about teaching. Cultural transmission, Mark. The most important job in the world.
The pub had been gutted and refurbished at least once since he and Mel had drunk their illegal teenage drinks. Hands held, halves of lager, The Game, the sudden gulping retreat back to the stable-yard, deserted now, the scented, pricking double bed of hay. Tip: always bring a horse blanket if you intend to make love in a hay-barn. Did she laugh and laugh with her doctor husband? Did she play The Game? Or was she quite different: a different person, a different time?
Would you like me to laugh and laugh? Shall I be a silly giggly girlie for you? Morgan, I prefer your silliness the way it is. And that night when she had read for him a poem, seizing the book from the pile beside the bed:
after all white horses are in bed
Love without punctuation.
But love is not really about bed. To believe so is to sentimentalise. The avowals, the grappling, the giggling, or for that matter the poetry: these are only marriage when marriage is gone. You remember the beginning, the end. You can’t reconstruct the bit in the middle. The bit that mattered.
Telephone her? But he had no number to call. Write to her, via her forwarding address? Suggest a civilised meal, a grown-up discussion? And always returning home to the morsing answerphone, the shoal of messages for her diligently transcribed. These days he never forgot to switch on the answerphone. If she collected her own messages from afar – it was impossible that she did not – why did he never catch her? Why were there no phone-crashing retreats from his voice? His finger reaching out to press the button, the messages from her friends, her admirers, her editors. Waiting always for her voice: never hearing it. They knew something was up, these callers: well, I knew it wouldn’t last. Not really up to her standards, was he? Mark’s darkest secret the one he had somehow managed to keep secret even from himself: that he agreed. The daily robot valediction: end of final message.
Sitting in a pub snivelling into your pint, sentimental bastard. This would never do. Would his saddle fit the little mare? That was the only question that mattered. And besides, it was time for Drinks Before, as his mother always termed that ceremony.
He parked outside the house that was more like a vicarage than the vicarage, as his father had said when they moved in a decade and a half back. ‘Darling.’ A kiss accepted on each cheek. ‘Come in and pour me a nice drink, it’s time for Drinks Before.’
It was a peculiarity of hers never to pour her own drinks ‘except in extremis, darling.’ So Mark poured her a generous gin and generously helped himself to whisky. She would say, ‘Well, “cheers”.’ Relishing the vulgarity, the inverted commas.
He carried the tinkling glass to where she sat in her high wing-backed chair, the table beside her towered and castellated with books. He placed a mat on the nearest book and then the glass.
‘Well, “cheers”.’ She sipped, and then added another ritual phrase: ‘I can feel it doing me good.’ She smiled a trifle winsomely as she said this. Her hair was apparently freshly crenellated into new grey ramparts. ‘Did I understand you aright?’ she asked. ‘On the telephone?’
‘In what particular?’ As always, Mark found himself echoing his mother’s eccentricities of diction.
‘Horses, darling.’
‘Oh, horses, yes.’
‘You know, when your father and I moved to the country, it was not with the intention that you became a bumpkin’. Not the first time she had said this. ‘That silly girl, and that fucking horse.’
He did not make the joke about the adjectives. ‘I saw Mel the other day.’
‘No one is called Melody. And she still has horses?’
‘So do I. I’ve just bought one.’
‘Oh, darling.’
‘That’s why I want my riding gear.’
And he looked up, to be struck by a sudden knifing glance: The Mate’s X-ray vision. He and Bec had a shared fantasy, to which their father had been privy, that their mother possessed super-powers. ‘And Morgan does not approve? Hence her absence on this visit?’
‘Morgan doesn’t know anything about it. She is not around. She has taken leave of absence.’ What an extraordinary way to put it.
‘Oh.’ The monosyllable hard, condemning.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, darling.’ And the descent into tears. ‘Oh, darling, oh dear.’
Then the doorbell. The tears, though copious, seemed to shoot back into their ducts by an act of will.
Mark looked down from his eminence of 15 hands and one inch and admired the sweatered bosom below. Bosomina, he remembered, and especially Sexuella. ‘All right if I give her a spin in the school?’
A reasonable request. Why the slight hesitation? ‘Sure. Shall I take her head?’
‘Don’t bother. I expect I’ll manage.’
They walked across the yard to the outdoor school, the flat sand-floored oblong, nicely fenced, the dressage letters around the sides: KEH on one side, FBM on the other, letters arranged as they are in every school in the world. A pile of showjumping poles and jump-stands to one side, a decent-sized fence set up in the middle of the sand. Bloody hell, if that was her idea of a practice fence she was serious all right.
Kath strode ahead to open the gate, and he squeezed the mare forward. But oddly, she didn’t respond. As if there were a loose connection in her wiring. Instead, she stopped dead. Mark patted affectionately. ‘We’re not going to do anything difficult, miss,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s go.’ And this time kicked.
A terrible thing happened. She did not go forward, as he asked. She went up. What non-riders call rearing. Horsey people, not in the main ones for euphemism, usually call it a stand, or standing up. Rearing is too naked an expression, too terrible an event.
Some horses rear in uncontrollable terror, a rare one might even do so in malice. But she rose almost in calm. She stood to her full height with controlled grace, and having risen, stayed there, perfectly balanced. Body perfectly vertical. Mark felt his left leather slip from the saddle; he remained in place with pressure of his knees and one hand on her chest. If he lost balance himself, he would pull the mare over backwards, on top of him: potentially lethal, that, especially on concrete. He stayed still, so did she. After holding the position for, it seemed, several weeks, as slowly, as gracefully as before, she lowered her front hooves to the ground.
Mark, riven with terror and dismay, found himself patting the mare’s conker-brown neck. Patting? Shouldn’t he be beating? He had, after all, a borrowed stick in his hand. But he soothed, soothing himself, perhaps, more than the mare.
‘Can you put the leather back for me?’
‘Sure.’ Avoiding his eye.
The leather reattached, he walked the mare in a circle outside the school, patting, talking. Edging always that little closer to the gate,
