Things to Make and Mend (8 page)

‘Weird,’ Colin replied. ‘Weird weird weird.’

‘Even the word weird,’ she said, ‘sounds weird. If you say it enough times.’

And, alone, she began to laugh.

They reached the Zoo shortly after three. But it was not like the song on her parents’ record player. It was not
all happening.
Their illicit day in London had gone flat. Even the wind had dropped, to be replaced by a cold, sleety rain.
Maybe he’s realised he’s too old for me, Rowena. Maybe I’m not posh enough. Maybe he’s thinking he should be with someone who
–

Her stomach rumbled loudly. ‘Whoops,’ she said, placing a hand over her belly.

‘What was that? Concorde taking off?’

‘Ha!’ she replied, and could think of nothing more to add.

Now things were going decidedly wrong. It felt as if they were sobering up after too much cider. Sally was clumsy, klutzy, a
common
girl with noisy insides. Colin had become testy, verging on unkind. And the animal enclosures were smaller and more
boring
than Sally had imagined. Surely, she thought, a
twentieth-century
zoo should be nicer than this, with swaying trees and long grass for the animals to hide behind. Where there would be leafy retreats. But no: this zoo was just like they always were. Like the awful concrete zoos in her old Peter and Jane books.
Look, Mummy! Look, Daddy! A bear!
The polar bear shuffled back and forth in his small square; the hippos stood at the gates of their pens like strange cows; the arctic hare sat alone and stared through the bars, its fur a dry, yellow-white, like a badly-
washed-out
paint brush.

Standing by the flamingo cages Sally thrust her hands, star-like,
up to the mesh. ‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘The flamingoes match my nails!’

Some chagrined-looking owls in the neighbouring cage turned their heads to look at her.

‘You’ve frightened the owls,’ Colin snapped.

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve frightened the owls,’ he said again, looking up at the two birds sitting high in the branches. It seemed at that moment that he much preferred the owls to her. They were wise and she was stupid.
Patione et consilis,
she thought suddenly,
remembering
her school badge. But before she could think of anything appropriate to say, he had turned and begun to walk away.

Think of something, think of something.

‘I’m just going to find a bog,’ she called. Colin and the owls turned, round-eyed, to watch as she stalked off.

But there wasn’t even any sanctuary in the Ladies. She had been in there for half a minute when there was a knock on the door and a man walked in.

‘Mind if I just come in to clean, love?’

‘No, no, that’s fine,’ Sally replied, wiping her eyes quickly and watching in disbelief as he crashed in with a mop and a bucket of water and a sign saying ‘Male cleaner in attendance’.

‘Having a nice day?’ the man asked convivially, looking at her in the mirror. ‘Seen the elephants?’

And he revolved the extremely dirty-looking mop around the bucket, then slapped it down on to the floor tiles.

‘They’re great,’ he said, ‘the elephants.’

I’m used to being on my own; slightly
abnormal.
I’m used to people scurrying off when I tell them about myself. People pretend to be cool, unshockable, but they’re not. They comment in an interested way about the fact that I,
Rowena Lockhart, MA, PhD, tutor and translator,
gave birth at fifteen. And then they move on. It happens wherever I go. Rouen was no exception. That evening in Rouen, I found myself standing alone, cradling my third wine glass and contemplating going upstairs to my room for an early night.

I had already glanced across the Function Suite to assess the other women, the ones with small children. They were sitting at a low table now, laughing and drinking coffee. Impenetrably alike. Normal. I thought about sitting on my neat hotel bed upstairs and watching the elevated TV, maybe even going over the presentation I was meant to give the next day. I certainly did not feel like joining the normal mothers.

I was, in fact, slightly drunk: not a good state for a single mother. Not a good state for anyone on their own.
Must curb that tendency. Should have had more of those vol au vent things.
And I had been about to put my empty wine glass down on a passing tray, I had been about to head for the stairs, when there was the sound of a man’s voice.

‘Mesdames, messieurs, dans cinq minutes le tour de la
cathédrale
va commencer …’

A large, rather handsome man was standing in the middle of the room. His accent was good, but not brilliant. Canadian but not French–Canadian. He looked down at his watch. ‘Cinq minutes,
mesdames, messieurs …’

The sight of this man for some reason made me feel cheerful. Why? I looked at him, my vision very slightly blurred. Maybe it was because he had a true kind of jolliness about him. He was tall and slightly overweight and he looked as if he didn’t take events like this too seriously. He was not earnest. He did not like earnestness. He was wearing a creased suit. I smiled at him. The man noticed me and smiled back. Then he turned, walked past the women with the handbags and disappeared.

I didn’t know where to look. The man’s departure was so
surprisingly
abrupt that it had brought tears to my eyes. It seemed an unkind thing to do, after smiling at me. Cruel. I stood and watched my empty wine glass being carried with others on the tray into the kitchens and felt a familiar sensation – a desolate feeling that I have been prone to for years.

But then, just as suddenly, the man had returned. My heart lurched again with renewed hope. He walked back into the room, past the women with the handbags and straight up to me.

‘So,’ he said, as if we had already been introduced, ‘have you seen the Cathedral yet?’

I felt myself blush, embarrassed by my watery eyes.

‘Not yet. Well, not this time. The last time I saw it I was fifteen,’ I replied in a rush. ‘I came here on a school exchange,’ I added, thinking of my old friend Sally Tuttle,
la famille Duval,
the trip to the Bayeux Tapestry.

The man smiled at me. He seemed to want me to continue talking.

‘It doesn’t actually seem that long ago now I’m back,’ I said. The man had greyish eyes, very clear and kind.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it probably hasn’t changed much. But there’s a coach trip, if you’re interested. To see it floodlit.’

‘It wasn’t floodlit when I last saw it.’ I noticed that I was
slurring
my words.

‘Things do change, then. Things progress. I’m meant to be organising folk,’ the man said. ‘I’m the organiser for the evening. Look, it says so here.’

And he pulled forward the badge on his collar.

‘So. If you want to come, the coach goes at ten. From the front of the hotel. It’s got
Vacances Monet
written on the side.’

‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he smiled, ‘it would,’ and he touched my arm very briefly as he said goodbye, but in a friendly, possibly even kindred-
spirited
way.

At five to ten I went down to the hotel foyer and got on the coach. It was half-empty: there were a couple of elderly lecturers on board, and a few academic parents with their sleepy children, making me miss my once eight-year-old son. It was all very polite. Very cultured and civilised, everyone in groups of two, three or four apart from me and the driver. The driver and I were units. The driver sat on his seat, a cigarette in his mouth. I peered out through the coach window at the neon bar sign and the
plate-glass
hotel doors. It was cold – a clear, black sky with stars. I wrapped my
Jolly-appropriate
shawl more tightly around my shoulders.

She discards things too easily sometimes. Holds on to them for years, and then just lets them go. Sally thinks about Rowena Cresswell’s green dress and regrets her decision to leave it in the dress agency.

The sky outside turns a greyish-orange as she stands in John Lewis’s haberdashery department, deliberating over the
tapisserie
wool and the Pearl Cotton No. 5. Sometimes it worries her a little: this inability to make decisions.
Should I choose the
sea-green
or the leaf-green? The azure or the cobalt?
She is the kind of person who can waste a lot of time deliberating over things like this. Adjusting her expression to one of serenity and hope, Sally picks up all four shades of green
coton à broder
and moves towards the Pay Here counter.

She misses her train back home and has to wait thirty-five
minutes
for the next one. She sits on a bench with her bag of threads and her bag of rejected clothes. She does not feel like a leading practitioner in the field of embroidery.

It is getting dark now. She thinks of her daughter and hopes she is wearing enough layers to cope with the cold: these days Pearl never seems to appreciate the requirement for layers. Sally has not, of course, had time to buy anything to wear herself, for the embroidery conference tomorrow. No life-enhancing new coat. No practical handbag. And now, sitting at Victoria station with her old coat and her handbag with too many straps, she
suddenly
has thirty-five minutes of time; potential clothes-shopping time in which she can do nothing. Visiting Sock Shop will not
suffice. So she remains on the bench. She sighs and looks at her lap, her unsatisfactorily pointy knees beneath her woollen skirt. She wants something to occupy her hands. She is not used to
sitting
with empty hands. She reflects that, that morning, she had stuffed the post into her handbag on her way out of the house, and now she gets it all out to read. She opens the envelopes quickly, one after another, resting them on her lap. There is a
letter
from the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation, a letter from the Embroiderers’ Guild, a Damart catalogue, a flyer about hearing aids, an electricity bill and a wrongly-addressed postcard: picture of a waterfall, some rocks and a spindly tree. She turns it over.

Sally pictures the scene – some poor woman toppling into a
shallow
stream, a brass band playing in the distance. She looks up and smiles at an elderly woman in a tracksuit who has come to sit on the bench beside her. The woman, mumbling something to herself, peers surreptitiously at Sally’s letters. Sally shuffles a
little
further up the bench.

The letter from the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation describes how
thrilled
they are to have commissioned an artwork from her. The letter from the Embroiderers’ Guild expresses how
thrilled
they are to have booked her for a talk, in Edinburgh, on the art of embroidery. Sally does not know how to respond to so many thrilled people. It is not something she has ever had to do. She
pictures herself standing in a Scottish hotel room, her English voice twanging on, competing with a coffee percolator on a side table.

The elderly woman in the tracksuit sighs and gets up again. A pigeon comes and pecks at some old French Fries which are stuck to the floor.

Sally looks at the catalogue from Damart. Even Damart is very pleased with her.

Damart catalogues, like
Embroidery Times
, punctuate Sally’s life at regular intervals. She and Pearl are fond of these too: of their ‘winter-busting’ socks and knickers; of the models’ resilient smiles and strange willingness to be seen in rosebud-decorated lounger suits.

Now two men are having an argument outside Tie Rack, clumsily prodding and pushing each other around, hands hard and angry. It is the sort of incoherent male argument that
suddenly
escalates, becomes wild and bloody and frightening,
injuring
innocent bystanders. Sally watches as two men in uniforms come to separate them, and they all plod, shouting at each other, down the platform. After a while another woman comes and sits beside her, listening to some very loud music on tiny black
headphones
.
Tsh, tsh, tsh.
Her boyfriend comes to join her. ‘Shove up,’ he observes. He is also wearing headphones. They sit side by side, listening to their headphones.

In East Grinstead the sky is a pure grey, almost beautiful if you looked at it objectively. East Grinstead itself is not a place of great
beauty. There is the little cluster of old shops in the High Street but the majority of the town is without pretension. Over a lot of it seems to hang the disappointment of the suburbs. The stigma of being near London, but not London. The failure of being Sussex but not rural Sussex. All the shops seem to sell the same things: plastic buckets, galvanised shovels, dog bowls, cassettes, baby clothes. Walking past Woolworths, Sally glances through the window to see an elderly woman hovering by the pic’n’mix,
petrified
with indecision.

Let me not become like that.

She looks at her watch. She pictures her hotel room in
Edinburgh,
her floral sponge bag, her dressing gown, her change of clothes.

Sally’s parents live in a new bungalow on the edge of town, not far from the Cresswells’ old house. Their bungalow is small and easy to maintain. They have a doorbell that goes ‘ding-dong,’ an ivy growing up a trellis, tartan slippers in the porch and painted glass butterflies suspended from a small ornamental sorbus tree. In their living room they display framed examples of Sally’s work.

She is late now, and there is only just enough time, before she has to leave again, for a cup of tea. Not for the plate of sandwiches that she can see waiting on the kitchen sideboard, or the small glass of sherry, or the iced Madeira cake.

‘I’m really sorry, Mum,’ she says. She hangs on to her bag of embroidery silks and feels guilty.

Her mother is wearing a roll-neck jumper and a tweed skirt and looks very elegant. Almost chic. She can do that, much
better
than Sally. Her hair is thick and still with a lot of ginger in it. Her nose is aquiline, her eyes dark.

They drink tea. Her mother has always made the best tea Sally has ever drunk, just the right strength and temperature, in a
white, rose-patterned cup. And while they drink she talks about one of their neighbours, Mavis, who is in hospital with her leg in traction.

‘The doctors say it might be suspended like that for weeks,’ she says, leaning against the worktop. Hanging on the
clothes-dryer
above her head is her old white bathrobe.

‘Surely not weeks?’

‘That’s what she said the doctors said.’

From the living room Sally’s father, whose feet, resting on a pouffe, she can just make out around the edge of the door, says, ‘Days. It was days, love.’

Sally goes to her parents’ house once a week and worries that her dad is getting distant, that her mother is getting anxious. (‘How’s your work going, darling?’ she asks, playing with the rings on her wedding finger. ‘How’s the shop? And the
embroidery?
Are the evangelical people happy?’ Her mother can’t quite believe that, for a living, her only child spends her time sewing. And then there is her love life. Her unfortunate relationships. ‘When are you going to find yourself a nice man?’ her mother asks sometimes, as if Sally is twenty-two. ‘Maybe,’ Sally replies, ‘I am never going to find a nice man.’)

Her mother looks at her. ‘How’s Pearl getting on at school?’ she asks.

‘Fine. Busy. She’s still rehearsing for that concert.’

‘We’re hoping to come along to that.’

‘That’s nice. She’d be really pleased.’

Pearl plays the flute. Currently, she is rehearsing for a concert at the end of term. They are playing dreadful things: something patriotic by Elgar, and
The Ride of the Valkyries.
In rehearsals she sits between her best friend Caroline and a girl called Avril who is so tall and thin that she folds up like a music stand.

‘Has she got a boyfriend?’ Sally’s mother asks.

‘Not to my knowledge,’ Sally replies, obscurely irritated.

‘Can’t you tell?’

‘It’s not always obvious.
You
couldn’t ever tell, could you? Anyway, I don’t think she’d –’

‘I could tell when you were acting strangely, darling. I could tell that.’

‘Oh. And do you think Pearl’s acting strangely?’

Her mother sniffs and is quiet for a moment. ‘Maybe.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘No reason really.’

‘So why say it?’

‘It was just an observation, darling.’

‘You and your observations, Mum,’ Sally says, more snappily than she intended.

‘Well, you’re always so …’

‘So
what?
’

‘So head in the clouds.’

‘What?’

Her mother says no more. She has always been slightly irked by Sally’s dreaminess. By her apparent lack of motivation.
Is it a generational thing?
Sally imagines her thinking.
Do they all hover about like this, waiting for something to happen?
Maybe it is to do with the war. Her mother was one of the baby-boomers born in the Forties, when people seemed to be so much more constructive. She was a young girl during the ‘make-do-and-mend’ era. Sally’s grandfather used to put cardboard in his shoes to make them last longer. Her grandmother saved small lengths of string.

Now her mother begins to move around the kitchen,
rearranging
things and humming. ‘Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree.’

‘Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree’ is a sign. A sign for what is coming next.

‘Seen John much lately?’ she asks, taking the cling-film off the plate of sandwiches.

‘Not much.’

‘Just thought your paths might have crossed.’

‘No. Not recently.’

‘Haven’t been in touch much then?’

When she met Pearl’s father Sally was twenty-three: a
disappointed,
underqualified young woman who had left school too soon; a young woman sitting in a corner of an adult education class with a huge embroidery frame and a basket of tangled wools. John was a welder: an artistic one, tutoring a workshop. They first spoke to each other in the canteen, halfway through their classes. He was interested in the embroidery Sally was doing, a rather complicated zoo scene. It involved owls, polar bears, flamingoes. He told her that embroidery was not unlike metalwork in the patience required, in the intricacy, and invited her to look round the studio where he taught Metalwork for Beginners.

‘Interesting,’ Sally said, looking at the pile of molten pewter he was working on.

‘It’s called
Woman Sighing.’

‘I know how she feels.’

And he looked at her with admiration.

John was entirely different from Colin Rafferty. He was not upsetting. That was the main thing. And he did not make her blush or dream. He was slightly overweight, quiet, with a lot of dark, messy hair. He did not have mercurial wit, social poise, grace.
But,
Sally thought,
he has something truer, more lasting than that.
He did. She was with John for less than a year before she became pregnant. This was not her intention at all. Nor John’s. ‘Oh Christ,’ said John.

Becoming pregnant was, at the time, a huge mistake. And it had made her think of Rowena all over again: her former friend Rowena Cresswell, who had begun by then to alter in her memory, to become almost a fable. ‘The Friend who Changed’. She 
had not seen her for nearly nine years by that time. Now, feeling exhausted and sick at ten weeks gone, looking in the bathroom mirror at the noticeable swelling of her bare stomach, Rowena Cresswell was clear in her mind again: her face, her clothes, her smell, her way of speaking. Fifteen-year-old Rowena Cresswell, before she betrayed her.

Sally’s mother doesn’t ask any more about John, although she likes talking about him. She has always rather liked John, despite the fact that he went off with another woman years ago. He and Sally had discussed marriage, they had gone as far as checking out the registry office, and then he went off with a weaving instructor called Miriam. Miriam wove very complicated
self-portraits
using cardboard, brass tacks and black cotton. She made Sally think of a bower-bird, all energy and indignation. After a while she started to weave portraits of John: unappealing images with huge noses and dark expressions. She gave them titles like
The Irresolute
and
Why?,
and John retreated, puzzled and a little frightened to a one-bedroom flat in Chingford. He has remained there ever since. Pearl sees him most weekends. Sally sees him perhaps once every two months. She has still never quite forgiven him for leaving them. And sometimes she thinks of him in his small, messy flat in Chingford, and feels sad that she let him. But she does not have the right skills, she has come to realise: her relationships never go as planned. They are not the burnished, sparkling things she once dreamed of. They have been tangential, lop-sided, amazed at their own existence.

The wind bends the sorbus tree in her parents’ garden and all the glass butterflies make a jangling noise. Sally peers past, into the street.