Miss Chance
A wonderfully engaging novel about a man and the horse he falls in love with – the idiosyncratic Miss Chance.‘Get a motorbike. Get laid. The order doesn’t matter.’When teacher Mark Brown’s celebrated wife leaves him, his best friend Callum prescribes a swift return to adolescence.Mark does indeed turn back the clock, but not towards motorbikes. He returns to his first passion – horses. Getting back into the swing of riding after twelve years, Mark begins to put together the broken pieces of a story that is full of humour, love and pain.He is plunged back into contact with his extraordinary family and other flamboyant influences from his past. And over everything there is the shadow of his tantalising, enigmatic, beautiful and frustrating wife, Morgan.Miss Chance is at once delicate and down-to-earth, funny and poignant, a beautifully told narrative that reveals itself with an increasing power and momentum.
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SIMON BARNES
Miss Chance
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
Copyright © Simon Barnes 2000
Simon Barnes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
An extract from ‘along the brittle treacherous bright streets’ is reprinted from Complete Poems 1904–1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage.
An extract from ‘The Waste Land’ is reprinted from Collected Poems 1909–62 by T.S. Eliot by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006511960
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007484874
Version: 2016-10-04
For CLW, whom I courted on horseback, and also for Dolly Dolores VII (who may feel inclined to sue)
Contents
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.’
