I Think I Love You

18

Are you alone?” asked Petra. “Is there just one of you? I thought there were going to be more.”

“Me too,” said Bill.

They were standing at the coffee machine in the British Airways lounge. It was a while since Petra had flown, and she had half forgotten the crush of travelers at the check-in desks, the long lines of thrumming anxiety, everyone on the hard verge of complaint; having forged a way through, she found her need for coffee, here on the other side, almost overwhelming. Coffee and somewhere to sit down. Sharon, on the other hand, who had flown only twice before, and had never been in an airline lounge, was in heaven. She was eating a slab of soft cheese on a Ritz cracker, and devotedly studying the labels of the three available brandies, like an art historian at a show of lithographs. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

Bill waited until they were seated. He stirred his tea, sipped and said to Petra, as she raised her cup to her lips, “Yes, I was going to send one of our writers to cover you.”

Petra snorted into her coffee. Some of it slopped into the saucer.

“I’m sorry,” said Bill. “I’ll start again. What I was trying to say was, I asked one of our lot, a very smart lad called Jake, to fly out with you and write up the story. Ideal chap; did a really nice cover story for us last month on Emmylou Harris.”

“The most beautiful woman in the world,” said Petra.

“God, yes. Most of the survivors from that era, they look a bit, you know, lived-in. And she just seems to have sailed through without a scratch. And the voice with it. Amazing. Anyway, when I said about you, and, and … the David Cassidy thing, Jake jumped at it. Said it was a brilliant idea.”

“So where is he?”

“Well, it was him who pulled out. I mentioned that I was thinking of doing, you know, the deep background piece. An oldie speaks. And he says, go on then, Boss, you do it. Do the whole thing.”

“Do they really call you Boss?”

Bill made a face. He broke a biscuit in two and dunked one half in his tea. Petra was glad her mother wasn’t there to see it.

“ ’Fraid they do, and it always makes me feel like I’m going to be rumbled at any minute. Because I am really the least … bossy boss you can get. I mean, I’m sure I’m a nightmare to work for. But I don’t do shouting or throwing things or threats. I just doodle a lot and change my mind. Although I did staple my thumb to an A4 pad last week.”

“Ouch.”

“Very ouch. And how about you?”

“What about me?”

“Are you the bossy type? You don’t look it, but then …”

“Well, I’m organized.”

“Not the same thing. Who do you organize?”

“My daughter,” said Petra. “And me. I mean my days. I used to organize my husband, but then he organized himself into being with someone else.”

“Idiot,” Bill said.

“Who, me?”

“No, him.”

“Not all men are idiots, you know, just because they leave women.” Petra poured herself more coffee.

“Well, I left,” said Bill. “Because I didn’t know what to stay for. Or who, actually.”

“At least you didn’t leave to go and live on a houseboat with someone half your age.”

“God, is that what he did? He really is an idiot.”

“So there was no houseboat with you.”

“No, and no someone else, either. I just went. My dishwasher-stacking skills were becoming the most interesting thing about me. I thought of turning pro.”

“Me too.”

“Dishwasher?”

“No, cello.”

“Oh, cello’s much easier. You don’t need rinse aid.”

Petra smiled. “No, we use rosin instead.” She looked across at Sharon, who was busy slipping a complimentary Kit Kat into her hand luggage.

“Why did you give up?”

“Oh, because of my husband, I suppose.”

“Come on, he didn’t make you? Nobody does that nowadays. It’s not 1913.”

“No, but he’s one, too. A cellist. And he’s better than me.”

Bill sighed. “Modesty gets you nowhere.”

“But it’s true. He’s a star, and I … I mean, he’s like a planet and I’m just a moon, circling round. So I gave it up and went into music therapy, where I still use my, you know, my—”

“Gifts.”

“I was going to say skills. He has a gift, I have skills. Anyway, you can’t have two soloists in one house. People think we played duets all the time, making beautiful music and so on, but it’s not like that at all. I mean it wasn’t. It was more like a … like …” Petra, not wanting to go on, was relieved to find Sharon coming near, hauling her hand luggage. She was waving a leaflet.

“Pet, we can get a massage on the flight. For free.” She sank down into one of the chairs and puffed her cheeks, as if at the end of a long day, not the start. “Can’t decide whether to have the neck rub or the herby facial. Look, says here, ‘cleanses and refreshes with subtle oils of lavender and sage to rejunev, renuj …’ ”

“Rejuvenate?”

“Yeah, brilliant, ‘rejuvenate and brighten your looks, enabling you to step off at your destination ready to go and enjoy.’ Well, that’s us, isn’t it? Don’t know about you, but I haven’t had my looks brightened since 1981. Royal wedding. Only I would put a bloody face pack on just to watch TV.” She looked at Petra, then at Bill. “What you two nattering about, then?”

“Music,” said Bill.

“What, David’s music?”

“No, Petra’s. She was saying she doesn’t have a gift.”

“I—” Petra began.

“Oh, you don’t want to listen to her. I mean, you do want to listen, when she’s playing, like, but once she starts going on about how rubbish she is … Haven’t changed, have you, Pet? Never one for blowing her own trumpet. Cello.”

“She’s as good as I think she is, then?”

“Bloody brilliant, Pet is. Better than her bloody husband, I tell you.”

Petra sat through this with the flush gathering on her face. She hated to be talked about, even in praise, and especially when she was sitting right there. Who would like it? Pop stars, maybe, but nobody normal.

Their flight number was announced. Sharon and Petra stood up at once and started to gather their belongings. Bill stayed where he was.

“Give it a few minutes if I were you,” he said. “They’re trying to herd us. Won’t even open the doors for another twenty-five minutes.”

“Don’t want to miss it,” said Sharon, seriously concerned.

“We won’t, I promise. We’re near the front, anyway.”

“There’s posh,” said Sharon, sitting down again.

“All part of the service, ma’am,” said Bill, in a bad American accent. Petra sat down, too, though still uncertain.

“Do this a lot, do you?” said Sharon. If anyone else had asked, Petra thought, there would have been resentment at the edge of the question, like a stain; but Sha had no resentment in her soul. Not now, not twenty-five years ago. She took the world on its own terms, laughed out loud at its stupidities and waited patiently for any joys that might come along. Whenever, at any stage in life, Petra heard the phrase “counting your blessings,” she always thought of Sharon, aged thirteen, kneeling on the carpet in the Lewises’ lounge, emptying a pack of Spangles onto a copy of TV Times and sharing them out: one for you, one for me …

“I do quite a lot of flying, yes, for the job.”

“ ’Spect you get bored, don’t you?”

Petra watched Bill. He smiled at Sharon and said, “You know what? I don’t. Some blokes do, and it’s not that good for you, being cooped up in a tin can, but I’m still enough of a little boy to think that getting into the can at one end and coming out the other end in New York, eight hours later, is a kind of magic trick. And it’s … When you take off, it’s still quite, I don’t know, liberating, leaving all the usual stuff behind. You just know that for the next few hours nobody’s going to knock on your door or ask you about cover design or bollock you for not making a phone call. The only boring thing, I guess, is not getting to share the liberation. Normally it’s just me. One time I had to go to Hong Kong, and I left my book on the Gatwick Express, and ended up running for the plane, and spent fifteen hours reading the in-flight shopping mag. So now I know nothing about Raymond Carver but I know all there is to know about furry padded 747s and what the difference is between Diorissimo and Miss Dior.”

“Go on, what’s the difference, then?”

“Um, one comes in this handy atomizer, for all your fragrance needs on the go …”

Sharon actually barked with laughter. She reached out and took the undunked half of Bill’s biscuit.

“Well, now you’ve got us, haven’t you? So you won’t be bored.”

“Exactly.”

“Bang goes your liberation.”

“Exactly. Thanks a bunch.”

Petra watched the two of them, enjoying themselves. It looked as easy as a game of ping-pong: to and fro, nothing to it, no hard feelings, almost no feelings at all … Why was it always harder for her—cautious, loaded, heavy with spin? Why could she just never play the game? And she had noticed how deftly Bill had ducked the danger. If he had admitted that yes, he was bored by the traveling (and he had to be, like all businessmen were), it would have undermined the pleasure that Sharon was taking in this day. Not that Sha would have minded, or even noticed much; but to her the trip was something special, a big hilarious one-off. The right thing to do, the good thing, was to respect her feelings and play along. That’s what Bill had done, and, for the second time in as many weeks, Petra found herself thinking: I like him.

“What was the book you left on the train? Carver something,” she said.

“Raymond Carver. Short stories. Just the best. Perfect for leaving on trains.”

“I think I read some, in a collection. I’m so useless, if I really like something, I remember the plot and the characters and these silly details, like the color of someone’s lipstick, but I forget who wrote it.”

“The least important thing. Lipstick matters much more.”

“What was the title? Of your lost book.”

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

“Oh, I can tell you that,” said Sharon, taking an apple from a bowl on the table and rubbing it on her sleeve. “People in love don’t sit around chatting about it, like ‘Ooh, we’re so in love,’ do they? Waste of time. I knew this boy once, and all we ever talked about was who we’d really hated in school and what the best kind of ice cream was to go with what meal, like if you have roast chicken you have to have rum and raisin, right?”

Bill liked listening to the way her voice swooped up at the end of a sentence: rai-sin.

“And once, we spent a whole afternoon talking about how we’d live in space. And I was asking how you get the needle to stay on the record when there’s no gravity, if you want to have a listen to a song, and he was worried about flushing the toilet, and you know what he means, don’t you? All that pee floating round.” Bill and Petra looked at each other, trying not to laugh. “And so we split up, right, and it wasn’t until after that I was in the post office, and I thought, ooh he was lovely, that Gareth. I think I loved him, and I never said. Never knew. Nor did he, poor bloke. All we did was talk, like. Don’t know what happened to him, mind. Probably peeing in space. Might see him this morning if we look out the window, eh, Pet? Give him a wave.”

Petra shook her head in wonderment. “Your brain, Sharon fach …”

“This is a last and final call for passengers on BA flight one seventy-four …”

“There we are.” Sharon jumped to her feet.

“Don’t worry,” said Bill, getting to his feet. “You don’t start running till they ask for you by name.” He picked up Sharon’s hand luggage.

“Bloody hell. What have you got in here? Who have you got in here?”

“Gareth,” said Petra. “All tied up.”

“Get you,” said Sharon. “Anyway, I thought we had another boy coming? Didn’t you say there was a writer?” They left the lounge and started walking, three abreast, toward the gate.

“That’s what I thought,” said Petra. “But the other one dropped out. Just the three of us. Bill’s the writer now.”

“How’s that, then?” Sharon was asking Bill, but Petra answered first.

“It’s his field. You know, Professor of Cassidy Studies. World expert on batty old ladies who want to be fourteen again.”

“That’s not quite fair,” said Bill.

“On who?”

“Ermmm … hang on, left here. Gate Twenty-six. Down there.” He had quickened his pace again, Petra almost sprinting in his wake, but now he slowed. “Told you. Ages to go.” There was a small crowd around the gate, gradually filtering through in single file. “Wait till this lot clears.”

They stood there, while Sharon frisked herself for her boarding pass. “Had it somewhere.” She found it, at last, stuck against the Kit Kat. “There we go. So,” she went on, addressing Bill, “what makes you the expert, anyway?”

“What, on batty old ladies?”

“No, on David.”

“Oh, you mean batty young ladies. Oh, well, believe it or not, I used to write, a hundred years or so ago, for something called The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. And my—”

“Oh my Gaaawwwd,” Sharon and Petra cried out together. Bill looked startled.

“That was our Bible, that was.” Petra gazed at him with an earnestness he hadn’t seen before, though it didn’t seem unexpected, or even out of place. As for Sharon, her mouth was still ajar.

“Meaning?”

“Well, we believed it.”

“Not all of it.”

“Every word.”

“Still do,” said Sharon, regaining the power of speech.

“But,” said Bill, who was struggling with these latest revelations, “but, if it’s like the Bible, don’t you …? I mean, not everything in the Bible is true. Not literally.”

“It is to a believer,” said Petra.

“Yeah, but—”

“To one of them,” said Sharon, “them fundy, what are they? Fundymentals.”

“Fundamentalists.”

“Yeah, that’s the boys. That’s us.”

“You mean it was you back when you were kids,” said Bill. “You can’t still believe it. Not now. If you read that stuff now, you’d see in an instant that it was all cobbled together.”

“Gerraway with you, mun,” said Sharon. The crowd was thinning now, and they were beckoned toward the gate. “If you believe something, you have to go on believing, don’t you?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno.” Sharon handed in her boarding pass, then presented her passport. “Look at me,” she said, showing Bill the photograph. “What a mug shot. Like I’m wanted by the cops or something.” Petra came next. She was quiet.

“Well,” Sharon continued, as they filed down the tunnel toward the plane, “like the letters he wrote. David. You know, the every month ones, signed by him. You’re not going to say those were made up, are you? I mean, we knew those were actually him writing. Sounded just like David. We could feel it.”

Bill stopped. “But that was me.”

“What?” The two women stopped as well. Latecomers bustled past them. Up ahead, cabin crew held open the airplane door and smiled.

“That was my job. I wrote those letters. I was David Cassidy.”

Without hesitation, Petra swiveled round and started walking straight back the way they had come.

“Pet?” said Sharon.

“Petra, come back,” said Bill.

“I’m not coming,” called Petra over her shoulder. She went on walking.

Sharon nudged Bill with her elbow. “I think she likes you.”
Outside, the blue was so pure it felt like a special effect. A fake backdrop, surely, thought Bill, not real sky. Petra, sitting beside him, hadn’t given it so much as a glance. She didn’t want to be here. The cabin crew had taken her aside and explained why she had to get on, talking calmly to her about luggage and security and departure slots. But still, she could have gone, just walked on out of the airport and back home. Wanted to in a way. The absurdity of what she was doing suddenly overwhelmed her. It wasn’t that she, Petra, the woman of thirty-eight, had been upset by Bill’s bombshell, but the girl inside her, the one who still wanted to meet David, was shocked. All her life she had been lied to about love, and the man sitting next to her, tapping on his laptop, he had started it.

“Why did you do it?” she asked, looking down.

“Somebody had to.”

“But why?”

“Because … because there were thousands of people like you, I mean not just like you, but thousands with the same kind of—I don’t know, the same sort of love. The same craze. And we didn’t know what to do with you.”

“What d’you mean, do with us?”

“Well … we called it feeding the lionesses. Your appetite was, I mean, there was no end of it. You wanted more of him, every week, on every conceivable subject, than we could possibly supply. It was hard enough for us to churn it out, so the idea that he could have done it himself … It just wasn’t possible.”

“What about, what’s it called, syndication? He writes one letter, back in California or wherever, and it gets printed in all the different magazines all over the world. It wouldn’t have been ours alone, but at least it would have been true.”

“Not a bad idea. You should mention it to him when you see him on Wednesday.”

Petra said nothing. She knew she was being ridiculous, like a child; but then that, after all, was what was at stake here—the right to defend the child you used to be. The child who was trying out love, real love, for the first time. To be cheated in love later on, well, it happened, happened to the best of people; it had happened to her, with a vengeance, just this past year and her heart was ripped apart. But to be cheated at your first attempt, by someone trying on the disguise of the person you loved: What kind of betrayal was that?

The flight attendant went past with the drinks trolley, on her second run. Petra had shaken her head when she came round before. Now she ordered a vodka and tonic; not a drink she had ever ordered before in her life. Why now, then? It seemed as good an occasion as any. The attendant gave her two small bottles of vodka and two cans of tonic. Petra opened them and mixed them, half and half. Bill was drinking tomato juice. She wondered how it would look all over his white linen shirt.

He was staring into his plastic cup, saying nothing. Then he said, “Sorry.” He looked at Petra properly and steadily, admitting his guilt, hoping to see a flicker of merciful humor in those eyes of hers. Deep brown, her eyes. He took a breath and continued.

“But which would you have preferred, honestly? To read David’s letters, every month, and believe in them, and, I don’t know, draw strength from them in some way; or never to hear from him? To sit in your bedrooms and giggle and swoon over the nonsense I wrote on his behalf, and it was nonsense, believe me, or to sit there and look at a blank space in the fan mag, maybe with a few words from Zelda, saying, ‘We’re terribly sorry, but Mr. Cassidy doesn’t have the time, the inclination or the punctuation to write you the message you want to hear right now. Nor will he have the time in the immediate future; not until you’ve stopped loving him, at which point he will suddenly have all the time in the world.’ Think about it, Petra. You’re a brilliant woman, so you tell me. Which would it be? The happy fib, or the sorry truth?”

Petra swallowed half her drink in one long draught. She could feel it going straight to her head, siphoning directly from her stomach. She was blinking oddly, too; fizzy eyes, one of her friends used to say when they first had a girls’ night out.

“Who’s Zelda?” she asked eventually. The consonants were fizzy now as well.

“Oh God, she was my boss. Extraordinary woman, in a way. A sort of human galleon. Everybody took the piss, but I liked her a lot. She taught me how to be picky, for one thing.”

“Picky?”

“You know, check your spelling, lineation, pagination, dropped caps, contents page matching actual contents, picture credits. All the gubbins. Get your quotes right.”

“Unless you’ve made them all up,” she said.

“Yes, and even then they need to make sense, and sort of gel together. Believe it or not.”

“So picky was good.”

“Picky is always good. All the maddest poets were complete pedants, the madder the better. Byron, Baudelaire, all the Bs, all the wild boys; whoring and drinking, then back to the proofs and the semicolons. Come on, you’re the cellist. Without picky you haven’t got a hope, you know that.”

“Yes,” said Petra sadly, “I know that.” She thought of her mother, the Kaiser of Picky, and of Miss Fairfax, her own personal galleon. The world felt a lot less safe and rigorous without Jane Fairfax in it. The only consolation was that you could hand on the pickiness, pass it on to those who would live after you, so they, in their turn, would pass it on. “Bach never wastes a single note, Petra. You must play every note consciously.”

They said nothing for a while. “What became of her?”

“Who?”

“Zelda. Did you keep in touch?”

“Oh God. It was awful.”

“What was?”

“Well, we lost touch after I left the job. You know how it goes. The more you promise to stay in touch, the more guaranteed it is that you’ll never hear from each other again. I was waiting for her to make the call, and she was probably doing the same with me. And then a couple of years ago, by sheer chance, I was in Stratford. Not Shakespeare, the other Stratford, Stratford East. And this tiny little bloke comes up to me in the street, taps me on the arm, and I sort of veer away. Cos he looks a bit of a mess, bit smelly. And he says, ‘ ’Allo, Bill.’ And I look at him, and I swear I genuinely don’t know who it is. And it turns out to be this chap called Chas, who was our office boy, back in the, you know, the Cassidy days. I was always a bit mean about Chas, and I’m pretty sure he hated me, thought I was a snob and a college git.”

“And were you?”

“Totally. And it turns out, of course, that Chas was the one who kept in touch with Zelda. Not me, the nice boy with all the promises and the big career coming. Fat lot of good I was. But the dogsbody with no career at all, you know, a lifetime of doing other people’s dreary stuff for them, he was the good Christian soul. Met up with Zelda three, four times a year; lunch, pub, talk about old times. Which of course were her best times, as far as she was concerned. And she got ill, and refused to leave her flat, and Chas would take round the groceries, you know, heat up the soup.

“And I said to him, ‘How’s she doing now? Is she still alive?’ And he looks at me and says, ‘Oh no, died ten years ago.’ He went on hols, first trip ever, been saving up for it, and while he’s away she took some sleeping tablets. He comes back from Spain and finds her in bed. Been like that for two weeks. Just the most dreadful thing. Imagine how I felt.”

“Imagine how he felt,” corrected Petra. “Imagine how she must have felt.”

“Yes.” Bill looked down at his drink. This woman seemed to be peeling him apart. It was like going to confession.

“What would Zelda say,” asked Petra, a few minutes later, “if she knew you were going to meet David Cassidy? And that you were bringing two of your readers along?”

“Oh, no question. She would be completely thrilled. That would be her idea of heaven. To have arranged it so that other people could be happy.”

“Even though she wasn’t.”

“Well, she was on her own ground. It’s just that elsewhere she seemed, I don’t know, marooned.”

“Not like our girl there,” said Petra, nudging him and glancing over at Sharon. The flight attendant had come to ask what they would like for their lunch, and Sharon was deep in conversation. The attendant was forced to kneel down beside her and go through every detail, so that Sharon, who had been reading the in-flight menu ever since they took off, could savor all the possibilities before landing on the right one. “Is that real cream with the pineapple cake?” she was saying.

“I have to tell you, Petra,” said Bill, in great solemnity. “I’m in love.”

“Oh, please, Mr. Finn. And we’ve only just met. This is so sudden.”

“With your friend. I honestly think Sharon is the most lovable person I have ever met—I mean properly able to be loved. Like it’s her vocation or something. Of course, most of the people I work with are total shits, so she does have a head start, but still.”

“Well, I loved her first, so hands off,” said Petra. “You’re right, though.”

“Has she always been like that?”

“Always. From when she was—well, she was never a slip of a thing, but from when I first knew her. I was always glad she put up with me, she’s just a much better person than me.”

“Rubbish. How can you say that?”

“It’s true. She’s better and she’s happier.” Petra sipped her vodka. “Better because she’s happier.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Oh yes. People always say, oh, do good and it’ll make you happy, but that’s the wrong way round, isn’t it? Contented people are just more likely to do good, they’re more … equipped for it. They don’t have to work themselves up to it, it just comes naturally. I mean, look at her. Look at them.”

The attendant had departed, deeply bewildered by the in-depth discussion of salmon roulade, and Sharon was talking, with great animation, to the couple across the aisle. They were matching human beings: outsized but cheery, the bulk of them overflowing the seats, even these larger ones in business class. Both wore shirts of a deafening loudness, as if they were already in Las Vegas, not nine hours away. Both were drinking small bottles of champagne, their second bottle each. Their free hands, the ones not holding their drinks, were clasped together on the armrest.

“I think they might be married,” Bill said.

“Noooo!” said the woman to Sharon. She turned to her husband. “Hear that, Mr. J?”

“There you go,” said Bill quietly. “She’s Mrs. J.” Petra stifled a laugh.

“Guess what this lady’s doing in Vegas. You’ll never guess.”

“Gamblin’,” said Mr. J, and shook merrily at his own wit.

“No, silly, much better than that. Guess who she’s going to meet, her and her friends here.”

“Give up,” said the husband, instantly.

“Only David Cassidy, in’t it? David bloody Cassidy. I love that little fella.”

“Number fifty-three,” said Mr. J.

“Is it really? Fifty-three? Well, there you go, then. He’s coming back up. Well, I never.”

It was Petra’s turn to lean across. “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help overhearing. Who’s number fifty-three?”

“David is. Sorry, love, sounds a bit mysteeerious, don’t it?” The woman had an audience now. Half the cabin was listening intently, and the other half had no choice. “My husband here, he’s, well, he’s in the ringtone sector. You know, like on mobiles. ‘King of the Ringtones,’ that’s what the local paper said. And we have a chart, like, which songs are people choosing this week to put on their phones. And Mr. J was just saying that your David Cassidy, he’s up to fifty-three this week. Not bad, eh? I mean, especially seeing how old he must be. Wearing well, is he?”

“Bloody well hope so,” said Sharon, opening a packet of pretzels. “Not going all that way to see someone who looks like my grandad, are we?”

“Which song is it?” Petra asked. “In your chart.”

“ ‘I Think I Love You.’ Obvious, really,” said Mr. J.

“Completely,” said Petra. “Great song. Never dates.”

“Mind you,” he went on, “someone told me this funny thing at the office last week. Happened to a friend of his, his wife, right? Big Cassidy fan, all the way back. Anyway, she’s at the doctor’s, okay? Not just any old doctor’s, either. Gyny whatnot.”

“Mr. J!”

“So, she takes off her togs, puts her handbag down, with the phone in it, not switched off, and the gyny fella’s got his little, what do they call it? Speculation?”

“Speculum,” said Petra, who knew it well.

“That’s the job. Anyway, he’s got his speculum, right, and he’s having a proper feel, like you do—no, Marjorie, they got to hear this, let me finish—and he’s just saying, ‘Does it hurt,’ you know, ‘I do hope you’re not feeling any pain,’ all polite, and at that moment …” Mr. J paused to wipe his eyes, already overcome. “At that exact moment her phone, the one in her bag, starts going, ‘I think I love you’ …” Mr. J sang it to them, in a strong bass. “And this bird, she hears this ringtone, right, number fifty-three, and it’s just so wrong, for where she is, that she laughs, like really, really loud. And the poor doc, he gets shot out of her backwards, like a cork out of a bottle, she says, and his speculator comes flying out, too, and he bangs his head on the door. And she says, quick as a flash, ‘I do …’ ” Mr. J was uncontrolled by now, quivering in every corner of his frame, his wife beside him doing the same. “She says, all polite like, ‘I do hope you’re not feeling any pain.’ I mean, you’ve got to laugh, an’t you?”

Sharon was spraying pretzels over the aisle. Petra sat back.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to hear that song in quite the same way again.”

Bill looked at her and said, “All things considered, I don’t think we should tell David Cassidy what happened to his song.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He might be thrilled. He always wanted to reach out to his fans. Just not into them.” Petra had finished her drink, both bottles. Her tongue felt loose. She rattled the ice. “Anyway, what’s the plan when we get there?”

“Well, tonight, just as your body wants to go to sleep, your spirit has to get up and go and see David sing.”

“Oh, I think I can manage that.”

“And then tomorrow morning, at eleven thirty, depending on whether or not we can drag Sharon away from her all-night blackjack session, we go and meet David. Meet and greet, take a few snaps, sign autographs, that kind of thing. We won’t have that long with him, I suspect, but still. The good news is he’s staying at the same hotel as us.”

Petra closes her eyes. A quarter of a century ago, the news that she would be spending the night in the same hotel as David Cassidy would have made her faint clean away.

“Tonight is a special,” Bill was saying. “One-man show, I guess; he stands there and belts out all the golden oldies.”

“You mean to all the golden oldies.”

“That’s us. Most nights he’s in some stage show called, wait for it, EFX.”

“Effects?”

“No, spelled out, like E-F-X. Lots of dry ice and lasers and new songs. That’s why we timed the trip to coincide with the show he’s doing tonight. More your thing.”

“Very good of you.”

“Oh no, purely selfish. Gives me more to write about.”

The meals had arrived. Sharon had already dropped half a roll and was trying to open a sachet of salad dressing.

“Take cover,” said Petra to Bill.

Across the aisle, Mr. and Mrs. J were clinking glasses and proposing a toast to the assembled company.

“To David Cassidy.”

“To David Cassidy,” said Petra, raising her empty glass. “Bill?”

Bill gave a long sigh, as if suffering from an old wound, and lifted his tomato juice.

“To David Cassidy,” he said. “And Zelda, who art in heaven.”

Petra smiled, and touched her glass to his. “To Zelda.”