The Lessons Read online

  It doesn’t really matter. He believed that I might speak, and that was enough.

  I smoked another cigarette, watching the people walking about the streets. And as the day turned to evening and the cafés and restaurants of Islington began to tinkle and rattle, I let myself out of the flat and went home.

  Night, rising from the sea-green depths of a dream I forgot instantly on waking to the insistent sound of a telephone.

  Jess, awake fractionally sooner than me, switched on her bedside light. A cloud of yellow and blinking resolved at last into her face looking at mine and the sound of a telephone still. She frowned at me. I attempted to frown back, furrowed with sleep.

  She walked into the hall and picked up the telephone.

  I heard her say, ‘Hello?’

  Then, ‘It’s all right. What is it?’

  Then a long pause. Then, ‘Oh, God. No.’

  She walked back into the bedroom, holding the phone to her ear. Her expression was unreadable.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ll tell him. Yes, he’s here now. Do you want us to come?’ A pause. ‘All right. We’ll see you tomorrow.’

  She sat on the end of our bed and took hold of my hand, turning it over to put her palm against mine.

  ‘Oh, James,’ she said, and I think I knew then. Nothing other than this would have caused such horror, nothing less would have stretched the skin around her eyes or made her mouth convulse. ‘Oh, James, there’s been an accident.’

  22

  There was an inquest, of course. There had to be. A slow judicial uncovering of facts, a piecing together of shattered things, laying out the bones of the matter and noting: first this happened, then this, then this. This is how we make sense of the world, by trapping it in words and sentences, by pinning it like a butterfly to a felt backcloth, killing it to keep it still, so we may trace its lines.

  So, there was this: the November night was cold and the road was icy. Slides were shown of the ice on the road, the place where the tyres failed in their grip, the long, dark streaks where Mark’s foot had hit the brake but the car had not stopped, and had not stopped, and had not stopped. The depth of the tread had been measured, the length of the skid marks, the distance to the point of impact. The figures were carefully recorded.

  And there was Mark’s condition. Not drunk, it was ascertained, not over the limit. His blood and urine had been tested, but nothing of note had been discovered. He was lucky in that, if one can call it luck. If he and I had not argued he might have stayed in London for his usual excursions which would have left their traces. But if we had not argued and he had stayed in London everything might have happened differently. At the least, if we had not argued his mood might have been different. Mr Winters, they said, was in an agitated state. He and his wife had argued, the coroner heard. A separation had been discussed. A highly agitated state. It was recorded.

  But was he speeding? No. At the point when the brakes were applied, it could be calculated using various models, the car was travelling at between 40 and 45 miles per hour. Perhaps a little fast for an icy country road late at night, with a child fast asleep, he thought, strapped into her car seat. Perhaps a little fast, but not excessive. One would not criticize him, said the police witness, on that score alone. And we who knew how Mark drove when he was in a highly agitated state, we who had seen him take his eyes from the road … I who had seen the bead of sweat on his upper lip and known that he himself did not understand why he did what he did … We did not speak up, of course we didn’t. It was too late for that, too late for it to do any good. No one could know, now, precisely what had happened despite all tests and calculations. The night was cold. The bend was sharp. The speed was not excessive. These were the preliminary conclusions. Mr Winters, approaching a sharp bend, did not perceive the patches of black ice on the road. The front nearside wheel of his car hit the ice, causing the car to skid. Mr Winters wrenched the wheel, an overcorrection. The car hit a second patch of ice and skidded for several yards before colliding first with a fence and then, careening sideways, a tree at the side of the road. On impact, the car was travelling at approximately 20–25 miles per hour.

  And the child. Yes, here we came to it. I heard the sigh in the fingers of the coroner as he turned the page to look once more at the photo-graphic evidence. I did not see the photographs, did not wish to see them. I believe that Franny looked, with Simon. I believe that he wanted to see. Mr Winters, they said, naturally thought the child was asleep in the back seat. He had picked her up from her grandparents’ house – ‘wildly demanded her,’ one testimony reported. They did not think it wise to withhold the child from him although the hour was late and the child already asleep. She could in any case be carried to the car, fastened into her seat and taken to her own bed without waking her.

  He would have held her close to him, as he always did. The inquest did not go into this point, but it is clear to me. He would have smelled the milky, honeydew-melon scent of her breath and heard the quiet snuffle of her snore. Daisy, asleep, always had a look of tremendous seriousness; a frown between her closed eyes. He would have held her close to him and kissed the side of her neck and placed her, with such care, sleeping into the car seat, and fastened the buckle at her waist.

  On this point, a great deal of time was spent. Who had seen him buckle it? Who had heard the harness snap shut? Had they been certain the click was heard? It was a matter of grave importance, not least for the manufacturers of this brand of child’s car seat, and for the several thousand other parents who had purchased the same brand in the past three years. It was necessary to apportion blame, if blame there were to be apportioned. For when the car was examined it was clear that the buckle was undone. Could she have done this herself? The evidence was inconclusive. It had been known for children to undo their car seats, although a parent carelessly fastening a seat was more common. Mrs Winters had in the past seen the child trying to undo the buckle, little fingers and thumbs pressing down on the central latch, tongue out in concentration, pressing and pulling. Daisy was always trying to free herself from harness. Mark encouraged her. But there was no way, at this stage, to be certain.

  The child had been in a deep sleep when she was placed in the car, it was concluded, but the cold might have woken her. Would Mark not have noticed that she had awoken? Would she not have cried out? Would he not have seen her move? Ah, but he was in a highly agitated state. And she, sleepy and confused, might have made a little noise but been drowned out by the roar of the engine through the cold and frosted night. Perhaps Mr Winters had not, in his agitated state, fastened the buckle correctly. Perhaps it had already been open. Or perhaps Daisy had worked her little fingers down under the tight-fitting straps to the buckle, where she had pushed and wiggled until the webbing holding her in place released. It is so hard, sometimes, to tell the difference between the bindings that trap and those which secure; too hard for a child to know.

  It was impossible now to ascertain which of these scenarios had occurred. But certain it was that, at the moment of impact, the child was unsecured. At the first impact, she had been thrown forward, upward and to the side, into the window. She did not, as the expert witness averred, ‘exit the vehicle’, but the impact was sufficient to crack the window’s toughened glass. It was then that the most serious injury was sustained: the fracture of the skull, the unstaunchable cerebral haemorrhage. The second impact had thrown her back against the floor of the car, but the damage this had caused was by comparison minor. If the parents might find a modicum of comfort in it, the coroner said, they could be assured that the child had died without regaining consciousness.

  The verdict was accidental death. The coroner expressed his sorrow. The grieving parents could not look at one another as they passed from the court into the brittle winter day without.

  For several days, it seemed that no one spoke. There was a rushing sound constantly, like the sound of planes taking off, a blanket of noise which made speech intolerable. For se
veral days, there was nothing in the world but the sound of weeping.

  But there was madness, too. A hideous, scrabbling, madness which blew in great choking lungfuls through us so that we cried out suddenly, or woke terrified in the night, or looked at ourselves in the mirror and thought, I do not know who that person is, I do not know at all. There was no reasonable response but madness. There was no reason.

  Jess developed again the eczema which had not troubled her since childhood. Long raw streaks appeared on her legs and on her back and on her freckled chest, burning weeping flaking patches as if she had been licked by flame. She could not bear to be touched; even the flick of a bedsheet as she turned in the night could make her cry out.

  Mark did not attempt to hide from us the fresh scars, red and raging down his arms. He had come to stay with us because Nicola did not, because she could not, because they were not, there were no words between them. Even the language of glances or of touch had gone, even that. And because she blamed him, yes of course that too. There was no evidence of dangerous driving and yet we knew, we all knew, every one of us knew. It might have happened to anyone, the coroner had said, and yet it had happened to Mark. An icy road, an un fastened buckle, a highly agitated state.

  And so there was a taking of sides. Simon, of course, was with Nicola. The family wrapped itself tightly, a nexus of guilt and pain. I did not hear their conversations, but I can imagine how they would have spoken between themselves, each one saying to the other, ‘Why didn’t I stop him? Why didn’t I tell you to stop him? Why did we hand over that sleeping bundle, why? What were we thinking?’

  Franny attempted, at first, to go between sides. She loved Mark, she did, and hung on his neck and wept with him, and all her sardonic wit was gone and instead she lit cigarette after cigarette for him, holding two between her lips and lighting them both and passing one to him as if she were giving him oxygen or vital medication. But she loved Simon too, and it was hard for her. She grew pinched and drawn as the days went on, harder and with her grief inside her like a stone.

  It came to an end one day while Jess was in the bathroom of our flat dressing the fresh wounds on Mark’s arms and Franny and Emmanuella had walked on to the balcony to smoke. We were talking of nothing, as we did, and Franny became silent and then said, with a return of her sardonic smile, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that, if Jesus and God are the same person, and God made Jesus suffer on the Cross, then Jesus is a self-harmer?’

  There was a shift in the atmosphere. Emmanuella moved her weight from one leg to the other and threw her cigarette over the balcony.

  ‘A self-harmer too, I mean,’ Franny persisted, ‘like Mark.’

  Emmanuella moved suddenly, with a jerky motion unlike her accustomed grace, half hesitating as she acted. She took a pace forward and slapped Franny hard across the cheek.

  Franny staggered back, her hand clutching her face.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said. ‘Fuck, what did you do that for?’

  Emmanuella was impassive, her features calm.

  ‘It is not to joke, Franny, not about such things, not now.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Franny, nursing her face.

  Emmanuella watched her and said nothing.

  And after that Franny did not come to our flat any more.

  There were days and days to wait before the funeral. Acres of time to fill. And after the first numbness, the days were long and the nights were terrifying. Mark raved and stamped and wailed in the night, not sleeping or waking from sleep to find the knowledge new and fresh and all horror once more. We put a photograph of Daisy in the living room and it seemed both too much and not enough. Father Hugh visited Mark and sat with him for an hour in silence. Mark’s mother telephoned, but he would not speak to her. Jess applied aqueous cream to her red-raw streaks and Mark came home with pills in tiny bags or with folded pieces of paper and we waited for the funeral.

  It was for Nicola’s family, that responsibility. There was never any argument about that.

  Rebecca telephoned to let us know the arrangements. Here the location, here suitable hotels (and here, she told us, the family’s hotel, the hotel we were to keep Mark away from). She preferred not to speak to Mark. Once, he leapt up as I was talking to Rebecca and grabbed the phone from my hand.

  ‘Where’s Nicola?’ he demanded. ‘I want to talk to my wife.’

  In the silence of his listening we heard Rebecca’s crisp tones buzzing through the receiver.

  ‘She doesn’t want to talk to you, Mark.’

  The old Mark would have wheedled and persuaded. This Mark said nothing; like a broken prisoner, he hung his head and passed the telephone back to me.

  Later, I said to Jess, ‘I expect they wish they’d never met him.’

  Jess said, ‘He saved Leo’s life. He still did.’

  So few things in life permit clear calculations. Unlike the equations of velocity and heat transfer I’d learned at Oxford, the effect of one person’s life on another cannot be weighed in micrograms. ‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

  Something disturbed me before dawn in the hotel on the morning of the funeral. I awoke quivering, alert. A thump, a series of clanks, a muffled thud from the connecting room; Mark’s room.

  The door was unlocked and he was not in bed. The bedsheets and duvet were tangled and twisted. The drawers of the dresser had been flung about the room, the table upended. A keening sound came from the bathroom. I opened the door. Mark was leaning over the sink, breathing heavily. In his right hand he held a razor blade, which he was pressing deeply into the surface of his chest, just below the collarbone. Blood was running down his arm and chest, thick like syrup. There was blood in the basin, and on the wooden floor, on the white towels. There was a bloody handprint on the mirror, where he’d been leaning. He looked up, his pupils large and dark.

  He said, ‘James.’

  He said, ‘I can’t. I mean, it’s not. It’s not a good time for a party, James.’

  I felt my heart thump in my throat.

  I caught at his arm, the one with the razor, trying to pull the blade from his grasp.

  I said, ‘Stop, Mark, stop.’

  And he started to scream.

  Jess called her father, the GP, staying in a hotel a few miles away. Mark was seeing things. He talked about ghosts and demons, horses and angry avenging angels. I walked him up and down on the balcony. The night air calmed him a little and the screaming stopped but not the muttering, the slow murmur of sibilant syllables.

  ‘Somewhere,’ he said, ‘somewhere something, I can’t I can’t stop, stop them, ask, she didn’t ask, she says.’ He picked at the gushing wound on his chest.

  Jess’s father was all cool medical professionalism. He shone a light into Mark’s eyes and tipped out one tiny white pill from a brown bottle.

  ‘Now,’ he said, looking directly at Mark and holding his gaze, ‘I’m going to give you something to make you feel better. Do you think you can swallow this little pill?’

  Mark nodded abruptly several times.

  I washed the blood from my hands, brought him a glass of water and he took the pill.

  Jess’s father said, ‘It’ll take about twenty minutes to kick in.’

  He took Mark’s hand in his and laid Mark’s head on his chest. And then Jess, stroking the hair at the nape of Mark’s neck, began to sing:

  ‘Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot,

  Prête-moi ta plume, pour écrire un mot.

  Ma chandelle est morte, je n’ai plus de feu.

  Ouvre-moi ta porte, pour l’amour de Dieu.’

  I wouldn’t have thought she’d remember, but memory is a strange thing and pulls what is necessary from secret crevices at urgent times. It was the tune of the music box, the sound he had loved as a boy, and after a while Mark did begin to calm. His muttering ceased, his fidgeting grew still and, a little later, he yawned.

  Jess’s father looked over Mark’s cuts with professional calm. Seve
n deep lacerations above the heart; we could see the sickening white of rib at the bottom of some of them.

  ‘I’m going to suture these now,’ he said. ‘It might sting a bit. We could go to the hospital if you’d prefer.’

  Mark shook his head. No, he would not prefer. His eyelids were sagging and then creeping open again, whites of his eyes flashing.

  It was a slow and meticulous process, sewing Mark back together. It reminded me of my mother, when I was a child, sewing up an old toy whose stuffing was falling out. The needle went in through the flesh and slowly the thread was pulled after it. And again. And again. Sewing the skin together with even, elegant stitches until all the raw edges were gone. While he worked, Jess’s father muttered to Mark, telling him the stitching was going well, that it would soon be over, that he was a good boy. Mark meanwhile lay perfectly still, breathing in and out, his raked chest rising and falling.

  When it was over Mark slept, and we changed from our bloodstained clothes and went downstairs to drink coffee.

  Jess’s father said, ‘He was lucky you found him, James. Another few minutes with that razor and he could have done very serious damage. If he’d passed out from the blood loss he …’

  He paused. We understood what could have happened if Mark had passed out, bleeding heavily, alone in a hotel room in the middle of the night.

  He continued,‘You know, when Jess was little, I thought about this constantly. Constantly. How many ways there are to hurt a child.’

  He took a gulp of coffee.

  ‘One tries not to let them know, naturally, but one begins to be haunted by these visions the moment they’re born.’