Chloe Read Online Free PDF

not the
original
– yet nor was it a standard print such as Chloë’s. Jocelyn had commissioned hers from a young Chilean painter whom she had befriended on a coffee appreciation trip to South America in the seventies. She had brought Carlos back to London, sat him in the Tate and National Galleries, the Courtauld Institute and the Wallace Collection until he had quite mastered the Masters before sending him to Paris where she had an old friend who had known Matisse. Two years later, he enjoyed the first of many sell-out one-man shows. Now New York had him and he dressed in Gaultier and had a boyfriend called Claude whom he called ‘Clode’.
    But he came to Jocelyn’s funeral, and wept alone and at length before disappearing.
    As Chloë gazed at her own Mr and Mrs Andrews, she wondered what would happen to Jocelyn’s. There, Señora Andrews sometimes appeared to be winking and wasn’t there just a drift of something positively libertine about Señor Andrews?
    Chloë decided if she visited the house, she would see if she could take the painting home. But where was home to be? Wales? Ireland? Scotland, perhaps? Wasn’t home just a concept? Was it attainable? Really?
    Because it would not have crossed their minds to call her, Chloë rang her parents just before the Queen’s Speech to thank them for their perfunctory cheque. Two time zones away, they were just on their way out to cocktails with the Withrington-Smiths before a bash at Bunty and Jimbo’s so could it be brief? Yes, yes, Merry Christmas to you too, Chloë. Mother sends fondest! Must fly, bye!
    Owen and Torica Cadwallader: definitive ex-pats. Dictionary perfect and, as such, worthy of lengthy description or dissection in book, film or anthropological study. They whooped it up overseas, ricocheting around their vapid colonial existence; loving every minute, every year of it. Chloë had been born to them in Hong Kong and was to be their only child (a daughter – shame) who, at six years old and with a relocation to Saudi pending, had been shipped back to England to fumble her way through boarding school and other rites of passage. Had it not been for Jocelyn, she would have been quite alone. ‘Far too far to fly’ being her parents’ dictum and excuse, Chloë rarely saw them. Perhaps once every three years or so, for a day or so. If that. This year they had flown in for the state opening of Parliament but Jocelyn’s funeral two months later was ‘far too far to fly – we’ll send flowers’ – which they did, only on the wrong day.
    And yet Jocelyn remained forever discreet; she never judged them, never spoke badly about them and never colluded with Chloë who had expressed a brave indifference from a tender age anyway. Jocelyn’s sympathy and support, though unspoken and unasked for, were abundant and comforting. The unequivocal, unconditional love and respect that she lavished on Chloë made her want for nothing. Why pine for parents she did not know when she had a godparent the calibre of Jocelyn? For her part, Jocelyn had a daughter without the trials of pregnancy, labour or a husband. She had this wonderful god-daughter merely because her brother had captained Owen’s rugger team at Oxford.
    Chloë thought herself very lucky. While other parents came up to school
en masse
and took their daughters out for cream teas in Marlborough, Jocelyn descended by Aston Martin twice a term to whisk away Chloë, and any friends she chose, for magical interludes and picnics on the Downs replete with champagne, smoked salmon and chocolate liqueurs. She helped smuggle plenty of the latter 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