Chloe

by Freya North

  ‘But,’ sighed Chloë who had begun to thaw, ‘I miss her. And it hurts, it pulls – here,’ she explained, pressing both hands above her breasts. Peregrine and Jasper cocked their heads and donned gentle half-smiles.

  ‘She’ll never really be gone, you know,’ said Peregrine, cuddling up to her comfortingly in the armchair.

  ‘You’ll see her again, Clodders old thing. I bet you anything she’ll be in Wales!’

  ‘Ooh! And Ireland!’ cooed Peregrine, rolling his ‘r’s and jigging his head.

  ‘Scotland,’ philosophized Jasper, looking vaguely northwards.

  ‘And good old Blighty!’ declared Peregrine, gesticulating expansively and inadvertently clonking Chloë’s nose in the process.

  ‘In fact,’ said Jasper standing up and lolling with a certain swagger against the fireplace; one knee cocked, one hand in a pocket, the other draped aesthetically over the mantel, ‘you’ll see her quite often – in you!’

  Chloë looked at Jasper gratefully. And then she looked at him in quite a different light. She stifled giggles.

  ‘You’re Mr Andrews!’ she exclaimed, looking from him to the painting above his head.

  ‘Gracious duck!’ whooped Peregrine. ‘You are! To a ‘t’! What is it, Clodders? Is it the pose or the poise?’

  ‘It’s both,’ she declared, delighted.

  Jasper moved not one inch, if anything he lifted his chin a little higher and dropped his eyelids fractionally.

  ‘Then I suggest, my dearest Peregrine, that you don a divine sky-blue frock and sit demurely at my side! For if I am indeed Mr A, you can be no other than my devoted Mrs A!’

  ‘Velvet!’ proclaimed a suddenly lucid Chloë having picked herself up from a fit of giggles on the Persian rug.

  ‘Blue satin!’ sang Peregrine, tears of mirth streaming down his face. He looked at Chloë slyly. ‘Race you!’ he hollered before diving for the door and the stairs beyond.

  Because she was at least forty-five years younger than him, Chloë reached Jocelyn’s bedroom first and flung open the cupboard doors with the grandest of gestures that would have done her late godmother proud. Peregrine and Chloë, and a wheezing Jasper just behind, looked in awe at the sparkle and drape of the cupboard’s contents. There were yards of silk, watered, raw and crushed; swathes of satin, duchesse, brocaded and ruched; there was velvet and devore velvet; plain taffeta and moire; there was suede that was butter soft and cashmere that was softer than air. A superior collection of handmade shoes was hidden from view in their soft fabric sacks.

  The three of them stood in silent reverence and gazed on. Jocelyn was amongst them once more. Chloë slithered into a dark green velvet dress that was far too long but it didn’t matter. Jasper zipped her up and placed a lattice of jet around her neck while she scooped up her hair and he fixed it with a bejewelled pin.

  ‘Divine,’ he whispered, ‘so Rossetti! So Burne-Jones!’

  ‘Do you think I could have it altered to fit? Do you think I should?’

  ‘I think you should! Jocelyn decreed it in her will, girl. No use just having “anything of velvet” – what good is velvet if it is not to be worn? I’ll do it for you, being the accomplished seamstress that I am. Gracious, Peregrine!’

  Peregrine stood before them, resplendent in washed blue silk, one hand on his hips, the other raised affectedly above his head.

  ‘It fits like a glove!’ he declared, his voice saturated with pride heavily laced with outrage. Though it was decidedly odd seeing a man of grandfathering age wearing her godmother’s dress, Chloë had to concede that it fitted perfectly, suiting him and complementing his demeanour utterly.

  ‘I like it!’ she enthused after a momentary assessment.

  ‘I love it!’ boomed Jasper, twirling Peregrine around. ‘Shall we take more mulled wine and then play rummy?’

  Jasper insisted on hanging Chloë’s Mr and Mrs Andrews at the opposite end of the room to their Chilean doppelgängers.

  ‘We could play Spot the Difference,’ he declared, balanced on a Chippendale chair with a hammer between his knees and a picture hook pursed between his lips.

  ‘Her shoes for starters,’ said Peregrine, still befrocked, his nose inches from the frame, squinting through Jocelyn’s reading glasses. Then he whipped them off and stared at Chloë in alarm.

  ‘Gracious, Clodders! You haven’t even opened it! Look, Jaspot – it’s pristine. Not even the teeniest peek!’ He removed the envelope marked ‘Wales’ from the frame and handed it to Jasper who held it aloft as if about to light the Olympic flame – or Jocelyn’s chandelier at any rate. He looked at Chloë sternly and his left eyebrow left his forehead.

  ‘Why ever not, girl?’

  Chloë shuffled. Though she felt uncomfortable at being challenged, she felt more uneasy with the envelope suddenly out of reach. Jasper’s eyebrow remained aloft.

  ‘There just didn’t seem to be a right time, ladies,’ she said. ‘I held it often; I sniffed at it and held it up to the light. Its contents just seem so, I don’t know – portentous.’

  Approving Chloë’s vocabulary, Jasper allowed his eyebrow back down to earth.

  ‘I was,’ furthered Chloë, ‘all on my own. In Islington, after all.’

  This secured a bow from Jasper and a long nod from Peregrine who said ‘Islington. Why, of course’ very softly.

  ‘What say you,’ said Jasper cautiously, proffering Chloë the letter like a ring on a velvet cushion, ‘that we open it now? You’re in Notting Hill after all. With us. And the Andrewsiz. Looked over by You-know-who. Safe hands all.’

  Chloë took the envelope and held it to her nose, her eyes on Jasper but seeing far beyond him.

  Is it there? Is it Mitsuko? Do you know, I think so.

  ‘Mitsuko?’ asks Peregrine. Chloë nods. She turns the envelope over and wriggles her little finger into one corner. The rip, though a mere centimetre or so, is deafening. She takes her little finger to the other corner and winces as the tearing of paper screeches out.

  ‘Bugger,’ she mutters under her breath but unmistakably. ‘Would you? For me?’

  Jasper takes the envelope and slits it open with one deft movement. He passes it to Peregrine who slides the contents out with deliberation and grace. He offers them to Chloë but she must come forward to accept.

  ‘Go on,’ he whispers, ‘for us.’

  ‘For Jocelyn,’ says Jasper.

  ‘OK,’ says Chloë.

  There are two pages. A letter, and a map of Wales that appears to have been filched from a road atlas. In black ballpoint pen, an arrow shoots inland and south, to a red asterisk marked ‘Here!’ Handing the map to Jasper, Chloë skims through the letter seeing the words without reading them, reading names without knowing where or who – or indeed whether a who or a where.

  Peregrine’s chin is tucked over her shoulder. He smells faintly of chocolate gingers and Christmas.

  ‘Jasp!’ he says once he has read it right through. ‘Three guesses where she’s going!’ Jasper hands the map back to Chloë and closes his eyes with a measured twitch of his aquiline nose.

  ‘Three guesses,’ says Peregrine again, nudging Chloë with a wink.

  ‘And if I am correct in just one?’ Jasper asks, eyes still closed, nostrils slightly flared.

  ‘Oh Gracious Lordy, always a deal to be struck. Nothing’s ever unconditional with the old tart!’ Peregrine is pleasantly exasperated. ‘If you’re right in one, I’ll make it worth your while. There!’

  Jasper opens his eyes and smiles – benevolently at Chloë, somewhat lasciviously at Peregrine.

  ‘Gin Trap. I bet my bottom dollar. It’ll be the Gin Trap.’

  FIVE

  Chloë Darling,

  Well done! No doubt it took simply ages for you to open the envelope. I wonder whether you had help with it in the end? Well, here we are, setting off for Wales – perhaps we’ve already arrived. Is it still winter? It should be, I’ve envisaged it that way.

  Wales is a heady cont
radiction of rustic simplicity and rural grandeur, and ‘little lines of sportive wood run wild’ (Wordsworth’s succinct description for hedgerows, darling). Virginia Trapper will make your stay memorable indeed.

  You met Gin a couple of times when you were younger – perhaps you remember? She rarely leaves the farm now so I decreed special dispensation for her to miss my funeral. She did want to come, but I was happier for her not to be there. No doubt she’ll want to know all about it so paint a technicolor picture for me, would you? Don’t stint on detail and add a little flurry of brush strokes here and there, they’ll go down a treat.

  For all four countries that you will visit, you will see but a tiny corner of each. They are so vastly different – both from each other as well as within each itself. However, though I say so myself, I have picked rather well and assure you that each place will exude the essence of that country.

  I so wish I could be there with you.

  Really there.

  In life, in the flesh.

  Alas.

  Instead, you must carry me along.

  Promise me.

  Of course, as I write, I have absolutely no idea whether I will indeed be able to ‘look down’, to watch over you once my number’s up. Just now, I’d love an angel or agent to pop down and give me a clue or two but I shan’t hold my breath. Ha! The consequences if I were to!!

  If I find that I can, I will. If I can’t, just keep me close.

  Enjoy Wales and chin-wagging with the Gin Trap.

  Ireland next, remember.

  Fondest, as ever,

  Jocelyn.

  SIX

  The lane was slim. It was like a gorge between the hedges which rose up over six feet to either side. Though it was January and the bare trees were pressed as inky silhouettes sharp against the sky, the hedges sprouted shoots and leaves and even boasted berries and foliage that clung on from last summer. The hedge was an ecosystem of its own and the seasons were obviously its slave. Rabbit and robin cohabited and eyed Chloë amiably en route. The lane was single track and poorly surfaced but Chloë appeared to be the only traffic that day. There had been a road – a quick phone call to Skirrid End Farm the day before, to someone who wasn’t the Gin Trap, had informed Chloë that a bus would take her ‘inches from the lane’. It had indeed, but Skirrid End Farm was not ‘a few yards up on the left’. Chloë had walked the few yards and seen nothing but hedge. To the left or right. Estimating that she walked a mile in around fifteen minutes, she calculated that she had covered just over two of them; the run of hedgerow interrupted only every now and then by rickety gates leading to pasture.

  Something’s not right.

  Yes, it is. Keep going.

  Trudging along, half halting every few strides to hump her rucksack back into position, Chloë tried to envisage what Skirrid End Farm would look like. No clear picture entered her mind’s eye and if she tried to design the farm herself, she got no further than a vast front door more suited to a church. She considered the voice on the other end of the telephone. Australian? New Zealand? South African? No, it was antipodean for sure. Male. Not bowled over with joy and excitement to hear from her but welcoming none the less.

  ‘Ah yih! Ker-Low-E. Sure! Take the bus – it stops inches from the lane, we’re just up on the left. Few yahds, you know. Be seein’ ya. Travel safe.’

  Lunch-time had obviously been and gone and Chloë did not need the rumbles from her stomach to tell her so. After all, it had been nearing noon on the train but, despite protestations from her stomach even then, Chloë had rejected sandwiches of rubber in favour of fantasy: doorstep slabs of Aga-baked bread slathered with furls of hand-churned butter and crested with wedges of crumbling cheddar gouged by blunt knife from a wax-clothed round.

  There’d better be. There’d bloody well better be.

  Inches from the lane. Just a few yards up on the left.

  The lane was not getting any shorter and the hedges seemed to be higher now and appeared to converge ever so slightly. Any more than a few yards and they might very well close in on her. Chloë looked at her watch. Two fifty-three. Thirty-eight minutes. Seven minutes to three miles.

  ‘Three miles is not a few “yahds”,’ declared Chloë out loud. ‘Three miles is not funny. I’m starving hungry and have no idea where I am.’

  Walking past a driveway to her right, Chloë read the sign, ‘Skirrid End Farm’, and trudged wearily along.

  Skirrid End Farm! On the right? Back there?

  She came to a standstill and, still facing forwards, craned her neck around to reread the sign. Skirrid End Farm. Definitely.

  ‘A “few yards up”?’ she shouted. ‘On the left!’

  Who’s counting!

  ‘On the right?’ she declared to a robin. ‘Must be antipodean, that bloke. Everything topsy turvy!’

  It was, however, with good humour and an easily found spring in her step, that Chloë retraced a few yards and turned left up the drive to meet whatever was to greet her. The drive was long enough to wonder. Church-type door? A smoking chimney? A rusty old Taff astride a tractor? Border collies? Straight into the kitchen to a scrubbed table with gingham cloth and the bread and the cheese and the hand-churned butter? And ‘Chloë Cadwallader, there’s pri-tti now!’ sung in welcome?

  In the event, two large rumps met her view and, as she called ‘Hullo’, the tail of one was raised and a steaming mound of admittedly sweet-smelling manure was dumped sonorously at her feet in welcome.

  ‘Hullo?’ she called again, somewhat nasally.

  ‘Chloë? Is it you?’ The voice was pukka and strong and came from somewhere quite close. ‘Chloë?’ It belonged to a rotund woman who emerged from behind a wall with a saddle under each arm and a bridle over each shoulder. ‘Chloë? Cadwallader?’ Her hair was grey and plaited, Indian-squaw style, halfway down her back. ‘Jocelyn Jo’s God-Daughter Girl?’ Her cheeks bloomed cerise and a pair of button-black eyes glistened a delighted welcome at Chloë.

  ‘Yes, it’s me. I’m Chloë Cadwallader.’

  The other tail was lifted and a further greeting deposited with a rumble and a splat.

  ‘Am I glad to see you!’ The woman was very close, dumping the saddles on a low wall, offering her hand. No she wasn’t, she was offering to take Chloë’s rucksack. She tugged while Chloë wriggled free.

  ‘Thank heavens it was you!’ she was saying as she wrestled with straps and fought with buckles. ‘Thank heavens it was you whom Jocelyn sent. Though who else it could have been I do not know!’ Her laugh was deep and jovial. A Santa Claus chuckle. ‘But thank heavens that it is you and that you are here now.’ She slipped the bridles on to the two horses and rattled away without pause for breath. ‘I’ll take your worldly possessions. You jump up on Percy here and take Rosie and Kerry around the paddock. At the far end is the wood: one gate, one track, completely circular. About – An – Hour. Can’t possibly go anywhere else, nor get lost. Bugger! The bread! An hour. Ta-ra!’

  Very, very slowly, Chloë closed her mouth as she watched the Gin Trap scurry back to the farmhouse carrying her rucksack like a babe in arms. Even more slowly, she shifted her gaze downwards until it rested upon two piercing blue eyes belonging to a small girl in jodhpurs; blond hair in pigtails bedecked with meticulous red bows. With great circumspection, Chloë searched for her voice. Not knowing whether or not it would appear, what it would sound like if it did; nor, indeed, what it was she was to say, Chloë did not bother to clear it. It eventually crackled out, two tones deeper than usual.

  ‘Are you Rosie, or are you Kerry?’

  ‘I’m Kerry, silly. That’s Rosie.’

  Rosie turned out to be the first tail-lifter. She turned her doleful eyes on Chloë on hearing her name mentioned and misplaced.

  ‘So that must be Percy?’

  ‘’Course!’

  Rhymed with horse.

  And Chloë had not ridden one for some five years.

  As Kerry scurried off for hard hats, Chloë worked hard at kee
ping her mouth closed, her head on straight and her wits about her. Both Percy and Rosie were eyeing her quizzically. She picked her way carefully around their two pungent offerings and introduced herself self-consciously. They welcomed her unconditionally with a nuzzle and a huff apiece and then went back to chewing on their bits.

  Instinctively, she checked the throat lash and noseband on each bridle and tightened the girths on the saddles with a ‘Whoa there!’ to ward off any inclinations the horses had of nipping her. Chloë Cadwallader was back in the saddle.

  Kerry turned out to be a very nice girl of eight years old. She put Chloë at her ease at once for she did not want to know anything about her. She saw no need for an explanation of how an apparent stranger had dumped her rucksack for Percy and was now taking her out on a hack. Such an explanation would only eat into time precious for more important topics such as snaffle bits, jute rugs and ponies with people’s names.

  ‘You’ll love Jemima, she’s a Cleveland Bay cross, sixteen hands with a sock on her off hind. Desmond’s a bit of a pain, tends to put in a big one if you use your stick. Which you have to, all the time. He’s the roan over there with the wall-eye. Harry’s that big bay hunter type under the apple tree, he’s started going disunited in left canter. So I’m told. He’s too big for me. Might suit you, though.’

  What could Chloë do but say ‘I see’?

  ‘Boris, that grey Section B over there by the brook, his show name is Boris the Bold Mark Two. Which is daft really because he’s the biggest wimp out. He won’t even go over a cavaletti. But Basil, he’ll jump anything. I’ve jumped two foot six with a two-foot spread on him. And that was when I was just seven and three-quarters!’

  ‘I see.’

  While Kerry wittered on about running martingales and French gags, Chloë allowed Percy’s sway to relax her. A gentle canter fixed a smile to her face and sharpened her senses to her new surroundings. The farm was set in a dimple amongst the hills and, from a viewpoint at the top of the wood, she could see that there was indeed a chimney smoking and a tractor crawling along the side of one field. The hills were soft and amiable, not nearly as bleak nor as black as she had anticipated.