I Think I Love You (36 page)

She desperately wants Molly to carry that template of a good man in her heart, but when Petra tries to describe Dad to her daughter it just comes out as words. He was so lovely. Gentle. Kind. Wonderful baritone. Dancer. Dean Martin. That’s Amore.

How was she meant to sum up the human being who sheltered her as best he could from her mother, as the blows rained down on him? Occupational hazard.

At least, Petra thinks, her own daughter doesn’t feel she has to hide—not her Leonardo DiCaprio posters, not her feelings. Molly may not like her mum to come into the bathroom anymore, but she knows she has a vagina, not some indeterminate, shameful place called Down There that it’s not nice to touch.
Achafi!

Petra is glad about that. She rarely allowed Greta to see her feelings, knowing they would only afford an opportunity for disapproval or even gloating. One day, she was walking along the breeze-block wall in front of the bungalow they were building opposite and she fell, cutting open her knee and grazing her new shoes. The toecaps, glossy as a conker, were scarred with angry pink streaks. She came in crying, because she knew she’d be for it, but crying also for her poor new shoes, as the blood trickled down one leg onto her white sock.

“There you are,
see,
” her mother said.

Pain was there to teach you a lesson, although what that lesson was she never learned. Greta’s self-appointed role in life was to toughen up her daughter.

“Taking control of your emotions, please, Petra.”

When Petra thinks of herself as a child, she sees a mute who dare not speak. Music was her way of speaking, her therapy, too; William Finn—Bill—had said as much to her at the makeover. She’d never thought of it quite like that before.

“I must move house,” Petra thinks suddenly, closing the patio
doors behind her and sliding the bolts across. It was in this room that she had her last outbreak of grief for her marriage, the only one the world knew anything about. But it was terrible, flinging herself at Marcus’s legs and giving herself up to her misery. Promising him things, begging. He had shaken her off, wanting to get away from her, eager to get back to what had taken him away. He told her that he had tried to let her down gently. You have to be cruel to be kind. Why? Why not just be kind?

After he’d gone, she sat in the dark sobbing and talking to herself. “There, there, you’ll be all right.” As if she were her own mother. Even then, she had listened for his steps on the path, thinking that perhaps he might come back, as he always had before.

Now, for the first time since Marcus left, she feels a faint stirring inside, the sense that she might have a future. The day after tomorrow, Molly will go to stay with Carrie round the corner, and she, Petra, will go to Vegas to meet David. Petra and Sharon and David. Sharon and Petra. And Bill. It no longer seems like quite such a mad plan. She finds herself singing “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” The lyrics as fresh as paint in her memory. Still humming, she consults her notebook and begins to type, the words coming easier now.

Bill closed his file, and then his laptop. This simple action, as always, triggered a twofold reaction within him: the need for a cigarette, and the deeper need for a drink. The fact that he hadn’t smoked in twenty years, and hadn’t been drunk in ten, was of no consequence at all. What mattered was that smoking and drinking were the kinds of things that writers were meant to do—reflex behaviors that were supposed to kick in at the foot of every page, or even the completion of a paragraph. They were badges of bad conduct, pinned to the writing to give it some extra shine. When you saw a photograph of a novelist, and he was seated at a typewriter, breathing through a Marlboro, with a tumbler of scotch at his elbow and the light of early morning at his back—well, it was 60 proof, was it not? The guy had
earned
his style; his books must be hard-won, ground out on a battlefield of booze and badly injured hearts. How could you take seriously the thoughts of a writer who survived on tea and biscuits?

Bill was ashamed of himself, automatically thinking
he
, but there was nothing he could do about it; when he thought of writing, it was the image of his fellow man that fell into his head. Part of him, he guessed, was stuck in 1973, when an author was still a guy in jeans, or, if dead, in a frock coat with a well of black ink to match the scotch. Imagine George Eliot, growling over her uneaten breakfast, fumbling to slit open the day’s first pack of Lucky Strikes, one hand rubbing her stubble, trying not to sniff the reek of last night’s breath, her own bad atmosphere …

All the smartest people Bill knew were women. He thought of Marie in the office. Women alone seemed to keep the traffic flowing
smoothly between their brains and mouths, whereas men were all gridlock and diversions and dead ends. When it came to communication, men were manholes. And, it went without saying, they didn’t read; they didn’t read men, and they sure as hell didn’t read women. A few men, like monks, still read, but they didn’t talk to other men about the books they’d read, and, if they read
good
books, they stashed them away like pornography. Just think if they read poems: under the bedclothes, with a torch, while their wives slept uneasily beside them.

When had men stopped reading? When had men become anti-reading, or reading become anti-men? Maybe the rumor had gone round, Bill thought, that books were good for you, like fruit or yoga or going to church. They nourished and sustained you. In other words, they were a bad idea. Maybe the only way that men would ever read, now, was government action. The government could start banning books, beginning with the good ones. Ban them and burn them, deny them and shred them to bits. Then men would want them again. A book would be like crack, or adultery, or treason; a book would be bad for you. And that would be a good thing.

And through it all, licking a forefinger and turning a page, the women would go on reading. Of all the smart women Bill knew, most were readers. And what they read, for the most part, was other women. When they weren’t too busy with their own lives, which was most of the time, they read about the lives of other women, most of whom, as far as Bill could work out, were even busier than they were, though whether that was meant to rebuke them or console them, he had no idea.

His flat was in a converted warehouse near Tower Bridge, a seven-minute walk from the office and with a partial view of the river. It had been a convenient stopgap; eleven years later it sometimes felt like home. Bill looked around his living room. It was tidy, he guessed, and welcoming; there were no carpet stains or unidentified burns or food remains; it was, recognizably, the place where a professional adult would seek to unwind, at the close of the day. But it was also, in some unmistakable way, a place where women did not come—or had not come of late, or come enough. There were books, but none left lying facedown, their spines cracked, the wings of their pages crinkled and
spread. That was another thing he would never understand about women: how they could bear to read in the bath, a novel propped in the soap tray, with steam rising and turning the fiction to pulp.

Here, though, in this room, the books were sentry-neat, like an army of knowledge. Only one was missing; you could see its place on the shelf, a dark gap. Now it was laid flat on the coffee table with a marker in it, beside the stack of magazines, and Bill couldn’t read its title from where he was sitting, at his desk, though he knew it as well as his own name, and he knew where the author had taken it from, under cover of darkness. Other people’s thoughts and feelings, long before, grew into poems, and bits of those poems drifted into the minds of novelists, and the novels sat on the coffee tables of men too tired and preoccupied with other things, like bringing out magazines, to think about the feelings that they themselves might once have had, long before. “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies …”

Bill went to the kitchen. Last year he had had a new one put in. German. It cost only slightly less than his father earned over ten years when he was trying to keep a family of five. He ran his hand over the granite worktop and smiled weakly at the folly of the industrial faucet, like a python made of steel. Who was he kidding? A tap that had enough pressure to douse the Great Fire of London would only ever be called upon to sluice Bill’s morning toast plate. He looked at the shelf of bottles, some never opened; who, in the course of human history, had asked for apricot brandy? All those drinks for guests, lovers, party-goers: people who liked to reminisce at length, others keen to forget. There were no cigarettes in the house. He made himself a cup of tea, took two biscuits, sat down at the table and began to dunk. Nothing was in his head. When he had finished, he tipped the dregs of grainy swill down the sink and paused. Then he left the kitchen, trailed past the living room like a sleepwalker, pushed open a door and flicked a switch.

Music ran round the room; along and up and down, as though on a stave. LPs at the far end, huddled together in stacks, their spines rubbed and unreadable even if you went up close. Elsewhere, CDs by the hundred, the thousand. And out of sight, in sliding drawers, at ground level, cassettes, in heaps of six, some of them ringed with elastic bands. Cassettes, what a joke: plastic shells with broken corners that
rattled like dried peas. Designed to be dropped and lost down the sides of car seats; but designed, too, to contain everything that you loved about a band, or, better still, everything that you could cook up by mixing one band that you loved with a dozen others, to make a compilation that you would pass on to friends. In mid-1972, Bill had felt the same way about compilation tapes that others felt about the National Gallery; in some ways, he still did. He opened a drawer and took out a batch of tapes. There was an index card, visible through the clear casing, with a song on each line. The first words he read were
Floyd, Pink
. Bill snorted, and then looked round quickly, as if an intruder had broken in with the specific purpose of watching a middle-aged man laughing at his pompous younger self.

Christ, had he really been that bad? It didn’t say much for the frenzy of Mr. Finn. How could music send you, spirit you out of yourself and into the stratosphere, if you filed it away afterward under
Floyd, Pink
? Bill wondered what on earth he must have done with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: four separate catalogs, presumably, or maybe four cubed. Sixty-four. What had happened to his record collection when one of them peeled away and became Young, Neil? A surprise, really, that the whole system hadn’t melted down.

Once, some years ago, he had brought a woman home. They had met at a party just before Christmas, and talked, not about music but about plenty of other, less contentious things. He remembered, for some reason, that she had worn a black velvet jacket, cut like a man’s tuxedo, with a white shirt and a double string of pearls; someone in passing, carrying drinks, had told her she looked lovely, and she had said, “I feel like a male impersonator,” and seen Bill’s smile. She offered to give him a lift home, and had said, as her car dawdled at his curb, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me to come in? It is Christmas, you know.”