Things to Make and Mend

by Ruth Thomas

  ‘Did Nelson fight the French?’ Sally shouted.

  ‘Yes. Don’t you know anything?’ Colin replied, before abruptly hoisting himself up on to the plinth of one of the lions, placing his left foot at the base of its tail and pulling himself on to its back.

  ‘Colin!’ Sally screeched, feigning delight.

  Colin didn’t reply. He leaned back against the lion, put his hands beneath his head and closed his eyes.

  ‘Does your friend know anything?’ he asked into the wind.

  ‘Who? Rowena? Know anything about what?’

  ‘About life. About history. About the battle of Trafalgar.’

  ‘No more than me.’

  ‘Does she know what Nelson said before he died?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Or was it Kismet?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What’s your school on about, then? What do you all pay your fees for?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  You are wonderful, she thought, gazing up at him. You are wonderful and funny and you have such long eyelashes.

  Colin lay there for a full five minutes, his eyes closed, while the wind blew down the back of Sally’s neck. She waited, looking around – at the pigeons again, across to Big Ben in the distance, up at the National Gallery and the steps and the tourists taking photographs.

  ‘Shall we go and get a coffee, then?’ Colin asked suddenly from his vantage above her. And he sat up, slid down from the lion, jumped off the plinth and took her hand in his. Sally’s heart sprang like a frog.

  ‘I know a place near here,’ Colin said, and without speaking further they walked across the square, over the road and down the steps into St-Martin-in-the-Fields. They sat in the crypt, drinking coffee. Sally peered around at the headstones mortared into the walls. There was a leaflet on the table informing them of the fact that a band (‘The Cryptics’) would be playing there at 7.30 on Saturday evening.

  ‘Could be cool.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She was not sure if it was quite normal to drink coffee in a crypt but she approved of anything she did with Colin. And nothing was normal now, in any case. She, Sally Tuttle, who occasionally still sported a plait, was going out with a twenty-one-year-old man! And when he spoke to her, when he kissed her, it was thrilling but not normal.

  *

  When they had finished their coffee they walked up Charing Cross Road and looked at the bookshops. They went into a little shop and bought a paperback on the Metaphysical poets. Then they queued for ages in Foyles to buy another very small book for Colin, on marketing strategies.

  ‘How stupid,’ Sally said, about the queuing system.

  ‘It’s a time-honoured tradition in Foyles,’ Colin retorted. ‘Queuing. You wouldn’t last a second in Russia.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I? Why not?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard of the bread queues? Haven’t you heard about the way they queue?’

  ‘No.’

  And he looked at her. Then he said, ‘Never mind. That’s why I like you, honey. Sweet and innocent.’

  In the National Portrait Gallery they looked at the paintings for a while – Beatrix Potter, Henry VIII, the Queen, and then got the lift down to the shop. They peered together at the postcards and the cases of coloured slides, Colin’s hand sliding lower and lower down Sally’s back. She didn’t know how to respond to this hand, so she ignored it; she stood, wooden as a figurehead. Last time I came here, she thought, I was with Mum and Dad.

  The women behind the till were discussing lunch.

  ‘That café on the corner does nice rolls,’ one of them was saying, into the echoing vaults. ‘And what are them things? Spinaca-something. Spinacafrittas?’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  ‘Maybe when you go for your lunch break you could pop up there, and …’

  ‘Excuse me,’ snapped Colin, ‘I hate to interrupt but can I just get this?’

  And he moved his arm from its new location around Sally’s shoulders and pushed across the counter the card bearing the portrait of the Scottish fishwife.

  The women looked at him. They did not blink. Then one of them said, ‘Certainly, sir.’

  ‘A woman after your own heart,’ Colin said when he gave the card to Sally. ‘Don’t you think she looks like you, in that scarf?’

  Sally looked at it. The shawl did look quite a lot like the blue scarf she possessed, the one she wore to look alluring.

  ‘Thanks,’ she replied, knowing she would cherish the card, even though the fishwife looked very earnest and not at all romantic. This was the first – and last – thing he ever gave her.

  *

  By the time they had been in London for a couple of hours Sally was exhausted with the effort of being happy. She felt like hiding in a phone box to give Rowena a call. Without her she felt out of her depth, a little fearful. What shall I say to him, Rowena? What shall I say?

  But Rowena wasn’t there and she would have to work out what to say on her own. How to be. How to be someone’s girlfriend, sitting on the stop-start Tube train, her hair clinging statically to the sleeve of his coat.

  They made their way towards Regent’s Park, walking hand-in-hand along the pavements, their breath coming out in little cold clouds. They sat for a while on another curlicued bench and Sally rummaged around in her yellow hessian bag for the poetry book she had bought.

  ‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did till we loved? Were we not wean’d till then?’ she read out loud, leaning back uncomfortably, her blue woollen-tighted legs on Colin’s lap. She stopped and wondered if she had done the right thing: maybe reciting poetry to him will make me look odd or earnest or –

  ‘Your voice is beautiful,’ Colin said, his eyes closed against the autumn sun.

  In a gutbucket way, Sally nearly replied. And she remembers how she had stroked his hair, where it was soft, at his temples. She read on, and wondered what snorted we, in the seven sleepers’ den meant.

  ‘Oh look, Colin,’ she exclaimed suddenly, stopping again to point out a small passing dachshund wearing a crocheted overcoat. Colin turned his head. Then he shivered, sat up, and banged his hands together.

  ‘Small things please you, don’t they?’

  ‘I thought he looked cute in that coat. My mum crochets.’

  ‘Your mum does what?’ Colin laughed. He took a cigarette out of his top pocket and lit it with a Swan Vesta.

  ‘Does it feel weird,’ he asked, taking a puff, ‘bunking off school?’

  ‘No,’ Sally lied, thinking not of school but of her mother and father, who were both so proud of her and her place at St Hilary’s. She had let them down. ‘Anyway,’ she said, getting up from the bench, ‘life’s weird whatever. Whatever you do.’

  ‘Weird,’ Colin replied. ‘Weird weird weird.’

  ‘Even the word weird,’ she said, ‘sounds weird. If you say it enough times.’

  And, alone, she began to laugh.

  *

  They reached the Zoo shortly after three. But it was not like the song on her parents’ record player. It was not all happening. Their illicit day in London had gone flat. Even the wind had dropped, to be replaced by a cold, sleety rain. Maybe he’s realised he’s too old for me, Rowena. Maybe I’m not posh enough. Maybe he’s thinking he should be with someone who –

  Her stomach rumbled loudly. ‘Whoops,’ she said, placing a hand over her belly.

  ‘What was that? Concorde taking off?’

  ‘Ha!’ she replied, and could think of nothing more to add.

  Now things were going decidedly wrong. It felt as if they were sobering up after too much cider. Sally was clumsy, klutzy, a common girl with noisy insides. Colin had become testy, verging on unkind. And the animal enclosures were smaller and more boring than Sally had imagined. Surely, she thought, a twentieth-century zoo should be nicer than this, with swaying trees and long grass for the animals to hide behind. Where
there would be leafy retreats. But no: this zoo was just like they always were. Like the awful concrete zoos in her old Peter and Jane books. Look, Mummy! Look, Daddy! A bear! The polar bear shuffled back and forth in his small square; the hippos stood at the gates of their pens like strange cows; the arctic hare sat alone and stared through the bars, its fur a dry, yellow-white, like a badly-washed-out paint brush.

  Standing by the flamingo cages Sally thrust her hands, star-like, up to the mesh. ‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘The flamingoes match my nails!’

  Some chagrined-looking owls in the neighbouring cage turned their heads to look at her.

  ‘You’ve frightened the owls,’ Colin snapped.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’ve frightened the owls,’ he said again, looking up at the two birds sitting high in the branches. It seemed at that moment that he much preferred the owls to her. They were wise and she was stupid. Patione et consilis, she thought suddenly, remembering her school badge. But before she could think of anything appropriate to say, he had turned and begun to walk away.

  Think of something, think of something.

  ‘I’m just going to find a bog,’ she called. Colin and the owls turned, round-eyed, to watch as she stalked off.

  But there wasn’t even any sanctuary in the Ladies. She had been in there for half a minute when there was a knock on the door and a man walked in.

  ‘Mind if I just come in to clean, love?’

  ‘No, no, that’s fine,’ Sally replied, wiping her eyes quickly and watching in disbelief as he crashed in with a mop and a bucket of water and a sign saying ‘Male cleaner in attendance’.

  ‘Having a nice day?’ the man asked convivially, looking at her in the mirror. ‘Seen the elephants?’

  And he revolved the extremely dirty-looking mop around the bucket, then slapped it down on to the floor tiles.

  ‘They’re great,’ he said, ‘the elephants.’

  Star

  I’m used to being on my own; slightly abnormal. I’m used to people scurrying off when I tell them about myself. People pretend to be cool, unshockable, but they’re not. They comment in an interested way about the fact that I, Rowena Lockhart, MA, PhD, tutor and translator, gave birth at fifteen. And then they move on. It happens wherever I go. Rouen was no exception. That evening in Rouen, I found myself standing alone, cradling my third wine glass and contemplating going upstairs to my room for an early night.

  I had already glanced across the Function Suite to assess the other women, the ones with small children. They were sitting at a low table now, laughing and drinking coffee. Impenetrably alike. Normal. I thought about sitting on my neat hotel bed upstairs and watching the elevated TV, maybe even going over the presentation I was meant to give the next day. I certainly did not feel like joining the normal mothers.

  I was, in fact, slightly drunk: not a good state for a single mother. Not a good state for anyone on their own. Must curb that tendency. Should have had more of those vol au vent things. And I had been about to put my empty wine glass down on a passing tray, I had been about to head for the stairs, when there was the sound of a man’s voice.

  ‘Mesdames, messieurs, dans cinq minutes le tour de la cathédrale va commencer …’

  A large, rather handsome man was standing in the middle of the room. His accent was good, but not brilliant. Canadian but not French–Canadian. He looked down at his watch. ‘Cinq minutes, mesdames, messieurs …’

  The sight of this man for some reason made me feel cheerful. Why? I looked at him, my vision very slightly blurred. Maybe it was because he had a true kind of jolliness about him. He was tall and slightly overweight and he looked as if he didn’t take events like this too seriously. He was not earnest. He did not like earnestness. He was wearing a creased suit. I smiled at him. The man noticed me and smiled back. Then he turned, walked past the women with the handbags and disappeared.

  I didn’t know where to look. The man’s departure was so surprisingly abrupt that it had brought tears to my eyes. It seemed an unkind thing to do, after smiling at me. Cruel. I stood and watched my empty wine glass being carried with others on the tray into the kitchens and felt a familiar sensation – a desolate feeling that I have been prone to for years.

  But then, just as suddenly, the man had returned. My heart lurched again with renewed hope. He walked back into the room, past the women with the handbags and straight up to me.

  ‘So,’ he said, as if we had already been introduced, ‘have you seen the Cathedral yet?’

  I felt myself blush, embarrassed by my watery eyes.

  ‘Not yet. Well, not this time. The last time I saw it I was fifteen,’ I replied in a rush. ‘I came here on a school exchange,’ I added, thinking of my old friend Sally Tuttle, la famille Duval, the trip to the Bayeux Tapestry.

  The man smiled at me. He seemed to want me to continue talking.

  ‘It doesn’t actually seem that long ago now I’m back,’ I said. The man had greyish eyes, very clear and kind.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it probably hasn’t changed much. But there’s a coach trip, if you’re interested. To see it floodlit.’

  ‘It wasn’t floodlit when I last saw it.’ I noticed that I was slurring my words.

  ‘Things do change, then. Things progress. I’m meant to be organising folk,’ the man said. ‘I’m the organiser for the evening. Look, it says so here.’

  And he pulled forward the badge on his collar.

  ‘So. If you want to come, the coach goes at ten. From the front of the hotel. It’s got Vacances Monet written on the side.’

  ‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled, ‘it would,’ and he touched my arm very briefly as he said goodbye, but in a friendly, possibly even kindred-spirited way.

  *

  At five to ten I went down to the hotel foyer and got on the coach. It was half-empty: there were a couple of elderly lecturers on board, and a few academic parents with their sleepy children, making me miss my once eight-year-old son. It was all very polite. Very cultured and civilised, everyone in groups of two, three or four apart from me and the driver. The driver and I were units. The driver sat on his seat, a cigarette in his mouth. I peered out through the coach window at the neon bar sign and the plate-glass hotel doors. It was cold – a clear, black sky with stars. I wrapped my Jolly-appropriate shawl more tightly around my shoulders.

  Fly, Attached

  She discards things too easily sometimes. Holds on to them for years, and then just lets them go. Sally thinks about Rowena Cresswell’s green dress and regrets her decision to leave it in the dress agency.

  The sky outside turns a greyish-orange as she stands in John Lewis’s haberdashery department, deliberating over the tapisserie wool and the Pearl Cotton No. 5. Sometimes it worries her a little: this inability to make decisions. Should I choose the sea-green or the leaf-green? The azure or the cobalt? She is the kind of person who can waste a lot of time deliberating over things like this. Adjusting her expression to one of serenity and hope, Sally picks up all four shades of green coton à broder and moves towards the Pay Here counter.

  *

  She misses her train back home and has to wait thirty-five minutes for the next one. She sits on a bench with her bag of threads and her bag of rejected clothes. She does not feel like a leading practitioner in the field of embroidery.

  It is getting dark now. She thinks of her daughter and hopes she is wearing enough layers to cope with the cold: these days Pearl never seems to appreciate the requirement for layers. Sally has not, of course, had time to buy anything to wear herself, for the embroidery conference tomorrow. No life-enhancing new coat. No practical handbag. And now, sitting at Victoria station with her old coat and her handbag with too many straps, she suddenly has thirty-five minutes of time; potential clothes-shopping time in which she can do nothing. Visiting Sock Shop will not suffice. So she remains on the bench. She sighs and looks at her lap, her unsatisfactorily pointy knees beneath h
er woollen skirt. She wants something to occupy her hands. She is not used to sitting with empty hands. She reflects that, that morning, she had stuffed the post into her handbag on her way out of the house, and now she gets it all out to read. She opens the envelopes quickly, one after another, resting them on her lap. There is a letter from the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation, a letter from the Embroiderers’ Guild, a Damart catalogue, a flyer about hearing aids, an electricity bill and a wrongly-addressed postcard: picture of a waterfall, some rocks and a spindly tree. She turns it over.

  Hardraw Force, Yorshire Dales National Park.

  At nearly 90 feet, this is claimed to be England’s

  highest unbroken waterfall. Brass band contests

  are held annually in the gorge at its base.

  Dear Grandad

  This is near where we are staying. We went for a walk here yesterday and Mummy fell in. Hope you are well.

  Love, Celeste.

  Sally pictures the scene – some poor woman toppling into a shallow stream, a brass band playing in the distance. She looks up and smiles at an elderly woman in a tracksuit who has come to sit on the bench beside her. The woman, mumbling something to herself, peers surreptitiously at Sally’s letters. Sally shuffles a little further up the bench.

  The letter from the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation describes how thrilled they are to have commissioned an artwork from her. The letter from the Embroiderers’ Guild expresses how thrilled they are to have booked her for a talk, in Edinburgh, on the art of embroidery. Sally does not know how to respond to so many thrilled people. It is not something she has ever had to do. She pictures herself standing in a Scottish hotel room, her English voice twanging on, competing with a coffee percolator on a side table.

  The elderly woman in the tracksuit sighs and gets up again. A pigeon comes and pecks at some old French Fries which are stuck to the floor.

  Sally looks at the catalogue from Damart. Even Damart is very pleased with her.