The Lessons Read online

  20

  Once, about a year ago, I came upon a picture of Nicola and Daisy unexpectedly. I had been searching through the drawer next to Mark’s bed – he was raving by the pool in the moonlight. I wanted to know what he’d taken. I looked in the vitamin-pill bottles, ran my fingertips along the seam of the drawer lining feeling for loose places, flipped open his sunglasses case and there they were. Nicola and Daisy in the sun smiling. The photograph was creased, carefully fitted to the curve of the case lid. Nicola was wearing a blue and white patterned dress, with dangling earrings, three slim squares of porcelain held together by silver rings. She was holding Daisy – who looked to be about eighteen months old in the picture – on her right hip. Daisy’s hair was very blonde. In the photograph you could see the sun shining on it. She was reaching out to grab one of Nicola’s earrings, and Nicola had caught her arm at an awkward angle to stop her. Nicola was smiling into Daisy’s face. Daisy’s mouth was set in a determined line, her eyes focused on the earring, oblivious of photographer and surroundings.

  This photograph stopped me. In the courtyard, Mark was still shouting at the moon and I thought, I could take this out now, show it to him and it would stop him too. I sat on the corner of his bed and looked at the photograph, feeling as though I could walk straight through it and out into the sunny day, where Nicola was holding Daisy on her hip and her earrings were moving in the sunlight. I wanted to do that. I knew just where this photograph was taken. On Broad Street, by the Sheldonian Theatre. Just out of sight to the left was Blackwell’s, then the White Horse, then Trinity College. I could almost hear the sounds of the street – there would be music playing out of some open window, and the air would be a little too thick with exhaust fumes. It was Oxford, on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the start of May. It was the day we graduated.

  Oxford, which likes to do things differently, dissociates graduation from the end of the degree course. It’s possible to graduate only a few months after finishing a degree but most people do what we did – wait four years and then take both the BA and the honorary MA at the same time. The MA is another piece of antiquity, lovingly carried in cupped hands into the modern day. We didn’t have to do any extra work for it, or take another exam. Seven years after joining the university, provided we passed our finals and survived that long, the degree of Master of Arts was awarded us.

  So, for a day, we took our place in the Oxford clockwork mechanism again. There was a great business of putting on robes, of learning the correct Latin words and gestures for the occasion. There was something comforting about it. After so long away, we returned and Oxford still had a role for us. People pass from school to school, from job to job, and though a great fuss is made when we leave – parties, cakes, gifts and farewells – a year later we might never have been there. No record is kept. There would be no special welcome if we returned to our old job four or five years after we left. But Oxford, whose speciality is remembrance, remembers. After BA there is MA, and after MA there are gaudies, decade after decade. And at the end of our days, if we have made our college proud, there will be an obituary, sent in the College Record to every eager first year, saying, until the end, this one belonged to us.

  After the ceremony, we stood in the street with our families, taking photographs of each other in our robes. Emmanuella’s family were polite to us, but distant; more interested in talking with her boyfriend. Franny’s family and Simon’s embraced. My parents and Jess’s greeted each other slightly nervously – they had met several times before but not often enough to have become easy in one another’s company. Jess’s father bent in to kiss my mother, who simultaneously took a step backwards and made an awkward little noise, so he missed her face completely. Eloise, Simon’s little sister, tugged on Jess’s father’s sleeve and asked if he was really a doctor and if so what were the symptoms of rickets. And it was there that the photograph was taken. Nicola was holding Daisy: a little girl, half-baby, half-toddler, babbling and charming in red leather sandals and a white embroidered dress over her nappy-clothed bottom. Mark borrowed Jess’s camera, Nicola hoisted Daisy on to one hip, Mark waved, Nicola smiled, Daisy grabbed for her earring and the picture was taken.

  And then what happened? Then, I think, Mark grabbed her from Nicola’s arms, clasped her to him and then made as if to drop her, catching her before she fell, swinging her into the air as she laughed and gasped. Nicola watched with a frown.

  ‘Mind her arms, Mark. She’s too heavy to swing.’

  Mark wrapped his arms around Daisy’s waist and brought his face close to the place where her neck met her shoulder.

  ‘You’re not too heavy, are you, darling?’

  Daisy was wriggling, trying to escape down to the ground.

  ‘What’s more, you are brilliant. You are my brilliant, beautiful daughter and one day you’ll come to Oxford just like your father.’

  Daisy chuckled and babbled at him. He lifted up her dress, blew a raspberry on her tummy and she screamed with fear and delight.

  She grew tired later, as children do, and we were all surprised, I think, by how tiresome it can be to spend time with a cross child. Mark and Nicola were the first people we knew to have a baby, we had not yet learned of their trials and difficulties. Nicola strapped her into the pushchair and Daisy did not like this at all. We were in the entrance hall of the Randolph – Mark had booked us all rooms there and though our parents had tried to protest, they had not done so strenuously. Mark paid for things in Oxford; it was not worth fighting the inevitable. On arrival, there was a little wait and Daisy became fractious, struggling against the bindings of her chair, desperately trying to push them out of the way so she could escape. Nicola offered her pieces of cut apple or dried apricots in an attempt to distract her, but she rejected these angrily.

  Daisy writhed in her chair, whimpering and bellowing, pushing the straps down again and again, fiddling with the buckle over her stomach. She was trying, it was clear, to open it the way she had seen her parents open it so many times in the past. But her coordination wasn’t good enough; she twisted and screamed and yelled.

  ‘I’m going to let her out,’ said Mark.

  ‘No,’ said Nicola, firm as a rap on the hand. ‘Look at this place. She’ll just spill people’s coffees on them, and break things and hurt herself. Leave her there. It’ll only be another few minutes. She can have a nice run around outside soon.’

  Daisy was working herself into a furious rage, twisting and turning, plucking at the straps. Jess and I, Franny and Simon looked at her mutely. Despite our inexperience it was clear that we couldn’t just let someone else’s child out.

  ‘I have to find a bathroom,’ said Nicola. ‘Try her again with the apple?’

  Nicola disappeared around the corner. Mark, holding a limp plastic bag containing brown apple chunks, looked at us, then at Daisy. He put one finger to his lips, winked and knelt down in front of the pushchair. Daisy, with red, tear-filled eyes, grew quiet staring at him as he stared at her.

  ‘Look, Daisy,’ he said.

  He took one of her little pudgy hands and pressed it on to the pushchair buckle. He pressed down himself too, until the buckle sprang open. Daisy wriggled free, hiccuping and stumbling in her haste to get out of the chair.

  ‘You all saw,’ said Mark. ‘She let herself out, didn’t she? There was nothing we could do.’ He leaned over to kiss Daisy’s head.

  She, now calming down, put her hand out for his and led him off to try to eat the bowls of potpourri.

  When Nicola returned, Mark shrugged and said, ‘She must have learned how to do it herself,’ and Nicola was too distracted preventing Daisy from hurling herself into the fireplace to consider this very carefully.

  For memory’s sake in the late afternoon we visited the old house in Jericho, rather like grandchildren paying a visit to an elderly relative – hoping for treats, dreading to see signs of decrepitude. The house had been shut up for several years now, and the garden was almost as overgrown as when I ha
d first visited it. The base of the sundial was covered by long grass, the brambles had made the pathway to the frog pond impassable. The house itself had that damp smell again, a smell of old rot.

  We were charmed to find Franny’s elaborate revision timetable still on the wall in her old bedroom, with the days counting down to finals crossed out until the very last one, still left uncrossed. Simon’s old room contained piles of his lecture notes – most of which started hopefully at the top of the page, but quickly degenerated into elaborate doodles with the occasional jotted word or book title. Emmanuella had left clothing, books, a shelf full of CDs and video cassettes. When questioned she shrugged and said, ‘But these are not my favourites, you know.’

  I think, that if Mark had suggested then that we all come back to live in the house we might have agreed. We had been sufficiently bruised by the difficulties of adult life to make this house seem more of a paradise. But he was too busy with Daisy. He walked down to the carp-pond with her, held her so she could see the orange fish circling under the water and sprinkled breadcrumbs on the surface for them to rise, open-mouthed, to feed. Daisy made the same motions with her mouth, opening it into a wide circle of O and closing it again. It occurred to me that if the fish were still alive, someone must have arranged for a gardener to be tending them. But the functioning of Mark’s life was still opaque to me then.

  Later on, we all lay on our backs in the long grass next to the sundial.

  ‘This is the wonderful thing about loving Oxford,’ said Mark. ‘She will never change. Our youth will always be here waiting for us if we want it.’

  I was expecting him to make the same promises and plans he always did: come back and live with me, stay here, let’s be here forever. But he didn’t. Daisy had changed something. I suppose he finally had a reason to want to separate from us.

  I had been surprised in general by how much Mark doted on Daisy. When they were together he was constantly holding her, tickling her, singing to her, making faces for her. I had expected that he would be uninterested in fatherhood until the baby became an alert toddler – because then she would be able to give him her attention. Instead, he was transfixed from her first puzzled, finger-grasping days, blinking at the world with dark blue eyes.

  He sang ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’ to her when she was a baby and a little later in life she would believe that he’d written the song specifically for her. Jess and I had visited for her christening and I watched him rock her to sleep in the nursery. The room was small, just enough for a cot, a changing table, a child’s wardrobe filled with expensive Italian baby clothes sent by Mark’s mother and little cardigans knitted by Nicola’s grandparents. It smelled of faeces and nappy-rash cream and talcum powder.

  Mark laid Daisy down on her back, pulled the blanket halfway over her and beckoned me to stand and look into the cot. As I did so, he put his arm around my waist and thrust his hand into the back pocket of my jeans. He never found such combinations in any way incongruous. I believe that was the visit during which we made love in his father-in-law’s corrugated-iron barn, behind a tractor with clumps of mud and horse shit caught in its tyres, while a sudden spring rainstorm clattered on the roof and passed on.

  ‘Are we damned, do you think?’ I remember saying to Mark afterwards.

  He looked at me and smiled.

  ‘Damned?’

  ‘For this. You and me. According to your God, are we damned?’ He pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his back jeans pocket and lit one.

  ‘Only if I die unexpectedly between now and my next confession. You’re damned anyway, of course. Atheists are.’

  ‘You go to confession?’

  Mark grinned.

  ‘When the mood takes me.’

  ‘Do you confess this?’

  ‘This?’

  ‘What we do, all of this. You know.’

  ‘I confess everything. It feels wonderful. I come out and feel that I’ve never done anything wrong in my life, that God has forgiven all and I am utterly new again.’

  ‘And then what? Start your wickedness all over again?’

  Mark flicked his eyes up at me and held my gaze. His eyes looked deep blue, cornflower blue and hooded, more mysterious than ever.

  ‘This isn’t wickedness, James.’ He leaned forward and planted a kiss lightly on my lips, pulling away when I tried to draw him closer. ‘Don’t you realize that you are the thing that allows me to be a good husband?’

  He jumped to his feet faster than I could manage and was off and out of the barn while I was still struggling to pull myself upright and go after him.

  Mark and I did not always have sex when I visited Dorblish. During Daisy’s first two years of life, he came to London half a dozen times, and on each occasion we reverted to our usual ways, but the distance between each visit was so great that, each time, I began to wonder whether in fact we had now finished with that episode in our lives, whether the occasional lapse was a mere aberration. I was even able to convince myself that this was what I wanted. After all – I was able to think away from Mark’s presence – hadn’t our affair run its course?

  And then he would call some afternoon and say, ‘Oh, James, I thought you might like to know I’m running up to town for a few days next week. It’s half-term, isn’t it, James? Would you like to meet up? At my flat, on Tuesday afternoon?’ And I would say yes. And when we met he would stand above me and gently insist that I admitted the truth, and I might enquire, ‘What truth?’ and he would explain that I knew quite well what he meant, and prove it to me until I could only shout out that yes, I still desired him, that yes, I wanted him, and this gave him satisfaction.

  Daisy grew sturdy and sweet. She learned to say her own name, ‘Daidy’, and mine. She began to recognize Jess and me, to trust us as she trusted her family. Once, on a walk, she could not quite clamber over a fallen log and held out her little hand to mine with such an expectation of my aid that I felt suddenly heartsick at the charm of her. I wondered then what she might make of me when she was grown. If she knew the truth, what would she think? Dirty old man, corrupter of parents, breaker of sacred trusts. She already knew how to place her hands together to pray with Nicola before bed; she would grow up a Catholic child, and I doubted that her views on morality would be as flexible as Mark’s. I took her hand and grabbed her around the waist, lifting her high into the air as she giggled and shrieked. But she’d already grown too old to enjoy being held. As soon as we were past the log, she struggled and wriggled until I put her down.

  Did I imagine it, or did Nicola not want me around her child? I began to notice this, or think I noticed it, when Daisy was nearly two. There began to be a little habit. Jess and I would arrive for a weekend and Nicola would say, ‘Good news, my parents are taking Daisy for the weekend. You’ve just got time to say goodnight to her and Mark will drive her round.’

  And we’d protest of course, but Nicola would say, ‘No, we grownups should be allowed to talk. I’m sure that’s what Mark wants, isn’t it? Grown-up talk like you have in London.’

  And there was a little business of bringing Daisy out, beginning to be sleepy in her pyjamas and socks, and a round of kissing and maybe a story or a game, and then Mark would buckle her into the car seat and drive her around to Nicola’s family. They were so close that this back and forth was constant; they drove to each other for meals, to watch television in the evening, and to ferry Daisy between all the places she was loved the best. Mark had his wish: to be at the heart of such a family.

  And at this point, Mark would say, ‘Oh, James, keep me company on the drive?’

  And I would say yes of course, certainly I will.

  And on the way back there was a place, invisible from both houses, a sharp bend in the road where we would stop the car and allow ourselves to be overtaken by desire. Cars rocketed past us round the bend, faster than I thought safe, but we were parked on the verge and Mark would say, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, they go faster in the co
untry than we do in the city.’ And I thought of making some joke about how fast we were going now, but the moment had passed and his scent was too intoxicating and his hand on the bare skin at the small of my back was too great for thought.

  *

  And one night, after one of these visits, driving back home to London, Jess said, ‘Darling, something awful.’

  She was driving. I was lolling in the passenger seat, drifting on the edge of sleep.

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘Nicola thinks Mark’s having an affair.’

  I was cold. Just that. As if I might have been cold for a long time but had only just noticed. I tried to decide what sort of noise an innocent man might make.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm.’

  A click, a tick-tock. Jess changed lanes.

  It seemed plausible to sit up a little, to open my eyes.

  ‘Does she know who with?’

  Jess shook her head, keeping her eyes on the road.

  ‘She thinks it’s someone he sees in town.’

  Cold again. Very cold. Cold and empty.

  ‘Huh,’ I said.

  ‘Have you ever seen him with anyone?’

  I swallowed, made a noncommittal hmming sound.

  ‘Don’t think so. Not that I’ve noticed.’

  Jess nodded.

  The traffic thickened a little. The car slowed. I opened the window a crack. To the right and left of us were luminous yellow fields of rape and lanes of traffic, fumes, honking.

  I swallowed. ‘It’d hardly be surprising, would it? I mean, we know what Mark’s like.’

  Jess nodded. ‘Yes,’ she rolled her shoulders, stretching the joints. ‘I think Nicola wants us to talk to him for her … but there’s nothing we can say really, is there? He is how he is. He always has been.’

  A pause. The traffic inched to a standstill. An engine revving behind us.

  ‘What’s she going to do?’