Miss Chance

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

‘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.

Again, Mark took this – not exactly as a come-on, but certainly as a signal of mild intimacy. He had not been fobbed off with a seat in the communal area, after all. But she later insisted that the invitation was purely a matter of logistical convenience. The cups were in her room, you see.

No, really, she was not beautiful. Nose too big. Eyes that indeterminate colour they call hazel, but which is really bits of everything. It can be anything you like. Cheekbones pronounced, but not classically high and mysterious and Slavic. In some way broad, and rather Eskimo-like. Hair dark, remarkably thick, cut to her shoulders.

She certainly wasn’t sexy. Mouth too thin, expression too forbidding, no tits. As she sat on the floor, Mark saw that she was wearing tartan tights.

Mark felt an interest in her. He admitted that to himself at once, but understood quite clearly that this was not a sexual interest. He sat on the floor and admired her room. It was not like every other student room in the world, with its posters tacked to the wall with blue putty. The minute space, more cubicle than room, was filled with a collection of Hindu pictures and objects. Not the ancient and deep art fashionable a decade and more ago, instead she had chosen loud, Mickey Mouse pictures of fat-cheeked dancing maidens and electric-blue Krishnas. There was a large statue of the elephant-headed Ganesh, and a multi-brachiate dancing Shiva. Pumpkin-breasted girls wore appalling simpers on the scarlet slashes of their mouths. The hearty vulgarity of this collection made the room more than a trifle sinister.

Behind the tiny bed stood a collection of snowstorms. Mark reached out, took one, shook it. Snow fell on plastic Venice, a gondola slid an inch beneath its plastic hemisphere. ‘They’re horrible, aren’t they?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

On a hook behind the door the dead zebra hung from a coat-hanger. She poured tea: pale green. Milk or sugar not so much as suggested. ‘It’s gunpowder tea. I hope you like it.’

‘So do I. Do you?’

The sudden not-quite-giggle, as if she had been found out. ‘I had to have it, you see. For the name.’

‘Talking of names, I’m Mark.’

‘Oh good. I’m Morgan.’

Mark smiled.

‘And if you’re working up a joke, I’ve heard it.’

‘No, no – I mean, you’ve got a Celtic mother? Or father?’

‘Celt-loving. Mother. You mean for once I don’t have to explain that I wasn’t named after the car I was conceived in –’

‘No.’

‘– or the sisterhood-is-powerful woman or the –’

‘Morgan le Fay. Fata Morgana. Wise woman. Mirage.’

A pause, a rather cool look from not beseeching, not brown eyes. ‘How well read you are.’

‘I may not have been to Oxford, but I have been educated, in my fashion. Is the ambiguity deliberate?’

‘Usually. Which one?’

‘Morgan. Wise woman? Or mirage?’

‘I try to be both.’

Mark wondered if there was a winsome poem he could work up around this ambiguity. They talked, sipped tea. When you are talking to someone you have just met for the first time, you drink your tea before it has cooled and you scald your tongue. They talked about the university, and the course she was doing, and the hall of residence she was living in.

‘I call them Sexuella and Bosomina. They’re both medical students. They sit out together in the communal area and giggle for hours about things like black men’s penises.’ A slight hint of distaste, that reminded Mark of Ashton. ‘I mean, I lived with a black guy in California, and I know.’

She seemed at the same time much younger than he, as was right for a first-year student, he in his final year. And yet much older, richer in experience. As if she had had the sort of experiences that actually matter. There was something about her quite foreign to studentkind: a worldliness.

She was reading philosophy. Philosophy was futile, Mark told her helpfully. Literature was the thing. Philosophy attempted to systematise the universe and could only be measured by its degree of failure, whereas literature, based as it is on genuine truth, is, you see, when it comes to the put-to –

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she said. ‘But there’s no point in studying it, is there? And of course philosophy is futile. That’s why I love it so.’ She was in love with Descartes.

‘But it’s not true,’ Mark explained, with all the authority of a third-year student.

‘Of course it isn’t. But such bliss, if it was.’

‘He says that reason is all there is to life. By that line of thinking, a cat, a dog, a horse, a new-born baby, a brain-damaged child –’

‘All so lovely.’

‘You can’t think that. He says animals are just clocks, automata. No thought, therefore no existence. Therefore no –’

‘He’s sweet, isn’t he, my René?’

‘He’s a monster.’

‘I know, I know. But I’m a monster too. You must learn that.’

12

Mark did not go to Mass or Marce, but instead went to the attic for communion with his past. He found the trunk that Bec had packed for him a decade back, brought it down, not without effort, and opened it. At once a hogo of neglect.

But after a moment, bravely he plunged. And really not too bad, really not too bad after all. A vulture’s nest of leather, certainly, but damp and mouldy rather than dry and cracking. A rescue was possible. Saddle soap and gallons of neat’s-foot oil, that was all that was required.

Clanking bits, various snaffles he had tried, the kimblewick he had used for cross-country after the bugger had buggered off with him. And there the saddle, bundled in anyhow, but the tree not apparently broken, and stirrup leathers and irons and all. If it did not fit the mare, he would at least sell it and buy another.

And there the boots, a generous parental gift, kept in shape by the pair of wooden trees, looking no more than rusty. Soft leather, the brief laces at the ankle. And jods, yes, a couple of pairs of fawn jods, coarse-looking and unfashionable compared to the neat and stylish haunch-huggers worn by Mel and Kath, but serviceable enough. And there his white competition jods. Not that there would be competition.

He took off his trousers there and then and pulled on a pair of musty jods. Elasticised material clamped his calves and thighs in a loving embrace. Could you have a Proustian squeeze? He did up the waist: they fitted. He felt dashing and purposeful, as of old. And there was his huge Barbour, very mouldy and in need of rewaxing. But it would still keep him dry, of course it would. And there the showjumping jacket, filthy, but rescuable. Lungeing cavesson: he was going to need that. No rugs. A disappointment. He would need rugs: but still, this was treasure enough.

And there at the bottom his priceless collection of rosettes: faded, blue and yellow: a few of them red. The red one from Potton: Lord, but they had flown that day. Galloping through the finish, teeth in the mane, spectators scattering, and he patting and patting the hard, sweaty neck; Trevor, like his owner, half-crazed with delight at his own daring.

And his jockey’s skullcap, too, beneath a rusty black silk. He tried it on, did up the leather strap beneath his chin.

And goodness, there was the flat cap he used to wear around horses: green cord, well faded. He tried that on, too; it felt damp to his fingers. Birthday present from Mel, his eighteenth. In the mirror he saw a figure from another world. A figure that knew nothing of the poet, nothing of the Cartesian Morgan. More than the skullcap, the flat cap made him look like a horseman. He could see himself, lungeing the little mare, in his rewaxed Barbour, the ancient cap over his eyes.

He removed the hat, and lobbed it back into the trunk. Everything else followed. Then an idea struck him. He went into the garage and started poking about near the back. It was an area that had scarcely been touched since his father died. For a while it looked hopeless. But then he spotted a filthy piece of tarpaulin. Standing on boxes and leaning over bundles of newspapers, he seized it. And it was, it really was his or Trevor’s New Zealand rug. It would need re-proofing. But it would do, if it fitted. And there, wrapped up inside, was Trevor’s night rug, and even a string vest or sweat-rug. Aladdin’s cave, that’s what it was.

He carried everything out to the Jeep, and smiled – almost a pussy-face – at the way the Jeep looked right when full of horsey kit. And so he poked about the kitchen in a fine good temper, looking for food. He decided to make a coq au vin; the ingredients were all there, perhaps by design. It was a dish she always liked him to cook.

She arrived, the house now reeking of wine. ‘Oh, you heavenly infant,’ she said, ‘I know I ought to prefer you to come to Marce, but it is truly wonderful to come home to your cooking. I shall surely go to hell for thinking such a thing.’

‘Do you think,’ Mark asked, ‘it’s time for Drinks Before?’

It was over the port, Mark taking a mere half-glass, since he had to drive, that his mother at last brought up the subject that had been oppressing them both all weekend. ‘This business with Morgan,’ she said. ‘Is it irrevocable?’

Mark had been quietly terrified of this moment. He feared the weight of her disapproval: of his fecklessness, of his helplessness. Once again ruining his life in a moment of folly. No Oxford, no proper job, now no wife, ‘I think it might be.’

‘Oh dear. Oh dear. And are you – er – committed elsewhere?’

He decided not to make a joke about Miss Chance. ‘No. Not my line, really.’

‘Oh, what a pit-pit. What a pit-pit.’ Mark had heard her use the expression to cover eventualities from a disappointing birthday present to the outbreak of nuclear war. ‘I am very sorry to hear it. But, Mark, listen to me. I have known parents express dismay when their children have problems with their spouses. I remember when Madeleine took sides and blamed Anthony for the break-up with his girlfriend. As a result, she didn’t see Anthony for two years. Or perhaps he turned up, grudgingly, at Christmas. But he married Anne, as you know, and everything worked out for him. And Madeleine accepted the situation and there was a reconciliation. And a scar too, no doubt, and certainly a long and painful gap. I don’t intend to have a long and painful gap. So please understand this. I know you think me a judgmental person, and with justice. But there will be no judging from me in this matter. I value you more than I value my own capacity for judging.’

Mark laughed, touched, and said: ‘In this one instance?’

‘In this one instance.’

13

For once, Mark was able to park right outside, so that was a bonus. He lugged the trunk, step by step, up to the front door, and then with a brief back-snapping exertion carried it into the hall. The rugs? Too stinky. He would leave them in the car till he had bought the re-proofing stuff. He fetched the bag of bachelor shopping, the heat-up meals, the beer; also a treat he had planned for himself, beancurd, oyster mushrooms, fresh chillies of the terrifying little green wrinkled kind. He knew what to eat, but not how to fill up the evening.

She had been.

At first nothing more than a twitchiness. Mark felt like James Bond finding that the hair he had stuck to the wardrobe door was no longer there. There had been an invasion, he was sure of it before he found any hard evidence. Then things became clearer. There was a coat missing from the hall, the one that billowed about when she wore it, as she almost always did, unbuttoned. And the Burberry was gone too, her famous spy’s mac.

Would there be a note? His heart stopped for a second as he considered for the first time the fantastic possibility that she was still there. He wanted that very much, and wished with all his heart to avoid it. And of course she had gone. And anyway, he would have noticed her car in the street, the famous Flying Toad Citroën DS. No, she had come and she had gone. Taking, no doubt, papers from her study and books from her shelves and clothes from her wardrobe. And some treasures, of course. Had she taken her less portable treasures? The snowstorm collection? Dancing Shiva? That would be an irrevocable step. But come. That had already been taken, had it not?

He walked into the sitting room: the great Islamic drapes were still there. And then a double take: his own, or Callum’s addition to the décor had gone. Marianne Faithfull and Brigitte Bardot were no longer pinned to the gorgeous fabric. How childish: she had torn them up in a fit of post-feminist fury. No she hadn’t: there they were on the long, long sofa, rolled loosely together. And something pinned to the drape behind the sofa, where Marianne had, hand on zip, so recently pouted.

Mark went to inspect it. It was a snapshot he had taken himself. It showed a naked woman. She was looking at the camera with an expression of frank irritation. The woman was Morgan.

He laughed out loud. He laughed in sheer delight at the beauty of the move. The picture was years old. He and Morgan had once spent some weeks in Greece and, in a deserted cove, Morgan had removed her clothes to swim and bask. She was caught half sitting, half lying, drying in the sun after her swim when Mark, driven by twin irresistibles, lust and the love of a jest, had sneaked up on her with the camera. She had divined his intention a fraction before he had pressed the shutter, hence the irritation.

But she liked it, when they examined the pictures in post-holiday nostalgia, ‘I like the way that clothes or their lack is a matter of supreme indifference to me. All that concerns me is my urgent need to give you a bollocking.’ And she had pinned the picture to her notice board in her study, along with odd postcards, notes to herself, various trouvailles. She received visitors in the study, and some of them remarked on the picture, ‘It’s very revealing, isn’t it?’ she always said, ‘It reveals my temper.’

But it didn’t, not really, because the incident had ended as such incidents must, when people take off their clothes in the sun. The picture was revealing all right, and it revealed a great deal more than temper or tits. Perhaps, Mark thought, it revealed their marriage.

‘But it’s not an erotic picture at all,’ she said, ‘I am unaware of my nakedness.’

‘Precisely what makes it erotic.’

‘Besides, I’ve got no tits.’

‘It was you that lectured me on the power of understatement.’

‘I did not lecture you on the power of no statement at all.’

‘Nor would it be relevant to do so, in this case.’

‘Lordy, Mr Brown, you say the sweetest things to a girl.’

And so on. Mark looked around the burgled flat, seeking a note. There was none. Just the picture, then. What was its meaning? For surely it had a meaning. ‘Why do people always ask me this?’ Morgan said, ‘If it had a meaning, I would hardly waste my time with it, now would I?’ It could not have been the work of a moment to find it. It had served its turn on the notice board, and must have been fairly deeply buried. She had gone to some trouble to make this meaningful statement, if statement it was, if meaning it had.

Did it mean that he was to forget her? Or did it mean that she knew who dominated his heart and mind, and that it was neither Brigitte nor Marianne? Was she in some way offended, to the point of jealousy (remember Sexuella) by the garlanded and zippered pin-ups? Was she competing with them? Saying that her own naked irritation was a more potent matter than anyone else’s seductiveness? And perhaps she was right.

Perhaps that was the meaning. Lust, and the love of a jest.

What does it mean, Morgan? I loved Alice but what does it mean? I loved Arachne but what does it mean? And she would reply to them all only with an expression, the one he called your bloody little sphinxy smirk.

‘Listen to this one, Morgan.’ He was brandishing the newspaper from which he had extracted a gem. ‘This bloke, mean, miser, hoarder, larder full of tins for when the bomb drops. But his crusty old heart is touched by a local convent’s appeal for food for the starving orphans. So he gives away a box of tins. Realises a week or so later that he has given away his dummy tins. In which he kept a fortune in cash, jewels, gold coins …’

And Morgan had snapped into wonder at this, head on one side, cogs of her brain visibly turning. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

‘But it gets better; there’s a pay-off. One of the nuns is last seen heading for the airport in plain clothes and a taxi …’

She shook her head decisively. ‘No. Leave the nun out. She spoils it.’

‘But surely that’s the cream of the jest?’

‘No. She spoils it. Keep your nun to yourself.’

The story had made it to her first volume, the one called Alice, without the flying nun. Neither quite moral nor quite cruel nor quite funny, ‘It’s futile without the pay-off.’

Same expression as the one in the naked photograph. ‘I know.’

‘The meaning is that there is no meaning?’

‘Stories don’t have meanings. They have shapes. Your story had a good shape, till you brought in the flying nun.’

Do pictures have meanings, when pinned to Islamic drapes? Every picture tells a story. But what was its shape?

The kitchen was pleasingly bare, free from all clutter. He took a Sabatier from the knife-block and tested it gently with his thumbnail. Like a bloody razor. He gave it a quick caress with the steel and then scalpelled mushrooms and bean curd and chilli for hot and sour soup. Not too hot, she would say. Or too sour. Well, this soup was going to be a belter.

14

‘Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee!’ Mark said, ‘and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again. Does that answer your question?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Because chaos comes anyway. Even though he never stops loving her.’

‘But that’s wrong. He couldn’t love her right at the very end. Because he kills her, right?’

‘Right, Jim,’ said Mark, rightly, scanning his audience, all to be included. ‘Any thoughts on that one? Jane?’