Things to Make and Mend

by Ruth Thomas

  Once again we are delighted to invite you, Ms Sally Tuttle, one of our most valued premier customers, to our next Special Events Day. Make any purchase and we’ll be delighted to give you absolutely free A FABULOUS FLORAL TABLECLOTH AND MATCHING NAPKINS!

  Damart catalogues, like Embroidery Times, punctuate Sally’s life at regular intervals. She and Pearl are fond of these too: of their ‘winter-busting’ socks and knickers; of the models’ resilient smiles and strange willingness to be seen in rosebud-decorated lounger suits.

  Now two men are having an argument outside Tie Rack, clumsily prodding and pushing each other around, hands hard and angry. It is the sort of incoherent male argument that suddenly escalates, becomes wild and bloody and frightening, injuring innocent bystanders. Sally watches as two men in uniforms come to separate them, and they all plod, shouting at each other, down the platform. After a while another woman comes and sits beside her, listening to some very loud music on tiny black headphones. Tsh, tsh, tsh. Her boyfriend comes to join her. ‘Shove up,’ he observes. He is also wearing headphones. They sit side by side, listening to their headphones.

  *

  In East Grinstead the sky is a pure grey, almost beautiful if you looked at it objectively. East Grinstead itself is not a place of great beauty. There is the little cluster of old shops in the High Street but the majority of the town is without pretension. Over a lot of it seems to hang the disappointment of the suburbs. The stigma of being near London, but not London. The failure of being Sussex but not rural Sussex. All the shops seem to sell the same things: plastic buckets, galvanised shovels, dog bowls, cassettes, baby clothes. Walking past Woolworths, Sally glances through the window to see an elderly woman hovering by the pic’n’mix, petrified with indecision.

  Let me not become like that.

  She looks at her watch. She pictures her hotel room in Edinburgh, her floral sponge bag, her dressing gown, her change of clothes.

  *

  Sally’s parents live in a new bungalow on the edge of town, not far from the Cresswells’ old house. Their bungalow is small and easy to maintain. They have a doorbell that goes ‘ding-dong,’ an ivy growing up a trellis, tartan slippers in the porch and painted glass butterflies suspended from a small ornamental sorbus tree. In their living room they display framed examples of Sally’s work.

  She is late now, and there is only just enough time, before she has to leave again, for a cup of tea. Not for the plate of sandwiches that she can see waiting on the kitchen sideboard, or the small glass of sherry, or the iced Madeira cake.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Mum,’ she says. She hangs on to her bag of embroidery silks and feels guilty.

  Her mother is wearing a roll-neck jumper and a tweed skirt and looks very elegant. Almost chic. She can do that, much better than Sally. Her hair is thick and still with a lot of ginger in it. Her nose is aquiline, her eyes dark.

  They drink tea. Her mother has always made the best tea Sally has ever drunk, just the right strength and temperature, in a white, rose-patterned cup. And while they drink she talks about one of their neighbours, Mavis, who is in hospital with her leg in traction.

  ‘The doctors say it might be suspended like that for weeks,’ she says, leaning against the worktop. Hanging on the clothes-dryer above her head is her old white bathrobe.

  ‘Surely not weeks?’

  ‘That’s what she said the doctors said.’

  From the living room Sally’s father, whose feet, resting on a pouffe, she can just make out around the edge of the door, says, ‘Days. It was days, love.’

  Sally goes to her parents’ house once a week and worries that her dad is getting distant, that her mother is getting anxious. (‘How’s your work going, darling?’ she asks, playing with the rings on her wedding finger. ‘How’s the shop? And the embroidery? Are the evangelical people happy?’ Her mother can’t quite believe that, for a living, her only child spends her time sewing. And then there is her love life. Her unfortunate relationships. ‘When are you going to find yourself a nice man?’ her mother asks sometimes, as if Sally is twenty-two. ‘Maybe,’ Sally replies, ‘I am never going to find a nice man.’)

  Her mother looks at her. ‘How’s Pearl getting on at school?’ she asks.

  ‘Fine. Busy. She’s still rehearsing for that concert.’

  ‘We’re hoping to come along to that.’

  ‘That’s nice. She’d be really pleased.’

  Pearl plays the flute. Currently, she is rehearsing for a concert at the end of term. They are playing dreadful things: something patriotic by Elgar, and The Ride of the Valkyries. In rehearsals she sits between her best friend Caroline and a girl called Avril who is so tall and thin that she folds up like a music stand.

  ‘Has she got a boyfriend?’ Sally’s mother asks.

  ‘Not to my knowledge,’ Sally replies, obscurely irritated.

  ‘Can’t you tell?’

  ‘It’s not always obvious. You couldn’t ever tell, could you? Anyway, I don’t think she’d –’

  ‘I could tell when you were acting strangely, darling. I could tell that.’

  ‘Oh. And do you think Pearl’s acting strangely?’

  Her mother sniffs and is quiet for a moment. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘No reason really.’

  ‘So why say it?’

  ‘It was just an observation, darling.’

  ‘You and your observations, Mum,’ Sally says, more snappily than she intended.

  ‘Well, you’re always so …’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So head in the clouds.’

  ‘What?’

  Her mother says no more. She has always been slightly irked by Sally’s dreaminess. By her apparent lack of motivation. Is it a generational thing? Sally imagines her thinking. Do they all hover about like this, waiting for something to happen? Maybe it is to do with the war. Her mother was one of the baby-boomers born in the Forties, when people seemed to be so much more constructive. She was a young girl during the ‘make-do-and-mend’ era. Sally’s grandfather used to put cardboard in his shoes to make them last longer. Her grandmother saved small lengths of string.

  Now her mother begins to move around the kitchen, rearranging things and humming. ‘Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree.’

  ‘Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree’ is a sign. A sign for what is coming next.

  ‘Seen John much lately?’ she asks, taking the cling-film off the plate of sandwiches.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Just thought your paths might have crossed.’

  ‘No. Not recently.’

  ‘Haven’t been in touch much then?’

  *

  When she met Pearl’s father Sally was twenty-three: a disappointed, underqualified young woman who had left school too soon; a young woman sitting in a corner of an adult education class with a huge embroidery frame and a basket of tangled wools. John was a welder: an artistic one, tutoring a workshop. They first spoke to each other in the canteen, halfway through their classes. He was interested in the embroidery Sally was doing, a rather complicated zoo scene. It involved owls, polar bears, flamingoes. He told her that embroidery was not unlike metalwork in the patience required, in the intricacy, and invited her to look round the studio where he taught Metalwork for Beginners.

  ‘Interesting,’ Sally said, looking at the pile of molten pewter he was working on.

  ‘It’s called Woman Sighing.’

  ‘I know how she feels.’

  And he looked at her with admiration.

  John was entirely different from Colin Rafferty. He was not upsetting. That was the main thing. And he did not make her blush or dream. He was slightly overweight, quiet, with a lot of dark, messy hair. He did not have mercurial wit, social poise, grace. But, Sally thought, he has something truer, more lasting than that. He did. She was with John for less than a year before she became pregnant. This was not her intention at all. Nor John’s. ‘Oh Christ,’ said John
.

  Becoming pregnant was, at the time, a huge mistake. And it had made her think of Rowena all over again: her former friend Rowena Cresswell, who had begun by then to alter in her memory, to become almost a fable. ‘The Friend who Changed’. She had not seen her for nearly nine years by that time. Now, feeling exhausted and sick at ten weeks gone, looking in the bathroom mirror at the noticeable swelling of her bare stomach, Rowena Cresswell was clear in her mind again: her face, her clothes, her smell, her way of speaking. Fifteen-year-old Rowena Cresswell, before she betrayed her.

  *

  Sally’s mother doesn’t ask any more about John, although she likes talking about him. She has always rather liked John, despite the fact that he went off with another woman years ago. He and Sally had discussed marriage, they had gone as far as checking out the registry office, and then he went off with a weaving instructor called Miriam. Miriam wove very complicated self-portraits using cardboard, brass tacks and black cotton. She made Sally think of a bower-bird, all energy and indignation. After a while she started to weave portraits of John: unappealing images with huge noses and dark expressions. She gave them titles like The Irresolute and Why?, and John retreated, puzzled and a little frightened to a one-bedroom flat in Chingford. He has remained there ever since. Pearl sees him most weekends. Sally sees him perhaps once every two months. She has still never quite forgiven him for leaving them. And sometimes she thinks of him in his small, messy flat in Chingford, and feels sad that she let him. But she does not have the right skills, she has come to realise: her relationships never go as planned. They are not the burnished, sparkling things she once dreamed of. They have been tangential, lop-sided, amazed at their own existence.

  *

  The wind bends the sorbus tree in her parents’ garden and all the glass butterflies make a jangling noise. Sally peers past, into the street.

  ‘I have to go now, Mum, or I’ll be late for Pearl.’

  ‘Well,’ her mother says, ‘sorry it was so short and sweet, darling. I suppose we won’t see you till you get back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I hope it goes well.’

  And something makes her heart tighten.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to say, Mum.’

  ‘Just say what you’d normally say.’

  ‘But I don’t normally say anything about my embroidery.’

  Her mother walks around the table to give her a hug. ‘Tell them why you do it, love,’ she says.

  And Sally leans into her perfumed, familiar jumper.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I don’t even know.’

  Pearl

  She named her daughter Pearl because she thought it was a pretty name. Unusual. It has a shimmering, peaceful quality and it alludes to something precious, which, of course, she is. A pearl is something beautiful that has emerged from a tough time. When she named her, she did not think of its overtones of old women, of old women who were young when beehive hairstyles and kohl eyeliner and Capstan cigarettes were in fashion.

  Pearl.

  Iridescent. Moon-like.

  She thought also of that line in Othello, that moved her once in an English lesson at school, Rowena’s chair empty beside her:

  … then you must speak

  Of one that lov’d not wisely but too well;

  Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought,

  Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,

  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

  Richer than all his tribe …

  ‘So you’re going to be mother-of-pearl,’ John said when Sally had finally made her mind up about the name. (They had agreed that she, having lumbered enormously about and given birth, should be the one with the final say.) ‘Nacre.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nacre. Mother-of-pearl. You see it in crosswords a lot. That’s about the only time you see it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  John had wanted to give their daughter a more normal name. Something not open to mockery at school.

  ‘It won’t be mocked at school,’ Sally said, when Pearl was about three weeks old – pale, beautiful, whole, priceless. The idea of her going to school one day seemed ludicrous.

  ‘It will get mocked,’ John said.

  ‘No it won’t.’

  Since then she has been known as Surly Pearl, Pearly Queen, Furball, Pert, Pearldrops, Burly Pearl (despite being as willowy as a tree).

  ‘Mum,’ Pearl said to Sally when she was about twelve and had taken briefly to calling herself by her middle name, Emma (which John chose), ‘why did you have to give me such a stupid name?’

  ‘It’s not a stupid name,’ Sally retorted, upset.

  ‘Yes it is. It’s an old-lady name. You get Pearls in bingo halls. Pearls with false teeth.’

  ‘You get Julias with false teeth,’ Sally said, thinking of an elderly neighbour she used to visit as a girl, whose teeth made a clattering noise when she spoke. ‘Or Catherines. Or Sarahs.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t think of them with false teeth, do you? Or in bingo halls.’

  ‘I can’t see this conversation going anywhere useful,’ Sally said, peering back at her needlework (her tower-block picture).

  Recently, though, she is pleased to say that Pearl likes her name again. She seems to have grown proud of its unusual quality. It is a jolie-laide kind of name. An ironic name. It is, she says, cool. The kind of name, Sally admits now, that requires a pretty girl to carry it off. But thankfully she is pretty.

  *

  Pearl is late. And her phone is switched off. This is nothing new. Her life is more of a mystery than it used to be, but Sally accepts that: that is how a girl’s life is. She knows she will just have to stand on the platform and wait for her.

  *

  While waiting she approaches East Grinstead station’s only-functioning Photo-Me booth. She needs a passport-sized photo for the little laminated conference card she has been told to expect by the Embroiderers Guild. She combs her hair quickly in front of the small rectangular mirror, steps into the booth and selects the background curtain colour – blue, not that dreadful orange. She adjusts the height of the little round stool, her legs absurdly visible beneath the tiny privacy curtain, places £4.80 in the slot, smiles her big smile and waits for the flash. Nothing happens. Apart from a small, blinking red light which says PLEASE INSERT MONEY.

  ‘I have inserted money,’ Sally mumbles to the booth.

  She leans forward and bangs the coin slot. The sign does not stop blinking. She presses the rejected coins button. Nothing happens.

  After a short while she sees a pair of legs stop on the other side of the curtain. She notes with sinking heart the jeans and expensively ugly trainers of an East Grinstead youth.

  “Snot working,’ says the voice belonging to the legs.

  ‘No.’

  She sits for a moment longer. Then, £4.80 and all dignity gone, she gets up from the little round stool, pulls back the curtain and steps out of the booth. The boy has disappeared.

  She walks over to a bench and sits beside a large woman eating chips. She continues to wait for her daughter.

  Someone has hung a plastic Santa Claus from the main doorway of the station, and his feet keep banging people’s heads as they walk past. There is a smell of cigarettes, damp paving, lavatory cleaner.

  People get off trains, find each other, hug, kiss and depart, and Ms Sally Tuttle (43, single mother, award-winning embroiderer) is still waiting. She imagines her daughter dawdling somewhere, having some conversation with her friends. A conversation that seems relaxed but is, she knows from experience, fraught with tension.

  She looks at her watch. Four fifty-five. After a lull a uniformed man walks around her very deliberately with a large-headed broom.

  ‘Not on the train, love?’

  ‘She’ll turn up,’ Sally replies. She watches the broom as it picks up station debris: tickets, leaflets, hot-dog wrappers.

  Then after five unfathomable
minutes or so there she is, ambling across the empty platform towards her, and Sally’s heart lifts. Pearl. My Pearl. Pearl has, she fears, inherited her father’s slightly drifting walk and Sally’s lack of self-belief. She is carrying her flute case and her spongy plastic school bag. She is wearing a pair of incredibly baggy green trousers. They remind Sally of the air-filled pyjama trousers she and Rowena Cresswell had to practise life-saving techniques with, in the school swimming pool.

  ‘Hi Mum.’

  ‘Hello, sweetheart.’

  Wearily, Pearl hands her a plastic carrier bag. Another plastic bag to carry.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you mind? Just for a bit.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Sometimes Sally doesn’t know quite what to say to her daughter, who has become a little distant lately, a little surly even. Her voice, as a child, was as clear as running water, but these days she always seems to mumble. Sally hears her talking to her friends on her mobile phone sometimes, and she doesn’t understand what she is talking about. She looks at her, her once smiling, once little girl. Her pony-tailed child with the blue wellingtons. She remembers when she used to paint pictures for her: Mummy smiling resolutely through forests, across beaches, over hills.

  Pearl’s mascara has gathered in dark smudges beneath her eyes.

  ‘Anything wrong, sweetheart?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Good. Well. Let’s get home for a cup of tea.’

  Sally says nothing about her day spent adrift in London’s haberdashery departments. She does not mention the little girl’s comment (‘Mummy, is that lady cross?’), or the worrying array of embroidery silks, or the sense, the sense as she skulked around the Gütermann cottons and the Lucky Lady button cards, that she should not be here, she should not be doing this. She just grips the two plastic bags in her right hand and looks around the station at the people walking back and forth. Passengers. People on affirmative, life-changing journeys.