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‘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 (#ulink_d0b15363-0c7a-5da2-9301-8835ab387f2d)
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 (#ulink_fd97cdd1-f9b4-5bc7-ab69-f5f7d911fedc)
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.’
