Chloe. Freya North

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СКАЧАТЬ the front door opened directly into the sitting-room but William only ever used the craftsmen’s entrance at the rear of the cottage. Consequently a thick Turkish rug bought at great expense and inconvenience whilst backpacking some years ago, hung down from door frame to floor. The back wall was papered with books which sat crammed on bookshelves William had built by hand, leaving a gap of just an inch between tallest book and ceiling, and between bottom shelf and floor. He was not bothered about any alphabetical or thematic ordering but arranged the volumes according to height and the spines’ aesthetic appeal. Viewed from the other end of the room, the books rose and fell in a sinuous sequence, rather like organ pipes or ordnance survey contours. Between the rug-door and the book-wall, a large hand-built terracotta pot four foot tall sat fat, proud and burnished to perfection. To the side of it, a selection of umbrellas and walking sticks, whose provenances were long forgotten, were propped precariously. The rest of the room was taken up by two incredibly easy chairs bought at auction and in serious need of reupholstering, and a stout Scandinavian wood-burning stove. Still warm, despite William’s three-day absence. It ought to be – it cost William almost as much as he made last year.

      His studio was his haven and his true home; the fact that the cottage was included in the rent was merely an added bonus. Built by a contemporary of Bernard Leach, it had been designed with no other purpose than to be a room conducive to the making of pottery. There were two anterooms, one for glazes and one being the damp room where ongoing pots could rest. The main room housed William’s wheel at one end, an immensely long trestle table and a high, plaster-topped console on which clay could be kneaded and wedged in preparation. Shelves ran around two walls carrying finished pieces, experiments, failures, stimulus material such as skulls and pebbles, and a wealth of books on ceramics. The building was designed to allow its craftsman unparalleled access to the views outside, thus the other two walls were predominantly windows. Facing the trestle table at which William usually stood and worked, the windows reached from ceiling to floor and provided an inspiring panorama across the garden to the moors; the windows in the wall by the wheel were lower so that a potter throwing could still see where land became air and the great sea started. The roof itself was essentially one big skylight. The studio was never cold for the kiln at the far corner kept it cosy.

      That afternoon, as the veiled December sun fizzled out over the sea to drop down beyond the horizon and hide until noon the next day, William prepared some vivid blue slip and checked on his pieces in the damp room. His mind was elsewhere and yet nowhere at all. Momentarily it flitted across Morwenna before going on a little excursion to London and the humming girl, where it stayed a rueful while to be brought back to the present by Barbara’s insistent bleat. William found it was quite dark and he sat on the steps of the studio tugging the goat’s ear and asking her what he should do. Her eyes glinted luminous, unnerving even, so he smacked her rump and scratched her beard before heading off for Morwenna’s, driven as he was purely by his groin. Driving guilt to a far-flung corner of his conscience.

      ‘Hungry, were you?’ Morwenna fought to contain her delight. A hundred and eighty pieces for the Bay Tree Bistro looked promising, as did an orgasm or two.

      ‘Not really – well, not hungry for food,’ qualified William with an overdone lascivious wink. He had always mixed up her money-look with her lust-look and she was so obviously wearing one of them now. Unfortunately, he could not decipher which for both incorporated moistened, parted lips and a slight glaze to the eye. He strode over and kissed her deeply, allowing his hand to travel expertly if routinely over her torso. He ran her pony-tail through his hands and looked at her face. Behind her smile he saw that her eyes were quite flat. Or were those £-signs, superimposed cartoon-like over them?

      ‘Morwenna,’ he said in as much of a drawl as he could muster convincingly, stepping towards her and kissing her as persuasively as he could.

      And so they made rather unsatisfactory love. William’s eyes were slammed shut throughout while Morwenna’s were fixed on the lampshade, waiting for a climax that never came and was not worth simulating. Afterwards, they thanked each other politely, assuring that it had been good for them, how was it for you.

      You shouldn’t have to ask, thought Morwenna as she rose and went for her dressing-gown.

      You shouldn’t have to pull your stomach in like that, thought William as he watched her.

      ‘Stay?’ she asked, hugging her dressing-gown about her, quite keen for him to go.

      ‘Not tonight,’ William replied, as lightly as he could.

      As Morwenna sipped at very sweet cocoa, she beckoned her cat to her lap. William, William. She gazed at the wallpaper without seeing its pattern. William Coombes was her lover and her livelihood; thirty per cent was thirty per cent after all, and his burgeoning reputation had seen his prices rise healthily. As much as she loved him, and love him she did, she loved the idea of him more.

      She had held the reins and guided William through an exhilarating run of discovery from which she had benefited too. Multiple orgasms and thirty per cent. Now they were on a downward slalom heading nowhere fast. The reins were gone from her hands and yet she could not remember letting them slip. Who held them now? Not William, for sure. The shift of power was now squarely with him and yet he was using it quietly to ride away from her.

      It was the creeping indifference she could not abide. His proclamations of affection were dwindling and empty and, as she confronted the truth with only her cat on her lap for comfort, she knew that he made them because he knew it was what she wanted to hear. Tracing a large vein threatening at her calf, Morwenna admitted silently with forlorn resignation that William was no longer in love with her. Her cat fixed his yellow eyes on her, his pupils expanding as he swallowed her in to his unnerving gaze. What could she do but acknowledge out loud that William simply no longer loved her? They had grown apart because he had grown up and she had grown old. She had also witnessed his growing disaffection with Saxby Ceramics.

      ‘But Morn,’ he had said under his breath once or twice, ‘I actually want to make the pots I want to make. Not made to order, made to measure, made to be dishwasher safe and microwave proof.’

      ‘You will, you will. Once you’re up and running,’ she had said lightly. But she could not deny that his career as a potter was now establishing itself and that his preferred frugal lifestyle could most certainly be maintained by the sale of a one-off studio piece every now and then.

      ‘Oh well,’ she said out loud in the plaguing silence of her room, ‘I still have you and you love me unconditionally, don’t you puss? You give me a hundred per cent, never mind thirty!’ The tabby kneaded her lap in enthusiastic camaraderie before absent-mindedly springing his claws, driving them deep into Morwenna’s thigh. She gasped with the shock and the hurt of it, hurling the animal off her lap, rubbing her thigh hard. The cat slunk reproachfully to the window-sill where he knocked over a photograph of William and gazed defiantly away from her.

      ‘You and him both.’

      William arrived back at Peregrine’s Gully at midnight. He felt wretched because he knew he had used Morwenna, and thereby abused her. He cursed his conscience for having returned only when his testosterone had levelled. He cursed testosterone. The humming girl was far from his mind, as was the echoing urn in a river of red. Going to the side of the cottage, he went directly to the studio. Barbara, a little bleary, was none the less delighted to see him and chewed her cud thoughtfully as he fetched a block of terracotta clay and began to knead and wedge it. Pulling it towards him and then thrusting it away, he worked the clay until the wetness had gone and a cross section revealed no air pockets, just a smooth dark red-brown slab. Good enough to eat. My, he was starving. It was gone one in the morning and he was cold; the hunger that he had used as a pretext to Morwenna now gnawed at his stomach and his soul.

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