Things to Make and Mend

by Ruth Thomas

  ‘So how long are you away for again?’ Pearl asks. ‘For your embroidery thingy?’

  ‘Till Saturday. You sure you don’t mind me going?’

  She peers at her daughter. She has hardly ever left her overnight. Maybe three or four times since she was a toddler. There has never really been the need.

  Pearl says, ‘I’m going to stay with Dad, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, I know, sweetheart. I know, technically you’re –’

  ‘Chill, Mum. It’s only for one night, isn’t it? It’s your big break and stuff. And I’ll be at school all day anyway.’

  Sally wants to kiss her cheek but they are in a station and her daughter would be embarrassed.

  *

  They go to wait at the bus stop. Sally feels suddenly tired. The fingers on her right hand have stiffened into a needle-holding position. Her back is bent like a peasant woman who has been digging up turnips all day. She does not feel like a woman on the brink of a professional break. When the bus arrives the two of them climb on and sit, wedged together on a small plaid-patterned seat. Pearl stares through the window at the denizens of East Grinstead. A woman in a pink jacket is pulling a tiny, tiny dog along the pavement. Two schoolgirls in uniform wait at the pelican crossing, cigarettes between their fingers. And Pearl turns her head, not wanting them to notice her sitting there with her mum. Sally doesn’t say anything. Perhaps it is to do with her years of service as a clothing alterations expert; her years of restraint and seriousness; of sticking pins into waistbands and lying about people’s figures.

  *

  Her sewing room is the smallest room in their house. The floor is covered with a pink spongy carpet which the landlord chose. When Sally puts the radiator on in the winter, the room smells of the pine shelving unit and the cheap wardrobe in which she keeps her frames and unused canvases. It is a Nordic smell suggesting forests and fjords. Her finished canvases are propped up in ranks jutting into the room. Her cows, her moonscapes, her fields, her people.

  When they get home she glances into the room, at her sewing table under the window, and the vase of red carnations she has put there. The flowers perfectly match the scarlet embroidery silk she is using to create some little red flowers at Martha and Mary’s feet. There is something pleasing about that. Beside her basket of threads there is a photograph of the three of them: Pearl, John and Sally, sitting outside a pub in Yorkshire. 1997. Pearl has a tendrilly fringe and gap-teeth. John is puzzled and putting on weight; and there is Sally, with the big smile on her face, and her arms around them both.

  There is not much else. Little things. Haberdashery. Beside her shelving unit is a piece of card with six green buttons sewn on to it. There is her box of sequins. And there is her pincushion with its pony-tailed Chinese men. Yellow, turquoise, scarlet and pink satin, pierced over the years by thousands of pins. She has always loved this pincushion. Her mother gave it to her when she was sixteen and needed little cheerful things. The men are holding hands, their fingertips – triangular points – stretching across an almost impossible gap.

  ‘When do you want to eat, Mum?’ Pearl calls from outside the door, and Sally turns and walks out of the room. ‘Have I got time for a shower before supper?’

  ‘I should think so,’ Sally replies vaguely, ‘It’ll give me time to …’

  And Pearl, standing on the narrow landing, silently switches on the bathroom light as if it’s a magic trick. They both peer into the bathroom: at the framed dolphin-embroidery above the bath; and at the array of shampoo and conditioner bottles.

  ‘Macaroni cheese do?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right,’ Sally says, hovering in the doorway. Sometimes, she reminds herself of her mother.

  *

  In the kitchen she chops three small, overripe tomatoes, her heart tight as a winding engine, anticipating the talk she has to give. What if I can remember nothing, what if I stand there transfixed? And she has so many things to say to Pearl before she leaves in the morning: Don’t forget Dad’s picking you up tomorrow. Make sure you take your flute in for rehearsal. Are you sure you’ve got my mobile number? And are you sure, are you really sure you don’t mind me going? Because I can cancel, easily, sweetheart. I just have to give them a …

  ‘Have you got any homework?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Well, make sure you do it, though, sweetheart.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Pearl spends thirty minutes in the bathroom and another forty-five in her room again, drying her hair with her interminably droning hairdryer. At last she returns to the kitchen, bringing with her the plastic carrier bag.

  ‘So. I thought you might like this,’ she says, handing Sally the bag.

  ‘Oh! This is … exciting.’

  Sally wipes her hands on the front of her apron, takes the bag and brings out its content. A book. A paperback book entitled Memories of the Blitz.

  She is not quite sure what to think. ‘Thanks very much,’ she says.

  ‘I just thought you might like it,’ Pearl says again. ‘It looked like your kind of thing.’

  ‘Did it?’ Sally replies. She feels a little alarmed. ‘I don’t remember the Blitz, darling,’ she says. ‘It’s more, like, Nana’s era.’

  Pearl looks at her. ‘I know that,’ she says.

  Sally touches her cheek and sits down at the table to look at the book. She turns to the photographs in the middle. There is a picture of a double-decker bus in a bomb crater. Another one of a small girl wearing a gas-mask. She is sitting on her mother’s lap. Her mother is also wearing a gas-mask.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ she says again. ‘It’s … great.’

  Pearl always mocks her for using that word. Great. And for using the words brilliant, appalling, gym-shoes and hi-fi.

  She wonders if Pearl imagined she might do embroideries of the Blitz. It alarms her a little, that she might think that.

  Pearl is sitting in her chair now, contemplating the dish of macaroni cheese. She doesn’t speak for a moment. Then she says, ‘I’ll probably go round to Nana and Grandad’s while you’re away.’

  She picks up the jug of water and pours herself a big tumblerful. And Sally notices that she is blushing. Her face, for no apparent reason, has become a little pink.

  Sally picks up a serving spoon and slices into the macaroni cheese.

  ‘Maybe when I come back we could do something nice,’ she says. ‘It’ll be Saturday. We could go up to town. Maybe we could go shopping? Or go to the pictures?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  And they fall silent again. They eat. Four houses along, the gadget-orientated young man starts up his new electric drill. He is doing something to his bedroom window frame.

  ‘So,’ Sally says. Sometimes it is so much effort being a resourceful mother.

  And after a moment Pearl puts her fork down.

  ‘I’m actually quite tired, Mum,’ she says. ‘Do you mind if I just go to bed?’

  ‘Oh –’

  ‘I’m just going to lie down, I think, if you don’t mind. I’ve got a bit of a headache.’

  ‘But –’

  Pearl stands up and pushes her chair under the table. ‘Night, then. See you in the morning.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Sally stares up at her daughter, a few thick strands of macaroni pronged on to her fork. She feels baffled. Uncomprehending. She feels middle-aged and upset.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘OK. Night, sweetheart. Thanks for the book. It’ll be great for … research.’

  ‘I thought you’d like it.’

  And Sally wants to get up and hug her. She wants to say something light and kind, something witty about the macaroni cheese, but her daughter has already left the room.

  *

  The fridge clicks and hums. The clock on the cooker ticks. Sally sits at the table and listens to her daughter walking about the house in her slippers.

  She does not go straight to her room. She goes into the bathroom. Then, after a few min
utes, Sally hears her walking across the landing into the sewing room. She does not normally go in there. Sally sits still, unmoving, and wonders what she is doing. There is the sound of drawers being opened and things being moved around. Sally hears an incomprehensible clanking noise and her sewing machine is pushed to one side. A drawer is opened in her little shelving unit. What is she doing? What is she doing? Then there is the sound of something falling, something shattering, and Pearl cursing under her breath. Sally frowns. She sits and waits for Pearl to come out with shards of glass or china in her hands, looking for the dustpan and brush. But she doesn’t. After another five minutes or so, Sally hears her slink out quietly, like a cat-burglar, and into her own room.

  Sally remains at the kitchen table for over half an hour. She feels fragile, like an eggshell turned upside down in its cup. What is she doing? What is she not telling me? Should I phone Mum? Should I phone her school? Perhaps I should phone John?

  She gets up and dials John’s number, but there is no answer.

  She is about to head upstairs for bed when she hears Pearl’s door opening again. Sally sits and watches her reflection appear in the window. She is creeping along the dark hallway, carrying a waste-paper basket.

  ‘Hallo,’ Sally says.

  ‘Oh,’ Pearl exclaims, halting, like a field mouse alert to an owl.

  ‘I broke your vase,’ she frowns, walking further into the room with the waste-paper basket. ‘That blue one.’

  ‘Oh, Pearl.’

  ‘I was just looking for something in your sewing room. In your little filing cabinet.’

  ‘What were you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a needle. I’ve got a splinter.’

  ‘Have you? Let me see.’

  ‘It’s OK. I got it out.’ Sally looks at her. ‘I thought I heard you crashing about in there,’ she says. ‘You didn’t damage my embroidery, did you? Didn’t get glass on it? Or water?’

  ‘No. It’s fine,’ Pearl says. ‘I’ll … get another vase.’

  She puts the waste-paper basket on the floor.

  She’s tired, Sally thinks, she’s very tired. ‘You had a long day,’ she says. ‘It makes you over-tired and then you bump into things.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Sally thinks: We are like Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. Alone on a desert island. And not even speaking the same language. The skin beneath Pearl’s eyes is tinged with grey. She stares through the window at the streetlights.

  ‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ she asks.

  *

  The phone rings some time after eleven when Sally is in bed, under her duvet, wearing the slippers, the leather-soled Aztec slippers she has owned since she was seventeen. It is John on the phone. He says, ‘Hi. I dialed 1471.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So. Is Pearl coming to stay tomorrow or what?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally replies, squinting in the sudden yellow light of the anglepoise. She glances across the room, at her spare embroidery frame, her needle case, her basket of threads.

  ‘So you’re going to Edinburgh then?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replies, looking up at her luminous ceiling-stars.

  ‘It’s not particularly convenient.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I did tell you weeks ago. This is, you know, my big break.’

  John sighs. ‘I was meant to be going out tomorrow night,’ he says.

  ‘Well.’ She is aware of a loose piece of wool inside her left slipper, beneath the arch of her foot. ‘You’ll have to rearrange it, I’m afraid.’

  He sighs again.

  ‘A date, was it?’ Sally asks, wiggling her foot.

  But John does not reply.

  She can imagine him roaming around his studio-apartment in Chingford – bearded, a trail of banana skins and old coffee mugs in his wake.

  ‘I’ll pick her up from school, then,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you. Tomorrow. Friday. Do you remember what time school finishes?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘OK then.’

  Sally holds the phone against her ear with her shoulder, reaches down under the duvet, pulls off her left slipper, turns it inside out and breaks off the strand of wool. She has strong, professional, thread-snapping hands. Her slippers, these days, are an assemblage of snapped threads.

  ‘I’m only away a day and a night,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you can pick up your romantic life when I get back.’

  And John nearly does not say goodbye. Then, at the last moment, he does. They are mature people. They are forty-four and forty-three.

  Before going to sleep, Sally calculates how many years she has owned her slippers.

  Stem Outline

  Sometimes I still wonder about my old teachers. About the despondent Miss Haugh, the upwards-and-onwards Miss Gordon, and Miss Button, peculiar Miss Button. I think in particular about Miss Button. Her fierceness. That man I saw her with once, in town, in a sports car. And her habit of confiscating sweets. Where did she put all those sweets? I wonder, too, why she chose those particular blouson patterns for us all to sew. Was it because the end result was so profoundly ugly? I recall mine was a stripy orange material, and Sally’s had little blue flowers on it. Nobody, not even the prettiest girl, could have looked good in a garment like that.

  *

  ‘She has a warped mind, that woman,’ I remember once mumbling to Sally Tuttle. And we looked across the room at pretty Miss Button, sitting behind her desk in a new cashmere sweater. Miss Button beamed back disconcertingly, took a sweet from a confiscated packet and popped it into her mouth.

  ‘D’you think she’s in lurve?’ Sally asked. ‘She looks all perky today.’

  ‘Dunno.’

  After Sally had started seeing Colin Rafferty I remember being embarrassed about the word love.

  I looked down at my sewing pattern. Pin front interfacing to wrong side of front yoke.

  ‘What is a front yoke?’ I asked. ‘Is it –?’

  ‘Rowena Cresswell,’ Miss Button’s voice interjected, ‘unless you get on with your work in silence you will have to leave the room.’

  Miss Button used to like lobbing harsh pronouncements, like hand grenades, into the torpor of a late afternoon. The thing about Miss Button was: she was sarcastic, but she wouldn’t let you join in with the sarcasm. She knew the other teachers were ridiculous but she wouldn’t tolerate us saying so. She was young, but she was so much more mature than we were.

  She had a curious, stalking walk too, I recall – a gait of immense self-importance which used to impress and slightly frighten me. I remember her stalking in her quiet shoes down the corridors, through the Resource Area, past the portrait of our school’s noble, bejewelled benefactor. In class she would pace like a caged and beautiful peacock up the rows of spotty, sweaty schoolgirls. At lunchtimes she would prowl past the desolate octagonal tables. ‘Enjoying your rice pudding, girls?’ she would ask.

  She also had a very soul-destroying habit of taking apart your work. She was even rumoured to take work home with her, to unpick at her leisure.

  ‘Hopeless girl,’ she would reprimand someone who had mangled her blouson pattern, lopping off notches and shearing along the wrong lines. ‘Shoddy, shoddy work.’

  And she would glare at the girl, her eyes a dark, beautiful brown.

  *

  Sometimes, I remember, when she was bored at the end of the day, she might lull us all into a false sense of camaraderie by engaging us in girlish conversation. She would sit on her desk, impeccable even at four in the afternoon, and discuss men. She would criticise the East Sussex Comp boys. She would talk about the Robert Redford film she had just seen, or muse on the failings of the day’s youth.

  ‘The problem with boys today,’ she would say, ‘is they have no sense of style. Half of them are unwashed and they walk around in those awful down-at-heel shoes. Don’t they? Those grotty, grey shoes.’

  Then she would flex her own beautifully-turned ankle, incline her head towar
ds the window and gaze at the street beyond, as if yearning for the impossibly exotic existence which she knew was waiting for her.

  Sally Tuttle and I sat side by side, secretly counting the number of times Miss Button used the word ‘grotty’ and jotting the number down in our rough books. Once, it reached as many as fourteen in a triple lesson. Miss Button was contemptuous of everyone. Although there had been that man in that low-slung sports car. ‘I suppose he wasn’t too grotty,’ I thought, brushing my fringe back, my bangles jangling down my arm.

  *

  The other day I described those blousons (very easy / très facile) to Kenneth. The waistline, I told him, had actually ended at mid-buttock and was elasticated, creating a bulging, balloon-like effect. The cuffs were also elasticated. The neckline was high and boxy. The finishing touch was a bow attached to the collar.

  ‘Attractive.’

  ‘Certainly was.’

  ‘And do you think Miss Button would have worn one?’

  ‘Not if you’d paid her a million quid.’

  Appearance mattered a lot to us then. The details mattered so much that sometimes you could overlook the larger picture. Sally Tuttle and I worried incessantly about our skin tone (greasy / ‘combination’), teeth (not straight enough), hair (too fine / too mouse). We discussed how far we could take in the sideseams of our skirts before the teachers noticed. And at breaktimes, meeting in the school toilets, I remember how we fussed endlessly with the important detail of our hair. We used to try to give it more ‘volume’ by bending forwards until it trailed against the ground and our faces reddened; then we would pull it into a tight bunch and snap in a hairband. When we stood up again, our ponytails would be ridiculously high, and our hair would bounce, bouffant, above our scalps. We resembled gonks. The look of 1979.

  I remember taking magazines into school, with titles like Hair, Hairstyles and Style. Sally and I scrutinised the photographs: pictures of grim-faced young women beneath perms and huge black fringes.

  ‘Look at that one!’

  ‘Look at her!’

  ‘What would your mum do if you came home with a perm?’