I Think I Love You (29 page)

“What d’you think, that you have to be the good girl forever?” Carrie said as she settled the bill. She was such a generous tipper that waiters regarded her with suspicion. Petra didn’t answer. For a few seconds, no more than that, she allowed Carrie’s suggestion to live in her brain, and then she banished it, like a wiper clearing a windshield.

Just the once, she had seen Karen Carpenter on a TV chat show; it must have been only months before she died. The singer laughed off the question about her weight loss. Denied it, charmingly, with that nicest-girl-in-the-school grin of hers. Then she walked across the studio and sang. Even when her body was gaunt and she had twigs for arms, the voice still poured out like cream from a jug. The voice didn’t know it was living inside the body of a starving child, and maybe Karen Carpenter didn’t, either. There were things about yourself that you couldn’t know, sometimes until it was too late.

Petra picks up the glockenspiel. Its glittering, wintry sound is a particular favorite of Sam’s. With a beater, she plays the tune they always use to say hello.

Sam should be here by now. The boy has a thing about not stepping in puddles or on the cracks in the pavement—his legs go stiff and he lifts them high like a Nazi storm trooper. Petra sighs. Elspeth, his mother, must be having a hell of a job getting him here in this rain.

So many fears once you have children in the world. Every night, Petra goes in to kiss Molly when she is asleep and she feels simple gratitude and relief that her baby has survived this long. Anorexia, which killed Karen Carpenter, is her biggest worry for Molly. Petra doesn’t remember its being such a big thing when she was at school; now,
extreme thinness has become yet another way to compete with one another. Trust girls to get into a contest to make themselves disappear. She doesn’t want Molly to waste her life hating her body. Too much female energy goes into getting smaller instead of bigger and bolder. Petra switches off the keyboard and rubs her sore shoulder. She has always been harshly critical of her own body, even when there was nothing to find fault with. Now that there is plenty to despair of, Petra looks back in frank astonishment at the girl who skulked about in long, droopy cardigans, even in the thermometer-busting summer of ’76, because she was under the impression that she had fat thighs. Why the hell didn’t she walk down the street waving a placard saying
I HAVE A 24-INCH WAIST
? That’s what she should have done.

There is a sound of two hands banging on the door and Sam’s excited puppy yelp. Petra turns to welcome her client.

She has almost no memory of ringing the magazine company. It is the one small consolation in a sea of churning embarrassment. Blaming alcohol would be her best bet, but it had been only eight in the morning when she made the call. Things have gotten quite dark for Petra lately, especially during that 3 a.m. dread hour when she wakes to find all her fears congregated at the foot of the bed, offering to run a trailer of forthcoming disasters. Maybe she will lose the house. Maybe Molly will love her father’s new girlfriend and find the houseboat a cooler place to stay than her mother’s centrally heated suburban home. She knows that Marcus, who claims he is too broke to pay her maintenance, somehow manages to find the cash to lavish treats on Molly. Butterscotch milkshakes and sponge cake, enjoyed by father and daughter in Fortnum & Mason’s over half-term, must have cost about a third of her weekly food budget; the thought rankles like a broken tooth. So does the fact that, as Mol let slip, Marcus swore her to secrecy, making Molly his gleeful co-conspirator against wicked, thrifty Mummy. Even so, Petra has no excuse for ringing a place that doesn’t exist at eight o’clock in the morning like a crazy old bat.

To say the action was out of character doesn’t quite cover the personality shift it required for Petra to ring up Nightingale Publishing.
On the computer, she’d managed to find out that, in the late eighties, Nightingale bought out Worldwind Publishing, which, almost a quarter of a century ago, had declared her the winner of the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz.

“How old did you say you were?” the woman who answered the phone had asked.

The woman said she was the editor of a magazine—
Teenworld
?—and she had been nice, more than nice, actually, but Petra could tell from the strenuously patient way she spoke, as though she were addressing either someone very old or very young, that the editor thought Petra was a loony time-waster. A view with which Petra had considerable sympathy. Still, stubborn as a child denied a balloon at its own party, she stood her ground. “I won,” she explained.

As a teenager, she had been unable to see things far away. Recently, things close up have also started to become a blur. Glasses have lost the four-eyed stigma they had had when she was a child. Molly declares that specs are hot, or perhaps cool. Petra can’t keep up with the temperature that is in fashion. Nevertheless, she comes from a generation that can’t quite shrug off the sense that specs make her undesirable. Reading glasses, even if they now come in a sleek dark frame that Carrie swears make her look like Ali MacGraw in
Love Story
, are further unwanted evidence that her body is in the business of betraying her. If she’s honest, there is also some niggling worry about a life that has not quite come into focus, and maybe it never will.

“What became of her, then?” Sharon had asked about a girl from the old days when they talked after her mother’s funeral.

What became of me? Petra had thought, though not said. She thinks it a lot lately. Petra Williams, what on earth happened to her?

Childhood had felt as if it were going to last forever. A single Sabbath was like a month of Sundays. Once she left home, went to study music in London, started making her own decisions and got married to Marcus, things speeded up. The years passed like water through your fingers, especially once you had a child and started to live for someone else. These days, another Christmas seemed to arrive just as she’d put the decorations from the previous year back in the loft. Dad died when he was sixty-four; she was over halfway there and she had barely gotten started. If she and Sharon had taken that trip to Los Angeles in 1974
and met David, life might have worked out differently. There was someone else out there she had been destined to be, and she’d never met that person because her mother hadn’t handed over the pink envelope. So Petra swallowed her pride, rang the magazine company and asked nicely for her prize.

Now she balls her fists into her eye sockets till the dark screen of vision is filled with stars. Petra has done plenty of shaming things before, but never has she made a fool of herself quite like this. Her dreams of escape, and there have been many, have stayed locked firmly inside her own head. She has gone to the cinema and seen men up on the screen that she fell in love with, and sometimes she has taken those men home to her bed. It was such a comfort when your troubles were piling up, to be able to lose them all in the arms of Jeff Bridges.

“Hey, don’t worry, baby,” Jeff would say with a shake of that leonine head, and then he’d kiss your troubles away. But the Jeffs were illusions made from wishing. You didn’t actually want Jeff Bridges to take you to the supermarket and help you pick out your fruit and veg, did you?

Now she was going to meet David Cassidy, the illusion of illusions, suddenly made flesh, years after giving up the ghost. Carrie said that death and grief could have a disinhibiting effect. Loss made you trigger-happy.

Trigger
-unhappy
, Petra thinks. What made her make that call? Was it the misery of Marcus finally leaving, like a low, cramping period pain? Was it sprawling like a stunned starfish in the marital bed and realizing that she liked to sleep on her back, rather than in the scrunched fetal position she had adopted every night for fifteen years to give her husband the space he needed? Was it fear that no one would ever want to have sex with her again? Or was it the greater, though related, anxiety that she could never bear to undress in front of a man who wasn’t her husband? She couldn’t imagine being looked at without the protective gauze of indifferent familiarity. The day after her mother’s funeral, she went to the grocer’s down the hill from her parents’ house and Gwennie, behind the till, peered at her for what felt like a full ten minutes before saying, with dawning recognition, “Oh,
there
we are. You were Gillian Edwards’s little friend, weren’t you?”

Perhaps she had been little, but no one was going to call her a
friend of Gillian’s. The years had dimmed and soothed many hurts, but the name Gillian—even when it came attached to a perfectly nice woman—still caused her stomach to curdle with dislike. It was unfair the way that a name could never entirely be rinsed clean of the stain of an early hatred. All her life, Petra would approach any new Gillian like a bomb-disposal expert, primed for devastation.

So successfully did she repress the memory of that foolish phone call that she was genuinely surprised when a woman named Wendy rang from
Women’s Lives
to say she wanted to do a feature on Petra going to meet her teen idol. These days, David Cassidy was doing a show in Las Vegas. Nightingale Publishing would fly Petra to Vegas, all expenses paid, and she would finally get a chance to meet her hero. Oh, and her friend could go, too, the one she had entered the competition with. Did they both mind coming into head office for a makeover? New haircut, makeup. Refresh your image, said Wendy. Everyone’s look gets a bit tired, doesn’t it? Most readers find it a really fun day out and pick up lots of useful beauty tips.

Petra, who had stopped listening after the all-expenses-paid part, said thank you, it sounded wonderful. Replacing the phone in its cradle above the cat’s bowl, she felt afloat with a sense of possibility.

Not everyone shared her keen sense of anticipation.

“Tragic” was how Molly described it, momentarily removing the Sony Discman to which she was umbilically connected. Petra explained hesitantly that the magazine had rung with a date for the “makeover.” She found herself holding the word at arm’s length, as though in a pair of tweezers. She had only a dim idea of what a makeover would involve. Over the years, she must have seen thousands of “Before” and “After” pictures in magazines and sometimes wondered how the women fared when they took their glossy new haircuts, prettily accented features and rediscovered cheekbones home to their husbands. What did the New You do with the old man, and vice versa?

“Sad, Mum, saaa-d,” said Molly. “You had a crush on him when you were my age. Most girls don’t like the same boy three weeks later. This is, like, twenty years.”

Standing at the kitchen counter, preparing Molly’s favorite penne pasta, Petra gives the grater a sharp tap with a knife, so the trapped
Parmesan falls onto the plate in a little landslide of pollen. As she transfers the grated cheese to a bowl and sets it on the table, she tries to explain that this is not about a teenage crush. It probably isn’t even about David Cassidy, not really. It’s about her, Petra: the mother formerly known as cellist. The urge to claim her silly prize is as powerful as the need to swallow or urinate. She desperately wants to find a way of telling Molly this, but the girl has already pulled on her headphones, listening to Destiny’s Child or Robbie Williams; going back to that private musical universe where she is happy and her parents are not getting divorced.

“Embarrassing and tacky” was her husband’s verdict when he came round to pick up Molly. They were standing by the open front door, Petra inside the house twiddling with the latch, Marcus shuffling on the doormat, as though he had better places to be. In this new Cold War, the doorstep with its grubby sisal mat has become their Checkpoint Charlie, the place where Molly gets handed over to the other side. Each time, Petra senses the profound unnaturalness of the exchange, and wonders how long before it will feel normal to share her child, to divvy her up like a pie. The civilized arrangement, the one suggested by the glossy magazines, is hard to reconcile with the primitive tug in her gut that tells her not to hand over her daughter and the violent desire to snatch her back again.

At the mention of the name David Cassidy, Marcus actually whinnied with distress, like a thoroughbred that finds itself entered by mistake in a donkey derby. Bad taste of any kind was a source of almost physical discomfort to him. Marcus shared Greta’s contempt for pop music and its brain-rotting properties. Privately, he also had his suspicions that Petra’s trip down memory lane was an attempt to get back at him for moving onto the boat with Susie, an act simultaneously so hurtful and destructive that someone else had to be blamed for it.

“Christ, Petra, are you having some kind of midlife crisis?” said Marcus.

Pot, kettle, black, thought Petra. Who’s having the midlife crisis, mister?

Her mother had prevented her going to meet David almost a quarter of a century ago. Now her husband despised her for it, and her
daughter said she was sad, which meant tragic, which meant pathetic or laughable, not sad, though sad was indeed what Petra was.

“So, you gotta go, right?” Carrie concluded briskly during one of their tea breaks. Carrie hands her the last fig roll in the packet and points out that the Cassidy Vegas trip has all the ingredients of a very promising rebellion.

“Aren’t they supposed to be for teenagers?” Petra asks dubiously.

Carrie shakes her head. “Listen, hon, rebellions are wasted on the young. What the hell have they got to rebel against? You and I, on the other hand, have a wide range of frustrations, disappointments and resentments, carefully accumulated over many decades. To my mind, the least we deserve is a little catharsis.”

Petra laughs loudly, though without conviction. Why hadn’t she rebelled against her mother? Fear, obviously. Dread. But it was more than that; she had felt paralyzed, unable to assert herself. Unable to locate a self to assert, that was it. Petra had experienced something like hatred for her mother’s irrational outbursts of temper at her father, had sensed the awful unfairness of Dad’s being punished, not for who he was, but for who he wasn’t. But there was nothing she could do to help him, or to help herself, that wouldn’t make it ten times worse. So she withdrew into her music, which muffled the distant sounds of battle.