Читать книгу Miss Chance - Simon Barnes - Страница 17

‘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 an interest in her. He admitted that to himself at once, but understood quite clearly that this was not a sexual interest. He sat on the floor and admired her room. It was not like every 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.’