The Lessons Read online

  We arrived in Oxford at 3 p.m., when the sun was low on the horizon. We drove north, through the city centre and up into Jericho, a maze-like Oxford district, its tangled streets lined with Victorian labourers’ cottages. It had been a cold, bright day but now the clouds had begun to gather and a few spots of rain burst on the windscreen.

  ‘Is it Mark’s house we’re going to?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jess, ‘it’s his house. He’s … yes.’

  ‘Is he a second year? Living out?’

  ‘No, he’s a first year like us but he’s …’ She breathed out a long breath. ‘Well, he’s rich. You’ll see. He’s good fun though. A bit … unexpected at times, that’s all.’

  We turned a corner on to another terraced Jericho street and saw that it was a dead end. The end of the street was a high wall.

  ‘Is it one of these terraced houses?’ I said.

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not Mark.’

  We parked the car and walked to the end of the road. It was only as I levered myself from the car and felt a sudden thrust of pain in my knee that I realized I had forgotten about it all this time. I eyed my stick, half-hidden by my suitcase on the back seat of the car, but could not bear to take it with me. I wanted so much to appear normal to this girl. Ahead, Jess was already striding towards a battered green door set into the dead-end wall at the end of the road. The wall was high, almost as high as the houses, and the top was covered with rusty barbed wire. Jess pulled a key out of her pocket, raised her eyebrows, fitted the key into the lock in the green door and turned. She opened the door and we walked through.

  *

  Beyond was a garden, or what might once have been a garden.

  It was large and dark and dense. So large, in fact, that it was impossible to gain any sense of its size from where we stood. Trees, perhaps once planted in ornamental fans, had broken through the rusted metal staples holding them back and grown together to form a tight mass of branches. To our left and right, we could make out the traces of paved paths heading through the undergrowth, but these were too densely thicketed to admit us.

  Ahead, though, someone had clearly recently hacked a way through. Swathes of the thickly massed branches had been cut, and a winding path led away from the door. Jess grinned at me and walked boldly forward. I, regretting my stick, glanced back and saw a crest embossed high on the wall. It was a shield containing a small circle with, engraved beneath, partially obscured by bird droppings, the two words ‘Annulet House’. I turned back and followed Jess.

  Overhanging branches and overgrown bushes blocked our way; the path was moss-sodden and squelched as we walked. All around us climbing vines trailed down and brambles caught our clothes. But among the devastation we could see traces of the place’s former order. Through the leaves and moss, I spotted a mosaic pavement ten feet square, cracked and discoloured. At one point, rounding a corner, we were suddenly faced by a massive statue of the god Pan, goat-legged, pipes to his mouth, his face and body pockmarked and lichen-streaked. I thought I glimpsed a sundial in a clearing to our left, unreachable by sun.

  At last we came through the tangle and out on to a stone-flagged area with two curved sets of stairs leading up to a crumbling Georgian house. It was enormous – the main section was three storeys tall, with seven windows along each floor, and its façade had faded into mottled beauty. The paint peeling in crackled strips from the shutters on the ground-floor windows had scattered green and white shards across the paving stones.

  ‘How can this possibly be here?’ I said. ‘How can it be here and not in the guidebooks, and no one knows?’

  Jess said, ‘We know, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Oxford’s full of secrets. It’s tradition.’

  She put her arm companionably around my waist and drew me with her to peer in through the window at the top of the door. We were at the back of the house and through the rippled bottle-bottom glass I could see a large red-flagged kitchen. There was a black range, an oak table that could comfortably seat twelve, and piles of packing cases.

  Jess opened the kitchen door and we went in. The house was cold and silent. I looked into the open crates. In one, a bust of a bearded man poking his tongue out nestled among shreds of newspaper written in the Cyrillic alphabet. In another were a dozen blue crystal balls; in a third, a set of extremely impractical-looking massive cast-iron saucepans, each big enough to cook a meal for thirty.

  ‘But whose house is this?’ I said. ‘I mean, really? It can’t be … This Mark’s a student, isn’t he?’

  ‘Is someone,’ said a voice from behind us, ‘taking my name in vain?’

  I turned. A previously unnoticed door next to the larder had opened, giving a glimpse of a small sitting room beyond. A man was leaning in the doorway, with blond hair that flopped into his eyes, wearing a pair of low-slung jeans with a loose banker’s shirt: blue striped, with white collars and cuffs. The outfit and his demeanour, half-amused half-wary, made him ageless: he could have been a boyish don or a precocious twelve-year-old.

  ‘Mark!’ said Jess.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘this must be the paramour. Quite as beautiful as you said, Jessica. Yes. It’s our house.’

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling, ‘it’s yours.’

  ‘It’s the same thing,’ said Mark, and reached out his arms to embrace her.

  4

  First year, Christmas break

  I did not like Mark; that much became immediately clear. I did not like his word ‘paramour’. I did not like the way he spoke.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t take it like that. Any friend of Jess’s is a friend of mine. You are deliciously welcome.’

  I did not like the way he looked at me, a tilt of the head, a mocking raised eyebrow, and particularly not the way he looked at Jess. I was territorial already, defensive. I wanted to read a special interest into her behaviour towards me and so I did not like how he touched her, the way she sat so close to him, her knees crossed towards him, his hand resting casually on her thigh. I did not like that at all.

  We were the first to arrive, but it became clear from Mark’s enumeration of the guest list that there would be others – many, many others.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve invited half of Oxford,’ said Jess.

  ‘Only the best people,’ said Mark, shaking his head. ‘Like the two of you, my dears.’ He squeezed Jess’s thigh and ruffled my hair. I stiffened and sat back.

  The short curly-haired woman I’d seen before in the library arrived as Mark was showing us the garden. She was Jess’s friend from school – it was she who had introduced Jess to Mark – and had an air of solidity and good humour. She wore a green velvet jacket and a pair of glasses over which she looked at me and said, to Jess, ‘And who’s this?’

  ‘This is James,’ said Jess. ‘He’s … a physicist.’

  She stuck out her hand. Her handshake was firm, her smile sardonic.

  ‘Well, how do you do, James-the-physicist? I’m Franny.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said, watching Mark greet a group of three blonde girls. ‘Same old. Drinking the blood of Christian children, cursing the name of Jesus.’

  She bent towards me and gave a wry half-smile, unblinking.

  ‘Jewish.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need to be sorry,’ she said, examining a crumbling bird-bath with apparent disdain. ‘Runs in the family.’

  Blond, broad-shouldered Simon arrived shortly after Franny.

  ‘How long have you been together?’ I asked after he’d greeted her with a lingering kiss.

  ‘Oh, we’re not,’ she replied. ‘We’re just there for each other in times of horniness.’

  I rapidly began to lose track of the new arrivals. There were five Norwegian girls, three blonde and two brunette, all of whom seemed to be named Ulla or variations thereof
. There were eight members of the Balliol football team, all wearing Balliol jerseys, who set upon the bottles of brandy they found in the kitchen with a great deal of enthusiasm. There were various ex-public schoolboys with names like Rory and Sheridan, each of whom arrived with a matching girl named Tommy or Georgie or, in the case of one particularly svelte girl, Lumpy.

  Mark greeted every new arrival with histrionic enthusiasm, clutching and gasping and exclaiming over the magnificence and delightfulness of each of his friends. He could not sit still. He decided he must show us the house, the whole thing, at once.

  The place made no sense: one could see its antecedents, but it had been so touched with madness that it no longer cohered at all. There were, we found when we later attempted to count them, somewhere between thirty-nine and forty-two rooms; no counting ever quite reached the same number. The oldest part of the house was Elizabethan: small panelled rooms at the centre of the ground floor. But generations had accreted layers of plaster and brick around stone. The Georgians had concealed it behind a false front. The Victorians were responsible for the broken greenhouses and the pointed extension at the back of the house. The Edwardians had added the tennis court and rockeries and then the place had ceased at the start of the Second World War.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mark, explaining this to us. ‘It belonged to my father’s great-aunt Clytemnestra. No one’s bothered to go over it since she died. So they gave it to me.’

  ‘They gave it to you?’ I said.

  I realized as soon as I’d said it that I should have remained silent. No one else seemed to think this point was worth commenting on. The rest of the group looked at me inquisitively. Only Jess seemed unconcerned; she smiled and winked.

  ‘Oh yes, well, they were so delighted I’d finally decided to come to heel,’ said Mark. He raised his eyebrows. ‘I believe they planned it all along, you know, although they’d never admit it.’

  ‘That’s … nice of them?’ I didn’t know who ‘they’ were, but this seemed a safe response to the news that someone had given Mark a house.

  He screwed up his nose.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I had to nag them and nag them for it even so. All the uncles and cousins seem to think it’s vulgar to own a house. But my father saw it my way. None of them want the place at all is the thing, because it’s a bit rough around the edges. But –’ he smiled suddenly, pirouetting on the spot, arms outstretched as if to embrace the blue and gold study we were standing in – ‘so am I. I love it! So fuck’em.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Jess squeezed my arm.

  Later, we unpacked our things in the Chinese-papered bedrooms Mark had allotted to us. They were two adjoining rooms, with a warped communicating door which was swollen with damp and would not shut though we tugged and pushed at it. The half-open door felt curiously intimate, as though we had been given just one room.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘how it is that if Mark’s so rich… he is rich, isn’t he?’

  Jess nodded.

  ‘And his family are rich. So why is this house in such a state of decay? I mean … where are the marble bathrooms and luxury yachts?’

  She frowned. We were in Jess’s room. I sitting in a broken split-cane chair, she on the bed.

  ‘I think … really rich people, not new rich but generations of richness … don’t think about things in the same way the rest of us do. Maybe because they don’t have to. Mark doesn’t, anyway. He’s really funny about money. But he’s so generous. You’ll see. Look how he’s got this place ready for us.’

  I opened the doors of the walnut wardrobe, its veneers curling with damp. At least, I tried to open them. One handle came off in my hand. Jess snorted, and tried to hide the laugh in her sleeve.

  ‘In what sense,’ I said, ‘is this house ready?’

  ‘Only in the sense that a very rich man with no idea about normal life might think it’s ready. But don’t be like that. It’s lovely really. An adventure!’ She threw herself back on to the bed and spread her arms and legs into a wide X shape. ‘And in any case, there are clean sheets on the beds, empty drawers and a stuffed … Actually, what is that on the mantelpiece? A skunk? I don’t like the way it’s looking at me.’

  She leapt up, stalked over to the fireplace and picked up the glass-eyed animal by its stiff brush tail. She looked around the room for a suitable place to deposit it.

  ‘Bathroom?’ I suggested.

  ‘God, no. Wouldn’t want to come face to face with that at 4 a.m.’

  ‘Under the bed?’

  ‘Might come to life. Feels like that sort of house, don’t you think?’

  Jess surveyed the view out of the window. An enormous privet hedge was beneath, grown wildly out of shape. She grinned, ran round behind me and pushed me towards the window, the touch of her hands on my back both firm and thrilling. One-handed, she pushed up the sash, leaned out of the window holding the stuffed skunk by its tail and dropped it gently into the centre of the privet.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Released back to its natural habitat.’

  In the evening, the party began in earnest. Three men in rugby shirts had run cables through the house, stuck down with rug-shredding gaffer tape. A few hours after dark, with pizza boxes already littering several of the living rooms, and groups of people making fires in the unswept grates, a sudden thunderclap of music struck across the house. The bass was insistent, distorting through the walls and ceilings. And more people arrived.

  Jess said, ‘Come downstairs with me. It’ll be fun.’

  I said, ‘Not yet. In a few minutes. Promise.’

  She tipped her head and looked at me, a little puzzled.

  And I thought, and I could see she thought, who is this man? Who have I brought here?

  She left and went downstairs.

  After ten minutes, I went to stand on the balconied landing. I looked down through the banisters to the hall three floors below. There were blonde girls in pink cocktail dresses and fur-collared coats laughing, and a pile of coats and handbags and shoes spilling across the marble-chequered floor.

  In the hall below, a girl said, ‘How high is it? How far up does it go?’

  She tipped her head back, a blue and silver scarf tied around her neck, and said, ‘Oh! There’s someone up there.’

  Mark’s head came into view in the oval of floor space.

  ‘It is the gloriously good-looking James,’ he said. ‘Jess found him first, though, so hands off. Why are you loitering up there, James? Get down here and let us ogle you!’

  And, while in my mind I dithered and wondered, somehow his command had set me free. I went downstairs.

  ‘And what are you?’ said a man whose name was Llewellyn, or Montgomery, or Noel, or St John or Stephan or Bobo or Kit.

  ‘This is James,’ said Mark, and took my arm. ‘He’s at college with Grunter – you know Grunter?’

  ‘What, that Norwegian bloke? I met him at Rhodes House drinks. Emmanuella brought him. Friends with him, are you?’

  Before I could respond, Mark said, ‘Certainly not. Grunter is the most boring man in Oxford and you know I’ve had that statistically confirmed. I couldn’t possibly have any friend of his at my party. You think he’s boring too, don’t you, James? Never talks about anything but work, barely talks to anyone but Manny.’

  ‘I, um, yes,’ and suddenly I saw that yes, Guntersen was boring. He was. Boring. Yes.

  ‘I’ve told Manny time and time and time again,’ Mark continued, ‘but does she listen? No. Tall blond men with broad shoulders, she can’t see past them. Whereas –’ he looked me up and down appraisingly – ‘yes … What she needs is a nice pretty English boy like you, don’t you agree?’

  ‘I … um,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ said Mark. ‘I’m going to convince her sooner or later that Grunter is too boring for anyone to bear. So if Jess turns you down, we’ll fix you up with Manny.’

  Something must have shown in my face then. A
flash of desire, a momentary indication that, my God, for someone to fix me up with Emmanuella was all I had hoped for in life. I tried to hide it but, looking back, I think it must have shown in my face.

  I was unwilling to wander from this theme, but the conversation moved on. A girl in a black beaded choker lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings.

  Mark put his arms around two of the women nearest to him and said, ‘Come along. If you’re good I’ll show you my gazebo.’

  He laughed and walked the girls towards the back of the house. I wanted to follow but did not wish to appear pathetic.

  The air was soupy, thick with conversation, smoke and perfume. I wondered where Jess was, then jabbed at myself for wondering. I mustn’t be following her around all evening. It was a party, after all. It couldn’t be so very hard to talk to people.

  I recognized Franny and stood next to her for a few minutes.

  ‘Mum and Dad insist that I have to find a husband who is of the blood pure,’ she said, holding Simon’s arm tightly.

  ‘What’s Si,’ said a girl, ‘too mongrel?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Franny, ‘just mongrel enough.’

  In a sitting room by a side door to the garden a young man was drawing on a hookah, while another lay sprawled on the rose-patterned carpet next to him.

  ‘Don’t bother Dev,’ the first man said, ‘he’s mashed. Fancy a draw?’

  He extended the pipe to me. A thin line of spittle hung between it and his lip for a moment before collapsing.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said.

  In a black and white tiled room, a couple was having sex on a mildewed sofa. They seemed oblivious of the people passing by the open doorway. His chest was bare. She was dressed as a 1920s flapper with black feathers in her hair and a beaded cocktail dress that shook as she moved on top of him. Her fishnet tights were ripped between her thighs. His head was back, staring unseeing at the ceiling. Hers was down, looking at her red-nailed hands on his chest. They were making no noise at all, and I wondered whether they were a couple, and this public display was something they always did or whether they had met here, perhaps only minutes before, and each was participating for their own private reasons.