Chloe

‘Heavens,’ Chloë Cadwallader declares for the third time. Concentrating very hard on the red wine stain on the carpet, she twiddles with a lively lock of auburn hair which springs back over her right eye just as soon as she tucks it behind her ear.

‘Heavens,’ she says, heaving out the ‘h’, ‘I can’t do that.’

Fingering The Brooch, she looks solemnly from letter to map and back again. Jocelyn’s handwriting and the map of the United Kingdom are at once familiar and yet somehow foreign and suddenly illegible. Chloë is aware that she knows the shapes but their meaning is now strangely elusive and forgotten.

‘I cannot do it.’

An envelope marked ‘Wales’ lies unopened and alluring on her knees. She takes it to her nose and inhales with eyes closed tight, hoping that she might detect Jocelyn’s trademark Mitsuko scent. Though the faintest whisper would suffice, the envelope, alas, smells of nothing.

‘Can I?’

Chloë crosses her living-room and flicks on the light, for the ready-to-break storm outside has plunged the December lunch-time into premature darkness. Venturing cautiously over to the window, she pins the brooch to her jumper. Though the shadowy reflection offered by the pane blurs her own features, it captures the glint of the brooch. Chloë knows its intricate course of serpentines and twists off by heart. A tear smudges her sight but she squeezes her finger into the corner of her eye and pushes the tear to the back of her mind.

‘Heavens,’ she mutters, ‘what on earth am I meant to do?’

The United Kingdom looms from the page; beautiful and conspiring. Wales first. Ireland next. Then Scotland. Finally, England. Clockwise and magnetic. What to do? What to do. What are you going to do? What would you do?

After quite some time, in which Chloë continued to consult heaven and earth to no avail (Jocelyn must be up there somewhere!), she kissed the brooch quickly and glanced at the envelope marked ‘Wales’; still unopened. Taking it to her nose once more but again in vain, she decided to give it to Mr and Mrs Andrews for safe keeping until she felt braver, until she knew what to do with it. And with her job (lousy), and with her boyfriend (awful). Chloë knew that Jocelyn would have approved for it was she who had introduced her to Gainsborough’s charming couple. Locked as they were within the fabric of a rather good framed facsimile, they had been good friends to Chloë for many years and now, with Jocelyn gone, they were her confidantes and advisers too. Immeasurably important for a timid girl, currently a little lonely and low, whose friends are few and whose family are far and distant anyway. Slotting the envelope in the gap which had appeared over the years between frame and print, Chloë was amused that it rested between the Andrews’s feet, with Mr A’s gun and dog protecting it further. She gazed at Mrs Andrews’s pale blue frock and regarded two concert tickets nestling by the corn stooks in the bottom right corner.

‘What would you do,’ she implored of the couple, ‘if you were me? What should I do?’

‘Sink me, girl!’ Mr Andrews chastised melodiously. ‘You have to ask?’

‘Of course I have to ask,’ Chloë said somewhat incredulously.

‘Go,’ laughed Mrs Andrews, ‘away!’

‘Away?’ Chloë gasped. ‘Do you really think so?’

‘To – The – Concert,’ spelt Mrs Andrews kindly and to Chloë’s relief.

‘I do so love Beethoven,’ Chloë reasoned, ‘but Brett can’t make it. Working late. Or something.’

‘Even better!’ exclaimed Mr Andrews. ‘He’d only fidget.’

‘Awful!’ Mrs Andrews declared, with deference to Jocelyn.

‘Rid yourself,’ agreed Mr Andrews likewise. ‘After all, if you can make it across London, you can certainly make it across country.’

With a glance at her watch and a slight bow to her intimates, who sent her on her way with their blessing, Chloë finally grabbed her coat, thrust both tickets into her pocket and locked the door on Islington. She’d open the envelope marked ‘Wales’ later. She’d decide what to do. Later. Hopefully.

A lovely man, of chiselled jaw and open smile, saved Chloë from an ignominious tumble down the escalator. He allowed her to hang on to his arm and swamp him with mumbled gratitude as she caught her breath and searched hard for composure. He swept away her apologies and said ‘Not at all’ to her profuse thanks. His was the other platform but Chloë found herself catching her breath again as he laid a hand on each shoulder and steadied her in the direction of hers. He was rather lovely. And he was so not Brett.

As the tube trundled south, Chloë thought back to first meeting Brett on the underground. Stuck in a tunnel. She had watched him twist and tut after five minutes, and heard him swear impressively after ten. As quarter of an hour approached, he had elicited her name and a giggle and, after much hastily heartfelt pleading, a dinner date for the next night too. I must be mad! Chloë had thought with just a little pride too and hardly able to wait to tell Jocelyn. Jocelyn, who of course had not yet met Brett, clapped her hands and thought it sounded marvellous. She and Chloë then sat down once again to watch Brief Encounter.

Oh, that the encounter had been brief; just the fancy dinner and perhaps one or two other non-committal dates. But Chloë had never met anyone like Brett, this busy man who worked in the City and who pinched the bridge of his nose while exclaiming he was so stressed out. He was an impressive decade older. He was joined at the hip to a mobile phone. He had a loft apartment in the Docklands and a ‘mega pressure’ job with late nights and great perks.

‘You’re not my usual type,’ he had warned Chloë as if she should be grateful. And, for a while, she was. So busy and big and yet he’d chosen her. Without, it seemed, the need to know much about her; but a desire, it soon transpired, for her to know everything about him.

She was a captive audience then.

She was deaf ears now. Brett’s ego had increased with his girth and his manners had collapsed with the stock market.

What on earth are you doing, Chloë? You seem ingenuous and good and inherently incompatible with this man!

I suppose.

So?

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.

TWO

As 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?