Each of Molly’s limbs was placed inside a tiny doughnut of foam to stop them from rubbing on the mattress. Any pressure on a preemie’s skin could be painful, the nurse said. A boy called Andy, barely out of his teens, he had spiky, gelled hair and moved in his soft shoes like a dancer. At first, Petra hardly dared touch Molly. If she held her hand next to the baby’s face, though, it did seem to calm her. Petra had this overwhelming impulse to fetch her cello and play; the baby had heard the cello every day for the seven months she’d been in the womb, so like her mother she must be missing it. Instead, Petra sang to her, humming the pieces they both knew by heart, her and the baby. The Bach suites, Elgar and the Borodin she’d been working on. Petra swore that Molly tried to turn her head.
In those first few weeks, Marcus came twice a day, bringing decent sandwiches and news and, best of all, simple animal comfort. Out in the corridor, Petra stretched her legs and recharged by burying herself in his arms, smelling the Marcus smell on his jacket. She saw that he was losing weight, his blue eyes staring out from damson sockets, and he had stopped shaving, so he was beginning to look like a holy man who has visions on top of a mountain.
James, who had been best man at their wedding, visited one Sunday and told Petra that Marcus had said the two girls in his life were suffering, and he could do absolutely nothing about it. The sense of impotence was terrible to a man who had always been able to fix everything with his hands.
One October afternoon, when Molly had just reached a normal birth weight, the consultant took Marcus and Petra into a side room. On the low pine table in front of them, there was an ominous box of Kleenex. The doctor offered water, which they declined. He was a big man, but sweet-looking; both burly and curly, with a snub nose. Petra thought instantly of one of those German teddy bears that fetch thousands at auction. If you pressed the doctor’s middle, he might have growled.
The consultant said that Molly was doing well. They were very pleased with her. The possible effects of oxygen deprivation, which had caused them concern, were no longer such a worry. Only time would tell for sure. Research suggested that babies as premature as Molly, even if they grew normally, could suffer some shortfall of confidence in adult life. It seemed the baby could carry a memory of its difficult start. Marcus and Petra should know, the doctor said, that Molly might experience some learning difficulties.
“We’re not expecting her to be prime minister,” Marcus snapped.
Until that moment, she didn’t know how angry he was.
Did Petra train as a music therapist because she had a premature baby who could have been brain damaged? What Petra knew was that by singing to her daughter, a newborn who looked a thousand years old, she became convinced that everything we are starts with music, that maybe music has the power to mend things that can’t be mended any other way. She sang to Molly and she believed the baby heard her song, that’s all.
A few days after Petra and the baby got home, Marcus told her that he’d been to bed with someone else while she was in the hospital. He’d been under terrific strain. Some girl in a northern orchestra, when he’d had to step in as soloist at short notice. The girl had become infatuated, clingy. It was nothing. He begged for forgiveness and Petra gave it gladly. Too quickly, she saw too late. Forgiveness needs to be earned, and thereafter, Marcus thought it was going cheap. Petra, for her part, could forgive but not forget.
The week after, her mother came up on the train to stay. She took charge of the bottles and the bed linen and the shopping and the cooking. The house soon had the pleasant hum of a well-ordered hotel. Petra, still in her dressing gown for long stretches of the day and leaking milk, was tearfully grateful. Greta was at the sink rinsing out the baby’s bottles with a long, narrow brush when Petra told her about Marcus and the affair. Maybe Molly’s arrival was the opportunity to open a new chapter of intimacy and trust with her own mother.
Greta listened intently, and finally she said: “You will have to make it up to him.”
“Make it up to him,” Petra repeated.
Her mother started fitting the teats back inside their white plastic surrounds with a rubbery snap. It was an unpleasant sound, oddly punitive.
“A man doesn’t like feeling in the wrong, Petra. It makes him unhappy,” Greta said, working methodically. “If you want to remain his wife, really you will have to help him to forgive himself. Ach, it’s the only way.”
The advice felt like it came from another age, one with gas lamps. Wasn’t that the kind of thing women did in an era before choices? But what choice did Petra really have? She had a tiny baby and no income; she and Molly were wholly dependent on Marcus’s success.
This was not love as Petra had understood it, or marriage, either, but she saw that her mother’s brisk advice was not simply hypocrisy; it was crude economics. She would have to make it up to Marcus for betraying her.
It would not be the last time. In an unwelcome moment of insight, Petra came to realize that, for Marcus, his affairs actually improved their marriage. He ran in late, his mistress’s sweat barely dry on his body, and bent tenderly to kiss his daughter doing her homework at the kitchen table. He romanticized their vulnerability, Molly’s and Petra’s, their helplessness; it stopped him from moving out, but he didn’t stay, either, not really.
Many years after neonatal intensive care, Petra picked up a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room and found a multiple-choice quiz titled “What Are Your Goals as a Mother?” It had honestly never occurred to Petra to have anything as ambitious as a goal for her child. Good health, holding close and staying alive was what it had been about with Molly from the very start, and that never changed.
For the most part, Molly confounded the gloomy predictions about delayed development, although she never did learn to tidy her room. If I had goals for my daughter, Petra thinks, what would they be?
To feel pleasure and ease in her own body. Not to stand hot and ashamed on the beach in a prickly towel tent with sand chafing her legs. Good friends and rewarding work. A kind man to love and respect her, who will be a devoted father for her children. Not to walk around all her life with a weighted heart.
Love can take so long to die. You think it’s dead, you think he’s trashed all the feelings you ever had for him. One day, he hands over his dirty sheets to be washed, because his houseboat has only cold water, and you feel sorry for him so you’re jamming them into the machine when you see that the sheets have these rusty islands on them, an archipelago of blood, her menstrual blood for Christ’s sake, and you are so enraged, so humiliated that he didn’t take care to spare you this fresh pain that you drop to your knees and you strike your head against the door of the washing machine. Better that you should hurt yourself than let him hurt you like this again.
This is what passes for logic when love has not died. You have sealed the chamber of the heart where the love for him used to live, sealed it in like nuclear waste, but there turns out to be another, smaller chamber where the love lives on. Stubborn, tenacious, enduring fucking love.
Why does Petra find it so hard to hate Marcus when hating him could set her free? It is the bittersweet knowledge that, if she accepts the man she has loved for so long is selfish and unkind, then the love itself may be rendered worthless. The love that brought Molly into the world, the love for which she has given up her life as a musician. A beloved child, a structure of shared friendships and obligations, birthdays, holidays spent on the Pembrokeshire coast and the Greek islands, everything that her marriage means made to look foolish and stupid and ugly.
So, stubbornly, Petra guards the love, refuses to give it up, even though the man who caused the love in the first place does everything in his power to erase it.
On the way to work, jostled in a crowded bus, its engine grinding and grizzling as it crests the hill, the soundtrack in her head is a wounded Joni Mitchell, singing a sad song about a love that’s gone.
15
Oh, Bill, this is Petra, today’s makeover victim. Pe
tra, this is William Finn, our editorial director.”
“Hello, Petra,” he says, holding out a hand and frowning. “Petra as in the Blue Peter dog?”
“Petra as in the Baader-Meinhof terrorist,” she says.
“Ah. I stand corrected. Mind if I take a chair?”
“They’re your chairs,” she says.
He perches awkwardly in the makeup seat next to her, a padded black plastic recliner with a headrest. It reminds Bill of his dentist; after a recent episode of root-canal work, this is not a happy association. At the shattering memory of the drill, Bill begins to cross his legs, then changes his mind as he feels himself start to slide backward. Before he knows it, they’ll have one of those hideous lilac capes around his neck and twists of tinfoil in his hair.
He wonders vaguely what he can have done to offend this woman he has never met before. Even by his standards, it is quite something to cause a major chill after a single sentence. The Blue Peter dog line was obviously not as amusing as he’d hoped. Maybe she’d heard it before.
When readers come in for a makeover they tend to be embarrassingly grateful, gurgling with excitement at entering the HQ of a magazine that they treat themselves to in the supermarket, in order to lighten the burden of the weekly shop. Occasionally, coming down in the lift, Bill has bumped into a couple of the Before and After candidates: chirpy as canaries with their new blow-dries, they stagger out of reception with carrier bags full of freebies and a set of professional photographs, bathed in artful radiance, to astound the old man back home. Bill has always wondered exactly how well the old man will respond to the New You that women these days seem to be so keen on. As men grow older, they tend to see change as suspicious—that is, if they notice it at all. Ruth used to tell him that she could switch all the furniture in their flat and he wouldn’t notice, so little attention did he pay to his physical surroundings. That wasn’t strictly true, although he did remember the day on which, dragging himself home after fourteen hours in the office, he poured, mixed, raised and drained an entire gin and tonic before realizing that what he was drinking from was, in fact, a squat new flower vase in frosted glass from Heal’s. In a panic, he threw the ice and lemon into the bin, dried the vase and pretty much got away with his own folly, although Ruth, coming in ten minutes later with a fistful of carnations, had wondered out loud, in some puzzlement, why the glass was so cold to the touch. A narrow escape; the cretinism of the male was a subject on which women’s research would never end.
Today’s Before and After is a different sort of customer. Most of her predecessors have been happy to be treated as guinea pigs for a day, as long as they go home more glossy than when they arrived. This one is less of a guinea pig, more of a cat. Dark, composed and cautious. The Crazy Woman, Marie had called her, but that isn’t true, unless the madness is tucked away, buried very deep. Nothing ungracious in her movements, no shrieks of hilarity or whines of complaint in her voice. Hard to pin down. She seems almost to be observing the makeover process at a distance, as though it were happening to someone else.
Bill wants to ask her about the quiz—their quiz, as he prefers to think of it. She had won it; he had compiled it, though she doesn’t know that. Not yet. He is sure the news will come as a surprise, but he needs some time with Petra to work out whether that surprise would or would not be pleasant. He has a faint memory, a shadow of a memory, of Zelda telling him to put the quiz together, and to do it in haste to meet a deadline. The Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz.
“Make it hard, William dear,” Zelda had called across the office, or something like that, presumably to sniggers from the men around the room. Make it taxing enough, in other words, to sort out the hard-core fans from the mere dilettantes who were moonlighting from their dreams of Donny Osmond or David Essex. And now, here it was, unearthed, brought back into the light an epoch later, like a sword hilt from an Anglo-Saxon hoard, and no less easy to decipher. Marie couldn’t find the quiz itself, but she had managed to dig up some old Cassidy material from the archive, bless her, and what struck Bill was how utterly impenetrable it was, even to someone who had once been steeped in Cassidy lore. Even to someone who, for eighteen months, had once been David himself.
Time had lent amusement, but no enchantment, to his time at Worldwind Publishing. Time in the slipstream of that squalid old shark Roy Palmer. Time with the redoubtable Zelda. Under her gentle prompting and, to be fair, her exacting standards, Bill had learned pretty much everything that had helped him to run magazines of his own. She would have been thrilled—genuinely moved, without the faintest shade of irony—to think of him reunited, now, with a devout reader of The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. It was Zelda who had warned him never to underestimate the primal power that the idol exerts over his fans, and here, in the chair next to him, her eyes firmly shut as her long dark hair is trimmed, sits the living proof that Zelda had been right.
How old is Petra? Bill is useless at ages. She had been a kid in 1974, that he knows for sure, so … But it isn’t about the math. As he studies her in the mirror, Bill registers calmly and without any ignition of desire that she is beautiful. Great bones, great brown eyes, something drowsy in them even when they opened wide. A cellist, someone had said. A real musician, not like him.
Mind you, sitting and staring at her will not do. He is the host; his job is to offer welcome. Also, Bill has just decided, he is here to establish a connection, build some kind of rapport—has to, if he is serious about this Cassidy feature that is taking shape like an Airfix model in his head. Part memoir, part meditation on the phenomenon of the teenage pop idol. “I Was the Real David Cassidy,” that kind of thing. Might work well in Gavin’s mag, you never know, for male readers who like to read. All three of them.
“I don’t remember the Baader-Meinhof gang’s having a terrorist called Petra,” Bill begins, uselessly, five minutes after his false start. Christ, no wonder she was ignoring him. “I know there was an Ulrike.”
“She was nineteen. Petra was. A hairdresser,” Petra says, with closed eyes. The lids are being painted a startling violet. “Went out in a hail of bullets. Like Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Ah, the hairstyles of the early seventies were certainly enough to drive a hairdresser to extreme lengths,” says Bill.
There is a laugh, but not from Petra. It rings out, strong and unabashed, from the blonde in the makeup chair on the other side of her.
“You’re telling me,” the woman says. “D’you remember that blimmin’ feather cut I had, Pet?”
“As if I could forget.” Petra smiles. “You looked like a sheep sheared by a drunk.”
The cheery blonde, whoever she is, has a good effect on her slender, dark friend. Bill sees Petra relax as they chat.
“Don’t think my hair’s ever grown back right, to be honest with you. Did you have a feather cut, then?” Sharon asks Bill.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Petra. “This is my friend Sharon Lewis. Sorry, Sharon Morgan. Sharon, this is Mr. Finn, who is the boss here and has come to have a laugh at the tragic women who are going to Las Vegas to meet their teen idol just in time for perimenopause.”
“Not at all,” says Bill. His ear is still adjusting to her tone. She is too quick for him. “I did have a Bowie cut, though. The plan was to look like Ziggy Stardust.”
“And how did it work out?”
“Not bad. I did actually end up looking quite like Ziggy. Just not the right Ziggy.”
“Which one did you look like, then?” Sharon asks.
“Next door’s cat.”
• • •
When Petra first announced that they had won the competition, Sharon hadn’t said, “What competition?” or “What are you on about?” or “After all this time?” or, worst of all, “So what? We’ve barely seen each other for the past ten years.” Although, God knows, any of those would have been a reasonable response. But Sharon, when the mood came upon her, or when happiness stole upon her, was ready to lose all reason. She had shouted, as i
f the years had fallen away, and it was still 1974, and Petra had just pushed open the bedroom door.
“You’re joking me, mun. We won? We won!” Then she burst out laughing.
As Petra remembered instantly, you didn’t really know how accurate the word burst was until you saw Sharon having a laugh. It sounded like a dozen paper bags being inflated and popped at the same time. Any louder and the neighbors would start banging on the walls. Lord knows what happened when she and Mal had sex; it would be like one of those major incidents where the police are forced to evacuate the area.
Armed with the phone number that Sharon had sent in a Christmas card, Petra had tracked her down to a modern cul-de-sac of detached homes. As Sharon had promised, it was a lovely spot. From the garden, you looked out across the beaten-silver sea to Pembrokeshire, where the mountains rose like smoke. The estate hadn’t existed when they were girls; if it had, they would have said it was posh or way above their station. Petra had arrived there to bring the good news; a couple of decades overdue, of course, but better late than never. And Sharon, once she’d stopped laughing, promptly went into a secondary burst, no less energetic than the first—into tears, this time, because it was impossible that Mal could be trusted to take care of their two boys while she was in Las Vegas.
“They’d get typhoid or something,” she said, kneading and tearing at a wad of paper tissues, which Petra had fetched from the bathroom as the burst began. “Can’t do it, sorry,” Sharon repeated, and went on saying so until Petra pointed out that missing out on the trip of a lifetime to meet David Cassidy was even more impossible than leaving Mal to deal with the kids.
They were surprisingly shy, the two friends, each trying to measure what time had done to the other woman’s face and body, without giving any outward sign that such an audit was taking place.
I Think I Love You Page 24