Chloe (19 page)

‘Morwenna!'

‘William!' she says cordially. She is wearing a navy blue woollen coat and dark leather gloves. She looks smart. A grown-up. Intimidating. A little. ‘Am I disturbing you?'

‘Well,' he falters, glancing at the perfect cylinder begging to be moved into a vase.

‘I'll not be long.' Her tone is businesslike and unnerves William further.

‘Everything OK?' He wipes his hands on his apron but stays astride his wheel. Morwenna twitches her face and gives a strange half-smile.

‘I've come with your birthday present,' she says brightly, thrusting her hands into her pockets and perching on a small corner of the table. William looks perplexed.

‘But my birthday's not until August!'

‘I do know that – but I thought you'd like it early.'

‘Oh!'

What else could he say? What was it he was going to say?

‘I thought you ought to start your thirties as you mean them to continue,' says Morwenna with a generous smile. William looks quietly for the present but, apart from her hands, there is obviously nothing in her pockets.

‘Thirty!' he exclaims. ‘Don't remind me!'

‘It reminds me how long ago it was for me,' says Morwenna morosely, silently chastising herself for doing so. William looks at the clay awkwardly, anticipating the you-think-I'm-old-and-ugly tirade.

‘Very nice,' he says instead.

‘What is?' Morwenna demands.

‘A birthday present four months early!'

An awkward silence descends for a moment-hour. Eventually, Morwenna rises and walks to the door before turning to face William, tinged by hazy sunlight, at the other end of the studio.

‘For your birthday, William, for your thirtieth, I am giving you your freedom. I want you to turn thirty unencumbered. I want you to be able to look back on all this as something that happened in your twenties – something that was fun at first though it soured inevitably.'

Now that is some soliloquy! She's taken the words from the jumble inside his mouth and placed them squarely, clearly, in the open. Out in the open, they've closed the regrettable situation. William parts his lips in the effort to make sense of all she is saying. Morwenna is tempted to cross over and kiss them one last time. William's lips are full and sensuous and he used them divinely. And most definitely in the past tense.

A split second hangs awkwardly in the heavy air between them. Morwenna is tempted to back up all she had said with ‘If that's what you want'. Similarly William, who hates confrontation on things emotional, fights from saying ‘Morwenna, don't worry, it will all be fine. I just need time'.

But neither speaks.

Waves of gratitude pass from one to the other. Though it hurts, Morwenna is relieved that William has made it easy for her by not contesting. He is enormously thankful that she has spared him the task he was dreading. And he is grateful to her, for he craves freedom.

‘OK,' he says gently, shrugging his shoulders and nodding slowly with respect.

‘OK, then!' Morwenna says cheerfully and with dignity.

‘So,' says William, ‘no more dinner services?'

Morwenna laughs lightly but with an edge. ‘Oh no!' she says. ‘Neither dinner services nor dinners themselves. You need have no more relations, let alone contact, with either Saxby Ceramics or its proprietor.'

For a good ten minutes after she left, William sat askew at his wheel and regarded the space she had left behind. A space indeed, but not a hole in his life, not something gaping that would need filling – just space. He felt a breeze travel over to him from the open door. He could taste the spring and smell the promise of summer.

At last. And it had been so easy. He laughed briefly. Barbara appeared at the door. He turned away from her and back to the clay cylinder: plain, precise and with potential. He smiled broadly and shook his head in amazement, sharing another moment when he and the clay were inextricable. You could use no ornithological analogies with William; Morwenna had not clipped his wings, nor was she now setting him free to fly on his own. Nor had he left the nest. Or mated for life.

Morwenna Saxby, he realized, had got her hands on him when he was in his malleable early twenties. She had formed him into this straight-sided cylinder; upright but featureless, strong but somewhat dull.

William set the wheel spinning. He slowed the speed. Twisting, he dipped one hand down within the vessel and made a knuckle with the finger of the other which he placed against the outside of the form. In harmony, instinctively, he drew both hands upwards and outwards. The clay travelled and grew and stretched, and the form opened out under his hands. Its body curved before widening beautifully; like the mouth of a trumpet, like speeded footage of a flower opening. William hummed cheerfully. The work was good and it was pleasing. The form: strong and individual.

The cylinder was gone. But it was still the backbone of this new form in front of him.

‘Robert?'

‘Darling!'

‘You busy?'

‘Heavens no, it's dead this afternoon, quite dead – like most of my patients, ha! It's a typical A and P Wednesday.'

‘A and P – arthritis and piles?'

‘No, no! Nothing nearly as exciting, merely the Aches and Pains brigade – they invariably turn up mid-week in the hope of taking a legitimate sicky from school or work for the rest of the week.'

‘And I bet you're as attentive to Mr Hypochondriac as you are to all your patients.'

‘My bedside manner, you mean?'

‘Ho! I for one can't get enough of your bedside manner, Dr Noakes. Actually, there are a few A's and P's of my own that need closer inspection!'

‘Merz Saxby! Sounds like an emergency! I'll be round to make you say “Ahh” just as soon as I can.'

‘I'm positively bedridden.'

‘Good. Stay there. I'm on call this evening but I'd rather be called out from the wrong side of your bed than from the right side of mine.'

‘Dr Noakes, it'll be a pleasure to have you, regardless of interruptions. Oh! By the way, I did it – I sacked William Coombes!'

‘Oh well bloody done! You can do without these prima donnas – how did he take it?'

‘Quite well, it must be said. Sulked a little and said he didn't want to do any more dinner services anyway.'

‘No grip on reality! Whether this is down to the artistic temperament or just general immaturity I've yet to decide. Mind you, what's the odds that he'll come to you with his tail between his legs and an armful of crockery when he's feeling the pinch?'

‘He won't.'

‘Just wait till he has a hole in his pocket – he'll be begging you to sell his ashtrays!'

‘He most certainly won't.'

‘You sound very sure.'

‘Oh I am. I'll not be hearing from William Coombes again. Though I may hear
of
him – he is a talented potter after all.'

O
h!' Chloë exclaimed, mouth agape and eyes very wide. Ronan Brady was startled and looked swiftly about him.

‘No, no!' said Chloë loudly. ‘I'm sorry – you surprised me, that's all.'

‘Were you not expecting me?' he said, the lilting softness of his southern accent soliciting Chloë's ears at once.

‘Not at all,' she responded. ‘I mean, yes I was – but not
you
.'

‘I don't catch you?' Ronan looked justifiably perplexed but refused to drop eye contact with her.

Chloë gave a quick laugh through her nose and looked down at her feet, suddenly acutely aware that she had odd socks on.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I just didn't expect Ronan Brady to
look
like you.'

‘Oh?'

‘I presumed – ignoramus that I am – that somehow all sculptors were very old.'

Ronan did not respond but kept peering at Chloë as if she were a whole new species to him, perhaps a subject he was about to sketch. Chloë twisted herself into her embarrassment.

‘You know – a shock of grey hair, aquiline features, long bony hands.'

‘Like Rodin?'

‘Not exactly,' said Chloë who had no idea what Rodin looked like, ‘there again, perhaps short and balding with a kindly, furrowed face and eyebrows of character; hands calloused but strong.'

‘Moore?' said Ronan, tucking his own hands into his pockets.

‘No,' said Chloë, ‘that's as far as my imagination took me.'

‘I meant Henry,' he explained patiently, ‘but don't bother your barney.'

‘Hey?'

‘And who are
you
?' asked Ronan.

‘Oh, me! I'm just Chloë, Chloë Cadwallader. I'm staying here for a while. Helping out. Till the summer. A couple more months. I must show you to your cottage.'

‘In your socks?'

Chloë scurried into the depths of the house leaving Ronan on the doorstep to breathe in the thin, precise air of the late April morning while considering Chloë Cadwallader. Nice legs, naïvety attractive. While Chloë laced up her trainers, she pondered how she had indeed presumed all men of art to be old and worldly, of weathered physiognomies peculiar to their vocation. Certainly, she had never expected this sculptor to have piercing blue eyes set deep into a finely chiselled face crowned by a shock of black hair, all of which sat atop a body that, despite clothing, was obviously honed from a single block of smooth marble.

‘What are your sculptures like?' asked Chloë as she led Ronan across the great lawn to a gate in a far corner.

‘What do you mean?' asked Ronan as he vaulted over the gate and waited for Chloë to climb it.

‘Well, I hear they're
sublime
,' she said, as if it were common opinion and not just Gus's, ‘but what do they look like?'

‘You've not seen any?' Ronan looked a little anxious.

‘No. I'm afraid not,' said Chloë with a shrug of her shoulders and an apologetic smile.

‘I'm fairly well represented north
and
south,' he said, quite intentionally embarrassing Chloë.

‘Well, I'm English,' she said by way of an excuse as she led him across south field towards a small building nestling against a stretch of beech and rowan.

‘Aye,' said Ronan, sympathizing.

‘I mean,' said Chloë, keen to restore herself, ‘are they abstract or figurative?'

Ronan smirked which unnerved her slightly. She marched on, pleased that he had to jig to catch up with her.

‘Without consummate knowledge of the figurative there can be no abstraction,' he said with a flourish. Chloë waited for him to explain further and frowned slightly to hasten it.

‘My work is an expression of my experience – and yet events or people are often portrayed in a non-figurative way, while my moods and emotions are frequently personified.' Chloë considered his words. They made sense and, though he spoke them soberly, it was without pretension.

‘Which materials do you use?' she asked. ‘Apart from Kilkenny limestone,' she added as an informed aside.

‘I use materials best suited to each work – but I carve rather than model.'

‘I see,' said Chloë, envisaging Moore over Rodin as she waited for more. Ronan stood still in the middle of the field, and the sheep lumbered away from him – in reverence, he believed; disinterest, decided Chloë. He gazed hard at a point beyond the horizon and obviously beyond Chloë's field of vision and comprehension.

‘I'll hack at Purbeck as if it were timber,' he proclaimed, ‘or I'll polish wood as if it were marble.'

Chloë watched a lamb give an involuntary buck before it trotted to its mother and demanded milk most impudently.

‘I'll follow the vein in marble or work against it absolutely.'

‘I see,' she said, ‘dependent on the mood and subject?'

‘Precisely!'

They walked towards the cottage.

‘What'll you do with the Kilkenny limestone?' Chloë asked brightly as she fumbled for the key. Ronan gave a clipped and condescending chuckle. Chloë stared at him, expressionless.

‘However can I know before I've seen the stone?' His smile was patronizing and Chloë did not like it. His smile was also rather attractive and it unnerved her that she'd noticed.

‘How
ever
would
I
know?' she said flatly, unlocking the cottage and turning on her heels so that his ‘Thanks, see you later' met nothing but her back.

‘You showed him to the cottage?' asked Gus.

‘Right to the door,' Chloë confirmed.

‘And?'

Chloë frowned and cocked her head. Gus closed his eyes momentarily before fixing them on her.

‘He's only Ireland's most promising sculptor! Did you
welcome
him? Settle him?
Chat
to him, for goodness sake?'

‘Ah,' said Chloë, ‘the Ballygorm welcome!' Her tiny note of sarcasm was lost on Gus who seemed pleased instead. ‘
I
certainly chattered,' said Chloë. ‘I asked him about his work but found him to be rather intense, somewhat guarded.'

‘Ronan Brady!' justified Gus, rolling his ‘r's. ‘I've asked him up to the house for lunch.'

‘Lovely,' said Chloë, who always gave people a second chance.

Lunch was lively; Ronan quite opened out to Gus's informed questions and opinions, and ate much and fast. Chloë found herself heartened that Ronan gave Gus the same reply when he enquired about the limestone. With a careful glance at Ronan, and another at Gus, Chloë decided Ronan was merely the brooding artist type, of which she had heard much but hitherto never met. Nothing to be wary of, it seemed. She thought of the eccentric, foppish artists Jocelyn had known, but remembered too that they had worked with liberal daubs of bright colour and not immense blocks of blue-black rock.

‘Chloë,' said Ronan, ‘what do you like?'