Chloe by Freya North Read Free Book Online

from last summer. The hedge was an ecosystem of its own and the seasons were obviously its slave. Rabbit and robin cohabited and eyed Chloë amiably
en route.
The lane was single track and poorly surfaced but Chloë appeared to be the only traffic that day. There
had
been a road – a quick phone call to Skirrid End Farm the day before, to someone who wasn’t the Gin Trap, had informed Chloë that a bus would take her ‘inches from the lane’. It had indeed, but Skirrid End Farm was not ‘a few yards up on the left’. Chloë had walked the few yards and seen nothing but hedge. To the left or right. Estimating that she walked a mile in around fifteen minutes, she calculated that she had covered just over two of them; the run of hedgerow interrupted only every now and then by rickety gates leading to pasture.
    Something’s not right.
    Yes, it is. Keep going.
    Trudging along, half halting every few strides to hump her rucksack back into position, Chloë tried to envisage what Skirrid End Farm would look like. No clear picture entered her mind’s eye and if she tried to design the farm herself, she got no further than a vast front door more suited to a church. She considered the voice on the other end of the telephone. Australian? New Zealand? South African? No, it was antipodean for sure. Male. Not bowled over with joy and excitement to hear from her but welcoming none the less.
    â€˜Ah yih!
Ker-Low-E
. Sure! Take the bus – it stops inches from the lane, we’re just up on the left. Few yahds, you know. Be seein’ ya. Travel safe.’
    Lunch-time had obviously been and gone and Chloë did not need the rumbles from her stomach to tell her so. After all, it had been nearing noon on the train but, despite protestations from her stomach even then, Chloë had rejected sandwiches of rubber in favour of fantasy: doorstep slabs of Aga-baked bread slathered with furls of hand-churned butter and crested with wedges of crumbling cheddar gouged by blunt knife from a wax-clothed round.
    There’d better be. There’d bloody well better be.
    Inches from the lane. Just a few yards up on the left.
    The lane was not getting any shorter and the hedges seemed to be higher now and appeared to converge ever so slightly. Any more than a few yards and they might very well close in on her. Chloë looked at her watch. Two fifty-three. Thirty-eight minutes. Seven minutes to three miles.
    â€˜Three miles is not a few “yahds”,’ declared Chloë out loud. ‘Three miles is not funny. I’m starving hungry and have no idea where I am.’
    Walking past a driveway to her right, Chloë read the sign, ‘Skirrid End Farm’, and trudged wearily along.
    Skirrid End Farm! On the right? Back there?
    She came to a standstill and, still facing forwards, craned her neck around to reread the sign. Skirrid End Farm. Definitely.
    â€˜A “few yards up”?’ she shouted. ‘On the
left
!’
    Who’s counting!
    â€˜On the
right
?’ she declared to a robin. ‘
Must
be antipodean, that bloke. Everything topsy turvy!’
    It was, however, with good humour and an easily found spring in her step, that Chloë retraced a few yards and turned left up the drive to meet whatever was to greet her. The drive was long enough to wonder. Church-type door? A smoking chimney? A rusty old Taff astride a tractor? Border collies? Straight into the kitchen to a scrubbed table with gingham cloth and the bread and the cheese and the hand-churned butter? And ‘Chloë Cadwallader, there’s pri-tti now!’ sung in welcome?
    In the event, two large rumps met her view and, as she called ‘Hullo’, the tail of one was raised and a steaming mound of admittedly sweet-smelling manure was dumped sonorously at her feet in welcome.
    â€˜Hullo?’ she called again, somewhat nasally.
    â€˜Chloë? Is it you?’ The voice was pukka and strong