said.
‘How I used to envy you two. The perfect couple. I used to think: why can’t Naz and I be like that?’
‘You’re all right, you two?’ Mark was alarmed. Other people’s problems were the last thing he required. Besides, he needed their stability. He needed someone to envy too.
‘Oh, we are. But we’ve had our problems. Like everybody. When she spent all her time at the centre.’ A centre for Muslim runaway females, Mark knew. ‘And I wished we had the perfect balance you two seemed to have.’
Perfect balance: the terrible unexplained absences, which she would still more terribly explain, were he to ask. And then an involuntary memory: the night she brought him hot and sour soup. Tenderness in a Styrofoam container; her famous spy’s mac, buttoned especially high, arousing more than his suspicions …
‘Look, Mark, I’ve been thinking. You know what you need to do?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’ve got this theory. Most of us make a terrible balls of our adolescence. Very few people ever get a second chance. But you can have your adolescence all over again, and this time, you can do it right.’
Mark was charmed by this. ‘All right. What do I do?’
‘Get a motorbike. Get laid. The order doesn’t matter. You must just do both as soon as possible. Like you used to do with those bloody horses you used to tell me about. Fall off, get back in the saddle again as soon as possible. I’ve got a present for you.’
Mark had been wondering about the roll of paper Callum had brought to the pub. He unrolled it, as requested. A 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
