The Lessons Read online

  He took Jess’s hand and pressed the back of it to his lips.

  Mark held my hand through the funeral like there was no other thing in the world he knew for certain. He threaded his fingers through mine and gripped so that he could lean into me. His feet did not know how to walk. His toes pointed in. He was lamed.

  There were crowds there. They washed around us like the tide, sweeping in and out, impersonal in their scale. Mark clearly did not know a great number of the people who approached and pressed his hand between theirs and told him they were so sorry, so very sorry. And some of them were sincere, of this I am perfectly certain. But one or two were there for quite different reasons. At one point, a man turned from us and said distinctly, ‘That’s Mark Winters, I know, but where’s cousin Tom? I want a word with him; I’ve some business he’d be interested in.’ And a woman, seeing Mark’s mother behind her veil, turned to her companion and said, ‘Isabella’s looking old, do you see?’ And I would not have believed, had I not been there, that such crassness was possible. But for some people nothing that happens to someone like Mark can ever be real. It is Mark’s money, his shining golden armour. They make his very essence appear unreal. This, too, is Mark’s problem: the details of his life are so dazzling that most people cannot see past them. His false exterior is so grand that no one can quite understand, that even I can sometimes scarcely grasp, that he is real, there, behind the trappings.

  I don’t know who had chosen the priest. He was a little man; not imposing, like Father Hugh. He was small and mostly bald, with wispy tufts of hair at the sides of his head and for all I knew he had never met Daisy and never seen the sweetness of her, never known the delight she took in blowing bubbles into her milk through a straw. He stood before the small coffin, in the full and buzzing church, robed in his authority, and said, ‘This life is but a garment that we wear for a little time.’ And slowly but insistently silence spread throughout the church. Because we wanted sense, that day.

  He said, ‘Grief is a journey which, if we undertake it, can bring us closer to God.’ And he said, ‘The death of little Daisy may cause us to ask if God is really here, if He is indeed real. How could a loving God, a just God, a merciful God allow such a terrible thing to happen?’ He paused. ‘If there is no God, then these things are truly meaningless. And for some, that meaningless life is enough. But there are those of us who look at this world, and its mystery and beauty – at the beauty of Daisy’s life, however brief – and cannot accept that it is all for nothing. There is meaning even here, if we can see it. We trust in the promise of the Cross and know that –’ and here he read from the lesson – ‘ “now we see as through a glass, darkly; but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully.”

  ‘We cannot know the purposes of God. But if life has any meaning then this too has meaning. And it must. It is simply impossible that it does not. We trust in the resurrection to eternal life. And we know that the living God can speak through the smallest of us, the least of us. He speaks to us now through the short life of Daisy. We know that her precious life was full of joy and significance. We must trust that the best of her continues. God has even now enfolded Daisy in His arms. She has gone home to be with Him who waits for all of us.’ And here the man’s voice broke. ‘ “While we are at home with the body, we are away from the Lord.” ’

  Mark was sobbing then, silently. And as the tears poured down his face he turned and put his lips close to my ear and he said, quite clearly, ‘All I want now is to be with her. Everything in this world is broken. Everything here in this world is wrong. It is not our home.’

  I grasped his hand very tightly and I thought, then this is what I am here for. Here, to save him from this. To wed him to the earth. I had not yet thought of what might come next for me, after this cracking open of the ground beneath our feet, but it became clear to me that whatever happened, I could not leave him.

  Mark tried to speak to Nicola after the funeral – went up to her, murmured a few words. She listened, stony-faced. He spoke a little more, gesticulating as he always did when he was nervous or unhappy. He reached for her hand. She pulled away, her face suddenly angry. Or perhaps simply desperate, for I saw tears starting in her eyes. She spoke a few words to him. He blinked and swallowed. She turned her back on him and walked towards the roadside, where Simon and the family were waiting.

  Out of the massed ranks of the family, only one figure separated itself and walked towards us. It was Leo, awkward in his black suit. He must have been eleven or twelve by then? He had shot up like a leggy plant, tall and skinny, very unlike the little boy he had been. Mark flinched when he saw him. His hand went up to his forehead, to the little crescent-shaped scar half-hidden at his hairline.

  Leo smiled. I think it was the first smile we’d seen that day.

  He stuck out his hand and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mark, I’m so sorry,’ as though the whole thing had been his fault.

  I think Mark barely even noticed who was speaking to him. He stared at Nicola until the car drove up and she was taken away from him as surely as if she had sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

  Emmanuella came back to London with us, sitting in the back of the car with Mark while Jess and I shared the driving. Jess’s father had given Mark a sedative immediately after the funeral. He lolled on the back seat quietly, sometimes falling asleep, waking a little and then dozing off again.

  We brought him into the flat and he sat on the sofa next to me, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. We did not talk a great deal. There was nothing to say. Mark was woozy, confused, his eyes focusing and defocusing.

  After a little while I said, ‘Mark, we should get you to bed.’

  And he leaned over and kissed me, hard, on the mouth, pushing his body into mine, rubbing his thumb at the nape of my neck. It was a lover’s kiss, not a friend’s or even an attempt at seduction. It was a kiss of intimacy. I jumped away, stood up, took a few paces back from the couch. I looked around the room. Emmanuella was smiling slightly, a confused smile as though she hadn’t quite understood a joke. Jess’s face was unreadable, quietly calm.

  Mark smiled at me, wrinkling his nose. ‘C’mon then, lover. Let’s go to bed.’

  Jess said, ‘Can I talk to you for a moment, James?’

  I followed her out into the hall.

  In the darkened passage I said, trying to bring a laugh into my voice, ‘I don’t know what that was about. It’s just, it must be Mark thinking that I’m … well, you know Mark.’

  Jess nodded slowly. I barrelled on.

  ‘God knows what that cocktail of drugs has done to him. He’s so confused he doesn’t know where he is.’

  Jess nodded again. She pursed her lips. I tried to say something else but she held up a hand.

  She said, ‘He’s in pain, James. You should go to him. Be with him tonight.’

  I didn’t understand. I said, ‘He’s confused. He doesn’t really want me. Maybe Emmanuella? Or you, maybe you could talk to him.’

  An odd expression flickered across her face then – almost amusement, almost affection. I still think of that sometimes, trying, as always, to understand her. In her way, she was always more opaque to me than even Mark.

  She said, ‘James. You should sleep in the spare bed with Mark tonight. You should be with him. He needs you.’

  It’s a strange thing to say, but I think I loved her more in that moment than I’d ever done before, and I had loved her a great deal. It wasn’t gratitude, or guilt, simply a fleeting understanding of what she was, this short, slight woman standing in a darkened hallway, wearing jogging bottoms and an old jumper, with her hands on her hips and peeling eczema scars on her arms. I couldn’t think, then, why I’d ever wanted anyone but her, how she could ever have seemed nothing to me when, so clearly, she was everything.

  ‘Jess,’ I said, wanting to express all of these things.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Not tonight. I’m tired. You’re tired. We can
talk about it in the morning.’ She looked at me, her eyes unreadable. ‘It’s all right. I’m OK.’

  And she turned and walked down the hall away from me.

  SECTION 3

  The Lessons

  23

  I don’t believe that Jess ever asked me to stay. A few days after the funeral, I went with Mark to arrange some matters in Dorblish and she did not object. After we returned to London, I stayed at his flat and she did not beg me to come home. The thing was settled before we had discussed it at all. I was reminded of the way we had become a couple, no fuss and no awkwardness. In the same way now our lives were unpicked without mess, simply and cleanly.

  I tried to talk to her but she said, ‘He needs you more than I do.’

  And I could not disagree with this. Over the spring, Mark began to heal physically – the scars on his arms faded, the cuts on his chest knitted together – but mentally he was worse than ever. There was no sign of improvement. He could not bear to be alone. He woke me repeatedly most nights, imagining monsters and spirits come to punish him.

  And I? I remembered several things. I remembered how I had longed for Daisy to be washed away before she began. I remembered how Mark and I had argued the night she died. And I remembered, most of all, Mark. He is the thing I have never been able to loose myself from. And now, for the first time, he wanted me as I wanted him – to be always near me, always close, holding one another. I did not think then of the things I have subsequently come to consider. I knew that I loved him and I knew that, at last, he needed me.

  Can I confess this too? It is the worst thing yet, in my litany. It is the thing of which I am most ashamed and which has made me learn the lesson that Mark has always known: that we are not, in essence, good. It is this: I was pleased. Not that Daisy was gone, not that. But pleased because at last Mark needed me. At last, I was not to be thrown away or beckoned with a gesture. I had wanted this; there was a triumph to it. My love had never been enough without his pain.

  There was a moment, I think, a teetering point when I doubted what I should do. It was just at the end of the school holidays. I was due to return to the school where I worked. I explained this to Mark and he frowned at me, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ He shook his head. ‘Just tell them you won’t be coming back. I can pay for a supply teacher or whatever.’

  It had occurred to me, but only dimly, that such things were possible. Mark took it for granted that I would not work now. He gave me signing power for one of his accounts. I looked at the sum of money sitting in the current account and was astonished.

  ‘There’s enough here to buy a house, Mark. A couple of houses. It should be somewhere it can earn interest.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I think that is interest. From something else. I’m not sure. There’s a man in the City who deals with it. You can talk to him if you like.’

  I took the dog-eared card he gave me from a private bank in London but never called the number. It seemed impertinent. I took what was provided and was grateful. The anger of my headmaster at the late notice of my departure flowed over me and fell away. I thought of it for a day or two and then lost it forever. I began to appreciate what money can provide: a waterproof imperviousness to the demands of others.

  We stayed in the Islington flat for a while, and left London in the early autumn, just as the days began to be touched with a moist coolness and the smell of rot. At first, we tried to go back to the house in Oxford, but it didn’t take. The rooms were empty without the six of us to fill them, and the memory of Daisy was everywhere she’d crawled and toddled and fallen on the day we graduated. Mark’s nightmares grew worse there, the dreams of Daisy sometimes infecting his waking hours to such an extent that he thought he saw her at every turn. And Oxford is so full of youth and joy. We could not be at home there.

  We went on. The limits of Mark’s territory seemed infinite. We spent a few weeks in a manoir in Normandy which had been owned by his father’s brother but he thought had now passed to him, ‘or as good as, anyway’. My French is extremely imperfect, but the housekeeper seemed to be reminiscing about his mother as a young girl. I mentioned this to Mark but he had no explanation.

  In January, the fogs fell over the orchards and Mark became restless. He talked of Brazil, of Bangalore and of Sydney. It was then that we hit upon San Ceterino, the villa here in the heel of Italy which he and Nicola had never visited. We had intended it to be just a way point, a stopping place on a journey which at the time we thought might bring us back to England one day. Perhaps two years of recuperation and then a return. But we have stayed, and stayed, and stayed. It is not that the house or the town has won us with its charms. I believe it is partly the squalor which appeals to Mark, the slight degradation of a town whose once-busy port has all but closed and whose major tourist attraction is a crumbling medieval monastery with a mildly picturesque campanile.

  We came to it in the most unattractive part of winter, when the sky was mould-grey and the grounds were so sodden with water that our shoes were half sucked off our feet as we walked the grounds. The beds were all mildewed, speckled and stinking. On the first night, we slept wrapped in rugs on the summer-house sofas, lighting our way with the candles we’d found in crates in an outhouse. We made love that night. As we were falling asleep, he clutched at my shoulders convulsively and whispered, I thought, ‘I love you.’ It was the first time he had said such a thing.

  I whispered, in the chill dark, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Hmm?’ he said. ‘What?’

  The next day, his credit card conjured new beds and furniture, television sets, stereos and extravagant quantities of groceries. Money smooths over all possibility of adventure.

  It was the cathedral, I think, which sealed it. In our first week here we walked down to the town and explored its cascading hillside of shops and houses and its dead dock, gazed up at its famous bell tower, which neither of us had the heart to climb. The Cattedrale di San Ceterino is too large for the town, which has shrunk in recent years. It is old and dark, furnished and panelled in burnished brown wood. It holds a relic of San Ceterino, it is said; the bones of one finger, covered by glass, next to a statue of the saint. One portion of the case is open, just enough for the faithful to touch their finger, or their lips, to one knuckle bone. The brass there is smooth and shiny, the bone itself worn to a brown gloss by the centuries of humanity who have approached, asking for favour, for blessing, for release from the various miseries of human life.

  Mark touched his lips to the stained bone. I stood back and looked at the figure of Jesus on the Cross that hovered above us. His back was twisted. His mouth gaped in a silent scream. And I thought, oh, I see. At last I see. It’s not about the visible suffering. Greater suffering than this can of course be imagined. It is about the celebration. Even the perfect life of God on earth culminates in suffering. We don’t have to clothe ourselves in imaginary woe. Each of us, if we live long enough, will have material for our own suit of sorrow. And when we do, it is this God who is waiting for us: who has known all along that life is nothing but pain.

  There were a few months, I remember, perhaps as much as a year, when there was some promise here. When spring sent up fragrant air and soft green shoots Mark talked of inviting some friends from London out for a house party. He had the grounds prepared and the bedrooms aired. I believe he even made some telephone calls, but no one came. That summer was the first time Mark brought home some of the teenagers from the town. The whole place was prepared for visitors, it was gaping for them. So Mark found some visitors for the house.

  One July morning he took a cab into town – he does not drive any more, not anywhere, not at any time – and in the late afternoon he returned with a rabble of teenage boys, about four or five of them. They seemed more to me then. It was only later, when I came to know them individually, that I understood how few there had really been. They were shouting, and as they walked they tossed a rugby ball from one to the
other. The day was drenchingly hot, absolutely without mercy. I was in the garden, lying on a sun lounger, struggling through an Italian newspaper article with a dictionary. Mark barely acknowledged me as he and the young men walked past. His eyes caught on mine and slid off. One of the boys finished his Coke and tossed the empty bottle into the swimming pool, where it landed with a gentle plash. He laughed. The others, more apprehensive, looked at Mark. Mark looked down at the bottle slowly filling with water, circling and being dragged under. He raised his eyebrows and grinned. The other boys laughed. They went into the house. I watched them go. After a minute or two, I dived into the pool to retrieve the bottle from the tiled floor. I held it in one hand and floated, eyes closed, ears filled with water, weightless.

  Later, when the boys were gone, Mark came out to talk to me. He sat on the lounger next to me, wearing only a pair of shorts, his hair tousled.

  He said, ‘You don’t mind, do you? It’s only for fun. I need something to take my mind off.’

  ‘Can’t I do that?’ I said. ‘Aren’t I enough?’

  There was a pause which seemed to last for hours. I could hear the sounds of children playing in the nearby fields, that high-pitched shouting which carries for miles.

  He shook his head.

  I don’t remember feeling anything in particular at that moment. Except, perhaps, a slight sense of recognition, the fulfilment of an old prophecy.

  He bit his lip. ‘It doesn’t mean …’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s not that I don’t want you. And you could –’ he attempted a little smile – ‘well, there’s nothing to stop you, if you want to. I mean, there’s nothing to stop you joining in.’

  It was a generous offer. He was more tongue-tied than usual as well. I focused on these things.

  After a while I said, ‘It won’t be every day, will it?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Not that often. Just. Sometimes. You know.’