Chloe

by Freya North

  His studio was his haven and his true home; the fact that the cottage was included in the rent was merely an added bonus. Built by a contemporary of Bernard Leach, it had been designed with no other purpose than to be a room conducive to the making of pottery. There were two anterooms, one for glazes and one being the damp room where ongoing pots could rest. The main room housed William’s wheel at one end, an immensely long trestle table and a high, plaster-topped console on which clay could be kneaded and wedged in preparation. Shelves ran around two walls carrying finished pieces, experiments, failures, stimulus material such as skulls and pebbles, and a wealth of books on ceramics. The building was designed to allow its craftsman unparalleled access to the views outside, thus the other two walls were predominantly windows. Facing the trestle table at which William usually stood and worked, the windows reached from ceiling to floor and provided an inspiring panorama across the garden to the moors; the windows in the wall by the wheel were lower so that a potter throwing could still see where land became air and the great sea started. The roof itself was essentially one big skylight. The studio was never cold for the kiln at the far corner kept it cosy.

  That afternoon, as the veiled December sun fizzled out over the sea to drop down beyond the horizon and hide until noon the next day, William prepared some vivid blue slip and checked on his pieces in the damp room. His mind was elsewhere and yet nowhere at all. Momentarily it flitted across Morwenna before going on a little excursion to London and the humming girl, where it stayed a rueful while to be brought back to the present by Barbara’s insistent bleat. William found it was quite dark and he sat on the steps of the studio tugging the goat’s ear and asking her what he should do. Her eyes glinted luminous, unnerving even, so he smacked her rump and scratched her beard before heading off for Morwenna’s, driven as he was purely by his groin. Driving guilt to a far-flung corner of his conscience.

  ‘Hungry, were you?’ Morwenna fought to contain her delight. A hundred and eighty pieces for the Bay Tree Bistro looked promising, as did an orgasm or two.

  ‘Not really – well, not hungry for food,’ qualified William with an overdone lascivious wink. He had always mixed up her money-look with her lust-look and she was so obviously wearing one of them now. Unfortunately, he could not decipher which for both incorporated moistened, parted lips and a slight glaze to the eye. He strode over and kissed her deeply, allowing his hand to travel expertly if routinely over her torso. He ran her pony-tail through his hands and looked at her face. Behind her smile he saw that her eyes were quite flat. Or were those £-signs, superimposed cartoon-like over them?

  ‘Morwenna,’ he said in as much of a drawl as he could muster convincingly, stepping towards her and kissing her as persuasively as he could.

  And so they made rather unsatisfactory love. William’s eyes were slammed shut throughout while Morwenna’s were fixed on the lampshade, waiting for a climax that never came and was not worth simulating. Afterwards, they thanked each other politely, assuring that it had been good for them, how was it for you.

  You shouldn’t have to ask, thought Morwenna as she rose and went for her dressing-gown.

  You shouldn’t have to pull your stomach in like that, thought William as he watched her.

  ‘Stay?’ she asked, hugging her dressing-gown about her, quite keen for him to go.

  ‘Not tonight,’ William replied, as lightly as he could.

  As Morwenna sipped at very sweet cocoa, she beckoned her cat to her lap. William, William. She gazed at the wallpaper without seeing its pattern. William Coombes was her lover and her livelihood; thirty per cent was thirty per cent after all, and his burgeoning reputation had seen his prices rise healthily. As much as she loved him, and love him she did, she loved the idea of him more.

  She had held the reins and guided William through an exhilarating run of discovery from which she had benefited too. Multiple orgasms and thirty per cent. Now they were on a downward slalom heading nowhere fast. The reins were gone from her hands and yet she could not remember letting them slip. Who held them now? Not William, for sure. The shift of power was now squarely with him and yet he was using it quietly to ride away from her.

  It was the creeping indifference she could not abide. His proclamations of affection were dwindling and empty and, as she confronted the truth with only her cat on her lap for comfort, she knew that he made them because he knew it was what she wanted to hear. Tracing a large vein threatening at her calf, Morwenna admitted silently with forlorn resignation that William was no longer in love with her. Her cat fixed his yellow eyes on her, his pupils expanding as he swallowed her in to his unnerving gaze. What could she do but acknowledge out loud that William simply no longer loved her? They had grown apart because he had grown up and she had grown old. She had also witnessed his growing disaffection with Saxby Ceramics.

  ‘But Morn,’ he had said under his breath once or twice, ‘I actually want to make the pots I want to make. Not made to order, made to measure, made to be dishwasher safe and microwave proof.’

  ‘You will, you will. Once you’re up and running,’ she had said lightly. But she could not deny that his career as a potter was now establishing itself and that his preferred frugal lifestyle could most certainly be maintained by the sale of a one-off studio piece every now and then.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said out loud in the plaguing silence of her room, ‘I still have you and you love me unconditionally, don’t you puss? You give me a hundred per cent, never mind thirty!’ The tabby kneaded her lap in enthusiastic camaraderie before absent-mindedly springing his claws, driving them deep into Morwenna’s thigh. She gasped with the shock and the hurt of it, hurling the animal off her lap, rubbing her thigh hard. The cat slunk reproachfully to the window-sill where he knocked over a photograph of William and gazed defiantly away from her.

  ‘You and him both.’

  William arrived back at Peregrine’s Gully at midnight. He felt wretched because he knew he had used Morwenna, and thereby abused her. He cursed his conscience for having returned only when his testosterone had levelled. He cursed testosterone. The humming girl was far from his mind, as was the echoing urn in a river of red. Going to the side of the cottage, he went directly to the studio. Barbara, a little bleary, was none the less delighted to see him and chewed her cud thoughtfully as he fetched a block of terracotta clay and began to knead and wedge it. Pulling it towards him and then thrusting it away, he worked the clay until the wetness had gone and a cross section revealed no air pockets, just a smooth dark red-brown slab. Good enough to eat. My, he was starving. It was gone one in the morning and he was cold; the hunger that he had used as a pretext to Morwenna now gnawed at his stomach and his soul.

  FOUR

  Though Chloë’s entire effects would have taken but a couple of hours to pack, it really did not seem an appropriate activity for Christmas Day. It could wait. Tomorrow, perhaps; Boxing Day after all. The easiest way for Chloë to block out the lack of Jocelyn was to travel backwards and pore over memories of Christmases past. Yuletide celebrations at her godmother’s had been peppered with good cheer and sumptuous refreshments, and peopled by the most colourful of souls. Chloë customarily took a place in the background, happily overshadowed by the mosaic of eccentricities that surrounded her. She was oddly comfortable with her shyness when at Jocelyn’s, surrounded by a host of fantastic characters scattered liberally through the house. There was the white witch, the man with the panama and the macaw, the Russian with the balalaika, the ageing French actress. But best of all, the septuagenarians, Peregrine and Jasper; made up to the nines and immaculately coiffured. (‘We’re the real Queens of England, we should be on the telly at three, don’t you think?’) Some called her Cadwallader, the white witch absent-mindedly called her Cleo, Peregrine and Jasper called her ‘Clodders’ as they had since she was small. She did not mind at all.

  Chloë would watch with awe as Jocelyn swirled around her guests, distributing drink and food, compliments and witticisms
with grace laced with abandon. Eyes dark with kohl bought in Petra, enviable cheekbones dusted with rouge from Paris and nut-brown skin bathed in Mitsuko, Jocelyn breezed about enveloped in velvet or swathed in chiffon, bejewelled extravagantly, bestowing on all her immense gift of effortless hospitality. Everyone was swept along on the tide of her countenance. Every so often and without making a scene, she would swoop down beside Chloë, usually squeezing next to her on the armchair to lavish kisses and furtive winks and nudges; ‘I’m Jocelyn jostling!’ she would pip in her ear. Chloë felt treasured indeed.

  Mr and Mrs Andrews had been there too, ensconced in Notting Hill, in Jocelyn’s glorious house. With pride of place over a faux-Elizabethan fireplace, they looked benevolently down on all from the gilt-edged confines of their elegant world. Of course, it was not the original – yet nor was it a standard print such as Chloë’s. Jocelyn had commissioned hers from a young Chilean painter whom she had befriended on a coffee appreciation trip to South America in the seventies. She had brought Carlos back to London, sat him in the Tate and National Galleries, the Courtauld Institute and the Wallace Collection until he had quite mastered the Masters before sending him to Paris where she had an old friend who had known Matisse. Two years later, he enjoyed the first of many sell-out one-man shows. Now New York had him and he dressed in Gaultier and had a boyfriend called Claude whom he called ‘Clode’.

  But he came to Jocelyn’s funeral, and wept alone and at length before disappearing.

  As Chloë gazed at her own Mr and Mrs Andrews, she wondered what would happen to Jocelyn’s. There, Señora Andrews sometimes appeared to be winking and wasn’t there just a drift of something positively libertine about Señor Andrews?

  Chloë decided if she visited the house, she would see if she could take the painting home. But where was home to be? Wales? Ireland? Scotland, perhaps? Wasn’t home just a concept? Was it attainable? Really?

  Because it would not have crossed their minds to call her, Chloë rang her parents just before the Queen’s Speech to thank them for their perfunctory cheque. Two time zones away, they were just on their way out to cocktails with the Withrington-Smiths before a bash at Bunty and Jimbo’s so could it be brief? Yes, yes, Merry Christmas to you too, Chloë. Mother sends fondest! Must fly, bye!

  Owen and Torica Cadwallader: definitive ex-pats. Dictionary perfect and, as such, worthy of lengthy description or dissection in book, film or anthropological study. They whooped it up overseas, ricocheting around their vapid colonial existence; loving every minute, every year of it. Chloë had been born to them in Hong Kong and was to be their only child (a daughter – shame) who, at six years old and with a relocation to Saudi pending, had been shipped back to England to fumble her way through boarding school and other rites of passage. Had it not been for Jocelyn, she would have been quite alone. ‘Far too far to fly’ being her parents’ dictum and excuse, Chloë rarely saw them. Perhaps once every three years or so, for a day or so. If that. This year they had flown in for the state opening of Parliament but Jocelyn’s funeral two months later was ‘far too far to fly – we’ll send flowers’ – which they did, only on the wrong day.

  And yet Jocelyn remained forever discreet; she never judged them, never spoke badly about them and never colluded with Chloë who had expressed a brave indifference from a tender age anyway. Jocelyn’s sympathy and support, though unspoken and unasked for, were abundant and comforting. The unequivocal, unconditional love and respect that she lavished on Chloë made her want for nothing. Why pine for parents she did not know when she had a godparent the calibre of Jocelyn? For her part, Jocelyn had a daughter without the trials of pregnancy, labour or a husband. She had this wonderful god-daughter merely because her brother had captained Owen’s rugger team at Oxford.

  Chloë thought herself very lucky. While other parents came up to school en masse and took their daughters out for cream teas in Marlborough, Jocelyn descended by Aston Martin twice a term to whisk away Chloë, and any friends she chose, for magical interludes and picnics on the Downs replete with champagne, smoked salmon and chocolate liqueurs. She helped smuggle plenty of the latter back to school: the very stuff of midnight feasts, bribery and blackmail. Once, when the weather had not been kind, the picnic was taken indoors at Badborough Court, a meandering country seat near Devizes owned by an old friend of Jocelyn’s (didn’t Lord Badborough kiss her for ages!).

  Jocelyn wrote weekly, came to parents’ evenings, sports days and school plays. When Chloë’s maths teacher chastised Jocelyn over Chloë’s general apathy and incompetence, the visits and the picnics and the chocolate truffles became more frequent. Not as a bribe, but as support.

  ‘I’m not surprised your mind wanders off in maths, it’s insufferably boring,’ Jocelyn had said over shandy at a pub near Avebury. ‘But just think, if you pass your O level you’ll never, ever, have to do maths again! And just think, if you pass your O level you can turn your back on mental arithmetic and formulae and daft equations, to add things up on your fingers forever more! That’s why we’ve got ten of them after all!’

  Chloë gained a ‘B’ for her maths O level and has used her fingers to count ever since.

  It was watching the Queen’s Speech on the television (Chloë remained upstanding with sherry and a mince pie) that decided her what to do.

  ‘Velvet, Your Majesty!’ she cooed with reverence and gratitude. ‘Jocelyn said I may have “anything of velvet” so I shall go directly and have my pick. First, though,’ she announced, ‘I shall pack!’

  Chloë, her belongings and Mr and Mrs Andrews crossed London for Notting Hill by taxi and her sudden Christmas cheer ensured an extravagant tip on top of the seasonally quadrupled fare. Chloë grinned and waved at the familiar front door; darkly glossed hunter green, brass fittings gleaming. Hullo, hullo, hullo, she chanted, skipping up the wide steps two at a time. She had her own set of keys, of course she did. But the locks had been changed, of course they had. Feeling tearful and bewildered, she sat down on the front steps, surrounded by bags that were suddenly too heavy and bulky, wondering what to do. She thought of all the velvet items inside that were now rightfully hers, she wondered about the Chilean Mr and Mrs Andrews hoping they were still where they should be, presiding over matters in the drawing-room. Her own Mr and Mrs Andrews were too cold and cross to talk. Or was that her? She hoped nothing had been removed or even moved inside the house and yet how could she check? With her bottom numbing against the cold stone, and her lower lip jutting in bewilderment tinged with self-pity, she felt at once trapped and yet barred. Christmas Day was closing around her. It was cold.

  Wales, suddenly, did not seem a good idea at all.

  ‘Wales,’ declared Peregrine, flinging his arm out in a roughly westerly direction, ‘is an absolutely splendid idea!’

  ‘Good old Jocelyn Jo!’ agreed Jasper, thrusting a mug of mulled wine into Chloë’s chilled hands.

  Jasper and Peregrine had found her, huddled and sleepy, on their return from a promenade along the Serpentine. Their keys fitted the locks on Jocelyn’s door perfectly for it was they who had had them changed. Jocelyn had left the house to them on that very condition: ‘To prevent my nearest and not so dearest trespassing and traipsing through.’ So Chloë had been rescued and was once again ensconced in a familiar armchair, looked down upon by the benevolent, if surreptitiously Latin, smiles of Mr and Mrs Andrews.

  ‘Your phone,’ said Jasper, ‘is perpetually engaged. We’ve been trying you for yonks.’

  ‘If the Sins weren’t using it,’ Chloë explained, ‘I left it off the hook. Knowing that it would never again be Jocelyn, I can’t bear to hear it ring.’

  Chloë cradled a chipped cup that she knew well and nibbled biscuits from the lucky dip of Jocelyn’s old Foxes’ tin. Wardrobes full of velvet were just up the stairs and off the landing, and there would undoubtedly be a bottle of Mitsuko in the bathroom, one in the bedroom. And yet it seemed strange to be there, half asleep, freezing cold, sitting amongst all the
familiar accoutrements and smells but with no Jocelyn.

  ‘They say that people inhabit their places, their things, long after they’re gone – but I can’t find Jocelyn anywhere here,’ Chloë mumbled, her nose running on to Peregrine’s Hermès scarf. Jasper topped up the mulled wine and laid a slender, perfectly manicured hand on the top of her head.

  ‘We couldn’t find her either, poppet, not at first. But in drifts and droves she returned and now we chat away to her frequently, don’t we, P? I hated it here at first, didn’t I, dear? I found it so empty – and yet everything was in its place; all should have been comfortingly familiar, but it was alien and cold. And then, a few days on, I opened a kitchen drawer and found a shopping list scrawled by Jocelyn on the back of an envelope. It matched entirely the items currently in the larder. Suddenly I was quite warm and Jocelyn was here once more.’

  ‘And for me,’ said Peregrine, coaxing the Hermès scarf from Chloë’s clutches to replace it with a damask handkerchief from Dunhill, ‘for me it was when I spied one slipper under the Lloyd Loom chair in her bedroom – you remember those pointy, turn-up-toe Indian things she had? It caught me quite unawares – it was only when, a day or so later, I found the other one lurking behind the laundry basket that I could smile. In fact, I had a right old chuckle – it was as if she had just that moment kicked them off prior to springing into bed with a magazine, a brandy and the telephone!’