I Think I Love You

21

Petra sat at her kitchen table, quite still, holding a mug of coffee in both hands. She watched the steam rise from it, in the morning light. The day was still young; their flight had landed not long after dawn.

She took a sip, then frowned at something. Her suitcase, in the doorway, airline tags attached. Just waiting for Molly to go tripping over it when she came in.

Petra rose and carried the case upstairs, bumping its bulk on every step, then swung and heaved it onto the bed. She breathed out, and was about to leave the room, to go downstairs and finish her coffee. She paused. Better hang her new linen jacket up before it got too creased. She went back to the bed, and clicked the two clasps on the case.

It opened, she swung back the top, and stopped. Her first thought was that she had taken the wrong suitcase at the airport. But no, there was the jacket, neatly folded, and the edge of her mother’s blouse underneath. But on top was something that was not hers. Yet it was meant for her, because her name was on the front.

Petra took the envelope and looked at it. The flap was not stuck down, just tucked in. She opened it, and slid the letter out. She read it for the first time in her life. Then she read it again to make sure.
Dear Petra,

How can I be sure, in a world that’s constantly changing, where I stand with you?

I’m beginning to think that man has never found the words that could make you want me.

Nevertheless, cherish is the word I use to describe all the feeling that I have hiding here for you inside.

As somebody once sang, I forget his name: life is much too beautiful to live it all alone.

Believe me, you really don’t have to worry. I only want to make you happy and if you say, hey, go away, I will. But I think, better still, I’d better stay around and love you. Do you think I have a case? Let me ask you to your face: do you think you … et cetera.

I believe you know the rest.

Yours,

sincerely,

Bill x
Petra put the letter in her pocket and went downstairs. Passing the hall table, she noticed a jug of sweet peas. The scent was so strong, intoxicating. On a Post-it note stuck to the wall, she spied Molly’s girly, looped handwriting: “I picked them. Told you!!!”

Petra smiled. The daughter, unlike her mother, was going to lead a three-exclamation-marks kind of life. She thought of Molly, obeying the request to pick the sweet peas while Petra was in Vegas, to keep the flowers coming, an instruction Molly’s mamgu had issued more than thirty years ago to Petra herself, and, who knows, maybe Greta heard it from her own mother in Germany. Things being passed on; habits, scents, beloved melodies, a heart-shaped chin: motherhood and memory forging a slender handrail to cling on to down the generations.

She wondered what Greta and Molly would think of Bill. It took a second to remember that one of those meetings would never take place now. Too soon, she thought. It’s too soon. And yet, we cannot choose those moments when two people are suddenly wide open and the merest glance has the power to console or heal.

In the years to come, the only thing they would find it hard to agree on was whether they had actually met at White City. Petra always said they must have because she loved the perfect symmetry of it. Bill was the first man to take her in his arms and, if life was kind to them, then he would also be the last.

Bill, who had made up the story that brought Petra to him, was perfectly happy for his darling wife to write whatever ending she liked best. Cariad was the Welsh word for darling. This Petra taught him, along with so much he had never known before.

She was so tired that morning she got back from the Cassidy trip, but old habit and new desire sent her into the living room. She bent down and flipped the catches on the case. Bill’s letter was in her pocket. Pulling the cello to her, she answered it. Urging the music on. Each note like a pearl. Each phrase like a string of pearls. One little phrase, and so many ways to say it.