Chloe. Freya North
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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