Things to Make and Mend (6 page)

‘I’m not in fact religious myself,’ she said.

‘It’s not a requirement, regrettable though that may be,’ the Reverend Hope replied, allowing himself a series of small,
perfectly
spaced laughs. Then he carried on. ‘We’re simply keen to project a more welcoming image of the Church. And at the same time we want to embrace modern art. We want to embrace
modern,
practising artists.’

Sally was quite touched to know that the Church wanted to embrace her. She couldn’t think what to say. The term ‘practising
artist’ made her feel proud and shy.

‘So you want me to embroider a particular scene?’ she asked.

‘No, it’s entirely up to you,’ Reverend Avery said, helping
himself
to another biscuit. Beneath the table, a black labrador sighed and thumped his tail in his sleep. It was the first time Sally had been aware of a dog beneath the table. She thought of her
comment
about vibrant animals, and clutched the edges of her
portfolio.

‘So I can do anything?’

‘Anything. As long as it’s Biblical. As long as it inspires
contemplative
thought,’ said the Reverends. 

On the train home, she looked out at the greyness of Network South-East’s junctions and halts. She looked down at her green coat and her nice below-the-knee skirt. Her heart was full, bulging with ambition. She thought,
I am an artist. I am wanted.
A tiny flame of happiness flickered and grew. And that was when she decided to embroider the picture of Mary and Martha. She had been thinking a lot, that spring, about the role of women. Women’s lot in life. And here were two interesting examples: those two difficult sisters. Mary going glamorously out into the world and Martha staying at home, crashing around the kitchen, doing the washing-up. Or was it the other way round? She couldn’t be sure.

There’s a small hole in the pane of my son’s living-room window. It’s letting in a thin stream of air. No wonder the flat is so cold. Somebody, some previous tenant, has drawn a thick black line from the window-frame to the surround, and written ‘De-luxe flat, fully air-conditioned’. It’s not Joe’s writing.

I have been thinking about all the people I’ve known in my life. Speculating on the number. There must be thousands now – from the little girl at primary school who once let me hold her gold star earrings, to Mrs Stanley, my ballet teacher, who used to open her mouth wide and shout ‘Remember your arms!’ above the clank of the ill-tuned piano. There were ephemeral
acquaintances
like my Needlework teacher Miss Button, about whom I knew little but conjectured much. And others, like my friend Sally Tuttle, whom I thought I would always know.

I once heard two women talking in a Chinese restaurant, late at night, on either side of a flower-vase. ‘She had a string of lovers,’ one of the women said, confidentially but loudly, to her friend. ‘Really?’ her friend replied. The first woman folded her arms across her plump breast, sending her pearl necklace scuttling down her cleavage. ‘An absolute string,’ she said. ‘I shudder to think …’

I never found out what the woman shuddered to think, but since that night, the phrase has always made me think of a
necklace.
Lovers like beads on a string. My particular string of lovers is a rather short one. Before Kenneth there was:

Peter (’88–’98), my ‘fiancé’ of ten years. I left him when he hit Joe during an argument.

Julien (’85–’87), a sweet French man, unemployed, blue-eyed guitarist and poet, ultimately scared off by the fact that I had a young son.

Matthew, (’82–’84), a very tactile engineering student who had also become fed up with the constant presence in my life of noisy toys, bedtime
routines,
morning
routines,
strewn pieces of Lego, unreliable babysitters, curtailed arrangements.

And one other – my earliest dalliance (’79–’79), whom I can hardly count as a lover. Not really. Except that he was Joe’s father.

My son is almost twice the age I was when he was conceived. The age I was, that autumn. It does not seem possible. I go to sit beside him on his rented Scottish sofa. I watch him drinking a cup of tea. I wonder what he is thinking.

‘Hey, Joe, hasn’t anyone ever shown you how to knot a tie?’ Kenneth asks him, apropos of nothing. Sweetly, Joe is wearing a tie –
for Kenneth’s benefit?
I wonder – but it is clumsily done, the knot as big as an apricot.

‘I didn’t have much tie-knotting advice when I was growing up,’ Joe replies. He leans forward to help himself to a Tunnock’s Teacake. ‘I know tying a tie is a rite of passage and everything …’

‘Hmm,’ I say. He has always had the unconscious knack of making me feel guilty. I regard him sitting there, preoccupied with the white, rubbery insides of his teacake and considering – what? San Francisco? His girlfiend? His teacake? I think:
He looks like his father.
He has exactly the same expression that I remember, and quiet smile and length of leg. He has that cowlick and those eyelashes. And he is tall: fortunately, he has not
inherited
my own lack of height. It is always so curious to be reminded of his father when in different circumstances I would have
forgotten
him. Maybe he would have crept into my head, briefly, once every few years. A bloke. A bloke I slept with in 1979.

Mary’s dress is more of a flowing affair than Martha’s. It has more grandeur, with medieval-ish, bat-wing sleeves and a nipped-in waist. Sally has used nearly four skeins of silk on it and it is still not finished. She likes to get the colour-changes as subtle as she can. That is why she has so many embroidery silks. In Martha’s face, for instance, there are six different shades. You need that many to get the expression of envy right.

Embroidery Times,
the sewing magazine that Sally subscribes to, is full of useful advice about such techniques. The gradations and the subtleties. It also features things called ‘makes’. The ‘makes’ it suggests this month are:

The world of embroidery is a kind world, a womanly world, full of gift-giving and the consumption of time. Time measured out in stitches and pricked fingers. Sally and Pearl often laugh at the more curious ‘makes’ in
Embroidery Times.
The embroidered egg-cosies and the embroidered bag in which to keep one’s embroidery threads. The Zen-ness of an embroidered embroidery-bag! She never makes these ‘makes’. But sometimes she wishes she was the sort of woman who did.

Rowena Cresswell’s mother used to subscribe to magazines. It is one of the few things Sally feels she would have in common with Rowena Cresswell’s mother. She used to get
Woman and Home, Woman, Woman’s Realm, Women’s Weekly.
She kept them all in a polished wooden magazine rack between the sofa and the
television.
She bought them on a fortnightly basis. It seemed like a kind of aberration, the amount of money she would spend on these publications, which all advocated the same things: plumped-up cream cushions, candles, highly-complicated
dinner
-party recipes involving lasagna sheets and roux sauce; adverts for shoe racks and leather-bound encyclopedias. Mrs Cresswell’s lifestyle, Sally supposes, must have mattered to her a lot. The ordered calm of it. The unchanging neatness. It is an ambition which Sally can comprehend now. The Cresswells
certainly
lived in a nicer house than the Tuttles did, at the expensive end of town. Unlike the Tuttles’ house, all the houses on Rowena’s estate were detached and they all had names. The
Willows
didn’t actually have a willow tree (it died shortly after they moved in) but it did have a very green, spongy lawn and a lot of bright, blowsy flowers in the flower beds. Custard-yellow tulips. Scarlet gladioli. The house was new, built in the early Seventies, with fake, old-fashioned tile-cladding. Sussex-red. Mr Cresswell was an undemonstrative man but from time to time, in the
summer
and early autumn, he would sit in his traffic-noisy garden, drinking beer and playing Frank Sinatra songs. ‘New York, New York’ bellowed aggressively across all the neat lawns of the
neighbourhood.

‘… start spreading the news,/ I’m leaving today,/ I want to be a part of it …,’ sang Sinatra, as people’s washing twirled around on their East Grinstead Whirly-birds.

Mr Cresswell was overweight. Mrs Cresswell was very thin. Even when Sally knew her, she must have been ill. Her legs gave no form to the blue trousers she wore. She used to work in a gift-shop
café, serving buns and scones with a silent sadness. Rowena and Sally used to go and watch her sometimes after school: they would sit at a table in a corner of the café and eat discounted
flapjacks.
Mrs Cresswell never spoke to them as they sat there: she seemed unable to combine work with any semblance of banter. Not even ‘How was your day?’

Occasionally she used to look across at Sally with an
expression
that was hard to fathom: a combination of irritation and pity. Her fine, fair hair was scraped tightly into a bun, wisps escaping from it like a badly-built nest. The other women all seemed quite jovial as they plodded around behind the counter, slathering margarine on to white rolls and wrapping buns in clingfilm. But Mrs Cresswell was not. Mrs Cresswell looked pained.
Disappointed.

When, some evenings, Sally went round to tea, Mrs Cresswell spoke to her in a slow, exaggerated voice, as if she was slightly delinquent.

‘And what are you doing for your O-levels again, Sally?’

‘English, Maths, French, Chemistry and Needlework.’

‘How nice. Needlework. And what a good idea, to focus on five. Five is all anyone needs, isn’t it?’

Rowena told Sally once that her mother had been an aspiring ‘career woman’: she had been heading for greatness in the legal profession. But then she had met Rowena’s father and got
married
and had Rowena and her ambitions had been shelved amidst the ornaments.

Rowena’s was one of the few houses Sally ever visited. After school they would let themselves in at the wobbly glass-fronted door, warble a reedy ‘Hi,’ then leap straight upstairs. They would sit in Rowena’s room, which smelled of new pine furniture and hoovered carpet, and discuss the dilemmas of their hearts.

‘So are you going to go for it then?’

‘What? Go for what?’

‘You know. With Colin. Are you going to, you know …?’

Sally remembers this particular conversation. It’d had, she supposes, particular relevance. She remembers thinking of Colin Rafferty and blushing and blushing and turning to reach for something, anything, a distraction. A record. She picked it up.
Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve).
Rowena had an eclectic mix of singles which even at the time struck her as odd. How could someone like both the Buzzcocks and
Supertramp?

‘You’ve gone puce,’ observed Rowena.

‘Thanks.’

‘You have, though.’

And Sally had stared down at the record sleeve.

‘I –’ Rowena began, and she stopped. Then she said, ‘It’s just you clam up about him. Ever since we met him. You always go all thingummy, Sal. I know he’s the love of your life and
everything
…’

Sally did not reply. She looked around Rowena’s room: at the china-headed Pierrot doll staring tragically into the night; at the make-up box and pink slippers; at the tips of the Cindy dolls’ feet peeping over the top of the wardrobe. She thought, ‘I have a boyfriend called Colin Rafferty.’ And a new image of him floated spectrally, heroically, into her mind.

‘I will tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s just, I mean, we haven’t …’

‘It’s all right,’ Rowena sighed, and Sally gazed, hot-faced, through the picture window at the almost technicolour garden beyond.

Occasionally, Sally spent the night at Rowena’s house. She remembers pulling flannelette sheets over the mattress of the Cresswells’ clanking Zed-bed; standing in the bathroom in her
Love is
… pyjamas. She remembers the tiny details that separated
Rowena’s way of life from hers. The little silver dish
containing
Mrs Cresswell’s jewellery (Sally’s mother never took her wedding ring off); the over-large rubberwood fruit-bowl (at home they had a cut-glass trifle bowl); the woven place mats (they had cork boards with pictures of parrots); in the garden, the sprinkler on the lawn (the Tuttles had a watering can). At suppertime Sally would feel like a prodigal daughter, returned from a life of hardship. The four of them would sit around the table in the ‘L’ of the dining room, eating casserole from large beige dinner plates. Mr Cresswell would eat in total silence. Mrs Cresswell would talk about the woman who used too much washing-up liquid in the gift-shop café. Outside, Mrs Cresswell’s windchimes would clank in the breeze, the wires twisting around each other in a way which Sally felt must irritate her.

From time to time she would give little presents to Rowena. Pencil-sharpeners, 45 rpm singles, pretty hairgrips. She also used to give presents to Colin Rafferty. She didn’t have a clue about aloofness then, about sangfroid. She was just besotted and would bring these offerings to him, like a cat bringing dead mice to its owner. She bought him a corkscrew and a pocket knife and a badge; she brought him a beautiful green feather and a shiny pebble. Things like that were imbued with meaning – with eternal significance.
Whatever happens, this means I will always love you. This time in our lives will always be
…

In all the time he knew her, Colin Rafferty gave her one thing: a postcard bearing the picture of an old Scottish fishwife, gutting herrings. Maybe giving presents heavy with poignancy was not something that men did.