Freya North - Chloe

‘A voyage!’ She tested the word to herself and found it astonishingly tasty. She crossed over to inspect some batik waistcoats but was utterly distracted by the fact that she could not remember when Christopher Columbus had embarked on his travels. She forsook enamel brooches for a browse around the bookshop, said ‘Ah! fourteen ninety -two!’ out loud and found herself buying a copy of On the Black Hill against her better judgement.

‘Never read any Chatwin,’ she explained to a totally disinterested sales assistant, ‘and I might be going to Wales, you see. Soon. Ish.’ Before she left the shop, however, she spied an illustrated copy of Gulliver’s Travels and paid for it at a different till.

Feeling somewhat bolstered that she had made some preparation, however rudimentary, for her possible voyage, Chloë devoted the last ten minutes before the concert to a stand of the most beautiful ceramics she had ever seen. Glazed on the outside in a lustrous charcoal pewter; within, they sang out in vivid cerulean swirled into eddies and streams of shimmering turquoise. The pots trumpeted rhythm and energy, calling out to be touched and listened to. Though Chloë had an eye for craft and the like, hitherto it had never stopped her in her tracks. Somewhere in the recesses of her rational self, she could half hear the final bell, and yet she was compelled to visit each urn in turn, to place her face as close as possible. To experience and to remember.

And that was William Coombes’s first sight of Chloë; her tresses of burnished copper whispering over the surface of his pots in her bid to get as near as she could to their very fabric. He saw her face fleetingly and her spattering of freckles reminded him at once of a glaze he had favoured some years before.

Lusty Red.

Watching her hurry to the stalls he caught a drift of her perfume, a glance of her neck, a shot of light from her brooch, a snippet of the orchestra tuning to an ‘e’. His senses were accosted and he stood still, in silence, appreciating it, absorbed.

‘Who was she, sniffing my pots?’ he asked the invigilator with a quick shake of his head to return him to the present.

‘She wasn’t just sniffing, she was humming right down into them – with eyes closed and all!’

Intrigued, William ventured over to his largest urn and, with a fleeting but self-conscious recce, hummed into its opening.

It hummed with him. The softest of echoes. He hadn’t realized.

As British Rail whisked him away from the capital, westward ho, William thought of the humming girl with the freckles set against a porcelain complexion. Gazing through the window at the monochrome winter landscape rushing past, he sipped absentmindedly at tasteless brown liquid that could be tea or there again coffee and remembered again her russet curls vivid against the grey of his glaze. At once he had an idea for a vessel and sketched it quickly on a scrap of paper spied on the neighbouring seat. Something fairly slender but subtly curving, smothered with terra sigillata , the rich slip he would then burnish until it shone almost wet. And oh! how the vessel would resonate when hummed into.

Damn. He scrunched the polystyrene cup viciously, digging his nails in deep, satisfyingly. Damn, damn it. Should he have waited until the concert had ended? He unwrapped a Mars bar. And if he had? What if she didn’t want to be spoken to?

What if she did?

Was his interest fired merely because his pots had kindled hers? Or did it have nothing to do with ceramics at all?

The chocolate was more sickly than childhood memory suggested so he wedged it, half eaten, in between the crushed polystyrene.

It may have been but a fleeting glance yet he burned now for what he had seen. As Dorset became Devon, he sat back and allowed a day-dream to take off. It was good for it both confronted and satisfied long dormant lust and hunger. However, as Devon became Cornwall, reality hindered its development and, resigned, William forced himself to unravel the fantasy, to work through and quash it in the harsh, prosaic winter light that streamed in through the windows from the sea.

And yet the freckles that were a shade lighter than the hair, and the eyes of mahogany that were two shades darker, swept in and out of his reasoning and accosted his groin, stirring it into an embarrassing but pleasurable stiffness concealed only by yesterday’s newspaper laid conspiringly over his lap.

As the train juddered to a standstill at Penzance, he ground a halt to his dreaming, banished the lust and persuaded his cock to quieten down and soften up. The humming girl was spurned; for there on the platform, plain in the plain light of the December day, stood the reason for such meanderings to remain infeasible, for such desires to be exiled: Morwenna.

The fantasy was over at once.

There had been a time, thought William as he dropped his holdall into the boot of her Fiat, when Morwenna Saxby had been his fantasy incarnate. Fifteen years his senior, her age and experience had made her a compelling and attractive proposition when they had met five years earlier. He was then a twenty-four-year-old potter with his first studio; she was a divorcee, seductive and smouldering, set on rectifying the limitations previously imposed by her puritan and lacklustre ex-spouse. She had appointed herself at once teacher and agent. She secured William commissions and took thirty per cent of the proceeds. She also explained to him, painstakingly, the ins and outs of the G-spot and the female orgasm until he knew the route off by heart.

William stole a look at her now as she settled herself into the driving seat and hated himself for wishing that her ear met her neck in the way the humming girl’s did. Morwenna was undoubtedly attractive but this was diluted by the regular reassurance that she now required.

‘Bags and wrinkles,’ she would sigh.

‘But I like wrinkly old bags!’ he would gently chide back, his irritation masked. She loathed her body generally succumbing to gravity, but he did not mind all that much.

I’m a potter. Surface beauty is defined by the underlying anchor of structure.

Exactly.

For all the small talk that was wrung out in the car on the journey north from Penzance to Zennor, they may as well have driven in silence. As they were friendly and polite, so too were they distant and withdrawn; their differences as marked as those between the south and north coasts of Cornwall. Their words, for the most part, were empty, the silences in between loaded.

William looked out over the brittle gorse to the sea, today grey and flat. He often judged his mood by the ocean and found they usually corresponded.

His cottage was now in sight and he was hopeful of making it there before a dinner invitation was offered. There would be little in his fridge but he would much rather go hungry. Lurching and rolling up the pocked and rutted track to William’s cottage, Morwenna spoke to him via the rear-view mirror and he answered her eyes accordingly.

‘Supper? Later? Eightish? Knowing you, your fridge’ll be bare.’

‘Probably. But d’you mind if I don’t?’ he said carefully. ‘You know what London does to me!’

‘Mind! Me!’ she started. ‘Suit yourself, my boy!’

William placed a hand on her leg because it seemed he ought to, and kissed her cheek likewise, lightly and without looking. He gathered his gear and walked towards his cottage. Without turning around he raised his hand in a motionless, emotionless wave. Morwenna read it as a halt.

She drove back to Penzance, stopping at the cliffs near Wicca to gaze at the horizon and gulp down the fortifying air.

‘Damn it!’ she said aloud, her voice swallowed by the wind. ‘I forgot to tell him that the Bay Tree Bistro want to commission a whole service. A hundred and eighty pieces. Nice little earner. And for William, too, of course. God forbid it will be too late. Keep him sweet a while longer. Just until it’s finished.’