by Ruth Thomas
‘… start spreading the news,/ I’m leaving today,/ I want to be a part of it …,’ sang Sinatra, as people’s washing twirled around on their East Grinstead Whirly-birds.
Mr Cresswell was overweight. Mrs Cresswell was very thin. Even when Sally knew her, she must have been ill. Her legs gave no form to the blue trousers she wore. She used to work in a gift-shop café, serving buns and scones with a silent sadness. Rowena and Sally used to go and watch her sometimes after school: they would sit at a table in a corner of the café and eat discounted flapjacks. Mrs Cresswell never spoke to them as they sat there: she seemed unable to combine work with any semblance of banter. Not even ‘How was your day?’
Occasionally she used to look across at Sally with an expression that was hard to fathom: a combination of irritation and pity. Her fine, fair hair was scraped tightly into a bun, wisps escaping from it like a badly-built nest. The other women all seemed quite jovial as they plodded around behind the counter, slathering margarine on to white rolls and wrapping buns in clingfilm. But Mrs Cresswell was not. Mrs Cresswell looked pained. Disappointed.
When, some evenings, Sally went round to tea, Mrs Cresswell spoke to her in a slow, exaggerated voice, as if she was slightly delinquent.
‘And what are you doing for your O-levels again, Sally?’
‘English, Maths, French, Chemistry and Needlework.’
‘How nice. Needlework. And what a good idea, to focus on five. Five is all anyone needs, isn’t it?’
*
Rowena told Sally once that her mother had been an aspiring ‘career woman’: she had been heading for greatness in the legal profession. But then she had met Rowena’s father and got married and had Rowena and her ambitions had been shelved amidst the ornaments.
Rowena’s was one of the few houses Sally ever visited. After school they would let themselves in at the wobbly glass-fronted door, warble a reedy ‘Hi,’ then leap straight upstairs. They would sit in Rowena’s room, which smelled of new pine furniture and hoovered carpet, and discuss the dilemmas of their hearts.
‘So are you going to go for it then?’
‘What? Go for what?’
‘You know. With Colin. Are you going to, you know …?’
Sally remembers this particular conversation. It’d had, she supposes, particular relevance. She remembers thinking of Colin Rafferty and blushing and blushing and turning to reach for something, anything, a distraction. A record. She picked it up. Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve). Rowena had an eclectic mix of singles which even at the time struck her as odd. How could someone like both the Buzzcocks and Supertramp?
‘You’ve gone puce,’ observed Rowena.
‘Thanks.’
‘You have, though.’
And Sally had stared down at the record sleeve.
‘I –’ Rowena began, and she stopped. Then she said, ‘It’s just you clam up about him. Ever since we met him. You always go all thingummy, Sal. I know he’s the love of your life and everything …’
Sally did not reply. She looked around Rowena’s room: at the china-headed Pierrot doll staring tragically into the night; at the make-up box and pink slippers; at the tips of the Cindy dolls’ feet peeping over the top of the wardrobe. She thought, ‘I have a boyfriend called Colin Rafferty.’ And a new image of him floated spectrally, heroically, into her mind.
‘I will tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s just, I mean, we haven’t …’
‘It’s all right,’ Rowena sighed, and Sally gazed, hot-faced, through the picture window at the almost technicolour garden beyond.
*
Occasionally, Sally spent the night at Rowena’s house. She remembers pulling flannelette sheets over the mattress of the Cresswells’ clanking Zed-bed; standing in the bathroom in her Love is … pyjamas. She remembers the tiny details that separated Rowena’s way of life from hers. The little silver dish containing Mrs Cresswell’s jewellery (Sally’s mother never took her wedding ring off); the over-large rubberwood fruit-bowl (at home they had a cut-glass trifle bowl); the woven place mats (they had cork boards with pictures of parrots); in the garden, the sprinkler on the lawn (the Tuttles had a watering can). At suppertime Sally would feel like a prodigal daughter, returned from a life of hardship. The four of them would sit around the table in the ‘L’ of the dining room, eating casserole from large beige dinner plates. Mr Cresswell would eat in total silence. Mrs Cresswell would talk about the woman who used too much washing-up liquid in the gift-shop café. Outside, Mrs Cresswell’s windchimes would clank in the breeze, the wires twisting around each other in a way which Sally felt must irritate her.
*
From time to time she would give little presents to Rowena. Pencil-sharpeners, 45 rpm singles, pretty hairgrips. She also used to give presents to Colin Rafferty. She didn’t have a clue about aloofness then, about sangfroid. She was just besotted and would bring these offerings to him, like a cat bringing dead mice to its owner. She bought him a corkscrew and a pocket knife and a badge; she brought him a beautiful green feather and a shiny pebble. Things like that were imbued with meaning – with eternal significance. Whatever happens, this means I will always love you. This time in our lives will always be …
In all the time he knew her, Colin Rafferty gave her one thing: a postcard bearing the picture of an old Scottish fishwife, gutting herrings. Maybe giving presents heavy with poignancy was not something that men did.
French Knot on Stalks
I first met my husband in Rouen, on something the head of my department insists on calling a ‘jolly’.
Jollies consist, in almost every country I have visited, of middle-aged academics helping themselves to wine and canapés in the dark interior of a chain hotel. The canapés are often alarming: potent, fishy things teetering on small oatcakes, too big to eat in one mouthful and too messy to eat in two.
‘I’ll go for one of these cherry-tomato things,’ people mumble, as if someone is forcing them to eat something or else. As if the hors d’oeuvres chef is having a laugh.
There is also innocuous jazz played low and a certain amount of flirting, particularly from the married ones.
*
Before I met Kenneth, I used to hang around at these events with female peers from other universities: we would stand near the bar in our best clothes and perfume and wonder if we were having fun. Was it more fun, more jolly, than sitting hunched over our computers and dictionaries and time-sheets? It was certainly a change; a social event for which I sometimes felt ill-prepared. My talent for chat was impeded by weeks of sitting alone in my office, surrounded by dusty plants, unread manuscripts and unmarked papers.
It was also a bit like being at Razzles on East Grinstead High Street. The anxious hovering. The pretending. The smoke and mirrors. It was strange seeing your peers in ‘casual’ attire, worrying that they might not look cool. Should we let our hair down? Take our handbags to the toilets? And we really had handbags now, real womanly handbags in which we kept packets of paper hankies, wet-wipes, lipstick, diaries, keys, receipts, business cards, photographs of our children. Some of the young mothers even had a nappy or two secreted bulgingly in one of the inner pockets.
I still have pictures of a baby in my wallet. Baby Joe, summer 1980. I can hardly believe how old this baby is now. The year of the Jolly in Rouen, he was in his last year at university.
*
On that particular evening it was August but already cold, and the Jolly delegates all seemed tired. The next day some of us would have to sit in a small, airless room discussing the translation of poetry from Hebrew into French, and from French into English. Discussing the nuances. The nuances of the nuances.
‘Is anyone interested in seeing the Cathedral?’ I asked.
No one was. Rouen Cathedral was too far away – an eight-mile taxi ride from our ‘central’ hotel. Everyone was too tired. One woman was pregnant and planning an early night.
So I had spent most of the evening looking at pictures of
other delegates’ children. None of them had children as old as my son. The oldest of the other children was nine. The women were all about the same age as me, but still at the stage of discussing potty training, speaking ability, nurseries, the amusing things children say.
‘The other day,’ said one of the women (a specialist in French Medieval Literature), ‘my daughter wanted to help me mop the kitchen floor. There she was, flinging this mop around and she suddenly looked up and said, “Mummy, when I grow up I want to be a floor-mopper.”’
The other women laughed. Some helped themselves thoughtfully to more Bombay mix from a bowl sitting on the bar.
‘And I thought,’ continued the woman, ‘where do girls get these thoughts? That they want to mop floors for a living? What happened to female emancipation?’
Nobody seemed to know. Perhaps, girt about with our motherly clobber – nappies in handbags, maternal antennae twitching long-distance – we were all wondering.
‘Well, my son is always careering around with action men and guns,’ someone began. And I felt a kind of heaviness in my chest. I have heard the Nature versus Nurture debate about once a fortnight for the past two decades. It has become a kind of phobia of mine.
‘It’s genetic. Nature,’ the women agreed. People always agree that it is Nature.
‘How about your son?’ someone asked, turning to me. ‘Does he bounce on the sofas too? Is he always into everything?’
‘My son is twenty-two,’ I said, and everyone stopped, glasses of wine and Bombay mix halfway to their mouths.
‘No!’ said the woman whose daughter wanted to be a floor mopper.
I felt the little group of academic mothers peering at me in the half-light, their brains whirring, calculating my age. I felt suddenly very envious of them – of the small children they had had at the appropriate age – little children, who were not about to leap off into the world; who still enjoyed bedtime milk, soft toys, bubble-blowing.
‘He does still hurl himself on to the sofas, though,’ I said. And the women paused for a second and laughed; then suddenly, wordlessly, turned and moved on, like a shoal of fish.
*
I missed something, by being a young mother. Missed out on mother-peers. When girls my age went out in the evenings, I would stay in my parents’ house in East Grinstead with my colicky baby son. We would sit and watch Life on Earth. When girls my age went down town to look at the make-up counters, I went up the road to buy nappies.
Now, women with sons the age of mine are collecting their pensions. Some of them have silver hair. Some of them are in their sixties.
I missed something from two different directions.
Kensington Outline
Rowena and Sally used to observe Colin’s female colleagues from a distance. These women always made Sally feel rather clown-like in her uniform and over-sized school shoes, while they floated about in their sexy tops, hair flicked and static with hairspray, little belts pulled in tight around their waists. But Rowena reassured her: Sally was the girl he wanted. Sweet Sally. ‘No competition, Sal,’ she used to say.
Sally’s first few dates with Colin Rafferty were furtive, spent in the pedestrian precinct or in the park during school lunch-hour. Rowena came too, following at a distance to make sure Sally was OK. Colin was a lot older than them, she reminded her. Nearly six years. He had informed Sally of this on their second date. It was quite shocking.
‘You be careful, Sally,’ Rowena had warned her, mother-henlike, when she relayed this information on to her. ‘You know what they’re like.’
Rowena was concerned. Possibly a little startled, too – Sally conjectured – that he hadn’t chosen her. Because Rowena was prettier than her. Rowena was brighter than her. And once, out of the corner of her eye, Sally had noticed a tiny scowl on Rowena’s face as she turned to leave. (Before Colin arrived she would go to lurk behind the silver birch trees at the other end of the park.)
Colin and Sally had had very little to say to each other on these early dates. Their conversations seemed always to be at cross-purposes. He would ask a very simple question, and Sally would gabble an extremely complicated response.
‘So. When do you go back?’
‘Who? What? Go back where?’
‘Your school.’
‘Oh. We go back on the sixth. But the fifth is the official first day back, it’s kind of the first day for the first and second years. But the sixth is, you know, the actual, you know …’
‘So. The fifth or the sixth?’
This sort of incoherence would happen perhaps three times during the course of a twenty-minute walk. Then Colin would kiss her, tell her that she was sweet and funny – that she made him laugh – and they would part.
‘How was he?’ Rowena would ask, catching up with her after Colin had gone.
‘Oh, Rowena, he’s so nice.’
‘Yes, but what did he say?’
And Sally looked up at the blue sky above the bowling green, at the pigeons clattering plumply, noisily up into it. She couldn’t quite remember what Colin had said. She also didn’t have a clue why he wanted to be with her. Does he really love me? Am I really pretty?
‘He’s … so nice,’ she said.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sally.’
*
It was Rowena who suggested London Zoo as a place for the first big date out of town. She had decided, from a distance of a few hundred yards, that Colin was respectable enough to go to London with.
‘Zoos are dead romantic,’ she said. ‘Plus, you won’t bump into anyone.’
Sally had pondered this. She hardly knew Colin, really, apart from the fact that he was nearly twenty-two and worked in advertising. But at London Zoo she imagined them openly holding hands, chatting about their lives, wandering along the paths in the cool greenness. Happily pointing out the gazelles and parakeets and laughing at the stick insects. They could really get to know each other there. He would see that she was funny but also serious: he would comprehend the intricacies of her mind. And London Zoo did seem like a lover-ish place to go; sweetly poignant. It was like the song her parents played on their record player: an old record on their new stereo.
‘Something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo – I do believe it, I do believe it’s true …’
*
On their way to the station, she noticed a man practising yoga. He was standing on a grass embankment at the side of the road, his long arms outstretched.
‘Doesn’t he look funny?’ she said to Colin.
‘Probably a student.’
‘So? What’s wrong with that? I’m a student.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re a schoolgirl.’
She didn’t reply. Flirting, sophistication, maturity, did not come easily. She worried about every sentence that came out of her mouth, in case it meant he fell out of love with her. Their relationship, twenty-one days old that Friday, was suspended on the finest, surrealist thread. How was it ever going to work? Sally looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock; she should have been in the school library with Rowena, revising. But there was a big romantic sun in the sky. There were pigeons and drifts of orange leaves at their feet.
‘Do you think that yoga man’s discovering his inner self?’ she said, hoping she looked very pretty as she spoke. She pushed her right hand through her long brown hair, inadvertently disturbing several kirby grips.
Colin smiled and walked ahead of her to the pedestrian crossing. Sally watched him go, this man she was in love with. She regarded his hair and his jacket and the way he walked. She thought of his kisses, metallic-tasting and intoxicating. But why does he love me? Does he think I’m pretty? Does he like my mind? Heart thumping, she watched as Colin began to cross the road. And she lagged behind for a moment. ‘I will give him some space,’ she thought. ‘I will be mysterious.’ It was childish, to go rushing after him all the time. So, loitering on the pavement, she turned to watch the yoga man again; to have her own fascinating thing to obse
rve.
But the yoga man had stopped. He was standing there frowning.
‘This is not a public performance,’ he said. ‘I am not a performing seal.’ He glared at her with peevish blue eyes and she felt, somehow, that he knew her secret.
*
By the time they made it to Victoria station she was as nervous as a rabbit. And Colin was in a funny mood. He had that inscrutable air about him, looking around the crowds with his vacant, angelic expression. They walked out of the station into a high wind which blew paper bags around their heads.
‘I hate the wind,’ Sally said, her voice raised.
‘Why?’ Colin shouted back. ‘It’s exciting! Beautiful. Like you!’
Did he say that? She thought she heard him say that. He had a clear, high voice, some of his vowel sounds occasionally betraying an exciting Northern origin. Speaking to him Sally used to try taming her own twanging, Southern vowels, but it never lasted. Like Miss Button, Colin had made a few remarks about her accent. He had once said it was a ‘gutbucket’ accent, and she didn’t even know what he meant. Unlike Miss Button, though, she hoped that Colin thought of her accent with tenderness.
Rowena’s presence, that day in 1979, would have been a comfort, a buffer, like those nets of corks that people sling over the sides of barges to stop them crashing into the riverbank. Unmoored, though, precarious, they spent the morning floating around – Covent Garden, the Strand, along the Embankment. They crossed trafficky roads. They walked beneath avenues of autumn trees. They sat on a green curlicued bench beside the Thames before walking across to Trafalgar Square to stare up at Nelson’s Column and three pigeons sitting on his three-cornered hat.