by Ruth Thomas
‘She’d wig out.’
This was the term before we were supposed to sit our O-levels. By this stage, I recall, girls had begun to realign themselves, to seek out kindred spirits. There had been a sudden pause, a suspension, a sort of quiet luminosity for a week or so, when there was the potential for anything to happen. It was like the end of childhood. It was like the Red Sea parting for a brief moment before everyone scuttled, terrified, for the banks of friendship. And then the seas had crashed in again, covering the poor singletons who had not made it. Help me! Save me! But it was too late. It was almost too awful to watch: the closing-in of the waters.
The washed-up, waterlogged girls still lurked at breaktimes, alone or in clinging, ill-matched groups, while Sally Tuttle and I marched magnificently around. We were the chosen ones: we had made it out of the Red Sea. And we were both grateful. What would we ever do without each other? Neither of us could envisage a time when we would not be together. Sometimes, there would be something that niggled. Some little comment that irked. But we knew we would still be meeting up for chats about men and words when we were ninety. Giggling in our rocking-chairs. I suppose, at the age of fifteen, girls know no better.
Rosette Chain
Nearly everybody Sally knew had come to her embroidery award ceremony. She was very touched. It was like a wedding without the cake or the confetti or the groom. Plenty of sparkling wine, though. Sally drank too much of it and was so overwhelmed she hardly spoke all evening
John made up for it. John, when he has had enough to drink, becomes very convivial. After the speeches and the clapping and the presentation of the cheque, he came to find Sally, and put his arm around her shoulders. He was wearing a shirt with a jolly, abstract print. He smelt quite pleasantly of sweat. His eyes looked watery and a little pink. He kissed her on the lips – a nice, rather alcoholic kiss – and said, ‘You and your sequins, Sally.’
‘I know.’
‘You and your sequins.’
‘I know.’
The rest of the event is already a bit of a blur. Sally’s embroideries, arranged on the walls, swam in and out of focus. The peacock, the elephant, the tower block. The elephant, the tower block, the peacock. Everyone wore nice clothes – wool, silk, linen – and stood for ages in a queue, waiting for the chicken satay sticks and peanut sauce. Wine glasses clinked. Waitresses yelled. People got quite exercised about the satay sticks.
*
Sally has never been good in crowds. What to say, what to say? She has always been shy, and considers herself very fortunate to have ebullient friends who can usurp the limelight. Even as a girl, her friends were much more outgoing than she was. Rowena, for instance. Sally doesn’t really know how that friendship happened. But somehow she had been scooped into her embrace. With Rowena, she felt bright, clever. And Rowena altered too: her accent plummeted, her syntax slipped. Maybe that was why Mrs Cresswell never liked Sally.
‘These sodding patterns always say they’re very easy,’ she remembers Rowena whispering to her in Needlework one afternoon. ‘They always say very bloody easy, but they’re bloody not.’
And Sally looked at the blouson pattern instructions spread out across their desk. At the pencil sketch of a woman, diaphanous, her legs as insubstantial and curved as raspberry canes. She was about to say something about the awful word ‘blouson’ – it was one of those words – when Miss Button’s voice cut across them.
‘I think you’ll find, Rowena,’ she said, striding across the room towards them, ‘that they are very bloody easy. Only a simpleton could get this particular pattern wrong. Although looking around this class …’ she added, and then, perhaps thinking better of it, she stopped talking and returned to her desk, to continue unpicking someone’s work.
‘Rhiannon Clark,’ they heard her spit, ‘when will you understand the difference between petersham and bias binding?’
Everyone looked up. Rhiannon Clark was standing by Miss Button’s desk, morose, her face pink, her blazer too tight. She was evidently not a girl for whom petersham would ever be important. Why could Miss Button not see that?
‘What a cow,’ Sally whispered to Rowena. Once, Miss Button had returned her homework to her – an essay on the care of delicate fabrics – covered in coffee stains. Sally had imagined her laughing and wiping coffee away with the back of her hand.
‘Do you think she’s actually the Wicked Witch of the East?’ Rowena whispered.
‘All I know is she’s a cow.’
And Rowena nodded seriously and began to cut out her collar interfacing with the coveted class pinking shears.
Miss Button was particularly unpleasant that day, Sally remembers. She had eventually reduced Rhiannon to tears – a miserable wreck sitting beside her sewing machine, her Kwik-unpicked garment in her hands.
‘She’s pure poison,’ Rowena said, the blades of her scissors slicing comfortingly against the nylon. And for some reason Sally was very happy when she said this. Rowena was so sure of her likes and dislikes. And Sally was one of her likes.
‘She’s probably lonely or something,’ she conjectured. ‘Or frustrated.’
Rowena smiled. ‘Frustrated spinsters are the worst. D’you want the pinking shears for your interfacing?’
‘Yeah.’
‘For your lovely blouson.’
Sally smiled.
‘When I’ve made mine,’ Rowena said, ‘I have plans to waft about in it across the fields.’
‘I’m planning to wear mine next time I see Colin.’
From her elevated desk, Miss Button made a point of ignoring their conversation. Perhaps even she knew there was no point breaking into one of their flights of fancy.
*
They left school together, to walk to the bus stop. It often rained and they never seemed to have umbrellas.
There were a lot of school pupils at that bus stop. The girls stood and talked and the boys stood and punched each other. Most of the girls had highlighted hair and heavy eye make-up. Most of the boys wore parkas.
‘I’ve got loads of spots today,’ Sally said, suddenly alarmed at the prospect of meeting Colin that evening.
‘Use some cover-up,’ suggested Rowena – a girl with the kind of matt skin that seemed impervious to everything, including adolescence.
‘Hi,’ a boy said to Rowena, and she turned. Mark Malone. A tall, thin boy who had a huge Adam’s Apple and played the oboe in his school orchestra. He and Rowena had once, briefly, gone out together, Rowena waiting for him outside the church hall where his orchestra rehearsed. He had been sweet, she told Sally, but she had eventually deemed him to be unsatisfactory. Rowena knew how to deal with men. She could end relationships with a definitive chop, like a martial arts move. Paul Woodman, Shaun Dale, both skillfully tackled and discarded. Now Mark Malone. Poor Mark. He had looked handsome at discos in his long white school shirt, which went impressively blue in strobe lighting. In plain daylight, though, you couldn’t help noticing his spots and his Adam’s apple. ‘People who play music are often quite serious, don’t you think?’ Rowena had said, and Sally didn’t know how to reply. She had felt rather sorry for Mark Malone, standing forlornly at the bus stop in the mornings, trying not to look at her. Rowena had been, she felt, a little harsh.
‘Oboe-boy again. Poor thing, look at him,’ she observed loudly. And the two girls turned and watched as he moved away, to stand alone, Malone Alone with his oboe, at the other end of the bus stop. It was funny, Sally thought, how you never liked people who liked you. Who liked you too much.
She worried that this might be the case with Colin, a man she loved beyond measure.
*
She was beginning to rearrange her evenings now, to be with Colin. They had moved from meeting in the park to his flat. And at some point, Sally felt sure, they would have a very profound conversation.
Colin’s life, though, was a mystery. Who were his family? Where did he come from? He told her, between kisses, that his mother was Italian – a great
beauty and a former opera singer. She had sung, he said, at La Scala, Milan.
‘What’s that?’ Sally asked, and he looked at her and said, ‘God, you’re ignorant, aren’t you?’
His father had been very handsome, apparently – ‘More handsome than me,’ Colin said – and had acted in Hollywood. But he didn’t see him any more. ‘I don’t really want to talk about my dad,’ he added, softly.
‘Oh,’ Sally frowned. Colin seemed to have led such a full and, in some ways, tragic life that she didn’t know how she could possibly be alluring enough for him: a girl who lived in a close at the wrong end of East Grinstead. A girl whose family ate fish fingers and Arctic roll. She looked around Colin’s room: at the posters he had put on the wall above his bed. A picture of a naked, rather green-looking woman. Another poster saying ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius’.
Why did you come to East Grinstead? Sally wanted to know. He seemed to have had such a glamorous upbringing that she couldn’t understand why he would want to come here. The son of a Hollywood actor and an opera singer, living in East Grinstead? Working in an office beside the pedestrian precinct? Walking past the municipal bins and the swing-park?
Colin sighed and blinked his beautiful eyelashes. ‘We fell on hard times. My dad had a terrible … fall … from some theatre scaffolding.’
And he looked as if he might cry.
‘Oh,’ said Sally, leaning her head against his arm.
His first Saturday job, he told her eventually, over the course of one evening, had been in a bakers, of all places – Crumbs, the bakers in the High Street. It had since closed down. He was fourteen. And he described, comically, how he had stood all day behind trays of macaroons and éclairs and apple turnovers. ‘There were these fat blokes,’ he said, ‘who used to shuffle in every day for pork pies and stuff.’ And Sally giggled. There were not many people who could make a Saturday job in a bakery look amusing – almost necessary, somehow – but Colin Rafferty was one of them. He imitated the way the fat pork-pie men spoke, and she giggled again and hoped her hairgrip was not pressing too much against his upper arm. Colin had gone on to greater things, of course: to his job in the advertising agency where he was presently engaged on an advert for a new brand of yogurt. Yogopot. He was still working on a slogan, he told her, and had whittled it down to three:
Yogopot for Pots of Taste
I’m potty for Yogopot
There’s a Yogopot at the end of the rainbow.
But still, why? Why did he …?
Colin gazed down at her. She gazed back and was on the point of leaning up to kiss him when he smiled and said, ‘Your hair looks very flat today, m’dear.’
Her heart clunked.
‘Sorry?’
‘Your hair,’ he repeated. ‘Very flat.’
*
He was good at doing that, she recalls: altering her happiness with one carefree comment. It would send her into an instant panic, make her wretchedly scrutinise her appearance when she got home. It would make her visit clothes shops after school, struggle into T-shirts in the changing rooms, look glumly at herself in the dark mirror. Am I pretty enough? Do I look old enough? Why does he want to be with me?
And her face would peer back at her, shifty and unsure. Somehow, all the other girls in the changing room seemed slimmer, older, more tanned. They all had Strip-waxed legs. They all had long, wavy hair.
Twelve ninety-nine, she would think, looking at the price tag on the shirt she had taken in, and wondering if she could ask her mother for a loan.
Rowena used to go shopping with her at the weekends but sometimes her presence would make her feel even worse. She would hang loyally on to the handles of all her plastic bags and say ‘He’ll like you in that,’ as Sally pulled some cheap, ribbed top over her head, the seams already coming apart. ‘Very sexy,’ she’d add.
They liked irony but it sometimes escaped them.
‘So how was Colin? Did you have a snog?’ Rowena asked her once in the middle of Miss Selfridge’s underwear department.
‘Rowena!’
Irritated, she had turned and glanced at a middle-aged woman standing by the sale bin. She was pulling out pairs of primrose-yellow knickers.
‘So did you?’ Rowena asked.
And something had made her not want to tell her.
‘Are you really in love with him?’ Rowena asked.
Sally did not reply.
Fern
I leave my son and husband putting houseplants into boxes. An umbrella plant, a weeping fig and a dried-out maidenhair.
‘Where are you off to?’ Kenneth asks as I am standing in the doorway of the flat.
‘I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ I say. ‘I just thought I’d go for a walk round the block.’
‘Do you need some Paracetamol?’
‘No. Thanks.’
I look at the plants. I feel too tired to place words into sentences.
‘So. See you in a bit. Won’t be long.’
‘Do you have your mobile with you?’ Kenneth calls as I am closing the door.
*
I met Kenneth too late to really contemplate having more children with him. I already had a son and Kenneth had two daughters. I was thirty-nine by then and he was nearly fifty, and it would just have been exhausting. Our relationship is predominantly to do with the mind, not the body. Not with nappies and baby-wipes, babysitters and school catchment areas.
*
When I used to feel particularly bitter about my lot (aged eighteen with a two-year-old son and no qualifications, no job), I viewed men with suspicion. All men. I remember, once, taking Joe to a swing-park on the southern edge of town, one of those depressing swing-parks with its inevitable squeaks and adolescents. All the other parents in the swing-park were mothers – all engaged with their children, all holding their hands on the dangerous bits and encouraging them down the slide. All except for one young man, who was lying flat on his back on a bench. His daughter had tagged on to the children of one of the women. He seemed to have assumed that an unknown woman in a bobble hat, already dealing with her own small children, would also look after his daughter. There was something so infuriating about this that I thought ‘Right’ and strode over to the man.
‘Excuse me.’
The man opened his eyes.
‘Is that little girl in the pink anorak your daughter?’
The man peered across the tarmac.
‘U-huh.’
‘Well.’ And now I couldn’t think what to say. My anger had overtaken my plan of attack.
‘I just thought you ought to know,’ I said, ‘that she was right at the top of that tree over there.’
I turned and pointed to a huge elm tree, a diseased one probably, its branches sticking out like the rungs of a ladder.
‘And,’ I continued, ‘she would have fallen if that woman over there’ – I pointed to the woman in the bobble hat – ‘hadn’t very carefully coaxed her down.’
The man considered me for a moment.
‘Well, that was very kind of her to coax her down,’ he said. ‘My daughter’s always getting into scrapes.’ And he smiled. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’
My heart thumped.
‘That is none of your business,’ I hissed, turning on my heel and, dragging Joe by the hand, striding across to the little awkward squeaky gate and leaving the swing-park.
I hated men. I hated them all. I didn’t want my son to grow up like that and taught him, as well as I could, how to be considerate. How not to hit. Or head-butt. How to say please and thank you. And he was often gentle and polite. But then he would also do these things which I could not stop. Nature, not nurture.
Girls are more intelligent. That is my opinion. But somewhere along the line, around the age of, say, fifteen, some of them will do something stupid. Some of them will find they have shackled themselves to an impossible situation.
My mother helped as well as she could with Joe, but she was ill by then, thin and u
nsure. She bought him things that were too old: jigsaw puzzles with fifty pieces when he was two. Junior science kits at three. My father retreated slightly after Joe’s birth, embarrassed by this new, unexpected relative which was not even in control of its own limbs.
It was hard for my parents: they waited fifteen years for their daughter to grow up, only to find themselves with a grandson.
*
I like Edinburgh; I have been here before, on lecturing trips. I spoke at a conference here a couple of years ago, on the French correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots. ‘Are you calling it Mary’s French letters?’ some wag in my department inquired. I fixed him with a scornful look.
I know the city’s geography these days, and can orientate myself by the views. I suppose I have never quite got over the excitement of city life. It is such a contrast with the town I grew up in. I love the all-night buses in cities, the department stores, the restaurants, the delicatessens. I love the posters, the leaflets, the curious events. In our hotel this morning, I picked up leaflets advertising the Chinese State Circus, a weekend archery competition on the Meadows and a display of rain-dancing in the museum. And tomorrow, in the hotel itself, there is going to be an ‘embroidery fest’. An embroidery fest! The phrase made me laugh. It is like the concept of a ‘power breakfast’. The passion! The drama!
Reading the blurb, I also noticed a name in bold font which I recognised. Jeremy Bowes. Dr Jeremy Bowes would be attending the embroidery fest, giving a keynote speech on medieval French tapestries. And I found myself smiling, all on my own, in the hotel’s lobby. Jeremy Bowes, that old charmer! Jeremy Bowes, possessor of a bargello waistcoat, whom I have encountered over the years in stuffy academic offices across Europe. And at Jollies, of course, over the stuffed olives and pretzels. Somehow, he has always managed to work his way, cat-like, into almost every cultural exchange on offer. Jeremy Bowes! I picture him, dressed in his expensively modest suit and that waistcoat. ‘Enchanté,’ he says, stooping slightly to bestow a kiss. He gave a lecture once in a museum in Paris, on the underacknowledged skills of medieval women. That was the first time I met him. I remember looking around the audience and witnessing the collective melting of female hearts. It was like spring snow plunging off an Arctic shelf. I pity all the middle-aged women who have not yet encountered him. Jeremy Bowes is one of those men that women often fall in love with. He is an original, in his expensively casual clothes; he is carelessly handsome. He is sympathetic. And he always focuses all his attention on the (female) person he is addressing.