Читать книгу Chloe - Freya North - Страница 13

The lane was slim. It was like a gorge between the hedges which rose up over six feet to either side. Though it was January and the bare trees were pressed as inky silhouettes sharp against the sky, the hedges sprouted shoots and leaves and even boasted berries and foliage that clung on from last summer. The hedge was an ecosystem of its own and the seasons were obviously its slave. Rabbit and robin cohabited and eyed Chloë amiably en route. The lane was single track and poorly surfaced but Chloë appeared to be the only traffic that day. There had been a road – a quick phone call to Skirrid End Farm the day before, to someone who wasn’t the Gin Trap, had informed Chloë that a bus would take her ‘inches from the lane’. It had indeed, but Skirrid End Farm was not ‘a few yards up on the left’. Chloë had walked the few yards and seen nothing but hedge. To the left or right. Estimating that she walked a mile in around fifteen minutes, she calculated that she had covered just over two of them; the run of hedgerow interrupted only every now and then by rickety gates leading to pasture.

Something’s not right.

Yes, it is. Keep going.

Trudging along, half halting every few strides to hump her rucksack back into position, Chloë tried to envisage what Skirrid End Farm would look like. No clear picture entered her mind’s eye and if she tried to design the farm herself, she got no further than a vast front door more suited to a church. She considered the voice on the other end of the telephone. Australian? New Zealand? South African? No, it was antipodean for sure. Male. Not bowled over with joy and excitement to hear from her but welcoming none the less.

‘Ah yih! Ker-Low-E. Sure! Take the bus – it stops inches from the lane, we’re just up on the left. Few yahds, you know. Be seein’ ya. Travel safe.’

Lunch-time had obviously been and gone and Chloë did not need the rumbles from her stomach to tell her so. After all, it had been nearing noon on the train but, despite protestations from her stomach even then, Chloë had rejected sandwiches of rubber in favour of fantasy: doorstep slabs of Aga-baked bread slathered with furls of hand-churned butter and crested with wedges of crumbling cheddar gouged by blunt knife from a wax-clothed round.

There’d better be. There’d bloody well better be.

Inches from the lane. Just a few yards up on the left.

The lane was not getting any shorter and the hedges seemed to be higher now and appeared to converge ever so slightly. Any more than a few yards and they might very well close in on her. Chloë looked at her watch. Two fifty-three. Thirty-eight minutes. Seven minutes to three miles.

‘Three miles is not a few “yahds”,’ declared Chloë out loud. ‘Three miles is not funny. I’m starving hungry and have no idea where I am.’

Walking past a driveway to her right, Chloë read the sign, ‘Skirrid End Farm’, and trudged wearily along.

Skirrid End Farm! On the right? Back there?

She came to a standstill and, still facing forwards, craned her neck around to reread the sign. Skirrid End Farm. Definitely.

‘A “few yards up”?’ she shouted. ‘On the left!’

Who’s counting!

‘On the right?’ she declared to a robin. ‘Must be antipodean, that bloke. Everything topsy turvy!’

It was, however, with good humour and an easily found spring in her step, that Chloë retraced a few yards and turned left up the drive to meet whatever was to greet her. The drive was long enough to wonder. Church-type door? A smoking chimney? A rusty old Taff astride a tractor? Border collies? Straight into the kitchen to a scrubbed table with gingham cloth and the bread and the cheese and the hand-churned butter? And ‘Chloë Cadwallader, there’s pri-tti now!’ sung in welcome?

In the event, two large rumps met her view and, as she called ‘Hullo’, the tail of one was raised and a steaming mound of admittedly sweet-smelling manure was dumped sonorously at her feet in welcome.

‘Hullo?’ she called again, somewhat nasally.

‘Chloë? Is it you?’ The voice was pukka and strong and came from somewhere quite close. ‘Chloë?’ It belonged to a rotund woman who emerged from behind a wall with a saddle under each arm and a bridle over each shoulder. ‘Chloë? Cadwallader?’ Her hair was grey and plaited, Indian-squaw style, halfway down her back. ‘Jocelyn Jo’s God-Daughter Girl?’ Her cheeks bloomed cerise and a pair of button-black eyes glistened a delighted welcome at Chloë.

‘Yes, it’s me. I’m Chloë Cadwallader.’

The other tail was lifted and a further greeting deposited with a rumble and a splat.

‘Am I glad to see you!’ The woman was very close, dumping the saddles on a low wall, offering her hand. No she wasn’t, she was offering to take Chloë’s rucksack. She tugged while Chloë wriggled free.

‘Thank heavens it was you!’ she was saying as she wrestled with straps and fought with buckles. ‘Thank heavens it was you whom Jocelyn sent. Though who else it could have been I do not know!’ Her laugh was deep and jovial. A Santa Claus chuckle. ‘But thank heavens that it is you and that you are here now.’ She slipped the bridles on to the two horses and rattled away without pause for breath. ‘I’ll take your worldly possessions. You jump up on Percy here and take Rosie and Kerry around the paddock. At the far end is the wood: one gate, one track, completely circular. About – An – Hour. Can’t possibly go anywhere else, nor get lost. Bugger! The bread! An hour. Ta-ra!’

Very, very slowly, Chloë closed her mouth as she watched the Gin Trap scurry back to the farmhouse carrying her rucksack like a babe in arms. Even more slowly, she shifted her gaze downwards until it rested upon two piercing blue eyes belonging to a small girl in jodhpurs; blond hair in pigtails bedecked with meticulous red bows. With great circumspection, Chloë searched for her voice. Not knowing whether or not it would appear, what it would sound like if it did; nor, indeed, what it was she was to say, Chloë did not bother to clear it. It eventually crackled out, two tones deeper than usual.

‘Are you Rosie, or are you Kerry?’

‘I’m Kerry, silly. That’s Rosie.’

Rosie turned out to be the first tail-lifter. She turned her doleful eyes on Chloë on hearing her name mentioned and misplaced.

‘So that must be Percy?’

‘’Course!’

Rhymed with horse.

And Chloë had not ridden one for some five years.

As Kerry scurried off for hard hats, Chloë worked hard at keeping her mouth closed, her head on straight and her wits about her. Both Percy and Rosie were eyeing her quizzically. She picked her way carefully around their two pungent offerings and introduced herself self-consciously. They welcomed her unconditionally with a nuzzle and a huff apiece and then went back to chewing on their bits.

Instinctively, she checked the throat lash and noseband on each bridle and tightened the girths on the saddles with a ‘Whoa there!’ to ward off any inclinations the horses had of nipping her. Chloë Cadwallader was back in the saddle.

Kerry turned out to be a very nice girl of eight years old. She put Chloë at her ease at once for she did not want to know anything about her. She saw no need for an explanation of how an apparent stranger had dumped her rucksack for Percy and was now taking her out on a hack. Such an explanation would only eat into time precious for more important topics such as snaffle bits, jute rugs and ponies with people’s names.

‘You’ll love Jemima, she’s a Cleveland Bay cross, sixteen hands with a sock on her off hind. Desmond’s a bit of a pain, tends to put in a big one if you use your stick. Which you have to, all the time. He’s the roan over there with the wall-eye. Harry’s that big bay hunter type under the apple tree, he’s started going disunited in left canter. So I’m told. He’s too big for me. Might suit you, though.’

What could Chloë do but say ‘I see’?

‘Boris, that grey Section B over there by the brook, his show name is Boris the Bold Mark Two. Which is daft really because he’s the biggest wimp out. He won’t even go over a cavaletti. But Basil, he’ll jump anything. I’ve jumped two foot six with a two-foot spread on him. And that was when I was just seven and three-quarters!’

‘I see.’

While Kerry wittered on about running martingales and French gags, Chloë allowed Percy’s sway to relax her. A gentle canter fixed a smile to her face and sharpened her senses to her new surroundings. The farm was set in a dimple amongst the hills and, from a viewpoint at the top of the wood, she could see that there was indeed a chimney smoking and a tractor crawling along the side of one field. The hills were soft and amiable, not nearly as bleak nor as black as she had anticipated.

‘Too much Bruce Chatwin,’ she murmured distractedly.

‘Isn’t he that showjumper?’ Kerry asked.

The wood crept part way up a slope, rather like a beard. The floor of it was covered with pine needles and mulch – rather like bristles. It was soft underfoot and smelt heavenly. From the top, Chloë could see that the farm was relatively isolated. She could make out buildings way over the other side of the lane but these were so far away that it was impossible to tell whether they were merely barns and byres or a dwelling. No smoke from there. Rising in jagged steps beyond was the Skirrid mountain, most onomatopoeic.

I’ll climb that one day. Maybe I’ll ride up. Would you like that, Percy?

Gin Trap’s directions brought Chloë and Kerry back into the yard on the dot of four – she could pick out the chimes of a grandfather clock. It wasn’t coming from the house which was directly in front, but somewhere to her left. It was on entering the tack room that she discovered it, tocking patiently, brass pendulum swinging in a most leisurely fashion. Though she had been at Skirrid End for just over an hour, already the tack room seemed as good a place as any for a grandfather clock. Chloë bade goodbye to Kerry and said she could see no reason why she shouldn’t take her out on another hack on Sunday.

‘Brilliant. Ask if you can ride Barnaby – he’s smashing. Liver chestnut, fourteen three, three-quarter Arab. Needs a kimblewick though.’

‘I see.’

The small of Chloë’s back nags ever so slightly. It tells her that five years has been an inordinate absence from the saddle. She rubs it tenderly and picks out the piece of chaff nestling in the corner of her mouth. She inhales deeply and closes her eyes. What is it?

I think that’s bread.

And?

Something else. Everywhere. Fresh, clean air. Hang on, tractor diesel, just faintly, over there.

And?

Sheep? No, horse. Of course. And? Wet earth.

Wales.

Wales.

She opens her eyes and takes a broad look around her. A smile breaks over her face and brings light into the darkening yard. Wales. As Peregrine said, a splendid idea. An hour and a half was all it had taken to feel settled, content and at home. And yet she had never been to Wales before. With the relaxed swagger of one who spends all day in the saddle down on the farm, Chloë saunters off towards the farmhouse, in search of hot bread and gingham tablecloths and this curious woman called Gin Trap. As she nears the porch, she sees a figure propped leisurely against it. It’s shadowy but it is most certainly a he. It must be the antipode.

‘Yo, Chlo! I’m Carl.’

Carl is possibly the best-looking man Chloë has ever set eyes on.