I Think I Love You

15

Oh, Bill, this is Petra, today’s makeover victim. Petra, this is William Finn, our editorial director.”

“Hello, Petra,” he says, holding out a hand and frowning. “Petra as in the Blue Peter dog?”

“Petra as in the Baader-Meinhof terrorist,” she says.

“Ah. I stand corrected. Mind if I take a chair?”

“They’re your chairs,” she says.

He perches awkwardly in the makeup seat next to her, a padded black plastic recliner with a headrest. It reminds Bill of his dentist; after a recent episode of root-canal work, this is not a happy association. At the shattering memory of the drill, Bill begins to cross his legs, then changes his mind as he feels himself start to slide backward. Before he knows it, they’ll have one of those hideous lilac capes around his neck and twists of tinfoil in his hair.

He wonders vaguely what he can have done to offend this woman he has never met before. Even by his standards, it is quite something to cause a major chill after a single sentence. The Blue Peter dog line was obviously not as amusing as he’d hoped. Maybe she’d heard it before.

When readers come in for a makeover they tend to be embarrassingly grateful, gurgling with excitement at entering the HQ of a magazine that they treat themselves to in the supermarket, in order to lighten the burden of the weekly shop. Occasionally, coming down in the lift, Bill has bumped into a couple of the Before and After candidates: chirpy as canaries with their new blow-dries, they stagger out of reception with carrier bags full of freebies and a set of professional photographs, bathed in artful radiance, to astound the old man back home. Bill has always wondered exactly how well the old man will respond to the New You that women these days seem to be so keen on. As men grow older, they tend to see change as suspicious—that is, if they notice it at all. Ruth used to tell him that she could switch all the furniture in their flat and he wouldn’t notice, so little attention did he pay to his physical surroundings. That wasn’t strictly true, although he did remember the day on which, dragging himself home after fourteen hours in the office, he poured, mixed, raised and drained an entire gin and tonic before realizing that what he was drinking from was, in fact, a squat new flower vase in frosted glass from Heal’s. In a panic, he threw the ice and lemon into the bin, dried the vase and pretty much got away with his own folly, although Ruth, coming in ten minutes later with a fistful of carnations, had wondered out loud, in some puzzlement, why the glass was so cold to the touch. A narrow escape; the cretinism of the male was a subject on which women’s research would never end.

Today’s Before and After is a different sort of customer. Most of her predecessors have been happy to be treated as guinea pigs for a day, as long as they go home more glossy than when they arrived. This one is less of a guinea pig, more of a cat. Dark, composed and cautious. The Crazy Woman, Marie had called her, but that isn’t true, unless the madness is tucked away, buried very deep. Nothing ungracious in her movements, no shrieks of hilarity or whines of complaint in her voice. Hard to pin down. She seems almost to be observing the makeover process at a distance, as though it were happening to someone else.

Bill wants to ask her about the quiz—their quiz, as he prefers to think of it. She had won it; he had compiled it, though she doesn’t know that. Not yet. He is sure the news will come as a surprise, but he needs some time with Petra to work out whether that surprise would or would not be pleasant. He has a faint memory, a shadow of a memory, of Zelda telling him to put the quiz together, and to do it in haste to meet a deadline. The Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz.

“Make it hard, William dear,” Zelda had called across the office, or something like that, presumably to sniggers from the men around the room. Make it taxing enough, in other words, to sort out the hard-core fans from the mere dilettantes who were moonlighting from their dreams of Donny Osmond or David Essex. And now, here it was, unearthed, brought back into the light an epoch later, like a sword hilt from an Anglo-Saxon hoard, and no less easy to decipher. Marie couldn’t find the quiz itself, but she had managed to dig up some old Cassidy material from the archive, bless her, and what struck Bill was how utterly impenetrable it was, even to someone who had once been steeped in Cassidy lore. Even to someone who, for eighteen months, had once been David himself.

Time had lent amusement, but no enchantment, to his time at Worldwind Publishing. Time in the slipstream of that squalid old shark Roy Palmer. Time with the redoubtable Zelda. Under her gentle prompting and, to be fair, her exacting standards, Bill had learned pretty much everything that had helped him to run magazines of his own. She would have been thrilled—genuinely moved, without the faintest shade of irony—to think of him reunited, now, with a devout reader of The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. It was Zelda who had warned him never to underestimate the primal power that the idol exerts over his fans, and here, in the chair next to him, her eyes firmly shut as her long dark hair is trimmed, sits the living proof that Zelda had been right.

How old is Petra? Bill is useless at ages. She had been a kid in 1974, that he knows for sure, so … But it isn’t about the math. As he studies her in the mirror, Bill registers calmly and without any ignition of desire that she is beautiful. Great bones, great brown eyes, something drowsy in them even when they opened wide. A cellist, someone had said. A real musician, not like him.

Mind you, sitting and staring at her will not do. He is the host; his job is to offer welcome. Also, Bill has just decided, he is here to establish a connection, build some kind of rapport—has to, if he is serious about this Cassidy feature that is taking shape like an Airfix model in his head. Part memoir, part meditation on the phenomenon of the teenage pop idol. “I Was the Real David Cassidy,” that kind of thing. Might work well in Gavin’s mag, you never know, for male readers who like to read. All three of them.

“I don’t remember the Baader-Meinhof gang’s having a terrorist called Petra,” Bill begins, uselessly, five minutes after his false start. Christ, no wonder she was ignoring him. “I know there was an Ulrike.”

“She was nineteen. Petra was. A hairdresser,” Petra says, with closed eyes. The lids are being painted a startling violet. “Went out in a hail of bullets. Like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Ah, the hairstyles of the early seventies were certainly enough to drive a hairdresser to extreme lengths,” says Bill.

There is a laugh, but not from Petra. It rings out, strong and unabashed, from the blonde in the makeup chair on the other side of her.

“You’re telling me,” the woman says. “D’you remember that blimmin’ feather cut I had, Pet?”

“As if I could forget.” Petra smiles. “You looked like a sheep sheared by a drunk.”

The cheery blonde, whoever she is, has a good effect on her slender, dark friend. Bill sees Petra relax as they chat.

“Don’t think my hair’s ever grown back right, to be honest with you. Did you have a feather cut, then?” Sharon asks Bill.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Petra. “This is my friend Sharon Lewis. Sorry, Sharon Morgan. Sharon, this is Mr. Finn, who is the boss here and has come to have a laugh at the tragic women who are going to Las Vegas to meet their teen idol just in time for perimenopause.”

“Not at all,” says Bill. His ear is still adjusting to her tone. She is too quick for him. “I did have a Bowie cut, though. The plan was to look like Ziggy Stardust.”

“And how did it work out?”

“Not bad. I did actually end up looking quite like Ziggy. Just not the right Ziggy.”

“Which one did you look like, then?” Sharon asks.

“Next door’s cat.”

• • •

When Petra first announced that they had won the competition, Sharon hadn’t said, “What competition?” or “What are you on about?” or “After all this time?” or, worst of all, “So what? We’ve barely seen each other for the past ten years.” Although, God knows, any of those would have been a reasonable response. But Sharon, when the mood came upon her, or when happiness stole upon her, was ready to lose all reason. She had shouted, as if the years had fallen away, and it was still 1974, and Petra had just pushed open the bedroom door.

“You’re joking me, mun. We won? We won!” Then she burst out laughing.

As Petra remembered instantly, you didn’t really know how accurate the word burst was until you saw Sharon having a laugh. It sounded like a dozen paper bags being inflated and popped at the same time. Any louder and the neighbors would start banging on the walls. Lord knows what happened when she and Mal had sex; it would be like one of those major incidents where the police are forced to evacuate the area.

Armed with the phone number that Sharon had sent in a Christmas card, Petra had tracked her down to a modern cul-de-sac of detached homes. As Sharon had promised, it was a lovely spot. From the garden, you looked out across the beaten-silver sea to Pembrokeshire, where the mountains rose like smoke. The estate hadn’t existed when they were girls; if it had, they would have said it was posh or way above their station. Petra had arrived there to bring the good news; a couple of decades overdue, of course, but better late than never. And Sharon, once she’d stopped laughing, promptly went into a secondary burst, no less energetic than the first—into tears, this time, because it was impossible that Mal could be trusted to take care of their two boys while she was in Las Vegas.

“They’d get typhoid or something,” she said, kneading and tearing at a wad of paper tissues, which Petra had fetched from the bathroom as the burst began. “Can’t do it, sorry,” Sharon repeated, and went on saying so until Petra pointed out that missing out on the trip of a lifetime to meet David Cassidy was even more impossible than leaving Mal to deal with the kids.

They were surprisingly shy, the two friends, each trying to measure what time had done to the other woman’s face and body, without giving any outward sign that such an audit was taking place.

Sharon, who always had the plumper face, had no wrinkles at all. Definitely looks younger than me, thought Petra.

Petra looked tired, though otherwise had barely changed; still slender with that Snow White skin and dark hair, not yet flecked with gray. Definitely looks younger than me, thought Sharon.

In the big, ranch-style kitchen, with its breakfast bar and high stools, Petra admired the pictures on the walls while Sharon made tea for them. The prints appeared to be Japanese until Petra found her glasses and saw that they were watercolors on a kind of parchment, depicting views that she knew like the back of her own hand.

“These are incredible, Sha,” Petra said. “That’s Three Cliffs Bay. You could walk straight into those waves and swim.”

“Went up to London. Saw that big Hokusai show at the Royal Academy. Beautiful. Got me into calligraphy. Working with very fine brushes. Bloody mess at first, but I’m getting the hang of it now. Did my City and Guilds art foundation. Degree next. Bit more time now the boys are settled in school. Bachelor of Arts not housewife, I am. You’ll be proud to know me one day, Petra.”

Petra felt a jolt of surprise that Sharon had done something like going to the Hokusai show without someone like her. Instantly, she rebuked herself. Christ, that was exactly the kind of patronizing attitude Marcus had infected her with, describing Sharon as a “colorful character” like she was something that came on in Shakespeare to keep the groundlings happy while the important tragic actors changed costume for their next big scene. Petra knew why she was there now. Not just because she needed company for her journey into the past to meet David. She was there to say sorry to Sha, to apologize for the missing years, for becoming the kind of woman who thought of Sharon Lewis as light relief.

“There’s lovely you’re looking,” said Sharon, placing her hand on top of Petra’s and letting it rest there. “From what you said, after Marcus finished with you, I thought you’d be a wreck, mun.”

All those years in London, Petra had thought of herself as the sweet Welsh girl, the innocent abroad. “Little me from the Valleys in the big bad city”—that was her shtick among her new circle of friends, who had taught her words like shtick. But it wasn’t she who was lovely. It was Sharon. That kind of sweetness was lost to her forever; Marcus had been her teacher in jaded worldliness and she had been a talented pupil.

“What d’you mean, emotionally he’s still with you?” Sharon demanded. “He’s shacked up on a boat with his fancy woman. Sometimes, for a clever woman, you’re bloody twp, you are, Petra. Honest to God. Bloody bastard,” she added, with as much malice as she would ever manage.

It was so hot they got in the car and drove to the beach. Sha put some sandwiches in a Tupperware container and they bought a big bag of Quavers at the petrol station, and a bottle of dandelion and burdock.

“I didn’t think they still made this,” Petra said.

“They don’t. It’s been out back since 1977. Land that time forgot, down ’ere. Hope you packed your own taramasalata.”

They were the only ones there, apart from a Jack Russell who barked at each incoming wave, greeting it with a darting fury, like a small and very indignant referee. After they had discussed how Quavers dissolved on your tongue, Sharon got down to the serious business of looking for pebbles.

“Apart from David and Steven Williams and Marcus, what men have you loved, Pet?”

Petra lay back and pressed herself into the stones, enjoying the way the warmth seeped into her bones through her clothes. “Andrew Marvell. Romantic, witty, brilliant foreplay. Incredible insight into what makes women tick.”

“Sounds fabulous. What was wrong with him, then? Married, was he?”

“Died in 1678. Poet. Also Member of Parliament for Hull.”

“A dead poet?” Sharon gave a cackle of disbelief.

“The only kind you can trust,” said Petra firmly. “You don’t want to let a live poet near you. They’re like locusts. Strip you of everything you ever felt, then use you for material in their sensitive first-person narratives.”

“Nice. And who else?”

Petra thought for a bit. “The dark one in Alias Smith and Jones. Pete Duel. Always had a thing for him. Most gorgeous smile in history. Remember we used to watch it on your TV after you got color for the Olympics?”

“Nineteen seventy-two,” Sharon confirmed. “He topped himself, didn’t he? Rest in peace, Pete Duel. Honest, Petra, I know you go for emotionally unavailable blokes, but alive would be a start.”

“I don’t want to start,” Petra said. “That’s over for me.”

“What? Love, over?” Sharon pressed a pebble into her friend’s palm. Petra opened her eyes. It was the palest greeny-blue speckled with black dots.

“Perfect. You always found the best ones. Plenty more pebbles on the beach. I couldn’t, you know. I just couldn’t bear to tell my story to someone else ever again. The effort of telling my story to a stranger.” She sat up and shook her hair. “Hey, we could advertise instead. ‘Damaged romantic Welshwoman, cellist, one careless owner seeks …’ ”

She was crying by then and her head was on Sharon’s shoulder.

“It’s all right, you know,” Sharon said. “It’s gonna be all right. We’re gonna go to Vegas and meet David and he’ll marry us both like one of those Morons—”

“Mormons, Sha,” said Petra, laughing tears and crying laughter. “Mormons.”

Back at the house, Sharon opened a bottle of wine, poured them a large glass each and got on with the boys’ dinner, quickly peeling the potatoes and cutting them into chips, while the two of them talked through travel arrangements and—far more important—what on earth each of them, come the great day, would wear.

“Retro, like,” said Sharon firmly. “Flares. Poncho. Just to freak David out. Like he just went through a time warp.”

“Well,” said Petra, “it’s a thought. But, look—” Here inspiration struck. “No bra, mind. Nobody did in nineteen seventy—”

“Oh my God.” Sharon cupped her bosom in both hands. “Are you joking? Two kids and twenty years later? Imagine this lot swinging around in front of the poor bloke. He’d be trying to shake hands with them.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’d get them through customs,” Petra said. “American security is very picky these days, anything that looks like it could be an offensive weapon.”

“All right for you, mun. Little Miss Pert. Look at them, all present and correct. Look at you. You’re exactly the same shape as you were when that Steven Williams got it bad for you—”

“He did not …” Petra found herself blushing. For her, the unearthing of the past was part agony, part archaeology: so much effort, and unease, and so little pleasure for your pains. So much turning to dust. Whereas for Sharon it was a trove, to be opened up and talked over, regrets all mingled with joyful recollections, everything up for grabs.

As if in answer to these buried thoughts, Sharon suddenly stopped in midconversation and put down her glass. “My treasure box,” she said. “I’m mad, me.” And with that she hurried up the stairs. She was gone quite a while. There were clatterings, a silence, two thumps and a string of Welsh oaths. Then she returned, arms laden with a cardboard box. The tape that held the lid down was wrinkled and dark brown, and had long since lost its power to stick. Sharon yanked it off and opened the box.

Inside was their archive, or its edited highlights: posters, postcards, flyers, newspaper cuttings, magazines. The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, stacks of it, held together with rubber bands that had hardened and cracked, or not held together at all. There were scrapbooks, the glue evaporated, the cuttings coming loose like snakeskin.

My God. That face. Petra was astonished. The eyes, with their heavy lashes. The parted lips. A face she had gazed at daily and longed to kiss. Even now, she knew that face better than she knew any of the world’s great paintings.

“Hullo, lovely boy,” said Sharon, greeting a poster of David on a horse. “Look at him, Pet. Gorgeous, wasn’t he? How old must he be now, then?”

“Twenty-four,” Petra said immediately.

“No, he was twenty-four then. Then’s not the same as now, is it? So, how old are we? Ancient, we are. So he’s eleven years older than us. When’s his birthday, then?”

“April twelfth,” Petra replied without missing a beat.

She hadn’t thought of David at all. Not once, not until that moment. It hadn’t been about him. All of a sudden, the idea that they were about to journey back to meet him—travel through time, not just cross the Atlantic—seemed improbably strange. If the David she had loved was still twenty-four, but David Cassidy was now a middle-aged man, how old did that make the Petra who was heading for Las Vegas?

She thought of the thirteen-year-old girl—“Gillian Edwards’s little friend,” that’s what Gwennie the grocer had called her—who had filled in the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz, tracking down every answer as though in pursuit of the Holy Grail. And the prize didn’t belong to Petra now, that was the thing. It belonged to the child she had been. And Petra had wanted her to have it. She wished she could give it to her: sneak past her mother keeping guard by the marble pastry slab in the kitchen, creep up the stairs and into that cold bedroom with the hard single bed and the brown counterpane and say, “Here it is, darling. You won.”

How could Petra and Sharon, with their children, their adult bodies, their buried parents and their marriages, healthy and wrecked—how could they go and see David? It was impossible, she saw that now. The David Cassidy she had loved would not be there, and neither would the girl who had loved him.

“So, d’you think our hotel room will have a jacuzzi, then, Pet? It’s America, so bound to, isn’t it? Petra?”

“Sorry. Miles away.”

“You’re telling me. I looked it up in Mal’s atlas. It’s in the middle of a bloody desert. You basically fly over sand for a while and then you look down, right, and there’s David Cassidy, standing there waving up at you. Like an oasis.” Not a word they had much use for in Wales. The way Sharon said it, the vowels took about half a minute to come out.

“Typical,” said Petra.

“What’s that, then?”

“Well, you just said I went after emotionally unavailable men.”

“No, I didn’t mean that.”

“Well,” Petra sighed, “I mean, you can’t get more emotionally unavailable than a pop star who lives five thousand miles away. And you’ve got thirty million rivals for him.”

“ ’S true,” said Sharon. “But, you know, maybe it was better that way.” She paused, hearing an echo in her own words. Then she began to sing. Without any warning, Petra found herself sitting drinking wine with a George Michael impersonator. Sharon stopped and took another sip. “Love a bit of George. No offense to David, mind.”

“None taken, I’m sure,” said Petra, wondering, for the thousandth time, at her friend’s ability to go with the flow of her own thoughts and see where they led. Had that been the secret of happiness, all along? Sing when you feel like it?

“Tell you what, though,” said Sharon, skipping back to the past. “If David had gotten off that horse and climbed down out of the poster into our bedrooms and made himself emotionally available, what would we have done, eh? We wouldn’t have shagged him, would we? We’d never kissed anyone, mun.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Petra. “I would have played him my cello. I had a bit I’d practiced for him specially. He’d have been blown away, I’m sure.”

“From what I heard, he was keen on a bit of blowin’ away,” said Sharon, with her witchiest cackle. “Funny thing is,” she went on, “I never did meet David, ’cept at White City, when he was half a mile away. But I still remember him a lot better than most of the boys I did, you know, know. I mean, just cos he wasn’t available didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Right?”

“Right,” said Petra. She felt light in the head, with laughter bubbling up, as if the absurdity of the whole thing—this plight, this opportunity, this old joke—was only now starting to strike home. She knew that her obsession with David had been strange, unbalanced; a sign there was something missing in her childhood. Molly loved Leonardo DiCaprio, but not in the desperate, all-consuming way that Petra at the same age had longed for David. Molly was happier, that was it. There was more in her life. Her need was not so great.

“Well, then,” Petra said, pretending to be decisive, “since Mr. Cassidy wouldn’t come to us, we’re going to go to him, aren’t we now?”

“Bit late, d’you think?” asked Sharon, in a rare flicker of doubt. “Look at me, Pet. I’m past it.”

“Come on, you’re gorgeous,” Petra replied. “Anyway, you know what they say. Forty’s the new thirty.”

Sharon made a face. “Try telling that to my backside.”
What do you wear for a makeover? Petra had decided to put on her patterned skirt and the black linen jacket she had bought for her mum’s funeral, over a black camisole top. Black sandals. Around her neck was the fine, gold Wright & Teague pendant that Marcus had bought her for Christmas, with matching studs. Seeing it glint, she wondered how much guilt had contributed to the purchase. Assessing herself in the hall mirror before she left the house, Petra noticed that the shoes, fashionable two years before, looked a bit scuffed these days. Too late to do anything about it. She felt like one of those women who dashes around tidying the house before their cleaner arrives. You didn’t want to arrive for a makeover looking like a wreck; on the other hand, you didn’t want to primp and prettify yourself too much, in case the “After” photo looked worse than the “Before.”

Years of comparing herself with her mother had led Petra to nurture what the magazines identified as poor body image. She probably didn’t look too bad for her age, and divorce was turning out to be the best diet ever invented. Still, when it came to beauty, her mother had set the standard. All her life, Petra would identify with the plain daughters of beautiful women. What did it feel like to be one of those poor girls born to a supermodel mother and a beaky rock-star dad? The rock stars always left a trail of chinless, beaky daughters behind them. Girls doomed to live in the shadow of their refulgently lovely mothers. Petra sometimes wondered if those mothers found it hard, as her mother had clearly found it hard, not to have given birth to a girl in their own image.

On honeymoon in Egypt, Petra and Marcus had been browsing in a bazaar when they came across one of those revolving postcard stands outside a cafe. Instead of scenes of the Nile or the Pyramids, the postcards had featured row upon row of perfect, blond, blue-eyed babies—the exact physical opposite of the local children. If her mother had visited Cairo, they would have founded a religion in her name.

“You are not unattractive, Petra,” her mother had said, twisting her child’s face toward the bathroom light. “You know, you are really not szo bad.”

“It’s too bad, Mum, not szo bad. I don’t look too bad.”

“That’s what I said, Petra. You don’t look szo bad for a girl of this age.”

And so, when Petra, years later, found herself with her own girl of that age, she did her best to reverse the process. For every word of praise that had been withheld from her as a child, Petra found five to lavish on Molly. At first it came hard, mastering this new vocabulary of encouragement and admiration. She had to make her mouth do it, like forcing down a foreign food.

“You look lovely,” she said experimentally. “Blue really suits you, love.”

“Stop it, Mum,” Molly would say, brushing off the compliment, but pleased nonetheless, perhaps.

Petra was so relieved that she could take uncomplicated pleasure in her daughter: the bloom of her skin, the surprising density of those slender limbs, pierced her heart. She had worried that the mother-daughter struggle was doomed to reenact itself down the generations, like the family curses in Greek tragedy, but it turned out that maybe, just maybe, the pattern could be broken. At least Molly would not be stuck, mute in the chrysalis of herself, as Petra had been at thirteen. She would not be szo bad.
“Could you leave the length, please?” Petra was at the mercy of Maxine, who did hair and makeup for the fashion shoots. Petra had been adamant that she didn’t want her hair cut, but, once it was washed, she noticed that Maxine began snipping away. “Just keep it as it is,” Petra added, to make quite sure. Maxine nodded intelligently and kept snipping. It was a clear case of selective hairdresser deafness.

When you got to Petra’s age, people began to suggest an Annette Bening cut. A pixie crop was meant to be flattering. And, on Annette Bening, it was flattering. On anyone with less-perfect features, however, which was every woman who had ever lived, apart from Audrey Hepburn, it lent a certain chipmunk bunchiness to the cheeks. Petra couldn’t bear to watch as her hair fell to the floor. She closed her eyes. The whole place was like this, from the moment they walked through the door. She and Sharon had met at Paddington Station and taken a cab together; to arrive separately, they had agreed, would be far too intimidating. But the intimidation went ahead anyway, at full blast.

It didn’t help having the magazine boss there, watching. William somebody, the editorial director, had come in and asked if she was named like the Blue Peter Petra. After all these years, there was still some twerp getting a laugh out of the TV dog. When she responded sharply, he went very quiet and sat there staring into space until Sharon made him laugh. William Finn, that was it. Bill.

“Great eyes,” Maxine said to Petra. “We need to bring them out more.”

A memory twitched in Petra, like a nerve. “It used to say in the magazines I read as a teenager that you had to use yellow eye shadow on the lid if you had deep-set eyes,” she said.

“Oh, they said all kinds of shit back then. Still do.” Maxine dipped a small brush into her eye-shadow palette. It was as big as a bumper chocolate selection box. Her voice was flat, so that lines of admiration and sarcasm came out at the same pitch. “Rinse your hair in rainwater as well, did you?” she said.

“We both washed ours outside in the rain,” said Sharon proudly, “even though we lived in a steel town and the air was full of black specks.”

Bill, Petra saw, was paying close attention as Maxine applied mascara to Petra’s lashes. With his fair, messy hair and slightly shambling look he reminded Petra of some actor. Sharon would know. Petra noticed Bill smiling, too, whenever Sharon spoke. At first Petra felt a flare of anger, because she thought he was laughing at her friend as Marcus used to; then she calmed down and realized, to her greater surprise, that he simply liked Sharon, and had on sight. They liked each other, after—what—three or four minutes? Sharon had always made friends easily, unlike her. Listening to her here in London, far from home, Petra could suddenly hear how strong Sha’s Welsh accent was, and she felt the quick surge of homesickness, swaying within, like the swell of the sea. That’s how Petra had talked for more than half her life, and she hadn’t even been able to hear it. What are the other things about yourself that you don’t know?

One thing she did know, for sure, was this: When you are offered the chance to meet a ghost, the man you were in love with a quarter of a century ago—half a life away—there is only one sensible thing to do. Just say no. Smile politely and say, thank you, but no thank you. I am a grown woman now, not a bit like the girl who loved that boy. I am a happily married woman.… Correction: I am a soon to be unhappily unmarried woman, with a daughter of my own. Nothing could be more shameful than to seek the past; nothing could be more tragic, or more laughable.

And yet. First love is the deepest. You don’t just fall in love, you capsize. It feels like drowning, but the thought of rescue is unwelcome. Other loves may come along, but the first breathes on inside you. And the things I still know about him: the date of his birth, his stepmother’s name, his passion for horses, his beach hideaway, the instrument he learned to play when he was lonely. Drums.

For two years I wore brown, because it was his favorite color. Can you believe it? I was a sallow teenager. I looked terrible in brown. I looked yellow in brown. But it was a small sacrifice to make. For David, I knew, would be pleased. Thanks to me, he would never be lonely again.

“Julia Roberts.”

Petra woke from her reflections with a jump. “What?” she said.

Sharon wasn’t addressing Petra in particular, just anyone who would listen, which was everyone in the room. “I was saying to Maxine, make me into Julia Roberts. You know, basically fantastic. Ringlets down to my waist. So if Richard Gere happens to be in Las Vegas, and he’s driving down the Strip, like, he’ll stop and go, ‘Hey, I know you!’ ”

“Sharon, my love,” said Petra, “the character you are describing is a tall brunette from Los Angeles in thigh-high boots. She is also a prostitute. You are a blond Welsh housewife, five foot three, and, as far as I know, nobody pays you for sex.”

“Depends.”

“Depends on what?” This was Bill, leaning forward, genuinely intrigued.

“Well, this one time, Mal bought me an ice-cream maker for Valentine’s, a Friday it was, and I took one look and sent the kids away to their nan’s until Sunday lunchtime.” She gave the dirtiest laugh that Nightingale Publishing had heard in twenty years. Then she said, by way of an airy afterthought, “You should have seen my banana splits.”

Maxine dropped her scissors. Petra buried her head in her hands, feeling her new haircut, for the first time, soft between her fingers, then looked up and met Bill’s smile with her own. He said, “Would you excuse me?”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” Petra said. “We really didn’t mean to be rude—”

“No, no, please, carry on. The ruder the better. I was just starting to learn something really interesting about dairy products. There’s honestly nothing I would rather do than sit here pretending to be a hairbrush and listening to women’s fantasies. Half the magazines we produce here consist of little else. I could literally take down everything Sharon says in shorthand and transcribe it directly into the next issue …”

“ ‘How an Ice-cream Sundae Saved My Sex Life, by Mum of Two,’ ” said Sharon. “With or Without Cherries? You Decide.”

“Exactly. You are clearly our perfect reader,” said Bill. “Would you like a job?”

Sharon grinned at him in the mirror and wrinkled her nose. “Gerraway with you, mun. Things to do back home. Thanks for the offer.”

“Anytime,” said Bill, adding, “No, it’s just that I have a conference call in …” He looked at his watch. “Ninety seconds.” He moved toward the door, then looked back at Petra. “Um …”

“Petra, please.”

“Petra. When you’re done, could you just nip down to my office? One floor down, turn left out of the lift. We just have boring paperwork to go through for the trip.”

“Sign my life away in blood.”

“That sort of thing. Shall we say half an hour?”

“More like five bloody hours with that lot in your hair,” said Sharon. The door closed. “Ooh, Pet, how about that? Nip down and see me sometime.”

“Sha …” Petra looked in the mirror at her stylist, who shook her head in wonderment, as if to say: Is she always like this, your friend?

“What’s a conference call, anyway?” Sharon asked.

“Oh, you talk to a lot of people all at the same time, at once. Except you don’t,” said Petra. “You just talk across them and nothing gets sorted out.”

“Oh, I get it,” said Sharon. “Well, he should come to Gower, shouldn’t he? Get that for free round my way, no charge. Mal hasn’t finished a sentence in twenty years. Poor bugger,” she added, with a voice full of love.
“How do you want it?”

“Oh, just milk, please.”

“Anything to eat? You must be exhausted after sitting in that chair all morning having your hair cut.”

“No, thanks. Sharon and I are going out for lunch in half an hour, and I think she may have some sort of medieval banquet in mind. We could well be rowing down to Hampton Court and having swan or something. I think her idea of London is quite …”

“Grounded in history?”

“I was going to say bonkers, but, yes, that sounds better. Just tea, please.”

They are sitting at a round table, in a booth at the back of the cafeteria. “The throbbing heart of Nightingale Publishing,” Bill had said, as he led her downstairs from his office; they had gone through the details of the trip in less than ten minutes—so fast, indeed, that she wondered, for a moment, why he had bothered to summon her. His secretary could have brought the papers up to the makeup room and done it there. Then he had invited Petra to have a cup of coffee. “We like to think it’s the strangest taste on the South Bank, and we want you to have something to remember this day by,” he said. So she had said yes, after a pause, hoping he wouldn’t notice the fluster in her expression. Then she had chosen tea.

“So, what have you been doing all this time?” he asks.

“I’m sorry?”

“I mean, since entering the competition in—when was it?”

“Nineteen seventy-four.”

“B.C. or A.D.?”

“Now you’re being the rude one.”

“I apologize. It’s just that, you know, it was quite some time ago …”

Petra groans. “Please don’t remind me. Am I a mad old witch? Is that what you thought, when they told you I called up?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Well, I was hoping for witch, obviously. Samantha from Bewitched. With twitchy nose and spells and everything.”

“What about mad?”

“Oddly enough, I didn’t think it was that mad. Remember, I’m old, too. In fact I’m about twice your age.” Petra opened her mouth to protest, but he didn’t stop. “So I remember the whole Cassidy thing. I was right in the middle of it.”

“You can’t have been. No boys allowed.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I remember it well enough to know that it was mad then, and I would have been, you know, a little bit disappointed if the madness had completely gone away. Even now.”

“So you do think I’m mad.” For some reason, she finds she is enjoying this.

“No, I think the madness has … matured. Like wine. Deepened into something else, perhaps.” Bill studies her closely. Amazing hands. Long fingers. Cellist, he suddenly remembers. He tries to think of a piece he can talk intelligently to her about. Borodin, Second String Quartet. His mum’s favorite. They had the slow movement played at her funeral. One of those bits of music so beautiful it soothes the cares of the world while telling you the world is too beautiful to last. Like Bill’s mother. Petra is sure to know it.

“So I’m vintage mad.” Petra laughs.

“Perfect.”

“Like this tea.”

“Christ, I hope not. Is it really as bad as it looks?”

“Even worse. It looks like the Thames.” She takes a spoon and stirs. Then she says, “In answer to your question, I haven’t spent the last quarter of a century thinking about David Cassidy, if that’s what you mean.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you look …” Bill stops.

“Careful.”

“I am being extremely careful.” He sips his coffee. “Meaning you are obviously someone who has widened her view of the world.”

“Is that so unusual?”

“Much more than you’d think, I’m afraid. I know an awful lot of people who don’t want to know any more than they did at fifteen. I mean really know. As if they’d taken one look at the world and thought, Not me, mate. Mostly men.”

“Well, there are times you can’t blame them,” Petra says. She is talking quietly now, almost too quietly, and Bill finds himself having to lean across the table.

“True,” he says. “Never underestimate the wish not to know.” He looks at her, as she stares down into her tea.

“Or the wish that you hadn’t had to find out,” she says, after a while.

“Ah yes, all the unsavory truths. Mostly men again.”

“You mean men finding out about women?”

“Other way round,” he says. “What do you see in your tea leaves, Gypsy fortune-teller?”

Petra dips her spoon and swills the tea around. “Your future appears to be brown,” she says at last.

“My favorite color,” he replies, and is taken aback when Petra looks up, sharply. But she says nothing, so Bill goes on.

“So what did you want to know? What have you learned all this while?”

“Well, I did music at the Royal Academy. Cello and a bit of piano. Then I played professionally, which earned me a fortune. Sometimes as much as twenty-three pounds a night. Now I do music therapy. That’s my job.”

“Music therapy?”

“Yes, you know. Using music as an aid to mental and spiritual health.” She feels as if she is reading from a script.

“For troubled souls, you mean. Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,” Bill says.

“If you like. I see quite a few savage breasts. Damaged kids mostly.” Petra hates talking about her job. People always jump to the wrong conclusion. More cautiously, she tries again. “When they hear about a job like mine people always call it ‘putting something back.’ ”

“And it’s not?”

“I feel I get more out of the kids, and the music, than they … It fills me up …” She trails off.

Bill smiles. “So it’s true then.”

“What is?”

“I knew it.”

“What did you know?”

“You have been thinking about David Cassidy all this time.”

Petra looks at him and narrows her eyes. “Never stopped.”

Bill sits back. “Tell me everything,” he says.