The Lessons (21 page)

13

Third Year

Soon after that, Oxford was over. It was the work that did it, first of all. The growling chasm of finals towards which we were being swept. Mark, probably driven by a dread of what his family would say if he failed, began spending up to ten hours a day in the library. Jess resigned from the orchestra and Franny became so obsessive in her work timetable that she even started noting down how long she’d spent in the bathroom and added that on to the end of her working day. This is Oxford: it need not be all or nothing, but it lends itself to that way of thinking.

And we began to spiral apart, slowly at first so we did not have to acknowledge what was happening. Franny took to spending part of her week back in college. Simon spent several weekends on recruitment retreats in Surrey or Hampshire, where he participated in group exercises, was interviewed and tested and asked to build a kayak using only three car tyres and a selection of rubber bands. Soon he triumphantly presented us with a letter confirming that, from the end of August, he would be employed by a well-known firm of management consultants. Jess and I spent a similarly fraught few days in London. She auditioned and was offered a position with a prestigious orchestra. I, less grandly, was accepted on to a PGCE course. One night over dinner at the house Emmanuella announced that she would be working as a TV-journalist in Madrid from the autumn, and we all toasted our success in good red wine.

All this news was merely the backdrop to finals, though. They were punishing; the insistent, inescapable mental pressure of Oxford condensed into a single, migraine-like week. Exam after exam after exam, a test of nerve and stamina rather than education or intellect. My exams were earlier than the others’, at the end of March. When I came out of each one, someone in the house would make me tea or soup and say, ‘How was it?’ Meaning ‘Tell us the secret. What is this thing, finals? How is it to be conquered?’

And I did not know how to tell them that it was simply an exam. Like a hundred other exams. Like collections, like penals, like A-levels, like GCSEs, like mocks. For ten days I sat in Exam Schools. I raised my hand if I wanted to go to the bathroom, I tied my papers together using green cord tags with silver ends, I wrote legibly, I showed my workings. The only difference was in the show of the thing: the subfusc and the marble floors and the regulations concerning the holstering of swords.

This external show is meant to impress and terrify, but knowledge acquired at Oxford is no different from knowledge acquired anywhere else. And when the others began their finals, they knew this too.

But finals, for all their hugeness, lasted barely a moment. They were over as soon as they had begun, and then there was only waiting for results, lying in the sun and packing up belongings. We greeted each other with flowers and champagne, and threw flour or glitter on each other’s heads. But the end of finals meant the end of other things as well, and this became increasingly clear.

Jess and I put a deposit down on a rented one-bedroom flat in London. Simon, using money saved from his lucrative summer jobs, got a mortgage and
bought
a small flat in London, which seemed to us to be the most grown-up thing we’d ever heard of. Mark’s owning a house was one thing; Simon’s persuading a bank to lend him money to buy one was quite another. Franny was accepted to read for a PhD at Cambridge and would be moving into graduate accommodation there. By our last night in the house, we had already reached the point where it took some effort to gather the six of us together.

The last night was a week after our results were announced. There were some surprises – Emmanuella received a lower second, while Simon got an upper second, and none of us could ever account for this except that it seemed often to be how things happened between men and women at Oxford, the men appearing to be marked with slightly surprising leniency, the women with surprising strictness. Franny got her first though, as did Jess. Mark received a bare third but redeemed himself ridiculously by winning a prize for his paper on ‘Religions and Mythology of the Ancient Near East’. There was even a prize-giving where, according to him, he was presented with a leather-bound copy of
Cory’s Ancient Fragments
by seventeen senior dons, each with a long beard and tattered gown. I got a lower second and was pleasantly surprised my mark was no worse. Other than that, I barely felt anything: no disappointment, no anger. Relief, mostly. Relief that it was over. Anne had been right: Oxford is a race and my race was run. I was no longer limping along behind the pack. It was done.

And after these things, we decided that we would have to have one last night of raucous celebration. We called it ‘the last good night’ later, because although there were other nights when the six of us spent the evening eating and drinking and talking and laughing, they were never quite like that again. I think we knew that this might be the case. That was why Emmanuella told whatever tall, taciturn blond was following her around just then that she had to have the evening off. That was why Franny blew off a night at high table, and Simon rescheduled a meeting with his management consultants, and Mark stayed home from roving.

And it was a good night. Mark ordered in hampers from Fortnum & Mason which Emmanuella scoffed at and made ham hock with split peas without reference to the contents of the hamper. We broke open a bottle of ancient port from the cellars and a wheel of creamy, gooey Stilton. We played card games and Cluedo – which Simon won in the most irritating fashion imaginable, not only guessing the murderer correctly but also telling us what cards we each had in our hands, like some sort of autistic savant. We drank more, we ate more. We played Twister and fell over on top of each other. Mark rolled a spliff and passed it round. Our jokes became funnier, our mood more expansive. I was filled with an immensity of love the like of which I had never felt before – love for the people giggling around the table, for the house with its many rooms which had been so daunting when we first arrived but which had welcomed us so warmly. I looked at the faces of my friends and saw that they were all astonishingly beautiful, and I found myself filled with simple gratitude that I had been allowed to share this time with them and a maudlin sadness too, a nostalgia for the present moment.

What is Oxford? It is like a magician, dazzling viewers with bustle and glitter, misdirecting our attention. What was it for me? Indifferent tuition, uncomfortable accommodation, uninterested pastoral care. It has style: the gowns, cobbled streets, domed libraries and sixteenth-century portraits. It is old and it is beautiful and it is grand. And it is unfair and it is narrow and it is cold. Walking in Oxford, one catches a glimpse through each college doorway, a flash of tended green lawn and ancient courtyards. But the doorways are guarded and the guardians are suspicious and hostile. For people like Mark, everywhere is Oxford: beautiful and ancient. For such people, life is an endless round of Oxfords: the quads and panelled rooms of Eton give way to those of Oxford, then the rooms of the Inner Temple and finally the Lords. For the rest of us, Oxford is an afternoon tour around a stately home: a place of wealth and beauty which, by its velvet ropes and querulous attendants, insists on reminding us that we do not belong. For me, Mark always held the promise that the ropes could be pulled back, that I could gain admittance. The question of how I would then leave did not, at that time, occur to me.

By 5.30 a.m. Emmanuella and Jess were asleep, curled up on Mark’s massive bed. We covered them with a blanket. Simon and Franny claimed they were going to play cards in Simon’s bedroom, although we knew full well what that meant because it was late, and they had been kissing copiously, and Simon’s hand was quite unashamedly stuck down the back of Franny’s jeans. Which left Mark and me on the landing.

He said, ‘D’you fancy a bacon sandwich?’

I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.

In the kitchen, Mark cut four thick slices off the loaf and set two each on two plates next to the hob. He pulled down a frying pan from the shelf above the sink and set it to warm. I knew better than to offer to help; he had his system.

As he reached for the bacon at the back of the fridge, he said, ‘Do you think we should just kill ourselves?’

‘What?’

‘No, really. I mean, don’t you think we should just get it over with now?’ He was smiling as he crossed the kitchen, bacon in hand. He took a long knife from the drawer and toyed with it, twisting its point on the tip of one finger. ‘We could, you know, hara-kiri, right here in the kitchen.’

He turned the knife towards his chest and mimed the sudden jab in and upward thrust.

‘Why would we do that?’

He sighed. He laid the strips of bacon into the pan; immediately, they began to crackle and their smoky odour made my mouth water. It was so late that I had begun to feel the hunger which replaces tiredness: sharp and biting.

‘Because our lives are over, James. This is it. The end. We will never have a time like this again.’

I thought of the little flat Jess and I had signed for two weeks earlier, of waking in the morning to make her coffee before work. I thought of living with her, and only her.

‘We’ll have other times. Different, wonderful times.’

He pushed the bacon around the pan; tiny sizzles rose and hissed away.

‘I feel sure,’ he said, ‘completely sure, that I’ll never really be myself again. Not after this. This was it for me. I’ve had my golden time. All the rest will be silver and brass.’

I rolled my eyes. This was what Jess called his obsessive over-dramatization.

‘There’ll be other times, Mark. We’re not going to become suddenly different, are we? We’ll have great times, all together in London.’

He sighed and ran his hand through his hair.

‘It’s all right for the rest of you. You’ve got things to go on to – careers. Franny’s got her PhD, Simon’s got his job, Emmanuella’s got her life in Madrid, you and Jess have got each other. What have I got?’

‘How about 150 million quid in a trust fund?’

He looked at me as though I’d assayed a very low blow indeed. As if I’d reminded him about some distasteful aspect of his past, or his own mortality. He forked the bacon and flipped it over. There was a low sizzle and the scent of smoke and frying. He pushed the bacon around the pan for a few more seconds, then quickly fished it out, on to the plates. He wiped each slice of bread round the pan, to take up the grease, and put the sandwiches together. He licked his fingers and, with his back towards me, stared at the plates for a moment.

I say to myself now, didn’t I know really? Wasn’t that why I was fascinated by Mark? Wasn’t it why I was in that house to begin with? And I think the answer is no. I didn’t know, not really. It did not even feel like a self-deceiving lie. I had concealed the knowledge from myself so well that no act of will could have retrieved it.

He turned round, but instead of holding the two plates his hands were empty and he reached forward, pulled my face towards him and kissed me. I jumped, but didn’t pull away. He tasted of cigarettes, of that mint chewing gum he liked. He shifted position. All I can remember is the thought circling around and around in my head: ‘I am kissing Mark. Mark is kissing me. I am kissing Mark.’ Like a catechism or a times-table; a thought, a true thought, but utterly without meaning or emotion.

After a minute or so, he leaned back, taking his mouth from mine but leaving his hand at the nape of my neck, stroking the hair there softly. His look was questioning, almost nervous. It’s funny, but that was what did it; I’d never seen him nervous before, not during finals, not in a roomful of strangers or a dodgy pub. It made him look younger than he was.

I didn’t think about anything. I hooked two fingers into his belt loop and tugged him towards me. I could smell the scent of his skin: cigarettes, pot, but underneath that a clean scent, like hay or grass.

He manoeuvred his right leg between mine as we kissed. I could feel his erection pressing hard against my thigh.

‘God, James,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about this for months. Years.’

I kissed him again, speaking into his mouth. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘me too. Years.’ I hadn’t known it until that moment, but it was true.

He fumbled with my belt buckle. All at once, I could feel each of his fingertips, the solid expertise of his palm, the rhythm of his arm. I gasped and leaned into him.

‘Now now,’ he murmured, ‘not yet, not yet. Be patient.’

He moved slowly, holding me tightly, urging me on and restraining me both at once. I felt a flush begin to spread across my stomach and up towards my chest. He pulled off my sweater – more carefully than I would have imagined, with gentle attention – and then took his off quickly, quickly returning to me, pressing against me. The expanse of his skin against mine was almost more than I could bear. His attentions became a little more urgent. Only a little.

He shifted position slightly, a new motion. My mind went blank.

‘Yes?’ he said, his breath hot in my ear.

‘Yes.’

He moved faster. The room became as small as the table we were leaning on, as the places where our bodies touched, as the pressure of his thumb. I pulled the heel of my hand down the small of his back and up again, relishing the ripple of his spine and the transition from downy skin to rough denim, pushing him towards me, increasing contact. I kissed him again, sinking my tongue deep into his mouth. I realized I was shaking. One of his hands was at the nape of my neck, comforting, as he whispered, ‘Slowly, slowly,’ while the other hand continued its necessary work. I could not go slowly. I touched my lips to the curve of neck and shoulder and his scent was cut grass and his taste was salt. His voice in my ear was sudden, intense.

‘Are you sure, James? Are you sure this is what you want?’

I didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

He pressed himself into me, liquid and smooth. He kissed me again.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I thought so.’