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Before I could dwell on that, I realised the rest of the choir had gone quiet and were waiting to start. With a great deal of force, I dragged my attention back to them.
“Okay, ladies, let’s warm up!” I called out, fixing my own performance-mode smile to my face.
They gamely sung their way through three of our standard warm-ups while I accompanied them on the piano, giving pointers. Petra came back halfway through the third one and wandered around, listening to how it sounded from various points in the room and shouting out tips of her own. When I stood up from the last warm-up, she immediately sat down and lowered the stool.
As predicted, replacing one arrangement of Ave Maria with another garnered us a few bemused looks, but I handed out the copies anyway. They soon realised that the heavy, tongue-twisting Latin we’d dropped couldn’t have been further from this mainstream pop, and that all the two songs shared was a name. They were clearly much happier with this one, and I silently congratulated myself on picking the right song. We went through the entire thing, giving each of the three sections their lines and then combining them, and then finally taking the whole thing from the top, with piano accompaniment.
When I began conducting, Petra launched in with the piano introduction, but immediately there was a chorus of “Huh?” and other bemused sounds from the choir. I stopped conducting and looked over at her. She was leaning forward, almost scrutinising the page, screwing up her eyes as if she was having difficulty reading it. After a couple of bars she looked up, then realised we were all looking at her.
“What?” she said, the music cutting off mid-bar.
“Wrong key,” I said.
She took another look at the music.
“Oh yes, so it was,” she said quickly, before launching back into it, this time in the correct key. Some of the ladies chuckled before turning their attention back to me, and I tried to ignore the pang of worry that had just tweaked my heart. Petra was always so… on top of things.
We made it through the whole piece – not chill-worthy yet, but it would get there – and then got cracking on another. The two hours hurtled by as they always did, and then we fielded questions for a further fifteen minutes until everybody had left and we were finally alone.
I immediately turned to face her and held out my arms. “Come here.”
“No,” she said, her voice going strangled. She turned on her stiletto heel and made for one of the doors leading deeper into the building. “I just… left something in the office.”
She was gone so quickly, I didn’t even have time to protest that her office was in the other direction. The caretaker came into the room and jingled her keys pointedly, and I gave her an apologetic half-wave before scurrying to tidy up the music and put the piano away.
Petra reappeared just before I was going to go and search for her. She looked her usual serene work-self, but I wondered whether that was because the caretaker was present. Without a word she wheeled the last basket of music out to the car, then got in the passenger side while I thanked the caretaker and helped her lock up. When I got in, she was scrolling through her Facebook.
“Did you eat today?” I said as I eased out of the car park. The drive was only a couple of minutes, but with the amount of stuff we had in the back on choir nights, using the car was more practical. I thought Petra wasn’t going to respond and that the drive would be conducted in silence, but eventually she clicked her phone off and shrugged.
“I had a sandwich. At lunchtime.”
“Petra, it’s half past nine! Did you not eat before choir?”
Another shrug. “I didn’t feel like it. I meant to go to the bakery after school ended, but I forgot.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to chastise her for not taking care of herself, but I knew that wouldn’t go down well. “I can make you some pasta when we get in?”
“That would be great,” Petra said, then the drive lapsed into silence again. It was just as well that our house was barely a two-minute drive from the school (hence why she normally walked).
“You go on inside,” I urged her, after seeing that she’d climbed out the car and was now standing there looking lost. “I’ll handle all this. Go and have a shower or something, and I’ll get the pasta on to boil.”
“Thanks,” she said absently, half-crawling inside. I heard her open the bedroom window, then a few seconds later the bathroom window next to it. I had just locked the front door for the night when the sound of water began from the bathroom, and I waited for Petra’s tuneful accompaniment. But there was nothing.
I quickly diced a couple of banana shallots and threw them in a hot pan to fry in oil, then added some fresh cherry tomatoes, allowing them to break down with the lid on. I was in the middle of mashing them up when Petra came down the stairs, clad in her fluffy red dressing gown and smelling of her fancy shower gel. Her face had been wiped clean of its makeup and she looked wan – as anyone would if they’d been running a school without food for nine hours.
“Voila, madame,” I said, pouring the sauce onto the plated pasta and placing it on the table. She sat down and picked up her knife and fork with a smile of thanks, then put the cutlery back down again to grind some salt and pepper. “I already seasoned it,” I said, and she glanced over at me again.
“Well, you probably did what you call seasoning,” she said. “But that’s what I call Scottish seasoning. Greek food has a bit more taste.”
“Ouch,” I said mildly, but didn’t rise to it. She was tired and hungry, of course she was snippy. Come to think of it, she’d been snippy the last few days. “Is your time of the month near?”
“You don’t know that? I always knew when yours was.”
“Should I know? I don’t exactly have a menstrual app any more, and it’s not like we really discuss it. Perhaps you should start marking it on the calendar like I did.” The very topic made me squirm, in fact, and I began to wish I hadn’t brought it up. “I just wondered if it was your hormones that were making you aggy, that’s all.”
“I’m not aggy!” She practically spat out her pasta. “I’m fucking exhausted! I’m tired, I’m overloaded, and I don’t need you being arsey about it!”
“Me being arsey?” I exclaimed. “I’m trying to be nice!”
