I Think I Love You (26 page)

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 emotion, 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.

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
t is purely by chance that Marie takes the crazy woman’s call. She got in early to the magazine this morning with a hangover that made her head feel like an ostrich egg. Vast yet fragile, it might crack at any moment. She successfully transferred her head from her flat to the Golf and then from the car park to the lift and then to her office, over by the window, like someone balancing a crystal goblet on a playing card. Now, she sits at her desk with a large bottle of Evian and a triple espresso, taking alternate sips from each to suppress the nausea. Marie needs to think. But her skull, and the sudden unwanted awareness of her brain, parched and throbbing within it, makes thinking impossible.

Today is the big group editorial meeting at which she is going to have to pitch the success story of her title,
Teengirl
, against the other editors with their bullshit advertising claims, all strutting their stuff in front of the editorial director. Sasha Harper, the editor of
Babe
, will be there in her armor of choice: top-to-toe Prada with her trusty dagger, the Montblanc pen. At the thought of Sasha, Marie moans softly and plunges a hand into her desk drawer, groping for aspirin. Inside, her
fingers find something squidgy and cool to the touch, and recoil. Opening one eye with great care, Marie sees it is the condom that
Babe
recently stuck as a free gift on its front cover. Chocolate-flavored condoms for young girls.

Jesus. Everything about that was so wrong. Marie and Sasha are supposed to be colleagues on the same team; between them they dominate the teenage magazine market, which is growing by the day. Marie’s
Teengirl
focuses more on pop stars, young love and music, while
Babe
specializes in celebrity gossip, sex and its related problems. Far from supporting each other, the two women have become rivals, probably because the editorial director is the acknowledged guru of their market sector. They vie for the Boss’s approval like sisters fighting over a crumb of praise from a remote father. Everyone calls him the Boss, except Barry, the marketing director, who is an old friend and uses his first name.

Marie had no need of an alarm this morning. She woke feeling wildly alarmed at 4 a.m., three hours after going to bed. Marie’s subconscious allowed her to admit what she would never accept in daylight: she is losing the battle to Sasha. The battle of taste and sex and hard cash. Fourteen-year-old girls increasingly choose to dress like hookers while forty-year-olds dress like teenagers. There is no doubt in Marie’s mind that girls are desperate to grow up quicker. Even nine-year-olds in crop tops want to crash the party. Where once they sought advice on unsightly love bites, the readers now seem to gobble up stuff about oral sex, if
gobble
is the word she’s looking for.