Things to Make and Mend (10 page)

‘Maybe when I come back we could do something nice,’ she
says. ‘It’ll be Saturday. We could go up to town. Maybe we could go shopping? Or go to the pictures?’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

And they fall silent again. They eat. Four houses along, the gadget-orientated young man starts up his new electric drill. He is doing something to his bedroom window frame.

‘So,’ Sally says. Sometimes it is so much effort being a resourceful mother.

And after a moment Pearl puts her fork down.

‘I’m actually quite tired, Mum,’ she says. ‘Do you mind if I just go to bed?’

‘Oh –’

‘I’m just going to lie down, I think, if you don’t mind. I’ve got a bit of a headache.’

‘But –’

Pearl stands up and pushes her chair under the table. ‘Night, then. See you in the morning.’

‘Oh.’

Sally stares up at her daughter, a few thick strands of macaroni pronged on to her fork. She feels baffled. Uncomprehending. She feels middle-aged and upset.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘OK. Night, sweetheart. Thanks for the book. It’ll be great for … research.’

‘I thought you’d like it.’

And Sally wants to get up and hug her. She wants to say
something
light and kind, something witty about the macaroni cheese, but her daughter has already left the room.

The fridge clicks and hums. The clock on the cooker ticks. Sally sits at the table and listens to her daughter walking about the house in her slippers.

She does not go straight to her room. She goes into the
bathroom.
Then, after a few minutes, Sally hears her walking across
the landing into the sewing room. She does not normally go in there. Sally sits still, unmoving, and wonders what she is doing. There is the sound of drawers being opened and things being moved around. Sally hears an incomprehensible clanking noise and her sewing machine is pushed to one side. A drawer is opened in her little shelving unit.
What is she doing? What is she doing?
Then there is the sound of something falling, something shattering, and Pearl cursing under her breath. Sally frowns. She sits and waits for Pearl to come out with shards of glass or china in her hands, looking for the dustpan and brush. But she doesn’t. After another five minutes or so, Sally hears her slink out quietly, like a cat-burglar, and into her own room.

Sally remains at the kitchen table for over half an hour. She feels fragile, like an eggshell turned upside down in its cup.
What is she doing? What is she not telling me? Should I phone Mum? Should I phone her school? Perhaps I should phone John?

She gets up and dials John’s number, but there is no answer.

She is about to head upstairs for bed when she hears Pearl’s door opening again. Sally sits and watches her reflection appear in the window. She is creeping along the dark hallway, carrying a waste-paper basket.

‘Hallo,’ Sally says.

‘Oh,’ Pearl exclaims, halting, like a field mouse alert to an owl.

‘I broke your vase,’ she frowns, walking further into the room with the waste-paper basket. ‘That blue one.’

‘Oh, Pearl.’

‘I was just looking for something in your sewing room. In your little filing cabinet.’

‘What were you looking for?’

‘Nothing. Just a needle. I’ve got a splinter.’

‘Have you? Let me see.’

‘It’s OK. I got it out.’ Sally looks at her. ‘I thought I heard you crashing about in
there,’ she says. ‘You didn’t damage my embroidery, did you? Didn’t get glass on it? Or water?’

‘No. It’s fine,’ Pearl says. ‘I’ll … get another vase.’

She puts the waste-paper basket on the floor.

She’s tired, Sally thinks, she’s very tired. ‘You had a long day,’ she says. ‘It makes you over-tired and then you bump into things.’

‘I suppose.’

Sally thinks: We are like Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. Alone on a desert island. And not even speaking the same
language.
The skin beneath Pearl’s eyes is tinged with grey. She stares through the window at the streetlights.

‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ she asks.

The phone rings some time after eleven when Sally is in bed, under her duvet, wearing the slippers, the leather-soled Aztec slippers she has owned since she was seventeen. It is John on the phone. He says, ‘Hi. I dialed 1471.’

‘Right.’

‘So. Is Pearl coming to stay tomorrow or what?’

‘Yes,’ Sally replies, squinting in the sudden yellow light of the anglepoise. She glances across the room, at her spare embroidery frame, her needle case, her basket of threads.

‘So you’re going to Edinburgh then?’

‘Yes,’ she replies, looking up at her luminous ceiling-stars.

‘It’s not particularly convenient.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but I did tell you weeks ago. This is, you know, my big break.’

John sighs. ‘I was meant to be going out tomorrow night,’ he says.

‘Well.’ She is aware of a loose piece of wool inside her left
slipper,
beneath the arch of her foot. ‘You’ll have to rearrange it, I’m afraid.’

He sighs again.

‘A date, was it?’ Sally asks, wiggling her foot.

But John does not reply.

She can imagine him roaming around his studio-apartment in Chingford – bearded, a trail of banana skins and old coffee mugs in his wake.

‘I’ll pick her up from school, then,’ he says.

‘Thank you. Tomorrow. Friday. Do you remember what time school finishes?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘OK then.’

Sally holds the phone against her ear with her shoulder, reaches down under the duvet, pulls off her left slipper, turns it inside out and breaks off the strand of wool. She has strong,
professional
, thread-snapping hands. Her slippers, these days, are an assemblage of snapped threads.

‘I’m only away a day and a night,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you can pick up your romantic life when I get back.’

And John nearly does not say goodbye. Then, at the last moment, he does. They are mature people. They are forty-four and forty-three.

Before going to sleep, Sally calculates how many years she has owned her slippers.

Sometimes I still wonder about my old teachers. About the despondent Miss Haugh, the
upwards-and-onwards
Miss
Gordon,
and Miss Button, peculiar Miss Button. I think in particular about Miss Button. Her fierceness. That man I saw her with once, in town, in a sports car. And her habit of confiscating sweets. Where did she put all those sweets? I wonder, too, why she chose those particular blouson patterns for us all to sew. Was it because the end result was so profoundly ugly? I recall mine was a stripy orange material, and Sally’s had little blue flowers on it. Nobody, not even the prettiest girl, could have looked good in a garment like that.

‘She has a warped mind, that woman,’ I remember once
mumbling
to Sally Tuttle. And we looked across the room at pretty Miss Button, sitting behind her desk in a new cashmere sweater. Miss Button beamed back disconcertingly, took a sweet from a confiscated packet and popped it into her mouth.

‘D’you think she’s in lurve?’ Sally asked. ‘She looks all perky today.’

‘Dunno.’

After Sally had started seeing Colin Rafferty I remember being embarrassed about the word
love.

I looked down at my sewing pattern.
Pin front interfacing to wrong side of front yoke.

‘What is a front yoke?’ I asked. ‘Is it –?’

‘Rowena Cresswell,’ Miss Button’s voice interjected, ‘unless you get on with your work
in silence
you will have to leave the room.’

Miss Button used to like lobbing harsh pronouncements, like hand grenades, into the torpor of a late afternoon. The thing about Miss Button was: she was sarcastic, but she wouldn’t let you join in with the sarcasm. She knew the other teachers were ridiculous but she wouldn’t tolerate
us
saying so. She was young, but she was
so much more mature
than we were.

She had a curious, stalking walk too, I recall – a gait of immense self-importance which used to impress and slightly frighten me. I remember her stalking in her quiet shoes down the corridors, through the Resource Area, past the portrait of our school’s noble, bejewelled benefactor. In class she would pace like a caged and beautiful peacock up the rows of spotty, sweaty schoolgirls. At lunchtimes she would prowl past the desolate octagonal tables. ‘Enjoying your rice pudding, girls?’ she would ask.

She also had a very soul-destroying habit of taking apart your work. She was even rumoured to take work home with her, to unpick at her leisure.

‘Hopeless girl,’ she would reprimand someone who had
mangled
her blouson pattern, lopping off notches and shearing along the wrong lines. ‘Shoddy, shoddy work.’

And she would glare at the girl, her eyes a dark, beautiful brown.

Sometimes, I remember, when she was bored at the end of the day, she might lull us all into a false sense of camaraderie by engaging us in girlish conversation. She would sit on her desk, impeccable even at four in the afternoon, and discuss men. She would criticise the East Sussex Comp boys. She would talk about the Robert Redford film she had just seen, or muse on the failings of the day’s youth.

‘The problem with boys today,’ she would say, ‘is they have no sense of style. Half of them are unwashed and they walk around
in those awful down-at-heel shoes. Don’t they? Those grotty, grey shoes.’

Then she would flex her own beautifully-turned ankle, incline her head towards the window and gaze at the street beyond, as if yearning for the impossibly exotic existence which she knew was waiting for her.

Sally Tuttle and I sat side by side, secretly counting the
number
of times Miss Button used the word ‘grotty’ and jotting the number down in our rough books. Once, it reached as many as fourteen in a triple lesson. Miss Button was contemptuous of everyone. Although there had been that man in that low-slung sports car. ‘I suppose he wasn’t too grotty,’ I thought, brushing my fringe back, my bangles jangling down my arm.

The other day I described those blousons (
very easy / très facile
) to Kenneth. The waistline, I told him, had actually ended at
mid-buttock
and was elasticated, creating a bulging, balloon-like effect. The cuffs were also elasticated. The neckline was high and boxy. The finishing touch was a bow attached to the collar.

‘Attractive.’

‘Certainly was.’

‘And do you think Miss Button would have worn one?’

‘Not if you’d paid her a million quid.’

Appearance mattered a lot to us then. The details mattered so much that sometimes you could overlook the larger picture. Sally Tuttle and I worried incessantly about our skin tone (greasy / ‘combination’), teeth (not straight enough), hair (too fine / too mouse). We discussed how far we could take in the sideseams of our skirts before the teachers noticed. And at breaktimes,
meeting
in the school toilets, I remember how we fussed endlessly with the important detail of our hair. We used to try to give it more ‘volume’ by bending forwards until it trailed against the ground and our faces reddened; then we would pull it into a tight
bunch and snap in a hairband. When we stood up again, our ponytails would be ridiculously high, and our hair would bounce,
bouffant,
above our scalps. We resembled gonks. The look of 1979.

I remember taking magazines into school, with titles like
Hair,
Hairstyles
and
Style.
Sally and I scrutinised the photographs: pictures of grim-faced young women beneath perms and huge black fringes.

‘Look at that one!’

‘Look at her!’

‘What would your mum do if you came home with a perm?’

‘She’d wig out.’

This was the term before we were supposed to sit our O-levels. By this stage, I recall, girls had begun to realign themselves, to seek out kindred spirits. There had been a sudden pause, a
suspension,
a sort of quiet luminosity for a week or so, when there was the potential for anything to happen. It was like the end of childhood. It was like the Red Sea parting for a brief moment before everyone scuttled, terrified, for the banks of friendship. And then the seas had crashed in again, covering the poor
singletons
who had not made it. Help me! Save me! But it was too late. It was almost too awful to watch: the closing-in of the waters.

The washed-up, waterlogged girls still lurked at breaktimes, alone or in clinging, ill-matched groups, while Sally Tuttle and I marched magnificently around. We were the chosen ones: we had made it out of the Red Sea. And we were both grateful.
What would we ever do without each other?
Neither of us could envisage a time when we would not be together. Sometimes, there would be something that niggled. Some little comment that irked. But we knew we would still be meeting up for chats about men and words when we were ninety. Giggling in our rocking-chairs. I suppose, at the age of fifteen, girls know no better. 

Nearly everybody Sally knew had come to her embroidery award ceremony. She was very touched. It was like a wedding without the cake or the confetti or the groom. Plenty of sparkling wine, though. Sally drank too much of it and was so
overwhelmed
she hardly spoke all evening

John made up for it. John, when he has had enough to drink, becomes very convivial. After the speeches and the clapping and the presentation of the cheque, he came to find Sally, and put his arm around her shoulders. He was wearing a shirt with a jolly, abstract print. He smelt quite pleasantly of sweat. His eyes looked watery and a little pink. He kissed her on the lips – a nice, rather alcoholic kiss – and said, ‘You and your sequins, Sally.’

‘I know.’

‘You and your sequins.’

‘I know.’

The rest of the event is already a bit of a blur. Sally’s
embroideries,
arranged on the walls, swam in and out of focus. The
peacock,
the elephant, the tower block. The elephant, the tower block, the peacock. Everyone wore nice clothes – wool, silk, linen – and stood for ages in a queue, waiting for the chicken satay sticks and peanut sauce. Wine glasses clinked. Waitresses yelled. People got quite exercised about the satay sticks.

Sally has never been good in crowds.
What to say, what to say?
She has always been shy, and considers herself very fortunate to have ebullient friends who can usurp the limelight. Even as a girl, her friends were much more outgoing than she was. Rowena, for
instance. Sally doesn’t really know how that friendship
happened.
But somehow she had been scooped into her embrace. With Rowena, she felt bright, clever. And Rowena altered too: her accent plummeted, her syntax slipped. Maybe that was why Mrs Cresswell never liked Sally.

‘These sodding patterns always say they’re very easy,’ she remembers Rowena whispering to her in Needlework one
afternoon.
‘They always say
very bloody easy,
but they’re bloody not.’

And Sally looked at the blouson pattern instructions spread out across their desk. At the pencil sketch of a woman, diaphanous, her legs as insubstantial and curved as raspberry canes. She was about to say something about the awful word ‘blouson’ – it was one of
those words
– when Miss Button’s voice cut across them.

‘I think you’ll find, Rowena,’ she said, striding across the room towards them, ‘that they
are
very bloody easy. Only a
simpleton
could get this particular pattern wrong. Although looking around this class …’ she added, and then, perhaps thinking
better
of it, she stopped talking and returned to her desk, to
continue
unpicking someone’s work.

‘Rhiannon Clark,’ they heard her spit, ‘when will you
understand
the difference between petersham and bias binding?’

Everyone looked up. Rhiannon Clark was standing by Miss Button’s desk, morose, her face pink, her blazer too tight. She was evidently not a girl for whom petersham would ever be important. Why could Miss Button not see that?

‘What a cow,’ Sally whispered to Rowena. Once, Miss Button had returned her homework to her – an essay on the care of
delicate
fabrics – covered in coffee stains. Sally had imagined her laughing and wiping coffee away with the back of her hand.

‘Do you think she’s actually the Wicked Witch of the East?’ Rowena whispered.

‘All I know is she’s a cow.’

And Rowena nodded seriously and began to cut out her collar interfacing with the coveted class pinking shears.

Miss Button was particularly unpleasant that day, Sally remembers. She had eventually reduced Rhiannon to tears – a miserable wreck sitting beside her sewing machine, her
Kwik-unpicked
garment in her hands.

‘She’s pure poison,’ Rowena said, the blades of her scissors slicing comfortingly against the nylon. And for some reason Sally was very happy when she said this. Rowena was so sure of her likes and dislikes. And Sally was one of her likes.

‘She’s probably lonely or something,’ she conjectured. ‘Or frustrated.’

Rowena smiled. ‘Frustrated spinsters are the worst. D’you want the pinking shears for your interfacing?’

‘Yeah.’

‘For your lovely blouson.’

Sally smiled.

‘When I’ve made mine,’ Rowena said, ‘I have plans to waft about in it across the fields.’

‘I’m planning to wear mine next time I see Colin.’

From her elevated desk, Miss Button made a point of ignoring their conversation. Perhaps even
she
knew there was no point breaking into one of their flights of fancy.

They left school together, to walk to the bus stop. It often rained and they never seemed to have umbrellas.

There were a lot of school pupils at that bus stop. The girls stood and talked and the boys stood and punched each other. Most of the girls had highlighted hair and heavy eye make-up. Most of the boys wore parkas.

‘I’ve got loads of spots today,’ Sally said, suddenly alarmed at the prospect of meeting Colin that evening.

‘Use some cover-up,’ suggested Rowena – a girl with the kind
of matt skin that seemed impervious to everything, including adolescence.

‘Hi,’ a boy said to Rowena, and she turned. Mark Malone. A tall, thin boy who had a huge Adam’s Apple and played the oboe in his school orchestra. He and Rowena had once, briefly, gone out together, Rowena waiting for him outside the church hall where his orchestra rehearsed. He had been sweet, she told Sally, but she had eventually deemed him to be unsatisfactory. Rowena knew how to deal with men. She could end relationships with a definitive chop, like a martial arts move. Paul Woodman, Shaun Dale, both skillfully tackled and discarded. Now Mark Malone. Poor Mark. He had looked handsome at discos in his long white school shirt, which went impressively blue in strobe lighting. In plain daylight, though, you couldn’t help noticing his spots and his Adam’s apple. ‘People who play music are often quite serious, don’t you think?’ Rowena had said, and Sally didn’t know how to reply. She had felt rather sorry for Mark Malone,
standing
forlornly at the bus stop in the mornings, trying not to look at her. Rowena had been, she felt, a little harsh.

‘Oboe-boy again. Poor thing, look at him,’ she observed loudly. And the two girls turned and watched as he moved away, to stand alone, Malone Alone with his oboe, at the other end of the bus stop. It was funny, Sally thought, how you never liked people who liked you. Who liked you too much.

She worried that this might be the case with Colin, a man she loved beyond measure.

She was beginning to rearrange her evenings now, to be with Colin. They had moved from meeting in the park to his flat. And at some point, Sally felt sure, they would have a very profound conversation.

Colin’s life, though, was a mystery. Who were his family? Where did he come from? He told her, between kisses, that his
mother was Italian – a great beauty and a former opera singer. She had sung, he said, at La Scala, Milan.

‘What’s that?’ Sally asked, and he looked at her and said, ‘God, you’re ignorant, aren’t you?’

His father had been very handsome, apparently – ‘More
handsome
than me,’ Colin said – and had acted in Hollywood. But he didn’t see him any more. ‘I don’t really want to talk about my dad,’ he added, softly.

‘Oh,’ Sally frowned. Colin seemed to have led such a full and, in some ways, tragic life that she didn’t know how she could
possibly
be alluring enough for him: a girl who lived in a close at the wrong end of East Grinstead. A girl whose family ate fish fingers and Arctic roll. She looked around Colin’s room: at the posters he had put on the wall above his bed. A picture of a naked, rather green-looking woman. Another poster saying ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius’.

Why did you come to East Grinstead? Sally wanted to know. He seemed to have had such a glamorous upbringing that she couldn’t understand why he would want to come here. The son of a Hollywood actor and an opera singer, living in East
Grinstead?
Working in an office beside the pedestrian precinct? Walking past the municipal bins and the swing-park?

Colin sighed and blinked his beautiful eyelashes. ‘We fell on hard times. My dad had a terrible … fall … from some theatre scaffolding.’

And he looked as if he might cry.

‘Oh,’ said Sally, leaning her head against his arm.

His first Saturday job, he told her eventually, over the course of one evening, had been in a bakers, of all places –
Crumbs,
the bakers in the High Street. It had since closed down. He was
fourteen.
And he described, comically, how he had stood all day behind trays of macaroons and éclairs and apple turnovers. ‘There were these fat blokes,’ he said, ‘who used to shuffle in
every day for pork pies and stuff.’ And Sally giggled. There were not many people who could make a Saturday job in a bakery look amusing – almost
necessary,
somehow – but Colin Rafferty was one of them. He imitated the way the fat pork-pie men spoke, and she giggled again and hoped her hairgrip was not pressing too much against his upper arm. Colin
had
gone on to greater things, of course: to his job in the advertising agency where he was presently engaged on an advert for a new brand of yogurt.
Yogopot.
He was still working on a slogan, he told her, and had whittled it down to three:

But still, why? Why did he …?

Colin gazed down at her. She gazed back and was on the point of leaning up to kiss him when he smiled and said, ‘Your hair looks very flat today, m’dear.’

Her heart clunked.

‘Sorry?’

‘Your hair,’ he repeated. ‘Very flat.’

He was good at doing that, she recalls: altering her happiness with one carefree comment. It would send her into an instant panic, make her wretchedly scrutinise her appearance when she got home. It would make her visit clothes shops after school, struggle into T-shirts in the changing rooms, look glumly at herself in the dark mirror.
Am I pretty enough? Do I look old enough? Why does he want to be with me?

And her face would peer back at her, shifty and unsure. Somehow, all the other girls in the changing room seemed slimmer, older, more tanned. They all had Strip-waxed legs. They all had long, wavy hair.

Twelve ninety-nine,
she would think, looking at the price tag on the shirt she had taken in, and wondering if she could ask her mother for a loan.

Rowena used to go shopping with her at the weekends but sometimes her presence would make her feel even worse. She would hang loyally on to the handles of all her plastic bags and say ‘He’ll like you in that,’ as Sally pulled some cheap, ribbed top over her head, the seams already coming apart. ‘Very sexy,’ she’d add.

They liked irony but it sometimes escaped them.

‘So how was Colin? Did you have a snog?’ Rowena asked her once in the middle of Miss Selfridge’s underwear department.

‘Rowena!’

Irritated, she had turned and glanced at a middle-aged woman standing by the sale bin. She was pulling out pairs of
primrose-yellow
knickers.

‘So did you?’ Rowena asked.

And something had made her not want to tell her.

‘Are you really in love with him?’ Rowena asked.

Sally did not reply.