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

the dark interior of a chain hotel. The canapés are often alarming: potent, fishy things teetering on small oatcakes, too big to eat in one mouthful and too messy to eat in two.
    ‘I’ll go for one of these cherry-tomato things,’ people mumble, as if someone is forcing them to eat something or else. As if the hors d’oeuvres chef is having a laugh.
    There is also innocuous jazz played low and a certain amount of flirting, particularly from the married ones.
    *
    Before I met Kenneth, I used to hang around at these events with female peers from other universities: we would stand near the bar in our best clothes and perfume and wonder if we were having fun. Was it more fun, more jolly, than sitting hunched over our computers and dictionaries and time-sheets? It was certainly a change; a social event for which I sometimes felt ill-prepared. My talent for chat was impeded by weeks of sitting alone in my office, surrounded by dusty plants, unread manuscripts and unmarked papers.
    It was also a bit like being at Razzles on East Grinstead High Street. The anxious hovering. The pretending. The smoke and mirrors. It was strange seeing your peers in ‘casual’ attire, worrying that they might not look cool. Should we let our hair down? Take our handbags to the toilets? And we really had handbagsnow, real womanly handbags in which we kept packets of paper hankies, wet-wipes, lipstick, diaries, keys, receipts, business cards, photographs of our children. Some of the young mothers even had a nappy or two secreted bulgingly in one of the inner pockets.
    I still have pictures of a baby in my wallet. Baby Joe, summer 1980. I can hardly believe how old this baby is now. The year of the Jolly in Rouen, he was in his last year at university.
    *
    On that particular evening it was August but already cold, and the Jolly delegates all seemed tired. The next day some of us would have to sit in a small, airless room discussing the translation of poetry from Hebrew into French, and from French into English. Discussing the nuances. The nuances of the nuances.
    ‘Is anyone interested in seeing the Cathedral?’ I asked.
    No one was. Rouen Cathedral was too far away – an eight-mile taxi ride from our ‘central’ hotel. Everyone was too tired. One woman was pregnant and planning an early night.
    So I had spent most of the evening looking at pictures of other delegates’ children. None of them had children as old as my son. The oldest of the other children was nine. The women were all about the same age as me, but still at the stage of discussing potty training, speaking ability, nurseries, the amusing things children say.
    ‘The other day,’ said one of the women (a specialist in French Medieval Literature), ‘my daughter wanted to help me mop the kitchen floor. There she was, flinging this mop around and she suddenly looked up and said, “Mummy, when I grow up I want to be a floor-mopper.”’
    The other women laughed. Some helped themselves thoughtfully to more Bombay mix from a bowl sitting on the bar.
    ‘And I thought,’ continued the woman, ‘where do girls get these thoughts? That they want to mop floors for a living? What happened to female emancipation?’
    Nobody seemed to know. Perhaps, girt about with our motherly clobber – nappies in handbags, maternal antennae twitching long-distance – we were all wondering.
    ‘Well, my son is always careering around with action men and guns,’ someone began. And I felt a kind of heaviness in my chest. I have heard the Nature versus Nurture debate about once a fortnight for the past two decades. It has become a kind of phobia of mine.
    ‘It’s genetic. Nature,’ the women agreed. People always agree that it is Nature.
    ‘How about your son?’ someone asked, turning to me. ‘Does he bounce on the sofas too? Is he always into everything?’
    ‘My son is twenty-two,’ I said, and everyone stopped, glasses of wine and Bombay mix halfway to their mouths.
    ‘No!’ said the woman