I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  The day her mother died, she found out her husband was leaving her. It certainly made for an interesting funeral.

  Petra is in the front pew of the chapel wearing a broad-brimmed black hat. Her husband sits next to her, weeping. One day there will be a detective of tears. That’s what Petra is thinking. She has read recently in a magazine that scientists have discovered that real tears, tears of genuine and heart-wrenching sorrow, have a different chemical composition to the ones people cry when they watch a sad movie. Or the ones people cry if they have been caught out loving someone they shouldn’t. A woman who isn’t their wife, for example. There are oceans of fake tears out there, when you come to think about it, and now they have a way of telling.

  Petra thinks the detective would suggest a way of trapping your husband’s tears. On a Kleenex you handed him, perhaps, as he explained how much he hated the thought of leaving you and his thirteen-year-old daughter.

  “You are my world. I may be physically absent, but emotionally I’m still here,” the husband might say, just as Marcus had said to Petra, dabbing his eyes.

  Gently, she would take the tissue from him and seal it in a cellophane bag. Later, the detective would take the Kleenex to a laboratory, where technicians in white coats would reconstitute the dried tears in a test tube. A letter with the results would arrive about a week later. Then you would know. One way or the other, you would know. What your husband’s tears meant. The exact proportion of grief to guilt, of regret to relief, of salt to water. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me …

  Petra can hear the waves outside, hurling themselves against the shingle. The chapel is just across the road from the beach. It’s a beautiful summer’s day out there, a fact that can barely be registered inside this brown building, which seems to have been designed to keep in the dark and the damp. She can hear the cries and shouts of the tourists, which to her ears sound more like pain than pleasure.

  Petra tries to stop her mind wandering. This is my mother’s funeral, she tells herself. My mother is dead. Impossible. My mother is in that coffin. Greta has loomed so large in her life that it will take more than a funeral and a coroner’s certificate to convince Petra that she is gone.

  She is aware of Marcus in the pew beside her. Men don’t cry as easily as women. Their tears seldom come out without a fight. Her husband’s shoulders shudder slightly under his good gray coat with the black velvet lapels, the one she picked out for him before he did a series of recitals in Germany and Austria last year. Petra can hardly remember him crying, at least not since Molly was born, but in the past month Marcus has broken down more times than she can count. Since that Saturday afternoon when she got home, unexpectedly, from teaching at a workshop in Chiswick and the phone in the kitchen rang twice, then stopped for a few seconds and rang twice again. Petra picked it up, expecting to hear her mother’s voice. Instead a girl had said: “You don’t know who I am.”

  Petra feels the wifely impulse to reach across and comfort Marcus, a powerfully instinctive thing, but she is surprised to observe that her hand flatly refuses to obey the instruction the brain is sending it. Her fingers flex inside the stretchy black gloves bought from a market stall in town less than two hours ago. She’d thought only at the last minute that her mother would be upset if she didn’t wear gloves. The gloves make her hands feel webbed. She thinks of the black plastic feet of Canada geese.

  For the first time, it occurs to her that she is now a source of misery to the man she has spent most of her adult life with, an obstacle to his happiness. Marcus probably wishes it was her in the coffin.

  Petra shuts her eyes quickly to edit out this thought, then glances around at the congregation. For an elderly woman who kept herself to herself and who, throughout Petra’s childhood, discouraged visitors by ignoring the front doorbell and admitting only people who persevered and came round the back, her mother has drawn a decent crowd. There are officials and regulars from the chapel, two immaculate ladies from the department store where her mother worked briefly in hats, gloves and bags; and there is a surprisingly good turnout from her father’s family, most of whom her mother cordially loathed because they worked with their hands. Probably they’ve come along to hear the famous cellist.

  Across the aisle, Petra’s Auntie Mair, frail now with a heavily bandaged leg, gives Marcus the smile people smile at those they’ve seen on TV: both overfamiliar and unsure. In response, Marcus bestows on Auntie Mair the smile you would expect—friendly enough not to seem grand or up himself, but sufficiently cool and distracted to suggest that any further attempt at contact would be unwise. Petra feels sorry for him, almost. A funeral must be a grim and awkward place to be when your mother-in-law is in the coffin and her only child has recently found out that you’re in love with someone else.

  After she hung up on the girl, the phone in the kitchen rang again almost immediately and Petra snatched at it, ready now to say all the things she had been too shocked to say before. She bungled the receiver, which clattered off the wall and dangled by its cord a few inches above the cat’s bowl. When Petra finally managed to hold the phone to her ear, she found it wasn’t the girl after all; it was Glenys, her mother’s neighbor.

  “I’m so sorry, she’s gone,” Glenys said.

  “What? Who’s gone? Oh God.”

  No news so awful but Glenys wanted to be first with it.

  Petra had felt the need to call someone. The benign June light slanting into the kitchen through the apple-green blinds was the same as it had been just a few seconds earlier, as were the blameless washing-up brushes standing at attention in their wire basket, the picture of Molly on the pinboard next to the phone, smiling and freckled in her Pippi Longstocking costume for World Book Day. Petra had spent hours braiding orange wool around two pieces of bent coat hanger so that Molly’s braids would stick out just like Pippi’s. Her mother had been a genius at braids, a talent that seems to be woven into the German DNA. She used to brush the hair fiercely till it shone, then pull it tight from the root until Petra’s scalp squealed for mercy.

  She experiments with the idea of her mother being in the past tense, but, no, her brain won’t permit it. And what about that girl? Surely you should be able to call some kind of emergency service and say, “Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I am unable to process these two appalling blows simultaneously. Can I arrange to have one of them taken away?”

  In the chapel this drowsy afternoon, with its glowering, eagle-winged pulpit and its tall, sightless windows, two kinds of grief are twined tightly together in Petra’s heart: one grief for her mother, another for her marriage. And maybe, to complete the braid, a third: some nameless hurt that is slowly starting to take shape in her mind.

  “Let us pray,” she hears the minister say a long way off.

  When man and wife kneel, it disturbs a cold mustiness in the tapestry cushions, which smell to Petra, as they always have, of God and rain. She must know every single kneeler in the place. Her mother embroidered several of them herself until she began to curse her failing eyes. Bad eyes Petra has inherited. At the age of thirty-eight, she is now both short-sighted and long-sighted. Recently, she has found herself joining the ranks of those in supermarkets who bring tins right up to their nose and then hold them at arm’s length to try to read the ingredients. Today, even with her contact lenses in, she has to squint to make out the words of the hymns.

  Because the chapel is so close to the sea, practically in the water when the tide is high, the prayer books have always been briny with damp. On winter Sundays during her childhood, she remembers peeling the pages apart to find the psalm. The pages were so frail they were more like skin than paper. Whenever they sang “For Those in Peril on the Sea,” the choir locked in unequal struggle with the squalling seagulls on the roof, her dad used to say the same thing: “Champion! Well, we’ve got the sound effects anyway.”

  Champion was her father’s word to acknowledge anything that added to the sum of human happiness, that exclamation al
ways being accompanied by a brisk gleeful rubbing together of his hands, as if he were a Boy Scout trying to start a fire. “There’s champion for you, Petra fach.”

  People complain that the old start repeating the same stories again and again, and they do, oh they do, but Petra has learned the hard way that all irritation is instantly forgiven when the old are no longer around to tell the story one more time. She would give anything to have her father back here with her, even for five minutes, and to hear him make that lame joke about the seagull-backing singers. The replacement organist, presently toiling away in the balcony at the back of the chapel, isn’t a patch on Dad. After six years, she still thinks of Eric as new. He has problems with his pedaling. Each verse ends a beat or two after the singing with an apologetic, bronchial wheeze. Petra winces; she can put up with anything—bad eyes, bad weather, bad husband—but bad music, that she never will be able to bear.

  Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

  Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

  Its own appointed limits keep:

  O hear us, when we cry to thee

  For those in peril on the sea.

  The English words are unfamiliar. She realizes she knows the hymn only in Welsh. The translation must be for Marcus’s benefit. It is exactly the kind of detail her mother would fuss about, always worrying that they would look provincial and common in front of Marcus’s family, who lived in a converted mill in the Cotswolds and who went to great lengths to make the Williamses feel at ease. As if Greta could ever be relaxed with a woman called Arabella who struck up a conversation about color schemes. Her mother disliked Arabella on sight, and neither woman knew that it was because Marcus’s mother was a designer-clad reminder that Greta had married beneath her station.

  After the first verse, Petra can’t sing anymore, though her mouth continues to mime the Welsh words.

  You don’t know who I am, the girl had said.

  Didn’t she? Not in person, maybe, but Petra thinks that at some animal level, some molecular level of body chemistry, she knew exactly. Not who the girl was, but of her existence. There were none of the obvious clues. Marcus was far too fastidious for lipstick on collars or suspicious florist’s receipts. Far from being guilty and distracted, as men having affairs are supposed to be, he had seemed energized and attentive; he had even started driving Molly to her sleepovers and piano lessons, which had delighted Petra, always the designated family chauffeur despite her lack of confidence behind the wheel. Some things were different, though. When they were having sex, Marcus had difficulty finishing, and he had taken to flipping her over to get the job done. When she asked him about this, after a few glasses of wine and keeping the tone deliberately light, he gave that rueful little-boy grin of his and said it excited him. She was relieved to have his explanation, at the same time as being unconvinced. Really, she thought, the truth was that he couldn’t come if he saw her face. Much easier to imagine another’s face if your wife’s was buried in the pillow. Back late from a concert in Oxford one night, he rolled over in bed and said, “I want to fuck your mouth.” It was not a line that belonged in their life together—it came from another play entirely—and the instant he said it she must have known what it meant, but she tidied it away neatly in the marriage drawer marked PRIVATE, and forgot.

  Petra’s dad was never sure about Marcus. He always said Mark, then paused before the us, like a horse balking at a difficult fence, a tic that infuriated her mother, who adored her son-in-law unreservedly. Marcus’s combination of talent, acute sensitivity, quick temper and arrogance were delightful to Greta, because she believed them to be the ingredients of genius. Much could be forgiven such a man. It was kind, devoted underachievers like Petra’s father who could not be tolerated. Would her mother have thought that screwing a twenty-five-year-old violinist was just another perk of the artistic condition?

  No, not screwing. “Philandering,” Petra corrected herself quickly, seeing her mother’s cool stare of disapproval.

  Greta could not abide coarseness of any kind. She had stopped taking The Times after the paper started calling it sex instead of sexual intercourse. You never heard the word bastard pass her lips, only illegitimate. Long after the concept had lost its stigma, her mother would point to some sweet, apple-cheeked baby parked in a stroller outside the Co-op and murmur darkly, “Kerry’s illegitimate boy.” Her mother was stuck in the past. Bastard now meant something else entirely.

  Like Petra’s husband, for instance. As Marcus edges out of the pew and moves purposefully to the front of the chapel, Petra is able to observe her partner of almost fifteen years as others in the congregation must see him. Age has not withered him; in fact, age is struggling to land a finger on the man. “Hunky and soulful. And there’s lots of him. You lucky thing,” a friend had said to her, in the early days, and Petra had blushed; it was as though the friend had stood beside their bed and watched them sleep and wake. Seen Petra enfolded by those lazy, unclumsy limbs. Marcus has none of the artist’s traditional pallor; he is in excellent health, always has been, with strong features that will never grow gaunt or—and this, Petra has observed, is a horribly common fate for middle-aged men—fatten and droop until the handsome youth becomes a doughy, red-cheeked squire. Not Marcus, damn his eyes. Look at him. Turned forty last year, but he still has a thatch of wavy dark hair through which, now and then, he runs a distracted hand, to mess it up rather than neaten it. A dash of Ted Hughes, someone said, and it’s true. Under the decency, and despite the finesse, there is something wild not far below. Something you can’t trust.

  Marcus sits down, pulls the cello to him and sweeps the bow across the strings in a single motion. Whoever said that music was invented to confirm human loneliness obviously never heard her husband play. When he did the Elgar in Bristol last year, one reviewer said his performance was “at once muscular and sublimely sensitive.” Yes, and who got the most out of those muscles?

  As his bow moves, and the music swells, her anger rocks back and forth. Even if the detective of tears could get a sample from her husband, Petra isn’t sure she’d really want to know if they were genuine. When he said that he still loved her, did he mean it? We live in such strange times, Petra thinks. Science is solving all the secrets of mankind, one by one—predispositions to disease, the brain chemistry of criminals, DNA tests to establish fatherhood, the reason women prefer to mate with alpha males and live with beta ones. But human nature just isn’t keeping up with all this information. It isn’t ready for so much truth. Not all at once. Sometimes not knowing is as much as you can bear.

  Petra feels a sudden longing for him. Not for the weak, evasive man who has been accompanying her to marriage counseling while moving in with a violinist who looks insultingly like Petra at the same age. Marcus, the man who always despised the clichés of bourgeois escape, has set up home with his young mistress on a houseboat near Teddington.

  “A houseboat,” Petra had repeated dully. Was any love nest in the annals of adultery more designed to make you want to summon a nuclear submarine?

  “Mum, it’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

  Molly is standing next to her, stroking her arm, speaking softly. It’s only when her daughter pushes the tissue into her gloved hand that Petra realizes that she is the one who is crying. The tears are running down her cheeks in such profusion that they feel like they’re tying a ribbon of water under her chin. She can feel the wetness seep under the collar of her new black linen jacket. Twice as expensive as anything else in her wardrobe, but she couldn’t let her mother down on this important day.

  “Petra, taking the control of your emotions, please,” says her mother, and she feels her chin lift automatically and her spine stiffen.

  Posture can do a lot for a woman, her mother was always quite specific about that. If you carry yourself well, if you pull in your tummy, using your muscles as the body’s own girdle, then middle-age spread was not the inevitability some liked t
o pretend it was. All her married life, her mother took pride in the fact that she weighed exactly the same as she had on her wedding day. Greta took the Helena Rubinstein line: there are no ugly women, just lazy ones.

  From the summer’s day far away come the ding-dong strains of an ice-cream van. A tune that was meant to have been composed by Henry VIII for his future queen had ended up as tinky-tonk chimes summoning day-trippers at a Welsh seaside resort to buy a cone. What were the odds against that?

  “Mum?”

  “I’m fine,” Petra whispers back, and lays a hand on her daughter’s hair. Molly is so much fairer than Petra, blessed with her grandmother’s coloring and the same angelic, heart-shaped face.

  “Mamgu would love it that Daddy is playing Bach for her,” says Molly, and Petra gives a watery smile of assent.

  Molly is just thirteen and grieving for her grandmother. Merciful, uncomplicated grief. It was an unexpected bonus of motherhood, the way that Petra’s daughter and Petra’s mother had loved each other unconditionally and had been able to show that love in a way Petra found so hard to do with Greta. On the rare occasion when her mother laid a hand on Petra’s arm, she experienced it almost as an electric shock.

  The music comes to its solemn end, like a life well lived, and Marcus lifts his bow and throws back his head as if to shake himself from a trance. You can tell the congregation wants to applaud, but some unwritten rule says you aren’t supposed to clap in church. Do they really think God would be jealous of the talents of His own creation?

  Marcus rejoins them in the pew and glances sideways to see his triumph reflected in his wife’s eyes. She will not look at him. Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously. Petra studies her webbed fingers as the pallbearers lift the coffin onto their shoulders. What would her mother’s parting advice be as she goes to her grave? She would tell her to win Marcus back, no question. Greta wouldn’t let a man of that caliber go without a fight. “Top-drawer,” that’s what she called Marcus. Marcus’s family was out of the top drawer. It had pained Petra to hear her say it; the way her mother, one of Nature’s aristocrats, was so impressed by the class into which her daughter had married.