The Lessons Read online

  ‘Ah, a progressive,’ said Franny. ‘At least he doesn’t want us all burned, Mark.’

  ‘Maybe he’s right,’ said Mark. ‘How do you know, my darling Fran, that you wouldn’t be happier if you accepted Christ?’

  ‘Since I have a hard enough time accepting the tenets of my own religion,’ said Franny, pointedly picking up a piece of Parma ham from the cheeseboard, showing it round the table before popping it into her mouth, ‘I hardly think taking on a new one is going to bring me joy.’

  ‘But Nicola’s vicar – he does sound like a brave man – might tell you about the Gospel, the Good News, my love. Your religion with all its prejudices against the flesh of the pig is no more. Only believe in Christ and your troubles will be at an end.’

  ‘And you?’ said Franny, more jovial now, ‘I suppose you’d be happiest as a celibate, would you?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Mark contentedly, ‘but who knows what miracles the power of God might bring about in my life.’

  ‘Do you really believe that, Mark?’ I ventured.

  ‘Really?’ He popped an olive into his mouth. ‘Yes. Yes, I think I really do. He died for my sins, and for yours, Nicola, and perhaps for yours, Jess and James and Simon. But not for yours, Franny, you wicked heretic.’

  He picked up her hand from the table and kissed the back of it, and I could not tell how much of what he said was a joke.

  ‘But as for me, Nicola, the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak and I do rather like men, I’m afraid to tell you.’

  Nicola nodded, dipped her head down and then, thinking again, said, ‘But have you ever kissed a girl?’

  Mark tipped his head to one side and raised his eyebrows. I was intrigued to know the answer to this question.

  Evidently Franny was too. After a few moments, she said, ‘Go on, Mark, have you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quite a few actually, specially when I was younger. I don’t mind it at all, but then girls’ mouths are the same as boys’, aren’t they?’

  ‘So,’ Nicola pursued, ‘maybe you’d like it if you … Well, you don’t really know, do you, what you’d like to do with girls?’

  ‘Nicola,’ said Jess gently, ‘perhaps none of us know what might happen in the future, but he knows how he feels now.’

  Nicola looked uncertainly around the table.

  ‘I suppose people can change though,’ she said at last.

  It had become late again, and then early once more. We said goodnight at 5 a.m., shaking our heads and watching the stars wink out in the sky. Nicola hugged us, one after the other, even as her eyelids drooped and I wondered if we had done right by her, but I was too tired to make sense of it.

  The next day, we took a picnic to the river. Simon and I carried the basket on the walk down, while Jess and Franny carried large tartan blankets rolled up and tied with string. Leo rode on Mark’s shoulders, singing out like a little bird and pointing at trees and flowers whose names he knew, shouting them joyfully. When three or four white butterflies circled his head he swung and tried to grab at them, and almost fell. After that Nicola walked alongside Mark, holding Leo’s hand and reminding him of the stories of the place: where the swing used to be, where Eloise got frightened by the cow, where they’d come in the autumn to cut logs for the fire.

  We chose a spot by the river, under the shade of an alder tree. Nicola brought out hunks of cheese and bread, hard-boiled eggs, ham, apples and bars of chocolate. We feasted, splashed at the river a little – dangling our legs in but too tired to swim – then spread out one of the blankets, tramping down the grass to make it flat and comfortable.

  ‘You can’t sleep!’ said Leo, as first Franny and then Jess lay down on the blanket.

  ‘Yes, we can,’ said Franny. ‘We’re tired.’

  ‘But I’m boooored.’ Leo directed this at Mark, who was already settling himself against the tree trunk, eyes closed.

  ‘We’ll play with you later,’ said Mark.

  Leo came uncertainly and tugged on my shirt.

  ‘Can we play a game now?’

  ‘Sorry, kiddo.’ I found I felt comfortably grown up in this position, replying to the request in the same way my parents had to me on long summer days. ‘You’ll have to play by yourself for a bit, OK?’

  Leo wasn’t happy with this.

  ‘I’m booooooored,’ he roared again. He kicked at the tree trunk.

  I tried, afterwards, to remember who first suggested that Leo should be a monkey, hiding in the branches of the tree. We were tired of him, exhausted by the constant demands of a small child, hungover from the night before, and it could have been any of us. I think perhaps it was Franny but I cannot be sure. In any case, the idea was eagerly adopted. We could watch him play and lie very still in one place at the same time.

  Leo said, ‘Yes, yes. I can go “ook ook” like a monkey and throw nuts on you.’

  Simon lifted him up into the branches of the tree that hung over the bank out into the river.

  He clung happily to a branch, advancing hand over foot. I lay on my back and watched him wander through the branches. There are few things as beautiful as the sky observed through the leaves of a tree. The constant small movements, as if the leaves were alive and wriggling, the dapples of light and shade, patches of light opening up and closing again, the places where leaf over leaf produces a rich saturation of colour, or where the sunshine creates translucency. Like the layered frills of a petticoat or the delicate fanned ceiling of Christ Church Cathedral, so much of what we make in art is an attempt to recreate the simple beauty of a tree.

  Leo grabbed a chunk of leaves, ripped them off and scattered them down on us.

  ‘I’m a monkey!’ he said. ‘Ook ook!’

  ‘Hey!’ said Franny, sitting up. ‘Don’t do that. You nearly got me in the eye.’

  Leo stretched out his arms, T-shirt riding up, and hauled himself a little higher in the tree.

  ‘I’m a monkey,’ he said again. ‘You can’t catch me!’

  He threw another handful of leaves and twigs. A few of the pieces were quite large and heavy. They scattered drily on the baked earth.

  ‘Don’t do that, Leo,’ said Jess. ‘You really might hurt someone.’

  ‘Time to come down now, Leo,’ said Nicola.

  He had climbed up higher than we realized, higher than any of us could reach without climbing ourselves.

  Leo threw down another heavy handful of leaves and twigs and bark.

  ‘Ook ook!’ he said. ‘Ook ook! I’m the monkey and you’re all the other animals in the jungle and the monkey is the naughty one!’

  He was bouncing up and down, obviously excited to be out of our reach.

  He threw more leaves. Two handfuls this time, and as he hurled them, palms splayed open like starfish, he lost his balance, rocked backward on the branch, seemed about to fall, then clutched at the branch above and steadied himself.

  He was unafraid, but we became quiet.

  ‘Come on,’ said Nicola, making her voice serious. ‘Enough of this game. Come down, Leo. Come down now, please.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, shading his eyes from the sun with his forearm, ‘come down or I’ll come up there and get you myself.’

  Leo squirmed and wriggled further out along the branch.

  ‘Oh, come on, Leo,’ said Simon. ‘Or we’ll just have to shake you out of the tree.’

  Leo squeaked indignantly and climbed another few inches along the branch, out over the river.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Leo,’ said Nicola. ‘You’re going to have to –’

  And there was a sudden crack. The bough did not break, but bent like a spring and Leo jolted forward and reached his arms out to steady himself and as he reached the branch sprang again, past the stronger supporting branches it had rested on and, head over foot, arms outstretched, spinning like an acrobat, Leo fell.

  While he tumbled it was comical. His little mouth was as round as an o, his eyebrows raised, his hands st
ill reaching out. For that brief flash of time it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. And then he hit the water and screamed, and sound and colour returned to the world. His head went down under the surface. I couldn’t see him. I looked at the place he had vanished for the space of a heartbeat, two, three, and then he reappeared, struggling, gasping, several feet away from the bank. Much further out than he’d fallen in.

  He was facing towards us, but moving with the current of the river downstream. And suddenly his head vanished. Just under, then back. And I was still smiling, but only because my body was unable to stop. He went under again and then came back, his arms thrashing helplessly in the water, coughing and coughing. He was near enough that we could see the fear in his face, but too far away for us to be able to reach him.

  At once we were all action, each of us doing something different, loudly, at the same time.

  ‘Throw him a rope,’ shouted Simon, though we didn’t have a rope.

  ‘Break off a branch!’ shouted Franny, and tried to do so.

  Jess started to wade towards Leo but he was moving too quickly, away, downstream. And while we were dithering, wondering how to fetch help, whether we should take a boat and row out, Mark said nothing. I looked for him and saw him on the bank, tiptoe, hinged over like a half-open penknife. He stood poised like that for a moment, balanced, his toes gripping the bank, his head down. He pushed off cleanly, dropped into the water without a sound and surfaced a few yards downstream, towards Leo.

  Leo’s head went down. It did not re-emerge. The seconds elongated while Mark receded, slicing through the water faster than the current. He was a good swimmer; summers spent in the sea by his mother’s Italian house had left him with the compact, muscular shoulders and torso of a strong front crawl. He dived, but came up empty-handed. He looked around, struggling against the current. He dived again and came up cupping a small white head, his arm underneath the chin. We stood on the bank and watched, unable to move or speak.

  Mark ran through the shallows and back to the bank with Leo’s small body resting on his shoulder. We ran to him. We couldn’t see whether Leo was moving.

  Nicola said, ‘Is he all right? Mark, is he all right?’

  Mark laid the boy on the grass. Leo was a ghastly, ghostly grey; no sign of life came from him. Mark put his face close to Leo’s mouth, listening. Then he tipped the boy’s head back and breathed deeply into his lungs. One breath. Another. And suddenly Leo was coughing, choking. He turned to the side and vomited out a great lungful of greenish water, and Nicola said, ‘Oh!’ and dropped to her knees beside Leo, rubbing his chest with her hands and the corners of her skirt.

  Mark looked up. His shirt clung to his chest, his trousers were gone, lost somewhere in the river. Blood was pouring from a cut on his temple, near the hairline; he must have struck something underneath the water when he dived.

  Franny said, ‘Mark, you’re bleeding. You should …’

  He spoke over her. ‘Someone run to get help, for God’s sake! Nicola, fetch the picnic blanket. We need to get him warm.’

  Simon ran back towards the main road and the farmhouse, not even stopping to put his shoes back on. Mark stripped Leo out of his clothes, wrapped him in the picnic blanket and hugged him close to his body, rocking him gently, muttering under his breath. All I could think was how shocking it was to see Leo’s nakedness, suddenly, in the midst of a summer picnic, and how pale to the point of blueness his body had been. Nicola knelt beside Mark, rubbing Leo’s hair and holding him with one arm while his teeth chattered and he shook and shuddered.

  ‘Come here,’ said Mark. ‘Hug him with me, to keep him warm.’ He pulled her across, so that the two of them had Leo’s small body sandwiched between them as they sat face to face. ‘Not too close!’ Mark said. ‘We mustn’t hurt him. Let him breathe.’

  Nicola moved back fractionally. Her eyes remained on Mark, wide and frightened. He smiled at her, suddenly – an old Mark smile as if he’d just thought of a wicked joke to tell – and interlaced his fingers with hers. They sat like that, rubbing Leo’s arms and legs, until we heard the siren of the ambulance approaching.

  The interview with Rebecca, after we had left Nicola, Mark and David at the hospital, was the most painful of all. The ambulance men had tutted at us, and Simon had shaken while he telephoned his parents from the hospital, but we had not heard their voices, and when they arrived all they wanted was to see Leo and then, when they knew, to thank Mark and thank him again, and tell him again how grateful they were. Nicola would not let Mark go, would not cease holding him though the danger was long gone, and he stayed with her and she stayed by Leo’s bed.

  The rest of us had nothing to say to Rebecca. We stood awkwardly in her kitchen while she asked again and again, ‘What were you thinking? What were you thinking, letting a little boy like that climb a tree over the river? Not watching him? Not holding him? What were you thinking?’

  She seemed both distraught and genuinely puzzled. But we had no answer for her. We did not know what we’d been thinking and it seemed best to leave.

  Jess and I arrived at my parents’ house early in the morning, before either of them was awake. It was 4.30 a.m. and the sky was opalescent, pearl-blue feathered with grey. We kissed in the car for a long time, my hands roving under her sweater and tangled in her hair. She smelled a little sour from lack of sleep and I felt a thread of disgust and reminded myself that I must smell the same.

  At last I said goodbye to her and let myself into the silent house. The hallway and the stairs were smaller than I remembered and drained of colour. I had not remembered that the walls of the kitchen were so beige, or that the paper orrery in my bedroom had become so faded and dusty over the years. I could hear my father’s slow snores through the door to my parents’ bedroom. I went to wash my hands and splash water on my face in the bathroom and noticed, for the first time, that there was a dark line of mildew where the basin met the tiles.

  My parents had placed a neat white pile of post on my pillow. I took off my shoes and lay down, fully clothed, opening the letters one by one and hoping for sleep to take me at last. There were bank statements, a magazine, a couple of postcards and then a white envelope with an Oxford postmark. I opened it with a sense of exhausted detachment. ‘Mr James Stieff,’ it said, ‘has satisfied the examiners.’ My Prelims result. I had passed. Just barely: one of the marks was a lower second and the others thirds. I stared at the paper. Here, in this room, where I had slaved for my four A-grades at A-level, it seemed like a joke. Sleep was coming on me though in waves of broken images and nonsense thoughts. It washed against my shores, lapping insistently, dissolving me. Still clutching the letter, I let it take me down.

  9

  Second year, October, two weeks before the start of term

  ‘Your problem, James,’ said Anne, ‘is that you have no focus.’

  Paul, whose face reminded me more of a frog every time I saw him, nodded in silent agreement. He and Anne had driven up from London with a pile of Labour Party posters in the back seat. Paul’s amphibian features looked out sternly from a stack of leaflets headed ‘Paul Probert: Tough on Crime’. I wasn’t sure what good they thought my parents could do with these leaflets, 100 miles from his prospective constituency.

  ‘I’m sure he’s doing his best,’ ventured my mother.

  ‘I’m sure he’s not,’ said Anne. ‘He’s wasted his first year at Oxford, totally wasted it, and I’m sorry, James, but you’ll thank me in the end for telling you this. I knew people like you at Wadham. Lazy people. With no ambition.’

  Anne had no trouble at all demonstrating her own ambition. She rarely had trouble talking about herself. She’d proudly shown us her Home Office access pass, and her mention in Hansard for excellent work on the regulation of cod-liver oil. Within the year, it appeared, she might be promoted to the giddy heights of Assistant Deputy Vice-Chair of an important committee tasked with investigating soya beans. Fixing me with the beady eye of an Assistant Deputy Vice
-Chair addressing a recalcitrant minister, she barked, ‘James! Have you ever even been to the Union?’

  ‘No, I …’

  Anne nodded silently and turned to my parents with a raised eyebrow. I found myself imagining how Mark might react to Anne.

  ‘We paid a lot of money for that membership, James,’ rumbled my father.

  ‘I know you did, Dad. I …’

  ‘Don’t forget, darling, he was very ill,’ said my mother, but Anne had found her stride and was not to be deflected from it.

  ‘He wasn’t ill, he hurt his leg, and I don’t see what that has to do with anything else. Fine, he’s out for a blue. But it shouldn’t have stopped him working. That’s just giving in.’

  Paul coughed and interjected, ‘I had German measles once. German measles quite serious, you know, for an adult.’ He paused, apparently waiting for us all to commiserate with him on this grave misfortune. As we remained silent, he continued, ‘It was when I was up for an OUSU election. OUSU, important stepping stone. Career-wise, vital.’

  Anne nodded vehemently, as if to a committee meeting. I wondered if she’d type up and circulate some minutes of the conversation.

  ‘And what did you do, Paul?’

  Paul blinked, ‘Well, I went to hustings, you know. Important to make the effort. That’s what you do.’

  Anne began, ‘And you see, that’s exactly what I’m –’

  ‘I don’t see what this has got to do with you, Paul,’ I snapped, ‘or Anne, for that matter. You’re not my mum and dad.’

  Anne paused for a moment, mildly startled, I thought, by my answering her at all. ‘I’m sure Mum and Dad agree with me, don’t you?’

  ‘Your sister did very well at Oxford …’ began my mother.

  ‘She made use of the opportunity, is what she’s saying,’ said my father.

  ‘I’m not telling you any of this for the good of my health,’ said Anne.

  Later, I called Jess from the phone box at the end of our road, feeding it with 20p pieces as I listened to her calming voice. She had achieved a first in each of her Prelim exams and had received a crisp white letter informing her that she was to be awarded a scholarship of £500 a year.