Miss Chance. Simon Barnes
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.
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