Pillow Talk Part 28

'It's dawn.'

Outside the window, the thin light of the new day is slipping through the dark like the tail of smoke from a spent match.

'We could go to bed?'

'It's beautiful.'

'Then let's get dressed, Petra. I know where I'm going to take you.'

'Where?'

'Everywhere peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world as my friend St Aelred said.'

Chapter Thirty-nine.

Arlo's friend St Aelred turned out to be the third Abbot of Rievaulx Abbey and it was to these elegiac Gothic ruins that Arlo took Petra. They headed out on the Helmsley Road. Ahead of them Ingleby Bank, Clay Bank, the Wainstones and Carlton loomed through the dawn like benevolent mammalian ma.s.ses. The drive through Bilsdale was stunning in itself, the moors shrouded by the early-morning mist like an ephemeral duvet blanketing the land while regular folk still slept. Because of the lie of the land from this approach, the Abbey was kept secret in a hidden valley. Then, two miles from Helmsley and eighteen miles from Stokesley, Arlo turned off the moor road and suddenly they were driving down a steep and twisting lane until they came to the village of Rievaulx. Like a small flock protected by a mighty, divine shepherd the little rustic cottages on their gra.s.sy knolls were positioned at the foot of the magnificent ruins. The Abbey itself stood silent and proud, as if patiently waiting for kindred spirits to share its secrets, its beauty, in the fitting privacy of a time not controlled by English Heritage.

'We'll leave a donation later,' Arlo said, vaulting the wooden five-bar gate. 'I bring the boys here when I do devotional music with them. Helps it all make sense. I've often thought that in its ruined state Rievaulx is probably far more rousing and spiritual than if Henry VIII hadn't sacked it.'

'Sing hey nonny nonny for the dissolution of the monasteries,' Petra laughed and they walked through the grounds in silence. The magnificent run of arches: aisle, gallery, clerestory. Monumental stone, some columns soaring high, some reduced to little more than stumps. Some stone blackened from time, some stone pale and creamy. Petra touched her way around, feeling the lichen and beneath it the stone, hand-hewn. All for the love of G.o.d. 'There's a sadness here don't you think? A haunting beautiful sadness. A poetic melancholy. As if the ravages of war and of time have served only to strip the place back to its very core. Truly a heart of stone.'

They continued to walk, round and through, over and again.

'Look how the landscape is central to the impact of the place, as if the buildings have been absorbed into nature and yet the architecture captures the views, the land containing it,' Petra marvelled. 'Isn't it amazing how something so solid like these hulking great pillars, these arches spanning G.o.d knows how many feet, in the context of the landscape, the air, actually seem so light, delicate almost.'

'We'll have to make a trip to Fountains Abbey next,' Arlo said. He paused. 'And Bylands. In fact, why not give up your day job and come and teach architecture at the school?'

Petra reddened. But for a secret moment, she did consider it. She walked on a step or two behind Arlo. Something caught her eye. A lone, late bluebell, growing strong and determined in the shadow of the transept. She fell to her knees so she could see its flowerheads up close. She glanced over to Arlo, but he was preoccupied, craning his neck in the refectory, lost in his own world here.

And suddenly she's back at school and it's double English with her favourite teacher Mrs Balcombe and it's Gerard Manley Hopkins who Petra loves. Then it'll be lunch and Walnut Whips and tales of Africa with Mrs McNeil. Followed by an afternoon at the boys' school for pottery. Perhaps Arlo will be there, shyly serenading her. Perhaps he'll just sit with her, strumming his guitar and humming to himself while she works the cold wet clay through her hands. They'll smile, now and then, without saying all that much.

Back in the dawn of a new day, at Rievaulx Abbey, very much in the here and now, Petra cupped the bluebell flowers in her hands, gazed at them intently their sentient little faces and she thought again of Hopkins. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. And in an instant, she knows she won't be teaching architecture at Arlo's school because she loves her day job far too much. And all of a sudden she knows what to do with her tanzanite; what it wants to be. She'd just been afforded a dazzling glimpse of how the finished piece might look. And the process of making it had belted across her mind like a film reel on fast forward.

At this stage, that was all she needed to see; all her best works have germinated just like this. She knows that it is now stored, logged in her creative lobe, to be accessed whenever she wants, a.n.a.lysed frame by frame. She had caught sight of the end result and it's thrilling. Best of all, she knows she has the tools, the trade, the skill. Talent is Petra's greatest gift and she treasures it. The tanzanite was Mrs McNeil's great gift to Petra. And as Petra stood in the grounds of the beautiful Cistercian monastery, knowing just how she can do justice both to the stone and to Mrs McNeil's memory, her heart soared alongside the pillars of Rievaulx.

'Can we go?' she called to Arlo. She was so fired with the desire to work that she forgot all about her total lack of sleep.

By three in the afternoon, Petra was feeling all sketched out. Arlo had worked well alongside her, planning lessons and plundering his music collection for the purpose, listening to drifts and riffs with his headphones on. Every now and then, Petra picked up tinny hints filtering out and she'd think, Oh! I know that song.

She closed her sketchbook and put it face down on the floor. Arlo was sitting cross-legged, his back to her, his shoulders swaying to whatever it was he was listening to. She padded over to him on her hands and knees. He turned and smiled, patted her head, then ran her pony-tail through his hand as if it was a cat's tail. She laid her head against him, kissed his shoulder. She pressed her ear against the headphone. I know this! I know this! It's Neil Young! It's 'Heart of Gold'! She brought her face in front of Arlo's, her eyes alight, and sang the song at the top of her voice. He laughed, pulled the earphones down around his neck like a DJ. Still she sang and jigged and he gave her a round of applause.

'All-time favourite Neil Young song?' he asked her.

'"Cinnamon Girl",' she replied, not having to think. 'You?'

'"Needle and the Damage Done".'

Arlo yawned. He was starting to feel hazy from lack of sleep. 'G.o.d, I haven't felt this way for years,' he said. 'It's like doing c.o.ke, when you just do not sleep. Then you feel slightly delirious at precisely this time in the afternoon.' He looked at Petra who was looking slightly aghast.

'c.o.ke?' she asked, rather wide-eyed. 'As in caine rather than a-cola?'

Arlo laughed. 'Not even sixteen cans of Coca-Cola could keep me going all night. Yes, Petra, the naughty c.o.ke.'

'I've never tried it. I'm a bit square,' she told him, looking a bit sheepish.

'I did loads of it. I was a t.w.a.t in the music business, remember,' he said, looking a bit sheepish too.

Petra yawned.

'Am I boring you?' Arlo teased.

She laughed and shook her head. The whites of her eyes were a little bloodshot, dark circles underneath them, her skin pale. Arlo thought she looked beautiful. 'I'm tired,' she apologized.

'Let's pop out for ours teas as they say round here. Actually, I'm starving I'll take you to Yarm for a slap-up supper. Then we'll have an early night.'

'Or we could just have hot b.u.t.tered toast in bed. Sod the crumbs,' Petra said. 'Anyway, I thought teachers were meant to be poor?'

'As a teacher, I am poor,' Arlo said, 'but I also receive those healthy royalties from my music.'

'A most eligible bachelor,' Petra said. Then she blushed and looked away but not before she noticed that Arlo had reddened too.

Later on, home from Yarm, Petra and Arlo found their second wind and, over mugs of tea and a lot of Neil Young, they talked until it was really a quite respectable time to go to bed.

'Are you worried?' Arlo asked her. 'About going walkabout?'

'A bit,' Petra replied, pumping the pillow and pulling the duvet up to her nose.

He turned on his side to look at her. 'You sound worried.'

'It's not just that I take it as a given that most nights I'm off.' She paused. Plumped the pillow again. Pressed her hand gently against his chest. 'I don't know, Arlo you know so much about me now. All my naked truths. You've seen me, literally, laid bare.'

'I know you inside out,' Arlo said and to prove his point, his fingers made a rather smug journey up between Petra's legs while he raised an eyebrow c.o.c.kily.

'Stop it I'm being serious.' She tried not to laugh, pushed his arm away. 'My sleepwalking. My c.r.a.ppy parents. My disastrous relations.h.i.+p. My weak points.'

'Your sense of humour, your beauty, your sweet sweet nature. Your prodigious talent. Your strength,' Arlo countered, softly. 'Your courage.'

'So why do I feel a little vulnerable?'

'Because you're entrusting me with you at your most private,' Arlo said, 'plus you're also very, very tired.'

'But will you tell me your secrets?' Petra asked. 'Reveal the c.h.i.n.ks in your armour?'

'Are you saying I'm your knight in s.h.i.+ning armour?'

'Oh, you are my verray, parfit, gentil knight,' Petra said. 'But will you? Tell me? Show me let me see?'

'Not now,' Arlo said, with a glance at the clock revealing midnight wasn't that far off.

'But some time?' Petra persisted. 'Soon?'

'I don't have secrets,' Arlo said abruptly. 'Not really. Nor do you just your quirks, just your experiences that make you you.'

'But what's made you you?'

'You women you do pick the oddest moments for heart-to-hearts.'

But what do you mean by you women, Arlo? Who specifically? Tell me about who's made you the man that you are.

'There's nothing much to say,' he brushed the concept away. He lifted curlicue slicks of her hair away from her face, placed them over her shoulder to reveal the flow of her neck. 'I'm just like you. I've had my f.u.c.k-ups. Learned a few lessons. I'm older and wiser and find myself in love with the girl I was very first in love with.'

Petra decided that she ought to be content with this, for the time being at least, and she kissed him slowly, softly, to tell him so.

'Will you wake?' she asked, just as he was reaching for the bedside lamp. 'If I you know?'

'I promise even if I'm asleep.'

'I have spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly because you tread on my dreams.' She smiled. 'My all-time favourite poem.'

'Funnily enough I set it to music when I was seventeen or eighteen,' he smiled. 'Sweet dreams, Miss Flint.' He turned off the light, cuddled up close, nuzzled the nape of her neck. 'Beautiful day.'

They spooned for a while. Then they turned to lie on their backs, side by side, shoulders, hips and ankles just touching. Arlo encircled Petra's wrist with his fingers, like a loving handcuff, and she drifted off to a dreamless sleep feeling madly exhausted, happy and secure.

Chapter Forty.

Late the next morning, Arlo was in the shower, singing his teenage soft-rock version of "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven", alternating between gravely ba.s.s and surprisingly sweet falsetto. Petra sat up in his bed, her knees under her chin, grinning to herself as she listened to him. If music be the food of love and all that jazz, she thought to herself. Play on. And on and on.

There was knocking at the folly door. Arlo was belting out his anthemic chorus. 'Tread softly! Tread softly! You tread upon my dreams, oh baby. Oh yeah. Yeah yeah! Don't go treadin' 'pon my dreams, baby.'

So it was up to Petra to tread softly to open the door. And have Miranda Oates hurl her dreams into a nightmare.

'Who are you?'

'I'm Petra.'

'But who are you?'

'Oh! I'm Arlo's girlfriend. Can I help you?'

Petra watched as the woman on the threshold looked momentarily baffled before an expression of utter disdain replaced it. The woman laughed and, for the first time in her life, Petra truly knew what it was like to have someone laugh in her face. It was a sound that felt like being spat at.

'Arlo Savidge has a girlfriend?' the woman ridiculed. 'Since when!'

Petra felt affronted, so much so that she added extra time for good measure. 'Three months or so.'

'Well, I'm Miranda Oates,' the woman said, proffering her hand like royalty which Petra automatically took and shook. 'I teach here too. And I've been gamely f.u.c.king your so-called boyfriend.'

Petra started silently screaming at herself; a desperate and deafening scramble of instructions: Don't believe her! Don't show you're upset! She's lying! He hasn't! Wake up!

'I don't think so,' Petra said at length.

'I rather do,' Miranda countered. 'Girlfriend? Don't you know, Arlo doesn't do girlfriends. f.u.c.k-buddies maybe but not girlfriends. Hasn't he told you? Commitment is a Savidge anathema.'

'No, it's not,' Petra protested. 'Anyway, he's told me he loves me.'

Miranda made much of being unable to suppress a patronizing giggle. 'You're deluding yourself!'

Petra felt panic starting to rise like bile. 'Look, what do you want?'

Miranda sighed breezily. 'Oh, I came back to school early so I was just calling by on the off chance of a s.h.a.g.' She looked Petra up and down. 'Busy boy. I didn't think he'd have company. I didn't think I'd have to queue.'

Petra wanted to yell, f.u.c.k off. She had a strong urge to scratch Miranda. But while she dug her nails hard into the palms of her hands she also had a perverse desire to hear more.

Miranda twitched her lips. 'Did he spin out his celibacy yarn? Is that how he got into your pants? Did he make you melt with tales of his broken heart? His self-imposed exile from the joys of the flesh? Years and years of abstinence and then wow! along came you? I wouldn't get too excited about the "love" thing,' Miranda mocked, 'Arlo doesn't believe in love.'

'Yes, he does,' Petra said. 'He has told me, unprompted, that he is in love with me.'

'Drunk.'

'Sober.'

'And let me guess you then sucked his c.o.c.k, you were so delighted.'

Petra found herself silently racking her memory as to whether a blow-job had followed Arlo's declaration.

'Look, just tell him I'm back,' Miranda said, as if she was suddenly bored. Then she gave Petra a patronizing wave with her fingers as if she was taking leave of a child.

Petra closed the door. Beneath the thundering beat of her flailing heart, she could just about hear Arlo still singing his heart out about cloths of heaven. You tread upon my dreams.