Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

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