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“Oh, yes, very nice,” she hissed. “Embarrassing me in front of the ladies earlier? Was that nice?”
“Sorry?”
“The whole wrong-key thing!”
“You were in the wrong key! There was no other way to correct you other than mention it! If we’d have started singing in the key you were playing, the soprano line at the end would have broken their bloody voices!”
“They’d have been fine,” she blustered. “It’s good for them to transpose occasionally. Keeps them on their toes.”
“What, so you did it on purpose?”
“Yes!”
“Yes?” I repeated incredulously. This wasn’t like her.
“No,” she deflated slightly, having been called out. “No, but that’s not the point! We could have pretended. We could have passed it off as deliberate. They listen to you – if you’d have just carried on conducting, they would have cracked on with it. As it was, you made me look like an idiot!”
“Well, I have to say you’re behaving like one now,” I snapped, feeling a blast of temper. This was how it worked with me: I’d take it for so long, then blow. “I think you’ve been spending too much time with kids, and your maturity level is being pared down to theirs.”
Immediately I knew I’d hit hard, because she flinched. After a moment, she picked up her fork and started eating again, her movements now robotic. I went to the back door and opened it to let in some air, as well as to put an end to the argument. Both of us felt strongly about airing our dirty laundry in public, and if there was a door or window open nearby we kept our disagreement volume to a minimum. I knew she was unlikely to retort – loudly at least – if the door was open.
After a moment, and a few calming breaths, I turned back to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “That was hurtful.”
“It really was,” she choked, before standing up with a screech of her chair and running upstairs.
This time, I spent the full night on the sofa.
Chapter Nineteen
As I ate lunch the next day, my mind wandered from its fretting to the multi-coloured photo albums stacked on the shelf next to the utility room. They had been a tradition of mine for several years now. Going through my parents’ old photographs had been one of my favourite things to do with them, and later Petra. It had helped with the grief of losing my sister, and so I’d carried on doing it. At the end of every year, I’d have a selection of photographs from that year developed (from my camera at first but now our phones) and then write the context on the back, before sliding them into the album that Petra always bought me as part of my Christmas present.
The album I selected now was from 2015. We’d gotten married that July. The first photo was from New Year’s Day – a slightly drunken selfie Petra and I had taken in bed after waking up. We both looked rather the worse for wear, but deliriously happy. After all, we had been recently engaged, and it had felt as if the world was at our feet. I slid the photo out of its little plastic cover and flipped it over to read what I’d written on the back.
‘The morning after the night before, NYD 2015. What a night!! [flame emoji]’
A few squiggles accompanied it. I chuckled. I’d been very into emojis at that time, peppering my texts with them in a habit picked up from Petra. Clearly I had been frustrated at my failed attempts to draw the flame emoji, hence the square brackets. I took a closer look at the photo again, and smiled at Petra’s mussed hair and smudged makeup. Was that the year we’d been out with some choir friends and ended up singing Auld Lang Syne in the middle of the street just after midnight? I couldn’t quite remember.
The next photo was from a couple of weeks later. Petra and I were on the beach just a few minutes’ walk from our house, both bundled up like Michelin Men. There was an orange blob to the side of us which I immediately recognised as a finger, and from that I knew exactly who had taken the photo. Mum had never quite understood that camera lenses on phones were at the top and not the middle like a conventional camera, and thus her finger had appeared in many a photograph. A quick read of what I’d written on the back of the picture confirmed it. Mum took this on a visit down to Miltree, January 2015. Petra, me… and Mum’s finger.
I skipped a few photos, and landed in summer. My hand immediately rested on a picture of Petra in a red wrap dress with a glass of white wine in her hand. It was a handful of weeks before our wedding, and the excitement was palpable in the way she was sitting up straight, chest pushed forward, an enormous smile splitting her face almost in two. Everything about that evening had stuck in my mind. We’d reenacted our third date, and had sat on the patio with our phones, listening to songs that meant things to us, from our childhoods and our lives. Unlike on our third date, however, this time Petra had gone into depth about her childhood. The way she’d moulded herself into her very-Catholic parents’ idea of a perfect daughter, training to be a singer and working for them in their wedding planning business, before coming out as gay and being cut off. It had been the first time she’d shared anything so deep with me, and I’d listened, comforted her when she started to cry, then brought her around by moving the topic onto our wedding. That was when I’d taken the picture.
I flipped the page, and my heart rose further into my throat. I’d forgotten all about this one. Petra and I were standing at the top of the steps that led down to the beach here in Miltree. We were both facing out towards the sea with our back to the camera, with an arm around each other. The sunset ahead of us was an incandescent blend of purples and pinks and reds and yellows. As if the sky had recognised that it was our one-month wedding anniversary and was doing its very best to pack as many colours in as possible before it turned dark for the night. I was nestled in to Petra’s side and she had her head tilted to rest against the top of mine. We hadn’t even known the picture was being taken, but I was very glad for it.
Now tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d stood like that, just existing quietly in each other’s space. We still had what society called intimacy – i.e. sex – but this type of intimacy was long gone. The easy touch and unconscious warmth between each other had faded. Seven years, almost… I wondered if this was what they meant when they said about the seven-year-itch. As that horrible thought entered my brain, I slammed the album shut with a snap that seemed to cut through the cavernous silence of the kitchen.
Blinking furiously, I put the album back and picked up another one at random. They were stacked in no particular order, definitely not chronological, so of course I stumbled upon one of the very ones that would make my melancholy worse. This one was from 1991, the year I turned twenty-one and three years after we’d moved to Cornwall. The picture upon which I opened was one of the four of us – my little family. Lyndsey, nine years older than me, was visibly pregnant with her first child here – my oldest nephew Johnny – and yet my lip curled to see that she had a cigarette between her fingers. She had known full well the dangers of smoking, especially when pregnant, and yet she hadn’t quit, instead choosing to cut down to one or two per day. It was a miracle that Johnny and Dean were both still alive and healthy. At least I presumed they were, although due to their move to Scotland after her death, I hadn’t heard from them since I got married.
“You ’nana,” I murmured, touching Lyndsey’s grinning face in the photo. I didn’t have it in me to resent her any more. After all, she’d paid for her smoking with her life. Lung and throat cancer: the consequence of thirty-five years of chain smoking – literal chain smoking, one cigarette after another from morning until night, right from the age of sixteen. Petra had given up her smoking habit immediately when I told her, because it had been a deal-breaker for me. The power of love.
Except… where had that love gone? I didn’t understand it, but it was becoming clearer by the day suddenly. She was pushing me away.
Just as I was about to shut the album, I looked at my twenty-one-year-old self again. The young woman in the photo would never have envisaged my life now. She would never have even envisaged me with short hair – in this photo, my locks were as long and brunette as Petra’s were now, although more of a milk-chocolatey brown. Purple hair had been completely unheard of in our little Scottish village life as we grew up, and Cornwall had seemed just about the same.
And as for being a lesbian… well, I’d known. Of course I’d known, by then. But I’d never dreamed of being out. Of being with a woman. Of being able to get married to a woman. That type of life had seemed a million miles away, and it had seemed a charmed one, where nothing could ever go wrong.
It had, I realised suddenly. It had gone wrong.
