I Think I Love You (33 page)

On honeymoon in Egypt, Petra and Marcus had been browsing in a bazaar when they came across one of those revolving postcard stands outside a cafe. Instead of scenes of the Nile or the Pyramids, the postcards had featured row upon row of perfect, blond, blue-eyed babies—the
exact physical opposite of the local children. If her mother had visited Cairo, they would have founded a religion in her name.

“You are not unattractive, Petra,” her mother had said, twisting her child’s face toward the bathroom light. “You know, you are really not szo bad.”

“It’s
too
bad, Mum, not szo bad. I don’t look
too
bad.”

“That’s what I said, Petra. You don’t look szo bad for a girl of this age.”

And so, when Petra, years later, found herself with her own girl of that age, she did her best to reverse the process. For every word of praise that had been withheld from her as a child, Petra found five to lavish on Molly. At first it came hard, mastering this new vocabulary of encouragement and admiration. She had to make her mouth do it, like forcing down a foreign food.

“You look lovely,” she said experimentally. “Blue really suits you, love.”

“Stop it, Mum,” Molly would say, brushing off the compliment, but pleased nonetheless, perhaps.

Petra was so relieved that she could take uncomplicated pleasure in her daughter: the bloom of her skin, the surprising density of those slender limbs, pierced her heart. She had worried that the mother-daughter struggle was doomed to reenact itself down the generations, like the family curses in Greek tragedy, but it turned out that maybe, just maybe, the pattern could be broken. At least Molly would not be stuck, mute in the chrysalis of herself, as Petra had been at thirteen. She would not be szo bad.

“Could you leave the length, please?” Petra was at the mercy of Maxine, who did hair and makeup for the fashion shoots. Petra had been adamant that she didn’t want her hair cut, but, once it was washed, she noticed that Maxine began snipping away. “Just keep it as it is,” Petra added, to make quite sure. Maxine nodded intelligently and kept snipping. It was a clear case of selective hairdresser deafness.

When you got to Petra’s age, people began to suggest an Annette Bening cut. A pixie crop was meant to be flattering. And, on Annette Bening, it
was
flattering. On anyone with less-perfect features, however,
which was every woman who had ever lived, apart from Audrey Hepburn, it lent a certain chipmunk bunchiness to the cheeks. Petra couldn’t bear to watch as her hair fell to the floor. She closed her eyes. The whole place was like this, from the moment they walked through the door. She and Sharon had met at Paddington Station and taken a cab together; to arrive separately, they had agreed, would be far too intimidating. But the intimidation went ahead anyway, at full blast.

It didn’t help having the magazine boss there, watching. William somebody, the editorial director, had come in and asked if she was named like the
Blue Peter
Petra. After all these years, there was still some twerp getting a laugh out of the TV dog. When she responded sharply, he went very quiet and sat there staring into space until Sharon made him laugh. William Finn, that was it. Bill.

“Great eyes,” Maxine said to Petra. “We need to bring them out more.”

A memory twitched in Petra, like a nerve. “It used to say in the magazines I read as a teenager that you had to use yellow eye shadow on the lid if you had deep-set eyes,” she said.

“Oh, they said all kinds of shit back then. Still do.” Maxine dipped a small brush into her eye-shadow palette. It was as big as a bumper chocolate selection box. Her voice was flat, so that lines of admiration and sarcasm came out at the same pitch. “Rinse your hair in rainwater as well, did you?” she said.

“We both washed ours outside in the rain,” said Sharon proudly, “even though we lived in a steel town and the air was full of black specks.”

Bill, Petra saw, was paying close attention as Maxine applied mascara to Petra’s lashes. With his fair, messy hair and slightly shambling look he reminded Petra of some actor. Sharon would know. Petra noticed Bill smiling, too, whenever Sharon spoke. At first Petra felt a flare of anger, because she thought he was laughing at her friend as Marcus used to; then she calmed down and realized, to her greater surprise, that he simply liked Sharon, and had on sight. They liked each other, after—what—three or four minutes? Sharon had always made friends easily, unlike her. Listening to her here in London, far from home, Petra could suddenly hear how strong Sha’s Welsh accent was,
and she felt the quick surge of homesickness, swaying within, like the swell of the sea. That’s how Petra had talked for more than half her life, and she hadn’t even been able to hear it. What are the other things about yourself that you don’t know?

One thing she did know, for sure, was this: When you are offered the chance to meet a ghost, the man you were in love with a quarter of a century ago—half a life away—there is only one sensible thing to do. Just say no. Smile politely and say, thank you, but no thank you. I am a grown woman now, not a bit like the girl who loved that boy. I am a happily married woman.… Correction: I am a soon to be unhappily unmarried woman, with a daughter of my own. Nothing could be more shameful than to seek the past; nothing could be more tragic, or more laughable.

And yet. First love is the deepest. You don’t just fall in love, you
capsize
. It feels like drowning, but the thought of rescue is unwelcome. Other loves may come along, but the first breathes on inside you. And the things I still know about him: the date of his birth, his stepmother’s name, his passion for horses, his beach hideaway, the instrument he learned to play when he was lonely. Drums.

For two years I wore brown, because it was his favorite color. Can you believe it? I was a sallow teenager. I looked terrible in brown. I looked
yellow
in brown. But it was a small sacrifice to make. For David, I knew, would be pleased. Thanks to me, he would never be lonely again.

“Julia Roberts.”

Petra woke from her reflections with a jump. “What?” she said.

Sharon wasn’t addressing Petra in particular, just anyone who would listen, which was everyone in the room. “I was saying to Maxine, make me into Julia Roberts. You know, basically fantastic. Ringlets down to my waist. So if Richard Gere happens to be in Las Vegas, and he’s driving down the Strip, like, he’ll stop and go, ‘Hey, I know you!’ ”

“Sharon, my love,” said Petra, “the character you are describing is a tall brunette from Los Angeles in thigh-high boots. She is also a prostitute. You are a blond Welsh housewife, five foot three, and, as far as I know, nobody pays you for sex.”

“Depends.”

“Depends on what?” This was Bill, leaning forward, genuinely intrigued.

“Well, this one time, Mal bought me an ice-cream maker for Valentine’s, a Friday it was, and I took one look and sent the kids away to their nan’s until Sunday lunchtime.” She gave the dirtiest laugh that Nightingale Publishing had heard in twenty years. Then she said, by way of an airy afterthought, “You should have seen my banana splits.”

Maxine dropped her scissors. Petra buried her head in her hands, feeling her new haircut, for the first time, soft between her fingers, then looked up and met Bill’s smile with her own. He said, “Would you excuse me?”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” Petra said. “We really didn’t mean to be rude—”

“No, no, please, carry on. The ruder the better. I was just starting to learn something really interesting about dairy products. There’s honestly nothing I would rather do than sit here pretending to be a hairbrush and listening to women’s fantasies. Half the magazines we produce here consist of little else. I could literally take down everything Sharon says in shorthand and transcribe it directly into the next issue …”

“ ‘How an Ice-cream Sundae Saved My Sex Life, by Mum of Two,’ ” said Sharon. “With or Without Cherries? You Decide.”

“Exactly. You are clearly our perfect reader,” said Bill. “Would you like a job?”

Sharon grinned at him in the mirror and wrinkled her nose. “Gerraway with you, mun. Things to do back home. Thanks for the offer.”

“Anytime,” said Bill, adding, “No, it’s just that I have a conference call in …” He looked at his watch. “Ninety seconds.” He moved toward the door, then looked back at Petra. “Um …”

“Petra, please.”

“Petra. When you’re done, could you just nip down to my office? One floor down, turn left out of the lift. We just have boring paperwork to go through for the trip.”

“Sign my life away in blood.”

“That sort of thing. Shall we say half an hour?”

“More like five bloody hours with that lot in your hair,” said
Sharon. The door closed. “Ooh, Pet, how about that? Nip down and see me sometime.”

“Sha …” Petra looked in the mirror at her stylist, who shook her head in wonderment, as if to say: Is she always like this, your friend?

“What’s a conference call, anyway?” Sharon asked.

“Oh, you talk to a lot of people all at the same time, at once. Except you don’t,” said Petra. “You just talk across them and nothing gets sorted out.”

“Oh, I get it,” said Sharon. “Well, he should come to Gower, shouldn’t he? Get that for free round my way, no charge. Mal hasn’t finished a sentence in twenty years. Poor bugger,” she added, with a voice full of love.

“How do you want it?”

“Oh, just milk, please.”

“Anything to eat? You must be exhausted after sitting in that chair all morning having your hair cut.”

“No, thanks. Sharon and I are going out for lunch in half an hour, and I think she may have some sort of medieval banquet in mind. We could well be rowing down to Hampton Court and having swan or something. I think her idea of London is quite …”

“Grounded in history?”

“I was going to say bonkers, but, yes, that sounds better. Just tea, please.”

They are sitting at a round table, in a booth at the back of the cafeteria. “The throbbing heart of Nightingale Publishing,” Bill had said, as he led her downstairs from his office; they had gone through the details of the trip in less than ten minutes—so fast, indeed, that she wondered, for a moment, why he had bothered to summon her. His secretary could have brought the papers up to the makeup room and done it there. Then he had invited Petra to have a cup of coffee. “We like to think it’s the strangest taste on the South Bank, and we want you to have something to remember this day by,” he said. So she had said yes, after a pause, hoping he wouldn’t notice the fluster in her expression. Then she had chosen tea.

“So, what have you been doing all this time?” he asks.

“I’m sorry?”

“I mean, since entering the competition in—when was it?”

“Nineteen seventy-four.”

“
B.C
. or
A.D
.?”

“Now you’re being the rude one.”

“I apologize. It’s just that, you know, it was quite some time ago …”

Petra groans. “Please don’t remind me. Am I a mad old witch? Is that what you thought, when they told you I called up?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Well, I was hoping for witch, obviously. Samantha from
Bewitched
. With twitchy nose and spells and everything.”

“What about mad?”

“Oddly enough, I didn’t think it was
that
mad. Remember, I’m old, too. In fact I’m about twice your age.” Petra opened her mouth to protest, but he didn’t stop. “So I remember the whole Cassidy thing. I was right in the middle of it.”

“You can’t have been. No boys allowed.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I remember it well enough to know that it was mad then, and I would have been, you know, a little bit disappointed if the madness had completely gone away. Even now.”

“So you
do
think I’m mad.” For some reason, she finds she is enjoying this.

“No, I think the madness has … matured. Like wine. Deepened into something else, perhaps.” Bill studies her closely. Amazing hands. Long fingers. Cellist, he suddenly remembers. He tries to think of a piece he can talk intelligently to her about. Borodin, Second String Quartet. His mum’s favorite. They had the slow movement played at her funeral. One of those bits of music so beautiful it soothes the cares of the world while telling you the world is too beautiful to last. Like Bill’s mother. Petra is sure to know it.

“So I’m vintage mad.” Petra laughs.

“Perfect.”

“Like this tea.”

“Christ, I hope not. Is it really as bad as it looks?”

“Even worse. It looks like the Thames.” She takes a spoon and stirs. Then she says, “In answer to your question, I haven’t spent the last quarter of a century thinking about David Cassidy, if that’s what you mean.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you look …” Bill stops.

“Careful.”

“I am being extremely careful.” He sips his coffee. “Meaning you are obviously someone who has widened her view of the world.”

“Is that so unusual?”

“Much more than you’d think, I’m afraid. I know an awful lot of people who don’t want to know any more than they did at fifteen. I mean really
know
. As if they’d taken one look at the world and thought, Not me, mate. Mostly men.”

“Well, there are times you can’t blame them,” Petra says. She is talking quietly now, almost too quietly, and Bill finds himself having to lean across the table.

“True,” he says. “Never underestimate the wish not to know.” He looks at her, as she stares down into her tea.

“Or the wish that you hadn’t had to find out,” she says, after a while.

“Ah yes, all the unsavory truths. Mostly men again.”

“You mean men finding out about women?”

“Other way round,” he says. “What do you see in your tea leaves, Gypsy fortune-teller?”

Petra dips her spoon and swills the tea around. “Your future appears to be brown,” she says at last.

“My favorite color,” he replies, and is taken aback when Petra looks up, sharply. But she says nothing, so Bill goes on.

“So what did you
want
to know? What have you learned all this while?”