by Ruth Thomas
You look at them. They do not know your story. And you do not know theirs.
*
I am thinking about my life with my son in Paris. Living on a street where the cafés had not been trendy and the pavements were often strewn with rubbish – onion peelings and cabbage stalks and halves of orange marinading in the sunshine.
We had lived closest to the Filles du Calvaire Métro station. I remember buying our tickets there at a baffling machine. We used to take the Métro to a lot of places. Montmartre, the banks of the Seine, the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre. One afternoon, we had taken the Métro to St Michel and gone to see the tapestries in the Musée de Cluny. It was the first time I had ever been there, though I have been back many times since. I remember walking through the courtyard with Joe for the first time, past the stone well and the late hollyhocks and thinking how serene it was. A kind of haven: a sanctuary from the noise and all the blindingly-bright, white-shingled parks.
That was where we had first met Jeremy Bowes: at the Musée de Cluny. Handsome Jeremy Bowes had been standing in Room VIII (Salle de Notre Dame de Paris), his backdrop a series of white, headless statues. His embroidered waistcoat would not have looked out of place beside the tapestries in the next room. Seated in plastic chairs were a number of middle-aged women, listening to the lecture he was giving on the museum’s tapestries. And even the statues around him seemed to incline in his direction. Into his small, lapel-fastened microphone he was informing them all in quite good French on the meaning of peacocks, periwinkles, necklaces and unicorns.
Joe and I had stood in the doorway.
‘… et ce paon ici, que vous regardez, celui-ci, c’est …’
‘Mum,’ Joe said, ‘I want to see if there are dinosaurs.’
I looked down at my son, my mind momentarily blank. I remember whispering, ‘Darling, there aren’t any dinosaurs here. This is not a museum for dinosaurs.’
And a few of the women in the audience had turned at this point, and fixed us both with primitive, lantern-jawed expressions of dislike.
‘… et regardez bien,’ Jeremy Bowes was saying, ‘la myriade de couleurs magnifiques autour du plumage. Remarquez les petites taches …’
‘Mum!’ insisted Joe.
And after a moment I gave in, released my grip on my son’s anorak sleeve and followed him out of the room.
There were no dinosaurs. Not in the museum or in the shop. There were embroidered magnets, embroidered cushion covers and embroidered handkerchiefs.
‘Can I have a lollipop then?’ Joe asked, casting around for something that wasn’t hand-stitched. ‘Lollipops are cheap. They’re one franc.’
I didn’t reply.
‘Or one of these pencils?’ he said. ‘Look, there are kings and dragons.’
‘Oh, Joe, I can’t keep buying you things,’ I said, glancing at the shop’s display of petites surprises before noticing out of the corner of my eye that the handsome, waistcoated tapestry lecturer who had been in the Salle de Nôtre Dame had finished his talk and was now heading straight towards the shop.
‘But Mum –’
My heart skipped.
‘Mum, please –’
‘Sorry about that,’ I blurted to the lecturer, who was now walking through the doorway. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘about the commotion just then.’
Jeremy Bowes jumped slightly and looked at me. We were standing beside a bin full of small wooden unicorns and, apparently unsure what else to do, he leaned forward to pick one up.
‘I …’ I began again: ‘My son …’
He looked at me with his lovely brown eyes, and smiled. And when he spoke, I felt sure it would be something delightful. I was twenty-three and pretty, I suppose, and there, in Paris, without a man.
Jeremy Bowes opened his mouth. ‘It was somewhat distracting,’ he said.
‘Oh.’
‘The Musée de Cluny really isn’t the place to bring a small boy.’
‘Oh,’ I said again, my disappointment almost as physical as a punch.
‘Weren’t you ever a small boy in a museum, then?’ I asked Jeremy Bowes, holding on to Joe’s hand.
Jeremy Bowes looked a little taken aback. ‘A museum …’ he began but then he seemed lost for words. He trailed off. He said, ‘Excuse me.’ And he gave a curious little nod, turned, walked back to the doorway and disappeared.
*
We went to see the tapestries after that. I wanted somewhere comforting to go, something reassuring to look at. Somewhere dark.
The textile rooms were dimly lit to preserve the cloth and the thread, and we had had to strain our eyes to see the pictures properly. My heartbeat slowed as our eyes made their adjustments. And then we began to make them out, the colours and the figures. These were the tapestries of La Dame à la Licorne: deep red cloths covered with embroidered flowers, foxes, birds, fruits, monkeys, mythical beasts. Fantastically beautiful.
‘Look at the birds, Joe,’ I said, ‘and those tiny flowers.’
And slowly we moved along the tapestries, admiring them in turn, reading the descriptions, pointing out the animals and the flowers, all the way along, until we reached the last one. A picture of two young women. Two friends.
‘For a long time,’ said the text, ‘this particular tapestry defied interpretation.’
I looked at the picture. I stood and looked. And something, some draught, suddenly caused me to shiver. I don’t know why, but standing in front of that tapestry I felt suddenly quite bereft.
‘What’s your favourite bit in this one, Mum?’ Joe asked.
I looked. I considered. ‘The ladies,’ I said, and I continued to gaze at them – at the two young women in beautiful dresses, one a lady, the other her maidservant. One of them was handing the other a necklace from a casket.
‘Contrary to what was once thought, this lady is in fact not selecting, but depositing the necklace into the casket held by her maidservant, and holding it in a cloth, having taken it off. She is thus not in the act of choosing a piece of jewellery, but of renouncing her jewels.’
‘I like the dog,’ Joe whispered.
‘Yes, it’s a lovely dog.’
I looked at the dresses and thought of those flimsy, floating styles Sally Tuttle and I had once worn. Sally Tuttle, my lost friend.
Le coeur de ma mie est petit, tout petit,
J’en ai l’âme ravie, mon amour le remplit.
Si le coeur de ma mie n’était pas si petit …
A stout woman in pink corduroy trousers trod heavily on my foot, and I glared at her: it seemed a mean thing to do.
‘Come on then,’ I said to Joe, ‘let’s go and find a café.’
He looked up. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.
‘I’m not,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’
*
After that first encounter with Jeremy Bowes, I began to bump into him regularly around the world. At a conference in London (topic of discussion: the storage and handling of valuable works of art across Europe). At a university dinner in Seattle. A few years later, at a book launch in Antwerp. Sometimes I had to translate his papers and pamphlets. But he did not recall our first encounter, he told me, when I reminded him of it. No, he could not recall it at all. I knew he was lying; I saw a little flicker of knowledge cross his face.
From then on he has been one of those people I keep encountering, over the years. In museums, in hotels, on station platforms. Once, in the dairy aisle of a supermarket in Brittany. I had been clutching a lettuce and a cheap box of Camembert. Well, hello, Rowena!
Why is it people like Jeremy Bowes that you bump awkwardly into over the years? And of others, there is not a sign. Never a single sighting.
Needleweaving
It is eight minutes past eleven. Sally sits in her delightful room, her canvas on her lap, a red-threaded needle in her hand. Like a medieval lady waiting for her knight.
She turns on the huge radio fixed to the wall above her bed. ‘… you’ll find,’ a man’s voice is saying,
‘that if you wait too long your potatoes will have turned into a kind of mush …’
She changes stations. There is something tragic on Radio 4, a lot of sighing and moaning and sound effects: wooden spoons, tin buckets.
*
She knows what she is doing. From the three counselling sessions she had with Mrs Bonniface, she knows that she is stalling. Like one of those horses called Stardust. Whenever something good happens to me, I wreck it. Actually, she has never needed counselling sessions to be told that. Her mother has told her for years. At last, she is at the beginning of a new career! She is an authority on embroidery! But what is she doing? She is sitting in her bedroom, sewing. As per usual.
She wonders how Nora and Jeremy’s conversation is progressing downstairs. Even Nora, shy Nora Wheeler, is making a better go of things than Sally is. She is probably more accomplished at embroidery. She has coiffured hair. She is even flirting, in a curious kind of way, with the keynote speaker.
I should be here with a man, Sally thinks. I should be getting up in the morning with a man. And she thinks of John, on an early date in the winter of ’83, driving her across London in his beige Cinquecento, changing gear and then, sweetly, putting his left hand beneath his thigh to keep it warm.
Her yellow conference bag is lying at the foot of her bed. Sally leans across and pulls out the conference programme, which has been archly strung together with big yellow wool stitches. On the front page is a typed list of quotations:
Our lives are like quilts – bits and pieces, joy and sorrow, stitched with love
I love sewing and have plenty of material witnesses
I’d rather be stitchin’ than in the kitchen
Thinking that she should perhaps, after all, not take the conference so seriously – this is just another homely affair, all about love and stitches – she turns to page two. Page two has the next day’s agenda:
9 a.m. Breakfast and Reception
10 a.m. The Embroidery of Courtly Love, by keynote speaker Jeremy Bowes
10.45 a.m. An Embroiderer’s Yarn: Sally Tuttle, winner of this year’s £9,000 national embroidery award, gives a talk on her experiences as an embroiderer
11 a.m. Advanced Embroidery workshops
12 p.m. Lunch
2 p.m. Feedback session
4 p.m. Conference ends
The phrase ‘her experiences as an embroiderer’ makes her feel suddenly pale, bloodless. Experiences? She just sits and sews. She takes up trouser legs, a draught blasting under the gap of the shop door. How can she follow a talk on the Embroidery of Courtly Love? She thinks of those beautiful medieval tapestries and all those women who created them. She feels the weight of centuries of silent, female talent. Talent dismissed as hobby. Somebody has changed the title of her talk, too: ‘An Embroiderer’s Yarn’! It makes her sound like some old sea-dog, full of lies and exaggerations. Or some chatterbox, so easily dismissed, prattling on about her needlework. She remembers what Colin Rafferty once said: Needlework is not a career option, unless you want to make cushion covers all your life. And she is dreading that word feedback: the questions at the end, which she was told to expect some weeks ago by a woman called Francesca Coutts-Marvel on the other end of the phone. There’ll be a little question and answer session, yup?
She dreads someone, probably an eccentric woman in a hat, putting up her hand to say: ‘And what interested you in embroidery in the first place?’
‘Because it was all I had left,’ she would say across the hushed room in her clanging accent. Should she say that?
She looks at Martha and Mary and their big, sequinned eyes. I am actually here, she thinks, because I wrecked my chances twenty-five years ago. She pictures herself running from her hotel room, taking her embroidery with her. She sees herself a few hours hence, like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, running running running up the hill, all her hairpins coming loose. (Why! Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was nothing but a HEDGEHOG!)
She glares at Martha and Mary. But Martha and Mary are just a bundle of threads.
*
She keeps forgetting that she owns a mobile phone. She forgets that it is switched on and that it is her phone making that series of watery, descending notes, like a reed warbler. Her phone, in her handbag, on the chair.
She rushes to undo the zip of her bag and to retrieve the trendy little silver thing from a midden of old paper handkerchiefs, lengths of embroidery silk, Polo mints, make-up bag, purse.
She presses the green button with its sweet picture of an old-fashioned phone; one that would once have been conveniently attached to a wall.
‘Hello,’ says a man’s voice, ‘is that Mrs Tuttle?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is the Reverend Avery. I hope this is a good time to call.’
‘Yes. Not bad,’ she lies. The Reverend Avery, she reflects, with a stab of shame, is the only person who phones her with any regularity.
‘I was just phoning to see how it’s all going. How the … ha, ha, how Mary and Martha are progressing.’
He sounds edgy. Furtive. There’s something wrong.
‘It’s all going pretty well,’ Sally replies. She grips the phone tightly and looks at the hotel escritoire in front of her, at the laminated breakfast menu (poached eggs, kippers, porridge, croissant, yogurt with a selection of seasonal berries), the tastefully dull curtains, the framed rose print, the coat-hangers on the back of the door. She could be standing at the bottom of a well for all the Reverend Avery knows.
The Reverend Avery himself sounds rather stentorious, as if he is the one in the well. He is probably in some sepulchral church hall. Or perhaps he is looking at the chilly blank wall in Southwark Cathedral, where Sally’s embroidery is supposed to go.
‘It was certainly very … interesting to hear how you’re doing. We were wondering,’ he says, ‘whether we could perhaps arrange to see how it’s progressing. We were thinking we could perhaps schedule another meeting for the, ah …’ He pauses while, Sally imagines, he flicks through his ecclesiastical diary.
‘Actually,’ she says.
‘Sorry?’
‘I don’t really like … showing people my work until it’s finished.’
‘Oh?’
‘No. It’s just a bit of a superstition I suppose.’
‘Oh, well, ha, ha, the church is not a place for superstition. Perhaps just this once …?’
She doesn’t know how to deal with the Reverend Avery. She doesn’t know how subservient to be. She supposes he would once have been her patron, and she would have been his impoverished artist. Like the Medicis. Maybe she should do whatever he asks.
‘It would be so nice to –’ the Reverend Avery is saying.
‘OK,’ she interrupts. Maybe they want to commission someone else instead. Some knitter or patchworker.
‘Oh good,’ says the Reverend Avery. ‘How about Wednesday the fifth, about 11 a.m.? Back at headquarters?’
‘Yes,’ she replies cheerily, her heart sinking. She pictures the trip to Southwark Cathedral. The echoing walls. ‘That should be fine,’ she says. ‘Can I phone you back later to confirm?’
‘Of course, of course,’ says the Reverend Avery. And Sally imagines him putting his hand up, beatifically, in a sign of peace. He doesn’t trust me. Something has happened.
‘Goodbye then,’ says the Reverend Avery. ‘Work well.’ And he hangs up.
Sally presses the little green telephone button and watches the tiny rainbow on the screen bulge slightly, then contract and disappear into blankness. Richard of York Gained Battle in Vain. She takes off her shoes and her skirt and gets into bed.
Double Back
Poor Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned at Holyrood Palace, half a mile and five centuries away. A Frenchwoman surrounded by Scots, a woman who embroidered her own flame-red petticoats just before going to the scaffold. I wonder what Mary, Queen of Scots would think of Edinburgh now; of the pavements and the clowns and the trendy wine bars.
‘There’s quite a lot of French
names in Edinburgh aren’t there?’ I observe to Kenneth, flicking through the index of my A-to-Z. ‘Look – there’s a Beauchamp Grove, a Bellevue Crescent, a Cluny Place, a –’
‘There’s also a whole lot of Buckstones, Burdiehouses and Burnheads,’ says Kenneth, peering over my shoulder.
‘I was just pointing out the connections. The auld alliance and everything. I mean, what’s the link with Cluny?’
*
I think that taxi accident had a strange effect on my memory. My short-term memory has been shunted sideways by my long-term memory. More and more, I seem to remember things from twenty, thirty years ago. It is peculiar. This morning, for instance, while waiting for Kenneth in the hotel lobby, I looked down at the Visitor book on the reception desk and was instantly reminded of the autograph books we used to have at school. We used to write those little rhymes in them:
Two in a hammock attempted to kiss,
All of a sudden they ended like –
By hook or by crook I’ll be last in this book.
By egg or by bacon I’m sure you’re mistaken.
Schoolgirls don’t keep autograph books any more, I suppose. We were a lot more naive then. Nowadays girls have i-Pods and phones with built-in cameras.
Over breakfast I mention the autograph books to Kenneth. ‘Did you ever keep one?’ I ask.
‘Not something boys did.’
‘No. I suppose it wouldn’t be.’
My autograph book was cream-coloured, I remember, hardback, with a sticker of a smiling snail on it.
We are sitting – rather late because we were both tired this morning and somewhat down – on either side of a small, white-clothed table in the hotel’s dining room. A young couple at a table near ours are trying to get their small son to eat porridge from a teaspoon.