I Think I Love You (25 page)

Petra’s dad was never sure about Marcus. He always said Mark, then paused before the
us
, like a horse balking at a difficult fence, a tic that infuriated her mother, who adored her son-in-law unreservedly. Marcus’s combination of talent, acute sensitivity, quick temper and arrogance were delightful to Greta, because she believed them to be the ingredients of genius. Much could be forgiven such a man. It was kind,
devoted underachievers like Petra’s father who could not be tolerated. Would her mother have thought that screwing a twenty-five-year-old violinist was just another perk of the artistic condition?

No, not screwing. “Philandering,” Petra corrected herself quickly, seeing her mother’s cool stare of disapproval.

Greta could not abide coarseness of any kind. She had stopped taking
The Times
after the paper started calling it sex instead of sexual intercourse. You never heard the word
bastard
pass her lips, only
illegitimate
. Long after the concept had lost its stigma, her mother would point to some sweet, apple-cheeked baby parked in a stroller outside the Co-op and murmur darkly, “Kerry’s illegitimate boy.” Her mother was stuck in the past.
Bastard
now meant something else entirely.

Like Petra’s husband, for instance. As Marcus edges out of the pew and moves purposefully to the front of the chapel, Petra is able to observe her partner of almost fifteen years as others in the congregation must see him. Age has not withered him; in fact, age is struggling to land a finger on the man. “Hunky
and
soulful. And there’s lots of him. You lucky thing,” a friend had said to her, in the early days, and Petra had blushed; it was as though the friend had stood beside their bed and watched them sleep and wake. Seen Petra enfolded by those lazy, unclumsy limbs. Marcus has none of the artist’s traditional pallor; he is in excellent health, always has been, with strong features that will never grow gaunt or—and this, Petra has observed, is a horribly common fate for middle-aged men—fatten and droop until the handsome youth becomes a doughy, red-cheeked squire. Not Marcus, damn his eyes. Look at him. Turned forty last year, but he still has a thatch of wavy dark hair through which, now and then, he runs a distracted hand, to mess it up rather than neaten it. A dash of Ted Hughes, someone said, and it’s true. Under the decency, and despite the finesse, there is something wild not far below. Something you can’t trust.

Marcus sits down, pulls the cello to him and sweeps the bow across the strings in a single motion. Whoever said that music was invented to confirm human loneliness obviously never heard her husband play. When he did the Elgar in Bristol last year, one reviewer said his performance was “at once muscular and sublimely sensitive.” Yes, and who got the most out of those muscles?

As his bow moves, and the music swells, her anger rocks back and forth. Even if the detective of tears could get a sample from her husband, Petra isn’t sure she’d really want to know if they were genuine. When he said that he still loved her, did he mean it? We live in such strange times, Petra thinks. Science is solving all the secrets of mankind, one by one—predispositions to disease, the brain chemistry of criminals, DNA tests to establish fatherhood, the reason women prefer to mate with alpha males and live with beta ones. But human nature just isn’t keeping up with all this information. It isn’t ready for so much truth. Not all at once. Sometimes not knowing is as much as you can bear.

Petra feels a sudden longing for him. Not for the weak, evasive man who has been accompanying her to marriage counseling while moving in with a violinist who looks insultingly like Petra at the same age. Marcus, the man who always despised the clichés of bourgeois escape, has set up home with his young mistress on a houseboat near Teddington.

“A houseboat,” Petra had repeated dully. Was any love nest in the annals of adultery more designed to make you want to summon a nuclear submarine?

“Mum, it’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

Molly is standing next to her, stroking her arm, speaking softly. It’s only when her daughter pushes the tissue into her gloved hand that Petra realizes that she is the one who is crying. The tears are running down her cheeks in such profusion that they feel like they’re tying a ribbon of water under her chin. She can feel the wetness seep under the collar of her new black linen jacket. Twice as expensive as anything else in her wardrobe, but she couldn’t let her mother down on this important day.

“Petra, taking the control of your emotions, please,” says her mother, and she feels her chin lift automatically and her spine stiffen.

Posture can do a lot for a woman, her mother was always quite specific about that. If you carry yourself well, if you pull in your tummy, using your muscles as the body’s own girdle, then middle-age spread was not the inevitability some liked to pretend it was. All her married life, her mother took pride in the fact that she weighed exactly the same as she had on her wedding day. Greta took the Helena Rubinstein line: there are no ugly women, just lazy ones.

From the summer’s day far away come the ding-dong strains of an ice-cream van. A tune that was meant to have been composed by Henry VIII for his future queen had ended up as tinky-tonk chimes summoning day-trippers at a Welsh seaside resort to buy a cone. What were the odds against that?

“Mum?”

“I’m fine,” Petra whispers back, and lays a hand on her daughter’s hair. Molly is so much fairer than Petra, blessed with her grandmother’s coloring and the same angelic, heart-shaped face.

“Mamgu would love it that Daddy is playing Bach for her,” says Molly, and Petra gives a watery smile of assent.

Molly is just thirteen and grieving for her grandmother. Merciful, uncomplicated grief. It was an unexpected bonus of motherhood, the way that Petra’s daughter and Petra’s mother had loved each other unconditionally and had been able to show that love in a way Petra found so hard to do with Greta. On the rare occasion when her mother laid a hand on Petra’s arm, she experienced it almost as an electric shock.

The music comes to its solemn end, like a life well lived, and Marcus lifts his bow and throws back his head as if to shake himself from a trance. You can tell the congregation wants to applaud, but some unwritten rule says you aren’t supposed to clap in church. Do they really think God would be jealous of the talents of His own creation?

Marcus rejoins them in the pew and glances sideways to see his triumph reflected in his wife’s eyes. She will not look at him.
Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously
. Petra studies her webbed fingers as the pallbearers lift the coffin onto their shoulders. What would her mother’s parting advice be as she goes to her grave? She would tell her to win Marcus back, no question. Greta wouldn’t let a man of that caliber go without a fight. “Top-drawer,” that’s what she called Marcus. Marcus’s family was out of the top drawer. It had pained Petra to hear her say it; the way her mother, one of Nature’s aristocrats, was so impressed by the class into which her daughter had married.

The family follows the coffin out. At the very back of the chapel, in a row of seats to the side of the font, Petra notices a pretty, plump blond woman about her own age. She returns the woman’s smile. It isn’t until they’re outside by the gate, and the coffin is being loaded into the
hearse, that Petra shakes herself back to life and realizes she has failed to register a face she knows as well as her own.

Sharon.

They did keep in touch. On birthdays and Christmases, filling each other in on all the news, inevitably child-related as the years went by. Petra’s girl, Sharon’s two boys, David and Gareth. Every December, cards traveled from Wales to London, and back the other way, cards in which both women expressed the fond hope that this would turn out to be the year when they finally got together. After a while, Petra wasn’t sure how long, she forgot to mark Sha’s birthday, and a few years after that, she was shocked one day to find she could no longer recall the exact date. Third of July? Fifth? When she went home for the funeral of her cello teacher, Miss Fairfax, she took Sharon’s new number with her. The electrical business of Sharon’s husband, Mal, had prospered, and the family had moved a short way up the coast to an estate of detached houses with carports and a sea view. The neighbor on one side was a headmaster; on the other was a famous Welsh rugby player who had shacked up with the reupholstered wife of a plastic surgeon.

“There’s posh for you,” Sharon wrote in her Christmas card.

Petra didn’t call her during that visit. Time was short, she told herself, but it was the distance between them that felt too great. In the covered market, buying anemones for Miss Fairfax’s grave, she spotted a familiar figure with a coronet of baby-blond hair wearing a vivid purple mac, instinctively lifted her hand to wave—It’s
you
!—and then dodged behind a pillar. Petra didn’t know it was herself she was hiding from. She felt ashamed that she had avoided the best friend of her girlhood, but Sharon could have taken one look at her and read her pain and disappointment. She wasn’t ready to face Sharon looking at her face.

Their friendship had survived Sha’s leaving school at sixteen to go to the local business college to learn shorthand and typing, while Petra stayed on to do A levels and worked Saturdays in Boots the chemist. They still made each other laugh like no one else could. Tried out all the latest beauty products from Petra’s counter, including a face-tanning machine that required you to wear goggles when you sat in
front of it. They misread the instructions, of course, and Sharon’s face was baked to a fiery shade of terra-cotta, except for the white circles around her eyes. For weeks, she looked like an early female aviator.

Before she left school, for her final art coursework, Sharon painted beguiling, sloe-eyed girls on cardboard boxes, wearing the most incredible jeweled colors, always in rooms with the sea visible through a window.

Petra was awestruck. “They’re incredible. Like Matisse.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home, then?” Sharon laughed. “Get away with you, Petra. Everything’s got to be like something else with you, hasn’t it? Some things are just themselves, mun.”

Sharon should have gone to art college, somewhere really good, but, although she had huge natural ability, she lacked any sense of entitlement for her talent. Modesty and gentle humor were among the sweetest virtues of her people, but also their curse.

“I can always paint at home, can’t I?” Though she didn’t.

Petra and Marcus’s wedding was the turning point. After that, things were never the same between them. Sharon was making the bridesmaids’ dresses, but the fittings were a palaver because Petra had agreed to have the whole thing in Gloucestershire, in Marcus’s village, because, well, because they would put up a marquee in the garden and the church was so old and so pretty and their friends from London could get there more easily, rather than making the journey across the Severn Bridge into Wales, which took a toll in more ways than one.

The real reason was Greta. Entertaining of any kind and, in particular, a fear of social failure always made Petra’s mother angry. Greta would be bound to go on the attack, she would try to launch a preemptive strike against any perceived criticism or humiliation. Besides, Petra couldn’t imagine putting all of Marcus’s family in the cold brown chapel with her father’s sisters and a Baptist minister who could be guaranteed to mention sin at least twice, and maybe even fornication. The Church of England, which saw no sin that could not be forgiven and would be far too polite to mention it anyway, was a much more relaxing venue.

The night before the wedding, Sharon arrived at the Cotswold millhouse, her ancient Mini leprous with rust and exploding with
dresses packed in dry-cleaning bags. Made of a heavy bronze satin she’d found on Llanelli Market, the bridesmaids’ frocks were beautifully cut, almost sculptural, with a plunging neckline edged in tiny glistening beads. Marcus’s sister, Georgina, was the first to try hers on.

“What
fun,
” Georgie said. “I say, you could go to a nightclub in this.”

Marcus’s mother came in and took one look at Sharon and her dresses. “Oh, what fun. I think we can find a corsage to make that a bit more
respectable
, don’t you?”

Petra should have left then and there. Should have jumped in the rustbucket with Sha and sped away to the green green grass of home. But her infatuation with Marcus had stolen her away; she felt high on being wanted by this emotionally unavailable Englishman from the top drawer. Did she know she was marrying the man of her mother’s dreams? Not consciously, she didn’t. The taste of triumph was so strong it masked all other sensations.

At the altar, she turned to hand her bouquet to her chief bridesmaid and she saw tears in Sharon’s smiling eyes. For a second, no more, Petra felt she was falling, falling, as the bonds of her best and oldest friendship began to unravel.

The day after the funeral, Petra goes back to the house to start sorting through the stuff. Marcus has taken Molly for a walk on the beach followed by something to eat in the new café on the headland overlooking the bay. The café serves the kind of fresh salads and filled baguettes you get in London. Marcus has always complained about how appalling the food is down here; he clutches his chest and calls it the Death Plan Diet, which is another way of saying that people do a lot of comfort eating. Personally, Petra thinks that if you find yourself living in a former mining and former steel town during a period that social historians now call Postindustrial Decline, then you are entitled to a bit of comfort. (The once-proud port might as well change its name to Former: its future was all in the past.) It is surely no coincidence that, at the end of the twentieth century, it’s the rich who are most successful at being thin; they aren’t in need of comfort, being so comfortable
already. Walking down the main street, she notices people have gotten shockingly, distressingly fat. When she was a child, if you were poor, you were thin.

“Skin and bone. There’s nothing left of him,” her aunties would report with grim relish of a neighbor who had lost his job in the pit.