Things to Make and Mend (9 page)

‘I have to go now, Mum, or I’ll be late for Pearl.’

‘Well,’ her mother says, ‘sorry it was so short and sweet, darling.
I suppose we won’t see you till you get back.’

‘No.’

‘Well, I hope it goes well.’

And something makes her heart tighten.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to say, Mum.’

‘Just say what you’d normally say.’

‘But I don’t normally say anything about my embroidery.’

Her mother walks around the table to give her a hug. ‘Tell them why you do it, love,’ she says.

And Sally leans into her perfumed, familiar jumper.

‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I don’t even know.’

She named her daughter Pearl because she thought it was a pretty name. Unusual. It has a shimmering, peaceful quality and it alludes to something precious, which, of course, she is. A pearl is something beautiful that has emerged from a tough time. When she named her, she did not think of its overtones of old women, of old women who were young when beehive hairstyles and kohl eyeliner and Capstan cigarettes were in fashion.

Pearl.

Iridescent. Moon-like.

She thought also of that line in
Othello,
that moved her once in an English lesson at school, Rowena’s chair empty beside her: 

‘So you’re going to be mother-of-pearl,’ John said when Sally had finally made her mind up about the name. (They had agreed that she, having lumbered enormously about and given birth, should be the one with the final say.) ‘Nacre.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Nacre. Mother-of-pearl. You see it in crosswords a lot. That’s about the only time you see it.’

‘Oh.’

John had wanted to give their daughter a more normal name. Something not open to mockery at school.

‘It won’t be mocked at school,’ Sally said, when Pearl was about three weeks old – pale, beautiful, whole, priceless. The idea of her going to school one day seemed ludicrous.

‘It will get mocked,’ John said.

‘No it won’t.’

Since then she has been known as Surly Pearl, Pearly Queen, Furball, Pert, Pearldrops, Burly Pearl (despite being as willowy as a tree).

‘Mum,’ Pearl said to Sally when she was about twelve and had taken briefly to calling herself by her middle name, Emma (which John chose), ‘why did you have to give me such a stupid name?’

‘It’s not a stupid name,’ Sally retorted, upset.

‘Yes it is. It’s an old-lady name. You get Pearls in bingo halls. Pearls with false teeth.’

‘You get Julias with false teeth,’ Sally said, thinking of an
elderly
neighbour she used to visit as a girl, whose teeth made a
clattering
noise when she spoke. ‘Or Catherines. Or Sarahs.’

‘Yes, but you don’t think of them with false teeth, do you? Or in bingo halls.’

‘I can’t see this conversation going anywhere useful,’ Sally said, peering back at her needlework (her tower-block picture).

Recently, though, she is pleased to say that Pearl likes her name again. She seems to have grown proud of its unusual
quality.
It is a
jolie-laide
kind of name. An ironic name. It is, she says,
cool.
The kind of name, Sally admits now, that requires a pretty girl to carry it off. But thankfully she is pretty.

Pearl is late. And her phone is switched off. This is nothing new. Her life is more of a mystery than it used to be, but Sally accepts that: that is how a girl’s life is. She knows she will just have to stand on the platform and wait for her.

While waiting she approaches East Grinstead station’s
only-functioning
Photo-Me booth. She needs a passport-sized photo for the little laminated conference card she has been told to expect by the Embroiderers Guild. She combs her hair quickly in front of the small rectangular mirror, steps into the booth and selects the background curtain colour –
blue, not that dreadful orange.
She adjusts the height of the little round stool, her legs absurdly visible beneath the tiny privacy curtain, places £4.80 in the slot, smiles her big smile and waits for the flash. Nothing
happens.
Apart from a small, blinking red light which says
PLEASE INSERT MONEY.

‘I have inserted money,’ Sally mumbles to the booth.

She leans forward and bangs the coin slot. The sign does not stop blinking. She presses the
rejected coins
button. Nothing happens.

After a short while she sees a pair of legs stop on the other side of the curtain. She notes with sinking heart the jeans and
expensively
ugly trainers of an East Grinstead youth.

“Snot working,’ says the voice belonging to the legs.

‘No.’

She sits for a moment longer. Then, £4.80 and all dignity gone, she gets up from the little round stool, pulls back the
curtain
and steps out of the booth. The boy has disappeared.

She walks over to a bench and sits beside a large woman eating chips. She continues to wait for her daughter.

Someone has hung a plastic Santa Claus from the main doorway of the station, and his feet keep banging people’s heads as they walk past. There is a smell of cigarettes, damp paving, lavatory cleaner.

People get off trains, find each other, hug, kiss and depart, and Ms Sally Tuttle (43, single mother, award-winning embroiderer) is still waiting. She imagines her daughter dawdling somewhere, having some conversation with her friends. A conversation that
seems relaxed but is, she knows from experience, fraught with tension.

She looks at her watch. Four fifty-five. After a lull a uniformed man walks around her very deliberately with a large-headed broom.

‘Not on the train, love?’

‘She’ll turn up,’ Sally replies. She watches the broom as it picks up station debris: tickets, leaflets, hot-dog wrappers.

Then after five unfathomable minutes or so there she is, ambling across the empty platform towards her, and Sally’s heart lifts.
Pearl. My Pearl.
Pearl has, she fears, inherited her father’s slightly drifting walk and Sally’s lack of self-belief. She is carrying her flute case and her spongy plastic school bag. She is wearing a pair of incredibly baggy green trousers. They remind Sally of the air-filled pyjama trousers she and Rowena Cresswell had to practise
life-saving
techniques with, in the school swimming pool.

‘Hi Mum.’

‘Hello, sweetheart.’

Wearily, Pearl hands her a plastic carrier bag. Another plastic bag to carry.

‘Oh.’

‘Do you mind? Just for a bit.’

‘I suppose not.’

Sometimes Sally doesn’t know quite what to say to her
daughter,
who has become a little distant lately, a little surly even. Her voice, as a child, was as clear as running water, but these days she always seems to mumble. Sally hears her talking to her friends on her mobile phone sometimes, and she doesn’t understand what she is talking about. She looks at her, her once smiling, once little girl. Her pony-tailed child with the blue wellingtons. She
remembers
when she used to paint pictures for her: Mummy smiling resolutely through forests, across beaches, over hills.

Pearl’s mascara has gathered in dark smudges beneath her eyes.

‘Anything wrong, sweetheart?’

‘Nope.’

‘Good. Well. Let’s get home for a cup of tea.’

Sally says nothing about her day spent adrift in London’s
haberdashery
departments. She does not mention the little girl’s comment (‘Mummy, is that lady cross?’), or the worrying array of embroidery silks, or the sense, the sense as she skulked around the Gütermann cottons and the Lucky Lady button cards, that she should not be here, she should not be doing this. She just grips the two plastic bags in her right hand and looks around the station at the people walking back and forth. Passengers. People on
affirmative,
life-changing journeys.

‘So how long are you away for again?’ Pearl asks. ‘For your embroidery thingy?’

‘Till Saturday. You sure you don’t mind me going?’

She peers at her daughter. She has hardly ever left her overnight. Maybe three or four times since she was a toddler. There has never really been the need.

Pearl says, ‘I’m going to stay with Dad, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, I know, sweetheart. I know, technically you’re –’

‘Chill, Mum. It’s only for one night, isn’t it? It’s your big break and stuff. And I’ll be at school all day anyway.’

Sally wants to kiss her cheek but they are in a station and her daughter would be embarrassed.

They go to wait at the bus stop. Sally feels suddenly tired. The fingers on her right hand have stiffened into a needle-holding position. Her back is bent like a peasant woman who has been digging up turnips all day. She does not feel like a woman on the brink of a professional break. When the bus arrives the two of them climb on and sit, wedged together on a small plaid-
patterned 
seat. Pearl stares through the window at the denizens of East Grinstead. A woman in a pink jacket is pulling a tiny, tiny dog along the pavement. Two schoolgirls in uniform wait at the pelican crossing, cigarettes between their fingers. And Pearl turns her head, not wanting them to notice her sitting there with her mum. Sally doesn’t say anything. Perhaps it is to do with her years of service as a clothing alterations expert; her years of restraint and seriousness; of sticking pins into waistbands and lying about people’s figures.

Her sewing room is the smallest room in their house. The floor is covered with a pink spongy carpet which the landlord chose. When Sally puts the radiator on in the winter, the room smells of the pine shelving unit and the cheap wardrobe in which she keeps her frames and unused canvases. It is a Nordic smell
suggesting
forests and fjords. Her finished canvases are propped up in ranks jutting into the room. Her cows, her moonscapes, her fields, her people.

When they get home she glances into the room, at her sewing table under the window, and the vase of red carnations she has put there. The flowers perfectly match the scarlet embroidery silk she is using to create some little red flowers at Martha and Mary’s feet. There is something pleasing about that. Beside her basket of threads there is a photograph of the three of them: Pearl, John and Sally, sitting outside a pub in Yorkshire. 1997. Pearl has a tendrilly fringe and gap-teeth. John is puzzled and putting on weight; and there is Sally, with the big smile on her face, and her arms around them both.

There is not much else. Little things. Haberdashery. Beside her shelving unit is a piece of card with six green buttons sewn on to it. There is her box of sequins. And there is her pincushion with its pony-tailed Chinese men. Yellow, turquoise, scarlet and pink satin, pierced over the years by thousands of pins. She has  
always loved this pincushion. Her mother gave it to her when she was sixteen and needed little cheerful things. The men are
holding
hands, their fingertips – triangular points – stretching across an almost impossible gap.

‘When do you want to eat, Mum?’ Pearl calls from outside the door, and Sally turns and walks out of the room. ‘Have I got time for a shower before supper?’

‘I should think so,’ Sally replies vaguely, ‘It’ll give me time to …’

And Pearl, standing on the narrow landing, silently switches on the bathroom light as if it’s a magic trick. They both peer into the bathroom: at the framed dolphin-embroidery above the bath; and at the array of shampoo and conditioner bottles.

‘Macaroni cheese do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Right,’ Sally says, hovering in the doorway. Sometimes, she reminds herself of her mother.

In the kitchen she chops three small, overripe tomatoes, her heart tight as a winding engine, anticipating the talk she has to give.
What if I can remember nothing, what if I stand there transfixed?
And she has so many things to say to Pearl before she leaves in the morning:
Don’t forget Dad’s picking you up tomorrow. Make sure you take your flute in for rehearsal. Are you sure you’ve got my mobile number? And are you sure, are you really sure you don’t mind me going? Because I can cancel, easily, sweetheart. I just have to give them a …

‘Have you got any homework?’

‘Not much.’

‘Well, make sure you do it, though, sweetheart.’

‘Yeah.’

Pearl spends thirty minutes in the bathroom and another forty-five in her room again, drying her hair with her
interminably
droning hairdryer. At last she returns to the kitchen,
bringing with her the plastic carrier bag.

‘So. I thought you might like this,’ she says, handing Sally the bag.

‘Oh! This is … exciting.’

Sally wipes her hands on the front of her apron, takes the bag and brings out its content. A book. A paperback book entitled
Memories of the Blitz.

She is not quite sure what to think. ‘Thanks very much,’ she says.

‘I just thought you might like it,’ Pearl says again. ‘It looked like your kind of thing.’

‘Did it?’ Sally replies. She feels a little alarmed. ‘I don’t remember the Blitz, darling,’ she says. ‘It’s more, like, Nana’s era.’

Pearl looks at her. ‘I know that,’ she says.

Sally touches her cheek and sits down at the table to look at the book. She turns to the photographs in the middle. There is a picture of a double-decker bus in a bomb crater. Another one of a small girl wearing a gas-mask. She is sitting on her mother’s lap. Her mother is also wearing a gas-mask.

‘Thanks very much,’ she says again. ‘It’s … great.’

Pearl always mocks her for using that word.
Great.
And for using the words
brilliant, appalling, gym-shoes
and
hi-fi.

She wonders if Pearl imagined she might do embroideries of the Blitz. It alarms her a little, that she might think that.

Pearl is sitting in her chair now, contemplating the dish of macaroni cheese. She doesn’t speak for a moment. Then she says, ‘I’ll probably go round to Nana and Grandad’s while you’re away.’

She picks up the jug of water and pours herself a big
tumblerful.
And Sally notices that she is blushing. Her face, for no
apparent
reason, has become a little pink.

Sally picks up a serving spoon and slices into the macaroni cheese.