Chloe (2 page)

Habit?

They're there to be broken.

But what if? Just give Brett up? What if there's never anyone else?

Stuck in a tunnel.

Chloë gave the extra ticket to a bespectacled young man clutching a violin case like a lover. He was rendered speechless but grasped her hand in sublime appreciation, despite such a gesture causing him to rescue the slipping case with a grimace and a curiously raised knee.

As she strolled to peruse the craft exhibits in the foyer, the map of the United Kingdom loomed ever larger in her mind's eye. Such a map had superimposed itself on to whatever Chloë's eyes fell on during the journey to the South Bank. Wales was now magnified, aerially almost; the contours of imagined hills and valleys smiling up at her while a choir of rugby players and miners filled her ears and her heart momentarily. Squinting at some particularly delicate titanium jewellery, she held a pair of luminescent earrings to her ears.

‘A voyage!' She tested the word to herself and found it astonishingly tasty. She crossed over to inspect some batik waistcoats but was utterly distracted by the fact that she could not remember when Christopher Columbus had embarked on his travels. She forsook enamel brooches for a browse around the bookshop, said ‘Ah! fourteen
ninety
-two!' out loud and found herself buying a copy of
On the Black Hill
against her better judgement.

‘Never read any Chatwin,' she explained to a totally disinterested sales assistant, ‘and I
might
be going to Wales, you see. Soon. Ish.' Before she left the shop, however, she spied an illustrated copy of
Gulliver's Travels
and paid for it at a different till.

Feeling somewhat bolstered that she had made some preparation, however rudimentary, for her possible voyage, Chloë devoted the last ten minutes before the concert to a stand of the most beautiful ceramics she had ever seen. Glazed on the outside in a lustrous charcoal pewter; within, they sang out in vivid cerulean swirled into eddies and streams of shimmering turquoise. The pots trumpeted rhythm and energy, calling out to be touched and listened to. Though Chloë had an eye for craft and the like, hitherto it had never stopped her in her tracks. Somewhere in the recesses of her rational self, she could half hear the final bell, and yet she was compelled to visit each urn in turn, to place her face as close as possible. To experience and to remember.

And that was William Coombes's first sight of Chloë; her tresses of burnished copper whispering over the surface of his pots in her bid to get as near as she could to their very fabric. He saw her face fleetingly and her spattering of freckles reminded him at once of a glaze he had favoured some years before.

Lusty Red.

Watching her hurry to the stalls he caught a drift of her perfume, a glance of her neck, a shot of light from her brooch, a snippet of the orchestra tuning to an ‘e'. His senses were accosted and he stood still, in silence, appreciating it, absorbed.

‘Who was she, sniffing my pots?' he asked the invigilator with a quick shake of his head to return him to the present.

‘She wasn't just sniffing, she was humming right down into them – with eyes closed and all!'

Intrigued, William ventured over to his largest urn and, with a fleeting but self-conscious recce, hummed into its opening.

It hummed with him. The softest of echoes. He hadn't realized.

A
s British Rail whisked him away from the capital, westward ho, William thought of the humming girl with the freckles set against a porcelain complexion. Gazing through the window at the monochrome winter landscape rushing past, he sipped absentmindedly at tasteless brown liquid that could be tea or there again coffee and remembered again her russet curls vivid against the grey of his glaze. At once he had an idea for a vessel and sketched it quickly on a scrap of paper spied on the neighbouring seat. Something fairly slender but subtly curving, smothered with
terra sigillata
, the rich slip he would then burnish until it shone almost wet. And oh! how the vessel would resonate when hummed into.

Damn. He scrunched the polystyrene cup viciously, digging his nails in deep, satisfyingly. Damn, damn it. Should he have waited until the concert had ended? He unwrapped a Mars bar. And if he had? What if she didn't want to be spoken to?

What if she did?

Was his interest fired merely because his pots had kindled hers? Or did it have nothing to do with ceramics at all?

The chocolate was more sickly than childhood memory suggested so he wedged it, half eaten, in between the crushed polystyrene.

It may have been but a fleeting glance yet he burned now for what he had seen. As Dorset became Devon, he sat back and allowed a day-dream to take off. It was good for it both confronted and satisfied long dormant lust and hunger. However, as Devon became Cornwall, reality hindered its development and, resigned, William forced himself to unravel the fantasy, to work through and quash it in the harsh, prosaic winter light that streamed in through the windows from the sea.

And yet the freckles that were a shade lighter than the hair, and the eyes of mahogany that were two shades darker, swept in and out of his reasoning and accosted his groin, stirring it into an embarrassing but pleasurable stiffness concealed only by yesterday's newspaper laid conspiringly over his lap.

As the train juddered to a standstill at Penzance, he ground a halt to his dreaming, banished the lust and persuaded his cock to quieten down and soften up. The humming girl was spurned; for there on the platform, plain in the plain light of the December day, stood the reason for such meanderings to remain infeasible, for such desires to be exiled: Morwenna.

The fantasy was over at once.

There had been a time, thought William as he dropped his holdall into the boot of her Fiat, when Morwenna Saxby had been his fantasy incarnate. Fifteen years his senior, her age and experience had made her a compelling and attractive proposition when they had met five years earlier. He was then a twenty-four-year-old potter with his first studio; she was a divorcee, seductive and smouldering, set on rectifying the limitations previously imposed by her puritan and lacklustre ex-spouse. She had appointed herself at once teacher and agent. She secured William commissions and took thirty per cent of the proceeds. She also explained to him, painstakingly, the ins and outs of the G-spot and the female orgasm until he knew the route off by heart.

William stole a look at her now as she settled herself into the driving seat and hated himself for wishing that her ear met her neck in the way the humming girl's did. Morwenna was undoubtedly attractive but this was diluted by the regular reassurance that she now required.

‘Bags and wrinkles,' she would sigh.

‘But I like wrinkly old bags!' he would gently chide back, his irritation masked. She loathed her body generally succumbing to gravity, but he did not mind all that much.

I'm a potter. Surface beauty is defined by the underlying anchor of structure.

Exactly.

For all the small talk that was wrung out in the car on the journey north from Penzance to Zennor, they may as well have driven in silence. As they were friendly and polite, so too were they distant and withdrawn; their differences as marked as those between the south and north coasts of Cornwall. Their words, for the most part, were empty, the silences in between loaded.

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!'