Things to Make and Mend (4 page)

I was knocked down by a taxi a couple of years ago – a small, quite insignificant knock – and for a few days I suffered
short-term
memory loss. For a week or so I forgot various aspects of my life. I forgot to turn up to two French tutorials, prompting wailing, overbearing emails from my eighteen-year-old students (
re: where are you??!
). I spent £103 at Sainsbury’s and left half my shopping bags in the car park. I left my new, small and stylish mobile phone on top of a parking meter. I forgot that my
parents-in-
law had come to stay and locked them out of the house (I
discovered
them when I got home, sitting like gnomes on a pile of rocks in the front garden).

‘It’s OK,’ my seventy-eight-year-old mother-in-law said,
heaving
herself up from the rocks. They had come all the way from Canada to stay with us. Nice people, civilised. 

I have always forgotten appointments. Coffee dates. Dental check-ups. I mislay my glasses and my keys. But this was
something
new. These were disconcerting gaps in my memory. ‘My name is Rowena Cresswell,’ I said in Accident and Emergency, a couple of hours after the accident. I had, distressingly, forgotten my married name.

Fortunately the important facts of my life returned quickly – I remembered that I have a job as a French lecturer and translator; that I have a new Canadian husband and a quite old English son. That I live in North London, walk every day beneath the pretty shadows cast by London plane trees; that I spend a lot of time at either Stansted or Heathrow airports. But there were still
occasions 
when I would completely overlook something. It was as if there was a tiny gap in my brain, caused by the accident, down which pieces of information got lost. It was, I said, describing my condition to Wilma McHale, the departmental secretary, like
losing
things down the back of a sofa. Little, valuable things that you might not even know were missing. And then, when you were in the middle of looking for something else, they would suddenly surface.

‘I’ve gone blank. What’s the French for needle?’ I asked my
husband
the other evening, hunched, too late at night, over a
translation.
I had to be up at six to catch a plane, and I was trying to finish an essay on the nineteenth-century manufacture of Persian carpets. Camels were involved – in the context of their urine being used to bleach the wool.
Le blanchissage du tapis à l’urine de chameau
… and tapped my pen against my bottom lip. I thought of the quote from the Bible about camels and eyes of needles. I thought of needles in haystacks.

‘A needle …,’ Kenneth mused, not looking up from the fiercely spot-lit book he was reading. ‘L’aiguille,’ he said after a moment. ‘Masculine.’

‘Oh yes. I was thinking it was “clou” for some reason.’

‘That’s a nail.’

‘I know.’

‘You couldn’t get much sewing done with a nail.’

‘I know.’

I looked back at the page I was working on: …
and the intricacy with which the brightly-threaded needle was used
…

I worry about my forgetfulness a little. But I know it’s
probably
just due to tiredness and that little knock I had. I remember most things eventually. Important things, like words, phrases, turns of phrase. I love words; have always had a fear of
misinterpretation.
Which, I suppose, being a translator, is just as well.

Sally Tuttle walks to East Grinstead station carrying her
handbag,
a plastic bag from Harrods and a floral umbrella. The sky is a brightish grey. She is a
professional woman,
her heart calm, her mind uncluttered.

She gets on an ancient, door-slamming train to Victoria. It is early afternoon but the train is busy. She sits beside a woman who glances up, smiles, then returns her attention to her magazine. She is filling in a word puzzle, slowly circling around words that she has located in the jumble of letters. She works horizontally, vertically, diagonally. The words, Sally notices, are all to do with medicine.
STETHOSCOPE. ASPIRIN. WAITING ROOM.
The woman is gripped, as if there is nothing more important in the world than to locate the word
SCAPULA.
Sally sits beside her, her plastic bag on her knee.

She has come up to London to visit haberdashery
departments.
She likes to empty her mind at times of stress by gazing at the ranks of colours.

In John Lewis people are collapsing their umbrellas, folding their raincoats over their arms, walking purposefully towards their prospective acquisitions. It is three o’clock on a slow, pale afternoon, but there is nothing like a large department store to make you feel there is a purpose to life. You just have to glance at the Storage Solutions to know there is an answer to everything. Bras in a muddle? There are bra organisers! Cat hair on your coat? There are pet-hair de-fluffers!

In Sally’s plastic bag are a large number of unwanted clothes. She has it with her simply because, this morning, she opened her
wardrobe and decided to have a clear-out. She was in a purging mood, sifting through her ranks of swinging clothes: a collection of blues and greys.
That has to go, that has to go.
Her daughter has often commented upon her less successful garments (‘Mum, what is
this?’
). And so she had cast things off ruthlessly, sticking yellow Post-it notes to all the things she no longer wears:

And then there was the dress, her green silk dress, with its sequins and tassles. With its sweetheart neckline. With all its haberdashery. She loved it once, that dress – it was given to her, in fact, by Rowena Cresswell – but now it was much too small for her. And much too girlish. It was already old, a hippy thing, in 1979. What was the point, Sally wondered, in hanging on to that?

Brightness: she had this vision of brightness. Bright,
good-quality
clothes that would reveal a new, cheerful professionalism.

So this morning, quickly, she had stuffed all her old, half-liked or inherited clothes into the large Harrods bag (chosen for its
connotations
of grandeur although it actually came from Oxfam), and left the house. She had walked, in her green home-made coat and her summer-sale boots, up the street to the main road and then on to a shop called
A Second Glance.
A dress agency. It was the only dress agency, probably, within a twenty-mile radius of their house, located in a tiny row of boutiques and gift shops, all struggling to pretend they were not in East Grinstead at all but
somewhere fashionable, like Brighton or Chelsea.

A small bell tinkled as she stepped inside. Playing on an
overhead
speaker was some indeterminate piece of classical music: something noble and slightly tragic, with a lot of violins
harmonising
in thirds.

She stood on the soft carpet with the plastic bag. The interior of A Second Glance was warm and painted a sombre olive-green. There were lone twigs jutting out of vases at strategic points. A floral curtain concealed a small dressing room.

For a moment she couldn’t locate the shop assistant, and then she spotted her, sitting on a low chair by the till, reading the
Daily Telegraph.
She was camouflaged, wearing
olive-green:
a polo-neck jumper and matching woollen skirt. Over her jumper she wore a string of large green stones. They looked like gobstoppers. Sally advanced and the woman looked up. She glanced down at Sally’s bag: a
second glance?
She did not say hello.

‘Hello,’ Sally said, the word falling out of her mouth and
clanging
around the shop.

The woman lowered her newspaper, smiled and then lowered her eyelids.

‘I was wondering if you might be interested in looking at these,’ Sally said. Something, some restrained, stomach-plunging atmosphere about the shop, reminded her of her old school. Her politeness, her deference bounced off the walls, making her feel belligerently humble, like a knife grinder or someone going round the houses selling dusters and polish.

The shop woman carried on smiling, her eyes still closed. Then she opened them. ‘We’re not really taking things at the moment. But I’ll have a look. Seeing as you’ve brought them.’

‘Right.’

And Sally put the bag on to the floor beside the counter. She wondered if she should do some sort of sales-pitch. Was that
what you were supposed to do in dress agencies?

‘This is linen,’ she began, pulling out one of the jackets, ‘It’s …’

‘No,’ said the woman.

‘Oh,’ Sally said. ‘OK.’ And she put the jacket to one side and pulled out the next linen jacket.

‘How about this one?’

‘That looks almost identical.’

Sally didn’t reply. She put the second linen jacket on top of the first and dragged out the grey top.

The woman put on a pair of half-moon glasses. She advanced a maroon-nailed hand and fingered the sleeve. ‘No,’ she said.

Please take your hands off my blouse,
Sally thought. She was suddenly feeling very defensive about these clothes, very protective. They were a part of her history.
What do you know about these clothes? You wouldn’t know good clothes if they slapped you.

‘OK. Are you interested in hats?’

‘We don’t usually take hats,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘
Particularly
if they don’t arrive in a hat box.’

Sally glared at her. She felt like doing something
melodramatic:
taking out an enormous pair of scissors and slicing her way through all the shop’s dreary, self-satisfied clothes.

‘The only thing I have left,’ she snapped, ‘is this.’

And then she dragged out her green dress: the one she was given by Rowena Cresswell just before they never spoke to each other again; the one Sally nevertheless could not quite bear to part with, and used to wear when she was newly slim after her daughter’s birth. She wore it for years and years when she went out in the evenings on various unsuccessful dates after she had split up with Pearl’s father, and her mother would come to babysit. (Her daughter was a toddler by then and would sit on her lap before she left and pull at the tassles – ‘You looks pretty,’ she used to say …)

The woman hesitated, brushed the silk between thumb and forefinger, looked at the label. ‘I’ll take that one,’ she said.

‘Sure?’ Sally asked, feeling suddenly sad. (
I am changing,
she reminded herself,
I am moving on.
)

‘Yes. It’s vintage,’ the woman said breezily. ‘So it has some value. Do you know the system? Have you sold with us before?’

‘The system? No.’

The woman turned to her desk and wrote something very quickly in a notepad, tore the page out and handed it to Sally.

‘This is your receipt. You can phone in a month or so to see if it’s sold. If it hasn’t sold in about six months we’ll give it back.’

‘OK,’ Sally said.
Thanks a bunch, dear,
she thought. She took the receipt from the woman and looked at it. She did not want it now. She felt she had done something heartless, given away something she could not retrieve.

‘So I don’t …’

‘No,’ smiled the woman. ‘You don’t get money up front.’ She looked at Sally. ‘That’s not the way we do it.’

‘OK.’

Sally paused, aware of the practical, working clothes she was wearing, in the midst of so much feminine, floating attire. ‘How much do you think you’ll get for it?’

‘Thirty pounds, perhaps? We take forty per cent commission. So you’d get’ – swiftly, she made a calculation on a clonky,
infantile
-buttoned calculator – ‘eighteen pounds.’

‘Eighteen pounds,’ Sally croaked.

She looked up at her dress –
her dress
– which somehow was already hanging up on a rail like a trophy pinched by a magpie. There was even a label on it: ‘70s dress, green silk, good
condition’.
How did she do that so quickly?

Eighteen pounds was not enough. But she was suddenly very aware of their continuing lack of security, hers and her
daughter’s;
of the constant need to keep the wolf from the door. Loved
ones, she reminded herself, are more significant than clothes.

‘I’ll phone in a month then,’ she said, and she left the shop with her unwanted wares.

The bag of clothes has since been an encumbrance. It has sat on her lap, on the train, beside the word-puzzling woman, all the way to Charing Cross. It has squashed into the Tube train with her. It has bounced and bumped down Oxford Street and been wedged into lifts. Sally has not found a single charity shop in which to discard it.

In John Lewis’s Fashions, she wanders nervously past rows of impractical chiffon blouses and too-tight jeans –
not for me, not for me
– then takes the lift back to the haberdashery department. A little girl, about three years old, stares unblinkingly at her as they glide downwards. Sally looks back at her and smiles. The girl reminds her of her daughter at that age; she has the same
seriousness
and long, bright hair. The child, her eyes wide and brown, does not smile. Just as the doors are opening, she turns to her mother.

‘Mummy,’ she says, ‘is that lady cross?’

‘Shh, shh, shh,’ replies her mother, stroking the top of her daughter’s head with her flattened palm and directing her towards the bed-linen department. (‘Look!’ the child exclaims. ‘Bob the Builder duvets!’)

‘Cross?’ Sally wonders, leaving the lift and striding quickly through the departments (she has long legs and has been told by two significant men in her life that she looks like Big Bird from Sesame Street). As she approaches haberdashery, with all its
ribbons
and poppers and comforting skeins of embroidery silks, she glances at her reflection in one of the store’s mirrored pillars. She had thought she was looking calm, dignified, full of renewed
purpose
and optimism. But now she sees that the little girl was right. She does not look
cross,
exactly, but harrassed. She has that 
spaced-out, overworked look. She looks like a woman in her
forties
in a panic. Her hair is coming adrift. Her collar is half up and half down. Her skin is pallid after an early and continuing winter. She is carrying a plastic bag which looks creased and distorted, even though it originated in Harrods. And she has that anxious expression that she knows she has had since she was a teenager: that small, preoccupied frown that could be misinterpreted for anger.