tried to stop the conversation at this point. Always failed.
‘And I used to read to him when he was in hospital.’
‘I know, Bec –’
‘And every time he asked me to read “Cynara”. And every time I read it, his eyes filled up with tears. It was torture for him; it was the only comfort he could look for. That I could give him. That any one could give him.’
She shook her hair over her face and ignited a Gauloise. Mark wiped the corner of each eye with a discreet knuckle. Both drank.
‘I’m sorry, Markie. You’re the only one I can talk about it with.’
‘Rob –’
‘Never knew Dad. Hardly knows The Mate. He’s tremendously understanding, but he doesn’t understand. And never met Ashton, of course. So bitching about him doesn’t have the same kind of resonance.’ She smiled a little at this last frivolity.
‘All well with Rob? With you and Rob and so forth?’
‘I hope so. I don’t know what I’d do without him. We both lead such busy lives, you know. But it’s always good when we bump into each other. He cheers me up.’
‘Making millions?’
‘Doing all right.’
‘Tell me, Bec – do you understand what he does?’
‘You know, it’s funny you should ask that. It’s been very much on my mind of late. He came back from a really good day, and there I was, home, and so he told me all about it. And you know, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. No unconscious motivation. I really tried. And he’s explained it all so many times that I daren’t ask him again.’
‘It’s stocks,’ Mark said with great authority. ‘He goes out to work and spends all day broking the bloody things. Like a fishmonger.’
‘Who mongs fish. Thanks for your help, little brother. You seem quite chipper, for a man with a broken heart. Are you putting your life back together?’
‘I’m trying, Bec. But I’m joining up the wrong bits.’
‘Interesting. Got laid yet?’
‘How macho you are, Bec. How very wise they were to give you the job at Edge. No. But I think I might be in love.’
Mark made two long and graceless hops. What to do now? Take his left foot out of the iron? Scramble on board any old how? Ask Kath to hold her head, an offer already refused? The mare was seriously silly, and she made him look seriously schupid. Out of his depth.
With the third hop, Mark found he had enough leg beneath him to make a spring, and without considering the matter, sprang. It was not that he did anything seriously bloody comic, like leaping clean over the horse’s back, but his leap was out of all proportion to the animal beneath. Trev had been all but two hands higher, after all. But he caught his balance, caught it rather neatly, in fact. Touching her neck lightly with his right hand to get his bearings, lowering himself into the saddle with the softness of a butterfly alighting. Rather a passionate butterfly. As someone had said about something. Slipped his foot into the second iron. ‘God, you ride long.’
Kath, smiling to herself, perhaps at the mare’s restlessness, perhaps at the implied compliment, said, ‘Shall I hold her head while you adjust the leathers?’
But the mare seemed to have stopped spinning round and round, and now she wanted to walk. Walk terribly fast, with neck-stretching, head-nodding strides. Mark swung his left cowboy boot forward to tighten the girth. Damn it, it was him, that passionate butterfly. Which poem? But perhaps he had borrowed it from somewhere. Up two holes on the left; up two holes on the right.
‘Hello, angel,’ Mark said softly, as he took up a contact. That is to say, he moved the reins so that the bit moved in her mouth. That is to say, he reached out to touch her. The touch of a passionate butterfly.
Yes, it was part of the unpublished Morgan-gone sequence, the last poem he ever wrote. Unfinished: well, she came back, didn’t she? That time. The mare was eager to trot and Mark agreed that she might, and she responded to the thought alone. And decided to take control. She moved with huge jerky strides like a horse in a trotting race, leaning on the bit, seeking to extract his arms from their sockets. Mark checked again. At this, she cantered, quite the opposite of what he had intended. Another mild check: this time she started to hop like a rocking horse, making every second stride without putting her forefeet on the ground. Checked again, she tried to canter on the spot. This was not lack of schooling. This was craziness. It was seriously alarming.
But the odd thing was that Mark was not seriously alarmed. To his surprise, he heard himself laughing out loud. For she meant no harm; he knew this with absolute certainty. No malice. Just a little madness, nothing more. It is the tendency of the novice or frightened rider to yank at the horse’s mouth in times of trouble, but all Mark’s youth had come back to him: not to his mind, but to his hands. And his hands forgave, not blaming; and softened. And his legs squeezed her forward and suddenly, she was moving with power and purpose, and it was beautiful and she knew it as well as he did. Suddenly he was not sitting on a horse, but riding. Riding round the big green field with his borrowed hat slipping towards his nose and the chisel toes of his cowboy boots poking foolishly out of the irons. Riding.
Without further discussion, he asked for a canter, but she understood him all wrong, confused and mad again, and flung her head up. Mark, standing in the stirrups, had a perfect view of the white star on her forehead. Then a whack on the chest: he discovered that he had moved his head a few inches to one side. He had missed, by a hair, a broken nose.
‘All right all right,’ he told the mare without resentment. ‘Let’s be sensible horses, yes?’
And she found a bigger pace for him, a huge rolling canter, and he rode high and forward and balanced, and as he rode his hands made a thousand adjustments and counter-adjustments, more or less of their own volition. The mare asked tiny questions with every stride, and every one needed answering: the flow and counter-flow of information and opinion. Language.
‘Put her at a jump or two if you like.’
‘We like,’ Mark said.
He looked at the car-tyre jump with purpose and looking was enough. Beneath him, an angel spread her wings.
She suggested that he make a night of it. Do his sorting ‘after Marce’. So on Saturday evening he drove the Jeep into Hertfordshire. He had told his mother that he would be coming alone, because she did not care for impromptu arrangements. ‘Oh,’ she said. It was one of her more devastating monosyllables.
The Jeep carried him as if on rails on his own crosscountry route to Codicote: huge march of the railway viaduct across the Mimran valley just visible against the darkening sky. He remembered the Christmas walk to the A1, his mother’s tears.
He found that he had pulled in at the White Horse. He parked neatly, wondering if this was procrastination or a crass need
