Читать книгу Miss Chance - Simon Barnes - Страница 10

In the beginning, it was Mark that had been the star, not Morgan. It was he they pointed at in the students’ union, not she. That day, the day when he first set eyes on her, he was absolutely at the peak of his powers; his perihelion, as he later put it. And he dressed like the star he was. Everyone wore black in those days: but Mark wore over his black jeans and sloppy black polo-neck a green cardigan with leather buttons. It looked like something a middle-aged man would play golf in. His father had worn it to play golf in. Mark’s posthumous adoption of it was part mockery, part tribute, part self-mockery, part elaborate reverse dandyism. He had also just bought his first ever pair of cowboy boots: a dramatic move away from the Doc Martens required by convention. The cardigan, the boots: as a star, he could dare such things. He could do nothing wrong.

Undergraduates write poems: it is a condition of the age. But Mark was a poet. ‘You know,’ as a stage announcer had once said: ‘like T. S. Eliot and Wordsworth.’ In his second year he produced what he called, with becoming modesty, a slimy volume. The university poetry magazine, Penyeach, had done the publishing, and it was sixteen pages long and all the poems were by him, there’s glory for you. It was named for a knot he had learnt in the Cubs: A Round Turn and Two Half Hitches.

His poems made people laugh. Boy meets girl and hands her a garland of ironies. He wrote of the tangles and knots in sexual negotiation, caught undergraduate angst neatly enough: neatly enough, at any rate, for angst-ridden undergraduates to recognise themselves.

He would have died rather than admit it, but it was not his words that hit home, but the delivery. He was good at audiences: he liked it; he rose, quite literally to the occasion, standing taller than was his custom, eyes scanning the audience, sharing an intimate secret with – oh, several hundred on big days. It was nothing to him, tall and confident in bearing, his voice full of pretended perplexity, rising at the end of sentence as if to question even his full stops. He was preparing a second volume of similar sliminess to be published the following term, called Running Bowline, for the line in ‘What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?’ It was about the hideous embarrassment to which youth is prone. The best poem was unabashedly autobiographical: ‘The Night of Serial Buttock-Fondling’.

He was often asked to read a poem or two in the interval, when a decent band came to play. The sound of laughter coming towards him from many hundred voices was wonderful, and Mark, despite the attacks of rather bad peritonitis that gripped him before these big readings, adored it above all things. Occasionally, Penyeach would organise a reading for a smaller and theoretically more discerning audience, and he would watch the other poets do their nervous stuff, would laugh when appropriate or nod wisely, and offer fulsome congratulations, there being no side to him. And then read his own poetry. Last: always last.

There was always a reading in Freshers’ Week, naturally. By the beginning of the final year, his place of honour was assured. He strolled in as a piece of easy routine, a man comfortable with his own pre-eminence. Nothing was ever the same afterwards. And he didn’t even meet her: he didn’t dare. Or as he put it to himself at the time, not his type.

It was the usual sort of crowd: nervous, sneering, reluctantly admiring would-be poets, a lot of black clothes and Doc Martens. ‘And now to close the evening, Mark Brown will read us something.’

Mark, slightly nervous till that moment, took the floor like a great and well-beloved actor making an entrance, his extreme modesty of bearing somehow emphasising his incalculably lofty status. He shoved a handful of hair away from his eyes and pulled out a slimy volume, not without looking in the wrong pocket first, to an affectionate titter from those that knew him. The book had been folded in half and crammed into the back pocket of his jeans, what a way to treat a sacred object. He went straight into the poem: no preliminary remarks, not even a title. And led them into a web of mistrust and deceit, the poet no less a liar than his mistress. The poem ended ‘come lie with me and be my love’, nice double entendre, but Mark read it thus: ‘Come lie?/ with/ me?/ and be/ my/ love???’ The unasked questions hung in the air as he surveyed his audience in the brief silence that followed. Then the comprehending smiles: and the applause.

Mark read one more poem, the one he had written after he had learnt that T. S. Eliot found the fireworks of the peace ceremony more disturbing than the bombs of the enemy: a contradiction that converted neatly enough into student love. Standing tall and confident, eyes scanning around his audience as was his invariable custom. All were to be included: he spoke to all.

And bang.

Bomb; or firework. It is extraordinary how many trains of thought you can keep running at the same time without derailment. Mark thought this even at the time, while he continued to read. Also thinking about a poem he might write, recalling a childhood incident in which he had walked into a glass door. Also feeling the same shock he had endured on that occasion, as if the air itself had turned solid and knocked him silly. Also wondering if what he felt was a strong sense of attraction or a strong sense of distaste.

And all without missing a beat in the reading of his poem, save that he was now reading to an audience of one. He did not dare look away, save for an occasional glance down at his got-by-heart poem. Had he tried to regain his normal audience-scanning insouciance, he would have been lost. And every time he looked up from his page, she was there. He read to her, every word to her, and she listened, her head a trifle on one side, each hand clasping an elbow. She looked quite insufferable: and he could not look away.

A little triumph of self-mastery: he reached the end without disaster. He thanked her modestly, accepted her applause, though she seemed to be clapping in a special ironical way that made no actual sound. At last he was able to sit down, to face a different direction, while the Penyeach editor made his speech about all contributions being welcome.

‘Well done, my love,’ Christine said from her place at his side. ‘I’ve always liked the fireworks one. Never heard you read it better.’ And she gave him a small kiss on the cheek.

Fireworks of peace. ‘I need a drink.’ Christine at once reached into her bag and produced, with a Mona Lisa smile of triumph, a can of beer. ‘Adorable woman.’ Mark kissed, opened, drank. Then, the speech being spoken, he got up to do the sort of chatting that is required on these occasions, there being no side to him. Eventually the gathering thinned out, and Callum said it was time to go home.

The three of them walked back to the flat together. ‘Been talking to the weirdest woman,’ Callum said.

‘You mean the one in the black and white coat?’ Christine asked. ‘Where do you think she got it from? It looked genuine.’

‘She said you were winsome, Mark.’

‘I bet she says that to all the girls,’ Mark said sourly.

‘Did she like the poetry?’ Christine asked.

‘Said you were E. E. Cummings with capital letters, Mark. Is that a compliment?’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘But was it genuine? I hope you asked.’

‘Not in so many words. I asked her where she got it. Said she picked it up secondhand.’

‘That means it’s genuine,’ Christine said. ‘What a nerve. I could no more do that than fly. I mean, going to a poetry reading, a fresher – a fresher – wearing a zebra-skin coat. You’ve got to admire that, in a way. I mean, a dead zebra.’