by Lily Graham
I felt Victoria’s hand clutch mine while she cried. I hoped that, like May, I’d done the right thing in telling her my story. Victoria would speak to me about Mark when she was ready.
After some time, I led her through to the guest room, draping May’s soft blanket over her while she slept.
When I closed the door behind me, I didn’t need to look at my watch to know it was 3 a.m.
* * *
I took a seat in my studio. Cold now without the soft knitted blanket May had made at least two decades before when I fell off my bicycle and was rushed to the hospital. Mum had said that May worked at it tirelessly all night. I felt a lump in my throat at the forgotten memory, at thoughts of May and the other women who had been there for me whenever I needed them, whenever Mum couldn’t.
I wasn’t surprised when the postcard began to write, leaving behind just three words that night.
The Thursday Club
‘Mum?’ I asked.
But no new words followed. It was a reproach, I knew. A gentle one, but a reproach nonetheless.
How could I have done what I had to them? It was hard to see them without Mum there, but I shouldn’t have let that stop me. If I was honest with myself, they were one of the biggest reasons I’d wanted to come back to live here in the first place. It wasn’t just Mum I missed. Or sweet, funny May, but all of them: my mum’s dearest friends, who had always been there throughout my childhood. A group of women who taught me the value of friendship, of laughter, and yes, sometimes, whiskey after dark.
The same women who were there for us in our darkest times, when Mum grew ill, and when she was no longer there. With a sinking feeling, I realised that after Mum had left, so had I.
I had been back in Cornwall for months, yet as when Dad had offered me Mum’s writing desk, I’d been avoiding them as well. Or as much as you could in a village of this size. I was polite and friendly when I saw them, but they must have known that I was avoiding them. I never realised how much that may have hurt them. They’d each tried in their own way to welcome me back, but I kept putting them off. I’d tell May I’d come around ‘next week some time’ when I ran into her in the shop, but ‘next week’ never seemed to roll around. I’d tell Flavia when I saw her at The Cloud Arms that ‘we must have dinner one night’, but that night never seemed to come. I made up excuses when they called. More often than not, I visited Terry’s café, Salt, instead of popping into the village bakery where I’d have to see Robyn. I did it to all of them, not understanding why I was doing it really as it hurt either way. Avoiding spending time with them had been a different kind of pain.
I’d been a coward, simple as that.
The truth was I loved them, and I shouldn’t have tried to cut them out of my life just because it was likely to bring back sad memories.
As I sat there staring at the words etched in gold and stardust I realised that there were six other ‘mothers’ I’d lost as well, but this time it was of my own doing. I wiped my eyes. My gaze fell on my little wall calendar – it was a special edition of Detective Sergeant Fudge, and I laughed, realising that tomorrow was Thursday.
Well, of course it was. I didn’t believe in coincidences, did I?
I believed in Mum, though.
Chapter 9
The Thursday Club
Every Thursday afternoon for twenty-seven years they’d met. Sometimes the location changed, depending on whose home they had been to last. Sometimes they’d go to the same person’s house every week for close to a year because a new baby had been born.
Sometimes they worked on something new, or the same project lasted decades. Sometimes they all worked together, or split themselves into pairs.
Sometimes a foot would pause on the pedal of a machine, so that it could take a step towards a neighbour to offer a guiding hand, or to sigh in sympathy, or bring a cup of tea, or maybe a wee bit of something stronger, when something needed to be ripped apart and started over, from the quilt they were working on for a child’s nursery, to the marriage that had fallen apart. Sometimes one of their number would be ill, or couldn’t be there that night.
Sometimes when that happened, you’d find them all there at that one’s bedside instead. One of them getting out the Henry and giving the house a quick once-over, wiping down counters and appliances, and applying a healthy dose of lemon-scented disinfectant and common sense (Winifred Jones, it was always Winifred Jones, and you always seemed to say her full name, no one knew why), while another heated up some shepherd’s pie for the family, and yet another tended to the patient – usually that was Mum, she was always the one you wanted at your bedside. The one who knew just how to make you feel better. The one whose kind visage belied the force of will inside. Which made it all the worse when she was the one who grew ill herself. I’ll never forget when they heard that she was sick. Mum kept everything to herself. Always so ready to be the rock for everyone else. Till finally she had no choice but to break the news to them... not only that she was sick, but that she was dying too. That night May held her hand, as she began finally to cry and tell them what she’d been keeping from them for years...
No Henry was switched on that night. No shepherd’s pie warmed up, and no helpful scent of lemon was able to wash it away or still poor Winifred Jones’s shaking fingers, except the other six pairs of hands that reached out for hers.
There had always seven of them. That’s the way it had always been from the start.
Winifred Jones was the eldest, and the founder. The Cloudsea Primary School headmistress, she was the one who suggested that they form a sewing circle when Mum had joined the school as art teacher. There were many reasons they decided to start the group according to Mum, but most of these had been forgotten over the years.
May, Mum’s best friend, maintained that she’d agreed because the dress shop in town made clothes that were designed with little boys’ bodies in mind. Mum said they decided to start the group after a flash flood swept through a neighbouring village, when people were evacuated from their homes and the roads were blocked in and people were freezing in a caravan park that the council had helped set up, so they all made blanket squares until their fingers began to knit by themselves while they slept. Robyn Glass, who ran the bakery in town, joined at around that time too. Inviting her had been May’s brilliant idea, as she brought all the treats. Then Robyn invited Abigail Charming – an eccentric American, who had bought the Senderwood Estate after it was left to wrack and ruin and opened up the tea gardens there. I always suspected that she had made up the name ‘Charming’ but Mum insisted it was her real name. Apparently one night May had given Abigail a bit too much whiskey and dared her to show them her passport... and there it was, along with the fact that she was actually a good ten years older than she claimed.
And then there was Flavia. I adored Flavia, she was wildly beautiful. Employed as the rose expert at Senderwood, and as far as many of the local men were concerned she was as much of an attraction as the rose gardens themselves.
Flavia, however, was only interested in roses, in tending them, growing them, and discovering new hybrids for the garden. There was something so enchanting about Flavia, too, something about her rose-tinted view of the world that brought the sun to our living room whenever she was there, so at odds with the perpetual storm cloud that was nosy, grouchy Winifred Jones. It was bad enough going to the same school where your mum worked, but having the headmistress over every week? There were times when it was deplorable.
‘Still can’t ride a bike yet I see, Ivy-girl,’ she’d remark, pointing out the obvious when I came home with scratches along my knees.
‘Art may be your given talent, but you’ve got to pull your socks up in the maths department, Ivy-girl. Mr Benners said you’re barely keeping up, far too interested in making cartoons for your friends...’
As a result, there were many occasions I’d stay away from home on a Thursday when I was in school. But I always came back to see them... couldn’t seem to help m
yself.
May had given the group the name The Thursday Club, partly because in the beginning they couldn’t quite decide on the purpose of their club. Was it a knitters’ group, who occasionally sewed? Or a sewing circle that sometimes knitted? Were they a supper club, who occasionally crafted? Or a book group that forgot to discuss their books? When they realised that Thursday afternoon was the day they always met, rain or shine, due to old Winifred Jones’s clockwork scheduling, May Bradley hit on the name, and it stuck.
It was always a part of my life growing up, this group of women, who more often than not were found seated around my mother’s living room; somehow the rotation always seemed to have more circles towards Mum’s house, perhaps because, in her own quiet way, she was the centre.
I’d come in to find Mum seated next to her writing desk as always, with the gaggle of women around her. The fold-up table brought in and seven sewing machines humming along to the sound of Mum’s classical music in the background. Though, occasionally, May would get her way and I’d come in to hear them laughing, and working along to the sounds of the Beatles, or the Temptations or maybe the Four Seasons. There was something about sewing, May said, that brought out the sixties girl in her.
Today, I found them at May’s home, like I knew I would.
The door had been open, and I let myself in.
There were always seven. Always.
Except, now there were only six. Six slightly older women, hair somewhat changed, the odd new streak of grey and white, faces a little more lined, and one empty chair: an empty chair meant for Mum. Which made me bite my lip. It was Winifred Jones, of course, who first noticed me. Her ever-busy hands grew still and she simply gasped. For once, she had nothing to say. No ‘Ivy-girl’ admonishment.
Flavia turned towards me, her dark eyes widening.
I heard more than one whisper: ‘She looks just like Alice at her age.’
Then, suddenly Abigail’s bright, Southern drawl cut through the tense mood. ‘Darling girl!’ which never failed to touch my heart.
But it was May who shook her head. ‘Ah, lass! The prodigal daughter returns at long, bloody last.’ Her eyes were sparkling, ‘Shall I pour us all a wee dram and you can tell us all about it? Sure we’re all dying to know...’
I gave them a watery smile. ‘Go on then.’
So she did.
And I took a seat, realising that maybe... just maybe the empty seat was actually meant for me.
* * *
Later that evening, I found the little blanket folded on the end of the spare room, along with a note, saying simply:
Ivy,
Thanks for the words. I needed them.
Smudge
P.S. Beware The Terrorist...
Ominous words indeed.
* * *
The studio was lit when I entered. Lit with that strange light, of stardust and moonshine. A light that would now forever be associated with Mum in my mind.
She was waiting for me.
During the day, I always tried my best not to race through it, not to wish the time away; to somehow live through each day, but it was hopeless.
All I could think about was 3 a.m: getting into the studio and speaking with Mum.
When she was there, and the postcard began to glow, and write, call it fatigue or wonder, or simply magic, with my mind in an almost dream-like state, perhaps due to the early hour, and I was able to just let it be. Let it be enchanted and strange and fantastical.
Later, of course, in the ordinariness of the day, paying bills, scooping up after the dog, and mucking out the chicken coop, it was hard to imagine this time existed at all. That I hadn’t, in fact, dreamt it. But I hadn’t, and somehow, in some way, it was real.
I’d like to say that every night Mum could speak to me as if we existed in some time-lapse, that the postcard served like a form of telephonic exchange between my world and hers, that we could speak about anything that I desired, but it didn’t always work that way.
Sometimes she didn’t or couldn’t respond to my questions and I would have to manage my frustration. Frustration that I had no right to feel. Not when I had this. Because most of the time what she had to say was so much more than what I wanted, it was somehow what I needed to hear.
Though, of course, I didn’t always know it.
That night, the postcard only wrote once. I hated it when that happened. To wait all day for our exchange, only to feel like our precious sand in the hourglass was metered out grain by grain. I waited, my breath tight in my throat. But it stayed the same.
I didn’t know exactly why she wrote what she did.
Her words, etched in moonshine and silver, glowed bright, the words slowly, ever so slowly, filling the postcard.
Stitch by stitch
I didn’t know why she said it but I knew what it meant.
It was a squaring of shoulders; a testing of mettle. Most of all, it was a warning.
Chapter 10
Stitch by Stitch
There is a saying amongst the members of The Thursday Club that you don’t get to the end because every stitch is perfect. You get there because of the one that came before it and how you proceed from there. You get there by going stitch by stitch.
The truth is in life, as in sewing, things fall apart; it’s how you deal with it that counts.
Since I was a little girl, I’d been hearing one of my mum’s old sewing club members tell me that same sage advice whenever I needed it.
When I was learning how to ride a bicycle and came inside with scraped knees, and an exhausted dad who’d been running behind me up and down the street, to launch myself in a flood of tears into my mum’s arms, while I wailed that at age seven I was a hopeless failure, that I’d never get it. I’d be twelve and I still wouldn’t get it. Being in the double digits and not knowing how to ride a bicycle seemed to me back then the worst thing that could happen in the history of the world.
Mum had looked at me with her kind eyes, lifted a sewing needle and said, ‘Ivy, darling, it’s stitch by stitch, my girl, that’s how you’ll get there. Now go on then, dry your eyes.’
And they’d all nodded, while Mum gave me a gentle shove to get going, followed by my reluctant father, who gave them a tired smile, his long legs no doubt aching from riding the little pink bike I’d made him get on time and again so he could prove to me just how ‘easy’ it was.
Robyn, the baker, told me the same thing, when a year later Catherine and I had our first real fight, when she admitted that her aversion to cats stretched even to Fat Albert. Instead of acknowledging her bravery in being honest with me, I was sure this was the end of our friendship. How could I continue to be friends with someone who couldn’t see the many delights that was Fat Albert, chief of cats, the most lovable of creatures, whom I was sure proved the exception to every non-cat-loving rule? Which is what I told The Thursday Club with crossed arms, while ignoring poor Catherine’s pleading knocks on the door outside.
Robyn, herself a cat lady, and proud of it, said, ‘Ivy, everyone is entitled to their opinions. You can’t force someone to agree with you, it’s how you get around that difference that makes the friendship richer as a result. It’s like this stitch right here,’ she said, lifting up a bright orange swathe of knitted yarn, with a vividly interesting pattern, that was no doubt intended for Hastings, or Morpeth, one of her many tabby cats. ‘It was meant to be a loop stitch, like in the pattern, but I made a mistake and it turned into a knit stitch, so I kept it going, and it’s a much better piece as a result. You’ll see, the same thing will happen with your friendship. Things start to get really interesting when you trust each other enough with the truth.’
‘Even rroses are made more bea-uti-ful, when they turn out to be not as they seem,’ said the beautiful Flavia in her molten Italian voice, like rich chocolate gelato. ‘We always think of rroses as being perfect ... but they are not always – zey only get zere because of the care and attention we give zem,’ she said, rolling each r.
‘Stitch by stitch,’ agreed Winifred Jones, the grouchy headmistress, who clacked her needles together fiercely in response.
The circle bopped their heads in agreement. Being a wilful child, though, it had taken me a few weeks to see what they meant. That, and the fact that Catherine cornered me at school and told me that actually she was wrong, Fat Albert was the exception to the rule. She was lying, of course. We both knew it, but I did love her for it.
Throughout the years their motto had helped me, and when I faced a life without Mum, I would think: Stitch by stitch, which was sometimes translated to: Minute by minute, hour by hour.
When we failed to conceive. When we finally did, only to miscarry, twice. Somehow, I’d think: Stitch by stitch, and somehow, beyond the dark abyss that seemed ready to swallow me whole, I’d find my way to the other side.
I couldn’t help but wonder just what Mum had meant by sending me this message now; what did I need to face, what more could I possibly face?
I’d just finished up the latest drawings of Mr Tibbles when the phone rang. Not realising that I would need Mum’s words more than ever after the call.
Somehow, despite the fact that it was a number I didn’t recognise, a part of me knew: Genevieve.
I didn’t need Victoria’s warning to know that The Terrorist wouldn’t stop trying to get us to do things her way – such as visiting that specialist –even though we’d asked her to.
She’d sent the news clipping from the Telegraph the other day, the one that outlined the fertility specialist, Marcus Labuscagne’s, technique, with a note saying that if I wanted to change my mind, she’d set up the appointment for me.
I had decided to ignore it, which perhaps wasn’t the best plan.
A few days later, I’d gotten a call from the specialist, Dr Labuscagne himself, who no doubt had been paid a small fortune to give me his sales pitch, which lasted for forty-five minutes to the dot, obviously making sure he got his full money’s worth despite my many, many protestations, which went something like this: