out a series of clamps to see which one would fit. He was a big, cheerful man. Rosie had got to know him too over the last couple of weeks, as she and Tally popped in and out of each other’s houses to chat or get the kids together to play. He seemed to be always busy building or mending something, whenever he was off duty, and said it kept him sane after shifts attending RTAs and nightclub fights and hanging around at A&E or court. He liked to work with his hands, doing something simple and productive so that he could see an outcome for his labours at the end of it.

  Rosie, looking out at the borders bursting with late summer colour, said, ‘The garden’s looking nice; the hydrangeas are gorgeous.’

  ‘It’s full of weeds,’ Rob said. ‘Don’t look too closely.’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? Weeds R Us next door.’

  Despite Rosie’s attempt at a light-hearted tone, Tally detected weariness in her voice. She took in Rosie’s frayed jeans and old hoody, her lack of make-up, or her usual earrings, or even a watch. ‘Do you want a hand clearing it?’ she asked, worried that Rosie was struggling.

  ‘No, you two are helping me no end already. No, I’m going to concentrate on getting the house straight first and let the garden die back. It’ll be easier to clear it in winter.’ She hoped that she sounded plausibly enthusiastic and that it wouldn’t be apparent how completely overwhelmed she felt.

  Since finding out about Lily, a fortnight ago, she’d been too down to get on with much. The tins of filler and pale azure paint that she’d bought for the living room were still stacked in the hall. She’d searched the house thoroughly for clues about her twin but had found only a pair of first shoes, white T-bars, wrapped in tissue paper in a drawer. The leather was decorated with punched star-shaped holes and was scuffed grey at the toes. They could have been Lily’s, but they might just as well have been her own. There were a few birthday cards and Mother’s Day cards, together with a handful of childish drawings that she recognised as her own, and an exercise book with her first English essays on subjects like ‘My Pet’ and ‘My Best Day Out’ – but no letters. There were photo albums, one a wedding album and the other a family one with pictures of birthdays and Christmases, high days and holidays. There were no pictures of Lily and the earliest birthday picture was at Rosie’s fourth birthday party, showing her blowing out four striped candles on a cake.

  She’d been to see May several times but had got nowhere. The weather had turned heavy and thunderous, presaging the end of summer, and May was cranky, fed up with the humid heat and the flare-up in her arthritis. She had talked a little about the distant past, remembering her childhood and teenage days with Helena clear and bright as the park where they had played, moving from swings and seesaws to tennis and boys. Questions about her later life: work, friends, becoming an aunty, met with blankness, then a faltering return to the early days with her sister, so that her memories only made Rosie feel her own loss more keenly.

  Rob squeezed a generous line of wood glue into the cracked frame of the chair. ‘Can you hold it tight together while I put the clamps on?’ he said to Rosie. She obliged while he positioned them.

  Tally said, ‘Do you want to come to the Country Park with us tomorrow? Feed the ducks?’

  ‘I can’t; it’s Josh’s weekend again and I’ve got to get the kids to the services by ten. We’d love to do it another time though.’

  ‘Well, drop round when you get back. Have some lunch with us.’ Tally knew how flat Rosie felt without the kids’ routine to keep her busy; she would need something to get her through the weekend. ‘How are you getting on with your art? Are you getting a portfolio together? Have you sent anything out yet?’

  Rosie brightened for a moment. ‘I have actually. I’ve put them on my website and I’ve sent out good copies of the dragon one and some others to a few children’s publishers, as print samples.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Tally said warmly. ‘More power to your elbow!’

  Rosie managed a smile.

  Rob finished winding the last clamp. ‘There we are. If we leave it overnight that should do the trick.’

  ‘Thanks, Rob. You’re a star. I’d better press on; I’m taking the kids to meet May this afternoon.’ She pulled a face. ‘Just a quick visit, I reckon. I’m not sure how the energy levels of the under-fives and the over-seventies will mix.’

  ‘Hmm, good luck with that,’ Tally said.

  Rosie went to tell Sam to bring Cara in but hesitated in the doorway. Nicky was busy holding Cara’s hand so that she could feed carrot sticks to the guinea pigs, but Amy, in her quiet way, had persevered with Sam and was kneeling next to him using a little dumper truck to build a pile of sand, while he used a digger to shovel it up and move it elsewhere. They both pushed the tiny toys with slow deliberation, reversing and manoeuvring them, raising and lowering trailer and bucket. Amy asked Sam something and he frowned and failed to answer but she simply returned to her role without further comment. Both seemed engrossed in Sam’s game, and Rosie felt a rush of relief to see Sam interacting, however slightly, with another child.

  Mindful not to risk another of Sam’s tantrums, she went and squatted beside them to admire the roadways and building site they’d made. After a minute, she explained that they had to go. She asked Sam if he’d like to leave his trucks there so that they could pick up their game another time, thinking that he would say no and then consent to pack them away in the ice-cream carton that served as their container. To her amazement, he glanced at Amy and then agreed to leave them.

  Amy said, ‘Let’s put the lid on the sandpit so Polly doesn’t mess everything up.’ They solemnly lifted the lid on together, and Sam came away without a fuss.

  At Holly Court, Nurse Todd suggested that the children might prefer to be outdoors and led the way through to the gardens, where the lawn was dotted with croquet hoops. Sam ran on ahead and Rosie, with May on one arm leaning on a stick and Cara holding her other hand, teetered gently down the path towards the summerhouse.

  ‘He’s very … bouncy,’ May said, looking after Sam as he raced over and yanked open the glazed summerhouse doors.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Rosie muttered to herself. ‘Careful, Sam!’ she called out.

  Sam emerged, dragging a croquet mallet behind him. ‘Look, Mum! I’ve got a hammer.’

  ‘No, sweetheart; you’re not allowed that.’

  Sam pulled it down the steps, looking mutinous.

  ‘No,’ Rosie said firmly. ‘Put it back nicely.’

  As they reached the summerhouse, she saw the box of wooden balls and told him that he could take just one and roll it through each hoop in turn. ‘See how many goes it takes you and we’ll clap if you do any in one go,’ she finished. She helped May into one of the generously upholstered bamboo chairs and subsided into another with Cara on her lap.

  ‘How are you, Aunty?’ she said. ‘This is Cara.’

  May took no notice. ‘My bones ache,’ she said petulantly, rubbing her knees and then her elbows. She laid her head back on the cushion and closed her eyes.

  Cara wriggled down off Rosie’s knee and she lifted her back on again. Thinking that May was going to take a catnap, Rosie fished in her bag for a nursery rhyme book to entertain Cara. She began turning the pages, s
inging first ‘Pop goes the Weasel’ and then ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ while she jigged Cara up and down on her knee. When she began to sing ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’, she was aware of May’s wavery voice joining in.

  ‘“… and the dish ran away with the spoon,”’ they finished together.

  ‘Do you remember singing that to me when I was a little girl?’ Rosie asked softly, trying to lead her back to a time that might include memories of Lily.

  May opened her eyes and looked at her in an unfocused way. ‘Mother used to sing it to us,’ she said dreamily. ‘She used to play it on the piano.’

  Rosie sighed. It was hopeless. The summerhouse was warm, with a sweet, slightly sickly smell of wood and creosote. Squares of light from the small-paned windows lay across her lap and she cuddled Cara in, as the child began to relax into sleep, her mouth half-open, her head lolling against Rosie’s breast.

  Suddenly, May leant across and touched Cara gently on the cheek. ‘Which one is this? Where’s the other one?’

  Rosie stiffened. ‘Who do you mean, May? Does she remind you of Rosie? Is that it? Do you mean, where’s Lily?’

  ‘Lily’s gone,’ May said sadly.

  Rosie hardly dared breathe. ‘What happened to Lily?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice light.

  ‘It was an accident, a terrible accident.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘It was Maria’s fault. Helena was never the same after.’ She passed her hand in front of her face as if to flap away a pestering insect. ‘We don’t speak of it.’

  ‘I don’t remember Maria,’ Rosie said casually, afraid to break the spell of May’s remembering.

  ‘The Spanish girl. The one that Michael got to look after the twins so Helena could work …’ She faltered and tutted at herself in frustration. ‘Like a nanny. What d’you call them?’

  ‘An au pair?’ Rosie hazarded.

  ‘That’s it.’

  Something stirred in Rosie’s memory. A dark-haired girl with a long ponytail and freckled skin. A park playground. Being held under the arms and spun round, legs flying out, socks wrinkled round ankles, squealing with delight. Taking turns on a slide: Maria waiting at the bottom to catch them, first Rosie flying down to the bottom and jumping off, yes, then Lily … Lily in cotton dungarees and with pigtails and a chubby face, pushing herself off at the top and coming zooming down towards her …

  ‘And what happened? What went wrong?’ Rosie asked with a lump in her throat.

  ‘I’m not to talk about the accident. That’s what Michael said.’

  Rosie tried another tack. ‘Why not, May? Why should you not talk about it?’

  May gripped on to the arms of the chair, looking fierce. ‘He thought it would make Helena ill again. That she’d have to go away to that place; that she might never come out. But he was wrong. I said we should talk about it, that she needed to grieve for Lily. We argued and argued but he wouldn’t change his mind, and he took her away.’ Her eyes filled with tears and Rosie put her hand over her aunt’s bony fingers. ‘I didn’t want them to go. Michael said it would be best – a new start for them. He said there were too many reminders in the village, too many people who knew and might bring it up.’

  ‘You mean they moved from Weedon Bec to Highcross?’

  May nodded.

  Something was beginning to make sense. She thought of her mother’s periods of acute anxiety, when she would become restless and unable to sleep. She would watch TV late into the night or see the doctor for sleeping tablets. She remembered her father’s efforts to keep Helena from withdrawing: weekends away for ‘a change of scene’, hobbies taken up together that lasted only weeks before being laid aside, references to things Rosie hadn’t understood at the time – ‘counselling’, ‘the talking cure’; the move had not been enough. She remembered herself at the centre of their arguments, how torn it had made her feel: endless disagreements over what she could be allowed to do, her mother’s appeals that horse-riding or gym or even school trips were dangerous, and her father’s brisk replies about ‘mollycoddling’ or ‘cotton wool’. ‘Life is dangerous,’ he’d said once in exasperation, and her mother had looked at him as if he’d slapped her.

  May said, ‘I took their house on but they didn’t come back, not even for Christmas. They didn’t want to face it, kept it all under the carpet, didn’t want you … I mean Rose, to know …’ She looked from Rosie to Cara as if suddenly confused and stopped short.

  ‘How did the accident happen, Aunty?’ Rosie tried to keep the urgency she felt from her voice. ‘You can tell me now, can’t you? I’m all grown up.’

  May made her mouth a firm, straight line.

  ‘May, please! I really need to know!’

  May put her hand over her eyes. ‘Swept away,’ she murmured, ‘just swept away.’ She began to weep.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, May. I didn’t mean to upset you.’ She felt her own throat tighten and squeezed May’s hand. ‘We won’t talk about it any more.’ She gave her a tissue but May just held it in her hand, so she took it back and dabbed her cheeks and then, as she would for one of the children, held it to May’s nose and said, ‘Blow.’

  From the corner of her eye she saw Sam kick the croquet ball into the border. He mooched over to the summerhouse. ‘You said you would clap, Mummy,’ he said. ‘You said you were going to watch.’

  Her heart still thumping, she said, as cheerily as she could manage, ‘I’m sorry, love. I can watch you now.’

  Sam glanced uncertainly at May with her weepy-looking eyes and back to his mother. Make everything as normal as you can, Rosie told herself in an effort to steer through the current of emotion that her scraps of memory had brought whirling behind them. ‘Can you find the ball and have another go?’ She longed to get away on her own to have a chance to think, but first she must calm everything down for the others. She nodded encouragingly to Sam and he trailed off to retrieve the ball. She touched May’s hand and said, ‘Look, May; let’s see if Sam can get a hole-in-one. Remember when you and Helena used to play golf on the links course at Clifftops? Why don’t you tell me about those days?’

  That evening, despite all her efforts, the children seemed to pick up on her disturbed state and were difficult to settle. It was nine o’clock by the time she had read to Sam from his current favourite, The Little Prince, and no sooner had she got him down than Cara woke with a wail. She knelt by the lobster-pot cot and put a hand on Cara’s tummy while she soothed her and sang her back to sleep. The evening was humid, sticky and uncomfortable; she smoothed Cara’s hair away from her face and folded back the blanket. She turned on the Cinderella nightlight that stood on a stool beside the cot and from the windows of the blue and silver pumpkin coach a faint, cool light glowed.

  Rosie tiptoed from the room with the strains of ‘Lullaby and Goodnight’ still echoing in her head. She went slowly downstairs, thinking that all the songs she sang to Cara were ones her mother had sung to her. It made her feel sad. Even though there was continuity about it, tonight it felt too poignant. She started picking up toys in the living room and returning them to the wicker toy box. Suddenly she stopped, a ragdoll dangling from her hand. Something was moving in her brain … something to do with songs and the leggy, sprawling shape of the doll … suddenly, it was there, fully formed, a voice singing that was not her mother’s:

  La araña chiquitita trepó por la pared,

  Vino la lluvia y al suelo la tiró ¡plof!

  Chiquitita spider climbed up the wall,

  Down came the rain and threw it down, plop!

  Maria’s incey-wincey spider song. She groped for more: brown fingers walking up the pale inside of her arm and then tickling, laughter … it faded away.

  She tried to picture Maria’s face as she sang but nothing would come. May had said that Lily’s death had been an accident and that it was Maria’s fault. Rosie’s mind flicked over myriad possibilities: Lily pulling away and running into the road; or climbing up to a window left open, or a lake, a rive
r, a slip, a fall, a moment’s inattention; all nightmare scenarios that she and probably all mothers had hovering at the back of their minds. Maria had been young, just a girl really, too young to have had experience bringing up kids of her own.

  She tipped the last of the toys into the box. There had been other games, she was sure. Lions and tigers – that had involved crawling around under the furniture, Lily and her being chased on all fours, and hide-and-seek, one elephant, two elephants … ten elephants … COMING! Who was it coming to find them? Mum or Dad? There was a big tree you could hide behind. You could get right in amongst the branches. It had smelt strange – musty – and there was something squashy underfoot. She shut down the lid of the toy box and went out into the garden to carry on tidying away the debris of the day.

  Twilight was falling, the grass felt cool and damp beneath her feet and the honeyed scent of buddleia hung in the air. Automatically, she began filling a plastic crate with balls and bubble bottles, Cara’s stacking cups and Sam’s dumper truck. She bent to pick up Sam’s cars from his diggings: a big patch now with beaten mud racetracks lined with little pale stones gleaned from the soil. Flashes of sandy colour in amongst them caught her eye and she picked one out between her finger and thumb: a shard of biscuit-ware pottery. She found others and laid them out on the slab path, turning them over and over.

  Surely it couldn’t be … May had said that Rosie had lived at this house as a child but she had no recollection of it. She picked up Sam’s red metal spade and scraped a long furrow in the soil until she hit something hard; then she dug around it to loosen the earth’s grasp on it. She lifted out a rounded object to see the sketched eyes and the unmistakable shape of the long ear of the hare she’d broken long ago. Her body prickled with sweat as if she were again the child full of fear at what she’d done …