A sort of love story
“What are
you doing, Tim?” his sister asked. Her voice came muffled from the kitchen.
“I’m
reading the paper, Caroline,” he called back.
“No you’re
not.” She appeared in the doorway, her hands and wrists white with flour; she
was making pastry. “You’ve been sat there an hour.”
 |
| Albert Edelfelt, Red-Haired Model and a Japanese fan (1879) |
“Well,
there’s a lot in The Times,” he replied.
“No there
isn’t. Dad used to read it in 10 minutes on the loo.”
“That was
before the central heating. Do you remember, you could see your breath in there
in winter.”
“Don’t
change the subject.” Caroline perched on the arm of the chintz
sofa opposite, holding her floury hands away from the fabric. “You’ve been
slumped in Mum’s old chair since lunchtime. You could go and get some fresh air.”
“It’s been
raining.”
“It’s only
spitting,” she said. The sun had come and gone between light-grey clouds.
“I’ve been
thinking what to do about my house.”
“You know
what to do about your damn house.”
“I want to
keep it. I like Bracknell.”
“No-one actually likes Bracknell, you idiot. Move down here. We’ve got broadband in the village now. You don’t have to be in Bracknell to design databases.”
“But the
notches in the door frame,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“We marked
the kids’ heights as they grew up. Right up till Carla was 18.”
She didn’t
reply for a moment. Then she said:
“Sheila
wants to sell, Tim. You can’t keep half a house. Let it go. Sheila’s gone. Let
her go. Let it all go.”
“I wouldn’t
mind so much but she shagged my sodding boss.”
“So?”
“What do
you mean, ‘so’?”
“Isn’t that
a good reason to start all over again?” She stood up and went back into the
kitchen. “Get her right out of your life. Get the house out of your life. Come
home. Paint.”
“What?”
“Paint. I
don’t know why you stopped. You should never have left Central St Martins
really. You could have made a living at it.” Her voice came over the kitchen
clatter. “Do you know, Chloe Markham has one of your paintings. And a sketch
you did at the river when you were a student.”
“Who’s
Chloe Markham?”
“It’s her
married name. Chloe from the Grange.”
“What,
Chloe Cholmondeley-Ludicrous or whatever her name was? The posh little redhead
with no friends? You mean someone actually married her?”
“That’s not
very nice, Tim. Yes, her. She married an officer in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards.”
“He must be
bored.”
“Not
really. He’s dead,” she said. She looked out from the kitchen. “He drove over
an IED somewhere in Afghanistan. He got the MC.”
“Oh.” He sounded
deflated.
“Her
parents died years ago and she was an only, so she got the Grange. She still
lives there. She’s fostered several children and she drives the minibus for
shopping days and the community centre. We try recipes together sometimes and
when I had COVID she got my shopping and walked Bobby every day. You should go and
see her.”
“I might.”
“But first
go and get some bloody exercise. Take Bobby. He’d like a walk. Labradors need
exercise or they run to fat, just like younger brothers. BOBBY!”
 |
| Berthe Morisot, Little Girl at Mesnil (1892) |
So Tim went for a walk. It was quite a long
walk. (Bobby was all right with this.) They walked through the centre of the
village, the soft Devon air still damp from rain earlier in the day, the
intermittent sunshine lighting the edges of clouds with a livid white glow.
They passed the war memorial, its names clear, the stone clean and white. The
road branched here, the left fork for Upper Cringeworthy and the right for
Slattern. They took the road to Slattern but after a few yards Tim recognised
the bridleway he had always used as a child, when he wanted to slip away up
onto the moor; and he followed the stony muddy path until it started to climb
past small, tussocky fields with dry-stone walls, and 10 minutes later they
were at the edge of the open moor, climbing on a wide grassy sheep-track
through the heather and ferns, its surface garnished with rabbit droppings and
broken here and there by slabs of granite. The ferns smelled of talc.
The path narrowed, and twisted between the
boulders. Above them was the grey mass of a large tor; it looked close but it
was nearly an hour before they arrived. The tor was a field of scattered
granite boulders and slabs. Tim sat down on one of the bigger slabs, Bobby’s
lead folded in his hand..
“Well, that was good exercise,” he said. Bobby
wagged his tail and snuffled at the base of some ferns. Rabbits, thought Tim.
He looked out over the valley; he could see Upper and Lower Cringeworthy
clearly to his right and the hamlet of Slattern to the left. The road between
them was bordered by high hedges but now and then he could see the roof of a
tiny car move along it, lost like a beetle in the landscape.
“I should never have married Sheila,” he said.
(“You should never have married Sheila,”
Caroline said once. “Mind your own business,” he had replied.)
Then he started to think about Chloe.
*
She was very pale and had flyaway red hair and
freckles. She wasn’t in the village in term-time. She was sent away to a girl’s
prep school somewhere, then to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. In the holidays her
parents would arrange a party for her and they would all be invited (“Lt-Gen
Sir Gordon and Lady Smythe-Butler request the pleasure of
TIMOTHY’S
company… RSVP The Grange, Lower Cringeworthy). She would greet them politely and stiffly and
looked absolutely terrified. Her parents would urge her to lead them in party games
and she tried; once he saw her bite her lip so hard it almost bled. When she
went through the village the boys would hide on the hedges and throw dried
cow-dung at her. Sometimes she bent her head and ran. He couldn’t take part.
Somehow he knew that her school, too, must have been hell. As they entered
their teens he saw her less and less. Then she went off to Lady Margaret Hall
and he went to Central St Martins and the others in the village went to work. That
was 20 years ago. The last time he had seen her was the following summer, and
it had not occurred to him to think of it since. Now he remembered.
One warm day, home from Central St Martins for
the long vacation, he had taken his sketch-pad down to the river that rushed
through the wooded gorge below Slattern. On a bright afternoon the spray from
the eddies around the rocks caught the sunlight, as did the wings of the
insects; there was a fresh, damp scent from the river. He hadn’t started to
sketch anything, preferring to enjoy the afternoon. Then the bushes on the
opposite bank parted and a slim figure stepped between them, dressed in a
simple white shift and sandals. She was only 15 feet or so away and they looked
at each other in surprise.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. I do beg your pardon.”
“Why?”
“You seem to be sketching. I must have
disturbed you.”
“So what? It isn’t my river.”
“I’ll leave you in peace,” she said, and lifted
the branches.
“Stop,” he said, without quite knowing why.
“Sit down.”
She sat on a rock just out from the bank and he
picked up his sketch block. He worked quickly, glancing from the paper to his
subject and back again.
“Are you drawing me?” she asked. “Do you want
to? You really don’t have to.”
“I want to,” he said. “Do you know the sun is
catching your hair?”
He saw her relax; she took off her sandals,
tossed them on the bank and put her feet in the cool water, then sat forward,
her chin on her hands. She smiled, and he realised he’d never seen her do that
before; a nervous, frightened grin perhaps, but not like this. She looked
straight at him.
“Your eyes are blue,” he said. “I’d never
noticed that before.”
It didn’t take him long. He held it up for her
to look at, and she opened her eyes wide. “That’s too nice. I don’t look like
that.”
“You do, you know.”
After a pause, he said: “You can keep it if you
like.”
He tore it off the block and stood in the
river, passing it carefully. She looked at it and drew in her breath sharply.
“I must go now. Mama and Papa do not like me to
be late for sherry before dinner,” she said, but her eyes looked different from
before.
He let her go. Later he wished he had asked her to stay. But a few weeks later he met Sheila.
*
 |
| Franciszek Żmurko, Study of a Female Head (1900) |
When are you coming home? Dinner’s ready about
seven. BTW if you want to ring Chloe it’s Cringeworthy 6645.
“Yes, I’m coming home,” he muttered. He dialled
the number.
More flash fiction:
Cold
Everything is cold here
Solitude
A Cold War memory
Rhodri Hactonby's Maps
A question of social geography
Hiraeth
A yearning…
Strange Places
A spirit in the sky
A Sideways Journey
Things might have been different
Displaced
Encounter on E94th Street
Belonging
Do you? Where?
Leaving Home
A house has memories
