Chloe (38 page)

‘Who was that?' asked Mac, dunking tea bags held between two forks in and out of the pot.

‘Hmm?' murmured William, tearing his eyes away from the biscuits.

‘On the phone?' asked Mac. ‘Any message?'

‘Blimey!' exclaimed William, slapping his temples. ‘Still there! Holding for you!'

‘Who?' laughed Mac.

‘Josephine's niece?' suggested William, head cocked, knowing the details were inaccurate but unable to remember them precisely. Mac's smile vanished and yet his expression remained chipper. He glanced swiftly at the phone mounted to the kitchen wall but ignored it. Instead, he hurried through to the sitting-room, pulling the door ajar discreetly behind him.

Having delivered the message, William returned his gaze to the biscuits. In the kitchen alone, he perched on a stool and held a bourbon biscuit aloft, daintily between thumb and index finger. He took it to his nose, closed his eyes, and breathed in the nostalgic scent of baked chocolate. He dabbed his tongue gently against the sugar crystals on the surface. One or two detached themselves and dissolved deliciously in his mouth. Tiny, and yet their sharp sweetness sent a stab of pleasure along William's jaw. He was famished. He could easily have wolfed the biscuit in a single mouthful. Instead, he carefully prised the top layer away and regarded the two parts. The bottom layer, with its velvety fillet of chocolate cream, he inverted and scraped along his lower teeth, furrowing the soft chocolate on to his tongue and pressing it up on to the roof of his mouth. He sucked away, in a small heaven. It was so sweet and soft, so comforting and delicious, so nourishing and pleasurable, he could have wept. Instead, he ate three more.

‘Hullo? Mount speaking!' announced Mac, addressing himself as such for the first, and probably only, time in his life.

‘Hullo!' sang a soft voice. ‘This is Chloë. Cadwallader. Jocelyn's god-daughter?'

Mac was silent. Why should the voice sound so familiar? Previously unheard. No true genetic link. And yet it struck him deeply and he smiled fondly while gazing glazed at the middle distance.

‘Jocelyn?' she implored. ‘Jocelyn March?'

Mac cleared his throat.

‘Hullo,' he said quietly, ‘I'm so glad you've called. I knew you would.' He paused. ‘I've been waiting.' He paused again. ‘Chloë!' he mused gently, mainly to himself.

‘Well?' asked Mrs Stokes who had hovered out of sight but not out of earshot behind the door to her part of the house.

‘I'm going round there tomorrow morning,' said Chloë, her eyes dancing. ‘He
did
know my godmother! He sounds very nice indeed. I like potters!'

Mrs Stokes asked Chloë whether she thought she might stay another month. Only the rent was due and she needed to know in advance.

‘Probably,' considered Chloë, feeling brave and quite proud of it, ‘but could I let you know for sure tomorrow? Afterwards? In the afternoon?'

Chloë sets off at a good pace by bicycle for Carn Tregen. She decides Mac will be a dapper man with slick white hair and sharp blue eyes. His hands will be long and refined with tell-tale squints of clay caught under his fingernails. His voice will have a soft burr which will suit his general deportment and he will offer her sherry and peanuts. His house is to be Victorian, hung throughout with velvet curtains the colour of port and original William Morris wallpaper in many of the rooms. An old cat called Tompkins will be part of the furniture. Up in the eaves there is to be a suite of rooms that Mac will offer Chloë in return for a peppercorn rent and some company. She will accept with great surprise and humility, and she will tell Mrs Stokes this afternoon that she will not be signing for another month.

Chloë dismounts from her bicycle. The approach to Carn Tregen is far too pretty to free-wheel past. The road sweeps up and over in a straight line to the village, rather like the train on a bridal gown. After yards of this tarmac satin, a frill of small buildings pans out to either side. Smoke streams like chiffon from a few of the chimneys and, as Chloë nears, a bouquet of painted front doors presents itself. A church steeple stands daintily above all. Herring gulls wheel and rejoice overhead and car horns toot conversationally.

‘Sexy! Sexy!'

That was not the gulls.

‘Show us your pants!'

Nor was that.

The calls come from a parade of small schoolboys, clasping on to the green mesh fencing of their playground and scampering along its length like monkeys. Chloë is startled, but amused and just a little flattered too. She tries not to grin, to encourage, and then tries hard to ignore the impudence of eight pairs of eight-year-old eyes undressing her.

‘Phoarr!' gurgles one.

‘Ooh er, look-at-her!' chants another.

‘Miss Sexy!' hisses a further child.

‘What colour are your pants?' asks the smallest of the gang in a most conversational way. Chloë regards him directly.

‘They're blue and white,' she informs him, ‘stripy.'

For some reason, this information makes the boys scurry away, laughing hysterically and whooping with delight and embarrassment. As Chloë reaches the perimeter of the playground, the boys stampede back but say nothing, just panting in awe of the sexy Miss who has accepted their compliments so graciously.

‘Let's see!' they cry, but their request for a flash from Chloë is swallowed by her laughter and a sudden gust from the sea driving salt to the back of her mouth and making her eyes water.

As she winds her way down into Carn Tregen, Chloë realizes that the gulls are actually bickering, that car horns are being sounded indignantly and that most of the houses to the left of the road are modern and nondescript. However, those to the right and those lining the steep street down to the harbour are overwhelmingly picturesque and sit, pastel pretty and patient amidst the scamper and bustle of the harbour. A boat has just come in, crates are hurled from the deck, scuttling over the wet cobbles, and grabbed by thickset men in rubber trousers and huge boots who are wearing T-shirts despite the chill. The gulls are beside themselves with greed, swooping and cursing and coming as near to the crates and the men as they dare. A cursory sifting takes place right here on the harbour side, with anything obviously small, damaged or inedible being discarded. The gulls shriek as they hover, and yell as they dive for the scrap heap. The men curse and laugh and shout and belch.

Chloë regards the catch; the reason for the noise, the bounty for the fisherfolk, the swag for the gulls, the life-stuff of man and bird alike. Quite dead, still the fish slither as their oily little bodies sort themselves out and finally settle against each other. Quite dead, light continues to dance and glint off their scales. Glimpses of silver, glances of gold; mercury shooting, rust rolling. Pieces of hake!

There is something vaguely traumatic about it all. Chloë walks away gladly, sadly, and concentrates on Mac's precise directions instead.

Something about their eyes
, she contemplates as she leaves the village and the noise and the action.

So glassy and still. And yet so expressive.

Unsuspecting at the time of death. A look of remorse; that they should be but the money of man, the carrion of gulls.

Dead and unseeing. Yet seeming to see so much.

She shudders sharply. Her eyes alight on a rotting fish, its body torn and now forsaken, its eyes withered but still intact, staring still, just dulled. A stillness, a grace superseding the indignity of this last resting place – half on tarmac, half on grass, beside a hedge and far from the sea. Chloë walks on and shudders again, greatly perturbed that she should wonder and imagine how Jocelyn's body must look now. A year on. Heavens, a year today.

Jocelyn. Have you still flesh? Have you been stripped to a rattle of old bones? Can you speak if your tongue has gone? Can you be with me if you are six feet under? Have you any idea?

Dead and unseeing. Yet seeming to see so much.

Mac slept badly. He was excited and nervous. Chloë, of course, would look nothing like Jocelyn and yet he did not doubt that glimpses of the old girl would shine through and invest his cottage once more with the warmth and colour she had conveyed in abundance. He was frightened too; of being helplessly emotional, of saying too much. He wanted to work but November was crueller than true winter for though the cold was not as severe, the pervasive dankness seeped into his joints and rendered them painful and useless. Such pain would he have tolerated gladly, taken more even; only that his fingers, his wrists, his knees, might oblige and bend in spite of it. How could he be so upright and lithe one day, so brittle and incapacitated the next? When his doorbell rang out, he called ‘Coming!' in a loud, cheery voice because he knew it would take him some time to creak and crack his way out of the chair and over to his visitor.

And wasn't she lovely! A pre-Raphaelite muse but peppered with freckles and a winsome expression that made her seem artless and all the more attractive.

‘Chloë!'

‘Mr Mount?'

‘Mac – won't you come in?'

He gave her tea in a mug whose handle was a vine over which a pixie clambered. Just like the one Jasper kept his gardening twine in. She marvelled at the coincidence, and then declared it marvellous that it was not a coincidence at all. When Mac informed her that he made such mugs, she was charmed; when he gave her one of her own, she was utterly delighted.

‘Do you remember this brooch,' she asked him, proffering a chunk of her jumper towards him.

‘Like I saw it yesterday,' he assured her.

Here was a man she had never met before, had hitherto not even heard of, and yet there was already a tangible exchange of great warmth and empathy between them, congenial and comforting. They talked the morning away and Chloë gave Mac a colourful account of her travels. It did not worry her that he knew neither the Gin Trap, nor Gus, nor the senior or junior Buchanans. It was enough that he had a friend living in South Wales, shared Jocelyn's love of Scotland and expressed a desire to visit the landscape of Northern Ireland.

‘When did you meet Jocelyn?' she asks.

‘Moons ago, my love,
moons
!' he replies.

‘She's been gone a year. Exactly.'

‘I know.'

‘I miss her still.'

‘I do as well.'

‘It seems impossible that someone so full of life – and who lived it to the full – should ever be denied it.'

‘But don't you think that makes her immortal in some way?'

‘I do. I suppose. But that's not enough. I want her back.'

‘You don't mourn alone, Chloë. It follows that those who loved Jocelyn have great affection for each other too.'

‘How did you meet?' asks Chloë, comforted as much by Mac's words as by his arm, which she finds around her shoulder.

‘Mutual friend,' replies Mac nonchalantly. He unbuckles himself from his chair, declining politely Chloë's offer of assistance, and fetches an old leather book from the overstocked bookcase. Chloë stands up and they both rest against the long arm of the old chair as he flips through the pages.

‘What book is it?' Chloë enquires.

‘Oh the book is not the point,' Mac assures her, ‘it merely protects something – where is the blighter? – precious. It's
Gulliver's Travels
, by the way.'

The blighter turned out to be his only remaining photograph of Jocelyn. She was very young and a little blurred. Younger than Chloë had seen her in any other photograph, even those Peregrine carefully hinged and annotated in white, in thick black albums. Mac could not remember the date though he scoured the card for a clue. Pre-war, for sure. Her hair was oddly platinum, bobbed and furled to perfection; her lips dark and delineated into a careful Cupid's bow.

And her brooch! Look there! Look here!

And who is that by her side?

‘That's not you?' Chloë half asked, knowing that, though wrinkled and stooped, the man next to her could never have been that tall; his face too comfortably round and suiting his persona too well to have ever been any other shape. Certainly not the handsome face with the well-defined jaw and clean cheekbones of the man in the photo.

‘No, not me!' agreed Mac, a little wistfully, a little remorsefully.

‘Who is he?' wondered Chloë aloud, gazing at the photo as though it might fade any moment.

‘Our mutual friend,' explained Mac, placing the photograph carefully back in the book, between pages 111 and 112.

‘What's his name?' Chloë asked, wondering if she had ever met him. This friend. There had been so many.

As Mac put the book back into its precise position, he chose not to hear her. Relieved that she did not repeat the question, he turned from the bookcase, rubbed his hands and gave her an inviting smile.

‘Now!' he declared. ‘I must fulfil my duty and give to you what Jocelyn entrusted to me!'

Chloë tried not to bounce on the seat but failed.

‘What is it, what is it?' she all but squeaked. ‘And how on earth did she know I'd actually find you!'

Mac raised his eyebrow and his index finger as if to say ‘Wait, you lovely young thing, you!'

Images of silk shawls, fine oil paintings, exquisite jewellery and antique china sprang to Chloë's mind though she had no preference.

‘Please,' she implored, knowing full well that doleful eyes would win this old man around, ‘just tell me! I can't bear it.'

‘A key,' announced Mac, head cocked, knees creaking.

With Mac disappeared to retrieve this heirloom, Chloë settles back into the chair and wonders what the key might unlock. Maybe this was the point of Cornwall, hidden treasure!

Maybe I had to be on the verge of leaving before this could have happened.

Chloë reckons that the key will be dainty, filigree; perhaps tied to an old brown card scrawled with something ambiguous and only half legible. She gazes over to the spine of
Gulliver's Travels
but, though she wants more time with the photograph, she feels strongly that she should await Mac's invitation. For the while, she is content that it is there. It makes her feel safe. Another friend of Jocelyn's. As she lets the coarse velvet of the upholstery catch soothingly under her fingernails, she decides that she really does like Cornwall. And there is a link with Jocelyn and thereby a very good reason to stay on. Maybe she could run the café. Even have one of her own.