Pillow Talk

‘She’s brung us stuff,’ Bruce said cheerily, poking Petra’s bag as Eliza dragged her through to the sitting room.

Mary paused and Petra could see her assessing the subtlest way to do her familiar disappearing act. ‘Petra, do you mind holding court – then I can just finish off on the computer?’ And Mary wafted off muttering that she couldn’t believe she didn’t have time to go to a real supermarket these days.

An hour later, she reappeared. ‘Where on earth is John?’ she said. ‘I’ll phone him. Back in a sec.’ But soon enough, Petra could see her in the back garden, pruning half-heartedly before sitting down to sip from a mug.

Half an hour later, John arrived back.

‘Daddy!’ clamoured his two youngest children, rushing forward. Joanna glanced up momentarily from her teen magazine.

‘Hi, Dad,’ said Petra, with an awkward half-wave, hanging back. She was always surprised at how grey her father’s hair was; in between visits it automatically restored itself in her mind’s eye to the darker thatch she remembered best. It had definitely thinned more too, even since her last visit before Christmas. Today he also appeared smaller around the shoulders yet more slumpy around the waist.

‘Hullo, Petra,’ he said, craning forward to kiss her cheek while Bruce and Eliza clambered around him like chimps on a trunk. ‘Sorry I’m late – you know how these things drag on.’ But Petra didn’t know, because she didn’t know where he’d been or what the things were that he usually did on a Saturday in early April. ‘You look well, darling. How long can you stay?’

Petra looked at her watch. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘about another hour, really. Rob’s taking me to the theatre tonight.’

‘Rob?’

‘My boyfriend.’

‘The investment chappy?’

‘Yes. Him.’

‘You must bring him along next time you visit,’ John said.

‘OK,’ said Petra, wondering just now if she’d bother to visit before Christmas and wondering, very quietly, if she’d still be with Rob then anyway.

‘How’s work?’

‘Great, thanks.’

‘And everything else?’

‘Yes, everything’s fine, Dad, thanks.’

‘Where’s Mum?’ John asked and it was instinctively on the tip of Petra’s tongue to say, Still down in Kent actually I’m visiting her tomorrow – before she realized that he was asking the question of his other children.

‘Online,’ Joanna said, with a roll of her eyes.

‘Mummy,’ Eliza called.

‘She’s in the garden,’ Petra told him. And off he went, followed at intervals of a minute or two by his children. Petra brought up the rear.

‘Isn’t it lovely to see Petra, everyone,’ John announced. ‘Shame you have to go so soon. Next time, come for longer.’

‘And bring your boyfriend,’ Jo said.

‘OK,’ said Petra, ‘I will do.’ And it dawned on her that though she could stay until she physically needed to leave to catch a train, her visit had probably run its course already. ‘I suppose I’d better make tracks, now.’

‘Well, it’s lovely to see you,’ Mary said.

‘Don’t be a stranger,’ John added. ‘Come on, I’ll run you to the station.’

‘It’s not necessary,’ Petra told him. And John then said, ‘Well, OK then, if you’re sure,’ at the same time as Petra said, ‘But a lift would be great, thanks,’ and there was a momentary stalemate during which they laughed awkwardly and wondered how to backtrack.

‘Come on, the least I can do is run you to the station,’ John said.

‘Don’t dilly-dally,’ Mary warned him. ‘I’ve been run off my feet all day.’

John spread his palm to signify five minutes.

‘Bye, everyone,’ Petra said and the smaller children hugged her and bemoaned her leaving while Jo said, ‘See you,’ with the nonchalance characteristic of her age.

‘Great to see you,’ John said as he pulled up outside the station. ‘You look very well, darling.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ said Petra.

‘Are you OK for money?’ he asked, twisting to locate his wallet in his back pocket.

‘I’m fine, Dad,’ said Petra. ‘Thanks.’

‘Well, here,’ he said, passing over a twenty-pound note. ‘It’s not much these days – but you can buy your chappy an ice cream in the interval at the theatre tonight.’

Petra felt almost euphoric as the train pulled away.

He remembered that Rob is taking me to the theatre tonight!

But the feeling soon disintegrated into the familiar sense of deflation. She rested her forehead so that it banged lightly against the window.

I am never an unwelcome guest in my father’s house, but I am always an uninvited one. She felt close to tears and resolved not to arrange another visit until Christmas-time.

Petra’s mother now collected chickens with much the same passion as she’d collected shoes when Petra started at Dame Alexandra Johnson School for Girls. When the letter arrived announcing that Petra had a place and a bursary too, Melinda Flint had taken her daughter into town in a taxi and told her to choose anything within reason at John Lewis. Petra had chosen a thick pad of cartridge paper, bound beautifully, and a Rotring draughtsman pen. Her mother had then spent ages in the shoe department, finally deciding on a pair of slingbacks in vivid scarlet suede. ‘Don’t tell your father,’ Melinda had said, swooping down on a packet of cotton handkerchiefs monogrammed with a delicately embroidered P. Petra wondered how on earth her father could take offence to cotton handkerchiefs with her initial on them. Until she realized that her mother was referring to the shoes.

The only time John passed comment on her mother’s shoes was in the heat of an argument. And there were plenty. Shoes and arguments.

On a bright Sunday morning, Petra alighted from the train at East Malling, waited for a taxi and then asked the driver to stop so she could buy some milk.

‘My mother is into soya milk,’ she explained, ‘and I don’t like it.’

The soya-milk phase had lasted far longer than the redshoe phase which came to an abrupt end when John left. She’d thrown the shoes out. Dumped them in a bin bag along with any items of his he’d left. She’d then eschewed anything as lively as red shoes in favour of elegant dressing so dark and demure it was almost funereal. However, when John and Mary had moved into the house in Watford to prepare for Joanna’s birth two years later, Melinda had reverted to her maiden name of Cotton and, Petra assumed, the dress sense of her premarital days too. She forsook the nicely cut suits in sober colours to go with the flow. And everything was soon free flowing and colourful, from her hair to her long skirts to the yoga poses she did in the corner of the sitting room while Petra tried to watch Blue Peter.

When I finished school, Petra liked to explain, it wasn’t me who left home, but my mother. As soon as Petra’s place at Central St Martins was guaranteed, her mother left London.

Melinda lived first in a yurt near Ludlow for a few months, then she tinkered with communal living in Devon. She tried Portsmouth with a boyfriend called Peter and she stayed a while in Lincoln with a boyfriend called Roger. She settled on chickens and Kent a few years ago and is now more settled than Petra has ever known her to be. So self-sufficient, in fact, that she seldom has the need or the nous to phone her daughter for a chat, let alone to arrange to see her.

Today, it seems, Melinda is not in.

Petra wonders how long to give her mother. She half-heartedly rings the doorbell again and phones the number, hearing the phone ringing inside the cottage. She puts the bag with the milk in the shade and tries to see over the unruly hedge. She can hear clucking, as if the chickens are muttering under their breath that all the doorbell and phone ringing is an imposition on a quiet Sunday morning. She feels irritated. She doesn’t have a number for a local taxi firm and the cottage is not walking distance to any shops that might. She now feels relieved that Rob is not here. How pissed off would he be! He already refers to Melinda as Hippy Chick-en. She stomps around the cottage and peers into an old Renault she is sure cannot be her mother’s. Her mother hates cars. Last time, she reeled off a load of incendiary facts about emissions and the ozone to Rob when they had turned up in his Mercedes before Christmas. The memory enables Petra to feel again relieved that Rob isn’t here with her today.