by Ruth Thomas
‘A chicken suit?’ said a woman.
Before she speaks, she always trusts there will be someone in the assembled gathering who is on her wavelength, who will appreciate a different kind of conversation. She is often wrong. There is often a silence, a look of bewilderment. Where have they gone, she wonders, the people who used to appreciate comments like that?
Maybe I am too childish.
Maybe I am immature.
Maybe I am regressing.
Or progressing the wrong way.
And she remembers the way she used to laugh with Rowena Cresswell at school: those gasps for breath over things that were not even funny. Except they were, they were. Certain sights. Sounds. The way their Geography teacher’s briefcase used to snap importantly shut, and then flop open again, half an hour later. The way Miss Button used to strut, peacock-like, around the Portakabin. The vision of a distant, struggling line of cross-country runners wearing numbered sports-tunics. And words. The word ‘sports-tunic’ had once made Sally Tuttle and Rowena Cresswell laugh, hysterically, for days.
East Grinstead has changed a lot since then. Changed, altered, developed. Rowena Cresswell’s house, for instance, brand new in 1974, has acquired an established look. It has softened, gained a kind of bloom; it has ivy and honeysuckle growing up the wall and a front gate that doesn’t sit properly in its frame. (A young family lives there now: a resilient young couple with three wild little boys who are always swinging on the gate.) After the death, nearly twenty years ago, of Mrs Cresswell, and Mr Cresswell’s subsequent death four months later (heartbroken, apparently), the Willows was renamed. It is now the Gables. And when she thinks of it, she can recall gables, and baby birds nesting in them, beneath Rowena’s window.
On her way home from work, she still walks past their garden. She walks past the yellow roses and the crazy-paving and the cherry tree and remembers Mrs Cresswell planting it, clad in apron and spotty-palmed gardening gloves. Now, on early summer evenings, the tree is often completely covered with little birds. Sparrows, singing in the pale light …
‘Did you actually do Needlework at school?’ Pearl asked her the other day.
‘I did.’
‘So your school wasn’t very emancipated, then?’
‘Well,’ Sally replied, feeling somewhat crushed. She thought of St Hilary’s, now a housing estate with selected Victorian features. ‘Considering we survive on my sewing abilities, sweetheart, I think …’
But she trailed off. She knew what her daughter meant. Needlework lessons had not been emancipated. Even in 1979 they were archaic. They might as well have been doing needlepoint or crewelwork. They might as well have sat in an inglenook with their tapestry frames, sipping mead from pewter goblets while the pallid sunshine seeped in through the Portakabin’s high, metal-framed windows.
*
Select pattern pieces needed. With right sides together, pin sleeve into armhole, matching symbols and large * to shoulder seam. (* indicates Bust Point and Hipline)
But everything, it seemed then, could be made to fit. There was an armhole for each sleeve, an adjustment line for each non-standard waist.
‘Bust point and hipline,’ Rowena whispered, and they would both begin to laugh.
*
(‘What do you get out of embroidery?’ Graham the estate agent asked Sally on the last occasion she went out with him. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘you don’t strike me as someone who’d be into fussy little stitching.’
Fussy little stitching. Sally looked at him.
‘I enjoy it,’ she said. ‘I like the feel of the cloth. I like getting a load of different-coloured threads and turning them into a picture. You know, what do you get,’ she added, ‘out of writing “this delightful room boasts a dado rail” God knows how many times a week?’
This was when she and Graham had begun, slightly, to hate each other.)
*
She is currently working on a commission she received after winning the award. She is going to talk about it at the conference in Edinburgh. It depicts Mary and Martha, of Biblical fame. Large frame, satin stitch, straightforward in style, apart from the fact that she is sewing on hundreds of sequins. A fiddly, laborious task. But there is something irresistibly cheerful about sequins, like the sparkle of neon lights.
Her Mary and Martha are possibly a little too bejewelled for religious figures, so she has toned them down by giving them very plain dresses. Mary, the most daring sister, wears a maroon A-line thing while poor put-upon Martha must be content with a kind of smock in taupe. She has tried to give them different expressions, but has in fact managed to make them look very similar – they both have beige, satin-stitched faces, slightly wonky eyebrows and scarlet lips. They both have brown hair parted in the middle. As she stitches, Sally wonders what people will write about them. A wonderfully naive take on the embroiderer’s art, the judge of her winning entry pronounced last year, with a delightful enthusiasm for sequins; and she had felt slightly insulted at his assessment of her skills. She was not trying to be naive. But she supposes her embroidered figures do look a little childish; even the worldly Mary looks disingenuous, cartoonish, a bit simple. The two sisters have round faces, big ears, trusting eyes.
Innocent. Gullible. No doubt about it. It is never intentional, but there it is.
She was commissioned to do this embroidery in March by the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation, a group of vicars who spend most of their time in Southwark Cathedral. Reverends Avery, Beanie and Hope. When she got the commission she had to travel up to London to meet them. She had never really had a career as such; she had never had a business meeting in her life. And now she was going to have one with members of the clergy. Typical, her daughter’s father would say – How typically perverse of you, Sally.
The journey was actually more straightforward than she had imagined; there had been no need to lie awake the night before, staring at the luminous stars on her ceiling. In the morning she got up at seven, whispered goodbye to her sleeping daughter, got the 8.30 train up to London, took another train from Victoria, got on to two Tube trains and a bus, then walked up three roads, through a gateway, along a path and beneath the slapping wet boughs of a willow tree. She could feel her heart thudding. She looked around the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation’s garden: at its cotton-yellow jasmine, its seagull-grey chippings, its battlement-black gate, and her mind went through a possible choice of stitches for the scene. Cloud filling? Fern? Knotted satin? She walked past a wooden board stuck into the lawn bearing the words ‘The Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation’ and resisted an impulse to turn and run. She stepped through a low doorway into a small lobby, where she sat surrounded by piles of green hardback copies of the Common Prayer Book. There was a smell of dust and mildew and a sign on the wall which said ‘Please D’ont Leave Your Cups Here’. She sat and looked at that apostrophe until Reverend Beanie called her name.
She was the only person in the room without a dog-collar. She had chosen something demure for the occasion, though: her home-made green coat and her nice, swishing, below-the-knee skirt. A skirt that was really intended for the admiration of less lofty men. She smiled and cleared her throat. Then the Board and she sat down around a large mahogany table, upon which were arranged a teapot, pretty Indian Tree cups and saucers, side plates and a dish of custard creams. The oddly louche scent of coffee and cigar smoke hovered in the air.
‘Well, Mrs Tuttle,’ smiled the Reverend Avery, ‘Your work is charming, absolutely charming. That peacock for instance, that peacock is quite inspired.’
Sally wriggled in her seat. She wasn’t sure she liked the word ‘charming’: it was the sort of word an estate agent might use to describe a house that was too small.
‘Your use of sequins –’ began the Reverend Beanie vaguely, pouring tea into her cup.
‘What we’re looking for,’ interrupted the Reverend Avery, ‘despite the fact that this will be an award from the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation’ – and he suddenly stopped tal
king, put his clenched fist up to his mouth and coughed; then he continued – ‘is something quite homely. Something that reflects a more every-day take on Christianity.’
Sally looked at him. She thought of her old RE teacher, a short, bald man who used to breathe ‘We break this bread’ melodramatically into the school microphone at assemblies; she also thought of her embroidery of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, sited in her parents’ living room above their occasional table.
‘In fact I often …’ she began.
‘Hmm?’ said the Reverend Avery.
‘I often choose Biblical images for my work.’
‘Well, that’s most interesting. Why do you think that is?’
She pondered for a second.
‘Because they seem so colourful, I suppose. You know, there always seem to be a lot of vibrant animals and birds and … angels. Angelic figures,’ she added, fearing that she had begun to make no sense. She had seen Reverend Avery raise one eyebrow quizzically when she mentioned the vibrant animals. Why did I say that? Maybe it was because an image of Noah’s Ark had suddenly flashed across her mind, with its myriad honking and growling occupants. Lions, bears, chameleons. Sally picked up her teacup and took a quick sip. ‘And,’ she continued, trying to adopt a more educated tone, ‘it is, as we all know, a kind of embroidery tradition – an almost innate tradition. Think of all those Victorian samplers. And medieval religious tapestries.’
‘Ah yes,’ Reverend Beanie smiled knowledgeably. ‘The marvellous Apocalypse of St John.’
‘Yes,’ Sally replied. She had never heard of the Apocalypse of St John. The only famous tapestries she had heard of were the Bayeux Tapestry and The Lady with the Unicorn. She was suddenly horribly aware of her ignorance, her curtailed education.
‘I’m not in fact religious myself,’ she said.
‘It’s not a requirement, regrettable though that may be,’ the Reverend Hope replied, allowing himself a series of small, perfectly spaced laughs. Then he carried on. ‘We’re simply keen to project a more welcoming image of the Church. And at the same time we want to embrace modern art. We want to embrace modern, practising artists.’
Sally was quite touched to know that the Church wanted to embrace her. She couldn’t think what to say. The term ‘practising artist’ made her feel proud and shy.
‘So you want me to embroider a particular scene?’ she asked.
‘No, it’s entirely up to you,’ Reverend Avery said, helping himself to another biscuit. Beneath the table, a black labrador sighed and thumped his tail in his sleep. It was the first time Sally had been aware of a dog beneath the table. She thought of her comment about vibrant animals, and clutched the edges of her portfolio.
‘So I can do anything?’
‘Anything. As long as it’s Biblical. As long as it inspires contemplative thought,’ said the Reverends.
*
On the train home, she looked out at the greyness of Network South-East’s junctions and halts. She looked down at her green coat and her nice below-the-knee skirt. Her heart was full, bulging with ambition. She thought, I am an artist. I am wanted. A tiny flame of happiness flickered and grew. And that was when she decided to embroider the picture of Mary and Martha. She had been thinking a lot, that spring, about the role of women. Women’s lot in life. And here were two interesting examples: those two difficult sisters. Mary going glamorously out into the world and Martha staying at home, crashing around the kitchen, doing the washing-up. Or was it the other way round? She couldn’t be sure.
Mirrored
There’s a small hole in the pane of my son’s living-room window. It’s letting in a thin stream of air. No wonder the flat is so cold. Somebody, some previous tenant, has drawn a thick black line from the window-frame to the surround, and written ‘De-luxe flat, fully air-conditioned’. It’s not Joe’s writing.
*
I have been thinking about all the people I’ve known in my life. Speculating on the number. There must be thousands now – from the little girl at primary school who once let me hold her gold star earrings, to Mrs Stanley, my ballet teacher, who used to open her mouth wide and shout ‘Remember your arms!’ above the clank of the ill-tuned piano. There were ephemeral acquaintances like my Needlework teacher Miss Button, about whom I knew little but conjectured much. And others, like my friend Sally Tuttle, whom I thought I would always know.
I once heard two women talking in a Chinese restaurant, late at night, on either side of a flower-vase. ‘She had a string of lovers,’ one of the women said, confidentially but loudly, to her friend. ‘Really?’ her friend replied. The first woman folded her arms across her plump breast, sending her pearl necklace scuttling down her cleavage. ‘An absolute string,’ she said. ‘I shudder to think …’
I never found out what the woman shuddered to think, but since that night, the phrase has always made me think of a necklace. Lovers like beads on a string. My particular string of lovers is a rather short one. Before Kenneth there was:
Peter (’88–’98), my ‘fiancé’ of ten years. I left him when he hit Joe during an argument.
Julien (’85–’87), a sweet French man, unemployed, blue-eyed guitarist and poet, ultimately scared off by the fact that I had a young son.
Matthew, (’82–’84), a very tactile engineering student who had also become fed up with the constant presence in my life of noisy toys, bedtime routines, morning routines, strewn pieces of Lego, unreliable babysitters, curtailed arrangements.
And one other – my earliest dalliance (’79–’79), whom I can hardly count as a lover. Not really. Except that he was Joe’s father.
My son is almost twice the age I was when he was conceived. The age I was, that autumn. It does not seem possible. I go to sit beside him on his rented Scottish sofa. I watch him drinking a cup of tea. I wonder what he is thinking.
‘Hey, Joe, hasn’t anyone ever shown you how to knot a tie?’ Kenneth asks him, apropos of nothing. Sweetly, Joe is wearing a tie – for Kenneth’s benefit? I wonder – but it is clumsily done, the knot as big as an apricot.
‘I didn’t have much tie-knotting advice when I was growing up,’ Joe replies. He leans forward to help himself to a Tunnock’s Teacake. ‘I know tying a tie is a rite of passage and everything …’
‘Hmm,’ I say. He has always had the unconscious knack of making me feel guilty. I regard him sitting there, preoccupied with the white, rubbery insides of his teacake and considering – what? San Francisco? His girlfiend? His teacake? I think: He looks like his father. He has exactly the same expression that I remember, and quiet smile and length of leg. He has that cowlick and those eyelashes. And he is tall: fortunately, he has not inherited my own lack of height. It is always so curious to be reminded of his father when in different circumstances I would have forgotten him. Maybe he would have crept into my head, briefly, once every few years. A bloke. A bloke I slept with in 1979.
Zigzag
Mary’s dress is more of a flowing affair than Martha’s. It has more grandeur, with medieval-ish, bat-wing sleeves and a nipped-in waist. Sally has used nearly four skeins of silk on it and it is still not finished. She likes to get the colour-changes as subtle as she can. That is why she has so many embroidery silks. In Martha’s face, for instance, there are six different shades. You need that many to get the expression of envy right.
Embroidery Times, the sewing magazine that Sally subscribes to, is full of useful advice about such techniques. The gradations and the subtleties. It also features things called ‘makes’. The ‘makes’ it suggests this month are:
an embroidered plastic-bag holder
an embroidered, reusable Christmas cracker to fill with your own little gifts (‘How about some home-made fudge or tree decorations?’)
an embroidered apron
an embroidered greetings card
The world of embroidery is a kind world, a womanly world, full of gift-giving and the consumption of time. Time measured out in stitches and pricked fingers. Sally
and Pearl often laugh at the more curious ‘makes’ in Embroidery Times. The embroidered egg-cosies and the embroidered bag in which to keep one’s embroidery threads. The Zen-ness of an embroidered embroidery-bag! She never makes these ‘makes’. But sometimes she wishes she was the sort of woman who did.
*
Rowena Cresswell’s mother used to subscribe to magazines. It is one of the few things Sally feels she would have in common with Rowena Cresswell’s mother. She used to get Woman and Home, Woman, Woman’s Realm, Women’s Weekly. She kept them all in a polished wooden magazine rack between the sofa and the television. She bought them on a fortnightly basis. It seemed like a kind of aberration, the amount of money she would spend on these publications, which all advocated the same things: plumped-up cream cushions, candles, highly-complicated dinner-party recipes involving lasagna sheets and roux sauce; adverts for shoe racks and leather-bound encyclopedias. Mrs Cresswell’s lifestyle, Sally supposes, must have mattered to her a lot. The ordered calm of it. The unchanging neatness. It is an ambition which Sally can comprehend now. The Cresswells certainly lived in a nicer house than the Tuttles did, at the expensive end of town. Unlike the Tuttles’ house, all the houses on Rowena’s estate were detached and they all had names. The Willows didn’t actually have a willow tree (it died shortly after they moved in) but it did have a very green, spongy lawn and a lot of bright, blowsy flowers in the flower beds. Custard-yellow tulips. Scarlet gladioli. The house was new, built in the early Seventies, with fake, old-fashioned tile-cladding. Sussex-red. Mr Cresswell was an undemonstrative man but from time to time, in the summer and early autumn, he would sit in his traffic-noisy garden, drinking beer and playing Frank Sinatra songs. ‘New York, New York’ bellowed aggressively across all the neat lawns of the neighbourhood.