Chloe. Freya NorthЧитать онлайн книгу.
rise healthily. As much as she loved him, and love him she did, she loved the idea of him more.
She had held the reins and guided William through an exhilarating run of discovery from which she had benefited too. Multiple orgasms and thirty per cent. Now they were on a downward slalom heading nowhere fast. The reins were gone from her hands and yet she could not remember letting them slip. Who held them now? Not William, for sure. The shift of power was now squarely with him and yet he was using it quietly to ride away from her.
It was the creeping indifference she could not abide. His proclamations of affection were dwindling and empty and, as she confronted the truth with only her cat on her lap for comfort, she knew that he made them because he knew it was what she wanted to hear. Tracing a large vein threatening at her calf, Morwenna admitted silently with forlorn resignation that William was no longer in love with her. Her cat fixed his yellow eyes on her, his pupils expanding as he swallowed her in to his unnerving gaze. What could she do but acknowledge out loud that William simply no longer loved her? They had grown apart because he had grown up and she had grown old. She had also witnessed his growing disaffection with Saxby Ceramics.
‘But Morn,’ he had said under his breath once or twice, ‘I actually want to make the pots I want to make. Not made to order, made to measure, made to be dishwasher safe and microwave proof.’
‘You will, you will. Once you’re up and running,’ she had said lightly. But she could not deny that his career as a potter was now establishing itself and that his preferred frugal lifestyle could most certainly be maintained by the sale of a one-off studio piece every now and then.
‘Oh well,’ she said out loud in the plaguing silence of her room, ‘I still have you and you love me unconditionally, don’t you puss? You give me a hundred per cent, never mind thirty!’ The tabby kneaded her lap in enthusiastic camaraderie before absent-mindedly springing his claws, driving them deep into Morwenna’s thigh. She gasped with the shock and the hurt of it, hurling the animal off her lap, rubbing her thigh hard. The cat slunk reproachfully to the window-sill where he knocked over a photograph of William and gazed defiantly away from her.
‘You and him both.’
William arrived back at Peregrine’s Gully at midnight. He felt wretched because he knew he had used Morwenna, and thereby abused her. He cursed his conscience for having returned only when his testosterone had levelled. He cursed testosterone. The humming girl was far from his mind, as was the echoing urn in a river of red. Going to the side of the cottage, he went directly to the studio. Barbara, a little bleary, was none the less delighted to see him and chewed her cud thoughtfully as he fetched a block of terracotta clay and began to knead and wedge it. Pulling it towards him and then thrusting it away, he worked the clay until the wetness had gone and a cross section revealed no air pockets, just a smooth dark red-brown slab. Good enough to eat. My, he was starving. It was gone one in the morning and he was cold; the hunger that he had used as a pretext to Morwenna now gnawed at his stomach and his soul.
FOUR
Though Chloë’s entire effects would have taken but a couple of hours to pack, it really did not seem an appropriate activity for Christmas Day. It could wait. Tomorrow, perhaps; Boxing Day after all. The easiest way for Chloë to block out the lack of Jocelyn was to travel backwards and pore over memories of Christmases past. Yuletide celebrations at her godmother’s had been peppered with good cheer and sumptuous refreshments, and peopled by the most colourful of souls. Chloë customarily took a place in the background, happily overshadowed by the mosaic of eccentricities that surrounded her. She was oddly comfortable with her shyness when at Jocelyn’s, surrounded by a host of fantastic characters scattered liberally through the house. There was the white witch, the man with the panama and the macaw, the Russian with the balalaika, the ageing French actress. But best of all, the septuagenarians, Peregrine and Jasper; made up to the nines and immaculately coiffured. (‘We’re the real Queens of England, we should be on the telly at three, don’t you think?’) Some called her Cadwallader, the white witch absent-mindedly called her Cleo, Peregrine and Jasper called her ‘Clodders’ as they had since she was small. She did not mind at all.
Chloë would watch with awe as Jocelyn swirled around her guests, distributing drink and food, compliments and witticisms with grace laced with abandon. Eyes dark with kohl bought in Petra, enviable cheekbones dusted with rouge from Paris and nut-brown skin bathed in Mitsuko, Jocelyn breezed about enveloped in velvet or swathed in chiffon, bejewelled extravagantly, bestowing on all her immense gift of effortless hospitality. Everyone was swept along on the tide of her countenance. Every so often and without making a scene, she would swoop down beside Chloë, usually squeezing next to her on the armchair to lavish kisses and furtive winks and nudges; ‘I’m Jocelyn jostling!’ she would pip in her ear. Chloë felt treasured indeed.
Mr and Mrs Andrews had been there too, ensconced in Notting Hill, in Jocelyn’s glorious house. With pride of place over a faux-Elizabethan fireplace, they looked benevolently down on all from the gilt-edged confines of their elegant world. Of course, it was not the original – yet nor was it a standard print such as Chloë’s. Jocelyn had commissioned hers from a young Chilean painter whom she had befriended on a coffee appreciation trip to South America in the seventies. She had brought Carlos back to London, sat him in the Tate and National Galleries, the Courtauld Institute and the Wallace Collection until he had quite mastered the Masters before sending him to Paris where she had an old friend who had known Matisse. Two years later, he enjoyed the first of many sell-out one-man shows. Now New York had him and he dressed in Gaultier and had a boyfriend called Claude whom he called ‘Clode’.
But he came to Jocelyn’s funeral, and wept alone and at length before disappearing.
As Chloë gazed at her own Mr and Mrs Andrews, she wondered what would happen to Jocelyn’s. There, Señora Andrews sometimes appeared to be winking and wasn’t there just a drift of something positively libertine about Señor Andrews?
Chloë decided if she visited the house, she would see if she could take the painting home. But where was home to be? Wales? Ireland? Scotland, perhaps? Wasn’t home just a concept? Was it attainable? Really?
Because it would not have crossed their minds to call her, Chloë rang her parents just before the Queen’s Speech to thank them for their perfunctory cheque. Two time zones away, they were just on their way out to cocktails with the Withrington-Smiths before a bash at Bunty and Jimbo’s so could it be brief? Yes, yes, Merry Christmas to you too, Chloë. Mother sends fondest! Must fly, bye!
Owen and Torica Cadwallader: definitive ex-pats. Dictionary perfect and, as such, worthy of lengthy description or dissection in book, film or anthropological study. They whooped it up overseas, ricocheting around their vapid colonial existence; loving every minute, every year of it. Chloë had been born to them in Hong Kong and was to be their only child (a daughter – shame) who, at six years old and with a relocation to Saudi pending, had been shipped back to England to fumble her way through boarding school and other rites of passage. Had it not been for Jocelyn, she would have been quite alone. ‘Far too far to fly’ being her parents’ dictum and excuse, Chloë rarely saw them. Perhaps once every three years or so, for a day or so. If that. This year they had flown in for the state opening of Parliament but Jocelyn’s funeral two months later was ‘far too far to fly – we’ll send flowers’ – which they did, only on the wrong day.
And yet Jocelyn remained forever discreet; she never judged them, never spoke badly about them and never colluded with Chloë who had expressed a brave indifference from a tender age anyway. Jocelyn’s sympathy and support, though unspoken and unasked for, were abundant and comforting. The unequivocal, unconditional love and respect that she lavished on Chloë made her want for nothing. Why pine for parents she did not know when she had a godparent the calibre of Jocelyn? For her part, Jocelyn had a daughter without the trials of pregnancy, labour or a husband. She had this wonderful god-daughter merely because her brother had captained Owen’s rugger team at Oxford.
Chloë thought herself very lucky. While other parents came up to school en masse and took their daughters out for cream teas in