He threw back his head and roared a quick laugh – but long enough for Chloë to gaze at his masculine throat, his Adam’s apple vibrating most seductively.
‘Never could tell my left from my right. Back home, no probs. Sea’s on the left, mountains are on the right.’
‘And the “few yards”?’
‘Hell, distances back home are so vast, you know? Here it’s all so cramped I just presume anywhere’s a few yards from everywhere!’
‘Well, it looks like I’m here!’ Chloë acquiesced, privately thanking the heavens that she was.
‘And I’m most pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ quipped Carl, ushering her into the farmhouse with a flourishing bow.
After the gloom of the porch, and the hallway lit only by shards of light slipping through a door at the far end, the bright kitchen quite dazzled her. Though Chloë could feel the scorch of many pairs of eyes, momentarily she could not place any of them. With a strong blink, the kitchen and its inhabitants came into focus. It transpired that most of the eyes belonged to animals and, as she took in her surroundings, she spied creatures lurking in the most unpredictable of places. But the first thing that captured her eye and settled her soul was the vast Aga stretching across one side of the kitchen, bellowing forth warmth and the smell of baking bread in welcome. Above it, towels and jodhpurs were slung over the sheila-maid like bunting. The sparkle of all the eyes, and the beam from Gin Trap’s cheeks, made Chloë feel a festal welcome had been laid on in honour of her arrival.
In time, she found the kitchen always to be so. It was the heart of Skirrid End and exuded warmth and company for the Aga never went out and the room was never empty. It could lift her spirit and warm her right through on the darkest of mornings or the coldest of evenings. But she was never complacent about its gifts.
On that first day, eyes from every corner and level assessed and greeted her. One pair were Gin’s. Another, set deep into a face furrowed by years of furrowing the land, belonged to an amiable, stone-deaf Welshman called Dai the Hand, who drove the tractor and ‘mendsiz things’. The others belonged to an assortment of cats and dogs of varying shapes, colours and degrees of mental stability. Though out on the yard they formed an allied force to patrol the environs, the kitchen they had subdivided into a set of incontrovertible territories.
A dopey-looking labrador sprawled under the huge, scrubbed kitchen table and mumbled in his sleep.
(No gingham tablecloth. Never mind.)
Another acted as a draught excluder by the doorway and had to be shoved forcibly when entry or exit was required. At either end of the Aga, two identical black cats sat motionless. It soon transpired that they were ever waiting for the emergence of Jip, the Jack Russell, from his lair in the small warming shelf of the Aga. Yap, another Jack Russell but three-legged, sat in the old Windsor chair at the head of the table and woe betide anyone who fancied sitting there themselves. JR, the final Jack Russell, sat at the foot of Yap’s chair looking up imploringly with right foreleg cocked. Whether this was as a gesture of subservience or a snide reminder to Yap of his lack of right foreleg was unclear. A heap of interchangeable kittens snoozed aboard a stack of newspapers near the larder door. A greyhound, long since seen her day, lay in her dead-and-gone pose in the middle of the room, the bones of her hocks and elbows threatening to push right through the meagre pale fawn coat stretched taut over them. A small tabby cat with a shredded ear sat at the greyhound’s head and counted the dog’s vertebrae. Presiding in judgement over all, an immense shabby tortoiseshell with permanently half-closed eyes sat on top of the cookery books.
Though she had initially believed that all had gathered in a unified welcome, Chloë soon realized that her arrival had made negligible impact on the established ecosystem of The Kitchen. Before long, she bore witness to a bi-daily syndrome whose cause she would never discover. This consisted of a sudden and violent bout of musical chairs (most atonal) in which fur and fury flew around the kitchen. As quickly as it started, it finished and everyone returned to their positions as if nothing had happened. The kittens were asleep, the greyhound dead, JR’s leg was cocked and the tortoiseshell sat irreverently on Delia Smith perusing the scene. Without fail, Gin would look to each of the animals in turn and bellow ‘A hapless reshuffle of very little point.’
She was pointedly ignored.
The farmhouse was neither old nor particularly picturesque. It was a sensible structure well suited to its purpose. Its large covered porch provided ample storage for many a pair of muddied or manured boots; the larder was more of a walk-in chamber with wall-to-wall shelving deep enough to carry stock bought in bulk (Chloë gave up the count on reaching the fourteenth bottle of Vimto). Next to the larder was a cold room where the overflow from the fridge could reside quite happily and hygienically (provided the labradors could not gain entry). The kitchen, as we have seen, was vast enough to provide abundant space for all Skirrid End inhabitants other than equine, as well as to house the huge Aga which was the source of all heat and hot water at the farm. The hapless reshuffle of very little point often caused spillage of any liquid foolish enough to be on the kitchen table, and the breakage of any crockery not tucked into the wooden plate rack above the sink. The grand flagstone floor therefore, eminently moppable, was extremely practical too. The bedrooms upstairs were spacious but with windows proportionally small to keep the wind at bay. There was a drawing-room downstairs, bedecked by a regiment of family portraits of questionable lineage, but the room was used only once a year for the Skirrid End Farm Christmas Drinks Extravaganza. Anyone who knew Gin or any of her workforce (two- or four-legged) was invited to leave their boots in the porch and to partake of home-made hot spiced cider and mince pies in the drawing-room. In their socks.
Gin gave Chloë a guided tour after heartily plying her with home-made bread, slabs of farm butter and wedges of quite pugilistic cheese. Chloë would have been quite happy to remain for evermore in the kitchen, with the unparalleled gifts of the Aga and Carl. He was smiling, you see. Without interruption.
(At me?
At you!)
He’ll be there still, Chloë; his open face, his broad smile creating those dimples that have quite unnerved you. That are because of you.
Stop it! I’m going with Gin.
‘It’s clicked, my girl! We have met before and I do now remember you,’ said Gin as she showed Chloë a fine Chippendale chair in the corner of the bathroom.
‘I don’t think so,’ started Chloë, visibly racking her memory.
‘Did too!’ announced Gin, ushering her to an incongruous dressing-room bedecked with chintz and dainty china trinkets. ‘Though I must say, I’d’ve passed you in the street – not that we were likely to ever be on the same street had Jocelyn not brought us together now.’
Gin motioned Chloë to sit beside her on a fanciful chaise longue. Chloë, who could not think of anything to say, did the same as Mrs Andrews and laid her hands daintily in her lap, as befitting the room.
‘Oscar!’ beamed Gin, leaping to her feet and folding her arms triumphantly across her breast. She led the way to her bedroom. With arms still folded, she heaved herself on to the edge of an impossibly high mahogany bed in a perverted reworking of a Cossack dance. Finally aboard and legs swinging, she said ‘Oscar’ again, with apparent delight.
‘Oscar?’ gawped Chloë, who was now about the same height as the Cossack.
‘Gracious girl! Your horse!’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your horse, of course. Fifteen hands, bay thoroughbreddy thing with a white blaze, sock on the off fore, I seem to remember. Ridden in a grackle. Lovely paces, jumped like a bean. Oscar!’
Chloë was stunned and only the sight of her flabbergasted reflection in a pretty Queen Anne mirror brought her back to the present.
‘My first one-day event?’ she squeezed out in a whisper.
‘Indeed!’
‘When