Things to Make and Mend (18 page)

Poor Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned at Holyrood Palace, half a mile and five centuries away. A Frenchwoman surrounded by Scots, a woman who embroidered her own flame-red petticoats just before going to the scaffold. I wonder what Mary, Queen of Scots would think of Edinburgh now; of the pavements and the clowns and the trendy wine bars.

‘There’s quite a lot of French names in Edinburgh aren’t there?’ I observe to Kenneth, flicking through the index of my
A-to
-Z.
‘Look – there’s a Beauchamp Grove, a Bellevue Crescent, a Cluny Place, a –’

‘There’s also a whole lot of Buckstones, Burdiehouses and Burnheads,’ says Kenneth, peering over my shoulder.

‘I was just
pointing out
the connections. The auld alliance and everything. I mean, what’s the link with Cluny?’

I think that taxi accident had a strange effect on my memory. My short-term memory has been shunted sideways by my long-term memory. More and more, I seem to remember things from twenty, thirty years ago. It is peculiar. This morning, for instance, while waiting for Kenneth in the hotel lobby, I looked down at the Visitor book on the reception desk and was instantly reminded of the autograph books we used to have at school. We used to write those little rhymes in them:

Schoolgirls don’t keep autograph books any more, I suppose. We were a lot more naive then. Nowadays girls have i-Pods and phones with built-in cameras.

Over breakfast I mention the autograph books to Kenneth. ‘Did you ever keep one?’ I ask.

‘Not something boys did.’

‘No. I suppose it wouldn’t be.’

My autograph book was cream-coloured, I remember,
hardback,
with a sticker of a smiling snail on it.

We are sitting – rather late because we were both tired this morning and somewhat down – on either side of a small,
white-clothed
table in the hotel’s dining room. A young couple at a table near ours are trying to get their small son to eat porridge from a teaspoon.

‘In it goes,’ the young mother says as the boy turns his head. ‘Yum yum!’

It makes me want to get up and grab the small son: grab that part of my life again.

‘If all the boys lived under the sea,’ I say, ‘what a good swimmer Rowena would be.’

‘Sorry?’

‘One of those things people used to write in autograph books.’

Kenneth picks up his glass and takes a sip of orange juice. ‘What’s  up?’ he asks.

‘You know what’s up.’

His eyes are sympathetic. But he is also getting on with his morning. He is, for instance, eating French toast with chocolate spread while he has the chance. A pragmatist. I think of my son. I think of his father, a rather dreamy boy I slept with twenty-eight years ago. I wonder whether to eat an egg. But I am not hungry. I
can’t stop thinking of my son and the time before my son. Of those autograph books. 

The cloth on the breakfast table reminds me of the
embroidered
one I was given by my French exchange-family when I was fifteen – which reminds me again of Sally Tuttle. A part of me feels almost dizzy when I think of how much there is, how many people there are, to remember.

‘D’you know, I think that accident I had did something to my memory,’ I say, picking up my teaspoon to crack my boiled egg. ‘I seem to remember so much these days, from when I was in my teens.’

‘Maybe you’re getting old,’ says Kenneth.

‘Well, thanks.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he says, smiling. ‘Anyway, you had a kind of eventful adolescence, didn’t you?’

‘In some ways. In other ways it was totally static.’

I begin to peel the shell from my egg.

‘You’ll be OK,’ Kenneth says. ‘This is a difficult time. With Joe leaving. We’re all moving into the next phase.’

‘Does life always have to be in phases? In chunks? As if it’s a big cake or something? And what are we supposed to do in the next phase?’

‘Life as a cake,’ Kenneth muses.

Then he eats another piece of chocolate-covered toast. The thing about Kenneth, the thing I love almost more than
anything
else about him, is his grip on reality.

I can remember what the Number One song was the day Sally Tuttle and I began to make our blousons in Needlework. It was ‘Message in a Bottle’. The Police were big that year. Why should that come back to me now, after nearly thirty years? Or the ridiculous word ‘blouson’ – and the way it made us laugh! Laughing as we pinned the pattern (size 10/12) to the material; removing the thin paper template from the envelope, sewing white tailor’s tacks through the large black dots at shoulders, neckline and zip-fastener opening.

Two schoolgirls at their sewing desks.

Sally Tuttle and Rowena Cresswell.

Rowena Cresswell and Sally Tuttle.

We were very close. Like sisters.

And now I begin to remember the daily events in our lives. The way we used to congregate with the other girls around St Hilary’s big beige vending machine (it offered tomato soup, hot chocolate, coffee, tea and milk). The places where we sat: on the wall outside the Chemistry block, on the under-stuffed green armchairs in the Resource Area. The walks, in rain and sunshine, up the school drive.

Then there were the conversations about that boy Sally was in love with – Colin. Colin Rafferty. A young man, really, rather than a boy. And quite unsavoury, actually. Up to no good. But handsome. I recall that he had worked in advertising. He and Sally used to slope off together, up to London. I was so jealous. And I missed her, sitting beside her empty chair in class. I worried about her. Her absence always seemed so shocking –
Sally was a good girl!
– and I never knew what to say to her when she
reappeared
the next day.

‘You’re not eating much,’ Kenneth observes.

‘Not very hungry.’

‘You should eat. It’ll make you feel better.’

‘Hmm.’

I watch the young couple beside us hoist themselves up from their table, pick up their belongings – their baby-changing bag, their portable, clip-on high-chair, their plastic bags, their wipes, their baby – and leave the room.

‘Cute kid,’ Kenneth says.

My mother would always be late back from her shift at the
canteen.
I remember standing without Sally at the school gates,
feeling
nauseous and terrified and gazing at the incomprehensible graffiti. I gazed at that graffiti every day, as if it might one day change into something else, a coherent sentence.

Clare is a sexy fish.

Much sexier than Laura.

Nothing would change now. Or rather, everything would. My pregnant state would remain, but my life would become
unrecognisable.

My mother’s car always appeared slowly. Slowly it rounded the corner. A small blue Honda. I watched as my mother
carefully
changed gear and reversed the car compactly into the school drop-off bay. I would attempt a smile, lean forward, feel sick and open the door.

‘Hello,’ my mother said. She didn’t listen to music, the way a lot of mothers did in their cars. It was always completely silent in our car.

‘Hi,’ I replied, getting in and closing the door.

‘No Sally today?’

‘No.’

The smell of chamois leather made me want to throw up.
I am going to have to tell her,
I thought, looking down at the terrifying, incipient bulge beneath my waistband. (I had already, somehow, told Mark Malone: I had told him on the phone, and the only
thing he had said, after about five minutes, was ‘Oh Jesus.’ We hardly even knew each other. At the school bus stop in the
mornings
I used to see him glance stealthily across at my stomach as he stood with his gawky, scientific friends. He had exactly the same horrified expression as me, and I had almost felt sorry for him.)

‘How are you? How was school?’ my mother used to ask,
staring
through the windscreen. She had had her own secrets by then; something she did not want to reveal herself.

‘OK,’ I replied.

Every day, I wished I could tell her how things really were.

Joe was given a ticket on the day he was born. Like a kind of bus pass. It was blue, blue for a boy, and tied around his ankle: Baby Cresswell. I remember the sense of unreality – that I had had a baby, and that I had not died. I had thought the last thing I was going to see on earth was the maternity suite: those
crookedly-hanging
formica cupboard doors, the hoover-like gas-and-air pipe, that picture on the wall: a cheery vase of chrysanthemums.

‘You’re not going to die, Poppet,’ the midwife soothed (her name, I recall, was Wendy Bridges). ‘You are going to have a beautiful baby.’

I gave birth on my own, at the age of fifteen and ten months. I did not die. Wendy Bridges was right.

‘Good girl,’ Wendy Bridges told me. ‘You’re doing brilliantly. One more big push now.’

And I pushed and then I lay there, still alive. Somebody handed me a thin, warm, oddly heavy baby.

‘Is it supposed to look like that?’ I asked.

Outside the window I could see pink cherry blossom, and a blackbird sitting on a twig. I looked into my baby’s peculiar eyes.

And in that instant, I forgave them:

I forgave my baby.

I forgave Mark Malone.

I forgave my mother.

But the person I never quite forgave was Sally Tuttle.

At a quarter to ten a small gang of waitresses enters the breakfast room and begins, noisily, to tidy up. One of them clears the tables, another goes round with a highly fragranced spray, a third, her young face set in a world-weary expression, wheels the
enormous,
stainless-steel egg-poacher back into the kitchens.
Sometimes
it seems extraordinary to me, that such things as wheeled egg-poachers exist.

‘Shall we go?’ I say to Kenneth.

‘Yes,’ he replies, and we get up.

Kenneth has eaten six French toasts with chocolate spread.

I have eaten a third of a boiled egg.

She sleeps badly, waking up three times in the night to stare at the dull drape of the curtains. She falls asleep at 5.30 with a headache. The noise of seagulls wakes her again at seven.

She pushes back the duvet and regards the sticking-out bone of her left big toe: an inheritance from her mother. She has feet just like her mother’s.
Probably,
she thinks,
Pearl will end up with feet like mine too.
It does not seem fair. She feels obscurely guilty about her feet.

Her feet. Her hair. Her mannerisms.

Today is the day when she will have to describe her love of satin stitch, needle-weaving and overcast bars. People will expect her to know things. She doesn’t know how she is going to get through it.

While waiting for her
Out of Eden
-scented bath to run, she gets Martha and Mary out of their portfolio, opens the little
plastic
box of sequins and stitches four silver ones into the grass – dewdrops in the lawn.

‘But of course, your use of sequins …’ she imagines someone saying, some Interested Party, after her talk. ‘I read about it in
Embroidery Times.
Is that something you’ve always done? Applied sequins to your work?’

‘When I’m in the mood,’ she will reply, grumpily. ‘I don’t know why everyone is making such a fuss about the damned sequins.’

Nora and Jeremy will be in the background somewhere,
gazing
at each other. Sally’s voice, which she will hope to give a light, laughing inflection, will sound flat and accusing. And the Interested
Party will look at her. ‘I was only asking,’ they will say, and shortly after this they will wander away.

Her heart is jumping now. She needs to talk to someone who knows her.

She presses the little ‘On’ button on her phone and dials John’s number. But there is no answer. He is probably sleeping or welding. So she phones Pearl’s mobile.

A boy’s voice answers.

‘Good morning. World of Leather customer services. How may I help you?’

His voice is falsely nasal, irritatingly adolescent.

‘Who’s that?’ Sally says. ‘Is this –?’

Then she hears Pearl’s voice in the distance. Something that sounds like ‘Oh my God.’

There is a scuffling noise, giggling, then Pearl’s voice on the line.

‘Who was that?’ Sally asks, astonished.

‘Oh. Just … a friend.’

‘A friend?’

In the background, Sally can hear the boy speaking in his annoying voice again, trying to put Pearl off her conversation. A male tactic as old as the hills.
Don’t fall for it, don’t fall for it.

Pearl sounds flustered. ‘He’s just a bloke from school,’ she says, her voice bright and strained. ‘We, like, walked in together? From the station?’

‘But it’s nearly half past nine. Hasn’t school started?’

‘Yes. But it’s just … We’re just in a café for a bit. We’re sitting in a café. It’s just …’

And there is, now she listens, a clink of cutlery in the
background,
the murmur of people in calm conversation.

‘I see,’ Sally says, breathing in, because she suddenly feels short of breath. She wonders which café they are in. The Deep Sea? The Me-n-U? Who is this boy?

‘So. Are you on your way in now? If I phoned in say, twenty minutes, would you be at school? Or would you still just be
sitting
in a café?’

There is a pause. ‘Yes. We should be there by then.’

How admirable, in retrospect, her mother’s maternal skills were. How intuitive. ‘I’ll give you a ring tonight then, at Dad’s,’ Sally says, ‘and we can have a proper chat.’

‘Yes,’ says Pearl.

‘Fine.’

The boy continues to drone on unimpressively. Sally imagines someone angular, shoving French fries into his mouth.

‘I’ll phone you later then.’

‘OK.’

‘Pearl?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is he … your age? He’s not –’

Pearl sighs. Sally has never told her anything about Colin
Rafferty,
nothing at all, but she detects a note of accusation in her voice. ‘Yes, mother,’ Pearl says.

‘Well,’ she replies, and she finds herself blushing at her own double-standards. ‘Good.’

The boy’s voice chunters on, and before Pearl can say
goodbye
the phone is switched off.

She sits on the bed with the little phone in her hand. She feels as if she has just lost some complicated argument. She finds that she is shivering slightly, and wraps her dressing gown more closely around her. She senses the passing of time, gathering momentum like machine-worked running-stitch.

She thinks:
I shouldn’t have left her.

How would it be, she wonders, if she left the conference, got on a plane and flew back home to her daughter, to face
whatever
she is up to. But it is the kind of over-reaction she always makes.

‘I will go downstairs,’ she thinks, closing her eyes. ‘I will go downstairs and eat croissants with the other embroiderers.’

The green numbers on the radio clock say 9.28.

Sally has her bath, changes into her
embroidery expert
attire (a blouse with smocking detail, a long, flared skirt, hoop earrings), regrets her choice (
I look like bloody Gypsy Rose Lee
), picks up her yellow conference folder, her embroidery and her handbag and leaves the room. She stalks along the dimly-lit corridors, enters the lift, presses the button that says Press to Travel. She imagines the lift doors opening and herself emerging miraculously in Helsinki or the Dominican Republic.

‘Good morning,’ says the man with slicked-back hair at
reception.

‘Good morning.’

She gives him one of her smiles and makes her way to the
Conference
Suite, and the provision of breakfast.

But she has missed breakfast! She can hardly believe it: it is only nine forty-five but the embroiderers have descended upon the croissants and the cereal like the wolf on the fold. There are just baskets full of crumbs and smeared plates. Still, there may be time for coffee and a couple of biscuits, she is not too – but no, there go the waitresses, carrying away the coffee urns and the
little
biscuit trays. Sally’s stomach rumbles sadly as she watches it all disappear through the swing doors. And now that feeling returns: that incomprehension as to why she is there. She continues towards the back of the conference room, which is beginning to fill now with Embroiderers’ Guild people, amateur
needle-workers
and French historians. What a curious combination. The majority are women, but there are a few men in suits, dotted about like needles in a haystack. She notices Jeremy Bowes, entrancing a new woman by the water dispenser, and feels a
sudden
rush of panic.

Green canvas-backed chairs are lined up in rows in front of the speakers’ desk. And there is her desk, with her name pinned to it.
MS SALLY TUTTLE, SPEAKER.
Oh Jesus, a
speaker
! With her nervy accent! Her nothing-to-say! Her exemplary bundle of threads! And there is the microphone, and the vase of flowers and the upended water glasses. It reminds her of end-of-term assemblies at St Hilary’s, thirty years ago, with all its dull dignitaries behind the chrysanthemums, handing out prizes. She thinks of Miss Gordon, the deputy head. She wants to run.

‘Hello!’ says a young woman, approaching her. She has a sort of Alice band in her hair, and a wide, amiable face. A name-badge pinned to her jumper says
AMBER
. It seems that only the guest speakers are allowed surnames.

‘Can I help you?’ says Amber.

‘I was just … I’m speaking later on. If I can summon up the –’

‘Are you Sally Tuttle?’

‘Yes, I –’

‘Sally! Excellent! We were worrying that you might have got lost.’

‘Yes, sorry I missed the registration. And the breakfast. I
actually
–’

‘It doesn’t matter. You’re here now.’

‘Yes, I –’

‘Did you arrive late?’

‘No, I –’

‘Anyway, here’s your name badge,’ Amber says, locating a white laminated label on a bench and handing it to Sally. The pin pricks her finger. ‘Ouch, ouch,’ she says, automatically, the way she does when she is sewing with the girls in the shop.

‘Oops. Sorry.’ Amber pauses. ‘Occupational hazard, isn’t it? We’re all Sleeping Beauties, aren’t we?’

‘I suppose we –’

‘So. Come and meet some people.’

‘Right,’ Sally replies, wondering if it is Amber’s mission in life to stick pins in people and interrupt.

‘We were just having an interesting chat,’ Amber says over her shoulder as she hurries forth, ‘about sequins. I’m mad on sequins. How about you?’

Sally says ‘Pretty much everything I do is covered in sequins.’

‘Ha ha ha,’ Amber says, as if she has made a tremendous joke. ‘I can see we’re going to be entertained this morning.’

That was not meant to be funny,
Sally thinks. She looks out through the big shiny window of the hotel. The sky is immense, a huge, Scottish sky, a kind of luminous grey, with seagulls
gliding
around it. She thinks of her daughter in East Grinstead. She looks at the clock above the reception desk.

‘So. This is Sally Tuttle,’ Amber is telling a small group of Embroiderers’ Guild women who have all stopped talking and are smiling at Sally: polite, mature, interested, expectant. They all look as if they have been embroidering for most of their lives. They probably all know the precise difference between a French knot and a four-legged knot.
And they expect me to say something wise!

‘Sally’s a sequin fan,’ says Amber.

But I’m not a professional,
Sally wants to shout.
I just embroider because I like embroidering.

And she is about to say something about sequins, something, anything, to stop them staring at her, when there is a sudden, abrupt, tap on her shoulder.
How rude!
She turns.

‘Well hello there, Sally Tuttle!,’ a woman booms. A
middle-aged
woman, glamorous in cashmere, her brown hair expensively styled and coloured. There is a scent emanating from her, a warm, rather wistful scent akin to Chanel No. 5. Instantly Sally recognises her – her eyes and her voice and her stance – but she cannot comprehend why.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ the woman asks, delighted.

‘I do,’ Sally says, ‘but I’m sorry, I can’t quite –’

‘Mary Button!’ the woman beams. ‘Although, of course, you used to know me as Miss Button. Actually, I’m not a Miss or a
Button
any more …’ And now she is turning, smiling, at the little group of Embroiderers’ Guild members, assuming her teacher’s role.

‘I was the famous Sally Tuttle’s Needlework teacher,’ she says.

Sally stands, transfixed. Miss Button.

‘Hardly famous …’ she begins, her heart blanching.

But Miss Button interrupts. ‘I was wondering if you might be here actually, Sally. Having read about you in the papers.’

Sally feels herself blushing. She feels she might as well be standing there in her school uniform. The best part of three decades stretches and breaks, like a dividing cell.

Miss Button says, ‘Sally used to be my star pupil.’

‘Really?’ someone replies.

‘Yes. There was this sort of Damascene conversion, wasn’t there, Sally? That winter. Do you remember? You’d been making a pig’s breakfast of that blouse all autumn, and then you suddenly took off!’

‘Hmm,’ Sally replies, hot-faced, thinking of that blouson (
very easy / très facile
) and watching Miss Button’s lipsticked mouth.
She is still pretty,
she is thinking.
Lines on her forehead and around her eyes now, of course, but still she has that neat nose and lipsticked mouth
…

Miss Button still favours shades of caramel: a caramel
roll-neck
sweater and a caramel checked skirt. And her clothes still seem to resist evidence of normal life: cat hairs, creases, small marks on the cuffs. Some people have that ability. There always
did
seem to be an impenetrable shield around her, protecting her from grottiness …

‘… and of course I was only twenty-four myself at the time,’ Miss Button is saying, ‘and embroiled in this
terribly earnest
relationship with a quite inappropriate young copy-writer …’

And she pauses slightly, to glance at Sally. Sally looks back at her. Miss Button smiles. And Sally is aware of something, some intangible thing, some transgression made years ago –
insubstantial,
untouchable, like a fine fabric floating just out of reach.

‘Oh yes, I was quite the floozy – isn’t it funny how teenage girls always think their teachers are
desperately ancient
and respectable?’ Miss Button beams. She holds Sally’s gaze for a moment, infinitesimally pleased.

‘And, anyway,’ she continues, ‘just as I was
really
beginning to despair that Sally would ever finish this
awful blouson
…’

Sally stands and listens, time suddenly truncated, like a
folding
telescope. A
‘quite inappropriate young copy-writer.
’ Miss Button’s eyes are still a deep, treacherous brown.

‘But those blousons I made you all sew!’ she is saying now. ‘Those blousons, Sally! Weren’t they just awful?’

Sally opens her mouth but no word emerges. She thinks of that blouson (
very easy / très facile
), that ridiculous blouson of Rowena’s at the foot of Colin Rafferty’s bed.

Miss Button is standing very close. ‘Do you know,’ she
half-whispers,
‘I actually used to take some of them home with me in the evenings to unpick! When I first started at that awful school. I used to try and sort out the ones that had gone completely
pear-shaped.
Wasn’t that self-sacrificing of me!’

The other embroiderers have gone quiet, watching Sally and Miss Button. They stand, clutching their bags and empty coffee cups.

‘I used to macramé things,’ one woman says eventually into the silence. ‘I had all these macraméd owls …’