Chloe (15 page)

Though not warm, the weather is milder and buds crack out over the horse chestnut trees as she rides by. The grass underfoot is vivid green, the snowdrops have gone and the daffodils and crocuses are browning slightly. Robins are still going about their business but now the curlews hold top note in the symphony that fills the valley. Islington might never have existed. Chloë knows now that she will never return. Brett is a name which causes her only a slight shudder. No nausea. Not any more.

‘Brett?' asked Mrs Andrews, creasing her brow to aid recollection. ‘Who he?'

‘Who indeed!' declared Chloë triumphant.

Chloë started to pack; very slowly and without much enthusiasm. She knew that Gin had an envelope marked ‘Ireland', whose contents would provide the canvas on which she would colour the next season. She half wished that the greyhound might eat it but she wondered too if it might smell of Mitsuko and she would just like to see if it did. And then perhaps feed it to the greyhound. Up in The Rafters, she has started to make neat piles, a futile activity where a rucksack is involved, but it calmed her to do so. She has not thought about Carl very much the last few days, certainly not to the extent to which she longed for him soon after his departure almost three weeks previously. Having Gin to herself has been a source of comfort as well as entertainment; she was Jocelyn's great friend after all and Chloë has always felt safe and at ease in the company of Jocelyn's close circle.

Frequently, the two of them ‘talk Jocelyn': if the mood catches the one, the other is sure to be infected. They do not so much reminisce, for such an activity requires both parties to have been present in the past, so to speak. More, they mull over memories of Jocelyn, describing her colours and remembering her traits.

‘Remember sherry at five?'

‘An institution!'

‘With its own terminology!'

‘Time for a Tipple!'

‘It seems funny with good old Carl gone!' chipped Gin merrily, placing ‘waltz' on a triple word score, ‘don't you think? Chloë?'

‘Hmm,' hummed Chloë, using the ‘z' for ‘quiz' with the ‘q' on a double letter.

She smiled lightly.
She's itching to know but too awkward to ask!

Gin was becoming somewhat predictable in her ready deployment of Carl's name during conversation with, or in front of, Chloë. Whether Chloë was in her sight or merely in earshot, Gin ensured Carl's name came to the fore. To Gin's thinly masked frustration (ample eyebrow-lifting and measured sighs), Chloë remained commendably discreet.

‘My letters have me beat,' said Dai who was ignorant of his dyslexia and thus profoundly embarrassed by what he presumed to be an innate intelligence deficiency. Calling ‘Nos da' over his shoulder, he grumbled out of the kitchen somewhere into the night. Chloë and Gin played on until Gin won by twenty points.

‘Most unusual,' she said, ‘but your mind wasn't really on it, was it?'

Chloë conceded with a shrug and a meek smile. Gin sighed and raised her eyebrows.

‘I'll bet you're thinking of Ireland!' said Gin triumphantly, knowing full well that she was not and hoping therefore for denial and explanation.

‘Ish,' admitted Chloë without qualifying.

‘When do you want to set sail?' asked Gin, changing the subject with you-know-you-can-confide-in-me merriness. ‘Jocelyn told me that you should pack your bags when the first daffs were up.'

‘They've been up a while!' said Chloë with some consternation.

‘Yes,' agreed Gin, ‘but
most
premature.'

‘I've sort of set the end of the month for my departure – if you can bear me. Perhaps the first week of April?'

‘Wise,' said Gin, ‘wise. But don't make it April Fool's Day – you'll find the Irish batty enough without a calendric excuse to go raving do-lally!'

Chloë arranged the Scrabble counters into increasingly complex tessellations, and jumped at Gin's suggestion to ‘talk Jocelyn'.

‘Funny that Jocelyn never married,' she pondered.

Gin did not respond but busied herself making a ‘g' out of the counters. Chloë continued: ‘For my part, selfishly, I suppose I'm quite glad – perhaps I would not have felt so special if she had had children of her own?' Gin cocked her head and lifted an eyebrow in a ‘maybe'.

‘Do you know Lord Badborough? In Wiltshire?' Chloë asked. ‘We used to picnic in his grounds – and often in his drawing-room if it rained!'

‘Yes,' said Gin quite freely, ‘met the chap once or twice.'

‘Was he, you know, Jocelyn's b–' Chloë paused, prophesying at once how daft ‘boyfriend' would sound, ‘– beau?'

‘For a little while,' said Gin openly. She had finished with the Scrabble pieces and was now counting the loose change in the kitchen table drawer, not to mention a number of twenty-pound notes.

‘He used to kiss her most greedily!' said Chloë, thinking of Carl without being able to remember what he looked like.

‘Bet she never blushed!' mused Gin, as she replaced the coins and notes in the drawer.

‘No,' remembered Chloë, estimating that there must have been nearly seventy pounds, ‘she received him most graciously – without humouring him or pandering to his desires.'

‘That,' said Gin, ‘was probably easy for her – Badders was really just one of a long line of suitors who waited patiently and fruitlessly.'

Now it was Chloë's turn to fall silent. She cleaned her nails with an obliging fork. ‘Therein lay Jocelyn's skill,' decided Gin, ‘that she
never
toyed with any of them. They all knew that they stood not a cat's chance in a kennels, but her company was such a delight that they were happy with whatever level she set.'

‘Poor things,' rued Chloë, imagining a hundred of the finest landed gentry fetching pheasant and a good Rothschild bought at auction, laying on the silver and the Elgar to woo Jocelyn by. Expectant and forever optimistic, lavishing attention and hope on her.

‘Poor Jocelyn!' exclaimed Gin with very real woe, shaking her head and looking as though she might weep. Chloë cocked her head and asked ‘Why' with her eyebrows. Gin did not meet her gaze but looked far beyond it and straight back into the past. ‘The poor duck,' she said mistily, ‘she loved, she lost and she never found another for she refused even to look.'

‘Was it not reciprocated?' Chloë asked, mulling over this, imagining a man who never knew he was The One; another who spurned her; or another who died, perhaps.

‘Oh yes, Chloë,' said Gin, ‘he was as deeply in love with her as she was with him.'

This puzzled Chloë. Man meets woman. Love is mutual and deep. Love, surely, is happy ever after. No compromise. No alternative. No procrastination.
Amor vincit omnia
. Simple.

‘Who
was
he?' Chloë asked, suddenly appalled that there was an aspect to Jocelyn completely new to her, that she had not known, that she had not been invited to see. She racked her memory but was unable to locate anyone who might fit this role.

‘Did Jocelyn never talk of him to you?' Gin obviously felt compromised and her cheeks bristled red accordingly. Chloë continued to rack, squinting hard at the centre of the table in doing so.

‘No, I don't think so.'

Gin shared Chloë's focus on a whorl in the pine.

‘You'd know so if she had.'

‘I don't recall,' said Chloë slowly, hoping that she was masking the hurt from her voice.

‘You would, I assure you, you would,' said Gin kindly.

‘Might you tell me, Gin?' asked Chloë, wondering if a light tone might encourage Gin by dampening the strangely grave significance of the situation.

‘Gracious girl!' Gin declared, reddening again until her chin was the only part of her face not burgundy. ‘Couldn't possibly. It would be like going behind Jocelyn's back.'

Initially it hurt Chloë that there was a fundamental part of Jocelyn that had been kept private from her. But, predictably, she accepted and respected quite quickly. Jocelyn would have had her reasons and Chloë's best interests at heart. Surely. And her privacy was her prerogative after all.

I've had my own secrets after all.

Yes?

Goodness, of course! From acquiring trinkets from the corner shop without paying, to the infamous one-night stand.

Ah.

Just the once, though. For both.

Chloë and Gin continued to talk Jocelyn at least once a day, but steered a respectful curve away from anything that compromised her privacy too deeply. Chloë granted Jocelyn's wish that Gin should be spared no detail of her funeral. Gin clapped with glee on hearing that there had been champagne, and she wept when told that the sound of Louis Armstrong accompanied the coffin.

‘I should have gone!' she cried.

‘But Jocelyn gave you special dispensation,' said Chloë gently.

‘Bugger that! I could have pulled myself together and made it. If I can manage Monmouth – which is a good forty minutes – then London really should not pose a problem.'

‘Three and a half hours?'

‘I could have taken breaks. And Valium.'

‘Hyde Park Corner?'

‘I'd have taken the train!'

‘Changing lines? And then Paddington Station?'

‘I'd have hired a driver!'

‘And trusted
his
driving?'

‘Chloë Cadwallader,' sighed Gin, placing her hand over Chloë's, ‘you know me very well.'

‘I tell you, Gin,' said Chloë kindly, sandwiching Gin's hand between both of hers, ‘when I first learned I was coming here, that you were a friend but one I had no recollection of, well I was a little concerned. But having been here three months, I can understand why you are loath to leave the farm. You are needed here because you are the very bones of the place. It couldn't function without you and,' she broke, hoping it would not sound patronizing as it was meant only as a compliment, ‘I doubt whether you could function without the farm.'

Gin chewed over Chloë's insight and was not offended in the least. As she contemplated how soundly Chloë thought, and how this quality was indeed Jocelyn's legacy, she smiled and nodded and mouthed ‘I know'.

‘I would have liked to have been there. To have paid my last respects in a dignified way. To have heard Satchmo. To have become drunk on good Krug. Though I love Jocelyn the more for insisting that I was not there, I still wish that I could have been. Said a proper, fitting farewell.'

‘No one judged you, Gin. Least of all, Jocelyn. She'd have shuddered in her shroud if you had turned up on Valium and with a chauffeur – you'd have quite stolen her show! And say, just say, a hapless reshuffle of very little point had occurred in your absence? Can you imagine the consequences?'

‘Dear girl, you're quite right of course. So terribly young – and yet furnished with such wisdom! How can that be?'

‘It's having Jocelyn for a godmother,' said Chloë. ‘Had,' she rued. Gin squeezed her hand and winked largely.

‘Chloë,' she declared, ‘I think it's Time for a Tipple! To the drawing-room! We'll have sherry in our socks. We'll drink to Jocelyn and then play Monopoly.'

W
ith two days to go, Chloë tucked down for an early night. She now has the envelope marked ‘Ireland' and Mr and Mrs Andrews are looking after it. She remembers how ‘Wales' was dwarfed by them for weeks, nestling in a corner of the cornfield, but now, with the Andrews superimposed in miniature on to card, they teeter on top of this new envelope; the ‘I' of ‘Ireland' being quite as tall as Mr Andrews. Unfortunately, there was no trace of Mitsuko; Gin took a great sniff too but could detect nothing. Chloë has peeped at the contents. Another map, apparently culled from the same road atlas. Another letter, as yet unread.

During a particularly good dream, a loud crack woke Chloë. Initially she thought it part of the dream so she lay quiet and tried to remember what the noise might have been. Satisfied that it was probably the burly woodman in the smock chopping logs (the muscles in his forearms were delightful), she decided to go back to sleep and see if she couldn't get a little closer to him. Before she made it to the start of the forest, another noise intercepted. She sat up in bed and wondered who or what was playing games with her mind or her sleep.
Had
she heard something? She'd just have to sit tight and wait awhile. Before long, another noise. It could have been an owl for the uninitiated, but Chloë knew well the call of the local owls. And Chloë knew Carl better.

Thud. Something hit the window. Chloë had neither the wits nor the inclination to suppress her squeal. Without checking her hair, or buttoning her nightdress, she whipped back the curtains and flung open the window. It was pitch-black and starless.

‘Psst!'

‘Hey Chlo!' He sounded wonderfully throaty in his best whisper. Because he had been gone for shorter than the span of an animal's memory, none of the farmyard four-leggeds reacted adversely to his voice. Desmond gave a low whicker but he did so frequently during the night anyway. In the kitchen, the dogs and cats cocked ears but once they had detected no stranger they settled back into sleep.

‘What on earth are you doing here?' Chloë tried hard to whisper but was unable to prevent the involuntary edges of her voice coming through. She could make him out now, a break in the clouds allowing the new moon to send a soft light down to him. He was breathtaking. Chloë waved. He saluted.

‘Hey Chlo!'

‘Carl!'

‘You want to mate?'

‘What?'

‘Mate!'

‘Pardon?'

‘For-nic-ate!'

‘I'm coming!'

‘Yih? You bet you will be, girl!'

Chloë has no idea what she is doing, what she should be doing and what she most certainly should not be doing.