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‘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 (#ulink_1e8857b1-526a-56d3-aa8f-9a6c3fa8276f)
‘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 (#ulink_a9fc66d3-784a-5a96-ba29-5f67b94d26b3)
‘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.
