I Think I Love You (15 page)

“What?”

“What’s that saying. I don’t know what?”

“What don’t you know?”

“French. You know. Johnny says something.”

“
Je ne sais quoi.
”

“That’s the one.”

“What is Petra’s tiebreaker, anyway?” Gillian rolled over on the grass, turning her back on Stuart and the rugby. Through lowered eyelashes she had been surveying her prey, but now, once again, we girls were briefly of interest to her.

“Not telling.” Sharon laughed with a flash of defiance. “It’s our secret. Petra’s and mine. We’ll send you lot a postcard from Beverly Wilshire if yer lucky.”

“Who’s Beverly Wilshire when she’s at home?” demanded Carol.

Sharon caught my eye and we burst out laughing. I suddenly realized what the unfamiliar feeling was I’d been struggling to put a name to. I was happy. It wasn’t just the horse chestnuts that were full of surging hope. We were going to win the quiz, but, better than that, I had begun to be accepted for who I was, maybe even liked, one of the best feelings you can have. Had Gillian sensed it? Did she decide there and then to take it away from me?

Just because she could.

When you first start learning the cello, the sound you make is raspy and tuneless. This instrument is a challenge. It hurts your fingers and leaves bright red points on the tips. I cried. My mother told me I must persevere. Her Aunt Petra had been a cellist in Berlin. Aunt Petra made a sound so beautiful, she said, it made the whole family cry. I wondered what it would be like to make my mother cry. The skin on my fingers grew hard. I persevered.

Miss Fairfax was my cello teacher. My best teacher, but also the weirdest. She had short gray hair, and a whiskery, wrinkled face, and she was one of those people who are so old it’s hard to tell whether they’re a man or a lady. She taught Latin as well as music, but no one listened. In class, Jimmy Lo said that Miss Fairfax looked like a tortoise in a wig. Even as I was laughing along with everyone else, I knew it was a terrible betrayal. She deserved better from me. In fact, she deserved everything I had to give. People said Miss Fairfax lost her fiancé in the Great War, which was so long ago that she couldn’t possibly still be alive. She played the cello in London for a long time, in a quartet that appeared at the Wigmore Hall. I’d seen a poster in a frame at her house.
JANE FAIRFAX: CELLO
.

After I passed Grade 8 when I was twelve, she said: “Now, Petra, we are entering another country.” She didn’t mention the country’s name. But once she’d introduced me to the Bach cello suites, I think I knew it was the country I wanted to live in.

Before I got in with Gillian’s group, I used to practice at least two or three hours a day. I had not been practicing hard enough for the Princess Margaret concert and Miss Fairfax knew it.

“Your cello is not a donkey, Petra. It’s a racehorse. I want to hear that cello resonating. At the moment, that poor cello is very glum and sad.” Miss Fairfax pulled a tragic-clown face.

Her downturned mouth, with all the wrinkles around it, was like a drawstring purse. I thought, That is what she will look like when she is dead.

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.