The Lessons Read online

  And I thought of what it would take to say no, again, to this.

  ‘All right,’ I said, as she turned off the light.

  *

  I said the following things to myself. Number one, Mark doesn’t know. If Jess doesn’t know – and she didn’t, of that I was sure – then Mark could not know how I felt. Number two, he doesn’t want you. He’s got his own ideas about the right way to live, about what he’s doing now. You don’t figure in them, except as a friend, so pull yourself together. Number three, if he doesn’t know and he doesn’t want you, then the only thing that can make anything go wrong is you. It’s just a matter of willpower, James, just like resisting an extra Yorkshire pudding at Sunday lunch. All you have to do is not act, not say anything, not do anything that would make him think you wanted him. Come on, James, you’re good at not doing things. This should be easy.

  He pulled up at our door around lunchtime on the first day of my holidays in his little red sports car. His hair had grown longer than before, touching his collar and creeping around the sides of his face. In jeans, a white shirt with thin blue stripes and a battered blazer, he looked like the boy in school who was always on the verge of expulsion. He beeped the horn and leapt out of the car, all energy, and hugged me.

  That first day, we were like students again. We went to Piccadilly Circus, where Mark declared loudly how much better the lights were in Times Square. He bought a disposable camera and insisted I take pictures of him posing next to Eros, one foot off the ground, as if about to take flight.

  ‘He’s supposed,’ he shouted, although I was only three feet away from him, ‘to be facing the other way. He’s supposed to be firing his arrow down Shaftesbury Avenue. It’s a joke, you see – he’s supposed to be burying his shaft in Shaftesbury Avenue. Do you see, James? Do you understand?’

  I nodded and went red. The tourists sitting on the statue’s steps looked at us. I thought, they must think we’re lovers.

  In the British Museum, walking through the hushed marble halls, he began to talk nonsense at the loudest possible volume.

  ‘I mean, what do you think, James?’ he said. ‘I think she’s making a fuss about nothing. After all, I only gave her a BLACK EYE.’

  This directed at full blast towards an elderly couple peering at a Greek fresco.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I mean HONESTLY, if she’s going to provoke me, she’ll have to expect to get a HOT IRON IN THE FACE FROM TIME TO TIME.’

  ‘What?!’ I said.

  The elderly couple looked at us in horror and scurried away.

  He grinned. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you try one. How about the sketchers?’

  He motioned with his head towards two young men sitting at the foot of a broken statue, pencilling furiously in their sketchbooks.

  We strolled towards them and I searched my mind for something funny to say. As we walked past, I found myself declaring, ‘He’s making such a bloody fuss, you’d think I’d given him AIDS. After all, it was only CHLAMYDIA.’

  And Mark replied, not missing a beat, ‘But he did get it in his THROAT, DARLING.’

  The adrenalin pumped in my throat and my heart and my brain. I thought, this is exactly what I need. This, exactly this. I cast a glance over my shoulder as we left the room. The sketchers were staring at us, their drawing momentarily forgotten. When we walked into the next room I began to laugh and soon I could not stop, and the frowns and the stares of the serious museum-goers were nothing to me.

  On the way out of the museum, we went to the lavatories. Under the eyes of the other men, he pulled me into a cubicle with him and I thought, another tease? I could not tell and I thought, perhaps, James, he does know and perhaps he does want. But he only pulled a tiny plastic bag filled with white powder out of his pocket and said in, at last, a whisper, ‘Powder your nose?’

  ‘We’re in the British Museum, Mark.’ I could not keep the tone of shock out of my voice. ‘The British Museum. You can’t do that in the British Museum.’

  We were crammed into the cubicle, almost touching but not quite.

  He said, ‘You don’t imagine I’m the first person to have done this?’

  He tipped a little of the powder on to the toilet cistern, pulled a credit card out of his wallet and began to chop at it, scraping it into two orderly lines.

  ‘Someone will catch us,’ I hissed.

  He leaned in very close to me and whispered, ‘Only if you don’t stop talking.’

  I tried to look through the gap at the hinge of the toilet door to see if anyone was staring at us: two men together in a cubicle, surely doing something offensive to someone. But there was no staring anywhere. I turned back. Mark had rolled a £50 note into a tube. He proffered it to me.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  I thought, I am being offered drugs in the toilets of the British Museum. This is what my life has been missing up to this moment. I shook my head again. Mark shrugged.

  ‘Your loss,’ he said, and snorted both lines. As he tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling and his eyes watered and he began to grin I thought, yes, perhaps this is all that I need. Just this is quite sufficient.

  The next day, Mark arrived at 2 p.m., beeping his horn and doing a handstand in the streets while he waited for me.

  ‘Do you know,’ I said, bending over to talk to his head, ‘that there are two parking tickets on your windscreen?’

  ‘Oh, those!’ he said. ‘I just wait for the letters to come and send them to the banker. Come on. Let’s go and see the wizard.’

  And I thought of the energy it would take to explain to Mark the workings of the Penalty Charge system and how intensely useless it would be and instead just said, ‘The wizard?’

  The wizard lived in a grimy basement flat in Clerkenwell. His name was Jee, he had pale skin, dirty blond hair and wore a patterned smock and brightly coloured hat.

  He greeted Mark warmly with a hug, looked me up and down through narrowed eyes and said to Mark, ‘You sure?’

  ‘Oh, totally. He’s never done a thing wrong in his life, have you, James?’

  ‘S’what I mean,’ said Jee.

  ‘Nah, he’s all right,’ Mark said, and we walked through the door.

  It was clear to me at once that he was rich, that he had been born rich. My time spent with Mark and his friends had accustomed me to sifting the long-term rich from the nouveau from the purely aspirational. The key is the possession of objects which are clearly tremendously expensive but are treated with disdain and often held in surroundings of squalor. In Jee’s case, the kitchen with its broken orange plastic dish rack and dirty cupboards was enlivened by an enormous espresso machine, worth at least £1,000. But the machine had not been cared for: its surface was already pockmarked with kitchen grease and old coffee grounds had been dumped on the top. No one who had had to work to acquire this thing – either to buy it or to steal it – would have treated it in this way.

  In Jee’s living room, a group of men were hunched over a low mosaic-topped table, examining a collection of small coloured tablets and printed paper squares. From a distance, they looked like schoolboys admiring a selection of marbles and stickers.

  I thought I recognized one of them: a tall, thin man wearing drain-pipe trousers and with a slicked-back hairstyle. When he looked up I realized with a shock that he was a television presenter; famous for an anarchic programme he hosted on the subject of, in roughly equal parts, pop music, high culture and his genitals. He stared at me for a moment, grunted, then said to Jee, ‘Fine, fine, but what if I just want to lose, like, three whole weeks?’

  Jee nodded sagely, reached under his kaftan and produced a small bag of white tablets and a sheet of red paper squares.

  ‘Very mellow, my friend, extremely sybaritic.’

  The television star grimaced.

  ‘Will it get me off the fucking planet?’

  And Jee nodded slowly.

  On the other side of the table, next to Mark, was another face I
found vaguely familiar. A muscular man in an open-necked shirt and jeans. He, however, recognized me as well.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘It’s Jack, isn’t it?’

  ‘James,’ I said.

  I placed him; he was an acquaintance of Mark’s and had attended that first New Year’s Eve party at Annulet House.

  ‘Know anything about steel?’ he said.

  I blinked.

  He drew his attention away from the collection of coloured powders and tablets.

  ‘Only I’m thinking of going all in on steel. If they’re right and all the planes are going to fall out of the sky, what will we need?’

  ‘Ambulances?’ I ventured.

  He puffed out his cheeks and shook his head.

  ‘Too late by then. No one survives a plane crash, no one. Safety cards and “brace, brace” are just to stop people panicking. It’s true. I’ve looked into it.’ He pursed his lips. ‘No, if the planes fall out of the sky, what are we going to need? Steel. To rebuild them, see?’

  ‘Are planes made out of steel?’

  ‘What else would they be made of?’

  ‘Ummm,’ I said, ‘maybe aluminium? Or some kind of composite? Something light like that?’

  He thought about this for a long time, while fiddling with a 10-pence piece, turning it over and over, flipping it between his fingers, throwing and catching it.

  ‘Very good point,’ he said, ‘very good indeed. Yes. Very good. Aluminium. You might have saved me a bundle there, fella, an absolute bundle.’ He leaned towards Mark and said, ‘Clever chap, your friend. Positively insightful.’

  Mark looked at me, smiled and said, ‘Yes. Yes, he is.’ And a crazy happiness spread warm and liquid in my chest.

  Mark made a large and expansive purchase. So large, in fact, and so expansive that Jee thoughtfully provided him with a Marks & Spencer bag to carry it away in.

  ‘Where to now?’ I said.

  ‘Home,’ said Mark decisively. ‘Get some of these babies down me.’

  I could not keep the disappointment from my face.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, looking at me, ‘what a face you have, James! Like a sad little puppy. Do not worry, my darling, there will be treats tomorrow.’

  And he kissed me lightly on the cheek, jumped into his car and disappeared in it before I could think of how to persuade him to stay.

  We’d arranged to meet the next day at his flat in Islington at 2.30 p.m., but when I arrived he was surprised to see me. He was dressed in only pyjama bottoms, his hair still sleep-muddled.

  He said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming till the afternoon?’

  I said, ‘This is the afternoon.’

  He said, ‘Oh.’

  And he shook his head sadly and went to get dressed.

  We drove to my flat – his windscreen had acquired another two tickets, I noticed. Jess was out rehearsing and wouldn’t be back until the evening. Mark lay on his back on our sofa, holding his head in his hands. I made a late lunch and we ate in the kitchen. I realized that I hadn’t seen him eat since he arrived in London and this thought filled me with compassion for him. He seemed smaller now than he had been.

  Mark poured himself a large whisky and we talked about Oxford people, about what had become of them since we left. Mark had heard that Dr McGowan had finally been arrested for his cottaging activities and that the college had asked him to resign. He had, however, been immediately offered an even more prestigious chair at the Sorbonne so, as Mark said, ‘no harm done’. We talked of Franny, who’d coincidentally spent a few weeks of the summer at the Sorbonne. We wondered whether she’d seen Dr McGowan, and whether she’d managed to keep a straight face if so. Mark became more and more animated during this conversation, wildly fantasizing that they had met, that they had become great friends, that they were together right now, that if we called her we would find that he was in her rooms.

  ‘I’ll call her now!’ Mark said. ‘She could come down from Cambridge tonight. And then –’ a wild gleam flared in his eye – ‘we could go and see Emmanuella at the weekend! In Madrid! Or she could come here! I could fly her over. Maybe Simon could come from Chile, or Peru, or wherever he is.’

  He frowned, acknowledging that this was unlikely, but he had still not given up on the idea entirely. He picked up the phone and dialled Franny’s number in Cambridge.

  ‘Hello, my darling. Guess who it is.’

  A pause. A grin on his face.

  ‘S’right! And guess who I’m with.’

  Another pause, a wider grin.

  ‘No! Wrong! Guess again …’

  A shorter pause.

  ‘It’s James! I’m with James in London, and Jess is going to be home in a few hours, and we thought …’

  Another pause. A slight wrinkling of the brow.

  ‘No, she’s not. She’s still in Doorbl … Doorbi … She’s in Doorbell.’ A giggle from Mark.

  A pause. Mark bit his upper lip.

  ‘Well, yes I am, as a matter of fact, but there’s nothing wrong with that, is there, darling?’

  A short pause.

  ‘No, listen! Jess will be home soon, and we thought you could come down to London tonight and it’ll be just like old times, do you remember? In the house?’

  A longer pause. More lip chewing.

  ‘Oh, but darling Franny, it won’t take very long …’

  Cut off. A short pause.

  ‘I’m sure you can stay here tonight. Can’t she, James?’

  I nodded.

  ‘He’s nodding. Of course you can stay here tonight.’

  A long pause.

  ‘Oh, but you’ll have a wonderful time. We’re all here and we can go out on the town, or stay in and order some food, and I’ve got some lovely stuff, haven’t I, James?’

  He did not look at me this time to see whether I nodded or not.

  ‘Oh, but Fran …’

  Pause.

  ‘But you know that you’ll …’

  Pause.

  ‘But it’s our last chance in …’

  Long pause. Frown deepening on Mark’s face. A twist of the mouth.

  ‘I really can’t persuade you …?’

  Lines appearing at the sides of his mouth. A slight scrunch to his eyes.

  ‘OK, bye then.’

  He put the phone down and looked at the receiver for a moment.

  He said, ‘Uptight bitch.’

  I said nothing.

  He sat on the sofa for a while, staring out of the window at the blank grey sky. At last he said, ‘We had an argument.’

  I did not have to ask who he meant. I didn’t know how to reply to him. Instead, I simply waited.

  ‘She said she thinks this all might have been a mistake.’

  ‘She probably didn’t mean it.’

  He looked at me, a broken smile. He shrugged.

  ‘But it can’t be perfect any more, not like it was. Nothing ever stays.’

  ‘It’s not …’ I began, and then did not know how to proceed. I wanted to tell him something about how it was with Jess and me, how I had found that love was a constant cycle of coming together and breaking apart. But I did not want to talk or think about Jess just then. And perhaps I did not at that time have the ability to explain the truth about relationships: that they produce their fruit intermittently, unpredictably. That every relationship has moments when someone says, or thinks, or feels that it might not be worth doing. Every relationship has moments of exasperation and fear. And the work of the thing is to come through it, to learn how to bear it. And even if I could have explained this, Mark would never have understood it. He has always been rich enough that if something breaks he can simply throw it away and buy a new one. He had never used string or glue to bind something together again. He had never been forced to learn how to mend.

  Mark poured himself a second whisky, or was it his third now?

  ‘I don’t know why things have fallen apart like this.’

  ‘Between you and Nicola?’
r />   His face dropped. He stared into his glass.

  ‘No, between us, all of us. We used to be such good friends, didn’t we? I mean, didn’t we? You and me and Jess and Franny and Simon and even Emman … Emmanuella, although –’ he gestured with his glass, sloshing a little of the auburn liquid on to the carpet – ‘I never could get to the bottom of her. So to speak.’ He giggled. ‘So to speak.’

  ‘Yes, we used to be good friends.’

  ‘When we were all together. It was better then, when we were together in the house.’

  ‘It was a good time.’

  ‘No,’ he said, sitting forward, suddenly earnest. ‘No, it wasn’t a good time. It wasn’t just that. We were all more ourselves then. We were all who we really are, only we forget because of bills and responsibility and having to go to work and be married and that sort of thing. We’ve forgotten, but we have to try to remember.’

  His voice softened, lowered.

  ‘You, James, you were just so beautiful then. You’re still beautiful now. But then, when you were really yourself. God, I remember that just watching you cross the lawn, you know, just seeing you lying in the hammock, made me …’ He breathed out loudly. ‘You should all come back and live in the house again.’

  I thought back to that time. It was already brighter now than it had been; I could feel already the days of rain erasing themselves in my mind, the days when I had been lonely or sad. It was beginning to seem utterly golden, although I knew that it had been life, only life, with no mystery to it or redemptive quality or unattainable glories.

  Being with Mark I felt I could hear again the sound of rain on the conservatory roof, smell the ham hock cooking in the kitchen, see Franny and Jess arguing over their card game. I heard the shrieks of laughter as Simon pushed Emmanuella around the garden in the old wheelbarrow, or tasted the lip balm Jess used then, something with a hint of vanilla. Being with Mark, I remembered happiness, not as it had been for me, but as I imagined it was for him: rich, unending and enveloping.