Things to Make and Mend (5 page)

We are, at the moment, in Edinburgh. It’s cold, much colder than London, the dampness fingering its way beneath our coats. The sky is huge and white as a bowl of milk. We’re staying in the Royal Burgh Hotel, a place wrapped in miles of green tartan. But it is warm, with kind staff and a bowl of mints at the reception desk.

I suppose we are the sort of people this hotel thinks of as its
target
customers. Well-heeled, educated, forty-something. Madam is English, quite posh. Sir is Canadian, somewhat furrowed,
academic
type. He has suede shoes. She has leather gloves. Both smile wearily as they emerge from the lift into the lobby.

We are here so we can visit my son. And every time I think of this, something happens to my heart, something rises, expands and hurts. Because after we have seen him, he will be leaving. He has just split up with his girlfriend and is leaving Edinburgh – Scotland – the UK – for a new job in America.

‘Good evening, sir, madam,’ say the hotel reception staff.

‘Good evening.’

‘Nice evening lined up?’ the staff enquire, perhaps imagining a concert, a play, a dinner.

‘Yes, thank you.’

In reality we are a lot less sure of ourselves. We are not sure about the evening ahead of us. Maybe it will be nice and maybe it won’t. I grab a mint from the bowl at reception. Kenneth hands in the key.

It is cosy in the hotel. But as soon as you step outdoors, you are whirled into a kind of discreet melancholy which hangs over the
High Street and tries to nose its way under the doors of all the tourist boutiques and overpriced cafés. A kind of gloom beneath the cheery early-evening lights. Or maybe it is just me. At the
bottom
of the hill there are bright boxes of Edinburgh rock and fudge and tablet illuminated in the shop windows. Sweetshops full of gobstoppers, sherbet dips, lollipops, chocolate bears, Love Hearts, Flying Saucers, peardrops. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many sweets
en masse.
It makes me think about the two childhoods in my life: my son’s and my own. Kenneth and I are walking past a sparkling window display when I suddenly remember the craze we once had at school for Black Jacks.
Black
Jacks!
We were obsessed with them. My mother couldn’t stand them: the way they blackened your teeth.

‘Did you used to eat Black Jacks?’ I ask Kenneth.

‘Fralingers taffy was my favourite,’ he replies promptly, making me wish I had known him then, when he was a schoolboy in Ontario eating too many candies.

My son is a man in his twenties, not even his early twenties, and he has his own life. It is nine years since he left home. But I still can’t imagine how much I will miss him, even
how
I will miss him when he is in a different country. It will be a different quality of missing. Mothers and their children are not meant to be this far apart.

‘It’s cold,’ I say.

‘We’re in the frozen North.’

A vast seagull lands abruptly on the pavement in front of us and regards us with its reptilian eye. It plucks a chip from a
discarded
wrapper and takes off again. A young woman with a
toddler
in a buggy swears and dodges around an overflowing rubbish bin.

We decide it will take too long to walk all the way in this
temperature,
so we get on a bus and trundle down the streets, across North Bridge, over the lights and around a roundabout. It is
dark. A large hill looms to our right. Beneath it, a café displays exhausted-looking doughnuts, éclairs, cream puffs. We get off the bus at the top of London Road and begin to walk again. I notice that Edinburgh gets a little less salubrious, a little less ‘Festival City’, the nearer we get to my son’s flat.

Kenneth is still impressed though. ‘Fine proportions,’ he is saying – he has, for the last few minutes, been in a kind of reverie about Scottish architecture. He can be like that. Wondering. Awed. But I am not in the mood. I am nervous and sad, in
anticipation
of saying goodbye to my boy.

‘I’ve always thought the Scots –’

‘Yes. Here we are,’ I say, halting outside a battered black door situated between a video rental shop and a launderette. ‘Number eighty-three. And it’s’ – I consult my piece of paper – ‘buzzer six.’ I sound like a game-show host.

Standing on the worn stone step, I press the buzzer.

‘Hi, Mum,’ Joe’s voice says through a little steel grille. ‘Come up.’ There is a distant buzzing sound. I lean my shoulder against the door and push it open, into the unlit stairwell.

‘Hi, Mum,’ Joe says again at his doorway two floors up. ‘Hi, Kenneth. Good to see you.’

He steps forward and gives me a kiss on the cheek. He does that these days. I forget sometimes how old my son is. He even has faint lines on his forehead which I want to rub away, the way I used to wipe jam off his face.

‘So how was the flight?’

‘Short. There was hardly time to look down.’

‘Yes. That’s the thing with …’ Joe says, trailing off. He looks rather pained that we have to see the place where he lives. It is not, I feel, what he wants us to see.

‘This is a lovely flat,’ I say, looking up at the high yellowish ceiling in the hallway; at the line of my son’s underpants hanging from the pulley. It reminds me of the apartment we stayed in in
Paris once, my son rattling around the hot streets on his
too-small,
plasticky tricycle. And all the women smiling and saying ‘Ah, qu’il est mignon!’ I remember the oddly grey quality of the light. The jars of honey in the markets. The height of the
buildings.
The sense of other, more exotic lives going on around us.

The light in my son’s hall does not appear to work. I squint and smile at him.

‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ Joe says, and I want to hug him; I want to say, D
on’t go, don’t go, don’t go.
But I just walk politely behind him.

In the kitchen there is a stack of unwashed dishes and a damp dishcloth, left in a ball on the draining board. He has not wrung it out and hung it neatly over the taps to dry, as I would have done. As I suspect his girlfriend might have done. And now it smells stagnant. It has probably been like that for a couple of days. While he is searching for a box of teabags, I pick up the cloth between the tips of my fingers, walk quickly over to the bin in the corner of the room and drop it in. I glance at my son and freeze: he has observed me.

‘Old habits.’

Joe raises his eyebrows and smiles.

‘Mothers,’ he says to Kenneth. He is so mature, so worldly; my mothering, I suppose, is no longer a concern.

‘Milk in your tea?’

‘Please, Joe.’

He opens the fridge. The fridge seems to be full of half-
finished
jars of gherkins. Sprigs of yellowing dill float in the brine, preserved, suspended, reminiscent of something in my old school science lab.

‘So,’ Joe says into the fridge, ‘would you like a biscuit? I expect you’re hungry.’

And he closes the fridge door, goes to a cupboard and takes out a new packet of chocolate bourbons.

‘Or we have digestives,’ he says. ‘I mean …’

My son has never been very good at hiding things.
Girlfriends.
Lost girlfriends. Once, when I went to visit him in a flat he was living in in Newcastle, I bumped into a girl of about twenty varnishing her nails in the bathroom. Burgundy varnish. She had apparently been living with Joe, in his flat, for six weeks.

‘Hi, I’m Constanza,’ the girl had said, looking up and giving me a big, delightful smile. She was olive-skinned and pretty. She sounded Spanish. ‘And are you Joe’s …?’ she began, baffled.

‘I’m his mother.’

‘His mother? You are too young.’

‘Yes, well, I had Joe pretty young. I expect he told you.’

‘No, no, he didn’t tell me.’

Even now, at forty-three, I am still thrown by people’s astonishment.
You have a son of twenty-seven? No! How is that possible?
Often, I am mistaken for his older sister.

‘I was a teenage mum,’ I used to say a few years ago, when I wanted to shock people at dull departmental dinner parties, or at conference ‘jollies’.

‘How unexpected,’ one man joked, flapping his damask napkin. ‘You seem so cultured.’

‘How … French,’ said another man.

‘I am cultured. I am not French,’ I said, irritated.

‘Yes, but you act as if you are. French, that is.’

‘Do I really? How do French people act?’

‘Bossy.’

‘Bossy?’ I repeated, feeling a rush of irritation. ‘Bossy? Well. Ha! Maybe I have reason to be bossy. Maybe I’ve had to put up with a lot of comments like that over the years. Maybe I –’

‘Calm down,’ the napkin-flapper said, slightly alarmed. ‘I was joking.’

‘It is so nice to meet you,’ Constanza the pretty Spanish girl
said when I left my son’s flat in Newcastle. ‘I look forward to meet you again.’

But we never did meet again. My son’s girlfriends come and go, come and go. One day they are in his bathroom, polishing their nails, and the next, they are gone.

While the kettle is boiling, I go to the bathroom. It is long and thin and in need of repainting. There is a tall window at the far end, above the lavatory. The view is of other tenements and the distant, dark North Sea. I look at the things he has in his
bathroom:
a modest collection of cheap shampoos and shaving gel. There is still some evidence of his former girlfriend’s life here: a blue glass bottle on the window sill, a small whale-shaped mirror stuck to the wall, a half-empty box of cotton buds on the bath ledge.

‘He is packing to leave,’ I think. ‘And I am here to help him.’

‘Mum?’ Joe calls from the kitchen. ‘Tea. We’re in the living room.’

‘OK,’ I reply, walking back into the hallway, and wondering for a moment where the living room is.

Sally does not go out much in the evenings. She likes home. But she did recently go to a party with Sue from work. It was an hour’s drive away and she thought, well, she should. Sue drove – efficient, motherish – peering through the rainy windscreen at the dark, hedge-narrowed roads.

The party was full of middle-aged women, babies, husbands and wheezing, unwashed dogs. Sally sat next to a woman
introduced
to her as Veronica Beard. Veronica and Sally crouched on couches beside a low, pale table (Ikea, probably), and attempted to prong olives on to cocktail sticks.

‘So. What do you do?’ Veronica asked.

‘I work for a clothing alterations company in East Grinstead,’ Sally began shiftily. ‘I also do a bit of emb–’

‘Really? How interesting. And how long have you worked there?’

‘At In Stitches? Pretty much all my life.’

‘Ha ha,’ tinkled Veronica. ‘And you live there, too? You live in East Grinstead?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t go in for exotic locations, then?’

Sally was about to say something about a place being what you made it – which she is not quite sure she believes herself – when Veronica Beard snorted, put another olive in her mouth and said, ‘Anyway, maybe you can take the girl out of East Grinstead but can you take East Grinstead out of the girl?’

‘What’s wrong with East Grinstead?’ Sally asked. It isn’t chic, it isn’t metropolitan, but you could do worse. She hasn’t ever left,
for instance, which is proof enough. Then there are the floral
displays.
There is the proximity to London. There is the nearby miniature steam railway, which her parents used to take her to, and which she also used to visit with Pearl when she was little. Clattering around the tracks, Pearl in her flowery pinafore dress, asking all those unanswerable questions.

‘Mummy, why is smoke coming out of the train?’

‘It’s not smoke, sweetness, it’s steam. It’s how the train moves along.’

‘Why?’

‘Because steam is what pushes it. The fire heats up the water and the water turns into steam.’

‘Why? Why does the water turn into steam?’

‘It’s … a kind of chemical reaction, Poppet.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, Pearl. Y’know, not every question has an answer.’

‘Wh–’

‘Oh look, there’s a rabbit out there. Running along.’

There were very few towns which had their own steam railway, Sally reminded Veronica Beard. And not all towns have won the South-East in Bloom award.

She discovered later that Veronica Beard lived in Southend-
on-Sea.
Hardly Saint Tropez either, eh?
she should have said. She wished she had swept up to her at the tail-end of the party and said something shocking, betraying her working-class origins;
something
about Essex Girls or end-of-the-pier jokes. But she never says things like that to people she dislikes. She is not good at
withering
comments. Sometimes, in the presence of such people, her confidence fizzles, is trampled upon. She is Sally Tuttle,
grant-aided
girl; Sally Tuttle, who did not stay at school long enough to learn the subjunctive, or the reasons behind the Boer War.

She has never liked social gatherings in any case. She turns into a bit of a hermit-crab, arriving early to hide in the shell of a big leather sofa and scuttling out occasionally to refill her wine glass or grab a handful of pretzels. She also has, she knows, a
pincer-like
way of conversing; of throwing startling statements into the middle of a sober discussion on interest rates or school
catchment
areas. ‘I saw someone in a chicken suit today,’ she said at a rather solemn fortieth birthday party a few weeks earlier, ‘and they were crossing the road!’ The little group she was with stopped talking and looked at her.

‘A chicken suit?’ said a woman.

Before she speaks, she always trusts there will be someone in the assembled gathering who is on her wavelength, who will
appreciate
a different kind of conversation. She is often wrong. There is often a silence, a look of bewilderment. Where have they gone, she wonders, the people who used to appreciate comments like that?

Maybe I am too childish.

Maybe I am immature.

Maybe I am regressing.

Or progressing the wrong way.

And she remembers the way she used to laugh with Rowena Cresswell at school: those gasps for breath over things that were not even funny. Except they were, they
were.
Certain sights. Sounds. The way their Geography teacher’s briefcase used to snap importantly shut, and then flop open again, half an hour later. The way Miss Button used to strut, peacock-like, around the Portakabin. The vision of a distant, struggling line of
cross-country
runners wearing numbered sports-tunics. And words. The word ‘sports-tunic’ had once made Sally Tuttle and Rowena Cresswell laugh, hysterically, for days.

East Grinstead has changed a lot since then. Changed, altered, developed. Rowena Cresswell’s house, for instance, brand new in 1974, has acquired an established look. It has softened, gained
a kind of bloom; it has ivy and honeysuckle growing up the wall and a front gate that doesn’t sit properly in its frame. (A young family lives there now: a resilient young couple with three wild little boys who are always swinging on the gate.) After the death, nearly twenty years ago, of Mrs Cresswell, and Mr Cresswell’s subsequent death four months later (heartbroken, apparently), the Willows was renamed. It is now the Gables. And when she thinks of it, she can recall gables, and baby birds nesting in them, beneath Rowena’s window.

On her way home from work, she still walks past their garden. She walks past the yellow roses and the crazy-paving and the cherry tree and remembers Mrs Cresswell planting it, clad in apron and spotty-palmed gardening gloves. Now, on early
summer
evenings, the tree is often completely covered with little birds. Sparrows, singing in the pale light …

‘Did you actually do Needlework at school?’ Pearl asked her the other day.

‘I did.’

‘So your school wasn’t very emancipated, then?’

‘Well,’ Sally replied, feeling somewhat crushed. She thought of St Hilary’s, now a housing estate with selected Victorian
features.
‘Considering we survive on my sewing abilities,
sweetheart,
I think …’

But she trailed off. She knew what her daughter meant. Needlework lessons had not been emancipated. Even in 1979 they were archaic. They might as well have been doing
needlepoint or crewelwork.
They might as well have sat in an inglenook with their tapestry frames, sipping mead from pewter goblets while the pallid sunshine seeped in through the Portakabin’s high, metal-framed windows.

Select pattern pieces needed. With right sides together, pin sleeve into armhole, matching symbols and large * to shoulder seam. (* indicates Bust Point and Hipline) 

But everything, it seemed then, could be made to fit. There was an armhole for each sleeve, an adjustment line for each non-standard waist.

‘Bust point and hipline,’ Rowena whispered, and they would both begin to laugh.

(‘What do you get out of embroidery?’ Graham the estate agent asked Sally on the last occasion she went out with him. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘you don’t strike me as someone who’d be into fussy
little
stitching.’

Fussy little stitching.
Sally looked at him.

‘I enjoy it,’ she said. ‘I like the feel of the cloth. I like getting a load of different-coloured threads and turning them into a
picture.
You know, what do
you
get,’ she added, ‘out of writing “this delightful room boasts a dado rail” God knows how many times a week?’

This was when she and Graham had begun, slightly, to hate each other.)

She is currently working on a commission she received after winning the award. She is going to talk about it at the conference in Edinburgh. It depicts Mary and Martha, of Biblical fame. Large frame, satin stitch, straightforward in style, apart from the fact that she is sewing on hundreds of sequins. A fiddly, laborious task. But there is something irresistibly cheerful about sequins, like the sparkle of neon lights.

Her Mary and Martha are possibly a little too bejewelled for religious figures, so she has toned them down by giving them very plain dresses. Mary, the most daring sister, wears a maroon A-line thing while poor put-upon Martha must be content with a kind of smock in
taupe.
She has tried to give them different expressions, but has in fact managed to make them look very
similar
– they both have beige, satin-stitched faces, slightly wonky
eyebrows and scarlet lips. They both have brown hair parted in the middle. As she stitches, Sally wonders what people will write about them.
A wonderfully naive take on the embroiderer’s art,
the judge of her winning entry pronounced last year,
with a delightful enthusiasm for sequins;
and she had felt slightly insulted at his assessment of her skills. She was not trying to be naive. But she supposes her embroidered figures do look a little childish; even the worldly Mary looks disingenuous, cartoonish, a bit simple. The two sisters have round faces, big ears, trusting eyes.

Innocent. Gullible. No doubt about it. It is never intentional, but there it is.

She was commissioned to do this embroidery in March by the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation, a group of vicars who spend most of their time in Southwark Cathedral. Reverends Avery, Beanie and Hope. When she got the commission she had to travel up to London to meet them. She had never really had a
career
as such; she had never had a business meeting in her life. And now she was going to have one with members of the clergy.
Typical,
her daughter’s father would say –
How typically perverse of you, Sally.

The journey was actually more straightforward than she had imagined; there had been no need to lie awake the night before, staring at the luminous stars on her ceiling. In the morning she got up at seven, whispered goodbye to her sleeping daughter, got the 8.30 train up to London, took another train from Victoria, got on to two Tube trains and a bus, then walked up three roads, through a gateway, along a path and beneath the slapping wet boughs of a willow tree. She could feel her heart thudding. She looked around the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation’s garden: at its cotton-yellow jasmine, its seagull-grey chippings, its
battlement-black
gate, and her mind went through a possible choice of stitches for the scene.
Cloud filling? Fern? Knotted satin?
She walked past a wooden board stuck into the lawn bearing the words ‘The Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation’ and resisted an
impulse to turn and run. She stepped through a low doorway into a small lobby, where she sat surrounded by piles of green hardback copies of the Common Prayer Book. There was a smell of dust and mildew and a sign on the wall which said ‘Please D’ont Leave Your Cups Here’. She sat and looked at that
apostrophe
until Reverend Beanie called her name.

She was the only person in the room without a dog-collar. She had chosen something demure for the occasion, though: her home-made green coat and her nice, swishing, below-the-knee skirt. A skirt that was really intended for the admiration of less lofty men. She smiled and cleared her throat. Then the Board and she sat down around a large mahogany table, upon which were arranged a teapot, pretty Indian Tree cups and saucers, side plates and a dish of custard creams. The oddly louche scent of coffee and cigar smoke hovered in the air.

‘Well, Mrs Tuttle,’ smiled the Reverend Avery, ‘Your work is charming, absolutely charming. That peacock for instance, that peacock is quite inspired.’

Sally wriggled in her seat. She wasn’t sure she liked the word ‘charming’: it was the sort of word an estate agent might use to describe a house that was too small.

‘Your use of sequins –’ began the Reverend Beanie vaguely, pouring tea into her cup.

‘What we’re looking for,’ interrupted the Reverend Avery, ‘despite the fact that this will be an award from the Ecclesiastical Arts Foundation’ – and he suddenly stopped talking, put his clenched fist up to his mouth and coughed; then he continued – ‘is something quite homely. Something that reflects a more
every-day
take on Christianity.’

Sally looked at him. She thought of her old RE teacher, a short, bald man who used to breathe ‘We break this bread’
melodramatically
into the school microphone at assemblies; she also thought of her embroidery of
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,
sited in her parents’ living room above their occasional table.

‘In fact I often …’ she began.

‘Hmm?’ said the Reverend Avery.

‘I often choose Biblical images for my work.’

‘Well, that’s most interesting. Why do you think that is?’

She pondered for a second.

‘Because they seem so colourful, I suppose. You know, there always seem to be a lot of vibrant animals and birds and … angels. Angelic figures,’ she added, fearing that she had begun to make no sense. She had seen Reverend Avery raise one eyebrow quizzically when she mentioned the vibrant animals.
Why did I say that?
Maybe it was because an image of Noah’s Ark had
suddenly
flashed across her mind, with its myriad honking and growling occupants. Lions, bears, chameleons. Sally picked up her teacup and took a quick sip. ‘And,’ she continued, trying to adopt a more educated tone, ‘it is, as we all know, a kind of embroidery tradition – an almost innate tradition. Think of all those Victorian samplers. And medieval religious tapestries.’

‘Ah yes,’ Reverend Beanie smiled knowledgeably. ‘The
marvellous
Apocalypse of St John.’

‘Yes,’ Sally replied. She had never heard of the Apocalypse of St John. The only famous tapestries she had heard of were the Bayeux Tapestry and
The Lady with the Unicorn.
She was
suddenly
horribly aware of her ignorance, her curtailed education.