Chloe (36 page)

‘Really?' Chloë exclaimed, quite astonished. ‘Do you think I should?'

‘Well,' the man said, ‘it's not for me to say, dear. I can't make up your mind now, can I. But it would seem more economical, wouldn't it? If you're deciding to stay, that is.'

Chloë pondered over such a huge notion while her toast went quite cold. The landlord replaced it with a fresh batch and a copy of the previous week's local paper which he had fished out of the kindling pile, not that Chloë needed to know or would have minded. With only a little snatch absent-mindedly eaten from two slices of toast, Chloë pored over the paper with the landlord.

‘I'll just have a little look,' she said, circling a few details with a red pen and searching her landlord's face for approval, ‘just to see. I don't need to take anything immediately. I'll just see what's around. Then make a decision.'

‘You do that, my dear,' he burred, pointing to an interesting-looking notice that she had overlooked.

Chloë liked the first place she visited enough to write a cheque for a month's rent without thinking twice. Without really thinking at all.

If I had've, I'd never've.

You're telling us!

She felt quite exhilarated on walking back to the Bay View.

‘It's lovely and I can afford it!' she justified to the landlord, suddenly a little worried about her haste. That he gave her his best wishes with a further reduction from her bill, decided Chloë that she had done the right thing.

‘I've found us a nice place to live,' she announced to the Andrews.

‘You speak for yourself,' Mr Andrews countered, utterly sick of the Pink Parlour. He took his wife's arm and they promenaded back to their own lovely home while Chloë packed and praised her nous and nerve to the hilt.

The bedsit was one large, odd-shaped room spanning the top floor of a pretty terrace house above Porthmeor beach, near the artists' studios at Downalong. The ceilings were slanted and a stripped pine floor ran throughout. The furniture was sparse but nice; an old iron bed, a sofa that was still plump despite the upholstery having seen better days, a cheap cane chair and two matching bedside cabinets, an old chest of drawers with hints and glints of the layers of paint it had worn in its lifetime. The galley kitchen was minute but functional and the drawers contained a sensible selection of well-worn utensils. Mrs Stokes, the landlady, was plump and rosy and had cheeks like little crab apples. She let Chloë be, but was always around to share company and her incomparable baking. She had known Barbara Hepworth and happily regaled Chloë with unashamedly embellished tales of the artists and goings-on in St Ives in the 1950s. But she did not know Jocelyn. Still Chloë could find no one who did, though she made sure to mention her name often.

A second-hand bicycle with more gears than Chloë could ever need, and bought against her next week's wages, completed her picture. Shift work kept her time varied; providing free days for exploring while occupying evenings she would otherwise have spent alone. And she
is
on her own, with no point of contact, yet she is neither lonely nor being conscientiously brave.

The temperate climate helped, as did the pleasing landscape, alternately picturesque and stark; lush pasture suddenly becoming moorland, the shafts of the old tin mines punctuating the landscape as aesthetically as the standing stones, the twisted thorns. Contrast: like the way that artists and potters coexisted quite happily alongside the old fishermen and the plump ladies keeping safe the institution of cream teas; that the people were unsurprised by her, that they neither probed nor ignored, allowed her to feel safe and, with that, settled. She liked the spiky mess of the gorse, the thatches of scurvy grass, just as much as the late batches of pale toadflax; clusters of pretty lilac flowers like plump lips imploring her to stop and stoop. ‘Pig's Chops!' she could hear Jocelyn declare in awe though still she cannot find hint of her anywhere.

Though Chloë feels that she is well on the way to being accepted, that she is no longer side-glanced as a tourist, that there could be the making of a good friendship with Jane at the café, she just needs to ascertain whether she accepts Cornwall. Certainly, she no longer feels a tourist. But does Cornwall make her feel at home? Is there enough here for her?

Where can I slot in?

Could she become part of its fabric, a stitch that contributes to the strength of the whole but has an autonomous role as well?

Would I want that?

Need we answer!

But where?

Here?

Not sure.

William loved to witness autumn give way to the first signs of winter. All around him, nature shut shop for the next season. The bracken turned, and then turned again from colour to texture; the gorse became brittle and the grass pale. Here and there, tormentil scurried over the ground in a late flourish of tiny, brave yellow flowers. The summer-soft breeze, however, was churned into hurling, buffeting blasts while the sea carried away the last of its warm waters and blueness in exchange for a darker sea; heavier somehow, slate cold throughout. You could walk some distance from its edge but still have your breath caught and captured momentarily by a maverick gust. You could stand high on a cliff, lick your lips and taste salt.

Barbara grew her beard long and traded her summer sleekness for a more appropriate coat, coarser and slightly greasy. She took to spending long periods standing with her back to the wind while it splayed a parting in her coat and played it into whorls. Her bell was put away, as was William's striped deck-chair. The portable gas heater was brought out and put in the studio, its centre section taking the chill off early October, its full force required by the end of the month.

The acquisition of a motor car, however, denied William his customary excuse to hibernate and, to Mac's unspoken relief, there was now no reason not to remain mobile. His weekly visits to Mac continued and obliged William to carry on shaving. The previous winter, the more Morwenna had nagged, the longer he had left it and he had derived a perverse satisfaction from the allusion to Barbara as well as a certain relief that he was deemed and denounced unkissable. To shave clean for the trip to London last year had been almost as burdensome as the excursion itself and, in protest, he had remained defiantly bristled over Christmas. Now, as he worked on a series of pitchers with plump bodies and furling lips for this year's display at the South Bank, he laughed at the irony that he was alone at last, yet as smooth as a baby's bottom.

Mac, though he thought William's face and bone structure far too fine to hide behind hair, would have preferred him to be bearded but not alone. The ghastly Saxby woman was gone and William's countenance was restored; surely it was time now.

‘Time for
what
?' William teased.

‘To move on,' Mac said cautiously.

‘And go where?' feigned William.

‘Where you will let people come to you,' replied Mac, punching William's heart with a force that vanquished ambiguity. William laughed loud and sharp, shook his head and regarded the old man.

‘I'm a
pot
ter,' he explained as if to a child.

‘Precisely!' Mac proclaimed. ‘You live in clay on a cliff with a goat.'

‘And,' qualified William, ‘I am very happy with it!'

‘But,' cautioned Mac, holding his index finger aloft before pointing it directly at William and poking him on the biceps, ‘for how long?'

‘For the foreseeable future,' William proclaimed sternly, smacking his knees and trying to close the conversation. ‘And if, Mac, I find I'm lonesome, I'll find me a wife and breed me a chile!'

His Texan accent served only to rile Mac who responded with the thickest of Cornish burrs.

‘And who'll have the cliffclay manan gohte?

William paused.

‘Heidi?' he asked while his smile spread. Mac hurled a cushion at him.

‘Just keep your peepers open,' he winked at William, ‘and should someone knock,' he continued, tapping at his chest again, ‘let 'em in.'

William leapt to his feet, eyes narrow above a wry smile. He peered under Mac's chair, under the table; he removed books and looked behind them, he hurried to the kitchen and then back again.

‘I can't see anyone
here
!' he sang a little too sarcastically.

‘That,' said Mac, his look piercing straight through William, ‘is because no one knocked.'

‘And yet you're a clay-caked, content old potter!' said William triumphantly. Mac wore a half-smile that made William shift and shumble and hold on to the armchair while darting his gaze to and from Mac with a meek grin.

‘Content, yes,' said Mac, rising. He came very close to William, thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and rocked on his heels, observing him reprovingly. Then he stood absolutely still and grabbed William's chin in his left hand, pinching at the flesh not wholly inadvertently. He placed his right hand over William's heart and gave his chest another uncompromising shove.

‘Content, yes,' he whispered while the stillness of the room hung to his words. He held on to William's desperate-to-dart eyes, dropped his own and then raised them again, staunchly. ‘But I'd love to have been blissfully happy.'

William drove back slowly, at a pace safe enough for him to gaze from the window and ignore Mac's words. And forget Mac's tone. At Peregrine's Gully, he walked in and out of the rooms, trailing a hand gently along the window-sills and walls; letting fingers dab at the soil around the houseplants, dip in and out of his bowls and vases which were on display and not for sale. He pulled his hands quickly and lightly over the tightly packed spines on the bookshelf wall, like a pianist sweeping over a vast keyboard. Only there was silence. But William did not observe it for long. He sprang up the carpet-bare staircase in a dissonant dance of sorts and tried not to be disconcerted by certain creaks that were suddenly unfamiliar. He went into the spare bedroom and strummed his old guitar badly while trying to guess how much the small change half filling the oversize whisky bottle amounted to. Enough, he reckoned, for a whole round of whiskies. Only, William never stood a round because he rarely went to a pub. And when he did, it was for a bitter shandy and solitary supping well away from the bar.

He caught sight of himself in the large mirror propped against the wall and immediately diverted his gaze to its flamboyant driftwood frame. Slowly, however, his eyes inched their way back and soon, William shuffled over on his knees to have a closer look. He grabbed his chin the same way Mac had, clamping and closing his grasp until his lips puckered and he looked quite silly. He scrutinized his face and noticed for the first time that his eyebrows were not symmetrical. He saw that his forehead was lined and that none of the furrows traversed his brow unbroken. As if he had suddenly thought better of the worries that had caused them. As if the lines had been broken off mid-thought.

His hair needed a cut.

I'll go to St Ives, tomorrow.

He glowered at a blackhead on the side of his nose and pinched it hard, unsuccessfully. Further along, another two taunted him but he decided to leave them alone and eat more fruit instead. He found an ingrowing hair on his throat so he jutted his chin to stretch the skin while scraping his nail persistently until the offending hair sprang released; far longer, darker, than the surrounding bristles. Like the solitary oak amongst the scrub at the boundary of Peregrine's Gully.

I'll have a proper, cutthroat shave at the barber's. St Ives tomorrow.

There was now nowhere left to look but at his eyes and his first glance presented him with the spectacle of his pupils shrinking. Because it was far easier to look
at
his eyes rather than into them and beyond, he sat cross-legged and, placing a hand over each eye in turn, spent quite some time observing the antics of his pupils instead. On his way to have another peer at the lines on his brow, he caught full sight of himself. He looked swiftly away, unbuckled his legs and got to his feet, wincing at the sound of his creaking bones more than at the sensation itself.

I'm getting old!

You are!

He walked out of the room avoiding the mirror, making a note to take the whisky bottle to the bank in St Ives the next day. There was bound to be enough for a haircut
and
some potions and lotions to banish blackheads and furrows.

He went through to his bedroom and its bareness after the clutter quite startled him. He stood against the radiator, scorching the palms of his hands, while gazing out and over the cliffs to way beyond the sea. Though he rocked against the heat and felt it course a path from the base of his spine right up between his shoulder-blades, he shuddered with a chill that was not physical but affected him totally.

‘I am not
unhappy
,' he stated out loud, his eyes tracing the curl of the iron window lock over and over. ‘And I am
perfectly
content,' he reasoned as he walked over to the window to check the lock and see if there was perhaps a draught which had made him shiver. The old windows, however, appeared to be in excellent order. William returned to the radiator. He looked at his shoes and decided he could do with a new pair. He could afford them now, too, whether or not the funds from the whisky jar stretched that far.

St Ives, tomorrow
.

‘I am not
lonely
,' he laughed briefly, ‘and am quite content to be on my own. Alone.' Through the window, he could see that the afternoon had turned windy and grey. He kicked his shoes off and let his socked feet slide in little semicircles over the floorboards in front of him.

‘If you can happily be alone without being lonely,' he said quietly, ‘does it necessarily follow that if you are not unhappy, you are thus happy?'