by Freya North
‘I was thinking that myself, as I walked here. Made a Not-So-New-Year’s resolution of sorts,’ William admitted apologetically.
‘Dear boy, I’m jesting! Can’t you tell? Every day as I sit at my wheel I know exactly where you are, that we both have slurry on our hands and an image of the finished piece in our heads!’
‘Morwenna –’ started William tangentially. And closed the sentence at just the one word. His discomfort was tangible and though Mac was tempted to jest further to lighten the load, he knew that William required more. It was the advice of a father that William sought. Or father figure. One, indeed, who knew.
‘There’s the rub!’ Mac thought to himself but said out loud, unwittingly.
‘Pardon?’ said William, who was miles away – he had spied a bowl he had made some years before. Glazed in Lusty Red.
The humming girl’s freckles.
Mac was speaking.
‘I’m not one really to advise on the love element in life, never having had a wife, having only ever had women and never really loved any of them,’ Mac trailed off with a lascivious twink in his eye. ‘But, I do know what people in love look like, how they behave. I saw it in your father, many many years ago.’
‘With Mother?’ said William with certain incredulity.
‘No, no. Before your mother.’ Mac swept the subject away quickly. ‘Anyway, I’ve seen how a love-struck man looks and behaves. You, William, I am sorry to say, are not one of them. Therefore I prescribe an analysis of the common cliché.’ Mac was stalking the room with his fire-iron, pointing it here and there, doffing his head and playing with an eyebrow. William thought he resembled a slightly mad professor giving a lecture. Ever the attentive student, he waited. With a tilt of the head to gaze momentarily at the ceiling and yet not at the ceiling at all, Mac continued.
‘The common cliché, my boy. That’s what we need to consider here. After all, clichés only evolve if their sentiment is tried, tested and true. Cruel to be kind.’ He let the phrase hang in the air a moment. ‘Finish the contract – the Welsh bistro can be the last. Give her forty per cent if it makes you feel easier. And then give that Saxby woman the heave-ho. There’s no contract there to be finished but there is a psychological tie that is fast becoming a knot. It’ll soon strangle you entirely. The deed itself may well be seen as cruel, but you can execute it kindly.’
William accepted the advice and felt a certain resolve flow through his body. He gathered his coat with an effusive show of gratitude and genuine affection. A date was set for a morning’s throwing the next week.
‘If she protests, or if she whines, sling the old If-you-love-someone-set-them-free at her. Usually works.’ Mac laid a hand on William’s shoulder-blade and gave a friendly shove. As they hovered by the door prolonging their parting, William could see that he had something else to say. When it had reached the tip of Mac’s tongue, William knew instantly what it was. And it was that instant that Mac knew he had been rumbled. And yet, though he could have made rapid excuses about the encroaching darkness, William remained. So Mac cleared his throat.
‘And Dad?’
‘Dad’s gone, Mac.’
‘You make it sound like he’s quite dead!’
‘Well, isn’t he?’
‘No, he is not. And, though I’d forgotten that Crick-howl is in south-west Wales, I do know that your father is. And you know that too.’
EIGHT
It was not just the look of Carl that had dropped Chloë’s jaw and cranked long dormant cogs of concupiscence back into motion; more it was his manner, his voice especially. It was his twangy ‘Yo Chlo!’ that had hit her G-spot first, for he was still hidden in shadow when her ears were solicited. On closer inspection, a tall, lithe figure, blond of hair and blue of eye, was revealed. A generous smile presented a perfect set of ski-white teeth surrounded by lips like crimson velvet cushions. The smile was just slightly, but ever so alluringly, skew-whiff; causing a slight closing of the left eye, a deep dimple to the left cheek. There was a dimple in the right cheek too, but shallower. Chloë had an unbridled urge there and then to dab at the dimples with her tongue tip. It quite alarmed her but Carl’s outstretched hand brought her back to her senses which were, admittedly and rather awkwardly, on fire. She grabbed at his hand and shook it heartily, noting that it was warm, dry and smooth and that his wrists were gorgeous. She really ought not to look.
I don’t even know where to look. Or how.
‘I’m Chloë,’ she said, unintentionally huskily, ‘and your directions were absolutely appalling.’
‘Ah yih!’ He threw back his head and roared a quick laugh – but long enough for Chloë to gaze at his masculine throat, his Adam’s apple vibrating most seductively.
‘Never could tell my left from my right. Back home, no probs. Sea’s on the left, mountains are on the right.’
‘And the “few yards”?’
‘Hell, distances back home are so vast, you know? Here it’s all so cramped I just presume anywhere’s a few yards from everywhere!’
‘Well, it looks like I’m here!’ Chloë acquiesced, privately thanking the heavens that she was.
‘And I’m most pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ quipped Carl, ushering her into the farmhouse with a flourishing bow.
After the gloom of the porch, and the hallway lit only by shards of light slipping through a door at the far end, the bright kitchen quite dazzled her. Though Chloë could feel the scorch of many pairs of eyes, momentarily she could not place any of them. With a strong blink, the kitchen and its inhabitants came into focus. It transpired that most of the eyes belonged to animals and, as she took in her surroundings, she spied creatures lurking in the most unpredictable of places. But the first thing that captured her eye and settled her soul was the vast Aga stretching across one side of the kitchen, bellowing forth warmth and the smell of baking bread in welcome. Above it, towels and jodhpurs were slung over the sheila-maid like bunting. The sparkle of all the eyes, and the beam from Gin Trap’s cheeks, made Chloë feel a festal welcome had been laid on in honour of her arrival.
In time, she found the kitchen always to be so. It was the heart of Skirrid End and exuded warmth and company for the Aga never went out and the room was never empty. It could lift her spirit and warm her right through on the darkest of mornings or the coldest of evenings. But she was never complacent about its gifts.
On that first day, eyes from every corner and level assessed and greeted her. One pair were Gin’s. Another, set deep into a face furrowed by years of furrowing the land, belonged to an amiable, stone-deaf Welshman called Dai the Hand, who drove the tractor and ‘mendsiz things’. The others belonged to an assortment of cats and dogs of varying shapes, colours and degrees of mental stability. Though out on the yard they formed an allied force to patrol the environs, the kitchen they had subdivided into a set of incontrovertible territories.
A dopey-looking labrador sprawled under the huge, scrubbed kitchen table and mumbled in his sleep.
(No gingham tablecloth. Never mind.)
Another acted as a draught excluder by the doorway and had to be shoved forcibly when entry or exit was required. At either end of the Aga, two identical black cats sat motionless. It soon transpired that they were ever waiting for the emergence of Jip, the Jack Russell, from his lair in the small warming shelf of the Aga. Yap, another Jack Russell but three-legged, sat in the old Windsor chair at the head of the table and woe betide anyone who fancied sitting there themselves. JR, the final Jack Russell, sat at the foot of Yap’s chair looking up imploringly with right foreleg cocked. Whether this was as a gesture of subservience or a snide reminder to Yap of his lack of right foreleg was unclear. A heap of interchangeable kittens snoozed aboard a stack of newspapers near the larder door. A greyhound, long since seen her day, lay in her dead-and-gone pose in the middle of the room, the bones of her hocks and elbows threatening to push right through the meagre pale fawn coat stretched taut over them. A small tabby cat with a shredded ea
r sat at the greyhound’s head and counted the dog’s vertebrae. Presiding in judgement over all, an immense shabby tortoiseshell with permanently half-closed eyes sat on top of the cookery books.
Though she had initially believed that all had gathered in a unified welcome, Chloë soon realized that her arrival had made negligible impact on the established ecosystem of The Kitchen. Before long, she bore witness to a bi-daily syndrome whose cause she would never discover. This consisted of a sudden and violent bout of musical chairs (most atonal) in which fur and fury flew around the kitchen. As quickly as it started, it finished and everyone returned to their positions as if nothing had happened. The kittens were asleep, the greyhound dead, JR’s leg was cocked and the tortoiseshell sat irreverently on Delia Smith perusing the scene. Without fail, Gin would look to each of the animals in turn and bellow ‘A hapless reshuffle of very little point.’
She was pointedly ignored.
The farmhouse was neither old nor particularly picturesque. It was a sensible structure well suited to its purpose. Its large covered porch provided ample storage for many a pair of muddied or manured boots; the larder was more of a walk-in chamber with wall-to-wall shelving deep enough to carry stock bought in bulk (Chloë gave up the count on reaching the fourteenth bottle of Vimto). Next to the larder was a cold room where the overflow from the fridge could reside quite happily and hygienically (provided the labradors could not gain entry). The kitchen, as we have seen, was vast enough to provide abundant space for all Skirrid End inhabitants other than equine, as well as to house the huge Aga which was the source of all heat and hot water at the farm. The hapless reshuffle of very little point often caused spillage of any liquid foolish enough to be on the kitchen table, and the breakage of any crockery not tucked into the wooden plate rack above the sink. The grand flagstone floor therefore, eminently moppable, was extremely practical too. The bedrooms upstairs were spacious but with windows proportionally small to keep the wind at bay. There was a drawing-room downstairs, bedecked by a regiment of family portraits of questionable lineage, but the room was used only once a year for the Skirrid End Farm Christmas Drinks Extravaganza. Anyone who knew Gin or any of her workforce (two- or four-legged) was invited to leave their boots in the porch and to partake of home-made hot spiced cider and mince pies in the drawing-room. In their socks.
Gin gave Chloë a guided tour after heartily plying her with home-made bread, slabs of farm butter and wedges of quite pugilistic cheese. Chloë would have been quite happy to remain for evermore in the kitchen, with the unparalleled gifts of the Aga and Carl. He was smiling, you see. Without interruption.
(At me?
At you!)
He’ll be there still, Chloë; his open face, his broad smile creating those dimples that have quite unnerved you. That are because of you.
Stop it! I’m going with Gin.
‘It’s clicked, my girl! We have met before and I do now remember you,’ said Gin as she showed Chloë a fine Chippendale chair in the corner of the bathroom.
‘I don’t think so,’ started Chloë, visibly racking her memory.
‘Did too!’ announced Gin, ushering her to an incongruous dressing-room bedecked with chintz and dainty china trinkets. ‘Though I must say, I’d’ve passed you in the street – not that we were likely to ever be on the same street had Jocelyn not brought us together now.’
Gin motioned Chloë to sit beside her on a fanciful chaise longue. Chloë, who could not think of anything to say, did the same as Mrs Andrews and laid her hands daintily in her lap, as befitting the room.
‘Oscar!’ beamed Gin, leaping to her feet and folding her arms triumphantly across her breast. She led the way to her bedroom. With arms still folded, she heaved herself on to the edge of an impossibly high mahogany bed in a perverted reworking of a Cossack dance. Finally aboard and legs swinging, she said ‘Oscar’ again, with apparent delight.
‘Oscar?’ gawped Chloë, who was now about the same height as the Cossack.
‘Gracious girl! Your horse!’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your horse, of course. Fifteen hands, bay thoroughbreddy thing with a white blaze, sock on the off fore, I seem to remember. Ridden in a grackle. Lovely paces, jumped like a bean. Oscar!’
Chloë was stunned and only the sight of her flabbergasted reflection in a pretty Queen Anne mirror brought her back to the present.
‘My first one-day event?’ she squeezed out in a whisper.
‘Indeed!’
‘When I was fifteen?’
‘If you say.’
‘Did you have jet-black hair?’
‘I did indeed! Went grey overnight when I learnt I’d inherited this place from my brother. Actually, rather when I heard he’d shot himself in the barns the other side of the lane.’
Now Chloë folded her arms too and then stood stock-still awhile, rapidly playing a cine-film of her youth on the wall of her mind’s eye.
‘I do remember you, Gin!’ she said eventually, uncrossing her arms and clambering aboard Gin’s bed. ‘Jocelyn brought you along and we all had whisky in the horsebox!’
‘Including Oscar!’
‘Including Oscar.’
It seemed that the upstairs was exclusively Gin’s and the downstairs exclusively the animals’. It was therefore some surprise to Chloë that none of the extravagantly furnished rooms upstairs at the farmhouse appeared to be allocated to her. Before, that was, Chloë learnt of The Rafters.
‘I’ve put you in The Rafters!’ boomed Gin as she slung down the ruffle blinds in her bedroom.
‘I thought you’d like it up there,’ she continued, pushing Chloë back along the corridor towards the bathroom. ‘You could have the spare room next to mine but as I ronfle comme un cochon, I thought you’d be safer and sounder in The Rafters.’
‘As you what?’ asked Chloë as politely as possible, thinking that it must be French but not as she knew it.
‘I snore like a pig!’ explained Gin quite soberly. ‘Comme un cochon,’ she stressed as she introduced Chloë to a steep staircase hidden by what she had previously presumed to be the airing cupboard door at the back of the bathroom.
‘Just remember,’ said Gin, with a sparkle in her eye, ‘to give a hearty three knocks when you’re coming down – I’m not a pretty sight in the bath, and even less so on the loo!’
Left by herself at last, Chloë contemplated a bottle of mane-and-tail conditioner by the bath before opening the door to The Rafters. The stairs leading there were not carpeted and she trod the boards forever upwards in a symphony of creaks and groans.
The Rafters were vast, half the house at least though the furniture had been arranged to subdivide the space further and create some vestige of cosiness. Thus, in the furnished half of the area, the beams had been painted dark green, the panels in between pale primrose. There was a skylight and a dormer window with small fussy curtains of pastel floral persuasion. They rose and fell conversationally with the breeze. (In March, she would learn they rarely touched the sill, the gales causing them to hover constantly at a ninety-degree angle to the window-pane.)
She looked over to an old iron bed in the corner with a faded kilim at the foot. Next to it was a Regency dressing-table and a stool covered and further filled in the curtain fabric. In the centre of the floor space, a sheep fleece lay like a martyr. A grand old cupboard of the C. S. Lewis type stood sagely in the middle of the room and in line with the first painted beam. Chloë opened it and stepped inside, clacketing the wooden hangers and smelling mothballs. Between the wardrobe and the stairwell was an old, battered armchair over which a tartan travel blanket was slung. It looked conspiring and inviting and was immensely comfortable when she sat deep into it to peruse her lair.
That night, Chloë excused herself after supper and washing-up duty, and before a session of Monopoly was to start. She had caught Carl’s eye many times over the meal and because her stomach leapt into her mouth each time, she found she could eat very little. He had dried while
she had washed and though he chattered away most amiably, to her horror one-word answers were all that she could contribute. Each time she felt a longer sentence brewing she would catch sight of his lovely wrists, or his chiselled jaw smattered with fair bristles, and find herself confined to ‘Really?’ or ‘Oh?’ or, worse, a chirrup of a giggle. So she used the excuse of the long rides by train and horse, and the excitement of it all, to gain an early night, and hiked up to The Rafters and into bed with her writing pad instead.
Halfway through a letter to Peregrine and Jasper (in which she mentioned Carl more than once or twice in passing) she felt a certain itchiness which could not be attributed to the fine cotton sheets nor the antique patchwork eiderdown on top. There was something in between. Something heavy and coarse. She rolled back the eiderdown. Of course. There, staring Chloë uncompromisingly in the face, an old New Zealand rug lay spread-eagled. Built for the coldest, wettest weather. Designed for horses living out in the fields in winter. Its green canvas waterproof shell was uppermost leaving the woollen lining to prickle its way through the cotton sheets. For a while, Chloë stood quite still, wearing her now perfected Skirrid End Jaw Drop. Slowly, a smile spread over her face. She sniffed at the rug and found it to be quite clean, the faintest smell of its long-gone wearer pleasant in the distance. She heaved it over so the woollen side was uppermost, rolled the eiderdown back and slipped deep down into the warmth.
‘Really rather sensible,’ she reasoned to The Rafters, ‘so warm and snug. As a bug in a New Zealand rug!’
She would finish the letter tomorrow. She was feeling pleasantly tired and pondered on a wistful innuendo about something from New Zealand keeping her warm at night, until slumber led her away and she slept, deep, dreamless and warm until dawn poured through the skylight the next day.