The Silk Factory Read Free Page A

the heads of the Michaelmas daisies. She peered at the shapes, blurring and clearing in the old glass.
    Daisies … Her mind flew back to another garden, another time, when she was a child: her mother sunbathing on a tartan rug; she, Rosie, sitting on a rusty swing, legs dangling. She remembered muttering under her breath while she was stringing daisy chains: one for her, one for her mother and one for her imaginary friend. For a year or two Rosie had taken her imaginary friend everywhere, summoning her to life as an only child’s talisman against isolation, picturing her sharing her meals, walking beside her to school, playing hopscotch with her and listening when she read aloud.
    Rosie had thought that her mother was asleep but she suddenly opened her eyes and asked her who she was talking to.
    ‘Only Arabella,’ Rosie said without thinking, engrossed in splitting a thin green stalk and threading another one through.
    ‘Who’s Arabella?’ Her mother propped herself up on one elbow, her attention now keenly focused on Rosie, making her stop threading and drop her hands into her lap.
    ‘She’s just a girl I talk to sometimes.’
    ‘People will think you’re strange if you go round talking to someone who isn’t real, Rosie. If you want someone to talk to, why don’t I phone one of the girls from your class and invite them round to tea?’
    ‘They’ll be at the park. They like playing outside,’ Rosie said sulkily. She had been trying for ages to get her mother to let her join in with the other children but it was always ‘too near teatime’ or ‘too late’ or ‘too rough’.
    Her mother wouldn’t be drawn.
    ‘I’d rather play with Arabella anyway. She’s just like me – the same age and everything,’ she said petulantly.
    Her mother sat right up and stared at her and something in her look made Rosie feel uncomfortable.
    ‘What does she look like?’
    ‘I told you, she’s exactly like me,’ Rosie said.
    Her mother’s face became red and angry. ‘That’s rude and you shouldn’t make up such stories.’ She got to her feet and stood over Rosie. ‘Don’t you know that it’s wicked to tell lies?’
    Rosie, alarmed by the sudden change in her mother’s mood, hadn’t known what to say and had shrugged and looked sullen.
    ‘Go indoors,’ her mother had said. ‘Go and do your homework.’
    Rosie had slipped off the swing, and trailed indoors leaving the daisy chains to wilt and shrink where they had fallen on the scuffed earth.
    Remembering the conversation, Rosie felt the familiar tug of regret that she had often found it difficult to understand her mother, who had suffered strange moods and unpredictable changes in temper so that they had often been at cross purposes.
    From a very early age, long before the conversation at the swing, she had been a secretive child, her mother’s tension making her careful, afraid of setting off her touchiness. If she ever broke anything she would try to hide it rather than tell her mother. The first hazy memory she had of this was when she had broken a garden ornament. She must have been around three years old. She had been playing alone in a garden while the grown-ups talked indoors and she’d found, peeping out from a lavender bush, a china hare, modelled with its ears laid flat against its back, looking up as if to the moon. Attracted by the smoothness of the sandy biscuit ware she had put her chubby hands around its body and lifted it up. Underneath, something dark was moving, a mass of woodlice disturbed and scattering, some breaking off from the heap and moving towards her feet … She dropped the china hare on to the hard slabs of the path and its head broke clean from its body and rolled, chipping eye and ear, to the side of the path. Aghast at what she’d done and terrified of the creepy crawlies, she had stuffed the ornament into the bushes, pulling the leaves around it. It made her sad now to think that this guilty concealment was her earliest