The Lessons Read online

  Jess and I became closer over that term, partly because of the joint battles with college authorities but also quite naturally. I wanted her and was surprised to find that she liked me too. She seemed quite as content in my company as I was in hers, and I found I did not really need other friends in college. We would spend the days at lectures or in the library, and then in the evenings we ate dinner together in hall and Jess – if she did not have orchestra rehearsals – would practise her violin while I read. It was, for Oxford, a very settled time. Franny joked that we already seemed to have been going out for years and this pleased me. After a few weeks of this life I wondered if we needed to move into Mark’s house at all, or whether we could continue just as we had been.

  But the wheels were already in motion. We moved into the house in March, towards the end of Hilary term, and began to get to know one another’s habits and routines. I learned, for example, that Mark suffered from insomnia and frequently read his theology set books in the music room at 3 a.m., listening to 1930s dance records, and that for all her apparent nonchalance Franny worked harder than anyone I’d ever known – even Jess or Guntersen. Simon already harboured ambitions – he read, with intense seriousness, a multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill and Tony Benn’s diaries, and I once walked into his room to find him addressing an empty armchair with the words ‘Now really, Prime Minister …’. Emmanuella, despite her privilege, was an excellent cook, and the house was frequently filled with the aromas of Spanish cuisine.

  One morning in April, Jess and I knew instantly from the insistent staccato of the knock at the door that the person trying to wake us up was Franny and no other.

  Jess opened the door. Wordlessly, Franny marched into the room and slammed the door behind her. She was in her long white night-dress, her hair frizzy and wild.

  ‘Have you seen who’s in the kitchen?’ she said at last.

  We shook our heads.

  ‘We’ve only just woken up,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll never guess who he’s bloody brought home this time.’

  At least twice a week, Mark brought a young man home – often a ‘townie’ rather than another undergraduate. Once there had been a boy from sixth-form college. All of these had been agreeable if taciturn – a succession of crop-headed young men shovelling down cornflakes and leaving with a brisk ‘cheers’. There was the slight matter of illegality to detain us, but as Mark himself was officially below the age of consent for gay sex at that time the whole thing seemed so uncertain as to be better ignored.

  ‘It’s only bloody Rufus McGowan!’ said Franny.

  We looked blank.

  ‘Junior Dean of St Thomas’s? Wrote Thinking the State? Gave the Stimfield lectures in political thought?’ More blank looks. ‘He was my tutor last term?’

  ‘Oh, Good Lord,’ said Jess.

  ‘Too bloody right. I heard them last night. Heard them, Jess! At it! The author of Thinking the State.’

  She breathed in and out slowly. ‘I walked into the kitchen, saw him, he looked at me, I looked at him, and I turned and ran. Actually ran.’

  ‘Perhaps Mark didn’t know he was your tutor when he, um, found him?’ I ventured.

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure of that,’ spat Franny. ‘I’m sure he didn’t walk up to him at the urinals and go, “Fancy coming back to mine for a shag? By the way, did you ever teach British political history to any of the following people? I just ask because it might be awkward at breakfast?” ’

  We went down to breakfast together, to face off against Rufus McGowan en masse. He was the oldest person Mark had ever brought to the breakfast table by at least fifteen years, serious-faced, with a deep furrow in his brow and an untidy mop of curly red-brown hair. When we entered the kitchen, he was reading The Times and wearing a pair of pyjamas evidently intended for a much larger man – the striped top billowed around him and the trousers flopped over his feet. But for all his absurd appearance, it was unquestionably like having breakfast with a tutor. He rattled his paper, harrumphed and poured himself a cup of tea without offering any of us a drop. Mark himself sat contentedly at the other end of the table, munching his toast and reading a novel, apparently unaware of all that was going on around him.

  Having become accustomed to Mark’s night-time conquests needing to be put at ease, Jess wished Dr McGowan a good morning. He peered at her, nodded without saying a word and returned to his reading. The experience was miserably reminiscent of attending a tutorial, at least in my case: the tutors had very little to say in response to whatever I happened to offer them.

  After a few moments Dr McGowan said, ‘I see an UNPROFOR force has been ambushed in Bosnia. A clear example that rules of engagement are worthless. They can never anticipate battlefield conditions. Don’t you agree, Miss Roth?’

  Franny blanched and paused halfway through taking a piece of toast.

  ‘Um,’ she said. ‘I, um …’

  ‘And can you tell me who drafted the rules of engagement in Bosnia?’

  ‘Um. General Cot?’

  ‘Hmmm.’ I had the distinct impression that Dr McGowan would rather Franny had got the answer wrong. ‘He’s been recalled by the UN, of course.’

  Jess, noticing that Franny was attempting to back out of the room, grabbed her arm, squeezed it and drew her to the far side of the kitchen to make tea with us in abject silence.

  Emmanuella came down next. She was in the house for only about half of each week and I’d been trying to stay out of her way. The drunken moment that first night hadn’t been repeated; in fact she’d been a little cold with me. I couldn’t tell if she was offended that I’d turned her down or annoyed that I’d gone as far as I had without stopping. In any case, she’d taken up with another Scandinavian athlete – this time Lars, a fencer from Oriel. I found unexpectedly that my jealousy was tinged with relief.

  Lars was not with her this morning, however, and, expecting to see another of Mark’s charming young boys, she leaned across the table and rattled the paper playfully. Her expression when it was put down and she saw not an eighteen-year-old but a man of mature years was one of undisguised horror.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. Then, recovering herself slightly and evidently thinking she must have misunderstood the situation, she put out her hand and said, ‘I am Emmanuella. You are … a relative –’ she looked around the table with confusion – ‘a relative of Mark?’

  ‘Come now, darling,’ said Mark, looking up from his novel at last, ‘you know better than that.’ He looked at Emmanuella meaningfully, until she blushed, said, ‘Oh!’ and blushed still deeper.

  Dr McGowan shook her hand, which she appeared to have forgotten she’d left in a position to be shaken, nodded and returned once more to the paper.

  Simon, arriving in the kitchen at just the moment that this exchange took place, could do little more than stand at the doorway and gasp – he too had attended Dr McGowan’s lectures, though more sporadically than Franny. Eventually, seeming to take the view that what he didn’t acknowledge couldn’t see him, he marched into the kitchen and busied himself at once making bacon and eggs. This flushed Dr McGowan. He had apparently been quite willing to appear oblivious of us, as long as we did not appear oblivious of him.

  Observing Simon’s back, he put down his paper with a great rustling and said in a low rumble, ‘Good morning. I am Dr Rufus McGowan. And you are?’

  Simon appeared to lose about ten years instantly, becoming a frightened schoolboy confronted with an angry master.

  He said, ‘Er, Simon …’

  Dr McGowan looked at him. Simon went red.

  ‘Studying?’

  ‘Um … PPE.’

  ‘Ah.’ Dr McGowan leaned back in his chair, arms folded in front of him. Even in oversized pyjamas, the authority of an Oxford tutor was absolute. ‘And what did you make of the assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and the aftermath?’

  Simon’s eyes bulged.

  ‘Um. I … um. It’s disappointing?’

/>   Dr McGowan stared at him for longer than was humane.

  ‘What college are you at?’ The word ‘boy’ seemed to hang inaudibly at the end of the sentence.

  ‘Um … Keble.’

  Dr McGowan snorted and returned to his paper as if this explained the evident dimness of Simon.

  *

  ‘What were you thinking?’ asked Franny after Dr McGowan had left.

  Mark shrugged his shoulders defensively.

  ‘He’s certainly different from your usual type,’ said Jess. ‘Where did you find him?’

  Franny rolled her eyes.

  ‘Martyrs’ Memorial,’ he said.

  There was a little silence while we stared at Mark, thinking it through. Emmanuella, however, did not understand.

  ‘You met him at the Memorial? But there is nothing there. Only the statues and a public bathroom.’

  Mark nodded and grinned.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  Mark leaned forward, his voice a low rumble, and said, ‘There wasn’t much talking involved.’

  ‘But how …’

  ‘Darling Manny,’ he said. ‘The lavatories under the Martyrs’ Memorial are a place where gentlemen can find other gentlemen to give one another relief for the urges of the flesh. Dr McGowan and I have obliged one another there on several occasions. This time I suggested we repair somewhere more … congenial, and he agreed.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Emmanuella, her eyes widening. Then she frowned. ‘I do not think this is very respectful to the martyrs, Mark, even if they were not Catholics.’

  He frowned at her, then beamed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘how right you are. I shall have to mention it at confession.’

  ‘An interview with a divine,’ said Dr Snippet. ‘Doesn’t it strike you that way, Mr Stieff?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Dr Snippet sighed and blew his nose.

  ‘It is the root of all we do here, Mr Stieff. If you’ll forgive me for going off on a tangent for a moment.’

  It was by no means unusual for Dr Snippet to go off on a tangent. My one-on-one tutorials with him were a special benefit, conferred without warning by the college presumably in recognition of my lacklustre academic attainments. But the man never stuck to the subject at hand. When I’d asked whether his musings were relevant for the exams, he’d tutted and said, ‘Mr Stieff, if all you cared about was examination results, you could have gone to –’ he coughed, as if about to say a rude word – ‘Keele. You are here not for a degree but for an education.’

  ‘I mean to say, Mr Stieff,’ said Dr Snippet, ‘that is how we began. The tutorial. Five hundred years ago, when this college was founded, I would have been a priest and you a young nobleman. We would all have been Catholics then, and the private confession of one’s sins would have been familiar to us. Much as – aheh-aheh-aheh – you come now to confess your sins of incomprehension.

  ‘Psychotherapeutic practice, of course,’ he continued, ‘draws from quite the same wellspring. The monasteries may have been dissolved, Mr Stieff, but their ways are all around us! Of course, there would have been no women in the colleges then. Still, times change and we change with them.’ He blew his nose so loudly that I was unable to decide if I had really heard him say, ‘More’s the pity.’

  When I returned to Annulet House that afternoon, the phone was ringing in the side passage by the kitchen. I ran in to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello?’ I was breathless and the line was crackly.

  ‘Marco!’ called a woman’s voice, followed by a babble of Italian.

  ‘Stop, stop,’ I said, catching my breath. ‘Do you speak English? Inglese?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I wish to speak to Mark. Is he there, please?’ said the woman in accented tones.

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘He’s not in.’

  ‘Who is this, please?’

  ‘It’s, um, it’s James. A friend of Mark’s. I live here too.’

  ‘Ahhhhh, he told me this. Some friends, to keep him company. Bene. Now James, this is Isabella. I am Mark’s mother.’

  She paused, as if knowing that I would need a moment to gather my thoughts. I thought with horror of the photographs in the study of a woman in diaphanous silk, and of the things Mark had told me about his parents.

  Mark’s father, Sir Mewan Winters, had ploughed the family money into industry in the 1950s and 1960s, turned his moderate fortune into a vast one and then, in the early 1970s, just after his fiftieth birthday and long a confirmed bachelor – with various cousins and nephews eagerly anticipating the inheritance that would one day be theirs – made a sudden match with Isabella, an actress who had appeared in a few mildly erotic Italian movies and was almost thirty years his junior. Mark had been their only child, and the marriage hadn’t lasted. His mother had been too unstable, his father too distant. Mark was packed off to boarding school at seven, only for Isabella to remove him on a sudden whim at thirteen. According to Mark, she led a rackety life and had dragged him with her through much of it: several husbands, with one not always quite given up when the next was acquired, constant travel and now a great deal of time spent in California with a much younger lover, a weekly colonic irrigation, a personal vegan chef and a psychic counsellor on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘er, hello.’

  I think I expected she would suddenly start chanting at me.

  ‘James,’ she said, in a perfectly sensible voice, ‘can you give to Mark a message from me? Tell him I will be in Oxford at the end of next week, yes? You will all like to meet me? You are not too busy?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying desperately to stop remembering that I had seen a photograph of her naked breasts, ‘yes I’d love to meet you. Er, that is, um, no, we’re not too busy.’

  She made a curt ‘mm’ sound, then said, ‘I am glad. You will tell Mark that we spoke about this? You will not forget?’

  ‘I won’t forget.’ I certainly wouldn’t.

  ‘You will give him the message as soon as you see him?’

  ‘I’ll even leave it for him, in case I’m out.’

  She laughed. ‘Good! Very responsible young man, James! Make sure he understands, James. At the end of next week. Friday.’

  She gave me a number in Paris where she could be reached and hung up.

  I stood in the passage holding the note I’d written. I looked around. Where could I put it that Mark would be sure to find it? The kitchen was cluttered with several days’ worth of breakfast things. Mark employed a cleaner to come in twice a week to tidy up after us. Was today one of her days? Might she throw away this scrap of paper? An obvious solution came to mind.

  Upstairs, I pushed open the door to Mark’s bedroom with a jangle of nerves. It felt unexpectedly intimate to be here without his knowledge or permission. The room was large with, at one end, an enormous curved bay window. The bed was huge too – a cream-curtained four-poster. Mark’s clothes were scattered across the floor, heaped in piles and bundled into black rubbish bags.

  Books, mostly theology with titles like Blood of Crucifixion and The Annotated Doctrine of Atonement, were stacked neatly at one side of the little walnut desk, and pages of notes were arranged in a half-circle on the floor around the chair. I picked one up idly and read the essay title ‘A God Who Does Not Suffer Cannot Save: Discuss’.

  After a few moments I put the essay down, slightly bewildered. I’d known Mark was studying theology, but hadn’t thought anyone could take it seriously. I was not religious. My parents were somewhere between agnostic and the woolliest Church of England. They’d married in a church, Anne and I had been baptized, and that had been that. Anne was a positive and committed atheist, asserting that ‘the whole thing’s rubbish. Not just rubbish. Pernicious rubbish’.

  I put the note on his desk. As I stepped back, I noticed the edge of a brown figure hanging on the wall, mostly concealed behind the sweep of the curtains. I walked over to it and gingerly pulled back the edge of the
curtain to find, as I’d half-known I would, a dark brown wooden crucifix, the length of my forearm, polished to a burnished gleam. The figure on the cross was emaciated, each rib showing clearly through the skin, a deep hollow between chest and pelvis. The figure’s mouth was open in a grimace of agony, the flesh of the hands was ripped and battered around the nails.

  It would have been better if it had been openly on display. That way I might have said to myself that it was a piece of art, appreciated for its skill and technique. But this hidden figure was something else. An object for prayer, for belief. A private ritual. I felt revolted by the image, by its implicit praise for suffering and for humiliation and for pain. I wanted to hold up my wretched grinding knee and say, ‘This? Is there glory in this?’

  After a few dizzy and uncertain moments, I pulled the curtain back and limped from the room.

  Mark did not return home until past midnight, by which time I had forgotten about the note. Franny had found a box of hats in the cellar labelled ‘Maud, 1936’ and was going through it. We particularly liked the fez decorated with two stuffed pheasants lolling uneasily on wires. Our first-year university exams were only a few weeks away now, and we longed for distractions.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Franny, sweeping her head from side to side to make the long tail feathers shake. ‘Am I fit to be seen at Ascot?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Simon, making a grab for the hat. ‘You’d frighten the horses.’

  Franny laughed and made to grab it back. There was a brief, noisy tussle.

  ‘What’s all this?’ came a voice from the other side of the door.

  It was Mark. I hadn’t heard him come in; none of us had. We eyed each other nervously. We were still uncertain how free we could be with the things we found in the house.

  Mark pushed open the door. He held up his hand. He was shaking.

  ‘Who …’ he began, but could not continue. He breathed in and out twice, then started again. ‘Who left this bloody note for me?’

  We looked at each other. For just a second, I felt as bewildered as the rest. I had left a note, but surely he must mean some other note, some more offensive missive?