Chapter 19
“Are you busy on Friday?” Sarah asked. “I’m going to look at lace for my wedding dress.”
It was the first time they had spoken since the chance encounter in Kidlington, and Olivia was surprised how pleased she was to hear Sarah’s voice, and how flattered by the invitation, too. She’d imagined Sarah would have dozens of friends more suitable for such an expedition: practical, decisive friends with a working knowledge of fabrics.
“I’m not much good on lace,” she said, “but why not? Where are you going?”
“There’s a shop on the way to Cheltenham. I could pick you up.” At the other end of the phone Sarah hesitated. “It sounds beautiful, the shop, the lace. It should be fun.”
The hesitation was touching too, Olivia thought. Perhaps a bit of Sarah’s company would be good for her. Perhaps she could do with some wholesome, straightforward activities like choosing lace.
Friday was wet, a day of low skies. There was a lot of traffic on the roads, as though everyone was trying to get away from the rain.
“I’m making the dress,” Sarah explained, as they crawled along the A40 towards Burford. “I know it’s mad. I’d be better off with a dressmaker who knew how to flatter my figure, but I’ve always wanted to make my own wedding dress. Remember Mrs Darnley in Home Economics, saying if we practised enough we could do tiny, dainty buttonholes like the ones on Princess Diana’s wedding dress?”
Princess Diana, thought Olivia. That dated them. “I hated Mrs Darnley,” she said.
Sarah laughed. “You were always off doing music. You never got any better at sewing.” They reached a section of dual carriageway and Sarah’s MG put on an effortless spurt of speed to overtake the lorry they’d been trailing for five miles. Olivia had been surprised by the car, but she had to admit it was fun riding in something designed for pleasure rather than practicality.
“What happened to your music, anyway?” Sarah asked. “Do you still play?”
“I teach,” Olivia said. “I practise barely enough to keep my fingers moving, these days.”
“That’s a shame. You used to play so beautifully.”
Olivia thought of her irascible teacher in Edinburgh with his regime of technical exercises, and the professor of piano at the Royal College of Music who’d encouraged her to specialise in the early Romantics. Early romantic was about it, she thought.
“When the boys were first born I imagined peaceful hours at the piano, lulling babies to sleep with Chopin nocturnes,” she said. “But it didn’t work out like that. They tolerated me playing nursery rhymes, but only if they could sit on my knee, and even then they screamed for the same tunes over and over again.” She used to blame Robert for their musical taste; it had become an in-joke.
“Ungrateful brutes,” said Sarah.
Olivia glanced sideways at her, remembering the sight of the boys sprawled in the TV room, and Sarah’s smiling incomprehension. Did Sarah want children? Olivia imagined her with one of those buggy-to-car contraptions, a tiny creature strapped deep inside. For some reason the idea filled her with gloom.
Sarah pulled in behind a sluggish Mini with a little click of annoyance.
“How’s your mother?” she asked.
“Busy,” said Olivia.
“That’s good.”
“She’s turned herself into an expert on old buildings. Not exactly the hands-on Granny. Robert’s mother sees more of them; she comes down from Scotland for a week at a time.”
There was silence for a moment. Olivia couldn’t remember what had happened to Sarah’s parents, whether she was supposed to know. After a little while she said: “Yours?”
“My mother’s dead,” Sarah replied. “Twelve years ago, now.” She flushed, and lifted a hand from the steering wheel to push her fringe back from her forehead. “I found her wedding dress last time I went home to see my father, tucked away in a box on the top shelf of her wardrobe. Such a beautiful dress. It wouldn’t fit me in a million years.”
Olivia looked at her, the competent shoulders clad in red lambswool, and couldn’t think what to say. She didn’t remember Sarah and her mother being especially close. She didn’t remember much at all about Sarah’s mother, in fact – a slightly austere figure, perhaps, despite her solid Englishness? Intent but distant, on public occasions, and Sarah always anxious to please her.
“She was so elegant,” Sarah said. “Do you remember? My brother and I were the wrong way round. He was delicate and winsome, with long lashes like some romantic poet. I was plain and plump, no good at all for dressing up.”
“Rubbish,” said Olivia, but Sarah shook her head.
“She always wanted to see me married,” she said. Olivia waited for her to say more, but she didn’t.
They slowed for a roundabout, then accelerated away again. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still heavy, clouds fissured with streaks of sharp blue like fault lines.
“You shouldn’t feel badly about enjoying it,” Olivia said. “The wedding.”
Sarah laughed, a sudden chirp that was surprising in so small a space, followed by a string of sounds that might have been laughter or something quite different. For a moment Olivia thought Sarah might be going to cry, but the noise stopped as abruptly as it had started.
“I’m doing my best,” she said. There was a deep flush along her jawline, but otherwise she looked entirely composed. “Believe me, I’m doing my best.”
A moment later, she swung the MG off the road and into a parking area in front of a converted barn that housed a row of artisan shops.
“Here we are; it’s at the end of this barn thing.”
The shop was smaller than Olivia had expected, a dark little room with delicate pieces of lace laid out in glass-topped cabinets. On the walls were framed engravings – tiny and intricate themselves – of lace-makers at work in cramped Victorian cottages.
Sarah rang the brass bell that stood on the counter at the back, and Olivia drifted towards the other side of the room. Like being a child, she thought, slipping out of your mother’s shadow once you were inside a shop. She felt a little uneasy, now, about this outing. She hardly knew Sarah, she thought; she had no idea what had happened to her in the last twenty-five years. It was all very well thinking you could pick up the thread of a friendship and find nothing substantially changed, but she and Sarah hadn’t really been friends to start with.
But at least it was only a morning. And the shop was fascinating: there was something strange and rarified about the atmosphere, as though the silence was made up of a myriad tiny breaths, held in suspense so as not to disturb the stillness. As her eyes adjusted to the light, Olivia gazed at the samples on display with awe. Had people really made these tiny stitches and minuscule knots? They looked like a blend of cobweb and snowflake, too perfect for human handiwork. Even the names sounded magical: Honiton, Mechlin, Valenciennes; tambours, flounces and lappets.
“I need ivory,” she heard Sarah saying, “not cream.”
Olivia glanced across to see her handling the lace with an assurance she couldn’t help admiring.
“That length of Honiton there,” said the assistant, a stout, grey-haired woman wearing a white blouse with an elaborate collar, “we’ve a veil in a very similar pattern if you wanted to match it.”
She opened a door at the back of the shop. Sarah turned to Olivia with a smile, and they followed the woman through into another room where wedding veils and christening gowns trailed from padded hangers. The assistant moved among them, looking for the one she wanted, then lifted down a length of lace and held it out to Sarah. The design looked different on a piece this size; the swirl of flowers and leaves was clearly discernible, the twists of the thread invisible. Patterns of light and shade, Olivia thought. She had a sudden urge to dress up; to drape herself in fairy cloth, like a little girl.
“Let me see it on you,” Sarah said, as though she’d read Olivia’s mind.
Olivia’s own wedding had been low-key, her dress
an off-the-peg purchase from John Lewis and the reception demure. One branch of Robert’s family was teetotal Presbyterian. Olivia hadn’t minded the limitations on drinking and dancing: she’d been more concerned to get married than to have a wedding to remember. Whatever you did it was only one day, she’d thought, lasting no longer than any other. Here and then gone. But now, twirling in slow motion in front of the mirror, her dark hair edged with tiny flowers, she understood Sarah’s excitement. The thrill of transformation; the urge to be a princess for a day.
“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “You try it.”
They had lunch, afterwards, in a tea shop in Burford, as antique in its way as the lace shop. Croque monsieur and omelettes; waitresses well over sixty, wearing white aprons.
“It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” Sarah asked. “I hope you’re glad you came.”
“Yes.” She was glad, Olivia realised; glad on several counts. The morning had been intriguing. And the lace had impressed itself on her mind, inducing a strange dreaminess, so that her thoughts seemed to form patterns rather than words. She imagined the way it would imprint its design into soft clay, leaving a negative image as intricate as the positive. Two sides of the same thing, she thought, the outward appearance and its inward reflection.
“It’s odd to think it would be nothing without the holes,” she said. “The lace. It’s defined by what isn’t there, by the gaps as much as the threads.”
“Like life,” Sarah said.
Olivia stared at her, and she blushed.
“Exactly,” Olivia said. “The choices you don’t make.”
“Presence and absence,” Sarah ventured.
Olivia nodded slowly. “Maybe that’s all life is,” she said, “empty spaces woven together. A construct of opposites; all those things that can’t exist without each other. Past and future, good and bad. Maybe they’d cancel each other out if you didn’t fix them in place with a few well-placed knots.” Olivia sat back a little. “Do you ever have the feeling that if you pulled one thread, the whole thing would dissolve?”
Sarah took a sip from her water glass before speaking. “But there can’t be much room in your life for empty space,” she said. “Your sons, your marriage, your teaching – “ She looked at Olivia, her expression inscrutable.
In that moment Olivia felt an overwhelming sense of affection, and of gratitude, and of pity. She smiled, and reached for a piece of the buttered bread that was stacked in a basket between them. “Don’t take any notice of me,” she said. “I have these peculiar ideas sometimes.”
“Not peculiar,” Sarah said. “Interesting.”
“Maybe.” Olivia felt light-hearted now, as though some pressure had been released inside her. She felt like dropping the subject, but she could see that Sarah was still thinking about what she’d said.
“There is something extraordinary about lace,” Sarah said. “All those hours of work in a frill.”
“A throwaway detail,” Olivia agreed. “A veil to cover your face when you get married. There’s a symbolic gesture if ever there was one.”
Sarah frowned. The wrong thing to say, Olivia realised. The wrong throwaway detail.
“Don’t you think symbolic gestures matter?” Sarah asked. “Isn’t that exactly how we weave our lives out of – out of nothing, if you like? How we stop them being nothing? I sometimes think …”
The oldest of the waitresses banged through the door from the kitchen, carrying two plates. Two omelettes, liberally sprinkled with cress, were set down in front of Olivia and Sarah with a grunt of encouragement.
“Go on,” said Olivia, when the waitress disappeared again, but Sarah shrugged, shook her head lightly. Looking at her, Olivia wondered suddenly whether Sarah’s determination, the indomitable momentum of the wedding preparations, was designed as much as anything to carry Sarah herself along.
“Does it feel odd, getting married now?” she asked. “When you’ve been used to a different kind of life?”
“It’s what I’ve wanted,” Sarah said. “I feel very fortunate to be given the chance.”
“But?”
But Sarah just smiled. The chink that had opened up for a moment had closed again, Olivia saw. She couldn’t blame Sarah. Much better to let the elaborate framework of life be what it was: an appealing fiction, constructed knot by laborious knot.
Chapter 20
Olivia had a plan for tonight. Robert was flying to Germany in the morning, and she’d decided to feed the boys early so they could have supper alone: a rare event, these days. People said you had more time for each other as your children grew up, but Olivia hadn’t noticed that. By the time the boys left home, she thought sometimes, she and Robert would have forgotten how to be alone together.
As she chopped onions for the boys’ spaghetti bolognese, she remembered the first year of their marriage: both of them twenty-three, playing house together in E11. Robert had commuted deep into the City to his grown-up job while Olivia, who only had to go in to the Royal College of Music twice a week, spent most of her time at home, practising on her battered old upright piano. Robert carried the air of the outside world into the tiny flat when he returned, the eddies of grown-up London escaping from his briefcase, shaken out of his hair, and they’d have the whole evening ahead, just the two of them. There were stand-by tickets for plays and concerts, Sunday walks in London parks, and Olivia’s experiments in cooking, hampered by the landlord’s battered pans that they’d never thought to replace. The recipes redeemed or ruined by a last-minute ingredient: lasagne doused with cinnamon on an ill-fated whim.
Olivia didn’t often think about those years. Was that, she wondered now as the water came to the boil, the only time when she’d been properly an adult, that time when she’d thought she was playing at being grown up?
She remembered, then, the day Robert had come home early, his reliable figure blurred by anxiety. Black Monday: the day of the stock market crash. Rumours had spread fast, and Robert’s boss had acted promptly to rationalise his team. There he’d been, home by mid-afternoon, jobless, not knowing what to do with himself. Olivia smiled, remembering. She had taken his clothes off, his Austin Reed suit and striped shirt, and taken him to bed. They’d opened a bottle of champagne from Robert’s Christmas bonus hamper, drawn the curtains against the autumn sunshine, hidden away from the world. He had relied on her, that day, to set things right. Never mind, she’d said; we’re young, we have each other, we can do anything we want. We could go and live on an island. For an afternoon and an evening they’d flown free, far away from the grime and crush of London.
But the next morning there had been a call from the office. No hasty decisions, they’d said; too valuable to the team to lose you that easily. So Robert had put his suit back on, got on the tube and disappeared back to his other life, the one that had paid the mortgage and built up the pension scheme ever since, fostering their progress from Leytonstone to Islington to Oxford and providing all those babygros and football boots, those summer holidays and school trips and new roofs. It hadn’t occurred to Olivia to feel regret, but she saw now that that had been the moment when things were settled, finally, between them. When their course had been set. Her own life had filled out since then, year by year, child by child, but looking back she could envy the simplicity and completeness she’d felt then; the sense of possibility. And the music, every day.
She was lost for a moment when Tom came into the kitchen; stranded in an earlier life he hadn’t been part of. She stared at him, adjusting her focus back to the present.
“See you later,” he said. He’d exchanged his school clothes for uniform of a different kind: jeans narrow around the legs, T shirts and sweatshirts layered artfully into dishevelment.
“Okay.” Olivia looked at him more closely, a new neutral expression for her oldest son that avoided expectation or reproach or enquiry. She jabbed at the blackening onions in the frying pan. “Want anything to eat before you go?”
Tom shook his head. “Migh
t bring some friends back.”
Olivia nodded. She thought, as she had once or twice before, of mentioning Lucy, but she resisted the temptation. It was better not to ask unnecessary questions. Tom had always valued his privacy: even as a little boy he’d had boxes of secrets under his bed, notices on the door warning people to keep out, and his disengagement from family life had progressed steadily since then. Last year, he’d taken over the attic and created a lair from which a stream of friends now came and went, most evenings. If she showed too much interest in all that, Olivia thought, he’d take more trouble to conceal it from her. She liked the fact that he got on with his life in plain view, and that he had a space in the house where he felt at home. It was a good balance, she thought. An equilibrium, for the time being.
“Homework?” she asked.
Tom shrugged. Olivia was spared a decision about whether to press him further by the ringing of the phone.
“Ma,” she said. “How are you? Good trip?”
Before her mother replied Olivia heard the front door close at the other end of the corridor.
Olivia knew Tom was remarkably easygoing, remarkably little trouble, for an eighteen-year-old. He went to school without complaint; he engaged in the same banter with his brothers, the same lion cub scuffles as before. But Olivia had almost no idea what went on in his head, these days. She told herself that was what she’d expected. Watching the boys grow up, she’d felt pleasure and regret at each new step, but also relief: it was a vindication, like taking a cake out of the oven and finding it has risen, just as the recipe promised. It proved her competence, refuted her nagging suspicion that she was an amateur mother getting by on a wing and a prayer. And she had three more after Tom, a long way to go before her nest was empty.
Even so it felt strange, the beginning of letting go; the sudden presence of all these almost-adults in her house, friends and strangers drifting through.
“Hi,” Olivia would say, as a waft of perfume and cold air swept up the stairs. She’d catch sight of her face, sometimes, in the hall mirror, and realise she was her mother’s age now.
The Partridge and the Pelican Page 14