I Think I Love You

14

So, what’s the worst that can happen? Either you find yourself in the presence of the guy you worshipped and adored or he’s a sort of pickled Liberace.”

Carrie fishes the tea bags out of the mugs and drops them in the sink. “Do you want milk?”

“And sugar, please.”

“Milk in tea I can just about do. Sugar is kind of against my religion as a person from San Francisco,” Carrie says, reaching for the box of Tate & Lyle, which is soggy from standing too long on the draining board. “One lump of type-two diabetes or two?”

Petra doesn’t reply. It’s the start of the working week and she is fiddling with her bow. She takes some rosin and draws the bow across it, giving a little shudder at the beginning and the end. She pulls the cello to her and makes the loudest noise she can. Lately, for some reason she has taken to playing a few bars of Led Zeppelin as a warm-up. When she was in the sixth form at school, Led Zeppelin was what all the boys who couldn’t play the guitar played on the guitar. It doesn’t sound all that great on the cello, but she finds the burst of aggression strangely soothing.

The rain is tapping out a furious rhythm on the windows of the center. Inside, the two women feel as snug as if they were in the cabin of a tiny boat lit by oil lamps. The harsher the elements outside, the deeper their contentment. Carrie and Petra get a lot of client referrals from local hospitals and social services, kids from homes of scarcely credible brutality who often have an angry response to the therapy, at least at first.

“Shut yer face, woman,” one boy said to her over and over.

Karl, with a body two sizes too big for him, smashed an impressive number of percussion instruments, including a drum that, strictly speaking, should have been unbreakable. Such cases have lost their power to shock her. If you’ve never known harmony in your brief life and your days lack any rhythm because your drug-addict parents keep such strange hours, why wouldn’t you take it out on a snare drum? Many of the children Petra sees have severe learning difficulties.

“Your nutters.” That’s what Marcus called them. “For God’s sake, Petra, why are you wasting your talent on those nutters?”

Let me in, let me in, the rain taps irritably on the windows. The staff room overlooks a small park, really a picnic rug of grass that functions as the local dog toilet. When people in London talk about green spaces it makes Petra laugh. If you come from South Wales, the grass on the other side never looks greener; it always looks yellow, or shitty brown. As she gets older, she finds she suffers more from hiraeth; a word with no exact equivalent in English, it means a powerful yearning for the place you came from. She has lived in London longer than she lived in Wales, more than half her life, yet there is some stubborn part of her that prevents her calling this city home. The hiraeth feels like an extra muscle of the heart that contracts painfully whenever she thinks of the hills and of the rain falling in a curtain over the sea.

It is supposed to be summer, but the south of England has been hit by freak floods. In London it has been raining so continuously that you notice the deluge only on the rare occasions that it stops. Dogshit Park has become a lake of mud.

Carrie passes Petra her mug of tea and a packet of fig rolls, which have become the women’s private joke and their public addiction. Petra takes two and breaks one in half before biting into the figgy ooze.

“Hey, since you got back from Wales you’ve been inhaling sweet things?”

Carrie’s drawl swoops up at the end of the sentence, turning every statement into a question. It’s an inflection the Welshwoman and the Californian have in common.

“Stress,” Petra says lightly. “Death, divorce and what’s the third thing that’s meant to be one of the most stressful life events?”

“David?” asks Carrie.

“You’re just jealous.”

“Jealous? Of you going to Vegas to meet David Cassidy?” Carrie shakes her sleek gray head and her hoop earrings tinkle with silvery mirth. “C’mon, I wouldn’t have given David a suck of my ice pop. I was a Bobby Sherman girl.”

“Who’s Bobby Sherman?”

“Oh. Just the fluffiest, cutest-smiled, swingiest-hipped, hottest teen idol who ever lived, that’s all.”

“Bobby Sherman?” Petra speaks the name with the incredulous condescension that the true believer reserves for any teen idol besides her own. “How many fans did he have then?”

“Just thirty million, plus me and Marge Simpson,” says Carrie.

Petra sets down her bow and checks her watch. Nearly time for her next session. She must pop to the loo first; you never leave a class in the middle, it breaks the spell.

“Marge Simpson had a crush on Bobby Sherman? I thought she was a cartoon character.”

“They’re all cartoon characters, Petra, my dear, that’s the point. Bobby was my psychic pocket just like David was yours.”

“Psychic what?”

Before she specialized in music therapy and followed her husband, Don, to England, first to Oxford and then London, Carrie had trained as a Jungian analyst. In general, she speaks English around the center, but sometimes she drops one of her more obscure psychoanalytical terms into the conversation. Petra studies her friend fondly. She can see that Carrie is about to launch into one of those melodious explanations that drop from her lips like a waterfall. Rangy and athletic, Carrie looks like she was born with a golden tan and hiking boots. With her clear blue eyes and cinnamon sprinkling of freckles over nose and cheeks, she could be Robert Redford’s sister. Blessed with thick silver hair that somehow looks chic instead of elderly, she seems ageless and enviably self-possessed. On weekends, she loves to climb cliffs, and she is just as nimble at finding the mental toe- and handholds to get you through a difficult patch. Carrie has two grown-up daughters, one a doctor, the other on a permanent gap year, and she has been a lighthouse for Petra as she attempts to navigate Molly’s teenage storms; they start early these days. Twelve is the new sixteen. She knows she would be lost without the older woman’s relaxed assurances that bitter rows and equally savage silences are completely normal. Once or twice lately, Molly has even made Petra cry.

“What d’you expect? She’s a teenager. Put on earth to test the theory that maternal love can withstand any amount of shit.”

Petra envies Carrie; or rather, she wants to be her, to know what it feels like to live in a mind and body that certain and true. Compared to Carrie, Petra feels she is still driving with an emotional learner’s permit. Her mother’s death was such a shock. Not the fact of Greta dying; it was obvious for months that not even her mother could stare down the cancer, which had moved, without mercy, from organ to organ like an advancing army. No, it was the fact that Petra hadn’t expected to feel like an orphan. Not at the age of thirty-eight. Not when she was an adult. Nonetheless, orphaned is what she feels. Grief for her dad has surfaced again through the grave he now shares with her mother. She manages to be glad that neither parent lived to see the breakup of her marriage. Since Marcus left, Petra likes to sit near Carrie in the staffroom, the way animals lie beside each other in a stable.

“Psychic pocket,” Carrie elaborates; “it’s like the basket into which you put all your needs and longings.”

Petra frowns. “Isn’t that called love?”

“No, it’s pure fantasy. Very common, but also hopeless and inappropriate.”

“Sounds like love to me,” says Petra, picking up her cello and maneuvering it into the case. “Hopeless and inappropriate at love. I have a degree in that.”

At the door, she remembers something and turns back to Carrie, who is busily scouring a cup with a brush. “Why did you have to say that stuff about pickled Liberace? You know that’s all I’m going to be able to think about when I go and see David. You’re supposed to be supportive. As my friend.”

“As your friend,” says Carrie, “I’m not here to make you feel better. I’m here to feel envious and competitive and subtly undermine you while pretending to be real sympathetic.”

“Oh thanks. You, you”—Petra stammers toward the insult—“you therapist,” she finally spits out. Laughter makes her body feel better. Her shoulder has been acting up lately, and she winces as she lifts the cello through the doorway.

The room she works in is a couple of doors down the corridor. Bare and tranquil with pale, clackety wooden floors, it has bulbous, podlike windows set in the ceiling. After dragging the instruments from the wall and setting them up on a table in the middle, Petra takes a seat at the keyboard and starts to play a few chords. On the flat roof above her, the rain creates a percussive hiss; it sounds more like static on the radio than water. Why is rain so comforting when you’re miserable and so damned annoying when you’re not?

As her fingers fall into formation over the notes, through the static a woman’s voice comes to her unbidden, one of the most beautiful voices she’s ever known. It is no strain to recall the song the woman is singing, no strain at all. Petra hums the intro and hears the woman come in on an impossibly low B-flat, a man’s note really. A woman had no business being able to sing that well that low.

“Talking to myself and feeling old.”

She and Sharon used to sing it together. When they first learned those words they were so young, babies; they couldn’t know. How could they possibly have known? What do thirteen-year-olds know about feeling old?

“Rainy Days and Mondays.” Luxuriating in the song’s sadness, Petra surprises herself by launching with sudden gusto into the saxophone solo. That shot of brass in the middle of such a melancholy tune, it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Respectfully, she doffs her musician’s cap to Richard Carpenter. How well she remembers the chocolate-brown cover of the album and that ornate rococo lettering. Was it really gold? The Carpenters were supposed to be cheesy, a taste you kept to yourself she learned much later at college, but their melodies had outlived those of nearly all their cooler contemporaries. Far more complex harmonies, with words that felt like they sprang naturally from the tune.

She and Sharon used to love harmonizing on “Close to You.” Petra took the tune and Sha did all the waaaa-aah-ar-ahhh bits.

Karen Carpenter, lost to anorexia at—what, thirty-two? Such a stupid waste. Petra sees that beautiful face, framed by jubilant brown curls. Critics called Karen’s face cherubic, so the poor woman must have decided to starve it. Her cheeks were just bonny, that’s all. Karen’s voice had no strain in it whatsoever, no gear change; it moved from low to high as though a voice traveled through liquid, not air. Who else could do that? Ella, Barbra. Not many in pop, that’s for sure.

How she had longed for a dress she saw Karen Carpenter wearing in Jackie. Petra can remember it now, remember it far better than most of the clothes she actually owned. Long, frothy cream cheesecloth, with a high neck and strips of broderie anglaise down the bodice. It was the dress the sisters in Little House on the Prairie wore in their dreams. Didn’t Katharine Ross wear the same dress on the bike with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy?

Bowler hat. Paul Newman, not Katharine Ross. Now she is confused. Memory can do that to you. She is no longer sure if she is remembering things as they were or as she’d wanted them to be.

She must tell Carrie; she’s bound to detect some hidden meaning in that long cream dress with its hint of bridal chastity. When they first met, Petra had been quietly appalled by the American’s habit of treating her like a puzzle that needed solving. She was too Welsh to feel entirely at ease with the way Carrie picked over even the most minor detail of her life, hunting for clues. Petra’s bad headaches were just migraines, for God’s sake, not a sign of a crippling inability to assert herself in her marriage, as Carrie had suggested. One day over lunch at their local café, Petra mentioned a thank-you letter that had arrived from her mother that morning. Coming from Greta, it was a no-thanks thank-you letter. Only her mother could express gratitude without sounding in the smallest bit appreciative. Reading the letter a second time, Petra felt what small reserves of confidence she had deflating, as though her soul had a slow puncture.

“Well, what d’you expect? Your mom’s such a bitch,” Carrie said mildly, spearing a gherkin.

It was like a shotgun going off. The volume of the world changed. A fork that a woman put down on the neighboring table reverberated like a timpani section.

Who dared to call her mother a bitch? It had never occurred to her that she, Petra, was allowed to judge Greta. It was Greta who judged Petra and found her wanting, not the other way round.

“What d’you think, that you have to be the good girl forever?” Carrie said as she settled the bill. She was such a generous tipper that waiters regarded her with suspicion. Petra didn’t answer. For a few seconds, no more than that, she allowed Carrie’s suggestion to live in her brain, and then she banished it, like a wiper clearing a windshield.

Just the once, she had seen Karen Carpenter on a TV chat show; it must have been only months before she died. The singer laughed off the question about her weight loss. Denied it, charmingly, with that nicest-girl-in-the-school grin of hers. Then she walked across the studio and sang. Even when her body was gaunt and she had twigs for arms, the voice still poured out like cream from a jug. The voice didn’t know it was living inside the body of a starving child, and maybe Karen Carpenter didn’t, either. There were things about yourself that you couldn’t know, sometimes until it was too late.

Petra picks up the glockenspiel. Its glittering, wintry sound is a particular favorite of Sam’s. With a beater, she plays the tune they always use to say hello.

Sam should be here by now. The boy has a thing about not stepping in puddles or on the cracks in the pavement—his legs go stiff and he lifts them high like a Nazi storm trooper. Petra sighs. Elspeth, his mother, must be having a hell of a job getting him here in this rain.

So many fears once you have children in the world. Every night, Petra goes in to kiss Molly when she is asleep and she feels simple gratitude and relief that her baby has survived this long. Anorexia, which killed Karen Carpenter, is her biggest worry for Molly. Petra doesn’t remember its being such a big thing when she was at school; now, extreme thinness has become yet another way to compete with one another. Trust girls to get into a contest to make themselves disappear. She doesn’t want Molly to waste her life hating her body. Too much female energy goes into getting smaller instead of bigger and bolder. Petra switches off the keyboard and rubs her sore shoulder. She has always been harshly critical of her own body, even when there was nothing to find fault with. Now that there is plenty to despair of, Petra looks back in frank astonishment at the girl who skulked about in long, droopy cardigans, even in the thermometer-busting summer of ’76, because she was under the impression that she had fat thighs. Why the hell didn’t she walk down the street waving a placard saying I HAVE A 24-INCH WAIST? That’s what she should have done.

There is a sound of two hands banging on the door and Sam’s excited puppy yelp. Petra turns to welcome her client.
She has almost no memory of ringing the magazine company. It is the one small consolation in a sea of churning embarrassment. Blaming alcohol would be her best bet, but it had been only eight in the morning when she made the call. Things have gotten quite dark for Petra lately, especially during that 3 a.m. dread hour when she wakes to find all her fears congregated at the foot of the bed, offering to run a trailer of forthcoming disasters. Maybe she will lose the house. Maybe Molly will love her father’s new girlfriend and find the houseboat a cooler place to stay than her mother’s centrally heated suburban home. She knows that Marcus, who claims he is too broke to pay her maintenance, somehow manages to find the cash to lavish treats on Molly. Butterscotch milkshakes and sponge cake, enjoyed by father and daughter in Fortnum & Mason’s over half-term, must have cost about a third of her weekly food budget; the thought rankles like a broken tooth. So does the fact that, as Mol let slip, Marcus swore her to secrecy, making Molly his gleeful co-conspirator against wicked, thrifty Mummy. Even so, Petra has no excuse for ringing a place that doesn’t exist at eight o’clock in the morning like a crazy old bat.

To say the action was out of character doesn’t quite cover the personality shift it required for Petra to ring up Nightingale Publishing. On the computer, she’d managed to find out that, in the late eighties, Nightingale bought out Worldwind Publishing, which, almost a quarter of a century ago, had declared her the winner of the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz.

“How old did you say you were?” the woman who answered the phone had asked.

The woman said she was the editor of a magazine—Teenworld?—and she had been nice, more than nice, actually, but Petra could tell from the strenuously patient way she spoke, as though she were addressing either someone very old or very young, that the editor thought Petra was a loony time-waster. A view with which Petra had considerable sympathy. Still, stubborn as a child denied a balloon at its own party, she stood her ground. “I won,” she explained.

As a teenager, she had been unable to see things far away. Recently, things close up have also started to become a blur. Glasses have lost the four-eyed stigma they had had when she was a child. Molly declares that specs are hot, or perhaps cool. Petra can’t keep up with the temperature that is in fashion. Nevertheless, she comes from a generation that can’t quite shrug off the sense that specs make her undesirable. Reading glasses, even if they now come in a sleek dark frame that Carrie swears make her look like Ali MacGraw in Love Story, are further unwanted evidence that her body is in the business of betraying her. If she’s honest, there is also some niggling worry about a life that has not quite come into focus, and maybe it never will.

“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.

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 f*cking 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.