Czytaj książkę: «Miss Chance»

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

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.’