Chloe

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 Marlborough, Jocelyn descended by Aston Martin twice a term to whisk away Chloë, and any friends she chose, for magical interludes and picnics on the Downs replete with champagne, smoked salmon and chocolate liqueurs. She helped smuggle plenty of the latter back to school: the very stuff of midnight feasts, bribery and blackmail. Once, when the weather had not been kind, the picnic was taken indoors at Badborough Court, a meandering country seat near Devizes owned by an old friend of Jocelyn’s (didn’t Lord Badborough kiss her for ages!).

Jocelyn wrote weekly, came to parents’ evenings, sports days and school plays. When Chloë’s maths teacher chastised Jocelyn over Chloë’s general apathy and incompetence, the visits and the picnics and the chocolate truffles became more frequent. Not as a bribe, but as support.

‘I’m not surprised your mind wanders off in maths, it’s insufferably boring,’ Jocelyn had said over shandy at a pub near Avebury. ‘But just think, if you pass your O level you’ll never, ever, have to do maths again! And just think, if you pass your O level you can turn your back on mental arithmetic and formulae and daft equations, to add things up on your fingers forever more! That’s why we’ve got ten of them after all!’

Chloë gained a ‘B’ for her maths O level and has used her fingers to count ever since.

It was watching the Queen’s Speech on the television (Chloë remained upstanding with sherry and a mince pie) that decided her what to do.

‘Velvet, Your Majesty!’ she cooed with reverence and gratitude. ‘Jocelyn said I may have “anything of velvet” so I shall go directly and have my pick. First, though,’ she announced, ‘I shall pack!’

Chloë, her belongings and Mr and Mrs Andrews crossed London for Notting Hill by taxi and her sudden Christmas cheer ensured an extravagant tip on top of the seasonally quadrupled fare. Chloë grinned and waved at the familiar front door; darkly glossed hunter green, brass fittings gleaming. Hullo, hullo, hullo, she chanted, skipping up the wide steps two at a time. She had her own set of keys, of course she did. But the locks had been changed, of course they had. Feeling tearful and bewildered, she sat down on the front steps, surrounded by bags that were suddenly too heavy and bulky, wondering what to do. She thought of all the velvet items inside that were now rightfully hers, she wondered about the Chilean Mr and Mrs Andrews hoping they were still where they should be, presiding over matters in the drawing-room. Her own Mr and Mrs Andrews were too cold and cross to talk. Or was that her? She hoped nothing had been removed or even moved inside the house and yet how could she check? With her bottom numbing against the cold stone, and her lower lip jutting in bewilderment tinged with self-pity, she felt at once trapped and yet barred. Christmas Day was closing around her. It was cold.

Wales, suddenly, did not seem a good idea at all.

‘Wales,’ declared Peregrine, flinging his arm out in a roughly westerly direction, ‘is an absolutely splendid idea!’

‘Good old Jocelyn Jo!’ agreed Jasper, thrusting a mug of mulled wine into Chloë’s chilled hands.

Jasper and Peregrine had found her, huddled and sleepy, on their return from a promenade along the Serpentine. Their keys fitted the locks on Jocelyn’s door perfectly for it was they who had had them changed. Jocelyn had left the house to them on that very condition: ‘To prevent my nearest and not so dearest trespassing and traipsing through.’ So Chloë had been rescued and was once again ensconced in a familiar armchair, looked down upon by the benevolent, if surreptitiously Latin, smiles of Mr and Mrs Andrews.

‘Your phone,’ said Jasper, ‘is perpetually engaged. We’ve been trying you for yonks.’

‘If the Sins weren’t using it,’ Chloë explained, ‘I left it off the hook. Knowing that it would never again be Jocelyn, I can’t bear to hear it ring.’

Chloë cradled a chipped cup that she knew well and nibbled biscuits from the lucky dip of Jocelyn’s old Foxes’ tin. Wardrobes full of velvet were just up the stairs and off the landing, and there would undoubtedly be a bottle of Mitsuko in the bathroom, one in the bedroom. And yet it seemed strange to be there, half asleep, freezing cold, sitting amongst all the familiar accoutrements and smells but with no Jocelyn.

‘They say that people inhabit their places, their things, long after they’re gone – but I can’t find Jocelyn anywhere here,’ Chloë mumbled, her nose running on to Peregrine’s Hermès scarf. Jasper topped up the mulled wine and laid a slender, perfectly manicured hand on the top of her head.

‘We couldn’t find her either, poppet, not at first. But in drifts and droves she returned and now we chat away to her frequently, don’t we, P? I hated it here at first, didn’t I, dear? I found it so empty – and yet everything was in its place; all should have been comfortingly familiar, but it was alien and cold. And then, a few days on, I opened a kitchen drawer and found a shopping list scrawled by Jocelyn on the back of an envelope. It matched entirely the items currently in the larder. Suddenly I was quite warm and Jocelyn was here once more.’

‘And for me,’ said Peregrine, coaxing the Hermès scarf from Chloë’s clutches to replace it with a damask handkerchief from Dunhill, ‘for me it was when I spied one slipper under the Lloyd Loom chair in her bedroom – you remember those pointy, turn-up-toe Indian things she had? It caught me quite unawares – it was only when, a day or so later, I found the other one lurking behind the laundry basket that I could smile. In fact, I had a right old chuckle – it was as if she had just that moment kicked them off prior to springing into bed with a magazine, a brandy and the telephone!’

‘But,’ sighed Chloë who had begun to thaw, ‘I miss her. And it hurts, it pulls – here,’ she explained, pressing both hands above her breasts. Peregrine and Jasper cocked their heads and donned gentle half-smiles.

‘She’ll never really be gone, you know,’ said Peregrine, cuddling up to her comfortingly in the armchair.

‘You’ll see her again, Clodders old thing. I bet you anything she’ll be in Wales!’

‘Ooh! And Ireland!’ cooed Peregrine, rolling his ‘r’s and jigging his head.

‘Scotland,’ philosophized Jasper, looking vaguely northwards.

‘And good old Blighty!’ declared Peregrine, gesticulating expansively and inadvertently clonking Chloë’s nose in the process.

‘In fact,’ said Jasper standing up and lolling with a certain swagger against the fireplace; one knee cocked, one hand in a pocket, the other draped aesthetically over the mantel, ‘you’ll see her quite often – in you!’

Chloë looked at Jasper gratefully. And then she looked at him in quite a different light. She stifled giggles.

‘You’re Mr Andrews!’ she exclaimed, looking from him to the painting above his head.

‘Gracious duck!’ whooped Peregrine. ‘You are! To a ‘t’! What is it, Clodders? Is it the pose or the poise?’

‘It’s both,’ she declared, delighted.

Jasper moved not one inch, if anything he lifted his chin a little higher and dropped his eyelids fractionally.

‘Then I suggest, my dearest Peregrine, that you don a divine sky-blue frock and sit demurely at my side! For if I am indeed Mr A, you can be no other than my devoted Mrs A!’

‘Velvet!’ proclaimed a suddenly lucid Chloë having picked herself up from a fit of giggles on the Persian rug.

‘Blue satin!’ sang Peregrine, tears of mirth streaming down his face. He looked at Chloë slyly. ‘Race you!’ he hollered before diving for the door and the stairs beyond.

Because she was at least forty-five years younger than him, Chloë reached Jocelyn’s bedroom first and flung open the cupboard doors with the grandest of gestures that would have done her late godmother proud. Peregrine and Chloë, and a wheezing Jasper just behind, looked in awe at the sparkle and drape of the cupboard’s contents. There were yards of silk, watered, raw and crushed; swathes of satin, duchesse, brocaded and ruched; there was velvet and devore velvet; plain taffeta and moire; there was suede that was butter soft and cashmere that was softer than air. A superior collection of handmade shoes was hidden from view in their soft fabric sacks.

The three of them stood in silent reverence and gazed on. Jocelyn was amongst them once more. Chloë slithered into a dark green velvet dress that was far too long but it didn’t matter. Jasper zipped her up and placed a lattice of jet around her neck while she scooped up her hair and he fixed it with a bejewelled pin.

‘Divine,’ he whispered, ‘so Rossetti! So Burne-Jones!’

‘Do you think I could have it altered to fit? Do you think I should?’

‘I think you should! Jocelyn decreed it in her will, girl. No use just having “anything of velvet” – what good is velvet if it is not to be worn? I’ll do it for you, being the accomplished seamstress that I am. Gracious, Peregrine!’

Peregrine stood before them, resplendent in washed blue silk, one hand on his hips, the other raised affectedly above his head.

‘It fits like a glove!’ he declared, his voice saturated with pride heavily laced with outrage. Though it was decidedly odd seeing a man of grandfathering age wearing her godmother’s dress, Chloë had to concede that it fitted perfectly, suiting him and complementing his demeanour utterly.

‘I like it!’ she enthused after a momentary assessment.

‘I love it!’ boomed Jasper, twirling Peregrine around. ‘Shall we take more mulled wine and then play rummy?’

Jasper insisted on hanging Chloë’s Mr and Mrs Andrews at the opposite end of the room to their Chilean doppelgängers.

‘We could play Spot the Difference,’ he declared, balanced on a Chippendale chair with a hammer between his knees and a picture hook pursed between his lips.

‘Her shoes for starters,’ said Peregrine, still befrocked, his nose inches from the frame, squinting through Jocelyn’s reading glasses. Then he whipped them off and stared at Chloë in alarm.

‘Gracious, Clodders! You haven’t even opened it! Look, Jaspot – it’s pristine. Not even the teeniest peek!’ He removed the envelope marked ‘Wales’ from the frame and handed it to Jasper who held it aloft as if about to light the Olympic flame – or Jocelyn’s chandelier at any rate. He looked at Chloë sternly and his left eyebrow left his forehead.

‘Why ever not, girl?’

Chloë shuffled. Though she felt uncomfortable at being challenged, she felt more uneasy with the envelope suddenly out of reach. Jasper’s eyebrow remained aloft.

‘There just didn’t seem to be a right time, ladies,’ she said. ‘I held it often; I sniffed at it and held it up to the light. Its contents just seem so, I don’t know – portentous.’

Approving Chloë’s vocabulary, Jasper allowed his eyebrow back down to earth.

‘I was,’ furthered Chloë, ‘all on my own. In Islington, after all.’

This secured a bow from Jasper and a long nod from Peregrine who said ‘Islington. Why, of course’ very softly.

‘What say you,’ said Jasper cautiously, proffering Chloë the letter like a ring on a velvet cushion, ‘that we open it now? You’re in Notting Hill after all. With us. And the Andrewsiz. Looked over by You-know-who. Safe hands all.’

Chloë took the envelope and held it to her nose, her eyes on Jasper but seeing far beyond him.

Is it there? Is it Mitsuko? Do you know, I think so.

‘Mitsuko?’ asks Peregrine. Chloë nods. She turns the envelope over and wriggles her little finger into one corner. The rip, though a mere centimetre or so, is deafening. She takes her little finger to the other corner and winces as the tearing of paper screeches out.

‘Bugger,’ she mutters under her breath but unmistakably. ‘Would you? For me?’

Jasper takes the envelope and slits it open with one deft movement. He passes it to Peregrine who slides the contents out with deliberation and grace. He offers them to Chloë but she must come forward to accept.

‘Go on,’ he whispers, ‘for us.’

‘For Jocelyn,’ says Jasper.

‘OK,’ says Chloë.

There are two pages. A letter, and a map of Wales that appears to have been filched from a road atlas. In black ballpoint pen, an arrow shoots inland and south, to a red asterisk marked ‘Here!’ Handing the map to Jasper, Chloë skims through the letter seeing the words without reading them, reading names without knowing where or who – or indeed whether a who or a where.

Peregrine’s chin is tucked over her shoulder. He smells faintly of chocolate gingers and Christmas.

‘Jasp!’ he says once he has read it right through. ‘Three guesses where she’s going!’ Jasper hands the map back to Chloë and closes his eyes with a measured twitch of his aquiline nose.

‘Three guesses,’ says Peregrine again, nudging Chloë with a wink.

‘And if I am correct in just one?’ Jasper asks, eyes still closed, nostrils slightly flared.

‘Oh Gracious Lordy, always a deal to be struck. Nothing’s ever unconditional with the old tart!’ Peregrine is pleasantly exasperated. ‘If you’re right in one, I’ll make it worth your while. There!’

Jasper opens his eyes and smiles – benevolently at Chloë, somewhat lasciviously at Peregrine.

‘Gin Trap. I bet my bottom dollar. It’ll be the Gin Trap.’

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