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‘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 (#ulink_e9407398-7a5c-58d5-8deb-fdbc446c51cc)
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 (#ulink_a8147480-ebb9-5efc-b833-45d3526ba2ec)
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 (#ulink_a612e54c-0461-5c54-a6fe-8d5a23720d1b)
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 (#ulink_0730e0c2-2ffc-5782-9648-7d6f9ec4a302)
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.’
