by Freya North
She fooled them for a week. Charlton Squire too.
No one who'd borrowed the Old Stables had ever returned the keys by plonking them on the glass top of one of his display cabinets. Usually, they were wrapped up with purple prose and tied with ribbons of gratitude; long thank-you notes extolling the accommodation, the area, the generosity of the host. Invariably, a bouquet or a bottle of champagne accompanied their return. But Petra sauntered in and put the keys down as if they opened nothing more than the stationery cupboard out the back.
‘Thanks, Charlton,’ she said. ‘It was great. Must dash.’
‘There's something up with that girl,’ Eric colluded with Gina and Kitty later that week when Petra had popped out to Bellore for some solder. ‘I can't put my finger on it.’
‘She's spending an inordinate amount of time gazing out of the window,’ Gina said.
‘But she's not sharing the view,’ said Kitty. ‘If she catches you watching her, she quickly returns to her work as if she'd only looked up for a second or so.’
‘I've asked, Are you OK? a couple of times,’ said Gina, ‘and she just says, Oh yes, I'm fine, with a breezy smile.’
‘Perhaps she just doesn't want us all snooping and hovering,’ said Kitty.
‘Whatever – something is amiss,’ Eric said. ‘I know her better than you, remember.’
Gina turned her back on them. It amused her how Kitty and Eric competed over Petra. ‘Do you think something happened up there?’ she said as if the North was a wild and mystical place.
‘Who can say?’ Kitty said darkly.
‘She'd have told me,’ Eric differed, ‘by now.’
But Petra gave nothing away. She arrived in the mornings insouciant, often with cappuccinos all round. She spent long days working industriously. She took great interest in the works of her Studio Three but gave little away of her own project, preferring instead to work covertly, her arm across her sketchbook like a schoolgirl preventing classmates from copying. She spent hours at a time crocheting copper wire into strange, formless configurations, or else she was pressing sheets of it with other materials through the rolling mill to experiment with different textures. The mesh bags from washing tablets, fibrous plastic scourers, scraps of netting, popped bubble wrap, knots of wire – they all went through the mill with the copper, over and again; Petra seemingly engrossed both in the process and the results.
She'd been back a week when an opportunity arose for Eric to take a closer look.
‘Where's Petra, Gina?’
‘Post office.’
‘What are you doing, Eric?’
‘I'm intrigued, Kitty.’
‘That's her sketchbook – you oughtn't. You know that.’
But Eric had already started to flip through the pages. ‘I'm not spying,’ he said quietly, after a while. ‘I'm just taking a quick peek behind the façade.’
Kitty and Gina regarded each other but stayed put.
After a while, Eric looked over to them with a quizzical smile. ‘It's all bollocks.’
‘What is?’
‘Everything! It's all been bollocks,’ he said. ‘What she's told us – and all this.’ He held Petra's sketchpad up high and fanned through the pages.
‘Define “bollocks”,’ Kitty challenged him.
Eric seemed amused. ‘Well, it's not bollocks in that these are rather commendable sketches. But they have nothing to do with her vocation. These aren't preparatory drawings for future designs. Nor do they have anything to do with all the wire knitting and rolling-mill stuff – which in themselves are bollocks too.’
‘Some friend you are,’ Kitty said.
‘She's been filling her days, my dears,’ he chuckled softly, ‘filling her days with stuff that has nothing to do with work or with London. Look.’ He fanned the book again.
The women walked over and quietly examined the sketches.
‘See,’ said Eric, ‘her mind is elsewhere. Her mind is not on work. It's not in London. Not in the here and now. Her mind is full of Yorkshire and so is her sketchbook.’
Pages and pages of Petra's book were filled with charming drawings of rural landscapes and river bends and sheep, little vignettes in pencil crammed with affection and rustic detail. There were sketches of ducks diving, of a bicycle propped against a tree-trunk, of cottages, of rickety gates and tumbling paths; there was a page filled entirely with cartoon ice-cream cones.
Kitty picked up some of the warped pieces of copper, indented with the imprints of the bits of junk Petra had run through the press. ‘I have to agree with you, Eric.’
‘It's not just her mind that's in Yorkshire,’ Gina said at length, ‘I'd say it's her heart.’
By the following week, Petra suddenly couldn't sit still long enough to draw a lamb, let alone a flock, and she was far too fidgety for work at the rolling mill to be anything other than downright dangerous. She kept nipping out of the studio only to return empty-handed. She responded to direct questions with vague, incomplete answers. She frowned a lot. She was late into the studio and the first to leave.
Charlton crossed paths with her as she meandered along Greville Street.
‘Hullo, Pet, you'll save my old bones those flights of stairs to yours. Can you take on some work for me? God, you look dreadful.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You can?’
‘Can what?’
‘Out-work? It's not big – but it's fiddly.’
‘Oh. I don't know. I'm so busy with my own stuff.’
‘Stuff?’
‘Yes, stuff.’
‘Sounds exciting.’
‘Not really.’
‘Are you all right, Pet?’
‘Yes. Of course. Just fine.’
And then, on the Wednesday night, Petra had a dream so compelling it kept her glued to her bed and gave her a sleep so deep that when she awoke she lay for a few minutes desperately trying to assess what was real and what was fantasy and hoping beyond hope that a substantial part of the latter might somehow have made it into the former.
She sat at her bench all morning, drumming her fingers distractedly against the skin while she gazed at nothing in particular in the middle distance. She didn't touch her tools or her sketches and she was immune to the concerned glances being directed her way from her colleagues.
It was Gina who approached her though Eric was soon at her heels, Kitty shoulder to shoulder with him. They were forming an arrowhead, homing in on her, and she looked up, alarmed. It was Gina who laid her arm gently around her shoulders. She didn't say anything but bestowed upon Petra a skilled look of maternal affection and concern which she'd perfected over the years with her own family to elicit honesty and details.
‘It's so silly,’ Petra started. ‘Really stupid. I'm angry with myself for being so stupid. But I can't seem to shake it off.’
‘Shake what off?’
‘I had a dream. Last night. And the dream has turned into a feeling. This idiotic feeling. I know that the feeling is so far-fetched it's almost laughable. And that's what's making me more miserable. I know it, but I can't help feeling it.’
‘Feeling what?’
Petra opened her mouth and then closed it and her change of tack was visible long before she spoke. ‘Do you believe in fate?’
‘Yes,’ Kitty whispered.
‘I'd like to,’ said Eric, looping his shoulder in front of Gina's.
‘Not really,’ said Gina.
‘Oh,’ said Petra.
‘Why?’ Gina asked.
Petra shrugged. ‘It's just so stupid.’
‘So you keep saying,’ said Eric. ‘Talk to me.’
‘I dreamt about someone. It was someone I saw when I was in North Yorkshire. Someone I once knew,’ she said. ‘I hadn't seen him for seventeen years and then one rainy day just before Easter, in a tiny sweetshop in the wilds of Yorkshire, I bump into him – literally.’
‘From city wanker to sweetshop owner,’ Kitty marvelled. ‘Marry this one, Petra.’<
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‘He doesn't own the sweetshop, I don't even know what he does do,’ Petra said and she glowered at herself. ‘We didn't say much. We didn't say that much, really, seventeen sodding years ago.’
‘But you can't stop thinking about him and now you're dreaming about him and you wonder if fate put him your way and whether you should return north and give destiny a helping hand?’ Eric's eyes sparkled.
‘See how stupid it is?’ Petra chided herself while nodding at Eric.
‘Yes, it's fate. It's fate dressed as Cupid,’ Kitty said. ‘I'd say get the first train back there and personally hand Cupid the arrows from his quiver.’
Kitty's Studio Three gawped at the unmitigated romanticism spewing from the dark-burgundy lipsticked mouth of the variously pierced, multi-tattooed black-clad Goth in their midst.
‘But Kitty,’ said Petra, ‘I couldn't tell Cupid in which direction to take aim. I haven't a clue where Arlo is.’
‘Arlo?’ said Gina.
‘It means “manly”,’ cooed Eric.
‘What was said?’ Kitty asked her.
‘He said he'd find me,’ Petra said. ‘God knows how. He doesn't know where I live either. That's what I mean when I say it's all so stupid. And pointless. And if it's stupid and pointless why can't I keep him from my mind?’
‘Because it has the makings of a fairy tale,’ said Kitty a little sadly, ‘and fairy tales don't happen in real life.’
Petra shrugged. ‘Exactly,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-four
Arlo returned to Roseberry Hall. Not even in his wildest dreams had he envisaged Petra running in slow motion down the drive and into his arms, yet in reality it was still a shock to find he had only the grunting Walley Brothers for company. These grizzled old men, the longest-serving members of staff, spoke little and smelt a lot, mooching about the grounds as they did checking fencing, killing rabbits and removing fox dung. They'd grunt if they were feeling cordial, more usually they made a sound closer to a growl. No one liked them. Even the most mischievous boys steered clear. Even Headmaster Pinder privately considered there to be truth in the rumour that the Walley Brothers made personal use of the fox shit they removed, so odoriferous and generally repellent were they. No one was entirely sure of their Christian names but their lack of redeeming features, such as personalities in general, saw them only ever referred to as Mr Walley and Mr Walley. However, the playing fields never had a trace of fox dung and the fences were always orderly and as the Walleys' arrival at the school had predated Headmaster Pinder's by at least a decade, their jobs were safe.
Returning to school a good few days before the staff were due to filter back, Arlo swiftly decided Trappist solitude was preferable to any level of contact with the Walley brothers so he took to his folly and wondered whether he was slightly deluded to have come back early at all. He'd forsaken his lovely mum's home-cooking and the opportunity to spend time with a couple of his childhood friends, to belt back north on a whim. Late that night, while he waited in vain for sleep, he started to feel increasingly foolish for returning in such a hurry on what now seemed such a ludicrous premise. He decided he'd allocate himself two days to meander around the environs. If she's here I'll find her, he told himself, and if she isn't, I won't. Two days, and then life must return to how it was.
He window-shopped for the first time in his life; in Guisborough, Yarm and Stokesley, looking not at the merchandise but at the passers-by reflected in the windows. He lingered over a latte at Chapter's Deli – and soon after, over a pot of tea at the School House café, glancing nonchalantly at the clientele while trying to eavesdrop for clues. He went for a haircut and casually asked the stylist had she seen Petra? Petra who? Petra Flint – she's probably one of your clients, you know.
He dropped her name into conversation once or twice when he went for an early pint at the Blackwell Ox in Carlton, in a manner which suggested, Petra Flint? You know Petra! but none of the locals seemed to.
In Great Ayton the following day, Arlo procrastinated over precisely when to go into Suggitts so he went for a hike, pacing up Easby Moor, telling himself that he was marvelling at the view rather than scrutinizing it for someone who would barely register on such a vast panorama unless she was standing alongside him. He even looked to his left, to his right. Over his shoulder. But he was most certainly on his own.
‘I'm a stupid fuck,’ he chided as he stomped back down to the village.
He bought a chocolate bar from Suggitts and made small talk with the sales assistant.
‘Oh well, I'd better get going. Thanks for this. Take care now. Looks like it's brightening. No, the boys don't come back until Sunday. I'm just catching up on my marking, my lessons – making good use of the peace and quiet. Bye now.’
‘Goodbye, pet.’
Arlo hovered in the doorway, his mouth full of Mars Bar. He gulped it down and turned back. The proprietor thought he looked as though he was going to choke. He cleared his throat a number of times and patted himself on the chest. He was about to turn away again but stopped himself.
‘That girl – in the rain. Do you remember? Just before Easter.’
‘The lass who paid for your Easter egg?’
‘Yes.’
‘What of her?’
‘I don't know,’ he said honestly. ‘I don't know. Has she been back?’
‘For your money?’
‘Or maybe she's just been back here anyway?’
‘She's not, I'm afraid. But all the Easter chocolates are reduced now, though they've still got a way on their best-before. But you could leave your money with me.’
‘So she will be back then, you think?’
‘She was in practically daily. Though I can't say I've seen her since.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since the rain, pet.’
‘Her name is Petra.’
‘That's nice.’
‘If you see her—’
‘—I'll tell her you wish to settle your debt.’
That night, staring at the cracks in the bedroom ceiling because closing his eyes had not brought him closer to sleep, Arlo found it hard not to feel deflated. It was hard to turn a blind eye to the taunt of images of Petra which alternated with memories of Helen in his mind. Arlo had constantly rationalized that what happened all those years ago with Helen had induced the celibacy he'd maintained ever since. He'd flicked off the switch which controlled thoughts of love, that switch which turned on desire; he'd unplugged it from his core, removed the fuse and hurled it away. And hadn't his life been all the more straightforward for it. Much better. Preferable.
Now, suddenly, after one incident with a chocolate rabbit and a furtive wank in his childhood bed, there were those unmistakable stirrings in his soul and his body surged again. He wanted to see her, hear her, touch her, taste her. He wanted to feel her hair, test how soft her cheeks were against his lips, see how her body might fit and fold into his; he wanted to scoop up her dizzy hair and gaze at the nape of her neck. And he wanted his body to be felt, he wanted her hand to slip round the back of his neck, her other hand to be laid against his chest; he wanted her lips to reach up to his, he wanted to sense how she'd stand on tiptoes in the process.
But he hadn't found Petra and he didn't know where else to look and he thought himself a stupid fuck for even trying. Window bloody shopping. Pot after pot of sodding tea. Scouring the landscape. Grilling sweetshop owners.
It wasn't going to happen.
So why couldn't he just think, Oh well, what the hell, and forget her? Go back to the calm and surety of feeling that he simply didn't give a damn when it came to love and lust and all that life-consuming panoply.
And why couldn't he just go to bloody sleep? Look at the time, for God's sake.
When a knock at his door followed by a rapping on his windows awoke Arlo the next morning, his first thought was Petra, his second thought was the Walley Brothers. He checked what he was wearing – a T-shirt and boxer shorts – and assessed t
his would do for either. The thought that it might be Miranda with croissants and fresh orange juice hadn't entered his mind.
‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ Miranda said.
‘Miranda?’ said Arlo.
‘Are you going to invite me in?’ she said. ‘I come bearing gifts.’
But she was already in. And Arlo really noticed that one of her gifts, alongside the croissants and orange juice, was her comely figure. Today displayed under a tight T-shirt that was just a little too short for the jeans she was wearing. Glimpses of flat toned midriff. It was as if, previously, he'd seen her only in monochrome, behind some sort of haze. Arlo felt suddenly ravenous.
‘Is anyone else around?’ she asked.
‘Just you, me and the Walleys,’ Arlo said and she wrinkled her nose with disdain.
‘Well, I haven't enough to go around,’ she said, ‘so it would be rude to invite them in.’ She walked through to his kitchenette and started busying herself opening cupboards and drawers though Arlo would have been quite happy to have swigged the juice from the carton and dabbed up any croissant crumbs from his lap. ‘How was your Easter?’ she asked, though she didn't wait for a reply. ‘I'm taking that job. I've come back early to see David Pinder. Though he can't entice me to stay. It's an amazing opportunity – a feather in my cap. I'd be mad not to take it. So, this is my last term.’ She turned. Two glasses balancing on two plates. Kitchen roll under her arm. Belly button peeking out under her T-shirt. Arlo speechless.
‘Earth to Arlo,’ she laughed. ‘Are you awake?’
With one hand on his hip, Arlo ran the palm of the other over his closely cropped hair, down to his neck while he rotated his head gently, side to side, as if stiff from sleeping awkwardly. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I'm awake.’
‘Come,’ she said, all sparky, ‘let's eat.’ And she led the way back through to his lounge. And he followed her bottom all the way. And she was turned away from him, bending to place the plates on the coffee table. Now she was straightening to open the carton of juice. Bending again, to lay out the croissants. Black knickers. Arlo could see the tip of a tattoo in the small of her back. No idea of what it was. Whatever it was it was delineated further down, nearer her bum. She bent again, to pour.