The Lessons Read online

‘See you on the other side,’ he said.

  Exams were over just before the longest day in the year, when the light of the evening lasted until past 10 p.m., and the night was gentle. We lay in the sun on the lawn that afternoon, our bodies extended like spokes around the sundial, warmed and drowsy. Mark rolled a joint and passed it round.

  Franny lay with her head in Simon’s lap as they compared choices, rubric by rubric.

  She said, ‘You did the one on de Gaulle? It didn’t look like it offered much opportunity to be clever.’

  Simon patted her curls gently. ‘I’m not as clever as you though, so it doesn’t matter.’

  Franny made a ‘come come’ noise, but I could tell this remark had pleased her.

  Emmanuella smoked a long white cigarette from a packet with a Scandinavian name, leaned back and streamed the smoke into the air. She was wearing a loose orange halter dress, her hair pouring down her bare back.

  She said, ‘I was not surprised by any question. Not at all.’

  Simon leaned forward, pulled her hair and said, ‘Stop showing off.’

  Emmanuella pinked and pouted and took some more champagne.

  The bottle passed around again. We brought out food and wound the radio cord through the grass to play Fox FM, tinny and distorted. When ‘Boys and Girls’ came on, with its creaking, insistent beat, Mark and Franny danced on the lawn. The sky turned from pale blue to a deeper, more magnanimous hue. It became a glorious, silk-black evening filled with glow-worms, a plethora of tiny lights winking and flashing from the bushes, like the stars which were that night almost musically bright.

  At midnight, Simon yawned and said, ‘Mates, I’ve got to get to bed.’

  After the general protest had died down he said, ‘Got to. Start work on Thursday, Dad’s coming tomorrow at 8 and I haven’t started packing yet.’

  There was more argument. The champagne bottle lolled on the blue velvet grass and the stars swam, and eventually it was Mark who said, ‘He’s got work. He has to.’

  And Simon said, ‘I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks anyway, right?’

  ‘At your parents’, yeah,’ said Jess.

  ‘Not me,’ said Emmanuella. ‘I must be in Madrid all summer.’

  And Simon let out a roar and charged at Emmanuella. She screamed as he lifted her up to the stars and crunched a martini glass under his sandal, letting out all the glitter and bubbles. He spun her around, the orange dress streaming out behind her like underwater seaweed, and crushed her to him in a hug and set her down giggling and gasping on to the grass.

  He looked around.

  ‘Anyone else?’

  We shook our heads.

  ‘Right then,’ and he beat his chest at the sky and he and Franny went to bed.

  Not long after that Lars arrived for Emmanuella. He crashed through the garden to reach us, and when he emerged, he appeared downcast and serious, even though he had arrived so late, and so clumsily and with such an obvious purpose. Emmanuella allowed him to help her to her feet and I thought, I never understood her at all, never knew a particle of who she was. She wished us goodnight graciously and the orange dress swirled in the grass and I could tell that Lars was impatient to his fingers’ ends to be touching her. I found I felt amused, with only the tiniest flicker of smoky jealousy at the edge of my thoughts.

  And then we were three. We sat among the remnants of the picnic, eating an olive or quail’s egg from time to time. We lit several of the storm-lantern candles dotted around the edges of the lawn and they cast a gentle light. We drank a little more, peering into the bottles’ ends to see whether every drop had gone, and buoyed by our own lightness we stayed up a little longer and a little longer.

  It was 3 a.m. and Jess had already fallen asleep several times for a moment or two in my arms when she whispered that she was so tired she had to go to bed. Through her starched pale pink shirt, her breasts pushed against my chest as she kissed me goodnight. I placed my hand between her shoulder blades and pulled her down for a kiss: wet, open-mouthed, her body resting on mine, pushing down into me. Her left leg was between mine. I could feel the pressure of her pelvis on my stomach, the slight friction. Mark, lying on his back next to me, heel to head, sat up and said, ‘Oh, just go and fuck already.’ Jess’s eyes were half-closing with sleep and she smiled and shook her head a little. She lay for a while along my body, and then gently disentangled herself and went to bed.

  ‘It’s nearly dawn,’ said Mark. ‘We should be facing east at a time like this.’

  I looked and saw that at the edge of the world a thin line of blue had cracked open the black and glittering sky. One or two birds had noticed this too; a bubbling warble came from the holly hedge. So we repaired, with the final bottle of champagne, to the huge swing chair suspended from a low-hanging oak branch and sat in silence for a while watching the crack of light widen and day enter the world again. I found myself thinking, perhaps this will be the last time, perhaps I’ll be sent down after those exams, perhaps this is all I was ever going to get.

  And without quite meaning to I said aloud, ‘I’m afraid I’ll never get to come here again.’

  Mark was lying back in the swing chair, one foot trailing near the ground. He gave it a push and we rocked gently.

  ‘I’m not going to throw you out, am I?’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘You can come here whenever you like.’

  I took a breath and spoke. ‘I might fail,’ I said. ‘I might be sent down. I really might.’

  I hadn’t said it to Jess, not like this. She believed in thinking positively, in not allowing doubts to enter one’s mind.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mark. ‘I might too, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  ‘I’d have to go back home.’

  ‘Don’t see why. If you get sent down you can carry on living here, can’t you?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course. You could go to Brookes or something if you wanted. There’s no reason …’ He toed the grass thoughtfully. ‘There’s no reason we all can’t go on living here forever, you know.’

  ‘Forever?’

  Mark dug his heel into the ground and set the swing going again.

  ‘Why not? Why not forever? The house is big enough, and we could make it as we liked it, and change it when we wanted. Why should it ever end?’

  ‘I should think we’ll want to get jobs, won’t we? Simon wants to be Prime Minister.’

  Mark wrinkled his nose. ‘Oh, jobs. Well, he can be Prime Minister from here, can’t he?’

  He sat up and jabbed at the ground with both heels, sending the swing arcing back, his legs held stiff in front of him.

  ‘Yes, if you just rename the house Chequers, I expect that’d sort it.’

  Mark laughed.

  ‘See? It’s not so hard. But really, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re welcome here. Especially after …’

  He looked at me and then at his feet. The swing had come to a halt again, and he kicked gently at the dandelion clouds among the grass.

  ‘It was OK. She couldn’t be as angry with me as she could with you, you know? It was fine.’

  ‘It was good,’ said Mark. ‘You were good. It was more than I deserved. Do you know,’ he spoke quickly, ‘do you know I mentioned you in confession? What I did to you the first night, I am sorry for it, with the hash cake. I am sorry. I had a penance for it particularly. And all the other clumsy things. I am so often stupid, but I am sorry. Do you think we can be friends?’

  He said this with the simple sincerity of a child and I found that I could not help responding in the same way.

  ‘Yes, I hope so,’ I said.

  He hugged me then, briefly, one arm thrown around my shoulders, and I hugged him back.

  Afterwards, we sat for a while in silence beneath the vast, lightening skyful of stars. While some cover of darkness still remained, he started to talk, quite slowly and precisely, about his mother. He t
old me about her four marriages ‘so far’ and her lovers and her strange oeuvre of 1960s movies and her exotically aristocratic relatives and her house in California with the macrobiotic chef.

  ‘For a long time we only had each other,’ he said at one point.

  Then later, after he had told the story of how his mother set one of his father’s Jaguars on fire during their divorce, he said, ‘It doesn’t sound quite normal, does it?’

  And I said, ‘She’s not like my mother. But I don’t think normal’s so great either.’

  He said, ‘I’m so fucking embarrassed, you know? That you all had to put up with her and her weirdness and Father Hugh and … I’m just so fucking embarrassed.’

  And I said, ‘You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. She’s horrible to you, but she was charming to us.’

  He looked at me gratefully. A long, careful look.

  He put one foot on the ground to steady himself, leaned forward, rested his hand on my upper arm and pressed his lips to mine. There was a moment’s pause. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. Neither of us moved. He blinked. I put a hand between us, resting it in the centre of his chest, and pushed him off.

  I said, ‘Mark, you know that I don’t, you know. I’m just not attracted to men.’

  ‘Jesus, James, I’m sorry. Must be the drink. Fuck. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just, you know …’

  ‘It’s fine, Mark. Really. It’s fine.’

  We sat for a few moments in silence, until the loud, fluid song of the blackbird began. All at once, the dawn chorus rose up like jungle chattering, wild and insistent, without any possibility of comprehension. We staggered into the house and wished each other goodnight.

  ‘Apparently we’ll see it as we come over the hill,’ said Franny, looking down at her notes. ‘The road bends to the left and it’s in the crook of the river to our right.’

  Jess slowed down as we reached the crest of the hill, on the bend where the overhanging trees fell away. We looked obediently down to the right. We saw an eiderdown landscape, soft and billowing, polygons of green and shocking rapeseed yellow like pieces of paper cut by a child. At the bottom of the hill, where the cut pieces met in a knot of trees and the river sparkled, we saw a white-painted house.

  ‘I see it!’ said Jess. ‘Oh, look at Dorset, it’s so pretty.’ And, as we pulled away, ‘Why is it that we can’t make towns that are as pretty as the countryside?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Franny, ‘it’s a proof of the existence of God, didn’t you know? Nature is made by God and so is perfect, whereas towns are only made by boring old man, so they’re rubbish. Apparently that’s what Nicola thinks, anyway.’

  ‘No, is she really so po-faced about it?’ asked Jess.

  ‘S’what Simon says. Evangelical vicar has nabbed her for Christ.’

  Jess consulted the map and made a right turn, taking us through a stony village, its little cottages crammed together.

  ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ said Jess. ‘She’s probably just got a crush on the vicar.’

  This remark irritated me, as Jess did more when she was with Franny than when we were alone. Franny’s world-weary demeanour brought out a falsely adult edge in Jess, a set of pat statements that made her sound like someone’s mother. It was part of the grown-up persona which had first attracted me, but it came with a hardness that I found tiring.

  ‘Nicola’s the oldest sister, is that right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yup,’ said Franny, ‘oldest after Simon. She’s thirteen. Then there’s Eloise, who’s eight, and Leo, who’s four.’

  ‘Four!’ I said. It was faintly scandalous to imagine that anyone of my parents’ age could have a four-year-old child. The implication that they were still having sex was impossible to ignore.

  ‘I know,’ said Franny. ‘Simon says he used to take Leo out in his pushchair and old women berated him for being a teenage dad.’

  She rolled down the window, lit a cigarette and puffed on it briefly, five or six drags, before flicking it on to the road.

  ‘There it is,’ she said. ‘Park Farm, there, see the green sign? Turn in there.’

  *

  The Wedmores were variations on a theme of pink and cream. Next to Simon’s ruddy skin and straw-coloured hair, one could see how they all fitted together. Nicola, the evangelical thirteen-year-old, had bright blonde hair and cream-coloured skin, rising to pink in the apples of her cheeks. She wore a wooden cross on a leather thong. Eloise, eight years old and bookish, was all pale, even to her eyelashes, wearing a dark blue print dress that made her look paler still. She complained, as soon as we arrived, that she had a headache and knew it must be sunstroke, while the others laughed and rolled their eyes because Eloise was a known hypochondriac. Rebecca, their mother, was sunburned, rosy, short-cropped hair a thick dark yellow, dressed in rolled-up dungarees and leading Leo, all golden-headed and curious, by the hand. Only David, the father, was dark-haired, but his shoulders and his blunt nose were Simon’s too.

  One could also see where Simon’s personality had grown. There was his father in his stolidity and good humour. When his mother made a little gesture, flattening her lips and cradling her jaw in her hand as she thought, I caught Jess’s eye and we smiled, because Simon had this precise gesture, exactly the same. And in the dynamics of the family too, in the shouting for attention at the table and Nicola saying, ‘Eloise, for the last time put that book down and pass the potatoes,’ and Eloise sticking her tongue out and pouting, and Rebecca frowning and chiding but smiling at the same time, and David calmly reaching behind and passing the potatoes, in all of these things Simon was clearly visible.

  The family went to bed at 10 p.m. or so, and Rebecca said, ‘Don’t stay up too late. And remember to put everything in the dishwasher when you’ve finished.’

  And these last words reminded me of the old rusty tap in the kitchen at Annulet House that had to be opened and closed with a pair of pliers. I thought that being wealthy was not the same thing as being grown up and it was startling to me that I had never thought so before.

  We stayed up late, of course, as we always did. We opened another bottle of wine, and Nicola stayed downstairs to talk. She was coming into spots with a shiny face, a little awkward in the floral dress which accentuated her already-large bosom. She spoke earnestly about her church and the vicar, while Franny shot Jess a knowing glance. Nicola was interested in Franny, curious but wary.

  She said, ‘So, Si, is Franny your girlfriend? You never say properly.’

  And Simon looked at Franny and Franny looked at Simon.

  ‘I wouldn’t say girlfriend,’ said Franny.

  ‘Fiancée?’ said Simon.

  Nicola’s eyes opened very wide.

  ‘Don’t tease the girl, Simon. We’re not so much boyfriend-and-girlfriend,’ Franny began, ‘we don’t so much go out as …’

  ‘You don’t so much go out as stay in,’ said Mark.

  Nicola looked a little puzzled by this.

  ‘Modern life is so complicated,’ said Jess. ‘They’re very lovely friends is all.’

  ‘And do you have a boyfriend, Nicola?’ said Franny, looking at her over her glasses. ‘Or a girlfriend, don’t want to make assumptions.’

  Nicola blushed. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I’m too young. Our vicar says that …’

  Mark rolled his eyes at us.

  ‘She’s been like this all day, you know. Our vicar this, our vicar that. I want to meet this vicar if he’s got a thirteen-year-old-girl so interested in him.’

  Nicola’s flush crept up her neck, pink and prickled.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ she said. ‘He tells us a lot of true things, that’s all, things that …’

  Mark interrupted again. ‘Well, if he tells you you’re too young for a boyfriend at thirteen he’s not telling you anything true at all. Even I had a boyfriend at thirteen.’

  Nicola blinked, tried to laugh as if to prove that this must be a joke, then stopped. I noticed that Jes
s met her eyes and smiled kindly.

  ‘I don’t understand …’ said Nicola, then stopped, looked at us and said, ‘Are you gay?’

  Mark said, ‘Not only gay, my darling, but positively ecstatic.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She looked crestfallen.

  Mark had arrived at the house a few hours before us; he and Nicola had spent the afternoon chatting together in the orchard. I thought how impressive he would appear to a thirteen-year-old girl.

  She frowned, then said, ‘Our vicar says there’s no such thing as gay, just misguided.’

  Franny drew in her breath sharply.

  ‘Now come on, Nic …’ said Simon.

  ‘That’s what he says.’ She nodded. ‘He’s not so horrible as you think, Si. He says gay people deserve our sympathy and compassion, but their desires are sinful.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ muttered Franny, ‘I wonder what he makes of Jews.’

  Nicola drew breath to speak, got as far as saying, ‘Well,’ when Simon said swiftly, ‘That’s enough, Nicola,’ and then, apologetically, to us, ‘She’s only repeating what she’s heard.’

  ‘Don’t talk about me like I’m five years old.’

  ‘Stop talking nonsense and I will,’ and to us, ‘I’m really sorry about this.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Mark, pouring himself another glass of wine. ‘It’s not nonsense. It’s faith, that’s all. I’m a religious man myself, you know, Nicola. More wine?’

  Nicola accepted the glass of red wine and sipped it slowly.

  ‘Now,’ said Mark, ‘tell us what your vicar says about gay people and we can have a proper conversation about it.’

  Franny said, ‘But if you start telling me what he says about Jews, I’m going to bed.’

  Mark tutted. ‘I’m sure that, like me, he thinks Jews are perfectly splendid, doesn’t he, Nicola?’

  Nicola said, ‘Well, he …’

  ‘Go on,’ Franny drawled.

  Nicola fiddled with her napkin.

  ‘Maybe it really is time for bed now,’ said Jess.

  ‘Yes, I …’ began Simon.

  ‘He thinks Jews would be happier if they accepted Christ,’ said Nicola quickly. ‘And he says that gay people deserve our compassion, but they ought to try to not be gay because that’s what God wants.’