by Ruth Thomas
‘Yes, I know that,’ I reply, picking up all my possessions. I seem to have accrued a lot more, even in the departure lounge. A bagful of newspapers and books. A packet of Simmers biscuits. Then there is my coat, my cardigan, my handbag.
Getting up a few seats away is a woman about my age who appears to have even more stuff than me. Impossible amounts of stuff. Propped against the side of her chair is a large black portfolio, and she stoops to pick it up. She is also carrying a plastic bag, a handbag with an inordinate number of buckles and straps, and a small rucksack. Swung across her left arm is her coat, a bright green thing – green as a privet hedge. And tucked beneath her right arm is a large, slightly battered-looking bunch of flowers. Gerbera, chrysanthemums, marguerites, more greenery. I wonder if the flowers were given to her by a lover or a husband. I wonder if her portfolio denotes that she was an embroiderer at the conference. A needlewoman of some kind, anyway. Or a designer, perhaps. Or a painter. And I feel obscurely jealous of her – of her artistic career, her brightness, her style. Maybe she has made more sensible choices in her life.
Now there is an altercation at Gate 34. A man with a We Get There First bag has lost his boarding pass. He raises his voice. An airport employee responds with a raised voice. I can’t hear the actual words.
Out of the corner of my eye I continue to spy on the woman with the portfolio. She is standing there in a slight dream, edging slowly forwards in the queue to Gate 34. With her flowers and her green coat and her silver-stranded hair she looks like a middle-aged water nymph.
As passengers begin to disappear through the departure gate, Kenneth finally gets up from the uncomfortable, metal-legged banquette. He walks over to me, smiles and looks at his watch. ‘How’s the ankle?’
‘Swelling up nicely. It’ll probably swell up even more on the plane.’
‘Well,’ he says. ‘We’ll be back in time for supper. Supper and a nice warm bath.’
‘Hmm.’
Why, I am thinking, am I drawn to this over-burdened woman?
‘Home in time to phone Joe.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
I am still watching her as she nears the gate. She says ‘Oops, sorry’ to an elderly man she has just whacked in the ribs with her portfolio. Then she makes a little movement: she tucks her flowers higher beneath her arm and twists slightly to reach into her pocket for her boarding pass – and it is the way she moves, leaning her portfolio against her leg, it is the way she knocks something from her pocket on to the floor – a small, rattling, transparent box – that makes my heart jump.
I know who she is.
I know who she is.
And I don’t know what to say.
I put my hand on Kenneth’s arm. ‘Shush,’ I say.
‘What?’ he replies, ‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘Shush.’
‘What do you mean? What’s the matter?’
I look at her again – at the woman with the flowers who is scattering sequins all over the floor now, the lid having flown off the box, causing a tinselly, iridescent clatter of gold and silver and ruby and turquoise against the airport’s floor tiles.
‘Oh God, sorry,’ I hear her say to the fixed-face gate attendant.
‘Can you stand to one side please?’ the attendant says. ‘To let others past.’
‘Yes, sorry, I …’
‘I’m surprised those things didn’t show up in the X-ray machines.’
‘Yes, but they’re not metal,’ the woman says, looking up from her hunt. ‘They look metal but they’re actually …’
And she is hardly any different from the way she was when I knew her. She really isn’t. Even the way she pronounces ‘metal’ and the expression she has on her face. Serious. A little cross. It was never intentional, but there it still is. And the same flopping hair. And that billow of determination around her: something close to a cloud or a shadow.
I don’t know where to look. So I stare through the window. A man walks along the edge of a runway holding two round red boards which look like table-tennis racquets. A white plane rumbles past before heaving itself miraculously up into the air. And all the people at Departure Gate 34 look up at the aeroplane, and tut.
I turn my gaze back to the woman with the flowers and the scattered sequins. She has scooped up about half of them now and is looking around, a little pink-faced, at the irritated crowds.
I push my coat and bag into Kenneth’s arms and walk forwards a few paces.
‘This kind of thing always happens in the worst possible place,’ Sally whispers to me.
‘I know,’ I say, as I kneel to help her.
Renaissance
She has the house to herself all morning and stays indoors. It is January, the sky as white and cold as Egyptian cotton. She is wearing three layers including a thermolactyl vest and her Aztec slipper-socks.
Her mother phones at nine to ask her to pick up some dry-cleaning, an eiderdown and their living-room curtains – the ones she made for them, with the pelmet and the swags.
Sue phones to arrange a meeting in Starbucks. They will eat Granola bars and drink too much coffee.
Her bank phones to ask if she wants to change her account to something called a Gold Reward. She thinks of gold bars in suitcases, nuggets, bullion. Her bank is very pleased with her.
*
The Reverends Avery, Hope and Beanie are not, unfortunately. She knew it. She knew, as soon as she mentioned the vibrant animals all those weeks ago, that they were rattled.
It seems that Mary and Martha are not, after all, quite what they had been looking for. A little too cartoonish, the Reverend Avery’s voice had suggested soothingly over her mobile phone. The concern, the Reverend Avery said, is that they may appear a little too, well, comical. Almost irreverent. Because the story of Mary and Martha is, in fact, quite serious. It makes a serious point about people’s place in society. And about Jesus. And we do not wish to offend.
‘You knew what my work was like,’ Sally replied stonily. ‘I thought that’s why you commissioned me. You wanted something naive.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s just in this particular instance … Martha in particular looks quite … cross-eyed. It was not quite what we had in mind.’
She never trusted him. Even before she met him, there had been something about that little sign in the lobby: ‘Please D’ont Leave Your Cups Here’. There had just been something about it.
‘I can unpick it if you like,’ she said, ‘and start again.’
‘Oh no no no no,’ the Reverend Avery said, startled. ‘We like it, we like it. We really do. It’s just … We just thought, perhaps next time a different subject matter? It is charming, absolutely. The colours … We just thought perhaps you might like to use a less – a more – a better-known story next time. With Jesus in it. We thought perhaps Jesus feeding the Five Thousand.’
Sally considered for a moment. She imagined embroidering five thousand fish and loaves of bread.
‘Well,’ the Reverend Avery said, ‘why don’t I give you a few days to think about it? The offer’s there. Just something a little more … accessible. We like your work very much indeed.’
‘Just not so many sequins or funny faces.’
There was a small intake of breath, and in the background, the sound of a barking dog.
‘Absolutely,’ said the Reverend Avery.
(‘… and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her …’)
‘OK. I’ll think about it.’
And Sally Tuttle, Needlewoman, put down the phone.
*
She spends some time tidying her workroom, rearranging the embroidery silks in her little chest of drawers. She lines them up in subtly shifting colours. Yellow, ochre, tawny, orange, red. Indigo, midnight, navy, air force. Having finished Mary and Martha she doesn’t have enough to occupy her hands. She misses embroidering them, and her hands seem to shake a lot. She wonders if there is something wrong with them. Sticking stray needles back
into her needle case, she keeps pricking her fingers. She should have started her new commission by now – a big picture of Amber’s cat lying in a washing basket (taken from a photo). This is her career now and she has to be pragmatic: she has to not bite the hand that feeds her.
When her alarm clock goes off at eleven, she jumps.
Time to go into the kitchen.
*
She has decided to make a quiche for lunch. It is in memory of a cookery lesson they had once, when the contents of Rowena’s quiche had risen up like something Biblical and leaked through the bottom of the oven door.
‘Look at Rowena’s oven!’ somebody exclaimed, and they had all stood and watched this yellow, milky puddle creeping slowly across the linoleum. It was extraordinary. Miss Andrews, jowelly and aghast, said she had never seen anything like it. ‘And I have seen some disasters in my time,’ pronounced Miss Andrews.
Her own quiche had actually turned out quite well, she recalls: the pastry light, the filling golden and symmetrically decorated with bacon strips. She had been planning to take it home on the bus, to eat with her parents that evening. But, walking with it to the display table at the end of the lesson, she had tripped and neatly upended it into the bin. Flip: there it goes! It happened so deftly that it seemed right. A sacrificial quiche. But what a waste of ingredients! The exact opposite of what was meant by Home Economics. It was the only time she ever heard Miss Andrews swear.
*
The bell rings ten minutes later than arranged and she is in such a state of nerves that she almost mentions the quiche incident as soon as she has opened the door.
‘Hello,’ Rowena says. She is alarmingly composed. Glamorous, her hair expensively cut. She has on smart leather gloves and a beautifully sweeping woollen coat.
‘Hello,’ says Sally. She has changed out of her slipper-socks and put on a nicer top. But still. Plus ça change. She is still hard-up and living in East Grinstead. She is still too tall and awkward, the words still spin garishly out of her mouth. She glances down and sees that she has left three needles pinned to her jumper, high, near her right shoulder. One of them has a piece of silver thread attached to it. She notices Rowena looking at it too. She nearly says ‘the ties that bind’, but then she doesn’t.
‘Well,’ she says, standing aside to let Rowena in. And then they kiss – Sally veering to the wrong side – and in she comes, on a trail of perfume.
‘I’m in the kitchen,’ Sally says.
‘No you’re not, you’re in the hall,’ replies Rowena.
‘Ha.’
And now she can’t think what to say at all. She doesn’t know what Rowena expects, after all these years. She just feels terribly domestic, a pastry-baking needlewoman, particularly skilled at blowing her chances. Terribly awkward and Big Birdish and ashamed. And here is this old acquaintance of hers, this professional person, this translator, this jet-setter who has turned up at her house for an hour or so. It is not going to work. They have pulled apart, the distance between them stretching like worn elastic. Rowena has a mature Canadian husband; Sally has an ex-boyfriend who lives in Chingford. Rowena has a designer coat; Sally takes up hems for a living. She thinks of how long she held on to that dress she gave her. She betrayed her. And she feels the sadness of decades.
‘Well,’ she says, leading her from the hall into the small, condensation-filled kitchen. Her spider plants hang like sinister pets from her hand-made pot-holders. Her elephant picture looks childish. Her camel place-mats just look weird.
Rowena smiles.
‘Did you do that?’ she asks, pointing to the embroidery of Mary and Martha which Sally has hung loomingly, a redundant thing, over the cooker. Martha really is cross-eyed, now she comes to look at her. She can see what the Reverend Avery means.
‘Those sequins must have taken you for ever!’ Rowena exclaims.
‘They did.’
Rowena regards the picture. ‘Well, wow,’ she says, and is quiet for a moment. ‘And did you do that one?’ she asks, indicating the sunflower. ‘And the peacock? And the owl?’
‘I did all of them.’
‘Wow. You’re prolific.’
She peers more closely at the peacock, at the big sequins in its tail. ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
‘I don’t know. They just occur to me.’
‘But you never used to like Needlework, Sally,’ Rowena says. ‘You were never even any good at it.’
‘Something happened. I just became … I just turned into Needlewoman.’
They smile at each other, words refusing to leave their mouths. Oh God, she has changed. She is polite, urbane, normal. She doesn’t know me any more. And it occurs to her that they really should have said goodbye at the airport. So long, Sally! So long, Rowena! They should have left them behind, those girls of 1979 – they are still there somewhere, she supposes – they should have left them to their records and their fashions and their conversations about words and God and hairstyles. But this thought panics her too, almost as much as the reality of Rowena standing there, in her kitchen.
‘So. Have a seat,’ Sally says, pulling out a chair with an embroidered cushion on it, and Rowena says thanks and sits down. Forty-three-year-old Rowena Cresswell. She has lines around her eyes, and strands of silver in her hair.
‘Just going to wash the salad,’ Sally mumbles, turning to the sink, ‘and then we can eat.’
She wonders how long Rowena will stay. She thinks of her dates with Graham the estate agent. At least with Graham she knew she had nothing to lose.
At the taps she makes a big fuss with the salad spinner, turning it round so quickly that if she let it go it would spin like a flying saucer across the room. She is aware of Rowena’s calm presence at the table behind her.
‘I like your kitchen,’ Rowena says. It is something anyone would say.
‘Thanks.’
Sally shakes the lettuce leaves – over-priced rocket and cos – into her best wooden salad bowl, pours on oil and vinegar and takes it to the table.
‘So,’ Rowena says. ‘Are your parents well?’
‘Oh yes, both fine really. Both enjoying their garden.’
Some expression close to sadness moves across Rowena’s face. ‘I liked your mum and dad,’ she says.
‘Yes, well. They, you know … Nothing’s …’
‘And how’s your daughter? What’s she up to today?’
She has removed her coat now – something Sally forgot to suggest when she arrived – and is sitting there wearing a silk blouse. Blue, with a small floral pattern.
‘Pearl?’ Sally replies airily. ‘Oh, she’s meeting her new man.’
The thought of Pearl roaming around the hinterland of East Grinstead with an adolescent called Liam Cruikshank does nothing to calm her. She turns the salad leaves about with the over-large wooden servers. They make an un-salad-like clonking noise. Rowena regards the spoons, and Sally finds herself blushing. Say something, say something.
‘Do you remember –’ she begins.
‘That bloke you were in love with?’
She can feel the blush increasing. ‘Well, no, I wasn’t going to …’
Rowena leans back in her chair and smiles. ‘The thing I remember most about Colin Rafferty,’ she says, ‘is that time you went to London and recited poetry at him.’
‘Do you? Do you? I’d forgotten all about that. I don’t remember even telling you that.’
Rowena looks at her. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you did. I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did till we loved? Were we not weaned till then …’
‘I’d forgotten.’
‘Anyway. I always thought it was very sweet.’
Her heart is thumping. Here is Rowena, here is Rowena Cresswell, in my house!
‘Right,’ she says, moving away from the table. ‘Anyway. He wasn’t the romantic proposition I imagined.’
‘No.’
And remembering what Colin once said to her about embroidering cushion covers, Sal
ly flits domestically about. Maybe that is all she is good for. Domesticity. She thinks of what Rowena has told her since they met. The countries she has visited, the things she has done. The boy she slept with in 1979.
Lifting the quiche from the sideboard, she slides it on to a dish and nudges it straight with the edge of her thumb. She turns back to the table and places it on to one of her embroidered place mats, the one with poppies (burden stitch) and dandelions (half chevron). Then she picks up a serving knife and starts to cut into it. But the pastry is stubborn, tougher than she had hoped. It looks like baked earth. The slice finally breaks into two, the knife slipping and clanking against the dish.
‘Oh,’ she says, and she wants to cry. ‘Well, anyway. Help yourself to salad.’
And she hands Rowena the enormous salad servers.
‘Thank you,’ Rowena says. She looks at her plate and the place mat beneath it. She glances up at her, as if waiting for some social nicety that Sally is unaware of.
‘Pastry was never my forte …’ Sally begins.
But Rowena does not reply. She picks up her fork and smiles, a little wistfully, her glance sliding from her plate to Sally’s face, to the embroidery on the wall. Then she looks back at her plate and the salad upon it. She puts her fork down. She looks at Sally again. And she laughs. It is a laugh Sally has not heard for twenty-eight years.
‘What?’ Sally says. ‘What is it?’
‘Those women, Sally, those women! Look at their faces! God, they’ve been through the mill, haven’t they?’
Sally looks up at Martha and Mary and then sits down. She thinks of that song they used to sing: ‘I am a wee weaver confined to my loom …’
‘Who are they meant to be?’ Rowena asks.
‘They’re just two women.’
‘Just two women? Honestly, Sal! Do you think you could embroider me two women like that?’
Sally picks up her napkin and places it on her lap.
‘I could,’ she says.
Stranded cotton has been used for this embroidery in the following colours:
0213, 0214, 0215, 0216, 0217, 0968, 0337, 0881, 08, 09 and 010.