Simon Barnes - Miss Chance

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?’

‘I know –’ This was the bit he couldn’t bear. It always made him cry, every time Bec told him. He always 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.