tone, a fragrance almost, that made
them inimitable. Layla sensed the difference with her mind as much
as her eye, feeling the true purple as a billowing radiance that
filled out the cloth, the same way that wind and sunlight filled
out the sails of the Auster when her father brought her in on the morning
tide.
There was also
the fact that the stink and mess of the press vats revolted her and
the idea of so much killing – whole cities of sea snails, their
pastures laid waste, their soft bodies rendered down to a foul gunk
– made the bile rise in her throat. It was not the kind of thing
you could explain to people, but it came to her more than once in
the days following her encounter with the old woman that she would
have no trouble in understanding. She returned to Athenaeum Street
each afternoon, illogically hoping the old woman might be there
again, but she never was. Layla couldn’t believe she had let her
escape without finding out where she lived or at least her
name.
The old hag
scared her a little, but the thought that in losing sight of her
she might also have lost a link with her mother was more
frightening still. She hung around in the lane, gazing into the
heart of the thorn bushes and pondering what the old woman had
said, that Layla could learn from the dainty orb weavers if she
chose to. The more Layla watched the spiders the more she felt
prepared to admit there might be something in it. Their fixed
devotion to their task was something she understood completely. She
was forced to concede that the spiders’ ways were less of a mystery
to her than those of her work colleagues at Minerva Textiles, the
daughters of fishermen mostly, who were adept enough with their
hands but who took no interest in aesthetics, and who used the
slightest departure from routine as an excuse to forget about their
work entirely.
The spiders’
work was part of them, integral to their survival as their stomachs
and guts. Since coming to the city Layla had begun work on a new
panorama, a tableau depicting the escapades of the infamous female
brigand Jocasta Zet. It wasn’t until she had been at work on it for
a week that she realised she’d based her image of Jocasta on the
black receptionist at the Hotel Europa.
She planned to
mount an exhibition the following spring. Her boss at Minerva had
offered her a portion of the firm’s trade stand at the Atoll City
Expo that autumn but in the end Layla had said no. It was an
opportunity of sorts, but Layla did not want her work becoming
permanently associated with the commercial sector. She had already
received two private commissions on the back of the publicity
generated by the competition she had won three months before her
departure for Atoll City. Both commissions were lucrative, and a
couple of galleries had expressed a tentative interest in
representing her. If things continued to progress she hoped to be
able to give up her job with Minerva within a year.
In the middle
of August she began her first love affair. John Caribe was a silk
and cloth merchant, originally from Madrid. He had known Idmon
Vargas for years, and traded his silks for high prices all over the
world. He had full lips and a swarthy complexion, and the tips of
his fingers were callused from measuring yarn. Layla knew plenty of
women would be drawn to Caribe by his diamond cufflinks and obvious
charisma but what attracted her most of all was the way he talked
about colours, throwing down their names like a gauntlet in his
odd, burred accent, rattling them off one by one as if reciting
some obscurely riveting piece of street poetry.
She first met
him when she went to buy silk, joking that she couldn’t afford her
father’s prices, and when eventually Caribe pressed his mouth down
over hers in the stockroom of his cavernous premises on Salamanka
Street she did not resist. She was shocked and secretly thrilled at
how this slant-eyed tycoon with the sardonic grin and the coolest
head for figures she had ever