You can’t control the people you love. The phrase had invaded Mark’s head like a parasite. It squirmed and wriggled around for, it seemed, most of the night. You can’t control the choice, and having involuntarily chosen, you can’t control the person either. Neither sleeping, nor quite waking, it seemed important – no, essential to the processes of life – to encapsulate the dual notion in a perfectly honed epigram. Final line to a winsome poem, perhaps. Or first line of a Morgan short story. Though love wasn’t really her subject, was it?
Or was it? But nobody ever did quite understand her stories, she said; and he was the only one that ever understood her jokes. Until now, presumably.
Days were easier, of course, and evenings really not too bad. There are, of course, disadvantages to being left by your wife, but it is a great opportunity to look up old friends. Mark had done a lot of work on that phrase as well.
‘Callum?’
‘Oh God, you. Need me to talk you out of suicide again?’
‘It’s either a beer with you or the gas oven.’
Banter. Make light. A jest. Guess at the horrors, if you wish; but Mark preferred banter. He had made this resolution, he liked to think, to protect the world from boredom: who wanted to hear about his banal predicament? But it protected him too. Not thinking. Forget the night, and its wakefulness and its vain pursuit of perfect epigrams. And anyway, it was in the Morgan tradition, was it not? She had left him, not in a storm of tears or temper, but with a jest. Rather a loving jest. But then she would, wouldn’t she?
Callum told him that Naz was on late turn and he was in sole control of their boy, and so he would not be available for drink and solace until ten. Which was far too long. And left Mark flicking through the address book once again: a name, a number, an inspiration.
He had passed her before. And kept going. Now he looked again. Well, he reasoned. Why the hell not? True, he had not seen her since that night when they had concealed the objet d’art – but these were not normal times. A state of emergency had been declared: this would be a serious escalation. So escalate. His hand made a series of minute advances and retreats over the telephone.
Melody. No one is called Melody, his mother used to say.
‘Mel?’
‘Good God.’
He remembered her voice too, every nuance. Somehow, he had not expected to. ‘I’d love to. But I can’t. I can make Saturday lunch, though, if you don’t mind coming out to Radlett.’
‘No one lives in Radlett.’ His mother’s son.
‘My horse does.’
‘Fancy you still having horses. It must be ten years at least since I last sat on a horse.’
‘One horse. Though I have another I’m supposed to be exercising right now, a nasty stroppy bugger of the kind you used to adore.’
‘How lovely to hear your voice talking about horses again. People don’t change, do they?’ He heard with mild surprise the affection in his voice, and thought again of their last meeting, and its horror.
‘So why don’t you come and hack him out tomorrow morning, and then we’ll have lunch?’
Mel. There had been a time when tumbling in the hay had been no metaphor. But horses … Mark had no wish ever to sit on a horse again, but anything was better than solitude. Sure. Great. I’ll be there.
The house was too big. A few days ago, it had felt like half his; now he knew it was all hers. Her Islamic draperies, her gods and goddesses, dancing Shiva, the knotting of the banister, the one remaining maze. Morgan was present in every way but one: a conjuring trick quite typical of her. Not fair. And damn it, what should he wear?
‘It’s funny,’ Callum said, a fair bit later that same Friday, when such subjects as life and the departure of wives had been fully discussed.
‘No it isn’t,’ Mark said.
‘How I used to envy you two. The perfect couple. I used to think: why can’t Naz and I be like that?’
‘You’re all right, you two?’ Mark was alarmed. Other people’s problems were the last thing he required. Besides, he needed their stability. He needed someone to envy too.
‘Oh, we are. But we’ve had our problems. Like everybody. When she spent all her time at the centre.’ A centre for Muslim runaway females, Mark knew. ‘And I wished we had the perfect balance you two seemed to have.’
Perfect balance: the terrible unexplained absences, which she would still more terribly explain, were he to ask. And then an involuntary memory: the night she brought him hot and sour soup. Tenderness in a Styrofoam container; her famous spy’s mac, buttoned especially high, arousing more than his suspicions …
‘Look, Mark, I’ve been thinking. You know what you need to do?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’ve got this theory. Most of us make a terrible balls of our adolescence. Very few people ever get a second chance. But you can have your adolescence all over again, and this time, you can do it right.’
Mark was charmed by this. ‘All right. What do I do?’
‘Get a motorbike. Get laid. The order doesn’t matter. You must just do both as soon as possible. Like you used to do with those bloody horses you used to tell me about. Fall off, get back in the saddle again as soon as possible. I’ve got a present for