Читать книгу Miss Chance - Simon Barnes - Страница 11

The armchair was deep and leather and comfortable, but she had acquired a taste for ritzy surroundings. The fire had been lit, though it was rather early in the season, and reasonably warm. But it was that sort of hotel.

Mark had not sought the meeting, but was delighted when it was suggested – no, insisted upon. ‘Er,’ he told the waiter confidently. But she would pay, snatching up the bill purposefully when she had done so, to tuck into her slim not slimy black wallet, another trophy for her expenses, entertaining British snowboarding champion or the latest naked actress. Or something.

‘Bloody Mary,’ he said. ‘Please. Spicy.’ Her favourite drink, as it happened. And there she was, too, walking in, gazing about shiftily, spotting him. He stood to kiss her, nicely, on each cheek. ‘Bec. Good to see you.’

‘Good to see you, little brother. Spicy,’ she said to the waiter. ‘Bloody Mary, please.’

She sat. Then shook hair away from her face and smiled, both uncharacteristic moves. The hair was long, fair, undyed, worn in two long halves that normally allowed only a pale strip of face to be seen. ‘I’ve known women who hide behind their hair like fawns in the undergrowth,’ Morgan said. ‘Your sister lurks behind her hair like an ocelot in ambush.’

It always amused Mark, to hear how many people were genuinely afraid of Bec, or Rebecca as everybody else in the world called her. Not that he found such fear incomprehensible: there were at least a thousand occasions in their shared past when she had beaten him up. He was just delighted to learn about subsequent victims. ‘Why do you think,’ he had once asked Morgan, ‘she didn’t go in for women’s glossy magazines? Why men’s?’

‘Mountaineers don’t look for the easiest way up a mountain,’ Morgan had said. ‘They shin up the North Face.’

‘And how are things at Edge?’

The packet of tipped Gauloises already on the table, the brief clack, the gold bonfire of the Zippo. ‘Good,’ she said, hissing smoke. ‘Preliminary figures for August are the best yet.’

‘Why was that?’

Her hair had fallen in front of her face, and from its depths she gave him her pitying look. ‘Should have seen the babe I put on the cover.’ She shook her head, not in negation, but to offer him a little more face, softened with concern. ‘But look, Markie, what’s this all about? Oh, thank you.’

She took her drink, sipped, as Mark told his brief banal story that led to his long-term banal predicament. She gave him uncritical sympathy. ‘But no nervous breakdown yet? No suicidal despair? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’

‘Oh God, Bec, don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But mostly I’ve managed to keep too busy.’

‘Game plan is to get suicidal as soon as you can find a window?’

‘Nice double entendre, Bec. But listen, talking about being busy. I wondered if you knew. I mean, you did all the packing up that time, when I was away for the autumn term.’ He meant, but did not say, after their father’s death. ‘And I just wondered if you threw away my riding stuff. Or not.’

‘Your riding stuff? Good God, is this another fashion statement?’ She had always been unkind about cowboy boots.

‘Perhaps. If so, I think I may have got hold of the ultimate fashion accessory. I think I might have bought a horse.’

At this she laughed, really laughed, almost a giggle, an unusual thing altogether these days. ‘You mad little bastard.’

‘That’s roughly what everyone else has said.’

Bec said: ‘He ruined his life with that horse and that silly girl. It’s not my fault he didn’t get to Oxford. It’s all the fault of that silly girl and that fucking horse.’

Mark grinned, a little warily. The words still brought a flash of pain. ‘She got the adjectives the wrong way round,’ he said.

‘Cabin-trunk,’ Bec said. ‘I remember distinctly. Loads and loads of stuff. Massive cat’s cradle of leather. Clothes.’

‘Boots?’

‘You and your boots. Yes, boots on silly sort of false legs. Either in the trunk, or alongside. Up in the attic. No chance that The Mate will have lugged it out. Even if she were to call on all her super-powers. Weighs a ton.’

‘Still less Ashton.’

‘That would be a bit grossly physical for him, wouldn’t it? You still going up there and talking to the little shit?’

‘Well, I do go up there every now and then. To see The Mate. As you know. And that does rather involve seeing Ashton.’

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.’