Chloe Read online

  William looked out over the brittle gorse to the sea, today grey and flat. He often judged his mood by the ocean and found they usually corresponded.

  His cottage was now in sight and he was hopeful of making it there before a dinner invitation was offered. There would be little in his fridge but he would much rather go hungry. Lurching and rolling up the pocked and rutted track to William’s cottage, Morwenna spoke to him via the rear-view mirror and he answered her eyes accordingly.

  ‘Supper? Later? Eightish? Knowing you, your fridge’ll be bare.’

  ‘Probably. But d’you mind if I don’t?’ he said carefully. ‘You know what London does to me!’

  ‘Mind! Me!’ she started. ‘Suit yourself, my boy!’

  William placed a hand on her leg because it seemed he ought to, and kissed her cheek likewise, lightly and without looking. He gathered his gear and walked towards his cottage. Without turning around he raised his hand in a motionless, emotionless wave. Morwenna read it as a halt.

  She drove back to Penzance, stopping at the cliffs near Wicca to gaze at the horizon and gulp down the fortifying air.

  ‘Damn it!’ she said aloud, her voice swallowed by the wind. ‘I forgot to tell him that the Bay Tree Bistro want to commission a whole service. A hundred and eighty pieces. Nice little earner. And for William, too, of course. God forbid it will be too late. Keep him sweet a while longer. Just until it’s finished.’

  She flexed her fingers which had started to ache in the chill of the air. She rued the fact that her knuckles looked bony, large, and she wondered why the nail beds were so purple. The sea looked ominous and dark. She shuddered and returned to her car, driving to Penzance with the radio on loud so that she could not hear herself think about William.

  Well Chloë? Have you gone yet?

  It’s raining, has been for days.

  You’re still in Islington.

  I’m still here.

  Chloë munched a mince pie thoughtfully in front of Mr and Mrs Andrews. ‘Wales’ nestled unopened at Mr Andrews’s feet, remaining but a daunting concept in a forsaken corner of Chloë’s mind. She felt tempted to open the envelope but sticky fingers were today’s good excuse not to. Good King Wenceslas looked out from the small transistor radio on Chloë’s bedside table. She hummed with him, distractedly. Her first Christmas without Jocelyn was looming.

  Is she at peace? she wondered as she sponged crumbs from a chest of drawers with her finger.

  Couldn’t she have waited a while longer? she rued as she wiped her finger along the picture frame and winced at the streak of dust that confronted her.

  Just one more Christmas? she lamented, sinking down on to her lumpy mattress and tracing a new route across the cracks on the ceiling.

  Oh the joys of renting! she cursed, desperate for Jocelyn to advise her to move, dear girl.

  Where to?

  Ha! Knowing Jocelyn, bloody Wales or Ireland, Scotland even.

  What to do. Where to go.

  And when.

  Why should Chloë procrastinate so? Shouldn’t she leap at such an opportunity? Not only is this the chance to rid herself of lousy job and awful boyfriend in one fell swoop, she is also being given the means to find her feet, her future and her fate. But the envelope marked ‘Wales’ remains unopened; Chloë has returned from another depleting day at work and Brett’s arrival is imminent.

  If her treasured godmother’s death less than a month before had fractured Chloë’s life, then her last will and testament had thrown her world into quandary. In Chloë’s twenty-six years, there had been few decisions to make yet here she was being guided and goaded by a dead woman to make two that were potentially momentous. Retrieving a framed photograph of Brett, Chloë tapped his chest sternly.

  ‘Jocelyn never liked you much,’ she told him while he grinned back at her, suave and vain. She pushed her thumb over his face until it was covered completely. ‘And I never actively sought her approval because deep down I think I knew there was little that warranted it.’

  Chloë kept her thumb over the photograph and drummed the fingers of her free hand against the armrest of the chair. Though now headless, Brett’s stance, with hands on hips and one knee cocked, spoke reams of his arrogance and vanity. She smacked her hand flat over the photograph so that only a palm tree and an innocuous tuft of hair peeped through. She ceased her finger thrumming and stared straight ahead at nothing at all and thereby deep into the very nub of the matter. Chloë placed the photograph frame face down on top of the television and flicked aimlessly through the channels. Santa Claus met her on every one and Chloë was thankful that she did not have satellite.

  Knowing that Brett could swagger in at any moment, brandishing his infuriating trademark ‘Ciao’, produced little spurts of adrenalin which made her pace about and fiddle with things that could well have been left just so.

  The curtains are hanging fine, Chloë; there is no fluff on that cushion. The pictures are dead straight.

  Poor girl, she’s tried twice before to sever her dealings with Brett. The first time, she located him on his mobile phone but fumbled over her words so badly that she ended up apologizing: ‘Oh nothing, it’s nothing, I’m just being daft.’ The second time, Brett beat her to it, yet while he was flourishing his final ‘ciao’s, Chloë found herself pleading for another go.

  ‘The thing to do,’ Chloë said to Mrs Andrews, ‘is not to mince my words.’

  ‘Precisely,’ her confidante encouraged, ‘straight to the point. Plain English. No beating about the bush. And no metaphors!’

  Brett has arrived and he fills the doorway with his frame, his bulky silhouette backlit from the light in the communal hall.

  ‘Ciao!’

  ‘Quick, close the door – it’s bitter!’ says Chloë a little too cheerily.

  ‘What a day, I’m so stressed out,’ he growls, slumping into the chair and up-ending the photograph frame so that he can admire himself, tanned and in Jamaica, in December and in Islington. ‘What a frig of a day.’

  He kicks off his shoes, stretching his legs out, imposing on Chloë’s space, spouting a soliloquy peppered, as usual, with ‘I’ and ‘me’.

  ‘What’s cookin’? I’m starvin’.’ Chloë hates the way he drops his ‘g’s. She fiddles with picture frames and finds fluff on cushions. He checks the messages on his mobile phone. Something inside Chloë is burning and welling. It’s Jocelyn. It’s Mrs Andrews. ‘Look at him,’ they seem to be spurring Chloë, ‘the repugnant lump!’

  ‘Brett,’ Chloë hears her voice suddenly escape the safety of things left unsaid, ‘I have something to tell you. There’s something I need to say.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he twists his toes and burps under his breath.

  ‘You know bread?’ Chloë starts, shaking down a few locks of her hair to hide behind.

  ‘Huh?’ He regards her suspiciously, curling his lip. ‘Bread?’

  ‘Mm!’ she agrees, tucking the curls temporarily behind her ears. ‘Once it’s stale, it can never truly be revived. Not even if it was once quite tasty.’

  ‘I’m bloody star-vin’,’ Brett snaps, caressing his belly which rumbles like the thunder slowly etching its way across his brow. ‘Are you tellin’ me that’s all there is? Bread that’s gone off?’

  ‘That’s what it is. Was,’ Chloë reasons, suddenly radiant, ‘and well past its sell-by date.’

  It was only when Chloë heard the communal door bang downstairs that she allowed herself to sink into the chair and shake uncontrollably. After a while she picked up the photograph frame and chuckled; laughing out loud until tears of mirth oozed from the corners of her eyes and her ribs creaked for mercy.

  I did it!

  ‘Mrs A, I did it! I really, actually, did.’

  ‘You did indeed, dear. Metaphors and all.’

  Carefully, Chloë removed the photograph and tore it methodically into strips which she then twisted and coaxed into an origami star – a skill she learnt many years before not knowing quite when
it would have its use. She contemplated the spiky form and rotated it, catching a little bit of Brett’s hand here, a nose and half a mouth there; an elbow, part of a tennis shoe, a palm frond. Capped teeth.

  In the ball of my hand, let alone under my thumb!

  ‘Bye-bye,’ she sang, tipping the origami from hand to hand. ‘The first time I ever stood up to you was ultimately the last too!’ She listens to the silence and loves the peace it promises. ‘Were you that “awful”?’ she whispers at Brett’s faceted face. ‘Yes, I suppose you were.’ Chloë went over to the window, peering intensely up at the ink-navy sky wishing for a star. ‘Bossy,’ she clarified, holding the origami star aloft and catching a glance of Brett’s mouth; ‘tactless,’ she shuddered, ‘chauvinistic, too.’ She crossed to the mirror and sprung ringlets of her hair through her fingers, remembering how Brett had referred to it, when wet, as ‘positively pubic’. Well Chloë, he’s losing his!

  She settled snugly into the armchair and contemplated the fractured photograph once more. ‘You were but a cheap processed oaf,’ she said, proud of the pun, ‘and I think, actually, I’d rather enjoy something more wholesome and nourishing now.’ With that, she tossed the splintered, diminished image of Brett deftly into the waste-paper basket.

  Just the ‘lousy’ job now, Chloë; time to free yourself from the self-obsessed shackles of the lowly paid and not very good inner London Polyversity where you’ve shouldered the role of student-communication-liaison-welfare-officer for four thankless years. Think of it! No more students-in-need, the Sins that frequently run amok in the already cramped Islington studio you’ve been renting.

  Chloë’s flat was presently overrun by an eighteen-year-old first-year anorexic, a second-year suicidal with girlfriend trouble and a third-year in the throes of a pre-finals breakdown. They littered her flat and demanded round-the-clock counselling and unrestricted access to fridge (apart from the anorexic) and telephone (often simultaneously). Demanding indeed, with pay and praise as paltry as they were.

  Finally, on a turbulent December afternoon just a day away from the end of term, bolstered by Jocelyn’s legacy and inspired by the map of the United Kingdom, Chloë has decided to resign. She has her eye on a moment to savour and worries that if she procrastinates, or changes into something more becoming, the moment would be lost. Then Lent term would be mercilessly upon her. And Wales would remain unopened. Wales would be forgotten. Closed.

  She could not possibly insult Jocelyn so.

  And there is no law against handing in one’s notice wearing jeans and trainers that should be restricted to solitary evenings safely inside.

  ‘But Chloë, the students need you – you’re their lifeline. If it’s a rise you want, we could, at a stretch, offer you one per cent over three years?’

  Chloë is surrounded by lino and melamine, strip lighting and orange plastic chairs. They are chipped and unsteady. Rain courses relentlessly down the steel-framed windows. A small puddle is forming on the flaking grey window-sill. It is unbelievably drab and depressing and Chloë feels all the more resolute for it. She rejects the pay rise and leaves guilt firmly in the room when she closes the door quietly behind her.

  Well, if Chloë Cadwallader is not to be a student-communication-liaison-welfare-officer, with a boyfriend called Brett and a rented studio in Islington, what is she to be?

  On Christmas Eve, she has absolutely no idea. And now there is no Jocelyn to turn to for advice. And yet, was not her godmother still overseeing Chloë’s education and welfare with as much concern and motivation during her death as she had during her life? Was not her legacy precisely that there was no better place for Chloë to start in the worldwide scheme of things than in the great British Isles?

  ‘Europe,’ Jocelyn had once said to Chloë, ‘is enthralling, the United States vast. Africa is captivating, Asia a jewel. Australasia is glorious and fiendishly far away but Britain, Britain is the garden of the world with secrets of joy lurking in every tiny nook.’

  Jocelyn’s bequest was that her god-daughter should discover and share those secrets. Who knows what she might find. And where. How exciting and what an opportunity. Grab it! Go! Have you gone yet?

  Christmas Eve in Islington. Chloë has pinned Jocelyn’s map above her bed and as she gazes at the four countries, she decides that now is the time to greet Wales. With Mr Andrews’s encouragement, she extends a tentative hand out towards the envelope. But she stops midway and wonders if it is all a little too far-fetched. So Jocelyn had deemed Chloë’s job deplorable and had thought Brett loathsome, but was a voyage to the distant corners of the United Kingdom really the answer? Was it a logical solution? Was it necessary?

  Was it even sensible?

  (‘People who are forever sensible are interminably dull, Chloë sweet. As drab as a black brolly in Islington.’)

  Was it a good idea? Realistically?

  ‘I’ve quit job and jilted the boyf – won’t that do?’ Chloë says aloud with just a touch of a whine to her voice. ‘What if I just move away from Islington – say, try Putney? How about I look for a job in a nice private firm – market research or something? Mr Andrews, please advise!’

  Mr Andrews, however, remains silent, his grin stony and fixed. And Chloë suspects that there is little point consulting Mrs Andrews who appears, on Christmas Eve, the sort of lady who would not speak unless spoken to but might, with a giggle and a glance, sing a little ditty if cajoled and flattered.

  Chloë does not want entertaining, she wants someone to tell her what to do. She can no longer reach out to Jocelyn and seek her advice.

  And yet it is Jocelyn’s advice that is in dispute today.

  Wales, still enveloped beyond reach, is yet tantalizingly close.

  ‘I’ll start packing tomorrow,’ Chloë says decisively.

  Mr Andrews cocks his rifle approvingly, Mrs Andrews giggles.

  THREE

  William bundled the contents of the holdall into his washing-machine, retrieving his toothbrush and razor at the last minute. He waited patiently for the whir and clicks to commence and then watched the water trickle shyly over the laundry. Satisfied that the cycle was under way (it only ever seemed to start under paternal encouragement) he confirmed that there was indeed nothing in the fridge and left the kitchen for his studio.

  The studio was a stone’s throw from the kitchen, which was itself a pebble’s roll from everywhere else; there being neither corridors nor landings at William’s cottage. Incongruously called Peregrine’s Gully, the cottage was compact and thickset. It reminded William of an Exmoor pony; essentially native, ruggedly pretty and inherently suited to its environment. It sat, small and brave, in a gentle acre meadow of its own, flanked on one side by a scar of gorse, on the other by the poor land petering out to the cliff edge. Local sheep often gazed longingly at the grass on the inside of William’s fence and while he was not averse to a visit and a polite nibble, a bellow from Barbara invariably saw them off.

  Barbara was a goat who had sauntered in through a gap in the fence soon after William had arrived at Peregrine’s Gully. He had shooed her and chased her and smacked her rump with a slipper but she had stood her ground, twitched her beard and fixed her yellow eyes on him, lovingly and unrelentingly. He had growled at her, he had waved wooden implements at her and he had ignored her, but still she stayed, nibbling the edges of the grass in a dainty and ingenuous manner. None of the farmers claimed her and a notice in the local paper brought no one. So she was invited, begrudgingly at first, to stay. William called her Barbara after her bleat.

  Barbara adored him; following at his heels whilst he pottered around the garden, standing for hours with her forelegs just inside the studio door while he worked, looking up at him conversationally when he sat to eat in the kitchen, staring alongside him at the washing machine as he coaxed it to work. Barbara gave the postman short shrift and frequently chased cars down the drive or stood defiant, stamping, right in the middle as they approached. She loathed Morwenna. In the early
days, she trod on her, chewed her clothing and defecated as close to her as she could. Now, she just glowered at her witheringly or ignored her entirely whilst making eyes at William. Invariably, Morwenna brought carrot butts and lettuce ends as a peace offering, sometimes even ginger-nuts as a bribe, but these placated Barbara only temporarily.

  It was the windows at Peregrine’s Gully that had decided William to rent the property. They had good deep sills affording place and space to his ceramics, and provided some respite from the invasive winter chill. Of the two small bedrooms upstairs, he slept in the one which looked out to the cliffs and onward to the sea. It contained only a bed, a tea chest for a bedside table and the incongruous chintzy curtains that had come with the cottage. The other room, however, was stuffed with the stuff of bedrooms: guitars, books, an enormous mirror framed by driftwood for which he had exchanged a nicely glazed set of mugs, an oversize whisky bottle half full of small change, two chests of deep drawers stuffed full of thick jumpers, and a Victorian oak cupboard he had bought for a song wherein the rest of his clothes were housed. Such items, essentials or paraphernalia, were banned from his bedroom for it was the bare white walls, the uninterrupted run of floorboards, which provided him with the empty canvas, the armature, for new works to take root in the fertile hours of daybreak.

  Downstairs, the front door opened directly into the sitting-room but William only ever used the craftsmen’s entrance at the rear of the cottage. Consequently a thick Turkish rug bought at great expense and inconvenience whilst backpacking some years ago, hung down from door frame to floor. The back wall was papered with books which sat crammed on bookshelves William had built by hand, leaving a gap of just an inch between tallest book and ceiling, and between bottom shelf and floor. He was not bothered about any alphabetical or thematic ordering but arranged the volumes according to height and the spines’ aesthetic appeal. Viewed from the other end of the room, the books rose and fell in a sinuous sequence, rather like organ pipes or ordnance survey contours. Between the rug-door and the book-wall, a large hand-built terracotta pot four foot tall sat fat, proud and burnished to perfection. To the side of it, a selection of umbrellas and walking sticks, whose provenances were long forgotten, were propped precariously. The rest of the room was taken up by two incredibly easy chairs bought at auction and in serious need of reupholstering, and a stout Scandinavian wood-burning stove. Still warm, despite William’s three-day absence. It ought to be – it cost William almost as much as he made last year.