style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Why was that?’
Her hair had fallen in front of her face, and from its depths she gave him her pitying look. ‘Should have seen the babe I put on the cover.’ She shook her head, not in negation, but to offer him a little more face, softened with concern. ‘But look, Markie, what’s this all about? Oh, thank you.’
She took her drink, sipped, as Mark told his brief banal story that led to his long-term banal predicament. She gave him uncritical sympathy. ‘But no nervous breakdown yet? No suicidal despair? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’
‘Oh God, Bec, don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But mostly I’ve managed to keep too busy.’
‘Game plan is to get suicidal as soon as you can find a window?’
‘Nice double entendre, Bec. But listen, talking about being busy. I wondered if you knew. I mean, you did all the packing up that time, when I was away for the autumn term.’ He meant, but did not say, after their father’s death. ‘And I just wondered if you threw away my riding stuff. Or not.’
‘Your riding stuff? Good God, is this another fashion statement?’ She had always been unkind about cowboy boots.
‘Perhaps. If so, I think I may have got hold of the ultimate fashion accessory. I think I might have bought a horse.’
At this she laughed, really laughed, almost a giggle, an unusual thing altogether these days. ‘You mad little bastard.’
‘That’s roughly what everyone else has said.’
Bec said: ‘He ruined his life with that horse and that silly girl. It’s not my fault he didn’t get to Oxford. It’s all the fault of that silly girl and that fucking horse.’
Mark grinned, a little warily. The words still brought a flash of pain. ‘She got the adjectives the wrong way round,’ he said.
‘Cabin-trunk,’ Bec said. ‘I remember distinctly. Loads and loads of stuff. Massive cat’s cradle of leather. Clothes.’
‘Boots?’
‘You and your boots. Yes, boots on silly sort of false legs. Either in the trunk, or alongside. Up in the attic. No chance that The Mate will have lugged it out. Even if she were to call on all her super-powers. Weighs a ton.’
‘Still less Ashton.’
‘That would be a bit grossly physical for him, wouldn’t it? You still going up there and talking to the little shit?’
‘Well, I do go up there every now and then. To see The Mate. As you know. And that does rather involve seeing Ashton.’
She wagged her head, bringing more hair forward to narrow the Gothic arch through which she looked out at the world. ‘I don’t know how you can do it. I can’t bear even the thought of sharing the same postcode. Even for half an hour.’ She shook her head again, reducing the width of the strip of face to about two inches. Eyes very fine, very troubled. It was only about the hundredth time they had had this conversation. In family life, language is not a medium for the exchange of information.
‘Have you seen The Mate of late?’ Mark asked.
‘Took her to lunch last week. The usual fifty-five mentions of Ashton. Jesus, she knows what it does to me.’
‘She can’t help herself. Like biting on a bad tooth. She only mentions him to me about once every meeting. But always that once.’
‘But you go home, and he’s actually there. And you sit at the same table as him, watch him pouring the wine in Dad’s place, and you manage to hold down your supper.’
‘I know, Bec. It’s not a betrayal of you. I just wasn’t there.’
‘I know you’ve always felt bad about that.’
‘Oh, Bec. Coming back from my jaunt. Swaggering up the drive with my tales of the conquest of Europe. It was the worst, the worst thing ever.’ Not a medium for the exchange of information.
She smiled a sudden wreath of smoke. ‘Worse than the night of serial buttock-fondling?’
‘You and your memory. But I know it was much worse for you being there. But you must understand that my going back is still some way of trying to … I don’t know …’
‘I know there was never any actual adultery, and so they thought that made it all right. As if the only available sin was fucking. He darkened the last years of Dad’s life –’
‘Bec –’
‘And the hour of his death. She brought Ashton in –’
‘I know –’
‘– to give him the comforts of the Church. She brought his chief tormentor in life to torment him on his deathbed.’
‘Bec.’
‘Two more, please. Spicy. I know,’ she said, turning back to Mark, ‘that you think I’m unbalanced on the subject.’
‘No one is balanced on the subject of death. Your own, anybody’s. Except Lao Tzu, perhaps.’
‘No!’ A cry of pain. ‘Ashton is to do with bloody life, God rot him. How to fuck up various people’s lives, while all the time smiling and making jokes and doing favours and being obliging and urbane and amusing.’
‘I understand …’
‘But you weren’t there. You didn’t watch him worm himself into the family, while I was at home doing my sentence on the Hertford Mirror. I saw it all happen, before my eyes, in slow motion. Saw Dad become a sad old bastard, in slow motion before me.’
‘Bec’
‘Fathers and daughters, I know, I’ve read Freud too, you know.’ A line of Morgan’s, that, originally. It became a line of Mark’s, now a line of Bec’s. ‘Did I ever tell you what I nearly gave The Mate for Christmas last year? I found a complete Freud in a secondhand bookstore, and I bought the lot. Bloody expensive they were, too. Still got them at home. I chickened out.’
‘Would she have got the joke?’
‘Too obvious. That was the problem. We had an argument on precisely that subject. She simply couldn’t accept the idea of unconscious motivation.’
‘You talked about it?’
‘I think we were talking about you. And I said that everyone seeks in marriage to replicate the relationship with the parent of the opposite sex. But she sat on it at once. At once. Schupid nonsense,’ the last two words being another impersonation, ‘so perhaps she could see the dangerous ground on the far side of the hill. With her X-ray vision.’
‘Thank you. Spiritual infidelity.’ The first to the waiter.
‘You always did need a good sub, didn’t you? Infidelity. We’ll have no redundant adjectives when I’m editing. You know how fond he was of the Victorians? Palgrave?’
