She put her head a little to one side and raised an eyebrow above one of her own blue, not navy, eyes, though not in invitation to the delights of the hay-barn. ‘Have you become a sucker for lame ducks in your old age?’
‘It’s the spark in her –’
‘It’s the damage that’s the attraction. Isn’t that right?’
‘Stop trying child psychology on me.’ A standard marital riposte of Morgan’s, as it happened.
Mel was smiling to herself in a thoughtful sort of way. Then she turned to him. ‘I always thought you wanted the part of lame duck for yourself.’
‘Me?’ Mark was outraged. Morgan had, more than once, said much the same thing.
She grabbed his arm suddenly, impulsively, in a fashion that took him back through a dozen years, to a period when they had both been unsure of themselves, but each quite certain of the other. ‘I think you’re mad, but never mind. I’ll help you all I can. Because you’re going to need all the help you can get.’
‘Port, Canon?’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
Ashton took from her a decanter and poured himself a decent slug, then gave the decanter an interrogative waggle. ‘Port, Mark?’
‘Thanks.’ It’s like heavenly cough mixture, his mother had said once, and having said it once, said it often. He helped himself, and then poured a top-up for his mother, as she preferred.
The port ceremony was much beloved by his mother, who adored ceremony in all things. It used to irritate Mark profoundly. There had been a time – shortly after his Mel and Trevor period; shortly before what he must now think of, since it was concluded, as his Morgan period – when he used to smoke roll-ups as the port was passed. Reforming your parents is never easy, or for that matter possible. But at the time it had seemed important to try.
No longer. The port did not irritate him beyond speech, and he could listen to the facetious intimacies of the couple sharing the table with him without wishing to slaughter either of them, unlike poor Bec. Without smelling the whiff of betrayal in every smile.
His mother for the most part liked evasiveness in conversation, but there was a time and place for stronger conversational meat. That was at the dining table, at what she usually called the Cheese Stage, but was really, of course, the Port Stage. The cheese stood before them more or less untasted, though Ashton was boldly eating with his fingers a slim strip of feety Stilton. The Mate supped slowly. She had no palate for wine, and bought whatever Ashton told her, but she knew a little about port. ‘I have applied my mind,’ she said, a favourite concept of hers. Mark had not applied his mind and knew nothing about port, save that it was prime hangover material, and when he stayed the night he always drank two or three glasses too many.
‘The bishop’s letter,’ she said, ‘was about the marrying of divorced persons.’
The remark was addressed to Mark, so he replied. ‘I am sure you’ve told the bishop that divorced people are married, whether they like it or not.’ The bishop was an old enemy, a liberal and progressive type, prone to all the religious gimmickry The Mate most despised. He was, Ashton had assured Mark, rather afraid of her, with her doctorate in theology and her letters to periodicals and her books.
Ashton pushed his chair away from the table and leant back, a man at his ease, hands clasped behind his head. An absurd figure, perhaps: clad in cassock, no modern trouser-clad clergyman; about his waist a purple sash some four inches wide, the ends of which hung almost to his knee when standing. That made his outfit the more absurd, because standing, Ashton was an inch or two over five feet, or a good six inches shorter than Mark’s mother. His absolute ease of manner in all circumstances was a considerable weapon: he was a man quite without dwarvine crankiness.
‘I had a couple come in today,’ he said, or rather ‘tud-AIR’, for he spoke in an extraordinary bray, with etiolated Oxford vowels and a mannered stress on unexpected words. He could have been a figure of fun, a humorous clergyman from a farce, running from bedroom to bedroom with – well, no, not his trousers down, obviously, but with his cassock round his waist, perhaps. And yet it was his self-certainty that carried the day. It was a thing narrowly achieved, but it made him a formidable rather than a ridiculous person.
‘Indeed?’ His mother’s tutorial voice, she always the teacher rather than the taught.
‘Both divorced. I think I might marry them.’
She raised her eyebrows, both of them, skyward. ‘Pray continue.’
‘I know you believe, as an Anglo-Catholic–’ or rather kyath-lick – ‘that marriage is a sacrament –’ syack-rament – ‘and therefore incapable of reversal. As you may know, Mark, I have occasionally married divorced persons when there seem to be grounds for what the Romans call lack of due discretion. When, for example, a woman is bullied into marriage, absurdly young, generally pregnant –’ distasteful condition, that, no Roman relish of the full quiver – ‘and incapable of fully understanding the vows she made.’
‘Dubious and dangerous,’ said Mark’s mother.
‘Marriage?’ Mark asked. ‘Or its annulment?’
Mark had shifted onto dangerous ground, and his mother might have taken him further. But Ashton was not about to relinquish his story, nor she to interrupt him. ‘I have never married a doubly divorced couple. I was rather struck by what the man said to me. He said, my fiancée was the innocent party –’
‘Insofar as there is such a thing, Canon.’
‘I think I can accept that there is, Doctor, in a rough and ready fashion. She should not be penalised for her innocence, he said.’
‘That was quite well argued,’ Mark’s mother allowed.
‘And then he said, I was the guilty party in my own first marriage. I made a terrible mess of things. I can promise you two things. One, I will make more mistakes. But two, I will never make that particular mistake again.’
‘The boy is not altogether a fool.’
‘Hardly a boy, more or less your age, Mark. And I thought: can there be such a thing as a sanctified second go? Can one make a case for the blessedness of the second chance?’
‘St Peter had three chances,’ said Mark’s mother. ‘Look where that got him.’
‘The papal throne,’ Ashton said. ‘And you will recall that he also had a second chance for martyrdom. He muffed the first one. But then he turned round and went back.’
‘Are you comparing martyrdom and marriage? I have always fancied St Sebastian as a kind of role model …’ Mark earned a moment of laughter for this.
‘Marriage is not about having a bloody good try,’ Mark’s mother pronounced. ‘Modern marriages fail because each party enters into a contract with a built-in get-out clause. It is the opposite of Macbeth: getting out is easier than going on. Divorce is not a rescue package for a failed marriage. It is the acceptability of divorce that actualises failure. Darling, another smidgen of that heavenly cough mixture.’
Mark poured for his mother, passed to Ashton who poured, passed back to Mark. Bloody affected nonsense, she came from the lower-middle classes of Manchester. He poured himself another sticky helping, that really must be the last.
‘So you would not marry divorced persons?’ Mark asked his mother. ‘Under any circumstances?’
‘I didn’t say that. I speak about the complete failure of those whose duty it is to comment on the matter to comprehend even a little of the subject.’ She spoke as one with a right to speak. Mark thought suddenly and distressingly of ‘Cynara’. ‘Nobody, but nobody