Miss Chance

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

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

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

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.’

‘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

‘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?’