The family follows the coffin out. At the very back of the chapel, in a row of seats to the side of the font, Petra notices a pretty, plump blond woman about her own age. She returns the woman’s smile. It isn’t until they’re outside by the gate, and the coffin is being loaded into the hearse, that Petra shakes herself back to life and realizes she has failed to register a face she knows as well as her own.
Sharon.
They did keep in touch. On birthdays and Christmases, filling each other in on all the news, inevitably child-related as the years went by. Petra’s girl, Sharon’s two boys, David and Gareth. Every December, cards traveled from Wales to London, and back the other way, cards in which both women expressed the fond hope that this would turn out to be the year when they finally got together. After a while, Petra wasn’t sure how long, she forgot to mark Sha’s birthday, and a few years after that, she was shocked one day to find she could no longer recall the exact date. Third of July? Fifth? When she went home for the funeral of her cello teacher, Miss Fairfax, she took Sharon’s new number with her. The electrical business of Sharon’s husband, Mal, had prospered, and the family had moved a short way up the coast to an estate of detached houses with carports and a sea view. The neighbor on one side was a headmaster; on the other was a famous Welsh rugby player who had shacked up with the reupholstered wife of a plastic surgeon.
“There’s posh for you,” Sharon wrote in her Christmas card.
Petra didn’t call her during that visit. Time was short, she told herself, but it was the distance between them that felt too great. In the covered market, buying anemones for Miss Fairfax’s grave, she spotted a familiar figure with a coronet of baby-blond hair wearing a vivid purple mac, instinctively lifted her hand to wave—It’s you!—and then dodged behind a pillar. Petra didn’t know it was herself she was hiding from. She felt ashamed that she had avoided the best friend of her girlhood, but Sharon could have taken one look at her and read her pain and disappointment. She wasn’t ready to face Sharon looking at her face.
Their friendship had survived Sha’s leaving school at sixteen to go to the local business college to learn shorthand and typing, while Petra stayed on to do A levels and worked Saturdays in Boots the chemist. They still made each other laugh like no one else could. Tried out all the latest beauty products from Petra’s counter, including a face-tanning machine that required you to wear goggles when you sat in front of it. They misread the instructions, of course, and Sharon’s face was baked to a fiery shade of terra-cotta, except for the white circles around her eyes. For weeks, she looked like an early female aviator.
Before she left school, for her final art coursework, Sharon painted beguiling, sloe-eyed girls on cardboard boxes, wearing the most incredible jeweled colors, always in rooms with the sea visible through a window.
Petra was awestruck. “They’re incredible. Like Matisse.”
“Who’s he when he’s at home, then?” Sharon laughed. “Get away with you, Petra. Everything’s got to be like something else with you, hasn’t it? Some things are just themselves, mun.”
Sharon should have gone to art college, somewhere really good, but, although she had huge natural ability, she lacked any sense of entitlement for her talent. Modesty and gentle humor were among the sweetest virtues of her people, but also their curse.
“I can always paint at home, can’t I?” Though she didn’t.
Petra and Marcus’s wedding was the turning point. After that, things were never the same between them. Sharon was making the bridesmaids’ dresses, but the fittings were a palaver because Petra had agreed to have the whole thing in Gloucestershire, in Marcus’s village, because, well, because they would put up a marquee in the garden and the church was so old and so pretty and their friends from London could get there more easily, rather than making the journey across the Severn Bridge into Wales, which took a toll in more ways than one.
The real reason was Greta. Entertaining of any kind and, in particular, a fear of social failure always made Petra’s mother angry. Greta would be bound to go on the attack, she would try to launch a preemptive strike against any perceived criticism or humiliation. Besides, Petra couldn’t imagine putting all of Marcus’s family in the cold brown chapel with her father’s sisters and a Baptist minister who could be guaranteed to mention sin at least twice, and maybe even fornication. The Church of England, which saw no sin that could not be forgiven and would be far too polite to mention it anyway, was a much more relaxing venue.
The night before the wedding, Sharon arrived at the Cotswold millhouse, her ancient Mini leprous with rust and exploding with dresses packed in dry-cleaning bags. Made of a heavy bronze satin she’d found on Llanelli Market, the bridesmaids’ frocks were beautifully cut, almost sculptural, with a plunging neckline edged in tiny glistening beads. Marcus’s sister, Georgina, was the first to try hers on.
“What fun,” Georgie said. “I say, you could go to a nightclub in this.”
Marcus’s mother came in and took one look at Sharon and her dresses. “Oh, what fun. I think we can find a corsage to make that a bit more respectable, don’t you?”
Petra should have left then and there. Should have jumped in the rustbucket with Sha and sped away to the green green grass of home. But her infatuation with Marcus had stolen her away; she felt high on being wanted by this emotionally unavailable Englishman from the top drawer. Did she know she was marrying the man of her mother’s dreams? Not consciously, she didn’t. The taste of triumph was so strong it masked all other sensations.
At the altar, she turned to hand her bouquet to her chief bridesmaid and she saw tears in Sharon’s smiling eyes. For a second, no more, Petra felt she was falling, falling, as the bonds of her best and oldest friendship began to unravel.
The day after the funeral, Petra goes back to the house to start sorting through the stuff. Marcus has taken Molly for a walk on the beach followed by something to eat in the new café on the headland overlooking the bay. The café serves the kind of fresh salads and filled baguettes you get in London. Marcus has always complained about how appalling the food is down here; he clutches his chest and calls it the Death Plan Diet, which is another way of saying that people do a lot of comfort eating. Personally, Petra thinks that if you find yourself living in a former mining and former steel town during a period that social historians now call Postindustrial Decline, then you are entitled to a bit of comfort. (The once-proud port might as well change its name to Former: its future was all in the past.) It is surely no coincidence that, at the end of the twentieth century, it’s the rich who are most successful at being thin; they aren’t in need of comfort, being so comfortable already. Walking down the main street, she notices people have gotten shockingly, distressingly fat. When she was a child, if you were poor, you were thin.
“Skin and bone. There’s nothing left of him,” her aunties would report with grim relish of a neighbor who had lost his job in the pit.
She’s glad Marcus and Molly aren’t with her. When she pushes open the front door, the smell of her mother’s last illness comes down the stairs to greet her. Of course, Greta had refused point-blank to be ill. In the final few weeks, when her balance was, as even she had to admit, “not szo good,” she still insisted on going upstairs to bed by herself, even though Petra had made up the couch in the front room. Greta fought the last battle with her preferred weapons: Teutonic stoicism and Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass.
Petra pushes the glazed door into the kitchen. The cabinetry, a buttery apricot with brass rings for handles, and the chubby Belfast sink date from when the house was built more than seventy years ago. She opens the fridge and registers its contents—three slices of ham wrapped in foil, half a yogurt with a plastic-wrap hat, three tomatoes and some peas from the garden, still in their pods. Her parents grew up during the war—her mother in Germany, her dad on a local farm. For that generation, she thinks, it wasn’t just food that was rationed. Feelings were rationed, too. They were more frugal with emoti
on, always keeping something in reserve.
Long ago, she remembers her mother going berserk in this kitchen after Petra had wandered in while studying for an exam and had absentmindedly helped herself to a hunk of Cheddar.
“When I was your age I would have made that piece of cheese last a week,” her mother snapped, snatching the Tupperware container from Petra’s hand and slamming it back in the fridge.
Standing at the foot of her bed later that evening, her dad, the peacemaker, said, “What you have to understand, cariad fach, is that people who have been hungry, really hungry, mind, well, they’re not the same as people who haven’t known hunger.”
Everything in the house is exactly as Petra remembers. The upright in the front room has a Chopin prelude open on the stand; Petra tries a few notes, but hearing her father’s piano is unexpected agony, like slicing open a finger. After Dad died, her mother had started to like and value him; she polished the memory of a man who was only ever drone to her queen bee while he was alive.
Back in the hall, the phone on the wicker table is the one her parents had installed more than thirty years ago. There was a flurry of excitement when it was first put in. So rarely did they have visitors that the telephone engineer made a lasting impression. A cheerful man in blue overalls, he warmed the house several degrees just by entering it.
“Lovely place you got here, Mrs. Williams. Righto, then.”
Petra loved that new phone: it brought a little futuristic glamour to a household that might as well have been in nineteenth-century Prussia. The phone was avocado with a darker green dialing circle. Petra remembers calls she made on that phone that felt so urgent the dial seemed to take forever to come back. “Three-two-five-eight,” her mother would answer, long after such formality started to sound stilted and faintly comical and the number itself had been lengthened and relengthened by ever-changing phone companies.
It’s not always easy to recognize the significant moments of your life as you’re living them, but Petra understands this is one of them. To stand in that hall and to realize that neither of her parents will ever answer the phone again. Nor will she ever need to dial their number. Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.
Upstairs, in her parents’ room, she pulls back the heavy lined curtains. The small garden below, always so neat while her dad was alive, is in open rebellion as though, freed from her mother’s reproving gaze, the plants had suddenly decided to throw a wild party. Swarming up the sooty brick wall, pastel garlands of sweet peas are wilting under their own abundance. The sweet peas need to be picked so the flowers come again and again. Mum taught her that. Petra will do it later.
First, her mother’s wardrobe, which dominates the master bedroom. Double-fronted mahogany, it has a full-length mirror with a pretty beveled edge that winks like diamonds when they catch the light. Such heavy stuff has fallen out of fashion. Brown furniture, they call it these days. In Petra’s south London home, Molly keeps her skinny jeans and Topshop gear in a small canvas closet that fastens with a zipper. It looks like something forensic scientists might erect at the scene of a murder. The little tent gives off an attitude that says clothes are lighthearted, cheap and disposable. Not so Greta’s astonishing wardrobe, which resembles a Lady chapel constructed to celebrate eternal femininity. Petra twists the brass key and hears a satisfying click.
Inside it’s like a magazine feature on “How a Woman Should Take Care of Her Clothes.” Neat racks of shoes and boots at the bottom. The spare shoe trees look faintly sinister, like puppets without strings. There are none of those bunched-up sweaters that Petra stuffs any old how onto her shelves when she’s in a hurry. She strokes a tweed suit with a nipped-in waist and what looks like a mink collar. It could have been worn by Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Such a delectable suit demands Cary Grant at the very least to scramble up a cliff face and pay homage to it. Petra buries her face in the dense caramel twill, where she can still smell traces of her mother. Echt Kölnisch Wasser No. 4711. Eau de cologne No. 4711, the pungent ghost of gin and freesias. Now she starts to cry properly. For all the beautiful places that this lovely suit never traveled to, for the beautiful woman who would have loved those places if only she’d had the chance. In the drawers down one side of the wardrobe, she finds scarves, both chiffon and silk, and a separate compartment for handkerchiefs, folded and ironed into perfect miniature sails.
Her mother believed in what are now called investment pieces: lambswool sweaters in timeless neutrals, folded with tissue paper that crackles when you touch them, two good crisp white cotton shirts on padded hangers. Petra was planning to keep a couple of things for herself and Molly, then take a carload down to the church hall, but this is not secondhand, it’s vintage. Her mother deserves a costume museum, not a jumble sale.
Petra is feeling behind the coats when she finds it. She isn’t looking for it. She isn’t looking for anything. She is reaching for a pair of black patent heels, the shine still on them after thirty years, when her fingers brush against something colder than leather. She takes it out. A biscuit tin with a lake and mountains on the lid. A Christmas gift from an aunt in Heidelberg. Inside the tin, there are postcards, black-and-white snapshots of her parents in their youth, and a sheaf of letters tied together with a red ribbon.
The pink envelope is out of place. It has smiley faces and a rainbow sticker on the front. Her heart jumps when she sees it’s addressed to her, but there is something strange about the handwriting. It takes a moment, and half a lifetime, to recognize it as her own. Not her own now, but the way she used to write, a long time ago, with flowery loops and hearts instead of dots over the i’s. The envelope has been opened, and it is easy to slide out the letter inside. She reads it for the first time in her life. Then she reads it again to make sure.
She gets up and walks across the landing and pushes the door into her old bedroom. The brown candlewick coverlet is still on the bed, and slightly damp to the touch, though twenty-five years of light streaming through the sash window has faded the deep chocolate to a moldy olive-yellow. She kneels down, reaches under the bed, puts her finger into the opening between the floorboards, lifts the plank and pulls out a pile of magazines and a gray transistor radio. She flicks the switch.
Ridiculous. Completely insane. She half expects to hear his voice.
Cherish is the word I use to describe,
All the feelings that I have hiding here for you inside.
But there is nothing. She opens the flap on the back of the radio with her fingernail and wrinkles her nose; acid has wept from the batteries and eaten into the plastic.
Petra kicks off her funeral shoes and lies back on the bed, clutching the letter and the magazines to her chest. How could her mother have kept it from her? She must have known what the words would mean. “You, Petra Williams, are the winner of the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz.” The magazine is delighted to tell her that she has won the trip of a lifetime to travel with her nominated friend, Sharon Lewis, to meet David himself on the set of The Partridge Family in Los Angeles.
El Ay.
At the bottom of the letter, a name has been typed with such enthusiasm it has perforated the paper. Zelda Franklin. The date is July 22, 1974, almost twenty-four years to the day. This new loss, so stupid and insignificant compared to the other vast, overwhelming losses, flares up inside. Her lungs feel licked by a righteous flame. Petra, such a good girl for so long, blazes with the injustice of it. Happiness had come to her in a pink envelope, and it had been stolen from her. I was the winner, she thinks, amazed. I am the winner.
How could she do that? How could she? The grief she feels for Greta is not just to do with death; mother and daughter were lost to each other long before the woman with the perfect silver perm slipped away with steely grace in the room across the landing. Mingled with raw grief is the sorrow of knowing that her mother actually chose to keep
such a pleasure from her. Greta saw pop music as a fungus on the face of civilization and, worse still, a blight on her daughter’s future life as an artist. Petra runs her nails up and down the furry channels of the bedspread, feeling the strength in her fingers.
“Every day, really you must practice if you want to be the best,” her mother told her, and she had never disobeyed.
Greta had been right. Practice did make perfect, but where had thirty years of practice gotten Petra? Perfectly sad. She’s not sure how long she lies there or when a plan starts to take shape in her mind.
Sitting up, she retrieves her shoes and collects the magazines she has disinterred from her old hiding place. Who knows, they might give Molly a laugh. In the mirror above the little bookshelf, with its row of Enid Blytons, Petra catches sight of herself. It’s her father she sees looking back at her. Dad would never have put a dream come true in a box and kept it like a guilty secret.
Going downstairs, the letter tucked safely in her pocket, she wonders what would happen if she were to call that magazine up now and say to them, Please can I have my prize? Silly. There wasn’t any them left to call. No magazine, no Zelda Franklin, no Partridge Family. Petra takes the magazine from the top of the pile so she can get a proper look at the face on the cover. The eyes had it. Deep green pools you could pour all your longing into. He was so lovely; still lovely. Once he meant the world to her. And she had won the opportunity to tell him so. That moment was lost forever, like a million other moments in a human life. Passing the wicker hall table on her way to the front door, Petra inserts a finger into one of the holes on the avocado phone; dragging it round, then letting it go, she hears the familiar mechanical whirr as the dial returns to its position. But even if there were people to call, what on earth would they think of her?
I Think I Love You Page 20