Things to Make and Mend (7 page)

I first met my husband in Rouen, on something the head of my department insists on calling a ‘jolly’.

Jollies consist, in almost every country I have visited, of
middle
-aged academics helping themselves to wine and canapés in the dark interior of a chain hotel. The canapés are often alarming: potent, fishy things teetering on small oatcakes, too big to eat in one mouthful and too messy to eat in two.

‘I’ll go for one of these cherry-tomato things,’ people mumble, as if someone is forcing them to eat something
or else.
As if the hors d’oeuvres chef is
having a laugh.

There is also innocuous jazz played low and a certain amount of flirting, particularly from the married ones.

Before I met Kenneth, I used to hang around at these events with female peers from other universities: we would stand near the bar in our best clothes and perfume and wonder if we were having fun. Was it more fun, more
jolly,
than sitting hunched over our computers and dictionaries and time-sheets? It was certainly a change; a social event for which I sometimes felt ill-prepared. My talent for chat was impeded by weeks of sitting alone in my office, surrounded by dusty plants, unread manuscripts and unmarked papers.

It was also a bit like being at Razzles on East Grinstead High Street. The anxious hovering. The pretending. The smoke and mirrors. It was strange seeing your peers in ‘casual’ attire,
worrying
that they might not look cool.
Should we let our hair down? Take our handbags to the toilets?
And we really
had
handbags
now, real womanly handbags in which we kept packets of paper hankies, wet-wipes, lipstick, diaries, keys, receipts, business cards, photographs of our children. Some of the young mothers even had a nappy or two secreted bulgingly in one of the inner pockets.

I still have pictures of a baby in my wallet. Baby Joe, summer 1980. I can hardly believe how old this baby is now. The year of the Jolly in Rouen, he was in his last year at university.

On that particular evening it was August but already cold, and the Jolly delegates all seemed tired. The next day some of us would have to sit in a small, airless room discussing the
translation
of poetry from Hebrew into French, and from French into English. Discussing the nuances. The nuances of the nuances.

‘Is anyone interested in seeing the Cathedral?’ I asked.

No one was. Rouen Cathedral was too far away – an eight-mile taxi ride from our ‘central’ hotel. Everyone was too tired. One woman was pregnant and planning an early night.

So I had spent most of the evening looking at pictures of other delegates’ children. None of them had children as old as my son. The oldest of the other children was nine. The women were all about the same age as me, but still at the stage of discussing potty training, speaking ability, nurseries, the amusing things children say.

‘The other day,’ said one of the women (a specialist in French Medieval Literature), ‘my daughter wanted to help me mop the kitchen floor. There she was, flinging this mop around and she suddenly looked up and said, “Mummy, when I grow up I want to be a floor-mopper.”’

The other women laughed. Some helped themselves
thoughtfully
to more Bombay mix from a bowl sitting on the bar.

‘And I thought,’ continued the woman, ‘where do girls get these thoughts? That they want to mop floors for a living? What happened to female emancipation?’

Nobody seemed to know. Perhaps, girt about with our motherly clobber – nappies in handbags, maternal antennae twitching long-distance – we were all wondering.

‘Well, my son is always careering around with action men and guns,’ someone began. And I felt a kind of heaviness in my chest. I have heard the Nature versus Nurture debate about once a
fortnight
for the past two decades. It has become a kind of phobia of mine.

‘It’s genetic. Nature,’ the women agreed. People always agree that it is Nature.

‘How about
your
son?’ someone asked, turning to me. ‘Does he bounce on the sofas too? Is he always
into
everything?’

‘My son is twenty-two,’ I said, and everyone stopped, glasses of wine and Bombay mix halfway to their mouths.

‘No!’ said the woman whose daughter wanted to be a floor mopper.

I felt the little group of academic mothers peering at me in the half-light, their brains whirring, calculating my age. I felt suddenly very envious of them – of the small children they had had at the appropriate age – little children, who were not about to leap off into the world; who still enjoyed bedtime milk, soft toys, bubble-blowing.

‘He does still hurl himself on to the sofas, though,’ I said. And the women paused for a second and laughed; then suddenly, wordlessly, turned and moved on, like a shoal of fish.

I missed something, by being a young mother. Missed out on mother-peers. When girls my age went out in the evenings, I would stay in my parents’ house in East Grinstead with my
colicky
baby son. We would sit and watch
Life on Earth.
When girls my age went
down town
to look at the make-up counters, I went up the road to buy nappies.

Now, women with sons the age of mine are collecting their
pensions. Some of them have silver hair. Some of them are in their sixties.

I missed something from two different directions.

Rowena and Sally used to observe Colin’s female colleagues from a distance. These women always made Sally feel rather
clown-like
in her uniform and over-sized school shoes, while they floated about in their sexy tops, hair flicked and static with
hairspray,
little belts pulled in tight around their waists. But Rowena reassured her: Sally was the girl he wanted. Sweet Sally. ‘No
competition,
Sal,’ she used to say.

Sally’s first few dates with Colin Rafferty were furtive, spent in the pedestrian precinct or in the park during school lunch-hour. Rowena came too, following at a distance to make sure Sally was OK. Colin was a lot older than them, she reminded her. Nearly six years. He had informed Sally of this on their second date. It was quite shocking.

‘You be careful, Sally,’ Rowena had warned her, mother-
henlike,
when she relayed this information on to her. ‘You know what they’re like.’

Rowena was concerned. Possibly a little startled, too – Sally conjectured – that he hadn’t chosen
her.
Because Rowena was prettier than her. Rowena was brighter than her. And once, out of the corner of her eye, Sally had noticed a tiny scowl on Rowena’s face as she turned to leave. (Before Colin arrived she would go to lurk behind the silver birch trees at the other end of the park.)

Colin and Sally had had very little to say to each other on these early dates. Their conversations seemed always to be at
cross-purposes.
He would ask a very simple question, and Sally would gabble an extremely complicated response.

‘So. When do you go back?’

‘Who? What? Go back where?’

‘Your school.’

‘Oh. We go back on the sixth. But the fifth is the official first day back, it’s kind of the first day for the first and second years. But the sixth is, you know, the actual, you know …’

‘So. The fifth or the sixth?’

This sort of incoherence would happen perhaps three times during the course of a twenty-minute walk. Then Colin would kiss her, tell her that she was sweet and funny – that she made him laugh – and they would part.

‘How was he?’ Rowena would ask, catching up with her after Colin had gone.

‘Oh, Rowena, he’s so nice.’

‘Yes, but what did he say?’

And Sally looked up at the blue sky above the bowling green, at the pigeons clattering plumply, noisily up into it. She couldn’t quite remember what Colin had said. She also didn’t have a clue why he wanted to be with her.
Does he really love me? Am I really pretty?

‘He’s … so nice,’ she said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sally.’

It was Rowena who suggested London Zoo as a place for the first big date out of town. She had decided, from a distance of a few hundred yards, that Colin was respectable enough to go to
London
with.

‘Zoos are dead romantic,’ she said. ‘Plus, you won’t bump into anyone.’

Sally had pondered this. She hardly knew Colin, really, apart from the fact that he was nearly twenty-two and worked in
advertising.
But at London Zoo she imagined them openly holding hands, chatting about their lives, wandering along the paths in the cool greenness. Happily pointing out the gazelles and
parakeets
and laughing at the stick insects. They could really get to know each other there. He would see that she was funny but also serious: he would comprehend the intricacies of her mind. And London Zoo
did
seem like a lover-ish place to go; sweetly poignant. It was like the song her parents played on their record player: an old record on their new stereo.

‘Something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo – I do believe it, I do believe it’s true …’

On their way to the station, she noticed a man practising yoga. He was standing on a grass embankment at the side of the road, his long arms outstretched.

‘Doesn’t he look funny?’ she said to Colin.

‘Probably a student.’

‘So? What’s wrong with that? I’m a student.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re a schoolgirl.’

She didn’t reply. Flirting, sophistication, maturity, did not come easily. She worried about every sentence that came out of her mouth, in case it meant he fell out of love with her. Their
relationship,
twenty-one days old that Friday, was suspended on the finest, surrealist thread. How was it ever going to work? Sally looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock; she should have been in the school library with Rowena, revising. But there was a big romantic sun in the sky. There were pigeons and drifts of orange leaves at their feet.

‘Do you think that yoga man’s discovering his inner self?’ she said, hoping she looked very pretty as she spoke. She pushed her right hand through her long brown hair, inadvertently disturbing several kirby grips.

Colin smiled and walked ahead of her to the pedestrian
crossing.
Sally watched him go, this man she was in love with. She regarded his hair and his jacket and the way he walked. She thought of his kisses, metallic-tasting and intoxicating.
But why
does he love me? Does he think I’m pretty? Does he like my mind?
Heart thumping, she watched as Colin began to cross the road. And she lagged behind for a moment. ‘I will give him some space,’ she thought. ‘I will be mysterious.’ It was childish, to go rushing after him all the time. So, loitering on the pavement, she turned to watch the yoga man again; to have her own fascinating thing to observe.

But the yoga man had stopped. He was standing there
frowning
.

‘This is not a public performance,’ he said. ‘I am not a
performing
seal.’ He glared at her with peevish blue eyes and she felt, somehow, that he knew her secret.

By the time they made it to Victoria station she was as nervous as a rabbit. And Colin was in a funny mood. He had that inscrutable air about him, looking around the crowds with his vacant, angelic expression. They walked out of the station into a high wind which blew paper bags around their heads.

‘I hate the wind,’ Sally said, her voice raised.

‘Why?’ Colin shouted back. ‘It’s exciting! Beautiful. Like you!’

Did he say that? She thought she heard him say that. He had a clear, high voice, some of his vowel sounds occasionally betraying an exciting Northern origin. Speaking to him Sally used to try
taming
her own twanging, Southern vowels, but it never lasted. Like Miss Button, Colin had made a few remarks about her accent. He had once said it was a ‘gutbucket’ accent, and she didn’t even know what he meant. Unlike Miss Button, though, she hoped that Colin thought of her accent with tenderness.

Rowena’s presence, that day in 1979, would have been a
comfort,
a buffer, like those nets of corks that people sling over the sides of barges to stop them crashing into the riverbank. Unmoored, though, precarious, they spent the morning floating around – Covent Garden, the Strand, along the Embankment.
They crossed trafficky roads. They walked beneath avenues of autumn trees. They sat on a green curlicued bench beside the Thames before walking across to Trafalgar Square to stare up at Nelson’s Column and three pigeons sitting on his three-cornered hat.

‘Did Nelson fight the French?’ Sally shouted.

‘Yes. Don’t you know anything?’ Colin replied, before abruptly hoisting himself up on to the plinth of one of the lions, placing his left foot at the base of its tail and pulling himself on to its back.

‘Colin!’ Sally screeched, feigning delight.

Colin didn’t reply. He leaned back against the lion, put his hands beneath his head and closed his eyes.

‘Does your friend know anything?’ he asked into the wind.

‘Who? Rowena? Know anything about what?’

‘About life. About history. About the battle of Trafalgar.’

‘No more than me.’

‘Does she know what Nelson said before he died?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Kiss me, Hardy.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Or was it Kismet?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What’s your school on about, then? What do you all pay your fees for?’

‘I don’t know!’

You are wonderful,
she thought, gazing up at him.
You are
wonderful
and funny and you have such long eyelashes.

Colin lay there for a full five minutes, his eyes closed, while the wind blew down the back of Sally’s neck. She waited, looking around – at the pigeons again, across to Big Ben in the distance, up at the National Gallery and the steps and the tourists taking photographs.

‘Shall we go and get a coffee, then?’ Colin asked suddenly from his vantage above her. And he sat up, slid down from the lion, jumped off the plinth and took her hand in his. Sally’s heart sprang like a frog.

‘I know a place near here,’ Colin said, and without speaking further they walked across the square, over the road and down the steps into St-Martin-in-the-Fields. They sat in the crypt, drinking coffee. Sally peered around at the headstones mortared into the walls. There was a leaflet on the table informing them of the fact that a band (‘The Cryptics’) would be playing there at 7.30 on Saturday evening.

‘Could be cool.’

‘Yeah.’

She was not sure if it was quite normal to drink coffee in a crypt but she approved of anything she did with Colin. And nothing was normal now, in any case. She, Sally Tuttle, who
occasionally
still sported a plait, was going out with a twenty-
one-year
-old man! And when he spoke to her, when he kissed her, it was thrilling but not normal.

When they had finished their coffee they walked up Charing Cross Road and looked at the bookshops. They went into a little shop and bought a paperback on the Metaphysical poets. Then they queued for ages in Foyles to buy another very small book for Colin, on marketing strategies.

‘How stupid,’ Sally said, about the queuing system.

‘It’s a time-honoured tradition in Foyles,’ Colin retorted. ‘Queuing. You wouldn’t last a second in Russia.’

‘Wouldn’t I? Why not?’

‘Haven’t you heard of the bread queues? Haven’t you heard about the way they queue?’

‘No.’

And he looked at her. Then he said, ‘Never mind. That’s why
I like you, honey. Sweet and innocent.’

In the National Portrait Gallery they looked at the paintings for a while – Beatrix Potter, Henry VIII, the Queen, and then got the lift down to the shop. They peered together at the postcards and the cases of coloured slides, Colin’s hand sliding lower and lower down Sally’s back. She didn’t know how to respond to this hand, so she ignored it; she stood, wooden as a figurehead.
Last time I came here,
she thought,
I was with Mum and Dad.

The women behind the till were discussing lunch.

‘That café on the corner does nice rolls,’ one of them was
saying,
into the echoing vaults. ‘And what are them things?
Spinaca-something.
Spinacafrittas?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Maybe when you go for your lunch break you could pop up there, and …’

‘Excuse me,’ snapped Colin, ‘I hate to interrupt but can I just get this?’

And he moved his arm from its new location around Sally’s shoulders and pushed across the counter the card bearing the portrait of the Scottish fishwife.

The women looked at him. They did not blink. Then one of them said, ‘Certainly, sir.’

‘A woman after your own heart,’ Colin said when he gave the card to Sally. ‘Don’t you think she looks like you, in that scarf?’

Sally looked at it. The shawl did look quite a lot like the blue scarf she possessed, the one she wore to look alluring.

‘Thanks,’ she replied, knowing she would cherish the card, even though the fishwife looked very earnest and not at all romantic. This was the first – and last – thing he ever gave her.

By the time they had been in London for a couple of hours Sally was exhausted with the effort of being happy. She felt like hiding in a phone box to give Rowena a call. Without her she felt out of
her depth, a little fearful.
What shall I say to him, Rowena? What shall I say?

But Rowena wasn’t there and she would have to work out what to say on her own. How to be. How to be someone’s
girlfriend,
sitting on the stop-start Tube train, her hair clinging
statically
to the sleeve of his coat.

They made their way towards Regent’s Park, walking hand-
in-hand
along the pavements, their breath coming out in little cold clouds. They sat for a while on another curlicued bench and Sally rummaged around in her yellow hessian bag for the poetry book she had bought.

‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did till we loved? Were we not wean’d till then?’ she read out loud, leaning back
uncomfortably,
her blue woollen-tighted legs on Colin’s lap. She stopped and wondered if she had done the right thing:
maybe reciting poetry to him will make me look odd or earnest or
–

‘Your voice is beautiful,’ Colin said, his eyes closed against the autumn sun.

In a gutbucket way,
Sally nearly replied. And she remembers how she had stroked his hair, where it was soft, at his temples. She read on, and wondered what
snorted we, in the seven sleepers
’
den
meant.

‘Oh look, Colin,’ she exclaimed suddenly, stopping again to point out a small passing dachshund wearing a crocheted overcoat. Colin turned his head. Then he shivered, sat up, and banged his hands together.

‘Small things please you, don’t they?’

‘I thought he looked cute in that coat. My mum crochets.’

‘Your mum does what?’ Colin laughed. He took a cigarette out of his top pocket and lit it with a Swan Vesta.

‘Does it feel weird,’ he asked, taking a puff, ‘bunking off school?’

‘No,’ Sally lied, thinking not of school but of her mother and
father, who were both so proud of her and her place at St Hilary’s. She had let them down. ‘Anyway,’ she said, getting up from the bench, ‘life’s weird whatever. Whatever you do.’