Free Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas

whose daughter wanted to be a floor mopper.
    I felt the little group of academic mothers peering at me in the half-light, their brains whirring, calculating my age. I felt suddenly very envious of them – of the small children they had had at the appropriate age – little children, who were not about to leap off into the world; who still enjoyed bedtime milk, soft toys, bubble-blowing.
    ‘He does still hurl himself on to the sofas, though,’ I said. And the women paused for a second and laughed; then suddenly, wordlessly, turned and moved on, like a shoal of fish.
    *
    I missed something, by being a young mother. Missed out on mother-peers. When girls my age went out in the evenings, I would stay in my parents’ house in East Grinstead with my colicky baby son. We would sit and watch Life on Earth. When girls my age went down town to look at the make-up counters, I went up the road to buy nappies.
    Now, women with sons the age of mine are collecting theirpensions. Some of them have silver hair. Some of them are in their sixties.
    I missed something from two different directions.

Kensington Outline
    Rowena and Sally used to observe Colin’s female colleagues from a distance. These women always made Sally feel rather clown-like in her uniform and over-sized school shoes, while they floated about in their sexy tops, hair flicked and static with hairspray, little belts pulled in tight around their waists. But Rowena reassured her: Sally was the girl he wanted. Sweet Sally. ‘No competition, Sal,’ she used to say.
    Sally’s first few dates with Colin Rafferty were furtive, spent in the pedestrian precinct or in the park during school lunch-hour. Rowena came too, following at a distance to make sure Sally was OK. Colin was a lot older than them, she reminded her. Nearly six years. He had informed Sally of this on their second date. It was quite shocking.
    ‘You be careful, Sally,’ Rowena had warned her, mother- henlike, when she relayed this information on to her. ‘You know what they’re like.’
    Rowena was concerned. Possibly a little startled, too – Sally conjectured – that he hadn’t chosen her. Because Rowena was prettier than her. Rowena was brighter than her. And once, out of the corner of her eye, Sally had noticed a tiny scowl on Rowena’s face as she turned to leave. (Before Colin arrived she would go to lurk behind the silver birch trees at the other end of the park.)
    Colin and Sally had had very little to say to each other on these early dates. Their conversations seemed always to be at cross-purposes. He would ask a very simple question, and Sally would gabble an extremely complicated response.
    ‘So. When do you go back?’
    ‘Who? What? Go back where?’
    ‘Your school.’
    ‘Oh. We go back on the sixth. But the fifth is the official first day back, it’s kind of the first day for the first and second years. But the sixth is, you know, the actual, you know …’
    ‘So. The fifth or the sixth?’
    This sort of incoherence would happen perhaps three times during the course of a twenty-minute walk. Then Colin would kiss her, tell her that she was sweet and funny – that she made him laugh – and they would part.
    ‘How was he?’ Rowena would ask, catching up with her after Colin had gone.
    ‘Oh, Rowena, he’s so nice.’
    ‘Yes, but what did he say?’
    And Sally looked up at the blue sky above the bowling green, at the pigeons clattering plumply, noisily up into it. She couldn’t quite remember what Colin had said. She also didn’t have a clue why he wanted to be with her. Does he really love me? Am I really pretty?
    ‘He’s … so nice,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sally.’
    *
    It was Rowena who suggested London Zoo as a place for the first big date out of town. She had decided, from a distance of a few hundred yards, that Colin was respectable enough to go to London with.
    ‘Zoos are dead romantic,’ she said. ‘Plus, you won’t bump into anyone.’
    Sally had