Part 6 (1/2)

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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 red-shoe 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 a.s.sumed, 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 p.i.s.sed 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.

After half an hour, and on the verge of drinking some milk straight from the carton, Petra can hear voices and over the stile on the other side of the lane, her mother and another woman appear.

'Yoo-hoo!' Melinda calls, as if Petra has just arrived and not spotted her.

The other woman waves.

'We've been for a lovely walk,' her mother tells her, 'hours and hours. Isn't it a joy to be in flip-flops in April! Lovely to see you, darling. Come on in. Oh Christ, look at this, Tinks, my daughter has brought her own milk with her!'

Each time Petra visits her mother, she is surprised and a little alarmed by how much stuff can be crammed into such a small s.p.a.ce. By contrast, the chickens live in a stylish and s.p.a.cious way, in designer coops bought at great expense.

'There must be thirty birds in your back garden,' Petra remarks, her head bobbing as she vies for a view from the kitchen window not obliterated by wine bottles with candles stuck in them or pelargoniums growing up from the sills meeting the spider plants clambering down from macrame hanging pots at the ceiling.

'Twenty-six,' Melinda corrects her, 'but two bantams are joining us next week. You'll come and collect them with me, won't you, Tinks.'

There is silence.

Melinda and Petra look around but though the cottage is crowded with belongings, there is certainly no one else there.

'She must have gone,' Melinda says airily. 'Well, the cacti can have her tea. I insist you try rice milk, Petra. I've changed from soya.'

They take their tea out into the back and the chickens squawk their irritation but soon settle down into a sort of muttering indifference.

'Rob says hi,' Petra says.

'Tell him I say hi and Have you sold your horrid car, Rob,' Melinda says and she starts giggling.

'Mum,' Petra objects quietly.

'He's too businessy for you, Petra,' Melinda says. 'You need someone more I don't know less Mercedesy.'

'Don't be so judgemental,' Petra says. 'You hardly know him.'

'I'm not being judgemental,' Melinda says. 'I'm just making an observation. How long have you been with him?'

'Coming up for ten months.'

'There,' Melinda says. 'Obviously you know him better than I but there again, perhaps I know you better than he.'

Petra wants to say, You hardly know me at all, Mum we rarely speak and I hardly see you. 'Don't talk in riddles,' she says instead. And though she wants to defend Rob, she decides to leave it at that. Because, annoying as it is, her mum is a little bit right. Rob is businessy. He is Mercedesy. But Petra thinks it's up to her to decide whether he's too much so.

Petra is starting to feel tired and irritable. I just want a normal cup of tea and a sensible chat.

'Yoo-hoo!' It's Tinks, suddenly appearing from inside the house.

'I thought you'd b.u.g.g.e.red off!' Melinda says and the two women fall about laughing.

Petra bites her lip, not sure if she'd like to swear, cry or just yell.

'I have to go, Mum,' she says. 'Rob has tickets for a thing.'

'You've only just arrived,' her mother protests.

'Actually, I arrived two hours ago,' Petra says, 'but you weren't here.'

'Oh come now, darling,' her mother says abruptly, 'you can hardly blame me for going for a stroll on a beautiful day like today. It's April! Flip-flop time! Goodness me, you Londoners, you youngsters, you're always in an insane rush, obsessing with schedules and timetables. Anyway, you can't go just yet, I need to collect some eggs for you.'

As Petra headed home, with the eggs and also the milk that her mother would not allow in her fridge, she thought about the period when her mother was slightly more staid and her father a little less dowdy. She must have been about eight or nine. But what was clearer than recollections of how they looked at that stage, what was more vivid than memories of family outings to the zoo back then, or those supper-times with Ambrosia Creamed Rice for pudding, was that this was precisely the period when Petra had first started sleepwalking.

Chapter Eight.

Petra had made much of not going into work the following day. She curled up under the duvet in Rob's bed that Monday morning and tried to entice him to stay with her.

'Play hooky?' she asked playfully.

'Why?' he said.

'Don't go into work,' she said.

'Why not?' he said.

'Stay right here and play with me!' Petra said. Rob hadn't asked why she wasn't going into work. 'I feel a bit low,' she told him, as if he had, 'after the weekend. My parents. You know. It's difficult.' Rob didn't ask why specifically.