Chloe by Freya North Page A

– the latter would suppose the former, hence the resolute whistling.
    The New Year had been one of the wettest on record and the ground ran beneath his feet like the slurry in the basin of his wheel after a day’s work. As he strode the well-known route he rued the fact that it had been months – last autumn at least – since he had visited Mac. He knew his phone call was unnecessary, that he was always welcome; but he knew too that a phone call more than once in a while, a visit for a visit alone and not for advice, would not go amiss. Mac was well into his seventies after all. And after all, Mac was Mac.
    Michael Mount, commonly known as Mac, was William’s mentor. He had taught him everything he knew about clay but, most importantly, he had instilled in him the intrinsic magic of the stuff and had inspired him more than any teacher at college, more than any studio potter studied and lauded. More, therefore, than Bernard or David Leach, more than Lucy Rie, more than Thomas Naethe even. For it had been Mac who had wrapped William’s hands around a ball of terracotta clay when he was nine years old. With his own hands covering, and uttering not a word, he had squeezed hard over William’s until the clay was quite warm and had compacted under his fingernails, colouring every line and gulley in his palm.
    â€˜It’s like the earth,’ William had gasped in awe, scrutinizing his hand.
    â€˜Well, it
is
called terracotta, dear boy!’ Mac had said gruffly, having always felt awkward about conversing with children.
    â€˜No,’ insisted William, ‘
the
earth – look, in the palm of my hand. Rivers of clay, Mac. See how it’s dried here? That’s an earthquake. And see this,’ he explained, holding the terracotta ball aloft, ‘this is like the world too – see? From my nails and your squeezing? The Himalayas. The sea. Here’s England, this patch here.’
    Mac hadn’t the heart to tell the boy that Ireland was usually seen on the left, not the right, of mainland Britain so he patted William on the head.
    â€˜Along with diamonds, clay is the most precious thing the earth gives us,’ he said sternly, tweaking William’s ear and motioning him to sit. ‘Man himself was fashioned out of the stuff.’
    While Mac and William’s father shared a pipe and a memory or two, William perched on a stool in a corner and, like Little Jack Horner, stuck his thumb deep and with relish into the clay. Instinctively, he squeezed against it with his first three fingers and began to pinch a slow, clockwise path around his thumb with deliberation and reverence. The ball had become a bowl.
    That afternoon he made two more. The next week he was coiling. Bowls, urns, pots; vessels all for they both contained and revealed space. Intuitively, William made shapes where the space inside determined the form, and he built forms which described the space they occupied. At nine years old, he had no idea he was doing either. Mac was convinced that first afternoon that the child was a prodigy and, as a consequence, saw no need for any specialized child-conversing technique. With this boy he could talk unguardedly about clay; a feat rarely possible with contemporaries. The boy, too, lost all awkwardness and stilted politeness. They could, in fact, just chat. They could also be sound and secure in each other’s silence. The clay had wedged shut the generation gap and had fired impermeable a friendship between them. Far more precious than diamonds.
    For ten years, until he went to college, William arrived at Mac’s at nine every Saturday and Sunday morning and most afternoons during school holidays. That he forfeited a coveted place in the school football team and sacrificed initiation into the intricacies of adolescent sex, bothered him not at all. A vessel, growing and undulating under his hands, damp and silky to the touch, was far more sensual a proposition