Things to Make and Mend (15 page)

Her
award-winning
embroidery was sent ahead a few days ago. Fed-exed, as somebody informed her on the phone. But she could not bear to do that to Mary and Martha: couldn’t place them in the hands of some man in a uniform and watch them
disappearing
into the ether. What if she never saw them again? What if they ended up on the other side of the world, received with confusion by someone in Alaska or New Guinea? So she packed Mary and Martha carefully into her portfolio, covering them in white tissue paper, smoothing the threads on the rough side.

She is on the point of leaving for the airport when there is a phone call.

‘Sperlin?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Sperlin?’

‘Oh. No, you’ve just missed her, I’m afraid. She’s on her way to school.’

‘Cool. Cheers.’

And he hangs up. Sally doesn’t have a clue who he is.

Two more calls follow while she is running around wondering where her keys are. The first is from Sue at In Stitches. ‘
Nervous?
’ she asks.

‘Extremely. And I’ve just gone and lost my keys.’

‘You’ll find them.’

‘Ha!’

‘We’re all rooting for you, Sal. You’ll be fine.’

‘Thanks,’ Sally says, looking up and seeing her keys on top of the bread bin. ‘I’ve just spotted my keys,’ she says.

‘Told you you would.’

Sometimes she feels her friends have more faith in her than they should.

The third call is from the Reverend Avery.

‘How is the, ah, embroidery coming along?’ he booms.

‘Oh, fine. Yes, it’s … I think I’m on the final leg of the
foreground
now.’

‘The final leg of the foreground,’ Reverend Avery muses. ‘Hmm.’

And neither of them seems to know how to continue. Sally looks at her watch. She pictures a plane taking off.

‘Are you using sequins?’

‘I’m actually getting low on sequins.’

‘Low on sequins. Ah.’

The Reverend Avery sounds a little concerned.

‘I’d normally order them in bulk,’ she explains, ‘but I don’t want to … hang around waiting, and I’m off to Edinburgh today. Right now, in fact,’ she adds, the sense of lateness increasing and making her feel slightly sick. She reaches up to the bread bin and grabs her keys. ‘So I’ll see if I can find a haberdashery
department
while I’m there,’ she says, ‘and stock up.’

She is not sure why she is telling the Reverend Avery the minutiae of her embroidering schedule. Or of her need to hang around haberdashery departments every so often, just taking in the colours, the textures, the minutely beautiful cards and
packets.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘I have to go now, or I’ll miss my plane.’

‘Yes. Off you scoot,’ the Reverend Avery says tetchily – making her wonder how on earth he got involved with the
commissioning
of something as fiddly and irksome as an embroidery.

The flight up to Edinburgh is full of people carrying identical conference bags. They are made of black canvas with webbing straps, and emblazoned with the logo
We Get There First.
Sally thinks of the machine operators who embroidered the logos.

She is standing in the plane’s narrow central aisle behind an overweight young man in a vented suit. His trouser legs (she noticed, as she walked behind him on to the plane) need
lengthening
at least half an inch. She resists an impulse to laugh as he tries to push past another overweight young man in a vented suit, and their
We Get There First
bags become wedged fast.

‘You
could
wait a minute,’ one of them snaps.

‘I’d be waiting all day.’

‘Excuse me,’ Sally says, swerving around them into her seat. She puts her bag in the overhead locker and her portfolio by her feet.

She has always been a nervous flier. She grips the flimsy plastic arms of her seat as the plane rumbles along the tarmac, its
passengers
rattling and swaying like wooden dollies. It lifts abruptly as if a giant child has picked it up to play with. Within seconds they are thousands of feet up, the land beneath them smugly safe. The engine roars, changes pitch (
Why’s that? Why’s that?
) and Sally’s palms sweat. Beside her a woman sighs and opens a minuscule packet of Planter’s peanuts. Sally closes her eyes and tries not to think how far up and how fast they are traveling. Air journeys always seem incredibly foolish, a kind of unthinking leap into the air.

There is a huge crowd of backpackers on the shuttle bus to the terminal, a lot of red Gortex and dangling rip-cords. Sally finds a seat but is nearly flung off it as the driver swerves to avoid
something
lying on the tarmac. A suitcase. A blue-and-orange checked suitcase, with yellow airport tape wrapped vigorously around it.
Where did that come from? Did it fall out of the sky?
Then she sees that it has dropped off a baggage trolley. She imagines the same thing happening to her portfolio and is thankful that she has it with her. She hangs on to its handles, the way she once used to hang on to Pearl’s hand.

A man in overalls is standing on the tarmac, waiting to run out and retrieve the lost bag. He makes a gesture to the bus driver, denoting thanks that he didn’t cover it with tyre marks. The driver gives him a little nod and a semi-wave and drives on. How polite people in vehicles can be. How civilised, even on the
tarmac
of an airport, with that little edge of condescension.
Thank you, my man.
Making those little waves, like the queen.

Sally gets off the shuttle bus at the main building. It is
three-thirty
in the afternoon. Cold. The sky is orange. There is a smell of chips wafting east.

In the nothing-to-declare queue she stands behind a young, pregnant woman. She is about six months
gone
– her stomach has reached that beautiful stage of roundness, that still plausible grandeur. Even after nearly sixteen years Sally still misses that solid state: the validity, the company of another presence with her; the outrageous acrobatics of a baby in her belly.

‘Not much fun, all this standing, for you,’ she says to the woman.

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ the woman replies. She smiles at her, as if perhaps Sally doesn’t know what pregnancy is like. And Sally smiles back, reminded of that feeling of being unique.
Invulnerable.
The opposite of what people expect.

A short, swarthy man is standing outside the automatic doors, waiting for her. He is holding up a card which says
SALLY
TUCKWELL
.

‘Hello,’ Sally says, walking towards him and giving him one of her smiles – the big, confident smile which, she knows, is one of
her assets. (Her counsellor Mrs Bonniface said a big smile can do wonders. Over the years she has learned how to enhance her mouth and how to conceal her big ears, her fine hair, her (mother’s) nose. She has also acquired something she never thought she would have: a tough shell. Impenetrable as thimbles. She hides behind it at work: her Needlewoman face.
Yes, of course we can fix that, no problem!
)

She is about to say to the taxi-driver, ‘It’s Tuttle, actually, not Tuckwell’ (
I had a friend once,
she thinks,
whose surname was Cresswell
), but then she doesn’t bother.

‘OK, hen?’ the man says, taking her rucksack and portfolio and opening the door of his waiting cab – it smells of vanilla and has a cluster of small plastic grapes hanging from the rear-view mirror.

Sally gets in and sits quietly on the slippery leather seat.

‘Ken Embra?’ the driver asks over his shoulder as they begin to move. Incomprehension flits like a moth around Sally’s brain.

‘Do you know Edinburgh, like?’ the driver says, articulating slowly.

‘Oh. No. I’ve never been here before,’ Sally replies in her south-east English accent.

She looks out of the window at the drab environs of Edinburgh airport. Bungalows – bungalows in Edinburgh? Roundabouts. Shopping malls. A large, purple shack calling itself PC World. It all looks like East Grinstead. Maybe everywhere these days looks like East Grinstead. An aeroplane takes off and crosses the frozen vapour-trail of an earlier one. A big kiss in the sky.

‘You staying at the Royal Burgh, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a fine hotel, the Royal. A fine hotel. Better than all that Ibis nonsense.’

‘Oh good.’

This is the vocabulary of her new life:
Conference. Delegate.
Allocate.
She has been allocated two conference delegates to talk to when she arrives. Their names are typed on her information sheet: Jeremy Bowes and Nora Wheeler. She is due to meet them at the hotel at six, for drinks followed by a dinner. She is intrigued about Jeremy Bowes. The world of embroidery and dressmaking is usually entirely bereft of men. She imagines
sitting
opposite him and Nora at an octagonal table. (
‘And which embroidery stitch do you prefer, Ms. Tuttle?’ ‘Oh, satin stitch, Jeremy, every time.’
)

As they round a corner, Edinburgh Castle appears, dreamily, on the skyline. Now the bungalows begin to peter out and give way to tall grey tenements. The taxi passes a kebab shop, a
stationer’s,
a costume hire company and a bagpipe shop. There are seagulls in the sky. Maroon double-decker buses. Schoolgirls in blue blazers and kilts. A smell seeps slyly into the cab – a smell she can’t place, like overheated Weetabix.

‘That’s the brewery, like,’ the taxi driver says suddenly.

‘Oh.’

‘It’s the malt. But they’re pulling it all down.’

‘Pulling what down?’

‘The brewery, like.’

‘Oh. That’s a shame.’

‘End of an era.’

‘Yes.’

The schoolgirls make her think of Pearl. She gets her mobile phone out of her handbag – a phone she has bought especially for the occasion, and on which she has only just got used to pressing the correct buttons. She wants to phone John to see if he has remembered to pick Pearl up from school; but the little screen just lights up, displays a picture of a rainbow and says Emergency Calls Only. Her phone does not appear to be able to connect to East Grinstead. The only person she can call is an
emergency switchboard operator. She thinks of Pearl and a tiny electrical charge of anxiety fizzes inside her chest. She puts the phone back in her bag.

‘So,’ the taxi driver says, ‘are you here on business or pleasure?’

‘Business. I’m going to a conference. On embroidery. Which is what I …’

‘Come again?’

The man’s left ear seems to move very slightly towards the open window.

‘Embroidery,’ she repeats loudly, and the word hangs in the cab, unaugmented, gaining too much significance. She looks at her portfolio and her rucksack and her handbag sitting beside her, like three long-suffering travelling companions. She
imagines
Mary and Martha staring crossly up from their canvas.

‘What aspect of embroidery is that, then?’ the taxi driver asks, making her jump.

‘The history of it,’ she replies, raising her voice above the noise of the engine. ‘And the connection of Scotland and France.’

‘Oh aye, the Auld Alliance,’ the taxi driver booms. ‘That old chestnut.’

Outside the window a little girl is refusing to hold her mother’s hand. Crouching on the pavement while her mother walks away, pretending to abandon her.

The foyer of the Royal Burgh Hotel is pale and cool, with a smooth floor and a lot of glass surfaces. Sally emerges into it through the expensive doors –
taa-daah!
– carrying her
portfolio,
her handbag and her rucksack. She thinks she probably looks like a too-old student. A man with slicked-back hair is sitting behind the reception desk, his chair so low that his chin only just reaches above the counter.

‘Good afternoon, madam,’ he says.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘Would you like someone to take your luggage up?’

‘Oh, no, it’s OK, thanks. It’s very light.’

It
is
light, her luggage, but she feels this was the wrong response. The man looks at her rucksack, her portfolio and her handbag. ‘OK,’ he says, handing her her room key and directing her towards the lift.

The corridors smell of bacon and lilies and Mr Sheen.

She walks along the second floor, noticing the way all the doors swish against the carpets. It feels opulent, professional. And here she is, in it. She wants to phone Pearl just to tell her what colour the carpets are. To inform her that there is a large pewter bowl bearing pine cones, positioned on a wooden table at the end of the corridor, and three enormous white candles placed, like altar decor, on a window sill. She steps into a lift and notes that it is made by a company called Schindler. And that the piped music is ‘Annie’s Song’. She wants to tell her daughter all this. All the details of being away
on
business.

Her room is just as she had hoped. Large and beige, with a double bed, a sofa, an en-suite bathroom and a number of innocuous flower-prints on the walls. It is excitingly bland. It makes her feel polished, elegant, important. She looks at the
double
bed with regret.

She has been picturing this place for months, ever since she got the letter from the conference organisers. She goes into the bathroom. There are five white towels, a transparent shower
curtain,
a shower cap and a wrapped sachet of Lux soap. There are small sachets of shampoo and moisturising cream. There is a pink carnation in a vase and a matching toilet roll. She wonders about the chamber maid whose job it is to perform daily feats of origami with its top sheet.

The wardrobe in the bedroom smells of citronella and contains eight wooden coat-hangers. There are packets in a
lavender
-lined
drawer in the bedside cabinet, containing a shoeshine kit, complimentary mints and an emergency repair set (two
buttons;
one needle; four threads). Sally takes off her coat and looks out of the window at the view: the laundry chute and ventilation shafts emerging from the hotel kitchens.