Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Glue I Keep for Others
A restorer's glue pot is used overnight by a hand that is not hers on repairs she has only pencilled round and has not yet begun.
- dated: "the workshop years"
- narrator: "Petrina Rye, restorer"
14 January. I keep other people's furniture standing and I keep a glue pot standing, which is what my trade is boiled down to: rabbit glue from the ironmonger, sold by the pound in amber slabs, warmed Wednesdays and whenever a seam wants it. Yesterday I pencilled a ring round the lifting veneer on Mrs Gwen Pryce's secretaire and went home at dusk, meaning to open it Thursday. This morning the blister is laid. Glued, pressed, under cauls I do not own and have not bought, and the pot is down a thumb's depth with the skin skimmed off. My worst brush was rinsed out stiff and laid across the jar, the way a hand lays a brush when it means to come back tomorrow. I have taken the pencil ring off the veneer with my own thumb and written the secretaire in my day book as in hand, because it is.
3 February. I tried it, as anyone would. Left the pot foul on purpose, glair dried to horn in the bottom, a pot no hand could work and no hand would want to. Morning: the pot was bell-metal clean and sweet, and a second job was laid — the drawer lining on the Harlow bureau, a repair I had only annotated in soft pencil and never begun. It is the washing up that sits with me more than the glue. My mother's saying, out of her own laundry days: them as wash up before the work means to stay for the work. The pot was mine and is now kept. I did not write that sentence until the third try.
19 February. Figures are my comfort, so here are figures. I weighed the pot dry on the postage scales Sunday night, note taken: four ounces over the empty weight. Weighed it Friday morning: nearer two and a half. Two weighings a week since, and the falling of the ounces answers every time to what one laying of veneer takes, no more, no less. Whoever uses it uses it like a tradesman and wastes like a tradesman: hardly at all. The arithmetic is exact, which I am glad of and which is the whole of what I can swear to. I have set no fingers down in this book and mean to keep it so.
6 March. The secretaire went home to Mrs Pryce paid for in full, one mending, my ticket on it. The bureau goes next week, likewise. I charged for my work and not for the other laying, as it is not mine to charge for; but the pot is mine, and the glue is mine, bought pound by pound out of my own housekeeping, so I have opened a line under the repairs in my day book for glue consumed on work not begun, and I keep the sums there. The line is filling. What I cannot settle, trimming the lamp of an evening with the shop locked and the pot scrubbed and the brush laid across the jar how he or she or it leaves it, ready for the morning: I have always kept my glue for other people's repairs. Only lately I have stopped assuming the others come off my book. Whose comes after mine?