We were in the small music-practice room, ten days before White City and just under three weeks before Princess Margaret. Behind her glasses, Miss Fairfax’s blue eyes had a milky glaze that made them look like marbles. I wondered if she had been pretty once.
“I can’t do it, Miss,” I said miserably. I wanted her to say I didn’t have to.
She made a soft tock-tock sound, adjusted my hand on the bow, pulled my shoulders down and back and let her hand rest there awhile. It was no weight, her hand; the bones as light as a mouse, but the sinews were still powerful from all the years of practice. Blue veins stood out from the crepey, mottled skin like electrical wires.
“Petra, I want your back to be as strong as a tree trunk, and your legs and feet like roots going into the floor. Good, much better. That way the head stays free and your ears can listen to the room. During the concert, there are going to be lots of distractions and you will have to find a still point of calm in the hall. And your right arm—like this—the right arm should be as free as flowing water. Can you feel the difference?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“Good. So that way your body will be moving naturally, but your ears and mind are totally focused. You know, Bach never wastes a single note. You must play every single note consciously.”
She must have felt my doubt because she placed a finger in the middle of my forehead. “All the notes are in here,” she said. “Now we must use our imagination. In music, you never say the same thing the same way twice. Do you understand, Petra?”
I shook my head. She asked me to think of a song title. “The first one that comes into your head.”
“Do you mean, um, normal music or classical?”
When she smiled, I thought I saw the girl. The one who said good-bye to her soldier boyfriend more than fifty years ago and never married. She sat like Patience on a monument smiling at grief, like in the play. How sad that was. To sit on a war monument with your boy’s name written on it.
“Normal will be fine.” Miss Fairfax laughed. “What’s the song title?”
“ ‘I Think I Love You,’ Miss.”
“It’s a popular song?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect. So the first time we play ‘I Think I Love You,’ just plain, exactly like that. I think I love you. The second time it’s I think I love you. Because certainly nobody else loves you in the same way. The third time it’s I think I love you. The cello is saying, Hmm, maybe I love you, maybe I don’t, let’s wait and see. And the fourth time we play the phrase, what do we say, Petra?”
“I think I love you?”
“Good. Certainly nobody else is going to be allowed to love him, are they? He belongs to you. Or it could be, I think I love you, not I quite like you. I feel passionately. Or, last one, I think I love YOU.”
“Yes, and there’s nobody else,” I said.
“Precisely,” said Miss Fairfax with a brisk clap of her hands. “Good girl. One little phrase and all those different ways of saying and feeling it. Now, when you play the piece I want you to think of trying to make each note like a pearl, then make each phrase like a string of pearls.”
She asked what I imagined when I played the Bach. I said I thought of a sad story, maybe someone dying. (I didn’t say what I really thought of, which was a girl trying to bring back a boy who had gone away, urging the music on to bring him back to her so she could hold him one more time and he comes back and he kisses her and they fall into each other’s arms and they sort of explode with joy and sadness and then they die of ecstasy because their love is too perfect for this world. I couldn’t tell her that, could I?)
“Yes, loss. Mourning.” Miss Fairfax took off her glasses and rubbed her ancient eyes. “But we can mourn people who are alive, Petra. Princess Margaret. We look at her and we think, she’s beautiful, she’s the queen’s sister wearing fine clothes, she arrives at our school in a Rolls-Royce and all the people cheer and applaud. What does she know about sadness?”
Miss Fairfax told me that Princess Margaret once loved a man, Captain Peter someone, and she had to give him up because he was divorced. She renounced him because it was her duty. The church said so.
A real live princess with a broken heart. Here was thrilling news from another planet.
“Is she happy now, Miss?”
Miss Fairfax took some rosin and drew my bow across it, giving an extra little shudder at the beginning and the end. “No, my dear, I don’t think she is.”
Love was so hard to learn about. It was lucky you didn’t have to do a quiz on it.
“Now, from the beginning if you don’t mind. Bach doesn’t want you to be afraid of him, Petra. Let’s show respect to him by playing each note as you imagine he wanted it to be. One pearl at a time.”
I began to play, trying to do exactly as she’d told me, feeling her hand guiding mine. She stopped me after twenty bars and said that was better. Much better.
“Now keep practicing exactly like that. For the next twenty-five years.”
When I saw Gillian’s bedroom for the first time, I wanted to raise a white flag.
“Okay, you win,” I said under my breath.
Just thinking about Gillian with her perfect bedroom and her invincible prettiness made me want to surrender. To her new stereo with its smoky glass cover and separate speakers, to the white wall-to-wall shaggy carpet, to the other girl’s obvious superiority. Above all, there was her dressing table with the three mirrors in which Gillian could see herself front, side and back. It was the size of our Hillman Imp.
The Mary Quant eye-shadow present seemed to have worked its costly magic, just as I’d hoped it would. In the lunch queue, the day after her birthday, Gillian invited me round to hers for tea to listen to records. My mother was so impressed I had a friend who lived in Parklands Avenue that she made my dad wear a tie to drop me off, even though he wasn’t invited in.
You know, I had been fantasizing about that invitation for so long. I had scripted whole conversations in which Gillian and I suddenly discovered how much we had in common. I saw us sitting on her bed giggling together; we would try on her clothes and leave them scattered in careless heaps on the floor and she would curl my new pageboy haircut under with her heated tongs and knot a scarf around my neck while giving advice on what suited me. “That green top is fabulous on you, Petra.” I saw us like two girls in a cartoon strip in Jackie, with the speech bubbles waiting to be filled in.
When it really happened, suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. It wasn’t that Gillian’s legendary bedroom would be a disappointment—how could it be? It would be me that was the disappointment. I would fail to sparkle in girly chitchat, I would remain myself, instead of being transformed into the fashionable, fun, fantasy Petra other girls liked to be with—girls like Angela Norton, who was still supposed to be Gillian’s best friend, but who looked like she was about to cry when she heard I was going round there for tea.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about my side of the conversation. All Gillian wanted to talk about was Stuart.
Did I think he really fancied her?
I did.
But why would Stuart fancy her when he could have any girl in the school he wanted?
Because she was so incredibly pretty and fabulous.
Okay, but was I really really one hundred percent sure that Stuart fancied her?
There could be no doubt about it. He’d be a complete idiot not to, wouldn’t he?
But Gillian said she’d chucked Stuart on Friday and thrown his locket in the road because he had wanted to go too far, and she didn’t feel ready. Letting them undo your bra, that was okay, but what did I think about boys getting in your knickers? Would that make her a slut?
I didn’t really know.
Oh, so I thought she was a slut, did I?
No, of course I didn’t. No.
Did I think Stuart would call her and say sorry or would he start going with a girl in his own year like Debbie Guest, who would let him
do whatever he wanted?
I thought that he would definitely call her and say sorry.
So, did I think she should ring Stuart up right this minute and say she forgave him and give him another chance?
I wasn’t sure.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Gillian concluded happily. “I’ll call him right now.” Unbelievably, she had a phone of her own by the bed.
“Yeah, I’ve really missed you, too, handsome,” she whispered breathily into the receiver. While Gillian snuggled back onto her lacy pillows for what was clearly going to be a long heart-to-heart, I perched at the end of her bed, one foot tucked under me, the other on the floor, wondering when would be a good moment to get up and make my excuses.
“No, I’m not, you are. Yes, course I want to. Naughty boy.”
With difficulty, I managed to catch Gillian’s eye and pointed first to myself and then to the door, semaphoring my wish to slip out, but she shook her head twice in a businesslike manner and carried on cooing into the phone. Whatever drama was unfolding between her and Stuart, it clearly required an audience. Wordlessly, willingly, I accepted my part in it. Gillian had three mirrors to look at herself in and now she had four.
I lowered myself awkwardly off the bed and bum-shuffled over to the rack of records next to the stereo, trying to be invisible. The first single I picked up had a bright orange center. Harry Nilsson’s “Without You.” I could remember when it was number one. For five whole weeks. Five Sunday nights, chart night, when the forlorn opening piano chords came out of the windows of all the teenage bedrooms in all of the houses in all of the streets in all of the world. By the fifth week, we got pretty sick of it and started to think the song was whiny and even a bit boring. I played the chords over in my head and remembered how great it was.
That “No” at the beginning was perfect, mind. Like Harry was in the middle of a conversation with himself and had just started singing it out loud. I thought of Miss Fairfax. Never play the same phrase the same way.
Gillian’s tinkling laugh cut into my memory of the music and I looked across at her. She was reclining against the purple padded headboard, twirling the phone’s curly cream flex around her index finger, which had shell-pink polish on its tip. Everything about her was exquisite. She looked like the most expensive kind of girl ever made. Like a porcelain figurine. Compared to Gillian, other girls seemed crude and misshapen, like we’d all been turned out by some amateur potter at evening class.
Whichever way you looked at her, Gillian scored higher in every way—marks for looks, marks for figure, marks for just being. When Gillian blushed, it seemed an act of the utmost delicacy, like some swoony heroine out of a romantic novel. When I blushed, it was hot and red and humiliating. Even the fact that her breasts were nothing special—they were still stranded in that no-woman’s-land between bee sting and apple—somehow made her seem mysterious and desirable. The graceful swelling beneath Gillian’s white school blouse made me think of the plumage of a swan.
No one would dare call Gillian Edwards a flat-chested cow, which is what Ian Roberts shouted after me last winter as I ran out late onto the hockey field. A remark that stung, stung worse even than that spiteful hockey wind that flays your cheeks and your knees. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t forget it, because every time I forced the remark to the back of my mind, it would spring up again like a leery jack-in-the-box. Flat-chested cow. A remark that made me realize how lonely I was, back in the days before Sharon, because there wasn’t a single girl I dared share it with. Not one friend who would help laugh away the unkindness and join me in speculating on the tragic proportions of Ian Roberts’s itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny peeny.
It’s easier being beautiful. Not deeper, not better, just easier. I figured that out over those months in 1974, when I got to study Gillian Edwards up close. Beauty made her lazy, though, like a pampered pug on a sofa that’s been fed only the choicest morsels. People came to lay tributes to her loveliness and she took them as her due. Boys made complete prats of themselves in front of her. Tranquilly, she would watch them out of her fine blue eyes.
When a girl isn’t beautiful, people say, Oh, you’ve got beautiful hair, you’ve got lovely eyes, you’ve got great legs. Every female wants a little piece of beauty to call her own, a slender ankle she can admire while trying on new shoes, or peachy skin that friends remark on, but Gillian’s beauty was whole, it had an absolute rightness and completeness to it: it all fitted together. She didn’t have beautiful eyes, beautiful legs, beautiful hair; she was beautiful.
When it came to personality, I could see Gillian would not get top marks, not even close. But, as a keen student of multiple-choice quizzes, I knew full well that the personality category was a consolation prize, something left over for the girls no one wanted to snog. Sitting in that bedroom, listening to Gillian flirting on the phone with Stuart, and feeling like such a lemon, such a baby without a boy of my own, I knew that I badly wanted to be kissed. I didn’t want to be in the audience. I wanted to see that look on Captain Von Trapp’s face when he takes Julie Andrews out on the terrace during the ball and he knows, he just knows, and she’s gabbling away nervous as anything, because she knows it, too, and she thinks, If I just keep moving my mouth, he won’t be able to kiss it.
And he starts to sing to her, saying that he must have done something good in his life, because Julie Andrews, who can clothe all of his seven children from a single pair of bedroom curtains, adores him.
Proud, arrogant men humbled by love, who buckle under its intoxicating influence; oh yes, I would always be a sucker for those. I hoped there might still be a chance with David; I would be seeing him for the first time in person in just four days at White City. I was sure I would always love him, but I didn’t want to kiss Sharon’s Cassidy shrine anymore. The paper was gluey and cold. I wanted a real boy to pull me toward him and say, “Come here, you.”
“What d’you think of these?” Gillian had finally put down the phone to her reinstated boyfriend and was rummaging in the white fitted wardrobe that ran the entire length of the wall opposite the window. She came out smiling. Gillian’s smile only made rare appearances and I was struck by how tiny and white her teeth were, like a baby’s teeth.
“Here we are,” she said. “Try these on, Petra—you’re size four, same as me, aren’t you?”
These turned out to be a pair of platform shoes, in a shade of gorgeous burgundy brown, the very same shoes that I had worshipped for at least two months in the window of Freeman Hardy Willis. Frankly, there was more chance of becoming Mrs. David Cassidy than of my mother buying me such trendy, towering footwear. (Although she always wore heels herself, my mum preferred to keep me in the kind of sensible, round-toed flats that looked like Cornish pasties and were worn only by old women with walking frames.)
“You can keep them,” Gillian said, just like that, as though a pair of shoes that cost £9.99 were just loose change. She flung open another door and started pulling out tops and skirts. I was startled to spot a poster of an alien tartan life-form hanging on the inside of the wardrobe.
“Didn’t know you liked the Bay City Rollers,” I said, unable to conceal my astonishment.
Gillian gave a yelp of laughter. “Best to be prepared. Keep your options open where lover boys are concerned,” she said. “David’s on the way out, isn’t he? He’ll be chip paper by Christmas. The rest of the Rollers are scrotty, but Les McKeown, the lead singer, he’s a bit of all right, isn’t he? Anyway,” she said, “I like ‘Shang-A-Lang.’ ”
“ ‘Shang-A-Lang?’ ” The song was a shocker. A rinky-dink excuse for rock ’n’ roll. Was this the same Gillian who once refused to stay over at Karen Jones’s house on principle because Karen had a poster of Donny Osmond on her bedroom ceiling and she thought it was disloyal to fall asleep looking at another pop star’s face?
Other people’s heroes are always mysterious. But to swap David for a group of pasty-skinned boys with tartan trousers worn so short they revealed a
few inches of hairy white leg? Impossible. While I was still trying to absorb her treachery, Gillian threw a bundle of clothes at me. There were sky-blue hot pants with a red anchor design on the bib, two psychedelic dresses with swirly patterns, one in orange, the other in hot pink; there was a chain belt made up of gold links and fake precious stones, a silky pink bomber jacket and a purple choker with a cameo brooch. It was the kind of gear girls wore on the cover of Jackie. It was the kind of clothes you could call gear.
“Put something on, quick,” she instructed. “Stuart’s coming by with some of the boys. Taking us down to the beach. Car’ll be here in five minutes.”
It was a school night and we hadn’t eaten anything, not since lunchtime, when I’d just had a Twix because I was saving my dinner money for White City. I felt faint with hunger. The sensible thing to do would be to say I had to get home, but apparently under some kind of spell, I pulled on the pink swirly mini-dress and the pink bomber jacket and added the choker as an afterthought, to add length to my short neck. In the largest of Gillian’s three mirrors, I caught sight of an unfamiliar figure. A groovy chick with long, pipe-cleaner legs that ended in a pair of gorgeous burgundy-brown platforms. I barely knew her.
Gillian had gotten her jacket on and switched off her bedside lamp, so the room was dark, apart from a beam of light from the landing, when she said, “Pet, I was thinking we could go in for the David Cassidy quiz.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Well, we’re cleverer than the others by miles, and I think we’d be a great team. It’d be such a laugh if we won. Get our picture in the paper an’ everything. What d’you reckon?”
The sensation of being wanted by Gillian was so new and delightful that I hadn’t examined it too closely. Now, the nature of the bargain came home with such speed that I felt physically winded, like that day I got thumped in the chest by a monster wave down at Three Cliffs Bay. My mind was whirring. It was trying to work out how many moves back she’d planned this. I felt the sudden despair of coming up against a superior opponent.
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