Tie One in Eight

by Anni Albers, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Point paper

The design came down from the top floor on a Tuesday in October, rolled, with a rubber band round it that Mr Bowyer had taken off the morning post. Nora Hulme unrolled it on the sloping board beside the piano machine and weighted the corners with the things she kept for the purpose: two empty bobbins, a tin of Zubes, and the brass key to the card store, which was heavier than any key needed to be.

It was a tie silk. Most of them were. Sherratt & Daintry wove ties for the shops in St Ann's Square and for two firms in London that sewed their own names into the lining, and Nora had cut cards for some thousands of them since she came into the card room at fifteen. She knew a tie by the width of the repeat on the paper before she looked at what was painted inside it.

This one was a hill. Mr Bowyer had painted it in black across the lower half of the repeat: a long shoulder rising from the left to a point, and a shorter, steeper fall on the right. Above it he had painted nothing. The white of the paper was the ground, and the ground meant the grey satin warp, so it was a black hill under a grey sky. In the margin, in his small upright hand, he had written Shutlingsloe, and under that: Black weft fig. Grey 8-end sat. grd.

She had seen Shutlingsloe on most mornings for twenty-two years, from the end of her street. It did look like that, when the cloud was off it. He had got the shoulder right.

She took the reading glass and went along the base of the hill a square at a time. Point paper is ruled in eights, with a heavy line every eighth square each way. The small squares inside are threads: one square across for each end of warp, one square up for each pick of weft. Where a square is painted the weft lies on top; where it is white, the warp does. Everything a loom can do is in that: over, or under.

Along the bottom of the hill the black ran without a break for fifty-two squares.

She counted it again from the other side and got fifty-two again. So the black weft would cross fifty-two ends of warp with nothing to hold it down: a single thread of silk lying loose across a sixth of an inch of cloth. On a tie. A man would knot it every morning and pull it tight against his collar stud. He would push a tiepin through it, and his cuff would brush it a hundred times a day, and so would the stubble on his chin by evening.

It would weave. The loom would not object. The cloth would come off the beam looking exactly as it was painted, flat and black and soft as a mole's back, and Mr Bowyer would be pleased with it. And in a month, on somebody's neck in Stockport, the floats would be drawn up into loops, and the loops would catch, and the catches would run.

She rolled the paper again, put the rubber band back round it, and took it upstairs at dinner time.

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Mr Bowyer's room was at the top of the mill under the north lights, where the light was best and coldest. He had a paraffin heater he was not supposed to have and a radiogram he had brought from home. He was twenty-eight and had been at the art school in Manchester, and he wore a green knitted tie of his own making which he said was a protest, though he had never said against what. He was eating a pork pie over the waste-paper basket.

"The hill floats fifty-two," Nora said.

"It does."

"It wants tying."

He swallowed and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief. "If I tie it, it goes grey. It goes speckled. The whole idea is that it's one shape. You look at it and it's the hill, one piece of black. Not a hill with measles."

"It'll pull."

"It's a tie, Mrs Hulme. Nobody wears a tie for ever."

She held the roll out to him, and after a moment he took it, because there was nothing else to do with his hands. "Leave it with me," he said.

When she came in on the Wednesday it was back on her board. He had drawn a red pencil line along the base of the hill and written across it: Tie 1 in 8. G.B. Under that, smaller, as though he had come back to it after putting his coat on: Keep it quiet.

The cards

The piano machine was older than Nora and had been rebuilt twice. It had a keyboard of short wooden keys in rows, each key worked a punch, and each punch stood for one needle of the jacquard on the loom and so for one end of warp in every repeat. The card went in at the back, a strip of stiff grey board as long as her forearm. She read one row of the point paper — one pick, one passage of the shuttle — and pressed down the keys for every painted square. When the row was set she trod the treadle, the punches went through the card with a sound like a stapler, and the card moved on and the next came in. Then the ruler on the paper moved up a square, and she read the next row.

People who had never done it thought it was like typing. It was not like typing. On a typewriter a letter is a letter. On the piano machine the same pressure of the same finger meant something different on every row, depending on the painted squares and on where the heavy eight-lines fell under the ruler, and the hand had to know the paper without the eyes going back to it. When she was young her hands had been slower than her eyes. Now they were quicker, and the difficulty was to stop them.

Tie 1 in 8 she understood. In every eight ends of black she was to lift one end of warp over the weft, once, to hold it down: a single grey stitch in the black, too small to see from across a room. It was ordinary work. Card cutters put ties in every week. Usually the designer did not bother to write it.

Keep it quiet told her the order he meant, although he had not written the order down.

An eight-end satin has a counter, and every card cutter had it in her fingers: one, four, seven, two, five, eight, three, six. You put the first tie on the first end, the next tie three ends along on the next pick, and so on round, and no tie ever sits next to the tie on the pick before it. The ties scatter. They spread themselves as thinly as eight can be spread, and the eye cannot join them up into anything, so the black stays black. That was what Mr Bowyer wanted. A satin order makes the binding disappear.

There was another order. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight: each tie one end along from the one before. That was a twill. In a twill the ties stand shoulder to shoulder from pick to pick, so they make a line, and the line runs on across the cloth at a slant.

She set the first row of the hill and did not tread the treadle.

On the paper a twill line runs at forty-five degrees, because the squares are square. Cloth is not. Mr Bowyer's grey warp was set very close, nearly three hundred ends to the inch, and the black weft was thicker and beat up more openly. An end was narrower than a pick was tall, so a line that moved one end along for every pick it climbed would not lie at forty-five degrees in the silk. It would stand up steeper. She had watched the paper tell lies about angles for twenty-two years. In the cloth the line would come down nearly straight, a little slanted, the way rain came at the card room window when the wind was from the west.

In satin order the ties would pin the black down evenly everywhere, and the light would go dead on it. She had seen that too: a navy figure on a 1949 tie in the sample book, tied in satin, which had always looked to her like a blackboard. In twill order the ties would give the light a direction. They would show. Mr Bowyer had written Keep it quiet, and they would not be quiet.

The hill had the same number of ties in either order. One in eight. Neither order was more work.

She pressed the key for the first end of every eight across the black, and trod.

The card came forward. On the next row she moved each tie one end along, and on the next one more, and her hands, which knew the satin counter better than her own date of birth, kept trying to jump three and she kept stopping them. By the twentieth card they had stopped trying. When a tie reached the eighth end of its group it went back to the first and began to climb again, so that six lines went up the shoulder of the hill side by side, eight ends apart. At the steep right-hand side, where the black finished, she let the line run off the edge.

The sky she cut as painted, plain grey satin, nothing added. The sky did not need her. Its warp floated seven and was bound by its own weave, as a satin is.

It took her two days and a little of the Friday. There were six hundred and forty cards in the repeat.

Lacing

Doris Sutton laced in the corner by the stove, on a frame with a long trough in it, threading the cards together through the lace holes at each end with a figure-of-eight of waxed cord so that they would fold over on each other in a chain and go round the cylinder of the jacquard in their proper order. Doris was faster than anyone in Macclesfield and talked the whole time, mainly about her son-in-law.

Before she handed them over, Nora squared the stack on the board, took the end of it in her left hand, bent it a little, and let the cards run off under her thumb, the way her brother had shown her with cigarette cards when they were children.

She held the stack between herself and the window while it ran. In the sky part of each card the holes were scattered as the satin scattered them, and they flickered and told nothing. In the hill part there was, on every card, one small hole of daylight in each eight, and as the cards ran, the holes walked. They went along together, a step to each card, as far as the heavy line, then jumped back and walked again, all of them in step. They went the way a drop of water goes down a pane of glass when it has found a road.

She ran them twice. Then she gave them to Doris.

"Rain coming," Doris said, looking at the window, and began on the son-in-law.

The loom

Arthur Swindells hung the chain on the Thursday of the following week. He was the tuner for the six silk looms at the far end of the shed and had been at Sherratt & Daintry longer than the paraffin heater or Mr Bowyer, and he did not hurry. He climbed up to the jacquard with the cards over his shoulder like a fireman's hose, laced the last card to the first so that the chain made a loop, and let it fold itself down over the cylinder. Then he wove a sample length, a foot and a half, with the shed going up and down above him and the cards turning over one at a time with a sound like a clock that could not decide.

Nora was not supposed to be in the weaving shed. She was there at four o'clock with a docket in her hand, which was what she always carried when she went where she was not supposed to be.

Arthur had cut the sample off and laid it on the cloth table under the lamp. Six hills across, grey sky over each of them. In the black of every hill, if you were close enough, there was a fine slant of grey, not a line exactly but a direction: a great many small grey points standing one above another and leaning, so that the hill seemed to be seen through weather. From the end of the table, three yards off, the points were gone and the hill was black, but it was not flat black. It had a grain, like the grain in slate. When Arthur moved the lamp the grain moved with it.

Mr Bowyer came down at twenty past. Somebody must have told him. He looked at the sample for a long time without touching it, and then he picked it up by two corners and held it at arm's length and tipped it to the lamp, one way and then the other.

"That isn't quiet," he said.

"It's one in eight," Nora said.

"I can see it's one in eight."

He put the sample down and pressed his thumbnail along the base of a hill, hard, and dragged it, the way a cufflink would drag. Nothing lifted. He did it again on the grey sky, where the satin floated seven, and nothing lifted there either. He turned the cloth over. On the back there was a faint slant of black on the grey that looked, Nora thought, like the shadow of the front.

"I said satin," he said.

"You wrote quiet."

Arthur was oiling something on the next loom that did not need oiling.

Mr Bowyer rolled the sample round two fingers, put it in the pocket of his jacket, and went up the stairs, and nobody saw him again that day.

The cloth

Nora did not hear what was said on the top floor the following week, when the buyer from the London firm came up on the train. She heard it on the Friday from Arthur, who had heard it from the commercial manager's typist, so it had already been through two people and had come out short.

The buyer had been shown four designs. He had taken the Shutlingsloe and turned it to the window. He had asked if it could be had in navy on bronze as well as black on grey, and was told it could. He had ordered forty pieces of each.

On the Monday the order docket came down to the card room for a second set of cards, a duplicate for the second loom. Under the design number somebody in the office had written the name of the design as it was going to be entered in the book, and they had not written Shutlingsloe. They had written Shutlingsloe (Rain).

At half past ten Mr Bowyer brought the next design down to the card room under his arm, instead of sending it.

He did not mention the hill. He unrolled the paper on her board, and she weighted the corners: the bobbins, the Zubes, the key. It was water, a long flat stretch of it painted black from edge to edge of the repeat, with a line of grey reeds standing up out of it at the right-hand side and a small grey moon above.

"Tatton Mere," he said. "It floats sixty-four. More, in places."

"It wants tying."

"I know it does." He put his pencil back in his breast pocket, behind the green knitted tie. "I haven't put the ties in. I've left the tying to you."

He went back up the stairs. She heard him stop halfway and then go on.

Nora sat down at the board, took up the reading glass, and began along the bottom of the water, square by square, to count.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Annā Albers per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Anni Albers, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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