Kitabı oku: «Pillow Talk»

FREYA NORTH

Pillow Talk

Copyright

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition 2008

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2007

Copyright © Freya North 2007

From 100 Love Sonnets: Cien Sonetos de Amor by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott, Copyright © Pablo Neruda 1959 and Fundacion Pablo Neruda, Copyright © 1986 by the University of Texas Press. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007245925

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007325795

Version: 2015-10-13

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Praise for Love Rules:

‘Freya North has matured to produce an emotive novel that deals with the darker side of love – these are real women, with real feelings.’

She

‘Tantrums, tarts, tears and text-sex … what’s not to love about this cautionary tale for true romantics?’

Heat

‘A distinctive storytelling style and credible, lovable characters … an addictive read that encompasses the stuff life is made of: love, sex, fidelity and, above all, friendship.’

Glamour

‘Plenty that’s fresh to say about the age-old differences between men and women.’

Marie Claire

‘An intelligent tale of chance encounters, long-lasting friendship and what it’s like to fall in and out of love.’

B Magazine

Praise for Home Truths:

‘An eye-poppingly sexy start leads into a family reunion laced with secrets. Tangled mother/daughter relationships unravel and tantalising family riddles keep you glued to the end.’

Cosmopolitan

‘An engrossing emotional drama that’s sure to feature on bestseller lists.’

Eve

‘You’ll laugh, cry, then laugh some more.’

Company

‘Freya North manages to strike a good balance between drama, comedy and romance, and has penned another winner in Home Truths … touching, enjoyable.’

Heat

Dedication

In loving memory of my grandmothers,

Grandma Rennie and Grandma Net.

Never far from my thoughts

and always in my heart.

Epigraph

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two together in their sleep will defeat the darkness

Pablo Neruda Love Sonnet LXXIX

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-one

Chapter Fifty-two

Chapter Fifty-three

Chapter Fifty-four

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Author’s note and Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Freya North

About the Publisher

Prologue

Something isn’t quite right – I have a hunch about this. But I think I’ll just tuck it into the back of my mind while I tuck my feet into my wellington boots. Now I’ll open my front door and step out into the night.

I’m ready. Where is it I’m meant to be going? I can’t quite remember. It’ll come back to me in a moment. I’ll just put one foot in front of the other and trust myself. I am turning left. If I am automatically taking this direction to Wherever, this must mean it is the right way to go.

Now where am I? I’m glad I’m wearing my gumboots. That was a good idea. I had to rummage for them as I can’t remember when I last wore them. I can’t remember when I last had a weekend away from the city. No one has ever whisked me away. Not that I’ve ever asked – that wouldn’t be me. That’s not to say I haven’t daydreamed of it, though.

But enough of this mental meandering, I must walk on. This way. That way. I don’t feel very comfortable. I’m rather cold and my feet feel – strange.

I’m hoping for the landmark to loom, to say to me that I’ve arrived at my destination. I know metaphysics would say that it’s not the arriving but the journey that’s the point – but I’m going to have to have a sit-down and a rethink if I don’t get there soon. Perhaps I’ve gone the wrong way. I don’t want to admit to myself that I don’t really know the route because that would call into question the destination which, actually, I can’t remember at all. Well, I’ll keep on walking this way. My feet are really sore. I’d love a bar of chocolate. I’m quite tired now. Sleepy, in fact. Something will jog my memory.

It was not Petra Flint’s memory that was jogged. It was her slumber. By the police. She woke with a start and in a panic; for a split second she thought she was blind. Actually it was very dark and she was lying face down on the ground. Earthy, itchy ground, and wet.

‘Are you OK?’

Petra lifted her head a little and glanced up: two police officers were looming over her. The sudden beam from a torch scorched her eye so she dropped her gaze and put her face back to the ground. She was wearing her nightshirt and her wellington boots, which were on the wrong feet, and she felt mortified. She also felt alarmingly cold. She spat. There was a tickle of grass and a crunch of soil in her mouth. The torch beam wavered. Shit. The police. She scrambled up, whacked by nausea as she did so. Disorientated, she still sensed an urgency to explain because it couldn’t look good, to the police, that she’d been found sprawled on the ground in an oversized Snoopy T-shirt and wellies.

‘Are you OK?’ one officer asked, steadying Petra; the firm arm of the law surprisingly gentle at her elbow.

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she told them, hoping to sound convincing but certain she sounded guilty. She looked around her. She recognized nothing. She didn’t know where she was. A park. ‘Where is this?’ She caught the glance that passed between the officers. She just wanted to go home. Warm up. Tuck in tight for a better night’s sleep. Better not ask any more questions then, better leave that to the police. Better still, give them answers before they even ask. ‘My name is Petra Flint,’ she said clearly, ‘and I sleepwalk.’

Oh my God, my grandmother is dead. The shrill of the phone woke Rob with a start; his ailing grandmother his primary thought. He grabbed at his watch, noting it was almost three in the morning as he said hullo. He listened carefully, soon enough faintly amused by how he could be relieved it was just the police. Grandma is fine, Rob thought, though he wondered whether he’d now jinxed her life by anticipating her death.

‘Yes – Petra Flint,’ he said with the measured bemusement of a parent being called before their child’s head teacher, ‘Petra is my girlfriend. Yes, she is known to sleepwalk – though usually she takes measures to prevent this, keeps herself under lock and key. You found her where?’

He scrambled into some clothes muttering that Christ he was tired. As he found Petra’s keys and snatched up his own from the mantelpiece, he wondered why somnambulists never managed to subconsciously take their keys when they took off into the night. On one sortie, Petra had filled her coat pockets with onions. On another she had taken the remote control from the television with her, having first removed the batteries and placed them in a careful configuration on the kitchen table. In the ten months Rob had known Petra and on the many occasions she had sleepwalked, only a few times had she made it out into the night yet not once had she taken her keys. Or a penny. Or her phone. And, as he drove off towards Whetstone at the behest of the police, Rob decided that, in this age of mobile telecommunication, it was for sleepwalkers alone that phone boxes still existed, providing shelter and the reverse-charges call until someone arrived to take them home. This was, however, the first time he’d been called by the police.

Her sheepish expression could have been due as much to her Snoopy nightshirt as to the circumstance. Rob thought she looked rather cute, all forlorn and mortified. If he ignored the wellington boots and the dirt on her chin.

‘Petra,’ he said, raising an eyebrow towards the duty officer, ‘what were you thinking?’

He always asks me that, Petra thought petulantly. And he never listens when I say I don’t think, I don’t know. Somewhere, in the deeper reaches of my subconscious state which I simply cannot access when I’m awake, I obviously thought that this was a very good idea at the time.

She shrugged. ‘Do you have my keys?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘come on.’ He put his fleece jacket around her shoulders and bit his tongue against commenting on her wellington boots. They certainly weren’t Hunters, they weren’t even imitations. These were old-fashioned: shapeless tubes of black rubber reaching the unflattering point midway up her bare calves. Tomorrow, he’d see the funny side. Tonight he was tired and a little irritated.

‘One day you’ll get hurt, you know,’ Rob warned her, before starting the car.

My feet really hurt right now, Petra thought, even though each boot was now on the correct foot. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pressing the side of her head hard against the car window, the judder at her temples convincing her she was truly awake, ‘I can’t remember a thing. I don’t know where I was going.’

‘So you always say,’ Rob nodded. ‘Do you mind if I don’t come in?’ he said, soon pulling up outside Petra’s flat. ‘I have clients from Japan first thing in the morning.’

‘Sorry,’ Petra shuffled, ‘sorry.’

Rob looked at her, his exasperation softening a little. ‘It’s all right. It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Goodnight, Petra – and lock your bloody bedroom door.’

Chapter One

The first Wednesday in March was going to be a peculiar day for Petra Flint but it would take another seventeen years for her to consider how seminal it had been. Usually, school days were utterly dependable for their monotony, with daytime plotted and pieced into fifty-minute periods of quality education. The reputation of Dame Alexandra Johnson School for Girls and its high standing in the league tables was built on courteous, bright girls achieving fine exam results and entry into Oxbridge and the better Red Bricks. The school was sited in a residential street just off the Finchley Road, east of West Hampstead. It occupied four Victorian houses, somewhat haphazardly interconnected, whose period details sat surprisingly well with blackboards, Bunsen burners and the students’ adventurous artwork. All members of staff were upright and eager, and it was as much the school’s edict to impart a similar demeanour on the girls as to teach them the set curriculum. The headmistress, Miss Lorimar, was of indeterminate age, looked a little like an owl and could swoop down on misconduct or mess in an instant. She infused the girls and staff alike with a mixture of trepidation and respect. Ad vitam Paramus, she’d often proclaim, in morning assembly or just along the corridors, Ad vitam Paramus.

Petra liked school. Miss Lorimar had only ever had cause to bark praise at her. Petra wasn’t staggeringly bright, nor was she tiresomely popular but in keeping a naturally quiet and amicable profile, she was well liked by her teachers and classmates. She liked school because it provided respite from home. On her fourteenth birthday last year, she had been summonsed to Miss Lorimar’s office.

‘Sit.’

Petra had sat. She had sat in silence glancing at Miss Lorimar who was reading a letter with great interest.

‘I see it is your birthday,’ the headmistress had announced, ‘and I see you are having a rotten time at home.’ She brandished the piece of paper which Petra then recognized as coming from the pad of light blue Basildon Bond that was kept in the console drawer in the hallway at home. ‘Your mother has disclosed the situation with your father.’ Petra’s gaze fell to her lap where she saw her fists were tightly clenched. ‘I shall circulate this information in the staff room,’ Miss Lorimar continued, as if referring to a case of nits. There was a pause during which Petra unfurled her fists and worried that her fingernails weren’t regulation short. Miss Lorimar didn’t seem interested in them. ‘Happy birthday,’ she said, her bluntness at odds with the sentiment. There was another pause. When Miss Lorimar next spoke, the steely edge to her voice had been replaced with an unexpected softness. ‘Let school be your daytime haven, Miss Flint,’ she said. ‘You can be happy here. We will care for you.’

And Petra was happy at Dame Alexandra Johnson School for Girls and she did feel well cared for and now, a year on from her parents’ divorce, home was no longer a place to trudge reluctantly back to.

That first Wednesday in March, double maths, first break and double English were blithely pushed aside as Miss Lorimar strode into the Lower Fifth classroom after assembly.

‘I wanted to call it Task Force,’ she bellowed and no one knew what she was talking about, ‘but the governors thought it sounded too military.’ She narrowed her eyes and huffed with consternation. Twenty-eight pairs of eyes concentrated on the dinks and notches in the old wooden desks. ‘So we are calling it Pensioners’ Link instead. One lunch-time each week, you will go in pairs and visit pensioners in the locale. You will do odd jobs, a little shopping and, most importantly, you will provide company.’ She looked around the class. ‘The elderly have started to become forgotten, even disposable, in our society,’ she said darkly. ‘It’s an outrage! They are the cornerstones of our community and much is to be learned from them. You will sit and you will listen. Thank you, ladies.’ A spontaneous hum from girls desperate to chatter erupted, though a withering look from Miss Lorimar soon silenced it. With a tilt of her head towards the classroom door, a group of people filed in. ‘We welcome members of social services who will be your chaperones today. You will be back in time for final period before lunch – and the concert.’

The concert. Oh yes, the gig. Noble Savages, the band made up from Sixth Formers at nearby Milton College Public School for Boys, were playing in the hall at lunch-break. What a strange day for a school day. Rather wonderful, too.

Petra had been paired with Darcey Lewis and they’d been teamed with Mrs McNeil who was eighty-one years old and lived on her own in a flat in the mansion block above the shops near Finchley Road underground station.

‘I didn’t know people even lived here,’ said Darcey.

‘God you’re a snob!’ Petra said.

‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ said Darcey ingenuously. ‘I meant that I haven’t ever bothered to look upwards beyond McDonald’s or the newsagent or the sandwich shop.’

‘It is pretty spectacular,’ Petra agreed, as she and Darcey craned their necks and noted the surprisingly ornate brickwork and elegantly proportioned windows of the apartments sitting loftily above the parade of dog-eared shops.

‘This is such a skive!’ Darcey whispered as the lady from social services led them into the building. ‘Missing double bloody maths to chat with an old biddy.’ Darcey’s glibness was soon set to rights by the dingy hallway and flight after flight of threadbare stairs. ‘Why do you make someone so old live up here?’ Darcey challenged social services.

‘Mrs McNeil has lived here for twenty years,’ was the reply. ‘It is her home and she does not wish to move.’

The walls were stained with watermarks from some long-ago flood and from the scuff and trample of careless feet. The building smelt unpleasant: of carpet that had been damp, of overheated flats in need of airing, faint whispers of cigarette smoke, camphor, old-fashioned gas ovens, a cloying suggestion of soured milk. Mrs McNeil’s front doorknob was secured with a thatch of Sellotape, the ends of which furled up yellow, all stickiness gone.

‘She won’t let us fix it,’ the social services lady told the girls, as she rapped the flap of the letter-box instead.

‘Bet she smells of wee,’ Darcey whispered to Petra.

‘Shut up,’ Petra said.

Mrs McNeil did not smell of wee but of lavender cologne, and her apartment did not smell of sour milk or mothballs. It did smell of smoke but not cigarettes, something sweeter, something more refined. Cigarillos in cocktail colours, it soon transpired. She was a small but upright woman, with translucent crêpey skin and skeins of silver hair haphazardly swooped into a chignon of sorts. ‘Hullo, young ladies,’ her voice was a little creaky, but her accent was cultivated and the tone was confident, ‘won’t you come in?’

They shuffled after her, into the flat. Mrs McNeil’s sitting room was cluttered but appeared relatively spruce for the apparent age and wear of her belongings and soft furnishings. A dark wood table and chairs with barley-twist legs jostled for floor space against a small sofa in waning olive green velvet with antimacassars slightly askew, a nest of tables that fitted together from coincidence rather than original design, a tall ashtray from which a serpentine plume of smoke from a skinny pink cigarillo slicked into the air. On the walls, pictures of sun-drenched foreign climes hung crooked. Around the perimeter of the room, butting up against the tall skirting boards, piles and piles of books, all meticulously finishing at the same height. Petra thought they looked like sandbags, like a flood defence, as if they were protecting Mrs McNeil and keeping her safe within these walls. Or perhaps they kept mice out. Perhaps the tatty patterned carpet simply did not fit properly wall to wall. Petra looked around her; there just was not the room for enough shelving to house that many books. And the walls were for those paintings of somewhere hot and faraway.

At that moment, surrounded by decades of life and so much personal history, Petra deeply missed having grandparents of her own. She took Mrs McNeil’s bony hand, with its calligraphy of veins and sinews and liver spots, in both of hers.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs McNeil,’ she said, looking intently into the lady’s watercolour-pale eyes. ‘I’m Petra Flint.’

‘You may call me Lillian, Petra Flint,’ she said.

‘Hullo, Lillian,’ Darcey said slowly and loudly with unnecessary stooping. ‘I’m Darcey Lewis.’

‘You, dear, can call me Mrs McNeil,’ Lillian said tartly.

And so began a friendship between Petra Flint and Lillian McNeil which, though it would last less than three years, was deep in its mutual fondness and, for Petra in particular, longstanding in its reach. On that first visit, while Darcey sat on the green velvet sofa and helped herself to ginger snaps, Petra asked Mrs McNeil if she would like her pictures straightened.

‘I’ve never been abroad,’ Petra said. ‘Please will you tell me a little about them, as I straighten them?’

‘Let’s start here, in Tanzania,’ Lillian said, peering up at a painting. ‘I lived there forty years ago. I loved it. This is Mount Kilimanjaro at dawn. I sat beside the artist, under this baobab – or upside-down – tree as he painted.’

After that, whenever Petra visited, often twice or three times a week, the paintings she had previously righted were crooked again. Invariably one was more skewed than the others and that was the one that Lillian McNeil planned to talk about that day. Darcey rarely visited Mrs McNeil again. She swore Petra to secrecy, bunking off Pensioners’ Link to meet her boyfriend for lunch at McDonald’s instead.

From the tranquillity of Mrs McNeil’s flat, Petra and Darcey walked straight into an overexcited buzz back at school. There was usually something going on in the school hall at lunch-times, but it was more likely to be drama or dance club or one of the classes practising a forthcoming assembly. In its hundred-year history, this was the first lunch-hour in which the school had been put at the disposal of five boys and their impressive array of rock-band paraphernalia. Miss Golding the music teacher, a sensitive creature for whom even Beethoven was a little too raucous, looked on in alarm as if fearing for the welfare of her piano and the girls’ eardrums. While she backed herself away from the stage, her arms crossed and her eyebrows knitted, other members of staff bustled amongst the girls trying to calm the general fidget and squawk of anticipation. It was only when Miss Lorimar introduced the members of the band that the students finally stood silent and still.

‘These are very Noble Savages,’ their headmistress quipped, tapping the shoulders of the singer and the drummer. ‘First stop: Dame Alexandra Johnson’s, next stop: Top of the Pops!’ She made a sound unsettlingly close to a giggle before clapping energetically. The girls were too gobsmacked to even cringe let alone applaud. But before Miss Lorimar had quite left the stage, before Miss Golding had time to cover her ears, the Noble Savages launched into their first number and the varnished parquet of the hall resounded to the appreciative thumping of three hundred sensibly shod feet. Just a few bars in and each member of the band had a fan club as yelps of ‘Oh my God, he’s just so completely gorgeous,’ filtered through the throng like a virus. ‘I’m in love!’ Petra’s friends declared while she nodded and grinned and bopped along. ‘God, I’m just so in love!’

Nuclear no! Arlo Savidge sang as Jonny Noble, on rhythm guitar, thrashed through powerful chords and Matt on drums hammered the point home.

Government you are meant

to seek peace

not govern mental.

Time to go! Nuclear no!

The girls went wild and the majority of them made a mental note to join CND at once. After thank-yous all round from the band, Jeremy skittled his fingers down the run of piano keys, took his hands right away for maximum drama and then crashed them back down in an echoing chord of ear-catching dissonance.

Jailed for their thoughts

Caged for their beliefs

Imprisoned behind bars of bigotry

But still their spirits fly

Set them free

Set them free

We must

Set them free.

The older girls were shaking their heads, while hormones and concern for political injustice sprang real tears to their eyes.

‘Free Nelson Mandela,’ Darcey said to Petra with a very grave nod.

Petra closed her eyes in silent supplication.

‘Do you think the drummer would like to free me of my virginity?’ Amy asked and her classmates snorted and laughed and gave her a hug.

‘Do you think the one with the red-and-white guitar would like me in a big red bow and nothing else?’ Alice asked.

‘Shh!’ Darcey hissed, beginning to sway. ‘It’s a slowy.’

‘“Among the Flowers”,’ the singer announced, his eyes closed.

While gentle chords were softly strummed by Jonny, Arlo caressed the strings of his guitar. The sweetest melody wove its way through the crowd as “Among the Flowers” floated like petals through the hall. The harmonies seduced even Miss Golding who tipped her head and appraised the band with a timid smile. When Arlo began to sing, it was without the strident, Americanized preach of “Set Them Free” and “Nuclear No!”; instead it was deeper and pitch-perfect, wrought with emotion and, one felt, his true voice.

I see her walking by herself

In a dream among the flowers Won’t she wake

Won’t she wake

And see how I wait

See how I wait

For her

Is she walking all alone

Is she lonely in the flowers

Can I wake her and take her

Take her with me through the flowers

Out of her dream

And into mine

Out of her dream

And into mine.

He sang with his eyes shut, his mouth so close to the microphone that occasionally his lips brushed right over its surface. Arlo only opened his eyes when the piano solo twinkled its romantic bridge between the verses. All eyes were on the band but the focus was on Arlo who had eyes for one girl alone.

Is he looking at me?

No, he’s looking at me!

Fuck off, it’s me he’s looking at.

It’s me, thought Petra, he’s looking straight at me. Aren’t you. Hullo.

‘Out of her dream,’ Arlo sang to Petra, ‘and into mine.’

Chapter Two

The morning after Petra sleepwalked towards Whetstone was the morning she would hear again “Among the Flowers” for the first time in seventeen years. But it wasn’t the song that woke her, it was the telephone.

‘Where are you? It’s bloody Wednesday – it’s your day to open up so I didn’t bother to bring my keys. Your mobile is off. Bloody hell, Petra.’

She clocked the voice: Eric. She noted the time. She had overslept and she still felt exhausted.

‘I can’t get hold of Gina or Kitty,’ Eric was wailing with a certain theatricality, ‘and I’ve been waiting bloody ages.’

‘I’ll be right in, I had a bad night. I’ll be there in an hour. Sorry.’

Petra flung back the duvet and stood up quickly which compounded the fuggy nausea of having been awoken with a jolt. Physically holding her head, and with her eyes half shut, she shuffled to the bathroom to take a shower. It stung. Glancing down, she saw that her right knee was badly grazed. Carefully, she flannelled off the small sticky buds of blackened blood and bravely ran the shower cold over the freshly revealed abrasion. Scrubbing dirt from her fingernails, she observed a blade of grass whirl its way down the plughole. She gave a little shudder. She hated these hazy half-memories of the night before. She dried herself, dabbing gingerly at her knee, smoothing on Savlon and sticking a plaster lightly over the wound. Jeans felt too harsh so she pulled on a pair of old jogging bottoms, hurried into a sweatshirt and odd socks and shoved on the bashed-up trainers she favoured for work. But she had to clench her teeth and screw her eyes shut at a sudden scorch of soreness from her feet. Easing the shoes off, peeling her socks away, she inspected large blisters at each heel; one had burst and was red raw, the other bulged with fluid. If I cry now, Petra told herself, I won’t make it into work at all. Bloody stupid sleepwalking – where was I going? What was I thinking?

She placed a pad of cotton wool on each heel, secured with Sellotape, slipped her feet into socks first stretched wide and then slid her feet into sandals. Sandals which she liked but which Rob referred to as ‘German lezzy abominations’.

‘If Rob could see me now,’ she muttered, giving her reflection a cursory glance before heading for the studio. ‘I hope he’s OK.’

Eric felt a little sorry for Petra when he spied her at a distance limping along Hatton Garden. He waved at her and she tried to pick up her pace. He gestured the universal sign-language for ‘Coffee?’ to which she nodded and clutched her heart so he nipped into the café outside which he’d been loitering and as Petra reached him, a comforting cappuccino was placed in her hands.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘and thanks.’

‘You OK?’ Eric asked, taking the studio keys from her as they walked in the direction of Leather Lane.

‘Yes, I overslept,’ Petra said.

‘You know, socks and sandals are generally unforgivable in all but children,’ Eric said with a superciliously raised eyebrow, ‘but mismatched white socks and spoddy sandals are a breach of the public peace. Gina will wince in pain and Kitty won’t let you hear the end of it.’

‘Spoddy sandals?’ It made Petra smile. ‘Rob calls them my German Lesbian Things,’ she confided, frowning guiltily at her Birkenstocks.

‘I know a German lesbian or two,’ Eric qualified, ‘and let me tell you, I have never seen them wear socks with those. They are spoddy sandals. They’re the summer equivalent of Nature Trek shoes. Without socks they are tolerable. But with socks they are indefensible.’

‘I have the most terrible blisters,’ Petra explained, as Eric unlocked the studio and they went about flicking on lights and hoicking up blinds.

‘Have you been hiking up mountains since yesterday evening then?’

‘You could say that,’ Petra said quietly. ‘I sleepwalked last night. Right out of the house. Almost a mile. In wellies.’

‘Dear God,’ Eric exclaimed. He took a long look at her. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

In the fifteen years he’d known her, since they were undergraduates in jewellery design at Central St Martins, he’d become familiar with her two very different morning faces. Her complexion soft and peachy after a good night’s sleep or, as today, sallow and slightly haunted from the disturbance of somnambulism. When they had shared student digs, Eric had been the only one amongst the housemates not to laugh at her expense, never to tease her, always to believe it was entirely involuntary and an onerous affliction. What Petra doesn’t know is that Eric used to wedge a chair outside her door and if it clattered he would wake and find her and gently guide her back to bed. He still brings in cuttings about the subject, buys Petra herbal preparations promising to rebalance the soul and promote uninterrupted sleep. He’s tried to monitor when it happens most, or when the episodes are more extreme or when they happen least but so far his analysis has established no set pattern or reason.

‘Rob rescued me,’ Petra told him.

Eric pursed his lips to prevent himself from saying, Well, that’s a contraction in terms.

‘Actually, the police found me,’ Petra clarified, ‘and they called Rob.’

‘The police,’ Eric sighed but more because he had a bit of a thing about men in uniform.

‘Police?’ Gina exclaimed, having arrived at the studio just at that moment.

‘Oh fuck, not the bastard police,’ scowled Kitty, right behind Gina but hearing even less of the conversation.

‘Stop picking up fag ends,’ Eric said.

‘But you are a fag,’ Kitty snorted.

‘And we did come in at the very end of what you were saying, darling,’ said Gina.

Gina carefully put her cashmere cardigan on a coat-hanger before placing it on one of the coat hooks, hanging her butter-soft nubuck leather Mulberry bag beside it. She slinked her slender frame into a pristine white lab coat and swept her hair away from her face with a wide velvet hairband. Kitty meanwhile took off her black crocheted shrug and slung it over the back of a chair, kicked off her thumping great black boots with the integrated steel shin guards and clumped down into the old pair of black trainers she kept at the studio. It was only when she tied back the drapes of her dyed black hair that her eyes became visible, meticulously delineated by bold swipes of black eyeliner, shaded in with eye shadow the colour of bruising and emphasized by thick slicks of jet black mascara.

Jewellers Kitty Mulroney and Georgina Fanshaw-Smythe shared the space with Eric and Petra and over the years the four of them had formed a thriving community, each referring to the others as their Studio Three. They shared the overheads, divvied tools and equipment, pitched in for a compact kitchenette, divided the chores and dished out praise for each other’s work and support for each other’s lives too. Their studio occupied a section of the third floor of an old building on a narrow street running between Leather Lane and Hatton Garden. Though it was not a big space, toes were never trodden upon. But the true success of their working environment was due to their extreme differences on personal and creative levels.

The variously pierced and tattooed Kitty, with her kohlblack make-up, dark pointy dress sense, and hair the colour and consistency of treacle, nevertheless made jewellery of painstaking delicacy and femininity; beautiful filigree pieces, two of which were on display at the Victoria and Albert museum. She sparred with Eric, trading insults and nicknames – though she had checked in advance if he’d mind her calling him ‘Gayboy’ and she was actually quite flattered when he retaliated with ‘Jezebel’. She also had a gentle fascination with Gina whose vowels were as polished as her beautifully bobbed fair hair, whose tools were in the same perfect condition as her weekly manicure, whose domestic set-up appeared to be as neat and classy as the ending of a Jane Austen novel. In turn, Gina had nothing but awe and respect for the impecunious Goth from New Cross. She marvelled at Kitty’s sullen darkness, her apparent self-sufficiency when it came to love, her brazenness when it came to sex, her creative nonchalance when it came to money – not to mention her fascinating ways with black leather, black everything.

‘I’m two-a-penny in SW3,’ Gina had once said, ‘but you, Kitty, you are unique. Exotique.’

What was neither predictable nor dreary was Gina’s work; large and chunky, fusing tribal design with modernist juts and twists.

‘One thing you are not is predictable or dull,’ Kitty protested. ‘You have daughters called Harry and Henry – how much more rock-and-roll can you get?’

‘But that’s short for Harriet and Henrietta,’ Gina said.

‘But you call them Harry and Henry and when people see you loading them into your Sloane Range Rover, that’s what they hear.’

Eric Bartley, far more girly than any of the women, felt it his duty to cluck over them like a mother hen. He brought in cakes and treats and new-fangled organic tonics and was the one who made the tea most often, earning him the moniker ‘Teas Maid’. If any of the women seemed below par, he’d give them a grave, sympathetic nod. He constantly sought their advice: from Clarins versus Clinique, to his frequent relationship dramas and what to cook that night; from his hair colour or his weight, to whether to buy Grazia or Men’s Health. But when he was working on his strong, masculine, classic designs, he worked in utter silence, interspersing long periods of extreme concentration and productivity with bursts of manic chatter and scurrilous gossip.

Today, all eyes are on Petra. She may have washed the grass from her hair and restored its long, glossy mahogany curls, her fingernails may now be clean and jogging pants hide the plaster on her knee, however it is not the odd white socks and Birkenstocks which betray her in an instant, it’s her demeanour. Everyone is used to Petra being the quieter member of their tribe, but today she is exceptionally wan. It casts a pallid mantle over her already delicate features; darkened hollows compromising the rich hazelnut of her usually bright eyes. She’s slim, but today she looks brittle. Though her clothing rarely courts much attention, today she looks a mess.

‘Are you all right, Petra darling?’ Gina asks.

‘Because you don’t look it. You look crap,’ says Kitty, ‘if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘I had a bad night,’ Petra tells them. ‘I’m fine now. Just a bit tired.’

‘Rob?’ Gina mouths to Eric who shakes his head.

‘Not Rob,’ Petra hurries. ‘Rob came to my rescue. I just went walkabout whilst I was asleep. You know me.’

‘Right out of the house,’ Eric whispers to the other two. ‘She was walking to Whetstone.’

‘I don’t even know where Whetstone is,’ Gina says, as if it was possibly as far flung as the Arctic. ‘I thought you just tottered off to rearrange things in the kitchen, or bumped into the odd wall or door.’

‘I do, usually,’ Petra says.

‘Do you have any history there?’ Kitty asks darkly. ‘In Whetstone? A past life? Or ancestors? Bad blood?’

Petra smiles and shakes her head.

‘Then maybe you weren’t so much walking, as being led?’ Kitty suggests in a hush.

‘I just walk,’ Petra shrugs. ‘I don’t know where I was going, or why, because I can’t remember. But the police found me and Rob came for me.’

‘Did you hurt yourself?’

‘Bashed, bruised and blistered,’ Eric interjects, ‘the poor lamb. Look at her footwear – that’s necessity, not fashion.’

‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ Petra says, suddenly tiring of the attention. ‘I’m just knackered. And pissed off with myself because I haven’t actually left a building in my sleep for a good few months.’

‘Not since the fire-escape incident?’ Eric asks, with a sly wink.

‘God,’ Petra says, covering her face in horror.

‘You escaped from fire?’ Gina asks ingenuously.

‘You were in Bermuda, Gina,’ Kitty growls. ‘Petra was staying at a hotel in the country for her friends’ wedding.’

‘And woke up freezing cold and stark naked on the fire escape,’ Eric adds.

‘And the only way back in was through the main entrance,’ Kitty says.

‘And of course she didn’t think to take her room key,’ says Eric.

Gina is flabbergasted. ‘What were you wearing to Whetstone last night?’ she hardly dares ask.

‘Gumboots and an oversized Snoopy T-shirt,’ Petra mumbles from behind her hands.

‘Well, that’s better than nothing,’ Gina says kindly though the look from Kitty says that she begs to differ.

‘There must be something in it,’ Kitty says. ‘Whetstone, the wellies – don’t you think? Tarot will tell you. I have my cards with me – do you want me to read for you?’

‘If sleep specialists can’t tell me why I’ve sleepwalked since I was eight, then I’m not sure the answer lies in tarot,’ Petra says. ‘Not after nearly twenty-five years. Perhaps there’s nothing in it anyway. Maybe my body is just restless. Or my brain just can’t quite switch off. No one seems to know. It’s just my – thing.’

‘But the cards will know,’ Kitty says darkly, fiddling with the hoop in her right nostril.

‘Go on,’ Eric says, ‘let her read for you. You might discover you’re to meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger.’

‘But I have my tall, dark, handsome Rob,’ Petra protests and raises her eyebrow defiantly at Eric who has already raised his at her.

Kitty shrugs. ‘Another time, then. I need to get on with my cuff.’ She unwraps from a soft cloth her current work in progress: delicate swirls and serpentines in white gold, like calligraphy in three dimensions, which she’s designed to be worn around the upper arm.

‘It’s stunning,’ Petra tells her.

‘Thanks,’ Kitty says shyly. ‘I just wish I didn’t owe my gem dealer so much – I really want those rubies for here, here, here and there.’

‘Those earrings you made for Gallery Tom Foolery – they’ll sell like hot cakes,’ Gina says encouragingly.

‘Hope so,’ Kitty smiles and tucks herself in to her bench.

‘Is it a Radio 2 day or a Classic FM day?’ Eric procrastinates.

‘Two.’

‘Two.’

‘Don’t mind.’

And the group settles down to work. Kitty filing and filing in pursuit of perfection; lemel, or gold dust, gathering like specks of wishes glinting in the pigskin slung like a hammock, hanging over her lap from the curved inlet of her bench. Gina is scrutinizing turquoise and amber. Eric buffs and polishes two wedding rings he’s just finished, his hair safely away from the spin of the machine in a girly topknot, his eyes protected by goggles.

Petra wonders what she actually has the energy to do. She has some out-work from Charlton Squire, the gallery owner and jeweller who takes a sizeable commission of her sales but who keeps her earnings a little more constant by giving her his own designs to make up. She sips tea. She is starting to feel more human. She sends Rob a text to say sorry bout last nite – ta 4 saving me! hope meeting v.g. luv u! p xxx

Spring sunshine filters through the dusty studio windows. Eric looks so comical and sweet. Kitty is stooped in concentration, the cuff sending out dazzles of light as the sun catches it. Gina is beating life into silver by beating the hell out of it, singing along to the radio between clouts from her hammer.

I like this song, Petra hums to herself. She analyses Charlton’s design, sticking the papers to the wall in front of her. She chooses her tools. A sudden thunder of hammering from Gina drowns out the presenter’s rambling and when Gina stops, the next song playing is one she doesn’t know and therefore can’t sing along to.

But Petra knows it.

Instantly, Petra is wide awake and utterly alert, transported back seventeen years, back to school, back to being fifteen. Back to that strange lunch-time after she’d first met Mrs McNeil, when she was serenaded across the packed school hall by a Sixth Former from Milton College. Arlo Savidge.

The song playing just now is “Among the Flowers” and its exquisite melody and gentle lyrics drift out of the communal stereo straight into Petra’s soul.

Chapter Three

But it’s not Arlo’s voice. At least, I don’t think it is. In fact, I’m sure it isn’t. His voice is still crystal clear in my memory – though I’m having to rack my brains to remember exactly what he looked like.

Arlo Savidge. I wonder whatever happened to Arlo Savidge. Who would know? I don’t keep in touch with anyone from school and I never heard from or of him after I left. It wasn’t unrequited love – because he never actually asked and so there was never anything I could actually answer and of course nothing ever really happened. But it was love, in its own gentle, quirky way. A love without a kiss, without a single touch, let alone a declaration. More pure, probably, than any physical relationship I’ve had. It was all so beautifully and yearningly unsaid. And yet we only knew each other for just under eighteen months.

I felt as though there was a spotlight on me, during that one song in that one lunch-time at school. As if Arlo had told an invisible lighting technician that there was a girl in the Lower Fifth, milling with her pals in the middle of the crowd and when I sing I’ll be singing to her so can you shine a light and pick her out so she knows. So that she knows how I feel and so that she will feel special.

And his song was the light and I knew all right. I felt it. It was odd and I felt as though I didn’t know where to look, as though I wanted desperately to look away but of course I couldn’t because I was transfixed. I do remember his eyes even though he was over there, up on the stage. It was only later that I knew what colour they were. Blue. Very very blue. His eyes were locked onto mine – even when he closed them with emotion, he’d open them straight into my gaze. He didn’t glance away once, he didn’t look at anyone else and I don’t think I even blinked. And I do remember his lanky physique, his white school shirtsleeves rolled just above his elbows, the lovely strong forearms of his burgeoning masculinity. You could see his muscles delineate according to how passionately his played his guitar. He stood, legs slightly apart but relaxed, one foot tapping the rhythm, lips right against the mike. He had nice hair, I remember at the time thinking he had cool hair – in retrospect, it was nice and cool in that archetypically schoolboy way – just about within the school regulation side of Jim Morrison. Carefully unkempt curls and waves. Sandy rather than blond.

But it wasn’t him as a package that I fancied. In fact, I didn’t ever really fancy Arlo – I bypassed that stage and fell in quiet love. Fancy was too vulgar a reaction to being serenaded. I remember loving him in an instant because he was singing to me, because, somehow, he had written that song for me. And the magic between us must have come from him not knowing he’d written it for me until he saw me that day and me not knowing what it felt like to be at the centre of someone’s world until just then. I think he felt that way too. But I don’t know because he never said and I never asked.

Is she walking all alone

Is she lonely in the flowers.

But this voice, today, is not Arlo’s. It’s his song but it’s not him. Though no doubt his voice will have changed over the intervening seventeen years, it won’t have changed into this. It’ll probably have just deepened a little, lost a slice of its purity, gained a little worldly gravel to its timbre.

Whatever happened to Arlo Savidge?

I remember feeling woozy, a little breathless, that lunchtime. It was so thrilling – me, a Lower Fifth Year, being the focus of a Sixth Former. It was, I suppose, the most romantic thing that anyone has ever done for me. Rob took me to Claridges for my thirty-second birthday in December, but that was ostentation, not romance; we’d only been together a few months. And he bought me a pen from Tiffany for Christmas and red roses on Valentine’s Day. But all of that is relatively easy if you can afford it. Back then, Arlo only had pocket money yet he created something unique and beautiful and precious. And lasting.

I wonder if he has ever stopped to wonder, over the years, whether I’ve been walking all alone, whether I’ve been lonely in the flowers? Rob sent me flowers last month after that blazing row when he stood me up but when they were delivered I buried my nose in them and as I inhaled their heady scent I sobbed. I felt desperately alone in those flowers.

Things seem to be quite good at the moment. Or at least, they’re getting better.

But just perhaps, just say things were better way back then. They say that our school years are the best years of our lives. Do I agree? Is that true? Is it still too early to tell? But I think back to all I achieved, to the colourful mix of my schoolmates, to the eccentricities of my teachers. Have I ever been part of such an intense mêlée of uniqueness since? We had school uniform – yet though young and not quite formed, we all stood distinct. When I went to college, all we students shared an unofficial, interchangeable uniform of our own which made everyone blend and bland. Slouchy grouchy stressed and broke. I don’t even know where Arlo went to university. Maybe he’s a super rock god in America. Perhaps he jacked it all in and is an accountant. Maybe he’s an impoverished musician in a garret in Clerkenwell. Or perhaps he’s a middle-class husband with 2.4 kids. Perhaps the litheness and the curls are gone and he has a paunch and a bald patch. I don’t know. But how beautiful that his music will always exist. What a legacy. It’s on the radio. It’s finishing.

‘That was Rox and a hit from five years ago, “Among the Flowers”. Beautiful. And it’s approaching midday so it’s over to Annie for the news and weather.’

Did you hear that? It was a hit five years ago. Where was I back then that I never heard it? Nowhere in particular. It just passed me by. How odd. Am I that square not to know what was top of the sodding pops five years ago? I have heard of Rox. But I didn’t know they covered Arlo’s song. I wonder how they came by it? Are there other bands out there covering his other tracks? Is he some hugely successful songwriter? Why am I even wondering about any of this? I saw him so rarely, if I think about it.

My school and Milton College used to join up for activities like choral society and pottery and drama club. I was never outgoing enough to go for drama club, and choral society was a bit naff, but I was very good at pottery. That summer term – the term after that lunch-time gig – I used to walk over to Milton College with Anna and Paula on Wednesday afternoons to do pottery. Some of the boys asked us if we’d come because we were good with our hands; I took it as a compliment and said yes – but Anna and Paula took it as a come-on and they were delighted and said things like, That’s for us to know and you to find out, guys.

We were good with our hands, us three. Very good. Paula and Anna took to the wheel and threw gorgeous pots and bowls. I liked working more organically and constructed great big urns that were really glorified coil pots which I’d burnish and burnish and then scarify the sheened surface with these dense little marks like hieroglyphics. I spent hours on them. Because it was summer, Mr Whatever His Name Was let me sit outside with my pots and my tools and that’s when I saw Arlo again. He walked across the playground over to me, like a strolling troubadour, strumming and humming until we shared a great big grin. Then he sat a little way off, playing.

Every Wednesday afternoon after that, during that summer term, he’d somehow appear when I appeared, mostly with his guitar. He never sang ‘Among the Flowers’ for me again. Not from beginning to end. Not with the words. Every now and then he’d hum it and strum it but very delicately, slipping a few bars in between other melodies. We kept each other’s company, those Wednesday afternoons, though we didn’t say much at all. I asked him what A levels he was doing. I can’t remember now. He asked me how many O levels I was taking. Christ, how many did I take? Eight. And passed seven. He told me about some of the mad teachers at his school. I told him all about Mrs McNeil. And then I didn’t really see him until the following spring because I chose print-making during the winter term. And though he’d’ve been swotting for A levels, he did find time most Wednesdays to find me. And we just picked up from where we’d left off.

‘How’s your little old lady?’ he’d ask, when we were sitting not talking and not really working. I’d tell him some of the stories she told me, some of the funny little errands I ran for her. Once he covered his eyes and winced and I asked what was wrong and he said my halo was so shiny and bright it hurt his eyes and I chucked a little wet clod of terracotta clay at him and he laughed. Mostly though, we shared happy little interludes of chat in an otherwise quietly industrious atmosphere. I was engrossed in my terracotta urns and he was deep in thoughts of chords and riffs. Out in the playground, in the warmth of his final summer term at school. We’d sit together, though we were actually a couple of yards apart. We were certainly sitting together none the less, separate yet united in our little hive of creativity and tenderness every Wednesday afternoon.

And now I make jewellery. I wonder what Arlo does because he used to make music. And, for the first time in seventeen years, I’ve just heard the song he wrote for me. On national radio.