Miss Chance. Simon Barnes
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minds, the thing that happens when you meet the one perfectly suited other person. Rubbish. Marriage is a mystic state, certainly, but not in the way we are taught. It is my belief that any two people can make a marriage work. All it requires is the joint and total will of both parties. Nothing more. Nothing less.’
‘That’s mystical?’ Mark asked.
‘Certainly. It is a violent assertion of the will. The mystery is that two people will exactly the same thing. That is why marriage is the most terrible and devastating of all the sacraments, not excluding the last.’
‘Who was it said,’ Ashton asked, ‘that he preferred funerals to weddings, because marriage was so depressingly permanent?’
Mark’s mother pursed her lips in secret pleasure at this: what his father had always called her pussy-face. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very.’ And Ashton received a smile of deep appreciation, deep affection.
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
The inevitable dole of tears: a single one, unwiped, his upper, non-pillow-facing eye. So Bec always said, anyway. He wasn’t there.
‘Are you the animal man?’ She turned beseeching brown eyes on him.
Mark smiled hugely, straight into her uncannily wide red mouth. It was impossible not to. It’s my most famous quality.’
‘Oh dear, you’re not the animal man, are you?’
‘An animal man.’
‘I mean the man from the Animal Rights Association or whatever it’s called. They promised someone would come, and I do want to join because I love animals.’
‘But not animal men?’
‘That’s why I’m a vegetarian, you see. But I hate fish. So I eat them all the time.’
Mark’s eyes kept slipping from her lovely eyes and her lovely mouth to her lovely jumper. Or rather, her lovely jumpered bosom, its colour a pale kitten, kitten-soft and positively demanding to be caressed. Mark would have sold his soul, had Mephistopheles been available and bargain-hunting, for half a minute’s double-handed fondle. ‘Poor fish. Are you quite heartless?’
‘Oh yes. I’m a monster, and utterly without feeling.’ She looked meltingly at him. ‘Who are you,’ she asked, ‘if you’re not the animal man?’
‘I’m the poetry man.’ Her face did not light up. He pulled a copy of Penyeach from his shoulder bag. ‘See, admire, buy. There’s a poem by me in it.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Sex,’ Mark said promptly.
‘Then I wouldn’t like it. I only like poems about animals, you see.’
‘But not poems about fish?’
‘Oh heavens, do people write poems about the filthy things? I shall never look at poetry again, in case I find one about fish. But you see, I’m not really a poetry person. Though I rather think my floor-sharer is.’
‘Which one?’ Half a dozen bedrooms led off the communal sitting area in which they talked.
‘Knock there,’ she said, indicating a door. Then she lowered her voice to an almost voiceless whisper, ‘If you dare.’
Mark, daring, knocked. There was no call of welcome. But after a moment, slightly too long a moment, the door opened. And she was looking at him with a look of assessment. After a fraction, she widened her eyes at him. For just a second, or perhaps rather less, there was an increased area of white around the iris, a little as if she were a startled horse. But she was not really startled at all. She was, as it were, ironically startled. All Mark’s sense of bantering ease fell from him. She seemed to possess to a very high degree a talent for unease.
‘The poet,’ she stated rather than asked.
‘The winsome poet.’
At this something slightly odd happened. She gave a sharp two-syllable laugh. If Mark had not already decided that nothing could be more remote from this person’s experience as nervousness or giggling, he might well have called it a nervous giggle. It was perhaps a turning point in their relationship, and Mark failed to recognise it. It is possible that everything would have been different had he done so. ‘Oh dear, I did say that, didn’t I?’
‘So I believe.’
‘Were you terribly hurt?’
‘There are adjectives I would have preferred.’
Concern crossed her face. ‘Oh dear. I am sorry. Have you ever found that when you meet people for the first time you find yourself quite by accident saying exactly what you are thinking?’
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
‘No, it isn’t. I was expressing interest in the phenomenon.’
‘That’s all right then. But look, I am here to sell you the latest phenomenal issue of Penyeach.’
‘I bought one at the poetry reading. To read your poem.’
‘See, you can be nice, can’t you?’
‘No, I can’t. I just wanted to read it.’
‘And having read it and loved it you went on to buy my book.’
‘I did, actually.’
‘A person of wealth and taste. Did you find it winsome?’
‘I did, actually.’
Afterwards, they were to argue about what happened next. Mark said that her offer of a cup of tea was obviously an expression of interest in him, and intended to be understood as such. She maintained it was no more than good manners. My floor-sharer, she said, offered refreshment to the animal man, when he arrived. Visitors got tea: sexual feeling had nothing to do with the matter.
She made tea in the shared kitchen. Mark watched her trickle a palmful of green pebbles into the scalded pot. He watched her accomplish this small domestic task, wondering at her. The skirt was longer than was fashionable, and, since not black, startlingly unusual. But it would have been unusual, not to say startling, in any age. It comprised seven or eight horizontal layers of tartan, which ought to have clashed appallingly. She wore a tartan lumberjack’s shirt, mostly red. The get-up really should have dominated her, but it failed utterly.
It is the custom for students to go around in some sort of near-fancy dress. Mark’s own outfit, which included a soft tweed fishing hat and a Norfolk jacket with many pockets and odd patches of leather, was of that school, though the fact that it was part of his father’s legacy almost legitimised it. Its intention was broadly ironical: not the case with the baffling, and eye-baffling crisscrosses before him.
‘Come to my room,’ she said.
Again, Mark took this – not exactly as a come-on, but certainly as a signal of mild intimacy. He had not been fobbed off with a seat in the communal area, after all. But she later insisted that the invitation was purely a matter of logistical convenience. The cups were in her room, you see.
No, really, she was not beautiful. Nose too big. Eyes that indeterminate colour they call hazel, but which is really bits of everything. It can be anything you like. Cheekbones pronounced, but not classically high and mysterious and Slavic. In some way broad, and rather Eskimo-like. Hair dark, remarkably thick, cut to her shoulders.
She certainly wasn’t sexy. Mouth too thin, expression too forbidding, no tits. As she sat on the floor, Mark saw that she was wearing tartan tights.
Mark felt