by Freya North
‘It’s chilly, Merz Saxby!’
‘Er, yes! Dr Noakes,’ responded Morwenna easily, seeing through her salt-water haze that navy blue suited him very well. ‘Would you like to come in?’ she said, blinking hard, oily fat tears squeezing themselves out but managing to creep only to the start of her cheeks.
‘Yes. Would you like to call me Robert?’
‘Yes. Would you like to call me Morwenna?’
Morwenna offered tea or whisky and Robert plumped for the latter. Blotting her eyes carefully with kitchen roll, she waited for an explanation.
‘You were booked in with me,’ Robert explained, ‘for your once-over, but it was my decision to pass you on to Dr Grey. She’s a most excellent physician.’ Morwenna raised her eyebrows as if to say ‘And you’re not?’
‘But that wasn’t the reason for the referral – I’m a pretty dab doc myself!’ Morwenna’s smile of agreement put Robert at his ease, so the bush was not beaten about for a moment longer.
‘See, it would have been un-pro-fessional for me to have given you the once-over and, er, then to have asked you if you might like to have dinner with me.’
There!
Morwenna’s soul surged. ‘Oh?’ was all she could manage.
‘Would you?’
‘Yes!’ she said, a little too enthusiastically. ‘Would you?’
‘Would I what?’ asked Robert.
‘Why! Give me the once-over before dinner!’
When William remembered about dinner at Morwenna’s it was already eleven at night and he had finished two rounds of stilton-and-marmalade sandwiches. First he thought how it was too late to phone. Then he thought that Morwenna would have phoned to reprimand him anyway by now. He thought it strange that she hadn’t. Next he thought maybe she had forgotten as well. But he thought that odd as well. He thought for a while longer. But not about Morwenna – he thought no more of it. He went to bed, straight to sleep. Dreamless. He thought no more.
TWELVE
‘Shit Chlo!’ said Carl under his breath, ‘what an ass!’
Chloë spun on her heels and scrutinized her reflection in the glass-fronted mahogany sideboard which sat easily in the tack room next to the grandfather clock.
‘Woe!’ she wailed. ‘Is it the riding? All that squidging by jodhpur and squashing by saddle?’
Carl looked puzzled.
‘Is it very noticeable?’ pleaded Chloë, craning her neck and tucking up her pelvis. ‘How huge?’ She bit her lip. ‘Well-padded or downright unacceptable?’
‘You what?’ said Carl, none the wiser.
Chloë gave herself a hard pinch on the left buttock and batted doleful eyes at him. He broke into a wide smile and walked over to her. Turning her sideways on, he crouched until he was eye-level with her bottom. With a light but skilled hand, he glided over her buttocks; eyes half closed to assist his expert analysis. He stood up and turned her towards him. Putting his hands gently on her shoulders and not letting her eyes venture from his for a moment, he slid his hands down over her back to the base of her spine. Exerting a little more pressure, he traversed his hands over her buttocks and down to the tops of her thighs. To do so, he had to bend his knees slightly. To do so, he had to part his legs a little. This forced him to buck gently into her and, as a consequence, his groin was glued to hers. Keenly, he held on to the tops of her thighs, revelling in the base of her bottom resting lightly on top of his hands.
‘Shit Chlo,’ he said hoarsely, ‘all I said was that you have a great ass!’
Chloë laid her hands over his pectorals which she could feel and define well beneath the ample layers of wool that the Welsh February decreed. She could feel his erection pressing into her appendix, as was its wont. Having lowered her eyes demurely, she raised them again to his. And smiled.
‘I thought you meant –’ she faltered.
‘Daft cow!’ said Carl gently. Carl’s greatest compliments were his softly drawled insults.
‘You do know that my name is Chloë?’ said Chloë. ‘Klowee?’
Carl pulled his puzzled expression back down over his face, knowing the effect it would have on her. Chloë clenched her buttocks with delight, tapped him on the nose and gave his chin a quick pinch. Wilfully, she ran her tongue tip over her teeth, finishing with a flourish of a smile.
‘For some reason,’ she said, squeezing Carl’s buttocks which were firm and fitted her grasp very well, ‘you’ve taken to prefixing an abbreviation – a true perversion of its virgin state.’
Carl twisted his top lip and dipped his eyebrows simultaneously, shaking his head slowly, trying to fathom her out.
‘Shit Chlo, what are you on?’
‘See!’ laughed Chloë triumphantly. ‘Shiklo!’
She grabbed a pair of bridles and, humming gaily, turned to leave the tack room.
‘Chloë Cadwallader,’ enunciated Carl with care and conviction after her. Still humming, she turned towards him, the brave sun of a frosty February morning alighting on her face and throwing fire into her hair.
‘Yes?’
‘Chloë Cadwallader,’ he said even more slowly, chewing the vowels, sucking the consonants; rolling the syllables around his mouth and booming them over to her, ‘you’re one crazy bitch!’
As Chloë tacked up, she smiled to herself with Carl’s words stroking her psyche. Fancy such affection lacing such seeming insults! To be called a ‘crazy bitch’ by Carl was something to be savoured and played, again and again. And ‘daft cow’ – well! When Brett had called her ‘darling’ it had meant so little that it had grated her ears savagely. When he ended his calls with ‘Love you!’ she would often hold the receiver away from her ear. And hold it even more distant when he closed the conversation with his trademark ‘ciao!’ Now, with Carl’s love-laden calumnies chiming in her ears and a small child tugging eagerly at her jacket, Chloë looked around her and beamed gratitude at the hills and the sheep and the hazy boundless sky.
Wales, as Peregrine had said, was an absolutely splendid idea. Wales, as Jocelyn had said, was a heady contradiction of rustic simplicity and rural grandeur. Wales, as Gin often trilled, was wild, wet and Welsh! Wales, as Carl said once, was a cool country, pretty and awesome in equal measures.
‘Wales,’ said Chloë quietly to herself as she gave the small child a leg up and checked the pony’s girth straps, ‘Wales is the best thing that’s happened to me.’
Just you wait!
‘MissChloëCadwalladerEsquire,’ called Carl as Chloë and her young charge ambled out of the yard, ‘you’ve forgotten your badge! Agin.’
Chloë brought Desmond to a square halt and checked. It was quite true, once again, or agin (she now heard certain words exclusively in New Zealandish dialect).
‘Where would I be without you!’ she called with fondness, carefully unpinning Jocelyn’s brooch from her breast.
‘You’d be on your hands and knees scouring the grass for it, like last week!’ laughed Carl, hands on hips, divine forearms on display. ‘Or rummaging about on the muck heap like the week before, you dim wench!’ He sauntered over, his clumping boots scumbling leisurely over the cobblestones.
‘Thanks a million, young man,’ said Chloë, entrusting her heirloom to the man with the perfect wrists, ‘and please,’ she grinned, ‘call me Shiklo!’
‘It’s pretty,’ said Carl, holding the brooch in the approximate direction of the suddenly swallowed sun. Chloë loved the way his ‘t’s were unclipped, more a roll of the tongue inside his smile.
‘It’s perhaps the most precious thing I have,’ she said seriously.
‘Apart from your sanity? And that’s on its way out!’ said Carl, slapping his thighs in mirth.
Oh! His thighs!
‘Oh ha bloody ha!’ retorted Chloë, desperate to keep a straight and severe face.
‘Well, I’d be right honoured to be Guardian of the Badge till your return, milady!’ said Carl with an extravagant bow.
‘Thank you, kind sir!’ chirped Chloë, allo
wing him a fleeting smile and a lascivious wink. The small child regarded them with a certain incredulity, and a maturity that exceeded both theirs.
‘Come!’ said Chloë to the horses.
‘Shit Chlo,’ called Carl after her, ‘wouldn’t mind!’
Maybe soon.
You mean?
Yes. Well. Wanted to take it slowly. You know, have fun with the infamous bases. Base three’s next you see. Got to feel ready for the home run. Heavens, this is a first for me, remember.
William felt uncomfortable. His neck felt stiff and his legs were begging for a stretch. His bladder was full. Again. He was thirsty and felt tension spread across his forehead. He looked pale. And a little panicked. But he felt uncomfortable more because he was driving. He was nearing the Severn Bridge and was bang on schedule but still he felt ill at ease. He hated driving because he trusted a bicycle more, and his legs the most. Most of all, he hated the fact that the car he was driving belonged to Morwenna.
‘William!’ she had chastised most unbecomingly, putting an affected whistle to the ‘w’, ‘Well!’ (she did the same there too) ‘I really do think it’s time you bought yourself a motor. A little run-around at least.’ She paused. ‘Hmm! A little run-around would suit you very well.’ The barb missed William completely and fell flat on the carpet in her house.
‘Morn,’ he had protested in a voice he wished sounded stronger, ‘it is for the Bay Tree Bistro! Business, not pleasure – usually it’s you who takes my wares to their patrons. I’m offering to do this run.’
‘And why?’ whistled Morwenna, suddenly and quite inexplicably suspicious.
‘I’m not sure really,’ faltered William, ‘just fancied a change of scene?’
‘You!’ Morwenna barked sarcastically. ‘Leave Cornwall! Out of choice?’
William tilted his head and looked at her, loathing her.
What the hell.
‘There’s someone I have to see,’ he said quietly and with relish. Morwenna raised her eyebrows as disinterestedly as such a gesture allowed. William went for the kill. Why not?
‘Someone I want to see.’
He left it at that.
And left.
She phoned Robert: ‘Bloody ceramicists. So precious!’
‘Not that young chap you told me about? The one who thinks dinner services are beneath him?’
‘The very one. The most noisome of all my clients,’ spat Morwenna, using the word ‘client’ like a pin in a voodoo doll.
‘Sounds precious indeed,’ colluded Robert. ‘Fancy baulking at making things people want, in favour of making things that people won’t necessarily want to buy. Not what you’d call business acumen!’
‘No. Crazy! These artist types,’ agreed Morwenna breezily, trying desperately to banish images of William’s one-off pots from her mind’s eye.
Go away.
They are sublime!
I know. But dinner services bring in the pennies.
Is that the point? Pot-boilers?
Isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
‘The point,’ said Morwenna to the replaced handset, ‘is that whatever William makes from clay, people will want to buy. Whether they need them or not. Just to see them is to want them. And to want never to be without them.’
William is on the Monmouth Road. A weight has been lifted with entry into Wales. While he was still in England, this neighbouring country seemed so foreign and distant. While he was in England, he could have turned around and ditched the project. The Royal Mail could do a Special Delivery. And he had made no appointment at that other port of call in Wales. Now, he was in Wales. Just. But already its features as a distinct country were plain to the eye. The roads. What was it? Different tarmac? Better? And the fields – a slightly more verdant green? Tinged with blue in contrast to the yellow undertones in Cornwall? And, of course, the road signs. The language. As he drove, he tasted out loud the strange configurations of double ‘I’s and ‘f’s, the odd ‘y’, the abundance of consonants.
Tintern Abbey roused him to pull over and stop suddenly, without a thought for the motorists behind him, with no thought other than to see for himself. Serene yet melancholy, the abbey stood skeletal pewter against the dark lush valley; a torn doily of stone, defying both weather and time, infinitely more Romantic in its ruinous state than it could ever have been when standing complete. William winced at the garish tea-and-souvenir shop and gave himself instead to the abbey’s bony grasp for quite some time. Drizzle brought him back to the day in hand and he made tracks for his destination and his salary.
The Bay Tree Bistro was thrilled with the crockery.
‘Lovely!’ bellowed the highly English proprietor.
‘There’s pretty,’ sang the Welsh waitresses.
‘Is it heat resistant?’ asked the black chef with a West Midlands accent.
‘Dishwasher proof?’ quizzed the commie-chef.
‘Yup. Yup. And microwave safe too!’ announced William, pride in his wares unleashing the latent salesman from within.
‘We,’ said the chef clearly and with a sneer, ‘do not use microwaves at the Bay Tree Bistro.’
‘Of course not!’ faltered William, back again to his retiring self.
‘I thought perhaps some dinky salt and pepper whatsits,’ said the proprietor who William thought would be far better suited to a Devonshire tearooms.
‘Perhaps tiny bowls?’ suggested William, biting his lip and the urge to denounce the proprietor a philistine. ‘Allowing just a flick of salt, a pinch of pepper? After all,’ he said with a generous and beseeching smile at the chef, ‘I would say there is little practical use for condiment sets here. I’ll bet the food is seasoned to perfection before it reaches the diner!’
‘Soup?’ said the chef, still smileless but doffing his head just almost imperceptibly at William’s compliment. ‘Spinach and nutmeg.’
‘Please!’ said William, convinced that this man was more affable than his exterior suggested. The chef stirred and took a sip. He smacked his lips with satisfaction. Reaching above for a bowl, he glanced at William whose face was open, his pose relaxed. The chef replaced the bowl with a nonchalant clatter and swooped on one of William’s.
‘Does it need a wash?’ he asked. William shook his head. ‘It’ll taste far better in this,’ said the chef, brandishing the most perfect and white set of teeth William had ever seen.
‘Bloody pony-trekkers!’ said William, digging his nails into the steering wheel and, remembering it was Morwenna’s, driving them deeper for good measure. It was nearing three in the afternoon and he had wanted to make The Visit today so that he could make an early start tomorrow and be back in Cornwall by mid-afternoon. Once William had earned the chefs approval, he had been fed and watered splendidly. He thought perhaps a touch of salt would not have insulted the soup. But he did not mention it. In fact, he did not say much at all. The chef brought soup, onion tart and a heavenly rhubarb crumble in quick succession, allowing William time enough only to scrape his plate and coo appreciatively between courses. Now, with belly full and strings of rhubarb caught between his teeth, he bemoaned his appetite and his desire to please and befriend, for it meant that The Visit must be postponed until the morning and Cornwall would not see him until the evening.
The pony-trekkers ambled ahead at the neck of the lane which was single tracked and not for the overtaking. He watched one of the horses, a small pony, lift its tail and dollop generously on to the road, splaying its legs and waddling just slightly as it did so. Hoping that they might turn off into a field before he caught up with them, and thinking of Morwenna’s tyres, William slowed his pace right down. He could hear the hollow clop of horse and saw billows of steam seeping rhythmically from unseen nostrils. There were only two horses but it still gave him no room to pass. It had started to drizzle and the riders pushed the horses on into trot. Up down up down. One two one two. A small girl and a young woman. Black hatted and hair bunched. Hair flapping. Up down. One two.
>
The hair.
The hair.
William did a double take. Suddenly he remembered London. Pre-Christmas. Last year, already. Busy. Bustling. Lights and music on the South Bank. Money ringing alongside praise and adulation in his ear. Seeing her hum without hearing her. Catching her hair, glimpsing her freckles, her mahogany eyes, a glance of her porcelain neck. And the urn she had inspired that was not yet started but called to William from the back of his mind each day he sat down to work on other projects. It was quite possible, of course, that the sumptuous auburn tresses of the humming girl were hers not exclusively, that somewhere in the United Kingdom at least, never mind the world at large, another girl might be similarly endowed.
‘But still,’ said William aloud, shifting in the seat in the hope of a glimpse of her face. He was back in Wales on a drizzly afternoon, juddering in second gear on a single-track lane.
‘Shall I toot?’ he asked the rear-view mirror, wondering if that would afford a good look at the rider as well as a way through. Better not, said his conscience, knowing horses to be flighty creatures, and annoyed riders a belligerent race. As luck would have it, the girl with the beautiful hair outstretched her arm and waved him on in a most policemanly fashion while she and her charge moved neatly over into a passing place. William wanted to honk his appreciation but resisted. Instead, he raised his hand as he passed, preventing though it did a look at her face. The rear-view mirror provided no further details as the drizzle had swallowed the riders and their mounts into timeless silhouettes.
William drove on. He was sure that, behind the hedges, a gorgeous landscape lay. Normally he would have explored further, but today he drove on. It was not just the rain, but his uncertainty of his destination. Could he make The Visit today? No. Was he sure of the directions to the B&B? No. He turned left into a lane which was signposted to places near where he was supposed to be going. The hedges grew higher, the sky greyer and William’s mood worsened. He longed for gorse and the sea. And the space that the two afforded the sky.
‘Damn it,’ he said, punching the centre of the steering wheel and quite forgetting that the horn was there, ‘I really haven’t the foggiest.’