back to school: the very stuff of midnight feasts, bribery and blackmail. Once, when the weather had not been kind, the picnic was taken indoors at Badborough Court, a meandering country seat near Devizes owned by an old friend of Jocelyn’s (didn’t Lord Badborough kiss her for ages!).
Jocelyn wrote weekly, came to parents’ evenings, sports days and school plays. When Chloë’s maths teacher chastised Jocelyn over Chloë’s general apathy and incompetence, the visits and the picnics and the chocolate truffles became more frequent. Not as a bribe, but as support.
‘I’m not surprised your mind wanders off in maths, it’s insufferably boring,’ Jocelyn had said over shandy at a pub near Avebury. ‘But just think, if you pass your O level you’ll never, ever, have to do maths again! And just think, if you pass your O level you can turn your back on mental arithmetic and formulae and daft equations, to add things up on your fingers forever more! That’s why we’ve got ten of them after all!’
Chloë gained a ‘B’ for her maths O level and has used her fingers to count ever since.
It was watching the Queen’s Speech on the television (Chloë remained upstanding with sherry and a mince pie) that decided her what to do.
‘Velvet, Your Majesty!’ she cooed with reverence and gratitude. ‘Jocelyn said I may have “anything of velvet” so I shall go directly and have my pick. First, though,’ she announced, ‘I shall pack!’
Chloë, her belongings and Mr and Mrs Andrews crossed London for Notting Hill by taxi and her sudden Christmas cheer ensured an extravagant tip on top of the seasonally quadrupled fare. Chloë grinned and waved at the familiar front door; darkly glossed hunter green, brass fittings gleaming. Hullo, hullo, hullo, she chanted, skipping up the wide steps two at a time. She had her own set of keys, of course she did. But the locks had been changed, of course they had. Feeling tearful and bewildered, she sat down on the front steps, surrounded by bags that were suddenly too heavy and bulky, wondering what to do. She thought of all the velvet items inside that were now rightfully hers, she wondered about the Chilean Mr and Mrs Andrews hoping they were still where they should be, presiding over matters in the drawing-room. Her own Mr and Mrs Andrews were too cold and cross to talk. Or was that her? She hoped nothing had been removed or even moved inside the house and yet how could she check? With her bottom numbing against the cold stone, and her lower lip jutting in bewilderment tinged with self-pity, she felt at once trapped and yet barred. Christmas Day was closing around her. It was cold.
Wales, suddenly, did not seem a good idea at all.
‘Wales,’ declared Peregrine, flinging his arm out in a roughly westerly direction, ‘is an absolutely splendid idea!’
‘Good old Jocelyn Jo!’ agreed Jasper, thrusting a mug of mulled wine into Chloë’s chilled hands.
Jasper and Peregrine had found her, huddled and sleepy, on their return from a promenade along the Serpentine. Their keys fitted the locks on Jocelyn’s door perfectly for it was they who had had them changed. Jocelyn had left the house to them on that very condition: ‘To prevent my nearest and not so dearest trespassing and traipsing through.’ So Chloë had been rescued and was once again ensconced in a familiar armchair, looked down upon by the benevolent, if surreptitiously Latin, smiles of Mr and Mrs Andrews.
‘Your phone,’ said Jasper, ‘is perpetually engaged. We’ve been trying you for yonks.’
‘If the Sins weren’t using it,’ Chloë explained, ‘I left it off the hook. Knowing that it would never again be Jocelyn, I can’t bear to hear it ring.’
Chloë cradled a chipped cup that she knew well and nibbled biscuits from the lucky dip of Jocelyn’s old Foxes’ tin. Wardrobes full of velvet were just up the stairs and off the landing, and there would undoubtedly be a bottle of Mitsuko in the bathroom, one in the bedroom. And yet it seemed strange to be there, half asleep, freezing cold, sitting amongst all the familiar accoutrements and smells but with no Jocelyn.
‘They say that people inhabit their places, their things, long after they’re gone – but I can’t find Jocelyn anywhere here,’ Chloë mumbled, her nose running on to Peregrine’s Hermès scarf. Jasper topped up the mulled wine and laid a slender, perfectly manicured hand on the top of her head.
‘We couldn’t find her either, poppet, not at first. But in drifts and droves she returned and now we chat away to her frequently, don’t we, P? I hated it here at first, didn’t I, dear? I found it so empty – and yet everything was in its place; all should have been comfortingly familiar, but it was alien and cold. And then, a few days on, I opened a kitchen drawer and found a shopping list scrawled by Jocelyn on the back of an envelope. It matched entirely the items currently in the larder. Suddenly I was quite warm and Jocelyn was here once more.’
‘And for me,’ said Peregrine, coaxing the Hermès scarf from Chloë’s clutches to replace it with a damask handkerchief from Dunhill, ‘for me it was when I spied one slipper under the Lloyd Loom chair in her bedroom – you remember those pointy, turn-up-toe Indian things she had? It caught me quite unawares – it was only when, a day or so later, I found the other one lurking behind the laundry basket that I could smile. In fact, I had a right old chuckle – it was as if she had just that moment kicked them off prior to springing into bed with a magazine, a brandy and the telephone!’
‘But,’ sighed Chloë who had begun to thaw, ‘I miss her. And it hurts, it pulls – here,’ she explained, pressing both hands above her breasts. Peregrine and Jasper cocked their heads and donned gentle half-smiles.
‘She’ll never really be gone, you know,’ said Peregrine, cuddling up to her comfortingly in the armchair.
‘You’ll see her again, Clodders old thing. I bet you anything she’ll be in Wales!’
‘Ooh! And Ireland!’ cooed Peregrine, rolling his ‘r’s and jigging his head.
‘Scotland,’ philosophized Jasper, looking vaguely northwards.
‘And good old Blighty!’ declared Peregrine, gesticulating expansively and inadvertently clonking Chloë’s nose in the process.
‘In fact,’ said Jasper standing up and lolling with a certain swagger against the fireplace; one knee cocked, one hand in a pocket, the other draped aesthetically over the mantel, ‘you’ll see her quite often – in you!’
Chloë looked at Jasper gratefully. And then she looked at him in quite a different light. She stifled giggles.
‘You’re Mr Andrews!’ she exclaimed, looking from him to the painting above his head.
‘Gracious duck!’ whooped Peregrine. ‘You are! To a ‘t’! What is it, Clodders? Is it the pose or the poise?’
‘It’s both,’ she declared, delighted.
Jasper moved not one inch, if anything he lifted his chin a little higher and dropped his eyelids fractionally.
‘Then I suggest, my dearest Peregrine, that you don a divine sky-blue frock and sit demurely at my side! For if I am indeed Mr A, you can be no other than my devoted Mrs A!’
‘Velvet!’ proclaimed a suddenly lucid Chloë having picked herself up from a fit of giggles on the Persian rug.
‘Blue satin!’ sang Peregrine, tears of mirth streaming down his face. He looked at Chloë slyly. ‘Race you!’ he hollered before diving for the door and the stairs beyond.
Because she was at least forty-five years younger than him, Chloë reached Jocelyn’s bedroom first and flung open the cupboard doors with the grandest of gestures that would have done her late godmother proud. Peregrine and Chloë, and a wheezing Jasper just behind, looked in awe at the sparkle and drape of the cupboard’s contents. There were yards of silk, watered, raw and crushed; swathes of satin, duchesse, brocaded and ruched; there was velvet and devore velvet; plain taffeta and moire; there was suede that was butter soft and cashmere that was softer than air. A superior collection of handmade shoes was hidden from view in their soft fabric sacks.
The