Chloe

by Freya North

  Up there. Look. A driveway. A few yards on the right.

  The Fiat lurched and heaved over the cobbles before William brought it to a long-deserved standstill. Pulling his jacket over his head and quite resembling the hunchback of somewhere or other, he scoured the apparently deserted yard for some sign of life. He heard faint barking and lumbered off in search of it, cursing his aged suede brogues whose soles were sieve-like. Skirting around the side of the house, guided by sporadic barking and a growing light, William came across a window and peered in. A kitchen. A young man reading. Dogs and cats snoozing harmoniously. Bingo!

  Giving the back door a positive rat-a-tat-tat, William entered before waiting for an answer and immediately wished he had, for at once he found himself centre stage in a broiling mass of cat hair and dog fur, claws and incisors, howling and hissing. Something bit his leg sharply and it hurt. And then suddenly, all was still. The young man reading had not seemed to notice. Slowly, he took his eyes from the page and contemplated William benignly.

  ‘Hullo mate!’

  Who?

  ‘Er, hello?’ asked William. The young man put down his book and widened his eyes in readiness to assist.

  ‘Er, I think I’m lost. A little,’ explained William. ‘Might you tell me where Fforest is?’

  ‘Ah sure mate! Go further along the lane, right? And then hang a left, swing a right, right? Is it the Blue Boar you’re after?’

  William nodded, trying hard to decipher the rights from the lefts and the rights.

  ‘Right!’ the young man said. ‘Well, it’ll be a few yards further on the right, no left. Hang on.’ He rose and came into the centre of the room, miming as if driving, shutting his eyes and concentrating. ‘Yih! That’s it for sure. Few yards on the right! Mate!’ He was triumphant and glad to be of service. He held out his hand for a shake which William accepted and returned a little reservedly.

  ‘Okey doke,’ said William, ‘I go back out and then turn –’

  He stopped. The young man cocked his head, urging the stranger’s memory to crank back into action. After a good moment, he realized the stranger had forgotten all about directions and destinations, he was somewhere quite else. Miles away. In the fruit bowl. The young man followed his gaze and found it to rest upon the old tin badge he had tucked between the oranges and pears for safe keeping. The stranger gave a quick shake of his head to bring him back to the present, though a trace of a frown continued to hover over his brow.

  ‘Many thanks,’ he said, ‘I’d better make tracks.’

  ‘Sure thing, mate.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said William as colloquially as he could. The young man saw him to the car and William said, ‘Straight, then left, right and it’s a few yards on the right, right?’ He offered his hand for a shake and received a pat on the shoulder too. A little lost for words, he grinned distractedly and made off.

  The Blue Boar was quite a distance away. And it was on the left, not the right. William picked at rabbit pie for an early supper and then retired to a small cosy room with a single bed and mauve velveteen headboard, punched into a pointless padded pattern by matching velveteen buttons. As he waited for sleep to descend, his mind played games with the tracery of Tintern Abbey, the sinewy auburn tresses of the pony-trekker and the art-nouveau serpentines of the I’m-sure-I’ve-seen-it-before brooch. Their patterning intermingled until they were no longer distinct and, try as he might, he could not tell them apart.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Mr Coombes look! A visitor! Your son! Will-i-am.’ Mr Coombes, well over six foot but wizened and crooked down to five and a half, leapt to his feet and burst into a cacophony of wheezing and coughing.

  ‘My son!’ He looked at the care attendant as if she were mad while she nodded slowly, as one might to a child.

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ said William with care, stepping forward to take his father’s hand. It was lukewarm, dry and papery, so papery. While waiting for him to respond, William looked down on it. The skin had a greenish grey tinge and stood up in crinkled peaks over the veins, the knuckles and the tendons. Coursed with blue, highly deoxygenated blood, and riddled with liver spots, the skeletal framework beneath threatened to break right through. And yet the nails were beautiful, well tended and strong. They were familiar to William for they had changed little since his childhood. Oval, smooth and even. Quality.

  ‘Dad, hello. It’s me. William. Your son.’

  ‘My son?’ bellowed Mr Coombes with inflection worthy of a Shakespearian actor. ‘My son?’ He looked at the care attendant. ‘Have I a son?’ She nodded keenly and flicked her head in the direction of William. It pleased him that his father should be wearing a tie, albeit with a Fair Isle tank top. William tilted his head to the nurse to say all was fine, she could go. She went. He was alone with his father. And twenty other aged men whose twilight years had been savagely forced into a ramble of darkness and indignity. Perhaps, though, the gloom was cast by those who visited, those who knew them. Before. For these elderly gentlemen knew not who they were nor much about anything at all. But they all seemed perfectly happy, despite memory failing to serve them with a credible past.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Benedict!’ Mr Coombes bawled looking William straight in the eye and clasping him rigidly between his two sharp hands. ‘Benedict, my dear boy! So good of you to come.’

  ‘It’s William, Dad. Remember? Your son, Will-i-am.’

  Mr Coombes cocked his head but refused to look blankly, as if it were he who was waiting for Benedict to come to his senses. And stop larking about. He broke into a broad smile: ‘Benedict!’ he jested with love and mirth, raising his fists as if to spar jovially.

  Come, William. He is happier for you to be Benedict. And his happiness should be your primary concern. After all, it’s been years.

  William obliged and, as Benedict, raised the palms of his hands allowing his father to spring a surprisingly nimble one-two-two.

  ‘Let’s sit,’ he suggested, scouring the room.

  ‘Jolly good!’ wheezed Mr Coombes. He led William by the elbow; past a table on which dominoes was being played in slow motion and to rules most elaborate and lenient; past a long line of blanket-kneed veterans who sat gazing out of the window at nothing at all. Patiently. Passing time. Life passing them by. Quite content.

  How do you know?

  Look at their faces.

  They’re off their rockers.

  But they don’t know that.

  Mr Coombes’s velveteen chair was covered with yellowing antimacassars over the arms and at the head. A pile of newspapers dated some months previously lay to one side. A small wooden boat and a mug that William recognized instantly as one of Mac’s lay to the other. He helped his father creak and fold his body down into the chair and pulled up a footstool on which he perched.

  ‘So!’ said William.

  ‘Ah, Benedict,’ replied his father kindly, ‘so good to see you. They told me I might find you here. Long journey, I might add, but worth it. So sorry to hear of your troubles – losing a leg and a love, gracious me!’

  William fell silent. What on earth could he say. As his father rambled about France and the Gerries and wasn’t it all bloody awful, old man, he scoured his face for memories and their incumbent emotions.

  I do remember your eyebrows, though they are now quite white. Hey! You should see Mac’s! But those aren’t your teeth, are they? They’re not teeth at all – just clever prosthetics which help you speak without whistling, eat without dribbling, and give your face some semblance of dignity. But they’re not yours, they’re not you. Yours were idiosyncratically crooked on the bottom, and there was one missing on the top left. Do you remember? I do. Do you remember how you could fit a pea into the gap? How you could whistle through it? I do.

  ‘Gracious me, down on the Place de la Whatjumicall, sipping pastis and smoking those frightful tabs!’

  Poor man, poor human being – that it should come to this. You with your papery skin hanging in folds. Jowl
s like a bloodhound. Only bloodless. Witless. And insane.

  ‘Heavens, we’ll be late for the reconnoitre if we don’t watch it. Ages since I’ve played cricket, mind.’

  Allowing his father to banter on (something about steel in Sheffield and the Queen Mother), William traced his finger slowly over the condensation on the window-pane whose misty bloomed surface begged to be drawn upon. First he drew a quatrefoil at Tintern then, continuing the line, doodled an approximation of the brooch he had seen in the fruit basket. While signing his initials over and over, he realized his father had become silent. His mouth had dropped and he was staring intently straight ahead. William followed his gaze. Maybe cutting into the condensation had afforded him a snippet of the view outside. It was a glorious morning and the setting of the home was magnificent; a great arboretum festooned with snowdrops, premature daffodils breaking through the downy grass. William gazed alongside him a while.

  ‘So, Dad,’ he said merrily.

  ‘Jer,’ he replied weakly. William’s shoulders slumped involuntarily and he failed to suppress a sigh of frustration.

  Here we go.

  He turned towards his father. Still he stared fixedly at something but probably, thought William, at nothing at all. He forced himself to stroke his hand. The action was easy but to infuse it with genuine tenderness was not. Mr Coombes seemed unaware of the gesture but his hand was still, so William continued to stroke it.

  ‘Jer,’ Mr Coombes said in a soft wail, ‘je, je, je.’

  He had started to drool slightly from the corner of his mouth. His breath was sweet–sour. William tried not to notice it, certainly not to be repulsed by it, so he regarded his jeans instead and admired his muscular thighs ending at neat knees. He compared them with his father’s. Only there were no knees. William wondered whether, if the pale grey flannels were raised, there would be no legs. Just broom handles.

  ‘Jer.’ He turned immensely sad eyes to William. They were ice blue, but so pale that William was sure the last residue of pigment was slowly evaporating before him. The corners of his father’s eyes hung in red pips pressed close to the yellowing eyeball. There was sleepy dust unattended to in the corner of the left eye. Gently, William pressed his finger against it and then flicked it away against his jeans. His father did not flinch. He did not notice. He was staring at the window, through the window and way beyond the window altogether. He was motionless.

  ‘Jer, je, je, je,’ he chanted distractedly.

  William felt his fist clench.

  Shut up!

  I want to hit him.

  He drove it instead hard into his thigh and sprang to his feet.

  ‘Bye-bye, Dad,’ he said quickly, bruising a hard kiss against the old man’s forehead. He could still hear his stuttering when he reached the doorway. Somebody else’s father came scurrying up to him, using battered old carpet slippers as ice-skates on the lino floor.

  ‘Son!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Thomas! What a lovely surprise. Is it today or tomorrow that we’re going?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘To Portugal, dear boy! Oh, or is it Spain? Damn and blast! Never mind, let’s go and see if Mother has the kettle on, I know she’s baked a cake. Come, Tom!’

  As William was led nowhere, he turned for a final glance at Mr Coombes. Still sitting. And staring. He listened hard. Nothing. He looked intently; his father’s lips were still moving.

  ‘Je, je, je,’ William said to himself before handing the old man to a nurse whom he greeted quite happily as ‘Mummy’.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘Yo Chlo!’ Carl nuzzled up to her as she took the screeching kettle off the Aga and poured water over instant coffee granules.

  ‘Good morning, Carlos!’ she sang.

  ‘Who? Eh?’

  Chloë pressed her mug into his hands, took another for herself and started the process again. The kettle whistled obligingly almost immediately.

  ‘Morning youngsters!’ Gin yawned leisurely and growled back at Yap: ‘Hapless!’ she roared in warning, her eyes narrowed and her voice deep.

  ‘Morning Gin,’ said Chloë, ‘coffee?’

  ‘Poetry to my ears – and a necessity for my brain. Please!’

  Chloë gave her the second mug and ran the process one final time for her own ends.

  ‘Morn!’ sang Carl, putting great sincerity into his abbreviation.

  ‘Now, are the horses done? Good. I’ll run you into Monmouth so you can buy your tank, or whatever you intend to bulldoze Europe in! I need soap anyway and nowhere in Abergavenny stocks my par-tic-u-lar Christian Dior. Peasants! Chloë, do you want to come too?’

  Are you matchmaking?

  I might be.

  ‘To Monmouth?’ asked Chloë.

  ‘Well, I haven’t enough petrol for Timbuk-bloody-Tu! Yes, to Monmouth.’ Chloë shot a glance at Carl; he was submerging spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, hoisting them back up before they dissolved and then sucking on them sonorously. She thought of something else he could suck and then perished the thought.

  How could I!

  How indeed?

  How easily I could.

  ‘No, I’ll stay. I might take Jemima over the cross-country course.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Gin, somewhat surprised. She slid open the drawer in the kitchen table and retrieved a fifty-pound-note from the pile of old shopping lists, sweet wrappers and odd gloves. ‘Gracious,’ she said, ‘look here!’ It was the ‘x’ from the Scrabble set. ‘I do believe Dai has been cheating!’ She asked if they thought it a sackable offence. She fed the piece to the grateful greyhound. And asked them not to inform the RSPCA.

  ‘The thing about sex,’ said Chloë to Mr and Mrs Andrews once the grumble of the Land Rover had faded, ‘is that it always seems such a big deal. That one-night stand I had, just before Brett – I was so determined that it should be flippant, fun and forgettable. What happened? I spent a week fretting and regretting! It was a big deal. And sex with Brett; Heavens, banish the memory or let me redo the past! It was when I watched that nature programme about pigs tracking truffles that I realized where and when I’d heard such noises!’

  Mrs Andrews stifled a giggle. Chloë shuddered and left the dressing-table, crossing over to the wardrobe. Cranking open the door, she inhaled deeply and then closed it again. She sat in the old chair and looked over to the dressing-table. Funny how swiftly Mr and Mrs Andrews became just a postcard. Made of paper. Not real at all. She returned to the dressing-table and brushed her hair again. It needed it. The Andrews sprang back into life. She needed them.

  ‘You see, I don’t think I’ve ever really made love. There hasn’t been anyone who’s made me love them for me to want to do anything but lie there and oblige. But,’ she said, glancing at Mr Andrews’s breeches, ‘I think I’d rather like to make love with Carl.’

  The Andrews seemed to think that this was a reasonable idea.

  ‘Only, well, he’s never actually asked.’

  Mrs Andrews pointed out that Chloë was lucky to live in an age of sexual equality whereas she was pretty much restricted to waiting demurely in her boudoir, to say nothing of the confines of canvas. Chloë gazed at her frock and wondered if the lacy bits itched. For all she knew, Mrs A was very probably not wearing knickers, horny as hell, waiting for Gainsborough to finish for the day so she could hoick up her skirt and grant her husband swift entry. Right there. On the bench. Out of doors. In the estate.

  ‘Go on,’ she seemed to be saying to Chloë, ‘give him one from me!’

  She couldn’t possibly!

  Chloë looked again and glanced away quickly.

  She couldn’t possibly.

  ‘But, wouldn’t that be a little wanton? Shouldn’t I wait for him to do the asking?’

  Mrs Andrews raised her eyebrow mockingly. ‘We’re not talking marriage here, only sex, dear girl!’

  ‘What do I do then?’ Chloë retorted. ‘Come straight out with it and say “I say Carl, fancy a shag”? I think
not.’ She pranged the bristles on her hairbrush and pressed them gently against her cheek. ‘Perhaps a little note: “Carl, Carl, come to me and take me to the stars and back”? No, no. We’re never alone for long enough. And when we are, we seem to enjoy kissing and foraging for its own sake, not as a preamble to some greater sexual plane. I’m having fun as it is – but I would like to go further. I’d like to try. I think. Before we part, just so I know, just so I won’t regret.’

  Mr Andrews was not listening, he was arguing with Gainsborough who had painted out the pheasant he had shot for his wife and which currently lay in her lap.

  ‘Look at the bird!’ he exclaimed to the artist. ‘What a specimen!’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Gainsborough, doffing a raised eyebrow to Mrs Andrews who, in turn, winked long and slow at Chloë.

  A letter arrived second post from Jasper and Peregrine. Their advice was sound and welcome.

  Chloë ducks, thrilled to hear your news, you saucy hussy you! Jocelyn would be proud. Remember, condoms are a must but operatics are a turn-off! The same goes for weeping. And farmyard impersonations.

  That night, Chloë climbed into bed without a peep through the curtains. Too much of a distraction. She wanted to think on what to do, a plan of action, which course to take.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said to the Andrews though she looked up at the rafters, ‘what with his lovely orange Volkswagen combie-thingy that he bought today, Carl is now leaving in a couple of weeks. Half of me wonders if I’ll feel a flop if he goes and we haven’t. The other half of me thinks what a perfect opportunity it would be to do It. No strings attached, no relationship to go horribly wrong. The other half – damn! I can’t have three! Another part of me says perhaps it will spoil things if we do do It. Maybe it won’t be earth-moving. And then what would be the point? I like the kissing and the rummaging. It’s so furtive and exciting. Safe, too. And nice.’

  Mr Andrews asked his wife what the girl was wittering on about. Mrs Andrews merely tutted, said ‘you wouldn’t understand,’ took the pheasant from her lap and flung it over her shoulder behind the oak tree.