Miss Chance - Simon Barnes

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other student room in the world, with its posters tacked to the wall with blue putty. The minute space, more cubicle than room, was filled with a collection of Hindu pictures and objects. Not the ancient and deep art fashionable a decade and more ago, instead she had chosen loud, Mickey Mouse pictures of fat-cheeked dancing maidens and electric-blue Krishnas. There was a large statue of the elephant-headed Ganesh, and a multi-brachiate dancing Shiva. Pumpkin-breasted girls wore appalling simpers on the scarlet slashes of their mouths. The hearty vulgarity of this collection made the room more than a trifle sinister.

      Behind the tiny bed stood a collection of snowstorms. Mark reached out, took one, shook it. Snow fell on plastic Venice, a gondola slid an inch beneath its plastic hemisphere. ‘They’re horrible, aren’t they?’ she said.

      ‘Yes.’

      On a hook behind the door the dead zebra hung from a coat-hanger. She poured tea: pale green. Milk or sugar not so much as suggested. ‘It’s gunpowder tea. I hope you like it.’

      ‘So do I. Do you?’

      The sudden not-quite-giggle, as if she had been found out. ‘I had to have it, you see. For the name.’

      ‘Talking of names, I’m Mark.’

      ‘Oh good. I’m Morgan.’

      Mark smiled.

      ‘And if you’re working up a joke, I’ve heard it.’

      ‘No, no – I mean, you’ve got a Celtic mother? Or father?’

      ‘Celt-loving. Mother. You mean for once I don’t have to explain that I wasn’t named after the car I was conceived in –’

      ‘No.’

      ‘– or the sisterhood-is-powerful woman or the –’

      ‘Morgan le Fay. Fata Morgana. Wise woman. Mirage.’

      A pause, a rather cool look from not beseeching, not brown eyes. ‘How well read you are.’

      ‘I may not have been to Oxford, but I have been educated, in my fashion. Is the ambiguity deliberate?’

      ‘Usually. Which one?’

      ‘Morgan. Wise woman? Or mirage?’

      ‘I try to be both.’

      Mark wondered if there was a winsome poem he could work up around this ambiguity. They talked, sipped tea. When you are talking to someone you have just met for the first time, you drink your tea before it has cooled and you scald your tongue. They talked about the university, and the course she was doing, and the hall of residence she was living in.

      ‘I call them Sexuella and Bosomina. They’re both medical students. They sit out together in the communal area and giggle for hours about things like black men’s penises.’ A slight hint of distaste, that reminded Mark of Ashton. ‘I mean, I lived with a black guy in California, and I know.’

      She seemed at the same time much younger than he, as was right for a first-year student, he in his final year. And yet much older, richer in experience. As if she had had the sort of experiences that actually matter. There was something about her quite foreign to studentkind: a worldliness.

      She was reading philosophy. Philosophy was futile, Mark told her helpfully. Literature was the thing. Philosophy attempted to systematise the universe and could only be measured by its degree of failure, whereas literature, based as it is on genuine truth, is, you see, when it comes to the put-to –

      ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she said. ‘But there’s no point in studying it, is there? And of course philosophy is futile. That’s why I love it so.’ She was in love with Descartes.

      ‘But it’s not true,’ Mark explained, with all the authority of a third-year student.

      ‘Of course it isn’t. But such bliss, if it was.’

      ‘He says that reason is all there is to life. By that line of thinking, a cat, a dog, a horse, a new-born baby, a brain-damaged child –’

      ‘All so lovely.’

      ‘You can’t think that. He says animals are just clocks, automata. No thought, therefore no existence. Therefore no –’

      ‘He’s sweet, isn’t he, my René?’

      ‘He’s a monster.’

      ‘I know, I know. But I’m a monster too. You must learn that.’

      Mark did not go to Mass or Marce, but instead went to the attic for communion with his past. He found the trunk that Bec had packed for him a decade back, brought it down, not without effort, and opened it. At once a hogo of neglect.

      But after a moment, bravely he plunged. And really not too bad, really not too bad after all. A vulture’s nest of leather, certainly, but damp and mouldy rather than dry and cracking. A rescue was possible. Saddle soap and gallons of neat’s-foot oil, that was all that was required.

      Clanking bits, various snaffles he had tried, the kimblewick he had used for cross-country after the bugger had buggered off with him. And there the saddle, bundled in anyhow, but the tree not apparently broken, and stirrup leathers and irons and all. If it did not fit the mare, he would at least sell it and buy another.

      And there the boots, a generous parental gift, kept in shape by the pair of wooden trees, looking no more than rusty. Soft leather, the brief laces at the ankle. And jods, yes, a couple of pairs of fawn jods, coarse-looking and unfashionable compared to the neat and stylish haunch-huggers worn by Mel and Kath, but serviceable enough. And there his white competition jods. Not that there would be competition.

      He took off his trousers there and then and pulled on a pair of musty jods. Elasticised material clamped his calves and thighs in a loving embrace. Could you have a Proustian squeeze? He did up the waist: they fitted. He felt dashing and purposeful, as of old. And there was his huge Barbour, very mouldy and in need of rewaxing. But it would still keep him dry, of course it would. And there the showjumping jacket, filthy, but rescuable. Lungeing cavesson: he was going to need that. No rugs. A disappointment. He would need rugs: but still, this was treasure enough.

      And there at the bottom his priceless collection of rosettes: faded, blue and yellow: a few of them red. The red one from Potton: Lord, but they had flown that day. Galloping through the finish, teeth in the mane, spectators scattering, and he patting and patting the hard, sweaty neck; Trevor, like his owner, half-crazed with delight at his own daring.

      And his jockey’s skullcap, too, beneath a rusty black silk. He tried it on, did up the leather strap beneath his chin.

      And goodness, there was the flat cap he used to wear around horses: green cord, well faded. He tried that on, too; it felt damp to his fingers. Birthday present from Mel, his eighteenth. In the mirror he saw a figure from another world. A figure that knew nothing of the poet, nothing of the Cartesian Morgan. More than the skullcap, the flat cap made him look like a horseman. He could see himself, lungeing the little mare, in his rewaxed Barbour, the ancient cap over his eyes.

      He removed the hat, and lobbed it back into the trunk. Everything else followed. Then an idea struck him. He went into the garage and started poking about near the back. It was an area that had scarcely been touched since his father died. For a while it looked hopeless. But then he spotted a filthy piece of tarpaulin. Standing on boxes and leaning over bundles of newspapers, he seized it. And it was, it really was his or Trevor’s New Zealand rug. It would need re-proofing. But it would do, if it fitted. And there, wrapped up inside, was Trevor’s night rug, and even a string vest or sweat-rug. Aladdin’s cave, that’s what it was.

      He carried everything out to the Jeep, and smiled – almost a pussy-face – at the way the Jeep looked right when full of horsey kit. And so he poked about the kitchen in a fine good temper, looking for food. He decided to make a coq au vin; the ingredients

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