The Lessons Read online

  In a green-papered room looking out on the statues, a group was engaged in conversation.

  ‘I think I’m drunk.’

  ‘Obviously you’re not, or you wouldn’t be able to think it.’

  ‘Isn’t that madness, not drunkenness?’

  ‘Why, do you think you’re mad?’

  A wing-backed armchair was free. I sat in it and listened to the strangeness. On a table was an array of produce from Fortnum & Mason nestled in duck-egg-blue paper: a wheel of cheese, a tower of chocolate fairy cakes and brightly coloured jellies in vodka glasses. Several small jars containing caviar had been thrust into a fire bucket filled with ice.

  ‘Is that caviar?’ someone said.

  ‘Of course,’ said someone else.

  ‘I wonder what would happen if you snorted it.’

  ‘I’d pay £50 to see you try.’

  The lighting in the room was dim and unsettling. Around the walls were photographs of film stars. Some I recognized and some I did not; some were signed and some unsigned. I squinted at them for a little while, challenging myself to name them, but the chatter soon became soporific. My eyelids grew heavy. I was on the edge of a dream when a loud sound alerted me that, across the room, something was going on.

  I opened my eyes.

  Mark had entered, accompanied by a crowd. He gestured at the pictures in one corner of the room, a group of five shots of the same delicate-featured woman. In one arty black and white photograph she was wearing dark glasses, with a cigarette holder clamped between her teeth. In another she was lying back on a chaise longue, wearing a beaded evening gown that was slit all along the leg. Her left leg was raised and her arms spread wide.

  Mark leaned towards the woman standing next to him and whispered something in her ear. The other guests smiled and muttered. The woman turned her head and I saw that it was Jess. I must have made a sound of some sort, for Mark swung round quickly, pirouetting on the ball of one foot.

  ‘James!’ he crowed. ‘You are quite the man I was looking for, a man of taste, a man of refinement. Tell me, what do you think of this group of pictures?’

  ‘Hmmm?’ I said.

  ‘These pictures. This woman. What do you think of them?’

  ‘Mark,’ said Jess. There was a warning in her tone, a hint of something. She walked towards me and perched on the arm of my chair, taking my hand in hers.

  ‘Come on, James,’ said Mark, ‘what do you think of the pictures?’

  Something else was going on. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that. Next to me Jess stiffened. I felt her hand close around mine.

  ‘Don’t, Mark,’ she said.

  Mark tipped his head to one side, flicked a quick look at me, then looked at Jess.

  ‘I’m only asking.’

  Jess pursed her lips. After a moment, she said, ‘Ask. Someone. Else.’

  Mark met her gaze. I saw him move his tongue inside his closed mouth, licking his top front teeth, pushing his lips out.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, then, all smiles, turned to a man staggering unsteadily across the room.

  ‘Rob,’ he said, ‘what do you think of my pictures?’

  Rob collapsed on to a sofa and looked around him with exaggerated concentration.

  ‘Do you like them, Rob?’

  All at once, no one else in the room seemed to be talking.

  Rob peered at the walls. Spotting the one closest to him, the woman nude, draped with multicoloured art silk, he broke into a grin.

  ‘Dirty pictures, is it?’

  Mark grinned.

  ‘Yeah, that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘What do you think of her?’

  Rob looked at another picture in which the woman was dressed in diaphanous silk, her naked breasts clearly visible through the fabric. Rob blinked and pulled his head back a little, having some difficulty focusing.

  ‘She’s fucking gorgeous,’ he said at last.

  Mark lit a cigarette, took a deep drag and blew the smoke out slowly, in a steady stream. He held the cigarette just a little away from his mouth and said, ‘She’s fantastic, isn’t she? Would you, you know, do her?’

  Rob squinted at the picture. He smiled drunkenly. ‘Fuck, yeah. Who is she? Your girlfriend or something?’

  Mark took another long, slow pull on his cigarette, then said, ‘That’s my mother.’

  It is at this point that my memory begins to blur. Although nothing had yet passed my lips I find that in my recollection the ferns and trees had already started to creep from the wallpaper to spread their tendrils through the room. Everything felt dangerous and confused. The music grew louder. Mark was dancing and talking and running his hand through his blond hair and squeezing my shoulder. Jess got up to dance and said, ‘Come on, come on,’ but I remained seated. Someone gave me a cake and I ate it. It tasted a little dry. I chewed it more thoroughly. Time dilated and contracted and across the room Jess was dancing and laughing and talking, tossing her hair back from her shoulders and touching another man, a man who was not me, on the arm.

  Time passed again. It seemed to be doing so more slowly. I thought I saw all sorts of wonders. A woman I had never met took off her beaded top and bra and danced. Simon threw Franny over his shoulder and carried her through the room, like a caveman with his trophy. I seemed to see Mark dancing with another man, hip to hip and chest to chest, sinuous and strong. My head felt heavy I wanted to rest it and Jess was there in her gold dress with sequins all over and I was wearing jeans but nonetheless I walked to her and laid my head in her lap.

  ‘Very affectionate,’ someone said. And this seemed to me the funniest thing in the world, the funniest thing I had ever heard, and I laughed and laughed with Jess’s hand on the back of my neck.

  ‘Did you …?’ said Jess to someone.

  ‘No, not me, I don’t share,’ someone said.

  ‘Then which one of you?’ said Jess.

  Mark said, ‘It was me.’

  ‘Oh, God, what did you give him?’

  ‘Just some weed.’

  ‘How much, for fuck’s sake?’

  The room was triangulated, its dimensions folding in, the vanishing point closer than it should have been, and I stood up because I needed a better vantage place to see and be seen.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ someone was saying, ‘without telling him?’

  ‘I thought it would help him relax. He just seemed a bit … you know.’

  In my head a siren went off. It was distant at first, but growing closer and with a line into my heart and the beating that grew more and more intense with every thrashing crashing chastening word. My body is eating itself, I thought.

  ‘Mark,’ said Jess, and her hand was on his chest and she was saying further words but I could not hear them at all.

  I saw how this worked. I was here to be the moon, reflecting Mark’s glory because Jess was in love with him and they were playing a long and intricate game. And my wanting of her, and my need and my desire were only trophies she had brought to offer him. I would have run, but the teeth in my knee began to gnaw, so I crawled down the corridor papered with velvet bees and if she called after me I did not notice.

  Outside in the garden the air was cool and still. I stood up and walked slowly. The music throbbed from the lighted windows of the house, pulsing to the beat of the blood in my eyeballs, but the cool muted it, turning it leafy and distant. Though my shirt was thin and the rain had wet the grass, I walked through the garden further and further from the people and the tumult of destruction.

  In the early-morning light Jess found me. I was sitting on the lawn with my back resting against the sundial, staring at my hands, seeing the fat beneath the skin and the blood beneath the fat and the muscle beneath the blood and the bones beneath the muscle and on and on until the colours of my skin parsed into atoms and parts of atoms, the tiniest parts of reflecting light beneath which all of us are made of nothing.

  I said, ‘I can’t stay here, I can’t.’

  And she held my hea
d and pressed my cheek very close to her breasts.

  ‘It’ll get better,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’

  She sat down next to me and slipped her arm around my waist, resting my head on her shoulder.

  ‘Are you …’ I said, ‘are you in love with Mark?’

  She blinked and blushed, and I thought – yes, yes you are. And she said, ‘Don’t be an idiot. Mark’s gay.’

  I thought for a moment. I brought to mind the half-remembered image of Mark dancing with a taller man the previous night. I felt entirely a fool.

  ‘What are you …? Why did you even bring me here?’

  She turned her head towards me, pursed her lips into a smile, eyes dancing.

  ‘Because I fancy you, obviously.’

  And she kissed me as though there had never been any question we would do otherwise.

  We did not have sex that morning, or in the several nights and mornings that followed; it would be two or three delicious weeks before we progressed through the slow removal of clothes above the duvet to the things that might happen beneath it.

  That morning, we lay on her bed together. She brought me a large glass of water and I sipped it slowly. She made me lean back on the bed.

  ‘I’d follow you anywhere,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ I said.

  ‘Now? You are going to sleep and I –’ she leaned forward and retrieved a book from her bedside table – ‘am going to read Hetherington’s Theory of Composition while you do.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We’ll talk about that when you wake up. I can take you home if you like. But sleep first.’

  When I woke, it was late afternoon and the sun was already red-gold and low in the sky. My head hurt and my mouth was dry. I opened my eyes, then quickly closed them again. Someone was sitting in a chair next to the bed.

  ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘you’re awake. Do you want some water? I can make breakfast – we’ve got good sausages. Or I do an excellent bacon sandwich. You’d like my bacon sandwich.’

  I opened my eyes again, more slowly.

  It was Mark, standing by the bed, holding a glass of water close to my lips.

  I jerked my head back. Pain shot like an icicle down my neck and into my spine.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I thought of that. Here’s a bottle.’

  He passed me a glass bottle of Perrier. I looked at him, then examined the seal. Digging the metal cap into the palm of my hand, I cracked opened the bottle and drank deeply, directly from it.

  Mark watched me gravely.

  ‘Where’s Jess?’ I said at last.

  ‘She went out for a walk. She’ll be back soon.’

  My head felt heavy and old, layers of rust accreted round a thick iron sphere. My right leg was dead. I wiggled my toes to move the blood around and waited for the prickles in my thigh and calf, and the slower dull ache in my knee.

  ‘Do you …’ Mark stood awkwardly. ‘Do you remember much about last night?’

  ‘I remember what you did.’

  ‘Yeah. Look.’ I thought he was about to excuse himself, to tell me it had been a mistake or an accident.

  ‘It’s not that I want you to like me,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’

  He blinked at me, cocking his head to one side.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘Want?’ My voice was flat.

  ‘You make it sound so …’ He frowned. ‘It’s not payment, not like that. Just, what do you want? That I can help with? I owe you one. That’s all. Because I’m sorry.’

  My head crackled and bled with white static humming. I licked my lips. I tasted blood.

  I took another sip of water, feeling the bubbles bursting on my tongue as a gentle agony.

  ‘I don’t want anything from you, Mark.’

  He stood up and moved close to my bed. His thighs were pressed against the mattress. He bent down smiling, the way one might lean over to tuck a child into bed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you do. I think I know how to make it up to you.’

  *

  Jess returned as the sun was setting. Her hair was loose, windswept from her walk. She embraced me so naturally, and when we kissed she tasted of autumn berries, tart and sweet. She put my hesitant hand on her breast and I felt the nipple, small and hard beneath her sweater.

  She said, ‘I’m sorry, really sorry about last night. I didn’t think he’d …’

  But my heart was pounding and my skin was electric, and my thumb was on the point of her breast.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. Let’s not talk about him now.’

  And after a minute or two all thought faded away.

  5

  First year, January, first week of term

  Kendall jostled me as we crowded into the library.

  ‘You’ve had a busy vac, eh?’

  I supposed he had seen Jess and me kissing before we parted into subject groups, she downstairs to sit with the rest of the music students, I up in the gallery with the physicists.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said.

  There was a bustling of rulers and special pencils and lucky protractors. A few words whispered as we found our places in the ancient library. I was accustomed to a more utilitarian exam setting: the school gym, underneath the basketball hoops, with rubberized floors that squeaked when we shuffled our chairs. But Oxford is defined by its superfluity of beauty, by its application of beauty to the mundane. The morning light filtered through the library windows, splashing crimson on the pale floor tiles. The gold-tooled volumes of the College Record gleamed. Each of us had our own wooden inkwell, lined with indigo glass, in case we should care to write our answers with a dip-pen.

  ‘Quickly, please!’ called the librarian.

  ‘Fast work,’ said Kendall, winking. ‘Nice one.’

  I smiled. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why do you think they call them collections?’ He was speaking quite loudly, even though the library was becoming hushed. ‘Why collections? Why not exams? Or tests? What are they collecting?’

  I made an indeterminate noise. It might have been a ‘hmph’, or perhaps an ‘ahm’.

  ‘At least we’re in it together, right, Stieff? None of us will do well, not except …’ He jerked his head towards the next table, where Guntersen was laying out pencils, eraser and calculator at right angles. I thought, Mark is right, he is boring. Terribly, terribly boring. The thought pleased me.

  ‘Did you notice that Spanish girl wasn’t with him today? No good-luck kisses?’

  I had noticed.

  ‘She’s probably got exams now too,’ I said. I took out my clear pencil case.

  ‘What do you think they’d do if we failed though?’ Kendall whispered. ‘What do you think they’d …’

  Kendall’s voice trailed off. I looked at him squarely. He had a soft face: squashy nose, thick lips, ears with long lobes, a round schoolboy haircut. He was sweating and he looked unwell, with a yellow tinge to his face. I suddenly felt pity for Kendall. I had Jess at least, now. We’d spoken daily since the party; at first I’d called her from the phone box at the end of my parents’ road, and then we’d come up early together to Oxford, excited to be near each other. What did Kendall have?

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? They won’t send us down after one term.’

  ‘Quiet now!’ said the librarian.

  The whispered conversations died away. The second hand of the great ornamental clock swooped around. The minute hand ticked: 9.30 a.m.

  ‘You may turn over your papers and begin now.’

  Jess and I had come back to Oxford just after New Year, almost two weeks before the start of term. It had been her suggestion and I, longing to escape the suffocating environment of my parents’ house, eager to see her again, had agreed enthusiastically. We’d holed ourselves up in her bedroom and worked. It was
only ten days of effort, but there was a calm, methodical manner to it that had given me hope.

  ‘I know nothing,’ I’d said. ‘There’s no way I’ll pass.’

  ‘First thing,’ she said, ‘what’s the mark scheme?’

  We pored over past papers, as I remembered the less bright boys at my school had been forced to do. We worked out where answering a question would gain most marks, which marks could be got most easily.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ said Jess. ‘You could learn all four topics a bit, and you wouldn’t do as well as if you learned one very thoroughly and skipped the rest. Which is your favourite?’

  I had never prepared to fail before.

  ‘Don’t think of it like that,’ said Jess. ‘You’re doing what needs to be done.’

  There’s a sense of mastery that comes in examinations. It’s an experience that is rare in the outside world. The number of questions, the different ways they can be presented: these things are limited, and each can be explored, studied, perfected. No wonder we spend our adult lives feeling we’re simply pretending to know what we’re doing. After sixteen years spent doing exams, where the lessons we’ve received perfectly fit the challenges we’re faced with, our preparation for the unpredictable events of normal life will always seem shoddy and haphazard.

  Even in the half-baked way we had planned, there was a kind of mastery in my performance that day. I knew where to go and what to do. I read through the questions, found the one I understood and worked through it calmly. While it continued it was all-engaging. For an hour I lived in the rule of the squared paper, the sinusoid, the curves tending to infinity.

  After an hour I looked up. I had been dimly aware of a noise to my right, a fidgeting and sighing. Kendall was still sweating, gnawing at the end of his pencil, sinking toothmarks into the wood. By some instinct he knew I was looking at him and grasped my glance.

  Clowning, he rolled his eyes, motioned to the paper, shook his head, let out a theatrical sigh. I felt suddenly irritated by him. Did he think we were the same, he and I? Did he think I was also so hopeless that I had to treat all of this as a joke? I may have let out a little tut, and returned to my paper, looking for the questions on which we’d decided I could score at least half-marks.