I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  “What became of her, then?” Sharon had asked about a girl from the old days when they talked after her mother’s funeral.

  What became of me? Petra had thought, though not said. She thinks it a lot lately. Petra Williams, what on earth happened to her?

  Childhood had felt as if it were going to last forever. A single Sabbath was like a month of Sundays. Once she left home, went to study music in London, started making her own decisions and got married to Marcus, things speeded up. The years passed like water through your fingers, especially once you had a child and started to live for someone else. These days, another Christmas seemed to arrive just as she’d put the decorations from the previous year back in the loft. Dad died when he was sixty-four; she was over halfway there and she had barely gotten started. If she and Sharon had taken that trip to Los Angeles in 1974 and met David, life might have worked out differently. There was someone else out there she had been destined to be, and she’d never met that person because her mother hadn’t handed over the pink envelope. So Petra swallowed her pride, rang the magazine company and asked nicely for her prize.

  Now she balls her fists into her eye sockets till the dark screen of vision is filled with stars. Petra has done plenty of shaming things before, but never has she made a fool of herself quite like this. Her dreams of escape, and there have been many, have stayed locked firmly inside her own head. She has gone to the cinema and seen men up on the screen that she fell in love with, and sometimes she has taken those men home to her bed. It was such a comfort when your troubles were piling up, to be able to lose them all in the arms of Jeff Bridges.

  “Hey, don’t worry, baby,” Jeff would say with a shake of that leonine head, and then he’d kiss your troubles away. But the Jeffs were illusions made from wishing. You didn’t actually want Jeff Bridges to take you to the supermarket and help you pick out your fruit and veg, did you?

  Now she was going to meet David Cassidy, the illusion of illusions, suddenly made flesh, years after giving up the ghost. Carrie said that death and grief could have a disinhibiting effect. Loss made you trigger-happy.

  Trigger-unhappy, Petra thinks. What made her make that call? Was it the misery of Marcus finally leaving, like a low, cramping period pain? Was it sprawling like a stunned starfish in the marital bed and realizing that she liked to sleep on her back, rather than in the scrunched fetal position she had adopted every night for fifteen years to give her husband the space he needed? Was it fear that no one would ever want to have sex with her again? Or was it the greater, though related, anxiety that she could never bear to undress in front of a man who wasn’t her husband? She couldn’t imagine being looked at without the protective gauze of indifferent familiarity. The day after her mother’s funeral, she went to the grocer’s down the hill from her parents’ house and Gwennie, behind the till, peered at her for what felt like a full ten minutes before saying, with dawning recognition, “Oh, there we are. You were Gillian Edwards’s little friend, weren’t you?”

  Perhaps she had been little, but no one was going to call her a friend of Gillian’s. The years had dimmed and soothed many hurts, but the name Gillian—even when it came attached to a perfectly nice woman—still caused her stomach to curdle with dislike. It was unfair the way that a name could never entirely be rinsed clean of the stain of an early hatred. All her life, Petra would approach any new Gillian like a bomb-disposal expert, primed for devastation.

  So successfully did she repress the memory of that foolish phone call that she was genuinely surprised when a woman named Wendy rang from Women’s Lives to say she wanted to do a feature on Petra going to meet her teen idol. These days, David Cassidy was doing a show in Las Vegas. Nightingale Publishing would fly Petra to Vegas, all expenses paid, and she would finally get a chance to meet her hero. Oh, and her friend could go, too, the one she had entered the competition with. Did they both mind coming into head office for a makeover? New haircut, makeup. Refresh your image, said Wendy. Everyone’s look gets a bit tired, doesn’t it? Most readers find it a really fun day out and pick up lots of useful beauty tips.

  Petra, who had stopped listening after the all-expenses-paid part, said thank you, it sounded wonderful. Replacing the phone in its cradle above the cat’s bowl, she felt afloat with a sense of possibility.

  Not everyone shared her keen sense of anticipation.

  “Tragic” was how Molly described it, momentarily removing the Sony Discman to which she was umbilically connected. Petra explained hesitantly that the magazine had rung with a date for the “makeover.” She found herself holding the word at arm’s length, as though in a pair of tweezers. She had only a dim idea of what a makeover would involve. Over the years, she must have seen thousands of “Before” and “After” pictures in magazines and sometimes wondered how the women fared when they took their glossy new haircuts, prettily accented features and rediscovered cheekbones home to their husbands. What did the New You do with the old man, and vice versa?

  “Sad, Mum, saaa-d,” said Molly. “You had a crush on him when you were my age. Most girls don’t like the same boy three weeks later. This is, like, twenty years.”

  Standing at the kitchen counter, preparing Molly’s favorite penne pasta, Petra gives the grater a sharp tap with a knife, so the trapped Parmesan falls onto the plate in a little landslide of pollen. As she transfers the grated cheese to a bowl and sets it on the table, she tries to explain that this is not about a teenage crush. It probably isn’t even about David Cassidy, not really. It’s about her, Petra: the mother formerly known as cellist. The urge to claim her silly prize is as powerful as the need to swallow or urinate. She desperately wants to find a way of telling Molly this, but the girl has already pulled on her headphones, listening to Destiny’s Child or Robbie Williams; going back to that private musical universe where she is happy and her parents are not getting divorced.

  “Embarrassing and tacky” was her husband’s verdict when he came round to pick up Molly. They were standing by the open front door, Petra inside the house twiddling with the latch, Marcus shuffling on the doormat, as though he had better places to be. In this new Cold War, the doorstep with its grubby sisal mat has become their Checkpoint Charlie, the place where Molly gets handed over to the other side. Each time, Petra senses the profound unnaturalness of the exchange, and wonders how long before it will feel normal to share her child, to divvy her up like a pie. The civilized arrangement, the one suggested by the glossy magazines, is hard to reconcile with the primitive tug in her gut that tells her not to hand over her daughter and the violent desire to snatch her back again.

  At the mention of the name David Cassidy, Marcus actually whinnied with distress, like a thoroughbred that finds itself entered by mistake in a donkey derby. Bad taste of any kind was a source of almost physical discomfort to him. Marcus shared Greta’s contempt for pop music and its brain-rotting properties. Privately, he also had his suspicions that Petra’s trip down memory lane was an attempt to get back at him for moving onto the boat with Susie, an act simultaneously so hurtful and destructive that someone else had to be blamed for it.

  “Christ, Petra, are you having some kind of midlife crisis?” said Marcus.

  Pot, kettle, black, thought Petra. Who’s having the midlife crisis, mister?

  Her mother had prevented her going to meet David almost a quarter of a century ago. Now her husband despised her for it, and her daughter said she was sad, which meant tragic, which meant pathetic or laughable, not sad, though sad was indeed what Petra was.

  “So, you gotta go, right?” Carrie concluded briskly during one of their tea breaks. Carrie hands her the last fig roll in the packet and points out that the Cassidy Vegas trip has all the ingredients of a very promising rebellion.

  “Aren’t they supposed to be for teenagers?” Petra asks dubiously.

  Carrie shakes her head. “Listen, hon, rebellions are wasted on the young. What the hell have they got to rebel against? You and I, on the other hand, have a wide range
of frustrations, disappointments and resentments, carefully accumulated over many decades. To my mind, the least we deserve is a little catharsis.”

  Petra laughs loudly, though without conviction. Why hadn’t she rebelled against her mother? Fear, obviously. Dread. But it was more than that; she had felt paralyzed, unable to assert herself. Unable to locate a self to assert, that was it. Petra had experienced something like hatred for her mother’s irrational outbursts of temper at her father, had sensed the awful unfairness of Dad’s being punished, not for who he was, but for who he wasn’t. But there was nothing she could do to help him, or to help herself, that wouldn’t make it ten times worse. So she withdrew into her music, which muffled the distant sounds of battle.

  Now, in her own home, when Molly yells from the top of the stairs, demanding some missing item of laundry, or tells her mum she just doesn’t get it, Petra tries to be glad.

  You have a child who can call you an idiot and says that she hates you, secure in the knowledge she will still be loved, Petra tells herself.

  It feels like progress, of a kind.

  In her marriage, Petra played second fiddle to her husband, which was funny when you came to think about it. Second fiddle. Technically, as a cellist she was his equal. At college they had vied for the same prizes, though Marcus always had the edge in drive and ambition. Anyway, it didn’t really matter because she worshipped him and she was delighted and astonished to be loved in return by such a man, such a catch. A son-in-law who practically made her mother swoon with approval. At the wedding, it was Greta who mouthed “I do” first.

  She heard Marcus before she saw him. Exploring the college basement during her first term, looking for the coffee machine, she found herself in a long corridor lined with practice rooms, which had portholes set high in the dark wood doors. As she waited for the thin, tawny liquid to fill the plastic cup, the sound of a cello came from the room opposite. She stopped dead, seeking to place it. Yes. Chopin. Introduction and Polonaise, early Chopin. “Drawing-room stuff,” one lofty fellow student had said to her once, tossing his hair, and she had thought, Not in my drawing room, mate. Wished she had said it to his face. Not that he would have understood; he couldn’t imagine a world where there were no drawing rooms. A world like hers.

  And now, here it was again; shorn of the piano accompaniment, played naked on a damp Tuesday morning, with rain in the air outside. Just the kind of morning that was crying out for Chopin to come and rescue it. Who was playing? Her fingers tingled. Odd reaction, not so very far away from lust. A chord of different feelings: admiration, curiosity, the faintest touch of envy. The best musicians answer something in you when you don’t even know the question. Petra couldn’t resist. She walked up to the door and, on tiptoe, peered through the porthole, like one passenger on a ship pursuing another. Marcus was sitting, half facing in her direction, head bowed, bow sweeping, eyes half lowered or closed, she couldn’t tell. When he finished, he opened them and looked straight at her, as if he knew she’d been watching. Probably had, the fiend. His lips were slightly parted, and he looked out of breath. It was another four years before she felt those lips on hers. Four years between the Introduction and the Polonaise. Dance with me.

  Petra had other boyfriends in the meantime. All of them English, all of them out of reach. Top drawer. They were amused by her accent, and, in the pub, they did impersonations of a cartoon way of speaking she had never heard.

  “Well, look you, there’s lovely, boyo.”

  Boyo?

  The proud daughter of a self-improver who swore by Reader’s Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” Petra had never heard such a thing, let alone said it. To her ear, this singsongy mimic sounded not Welsh but Indian, though, like a good sport, she laughed anyway and accepted another shandy. Colluding with what other people thought about you felt easier than explaining who you really were. The more English, the more cultured and the more alien the men, the more Petra wanted them. Getting the emotionally unavailable public schoolboy to become available to her, the girl from Gower, that was what gave her the special jazzed-up feeling, the feeling she craved. She hoarded their protestations of love like other girls hoarded jewels. Where was the thrill in conquering those who wanted you? She couldn’t see the point. Pain and joy braided tightly together, that was what Petra craved. And no one played that tune as well as Marcus.

  Oh yes, he had strummed her pain with his fingers, all right. Killed Petra with his song.

  “Well, that’s one of the most desirable properties off the market,” sighed Jessica, the viola player in her quartet, when Petra showed her the ring Marcus had given her in Florence. An emerald jealously guarded by two diamonds. The envy of other women sealed her happiness. She had never been the object of envy before and she noticed how it could fill you up, the same way thirsty flowers took in water. How had she, Petra, managed to win the unobtainable man? She felt blessed; better still, she felt chosen.

  So the rest didn’t matter. Second fiddle was the instrument she had always been destined to play, some small voice inside told her. Besides, it was only practical; you couldn’t really have two professional cellists in one house. So Marcus built his career on the public platform and, after a few well-received solo appearances, Petra began to scratch a living in the cracks—concerts with the quartet, session work, teaching. She did several lucrative stints as a backing instrumentalist on Top of the Pops, playing, as requested, in a short black skirt, which was meant to look sexy, but ended up gynecological, when your instrument was gripped between splayed knees.

  Marcus took out a bank loan to pay for a part share in a very valuable cello to use in recitals, and they needed her money to meet the day-to-day bills. The magazines she rarely had time to read these days had some fancy new term for what she did—portfolio career—but Petra knew what she was. Second fiddle.

  Everything changed when Molly Isolde was born at twenty-nine weeks. Her daughter was the size of a gym shoe. It was June, and Petra was due to play at the Wigmore Hall that lunchtime. Borodin, Second String Quartet. She was humming the Nocturne under her breath as she hurried to make up for time lost on a train delayed at London Bridge. The heat had taken the capital by surprise, just as London was always surprised, quite predictably, every summer by the sun and every winter by the cold.

  It was so damned hot, and she was breathing for two. The air struggled to reach the farthest corners of her lungs. Alveoli. She hadn’t thought of the word since she’d taken Biology. Lungs were structured like trees and alveoli were the little buds on the end of the branches. They played some key role in making the oxygen, she couldn’t remember what, but they weren’t making it now, or not fast enough, anyway. Petra was always amazed how the present and the past could be going on in your head simultaneously, like hundreds of TV channels behind your eyes. Here she was, in the thrumming center of London, yet also back in the Biology lab in South Wales, which reeked of gerbil sawdust and jars of formaldehyde.

  Oxford Street was packed, the shoppers moving slowly, torpid as carp in an overstocked pond. Petra was in a hurry, so she broke off the main road and took a shortcut up the small, L-shaped street by the Tube where she often stopped to buy a single mango from the fruit stall. She always took it to the square behind John Lewis. Mango eating, she firmly believed, should be a solitary activity because of the dribbling problems. So Petra was inching her way up Regent Street, maneuvering her bump and her cello like a plumber’s toolbag, when she felt the water sluicing down her legs. It wasn’t just a trickle of water, it was a comedy bucketful thrown by a clown.

  Embarrassment came first—she was Welsh, after all. Then panic. Fear took a little longer to kick in. A security guard outside Broadcasting House took pity on the pregnant woman crouching in a puddle on his patch of pavement. An ambulance was called and within minutes Petra was in the hospital. One of the best in the city, fortunately, with a specialized premature baby unit. When they were admitted—it was definitely they; she already thought
of the baby as a separate person—they were surrounded by broken, bloody, tearstained bodies.

  The doctor stuck in a needle, a steroid injection to encourage the baby’s lungs to grow faster. Undeveloped lungs could be a problem, he was saying. Alveoli again. But Baby was already on her way; there was no stopping her.

  “If You let her live, God, if You will please just keep her alive, I promise …”

  Petra began that sentence many times during Molly’s first few days, but she never completed it. It seemed beyond saying, beyond any words she knew at least, how much she was prepared to promise if her baby girl could pull off the miracle of survival. Her own life Petra would have discarded in an instant for the sake of this tiny stranger.

  She never knew a place called neonatal intensive care existed; most people are lucky because they don’t ever have to know. When you first go in, the unit looks a lot like a museum, except the exhibits in the glass cases are alive, or at least being kept alive by the machines, and by the fervent prayers of their parents. When Petra was wheeled in for the first time, still woozy and wearing her green hospital gown, she saw transparent box after box containing these anguished sketches of humanity. One of them was her daughter.

  Shrunken, with blue eyes the size of a five-pence piece, Molly barely looked like a baby at all. Her head was not much bigger than a lightbulb, and to Petra the filaments of the brain inside seemed just as fragile. The bonnet that Greta had knitted as part of a beautiful layette swamped the baby, so, for the first month, Molly wore one of the matching woollen bootees as a hat. (Petra still keeps that lucky sock in her bedside drawer—a little yellow from the passing years, and shockingly small.)

  She lived in the unit day and night with background music provided by the beeping and sighing of the machines. Each time the machine breathed for her, Molly’s throat gave a little froggy jump. As Petra found out, you learn a lot about yourself when you’re so close to that much vulnerability. You learned that if you’re tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever with your precious child.