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.’
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
