Things to Make and Mend (16 page)

Outside a blackbird is singing – a beautiful silvery evening song – from the top of the laundry chute. She stays at the window to listen for a while, and to look up at the remnant of the moon – very pale and round up there, like a pod of honesty. Sometimes, at home, she can forget to look up for days – weeks even – and she doesn’t even know if the moon’s full or a crescent. Then, when she does glance up and see it, it’s so beautiful she feels ashamed for neglecting it.

Late in the afternoon, feeling in need of jollity, brightness, warmth, we walk to a pizzeria. It is not the kind of restaurant or time of day I envisaged. But it has a nice name – Amici’s – and Joe has, he tells us, been there several times before. It is up a long hill, on the south side of town. My legs ache.

‘It’ll work up an appetite,’ Kenneth says.

Joe does not talk much on the way. He has been subdued all day. His walk is the same as it has always been: hands in his
pockets,
eyes on the pavement.

‘Anything wrong?’ I ask.

‘No, I’m OK,’ he says. ‘Just a bit tired.’

He’s apprehensive, I think – about America and his new job – but he doesn’t want to show it. Typical man. I glance at him as I walk beside him. He is nearly a foot taller than me. Lanky. I try not to think of him walking lankily along a rubber gangway tomorrow, into a jumbo jet, and flying away.

Kenneth is doing his best to buoy us up. He strides, breathing out clouds of warm air, relaxed in his shoes. He is talking about California in the Seventies, an era which he sometimes seems to regard as recent.

‘… essentially the time of flower power …’ he is saying.

‘Yes,’ Joe replies.

‘… flea markets everywhere … bookstores …’

Kenneth’s words drift into the cold air. It is freezing.

‘… but maybe it hasn’t really changed so much. What do you think, Ro? Do you think Berkeley’s changed a lot since then?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Lost in thought?’

‘Hmm?’

My eyes are fixed on the gum-marked pavement.

The Amici’s waiter has a new-looking beard. He is twenty-two at most. Younger than Joe. His eyes are green and shiny like a kitten’s.

‘Would you like to order some drinks?’ he says, and I ask for three beers. It is five in the afternoon but I need a beer.

We are given a table by the window, a rather small one with too much cutlery on it, a vase of red carnations and a large, glass
candle
-holder cluttering our view of each other.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘how nice.’

‘It’s not bad, this restaurant,’ Joe replies. ‘We used to come here quite a lot. We … It’s …’

And he stops talking.

Directly in line with us, on the other side of the window, is a bus stop. Three people are waiting at the bus stop and looking in: an elderly woman in a heavy coat, and two young girls in tracksuits. A man and a dog walk past. The dog also glances in, a wondering expression on its face.

‘So. I’ve got a bit of news,’ Joe says.

‘Oh yes?’ I say brightly, my heart clonking.

Kenneth, who has been sawing away at a rather hard bread roll from the basket, stops and puts his knife down.

‘So,’ I say, beaming, ‘what is it?’

And Joe blushes: something he hardly ever does. I watch the pink rising up his cheeks to his forehead. He looks through the window at the girls in tracksuits.

It will be something about his girlfriend,
I think. When
someone
says ‘I’ve got a bit of news’ doesn’t it usually mean that they, or someone else, is pregnant?
Is she pregnant? Surely not. Not when people are so open about everything. Not with the pill. Not when …

Joe is looking down at his elaborately-folded napkin. ‘It’s …’ he says.

‘Hmm?’

‘Maybe now is not the right moment, actually. Maybe I should …’

‘Hey, go on, spit it out!’

‘No, it’s OK. I’ll tell you later.’

‘Joe, come on. It’ll –’

‘Can I take your order now?’ the young, bearded waiter says, suddenly appearing like a new set of ten-pins at our table.

I don’t know what to say. The overcrowded table looms
garishly
up at me. Outside the window a bus arrives. The elderly woman and the young girls get on to it and are transported away.

‘Could we have a while longer, please?’ Kenneth says to the waiter.

I look at my knees. I feel suddenly as cold as tap water.

The waiter looks at me as if I might be ill, says ‘Sure’ and is just moving away when I hear myself bark, ‘No, it’s OK.’ And I grab the menu.

‘I’ll have the Pizza Capricciosa,’ I yell.

‘Oh,’ Kenneth says, startled, ‘OK, well …’ And, jolted into action, he snatches the menu from me. ‘I’ll have the … the Spaghetti Napoletana.’

‘And I’ll have the Linguine della Casa,’ Joe says quickly.

The waiter writes down our order, sighs slightly, collects up our menus and walks away.

‘Well, that was super-efficient,’ Kenneth says.

‘Yes.’

We sit around the flower vase. Kenneth looks moody. Joe looks staticky, as if he’s just touched an electric fence. I don’t know what to say. I think:
My son is going to America tomorrow. And there’s something that he can’t even tell me.

It is ridiculous.

It is ridiculous and upsetting.

Any minute now, I think, there are going to be tears.

‘So,’ I say with forced jocularity. ‘When
are
you going to tell us, darling? Over the main course or –’

‘I’ve been in touch with my dad,’ Joe says.

‘Oh.’ I grip on to the wallet in my lap.

‘He lives in the States now,’ Joe says. ‘In New York State.’

‘Really? Does he?’

‘So I’m going to meet him. For a coffee.’

‘Right, well, that’s … I’ve always thought it’s important you meet him,’ I lie. Because I never wanted them to meet. Ever. I just wanted it to be me and my baby. My beautiful boy in his babygro. His father has always been almost irrelevant.

‘So,’ I say regarding the table with too much cutlery on it, too much
stuff
– candle-holder, wine list, dinner menu, lunch menu, flowers – I want to put my arm out and sweep all of it on to the floor. ‘So what’s he doing out there?’

‘Married with kids. My half-sisters, of course. Ella and Gretel. They’re sixteen and twelve. My dad’s playing the oboe. In one of the orchestras.’

‘Really?’

My voice is over-loud and shaking. Waiters walk noiselessly to and fro.

‘So. You have half-sisters?’

‘Yep.’

‘Ella and Gretel.’

‘Yep.’

I nearly say something about their names, something to do with pantomimes. The existence of Ella and Gretel makes me feel obscurely jealous.

I look at Kenneth, who looks back at me. His face is sad with sympathy. The smell of pizza skulks around our table. At the table beside ours some women, about my age, are having a Friday
lunch out. They are wearing pretty things: pretty, happy things with straps.

‘I’d like the chance to get to know him,’ Joe says, looking down at the few inches of uncovered tablecloth. He looks angry. And I never wanted this to be something he’d be angry about, the
circumstances
of his birth: two teenagers who made a mistake one autumn evening. I told him years ago all I knew about his father, which was not very much. Not enough, evidently.

‘I found him on the internet,’ Joe says as Kenneth stands up quietly, places his napkin on his chair and makes his way with weary inevitability towards the toilets. ‘I looked up Malone and East Grinstead.’

‘How …’ I begin, searching for the appropriate word, ‘easy.’

‘Yes. It was.’

I look up to see Kenneth open the door of the Signores, knock it against an umbrella stand and a potted fig tree, and disappear.

It is not quite five-thirty.

‘
That’s Amore’
finishes. ‘
O Sole Mio’
begins.

Joe says, ‘I’m not blaming you or anything, Mum.’

‘No. I know you’re not.’

‘I mean, I know you were young and everything when you had me. I know I was’ – he pauses – ‘a mistake.’

I look into his eyes. ‘You weren’t.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘OK. At the time. But my best ever mistake.’

‘I just …’

‘I was very young,’ I continue. ‘I was fifteen. I was very much left to my own … devices.’

‘I know.’

‘I was fifteen.’

‘I know.’

‘I didn’t have you adopted.’

I turn my head. In front of the bus stop, the picture stencilled
on the window is of an enormous Italian mamma wearing a chef’s hat and holding a wooden spoon. And I wish I had been like that: I wish I had been a comforting mamma with an
enormous
bosom and an appropriate set of motherly rules. But I was too young. I didn’t know what I was doing. ‘There was no one to help me,’ I said. I suppose I did my best.

Every so often, a vision of the green dress enters her head and she feels a little sense of panic.
What have I done?
Why did she leave something so precious in that horrible shop, then get on a plane and fly to Scotland? Her dress, with that woman’s patronising note attached to it?
Green silk, good condition.
Why hadn’t she just whisked it back into her bag and left? Too hasty: she has always been too hasty in leaving things behind.

She has made these decisions in her life: really quite small decisions about whether to take up Needlework, say, or whether to ignore someone’s phone calls, and they have opened out into enormity. And now here she is, with the life she has constructed for herself. She is Sally Tuttle, forty-three,
embroidery expert,
sitting
on a small leather sofa in a Scottish hotel foyer, beside an arrangement of potted plants and a tankful of goldfish.

It is nearly six o’clock. She is waiting for her fellow conference delegates. She keeps looking up at people passing, but they are not the people she is supposed to meet: they walk on and out, into the evening.

After a while she is joined on the sofa by an elderly English couple. The woman sits down beside her, and the man stands and hovers.

‘Goldfish,’ says the woman. 

‘Yes,’ says the man.

Sally shifts as unobtrusively as possible to give the woman more space: she is a big person, with a spreading lap. She and her husband are wearing almost identical brown corduroy trousers.
And they are both unhurried, careful, conscientious, with neat suitcases. They remind Sally of tortoises. They have built a whole life together, secure in their shells, and have they ever been out of love? Possibly not. Sally tries to imagine herself with a man, thirty years hence, looking dignified and old in a hotel lobby. Looking as if she has spent the larger part of her life with him.

Now a man of about Sally’s age walks across the foyer. He looks a little like a man she dated for one night, a few years ago. A bank clerk called Peter. Peter was sound. Normal. Alarmed by Sally’s all-encompassing embroidery: the peacocks and the
elephants.
This man has the same mousily youthful hair, the same bouncy walk, the feet turned slightly inward –

A woman’s voice says quietly, ‘Sally?’

And she jumps, readjust her limbs, turns in her seat and smiles.

‘Nora?’

‘Yes,’ the woman says, doubtfully.

‘Nice to meet you.’

Sally is oddly annoyed that she missed the direction Nora Wheeler appeared from. She stands up and Nora Wheeler puts out her hand. ‘Oh!’ Sally says, before she can stop herself. It feels odd, shaking another woman’s hand. There is not the air of
dominance
that men indulge in. The smothering male palm. Nora and she just stand, holding hands for a moment, like small girls. Nora’s hand is slightly warmer than Sally’s.

‘I thought I’d be the last to arrive,’ Nora says shyly, peering around. She is shorter than Sally. She has pale, round eyes and the sort of hairstyle that appears in 1940s films: neat, shiny, with a side parting. Her suit is double-breasted, blue-flecked, belted.

‘Mr Bowes is quite late, isn’t he?’ she says, looking at her watch.

‘Male prerogative,’ Sally replies.

Nora has that effect that some petite women have, of making Sally feel too loud. Too prominent, like some building jutting out from a flat landscape.

‘Maybe he’s got held up,’ Nora suggests. ‘The traffic’s not good.’

‘Well. It’ll give us a chance to …’ Sally begins, trailing off.
It’ll give us a chance to what?
The journey has wearied her, and the anticipation, and the oddness of being here. She just wants to go back up to her room: she wants to get out her embroidery and work on another section of Mary’s sleeve. She doesn’t want to be sitting here with Nora Wheeler, shy woodland creature.

‘Let’s sit here,’ she says. ‘Hopefully he won’t be much longer.’

So they sit on the sofa again, knees almost touching. Nora hangs on to her yellow folder and smiles.

‘They’re pretty fish,’ she says, looking at the aquarium. Then she looks at her watch again. ‘Come on, Mr Bowes,’ she urges, as if he is the slowest person at school sports day.

They are just debating whether to go on without him, to go to the dining room and hope to see him later, when suddenly there he is – Sally knows instantly it is him – behind the glass of the revolving doors. A man in his late forties with a determined expression and dark hair that flops, cunningly haphazard, across his temples. A decisive man with a leather portfolio and
cuban-heeled
boots. He looks as if he has never had anything to do with embroidery in his life. How can he have arrived here, in their feminine midst?

They introduce themselves, then stand back for a moment. Sally’s smile is too big.

‘OK. So shall we find a table?’ Jeremy Bowes says.

‘Yes,’ Nora and Sally reply. Jeremy sets off and they follow.

‘This is a good table,’ Jeremy states, selecting one by the
window
and holding chairs out chivalrously, first for Nora and then for Sally.

‘Thank you,’ Sally says, sitting down and wondering why she is allowing this man to fluster her. She thought she had given up being flustered by handsome men. She looks down at her
knobbly
knees and then out, through the window. She can’t think of anything to say. She can feel her heart beating. ‘So,’ she says, looking with increasing interest at the very ordinary street beyond the glass. If she cranes her neck, she can just make out the edge of Edinburgh Castle on top of its misty, craggy hill. She clears her throat and holds on to the stem of her empty wine glass. Nora says, ‘A-haah!’. Apart from that, nobody speaks. The people of Edinburgh progress, in their anoraks and raincoats, up Lothian Road. You’d never find a beautiful castle in East
Grinstead,
but you would find people like this. People with
expressions
like this, in the same kind of anoraks, with those kinds of plastic bags …

And then all three of them begin to speak at once.

‘I –’

‘When –’

‘It’s –’

Jeremy’s observation eventually prevails.

‘It’s much colder here than in Paris,’ he says.

‘Paris?’ replies Nora, twisting the silver chain around her neck.

‘Apparently this is a “haar”,’ Sally says, suddenly inspired, accepting an enormous menu from an arriving waiter. ‘This mist. So the girl at reception told me. A sea haar. It rolls in from the sea.’

‘Yes,’ Nora says, ‘That’s what I was saying.
A haar.
’

‘Oh.’

Nora and Sally look at each other and for a second nearly laugh. Nora’s eyes are bright blue and turn up at the corners.

Nora looks back at Jeremy. ‘Anyway. How wonderful,’ she says. ‘To live in Paris.’

‘It is,’ Jeremy Bowes confirms crossly.

‘Edinburgh’s beautiful too, though, isn’t it?’ says Nora. ‘Almost Parisian, really.’

Jeremy purses his lips and says nothing. ‘Let’s order a bottle of wine,’ he says after a moment.

‘French, of course.’

‘Oui, oui, bien entendu.’

Now Sally feels irrationally annoyed, as if some very small object, possibly not even hers, has been taken away from her. As Nora and Jeremy speak, she continues to gaze out through the glass at the beautiful misty city.

A red-faced man reels past the window, very close, clutching a packet of fish and chips. This, indeed, does not seem very Parisian. In Paris he would at least be holding a baguette.

It happened, now she comes to think of it, as soon as Jeremy made his way out of the revolving door. There was something in the way he looked at them, some kind of recognition. As if he had been stumbling around in a big, perilous forest and suddenly, in the nick of time, found two damsels in a clearing.
‘You’re here at last! Thank God!’
And he was saved from being submerged in the brackeny undergrowth.

Nora had peered shyly back at him from the bracken. Sally was like the Girl Guide leader, up ahead, with her torch and practical rucksack. A girl who had somehow become cynical with the passing years; lost all her naivety about love.

‘The traffic was quite bad this evening,’ Nora whispers to Jeremy.

‘Was it?’ he replies, looking into her round blue eyes.

Nora smiles and plays again with the pendant around her neck. She has no wedding ring, no engagement ring. Sally
wonders
how old she is. At least her age. ‘I noticed –’ she begins, but she doesn’t continue with what she noticed, because Nora
interrupts.
‘I speak some French,’ she says to Jeremy. ‘Some schoolgirl French. Malheureusement, pas très bien.’

‘Mais c’est merveilleux!’ exclaims Jeremy. Then he adds, in English, ‘Believe me, it takes a lifetime to sound like a native.’

‘Well, your accent sounds pretty good to me!’ Sally quips – Sally, the third member of the party, behind the flowers.

‘Ha ha ha,’ Nora laughs. Jeremy does not reply. He does not seem particularly pleased with her last comment. He smiles rather alarmingly, then says, ‘So. Are you looking forward to the conference, Sally?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, very much.’

‘And I understand you won a prize?’

‘Yes. Last year,’ she says, her confidence suddenly
plummeting.
How infantile, to have won a prize. Like being back at school. She thinks of all those embarrassing headlines. ‘That’s what I’m going to be talking about,’ she says.

‘I’m particularly interested in French crewelwork techniques,’ Nora says, politely.

Sally beams brightly at them, so brightly that her jaw aches. She wants to say,
I don’t know a thing about French crewelwork techniques. I was a school drop-out. I went to evening classes.

Out of the corner of her eye she can see their three hors
d’oeuvres
in the serving hatch, illuminated in the pretty yellow light. A man is sprinkling parsley over them and wiping the edges of the plates with a large tea towel.

‘There are our starters,’ she says, childishly.

‘J’ai faim,’ Nora replies.

‘Me too. All I’ve had all day is plane food. A strange chicken thing and a slab of cake. Both tasting remarkably similar to each other.’

Jeremy looks at her. ‘Plain food?’

‘Yes.’

‘–?’

‘Food that you –’ she begins.

‘– eat on a plane,’ concludes Nora.

‘Of course,’ says Jeremy. Then he looks at Nora. He sweeps his left hand through his thick brown hair.

The starters are on their way now: a waiter has picked up all three of them and is progressing, butler-like, across the room towards them.

Sally has chosen mussels. Now she regrets ordering them. The waiter places them in front of her and says ‘Enjoy.’ She looks down at them.

‘Everything OK?’ Nora asks.

‘Yes,’ Sally says. ‘Fine.’

‘Ah, les moules,’ observes Jeremy Bowes.

‘They look nice,’ says Nora, unsurely.

‘Yes.’

This is not what I embroider for,
she thinks.
I do not embroider so I can sit at a table with two strangers and talk about how nice mussels look.
She is missing Pearl: she should be with Pearl.
In ten minutes,
she thinks,
I will excuse myself and phone her.

She clears her throat and places her napkin on her knees.

‘So. Do you’ – she begins, turning to Nora and realising too late what an undiplomatic question she is about to ask – ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ Nora replies quickly. ‘That never … It wasn’t …’ She trails off. She looks down at her plate.

‘Ah, but it’s not too late, surely?’ Jeremy says chivalrously.

Dutifully, Nora laughs. But she looks crestfallen. Sally picks up her spoon and feel tactless. Too caught up with her own life to know how to conduct herself. She looks down at her mussels again. Mussels are not a quiet little dish, to be eaten
unobtrusively.
Mussels are an event. They make her feel exhausted just looking at them.

‘Right!’ she says out loud. And she wonders what a really
practical
woman would do. Her mother, for instance. Or Sue. Her mother or Sue would just get on with it. So she picks up her knife and begins to lever the shells open. They make a cracking noise. Fish-scented steam rises melodramatically.

‘You’re brave,’ Nora exclaims.

‘Why? Haven’t you ever eaten mussels?’

‘No.’

‘They’re wonderful. You should try them, Nora.’

‘Yes, you really should,’ Jeremy adds.

But this evening she finds she doesn’t have the panache required to eat shellfish. She feels inadequate and working-class. Exposed. The words fall out of her mouth. The mussels sit on the dish in front of her, aghast, affronted.

Now Nora and Jeremy are toying with their starters and
discussing
their childhoods – and moving gradually closer and closer towards each other.
How can she not see through him?
Sally thinks. He is probably married. He is evidently one of those serial flirts. A married flirt: the worst kind. Although he has not flirted with Sally.

Nora and Jeremy have discovered, through a combination of stumbling sentences and something else – telepathy? intuition? – that they both went to boarding schools. And that they both endured horse-riding lessons on mean-minded horses called Stardust. What an extraordinary twist of fate! Quelle
coincidence!
Two horses called Stardust! The subject of embroidery has been pushed aside.

‘I absolutely detested school,’ Jeremy spits. ‘I had an absolute horror of school.’ He is eating, very fast, a goat’s cheese tart with a side serving of ‘wild leaves’.

‘Yes, yes, me too,’ Nora agrees over her big bowl of
vichyssoisse.
Something has really happened to her now, some
unmistakable,
undeniable excitement. Sally recognises the early signs
of infatuation. Nora’s face is bright pink, and she laughs and peers, enraptured, at Jeremy. Now she removes her tweed jacket and is down to a surprisingly low-cut and clinging top, its
neckline
prettily picked out with lace. Damart, possibly. The pendant on Nora’s necklace is in the shape of a sea horse. The skin on her chest is blotchy with emotion. She is one of those mousey women who is daring underneath.