The Lessons Read online

  The truth was, I did know. I might try to turn this into a moment of betrayal and loss, but it was nothing of the sort. I know perfectly well that sex is sex and love is love and one need not imply the other. And I knew that Mark’s adventures with sixteen-year-old boys did not mean that he didn’t love me, just as I had known that my liaisons with Mark had not meant that I no longer loved Jess. I knew it then, I had always known it and I did not begrudge him these pleasures. Mark and I had made no covenant. He and I, and now these boys, were in the business of keeping him alive – a longer and more arduous journey than I could have imagined when I undertook it. And if the price of his life has increased over the years, it has grown so slowly and subtly that I have scarcely noticed.

  Eighteen months or so after we arrived in San Ceterino, I found a job. Mark was unhappy about this, uncomprehending and despondent.

  ‘I don’t see why you need it,’ he complained.

  I did not see why I needed it either. Nonetheless, I continued. My options were limited – I got the only job for which I was in any way qualified. I became an English tutor to businesspeople and would-be emigrants in San Ceterino. I have, over time, become rather fond of my gently determined pupils, with their ambitions for business expansion, or promotion, or a move to a different country. I find something charming in their dreams. Mark doesn’t agree. He calls them my waifs and strays, my hopeless ones. Once, on a particularly bad day, when it really seemed that he should not be left alone, I took him with me to my lessons. This was not a good experiment. Mark’s Italian is excellent, much better than mine. I can’t always follow what he’s saying. After those visits, two of my pupils requested that I should not come and see them again.

  It would be ridiculous to attempt to contribute to the upkeep of the house. The housekeeper comes every morning; the fridge is filled with the bounty of the seasons whether I work or not. The wages I earn are meaningless when compared to the unfathomable depths of Mark’s money. And yet I do work. I save the money I earn. It has become a tangible record of achievement – a tiny heap of useful things done. And time passes. It seems to me sometimes that I have come to the end of my life. Time passes here in San Ceterino, but it changes very little.

  Mark’s regret over the swimming-pool soup did not last long. Summer is his favourite season of the year – the town is full of young people with time on their hands. June melted into a blistering July and more young men and women traipsed up the hill to our house, escaping from the insistent irritation of the tourists and the demands of their parents, and hoping for the parties which Mark did not cease to provide. He was starting to look a little old, I thought, compared to these dewy-skinned young people. When he stared into the mirror and demanded my opinion of his faint crow’s feet I said I couldn’t see any lines at all. I wondered what he might be like in twenty or thirty years’ time – fifty or sixty years old and still bribing the young to keep him company? What was it he was looking for in these people? Was it simply that they were beautiful and easily dazzled, with a natural sympathy for those whose lives were as chaotic as their own? Or was he seeking a memory of himself in better times? Or, in some curious twist, a memory of Daisy, who would by now have been approaching her own teenage years?

  ‘Do you know who I miss?’ he asked me one evening in late July.

  We were sitting in the pergola behind the apple orchard. He was drunk but placid. We had had a visit the previous day from several of his friends – they hadn’t made a mess, nor had they left him in an unbearable condition. My sister Anne had telephoned earlier in the evening with the news that Paul had been appointed a Junior Minister while she had risen another rung in the department dealing with the regulation of edible oils. Mark and I had already passed a pleasant half-hour in mocking them.

  I knew who he missed, but I hadn’t expected him to talk about her so easily.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Nicola.’ He said it looking away from me, towards the trees, with an expression of firm decision on his face.

  ‘Nicola?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My wife.’

  This was not strictly an accurate description of their relationship. The divorce papers had arrived a couple of years earlier and he had signed them with all the appearance of disinterest and then spent the next four days insensible with drink.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘What do you think she’s doing now?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Mark.’

  He nodded sagely.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘that we should have some more children. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?’

  I noticed myself breathing in and then out. I moved my thoughts around Mark while he sat, cow-eyed, looking at me. It must be the drink. He has these lapses occasionally – not quite a loss of function but more an intensification of certain parts of himself, a voicing of impulses which he normally knows are absurd. Had he only had alcohol or something else as well?

  ‘Mmmm,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think that would solve everything.’ He paused and took a sip of his drink. ‘Do you know why I married her? Because the moment I met her I thought, she will make a wonderful mother. And she has done. She was. She ought to be again.’

  This was not the first time he had tried to explain to me why he had married Nicola. It is a subject he returns to often, each time proffering a different interpretation of the facts. I wonder if he even remembers his own feelings, after all this time.

  ‘I think,’ I began gently, ‘that Nicola might have moved on. You know, it’s been a long time since you last saw each other. She might not feel the same way any more.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ He took another sip of his drink, as though we were having a perfectly reasonable conversation. ‘I don’t think so. You see,’ he said, gesturing with his glass, sploshing some of the contents on to the baked earth beneath, ‘Nicola has a sort of loyalty to me which can never entirely vanish.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  Mark took this as permission to continue.

  ‘I can see why you’d think it, of course. After all, you and Jess never had that kind of relationship. In your case, you were the dog and she was the master, while with me and Nicola it was quite the other way around.’

  I thought my silence might stop him pursuing this avenue.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it was always like that between you two, wasn’t it? I always got the feeling that she didn’t love you so much as tolerate you. You would have forgiven her anything. But one little slip from you and all your usefulness to her was gone. Dogs have to be faithful, after all.’

  ‘I think that’s enough on this topic, Mark.’

  But he was warming to his theme.

  ‘Of course you’ve always been like that, haven’t you, James? All you can ever do is follow someone round. Jess, and now me. I wouldn’t be surprised if before Jess you used to follow someone round at school. Or your sister! Did you go to Oxford just because your sister did? Honestly, it’s surprising Jess put up with you as long as she did.’

  ‘Mark! Stop this now please.’

  He turned his face to me, hard and sneering. I was reminded of the way he’d been in Oxford the first time I’d met him, of the way he’d said ‘the paramour’.

  He said, ‘Do you know what, James? All you ever are is a reflection of other people. With Jess you were loyal, with me you’re dissolute. What are you really? Nothing. You’re all shadows and mirrors. All you’ve got is the power to ingratiate yourself with whoever you’re around, to make them like you. But the thing is, James, it doesn’t work. We don’t like you, none of us do – I don’t and nor did Jess.’

  He must have seen my face turn at that. A colour or a shading of the features. He has always been so good at picking up these little cues.

  ‘She talked about it with us in Oxford. She thought you were boring, James. She said so to the rest of us. She thought you were boring, and did you know, did she tell you, that she slept wit
h a violinist in her orchestra the term she was a soloist? When she was playing that Sibelius? Did she tell you that? Because she told us.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said.

  ‘It is true. They slept together that term and she almost left you, but she couldn’t bear it because you were so pathetic. That’s the kind of loyalty you inspire.’

  I gathered together my towel, my book, my bottle of water. I stood up and said, quite quietly, ‘Whether it’s true or not, we both know that you are the one who needs my pity, not the other way around.’

  I turned to walk back to the house.

  *

  The first blow caught me sharply on the side of my head, hard enough to make me reel dizzily and half-turn in the direction it had come from. Mark’s second punch, to the bone below my eye and catching my nose, sent me sprawling to the floor, a red flare exploding behind my eyes, a sickeningly familiar agony in my right knee, the pain suddenly vivid like a whip crack. I put my hand to my face and there was blood on my fingers, and I think I tried to say something at the same time as noticing that Mark was wearing shoes, not sandals, and although I saw him aim a kick at my stomach I could not process it quickly enough to think how I might defend myself except that I wanted to make myself very small.

  The kick, when it came, felt like it had forced the acid out of my stomach as well as the breath out of my body. I felt that I would vomit at any moment, that I was already vomiting. I saw the blood from my nose and my eye on the stones beneath my head and I realized that only one of my eyes was open.

  I managed to whisper, ‘Stop, please,’ and, looking down thoughtfully, he did stop. He tipped his head to one side and after a few moments, saying nothing, he walked back to the house.

  When he was gone I was surprised to find my body still breathing. In and out. Without any directions from me. There. In and out. Breathe, my body said to my mind, breathe. And after a short pause it said, come on. This has happened before. It is possible to survive. Stand up now. Walk away. Come on. Breathe.

  Mark was in the converted stable block, watching videos – I could tell from the noise. I stood wincingly. I had fallen on my damaged knee and, as I put weight on it, a bright star of pain flared in the joint. I limped to the main house, supporting myself on the wall, and found my stick in the umbrella stand next to the door. I packed a bag quickly – a change of clothes, sunglasses, my wallet – and called a cab, telling it to meet me at the end of the drive, not at the house. Through all of this, I continued to breathe, entirely without my own volition.

  24

  I went to a hotel in the town. They know me there, and know not to ask about the blood on my face and the blossoming red and purple across my eyes and cheek. Nevertheless, I put my sunglasses on before I went in.

  In the room, I called down to reception for ice and rinsed the blood from my face in the basin. I bent my head one way and then the other experimentally. A crunching of gears, grinding of bone, but not too much pain. My nose was unbroken. When the ice arrived, I wrapped some in a cloth napkin and held it to my nose and eye, hoping to stop the worst of the bruising.

  It hadn’t happened for months, not like this. It doesn’t happen above twice a year, if that. And I understand it, although I understand that it can’t go on.

  I sat on the bed, feeling my knee shriek as it bent. That would have to be dealt with, but in a moment. Outside, it was coming on for dusk, the sky half-visible through the thick dark-red patterned curtains. It is an old hotel in the centre of the town with rooms on two sides with views of the campanile. The rooms are dusty in a way that modern rooms do not become dusty – they have high ceilings and drapes and dark carved wood to hold the dust. I breathed through my mouth – sneezing would be painful at this juncture.

  I pulled myself up, holding on to the bedside table for support. I undid my trousers and let them fall to examine my knee. Yes. Some swelling already, a grinding twist as it moved. I prepared another icepack, positioned a chair next to the bed and raised my leg on to it. I sat there, facing the view of the campanile as dusk settled, a napkin full of ice held to my face and another to my knee. The ridiculousness of this situation struck me for the first time and I wanted, briefly but intensely, to call someone to share the joke. I felt that somewhere I had gone wrong, since I found I had no one to call to share a joke as good as this.

  Just after sunset a stream of bats began to leave the roof of the campanile. They nest there during the day and come out at night to feed. Against the pink-orange of the sky, they are a steady stream of milling black, pouring from the peaked corners of the roof, smearing dark across the sky before they dissipate into the town and surrounding countryside. Their fluttering noise is loud and uncanny. The event – the evening flight of the bats – is something of a local attraction. Many tourists lie on their backs in the square beneath the campanile, watching the bats pour across the sky. I, sitting in my chair in the hotel, clasping my ice, wearing only a shirt and pants, fell asleep without warning or hesitation.

  The next day, I went down to the harbour for lunch. It’s a twenty-minute walk and I wanted to test out my knee, feeling it bend and flex awkwardly, but not as painfully as the previous day. I drank coffee and orange juice and had hunks of cheese with bread and fruit. I tried to think of what I should do, but my mind continually slipped off the subject. I wondered again if there was anyone I should telephone. I supposed I could call my parents in England, but the thought was absurd – what would I say? What would they say to me except ‘Come home’? There was a thought curling alongside the coffee and the fruit and the view of the ships in the harbour, a simple seductive thought. It said that I would do what I had always done for the same reasons I always had. My debt to Mark was not yet paid, my business with him not yet concluded.

  I stared out at the ships, tiny paper triangles on the horizon. A few tourists were meandering along the seafront. An elderly couple had set themselves up with side-by-side easels, painting watercolour views of the sea. A young family dashed past, parents calling the children to heel in clipped Italian phrases. I paid my bill but remained seated, sipping my juice, watching the sea and the harbour.

  There was a couple – a man and a woman – a few hundred yards away, at the other end of the curved front of shops and restaurants. They were standing outside a souvenir shop, looking at some postcards on a stand. He was facing in my direction but so far off that I couldn’t see his face. Her back was towards me. All I could do was admire her; the long elegant legs in wide, linen trousers, the low-backed halter top, the broad straw hat with a black-and-white scarf tied around the crown. I was looking simply because I thought she was beautiful. And there was something in her bearing as well, a self-control as she stood resting her weight on one hip, searching calmly through her bag. My eyes stung. I shaded them from the sun and looked at her. I found myself thinking, I could love that woman. That one right there, I could love her.

  Fantastic, I thought. Just great. Well done, James. As if things weren’t confusing enough already. But somehow I couldn’t stop looking. She handed her camera to the man at her side, resting her arm lightly on his. She reminded me of something. She slipped off one sandal, shook out a pebble, then replaced it on her foot. She posed, leaning against a bollard on the quayside, and he took a picture of her. She linked her arm into his and they walked away from the quay, towards the centre of town.

  I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss – what if, I could not help thinking, what if she were the great love of my life, that woman? I knew it was absurd and yet I could not rid myself of the sensation. Hurriedly, I took up my stick, left a few coins on the table and limped after them.

  I knew which way they would go – there’s a well-worn tourist route around San Ceterino indicated by the only guidebook to feature the town, and followed faithfully by thousands of tourists each year. First the harbour, then the market, then the campanile and, for the dedicated, the 500-odd steps to the top of the tower. I have never climbed up, though we have lived
here for a number of years. I have always feared that my knee might give out halfway, that I might be stranded in the middle of a narrow, worn spiral staircase, people behind and in front of me, stone walls to either side, unable to go either up or down. I felt certain that I would catch up with the couple before they reached the tower, though. Tourists meander, stopping to look at lacework on market stalls or to admire the hand-carved toys. I would reach them quite soon. What I would do then was another matter. Perhaps I would look at her face and find the spell broken. Perhaps I would ask her to marry me. I would have to see when the moment arose. The simple sense of purpose was seductive, after the roiling clouds that had overpowered my brain that morning. I simply needed to catch up with them, there was nothing further.

  But they walked surprisingly swiftly. When I reached the corner of the road – a long, straight cobbled street with tiny shops to either side – I was just in time to catch sight of the woman’s wide-brimmed hat at the far end, turning left into the market. There were no great crowds, but my stick is awkward on cobbles and I had to go slowly. When I turned into the marketplace, I couldn’t see her at all. I looked left and right. My view was blocked by the awnings of the stalls. She could be anywhere. Heading straight through the centre of the market, past stalls selling fish and books and flowers and knitted blankets and wooden painted horses, I made my way uphill. I thought that perhaps, from the far corner of the market, its highest point, I might be able to spot her distinctive hat.

  But when I reached the other side I saw that they were not behind me but ahead, already taking the winding path that led up to the campanile. I paid a street vendor for a bottle of water, gulped it down and began the ascent of the hill.

  The day was becoming increasingly warm – it was bright and cloudless, the sky a deep and harmonious blue, echoing the colour of the water in the harbour. Sweat began to prickle all over my body as I walked on, slower than the tourist couple, finding myself falling further and further behind. Before long, I caught them only at the corners, at the edges of the winding path, when they were at the furthest end and I at the nearest. They were laughing, walking easily. I was leaning heavily on my stick, pulling my injured leg along with me, the joint becoming stiffer.