The Lessons (27 page)

I said, ‘This is the afternoon.’

He said, ‘Oh.’

And he shook his head sadly and went to get dressed.

We drove to my flat – his windscreen had acquired another two tickets, I noticed. Jess was out rehearsing and wouldn’t be back until the evening. Mark lay on his back on our sofa, holding his head in his hands. I made a late lunch and we ate in the kitchen. I realized that I hadn’t seen him eat since he arrived in London and this thought filled me with compassion for him. He seemed smaller now than he had been.

Mark poured himself a large whisky and we talked about Oxford people, about what had become of them since we left. Mark had heard that Dr McGowan had finally been arrested for his cottaging activities and that the college had asked him to resign. He had, however, been immediately offered an even more prestigious chair at the Sorbonne so, as Mark said, ‘no harm done’. We talked of Franny, who’d coincidentally spent a few weeks of the summer at the Sorbonne. We wondered whether she’d seen Dr McGowan, and whether she’d managed to keep a straight face if so. Mark became more and more animated during this conversation, wildly fantasizing that they
had
met, that they had become great friends, that they were together right now, that if we called her we would find that he was in her rooms.

‘I’ll call her now!’ Mark said. ‘She could come down from Cambridge tonight. And
then
–’ a wild gleam flared in his eye – ‘we could go and see Emmanuella at the weekend! In Madrid! Or she could come here! I could fly her over. Maybe Simon could come from Chile, or Peru, or wherever he is.’

He frowned, acknowledging that this was unlikely, but he had still not given up on the idea entirely. He picked up the phone and dialled Franny’s number in Cambridge.

‘Hello, my darling. Guess who it is.’

A pause. A grin on his face.

‘S’right! And guess who I’m with.’

Another pause, a wider grin.

‘No! Wrong! Guess again …’

A shorter pause.

‘It’s James! I’m with James in London, and Jess is going to be home in a few hours, and
we thought
…’

Another pause. A slight wrinkling of the brow.

‘No, she’s not. She’s still in Doorbl … Doorbi … She’s in Doorbell.’ A giggle from Mark.

A pause. Mark bit his upper lip.

‘Well, yes I am, as a matter of fact, but there’s nothing wrong with
that
, is there, darling?’

A short pause.

‘
No
, listen! Jess will be home soon, and
we thought
you could come down to London tonight and it’ll be
just
like old times, do you remember? In the house?’

A longer pause. More lip chewing.

‘Oh, but darling Franny, it won’t take very long …’

Cut off. A short pause.

‘I’m sure you can stay here tonight. Can’t she, James?’

I nodded.

‘He’s nodding. Of course you can stay here tonight.’

A long pause.

‘Oh, but you’ll have a wonderful time. We’re all here and we can go out on the town, or stay in and order some food, and I’ve got some
lovely
stuff, haven’t I, James?’

He did not look at me this time to see whether I nodded or not.

‘Oh, but Fran …’

Pause.

‘But you know that you’ll …’

Pause.

‘But it’s our last chance in …’

Long pause. Frown deepening on Mark’s face. A twist of the mouth.

‘I really can’t persuade you …?’

Lines appearing at the sides of his mouth. A slight scrunch to his eyes.

‘OK, bye then.’

He put the phone down and looked at the receiver for a moment.

He said, ‘Uptight bitch.’

I said nothing.

He sat on the sofa for a while, staring out of the window at the blank grey sky. At last he said, ‘We had an argument.’

I did not have to ask who he meant. I didn’t know how to reply to him. Instead, I simply waited.

‘She said she thinks this all might have been a mistake.’

‘She probably didn’t mean it.’

He looked at me, a broken smile. He shrugged.

‘But it can’t be perfect any more, not like it was. Nothing ever stays.’

‘It’s not …’ I began, and then did not know how to proceed. I wanted to tell him something about how it was with Jess and me, how I had found that love was a constant cycle of coming together and breaking apart. But I did not want to talk or think about Jess just then. And perhaps I did not at that time have the ability to explain the truth about relationships: that they produce their fruit intermittently, unpredictably. That every relationship has moments when someone says, or thinks, or feels that it might not be worth doing. Every relationship has moments of exasperation and fear. And the work of the thing is to come through it, to learn how to bear it. And even if I could have explained this, Mark would never have understood it. He has always been rich enough that if something breaks he can simply throw it away and buy a new one. He had never used string or glue to bind something together again. He had never been forced to learn how to mend.

Mark poured himself a second whisky, or was it his third now?

‘I don’t know why things have fallen apart like this.’

‘Between you and Nicola?’

His face dropped. He stared into his glass.

‘No, between us, all of us. We used to be such good friends, didn’t we? I mean, didn’t we? You and me and Jess and Franny and Simon and even Emman … Emmanuella, although –’ he gestured with his glass, sloshing a little of the auburn liquid on to the carpet – ‘I never could get to the bottom of her. So to speak.’ He giggled. ‘So to speak.’

‘Yes, we used to be good friends.’

‘When we were all together. It was better then, when we were together in the house.’

‘It was a good time.’

‘No,’ he said, sitting forward, suddenly earnest. ‘No, it wasn’t a good time. It wasn’t just that. We were all more ourselves then. We were all who we really are, only we forget because of bills and responsibility and having to go to work and be married and that sort of thing. We’ve forgotten, but we have to try to remember.’

His voice softened, lowered.

‘You, James, you were just so beautiful then. You’re still beautiful now. But then, when you were really yourself. God, I remember that just watching you cross the lawn, you know, just seeing you lying in the hammock, made me …’ He breathed out loudly. ‘You should all come back and live in the house again.’

I thought back to that time. It was already brighter now than it had been; I could feel already the days of rain erasing themselves in my mind, the days when I had been lonely or sad. It was beginning to seem utterly golden, although I knew that it had been life, only life, with no mystery to it or redemptive quality or unattainable glories.

Being with Mark I felt I could hear again the sound of rain on the conservatory roof, smell the ham hock cooking in the kitchen, see Franny and Jess arguing over their card game. I heard the shrieks of laughter as Simon pushed Emmanuella around the garden in the old wheelbarrow, or tasted the lip balm Jess used then, something with a hint of vanilla. Being with Mark, I remembered happiness, not as it had been for me, but as I imagined it was for him: rich, unending and enveloping.

‘And you and me, James, we were always good friends, weren’t we? Very good friends. Better than friends.’ He leaned closer. ‘You always fancied me, didn’t you? Do you remember that day, the day you left Oxford, in the kitchen? Do you remember, James?’

He was quite drunk; I was much less so. I should have called a cab for him, sent him home. But he smiled at me, stretched, and touched my cheek with the back of his hand. I could smell his skin, that faint scent of raspberries still, as though he had taken summer into him, as though high heat and sun were just below the surface of his skin.

I tried to resist. I did try. In so far as I was able. When he put his hand up to my face, I pulled back. He was still for a moment, looked at me. I looked at him. I tried to shake my head, or say something: you should go, I don’t want. Something along those lines. But I didn’t. Mark smiled his easy, lazy smile and moved forward again.

I kissed him. He kissed me.

He muttered, ‘I’ve been thinking about this for years, you know,’ and I wanted to remind him that he’d said that before, he’d said it the last time, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything at all.

That evening, after Mark left, after I’d showered and shaved and gathered up my clothes and put them through the washing machine, I tried to start an argument with Jess.

Jess and I rarely quarrelled. It’s difficult to quarrel with Jess, because she’s so essentially self-contained there’s no purchase, nowhere to get a handhold, pull her open, make her angry. And, truthfully, I disgusted myself even for wanting to. And I did want to. I wanted to make her cry. I wanted her to tell me to fuck off, or to throw something at me. I wanted her to say, ‘How dare you?’ or ‘I hate you.’ I wanted to know what it was would make her do those things, because it wasn’t anything I’d been doing up till then.

And if I could have broken her open, what then? If I could have found the right place to direct my hammer-blow, or wedged my chisel into a hairline crack on her shell and smashed or levered her apart, what would I have done next? She would have just been shattered, the parts of herself which fitted together so neatly now suddenly painful, never again as comfortable as they had been. There are enough of us in that condition already, without wanting to create any more.

19

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, hello, Nicola. It’s James. How’re you?’

‘Mmmm, fine. Leo and Eloise are staying with us for the weekend while my parents are away, did Mark tell you?’

‘Oh yes, I think he mentioned it. Does your sister still think she’s got glandular fever?’

Nicola laughed. ‘Either that or dengue fever, she’s not sure. Mark diagnosed her with beriberi. She enjoyed looking up the symptoms to that one.’

‘I bet she did. Is he there by any chance?’

As though she had reminded me of his existence.

‘Just a moment. Mark!’ A pause. ‘It’s James on the phone for you! He’s going to take it in the study. Just a sec.’

And then Mark’s drawled ‘Jaaaames’, and the click, always waiting for the click of her putting down the phone.

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘you rang?’

‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Planning a trip to London next week. Are you free at all? After work? Free to come over to the flat, that is?’

And I said yes. Every time, I said yes. I couldn’t not.

I had told myself repeatedly not to expect that we would continue. It wasn’t just that he had a wife, but also that he had never been one for revisiting his old grounds. Mark had been maudlin, it meant nothing. But Mark came up to town again two weeks later and it happened again. Wine and conversation, nostalgia and regret, intimacy and sex. And then again. And then again.

And I remember thinking one morning, while attempting to bash the rudiments of differential equations into the heads of twenty-six recalcitrant boys, oh, I am having an affair. It was a thought that occurred between one word and the next, making me stumble in my sentence. I would not have thought myself the kind of person capable of having an affair. But life teaches us who we are.

But then, of course, there had to be visits with Nicola. I was spending so much time with Mark that failing to see Nicola would have been an insult. And there was this too: now that I had dealt her this invisible blow, I wanted to see for myself whether she had guessed yet. To see if I could tell from the tiny turns of her head whether she knew that in the privacy of his flat Mark and I had screwed until I had shouted out all the breath in my lungs, until I thought by my trembling legs that I would never stand up again, until I thought, now I must be sated, now I must, and yet my appetite proved otherwise. I sometimes thought it must be obvious from every look between us that all I wanted, every moment I was near him, was to feel his naked skin on mine and to see him hard and willing and ready.

But apparently I was wrong. It wasn’t obvious. Mark always flirted with everyone, of course. So that the first time he slapped my arse as he walked past me from sitting room to kitchen, my stomach turned to meltwater. But Nicola looked on mildly and Jess smiled and I remembered, oh yes, he does this with everyone. And me? Perhaps I had looked at Mark with dog-like yearning for so long that no difference was discernible.

Nicola had become a little tetchy since I last saw her.

‘Oh, my God, Mark,’ she said, when he wanted to show us his collection of remote-controlled aircraft, newly acquired at considerable expense, ‘no one wants to see your toys, all right?’

She was kneeling in the long conservatory, jabbing at the earth around a ficus bush with a trowel.

‘They do,’ said Mark in a whining tone. ‘James wants to see them, don’t you, James?’

It was our second or third visit to Mark and Nicola’s gargantuan farmhouse-villa in Dorset. Mark and I had been together five or six times by then and I was still full of wonder and desire and excitement; every time we met there were new things to try, new explorations to be made. But this was a difficult situation. I couldn’t say, ‘Yes, I want to see your planes.’ I couldn’t say, with Nicola, ‘No, I don’t want to,’ even though it was true: I did not want to see his planes, I did not want to stand next to him in a chilly field, with Nicola and Jess looking on, while each of my joints ached to move closer to him or share some secret word. I found that my knee started to ache with its old sensitivity on these visits; perhaps from the damp, or perhaps from the country walks, or perhaps from the longing that devoured me.

‘I, um, I don’t know much about planes,’ I said.

‘See?’ said Nicola. ‘No one’s interested, Mark.’

‘That’s not what he said,’ said Mark. ‘He said he doesn’t know much about planes, ergo he needs someone to teach him. Like me!’

Nicola stood up and frowned at me, and at Mark. When had she become so constantly angry over trivial things?

‘I know,’ said Jess. ‘Why don’t James and Mark go off to fly the planes and you can show me the garden, Nicola?’