Simon Barnes - Miss Chance

He undid the head collar without looking to see how it undid, ran down the stirrup irons. Reins in left hand, hand on the pommel. Left foot in left iron: his body doing all these things apparently without reference to himself. Lowered himself with agile softness into the saddle. The horse shifted into a walk, but Mark did not correct him; merely soothed with his right hand.

They passed through the gate, which Mel opened adroitly for him. Mark swung his left foot forward almost to Gus’s nose, and tightened the girth a hole. Unthinking, essential movement: like turning on the light when you get home, or listening to the answerphone.

Mark’s body remembered everything as he lay diagonally across the acreage of the bed, possessed by an overmastering physical content. ‘The size of the bed is primarily an option for comparative solitude,’ Morgan said, ‘rather than one for gymnastic exhibitions.’

He felt the beginnings of an ache in the small of his back, and what he hoped was the conclusion of one at the top of his thighs. But that was no matter. Absurdly, he sketched the closing of his hands, leaving a gap for the reins between third and fourth fingers.

He had returned home to find the red light morsing from the answerphone, and reached out a hand to call its ghosts into being. Mark, why do you never remember to switch on the answerphone? Is it done deliberately to upset me, or is that aspect of it just good luck? Remember, I’ve read Freud too, you know. But it was not, of course, her; it never was. Just three messages for her; news of her departure had yet to spread. Had she collected the messages already, dialling in from whatever place she now occupied? What if she called now? The fourth message was for him: Callum. Come and share a takeaway with me and Naz – that is, of course, if you’re not out getting laid.

Which was good, especially as even Sunday was now under control, no longer the yawning void that Sunday traditionally presents to the newly abandoned. He had an appointment with a woman of startling good looks and slightly more startling force of character. He had to meet her in Radlett, where else?

Mark carried two pints of beer to their table in the Wagon and Horses. She still, it seemed, drank pints. ‘Here’s to you, Mel. And thanks. It was great to sit on a horse again.’

‘He went well for you. But then you’ve always liked sods.’

‘He’s not really a sod.’

‘You always say that. He’s normally a complete bastard to Theresa, out on a hack.’

‘I didn’t give him anything to fight.’ This was true. And without anxious hands tugging at his mouth, the horse found himself fighting a ghost and grew tired of his own temper. He was easy. And Mark felt that quiet, savage sense of penetration: infiltrating the strange land that lies between two species of mammal. The border-country; the land of his youth.

The pub was nicer than Mark had expected, peopled mainly, it seemed, with regulars, a few in riding clothes. There was an early autumn fire, and the food was as pub food should be. They sat with second drinks before them: ‘To speak only physically,’ Mark said, ‘it seems that every need bar one has been taken care of.’

Mel smiled in honour of this, and then added a grain of malice to the smile. She leant back in the chair and called to an adjacent table: ‘How’s that brilliant mare of yours, Kath?’

The next best thing in the world to talking about yourself is talking about your horse. She had Kath’s attention at once. And Mark’s. Blue-black hair in a crop that was somehow softened at the edges; tough face with eyes made huge with eyeliner. Navy-blue eyes, more or less, Mark decided, and a navy-blue jumper that had clearly been applied with a spraygun. Muscular body that looked hard, but was no doubt soft enough in places. Who was it that said after an abortive tryst, I have touched the hottest and the coldest parts of a woman?

Mark was taken aback by this lubricious thought, but still managed to elbow his way into the conversation. ‘How wonderful to have a brilliant mare. What does she do?’ James Joyce, that was it. No need to read Joyce till spring.

Kath looked at him accusingly. ‘What she did was jump. What she does now is hang about eating her head off.’

‘Got a leg?’

‘Christ, I wish it was something simple like a bowed fucking tendon.’ Harsh London vowels, with oddly softened consonants. ‘She’s gone in the brain, that’s the problem. Gone sour on me. I’ve been too soft on the old trollop. Let her get away with too much.’

A tourist who sits at a pavement café in Paris with his ears open slowly finds his schoolboy French returning. After the second drink he is inclined to venture a subjunctive. ‘What’s she done?’

‘Affiliated, last two years, few red ribbons. I don’t want to have the old bitch shot, but what else can I do? She’d make someone a lovely hack, except she’d probably kill them.’

‘Vicious?’

‘Nah. Pussycat. Just fucking mad.’

‘She sounds sweet,’ Mark said. He had intended nothing more than facetiousness, weakly flirtatious. But Kath turned and looked at him properly for the first time, bright with eyelinered challenge. ‘You can have her if you want. I’d take a grand for her.’

‘Is this your usual line of sales talk?’

‘I mean, can you ride ?’ Meaning rather more than can you sit on the top and steer.

‘It’s been known.’

Kath leant back in her chair and aimed sweatered breasts at him. ‘Do you want to try her out?’

Morgan was the past mistress of all out-cooling games. Years ago, Mark had shown her a disgusting playground trick, in which he had looked and sounded as if he were scraping together the broken ends of the bone in the nose. ‘If you ever do that again,’ she said, laughing, disgusted, ‘I will leave you. I will take it as a signal that you simply don’t want me around any more, and I shall pick up my bags and leave.’ Perhaps a thousand times since, Mark had seized his nose with both hands. ‘Try me,’ she always said. ‘Go on. Try me.’ And Mark never did. Being quite certain she would leave. 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.