The jest demanded it.
‘I’d love to try her,’ Mark said.
They agreed: Sunday morning at eleven. And then Kath turned back to the friends at her own table. Mel raised an eyebrow at Mark. ‘Well?’
‘Seems rather a sod.’
Mark loved his Jeep, but he had always been embarrassed by it. It was not the right vehicle for driving between Islington and Herne Hill. He would not have chosen it himself; Venetia had bought it for him, in a particularly wild fit of generosity, a few birthdays back. But now it had real mud round the wheel arches. There’s glory for you, as Morgan would say.
A couple of miles beyond the Wagon and Horses, Mark entered an almost Venetia-like maze of narrow lanes. Kath’s instructions were precise: past the metal barn, left at the lone brick house, right at the crossroads. And all within the annular M25. It did not seem physically possible; there was surely no room for these fields. They were a trick, or a piece of magic: through the looking-glass, down the rabbit-hole. The journey had something of the not-quite-rightness, the slightly-sick-making sense of disorientation that people found in Morgan’s stories. That Mark found in Morgan herself: though he would never have admitted to that. Against his will, he thought briefly of Morgan’s last party: the one to celebrate the Herne Hill job, and her publication of Alice.
And then, as promised, the yard. Mark swung in, and parked the appropriate Jeep beside a consonant four-berth horse lorry. At the gate, two Jack Russells welcomed him noisily from four feet off the ground, Jack Russells being unaffected by gravity.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ greeted Kath.
‘Hello,’ Mark agreed.
‘Made your will?’
‘I’ve left everything to you. I thought that right.’
She laughed. She was dressed as yesterday, the blue-black sleeves rolled a little short of the elbow. The revealed arms were full of sinewy strength. ‘Come and meet the old trollop.’
Accurate reconstruction of significant first meetings is always difficult; perhaps even undesirable. Over the years they acquire a carapace of mythology. Mark always claimed that his first sight of Mel was of her jodhpured buttocks: love, he stated, at first sight. Perhaps it was as he said; but if not, the false memory was the true one. He remembered Morgan’s clothes, the dead zebra, her air of secret amusement, at a joke that had never, it seemed, quite palled. Until last week, of course. Or their first meeting when actual words were exchanged. The lumberjack shirt. I’m a monster too. You must learn that.
‘I didn’t fancy you at all. I found you rather odious.’
‘I adored you from the first.’
‘Precisely why I found you odious.’
He remembered something of that first encounter with Trev, the horse of his youth. It was not the first sight of the big blaze face that he recalled, but the moment he patted the neck and felt the extraordinary hardness of muscle. ‘A lot of horse,’ he had muttered. Knowing from the single touch that the horse had been schooled and damn well schooled, too. And the horse had lowered his head just a fraction, a pink fleshmark just below the blaze, and then lifted his head with a jerk and a biff, smiting Mark lightly below the sternum and knocking a little breath from his lungs. ‘Boisterous sod, aren’t you?’ Feeling a hint of challenge, of male-to-male empathy in the touch.
Trevor had swaggered from his box, looking ready to take on the world. But Kath led Mark to a horse that seemed to have no presence whatsoever. She was looking over the half-door of a nice roomy box: bay head, white star, preposterously large ears. She looked meek and kind: a soft touch. ‘Hello, trollop,’ Kath said, slapping the bright neck a few times before entering the box, bridle over her shoulder, saddle on her stripped forearm.
Mark stood diffidently at the door, watching Kath tack up with neat, precise movements. ‘She’s tiny.’
‘She’s jumped five foot, it’s nothing to her. She may be 15-one, but look at the arse on her.’
‘She needs the pelham?’
‘Can’t always hold her in that.’
She led the mare out into the daylight: autumn sun made the bright bay coat gleam like a conker. Mark had always liked his horses dark and burly and tough but something about this meek-looking animal seemed to slip beneath his guard. Not his type: dangerous and intoxicating thought.
New departure; same old route to disaster. ‘Take her for a little run around the field,’ Kath said. ‘Get the feel of her.’
Mark put on his re-borrowed velvet riding hat. In his jeans and his cowboy boots and his riding school hat, he felt a complete phoney. He felt Kath judging him; the mare had not yet begun judging him. That would come in a few minutes.
He took the reins from Kath, just above the rings of the martingale, in his left hand. And with his right, reached out to touch her.
He had expected to make his hard hello-Trev slap, his boys-together greeting to his boisterous champion. But his hand refused to do anything of the kind. Instead he stroked, nibbled the neatly pulled mane with his fingers. The mare looked at him for a while. Then, very lightly, she touched his shoulder with her nose. Mark was absurdly moved. ‘Hello, angel,’ he said. Too soft for Kath to hear.
In the beginning, it was Mark that had been the star, not Morgan. It was he they pointed at in the students’ union, not she. That day, the day when he first set eyes on her, he was absolutely at the peak of his powers; his perihelion, as he later put it. And he dressed like the star he was. Everyone wore black in those days: but Mark wore over his black jeans and sloppy black polo-neck a green cardigan with leather buttons. It looked like something a middle-aged man would play golf in. His father had worn it to play golf in. Mark’s posthumous adoption of it was part mockery, part tribute, part self-mockery, part elaborate reverse dandyism. He had also just bought his first ever pair of cowboy boots: a dramatic move away from the Doc Martens required by convention. The cardigan, the boots: as a star, he could dare such things. He could do nothing wrong.
Undergraduates write poems: it is a condition of the age. But Mark was a poet. ‘You know,’ as a stage announcer had once said: ‘like T. S. Eliot and Wordsworth.’ In his second year he produced what he called, with becoming modesty, a slimy volume. The university poetry magazine, Penyeach, had done the publishing, and it was sixteen pages long and all the poems were by him, there’s glory for you. It was named for a knot he had learnt in the Cubs: A Round Turn and Two Half Hitches.
His poems made people laugh. Boy meets girl and hands her a garland of ironies. He wrote of the tangles and knots in sexual negotiation, caught undergraduate angst neatly enough: neatly enough, at any rate, for angst-ridden undergraduates to recognise themselves.
He would have died rather than admit it, but it was not his words that hit home, but the delivery. He was good at audiences: he liked it; he rose, quite literally to the occasion, standing taller than was his custom, eyes scanning the audience, sharing an intimate secret with – oh, several hundred on big days. It was nothing to him, tall and confident in bearing,
