by Ruth Thomas
‘What a bloody nightmare,’ she used to joke sometimes, when they reminisced about it.
Oddly, on their final day in France, Rowena’s ‘family’ had taken her on a sudden excursion to Rouen Cathedral and proceeded to shower her with gifts: boxes full of chocolates, a pair of fashionable shorts, a broderie anglaise tablecloth for her mother. ‘Pour notre petite écolière anglaise,’ Madame had written on the tag. ‘Guilt gifts,’ Rowena said, marvelling at that unexpected sight of the cathedral, and the possession of a hand-embroidered nappe pour table. She had shown the nappe to Miss Button on the ferry back to Folkestone. Miss Button had fingered the cloth. ‘Sad,’ she said, ‘how banal modern embroidery can be.’
Spider’s Web
She was never an intellectual girl, Sally. More of a plodder. Quite common too. Quite working-class. Within three years of arriving at St Hilary’s she had given up the following subjects: Latin, Social Studies, History, Geography, Art, German, Physics.
She persisted with Needlework.
Most girls, including Rowena, were studying eight subjects for their O-levels. Some were doing as many as ten. Francesca Ball, a kind of prodigy, was studying eleven O-levels and two AO-levels. But Sally Tuttle was studying five, one of which was Needlework. Needlework, said with a sneer. Neeeeedlewuuurk!
On Thursdays, Sally and Rowena were together all day. Conspiratorially they endured:
Maths
Needlework
Needlework
Chemistry
LUNCH (highlighted in glorious, happy pink)
French
French
French
Thursdays were bad. But they were lightened by each other’s presence. They were Sally’n’Rowena, Rowena’n’Sally: a natural phenomenon, like twin rocks in the sea. If one of them was spotted alone at school, people would be surprised. ‘Where’s Sally?’ they would ask. ‘Where’s Rowena? Is she ill?’
In every class, they shared a desk. Rowena was left-handed and so their writing hands clashed. It did not occur to them to sit the other way around until this was suggested one day by Miss Button.
‘Sit on Rowena’s right, Sally, for pity’s sake,’ she said, ‘and you won’t keep bashing into each other.’
Rowena and Sally looked at each other, giggled, got up, swapped seats and sat down again.
‘Wonder of wonders,’ said Miss Button.
After that, the only time Rowena intruded on Sally’s writing space was when, head almost in her arms at the end of a lesson, she would twirl her hair around the fingers of her right hand.
*
Be careful always to follow the correct size-lines.
Do not attempt to begin tacking until all the tailor’s tacks are in place.
NEVER cut into a notch.
‘Look at Miss Button,’ Sally whispered to Rowena that autumn afternoon, the afternoon of the ‘Wee Weaver’. Because Miss Button had started to sing, launching herself into the lyrics with a handful of girls sitting in the front row. How many more traditional songs were there?, Sally wondered. The week before it had been ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’ and the week before that, ‘Greensleeves’ (… Thy smock of silk, both fair and white, with gold embroidered gorgeously;/ Thy petticoat of sendal white,/ And these I bought thee gladly …)
‘Look at her go,’ Rowena whispered.
Miss Button was singing boisterously, a smile on her face, amber jewellery sparkling at her neck.
‘Why was the weaver confined to his loom?’ Sally wrote in her rough-book, sliding it across to Rowena.
Rowena considered, silently.
‘Maybe he wove his beard into it,’ she wrote, pushing the book back to Sally.
Some of their classmates were singing the words quite enthusiastically now – the voices of Christine Pringle and Susan Temple, dismissed long ago as the class goody-goodies, could be heard quite clearly above the drone. And Sally felt a little sad not to be joining in. She would have sung – she secretly enjoyed singing – but with Rowena she had appearances to keep up. So after a moment she stopped, sighed and started to doodle in her rough-book. A biroed heart, its circumference gone over and over in blue so that it left an impression over several more pages.
(‘She’s loved by all young men and that does grieve me,’ warbled Christine and Susan …)
An emphatic blue heart, through which she drew an arrow.
*
They were in the middle of the second verse –
As Willie and Mary rode by yon shady bough
Where Willie and Mary spent many the happy hour …
– when there was a sudden rap on the door, then the jack-in-the-box appearance of St Hilary’s deputy headmistress: a large, exasperated person. She walked, fast but solemn, across the room towards Miss Button. The two women stood close, teacherish, and whispered. Then Miss Button nodded her head, raised her hand and shushed the singing girls.
‘Sally Tuttle. Miss Gordon would like a word with you outside please.’
Sally felt her face become pale. She glanced at Rowena and Rowena glanced back. They know. Someone has told them.
And she was on her feet, the faces of her classmates looming up at her like lilies in a swamp.
‘You OK? Shall I come with you?’ Rowena whispered. This was not about embroidery. Rowena was the only person who knew what this was about.
Sally looked away.
‘Wish me luck,’ she croaked, and she felt Rowena touch her sleeve as she brushed past to the end of the row of chairs and across to Miss Gordon.
‘OK. Drama over. Let us resume,’ she heard Miss Button instruct the class. ‘Where Willie and Mary spent many the happy hour …’ she pronounced, clapping her hands together. The warbling resumed.
*
The green-upholstered Resource Area was meant for the sixth-formers to sit in during breaks, but nobody ever did. It was always as deserted as the Marie Celeste, all the sixth-formers preferring a broken-down brick wall behind the Assembly Hall.
Sally walked behind Miss Gordon. She looked down at her feet: at her oversized shoes moving her on, one step after another. She thought of Mary, Queen of Scots climbing the scaffold.
‘We’ll sit here,’ Miss Gordon proclaimed, swinging her substantial weight into one of the little chairs. She looked at Sally. ‘You’ve gone very pale,’ she said, noticing finally. ‘This is nothing to get alarmed about, Sally. You look quite … unwell.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Gordon. She frowned, paused, drew in her breath and then pulled an envelope out of her pocket. Sally was reminded of the conjuring tricks she had seen once, years before, at a children’s party.
‘It’s just a phone message from your father,’ Miss Gordon said.
Sally’s heart thumped on.
‘The secretary kindly made a note of what he said and said she would pass it on. So here I am,’ said Miss Gordon, ‘passing it on. Aren’t I the lucky one?’
‘Right.’
Sally took the note from the amused Miss Gordon. It had been sealed in the envelope, but someone, someone, had unsealed it.
MESSAGE FOR SALLY TUTTLE (4F) FROM HER DAD. REMEMBER TO LEAVE AT TWO THIRTY FOR DENTAL APPOINTMENT.
‘OK?’ Miss Gordon said, the small smile struggling not to appear on her face.
Miss Gordon had, Sally felt, always thought that she was slightly ridiculous – not really worth the generous bursary bestowed upon her – and here was the proof. A father who sends messages about dental appointments! And what does the father do? The father is a postman! Most of the girls who went to Sally’s school had parents with proper jobs. Solicitors. Doctors. Dentists. Accountants, like Rowena Cresswell’s dad. Diplomats: there was even a diplomat! Miss Gordon looked at Sally, her eyes small and twinkling and mud-coloured behind her glasses. She had a large, upholstered bosom behind a stiff grey jacket. Sally was aware of the pulse inside her head, of her heartbeat, of her ten fingers clutched into cold fists in her lap.
It was not her fa
ther who had phoned to leave that message. That message was a ruse. And now she had nowhere to place her fear of discovery. She felt as if she might be sick.
‘Not earth-shattering then?’ Miss Gordon asked.
‘No.’
Miss Gordon composed herself and continued. ‘You still look terribly guilty about something, though, Sally Tuttle. Any dark secrets we should know about?’
‘No. None at all.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ said Miss Gordon.
Couching
When you’re fifteen, of course, you don’t quite believe that things will change, alter, end. You can’t imagine that you might not always go down town on Friday nights; that you might not one day possess cheap dangling earrings as heavy as gobstoppers, or silver-blue eyeliner, or a pair of woven-soled espadrilles. You can’t foresee this. Sally, for instance, did not know that she would one day be the mother of her own fifteen-year-old girl. And that she would be a Needlewoman. Needlewoman, homelier sister of Wonderwoman. An award-winning Needlewoman, even. Who’d have thought it?
*
Sally and Rowena had first met him, this boy, this young man who had sent the message about the dentist, at Razzles nightclub. His name was Colin Rafferty. It was a Friday evening, August 1979.
Razzles was a dank, Italianate establishment near East Grinstead station. Long-since closed and turned into a garden centre with sofas, fibreglass gnomes and scented candles. But at the time it was the place to be on Friday nights. Rowena and Sally used to go with unquestioning resolve. They slunk nonchalantly past the bouncer who knew – but overlooked – their age. They hurried to the dismally yellow cloakroom, hung up their coats and checked their reflections in the wonky mirror. Then they wove their way back to the main room, to the edge of the dance floor and spent the rest of the evening rooted to the spot, clutching glasses of Fanta – the only drink the bartender would allow them. They listened to the records the DJ put on the turntable. ‘Boogie Wonderland’, ‘My Sharona’, ‘Bright Eyes’. They both held their heads at a slight angle, their long hair mysteriously flicked to one side, and regarded the boys from beneath it. Bands of coloured light zoomed and flickered around the room and when it brushed across their faces they were convinced that it made them look intriguing – mysterious, knowing, slightly triste. They wore baggy tops, swishing skirts and suede pixie boots. The music was always too loud, and Sally was always shouting ‘What? What?’ into Rowena’s ear.
Rowena had been the first one to spot Colin Rafferty, under the strobe lighting. It was Rowena who, beneath the over-amplified words of ‘When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman’, had moved her hand up to her ear and shouted the words dishy and he fancies you.
Sally did not believe her. She did not picture herself as a girl who was fancied by men in nightclubs.
‘Look,’ Rowena yelled. ‘He’s coming over.’ And Sally turned and felt her heart blanch. She noticed the way the boy walked beneath the light-scattering mirror-balls: a kind of off-kilter but determined walk, accompanied by a sweetly intense gaze. He smiled, and when he got closer she noticed his amused eyes, his neat chin, the charming creases at the edges of his mouth.
‘I hate this song,’ he opined, leaning one arm casually against a silvery pillar.
Colin Rafferty. It was Sally he wanted. Sally, not Rowena. She was so shocked she could hardly breathe.
Quarter Cross
In a couple of days Sally Tuttle will be giving a talk in Edinburgh, entitled (rather pompously, she fears now) ‘The Secret Art of Embroidery’. But what to say, when talking about embroidery stitches? About moss stitch and Pekin knot? And how to say it? How to seem? How to be? Embroidery has always been something she just does, and the idea of talking about it frightens her.
Preparation is all, she reminds herself. Like a properly pinned-down dress pattern, all the tailor’s tacks in place.
She is not a particularly tidy person but she does keep her workroom neat. She has a pine shelving unit containing all the things she needs. It is labelled, ordered, organised. There has to be a little area in everyone’s life that is organised. On the top shelf she has two baskets of cotton reels and three of embroidery threads, stranded cottons, wools, tapisserie silks. On the bottom shelf she has her old hand-operated sewing machine, her new foot-operated sewing machine, her goffering iron and her patterns. In the middle she keeps a small red filing-cabinet which has six drawers. These drawers contain, in descending order:
Needles and needle cases
Pins and pincushions
Buttons, poppers, fastenings
Sequins and ribbons
Canvases and squares of felt
Scissors, unpickers and pinking shears
In other areas of her life she is not tidy. She often leaves washing-up until the next day, and does not reprimand her daughter for leaving dirty plates and schoolbooks lying around the living-room floor. Embroidery, though, needlework, requires neatness. Cleanliness. Respect. Her trays and drawers at work are neat too. If they became a mess – a knot of threads, loose buttons, hooks and eyes – she feels she might as well call it a day.
*
Her elderly mother comes to visit her at In Stitches occasionally, stoically, often bringing something to eat – an individual muffin wrapped in cellophane, a slice of carrot cake. ‘Something to keep you going, darling,’ she says, glancing around the shop. It is not the career she hoped for her.
Sometimes after school her daughter Pearl comes to see her too but seems to have no comprehension of what her job involves: the careful measuring and pinning, the necessary ironing, the patient tacking and hemming. Careful work, Sally finds herself thinking, is lost on her daughter’s generation. Then she remembers Miss Button’s admonishments and sessions with the Kwik-unpick. She remembers how careless she was at Pearl’s age.
‘Good day at school, sweetheart?’
‘Hmm,’ Pearl replies, looking down and pressing the tiny silver buttons on her mobile phone. The buttons are so small that she has to use her fingernail.
‘Did you …?’
‘Yeah, hang on, Mum,’ Pearl says, bringing the phone up to her ear.
*
Since Sally left school, disastrously, at the age of fifteen-and-a-half, her career has been a series of nine-to-five jobs.
The first job she ever had was as a waitress in a café called The Country Kitchen. There was a uniform: a brown nylon dress with short puffed sleeves, a white, ineffectively small apron and, most mortifying of all, a nylon mob cap. She was supposed to look like a country wench; a pretty serving girl. Looking back, she thinks perhaps she did look pretty: she certainly got leers and comments from the middle-aged men who came into the café at lunchtimes. Or perhaps it was just that she was young. Youth was all that was necessary to attract middle-aged men. Hello there, Maid Marion, they used to say. Or: It’s Nell Gwynne. Or: I’ll have a bowl of porridge, Goldilocks.
They were supposed to serve wholesome things. Wholesome, late-Seventies style. Lumpy lentil soup. Big dry brown rolls. Hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes cut into water lilies. And Sally was supposed to smile, to giggle and sigh over the steaming soup bowls in a pretty, girlish way. She did not manage the giggling often, though, because her life had recently collapsed around her. So she stomped about in her big shoes, sweeping crumbs off the tables into people’s laps, scalding herself against the stainless-steel serving dishes, dropping boxes of loose tea and having to clatter around the too-small kitchen, sweeping up with a plastic dustpan and brush.
She put on weight and her apron became too tight. She dropped a tray, breaking five smoked-glass ashtrays, three cups and a soup bowl. She swore at one of the middle-aged men, telling him, in a not very Goldilocks way, to ‘get out of my face’. She was not having a very good time. She had become coarse and jaded.
The next job she got was in the accounts department of a plumber’s merchants. She sat in an open-plan office full of smoke, investigating the company’s dozens of unpaid bills, which a
ppeared as tiny account numbers on a microfiche. She sat opposite a woman called Brenda Bright who always wore red and smoked one high-tar cigarette after another, pausing only to take swigs of ink-black Maxwell House from a mug that said ‘I’m a Mug’.
‘Get out while you bloody well can,’ Brenda Bright used to advise her, as if she was Andromeda chained to the rocks.
The accounts office of the plumber’s yard was a terrible shock after her school’s wholesome classrooms – which I left willingly, Sally began to realise, of my own free will. Now she remembered St Hilary’s School for Girls with something approaching grief. She even thought of Miss Button with a kind of fondness. I was supposed to do A-levels! I was supposed to go to university and study French! And then catastrophe had intervened and she had done the only thing she could think of doing. She legged it. She ran.
She used to run from the plumber’s yard in the evenings, on to the wet, sparrow-chirping pavements, and not be able to make out the numbers of the buses home. ‘Three?’ she wondered, squinting, as they hove into view at the top of the hill. ‘Or eight?’ She can trace her short sight from her month-and-a-half at Capel’s Plumbers.
Now, peering at her hemming in the back of the shop she sometimes has a fleeting vision of that desk at the plumber’s yard, and that mug and that smoke, and Brenda Bright in the most enormous pair of glasses. What a vision, that vision of Brenda Bright.
Wise people are in the minority, she has found, over the years. Despite the owl on her school badge, she herself has not made wise decisions. Practicality has little to do with wisdom.
Knotted