SIMON BARNES
Miss Chance

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

Copyright © Simon Barnes 2000

Simon Barnes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

An extract from ‘along the brittle treacherous bright streets’ is reprinted from Complete Poems 1904–1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage.

An extract from ‘The Waste Land’ is reprinted from Collected Poems 1909–62 by T.S. Eliot by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

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Source ISBN: 9780006511960

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007484874

Version: 2016-10-04

Dedication

For CLW, whom I courted on horseback, and also for Dolly Dolores VII (who may feel inclined to sue)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: Schooling

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Part Two: Competition

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Keep Reading

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

1

You can’t control the people you love. The phrase had invaded Mark’s head like a parasite. It squirmed and wriggled around for, it seemed, most of the night. You can’t control the choice, and having involuntarily chosen, you can’t control the person either. Neither sleeping, nor quite waking, it seemed important – no, essential to the processes of life – to encapsulate the dual notion in a perfectly honed epigram. Final line to a winsome poem, perhaps. Or first line of a Morgan short story. Though love wasn’t really her subject, was it?

Or was it? But nobody ever did quite understand her stories, she said; and he was the only one that ever understood her jokes. Until now, presumably.

Days were easier, of course, and evenings really not too bad. There are, of course, disadvantages to being left by your wife, but it is a great opportunity to look up old friends. Mark had done a lot of work on that phrase as well.

‘Callum?’

‘Oh God, you. Need me to talk you out of suicide again?’

‘It’s either a beer with you or the gas oven.’

Banter. Make light. A jest. Guess at the horrors, if you wish; but Mark preferred banter. He had made this resolution, he liked to think, to protect the world from boredom: who wanted to hear about his banal predicament? But it protected him too. Not thinking. Forget the night, and its wakefulness and its vain pursuit of perfect epigrams. And anyway, it was in the Morgan tradition, was it not? She had left him, not in a storm of tears or temper, but with a jest. Rather a loving jest. But then she would, wouldn’t she?

Callum told him that Naz was on late turn and he was in sole control of their boy, and so he would not be available for drink and solace until ten. Which was far too long. And left Mark flicking through the address book once again: a name, a number, an inspiration.

He had passed her before. And kept going. Now he looked again. Well, he reasoned. Why the hell not? True, he had not seen her since that night when they had concealed the objet d’art – but these were not normal times. A state of emergency had been declared: this would be a serious escalation. So escalate. His hand made a series of minute advances and retreats over the telephone.

Melody. No one is called Melody, his mother used to say.

‘Mel?’

‘Good God.’

He remembered her voice too, every nuance. Somehow, he had not expected to. ‘I’d love to. But I can’t. I can make Saturday lunch, though, if you don’t mind coming out to Radlett.’

‘No one lives in Radlett.’ His mother’s son.

‘My horse does.’

‘Fancy you still having horses. It must be ten years at least since I last sat on a horse.’

‘One horse. Though I have another I’m supposed to be exercising right now, a nasty stroppy bugger of the kind you used to adore.’

‘How lovely to hear your voice talking about horses again. People don’t change, do they?’ He heard with mild surprise the affection in his voice, and thought again of their last meeting, and its horror.

‘So why don’t you come and hack him out tomorrow morning, and then we’ll have lunch?’

Mel. There had been a time when tumbling in the hay had been no metaphor. But horses … Mark had no wish ever to sit on a horse again, but anything was better than solitude. Sure. Great. I’ll be there.

The house was too big. A few days ago, it had felt like half his; now he knew it was all hers. Her Islamic draperies, her gods and goddesses, dancing Shiva, the knotting of the banister, the one remaining maze. Morgan was present in every way but one: a conjuring trick quite typical of her. Not fair. And damn it, what should he wear?

‘It’s funny,’ Callum said, a fair bit later that same Friday, when such subjects as life and the departure of wives had been fully discussed.

‘No it isn’t,’ Mark said.

‘How I used to envy you two. The perfect couple. I used to think: why can’t Naz and I be like that?’

‘You’re all right, you two?’ Mark was alarmed. Other people’s problems were the last thing he required. Besides, he needed their stability. He needed someone to envy too.

‘Oh, we are. But we’ve had our problems. Like everybody. When she spent all her time at the centre.’ A centre for Muslim runaway females, Mark knew. ‘And I wished we had the perfect balance you two seemed to have.’

Perfect balance: the terrible unexplained absences, which she would still more terribly explain, were he to ask. And then an involuntary memory: the night she brought him hot and sour soup. Tenderness in a Styrofoam container; her famous spy’s mac, buttoned especially high, arousing more than his suspicions …

‘Look, Mark, I’ve been thinking. You know what you need to do?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’ve got this theory. Most of us make a terrible balls of our adolescence. Very few people ever get a second chance. But you can have your adolescence all over again, and this time, you can do it right.’

Mark was charmed by this. ‘All right. What do I do?’

‘Get a motorbike. Get laid. The order doesn’t matter. You must just do both as soon as possible. Like you used to do with those bloody horses you used to tell me about. Fall off, get back in the saddle again as soon as possible. I’ve got a present for you.’

Mark had been wondering about the roll of paper Callum had brought to the pub. He unrolled it, as requested. A poster; no, two posters. The first, Brigitte Bardot wearing nothing but a few flowers, blooms that emphasised rather than concealed what lay beneath. The second showed Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle. She wore a leather jacket unzipped to the navel.

‘Put ’em on the wall when you get home. Make you feel adolescent.’

‘Not precisely my adolescence.’

‘This is classic adolescence. Think how much Morgan would hate them.’ Especially the tits. Mark saw, with startling vividness, Morgan’s burlesque breast-cupping: she had done this no more than a handful of times, but always making him laugh at moments when you’d have thought laughter impossible. ‘You’re the only one that ever understood my jokes.’

‘What you want is one of those hot little trail-bikes …’

Later that night, Mark used Morgan’s dressmaking pins to attach Brigitte and Marianne to the Islamic textiles that hung from the walls. They looked like a pathetic and utterly unconvincing act of defiance. Which was why he liked them.

Morgan. A woman you don’t meet every day; nice double entendre. Nothing in their life had been banal until that moment. She had even used a banal phrase to explain it all when, clad in an Edwardian walking-jacket with lion’s-head buttons and a fur trim, she had paused for a moment with the door ajar. Leaving him, after ten years in which they had seemed to live a life somewhat out of the common run, in this hopelessly banal predicament.

‘But I didn’t enjoy it,’ she said, more than once, by way of self-justification. ‘I kept wishing it was you.’

Though that had been years ago, when such matters were discussed.

Which reminded him. He had better read Othello over the weekend. Get his thoughts ready for Monday morning. Goats and monkeys!

And he still hadn’t decided what to wear. His riding clothes were presumably still at The Mate’s, with all the rest of the horsey gear. If she hadn’t thrown them away, of course. So they might as well be in China. He felt uncomfortable with the idea of riding in ordinary clothes. Almost as if riding were an ordinary thing. Had Morgan ever seen him in jodhpurs? But he would have remembered the stinging jest. Ten years; more, a dozen. But presumably you could ride in cowboy boots. After all, cowboys did.

So he was dressed in what were more or less his normal working clothes when he set off for Radlett the following morning. Black jeans, black cowboy boots, the oldest pair from his collection. Morgan had bought them for him on one of her trips to New York. The heels sloping back just a fraction, the toes rather noticeable chisels. The kids called him Clint, which was gratifying of them. Especially when you think what they called him at the old place.

If you pass the Wagon and Horses you’ve gone too far, she’d said. We can’t have that, can we? he’d replied, weakly flirtatious. So he did a 180 in the pub car park and headed back towards town. This time he found it: an unmade track leading away between a row of fifties houses, behind a large concrete stand, apparently for the dispatching of lorries. Not terribly country. There was a cleared area, where a few cars were parked, and beyond it, a five-barred gate. Mark parked, locked, opened.

It was an act that called into being a pair of large, pale Labradors. ‘Along this particular road the moon,’ Mark said to them kindly, offering to each wet Labrador nose a hand, ‘if you’ll notice follows us like a big yellow dog. You don’t believe? look back.’ Morgan, reading those words to him. The Fifth Avenue bookshop or store. The dogs, apparently much soothed by E. E. Cummings, parted, allowing his advance. Mark passed through the gate. And passed in a single sniff to that other country, the place where they do things differently, in which a cup of tea can produce a dozen volumes, the good past.

Horses: the sweet scent of their dung. The companions of his youth, the stamping, silent auditors of his first love. The wild flights across country, the terror at the start of big competitions, like rather bad peritonitis, the power, the leaping and turning. The solitude, the companionship. The early morning rides that were also hay-room trysts. The collection of rosettes, of kisses.

How do you expect to pass your A levels when you spend all your time at that stable? When we moved to the country it was not with the intention that you become a bumpkin. Besides, nobody is called Melody. She is, I grant you, a sweet child. Or would be if she could talk of anything but horses.

The Mate was wrong. Naturally, they had talked of everything from the menstrual cycle to the movement of the stars.

It is odd, the way that even when awash with memories, the details of the face you once loved best in all the world come as a surprise. That slightly crooked and more than slightly intoxicating smile from thin unsensual lips. ‘Mark!’

He kissed the lips, as an old lover should, though lightly. He then hugged, as an old friend should, doing the job properly, chest to chest. And was hugged back: ‘You look wonderful.’

‘So do you. Troubles suit you.’

‘I always liked you best in riding clothes.’

Holding him at arm’s length, she raised an eyebrow at that last remark: single, strong, black, ironical. He had not forgotten that, at any rate, nor the storms the challenging, teasing eyebrow could precipitate. The last storm, the objet d’art. Best not think about that. But no empty compliment: she looked more than wonderful – fit, honed, wind-battered. Jodhpurs do, after all, tend to emphasise rather than conceal. Mark remembered his surprise when first caressing a body that lacked stomach muscles of cast iron. ‘And I’m glad you got rid of that perm.’

‘It has been a long time, hasn’t it?’ They both knew precisely how long, but they were not going to speak of that, were they? ‘Come and meet Ed. Presuming Ed for short.’

Ed was very big and very black, without a trace of white on him anywhere. He was standing, tied up, tacked up, beside a burly dark bay, but Mark knew his manners and ignored the second animal, complimenting Ed before doing another thing. A slim, crooked stripe on the nose of the bay.

‘This is Gus. You’ll like him. He’s a sod. Just like old Trevor.’

‘Trevor was not a sod. You just couldn’t ride him.’

‘What about that time he decked you at Aston?’

‘That was my fault. He even tried to jump it. It was his gameness that was the problem.’

She shook her head. ‘Ungenuine sod. Are you riding like that?’

‘Can you find me a hat?’

She returned a few minutes later with an ancient and, it turned out, slightly too large velvet riding hat. ‘Stop wheedling and get on.’

‘Just introducing myself. They’re not machines, you know.’

Mel, mounted, was already looking down at him. A correct riding position is also something that tends to emphasise rather than conceal the woman beneath the not overly loose red sweater. Mark looked at her in a confusion of delight.

He undid the head collar without looking to see how it undid, ran down the stirrup irons. Reins in left hand, hand on the pommel. Left foot in left iron: his body doing all these things apparently without reference to himself. Lowered himself with agile softness into the saddle. The horse shifted into a walk, but Mark did not correct him; merely soothed with his right hand.

They passed through the gate, which Mel opened adroitly for him. Mark swung his left foot forward almost to Gus’s nose, and tightened the girth a hole. Unthinking, essential movement: like turning on the light when you get home, or listening to the answerphone.

2

Mark’s body remembered everything as he lay diagonally across the acreage of the bed, possessed by an overmastering physical content. ‘The size of the bed is primarily an option for comparative solitude,’ Morgan said, ‘rather than one for gymnastic exhibitions.’

He felt the beginnings of an ache in the small of his back, and what he hoped was the conclusion of one at the top of his thighs. But that was no matter. Absurdly, he sketched the closing of his hands, leaving a gap for the reins between third and fourth fingers.

He had returned home to find the red light morsing from the answerphone, and reached out a hand to call its ghosts into being. Mark, why do you never remember to switch on the answerphone? Is it done deliberately to upset me, or is that aspect of it just good luck? Remember, I’ve read Freud too, you know. But it was not, of course, her; it never was. Just three messages for her; news of her departure had yet to spread. Had she collected the messages already, dialling in from whatever place she now occupied? What if she called now? The fourth message was for him: Callum. Come and share a takeaway with me and Naz – that is, of course, if you’re not out getting laid.

Which was good, especially as even Sunday was now under control, no longer the yawning void that Sunday traditionally presents to the newly abandoned. He had an appointment with a woman of startling good looks and slightly more startling force of character. He had to meet her in Radlett, where else?

Mark carried two pints of beer to their table in the Wagon and Horses. She still, it seemed, drank pints. ‘Here’s to you, Mel. And thanks. It was great to sit on a horse again.’

‘He went well for you. But then you’ve always liked sods.’

‘He’s not really a sod.’

‘You always say that. He’s normally a complete bastard to Theresa, out on a hack.’

‘I didn’t give him anything to fight.’ This was true. And without anxious hands tugging at his mouth, the horse found himself fighting a ghost and grew tired of his own temper. He was easy. And Mark felt that quiet, savage sense of penetration: infiltrating the strange land that lies between two species of mammal. The border-country; the land of his youth.

The pub was nicer than Mark had expected, peopled mainly, it seemed, with regulars, a few in riding clothes. There was an early autumn fire, and the food was as pub food should be. They sat with second drinks before them: ‘To speak only physically,’ Mark said, ‘it seems that every need bar one has been taken care of.’

Mel smiled in honour of this, and then added a grain of malice to the smile. She leant back in the chair and called to an adjacent table: ‘How’s that brilliant mare of yours, Kath?’

The next best thing in the world to talking about yourself is talking about your horse. She had Kath’s attention at once. And Mark’s. Blue-black hair in a crop that was somehow softened at the edges; tough face with eyes made huge with eyeliner. Navy-blue eyes, more or less, Mark decided, and a navy-blue jumper that had clearly been applied with a spraygun. Muscular body that looked hard, but was no doubt soft enough in places. Who was it that said after an abortive tryst, I have touched the hottest and the coldest parts of a woman?

Mark was taken aback by this lubricious thought, but still managed to elbow his way into the conversation. ‘How wonderful to have a brilliant mare. What does she do?’ James Joyce, that was it. No need to read Joyce till spring.

Kath looked at him accusingly. ‘What she did was jump. What she does now is hang about eating her head off.’

‘Got a leg?’

‘Christ, I wish it was something simple like a bowed fucking tendon.’ Harsh London vowels, with oddly softened consonants. ‘She’s gone in the brain, that’s the problem. Gone sour on me. I’ve been too soft on the old trollop. Let her get away with too much.’

A tourist who sits at a pavement café in Paris with his ears open slowly finds his schoolboy French returning. After the second drink he is inclined to venture a subjunctive. ‘What’s she done?’

‘Affiliated, last two years, few red ribbons. I don’t want to have the old bitch shot, but what else can I do? She’d make someone a lovely hack, except she’d probably kill them.’

‘Vicious?’

‘Nah. Pussycat. Just fucking mad.’

‘She sounds sweet,’ Mark said. He had intended nothing more than facetiousness, weakly flirtatious. But Kath turned and looked at him properly for the first time, bright with eyelinered challenge. ‘You can have her if you want. I’d take a grand for her.’

‘Is this your usual line of sales talk?’

‘I mean, can you ride?’ Meaning rather more than can you sit on the top and steer.

‘It’s been known.’

Kath leant back in her chair and aimed sweatered breasts at him. ‘Do you want to try her out?’

Morgan was the past mistress of all out-cooling games. Years ago, Mark had shown her a disgusting playground trick, in which he had looked and sounded as if he were scraping together the broken ends of the bone in the nose. ‘If you ever do that again,’ she said, laughing, disgusted, ‘I will leave you. I will take it as a signal that you simply don’t want me around any more, and I shall pick up my bags and leave.’ Perhaps a thousand times since, Mark had seized his nose with both hands. ‘Try me,’ she always said. ‘Go on. Try me.’ And Mark never did. Being quite certain she would leave. The jest demanded it.

‘I’d love to try her,’ Mark said.

They agreed: Sunday morning at eleven. And then Kath turned back to the friends at her own table. Mel raised an eyebrow at Mark. ‘Well?’

‘Seems rather a sod.’

3

Mark loved his Jeep, but he had always been embarrassed by it. It was not the right vehicle for driving between Islington and Herne Hill. He would not have chosen it himself; Venetia had bought it for him, in a particularly wild fit of generosity, a few birthdays back. But now it had real mud round the wheel arches. There’s glory for you, as Morgan would say.

A couple of miles beyond the Wagon and Horses, Mark entered an almost Venetia-like maze of narrow lanes. Kath’s instructions were precise: past the metal barn, left at the lone brick house, right at the crossroads. And all within the annular M25. It did not seem physically possible; there was surely no room for these fields. They were a trick, or a piece of magic: through the looking-glass, down the rabbit-hole. The journey had something of the not-quite-rightness, the slightly-sick-making sense of disorientation that people found in Morgan’s stories. That Mark found in Morgan herself: though he would never have admitted to that. Against his will, he thought briefly of Morgan’s last party: the one to celebrate the Herne Hill job, and her publication of Alice.

And then, as promised, the yard. Mark swung in, and parked the appropriate Jeep beside a consonant four-berth horse lorry. At the gate, two Jack Russells welcomed him noisily from four feet off the ground, Jack Russells being unaffected by gravity.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ greeted Kath.

‘Hello,’ Mark agreed.

‘Made your will?’

‘I’ve left everything to you. I thought that right.’

She laughed. She was dressed as yesterday, the blue-black sleeves rolled a little short of the elbow. The revealed arms were full of sinewy strength. ‘Come and meet the old trollop.’

Accurate reconstruction of significant first meetings is always difficult; perhaps even undesirable. Over the years they acquire a carapace of mythology. Mark always claimed that his first sight of Mel was of her jodhpured buttocks: love, he stated, at first sight. Perhaps it was as he said; but if not, the false memory was the true one. He remembered Morgan’s clothes, the dead zebra, her air of secret amusement, at a joke that had never, it seemed, quite palled. Until last week, of course. Or their first meeting when actual words were exchanged. The lumberjack shirt. I’m a monster too. You must learn that.

‘I didn’t fancy you at all. I found you rather odious.’

‘I adored you from the first.’

‘Precisely why I found you odious.’

He remembered something of that first encounter with Trev, the horse of his youth. It was not the first sight of the big blaze face that he recalled, but the moment he patted the neck and felt the extraordinary hardness of muscle. ‘A lot of horse,’ he had muttered. Knowing from the single touch that the horse had been schooled and damn well schooled, too. And the horse had lowered his head just a fraction, a pink fleshmark just below the blaze, and then lifted his head with a jerk and a biff, smiting Mark lightly below the sternum and knocking a little breath from his lungs. ‘Boisterous sod, aren’t you?’ Feeling a hint of challenge, of male-to-male empathy in the touch.

Trevor had swaggered from his box, looking ready to take on the world. But Kath led Mark to a horse that seemed to have no presence whatsoever. She was looking over the half-door of a nice roomy box: bay head, white star, preposterously large ears. She looked meek and kind: a soft touch. ‘Hello, trollop,’ Kath said, slapping the bright neck a few times before entering the box, bridle over her shoulder, saddle on her stripped forearm.

Mark stood diffidently at the door, watching Kath tack up with neat, precise movements. ‘She’s tiny.’

‘She’s jumped five foot, it’s nothing to her. She may be 15-one, but look at the arse on her.’

‘She needs the pelham?’

‘Can’t always hold her in that.’

She led the mare out into the daylight: autumn sun made the bright bay coat gleam like a conker. Mark had always liked his horses dark and burly and tough but something about this meek-looking animal seemed to slip beneath his guard. Not his type: dangerous and intoxicating thought.

New departure; same old route to disaster. ‘Take her for a little run around the field,’ Kath said. ‘Get the feel of her.’

Mark put on his re-borrowed velvet riding hat. In his jeans and his cowboy boots and his riding school hat, he felt a complete phoney. He felt Kath judging him; the mare had not yet begun judging him. That would come in a few minutes.

He took the reins from Kath, just above the rings of the martingale, in his left hand. And with his right, reached out to touch her.

He had expected to make his hard hello-Trev slap, his boys-together greeting to his boisterous champion. But his hand refused to do anything of the kind. Instead he stroked, nibbled the neatly pulled mane with his fingers. The mare looked at him for a while. Then, very lightly, she touched his shoulder with her nose. Mark was absurdly moved. ‘Hello, angel,’ he said. Too soft for Kath to hear.

4

In the beginning, it was Mark that had been the star, not Morgan. It was he they pointed at in the students’ union, not she. That day, the day when he first set eyes on her, he was absolutely at the peak of his powers; his perihelion, as he later put it. And he dressed like the star he was. Everyone wore black in those days: but Mark wore over his black jeans and sloppy black polo-neck a green cardigan with leather buttons. It looked like something a middle-aged man would play golf in. His father had worn it to play golf in. Mark’s posthumous adoption of it was part mockery, part tribute, part self-mockery, part elaborate reverse dandyism. He had also just bought his first ever pair of cowboy boots: a dramatic move away from the Doc Martens required by convention. The cardigan, the boots: as a star, he could dare such things. He could do nothing wrong.

Undergraduates write poems: it is a condition of the age. But Mark was a poet. ‘You know,’ as a stage announcer had once said: ‘like T. S. Eliot and Wordsworth.’ In his second year he produced what he called, with becoming modesty, a slimy volume. The university poetry magazine, Penyeach, had done the publishing, and it was sixteen pages long and all the poems were by him, there’s glory for you. It was named for a knot he had learnt in the Cubs: A Round Turn and Two Half Hitches.

His poems made people laugh. Boy meets girl and hands her a garland of ironies. He wrote of the tangles and knots in sexual negotiation, caught undergraduate angst neatly enough: neatly enough, at any rate, for angst-ridden undergraduates to recognise themselves.

He would have died rather than admit it, but it was not his words that hit home, but the delivery. He was good at audiences: he liked it; he rose, quite literally to the occasion, standing taller than was his custom, eyes scanning the audience, sharing an intimate secret with – oh, several hundred on big days. It was nothing to him, tall and confident in bearing, his voice full of pretended perplexity, rising at the end of sentence as if to question even his full stops. He was preparing a second volume of similar sliminess to be published the following term, called Running Bowline, for the line in ‘What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?’ It was about the hideous embarrassment to which youth is prone. The best poem was unabashedly autobiographical: ‘The Night of Serial Buttock-Fondling’.

He was often asked to read a poem or two in the interval, when a decent band came to play. The sound of laughter coming towards him from many hundred voices was wonderful, and Mark, despite the attacks of rather bad peritonitis that gripped him before these big readings, adored it above all things. Occasionally, Penyeach would organise a reading for a smaller and theoretically more discerning audience, and he would watch the other poets do their nervous stuff, would laugh when appropriate or nod wisely, and offer fulsome congratulations, there being no side to him. And then read his own poetry. Last: always last.

There was always a reading in Freshers’ Week, naturally. By the beginning of the final year, his place of honour was assured. He strolled in as a piece of easy routine, a man comfortable with his own pre-eminence. Nothing was ever the same afterwards. And he didn’t even meet her: he didn’t dare. Or as he put it to himself at the time, not his type.

It was the usual sort of crowd: nervous, sneering, reluctantly admiring would-be poets, a lot of black clothes and Doc Martens. ‘And now to close the evening, Mark Brown will read us something.’

Mark, slightly nervous till that moment, took the floor like a great and well-beloved actor making an entrance, his extreme modesty of bearing somehow emphasising his incalculably lofty status. He shoved a handful of hair away from his eyes and pulled out a slimy volume, not without looking in the wrong pocket first, to an affectionate titter from those that knew him. The book had been folded in half and crammed into the back pocket of his jeans, what a way to treat a sacred object. He went straight into the poem: no preliminary remarks, not even a title. And led them into a web of mistrust and deceit, the poet no less a liar than his mistress. The poem ended ‘come lie with me and be my love’, nice double entendre, but Mark read it thus: ‘Come lie?/ with/ me?/ and be/ my/ love???’ The unasked questions hung in the air as he surveyed his audience in the brief silence that followed. Then the comprehending smiles: and the applause.

Mark read one more poem, the one he had written after he had learnt that T. S. Eliot found the fireworks of the peace ceremony more disturbing than the bombs of the enemy: a contradiction that converted neatly enough into student love. Standing tall and confident, eyes scanning around his audience as was his invariable custom. All were to be included: he spoke to all.

And bang.

Bomb; or firework. It is extraordinary how many trains of thought you can keep running at the same time without derailment. Mark thought this even at the time, while he continued to read. Also thinking about a poem he might write, recalling a childhood incident in which he had walked into a glass door. Also feeling the same shock he had endured on that occasion, as if the air itself had turned solid and knocked him silly. Also wondering if what he felt was a strong sense of attraction or a strong sense of distaste.

And all without missing a beat in the reading of his poem, save that he was now reading to an audience of one. He did not dare look away, save for an occasional glance down at his got-by-heart poem. Had he tried to regain his normal audience-scanning insouciance, he would have been lost. And every time he looked up from his page, she was there. He read to her, every word to her, and she listened, her head a trifle on one side, each hand clasping an elbow. She looked quite insufferable: and he could not look away.

A little triumph of self-mastery: he reached the end without disaster. He thanked her modestly, accepted her applause, though she seemed to be clapping in a special ironical way that made no actual sound. At last he was able to sit down, to face a different direction, while the Penyeach editor made his speech about all contributions being welcome.

‘Well done, my love,’ Christine said from her place at his side. ‘I’ve always liked the fireworks one. Never heard you read it better.’ And she gave him a small kiss on the cheek.

Fireworks of peace. ‘I need a drink.’ Christine at once reached into her bag and produced, with a Mona Lisa smile of triumph, a can of beer. ‘Adorable woman.’ Mark kissed, opened, drank. Then, the speech being spoken, he got up to do the sort of chatting that is required on these occasions, there being no side to him. Eventually the gathering thinned out, and Callum said it was time to go home.

The three of them walked back to the flat together. ‘Been talking to the weirdest woman,’ Callum said.

‘You mean the one in the black and white coat?’ Christine asked. ‘Where do you think she got it from? It looked genuine.’

‘She said you were winsome, Mark.’

‘I bet she says that to all the girls,’ Mark said sourly.

‘Did she like the poetry?’ Christine asked.

‘Said you were E. E. Cummings with capital letters, Mark. Is that a compliment?’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘But was it genuine? I hope you asked.’

‘Not in so many words. I asked her where she got it. Said she picked it up secondhand.’

‘That means it’s genuine,’ Christine said. ‘What a nerve. I could no more do that than fly. I mean, going to a poetry reading, a fresher – a fresher – wearing a zebra-skin coat. You’ve got to admire that, in a way. I mean, a dead zebra.’

5

The armchair was deep and leather and comfortable, but she had acquired a taste for ritzy surroundings. The fire had been lit, though it was rather early in the season, and reasonably warm. But it was that sort of hotel.

Mark had not sought the meeting, but was delighted when it was suggested – no, insisted upon. ‘Er,’ he told the waiter confidently. But she would pay, snatching up the bill purposefully when she had done so, to tuck into her slim not slimy black wallet, another trophy for her expenses, entertaining British snowboarding champion or the latest naked actress. Or something.

‘Bloody Mary,’ he said. ‘Please. Spicy.’ Her favourite drink, as it happened. And there she was, too, walking in, gazing about shiftily, spotting him. He stood to kiss her, nicely, on each cheek. ‘Bec. Good to see you.’

‘Good to see you, little brother. Spicy,’ she said to the waiter. ‘Bloody Mary, please.’

She sat. Then shook hair away from her face and smiled, both uncharacteristic moves. The hair was long, fair, undyed, worn in two long halves that normally allowed only a pale strip of face to be seen. ‘I’ve known women who hide behind their hair like fawns in the undergrowth,’ Morgan said. ‘Your sister lurks behind her hair like an ocelot in ambush.’

It always amused Mark, to hear how many people were genuinely afraid of Bec, or Rebecca as everybody else in the world called her. Not that he found such fear incomprehensible: there were at least a thousand occasions in their shared past when she had beaten him up. He was just delighted to learn about subsequent victims. ‘Why do you think,’ he had once asked Morgan, ‘she didn’t go in for women’s glossy magazines? Why men’s?’

‘Mountaineers don’t look for the easiest way up a mountain,’ Morgan had said. ‘They shin up the North Face.’

‘And how are things at Edge?’

The packet of tipped Gauloises already on the table, the brief clack, the gold bonfire of the Zippo. ‘Good,’ she said, hissing smoke. ‘Preliminary figures for August are the best yet.’

‘Why was that?’

Her hair had fallen in front of her face, and from its depths she gave him her pitying look. ‘Should have seen the babe I put on the cover.’ She shook her head, not in negation, but to offer him a little more face, softened with concern. ‘But look, Markie, what’s this all about? Oh, thank you.’

She took her drink, sipped, as Mark told his brief banal story that led to his long-term banal predicament. She gave him uncritical sympathy. ‘But no nervous breakdown yet? No suicidal despair? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’

‘Oh God, Bec, don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But mostly I’ve managed to keep too busy.’

‘Game plan is to get suicidal as soon as you can find a window?’

‘Nice double entendre, Bec. But listen, talking about being busy. I wondered if you knew. I mean, you did all the packing up that time, when I was away for the autumn term.’ He meant, but did not say, after their father’s death. ‘And I just wondered if you threw away my riding stuff. Or not.’

‘Your riding stuff? Good God, is this another fashion statement?’ She had always been unkind about cowboy boots.

‘Perhaps. If so, I think I may have got hold of the ultimate fashion accessory. I think I might have bought a horse.’

At this she laughed, really laughed, almost a giggle, an unusual thing altogether these days. ‘You mad little bastard.’

‘That’s roughly what everyone else has said.’

Bec said: ‘He ruined his life with that horse and that silly girl. It’s not my fault he didn’t get to Oxford. It’s all the fault of that silly girl and that fucking horse.’

Mark grinned, a little warily. The words still brought a flash of pain. ‘She got the adjectives the wrong way round,’ he said.

‘Cabin-trunk,’ Bec said. ‘I remember distinctly. Loads and loads of stuff. Massive cat’s cradle of leather. Clothes.’

‘Boots?’

‘You and your boots. Yes, boots on silly sort of false legs. Either in the trunk, or alongside. Up in the attic. No chance that The Mate will have lugged it out. Even if she were to call on all her super-powers. Weighs a ton.’

‘Still less Ashton.’

‘That would be a bit grossly physical for him, wouldn’t it? You still going up there and talking to the little shit?’

‘Well, I do go up there every now and then. To see The Mate. As you know. And that does rather involve seeing Ashton.’

She wagged her head, bringing more hair forward to narrow the Gothic arch through which she looked out at the world. ‘I don’t know how you can do it. I can’t bear even the thought of sharing the same postcode. Even for half an hour.’ She shook her head again, reducing the width of the strip of face to about two inches. Eyes very fine, very troubled. It was only about the hundredth time they had had this conversation. In family life, language is not a medium for the exchange of information.

‘Have you seen The Mate of late?’ Mark asked.

‘Took her to lunch last week. The usual fifty-five mentions of Ashton. Jesus, she knows what it does to me.’

‘She can’t help herself. Like biting on a bad tooth. She only mentions him to me about once every meeting. But always that once.’

‘But you go home, and he’s actually there. And you sit at the same table as him, watch him pouring the wine in Dad’s place, and you manage to hold down your supper.’

‘I know, Bec. It’s not a betrayal of you. I just wasn’t there.’

‘I know you’ve always felt bad about that.’

‘Oh, Bec. Coming back from my jaunt. Swaggering up the drive with my tales of the conquest of Europe. It was the worst, the worst thing ever.’ Not a medium for the exchange of information.

She smiled a sudden wreath of smoke. ‘Worse than the night of serial buttock-fondling?’

‘You and your memory. But I know it was much worse for you being there. But you must understand that my going back is still some way of trying to … I don’t know …’

‘I know there was never any actual adultery, and so they thought that made it all right. As if the only available sin was fucking. He darkened the last years of Dad’s life –’

‘Bec –’

‘And the hour of his death. She brought Ashton in –’

‘I know –’

‘– to give him the comforts of the Church. She brought his chief tormentor in life to torment him on his deathbed.’

‘Bec.’

‘Two more, please. Spicy. I know,’ she said, turning back to Mark, ‘that you think I’m unbalanced on the subject.’

‘No one is balanced on the subject of death. Your own, anybody’s. Except Lao Tzu, perhaps.’

‘No!’ A cry of pain. ‘Ashton is to do with bloody life, God rot him. How to fuck up various people’s lives, while all the time smiling and making jokes and doing favours and being obliging and urbane and amusing.’

‘I understand …’

‘But you weren’t there. You didn’t watch him worm himself into the family, while I was at home doing my sentence on the Hertford Mirror. I saw it all happen, before my eyes, in slow motion. Saw Dad become a sad old bastard, in slow motion before me.’

‘Bec’

‘Fathers and daughters, I know, I’ve read Freud too, you know.’ A line of Morgan’s, that, originally. It became a line of Mark’s, now a line of Bec’s. ‘Did I ever tell you what I nearly gave The Mate for Christmas last year? I found a complete Freud in a secondhand bookstore, and I bought the lot. Bloody expensive they were, too. Still got them at home. I chickened out.’

‘Would she have got the joke?’

‘Too obvious. That was the problem. We had an argument on precisely that subject. She simply couldn’t accept the idea of unconscious motivation.’

‘You talked about it?’

‘I think we were talking about you. And I said that everyone seeks in marriage to replicate the relationship with the parent of the opposite sex. But she sat on it at once. At once. Schupid nonsense,’ the last two words being another impersonation, ‘so perhaps she could see the dangerous ground on the far side of the hill. With her X-ray vision.’

‘Thank you. Spiritual infidelity.’ The first to the waiter.

‘You always did need a good sub, didn’t you? Infidelity. We’ll have no redundant adjectives when I’m editing. You know how fond he was of the Victorians? Palgrave?’

‘I know –’ This was the bit he couldn’t bear. It always made him cry, every time Bec told him. He always tried to stop the conversation at this point. Always failed.

‘And I used to read to him when he was in hospital.’

‘I know, Bec –’

‘And every time he asked me to read “Cynara”. And every time I read it, his eyes filled up with tears. It was torture for him; it was the only comfort he could look for. That I could give him. That any one could give him.’

She shook her hair over her face and ignited a Gauloise. Mark wiped the corner of each eye with a discreet knuckle. Both drank.

‘I’m sorry, Markie. You’re the only one I can talk about it with.’

‘Rob –’

‘Never knew Dad. Hardly knows The Mate. He’s tremendously understanding, but he doesn’t understand. And never met Ashton, of course. So bitching about him doesn’t have the same kind of resonance.’ She smiled a little at this last frivolity.

‘All well with Rob? With you and Rob and so forth?’

‘I hope so. I don’t know what I’d do without him. We both lead such busy lives, you know. But it’s always good when we bump into each other. He cheers me up.’

‘Making millions?’

‘Doing all right.’

‘Tell me, Bec – do you understand what he does?’

‘You know, it’s funny you should ask that. It’s been very much on my mind of late. He came back from a really good day, and there I was, home, and so he told me all about it. And you know, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. No unconscious motivation. I really tried. And he’s explained it all so many times that I daren’t ask him again.’

‘It’s stocks,’ Mark said with great authority. ‘He goes out to work and spends all day broking the bloody things. Like a fishmonger.’

‘Who mongs fish. Thanks for your help, little brother. You seem quite chipper, for a man with a broken heart. Are you putting your life back together?’

‘I’m trying, Bec. But I’m joining up the wrong bits.’

‘Interesting. Got laid yet?’

‘How macho you are, Bec. How very wise they were to give you the job at Edge. No. But I think I might be in love.’

6

Mark made two long and graceless hops. What to do now? Take his left foot out of the iron? Scramble on board any old how? Ask Kath to hold her head, an offer already refused? The mare was seriously silly, and she made him look seriously schupid. Out of his depth.

With the third hop, Mark found he had enough leg beneath him to make a spring, and without considering the matter, sprang. It was not that he did anything seriously bloody comic, like leaping clean over the horse’s back, but his leap was out of all proportion to the animal beneath. Trev had been all but two hands higher, after all. But he caught his balance, caught it rather neatly, in fact. Touching her neck lightly with his right hand to get his bearings, lowering himself into the saddle with the softness of a butterfly alighting. Rather a passionate butterfly. As someone had said about something. Slipped his foot into the second iron. ‘God, you ride long.’

Kath, smiling to herself, perhaps at the mare’s restlessness, perhaps at the implied compliment, said, ‘Shall I hold her head while you adjust the leathers?’

But the mare seemed to have stopped spinning round and round, and now she wanted to walk. Walk terribly fast, with neck-stretching, head-nodding strides. Mark swung his left cowboy boot forward to tighten the girth. Damn it, it was him, that passionate butterfly. Which poem? But perhaps he had borrowed it from somewhere. Up two holes on the left; up two holes on the right.

‘Hello, angel,’ Mark said softly, as he took up a contact. That is to say, he moved the reins so that the bit moved in her mouth. That is to say, he reached out to touch her. The touch of a passionate butterfly.

Yes, it was part of the unpublished Morgan-gone sequence, the last poem he ever wrote. Unfinished: well, she came back, didn’t she? That time. The mare was eager to trot and Mark agreed that she might, and she responded to the thought alone. And decided to take control. She moved with huge jerky strides like a horse in a trotting race, leaning on the bit, seeking to extract his arms from their sockets. Mark checked again. At this, she cantered, quite the opposite of what he had intended. Another mild check: this time she started to hop like a rocking horse, making every second stride without putting her forefeet on the ground. Checked again, she tried to canter on the spot. This was not lack of schooling. This was craziness. It was seriously alarming.

But the odd thing was that Mark was not seriously alarmed. To his surprise, he heard himself laughing out loud. For she meant no harm; he knew this with absolute certainty. No malice. Just a little madness, nothing more. It is the tendency of the novice or frightened rider to yank at the horse’s mouth in times of trouble, but all Mark’s youth had come back to him: not to his mind, but to his hands. And his hands forgave, not blaming; and softened. And his legs squeezed her forward and suddenly, she was moving with power and purpose, and it was beautiful and she knew it as well as he did. Suddenly he was not sitting on a horse, but riding. Riding round the big green field with his borrowed hat slipping towards his nose and the chisel toes of his cowboy boots poking foolishly out of the irons. Riding.

Without further discussion, he asked for a canter, but she understood him all wrong, confused and mad again, and flung her head up. Mark, standing in the stirrups, had a perfect view of the white star on her forehead. Then a whack on the chest: he discovered that he had moved his head a few inches to one side. He had missed, by a hair, a broken nose.

‘All right all right,’ he told the mare without resentment. ‘Let’s be sensible horses, yes?’

And she found a bigger pace for him, a huge rolling canter, and he rode high and forward and balanced, and as he rode his hands made a thousand adjustments and counter-adjustments, more or less of their own volition. The mare asked tiny questions with every stride, and every one needed answering: the flow and counter-flow of information and opinion. Language.

‘Put her at a jump or two if you like.’

‘We like,’ Mark said.

He looked at the car-tyre jump with purpose and looking was enough. Beneath him, an angel spread her wings.

7

She suggested that he make a night of it. Do his sorting ‘after Marce’. So on Saturday evening he drove the Jeep into Hertfordshire. He had told his mother that he would be coming alone, because she did not care for impromptu arrangements. ‘Oh,’ she said. It was one of her more devastating monosyllables.

The Jeep carried him as if on rails on his own crosscountry route to Codicote: huge march of the railway viaduct across the Mimran valley just visible against the darkening sky. He remembered the Christmas walk to the A1, his mother’s tears.

He found that he had pulled in at the White Horse. He parked neatly, wondering if this was procrastination or a crass need for a drink. Not that he would go short at The Mate’s, but that was not the point. Or perhaps it was a tribute to his father, to that last drink, the time they had talked about teaching. Cultural transmission, Mark. The most important job in the world.

The pub had been gutted and refurbished at least once since he and Mel had drunk their illegal teenage drinks. Hands held, halves of lager, The Game, the sudden gulping retreat back to the stable-yard, deserted now, the scented, pricking double bed of hay. Tip: always bring a horse blanket if you intend to make love in a hay-barn. Did she laugh and laugh with her doctor husband? Did she play The Game? Or was she quite different: a different person, a different time?

Would you like me to laugh and laugh? Shall I be a silly giggly girlie for you? Morgan, I prefer your silliness the way it is. And that night when she had read for him a poem, seizing the book from the pile beside the bed:

after all white horses are in bed

Love without punctuation.

But love is not really about bed. To believe so is to sentimentalise. The avowals, the grappling, the giggling, or for that matter the poetry: these are only marriage when marriage is gone. You remember the beginning, the end. You can’t reconstruct the bit in the middle. The bit that mattered.

Telephone her? But he had no number to call. Write to her, via her forwarding address? Suggest a civilised meal, a grown-up discussion? And always returning home to the morsing answerphone, the shoal of messages for her diligently transcribed. These days he never forgot to switch on the answerphone. If she collected her own messages from afar – it was impossible that she did not – why did he never catch her? Why were there no phone-crashing retreats from his voice? His finger reaching out to press the button, the messages from her friends, her admirers, her editors. Waiting always for her voice: never hearing it. They knew something was up, these callers: well, I knew it wouldn’t last. Not really up to her standards, was he? Mark’s darkest secret the one he had somehow managed to keep secret even from himself: that he agreed. The daily robot valediction: end of final message.

Sitting in a pub snivelling into your pint, sentimental bastard. This would never do. Would his saddle fit the little mare? That was the only question that mattered. And besides, it was time for Drinks Before, as his mother always termed that ceremony.

He parked outside the house that was more like a vicarage than the vicarage, as his father had said when they moved in a decade and a half back. ‘Darling.’ A kiss accepted on each cheek. ‘Come in and pour me a nice drink, it’s time for Drinks Before.’

It was a peculiarity of hers never to pour her own drinks ‘except in extremis, darling.’ So Mark poured her a generous gin and generously helped himself to whisky. She would say, ‘Well, “cheers”.’ Relishing the vulgarity, the inverted commas.

He carried the tinkling glass to where she sat in her high wing-backed chair, the table beside her towered and castellated with books. He placed a mat on the nearest book and then the glass.

‘Well, “cheers”.’ She sipped, and then added another ritual phrase: ‘I can feel it doing me good.’ She smiled a trifle winsomely as she said this. Her hair was apparently freshly crenellated into new grey ramparts. ‘Did I understand you aright?’ she asked. ‘On the telephone?’

‘In what particular?’ As always, Mark found himself echoing his mother’s eccentricities of diction.

‘Horses, darling.’

‘Oh, horses, yes.’

‘You know, when your father and I moved to the country, it was not with the intention that you became a bumpkin’. Not the first time she had said this. ‘That silly girl, and that fucking horse.’

He did not make the joke about the adjectives. ‘I saw Mel the other day.’

‘No one is called Melody. And she still has horses?’

‘So do I. I’ve just bought one.’

‘Oh, darling.’

‘That’s why I want my riding gear.’

And he looked up, to be struck by a sudden knifing glance: The Mate’s X-ray vision. He and Bec had a shared fantasy, to which their father had been privy, that their mother possessed super-powers. ‘And Morgan does not approve? Hence her absence on this visit?’

‘Morgan doesn’t know anything about it. She is not around. She has taken leave of absence.’ What an extraordinary way to put it.

‘Oh.’ The monosyllable hard, condemning.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, darling.’ And the descent into tears. ‘Oh, darling, oh dear.’

Then the doorbell. The tears, though copious, seemed to shoot back into their ducts by an act of will.

8

Mark looked down from his eminence of 15 hands and one inch and admired the sweatered bosom below. Bosomina, he remembered, and especially Sexuella. ‘All right if I give her a spin in the school?’

A reasonable request. Why the slight hesitation? ‘Sure. Shall I take her head?’

‘Don’t bother. I expect I’ll manage.’

They walked across the yard to the outdoor school, the flat sand-floored oblong, nicely fenced, the dressage letters around the sides: KEH on one side, FBM on the other, letters arranged as they are in every school in the world. A pile of showjumping poles and jump-stands to one side, a decent-sized fence set up in the middle of the sand. Bloody hell, if that was her idea of a practice fence she was serious all right.

Kath strode ahead to open the gate, and he squeezed the mare forward. But oddly, she didn’t respond. As if there were a loose connection in her wiring. Instead, she stopped dead. Mark patted affectionately. ‘We’re not going to do anything difficult, miss,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s go.’ And this time kicked.

A terrible thing happened. She did not go forward, as he asked. She went up. What non-riders call rearing. Horsey people, not in the main ones for euphemism, usually call it a stand, or standing up. Rearing is too naked an expression, too terrible an event.

Some horses rear in uncontrollable terror, a rare one might even do so in malice. But she rose almost in calm. She stood to her full height with controlled grace, and having risen, stayed there, perfectly balanced. Body perfectly vertical. Mark felt his left leather slip from the saddle; he remained in place with pressure of his knees and one hand on her chest. If he lost balance himself, he would pull the mare over backwards, on top of him: potentially lethal, that, especially on concrete. He stayed still, so did she. After holding the position for, it seemed, several weeks, as slowly, as gracefully as before, she lowered her front hooves to the ground.

Mark, riven with terror and dismay, found himself patting the mare’s conker-brown neck. Patting? Shouldn’t he be beating? He had, after all, a borrowed stick in his hand. But he soothed, soothing himself, perhaps, more than the mare.

‘Can you put the leather back for me?’

‘Sure.’ Avoiding his eye.

The leather reattached, he walked the mare in a circle outside the school, patting, talking. Edging always that little closer to the gate, canny horseman he. And then, easily, unemphatically, turning her to the gate. It really should have worked.

And she was up again, that eerily poised balance, half an inch from disaster.

He tried again, perhaps half a dozen times – and the same, every time. Every time.

Kath took charge. ‘Right. I’ll take her head. You use your stick. We’ll get her in and the little trollop won’t go up this time.’

Always with shame Mark remembered going along with this plan. Only once, but once still counts as betrayal. One attempt, three crisp whacks. He didn’t enjoy it, but you don’t have to enjoy it for it to count as betrayal. And she got away from Kath, and stood again: high, serene, proud. And riven with terror. Like her rider.

Then beautifully, almost soundlessly, she lowered her hooves to the concrete. Instantly, Mark put his right hand on the pommel and flicked his right leg to dismount athletically, landing neatly on his toes, more or less chest to chest with Kath, looking straight into her navy-blue eyes.

‘Had enough?’ Contempt in her voice.

But love was moving hard within him. ‘I’m going to buy this little mare from you. And I’m going to get her right.’

‘A good beating will sort her out, don’t you worry.’

‘Let’s put her away and discuss the matter, if that’s OK with you.’

Mugs of instant coffee in the tack-room, smell of leather and neat’s-foot oil. Kath had changed her note of challenge to one of dismay. ‘Look, I can’t sell her. I’ve got a reputation to look after. I never thought she’d be that bad.’

‘My risk.’

‘Look, how about a long loan, with an option –’

‘I couldn’t do it if she wasn’t mine. I have to be committed.’

‘But it’s crazy.’

‘I know.’

‘Tell you what, I’ll buy her back if –’

‘No get-out clause. Or it wouldn’t work.’ It was a long time since Mark had heard himself sound so sure about anything. Uncannily clear in his mind, he made arrangements, wrote a cheque for £500, post-dated so he could get some money into the account. A sinewy handshake, not lingering, on the deal. A very level stare.

He walked back to her box, alone. He had no treats, no extra strong mints, no carrots. He was not yet a horseman. He placed a hand on the mare’s bright bay neck. After a moment, she touched him with her nose, holding her head against him. Touching him.

Kath saw him back to the Jeep. ‘I hope it works out.’

‘Thanks. Oh, what’s her name, by the way? I suppose I ought to know.’

She laughed sharply. ‘Miss Chance.’

‘Ha.’

‘Last fucking chance, more like.’

‘No,’ Mark said. ‘Second chance. We all need one of those.’

She looked down to where he sat in the driving seat, door still open. She had one elbow on the door, standing nicely balanced on one hip. A sudden rather gentle smile. ‘Have you always been crazy?’

He smiled in return, and said farewell. It was a couple of miles down the road before he remembered what he should have replied. A line from a book somewhere, or perhaps a cowboy film. No, a book, one Morgan had been keen on. I guess I ain’t never been put to the test before.

9

She looked at him admiringly. ‘You really are a bloody fool, aren’t you?’

‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘It’s because you fancy her. Admit it.’

‘Not the point.’

‘Just want to impress her as the master horse-tamer. Well, I should warn you that she lives with Jim the fat farrier, and she’s tamed a few million horses herself. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that. And I could have told you a fair bit more about that mare of hers. Of yours, I mean.’

Mark had driven from Kath’s to make arrangements about keeping Miss Chance at the yard where Mel kept Presuming Ed. He discussed it with the yard’s owner, Jan, and then went to watch Mel and Ed complete a schooling session. As she finished, he hastened to tell her the news.

‘I already know a fair bit about that mare of mine.’

‘Good boy. Stand still.’ She looked back at Mark. ‘I mean, that was a nice little jumping mare, but she spoilt it. She jumped it in a puissance event, and I think she won – cleared damn near five feet, that I do know. But the mare was overfaced, she’s only seven, it was too much for her. She got frightened silly.’

‘It happens.’

‘And Kath, well, she can ride all right, don’t get me wrong. But I know how she treats a reluctant jumper.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

‘Let’s put you in your box, shall we? Oh, you want a mint, do you? Well, here we are. She beats the crap out of them, that’s what she does. What she has done is to terrify the life out of a horse, and then beat it up for being frightened. So the horse has – well, had a nervous breakdown, basically. You’d think she’d know better, but oh no. Typical showjumping type, no patience. Wants results, wants them quick. And so she smiled sweetly at you and persuaded you to part with a load of money for damaged goods.’ She was putting a light rug onto her horse, turned away from Mark, busying herself with the straps.

‘I couldn’t help myself, Mel.’

‘You should know better. I know you’re in a vulnerable state right now, but you can’t go forking out five hundred quid every time you fall for a pair of blue eyes.’

‘Brown eyes.’

‘God, he doesn’t even know what she looks like. Blue eyes, almost invariably a touch of blue eyeliner.’

‘No, Mel. Brown. One on each side of her head. Ears also brown, very large, pointed.’

‘You stand there for a bit and cool off and then I’ll turn you out, all right?’ She closed and bolted the stable door behind her and neatly flipped the bottom latch with her neatly booted foot. ‘Are you seriously telling me that it’s the mare you fancy?’

‘Something about her.’

‘Damaged goods, Mark.’

‘I know.’

She put her head a little to one side and raised an eyebrow above one of her own blue, not navy, eyes, though not in invitation to the delights of the hay-barn. ‘Have you become a sucker for lame ducks in your old age?’

‘It’s the spark in her –’

‘It’s the damage that’s the attraction. Isn’t that right?’

‘Stop trying child psychology on me.’ A standard marital riposte of Morgan’s, as it happened.

Mel was smiling to herself in a thoughtful sort of way. Then she turned to him. ‘I always thought you wanted the part of lame duck for yourself.’

‘Me?’ Mark was outraged. Morgan had, more than once, said much the same thing.

She grabbed his arm suddenly, impulsively, in a fashion that took him back through a dozen years, to a period when they had both been unsure of themselves, but each quite certain of the other. ‘I think you’re mad, but never mind. I’ll help you all I can. Because you’re going to need all the help you can get.’

10

‘Port, Canon?’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

Ashton took from her a decanter and poured himself a decent slug, then gave the decanter an interrogative waggle. ‘Port, Mark?’

‘Thanks.’ It’s like heavenly cough mixture, his mother had said once, and having said it once, said it often. He helped himself, and then poured a top-up for his mother, as she preferred.

The port ceremony was much beloved by his mother, who adored ceremony in all things. It used to irritate Mark profoundly. There had been a time – shortly after his Mel and Trevor period; shortly before what he must now think of, since it was concluded, as his Morgan period – when he used to smoke roll-ups as the port was passed. Reforming your parents is never easy, or for that matter possible. But at the time it had seemed important to try.

No longer. The port did not irritate him beyond speech, and he could listen to the facetious intimacies of the couple sharing the table with him without wishing to slaughter either of them, unlike poor Bec. Without smelling the whiff of betrayal in every smile.

His mother for the most part liked evasiveness in conversation, but there was a time and place for stronger conversational meat. That was at the dining table, at what she usually called the Cheese Stage, but was really, of course, the Port Stage. The cheese stood before them more or less untasted, though Ashton was boldly eating with his fingers a slim strip of feety Stilton. The Mate supped slowly. She had no palate for wine, and bought whatever Ashton told her, but she knew a little about port. ‘I have applied my mind,’ she said, a favourite concept of hers. Mark had not applied his mind and knew nothing about port, save that it was prime hangover material, and when he stayed the night he always drank two or three glasses too many.

‘The bishop’s letter,’ she said, ‘was about the marrying of divorced persons.’

The remark was addressed to Mark, so he replied. ‘I am sure you’ve told the bishop that divorced people are married, whether they like it or not.’ The bishop was an old enemy, a liberal and progressive type, prone to all the religious gimmickry The Mate most despised. He was, Ashton had assured Mark, rather afraid of her, with her doctorate in theology and her letters to periodicals and her books.

Ashton pushed his chair away from the table and leant back, a man at his ease, hands clasped behind his head. An absurd figure, perhaps: clad in cassock, no modern trouser-clad clergyman; about his waist a purple sash some four inches wide, the ends of which hung almost to his knee when standing. That made his outfit the more absurd, because standing, Ashton was an inch or two over five feet, or a good six inches shorter than Mark’s mother. His absolute ease of manner in all circumstances was a considerable weapon: he was a man quite without dwarvine crankiness.

‘I had a couple come in today,’ he said, or rather ‘tud-AIR’, for he spoke in an extraordinary bray, with etiolated Oxford vowels and a mannered stress on unexpected words. He could have been a figure of fun, a humorous clergyman from a farce, running from bedroom to bedroom with – well, no, not his trousers down, obviously, but with his cassock round his waist, perhaps. And yet it was his self-certainty that carried the day. It was a thing narrowly achieved, but it made him a formidable rather than a ridiculous person.

‘Indeed?’ His mother’s tutorial voice, she always the teacher rather than the taught.

‘Both divorced. I think I might marry them.’

She raised her eyebrows, both of them, skyward. ‘Pray continue.’

‘I know you believe, as an Anglo-Catholic–’ or rather kyath-lick – ‘that marriage is a sacrament –’ syack-rament – ‘and therefore incapable of reversal. As you may know, Mark, I have occasionally married divorced persons when there seem to be grounds for what the Romans call lack of due discretion. When, for example, a woman is bullied into marriage, absurdly young, generally pregnant –’ distasteful condition, that, no Roman relish of the full quiver – ‘and incapable of fully understanding the vows she made.’

‘Dubious and dangerous,’ said Mark’s mother.

‘Marriage?’ Mark asked. ‘Or its annulment?’

Mark had shifted onto dangerous ground, and his mother might have taken him further. But Ashton was not about to relinquish his story, nor she to interrupt him. ‘I have never married a doubly divorced couple. I was rather struck by what the man said to me. He said, my fiancée was the innocent party –’

‘Insofar as there is such a thing, Canon.’

‘I think I can accept that there is, Doctor, in a rough and ready fashion. She should not be penalised for her innocence, he said.’

‘That was quite well argued,’ Mark’s mother allowed.

‘And then he said, I was the guilty party in my own first marriage. I made a terrible mess of things. I can promise you two things. One, I will make more mistakes. But two, I will never make that particular mistake again.’

‘The boy is not altogether a fool.’

‘Hardly a boy, more or less your age, Mark. And I thought: can there be such a thing as a sanctified second go? Can one make a case for the blessedness of the second chance?’

‘St Peter had three chances,’ said Mark’s mother. ‘Look where that got him.’

‘The papal throne,’ Ashton said. ‘And you will recall that he also had a second chance for martyrdom. He muffed the first one. But then he turned round and went back.’

‘Are you comparing martyrdom and marriage? I have always fancied St Sebastian as a kind of role model …’ Mark earned a moment of laughter for this.

‘Marriage is not about having a bloody good try,’ Mark’s mother pronounced. ‘Modern marriages fail because each party enters into a contract with a built-in get-out clause. It is the opposite of Macbeth: getting out is easier than going on. Divorce is not a rescue package for a failed marriage. It is the acceptability of divorce that actualises failure. Darling, another smidgen of that heavenly cough mixture.’

Mark poured for his mother, passed to Ashton who poured, passed back to Mark. Bloody affected nonsense, she came from the lower-middle classes of Manchester. He poured himself another sticky helping, that really must be the last.

‘So you would not marry divorced persons?’ Mark asked his mother. ‘Under any circumstances?’

‘I didn’t say that. I speak about the complete failure of those whose duty it is to comment on the matter to comprehend even a little of the subject.’ She spoke as one with a right to speak. Mark thought suddenly and distressingly of ‘Cynara’. ‘Nobody, but nobody has ever told the truth about marriage. If you read modern newspapers, you would think that marriage was a life-long tumbling in the hay.’ Always bring a horse blanket. ‘The older myth, little better, is that marriage is a meeting of true minds, the thing that happens when you meet the one perfectly suited other person. Rubbish. Marriage is a mystic state, certainly, but not in the way we are taught. It is my belief that any two people can make a marriage work. All it requires is the joint and total will of both parties. Nothing more. Nothing less.’

‘That’s mystical?’ Mark asked.

‘Certainly. It is a violent assertion of the will. The mystery is that two people will exactly the same thing. That is why marriage is the most terrible and devastating of all the sacraments, not excluding the last.’

‘Who was it said,’ Ashton asked, ‘that he preferred funerals to weddings, because marriage was so depressingly permanent?’

Mark’s mother pursed her lips in secret pleasure at this: what his father had always called her pussy-face. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very.’ And Ashton received a smile of deep appreciation, deep affection.

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The inevitable dole of tears: a single one, unwiped, his upper, non-pillow-facing eye. So Bec always said, anyway. He wasn’t there.

11

‘Are you the animal man?’ She turned beseeching brown eyes on him.

Mark smiled hugely, straight into her uncannily wide red mouth. It was impossible not to. It’s my most famous quality.’

‘Oh dear, you’re not the animal man, are you?’

‘An animal man.’

‘I mean the man from the Animal Rights Association or whatever it’s called. They promised someone would come, and I do want to join because I love animals.’

‘But not animal men?’

‘That’s why I’m a vegetarian, you see. But I hate fish. So I eat them all the time.’

Mark’s eyes kept slipping from her lovely eyes and her lovely mouth to her lovely jumper. Or rather, her lovely jumpered bosom, its colour a pale kitten, kitten-soft and positively demanding to be caressed. Mark would have sold his soul, had Mephistopheles been available and bargain-hunting, for half a minute’s double-handed fondle. ‘Poor fish. Are you quite heartless?’

‘Oh yes. I’m a monster, and utterly without feeling.’ She looked meltingly at him. ‘Who are you,’ she asked, ‘if you’re not the animal man?’

‘I’m the poetry man.’ Her face did not light up. He pulled a copy of Penyeach from his shoulder bag. ‘See, admire, buy. There’s a poem by me in it.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Sex,’ Mark said promptly.

‘Then I wouldn’t like it. I only like poems about animals, you see.’

‘But not poems about fish?’

‘Oh heavens, do people write poems about the filthy things? I shall never look at poetry again, in case I find one about fish. But you see, I’m not really a poetry person. Though I rather think my floor-sharer is.’

‘Which one?’ Half a dozen bedrooms led off the communal sitting area in which they talked.

‘Knock there,’ she said, indicating a door. Then she lowered her voice to an almost voiceless whisper, ‘If you dare.’

Mark, daring, knocked. There was no call of welcome. But after a moment, slightly too long a moment, the door opened. And she was looking at him with a look of assessment. After a fraction, she widened her eyes at him. For just a second, or perhaps rather less, there was an increased area of white around the iris, a little as if she were a startled horse. But she was not really startled at all. She was, as it were, ironically startled. All Mark’s sense of bantering ease fell from him. She seemed to possess to a very high degree a talent for unease.

‘The poet,’ she stated rather than asked.

‘The winsome poet.’

At this something slightly odd happened. She gave a sharp two-syllable laugh. If Mark had not already decided that nothing could be more remote from this person’s experience as nervousness or giggling, he might well have called it a nervous giggle. It was perhaps a turning point in their relationship, and Mark failed to recognise it. It is possible that everything would have been different had he done so. ‘Oh dear, I did say that, didn’t I?’

‘So I believe.’

‘Were you terribly hurt?’

‘There are adjectives I would have preferred.’

Concern crossed her face. ‘Oh dear. I am sorry. Have you ever found that when you meet people for the first time you find yourself quite by accident saying exactly what you are thinking?’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

‘No, it isn’t. I was expressing interest in the phenomenon.’

‘That’s all right then. But look, I am here to sell you the latest phenomenal issue of Penyeach.’

‘I bought one at the poetry reading. To read your poem.’

‘See, you can be nice, can’t you?’

‘No, I can’t. I just wanted to read it.’

‘And having read it and loved it you went on to buy my book.’

‘I did, actually.’

‘A person of wealth and taste. Did you find it winsome?’

‘I did, actually.’

Afterwards, they were to argue about what happened next. Mark said that her offer of a cup of tea was obviously an expression of interest in him, and intended to be understood as such. She maintained it was no more than good manners. My floor-sharer, she said, offered refreshment to the animal man, when he arrived. Visitors got tea: sexual feeling had nothing to do with the matter.

She made tea in the shared kitchen. Mark watched her trickle a palmful of green pebbles into the scalded pot. He watched her accomplish this small domestic task, wondering at her. The skirt was longer than was fashionable, and, since not black, startlingly unusual. But it would have been unusual, not to say startling, in any age. It comprised seven or eight horizontal layers of tartan, which ought to have clashed appallingly. She wore a tartan lumberjack’s shirt, mostly red. The get-up really should have dominated her, but it failed utterly.

It is the custom for students to go around in some sort of near-fancy dress. Mark’s own outfit, which included a soft tweed fishing hat and a Norfolk jacket with many pockets and odd patches of leather, was of that school, though the fact that it was part of his father’s legacy almost legitimised it. Its intention was broadly ironical: not the case with the baffling, and eye-baffling crisscrosses before him.

‘Come to my room,’ she said.

Again, Mark took this – not exactly as a come-on, but certainly as a signal of mild intimacy. He had not been fobbed off with a seat in the communal area, after all. But she later insisted that the invitation was purely a matter of logistical convenience. The cups were in her room, you see.

No, really, she was not beautiful. Nose too big. Eyes that indeterminate colour they call hazel, but which is really bits of everything. It can be anything you like. Cheekbones pronounced, but not classically high and mysterious and Slavic. In some way broad, and rather Eskimo-like. Hair dark, remarkably thick, cut to her shoulders.

She certainly wasn’t sexy. Mouth too thin, expression too forbidding, no tits. As she sat on the floor, Mark saw that she was wearing tartan tights.

Mark felt an interest in her. He admitted that to himself at once, but understood quite clearly that this was not a sexual interest. He sat on the floor and admired her room. It was not like every other student room in the world, with its posters tacked to the wall with blue putty. The minute space, more cubicle than room, was filled with a collection of Hindu pictures and objects. Not the ancient and deep art fashionable a decade and more ago, instead she had chosen loud, Mickey Mouse pictures of fat-cheeked dancing maidens and electric-blue Krishnas. There was a large statue of the elephant-headed Ganesh, and a multi-brachiate dancing Shiva. Pumpkin-breasted girls wore appalling simpers on the scarlet slashes of their mouths. The hearty vulgarity of this collection made the room more than a trifle sinister.

Behind the tiny bed stood a collection of snowstorms. Mark reached out, took one, shook it. Snow fell on plastic Venice, a gondola slid an inch beneath its plastic hemisphere. ‘They’re horrible, aren’t they?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

On a hook behind the door the dead zebra hung from a coat-hanger. She poured tea: pale green. Milk or sugar not so much as suggested. ‘It’s gunpowder tea. I hope you like it.’

‘So do I. Do you?’

The sudden not-quite-giggle, as if she had been found out. ‘I had to have it, you see. For the name.’

‘Talking of names, I’m Mark.’

‘Oh good. I’m Morgan.’

Mark smiled.

‘And if you’re working up a joke, I’ve heard it.’

‘No, no – I mean, you’ve got a Celtic mother? Or father?’

‘Celt-loving. Mother. You mean for once I don’t have to explain that I wasn’t named after the car I was conceived in –’

‘No.’

‘– or the sisterhood-is-powerful woman or the –’

‘Morgan le Fay. Fata Morgana. Wise woman. Mirage.’

A pause, a rather cool look from not beseeching, not brown eyes. ‘How well read you are.’

‘I may not have been to Oxford, but I have been educated, in my fashion. Is the ambiguity deliberate?’

‘Usually. Which one?’

‘Morgan. Wise woman? Or mirage?’

‘I try to be both.’

Mark wondered if there was a winsome poem he could work up around this ambiguity. They talked, sipped tea. When you are talking to someone you have just met for the first time, you drink your tea before it has cooled and you scald your tongue. They talked about the university, and the course she was doing, and the hall of residence she was living in.

‘I call them Sexuella and Bosomina. They’re both medical students. They sit out together in the communal area and giggle for hours about things like black men’s penises.’ A slight hint of distaste, that reminded Mark of Ashton. ‘I mean, I lived with a black guy in California, and I know.’

She seemed at the same time much younger than he, as was right for a first-year student, he in his final year. And yet much older, richer in experience. As if she had had the sort of experiences that actually matter. There was something about her quite foreign to studentkind: a worldliness.

She was reading philosophy. Philosophy was futile, Mark told her helpfully. Literature was the thing. Philosophy attempted to systematise the universe and could only be measured by its degree of failure, whereas literature, based as it is on genuine truth, is, you see, when it comes to the put-to –

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she said. ‘But there’s no point in studying it, is there? And of course philosophy is futile. That’s why I love it so.’ She was in love with Descartes.

‘But it’s not true,’ Mark explained, with all the authority of a third-year student.

‘Of course it isn’t. But such bliss, if it was.’

‘He says that reason is all there is to life. By that line of thinking, a cat, a dog, a horse, a new-born baby, a brain-damaged child –’

‘All so lovely.’

‘You can’t think that. He says animals are just clocks, automata. No thought, therefore no existence. Therefore no –’

‘He’s sweet, isn’t he, my René?’

‘He’s a monster.’

‘I know, I know. But I’m a monster too. You must learn that.’

12

Mark did not go to Mass or Marce, but instead went to the attic for communion with his past. He found the trunk that Bec had packed for him a decade back, brought it down, not without effort, and opened it. At once a hogo of neglect.

But after a moment, bravely he plunged. And really not too bad, really not too bad after all. A vulture’s nest of leather, certainly, but damp and mouldy rather than dry and cracking. A rescue was possible. Saddle soap and gallons of neat’s-foot oil, that was all that was required.

Clanking bits, various snaffles he had tried, the kimblewick he had used for cross-country after the bugger had buggered off with him. And there the saddle, bundled in anyhow, but the tree not apparently broken, and stirrup leathers and irons and all. If it did not fit the mare, he would at least sell it and buy another.

And there the boots, a generous parental gift, kept in shape by the pair of wooden trees, looking no more than rusty. Soft leather, the brief laces at the ankle. And jods, yes, a couple of pairs of fawn jods, coarse-looking and unfashionable compared to the neat and stylish haunch-huggers worn by Mel and Kath, but serviceable enough. And there his white competition jods. Not that there would be competition.

He took off his trousers there and then and pulled on a pair of musty jods. Elasticised material clamped his calves and thighs in a loving embrace. Could you have a Proustian squeeze? He did up the waist: they fitted. He felt dashing and purposeful, as of old. And there was his huge Barbour, very mouldy and in need of rewaxing. But it would still keep him dry, of course it would. And there the showjumping jacket, filthy, but rescuable. Lungeing cavesson: he was going to need that. No rugs. A disappointment. He would need rugs: but still, this was treasure enough.

And there at the bottom his priceless collection of rosettes: faded, blue and yellow: a few of them red. The red one from Potton: Lord, but they had flown that day. Galloping through the finish, teeth in the mane, spectators scattering, and he patting and patting the hard, sweaty neck; Trevor, like his owner, half-crazed with delight at his own daring.

And his jockey’s skullcap, too, beneath a rusty black silk. He tried it on, did up the leather strap beneath his chin.

And goodness, there was the flat cap he used to wear around horses: green cord, well faded. He tried that on, too; it felt damp to his fingers. Birthday present from Mel, his eighteenth. In the mirror he saw a figure from another world. A figure that knew nothing of the poet, nothing of the Cartesian Morgan. More than the skullcap, the flat cap made him look like a horseman. He could see himself, lungeing the little mare, in his rewaxed Barbour, the ancient cap over his eyes.

He removed the hat, and lobbed it back into the trunk. Everything else followed. Then an idea struck him. He went into the garage and started poking about near the back. It was an area that had scarcely been touched since his father died. For a while it looked hopeless. But then he spotted a filthy piece of tarpaulin. Standing on boxes and leaning over bundles of newspapers, he seized it. And it was, it really was his or Trevor’s New Zealand rug. It would need re-proofing. But it would do, if it fitted. And there, wrapped up inside, was Trevor’s night rug, and even a string vest or sweat-rug. Aladdin’s cave, that’s what it was.

He carried everything out to the Jeep, and smiled – almost a pussy-face – at the way the Jeep looked right when full of horsey kit. And so he poked about the kitchen in a fine good temper, looking for food. He decided to make a coq au vin; the ingredients were all there, perhaps by design. It was a dish she always liked him to cook.

She arrived, the house now reeking of wine. ‘Oh, you heavenly infant,’ she said, ‘I know I ought to prefer you to come to Marce, but it is truly wonderful to come home to your cooking. I shall surely go to hell for thinking such a thing.’

‘Do you think,’ Mark asked, ‘it’s time for Drinks Before?’

It was over the port, Mark taking a mere half-glass, since he had to drive, that his mother at last brought up the subject that had been oppressing them both all weekend. ‘This business with Morgan,’ she said. ‘Is it irrevocable?’

Mark had been quietly terrified of this moment. He feared the weight of her disapproval: of his fecklessness, of his helplessness. Once again ruining his life in a moment of folly. No Oxford, no proper job, now no wife, ‘I think it might be.’

‘Oh dear. Oh dear. And are you – er – committed elsewhere?’

He decided not to make a joke about Miss Chance. ‘No. Not my line, really.’

‘Oh, what a pit-pit. What a pit-pit.’ Mark had heard her use the expression to cover eventualities from a disappointing birthday present to the outbreak of nuclear war. ‘I am very sorry to hear it. But, Mark, listen to me. I have known parents express dismay when their children have problems with their spouses. I remember when Madeleine took sides and blamed Anthony for the break-up with his girlfriend. As a result, she didn’t see Anthony for two years. Or perhaps he turned up, grudgingly, at Christmas. But he married Anne, as you know, and everything worked out for him. And Madeleine accepted the situation and there was a reconciliation. And a scar too, no doubt, and certainly a long and painful gap. I don’t intend to have a long and painful gap. So please understand this. I know you think me a judgmental person, and with justice. But there will be no judging from me in this matter. I value you more than I value my own capacity for judging.’

Mark laughed, touched, and said: ‘In this one instance?’

‘In this one instance.’

13

For once, Mark was able to park right outside, so that was a bonus. He lugged the trunk, step by step, up to the front door, and then with a brief back-snapping exertion carried it into the hall. The rugs? Too stinky. He would leave them in the car till he had bought the re-proofing stuff. He fetched the bag of bachelor shopping, the heat-up meals, the beer; also a treat he had planned for himself, beancurd, oyster mushrooms, fresh chillies of the terrifying little green wrinkled kind. He knew what to eat, but not how to fill up the evening.

She had been.

At first nothing more than a twitchiness. Mark felt like James Bond finding that the hair he had stuck to the wardrobe door was no longer there. There had been an invasion, he was sure of it before he found any hard evidence. Then things became clearer. There was a coat missing from the hall, the one that billowed about when she wore it, as she almost always did, unbuttoned. And the Burberry was gone too, her famous spy’s mac.

Would there be a note? His heart stopped for a second as he considered for the first time the fantastic possibility that she was still there. He wanted that very much, and wished with all his heart to avoid it. And of course she had gone. And anyway, he would have noticed her car in the street, the famous Flying Toad Citroën DS. No, she had come and she had gone. Taking, no doubt, papers from her study and books from her shelves and clothes from her wardrobe. And some treasures, of course. Had she taken her less portable treasures? The snowstorm collection? Dancing Shiva? That would be an irrevocable step. But come. That had already been taken, had it not?

He walked into the sitting room: the great Islamic drapes were still there. And then a double take: his own, or Callum’s addition to the décor had gone. Marianne Faithfull and Brigitte Bardot were no longer pinned to the gorgeous fabric. How childish: she had torn them up in a fit of post-feminist fury. No she hadn’t: there they were on the long, long sofa, rolled loosely together. And something pinned to the drape behind the sofa, where Marianne had, hand on zip, so recently pouted.

Mark went to inspect it. It was a snapshot he had taken himself. It showed a naked woman. She was looking at the camera with an expression of frank irritation. The woman was Morgan.

He laughed out loud. He laughed in sheer delight at the beauty of the move. The picture was years old. He and Morgan had once spent some weeks in Greece and, in a deserted cove, Morgan had removed her clothes to swim and bask. She was caught half sitting, half lying, drying in the sun after her swim when Mark, driven by twin irresistibles, lust and the love of a jest, had sneaked up on her with the camera. She had divined his intention a fraction before he had pressed the shutter, hence the irritation.

But she liked it, when they examined the pictures in post-holiday nostalgia, ‘I like the way that clothes or their lack is a matter of supreme indifference to me. All that concerns me is my urgent need to give you a bollocking.’ And she had pinned the picture to her notice board in her study, along with odd postcards, notes to herself, various trouvailles. She received visitors in the study, and some of them remarked on the picture, ‘It’s very revealing, isn’t it?’ she always said, ‘It reveals my temper.’

But it didn’t, not really, because the incident had ended as such incidents must, when people take off their clothes in the sun. The picture was revealing all right, and it revealed a great deal more than temper or tits. Perhaps, Mark thought, it revealed their marriage.

‘But it’s not an erotic picture at all,’ she said, ‘I am unaware of my nakedness.’

‘Precisely what makes it erotic.’

‘Besides, I’ve got no tits.’

‘It was you that lectured me on the power of understatement.’

‘I did not lecture you on the power of no statement at all.’

‘Nor would it be relevant to do so, in this case.’

‘Lordy, Mr Brown, you say the sweetest things to a girl.’

And so on. Mark looked around the burgled flat, seeking a note. There was none. Just the picture, then. What was its meaning? For surely it had a meaning. ‘Why do people always ask me this?’ Morgan said, ‘If it had a meaning, I would hardly waste my time with it, now would I?’ It could not have been the work of a moment to find it. It had served its turn on the notice board, and must have been fairly deeply buried. She had gone to some trouble to make this meaningful statement, if statement it was, if meaning it had.

Did it mean that he was to forget her? Or did it mean that she knew who dominated his heart and mind, and that it was neither Brigitte nor Marianne? Was she in some way offended, to the point of jealousy (remember Sexuella) by the garlanded and zippered pin-ups? Was she competing with them? Saying that her own naked irritation was a more potent matter than anyone else’s seductiveness? And perhaps she was right.

Perhaps that was the meaning. Lust, and the love of a jest.

What does it mean, Morgan? I loved Alice but what does it mean? I loved Arachne but what does it mean? And she would reply to them all only with an expression, the one he called your bloody little sphinxy smirk.

‘Listen to this one, Morgan.’ He was brandishing the newspaper from which he had extracted a gem. ‘This bloke, mean, miser, hoarder, larder full of tins for when the bomb drops. But his crusty old heart is touched by a local convent’s appeal for food for the starving orphans. So he gives away a box of tins. Realises a week or so later that he has given away his dummy tins. In which he kept a fortune in cash, jewels, gold coins …’

And Morgan had snapped into wonder at this, head on one side, cogs of her brain visibly turning. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

‘But it gets better; there’s a pay-off. One of the nuns is last seen heading for the airport in plain clothes and a taxi …’

She shook her head decisively. ‘No. Leave the nun out. She spoils it.’

‘But surely that’s the cream of the jest?’

‘No. She spoils it. Keep your nun to yourself.’

The story had made it to her first volume, the one called Alice, without the flying nun. Neither quite moral nor quite cruel nor quite funny, ‘It’s futile without the pay-off.’

Same expression as the one in the naked photograph. ‘I know.’

‘The meaning is that there is no meaning?’

‘Stories don’t have meanings. They have shapes. Your story had a good shape, till you brought in the flying nun.’

Do pictures have meanings, when pinned to Islamic drapes? Every picture tells a story. But what was its shape?

The kitchen was pleasingly bare, free from all clutter. He took a Sabatier from the knife-block and tested it gently with his thumbnail. Like a bloody razor. He gave it a quick caress with the steel and then scalpelled mushrooms and bean curd and chilli for hot and sour soup. Not too hot, she would say. Or too sour. Well, this soup was going to be a belter.

14

‘Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee!’ Mark said, ‘and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again. Does that answer your question?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Because chaos comes anyway. Even though he never stops loving her.’

‘But that’s wrong. He couldn’t love her right at the very end. Because he kills her, right?’

‘Right, Jim,’ said Mark, rightly, scanning his audience, all to be included. ‘Any thoughts on that one? Jane?’

‘He says he still loves her. Says that he – what is it? – that he just overdid it.’

‘One who loved not wisely but too well, exactly.’

Jim, slouching in his chair at the back, long hair falling over his face in a manner that reminded Mark of his sister, said: ‘Is Desdemona really faithful, Mr Brown?’

‘Everybody says so. The Moor included, at the end.’

‘But I mean, in that scene with Cassio, she’s obviously flirting with him, isn’t she? I mean she really likes him. She says so.’

‘Is liking someone infidelity, then?’

Jim seemed to have been looking hard at the back of Jane’s neck as he spoke. So perhaps there was a hidden agenda; after all, there generally is. Jim was the official propounder of the view that Shakespeare was overrated; well, every half-decent group needs one of those. Mark was not sitting at the desk provided, nor was he standing up and walking about. He was sitting among his audience, on one of the spare desks, foot on one of the spare chairs. His right ankle was on his left knee, revealing a great deal of dusty black boot. Clint indeed.

‘Do you get the impression that Desdemona’s a really sexy lady, Mr Brown?’ This was Ralph, the official Lawrentian; every half-decent group, etc. He had a strange helmet of black curls and a wonderfully dramatic pair of sideburns, no doubt the envy of the rest of the males. Inevitably there were a few giggles at this piece of daring, but Ralph intended a serious question beneath the showing-off, and Mark took it as such.

‘You clearly do, Ralph. Tell us more.’

‘Well, Cassio obviously fancies her. And Othello is crazy about her. Nice double entendre, Mr Brown.’ Mark laughed hearing one of his own tricks of speech amiably turned back on him.

‘Maybe Iago too,’ Jane murmured, from somewhere near his right boot.

‘Very intriguing point,’ Mark said.

‘So maybe Othello has some kind of real ground for his suspicion, Mr Brown.’ This again from Jim.

‘Is being an attractive person a form of betrayal, then?’ Mark asked.

‘It is if you are trying to cause trouble,’ said Susan, who signed her essays ‘Soo’. ‘I mean, if she wanted to upset Othello by flirting with Cassio, then she was betraying him, wasn’t she?’

A boy, dressed in pointedly conservative style, Roger or Richard somebody, said: ‘But did Shakespeare really intend us to worry about all this, Mr Brown?’

‘Ah, the intention problem,’ said Mark. On his knee, as always, there was a clipboard, that might have held notes on Othello but in fact held the names and notes for the recognition of the members of this new class, ‘It’s a very important point, er, Roger, and one we’ll come back to next week, when we do an unseen poem. But in the meantime, hold your horses.’ Susan or Soo murmured something to Jane beside her, and both giggled softly. Perhaps something to do with horses and cowboy boots. ‘In the meantime, I want you all to think about sex.’ This naturally got a laugh. A smooth and serious boy drew breath for a question. ‘And if you’re asking if sex is relevant for the exam, Sandeep, then I’m disappointed in you.’

Sandeep was well able to deal with a sally of this kind, as Mark had observed in previous classes, ‘I mean only to ask, Mr Brown, if the examiners will be shocked by such matters.’

‘As I’ve told you before, Sandeep, examination technique is something that will be discussed fully and at length in the last week of term. Worry about it then. For the next few weeks, I want you to worry about the play.’ A bell rang sharply. ‘There, doesn’t time fly when you’re talking about sex? Some thoughts, please, on paper. We’ve been talking about betrayal: right, tell me more. Take any one character in the play, and follow the theme of betrayal. Who, if anyone, does he or she betray? By whom, if anyone, is he or she betrayed? Let yourselves go. It’s a big subject, after all.’

By rights, Mark should have written up his notes for the day before he left. That had always been his usual practice. But she was waiting for him. And besides, he wanted to catch the light. Soon the hour would go back and evenings would become a wilderness of gloom. Rushing from school to the stable-yard, he was returning to his youth with a vengeance. He scribbled a few things to remember, notes for his notes, on his clipboard, and then hurried to collect his bag, and its usual ton of books. For he had to drive to Radlett.

For he had to drive to Radlett to work his horse. The yellow dogs leapt and curvetted at his entrance: ‘Don’t bark,’ Mark told them, ‘I live here now.’

Jan lived in a small lair with the tack-room behind her, where she smoked cigarettes and talked energetically to the telephone. She was doing exactly that when Mark arrived. ‘Nigh sauce,’ she was saying. She had the telephone tucked under her chin like a violin and was cleaning tack with both hands. She waved to him with a sponge full of saddle soap. ‘Bloody great big thing, nice bit of bone, up to your weight, easy. Nice paces, nice manners, and he’ll carry you all day. No world beater but he’s a nigh sauce.’ She pointed at the kettle and then at Mark and herself. So Mark obediently made tea, though he was itching to get at the line of boxes. Jan, still selling hard, eventually put the phone down. Mark rewarded her with sugared tea.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘She’s ’ere.’

‘Settled in all right?’

‘No trouble. Kath brought her over this morning, nigh sauce, happy with everything, bless her.’ Jan had a straggle of dark curls, jumble-sale clothes and more than a touch of gypsy. She ran the livery yard and bought and sold horses. Kath laughed in his face when he had told her that he was planning to keep the mare at Jan’s, and told him that Jan would ‘have you for breakfast’. ‘I turned her out after lunch ’cause she got restless in her box, and she got on fine, seemed to take a shine to Ed, bless him.’

‘No dramas, then?’

‘Course not.’ And she wouldn’t tell me if there were. All yard managers treat owners like amiable idiots, which in a sense is fair enough. They also treat all horses as if they were their own. ‘Brought, ’em all in just before five and fed ’em.’

‘She ate up?’

‘Every scrap. Nothing worried her. She’s a nigh sauce and she’ll not give you no grief.’ It is axiomatic that all yard managers know more about the horses in their care than do their owners. Jan explained about livery bills and their payment, the times when the yard could be visited, where the light switches were, the system for leaving messages and where the keys were hidden when she was away buying and selling or, as she occasionally did, sleeping or eating in her own home. All of which was essential information, but Mark wanted to see his horse. My horse.

Jan showed him the tack-room, and the place she had cleared for him, with a rack for saddle and for bridle and room on the floor for his trunk. She even helped him shift this item into its place, which was beyond the call of duty. ‘Right then. You’d better ride your rauce.’

‘I’ll just lunge her today.’

‘You get on her. She won’t give no trouble.’

‘We’ll see.’ A stock dismissive of his mother’s. Mark opened the trunk and removed the things he wanted. Including his green cord cap. He put it on his head. Horseman. He walked along to the boxes: a dozen heads, peering over their half-doors around three sides of a square. A strange joy seized him: the essential contradiction of it all. The mixture of cosy domesticity with deep wildness. That was the contradiction in this pleasant evening sight: the contradiction in everything to do with humans and horses. You seek wildness without wildness; you seek to tame without taming. And that last, that was precisely the problem that lay before him with this daft, lovely and troubled animal.

A head, bay, with a white star. He entered her box, talking soft greeting nonsense. A horse likes to hear the mood, read the intentions of the animals all around, equine, human, carnivorous. A horse always likes to know where every one is, and hates above all to be sneaked up on. The constant talking of horsey gibberish is a request: may I have permission to enter the border-country?

Mark slipped over her head a leather head collar that bore on a brass plate the name Trev. A gift, ancient but unforgotten, from Mel. It fitted well enough, on the topmost hole. He attached a lead rope by its clip and asked her to walk from her box. He tied her to a ring set in the wall, or rather, a loop of baling twine threaded through the ring. His fingers tied the quick release knot.

The mare accepted all this without fuss, even with kindness. The bouncing assertiveness of her madcap canter round Kath’s field, the terrifying vertical stand – these seemed matters connected with another horse, another being entirely.

Mark picked out her hooves with a hoof-pick and she lifted each foot in turn with easy courtesy. Then he brushed her vigorously with a body-brush, knocking the dust and scurf from the brush with a metal currycomb. Each movement took him deeper into the past. Trevor’s obstreperous behaviour before a show: he knew, all right, always read the excitement in the air. But the mare was kind and accepting, though she fidgeted uncomfortably when he brushed too hard. ‘Sorry, darling,’ he said softly. He had never called anybody darling. Nor angel, for that matter.

He removed her head collar, certain she would not take advantage of him. Put on Trev’s lungeing cavesson. Not to bother with surcingle and side-reins and stuff. Just attach the lunge-line to the ring on the nose, and grab the lunge-whip.

A crisis was approaching. The trick was to pretend that it wasn’t, because horses read human body language better than humans read horses’. Annoyingly, perhaps disastrously, he felt his pulse quicken. Pretend it wasn’t. ‘Come, miss.’

She saw the school ahead of her and stopped dead, as if she had walked into a wall. She had never seen it before. It was not the school where Kath had worked her, where Kath had tried to reform her with a series of beatings, where even Mark had hit her three times. But it was still a school, and she knew it. It was a Bad Place.

She stood a full inch taller, looking at the sand, every part of her expressing her not-quite terror. Damn it, Mark thought, I forgot my gloves. And hard hat, but I won’t need that, will I?

‘Come on, miss. Walk forward.’ Give her a bloody good belt and she’ll walk forward all right. A statue, staring forward at the bland sand, the abode of dragons. Mark let her stare for a while, mane-nibbling with his fingers, talking soft horsey gibberish. All right then. We’ll walk forward now, shall we?

Three paces, and another dead halt. Mark tried again, patting, talking. Plenty of time. Hope to God no one sees, they’ll think I’m the softest bloody touch that ever sat on a horse. Give us your lunge-whip, old son, and we’ll get her through.

‘Walk on, please, miss.’ And suddenly she was through the gate, and wild with excitement or terror at her own daring, and was dancing, threatening the safety of his toes. ‘Ah, the madcap,’ he said, much made up by this success, oblivious of the flying hooves, ‘I remember the madcap. Run about, then.’

And he was lungeing his horse in a circle, bracing himself against the wildness of her flight, taking a half-turn of line behind his back to stop the horse from water-skiing him across the school, and she ran her craziness to its end and at last started to work, and Mark kept her to it with little gestures of the long lunge-whip, never touching her.

And then all over again on the other rein.

Make much of horse. His old riding teacher’s instruction at the conclusion of any demanding piece of work. And Mark made much.

Back in her box, she was fêted with extra strong mints, and the smell of the minty breath of his horse was to breathe in the good past. He had reached out and touched her; his touch had been accepted. He stood for a while outside the box, leaning on the half-door, she looking out, occasionally touching him with her nose. Must leave. Bloody D. H. Lawrence to read. Write up those notes. Listen to the answerphone. Please God, not another surprise visit from Morgan. Perdition, he thought, catch my soul.

15

Rather rum. One of The Mate’s favourite expressions, and it seemed to cover every aspect of the situation. It had, indeed, been one of the rummer weekends of a life not untouched by rumness. And one of the rummest people he had ever met. By far the rummest he had ever kissed. What to make of it all?

It was hardly a personal triumph, for all the kissing, the being kissed back and the promise that he would kiss again. That strange night. Had he passed the test she had set him? Or had he abjectly failed? Did she know herself?

It had been a time stolen from the common run of things, that much at least was certain. But it had not been a lover’s idyll, a dalliance of hearts and bodies, of tempers and reconciliations and promises and plans. She had wept, yes, but only for the pier that stretched out into the sea. Rum.

It was thirty-six hours of magic, but not magic as the term is commonly understood. It was magic of the subtle, ambivalent and sinister kind that you find in Celtic myth. ‘Do you think you could learn to mildly dislike me?’ she asked. ‘It would make things so much easier, don’t you see?’

‘Perhaps. Could you learn to mildly dislike me?’

‘Oh, but I already do.’

‘That’s all right then.’

‘You’re so pleasant, you see.’

‘Only nineteen hours before I kiss you again.’

‘I’m looking forward to that.’

Well, Mark thought, walking up the stairs to the flat. Now a little less than twelve hours before he kissed her once again.

He opened the door and called out Callum’s name, but there was no reply. Then he saw a note pinned to the table by a knife, a regular means of communication: I’m at Chris’s. Could you come round right away? Whatever the time of night? It’s not life and death, but it’s important. All right?

Horror. For a moment he wondered if he wasn’t going to faint. Christine. Or perhaps throw up. He had not been in the mood for reality. What had she done? What did she know? Not that there was anything to know. Or not really.

He sat down for a good while longer, being appalled. But after a while, even being appalled runs out of steam. There was nothing for it but to go and face it. The reproaches: though what had he done for which he should be reproached?

Ten minutes later, he was knocking at Chris’s door. Callum answered: ‘Oh, thank God.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Go to the kitchen. I’ll tell her you’re here. She’s been listening out. Then I’ll explain.’

Callum’s face, his voice were neutral, carefully so. Mark went and stood about feebly in the kitchen. He wondered if there was beer in the fridge: she might have bought one for him. But it would not do, to look for it.

Callum came in. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. He sat down at the kitchen table. Mark sat also. ‘Thing is, she can’t speak. Physiological thing. I mean, it’s not her fault, she’s not putting it on. Had the doctor round. It’s some kind of locking-up. It’ll unlock in a day or so. Happens sometimes to people in shock.’

‘What’s happened, Cal?’ Mark’s own voice was not at its clearest.

‘She saw you going to the station.’

‘How?’ Perhaps that syllable was a complete giveaway, but if so, Callum gave no sign of understanding it. Anyway, giving what away?

‘We’ve been having quite a chat. She writes things down. New term resolution, remember? She was going to work every Saturday.’

‘Oh Christ, at the Cottle Reading Room.’ Which was near the railway station.

‘She was having a coffee break.’

‘Oh God, at the Voyagers.’ Which overlooked the station entrance.

‘And she saw you and –’

‘But look, Christ, what is she on about? All I did was catch a train, and anyway nothing happened –’

‘She saw you with a girl. And she knew at once that you were in love with her. By the way you were walking.’

‘Jesus, that’s ridiculous, I mean I was –’

‘Tell me about it sometime. But maybe you should see Chris now. And tell her what you want to tell her.’

‘Oh God.’

Mark went and knocked at her door. He then realised that waiting for a reply was foolish, so he called, ‘It’s me’ through the wood and then walked in. She lay on her mattress on the floor, a double mattress purchased primarily as an arena for gymnastics. Though that was not its function now. She lay under the covers, face on the pillow half-hidden by a straggle of fair hair. Body present, mind apparently absent, kidnapped by aliens. ‘Pretty child,’ his mother had said.

Chris sat up in bed, shifting the covers back. Not naked. Quite well wrapped up, in fact. Mark had been intending to embrace her, to kiss her face, but he did not do so, for reasons that eluded him. With odd, dormouse-like movements she rootled about for a notebook and pencil and wrote a word for him. Sorry.

‘Oh, look, Chris, Jesus, it’s me that’s sorry, all my fault, I didn’t mean to cause you any distress, it was hopeless of me, I’m such a bloody fool, but look, honestly, nothing happened, you’ve got it all wrong.’

I love you.

Oh God. ‘I’d never do anything to hurt you, it was stupid of me, inconsiderate, I just went to the seaside, you see –’

Are you sleeping with her yet?

‘Christ, no, not a thought of it, not an option, I mean we did spend the night there, but, you know, no hanky-panky. I mean nothing at all, no kissing and cuddling or anything. Just talking. I mean, she’s weird. I don’t even like her very much.’

You’re in love with her.

Mark explained at considerable length and with some warmth that this was not the case, and never could be. She wrote down one of his own favourite rejoinders, one he had used to tease her, laughing, a thousand times and more. She wrote, the lady doth protest too much. ‘Oh Christ, think what you like, Chris, but I know what I feel, and I know what happened, and I tell you, nothing’s changed so far as you and I are concerned. Not if that’s what you want.’ Mark had been ready to sweep her up into his arms at the conclusion of this avowal, but somehow it didn’t seem the moment. She was writing on her notebook once again. This time only very brief and rather brusque movements of the pencil. She then lay her head on the pillow to indicate that the interview was over. Mark rambled on disconnectedly for a while, but she did not respond. He tried laying his hand on her shoulder, even leant over to kiss her face, but she was hard, rigid, locked solid. So after a while of sitting in silence, in case she should wish to speak or at least to make some sign, he got up and left. He said as he went: ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. All right?’

In the notebook she had inserted, after the second word of the second line she had written for him, two further characters. LD.

‘You all right, Mark?’

Mark was standing in the kitchen with his hands clasped around the back of his neck. ‘Sure.’

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