His hands were warm, strong and hairless.
‘Ms,’ she replied taking her face out of the cavity of her polo-neck, ‘you know, with a zed. And yes, it was a goat.’
‘A billy-goat?’
Ha! Billy’s goat indeed.
‘No. A pet goat.’
‘Gracious.’
‘Not mine.’
‘I’m not surprised!’ He laid her leg down gently and pondered into the crook of his index finger. ‘I see from your records that there is no record of tetanus jabs. In fact, we have no record of you at all for the last seven years.’ He looked at her face and saw anxiety sown deep behind defensive eyes. He also noticed their sparkle and felt a long forgotten butterfly take wing in his stomach. He smiled. ‘Either you’ve been as fit as a fiddle or you have an inherent mistrust of the medical profession!’
Morwenna gave a nervous laugh and then retreated down into the mouth of her jumper.
‘We’ll give you a tetanus jab. And the once-over, too.’
Morwenna sank visibly.
‘If it makes you feel any easier, I myself had the once-over just last week,’ the doctor assured her.
Morwenna wondered why. He looked perfectly fit. He looked, actually, perfectly gorgeous.
‘At our age,’ he continued, scanning her notes, ‘it’s as important as servicing the car.’
I don’t think I’ve ever had the Fiat serviced.
‘Pardon?’
‘I can’t remember when I last had my car serviced,’ mumbled Morwenna.
‘Well then,’ he said grinning, ‘let’s hope we don’t find in you what undoubtedly lurks beneath your bonnet!’
Morwenna looked at him sternly. ‘But the car’s been running fine. It splutters a bit, creaks here and there and can’t cope with cold mornings. Oh my God’ she declared as the metaphor dawned, ‘just like me!’
‘And me,’ he rued quite happily.
‘But why meddle if there’s no muddle?’
He tipped back on his chair and observed her thoughtfully, tapping his fingertips together, wondering how to prolong her welcome presence in his surgery.
‘Wouldn’t you prefer to know if there’s a muddle before you’re in the middle of it?’
Morwenna contemplated the doctor through the safety of her jumper which she had kept pulled up to just beneath her nose.
‘What’s involved in the once-over anyway?’ she said quickly, through her visor of wool.
‘Heart, blood, weight, lungs, breasts – nothing to it really. We’ll do it before we do the jab if you like.’
I can’t let her go – I must just see if there’s a smile in there.
Morwenna gazed through the surgery window to the beach. An elderly couple walked a pair of dachshunds and two children were playing energetically; she could hear their delighted laughter through their abandoned movement. Her thigh throbbed and her mind whirled.
‘OK,’ she said tentatively, keeping her gaze fixed where it was, ‘but I’ll just go for the jab today. And quick! Before I run away.’ She took her face quite out of her jumper and fixed a not-so-ambiguous smile on the doctor.
Chloë has been at Skirrid End a month now, and has the saddle sores to prove it. She has also been nipped twice and trodden on often, but not by goats. She has newly defined biceps and firmer thighs as further proof of her new life, for every morning she is mucking out by seven-thirty, and twelve hours later she has bedded down eight horses and replenished twice as many water buckets twice a day. She rather likes the changes that country living has made to her body; her face has lost its pasty Islington tinge and her lungs are glad of the crystal air. Her hands are slightly thicker, her nails stubbier but she keeps them clean and trim and they are not unattractive at all. She has a healthy glow to her cheeks due in part to the crisp weather, and in part to the certain lust she has developed for Carl. Her lips, though, are a little chapped and she has convinced herself that they will be no good for kissing. Carl grows more handsome to her every day and it seems preposterous to Chloë that a man of such beauty,
(and humour and kindness!)
could ever want
(and intelligence and manners!)
to kiss her chapped lips.
She feels a vitality each day on waking and wholesome fatigue on retiring each night. A general sense of well-being. She is healthier and happier than she can remember and often wonders whether she should even bother with the rest of the United Kingdom. She would be quite content with life ever after here in Wales. Hardly surprising, for she is cosseted and secure – an integral part of a household – and her resultant happiness defines that the household must therefore be Home. Or as near to one as she has hitherto come, remember.
Conversation is on a very different plane to that to which Chloë had become accustomed over the preceding London-bound years. No one at Skirrid End knows Anna Recksick or whether there is much difference between a Gentleman’s Third and a First, and isn’t a 2:2 worn by ballerinas? Concerts on the South Bank could be fun, but at fifteen pounds per ticket, ludicrous! The tube sounds most uncivilized and Islington in dire need of greenery and more sky. In its collective voice, Skirrid End denounces the levels of noise, dirt and decay of the capital as intolerable, unthinkable and not worthy of further discussion.
Instead, and to Chloë’s delight, talk at Skirrid is devoted to the land, the weather and animals, interspersed readily with bawdy jokes and heated discussion as to whose turn it is to be banker in Monopoly. Chloë has even started roaring with relish ‘A hapless reshuffle of very little point’ at the opportune moment.
The days have a loose routine to them which provides a framework of security for Chloë. After mucking out, she gathers with Carl and Gin in the kitchen to discuss the day’s schedule. Lunch is self-service, as and when. Tea is an institution with bread and butter and fruitcake shared by all in the kitchen apart from the greyhound who is faddy about her food. Supper is delicious and invariably raucous, followed by life-and-death Monopoly sessions. (There is no television at Skirrid End and many of the letters from the Scrabble set have been eaten over the years by the greyhound, though this does not preclude occasional marathons of the game.) Dai, who proves to be a spendthrift with no notion of investment, usually bows out by nine and Gin, who mostly gambles everything for a hotel on Park Lane, retires soon after.
Chloë and Carl are invariably left with a delicious hour or so together in which they make hot chocolate and light conversation and Monopoly does not matter. He tells her he is travelling and will move on in the spring. She tells him she is travelling too. Really. In a way. Ditto the spring. He whets her appetite for New Zealand and she tells him where not to go in London. He thinks he may miss London out altogether.
‘Anyways, I’ll be seeing Paris and Edin-burrow.’
They learn each other’s favourite film (‘Really? Me too!’). And food. And favourite colour. And book (‘You must read it!’). They speak loosely of ‘back home’ but both feel compelled to live for the day and enjoy the present. Because of the Brett Years, Chloë has quite forgotten how to flirt and, deeming her lips unkissable anyway, she begins to find herself utterly relaxed in Carl’s easy company and chatters away freely. He adores her for it and also finds her rather alluring. He thinks she has the most beautiful hair he has ever seen and her freckles soon become the stuff of his last, late-night thoughts. But he doesn’t tell her so. Oh no. For while he is desperate to kiss her, he reads no sign of a come-on and presumes he must settle for just-good-friends. After all, not much point anyway with spring only a couple of months away to herald their separate ways.
There have been times