Freya North - Chloe

And for you, dear C, I leave this map. There are four more and you will find them all. Wales first, then Ireland, Scotland and finally England. Trust me.

There is also a sum of money which will see you on your way and pay for train tickets and postcards. It will enable you to give up that lousy job and hopefully give you the independence to rid yourself of that awful boyfriend – you are much too good for the former and far too precious for the latter.

I am sending you on a voyage, dearest one, in the hope that, once you are quite travelled out, you might find a small patch that you can at last call Home.

I have great hopes for you.

Keep me in mind, my duck.

Jocelyn.

‘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 can not 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!’

‘A way ?’ 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.