by Ruth Thomas
‘The only thing I have left,’ she snapped, ‘is this.’
And then she dragged out her green dress: the one she was given by Rowena Cresswell just before they never spoke to each other again; the one Sally nevertheless could not quite bear to part with, and used to wear when she was newly slim after her daughter’s birth. She wore it for years and years when she went out in the evenings on various unsuccessful dates after she had split up with Pearl’s father, and her mother would come to babysit. (Her daughter was a toddler by then and would sit on her lap before she left and pull at the tassles – ‘You looks pretty,’ she used to say …)
The woman hesitated, brushed the silk between thumb and forefinger, looked at the label. ‘I’ll take that one,’ she said.
‘Sure?’ Sally asked, feeling suddenly sad. (I am changing, she reminded herself, I am moving on.)
‘Yes. It’s vintage,’ the woman said breezily. ‘So it has some value. Do you know the system? Have you sold with us before?’
‘The system? No.’
The woman turned to her desk and wrote something very quickly in a notepad, tore the page out and handed it to Sally.
‘This is your receipt. You can phone in a month or so to see if it’s sold. If it hasn’t sold in about six months we’ll give it back.’
‘OK,’ Sally said. Thanks a bunch, dear, she thought. She took the receipt from the woman and looked at it. She did not want it now. She felt she had done something heartless, given away something she could not retrieve.
‘So I don’t …’
‘No,’ smiled the woman. ‘You don’t get money up front.’ She looked at Sally. ‘That’s not the way we do it.’
‘OK.’
Sally paused, aware of the practical, working clothes she was wearing, in the midst of so much feminine, floating attire. ‘How much do you think you’ll get for it?’
‘Thirty pounds, perhaps? We take forty per cent commission. So you’d get’ – swiftly, she made a calculation on a clonky, infantile-buttoned calculator – ‘eighteen pounds.’
‘Eighteen pounds,’ Sally croaked.
She looked up at her dress – her dress – which somehow was already hanging up on a rail like a trophy pinched by a magpie. There was even a label on it: ‘70s dress, green silk, good condition’. How did she do that so quickly?
Eighteen pounds was not enough. But she was suddenly very aware of their continuing lack of security, hers and her daughter’s; of the constant need to keep the wolf from the door. Loved ones, she reminded herself, are more significant than clothes.
‘I’ll phone in a month then,’ she said, and she left the shop with her unwanted wares.
*
The bag of clothes has since been an encumbrance. It has sat on her lap, on the train, beside the word-puzzling woman, all the way to Charing Cross. It has squashed into the Tube train with her. It has bounced and bumped down Oxford Street and been wedged into lifts. Sally has not found a single charity shop in which to discard it.
In John Lewis’s Fashions, she wanders nervously past rows of impractical chiffon blouses and too-tight jeans – not for me, not for me – then takes the lift back to the haberdashery department. A little girl, about three years old, stares unblinkingly at her as they glide downwards. Sally looks back at her and smiles. The girl reminds her of her daughter at that age; she has the same seriousness and long, bright hair. The child, her eyes wide and brown, does not smile. Just as the doors are opening, she turns to her mother.
‘Mummy,’ she says, ‘is that lady cross?’
‘Shh, shh, shh,’ replies her mother, stroking the top of her daughter’s head with her flattened palm and directing her towards the bed-linen department. (‘Look!’ the child exclaims. ‘Bob the Builder duvets!’)
‘Cross?’ Sally wonders, leaving the lift and striding quickly through the departments (she has long legs and has been told by two significant men in her life that she looks like Big Bird from Sesame Street). As she approaches haberdashery, with all its ribbons and poppers and comforting skeins of embroidery silks, she glances at her reflection in one of the store’s mirrored pillars. She had thought she was looking calm, dignified, full of renewed purpose and optimism. But now she sees that the little girl was right. She does not look cross, exactly, but harrassed. She has that spaced-out, overworked look. She looks like a woman in her forties in a panic. Her hair is coming adrift. Her collar is half up and half down. Her skin is pallid after an early and continuing winter. She is carrying a plastic bag which looks creased and distorted, even though it originated in Harrods. And she has that anxious expression that she knows she has had since she was a teenager: that small, preoccupied frown that could be misinterpreted for anger.
Scottish
We are, at the moment, in Edinburgh. It’s cold, much colder than London, the dampness fingering its way beneath our coats. The sky is huge and white as a bowl of milk. We’re staying in the Royal Burgh Hotel, a place wrapped in miles of green tartan. But it is warm, with kind staff and a bowl of mints at the reception desk.
I suppose we are the sort of people this hotel thinks of as its target customers. Well-heeled, educated, forty-something. Madam is English, quite posh. Sir is Canadian, somewhat furrowed, academic type. He has suede shoes. She has leather gloves. Both smile wearily as they emerge from the lift into the lobby.
We are here so we can visit my son. And every time I think of this, something happens to my heart, something rises, expands and hurts. Because after we have seen him, he will be leaving. He has just split up with his girlfriend and is leaving Edinburgh – Scotland – the UK – for a new job in America.
‘Good evening, sir, madam,’ say the hotel reception staff.
‘Good evening.’
‘Nice evening lined up?’ the staff enquire, perhaps imagining a concert, a play, a dinner.
‘Yes, thank you.’
In reality we are a lot less sure of ourselves. We are not sure about the evening ahead of us. Maybe it will be nice and maybe it won’t. I grab a mint from the bowl at reception. Kenneth hands in the key.
*
It is cosy in the hotel. But as soon as you step outdoors, you are whirled into a kind of discreet melancholy which hangs over the High Street and tries to nose its way under the doors of all the tourist boutiques and overpriced cafés. A kind of gloom beneath the cheery early-evening lights. Or maybe it is just me. At the bottom of the hill there are bright boxes of Edinburgh rock and fudge and tablet illuminated in the shop windows. Sweetshops full of gobstoppers, sherbet dips, lollipops, chocolate bears, Love Hearts, Flying Saucers, peardrops. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many sweets en masse. It makes me think about the two childhoods in my life: my son’s and my own. Kenneth and I are walking past a sparkling window display when I suddenly remember the craze we once had at school for Black Jacks. Black Jacks! We were obsessed with them. My mother couldn’t stand them: the way they blackened your teeth.
‘Did you used to eat Black Jacks?’ I ask Kenneth.
‘Fralingers taffy was my favourite,’ he replies promptly, making me wish I had known him then, when he was a schoolboy in Ontario eating too many candies.
*
My son is a man in his twenties, not even his early twenties, and he has his own life. It is nine years since he left home. But I still can’t imagine how much I will miss him, even how I will miss him when he is in a different country. It will be a different quality of missing. Mothers and their children are not meant to be this far apart.
‘It’s cold,’ I say.
‘We’re in the frozen North.’
A vast seagull lands abruptly on the pavement in front of us and regards us with its reptilian eye. It plucks a chip from a discarded wrapper and takes off again. A young woman with a toddler in a buggy swears and dodges around an overflowing rubbish bin.
We decide it will take too long to walk all the way in this temperature, so we get on a bus and trundle down the streets, across North Bridge, over th
e lights and around a roundabout. It is dark. A large hill looms to our right. Beneath it, a café displays exhausted-looking doughnuts, éclairs, cream puffs. We get off the bus at the top of London Road and begin to walk again. I notice that Edinburgh gets a little less salubrious, a little less ‘Festival City’, the nearer we get to my son’s flat.
Kenneth is still impressed though. ‘Fine proportions,’ he is saying – he has, for the last few minutes, been in a kind of reverie about Scottish architecture. He can be like that. Wondering. Awed. But I am not in the mood. I am nervous and sad, in anticipation of saying goodbye to my boy.
‘I’ve always thought the Scots –’
‘Yes. Here we are,’ I say, halting outside a battered black door situated between a video rental shop and a launderette. ‘Number eighty-three. And it’s’ – I consult my piece of paper – ‘buzzer six.’ I sound like a game-show host.
Standing on the worn stone step, I press the buzzer.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Joe’s voice says through a little steel grille. ‘Come up.’ There is a distant buzzing sound. I lean my shoulder against the door and push it open, into the unlit stairwell.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Joe says again at his doorway two floors up. ‘Hi, Kenneth. Good to see you.’
He steps forward and gives me a kiss on the cheek. He does that these days. I forget sometimes how old my son is. He even has faint lines on his forehead which I want to rub away, the way I used to wipe jam off his face.
‘So how was the flight?’
‘Short. There was hardly time to look down.’
‘Yes. That’s the thing with …’ Joe says, trailing off. He looks rather pained that we have to see the place where he lives. It is not, I feel, what he wants us to see.
‘This is a lovely flat,’ I say, looking up at the high yellowish ceiling in the hallway; at the line of my son’s underpants hanging from the pulley. It reminds me of the apartment we stayed in in Paris once, my son rattling around the hot streets on his too-small, plasticky tricycle. And all the women smiling and saying ‘Ah, qu’il est mignon!’ I remember the oddly grey quality of the light. The jars of honey in the markets. The height of the buildings. The sense of other, more exotic lives going on around us.
The light in my son’s hall does not appear to work. I squint and smile at him.
‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ Joe says, and I want to hug him; I want to say, Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go. But I just walk politely behind him.
In the kitchen there is a stack of unwashed dishes and a damp dishcloth, left in a ball on the draining board. He has not wrung it out and hung it neatly over the taps to dry, as I would have done. As I suspect his girlfriend might have done. And now it smells stagnant. It has probably been like that for a couple of days. While he is searching for a box of teabags, I pick up the cloth between the tips of my fingers, walk quickly over to the bin in the corner of the room and drop it in. I glance at my son and freeze: he has observed me.
‘Old habits.’
Joe raises his eyebrows and smiles.
‘Mothers,’ he says to Kenneth. He is so mature, so worldly; my mothering, I suppose, is no longer a concern.
‘Milk in your tea?’
‘Please, Joe.’
He opens the fridge. The fridge seems to be full of half-finished jars of gherkins. Sprigs of yellowing dill float in the brine, preserved, suspended, reminiscent of something in my old school science lab.
‘So,’ Joe says into the fridge, ‘would you like a biscuit? I expect you’re hungry.’
And he closes the fridge door, goes to a cupboard and takes out a new packet of chocolate bourbons.
‘Or we have digestives,’ he says. ‘I mean …’
My son has never been very good at hiding things. Girlfriends. Lost girlfriends. Once, when I went to visit him in a flat he was living in in Newcastle, I bumped into a girl of about twenty varnishing her nails in the bathroom. Burgundy varnish. She had apparently been living with Joe, in his flat, for six weeks.
‘Hi, I’m Constanza,’ the girl had said, looking up and giving me a big, delightful smile. She was olive-skinned and pretty. She sounded Spanish. ‘And are you Joe’s …?’ she began, baffled.
‘I’m his mother.’
‘His mother? You are too young.’
‘Yes, well, I had Joe pretty young. I expect he told you.’
‘No, no, he didn’t tell me.’
Even now, at forty-three, I am still thrown by people’s astonishment. You have a son of twenty-seven? No! How is that possible? Often, I am mistaken for his older sister.
‘I was a teenage mum,’ I used to say a few years ago, when I wanted to shock people at dull departmental dinner parties, or at conference ‘jollies’.
‘How unexpected,’ one man joked, flapping his damask napkin. ‘You seem so cultured.’
‘How … French,’ said another man.
‘I am cultured. I am not French,’ I said, irritated.
‘Yes, but you act as if you are. French, that is.’
‘Do I really? How do French people act?’
‘Bossy.’
‘Bossy?’ I repeated, feeling a rush of irritation. ‘Bossy? Well. Ha! Maybe I have reason to be bossy. Maybe I’ve had to put up with a lot of comments like that over the years. Maybe I –’
‘Calm down,’ the napkin-flapper said, slightly alarmed. ‘I was joking.’
‘It is so nice to meet you,’ Constanza the pretty Spanish girl said when I left my son’s flat in Newcastle. ‘I look forward to meet you again.’
But we never did meet again. My son’s girlfriends come and go, come and go. One day they are in his bathroom, polishing their nails, and the next, they are gone.
*
While the kettle is boiling, I go to the bathroom. It is long and thin and in need of repainting. There is a tall window at the far end, above the lavatory. The view is of other tenements and the distant, dark North Sea. I look at the things he has in his bathroom: a modest collection of cheap shampoos and shaving gel. There is still some evidence of his former girlfriend’s life here: a blue glass bottle on the window sill, a small whale-shaped mirror stuck to the wall, a half-empty box of cotton buds on the bath ledge.
‘He is packing to leave,’ I think. ‘And I am here to help him.’
‘Mum?’ Joe calls from the kitchen. ‘Tea. We’re in the living room.’
‘OK,’ I reply, walking back into the hallway, and wondering for a moment where the living room is.
Buttonhole
Sally does not go out much in the evenings. She likes home. But she did recently go to a party with Sue from work. It was an hour’s drive away and she thought, well, she should. Sue drove – efficient, motherish – peering through the rainy windscreen at the dark, hedge-narrowed roads.
The party was full of middle-aged women, babies, husbands and wheezing, unwashed dogs. Sally sat next to a woman introduced to her as Veronica Beard. Veronica and Sally crouched on couches beside a low, pale table (Ikea, probably), and attempted to prong olives on to cocktail sticks.
‘So. What do you do?’ Veronica asked.
‘I work for a clothing alterations company in East Grinstead,’ Sally began shiftily. ‘I also do a bit of emb–’
‘Really? How interesting. And how long have you worked there?’
‘At In Stitches? Pretty much all my life.’
‘Ha ha,’ tinkled Veronica. ‘And you live there, too? You live in East Grinstead?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t go in for exotic locations, then?’
Sally was about to say something about a place being what you made it – which she is not quite sure she believes herself – when Veronica Beard snorted, put another olive in her mouth and said, ‘Anyway, maybe you can take the girl out of East Grinstead but can you take East Grinstead out of the girl?’
‘What’s wrong with East Grinstead?’ Sally asked. It isn’t chic, it isn’t metropolitan, but you could do worse. She hasn’t ever left, for i
nstance, which is proof enough. Then there are the floral displays. There is the proximity to London. There is the nearby miniature steam railway, which her parents used to take her to, and which she also used to visit with Pearl when she was little. Clattering around the tracks, Pearl in her flowery pinafore dress, asking all those unanswerable questions.
‘Mummy, why is smoke coming out of the train?’
‘It’s not smoke, sweetness, it’s steam. It’s how the train moves along.’
‘Why?’
‘Because steam is what pushes it. The fire heats up the water and the water turns into steam.’
‘Why? Why does the water turn into steam?’
‘It’s … a kind of chemical reaction, Poppet.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, Pearl. Y’know, not every question has an answer.’
‘Wh–’
‘Oh look, there’s a rabbit out there. Running along.’
*
There were very few towns which had their own steam railway, Sally reminded Veronica Beard. And not all towns have won the South-East in Bloom award.
She discovered later that Veronica Beard lived in Southend-on-Sea. Hardly Saint Tropez either, eh? she should have said. She wished she had swept up to her at the tail-end of the party and said something shocking, betraying her working-class origins; something about Essex Girls or end-of-the-pier jokes. But she never says things like that to people she dislikes. She is not good at withering comments. Sometimes, in the presence of such people, her confidence fizzles, is trampled upon. She is Sally Tuttle, grant-aided girl; Sally Tuttle, who did not stay at school long enough to learn the subjunctive, or the reasons behind the Boer War.
*
She has never liked social gatherings in any case. She turns into a bit of a hermit-crab, arriving early to hide in the shell of a big leather sofa and scuttling out occasionally to refill her wine glass or grab a handful of pretzels. She also has, she knows, a pincer-like way of conversing; of throwing startling statements into the middle of a sober discussion on interest rates or school catchment areas. ‘I saw someone in a chicken suit today,’ she said at a rather solemn fortieth birthday party a few weeks earlier, ‘and they were crossing the road!’ The little group she was with stopped talking and looked at her.