Chloe. Freya NorthЧитать онлайн книгу.

      THREE

      William bundled the contents of the holdall into his washing-machine, retrieving his toothbrush and razor at the last minute. He waited patiently for the whir and clicks to commence and then watched the water trickle shyly over the laundry. Satisfied that the cycle was under way (it only ever seemed to start under paternal encouragement) he confirmed that there was indeed nothing in the fridge and left the kitchen for his studio.

      The studio was a stone’s throw from the kitchen, which was itself a pebble’s roll from everywhere else; there being neither corridors nor landings at William’s cottage. Incongruously called Peregrine’s Gully, the cottage was compact and thickset. It reminded William of an Exmoor pony; essentially native, ruggedly pretty and inherently suited to its environment. It sat, small and brave, in a gentle acre meadow of its own, flanked on one side by a scar of gorse, on the other by the poor land petering out to the cliff edge. Local sheep often gazed longingly at the grass on the inside of William’s fence and while he was not averse to a visit and a polite nibble, a bellow from Barbara invariably saw them off.

      Barbara was a goat who had sauntered in through a gap in the fence soon after William had arrived at Peregrine’s Gully. He had shooed her and chased her and smacked her rump with a slipper but she had stood her ground, twitched her beard and fixed her yellow eyes on him, lovingly and unrelentingly. He had growled at her, he had waved wooden implements at her and he had ignored her, but still she stayed, nibbling the edges of the grass in a dainty and ingenuous manner. None of the farmers claimed her and a notice in the local paper brought no one. So she was invited, begrudgingly at first, to stay. William called her Barbara after her bleat.

      Barbara adored him; following at his heels whilst he pottered around the garden, standing for hours with her forelegs just inside the studio door while he worked, looking up at him conversationally when he sat to eat in the kitchen, staring alongside him at the washing machine as he coaxed it to work. Barbara gave the postman short shrift and frequently chased cars down the drive or stood defiant, stamping, right in the middle as they approached. She loathed Morwenna. In the early days, she trod on her, chewed her clothing and defecated as close to her as she could. Now, she just glowered at her witheringly or ignored her entirely whilst making eyes at William. Invariably, Morwenna brought carrot butts and lettuce ends as a peace offering, sometimes even ginger-nuts as a bribe, but these placated Barbara only temporarily.

      It was the windows at Peregrine’s Gully that had decided William to rent the property. They had good deep sills affording place and space to his ceramics, and provided some respite from the invasive winter chill. Of the two small bedrooms upstairs, he slept in the one which looked out to the cliffs and onward to the sea. It contained only a bed, a tea chest for a bedside table and the incongruous chintzy curtains that had come with the cottage. The other room, however, was stuffed with the stuff of bedrooms: guitars, books, an enormous mirror framed by driftwood for which he had exchanged a nicely glazed set of mugs, an oversize whisky bottle half full of small change, two chests of deep drawers stuffed full of thick jumpers, and a Victorian oak cupboard he had bought for a song wherein the rest of his clothes were housed. Such items, essentials or paraphernalia, were banned from his bedroom for it was the bare white walls, the uninterrupted run of floorboards, which provided him with the empty canvas, the armature, for new works to take root in the fertile hours of daybreak.

      Downstairs, the front door opened directly into the sitting-room but William only ever used the craftsmen’s entrance at the rear of the cottage. Consequently a thick Turkish rug bought at great expense and inconvenience whilst backpacking some years ago, hung down from door frame to floor. The back wall was papered with books which sat crammed on bookshelves William had built by hand, leaving a gap of just an inch between tallest book and ceiling, and between bottom shelf and floor. He was not bothered about any alphabetical or thematic ordering but arranged the volumes according to height and the spines’ aesthetic appeal. Viewed from the other end of the room, the books rose and fell in a sinuous sequence, rather like organ pipes or ordnance survey contours. Between the rug-door and the book-wall, a large hand-built terracotta pot four foot tall sat fat, proud and burnished to perfection. To the side of it, a selection of umbrellas and walking sticks, whose provenances were long forgotten, were propped precariously. The rest of the room was taken up by two incredibly easy chairs bought at auction and in serious need of reupholstering, and a stout Scandinavian wood-burning stove. Still warm, despite William’s three-day absence. It ought to be – it cost William almost as much as he made last year.

      His studio was his haven and his true home; the fact that the cottage was included in the rent was merely an added bonus. Built by a contemporary of Bernard Leach, it had been designed with no other purpose than to be a room conducive to the making of pottery. There were two anterooms, one for glazes and one being the damp room where ongoing pots could rest. The main room housed William’s wheel at one end, an immensely long trestle table and a high, plaster-topped console on which clay could be kneaded and wedged in preparation. Shelves ran around two walls carrying finished pieces, experiments, failures, stimulus material such as skulls and pebbles, and a wealth of books on ceramics. The building was designed to allow its craftsman unparalleled access to the views outside, thus the other two walls were predominantly windows. Facing the trestle table at which William usually stood and worked, the windows reached from ceiling to floor and provided an inspiring panorama across the garden to the moors; the windows in the wall by the wheel were lower so that a potter throwing could still see where land became air and the great sea started. The roof itself was essentially one big skylight. The studio was never cold for the kiln at the far corner kept it cosy.

      That afternoon, as the veiled December sun fizzled out over the sea to drop down beyond the horizon and hide until noon the next day, William prepared some vivid blue slip and checked on his pieces in the damp room. His mind was elsewhere and yet nowhere at all. Momentarily it flitted across Morwenna before going on a little excursion to London and the humming girl, where it stayed a rueful while to be brought back to the present by Barbara’s insistent bleat. William found it was quite dark and he sat on the steps of the studio tugging the goat’s ear and asking her what he should do. Her eyes glinted luminous, unnerving even, so he smacked her rump and scratched her beard before heading off for Morwenna’s, driven as he was purely by his groin. Driving guilt to a far-flung corner of his conscience.

      ‘Hungry, were you?’ Morwenna fought to contain her delight. A hundred and eighty pieces for the Bay Tree Bistro looked promising, as did an orgasm or two.

      ‘Not really – well, not hungry for food,’ qualified William with an overdone lascivious wink. He had always mixed up her money-look with her lust-look and she was so obviously wearing one of them now. Unfortunately, he could not decipher which for both incorporated moistened, parted lips and a slight glaze to the eye. He strode over and kissed her deeply, allowing his hand to travel expertly if routinely over her torso. He ran her pony-tail through his hands and looked at her face. Behind her smile he saw that her eyes were quite flat. Or were those £-signs, superimposed cartoon-like over them?

      ‘Morwenna,’ he said in as much of a drawl as he could muster convincingly, stepping towards her and kissing her as persuasively as he could.

      And so they made rather unsatisfactory love. William’s eyes were slammed shut throughout while Morwenna’s were fixed on the lampshade, waiting for a climax that never came and was not worth simulating. Afterwards, they thanked each other politely, assuring that it had been good for them, how was it for you.

      You shouldn’t have to ask, thought Morwenna as she rose and went for her dressing-gown.

      You shouldn’t have to pull your stomach in like that, thought William as he watched her.

      ‘Stay?’ she asked, hugging her dressing-gown about her, quite keen for him to go.

      ‘Not tonight,’ William replied, as lightly as he could.

      As Morwenna sipped at very sweet cocoa, she beckoned her cat to her lap. William, William. She gazed at the wallpaper without seeing its pattern. William Coombes was her