Simon Barnes - Miss Chance

Yes, it was part of the unpublished Morgan-gone sequence, the last poem he ever wrote.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 for a drink. Not that he would go short at The Mate’s, but that was not the point. Or perhaps it was a tribute to his father, to that last drink, the time they had talked 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.