I Think I Love You

Part Two
1998

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets
I beg your pardon,
I never promised you a rose garden.
Along with the sunshine,
There’s gotta be a little rain sometimes.
“(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden”
12

The day her mother died, she found out her husband was leaving her. It certainly made for an interesting funeral.

Petra is in the front pew of the chapel wearing a broad-brimmed black hat. Her husband sits next to her, weeping. One day there will be a detective of tears. That’s what Petra is thinking. She has read recently in a magazine that scientists have discovered that real tears, tears of genuine and heart-wrenching sorrow, have a different chemical composition to the ones people cry when they watch a sad movie. Or the ones people cry if they have been caught out loving someone they shouldn’t. A woman who isn’t their wife, for example. There are oceans of fake tears out there, when you come to think about it, and now they have a way of telling.

Petra thinks the detective would suggest a way of trapping your husband’s tears. On a Kleenex you handed him, perhaps, as he explained how much he hated the thought of leaving you and his thirteen-year-old daughter.

“You are my world. I may be physically absent, but emotionally I’m still here,” the husband might say, just as Marcus had said to Petra, dabbing his eyes.

Gently, she would take the tissue from him and seal it in a cellophane bag. Later, the detective would take the Kleenex to a laboratory, where technicians in white coats would reconstitute the dried tears in a test tube. A letter with the results would arrive about a week later. Then you would know. One way or the other, you would know. What your husband’s tears meant. The exact proportion of grief to guilt, of regret to relief, of salt to water. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me …

Petra can hear the waves outside, hurling themselves against the shingle. The chapel is just across the road from the beach. It’s a beautiful summer’s day out there, a fact that can barely be registered inside this brown building, which seems to have been designed to keep in the dark and the damp. She can hear the cries and shouts of the tourists, which to her ears sound more like pain than pleasure.

Petra tries to stop her mind wandering. This is my mother’s funeral, she tells herself. My mother is dead. Impossible. My mother is in that coffin. Greta has loomed so large in her life that it will take more than a funeral and a coroner’s certificate to convince Petra that she is gone.

She is aware of Marcus in the pew beside her. Men don’t cry as easily as women. Their tears seldom come out without a fight. Her husband’s shoulders shudder slightly under his good gray coat with the black velvet lapels, the one she picked out for him before he did a series of recitals in Germany and Austria last year. Petra can hardly remember him crying, at least not since Molly was born, but in the past month Marcus has broken down more times than she can count. Since that Saturday afternoon when she got home, unexpectedly, from teaching at a workshop in Chiswick and the phone in the kitchen rang twice, then stopped for a few seconds and rang twice again. Petra picked it up, expecting to hear her mother’s voice. Instead a girl had said: “You don’t know who I am.”

Petra feels the wifely impulse to reach across and comfort Marcus, a powerfully instinctive thing, but she is surprised to observe that her hand flatly refuses to obey the instruction the brain is sending it. Her fingers flex inside the stretchy black gloves bought from a market stall in town less than two hours ago. She’d thought only at the last minute that her mother would be upset if she didn’t wear gloves. The gloves make her hands feel webbed. She thinks of the black plastic feet of Canada geese.

For the first time, it occurs to her that she is now a source of misery to the man she has spent most of her adult life with, an obstacle to his happiness. Marcus probably wishes it was her in the coffin.

Petra shuts her eyes quickly to edit out this thought, then glances around at the congregation. For an elderly woman who kept herself to herself and who, throughout Petra’s childhood, discouraged visitors by ignoring the front doorbell and admitting only people who persevered and came round the back, her mother has drawn a decent crowd. There are officials and regulars from the chapel, two immaculate ladies from the department store where her mother worked briefly in hats, gloves and bags; and there is a surprisingly good turnout from her father’s family, most of whom her mother cordially loathed because they worked with their hands. Probably they’ve come along to hear the famous cellist.

Across the aisle, Petra’s Auntie Mair, frail now with a heavily bandaged leg, gives Marcus the smile people smile at those they’ve seen on TV: both overfamiliar and unsure. In response, Marcus bestows on Auntie Mair the smile you would expect—friendly enough not to seem grand or up himself, but sufficiently cool and distracted to suggest that any further attempt at contact would be unwise. Petra feels sorry for him, almost. A funeral must be a grim and awkward place to be when your mother-in-law is in the coffin and her only child has recently found out that you’re in love with someone else.

After she hung up on the girl, the phone in the kitchen rang again almost immediately and Petra snatched at it, ready now to say all the things she had been too shocked to say before. She bungled the receiver, which clattered off the wall and dangled by its cord a few inches above the cat’s bowl. When Petra finally managed to hold the phone to her ear, she found it wasn’t the girl after all; it was Glenys, her mother’s neighbor.

“I’m so sorry, she’s gone,” Glenys said.

“What? Who’s gone? Oh God.”

No news so awful but Glenys wanted to be first with it.

Petra had felt the need to call someone. The benign June light slanting into the kitchen through the apple-green blinds was the same as it had been just a few seconds earlier, as were the blameless washing-up brushes standing at attention in their wire basket, the picture of Molly on the pinboard next to the phone, smiling and freckled in her Pippi Longstocking costume for World Book Day. Petra had spent hours braiding orange wool around two pieces of bent coat hanger so that Molly’s braids would stick out just like Pippi’s. Her mother had been a genius at braids, a talent that seems to be woven into the German DNA. She used to brush the hair fiercely till it shone, then pull it tight from the root until Petra’s scalp squealed for mercy.

She experiments with the idea of her mother being in the past tense, but, no, her brain won’t permit it. And what about that girl? Surely you should be able to call some kind of emergency service and say, “Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I am unable to process these two appalling blows simultaneously. Can I arrange to have one of them taken away?”

In the chapel this drowsy afternoon, with its glowering, eagle-winged pulpit and its tall, sightless windows, two kinds of grief are twined tightly together in Petra’s heart: one grief for her mother, another for her marriage. And maybe, to complete the braid, a third: some nameless hurt that is slowly starting to take shape in her mind.

“Let us pray,” she hears the minister say a long way off.

When man and wife kneel, it disturbs a cold mustiness in the tapestry cushions, which smell to Petra, as they always have, of God and rain. She must know every single kneeler in the place. Her mother embroidered several of them herself until she began to curse her failing eyes. Bad eyes Petra has inherited. At the age of thirty-eight, she is now both short-sighted and long-sighted. Recently, she has found herself joining the ranks of those in supermarkets who bring tins right up to their nose and then hold them at arm’s length to try to read the ingredients. Today, even with her contact lenses in, she has to squint to make out the words of the hymns.

Because the chapel is so close to the sea, practically in the water when the tide is high, the prayer books have always been briny with damp. On winter Sundays during her childhood, she remembers peeling the pages apart to find the psalm. The pages were so frail they were more like skin than paper. Whenever they sang “For Those in Peril on the Sea,” the choir locked in unequal struggle with the squalling seagulls on the roof, her dad used to say the same thing: “Champion! Well, we’ve got the sound effects anyway.”

Champion was her father’s word to acknowledge anything that added to the sum of human happiness, that exclamation always being accompanied by a brisk gleeful rubbing together of his hands, as if he were a Boy Scout trying to start a fire. “There’s champion for you, Petra fach.”

People complain that the old start repeating the same stories again and again, and they do, oh they do, but Petra has learned the hard way that all irritation is instantly forgiven when the old are no longer around to tell the story one more time. She would give anything to have her father back here with her, even for five minutes, and to hear him make that lame joke about the seagull-backing singers. The replacement organist, presently toiling away in the balcony at the back of the chapel, isn’t a patch on Dad. After six years, she still thinks of Eric as new. He has problems with his pedaling. Each verse ends a beat or two after the singing with an apologetic, bronchial wheeze. Petra winces; she can put up with anything—bad eyes, bad weather, bad husband—but bad music, that she never will be able to bear.
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us, when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
The English words are unfamiliar. She realizes she knows the hymn only in Welsh. The translation must be for Marcus’s benefit. It is exactly the kind of detail her mother would fuss about, always worrying that they would look provincial and common in front of Marcus’s family, who lived in a converted mill in the Cotswolds and who went to great lengths to make the Williamses feel at ease. As if Greta could ever be relaxed with a woman called Arabella who struck up a conversation about color schemes. Her mother disliked Arabella on sight, and neither woman knew that it was because Marcus’s mother was a designer-clad reminder that Greta had married beneath her station.

After the first verse, Petra can’t sing anymore, though her mouth continues to mime the Welsh words.

You don’t know who I am, the girl had said.

Didn’t she? Not in person, maybe, but Petra thinks that at some animal level, some molecular level of body chemistry, she knew exactly. Not who the girl was, but of her existence. There were none of the obvious clues. Marcus was far too fastidious for lipstick on collars or suspicious florist’s receipts. Far from being guilty and distracted, as men having affairs are supposed to be, he had seemed energized and attentive; he had even started driving Molly to her sleepovers and piano lessons, which had delighted Petra, always the designated family chauffeur despite her lack of confidence behind the wheel. Some things were different, though. When they were having sex, Marcus had difficulty finishing, and he had taken to flipping her over to get the job done. When she asked him about this, after a few glasses of wine and keeping the tone deliberately light, he gave that rueful little-boy grin of his and said it excited him. She was relieved to have his explanation, at the same time as being unconvinced. Really, she thought, the truth was that he couldn’t come if he saw her face. Much easier to imagine another’s face if your wife’s was buried in the pillow. Back late from a concert in Oxford one night, he rolled over in bed and said, “I want to f*ck your mouth.” It was not a line that belonged in their life together—it came from another play entirely—and the instant he said it she must have known what it meant, but she tidied it away neatly in the marriage drawer marked PRIVATE, and forgot.

Petra’s dad was never sure about Marcus. He always said Mark, then paused before the us, like a horse balking at a difficult fence, a tic that infuriated her mother, who adored her son-in-law unreservedly. Marcus’s combination of talent, acute sensitivity, quick temper and arrogance were delightful to Greta, because she believed them to be the ingredients of genius. Much could be forgiven such a man. It was kind, devoted underachievers like Petra’s father who could not be tolerated. Would her mother have thought that screwing a twenty-five-year-old violinist was just another perk of the artistic condition?

No, not screwing. “Philandering,” Petra corrected herself quickly, seeing her mother’s cool stare of disapproval.

Greta could not abide coarseness of any kind. She had stopped taking The Times after the paper started calling it sex instead of sexual intercourse. You never heard the word bastard pass her lips, only illegitimate. Long after the concept had lost its stigma, her mother would point to some sweet, apple-cheeked baby parked in a stroller outside the Co-op and murmur darkly, “Kerry’s illegitimate boy.” Her mother was stuck in the past. Bastard now meant something else entirely.

Like Petra’s husband, for instance. As Marcus edges out of the pew and moves purposefully to the front of the chapel, Petra is able to observe her partner of almost fifteen years as others in the congregation must see him. Age has not withered him; in fact, age is struggling to land a finger on the man. “Hunky and soulful. And there’s lots of him. You lucky thing,” a friend had said to her, in the early days, and Petra had blushed; it was as though the friend had stood beside their bed and watched them sleep and wake. Seen Petra enfolded by those lazy, unclumsy limbs. Marcus has none of the artist’s traditional pallor; he is in excellent health, always has been, with strong features that will never grow gaunt or—and this, Petra has observed, is a horribly common fate for middle-aged men—fatten and droop until the handsome youth becomes a doughy, red-cheeked squire. Not Marcus, damn his eyes. Look at him. Turned forty last year, but he still has a thatch of wavy dark hair through which, now and then, he runs a distracted hand, to mess it up rather than neaten it. A dash of Ted Hughes, someone said, and it’s true. Under the decency, and despite the finesse, there is something wild not far below. Something you can’t trust.

Marcus sits down, pulls the cello to him and sweeps the bow across the strings in a single motion. Whoever said that music was invented to confirm human loneliness obviously never heard her husband play. When he did the Elgar in Bristol last year, one reviewer said his performance was “at once muscular and sublimely sensitive.” Yes, and who got the most out of those muscles?

As his bow moves, and the music swells, her anger rocks back and forth. Even if the detective of tears could get a sample from her husband, Petra isn’t sure she’d really want to know if they were genuine. When he said that he still loved her, did he mean it? We live in such strange times, Petra thinks. Science is solving all the secrets of mankind, one by one—predispositions to disease, the brain chemistry of criminals, DNA tests to establish fatherhood, the reason women prefer to mate with alpha males and live with beta ones. But human nature just isn’t keeping up with all this information. It isn’t ready for so much truth. Not all at once. Sometimes not knowing is as much as you can bear.

Petra feels a sudden longing for him. Not for the weak, evasive man who has been accompanying her to marriage counseling while moving in with a violinist who looks insultingly like Petra at the same age. Marcus, the man who always despised the clichés of bourgeois escape, has set up home with his young mistress on a houseboat near Teddington.

“A houseboat,” Petra had repeated dully. Was any love nest in the annals of adultery more designed to make you want to summon a nuclear submarine?

“Mum, it’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

Molly is standing next to her, stroking her arm, speaking softly. It’s only when her daughter pushes the tissue into her gloved hand that Petra realizes that she is the one who is crying. The tears are running down her cheeks in such profusion that they feel like they’re tying a ribbon of water under her chin. She can feel the wetness seep under the collar of her new black linen jacket. Twice as expensive as anything else in her wardrobe, but she couldn’t let her mother down on this important day.

“Petra, taking the control of your emotions, please,” says her mother, and she feels her chin lift automatically and her spine stiffen.

Posture can do a lot for a woman, her mother was always quite specific about that. If you carry yourself well, if you pull in your tummy, using your muscles as the body’s own girdle, then middle-age spread was not the inevitability some liked to pretend it was. All her married life, her mother took pride in the fact that she weighed exactly the same as she had on her wedding day. Greta took the Helena Rubinstein line: there are no ugly women, just lazy ones.

From the summer’s day far away come the ding-dong strains of an ice-cream van. A tune that was meant to have been composed by Henry VIII for his future queen had ended up as tinky-tonk chimes summoning day-trippers at a Welsh seaside resort to buy a cone. What were the odds against that?

“Mum?”

“I’m fine,” Petra whispers back, and lays a hand on her daughter’s hair. Molly is so much fairer than Petra, blessed with her grandmother’s coloring and the same angelic, heart-shaped face.

“Mamgu would love it that Daddy is playing Bach for her,” says Molly, and Petra gives a watery smile of assent.

Molly is just thirteen and grieving for her grandmother. Merciful, uncomplicated grief. It was an unexpected bonus of motherhood, the way that Petra’s daughter and Petra’s mother had loved each other unconditionally and had been able to show that love in a way Petra found so hard to do with Greta. On the rare occasion when her mother laid a hand on Petra’s arm, she experienced it almost as an electric shock.

The music comes to its solemn end, like a life well lived, and Marcus lifts his bow and throws back his head as if to shake himself from a trance. You can tell the congregation wants to applaud, but some unwritten rule says you aren’t supposed to clap in church. Do they really think God would be jealous of the talents of His own creation?

Marcus rejoins them in the pew and glances sideways to see his triumph reflected in his wife’s eyes. She will not look at him. Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously. Petra studies her webbed fingers as the pallbearers lift the coffin onto their shoulders. What would her mother’s parting advice be as she goes to her grave? She would tell her to win Marcus back, no question. Greta wouldn’t let a man of that caliber go without a fight. “Top-drawer,” that’s what she called Marcus. Marcus’s family was out of the top drawer. It had pained Petra to hear her say it; the way her mother, one of Nature’s aristocrats, was so impressed by the class into which her daughter had married.

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 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.
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?