'Petra! Hey, Petra! Long time, no see.'
Petra was hurrying down the length of the mall, carrying packages under her arms. She had spent the past two hours trying to find a dress that would be suitable for the funeral. She'd gone from store to store in a frenzied search for a black dress only to discover that the simple, cotton black dress didn't exist in anyone's imagination but hers—not in the summer when the racks were filled with brightly coloured halters, blouses and sundresses. She'd finally bought a dress that was a soft-grey with white-cuffed sleeves and white buttons up a demure bodice. She'd felt quite panicky until she'd found it. For some reason, it seemed extremely important that she wear the appropriate thing to her mother's funeral.
Petra came to a flying halt and blinked, staring at the man in front of her. 'Yes,' she said slowly, 'it's been a long time.'
He'd grown a moustache that was redder than his dark hair, and she thought that he'd lost some weight as well. Certainly, he looked very trim, standing there in a pair of beige chinos and a white shirt. And he was tanned as if he spent his days in the sun.
'Well, how are you?'
'Fine,' she said.
'You're looking good.'
Petra tried to smile. 'Thanks—and you? How are you?'
'Doing great. Just came back from Spain.'
'That's nice.'
There was a silence even more awkward than this first exchange and then he said, 'I tried to phone you a couple of times,' he said.
'Did you?' she said warily.
'But I guess you were busy. Training again?'
'Yes.'
'Going to swim the lake?'
'I hope so.'
He cleared his throat. 'Hey, how about a coffee?'
The idea of spending even one more minute with him had Petra in a panic. 'No,' she said. 'I'm sorry… I can't.'
His grin was jaunty, as if she weren't turning him down, but then Petra had forgotten how he could be. His ego didn't let him have failures. His dark eyes looked her over as if he were undressing her. 'Well, when you come out from under, give me a call, why don't you?'
What could she say except—'Okay'. Not that she ever intended to phone him or see him again, but then Petra had no experience in the handling of old and unwanted lovers. She watched him walk away, his step swaggering and confident, and she wondered bleakly what she had ever seen in him. For a second, she urgently wished that Geoff was with her, his broad shoulder above her, his hand protectively at her waist. In her mind's eye flashed a quick vision of him from a week before at the lake. He'd been talking to Joe on the porch, lying down on the couch, wearing only a pair of shorts, his hands tucked underneath his head. His chest, flat and wide, was sprinkled with golden hairs, there were tufts of gold in his armpits. Down her glance had gone; down the breadth of his ribs to the ridged abdomen, down to legs that were lean and muscular and crossed at the ankle. And then she had turned away, feeling the warmth rise within her, that unwanted warmth.
It came to Petra then that Geoff was the first man that she had ever truly wanted. In fact, she hadn't known about desire before meeting him. Any other emotion that she'd felt with anyone else had been a sham, a facsimile of the real thing. She'd grown up without a man in the family, and she'd spent too isolated a childhood and adolescence to know what men were like. It wasn't any surprise that she would have willingly gone to bed with the first man who made a serious effort to sleep with her. She'd been curious; she'd wanted the experience, but she hadn't really wanted him. He'd only been an object, someone she was manipulating to satisfy needs that had nothing really to do with sex.
But her feelings about Geoff were different. Petra couldn't exactly sort them out. She liked him, wanted him, enjoyed him, was intrigued by him—a whole mix of emotions that tangled in her mind like a skein of yarn. No strand had an end or a beginning, each ran into the other in a confusing way. She couldn't separate her desire to sleep with him from her desire to talk to him from her desire to be with him. And, also tangled among these golden threads were the dark ones; her own fears, her need for independence, her distrust of people in general and men in particular, her knowledge that once the swim was over Geoff would be gone— happily and willingly.
Petra shook her head and gathered her packages closer to her, forcing thoughts of Geoff away. She still had so much to do before the funeral. There were Sheila's clothes that had to be packed and given away to some charitable organisation; there were her books, her papers, her crocheting, and her knick-knacks. Petra only wanted to save a few things; the pieces of jewellery that were worth something, a fancy perfume bottle that Sheila had owned since she was a teenager, the file of recipes that had been so exhaustively written out and indexed. It had saddened her immensely to discover that in fifty-five years of life, Sheila had left so little that was of any lasting importance.
Petra left the mall and put her packages into the boot of her car. Her last stop before going home was a visit to the minister of a nearby church. He had asked her to stop by and talk to him a bit about her mother so that he could give a fitting funeral benediction. Like all the professionals that Petra had had to consult in the past day, the lawyer and the insurance agent, he barely knew Sheila. In her last years, she'd grown too paranoid to step out of the house and go to church. He'd visited her a couple of times, but as she spent more and more of every year in the hospital, even those visits had tapered off to nothing. Petra sighed as she opened her car and slipped into the front seat. She didn't know what she could tell the minister about a woman whose grasp of reality was so weak that, half the time, she hadn't even been able to recognise her own daughter.
It didn't quite rain on the morning of the funeral, but the sky was a dark grey and a mist fell now and again. The mourners didn't wear raincoats but were carrying umbrellas and, as Geoff looked around him, all he could see from his height was a small sea of bobbing umbrellas. Only Petra stood bare-headed in the mist, her hair dampening and curling, and he ached to touch her, to comfort her, to ease her somehow, but her body language was so emphatically negative that Geoff knew better. From the way she was standing with her hands clenched at her sides, it was obvious that she wanted to be alone. The other mourners, the doctor from the hospital, a couple of nurses, and several neighbours, had also sensed her need for isolation. They had murmured condolences to her and then stepped away. Glancing at her now, Geoff saw the tension in her shoulders and the rigid hold of her head. He wondered what was going on inside her, what battles were being fought, what maelstrom of emotions was building to a pitch so high that she had to hold herself tight enough so that it wouldn't break loose. He wondered if she had cried for her mother, but he suspected that she hadn't. He thought he knew Petra well enough to guess that it would be near impossible for her to find a release for her grief. She was probably frantic to get back to the lake so she could throw herself into training once again. That was the Petra Morgan solution to problems that were too big to go away.
Both Geoff and Joe had understood this and had felt that it was unhealthy. When Geoff had suggested to Joe that he take Petra to his parents' home for a few days after the funeral, the trainer had expelled a breath of relief.
'She's going to need some winding down,' he'd said, 'or she'll burn herself out in the water.'
'She'll be forced to rest,' Geoff had reassured him. 'My father's retired and my mother's idea of a day's work is a short trip into town to get some more reading matter. They're easy-going people.'
'Sounds good,' Joe had replied. 'Just let Petra know she's forbidden to come back for a few days. I don't want to see her, no matter how much she hassles you. Got it?'
'Got it.'
What Geoff hadn't said at the time was that he also hoped that his family would do something else for Petra. He sensed, rather than knew, that there was a part of Petra that was raw and painful and afraid. He didn't know all the reasons why this was so, but even before the death of her mother, he'd been sensitive enough to catch the edges of a sadness that
lay beneath the strong personality and the defiant independence. What he wanted was for the warmth and love and closeness of his family to envelop Petra, to shield her from her grief, her cares, her anxieties. He knew how his father would welcome her and how his mother would fuss over her. They'd pamper her and then some, and Geoff knew how much Petra's life had lacked in pampering. She didn't talk very much about her childhood, but Sunny had filled him in on the details.
'She's had a hard time of it,' Sunny had said one afternoon when they were sitting alone on the small spot of grass outside the cottage, sharing a rectangle of sun. He's asked her about Petra's background and then, when she'd given him a look of suspicion, he'd assured her that he wouldn't use it in an article.
'In what way?'
'Her childhood was bad, really bad. Her father deserted the family when she was small, and her mother's crazy.'
'Crazy?' Geoff tried to understand what Sunny was saying. 'You mean, really crazy?'
'She spends most of her time in that mental institution north of Toronto.'
'What's wrong with her?'
Sunny gave an unhappy sigh. 'I don't know exactly. Schizophrenia perhaps.'
Geoff didn't know very much about schizophrenia, but he did know enough about mental illness to guess how devastating it must have been for Petra to live with a mother who was certifiably insane. 'I see,' he said slowly.
Sunny took a pin out of her hair, tucked some strands back into her bun and then stuck the pin back in again as if she would have liked to jab something else rather than her own head. 'And Petra's had to support the two of them, take care of her mother and organise her own life since she was a teenager. I've always been amazed and impressed that she made it through college and got herself a decent job. There's plenty of people out there who would have used a history like that to end up on welfare.'
Geoff was silent for a while and then he said, 'I suppose that explains the swimming, too.'
'Sure,' said Sunny. 'Joe says it's the only thing she's got that counts for anything, and it's the only outlet she's got to escape from her life. If you wanted to know what makes Petra swim, there you've got it in a nutshell.'
'And she doesn't want anyone to feel sorry for her.'
'God, no! Petra doesn't indulge in self-pity either, at least, not that I've noticed.' Sunny looked at Geoff through her dark glasses. 'She's an impressive woman.'
'Yes.'
'But very vulnerable to certain things.'
'Such as?'
'Such as… well, to put it bluntly, men.'
Geoff returned her look. 'Meaning what?'
'Meaning,' said Sunny, 'that I'm not blind to what's going on.'
It was too much to expect that Sunny who had a voracious interest in everything that went on around her would have missed the over-polite interchanges between Petra and himself. Ever since the night they'd met on the porch, they'd been cautious with one another, deferring to each other, passing the salt with pleases and thank-yous and carefully avoiding any physical contact.
Geoff gave her a non-repentant grin. 'Sunny, you've got an eye like a hawk.'
She waved a finger at him. 'If you hurt that girl,' she said, 'you'll be sorry.'
'It's okay,' he said ruefully, 'she doesn't want me.'
'Ah. Well, isn't that smart of her?'
'That's not very complimentary.'
'Tell me something, Geoff. Are you interested in a lifetime commitment to one woman?'
'No.'
'That's what I figured,' she said smugly, sitting back in her chair and putting her face to the sun. 'That's just what I figured.'
Of course, Geoff hadn't known then that he loved Petra. He'd only thought of her as a diversion, a small and sexy diversion. But now it was different. His heart went out to her, standing by the graveside of her mother, a slender, tiny figure, dressed in grey, her head bent, her back so stiff and rigid. He wanted to fold her into his arms and pour into her, if this sort of osmosis was possible, all the healing force of his love. But he couldn't. Like all the others around him, he was forced to stand away from her, knowing that somewhere hidden in that silent figure, a woman was crying and hurt and in pain.
The minister finished his benediction and a cloth was laid over the coffin. Slowly, those who had attended the ceremony paid their respects to Petra and then left. It wasn't until everyone was gone that Geoff finally approached her. She had not moved from where she had been during the funeral, but she no longer seemed to know what was going on around her. And, she was so engrossed in her inner thoughts that she never heard the soft sound of his footsteps or even noticed when he touched her.
'Petra?' Below his fingers, he could feel the damp fabric of her dress and, below that, the slender bones of her shoulder. The mist had started again, its drops so fine that it appeared as a fog, shrouding them in its greyness.
She turned to face him, and he saw that her eyes, dark and huge in the paleness of her face, were absolutely dry. 'Yes?' she asked, and there was no recognition of him in her glance. It was if she had never seen him before, as if he were a total stranger.
Geoff felt the pain of it pierce him in some visceral, vulnerable place, but he never flinched. He merely said as softly and as gently as he could, 'Come. It's time to go.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
There wasn't a bit of water near the home of Geoff's parents; not a pond, not a lake, not a stream, not a river. Not one place that Petra could swim in if she had wanted to, which was why Geoff had chosen it as a retreat of sorts in the first place. The house itself was large and comfortable, set on an acre of land in an old neighbourhood where the elms had grown to huge heights, the hedges were lush and thick, the pavements old and cracked from the thousands of small feet that had bicycled on them, run on them and played hopscotch on them. Even though the Hamilton boys were all grown, it was still a neighbourhood of children. The peace of the summer days was periodically broken by laughter, screams and high-pitched voices yelling at one another. It was the kind of neighbourhood where children grew up healthy and straight. It was the kind of neighbourhood that Petra had dreamed about as a little girl, but had never experienced.
On her first morning there, Petra dug her sneakers out of her suitcase, put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went jogging. Her slender figure and dark hair could be glimpsed through the trees from the back patio where Geoff and his parents were having breakfast. The patio had an old glass-topped table, plastic chairs that had seen better days and a couple of fly swatters to kill the insects that liked to share Hamilton meals and barbecues. As long as Geoff could remember, his family had eaten out of doors during the summer.
'She's an interesting girl,' Geoff's mother, Marion, remarked as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She was a small woman with salt-and-pepper hair and quick bird-like motions, still almost as pretty as the girl she had once been. 'Isn't she, dear?'
'Dear' was Geoff's father, Matthew, who usually spent his mornings buried in the Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. He'd been a stockbroker once, but upon retirement, he'd announced that he'd preferred politics to investments and now spent hours reading about politicians, elections and scandals. Other than that, he was a loving husband, a kind and generous father to his four sons and an adoring grandfather to three diminutive granddaughters.
'Yes,' he said absent-mindedly. Geoff's parents often held a three-way conversation between themselves and the newspaper. When they did this, all that could be seen of Matthew was the top of his head with its thinning grey hair. When he lowered the paper, the rest of him would come in view—a face with a strong jaw like Geoff's and mild blue eyes beneath rather fierce-looking eyebrows.
'Sad though,' Marion went on. 'Very sad. Don't you think so, dear?'
'Very,' Matthew agreed.
It would have been hard not to come to that conclusion. Petra and Geoff had arrived after dinner the night before and, no matter how hard Petra had tried to respond to the Hamiltons' warm welcomes, her wan smiles and attempts at enthusi
asm had been totally unconvincing. At nine-thirty, she'd said that she had a headache and had gone to bed. Geoff had to give his parents high marks for their restraint after that. They'd neither grilled him about her or made any comments although, knowing his mother as he did, Geoff wasn't surprised that her curiosity had finally surfaced this morning.
'My heart just went out to her, Geoff. I've never seen anyone with such… haunted eyes. She must have been close to her mother.'
'I don't know,' Geoff said, buttering a piece of toast.
'Her mother was sick, mentally ill. She'd spent most of the last few years in an institution.' When he'd phoned his parents from Mercy, Geoff had only offered them the bare bones of the situation. They knew that Petra was a marathon swimmer, they knew that Geoff was covering her swim, and they knew that her mother had died. Other than that, he'd left them in the dark. He knew that just the fact that he was bringing a woman home with him would cause enough of a stir.
Marion's face took on a look of shock. 'Oh, Geoff,' she said. 'I had no idea. Matthew, did you hear that?'
Geoff's father put down his newspaper. 'Yes,' he said, 'I did.'
Marion intervened. 'There's no father, is there, Geoff?'
'No. He disappeared when she was young. Petra had a hard childhood, there wasn't much money and not a lot of emotional support either.'
Marion liked to think of herself as an amateur psychologist. 'Do you suppose that has something to do with her swimming? I mean it's a rare person who decides to tackle a lake.'
Love is a Distant Shore Page 13