I Think I Love You (40 page)

Petra shook her head in wonderment. “Your brain, Sharon
fach …
”

“This is a last and final call for passengers on BA flight one seventy-four …”

“There we are.” Sharon jumped to her feet.

“Don’t worry,” said Bill, getting to his feet. “You don’t start running till they ask for you by name.” He picked up Sharon’s hand luggage.

“Bloody hell. What have you got in here?
Who
have you got in here?”

“Gareth,” said Petra. “All tied up.”

“Get you,” said Sharon. “Anyway, I thought we had another boy coming? Didn’t you say there was a writer?” They left the lounge and started walking, three abreast, toward the gate.

“That’s what I thought,” said Petra. “But the other one dropped out. Just the three of us. Bill’s the writer now.”

“How’s that, then?” Sharon was asking Bill, but Petra answered first.

“It’s his field. You know, Professor of Cassidy Studies. World expert on batty old ladies who want to be fourteen again.”

“That’s not quite fair,” said Bill.

“On who?”

“Ermmm … hang on, left here. Gate Twenty-six. Down there.” He had quickened his pace again, Petra almost sprinting in his wake, but now he slowed. “Told you. Ages to go.” There was a small crowd around the gate, gradually filtering through in single file. “Wait till this lot clears.”

They stood there, while Sharon frisked herself for her boarding pass. “Had it somewhere.” She found it, at last, stuck against the Kit Kat. “There we go. So,” she went on, addressing Bill, “what makes you the expert, anyway?”

“What, on batty old ladies?”

“No, on David.”

“Oh, you mean batty young ladies. Oh, well, believe it or not, I used to write, a hundred years or so ago, for something called
The Essential David Cassidy Magazine
. And my—”

“Oh my Gaaawwwd,” Sharon and Petra cried out together. Bill looked startled.

“That was our Bible, that was.” Petra gazed at him with an earnestness he hadn’t seen before, though it didn’t seem unexpected, or even out of place. As for Sharon, her mouth was still ajar.

“Meaning?”

“Well, we believed it.”

“Not all of it.”

“Every word.”

“Still do,” said Sharon, regaining the power of speech.

“But,” said Bill, who was struggling with these latest revelations, “but, if it’s like the Bible, don’t you …? I mean, not everything in the Bible is true. Not literally.”

“It is to a believer,” said Petra.

“Yeah, but—”

“To one of them,” said Sharon, “them fundy, what are they? Fundymentals.”

“Fundamentalists.”

“Yeah, that’s the boys. That’s us.”

“You mean it
was
you back when you were kids,” said Bill. “You can’t still believe it. Not now. If you read that stuff now, you’d see in an instant that it was all cobbled together.”

“Gerraway with you, mun,” said Sharon. The crowd was thinning now, and they were beckoned toward the gate. “If you believe something, you have to go on believing, don’t you?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno.” Sharon handed in her boarding pass, then presented her passport. “Look at me,” she said, showing Bill the photograph. “What a mug shot. Like I’m wanted by the cops or something.” Petra came next. She was quiet.

“Well,” Sharon continued, as they filed down the tunnel toward the plane, “like the letters he wrote. David. You know, the every month ones, signed by him. You’re not going to say those were made up, are you? I mean, we knew those were actually him writing. Sounded just like David. We could feel it.”

Bill stopped. “But that was me.”

“What?” The two women stopped as well. Latecomers bustled past them. Up ahead, cabin crew held open the airplane door and smiled.

“That was my job. I wrote those letters. I was David Cassidy.”

Without hesitation, Petra swiveled round and started walking straight back the way they had come.

“Pet?” said Sharon.

“Petra, come back,” said Bill.

“I’m not coming,” called Petra over her shoulder. She went on walking.

Sharon nudged Bill with her elbow. “I think she likes you.”

Outside, the blue was so pure it felt like a special effect. A fake backdrop, surely, thought Bill, not real sky. Petra, sitting beside him, hadn’t given it so much as a glance. She didn’t want to be here. The cabin crew had taken her aside and explained why she had to get on, talking calmly to her about luggage and security and departure slots. But still, she could have gone, just walked on out of the airport and back home. Wanted to in a way. The absurdity of what she was doing suddenly overwhelmed her. It wasn’t that she, Petra, the woman of thirty-eight, had been upset by Bill’s bombshell, but the girl inside her, the one who still wanted to meet David, was shocked. All her life she had been lied to about love, and the man sitting next to her, tapping on his laptop, he had started it.

“Why did you do it?” she asked, looking down.

“Somebody had to.”

“But why?”

“Because … because there were thousands of people like you, I mean not just like you, but thousands with the same kind of—I don’t know, the same sort of love. The same craze. And we didn’t know what to do with you.”

“What d’you mean, do with us?”

“Well … we called it feeding the lionesses. Your appetite was, I mean, there was no end of it. You wanted more of him, every week, on every conceivable subject, than we could possibly supply. It was hard enough for us to churn it out, so the idea that he could have done it himself … It just wasn’t possible.”

“What about, what’s it called, syndication? He writes one letter,
back in California or wherever, and it gets printed in all the different magazines all over the world. It wouldn’t have been ours alone, but at least it would have been true.”

“Not a bad idea. You should mention it to him when you see him on Wednesday.”

Petra said nothing. She knew she was being ridiculous, like a child; but then that, after all, was what was at stake here—the right to defend the child you used to be. The child who was trying out love, real love, for the first time. To be cheated in love later on, well, it happened, happened to the best of people; it had happened to her, with a vengeance, just this past year and her heart was ripped apart. But to be cheated at your first attempt, by someone trying on the disguise of the person you loved: What kind of betrayal was that?

The flight attendant went past with the drinks trolley, on her second run. Petra had shaken her head when she came round before. Now she ordered a vodka and tonic; not a drink she had ever ordered before in her life. Why now, then? It seemed as good an occasion as any. The attendant gave her two small bottles of vodka and two cans of tonic. Petra opened them and mixed them, half and half. Bill was drinking tomato juice. She wondered how it would look all over his white linen shirt.

He was staring into his plastic cup, saying nothing. Then he said, “Sorry.” He looked at Petra properly and steadily, admitting his guilt, hoping to see a flicker of merciful humor in those eyes of hers. Deep brown, her eyes. He took a breath and continued.

“But which would you have preferred, honestly? To read David’s letters, every month, and believe in them, and, I don’t know, draw strength from them in some way; or never to hear from him? To sit in your bedrooms and giggle and swoon over the nonsense I wrote on his behalf, and it was nonsense, believe me, or to sit there and look at a blank space in the fan mag, maybe with a few words from Zelda, saying, ‘We’re terribly sorry, but Mr. Cassidy doesn’t have the time, the inclination or the punctuation to write you the message you want to hear right now. Nor will he have the time in the immediate future; not until you’ve stopped loving him, at which point he will suddenly have all the time in the world.’ Think about it, Petra. You’re a brilliant
woman, so you tell me. Which would it be? The happy fib, or the sorry truth?”

Petra swallowed half her drink in one long draught. She could feel it going straight to her head, siphoning directly from her stomach. She was blinking oddly, too; fizzy eyes, one of her friends used to say when they first had a girls’ night out.

“Who’s Zelda?” she asked eventually. The consonants were fizzy now as well.

“Oh God, she was my boss. Extraordinary woman, in a way. A sort of human galleon. Everybody took the piss, but I liked her a lot. She taught me how to be picky, for one thing.”

“Picky?”

“You know, check your spelling, lineation, pagination, dropped caps, contents page matching actual contents, picture credits. All the gubbins. Get your quotes right.”

“Unless you’ve made them all up,” she said.

“Yes, and even then they need to make sense, and sort of gel together. Believe it or not.”

“So picky was good.”

“Picky is always good. All the maddest poets were complete pedants, the madder the better. Byron, Baudelaire, all the Bs, all the wild boys; whoring and drinking, then back to the proofs and the semicolons. Come on, you’re the cellist. Without picky you haven’t got a hope, you know that.”

“Yes,” said Petra sadly, “I know that.” She thought of her mother, the Kaiser of Picky, and of Miss Fairfax, her own personal galleon. The world felt a lot less safe and rigorous without Jane Fairfax in it. The only consolation was that you could hand on the pickiness, pass it on to those who would live after you, so they, in their turn, would pass it on. “Bach never wastes a single note, Petra. You
must
play every note consciously.”

They said nothing for a while. “What became of her?”

“Who?”

“Zelda. Did you keep in touch?”

“Oh God. It was awful.”

“What was?”

“Well, we lost touch after I left the job. You know how it goes. The more you promise to stay in touch, the more guaranteed it is that you’ll never hear from each other again. I was waiting for her to make the call, and she was probably doing the same with me. And then a couple of years ago, by sheer chance, I was in Stratford. Not Shakespeare, the other Stratford, Stratford East. And this tiny little bloke comes up to me in the street, taps me on the arm, and I sort of veer away. Cos he looks a bit of a mess, bit smelly. And he says, ‘ ’Allo, Bill.’ And I look at him, and I swear I genuinely don’t know who it is. And it turns out to be this chap called Chas, who was our office boy, back in the, you know, the Cassidy days. I was always a bit mean about Chas, and I’m pretty sure he hated me, thought I was a snob and a college git.”

“And were you?”

“Totally. And it turns out, of course, that Chas was the one who kept in touch with Zelda. Not me, the nice boy with all the promises and the big career coming. Fat lot of good I was. But the dogsbody with no career at all, you know, a lifetime of doing other people’s dreary stuff for them, he was the good Christian soul. Met up with Zelda three, four times a year; lunch, pub, talk about old times. Which of course were her best times, as far as she was concerned. And she got ill, and refused to leave her flat, and Chas would take round the groceries, you know, heat up the soup.

“And I said to him, ‘How’s she doing now? Is she still alive?’ And he looks at me and says, ‘Oh no, died ten years ago.’ He went on hols, first trip ever, been saving up for it, and while he’s away she took some sleeping tablets. He comes back from Spain and finds her in bed. Been like that for two weeks. Just the most dreadful thing. Imagine how I felt.”

“Imagine how
he
felt,” corrected Petra. “Imagine how
she
must have felt.”

“Yes.” Bill looked down at his drink. This woman seemed to be peeling him apart. It was like going to confession.

“What would Zelda say,” asked Petra, a few minutes later, “if she knew you were going to meet David Cassidy? And that you were bringing two of your readers along?”

“Oh, no question. She would be completely thrilled. That would
be her idea of heaven. To have arranged it so that other people could be happy.”

“Even though she wasn’t.”

“Well, she was on her own ground. It’s just that elsewhere she seemed, I don’t know, marooned.”

“Not like our girl there,” said Petra, nudging him and glancing over at Sharon. The flight attendant had come to ask what they would like for their lunch, and Sharon was deep in conversation. The attendant was forced to kneel down beside her and go through every detail, so that Sharon, who had been reading the in-flight menu ever since they took off, could savor all the possibilities before landing on the right one. “Is that real cream with the pineapple cake?” she was saying.

“I have to tell you, Petra,” said Bill, in great solemnity. “I’m in love.”

“Oh, please, Mr. Finn. And we’ve only just met. This is so sudden.”

“With your friend. I honestly think Sharon is the most lovable person I have ever met—I mean properly able to be loved. Like it’s her vocation or something. Of course, most of the people I work with are total shits, so she does have a head start, but still.”

“Well, I loved her first, so hands off,” said Petra. “You’re right, though.”

“Has she always been like that?”

“Always. From when she was—well, she was never a slip of a thing, but from when I first knew her. I was always glad she put up with me, she’s just a much better person than me.”

“Rubbish. How can you say that?”

“It’s true. She’s better and she’s happier.” Petra sipped her vodka. “Better because she’s happier.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Oh yes. People always say, oh, do good and it’ll make you happy, but that’s the wrong way round, isn’t it? Contented people are just more likely to do good, they’re more … equipped for it. They don’t have to work themselves up to it, it just comes naturally. I mean, look at her. Look at them.”

The attendant had departed, deeply bewildered by the in-depth discussion of salmon roulade, and Sharon was talking, with great animation, to the couple across the aisle. They were matching human
beings: outsized but cheery, the bulk of them overflowing the seats, even these larger ones in business class. Both wore shirts of a deafening loudness, as if they were already in Las Vegas, not nine hours away. Both were drinking small bottles of champagne, their second bottle each. Their free hands, the ones not holding their drinks, were clasped together on the armrest.