Things to Make and Mend (17 page)

Jeremy has removed his beige corduroy jacket too, and his cream turtle-neck sweater. He is sitting there in a pale blue shirt, the top button undone to reveal a little chest-hair, far up, like a high Plimsoll line. (‘And did they force you outside in the rain to play hockey?’ he is saying charmingly to Nora. ‘Yes, yes,’ Nora is saying.)

This abandoning of clothes is beginning to be a bit like strip poker.
There is something subconscious going on here.
Sally is the only person who continues to wear all the clothes she arrived in.

At the far end of the restaurant, a woman in a white halter-neck dress appears in the doorway and goes to stand by the piano. A pianist, already poised on the seat, looks up at her. She pauses for a second, smiles back at him, then launches into a song. ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’. Sally sits on the edge of her chair and listens. The pianist is good. The singer does not quite hit all the notes.

‘She’s confident,’ Sally observes, but Jeremy and Nora do not hear. She lets the comment float in the air, to die gracefully. Then she picks up her soup spoon and takes a sip of bouillabaisse from her dish of mussels. It goes down the wrong way. She splutters and coughs, tears springing into her eyes. Nora and Jeremy are still discussing the two horses called Stardust. Sally blinks and can’t see or breathe properly. Nora and Jeremy smile at each other. Sally gasps for air. She begins to be frightened. Then Jeremy, breaking off from his bittersweet equine reminiscences, glances across at her and finally looks concerned.

‘OK there, Sally?’

He leans across the table.

‘I’m fine,’ Sally rasps, her eyes bulging, the tears warm and painful. ‘Why do gods above me,’ the woman at the piano is singing, ‘who must be in the know …’

‘I’m fine,’ she croaks, attempting to smile. But she feels
explosive,
like an over-blown balloon. She cannot swallow, cannot breathe. Other diners have begun to turn surreptitiously in their seats, to observe the spectacle.
How awful, how awful to die
eating
mussels in a faraway hotel. Everything unresolved, everything unsaid. My daughter, my work, my loves
…

‘Oh dear,’ Jeremy is saying, ineffectually.

And now Nora Wheeler is taking charge. She has come round to Sally’s side of the table and has begun to slap her on the back. ‘It’s OK,’ she says. She slaps Sally’s back again. Something gives. Sally gasps and breathes. Jeremy hands her a glass of cool water and she takes a sip. She swallows, clears her throat, holds her hand up to her neck and sits, not speaking. The earrings swing warmly from her earlobes. Nora sits down again, even closer to Jeremy. United in the drama of the moment.

‘I’m OK now,’ Sally says, wiping her eyes.

‘It’s awful when that happens, isn’t it?’ Nora says, referring, Sally knows, not to the fear of dying but to the social
embarrassment
of it.

She looks at the two of them. ‘I’m feeling quite tired, actually,’ she says, ‘and I’ve got a bit of a headache. I’m wondering if … I don’t suppose …’

‘Why don’t you go and have a rest in your room?’ Nora suggests, with enthusiasm.

‘Yes,’ Jeremy adds. ‘You’ll probably feel …’

‘Yes, a rest would probably do me the world of good,’ Sally says, trying to regain some semblance of dignity. But she feels too tired, and too upset. And tomorrow she will have to get up early,
sit in an enormous room full of strangers and talk about
embroidery.
I should never have agreed to do this.
I should be in East Grinstead, hemming up a trouser leg.

‘I’ll go up for a little while,’ she says. ‘Go and compose myself. But I’ll probably come down again for a coffee later. So we can discuss the agenda for tomorrow?’

‘Allez vous coucher, Mrs Tuttle,’ Jeremy Bowes commands. ‘Si, si. Allez. Bonne nuit.’

‘Do you think if we tell the waiters, they’ll …’

‘Don’t worry about the waiters,’ Nora almost shouts, newly boisterous in her eagerness for Sally to leave her and Jeremy alone. ‘We’ll explain you’re not feeling too well. I’m sure they’ll –’

‘Well, if you really don’t mind …’

And she gets up from the table and walks away, up the
carpeted
length of the restaurant, up the stairs, past the framed
pictures
of Edinburgh (the Castle; St Andrew’s Square; Greyfriar’s Bobby; the Grassmarket), and along the corridor to her room. She opens the door with the credit-card contraption she was given by the man with slicked-back hair, and pushes her way in. There are all her things. Thank God. Her material possessions. Her coat, her sponge bag, her handbag, her sensible shoes. Her portfolio, her rucksack, her canvas. Her Martha and Mary – who seem, at that moment, to be her only friends.

No matter how difficult a time you are having, there are always thousands of people going about having a perfectly nice day. It is almost unbelievable. Some days are so difficult, so full of angst and awkwardness that you can’t imagine that other people are not affected. But they are not. They do not even know who you
are.

I am looking down at the street through our hotel window. It is ten thirty at night and freezing, the moon hiding behind a pale gauze of cloud. On the street below walks a girl in a black dress, progressing beneath the streetlamps to the bus stop, to begin work probably – some job in a bar or restaurant. Or maybe she is off to a party where she is hoping to meet
him:
the love of her life. She has nearly all her life ahead of her. She waits as a bus driver navigates a maroon bus down the dim green bus lane at exactly the same time as he did the night before. Watching the girl climb aboard is a man sitting on the pavement with his dog and his blanket and his empty polystyrene cup.

You look at them. They do not know your story. And you do not know theirs.

I am thinking about my life with my son in Paris. Living on a street where the cafés had not been trendy and the pavements were often strewn with rubbish – onion peelings and cabbage stalks and halves of orange marinading in the sunshine.

We had lived closest to the Filles du Calvaire Métro station. I remember buying our tickets there at a baffling machine. We used to take the Métro to a lot of places. Montmartre, the banks of the Seine, the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre. One afternoon,
we had taken the Métro to St Michel and gone to see the
tapestries
in the Musée de Cluny. It was the first time I had ever been there, though I have been back many times since. I remember walking through the courtyard with Joe for the first time, past the stone well and the late hollyhocks and thinking how serene it was. A kind of haven: a sanctuary from the noise and all the blindingly-bright, white-shingled parks.

That was where we had first met Jeremy Bowes: at the Musée de Cluny. Handsome Jeremy Bowes had been standing in Room VIII (Salle de Notre Dame de Paris), his backdrop a series of white, headless statues. His embroidered waistcoat would not have looked out of place beside the tapestries in the next room. Seated in plastic chairs were a number of middle-aged women, listening to the lecture he was giving on the museum’s tapestries. And even the statues around him seemed to incline in his
direction.
Into his small, lapel-fastened microphone he was informing them all in quite good French on the meaning of peacocks,
periwinkles,
necklaces and unicorns.

Joe and I had stood in the doorway.

‘… et ce paon ici, que vous regardez, celui-ci, c’est …’

‘Mum,’ Joe said, ‘I want to see if there are dinosaurs.’

I looked down at my son, my mind momentarily blank. I remember whispering, ‘Darling, there aren’t any dinosaurs here. This is not a museum for dinosaurs.’

And a few of the women in the audience had turned at this point, and fixed us both with primitive, lantern-jawed
expressions
of dislike.

‘… et regardez bien,’ Jeremy Bowes was saying, ‘la myriade de couleurs magnifiques autour du plumage. Remarquez les petites taches …’

‘Mum!’ insisted Joe.

And after a moment I gave in, released my grip on my son’s anorak sleeve and followed him out of the room.

There were no dinosaurs. Not in the museum or in the shop. There were embroidered magnets, embroidered cushion covers and embroidered handkerchiefs.

‘Can I have a lollipop then?’ Joe asked, casting around for something that wasn’t hand-stitched. ‘Lollipops are cheap. They’re one franc.’

I didn’t reply.

‘Or one of these pencils?’ he said. ‘Look, there are kings and dragons.’

‘Oh, Joe, I can’t keep buying you things,’ I said, glancing at the shop’s display of
petites surprises
before noticing out of the
corner
of my eye that the handsome, waistcoated tapestry lecturer who had been in the Salle de Nôtre Dame had finished his talk and was now heading straight towards the shop.

‘But Mum –’

My heart skipped.

‘Mum, please –’

‘Sorry about that,’ I blurted to the lecturer, who was now
walking
through the doorway. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘about the commotion just then.’

Jeremy Bowes jumped slightly and looked at me. We were standing beside a bin full of small wooden unicorns and,
apparently
unsure what else to do, he leaned forward to pick one up.

‘I …’ I began again: ‘My son …’

He looked at me with his lovely brown eyes, and smiled. And when he spoke, I felt sure it would be something delightful. I was twenty-three and pretty, I suppose, and there, in Paris, without a man.

Jeremy Bowes opened his mouth. ‘It
was
somewhat
distracting,’
he said.

‘Oh.’

‘The Musée de Cluny really isn’t the place to bring a small boy.’

‘Oh,’ I said again, my disappointment almost as physical as a punch.

‘Weren’t you ever a small boy in a museum, then?’ I asked Jeremy Bowes, holding on to Joe’s hand.

Jeremy Bowes looked a little taken aback. ‘A museum …’ he began but then he seemed lost for words. He trailed off. He said, ‘Excuse me.’ And he gave a curious little nod, turned, walked back to the doorway and disappeared.

We went to see the tapestries after that. I wanted somewhere
comforting
to go, something reassuring to look at. Somewhere dark.

The textile rooms were dimly lit to preserve the cloth and the thread, and we had had to strain our eyes to see the pictures properly. My heartbeat slowed as our eyes made their
adjustments.
And then we began to make them out, the colours and the figures. These were the tapestries of
La Dame à la Licorne
: deep red cloths covered with embroidered flowers, foxes, birds, fruits, monkeys, mythical beasts. Fantastically beautiful.

‘Look at the birds, Joe,’ I said, ‘and those tiny flowers.’

And slowly we moved along the tapestries, admiring them in turn, reading the descriptions, pointing out the animals and the flowers, all the way along, until we reached the last one. A picture of two young women. Two friends.

‘For a long time,’
said the text,
‘this particular tapestry defied interpretation.’

I looked at the picture. I stood and looked. And something, some draught, suddenly caused me to shiver. I don’t know why, but standing in front of that tapestry I felt suddenly quite bereft.

‘What’s your favourite bit in this one, Mum?’ Joe asked.

I looked. I considered. ‘The ladies,’ I said, and I continued to gaze at them – at the two young women in beautiful dresses, one a lady, the other her maidservant. One of them was handing the other a necklace from a casket.

‘Contrary to what was once thought, this lady is in fact not selecting, but depositing the necklace into the casket held by her maidservant, and holding it in a cloth, having taken it off. She is thus not in the act of choosing a piece of jewellery, but of
renouncing
her jewels.’

‘I like the dog,’ Joe whispered.

‘Yes, it’s a lovely dog.’

I looked at the dresses and thought of those flimsy, floating styles Sally Tuttle and I had once worn. Sally Tuttle, my lost friend.

A stout woman in pink corduroy trousers trod heavily on my foot, and I glared at her: it seemed a mean thing to do.

‘Come on then,’ I said to Joe, ‘let’s go and find a café.’

He looked up. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

‘I’m not,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’

After that first encounter with Jeremy Bowes, I began to bump into him regularly around the world. At a conference in London (topic of discussion: the storage and handling of valuable works of art across Europe). At a university dinner in Seattle. A few years later, at a book launch in Antwerp. Sometimes I had to translate his papers and pamphlets. But he did not recall our first encounter, he told me, when I reminded him of it. No, he could not recall it at all. I knew he was lying; I saw a little flicker of knowledge cross his face.

From then on he has been one of those people I keep encountering, over the years. In museums, in hotels, on station platforms. Once, in the dairy aisle of a supermarket in Brittany. I had been clutching a lettuce and a cheap box of Camembert.
Well, hello, Rowena!

Why is it people like Jeremy Bowes that you bump awkwardly into over the years? And of others, there is not a sign. Never a
single
sighting.

It is eight minutes past eleven. Sally sits in her
delightful room,
her canvas on her lap, a red-threaded needle in her hand. Like a medieval lady waiting for her knight.

She turns on the huge radio fixed to the wall above her bed. ‘… you’ll find,’ a man’s voice is saying, ‘that if you wait too long your potatoes will have turned into a kind of mush …’

She changes stations. There is something tragic on Radio 4, a lot of sighing and moaning and sound effects: wooden spoons, tin buckets.

She knows what she is doing. From the three counselling
sessions
she had with Mrs Bonniface, she knows that she is
stalling.
Like one of those horses called Stardust.
Whenever something good happens to me, I wreck it.
Actually, she has never needed counselling sessions to be told that. Her mother has told her for years. At last, she is at the beginning of a new career! She is an authority on embroidery! But what is she doing? She is sitting in her bedroom, sewing.
As per usual.

She wonders how Nora and Jeremy’s conversation is
progressing
downstairs. Even Nora, shy Nora Wheeler, is making a better go of things than Sally is. She is probably more
accomplished
at embroidery. She has coiffured hair. She is even flirting, in a curious kind of way, with the keynote speaker.

I should be here with a man,
Sally thinks.
I should be getting up in the morning with a man.
And she thinks of John, on an early date in the winter of ’83, driving her across London in his beige Cinquecento, changing gear and then, sweetly, putting his left
hand beneath his thigh to keep it warm.

Her yellow conference bag is lying at the foot of her bed. Sally leans across and pulls out the conference programme, which has been archly strung together with big yellow wool stitches. On the front page is a typed list of quotations:

Our lives are like quilts – bits and pieces, joy and sorrow, stitched with love

I love sewing and have plenty of material witnesses

I’d rather be stitchin’ than in the kitchen

Thinking that she should perhaps, after all, not take the
conference
so seriously – this is just another homely affair, all about love and stitches – she turns to page two. Page two has the next day’s agenda:

The phrase ‘her experiences as an embroiderer’ makes her feel suddenly pale, bloodless. Experiences? She just sits and sews. She takes up trouser legs, a draught blasting under the gap of the shop door. How can she follow a talk on the Embroidery of Courtly Love? She thinks of those beautiful medieval tapestries and all those women who created them. She feels the weight of centuries of silent, female talent. Talent dismissed as hobby. Somebody has changed the title of her talk, too: ‘An
Embroiderer’s
Yarn’! It makes her sound like some old sea-dog, full of
lies and exaggerations. Or some chatterbox, so easily dismissed, prattling on about her needlework. She remembers what Colin Rafferty once said:
Needlework is not a career option, unless you want to make cushion covers all your life.
And she is dreading that word
feedback
: the questions at the end, which she was told to expect some weeks ago by a woman called Francesca Coutts-Marvel on the other end of the phone.
There’ll be a little question and answer session, yup?

She dreads someone, probably an eccentric woman in a hat, putting up her hand to say: ‘And what interested you in embroidery in the first place?’

‘Because it was all I had left,’ she would say across the hushed room in her clanging accent. Should she say that?

She looks at Martha and Mary and their big, sequinned eyes.
I am actually here,
she thinks,
because I wrecked my chances twenty-five years ago.
She pictures herself running from her hotel room, taking her embroidery with her. She sees herself a few hours hence, like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, running running running up the hill, all her hairpins coming loose. (
Why! Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was nothing but a HEDGEHOG!
)

She glares at Martha and Mary. But Martha and Mary are just a bundle of threads.

She keeps forgetting that she owns a mobile phone. She forgets that it is switched on and that it is
her
phone making that series of watery, descending notes, like a reed warbler. Her phone, in her handbag, on the chair.

She rushes to undo the zip of her bag and to retrieve the trendy little silver thing from a midden of old paper handkerchiefs, lengths of embroidery silk, Polo mints, make-up bag, purse.

She presses the green button with its sweet picture of an
old-fashioned
phone; one that would once have been conveniently attached to a wall.

‘Hello,’ says a man’s voice, ‘is that Mrs Tuttle?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is the Reverend Avery. I hope this is a good time to call.’

‘Yes. Not bad,’ she lies. The Reverend Avery, she reflects, with a stab of shame, is the only person who phones her with any
regularity.

‘I was just phoning to see how it’s all going. How the … ha, ha, how Mary and Martha are progressing.’

He sounds edgy. Furtive. There’s something wrong.

‘It’s all going pretty well,’ Sally replies. She grips the phone tightly and looks at the hotel escritoire in front of her, at the
laminated
breakfast menu (
poached eggs, kippers, porridge, croissant, yogurt with a selection of seasonal berries
), the tastefully dull
curtains,
the framed rose print, the coat-hangers on the back of the door. She could be standing at the bottom of a well for all the Reverend Avery knows.

The Reverend Avery himself sounds rather stentorious, as if he is the one in the well. He is probably in some sepulchral church hall. Or perhaps he is looking at the chilly blank wall in Southwark Cathedral, where Sally’s embroidery is supposed to go.

‘It was certainly very … interesting to hear how you’re doing. We were wondering,’ he says, ‘whether we could perhaps arrange to see how it’s progressing. We were thinking we could perhaps schedule another meeting for the, ah …’ He pauses while, Sally imagines, he flicks through his ecclesiastical diary.

‘Actually,’ she says. 

‘Sorry?’

‘I don’t really like … showing people my work until it’s finished.’

‘Oh?’

‘No. It’s just a bit of a superstition I suppose.’

‘Oh, well, ha, ha, the church is not a place for superstition.
Perhaps
just this once …?’

She doesn’t know how to deal with the Reverend Avery. She doesn’t know how subservient to be. She supposes he would once have been her patron, and she would have been his
impoverished
artist. Like the Medicis. Maybe she should do whatever he asks.

‘It would be so nice to –’ the Reverend Avery is saying.

‘OK,’ she interrupts. Maybe they want to commission
someone
else instead. Some knitter or patchworker.

‘Oh good,’ says the Reverend Avery. ‘How about Wednesday the fifth, about 11 a.m.? Back at headquarters?’

‘Yes,’ she replies cheerily, her heart sinking. She pictures the trip to Southwark Cathedral. The echoing walls. ‘That should be fine,’ she says. ‘Can I phone you back later to confirm?’

‘Of course, of course,’ says the Reverend Avery. And Sally imagines him putting his hand up, beatifically, in a sign of peace.
He doesn’t trust me. Something has happened.

‘Goodbye then,’ says the Reverend Avery. ‘Work well.’ And he hangs up.

Sally presses the little green telephone button and watches the tiny rainbow on the screen bulge slightly, then contract and
disappear
into blankness.
Richard of York Gained Battle in Vain.
She takes off her shoes and her skirt and gets into bed.