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.

Chapter Four

‘Sir,’ Nathan whined, ‘sir.’ He’d been saying ‘sir’ for ages but Sir didn’t seem to hear. Sir seemed a bit lost in thought, somewhat distracted by the bright spring morning ablaze outside. ‘Sir! Mr Savidge! Sir Savidge.’

Nathan’s teacher finally turned his attention to him, raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m liking the “Sir Savidge” moniker, Nathan. In fact, class – you can all call me Sir Savidge from now on. OK?’

‘Yes, sir. Savidge. Sir.’

‘Nathan – what can I do for you?’

‘Would you say that rhythm is the soul of music, sir?’

Arlo regarded his pupil, unable to keep an affectionate smile at bay. He remembered being just like Nathan. A keen fourteen-year-old, happy to study but also keen to add personal philosophy to the dry curriculum. God, what a gorgeous day it was. Warm too.

‘I mean, Sir Savidge, sir,’ Nathan said. ‘Rhythm is the soul of music – wouldn’t you say?’ he repeated, dragging his teacher’s gaze away from the view outside. ‘But sir, if you put that kind of thing in your GCSE do you think the judges give you better marks?’

Judges. Sirs. Arlo changed his sigh into another smile and focused on the boy. ‘I think the examiners would mark you higher if you said something along the lines of rhythm being the lifeblood of music, Nathan. Think of blood, all of you – how it pulses, how it pumps. If blood doesn’t pump – if it ceases to pulse around our bodies – what are we?’

The class was silent.

‘Come on, guys, what are we?’

The class loved it when their teacher called them ‘guys’. ‘Fish?’ offered Artemas.

‘Fish?’ said his teacher.

‘Fish are cold-blooded,’ Artemas muttered while the class began to snigger. ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘No no no,’ Arlo said, thinking he ought to check it anyway with Mr Rose the biology teacher. ‘I’m talking physically and metaphysically. Come on, guys, if our blood isn’t being pumped then it’s not pulsing around our body – then what are we?’

The boys gawped at him.

‘We are dead!’ he said.

There was a murmur, a gasp or two. Schoolboys love the word ‘dead’.

‘So, if rhythm is the lifeblood of music, it must mean it is at the heart of it. Music needs rhythm to breathe its life into the listener – don’t you think?’ There was silence as twenty-five pens scribbled away at exercise books, frantic to copy Sir’s quote verbatim. Good old Artemas with his fish, Arlo thought. But poor old Nathan – he’d been on the right track but with the wrong metaphor, just a little unscientific when it came to the particular anatomy of music. Arlo considered how, though the whole class was committing his improvement on Nathan’s quote to memory, the GSCE examiners would no doubt put a red line through the lot. ‘If it’s not on the curriculum, it doesn’t exist,’ Arlo said under his breath though not so quietly that the eternally eager Finn right in front of him didn’t start to write that down too.

‘Finn – you can’t quote me on that.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

Arlo glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes till his charges swapped rhythm for the thwack of leather against willow. ‘Mussorgsky and Marley,’ he announced, browsing the CD shelves much to the boys’ anticipation. ‘They knew a thing or two about rhythm,’ Arlo said, loading discs into the machine. He tapped the remote control against his lips. ‘The Russian, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, died in 1881 and the Jamaican, Robert Nesta Marley, died in 1981. Listen to this.’ He chose “Pictures at an Exhibition” by the former and “Get Up Stand Up” by the latter. The boys were entranced; toes tapped, rulers and pens bounced gently against the edges of the desks. They would gladly have relinquished cricket to listen to more but the bell went and Mr Savidge ejected the discs and released the class.

‘Well done, guys,’ he said. ‘See you whenever.’ And he took up his gazing out of the window.

From the empty classroom, Arlo looked out across the rolling manicured lawn to the plotted and pieced playing fields beyond. He considered that schoolboys in cricket whites at that distance were basically interchangeable with the sheep scattering the North York Moors beyond the school’s grounds. They shared that peculiar characteristic of inactivity interrupted by sudden bouts of gleeful gambolling. But neither sheep nor cricket did much for Arlo. He was more of a dogs and tennis chap. Just then, he quite fancied a knock-around on court. He checked his timetable. He had a couple of hours until he taught the first years but then only the odd half-hour during the rest of the day and no opportunity that evening because he was on prep duty. He gathered his papers and books into the worn leather satchel the boys often teased him about and wandered over towards the main building.

He came across Paul Glasper in the staff room, enjoying a cup of coffee with the illicit luxury of the Sun newspaper. ‘It’s today’s,’ Paul bragged.

‘Who smuggled that in?’ Arlo laughed.

‘One of those blokes doing the electrics in Armstrong House,’ Paul said.

‘There’s a waiting list for it,’ came Nigel Garton’s voice from behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph which better befitted his Head of Physics stature, ‘and I’m next.’

‘You lot are incorrigible,’ said Miranda Oates, enjoying a digestive biscuit and a copy of Heat magazine. Arlo flicked his finger against it. Miranda peered up at him. ‘There’s more world news in this than in that,’ she said, tossing her head in the direction of Paul and the Sun. ‘This is essential reading,’ she smiled. ‘It helps me keep my finger on the zeitgeist. It helps me understand my students.’

‘Bollocks!’ came Nigel’s voice from behind the Telegraph, while Paul asked Miranda if he could have a flip through the magazine once she’d finished.

‘Only an English teacher could use “zeitgeist” in such a context,’ Arlo laughed, spooning instant coffee granules into a relatively clean mug. ‘Anyone for tennis? Paul? Fancy a knock-about?’

‘I’m busy,’ said Paul, shaking the Sun and snapping it open again.

‘Dickhead,’ Arlo laughed. ‘Nige? Come on, a quick game, set and match? You slaughtered me last week.’

‘And I’d love to slaughter you again, but I’m nipping into Stokesley for a haircut.’

‘You look gorgeous, Mr Garton,’ Arlo teased, ‘for a physics teacher.’

‘I’ve got a date,’ Nigel said.

‘I’ll come,’ said Miranda.

‘No, you won’t,’ Nigel said, ‘much as a threesome is on my wish list. But I try not to bed my colleagues.’

‘Not with you, prat,’ she said, ‘with you, Arlo – I’ll have a knock-up with you.’

‘Ooh er, missy,’ murmured Paul, who obviously wasn’t as engrossed in the Sun as the others thought.

Arlo gave her a glancing smile and made much of checking his watch. ‘Actually, on second thoughts, I think I’ll go into Stokesley with Nige and get my hair cut too.’

‘You haven’t got any bloody hair, Arlo,’ Paul piped up again.

‘I have more than you,’ said Arlo, running the palm of his hand lightly over the fuzz of his crop. ‘This is long, for me. I can practically do a comb-over on my receded parts.’

‘Do you have a date too?’ Paul asked.

Arlo baulked.

‘Well, you’re not joining me,’ Nigel protested.

Paul caught the look on Miranda’s face that said, I’ll be your date Arlo, before she buried her head in Heat when she sensed she’d been noticed.

‘Miranda’s got a demon serve,’ Paul told Arlo.

‘Another time,’ Arlo told her. ‘I’ll come into Stokesley with you, Nige.’

They belted along an empty road, lush flat fields to the left soon giving way to the sparser grazing on the moors rising and rolling away.

‘Daft, isn’t it,’ Arlo remarked. ‘We’re the teachers but I feel like I’m bunking off.’

‘You need to get out more,’ Nigel teased.

‘Probably,’ Arlo conceded. ‘It’s just so easy to not leave the school grounds now. When I first joined, I was exploring the region at every opportunity – rarely stayed in unless I was on duty. Now, four years on, I go out for a haircut, or to the pub once a week for precisely three pints and a scotch, and that’s about it.’

‘It’s cyclical,’ Nigel said. ‘I went through that. But I’ve been there two years longer than you and I’m telling you, I now plan my next outing hourly.’

‘Who’s your date?’ Arlo asked.

‘She’s called Jennifer,’ said Nigel. ‘I met her in Great Ayton last weekend. She was in front of me in the ice-cream queue at Suggitts.’

‘You sad old git,’ Arlo laughed, ‘spending your free time hanging out at ice-cream shops waiting for totty.’

‘Sod off,’ Nigel said. ‘She’s a lawyer. She was with some cycling group and they’d stopped off at Suggitts. You know how they do. All those Sunday riders.’

‘Well,’ Arlo said thoughtfully, ‘good luck.’

‘Haven’t had a shag in months,’ Nigel muttered. He looked at Arlo though he knew the answer. ‘You?’

‘Nope,’ Arlo said, assuming Nigel knew it was actually years but didn’t dare comment.

‘Miranda Oates would have you,’ Nigel told him.

‘I don’t mix work and pleasure,’ Arlo said.

‘All work and no play … as they say,’ Nigel warned him, pulling into a parking bay and putting a permit on his dashboard.

‘She isn’t my type,’ Arlo said.

‘Who is, then?’ Nigel asked as they walked towards the barbers. ‘In all the time I’ve known you, I haven’t a clue who your type is.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Arlo, relieved that they’d arrived.

Half an hour later, they were back in the car, Nigel’s short black hair slicked this way and that with product-assisted trendy nonchalance. Arlo’s hair was cropped even closer to his head, the style coming more from the fine shape of his skull, his smooth forehead, the slight but neat receding of his hairline. ‘I can’t believe they charge me twelve quid for what was essentially a couple of minutes with mini horse clippers.’

‘Mine was twelve quid too – and I had a blow-dry and a load of styling goop,’ Nigel laughed.

‘And you look lovely, darling,’ Arlo said drily. ‘It’ll be your lucky night.’ Nigel swerved as he turned to wink at Arlo, before tootling more cautiously through Stokesley and back out into the countryside.

‘It’s a nice enough spring day – but this is a wee bit optimistic,’ Arlo commented, as “Summer in the City” played on the radio. Both he and Nigel knew they would have to tolerate the usual squalls and sudden chills of April before they could move truly to spring, let alone nearer to summer.

‘What exactly is a “loving spoonful”, I’ve always wondered,’ mused Nigel. ‘I think it might be a type of cake. Or a wedding spoon like those Welsh love spoons. Or perhaps a feed-the-poor charity?’

‘Stop philosophising and step on it, will you,’ Arlo said. ‘We’ll miss last lunch at this rate.’

‘My hunger is for Jenn,’ Nigel growled lustily.

‘You prick,’ Arlo laughed. ‘Come on, I’m starving.’

They drove along, commenting on the Radio 2 playlist, humming and occasionally singing out loud. Nigel started some lengthy anecdote about a previous girlfriend and a curry when suddenly Arlo wasn’t listening at all because “Among the Flowers” was playing on the radio. The lyrics more chantingly familiar to him than the words to the Lord’s Prayer. The melody the theme tune to his life.

‘Do you remember this one?’ said Nigel, turning up the volume and tra-la-ing to the closing bars. ‘Awesome song.’

‘I wrote it,’ Arlo said quietly.

Nigel laughed. ‘And I wrote “Jumping Jack Flash”.’

Arlo didn’t respond. What was the point? The song, so much a part of his life, was nevertheless part of a past life so different and distant to that which he currently led.

Now “Mr Tambourine Man” was playing.

‘And I wrote this one, too,’ Nigel said, singing along dreadfully. ‘Hang on, this isn’t Bob Dylan.’

‘It’s the Byrds,’ Arlo said patiently. ‘Dylan wrote it. The Byrds adapted the lyrics and added a twelve-string guitar lead and I did write the one before.’

‘“The One Before”?’

‘No – the previous song. “Among the Flowers”.’

‘Sure you did,’ said Nigel, busy zooming up the school’s majestic driveway, whacking over the speed ramps, hurtling into the car park with a lively skid along the meticulously raked gravel. He switched off the engine.

‘I did,’ said Arlo.

‘You need to get out more, Savidge,’ said Nigel, ‘you really do.’

Arlo’s Year Eight thought pretty much the same thing that afternoon. But they weren’t complaining. He hadn’t said a thing to them all lesson, just looked at them queerly, while Beethoven filled the room. The 5th piano concerto. “The Emperor”. And however much Arlo loved the music, just then he couldn’t hear a note. And however much he loved his job, though he stood in front of his desk with his eyes trained on the twenty-two boys before him, he didn’t much notice them at all. He was somewhere else entirely and, for a few moments, he didn’t want to be there at all – horribly ensconced in five years ago. So he flung himself back further still. And was charmed to arrive back at half his lifetime ago, when he was seventeen and in the Lower Sixth at school and had written the song he still considers his best.

“Among the Flowers”. In terms of subject matter, the seventeen-year-old Arlo had risked derision by his schoolmates but the melody he had created was so sublime that it immediately excused the unmitigated romance of the lyric. He wasn’t really aware of the starting point. Usually, the songs he wrote for his band were inspired by his fiery teenage response to political injustice worldwide and his middle-class upbringing. But “Among the Flowers” was utterly at odds with “Soweto Sweat” and “Not Quiet on the Western Front” and “Life under Cardboard” – all of which had swiftly become veritable anthems at Milton College. Perhaps studying Tess of the D’Urbervilles for A level English had been a subliminal source. He’d fallen a little bit in love with Tess, had seen her through Angel’s eyes, when she walks through the juicy grass and floating pollen of the garden at Talbothays, drawn by Angel’s harp but conscious of neither time nor space, her skirts gathering cuckoo-spittle as she meanders through the dazzling polychrome of flowering weeds. But ultimately, Arlo’s Flower Girl was wholly mythical. She embodied the woman he was aspiring to hold as his own one day. He thought that if he could create his ideal, set his wish list to the six strings of his guitar, perhaps he could lure her to him, perhaps he’d give her life.

His then girlfriend was lovely enough but she didn’t inspire him to write. He’d lost his virginity to the girlfriend before that one and she’d made him horny as hell but love hadn’t come into it. Love was out there, of that he was sure, but even at seventeen Arlo trusted the logic of time and, for the time being, he embraced (rather physically) the fact that schoolgirls were to be very nice stepping stones towards the real thing. Arlo assumed, quite sensibly, that his teenage years should be about amorous fumblings and sticky sex. He had a feeling that university would probably provide more adventurous fornication and a serious relationship or two. And he imagined that his walk through the flowers to the love of his lifetime would probably be taken in his late twenties.

What he was not expecting, at the age of seventeen and on the day his band had been invited to play a lunch-time set at the nearby private girls’ school, was to come across his flower girl in bud. He had no idea that a fifteenyear-old girl would so completely embody the fantasy he eulogized in “Among the Flowers”. But having sung about Soweto to a sea of bouncing schoolgirls, having had them clap their hands above their heads to “Nuclear No” and chant the chorus of “Set Them Free”, he launched into the melodious and ethereal “Among the Flowers”. And there, from the sway and the smiles of one hundred and fifty pubescent schoolgirls, on that first Wednesday in March seventeen years ago, Arlo Savidge had caught sight of Petra Flint and realized in an instant that he’d written the song solely for her.

Arlo quite liked evening prep. More than seeming an after-hours affliction cutting into his evening, it was a quiet and useful hour and a half when none of the boys pestered him, concentrating their energies instead on finishing their homework so they could make the most of their free time before bed. Usually, Arlo used prep to do his marking or planning, or he’d write to his mother, perhaps check his bank statements; sometimes he just read a book, other times he simply sat and thought of nothing, occasionally he sat and thought about quite a lot. Tonight was one of those times.

‘What is it, Troy? No, you don’t – you can borrow my pen instead.’

Hearing “Among the Flowers” on the radio at lunch-time had sounded odder to Arlo than when Rox had first released it five years previously. It seemed so totally out of context that he should be listening to it, on Radio 2, in the middle of North Yorkshire, as he returned to his teaching job having just had a haircut. He didn’t blame Nigel for not believing him. It wouldn’t cross Nigel’s mind that he was telling the truth. Why should it? Who has songs published and played on national radio, yet teaches music at a boys’ private boarding school in North Yorkshire? For Nigel it had just been typical banter; they were at it all the time after all, the staff. A little like grown-up schoolboys themselves; mercilessly teasing each other, taking the piss, saying daft things, catching each other out.

‘Artemas – give Nathan back his calculator, please. Come on, guys.’

Was it self-indulgent, Arlo wondered, to have one’s own song on one’s mind? Was it an insult to Bob Dylan – for Arlo, the greatest songwriter of all time – that all afternoon he had so easily forsaken “Mr Tambourine Man” to mentally play his own ditty, penned at seventeen years of age, over and over again instead? Similarly, that he’d utterly blanked Beethoven? The version of “Among the Flowers” on a loop in his head was most certainly his own, not the version covered by Rox. He didn’t mind their interpretation – and it brought welcome royalties each year. He didn’t much care for Rox’s subjugation of the acoustic emphasis he’d intended in favour of soft sentimental rock, but he could see why their record label would have encouraged it. Much more Top of the Pops – as indeed it had been five years ago. And his version, the way he conceived it, wrote it, had only ever sung it, was in all probability a bit introspectively adolescent. Not commercial enough. Not slick enough. It occurred to Arlo that he hadn’t actually sung it in years. He’d written other stuff since. Not that he sang that much either. And though he knew “Among the Flowers” off by heart he doubted he’d ever sing it out loud again. It was tainted now, charred.

But it was different when he wrote it, over a decade before Rox took it. He liked who he’d been back then. The keenness, the naivety, the energy and optimism for the future: for Life, for the mystery of Love.

Petra Flint.

Blimey.

Now there’s someone he hadn’t thought about for a while.

Arlo glanced around the class as if he’d just spoken out loud, but the boys had their heads down.

‘Finn, stop chewing your shirtsleeve.’

When Rox had first released the song and had nodded their shaggy locks and generally postured in a deep and meaningful way on Top of the Pops, Arlo had briefly wondered about Petra, whether she was watching, whether she’d heard the song, remembered it, remembered him. But there had been so much else on his mind five years ago, he hadn’t had the capacity to dwell on it.

He thought about her now, though. In evening prep. Petra Flint. His unwitting muse and the prettiest girl he’d seen back then; the personification of the song’s subject matter who came into his focus out of nowhere the day that the Noble Savages had performed at her school. Whatever happened to Petra Flint?

‘Nathan, flick one more ink pellet at Troy and you’ll forfeit your next exeat.’

Petra Flint is probably an artist or a housewife, Arlo decided, bringing himself back to the present sharply. And here he was, aged thirty-four, sitting in an oak-panelled study room in a school that was over three hundred years old, presiding over twenty teenage boys who were battling with their homework and tiredness and boredom and their need to be just boys. He looked at them. They looked like a bunch of scraggly terriers who could well do with a noisy belt around the playing fields. He tried to see himself through their eyes. One of the slightly more cool teachers, he reckoned with some satisfaction: his small gold hoop earring, his excitingly varied taste in music, his occasional swearing, the fact that he had a tattoo on his upper arm which the boys had glimpsed but never seen in full, the fact that he called the boys ‘guys’, that he told them, when they asked him, that yes he had done certain drugs at certain times in his life. They’d never asked him about sex, though. They reserved that topic as a dare – preferring to cloak their queries with faked innocence and pose them to female members of staff instead. The cheeky buggers. Or perhaps they didn’t ask him because he didn’t give out that vibe. You can ask Mr Sir Savidge about music and drugs and tattoos because he knows about all that stuff. But don’t ask him about sex because he doesn’t have sex any more.

And if ever they should ask him, what would he say then? That he was celibate from personal choice? And that had been the case for five years? Was that the line he’d spin to Miranda Oates if she kept up her attention? Arlo thought about Miranda Oates with her shapely rear, her nice tits, her penchant for dark lipstick and bare legs, her obvious interest in him. And he wondered if it wasn’t just a bit sad, perhaps a little worrying, that he was thinking of inventive ways to fob her off when once he would quite happily have shagged her, gamely dated her even.

‘That’s the end of that,’ he said, suddenly out loud, and the boys took it to mean the end of prep and scarpered from the room a full five minutes early.

Chapter Five

Despite the mercy dash to Whetstone in the small hours, Rob’s meeting with the Japanese had gone well. Petra was very tired after the previous night’s sortie and though most of all she craved an early night, she’d phoned Rob and offered to cook at either her place or his. He suggested she join him in town. Getting ready, she asked herself a couple of times why she was doing something she didn’t want to do, why didn’t she just slob around at home and eat finger food in front of Location Location Location. But she answered herself sharply – her relationship with Rob was just ten months old and there was no time for complacency. Furthermore, Rob seldom invited her to socialize with his work people, though he frequently did. So she should be honoured, she told herself. And she shouldn’t let bloody sleep, or lack of it, dictate her life. She stood in her bedroom in a bath towel and wondered what she could wear that was appropriate for a night on the town with Rob and his cohorts, but would be comfortable. Her grazed knee was still too raw to go plasterless and her blistered heels necessitated backless shoes. But not my Birkenstocks, Petra thought, not on Rob’s big night – he’d be appalled. She decided to wear her slippers because they didn’t look too much like slippers; indeed, people wore a similar style as shoes. A pair of slip-on flat mules in a type of glorified plastic netting decorated with sequins and beads. She’d have to wear socks or tights because she couldn’t very well have her heels on display, with plasters or without. She hated anything drawing attention to herself. Just then, for a moment, she hated herself more for sleepwalking.

‘If I didn’t bloody sleepwalk, I could be tottering about in strappy heels. Not that I own a pair,’ she muttered to herself, slouching in front of the mirror. ‘Pop socks and slippers. For Christ’s sake.’ In the event, her cropped black trousers covered the offending top of the pop socks, and a plain black camisole teamed with a cardigan lightly decorated with beads gave her look a cohesion that pleasantly surprised her. Concealer helped with the bags under her eyes and mascara widened them beyond their weary proportions. On the tube, she congratulated her inventiveness: no one gave her a second look or even registered her choice of footwear.

‘And here is Petra,’ Rob announced as she approached his table at a busy Soho bar, ‘and – dear God – she’s wearing her slippers.’

Though she stood while everyone remained seated, she felt small and mortified. Two of Rob’s male colleagues glanced down at Petra’s feet in fascination, a couple of his female colleagues analysed them with pity, whilst circling their own beautiful footwear.

‘Blisters!’ Petra shrugged, making a lively joke of it.

‘They’re cute,’ one of the girls said lamely.

‘Watch out that none of these louts tread on your tootsies,’ slurred the other.

‘How are you, babe?’ Rob asked, pulling Petra towards him for a boozy kiss, his hand lingering over her buttocks.

‘Fine, fine,’ Petra said, aware that one of the other men was entranced by Rob’s hand on her bottom. There were no spare chairs.

‘You get the next round, darling,’ Rob said, ‘and you can perch on my knee.’

‘You get the drinks in, Rob, you wanker,’ said the woman who had defined Petra’s slippers as cute. ‘Here, your bum is quite small, cop a pew with me.’ And she shuffled to the edge of her chair, making room for Petra.

‘Thanks,’ said Petra. ‘I’m Petra.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m Laura. I work with Rob. We all do – we’re toasting ourselves because the Japs love us.’

‘Cheers,’ said Petra, though she had no glass to raise.

‘Get the girl a drink!’ Laura told Rob who flung his hands up in defeat and made his way to the bar.

‘Oh dear,’ Petra said, trying to look fondly after him, ‘he looks slightly the worse for wear.’

‘All the blokes do, they are all worse for wear,’ the other girl leant across and said, ‘whereas we girls are just pleasantly pissed.’

Petra wondered whether to toast this fact, but not having a drink enabled her to just nod and grin while the other women drained their champagne flutes. She didn’t much care for champagne, or wine bars. She preferred vodka and tonic in friendly pubs. This place was heaving yet echoey and she wasn’t sure whether she liked the milieu, a noisy rabble of suited men and highly well-heeled women bragging and flirting; money mingling with cigarette smoke and arrogant laughter. She felt intimidated and that irritated her. However, when Rob returned with a bottle of champagne but also a vodka and tonic for Petra, she reprimanded herself not to be so provincial and judgemental.

She sipped her vodka and grinned awkwardly while Rob and his colleagues talked about stuff she didn’t understand and people she didn’t know. She found herself making mental notes: pay bills, speak to her bank, ring her father – her mother too. It had been ages since she’d spoken to either, let alone seen them. She’d try and arrange to visit one on Saturday, the other on Sunday. She’d take Rob along. Over the last ten months, her mother had met him only a couple of times and her father just the once. She glanced over at Rob, a slight sheen to his face from euphoria and the effort of the day, his voice loud and fast from alcohol and high spirits. He looked nice in a suit, she thought, and wasn’t it good to see him in his element, holding court amongst colleagues, reeling off extravagant anecdotes and technical data from the working day just gone. Just then, Petra felt a wave of resentment towards Eric and Kitty and Gina who were not particularly subtle about their doubts over Rob. Particularly Eric. And Kitty. Gina slightly less so.

And yet look how Rob’s lot include me, Petra thought to herself – Laura and the other girl asking all about our relationship, that bloke with the wet patch on his shirt asking me about diamond merchants, that other one buying me another vodka and tonic. If Rob hadn’t been stressed out and moody that day he visited the studio, perhaps my lot would be more accommodating. And I probably haven’t helped – taking into the studio my daft insecurities and niggles. They’re very quick to criticize, my Studio Three. I bet they wouldn’t say my slippers are cute.

Petra tried desperately to stifle a yawn.

‘Are we keeping you up?’ one of the men teased her.

‘You do look a little tired,’ Laura commented.

‘She was up half the night,’ Rob said.

‘Phnar phnar,’ one of his colleagues nudged him.

‘Not likely,’ Rob laughed. ‘My girlfriend gets up to all sorts of shenanigans at night – but it’s nothing to do with me.’

‘I sometimes sleepwalk,’ Petra mumbled in, hoping to curtail details.

‘Yesterday – Christ, the early hours of this morning,’ Rob was saying, ‘I get a call from the police asking me do I know a Petra Flint, does she have wellingtons and a Snoopy T-shirt and is there any way she could have walked towards Whetstone whilst asleep.’

‘You’re joking,’ Laura said, the focus of her pity directed at Rob which disappointed Petra.

‘Appalling,’ Petra said quickly. ‘Hence the slippers – from my blisters.’

‘Mind you, at least she was clothed,’ Rob said, raising his glass at Petra and winking.

Oh God, don’t, Rob, please.

But Rob was bolstered by Bollinger and he had a captive audience and he quite liked the power of being a raconteur.

‘When I took her to meet my folks down in Hampshire, she walked into their bedroom, switched on their light, opened their cupboard doors, had a rummage around and then walked out again.’

‘Rob—’

But Rob paused for dramatic effect only. ‘Starkers!’ he told the table. ‘I don’t know who it was worse for – Petra, or my parents.’

Petra hid her head in her hands.

‘Do you really not realize a thing?’ the other girl asked, slightly accusatorily. Petra shook her head without raising her face.

‘Why don’t you go to bed wearing something – just in case?’ Laura asked her.

‘I do,’ Petra said, ‘especially when I’m staying away from home. I put on layers and layers before I go to bed. I don’t know why I take them off – I don’t know why I take off.’

‘Can’t you take a sleeping pill or something? It could be dangerous.’

‘So could taking sleeping pills,’ Petra said. ‘I’ve seen specialists, had tests. No one knows why I do it or how to stop me.’

‘I can’t believe she walked into your parents naked,’ Laura said to Rob, and Petra would rather she’d said it to her.

‘I don’t mean to,’ Petra said, trying to look imploringly at Rob who didn’t seem to feel her gaze. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘Petra will kill me for this one – apparently, before I met her, she actually got into bed with complete strangers.’

‘Oh my God – did you have sex with them?’

‘Of course not,’ Petra said crossly. ‘I was staying at a place in the country for my friend’s thirtieth birthday. I didn’t know the house and I think I was getting flu anyway. But yes, I walked in my sleep into another bedroom and got into bed with a couple.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Tried to get me out,’ Petra said. ‘I only stayed for a few minutes anyway and then I went out of my own accord.’

‘Out?’

‘Into the grounds of the house,’ Petra explained, ‘but someone was having a spliff outside and they led me back.’

‘They must’ve thought it was damn good skunk,’ one of the men laughed.

Petra shrugged. ‘I know it sounds funny and crazy – but it’s not. Believe me.’

‘It’s a liability,’ Rob said. ‘That’s why I’d like to say that I’m particularly proud of the deal we did today, chaps – because I was up half the night in Whetstone bloody police station.’

Everyone raised their glasses to Rob, and Petra suddenly wondered whether it would have been entirely her fault if he hadn’t closed the deal with the Japanese. Poor Rob, she thought, I am a liability. So she raised her glass highest of all. And though she was desperate to go home and snuggle up with him for an early night, she stuck it out at the bar because she felt he deserved it.

Later, much later, they took a cab back to Rob’s flat in Islington. Petra was beyond exhausted but woozy with vodka too. When she sobered up, she would think how it was not particularly logical to be mad at Rob for humiliating her yet also to want to impress him, seduce him, enamour him of her – so that perhaps he wouldn’t do it again. When she sobered up, no doubt she would wonder why on earth she hadn’t just said, Rob, you sod, please shut up – it’s private and you’re embarrassing me. But she was a little drunk and her heels throbbed and she’d knocked her knee on the side of Rob’s chair and it was the same chair she’d once wet in her sleep. And suddenly she loved him for having not humiliated her by revealing that episode to his colleagues. And foremost in her conscience was that she’d pissed Rob off the night before and so now she ought to make it up to him because she didn’t like upsetting people and she didn’t like arguments and she didn’t like conflict and she wanted to remind Rob that there was more to her than Snoopy T-shirts and calls from the police. And it would be so very nice if this relationship could last beyond a year.

Before he had time to pour himself a whisky, Petra was behind him, encircling her arms around him. She kissed him between his shoulder blades, huffing hot breath through his shirt while she travelled her hands down his stomach and unzipped his trousers.

‘What’s all this?’ he murmured though he took her hand and thrust it down his boxers. He turned and kissed her hungrily. He tasted slightly rancid, of too much beer and champagne on top of a liquid lunch, but Petra told herself to block it out. She kissed him back thoughtfully, taking care to skip her tongue around his mouth, her teeth grazing his lips. She looked into his eyes which were a little bloodshot but no doubt hers were too. She didn’t really like his face so much when he was drunk – it was what Eric would term ‘leery’ and Eric had seen Rob pissed once before. But leery was fine for now because sex was on the agenda. He squeezed her breasts and bucked his groin against hers. She swept her hand downwards and thrilled at the feel of his erection holding the fine wool of his suit trousers aloft. He fumbled with his belt and pushed his trousers and underpants down. His hands at her shoulders urged Petra to squat down though she stifled the wince of pain as her knee objected.

‘Suck my cock,’ he panted and Petra obliged, though she didn’t need his hands guiding her head and she wished he wouldn’t because it made her gag. ‘God, I’m horny,’ he murmured, pulling her up to standing, which again sent waves of pain through her knee as it was straightened. ‘Got to fuck you now,’ he said, groping and pulling her trousers as he backed her towards the sofa. His desire for her was what turned Petra on most about Rob. He could be arrogant, he could be moody. They hadn’t that much in common, really. He wasn’t what she’d term tender, which was a quality she rated, and he was attentive really because he could afford to be – flowers and gifts and nice dinners in upmarket restaurants. But he was very good at sex, and it was obvious that he thought Petra was very good at sex. He liked sex a lot and he liked lots of it and it flattered Petra that she appeared to turn him on so much and it was a thrill for her to take credit for his libido and his satisfaction.

So he fucked her rudely and quickly on his sofa and she thought to herself that, though her knee was being scuffled painfully against the fabric because he was taking her from behind, if they had been in missionary then both her sore heels would have suffered anyway. So it was OK. It was good, wasn’t it, as he humped into her, his hand between her legs fiddling around for her clitoris. As he came, his mouth was at her ear and his gasps and groaning turned her on more than his cock or his hands and she moved herself urgently so that she came too.

They lay in a post-orgasmic, drunken slump.

‘Nice fuck,’ Rob said at length, easing himself off her. ‘Petra,’ he said sternly, ‘pop socks?’

‘You weren’t meant to see,’ she said with a coy smile, ‘but you were in a rush to have me.’

He raised his eyebrow and shook his head. ‘Sometimes I think of you as so refreshingly quirky – but sometimes I think you’re just odd. Come on, girl. Bed-time. And dear God, don’t go walkabout tonight.’ He locked his front door and locked the key in his briefcase which had a combination code Petra didn’t know.

But she did walk. A couple of hours after they’d fallen asleep she’d left the bed and walked into the wall where she thought there was a doorway as she assumed she was at her flat.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Rob said, not that Petra could hear him. He found her in his sitting room, standing stock-still. He turned her shoulders and gave her a little shove every few steps.

‘Petra, I can’t be doing with this.’ She looked at him directly, her eyes vacant though she spoke at him.

‘I know what you mean,’ she said flatly.

‘I doubt it,’ Rob said back though he knew they weren’t conversing.

‘But I wouldn’t agree with you about Gordon Brown.’

She made to turn back to the sitting room but he steered her to the bedroom and she lay down without a murmur.

‘Sorry, babe,’ he said, ‘but I’m fucking knackered.’ And he took a tie from his cupboard, binding it around her wrist and securing it to the bedpost.

Chapter Six

Petra’s knee healed faster than the blisters so she continued to wear her Birkenstock sandals with socks to the studio all week, and still had to wear her pop socks and slippers when she saw Rob a couple of evenings later. I’m wearing pop socks again, she advised him, so if you want to do unmentionably rude things to me, can you give me warning so I can take them off first. Rob had called her a little hussy – much to her delight. And in the event, she left her socks on and they had sex energetically while he slapped her buttocks and called her a naughty naughty girl. When she woke the next morning, though her buttocks felt decidedly tingly it was her left wrist which felt really sore and when she looked at it, it was red; scorched like a burn. She showed it to Rob who’d said, Don’t you remember me pinning you down as I rogered you senseless? However Petra couldn’t remember, precisely. But the sex had been kinky and mostly in the dark and perhaps all that spanking had distracted her, so maybe he had. As she showered, she did quietly consider how, as good as they were at sex, it would be nice if she and Rob could be a little better at the bits in between. But she quickly washed away the notion that, quite possibly, it was beyond Rob’s natural personality to loll about chatting idly, or to hold hands whilst walking, or to make love rather than always fuck.

‘Petra, what have you done to your wrist?’ Gina asked her in the studio.

Petra pulled her sleeve down but gave Gina and Kitty and Eric a saucy lick of her lips. ‘Rob’s a bit of a tiger,’ she giggled, sashaying out to the toilet.

‘He’s a bit of a prat,’ Eric said dryly when Petra was out of earshot.

‘He’s a lot of a prat,’ Gina defined.

‘I don’t like it,’ Kitty said darkly. ‘Petra is naturally gentle – physically and emotionally. I’m sorry, but I don’t like to think of someone being rough with her.’

‘She can look after herself,’ Eric snapped because actually he wished he’d come out with Kitty’s insight.

‘No, Eric. I can look after myself,’ Kitty said. ‘Petra was born someone to be made love to – I’m someone born to fuck.’

Gina giggled. ‘Kitty, you are outrageous. You’re putting me off my work.’

Kitty shrugged, her skeins of blue-black hair snaking around her shoulders like a latter-day Medusa. ‘Sorry, Gina,’ she said, ‘but I do have authority to speak. I’ve had more sex with more people than all the hyphens in the double-barrelled surnames in your street.’

Gina giggled again. ‘Rob is a prat – but it’s not for us to say so. Anyway, Petra is very fond of him. And she’s really set on making this relationship last.’

‘Even if it doesn’t necessarily work,’ Eric sighed. ‘Christ.’

‘True,’ said Kitty, ‘but if I think he’s hurting her, then no one’s bloody gagging me. Silence has no place in the shadow of violence.’

Both Eric and Gina quietly hoped that this was the end of the matter and that Petra would not come into work with marks on her again. Neither of them fancied Rob’s chances against Kitty.

‘I’m taking Charlton’s piece back to him,’ Petra announced when she came in again. She showed them the ankh pendant she had fashioned out of gold according to Charlton’s precise design; Celtic ornament enlivening the surface. ‘Does anybody want anything?’

‘Can you pop into Bellore for me?’ Gina asked. ‘They phoned to say my turquoise is in – it’s all paid for.’

‘And I need some 4mm setting strip,’ said Kitty. ‘Can you lay out for me and I’ll pay you back?’

‘Anything else? Eric?’

‘Oh go on, twist my arm – I’ll have a cappuccino,’ Eric said. ‘But better make it a skinny one – my belt was tight this morning. Do you think I’ve gained weight?’

Petra raised her eyes at Kitty and Gina and left them to deal with Eric’s neuroses while she went about her errands.

On one side only of Hatton Garden there is a line of trees which bow subtly towards the kerb like some kind of benign, eco-friendly security grille. It is on this side, about halfway down, that Charlton Squire has the original of his two jewellery galleries. The other, opened last year, is off New Bond Street in the West End. Like Electrum in South Molton Street, Charlton Squire Gallery is revered as a hotbed boutique of cutting-edge talent. However, there’s a price to pay for such innovation in precious metals and gems and designs and it’s high; the pieces for sale are marketed meticulously as luxury goods for those who can afford them. There’s also a price to pay by the jewellers whom Charlton chooses to exhibit at his gallery and that is hefty commission charges. However, to exhibit at Charlton Squire means access to wealthy clients and occasional exposure in the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair.

‘It’s a six and two threes,’ Petra had justified when she told the others at the studio that Charlton had selected her work.

‘It’s a rip-off,’ said Eric.

‘Your nose is just out of joint because Charlton didn’t select you,’ Gina chided.

‘More like Eric’s dick is out of joint because Charlton turned down his crown jewels,’ Kitty said.

‘I didn’t offer him my body,’ Eric objected, ‘only my work. I don’t fancy him anyway – he’s not my type. He’s too big and swarthy and I don’t like his accent.’

‘You Southern poof,’ Kitty teased him.

‘Charlton Squire sounds like the love child of Jimmy Nail and Molly Sugden,’ Eric said. ‘I only understand every other word.’

‘You snob,’ said Kitty.

‘And he looks like their love child too,’ Eric said.

‘You bitch,’ said Kitty. ‘Meow.’

Charlton Squire did not look like the love child of Jimmy Nail and Molly Sugden, in fact he looked quite unlike anybody. He certainly did not resemble either parent; his mother a whippet-wizened Yorkshire lass, his father a solid Geordie. At nearing six foot five and eighteen stone, Charlton looked more like an oversized cliché, alarmingly like a tribute act for the leather-clad chap from the Village People; a look which hadn’t gone down well in his home town of Stokesley but had gone down a storm when he hit the gay scene in London twenty years ago. He’d ditched the thick moustache in his forties and had more recently relaxed the tightness of the top-to-toe leather and the amount of chest on public view. But he still came across as textbook gay and he used it to his advantage, whatever the sexuality of his clients. He’d charm the straight ones, flirt with the gay ones and inhibit anyone pursuing a discount by wielding his weight alongside a winsome expression of abject hurt if they dared ask.

Though Charlton Squire’s own designs were coveted worldwide, his secondary skill was as a scout. He could swoop down on promising talents and quickly appropriate them as his protégés, as if their genius was of his making and that he alone was responsible for tapping into their potential. Though ruthlessly ambitious, he liked to exude an air of benevolent altruism and eagerly promoted himself as a philanthropic patron and mentor. He still loved designing jewellery but he also loved the showmanship of owning his galleries. He had neither the time nor the inclination to physically make up his own pieces any more and so as well as having bench-workers in the workshop behind the gallery in Hatton Garden, he also sent out his designs to skilled jewellers he trusted. Petra Flint being one of them. She didn’t mind. She didn’t find it demeaning and it didn’t take her away from her own designs; she used her out-work from Charlton as a way of keeping her current account healthy and honing her dexterity as a jeweller – something she believed could always be more and more finely tuned.

What Petra loved most about Hatton Garden was its history and its honesty. It wasn’t as chic or salubrious as the West End but there was a definite sense of it being the genuine hub of her industry. The retailers in Knightsbridge, in Regent Street, lower New Bond Street and South Molton Street were simply trading the wares which could be mostly traced back to the Hatton Garden area anyway. She knew some young jewellers who had studios in Hackney, in Kensal Rise, but though she paid a little more for the privilege of renting studio space in London’s true jewellery quarter, it was money well spent for the buzz and the impetus it gave her. She loved the naffness of some of the shops; the lack of pretension of window displays haphazard on faded flower paper or frayed velvet boxes or cracked plastic cushions; she enjoyed the delusions of grandeur of others – from the geographically schizophrenic Beverley Hills London to the blingtastic Go for Gold with its windows stuffed full of solid gold chains thick enough to hoist anchor. She liked the way that the modern and ultra-chic could coexist quite happily with the old-fashioned and low key. R. Holt, with its frontage resembling a hardware store in need of a dust nevertheless nodded proudly at Nicholas James opposite, all uber-hip and with a minimalist take on window design. Cool Diamonds believed in the lure of its name alone in lieu of any window display while Petra’s personal favourite, A. R. Ullman, was endearingly Dickensian in the higgledy-piggledy jam-packedness of its diminutive shopfront. As she walked to Charlton’s, she browsed; said hullo to familiar faces, detoured via the Wyndham Centre to enquire about reflexology for sleep disorders. Kitty, Gina and Eric had sent her there for her birthday last December, booking her a crystal healing with chakra balancing session. She’d felt well and truly stoned afterwards.

When she was buzzed in at the Charlton Squire Gallery, the eponymous owner, in all his enormous campness, was locked in discussion with a young Hasidic Jew whom Petra recognized as Yitzhak Levy, from a family of renowned diamond dealers. Charlton stood a head and shoulders taller than Yitzhak and compared with the latter’s paleness, Charlton looked positively orange. But whatever Yitzhak lacked in physical stature, his magnificent hat and beautifully tonged sideburn ringlets gave him gravitas. From Charlton’s leather trousers and contour-skimming silken shirt the colour of midnight, to Yitzhak’s eighteenth-century Polish dignitary’s dress, the men epitomized the theatricality, the tolerance, the unique and unchanged trading mores of Hatton Garden. Petra knew what would happen next. There’d be gesticulations, perhaps some banging of fists and the throwing up of arms and then shrugs and nodding and handshakes. The diamond merchant dug into his overcoat pocket and produced the stone which Charlton exchanged for a wad of banknotes. More handshaking. Shalom. Kol tov. Deal done for the day. The men turned and noted Petra. Charlton swaggered over, cupped her face in his hands and kissed her forehead. Yitzhak nodded amiably enough but kept physical space at a premium.

‘He buys my diamonds,’ Yitzhak shrugged, ‘but none of his good money will buy your tanzanite, hey, Miss Flint?’

Petra shook her head vehemently.

‘And if I give you top dollar for it – will you trade with me?’

Petra shook her head again and shrugged. ‘It’s not for sale, Mr Levy.’

‘It’s only for keeping in a cotton hanky under her mattress,’ Charlton said, exasperated, ‘isn’t that right, Pet?’ He often called her Pet, it being a common endearment in the North-East as much as a convenient diminutive of her name.

‘I’ve brought your pendant back,’ Petra said, because her tanzanite was not for sale, not even for discussion.

‘May I?’ Yitzhak asked and Charlton handed the piece to him. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘A bit heathen for my liking. You ever thought of designing a nice Star of David range, Mr Squire?’

‘Most my clients are goyim,’ Charlton bantered back, the Yiddish for ‘non-Jew’ coming as easily as a second language.

Yitzhak shrugged. ‘If you make them – they will sell.’

Charlton nodded. ‘You’re probably right. Now bugger off and flog your diamonds elsewhere.’

The men laughed and shook hands again. Yitzhak nodded at Petra and left.

Charlton scrutinized her work in silence. He compared it in minute detail with his design and analysed the craftsmanship under a loupe.

‘Excellent,’ he said at length. ‘Do you want cash or have it as a credit against commission?’

‘Has any of my stuff sold?’ Petra asked him though she could see her work displayed beautifully in a well-lit cabinet.

‘Not this week, Pet.’

‘I’d better have the cash then, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Planning to go crazy at the weekend?’

‘Hardly,’ Petra said. ‘I’m off to see my parents.’

‘Are you taking the boyfriend?’

‘I am,’ she said proudly.

‘He’ll be down on bended knee in front of your pa, Pet.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Petra said, though privately she thrilled to the notion.

Chapter Seven

‘Hullo?’

‘Dad?’

‘Hullo?’

‘It’s Petra.’

‘Petra. Hullo. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. And you? I was thinking about popping in tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes – is that OK? About elevenish?’

‘Oh. Elevenish isn’t very good as Joanna has ballet. How about after lunch?’

‘After lunch? Or what about lunch-timeish?’

‘After lunch is better. If it’s all the same to you.’

‘Oh. OK. After lunch, then. See you tomorrow. And Dad? I’m bringing Rob.’

‘Rob?’

‘My boyfriend – you met him before Christmas.’

‘Investment chappy?’

‘Yes. It’s going really well.’

‘Well, we’ll see you both tomorrow then.’

Rob couldn’t think of anything he’d like to do less with his Saturday than go on a day-trip to Watford to visit Petra’s father. And he certainly wasn’t going to give over his Sunday to journey out to Kent to visit Petra’s mother. He’d rather visit his own parents in Hampshire, and that was saying something. His week had been long, mostly lucrative but exhausting. He fancied having a weekend left to his own devices. Certainly not to be wasted by being paraded in front of Petra’s parents. Why was she so keen to do that anyway? It wasn’t as if she was particularly close to them. Rob knew he could make it up to her by begging her forgiveness and promising that he’d have theatre tickets awaiting her return on Saturday evening, and the finest sushi in London when she came back on Sunday. Bloody work, he said. Bloody boring, he said. He didn’t say that visiting her parents was hard work and boring.

On the Metropolitan Line to Watford, Petra fought a losing battle against nostalgia. It was always the same and on each occasion, only as she felt her spirits start to sap would she remember how she always asked herself why was she making this trip – uninvited yet feeling duty bound? She knew she’d leave deflated and reflective. She could be snuggled up with her boyfriend instead, if only he was a bit more into snuggling. Or she could be out shopping then. She could be cleaning her flat or curled up with a book. She could be having a nice, easy day.

The journey to Watford was relatively short but it was long enough for her to let the train window, against which she rested her head, judder memories and thoughts from the safe and private place she usually kept them. She always felt positive in advance about visiting one parent or the other, but as the destination neared so did a sense of trepidation and the hunch that on her homeward journey she would question why she made the trip in the first place. Petra envied people whose parents continued to live in the old family home, enabling them to return to the cornerstone of their childhood each time they visited. No matter how far away that home might be, by definition it would be an easy journey to make. But Petra’s childhood home had been sold when she was fourteen and her parents had divorced. She and her mother had moved into a flat nearby and her father had moved away.

Petra gently played her fingertips over her lap as if in silent piano practice; in fact she was totting up the years. It occurred to her that John Flint had lived in his current house in Watford with his new family for the past fifteen years. In the same house. Which meant he’d been there a year longer than all the time he’d spent at home with Petra. Psychologically though, he’d moved out of that house long before his bags were packed and his current house was much more his home than theirs had ever been.

She looked out of the window, glimpsing cars at a standstill. John had offered to buy her a car for her twenty-fifth birthday, but she’d sensed he’d hoped she’d decline because at the same time he’d made much of Joanna’s school fees and there being another baby on the way.

There’d been another since then. Something good had come out of the split between her parents and that was half-siblings for Petra. Joanna and Eliza and Bruce. She peeled back the cellophane on a bland-looking sandwich. It was hard not to feel hurt that she hadn’t been invited for lunch. But Joanna had ballet and no doubt big families were on tight timetables at weekends to cram everything in. Including visits from the daughter, the stepdaughter, the half-sister.

Christ, I’ve just realized Joanna is the same age as I was when Dad left.

‘Petra!’ Eliza flung herself at Petra’s waist while Bruce tried to squeeze in between their bodies.

‘What a welcome,’ Petra told them, noting Joanna slunk around the banister. ‘Hi Joanna, I’m loving your haircut. How was ballet?’

‘Jo,’ said Joanna. ‘I like being called Jo now.’

‘Sorry,’ Petra said. ‘Jo suits you.’

‘I’m giving up ballet – I’m just going to do modern and tap.’

‘Wow,’ said Petra.

The teenager approached and helped her half-sister peel Bruce and Eliza off her limbs.

‘Did you brung us things?’ Bruce asked.

‘Yeah! Presents!’ Eliza shrieked. Petra noted that even Joanna now had an expectant twinkle in her eye.

‘Let the poor woman in, you lot!’ It was Mary. Petra’s father’s wife. From the start, Petra had somehow seemed old enough, self-contained enough and simply didn’t visit often enough for her to appear remotely in need of a stepmother. So Mary and Petra’s relationship bypassed that aspect. To Petra, Mary was her father’s wife. To Mary, Petra was John’s daughter. They both referred to him as John. They liked each other well enough.

They kissed. ‘John is out – he should be back soon. I’m just doing an online supermarket order. Kids – show Petra in.’

‘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.

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 space. By contrast, the chickens live in a stylish and spacious 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 macramé 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 buggered 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.

He sat on the edge of his bed and traced the pinky beige aureole of her nipple thoughtfully, as if weighing up the merits and consequences of her offer to stay at home, but then he tweaked her nose between his fingers and slapped her buttocks as if she was a puppy. ‘I have to go to work,’ he told her, ‘and you should too. It’s not healthy to play hooky.’ And with that, he swept back the duvet and flicked cold water at Petra from the glass beside the bed. She giggled and shrieked and writhed about the bed.

‘I’m working late tonight,’ Rob told her, ignoring her nakedness which quite hurt her feelings. ‘And I’m away overnight tomorrow. I’ll give you a call later in the week.’

‘It’s your birthday on Friday,’ Petra said.

‘Whoopee doo,’ said Rob.

‘You can’t wake up alone on your birthday,’ Petra said, though she remembered she’d done precisely that last December.

‘You girls and bloody birthdays,’ Rob said under his breath, procrastinating over which tie to wear.

‘You realize you need never come back to an empty bed after a long hard day’s work,’ Petra said, making much of her coy expression though her heart was thudding as she let slip what was on the tip of her tongue. ‘That is – if we lived together.’

Rob looked at her blankly. ‘Those are the times when I need my space the most,’ he said.

She cringed, not at the bluntness of his response but at what suddenly seemed the misfired audacity of her proposal. She sat herself up and fiddled with winding her watch. Rob’s expression softened. ‘We’ll go out Friday night and you can celebrate my birthday for me in whichever way you choose,’ he said. He ran her hair through his fingers. ‘It’s a bit soon, for me, to be talking about cohabiting and whatever.’

Petra nodded. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘You’ve got keys, haven’t you – remember to double-lock when you go.’

Petra cursed modern technology for its failings. Emails and text messaging and phone calls were all very well for shrinking the world in an amicable web of global communication but the truth was that her oldest, closest friend lived abroad and though the phone was marvellous in making a mockery of vast oceans and time zones, what Petra wanted most just then was simply a cappuccino in Lucy’s actual company. Feeling a little sorry for herself, she made one from the coffee machine in Rob’s kitchen. Sitting at his breakfast bar, calculating the time differences with Hong Kong, she decided to send a help! text message. If she was lucky, Lucy would be back from the school run.

She waited; toyed with the idea of phoning too but decided against it – her mobile phone bill was large enough and realistically this wasn’t an emergency, it was just her feeling a little down. She finished her coffee. Her phone remained blank. She took a shower. Still there was no reply. There wasn’t anything worth watching on daytime TV. And there was no food in Rob’s fridge. Just champagne, which irritated her. He’s a bit of a cliché, my boyfriend, she thought and wondered fleetingly how much else would get on her nerves if they did move in together. There now seemed little point in playing hooky; Rob had gone into work and her best friend was apparently oblivious to her cry for help. There was nothing to do but leave Rob’s flat and head for Hatton Garden.

‘Good weekend?’ Eric asked.

‘Ish,’ Petra said with a shrug.

‘Rob?’ Eric asked, expectantly.

‘Parents,’ Petra said.

‘How’s Mother Hen?’ Kitty teased, but carefully.

‘Barking mad,’ said Petra.

‘Does her hair still look like alfalfa?’ Kitty asked, because she loved this previous description of Petra’s.

It raised a smile. Petra nodded. ‘You’ll have to visit with me one day, Kitty,’ she said.

‘Your mother would love that,’ Kitty said. ‘One look at me and her hens will be laying eggs for their life.’

‘The thing is, my mother would love that,’ said Petra.

‘Did Rob chauffeur you about?’ Eric asked.

‘Well, he would’ve,’ Petra said, ‘but he had loads of work to do.’ Though she’d said it airily, there was uncharitable silence from her workmates. ‘It’s his birthday on Friday.’ Gina, Kitty and Eric nodded but returned to their work. ‘I’m going to surprise him,’ Petra said, ‘but I don’t know how just yet.’ Quietly, she paused to consider how hard she worked at choreographing this relationship without truly knowing whether Rob was much good at dancing to her tune. Their musical tastes were another thing that actually (along with a taste for champagne) they did not share.

Petra sketched. Recently she’d spent a lot of her studio time sketching. Sketching or doing out-work for Charlton. Though he had a selection of her pieces for sale, realistically, until funds came in, she couldn’t really justify purchasing the gold or the gems for her new designs. In fact, she just couldn’t afford it at the moment. She had a tab at Bellore, the suppliers to the trade, but Petra didn’t like letting that run too high. For the time being, she would just have to be content making up her designs in copper or steel wire for future pieces in precious metal. Perhaps if Charlton or one of her private clients liked them, they’d commission the real thing. But Petra wasn’t a saleswoman and the thought of contacting a previous client with a direct pitch for business appalled her.

‘I’ll do it for you,’ Eric had offered.

‘But they spent one thousand pounds on that crocheted gold necklace with the aquamarine only six months ago.’

‘So you suggest matching earrings,’ Eric had shrugged.

‘I don’t know, Eric,’ Petra had said. ‘It seems a bit mercenary.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Petra,’ Eric said. ‘It’s your bloody job, woman.’

‘Don’t swear at her,’ Kitty growled from the background.

‘My friend Sophia is turning forty this year,’ Gina said helpfully. ‘I could ask her hubby if he wanted to splash out on a gorgeous Petra Flint something-or-other. They’ve got buckets of cash and a penchant for the finer things in life.’

‘But surely you should be pushing him to splash out on a gorgeous Gina Fanshaw-Smythe?’ Petra said.

‘My stuff is way too chunky and vulgar for Sophia,’ Gina had replied ingenuously. ‘She’s very refined, is Sophia. Your style is perfect.’

As Petra sketched that Monday morning, working on curlicues and arabesques and serpentines, she recalled Gina’s compliment and it gave her a boost. Perhaps if she showed Gina a couple of her designs it would prompt her to mention Sophia again and maybe this time Petra might just say, Oh, OK then, if you think her husband might like to see my work, by all means show him. She worked again on an idea that had been nestling in her mind and her sketchbook for some time. She took coloured pencils and slicked mentions of gold over her soft pencil lines. Then she took a blue pencil and a violet one and worked the hues over each other. The design was for a necklace. Fine rose-gold belcher from the back of the neck slinking just over the trapezius where it then met an undulating line of solid rose gold sitting sinuously along the clavicle. From the centre of this, a gemstone. Tanzanite. Something sizeable, 4 carat or so. Balanced by two smaller tanzanites, a carat each, uniting the junctions between the gold chain and the solid gold.

She stood up, stretched, looked out of the window to the hubbub of Leather Lane. It’s busy this morning, for a Monday morning, she thought until Eric suddenly announced, ‘Lunchtime!’ and she looked at her watch and marvelled how the hours had rattled by while she had been so silently absorbed in her work. She felt quite triumphant, stimulated, productive. And very hungry. Gina was still engrossed in hammering a silver bangle and Kitty appeared to have left the studio. Petra decided to leave her sketchbook open and accompany Eric to the sandwich shop.

When they returned, Kitty and Gina were poring over Petra’s designs.

‘It’s stunning,’ Kitty said. ‘Classic but contemporary, delicate but strong.’

Petra looked at Gina expectantly. ‘You’re a clever bunny,’ Gina said. And Petra said, Do you think so, thank you, thanks a lot. But she couldn’t bring herself to mention Sophia’s fabulously rich husband.

‘Don’t let Charlton see it,’ Eric said. ‘He’ll copy it, the sod.’

‘That wouldn’t be your tanzanite, would it?’ Gina asked.

Eric looked at Petra’s drawing. ‘Her tanzanite is twice the size.’ He squinted at the sketch. ‘Three times the size.’

‘Bring it in again one day,’ Gina said, ‘so we can all have a jolly good ogle.’

Petra hadn’t been home since before the weekend. She’d gone directly from Watford and later Kent to Rob’s place and stayed over both nights. She’d rented her flat for just under two years. Recently she had renewed the lease. She’d asked Rob’s advice a couple of months ago, hoping that he’d say, Move in with me, babe. But his advice had been solidly financial. He pointed out that she couldn’t afford the down payment for a suitable flat in an area she liked and, with it still being a seller’s market, she may as well continue to rent for the time being.

Her flat was small and fairly sweet. The lounge could take a gate-leg table and three folding chairs as well as a sofa; it also had a fireplace with coal-effect fire and alcoves with shelving to either side, stripped floors and sash windows. The bedroom accommodated a double bed and the narrow church pew which Petra had bought as a student and had taken from bedroom to bedroom ever since. As there was only a small cupboard and a very narrow chest of drawers, the pew’s surface was invaluable. The bathroom had no window, just a noisy Vent-Axia but, bizarrely for the lack of space, a bidet too. Her upstairs neighbours were the landlords and they were a friendly if heavy-footed family.

Today, she came home to a note from them saying, ‘There’s a leak!!! We’ve had it fixed. Hope nothing of yours is affected??? Insurance will cover if so!!’ Petra looked around the sitting room and suddenly noticed the yellowed bulge at the far end of the ceiling and the beige fingers of damp clawing their way down the wall; her paperbacks on the shelf directly beneath were puffed swollen and soggy but they appeared to be the only casualty. In fact, Petra found herself more distressed by the state of her fridge – that her milk had gone off and that the KitKats she thought she still had were not there. She was going to slump down to sulk, then she thought she’d stomp off to the corner shop, but then she noticed the flashing of her answerphone.

‘It’s me! I’ve just done the school run! Where are you? Phone me and I’ll call you straight back.’

It was Lucy. Or, rather, it had been Lucy, phoning from Hong Kong. Hours and hours ago. It was now gone six and over the seas and far away Lucy would be fast asleep. In fact, it was already Tuesday for her. If Petra waited until eleven, she’d catch Lucy at breakfast.

The conversation started as it always did: with brief marvelling at the clarity of the phone line and how much time had passed since they last spoke.

‘I miss you,’ Petra said. ‘What are you having for breakfast?’

‘Fruit salad,’ Lucy laughed. ‘Miss you too. I did phone yesterday. What’s up?’

‘Well, I feel OK now – because I had a productive day at the studio. But I woke up feeling crap – because I used up my weekend visiting my parents.’

‘It’s not Christmas,’ Lucy said.

‘I know.’

‘I thought we’d decided you’d only visit at Christmas?’

‘I know. I don’t know why I did it, really.’

‘How were they?’

Petra paused. ‘They’re both always so preoccupied. I just feel inconsequential.’

‘You are far from it,’ Lucy said, almost sternly.

‘Thank you,’ Petra said. She paused because she wanted Lucy to continue.

‘You’re the strongest person I know,’ Lucy said. ‘All your achievements are your own. God, it’s not as if your parents gave you a leg-up, a foot in the door or even a pat on the back. You’ve always managed to stride out by yourself. And look at your success.’ She said it with triumph. ‘Does that help?’ she added.

‘Ish,’ said Petra.

‘Don’t let them upset you,’ Lucy said, ‘because of course they don’t mean to. They’re not bad people – they’re just, well, crap parents.’

Petra paused.

‘You don’t really need them,’ Lucy said.

‘But sometimes I want them,’ Petra said.

‘Everyone needs a sense of family,’ Lucy said, ‘in every sense of the word. You don’t quite have that and that’s tough. How are you sleeping?’

‘Not good,’ Petra said. ‘I’ve been waking up knackered. I think I must be sleepwalking a lot.’

‘How is Rob?’ Lucy asked.

Petra paused. She was acutely aware that she never paused when Eric or Gina or Kitty asked the question. She always jumped to his defence; blowing his trumpet and singing his praises. But with her oldest friend, such exaggeration was pointless. Honesty though, required greater effort. ‘Fine.’

‘Fine?’

‘Ish,’ Petra qualified.

‘I don’t like the sound of “ish”,’ said Lucy, wishing she was in the UK, wishing she knew Rob better because her first impression of him hadn’t painted her a particularly pleasing picture.

‘I’m not quite sure where I stand and I feel I should after ten months,’ Petra said. ‘After all, I’ve made it my mission to ensure that he wants for nothing from me. Sex. Support. Affection. Space.’

‘You give,’ Lucy defined, ‘but what do you get? Does he actually warrant all the effort you bestow?’

‘I wish he’d ask me to be with him – you know, move in, or something,’ Petra said, pointedly ignoring Lucy’s question. ‘I wish he’d just ask. I’d like to feel that he loves me enough to at least ask.’

On the other side of the Pacific, Lucy had closed her eyes and frowned. Love shouldn’t be such an effort. But she didn’t think love was the point – she suspected it was self-esteem. Petra will stick with Rob, Lucy thought, because Petra loathes the thought of splitting up. Petra wants to feel loved regardless of whether the object of her affection is actually worthy of hers.

‘It’s his birthday on Friday,’ Petra said, aware of Lucy’s silence and changing tack because of it. ‘I won’t see him until then. He’s too busy. He says.’

‘Will you be going out to celebrate?’ Lucy asked, her tone light. If she couldn’t physically be there to pick up the pieces, then she couldn’t very well dish out the home truths.

‘Yes. Somewhere in town, I guess. He hasn’t decided. He’s not really into birthdays.’

‘Don’t take that personally,’ Lucy said.

‘I’ve bought him a leather document case. Cost a bomb. And I might let myself into his flat beforehand,’ Petra told her. ‘You know – prepare it for later.’

‘What, balloons and banners?’

‘And rose petals!’ Petra enthused, missing Lucy’s sarcasm.

‘He’s a lucky boy,’ said Lucy and she really meant it.

‘Thanks, Luce,’ Petra said.

‘Call me,’ Lucy said, with a touch of urgency, ‘whenever. Seriously. Any time.’

Chapter Nine

Perhaps Rob’s mobile was on silent. But he’d said he’d be working late, so Petra wondered why on earth she was trying to distract him with phone calls anyway.

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘may as well go to bed.’ But first she went from room to room, collecting her damaged paperbacks which had been splayed over the radiators all evening to dry. She took them all into the sitting room. In drying, they had fanned themselves out, some almost 360 degrees, like drab versions of Christmas paper lanterns which take form when folded in on themselves. She scouted the room for heavy items to place on them. Some she put into piles, placing chair legs on top. Her Tony Parsons paperbacks she lay side by side underneath the television set and she set her John Irving collection upright, against the skirting board, wedging the sofa against them.

There were still another sixteen paperbacks remaining, fanned out like Elizabethan ruffs, but all the heavy items in the sitting room had been put to good use. Petra checked her mobile. It was still blank. Gathering the books, she took them into her bedroom and laid them in a shambolic pile on the pew while she upturned her mattress and jostled it off the bed frame and up against the wall.

On her bed base, she put Barbara Trapido shoulder to shoulder with Nick Hornby and was just about to add Hilary Mantel to make an interesting threesome when she was distracted. Near the head of the bed and over to one side was a black velvet pouch with a thin gold silken cord. Petra leant across Nick Hornby, nudging Barbara Trapido out of the way as she did so, and took the pouch. She didn’t open it; initially she just brushed the velvet against her cheek, her lips, as she sat cross-legged on the edge of the bed.

After a while, she slipped out the knot in the cord and eased open the neck of the pouch. With a little shake, she tipped out the contents. A white cotton handkerchief wrapped carefully around something hard. As she began, slowly, to unfurl the handkerchief, taking time to trace the embroidered ‘P’, she was about to detour in her mind’s eye back to the John Lewis department store, to shopping with her mother, to the time when her mother bought her this handkerchief, a time when her mother wore glamorous red shoes and didn’t have alfalfa for hair – but Petra pulled herself back from that memory because there was somewhere else she’d rather be. The handkerchief was now open and there, glinting and breathtakingly beautiful, lay Petra’s tanzanite. The size and gloss of a quail’s egg: 39.43 carats of it, beautifully worked into a stunning pear cut with a dazzling array of light-reflecting facets. Internally flawless; brilliantly blue with a seductive wink of violet too.

On her bed, she cupped her hand as a cradle for the gem. It felt warm and rock-solidly reassuring to hold while she travelled back seventeen years, back to the day she first heard about tanzanite.

‘Mrs McNeil?’ Petra called through the letter-box. ‘Lillian? Hullo? It’s me, it’s Petra.’

The door opened less than ajar. ‘So it is,’ said Lillian McNeil. ‘Come on in, dear.’ And she opened the door precisely wide enough for Petra to sidle her slim, fifteen-year-old body through sideways.

‘Oh, Mrs McNeil,’ Petra said softly, sadly, raising her hand gently to the bruising around the lady’s right eye. ‘It looks worse today than the day before yesterday.’

Mrs McNeil swept at the air as if her black eye looked far worse than it felt. ‘The good news is they caught the little scamps.’

‘Lock them up and throw the key away,’ Petra said angrily.

‘There was only a few bob in my purse. And my watch was cheap as chips – it just looked fancy. And my eye – well, I fell, you see. That part was just bad luck. They didn’t actually touch me at all.’

‘I’d quite like to swear now.’

‘Absolutely not. Swearing does not become you, Petra Flint.’

‘I’m just so angry.’

‘Let it pass, Petra. If I have – you must.’

‘Well, I bought you something – Walnut Whips. I bought you a packet of milk ones and look, new plain ones too.’

Lillian’s eyes sparkled rather than watered now. ‘You’ll have to help me eat them.’

‘OK! Oh, and I brought you this. I took it out on my library card.’ She handed Mrs McNeil an audio-cassette of Pride and Prejudice. ‘I thought – if your eye was sore. I thought – if you didn’t feel like reading. I know how you love your books.’

‘Bless you, little Miss Flint.’

Petra shrugged off the compliment. ‘Let’s eat the Walnut Whips,’ she said and she let Mrs McNeil choose between the plain and milk chocolate packets. ‘Shall I make tea, too?’

‘No, dear,’ Lillian said, ‘I’ll do that. Young people just don’t have the knack.’

‘We’re not taught properly,’ Petra agreed. ‘Before I met you, I’d never seen loose tea, just bags.’

While Mrs McNeil was pottering and clattering around the kitchenette, Petra browsed the room. She’d been visiting Mrs McNeil for nearly two terms. In fact, the summer holidays had just started, but it didn’t occur to Petra not to visit. It might be the school holidays but it wasn’t as if she was going on a family holiday this year. That in itself would be a contradiction in terms. It couldn’t be much of a holiday if there wasn’t much of a family. And anyway, there was something really nice about visiting out of school hours and not having the time restraints of double maths or netball or pottery at Milton College to rush away for. And, though there had been the unpleasant incident with Mrs McNeil’s bag at the bus stop the previous week, Petra would have visited Mrs McNeil today anyway: she was her companion, not her duty.

That room. That lovely room; walls awash with art of all description, surfaces heaving under the breadth of possessions accrued over decades, even the floor space reduced by that veritable library of diverse tomes. How many times had Petra been in this room? And there was still so much to look at. She loved all the trinkets and keepsakes from a history of visits to a wealth of countries and cultures; the antithesis of just the two statement pieces of Lladro that her parents had bought to embellish the mantelpiece, one of which had gone to Watford with her father. Most of all Petra loved Mrs McNeil’s pictures, some of which were prints, others originals in oil or watercolour or pastel or charcoal; some representative, others abstract, some framed, others tacked up with drawing pins. She was lost in thought, gazing at a vibrant oil painting, when Lillian came in with the tea.

‘Mrs McNeil,’ Petra said slowly, not turning around, still transfixed by the painting, ‘I’ve just got it!’

‘You shouldn’t use the word “got”, you know,’ said Lillian, ‘or “get”. It’s lazy.’

‘I mean, I’ve just figured it out!’ Petra qualified, her eyes still on the painting. Slowly, she turned, her face flushed with excitement. She walked across the room, towards Lillian and went to the watercolour of Kilimanjaro which hung by the front door and which she’d admired on her first visit. ‘This is Mount Kilimanjaro,’ she said, then walked over to the colourful abstract in oils which had so mesmerized her. ‘And this is, too!’

Lillian McNeil regarded her, steadily but expressionless. It didn’t matter to Petra.

‘All these times I’ve been here, in your home, I thought this painting was just a gorgeous colourful explosion of colours and shapes. You know, abstract art. I thought maybe it symbolized fire and light and atmosphere – a bit like Joseph Mallord William Turner who we’ve been doing in art.’ Petra stared at the picture. ‘But I didn’t realize it was real,’ she whispered. ‘Hang on – I’ve lost it!’ She fell silent. ‘Here!’ She traced her finger over the coloured shapes to denote the form. ‘It’s real, isn’t it – it’s Kilimanjaro. But to me, it looks like Kilimanjaro is on fire!’

‘It is,’ Lillian said softly, a little sadly. She paused. Then she straightened herself and smiled. ‘That painting was done over twenty-five years ago, Petra, and it appears you and I – and one other, who is no longer with us – are the only people to recognize its true subject matter. Most people think it’s a colourful pastiche of Clyfford Still.’

‘Who?’

‘You’ll learn. In art.’

‘But it isn’t.’

‘No, it isn’t. It’s by Hector McNeil. My late husband. He painted that. He painted it for me. We loved Tanzania. We lived there, happily, with Kili as our magnificent backdrop. More than a backdrop. That mountain was our everything.’

Instinctively, Petra went over to the chair in which she always sat and nodded gratefully as Lillian poured the tea. She placed the cup and saucer carefully on her knee and sipped daintily. She was sure such manners were the outcome of taking one’s tea in a bone-china cup and saucer. At home, there were only clunky Denby mugs.

‘Is the fire real or abstract?’ Petra asked. ‘Did the mountain really catch fire, when you were there?’

Lillian poured tea for herself, settled into her chair. ‘Legend has it that a great fire struck the mountain and that is what Hector’s painting celebrates. Fire needn’t necessarily destroy, Petra dear. Fire can reveal. Fire can create. Fire was the reason we came to be in Tanzania.’

Though Petra meant to sip, in her excitement it turned into a slurp. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Actually, the story starts a fair few years before the fire, Petra,’ Lillian began, ‘585 million years ago to be precise, when the continents collided in the pan-African event and caused a geological phenomenon. There, you can knock your geography teacher for six when you go back to school.’

‘What was the phenomenon?’

‘A most beautiful and rare gemstone was born.’

Petra’s glance ricocheted from the watercolour of Kilimanjaro by the door, to the vibrant oil of the mountain on fire across the room.

‘Have you heard of the Masai?’ Lillian asked her.

‘Of course,’ said Petra, ‘we did them in geography last term. We watched a video and our teacher brought in real Masai beads. I wore the bangle all lesson.’

‘A Masai legend tells of how a lightning bolt struck Kilimanjaro, setting the mountain ablaze and creating a magic fire in the sky. When the flames died down, glistening amongst the ash were stones of the most amazing array of blues: royal blue, midnight blue, indigo, periwinkle, lavender, blue-violet, violet-blue, pure violet. You see, the conditions had to be right those millions of years ago for the gem to be born and then, many millennia later, conditions had to be right for its existence to be revealed.’

‘Wow,’ said Petra. ‘Is it a sort of diamond then?’

‘It’s actually a thousand times rarer than diamond, Petra. And that’s a fact.’

‘Sapphire?’

‘No – it is the colour sapphire wishes it could be.’

‘What is it?’

‘It is tanzanite.’

‘Tanzanite?’ The word was lovely on the tongue.

‘And in just a few decades or so, there will be no more tanzanite. At all. It will be gone.’

‘Gone? Forever? Why?’

‘Because the only place in the whole world where it exists is a three-mile zone in the foothills of Kilimanjaro – the Umba Valley, the area outside Arusha in the Merelani Hills.’

Petra looks up from her lap to the wall opposite her bed where the abstract oil painting of Kilimanjaro ablaze hangs. She smiles, a little sadly. Dear dear Lillian McNeil. Petra takes the tanzanite and lays it between her index and middle fingers. Even in the dim of her bedroom in the middle of the night, the stone resounds with colour and hue; deep brilliant blue one way, glimpses of vivid violet the other. She can hear Mrs McNeil’s voice, as clear as if she is sitting beside her, alive still.

‘A Masai warrior I knew told me that if you look into the heart of tanzanite and see through to its soul, you see the colour of Kilimanjaro through the morning haze – which no paint, no pigment can replicate.’

Petra looks at her clock, surprised to see it is almost two in the morning. She looks at her tanzanite. Soon enough, there will be no more tanzanite. Anywhere in the world. Diamonds are forever, tanzanite is not. And she keeps hers under her mattress. She humps the mattress on top of all the paperbacks. She checks her mobile phone. The screen is still blank. Poor old Rob. What a thing to have to work so late.

Chapter Ten

‘Are you going to tell?’

Paul Glasper forsook the history A level essays he had settled down to mark, to pose the question to Miranda Oates in an excitable whisper, as if it was the juiciest secret to hit the school.

‘What? Tell what?’ asked Nigel Garton as he came into the staff room, as bleary-eyed as the pupils to whom he’d just taught double physics.

‘Who?’ Arlo Savidge asked, a step behind him. ‘Tell what who when?’

Paul held his hands up. ‘It’s not for me to say,’ he said with a slow and obvious wink to Miranda who rolled her eyes and flicked him a ‘V’ with her fingers.

Miranda shrugged. ‘I’m going for a job interview.’

‘A job?’ said Nigel. ‘What sort of job?’

‘A teaching job, of course.’

‘But you already have a teaching job,’ said Nigel.

Miranda shrugged. ‘Head of English.’

‘You’re Head of English here, aren’t you?’ Arlo said.

‘Yes, but I don’t want to base my entire career here at Roseberry Hall. Unlike you two.’

She looked at them while they looked at each other, baffled.

‘Don’t know why not,’ Nigel muttered, a little affronted.

‘It’s easy to forget that there’s life outside Roseberry Hall,’ Miranda said.

‘But isn’t the sense of belonging, of community, the point, surely?’ said Arlo.

‘You sound like the school’s prospectus,’ Miranda said. ‘Anyway, how about “Good luck, Miss Oates”?’

‘Good luck, Miss Oates,’ Nigel said flatly.

‘Good luck,’ said Arlo, ‘of course good luck. But you’d be sorely missed if you left.’

Paul noticed how a sparkle enlivened Miranda’s eyes, that the smile she shot over to Arlo was laced with a glance of hope.

Roseberry Hall was not a large school in terms of population, but in terms of acreage it was vast. The estate was contained, yet also heralded, by the original fine stone wall, something of a rarity in the hedge-bound locality. It was some eight feet high, crowned every few yards by a small decorative turret echoing those which were a feature of the Hall itself. From a distance and depending on the time of year, ramblers walking the Norse Lyke Wake Walk could look down on the Roseberry Hall estate in its entirety; from that perspective, the buildings and grounds and the wall running the entire perimeter resembled a well-constructed sandcastle complex. The eighteenth-century Hall itself, with its turrets and thick-silled casement windows and magnificent arched doorway, managed to be imposing in its grandeur without being intimidating. The founder of the school, Radcliff Lawrence Esq., a wealthy philanthropist whose special interests were education and architecture and the consequences of the one on the other, was sensitive to the effect that entering through that portal could have on a schoolboy. Lawrence believed that a school’s job was to teach by nurturing, not by fear. A child will not want to learn in a building he is intimidated to enter; but if the building inspires awe then the passage to the classroom will be an eager one. Lawrence’s ethos has lasted as well as the buildings themselves and to this day, despite the school being called Roseberry Hall Public School for Boys, the pupils themselves continue to be known as Radcliff Lawrencers.

It wasn’t a league-topping school in terms of academic excellence but in terms of producing well-mannered, bright and confident boys, it was exemplary. Everyone who worked there and every parent who paid handsomely for a son to be educated there, understood this to be the higher point. Roseberry Hall wasn’t about bullying astronomical grades out of the boys nor was it about saturating Oxford and Cambridge universities with alumni. Rather, the school was about not forcing a child to learn but inspiring them to want to listen. David Pinder, headmaster for over two decades, would reiterate in every speech he gave – to the boys, the parents, the governors, his staff – ‘Manners Maketh Man: our pupils join us as boys and leave us as fine young men, fully equipped to deal with the world at large.’ It was a proclamation that could be repeated by rote – by parents, pupils, governors and the staff alike. As if carrying Radcliff Lawrence’s torch, Mr Pinder, with his jolly demeanour and ebullient commitment to the school, instilled in everyone connected with Roseberry Hall his belief that the school occupied an important and enviable niche within the British public boarding-school system. For the staff and the three hundred and fifty boys from the ages of eleven to eighteen, no one could doubt that the school also occupied a privileged niche of English countryside. Tucked safely and scenically into genteel grassland at the foot of the North York Moors, the school was positioned twenty minutes from stunning coastal scenery yet just a short journey to many of the most picturesque villages in the area. The lie of the land was perfect for sports: manicured pitches within the school’s grounds opening out to serious cycling and running country. It was as if Roseberry Hall sat in state, receiving the varied gifts of the region. Depending on the weather conditions, even the plumes and fugs of effluence, the occasional colossal flares from the monstrous ICI works stretching for miles like a space-age city outside Middlesbrough, were considered to add drama and aesthetic intrigue to the big skies above the school.

The demarcation of work and rest was another of Radcliff Lawrence’s philosophies, thus schooling was contained in either the main Hall itself or in the newer science block built sympathetically from local stone with a more modern take on the turret emblem. The boys were lodged in five accommodation houses with sizeable apartments for the housemaster or mistress and their families, and lesser apartments for their deputies. The rest of the staff were scattered through the grounds, either in annexes, or in quirky little turreted follies just large enough to comprise a living room, kitchenette, small bedroom and compact shower room. Miranda Oates had a folly. Paul Glasper was deputy housemaster of Armstrong House. Nigel Garton’s rooms were part of the pavilion on the sports field. Arlo had a folly. Steven Hunter, the art teacher, lived above the decidedly grand boat-house. David Pinder resided in the headmaster’s house, an ornate turreted cottage that looked a little like a cake. After prep each evening, the Hall was shut, as if it was as important for the building to have a rest from the scamper and flurry of school-time as it was for the community to have a break from school. If the staff wanted a place other than their private quarters to spend their evenings, they used the Old Buttery, a self-contained building whose atmosphere was part staff room, part den. It was a healthy mix of shabby old leather suites and a huge plasma screen; Cook’s home-made cakes and the staff’s lethal home-brew. The evening of Miranda Oates’s interview, fortunately a Friday night, the Old Buttery was heaving with her colleagues glad of the excuse to test Barrel number 4 which had been fermenting since the New Year.

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