by Ruth Thomas
And Sally thinks of Jeremy Bowes, with his charm and his lovely eyes and his shoes and his anecdote about the horse.
‘Well, you know …’ she begins, and Nora looks at her hopefully, as if she is about to say something very wise about men.
‘Some men …’ she says slowly.
Nora sniffs.
‘… should not be taken too seriously.’
‘Yes, well, I know that,’ Nora snaps.
‘They will always,’ Sally continues, ‘take themselves seriously. So we shouldn’t have to bother. It is ultimately,’ she adds, ‘a big waste of time.’
Nora looks disappointed. She sighs and looks close to crying again. She says, ‘I suppose I thought he was different.’
‘That’s a common mistake,’ Sally replies, glancing up at a sign above the basin that reads ‘Now Please Wash Your Hands’.
‘Some of them are very nice of course,’ she says, ‘but some of them aren’t. The same,’ she adds hurriedly, ‘could be said about women.’
And she pulls a paper towel from the dispenser, dries her hands and dabs her eyes, realising that there are tears in them too. Then, before leaving, she does put her arms around Nora Wheeler and gives her a hug. You never know when a hug might be helpful. Or when something – anything – might be the right thing to say.
*
When she gets back to her room she folds Mary and Martha up and puts them gently in their carrier. She takes off her presentation clothes and packs them away too: her blouse and her skirt, her over-heavy earrings. She pulls on her trousers and shirt and coat and sits on the bed to wait until it is time to leave. She has just under half an hour. There is nowhere to visit in this time, nothing to do.
She opens her bedside cabinet and takes out an inevitable small maroon Bible. She turns to Luke – to a passage she already knows and has always struggled to understand. Her comprehension always falls slightly short.
‘… Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’
What is that good part? She has never understood that. Ignoramus. She fails to comprehend again, and puts the Bible back in the cabinet.
*
Now she sees that she has overlooked something. She has forgotten to pack her little box of sequins. It is sitting forlornly on the window sill where she left it the night before. She goes to pick it up and is just putting it into her coat pocket when there is a loud knock at the door. It makes her jump. She wonders if it is Nora Wheeler, come to say goodbye. Or, God, could it be Miss Button? Miss Button, come to talk about old times?
She edges around the end of her candlewicked bed to open the door.
There is a short man holding a large bunch of flowers. ‘Miss Tuttle?’
‘Yes?’
And he pushes the flowers towards her. ‘Oh,’ says Sally. She reaches out to take them, as if she does this every week: receives bouquets, like an opera singer. The flowers are predominantly yellow and white – gerbera, chrysanthemums, marguerites, punctuated by skeins of greenery. And a balloon! There is a balloon – a silver one, bobbing theatrically and bearing the words Well Done.
‘How … lovely,’ Sally says to the man. She feels she should sound more jubilant. She has never in her life received a congratulatory helium balloon. And unfortunately, now she has, she does not feel she deserves it.
‘There could be a card somewhere, like,’ the man says.
‘Thanks.’
‘Enjoy them, like,’ the man says, walking away and beginning to whistle.
She shuts the door and looks at the flowers. They have a slight scent – a kind of mild, jungly fragrance. Attached to the cellophane is a little cream-coloured envelope. She thinks of John, who once presented her with a bunch of hand-picked daffodils stolen from Wandsworth Common. And she thinks of Pearl, who used to run in from their tiny garden with flowers from the lawn – buttercups, daisies, chickweed – for her to put in an egg-cup filled with water.
But the flowers are not from John or Pearl. There is a note that says: ‘Congratulations, Big Shot! With love from the Needlepoint Sisters – xx’.
My friends. The balloon bobs like a speech bubble above her head.
*
Sitting on the bed again, she gets the phone out of her handbag, switches it on and dials directory enquiries.
A girl answers. ‘Which town please?’
She holds the phone close to her ear and reaches for the courtesy notebook from the bedside table. She lowers her voice. ‘East Grinstead,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for a Second Glance in East Grinstead.’
‘A second glance?’
‘It’s a dress agency.’
‘An estate agency?’
‘No. A dress agency’
‘A dress agency? What’s that?’
‘It’s like an estate agent’s, except it deals with dresses.’
There is a small silence at the other end of the line.
‘I’ve got a Second Glance on the High Street, East Grinstead. Will that do? Shall I put you straight through?’
‘Yes, that’s the –’
There is already an automated voice telling her what the number is. She jots it down in the notebook, hesitates, then dials.
‘Yes,’ the agency woman in the polo-neck jumper informs her, ‘yes, I was going to phone you later. Because we’ve just sold your dress. We sold it yesterday in fact. I thought it would go quickly, because it was a pretty dress. Such a pretty colour. Would you like me to send you a cheque or will you come in to collect it?’
‘If you could send me a cheque,’ Sally replies.
How easy, how easy it is, sometimes, to let things go. Material things. Bye bye, dress. She wonders what she will spend the money on. A pet-hair de-fluffer? A bra organiser? Or, no: something Rowena would have liked. It is the only way she can apologise.
*
Before phoning Pearl she sits for a few minutes beneath the bobbing balloon. It has a little sandbag tied to the end of its string, to weigh it down.
‘So how did your talk thingy go?’ Pearl asks.
‘It went pretty well.’ She leans against the bed’s headboard and flicks over the hem of a pillowcase to examine the stitches: a habit formed years ago.
‘So. It was funny,’ she says, not wanting to broach the subject of the young man in the café. ‘My old Needlework teacher was at the conference.’
‘How bizarre.’
‘Yeah. It was. It was …’ She tries to think of the best word to describe their encounter. But thinking about its implications is a little terrifying.
‘… revealing,’ she says to Pearl. ‘A blast from the past.’
‘A what?’
‘It was just quite strange.’
She doesn’t know what on earth to say to Pearl about the young man in the café. Where would she start, without feeling hypocritical? She imagines her daughter standing in John’s kitchen, fiddling with the little piles of domestic jetsam and flotsam that always end up there. Biros. Rubber bands. Bits of flux. Corners of envelopes with unfranked stamps. Maybe she is in love with this boy. Maybe everything she sees is altered because she is in love.
‘Guess what?’ Pearl says.
‘What?’
‘Embroidery Times came today.’
‘Did it?’
‘Guess what they’ve got in the “makes” section?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘“Embroider your own cafetière cover.”’
‘No!’
‘And,’ Pearl adds, “Embroider a sleeping bag for your pet hamster.”’
‘You made that one up!’
‘No I didn’t!’
There is the sound of a door opening in the corridor outside, two voices speaking, a man’s and a woman’s. The rumble of a wheeled suitcase. Then the door closes again.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know that vase I brok
e?’
She thinks for a moment. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s OK. It’s just, it was …’
Sally looks up at the balloon moving in the breeze from the open window.
‘Sweetheart,’ she says, ‘It’s not a disaster. People break things. Things can be mended. That’s the beauty of inanimate objects.’
She clears her throat and feels motherish. She pictures herself progressing into her future – walking, wisely, motherishly, on to the plane.
‘It’s just, I broke your sewing machine too,’ says Pearl.
‘Oh.’
‘It kind of fell off your table. I was looking for your pinking shears in those little drawers and it kind of –’
‘My pinking shears?’
Still with the phone at her ear, Sally bends and attempts to pick up her portfolio and her handbag. She nudges her rucksack with her left foot. She looks at the flowers and the balloon. Do they allow balloons on planes?
‘What did you want my pinking shears for?’ she asks.
‘To cut someone’s hair.’
‘Someone’s hair? With pinking shears? Whose hair?’
‘Liam’s,’ Pearl replies, almost inaudibly. ‘You know, that guy you spoke to yesterday? He’s kind of … I was going to tell you before but you went up to Scotland and everything …’
Sally gives up on the balloon and lets it rise in front of her again, tugging at its own weight.
‘It was for a fancy dress party,’ Pearl is saying. ‘He went as a tetrahedron. I went as a circle. He’s going to get it cut out. It’s, like …’
Well done, says the balloon.
‘Sweetheart, I’ve got to go now or I’ll miss the plane,’ Sally says. ‘I’ll have a look at the sewing machine when I get back. It’s pretty resilient. And it doesn’t really matter. It … You know, the main thing is …’
And she looks up at the balloon and wants to say something to her daughter about the young man. About being with people who make you happy. That is really all she wanted to say.
Into her head comes a picture of two girls, best friends, roaming around some basement shoe shop full of teenage footwear. Laughing, one of them picks up a tasselled platform boot.
Long and Short
The words on the badge Sally Tuttle once gave me were so tiny that you had to get really close to read them.
‘What are you staring at?’
An example of irony.
I pinned it to my school scarf the day Sally gave it to me. Then I lost the scarf, with the badge on it, a few weeks later. And I always felt strangely guilty about it. It seemed a bigger thing to have lost than it was. Sometimes, in the later stages of my pregnancy, I thought about that scarf and that badge. I wished I could have pinned the badge to my jumper, right over the bump.
Sally used to stare at me too, then; I could sense her staring in disbelief across the playground. She appeared to have formed some alarmingly hostile opinion about me. Maybe she’d had some attack of morality. Or some strange kind of jealousy. Whatever, she no longer spoke to me. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to tell her how it had happened. A teenage kiss that had progressed, altered, turned into something else. Very quick, very easy. It had not even been the romantic event I had been led to believe. But I had still ended up pregnant.
Pregnancy had been something Sally and I joked about. ‘Never say Ich bin satt to a German person,’ Sally once informed me after one of her swiftly abandoned German lessons. ‘It doesn’t mean I’m full, it means I’m pregnant!’
Our conversations had been like the ones in bubbles in Jackie magazines. (‘D’you think he loves me, Rowena? I’m not sure if he loves me …’)
Neither of us had talked about the practicalities of love. We had not considered that love was bound up with practicalities.
*
Kenneth and I are late arriving at the airport and have to hurry to the check-in desk. We trot, pulling our suitcases behind us. We jog past other travellers, all looking tired and wide-eyed, as if they have just been jolted awake in the middle of the night. And we have nearly made it – there is the British Airways sign and the queue – when my ankle suddenly twists and I find I am falling, all my belongings clattering about me.
There is a tiny pause, a snag in the smooth fabric of our airport surroundings.
Kenneth says, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Well, I’ve just fallen over,’ I retort. The floor tiles are hard and glittery. All around us there is the sound of trundling luggage and clicking shoes. People walking past stare; some even look back over their shoulders at this floored woman, who appears to have knocked over a yellow plastic cone which says ‘Caution! Wet Surface! Trailing Cables!’
‘You OK?’
‘Oh yes. Absolutely. I’m absolutely fine.’
Kenneth gathers my things and hangs on to them. I pull myself up and hobble on. My ankle hurts quite a lot, actually. I imagine it swelling overnight, puffing up taut and pale.
‘You’re tired and emotional,’ Kenneth says, offering his hand as we walk past the whisky boutique.
‘I know I’m tired and emotional,’ I snap. Something too big is taking up the space in my chest.
*
The queue is full of people with the We Get There First bags. Instantly I am annoyed. Who are these people who get there first? And why do they want to get there? What are they trying to prove with these canvas bags? With these suits? These enormous suitcases on wheels?
I think of asking Kenneth but he is looking absent now, crunching a fruit sherbet, and I don’t bother him. I am, actually, very pleased to have Kenneth about. I don’t know how I would have got through this without him. We are three people away from the front now and he is watching all the despondent-looking suitcases as they are labelled with orange tags, placed on to the rungs of the conveyor belt and parted from their owners.
‘That one looks as if it belongs in an Inspector Clouseau film,’ he says, indicating an overstuffed red-and-blue tartan hold-all. I don’t reply. I’m thinking that even the brand new suitcases look over-hopeful.
When we get to the desk we ask for a window seat and a middle seat and watch our own blue and orange suitcases disappear miraculously through the theatrical little curtain. There they go. I can’t help wondering if we are to be reunited at the other end.
Now we have to look for Gate 34. Kenneth picks up his briefcase and my shoulder-bag and reaches for my hand. ‘Good,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
He doesn’t say ‘Cheer up.’ He doesn’t find me a handkerchief. He knows when not to offer a handkerchief. And I love him for that. You don’t love that in a man when you are young. But later you do.
It was something about the suitcases, I want to say. But I suppose, having grown-up daughters, he knows.
‘OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shall we go then?’
‘Yes.’
I allow myself to be lulled by the synthetic comforts of Edinburgh Airport: overheated WCs, fluffy toys, magazines, sock and scarf displays, all helping to alleviate the trauma of parting. A kind of anaesthetic of blandness: the mild scent of coffee, the pink liquid soap, the over-large choc-chip muffins.
We have half an hour to wait for the plane. We skulk around for a while, in the environs of Gate 34. In the magazine shop we buy a copy of the Guardian and a copy of Le Monde, then go across to Costa Coffee and order two cappuccinos.
‘To go?’ the girl enquires.
‘Well, I suppose so,’ Kenneth says, looking at his watch. An aeroplane’s engines roar above our heads, and I wonder whether Jeremy Bowes is in it. ‘Seeing as we’re not staying,’ says Kenneth to the girl.
The girl takes a marker pen and writes something on to a large polystyrene beaker. Kenneth clears his throat.
‘We are going to sit down though,’ he says. ‘Briefly.’
‘Not to go, then.’ The girl sighs tetchily. ‘To sit in.’ And she crosses out what she wrote on the polyst
yrene beaker.
We don’t really sit in, there being no ‘in’. We sit up, our legs dangling from the high, uncomfortable silver stools.
A few feet away from me a young mother is attempting to feed her baby. She is sitting on one of the preposterously elevated stools, struggling to get him into the right position. And I remember that too: how difficult it was, fumbling with the bra strap, with the swollen, over-large nipple and the too-small baby-mouth. How were you supposed to hold your baby and keep him there? There had been nobody to show me what to do. This was in the privacy of my own bedroom, my discarded Cindy dolls staring crossly down at me from the top of the wardrobe. You can breastfeed your baby anywhere: nobody need know! commented the helpful baby books. The 1980s were so enlightened! But I never fed my baby in public.
*
The cappuccino is strong and rather bitter. I dunk my courtesy ginger biscuit into it and add a spoonful of sugar. Kenneth opens the Guardian and begins to read. Lives falling apart, lives reconnected.
Beside us a woman is addressing her husband. ‘I told her I’ve got pastry hands,’ she is saying, taking a sip of tea, the label hanging down the side of her cup, ‘because they’re cold, see?’
She pauses, and then reaches forwards and puts one of her hands on top of his.
‘I know you’ve got cold hands, Sheila,’ her husband sighs.
His wife gazes out through the big window.
‘I told her I’ve always had pastry hands,’ she says, ‘and Rita’s got bread hands.’
Kenneth sits and smiles at me, imagining, I suppose, a woman with ten bread rolls for fingers.
I stir my coffee.
‘Warm hands, cold heart,’ the woman says.
*
When our flight number appears I spring to my feet. Kenneth continues to sit, not seeing the need to hurry. There is no need, but I still do. Most people do.
‘The plane’s not going to go without us,’ says Kenneth.