The Lessons (28 page)

And Nicola, red-faced and snorting slightly, let us go.

In the field, damp creeping in through my trainers, I stood with Mark in the concealment of a clump of trees and kissed and groped and wished for more until Mark, perhaps feeling some sudden sense of propriety, broke away.

‘Come on,’ he said, panting, ‘enough of this. Let me do a loop the loop for you.’

On the next visit she became irrationally angry again. It was at dinner on our first night. She was handing plates around and when she came to me she stopped, hand half-outstretched, as though her motor had wound down.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, ‘but seeing you makes me angry, James.’

And I thought, God, not now, not yet, for perhaps some part of my brain had already begun to accept that this conversation must happen one day.

‘I know it’s not really your fault. I know what he’s like.’ She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, an angry agitated gesture. ‘James, I just –’ and she smiled, as though she knew she was being foolish – ‘all it is is that I think you’re getting what belongs to me. And it makes me angry, OK? That’s all.’

I swallowed, a hard lump building in my throat. I thought, God, am I going to cry? I said, ‘Well, I …’

And Jess stopped me, with a hand over my hand, and said, ‘James, let her finish. Go on, Nicola, why don’t you tell us what’s troubling you?’

And I wondered for a moment if the two of them had planned this together. Could it be, could it possibly be that Jess knew?

Nicola pouted and sat down. ‘All the bloody trips to London,’ she said, ‘the two of you together. It’s –’ her voice became very small and hushed – ‘I want to come too, sometimes. I just wish you’d take me too, Mark.’

‘Oh!’ said Mark.

The world started to move again. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. My pulse crashed in my ears.

‘I know it’s silly,’ she said, staring at her plate, ‘but I just feel so left out, down here by myself while you’re having fun in town.’

Mark smiled, and if he was a little pale Nicola did not seem to notice. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

So our simple pattern became a little more complex. Sometimes Mark would come to town alone, and then I would meet him at his flat. Sometimes he and Nicola would come together, and then he would book a hotel room nearby, somewhere small and discreet. Often, when I arrived at these rendezvous, he was late and I would have to wait for him, flipping through a newspaper, certain that the staff knew exactly what I was here for.

Once, as I sat waiting in the lobby, I thought I saw someone I knew – one of Jess’s friends from the orchestra. Had he looked my way? Had he seen me? Was he about to come over and say hello? Would Mark arrive then, at that moment? And would this orchestra friend then speak idly to Jess and would Jess then say, ‘Darling, why were you meeting Mark in the Patrum Hotel?’ I stood up sharply and walked to the bathroom where I was out of sight. I waited there, trembling, for almost half an hour and when I emerged Mark was waiting at my table, smoking a cigarette, wanting to know if I’d got the runs. ‘If so,’ he said, ‘you should really
go home
. You know?’

On another occasion, Mark had told me to meet him at the flat on a particular afternoon. It was almost five weeks since I’d last seen him and I waited with a sense of mounting excitement. When he arrived though, breezing through the door with an armful of glossy paper carrier bags, Nicola was with him. Her hair was windswept, her cheeks red. She beamed when she saw me.

‘It doesn’t bother you, does it, James?’ She had that earnestness of youth. ‘I wanted to tell you I was coming, but Mark said you liked being surprised.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s a lovely surprise.’

As she bent down to kiss my cheek, I looked at Mark. He opened his eyes very wide and smiled a close-mouthed smile as if to say, ‘Who, me?’

We managed to have sex on that visit, a breathless few minutes when Nicola, bemoaning the lack of dogs in the city, went for an afternoon walk. We barely had time to smooth our clothes down before she returned.

Once or twice Nicola asked me, in a half-joking voice, illuminating her interest by pretence of non-interest, what I thought Mark
did
in London.

‘Not when he’s with you, obviously.’

This was the visit when she had surprised me with her presence. It was a little after her walk and Mark had left on some unexplained errand.

She lit another cigarette – I couldn’t remember her smoking before Mark. She was so young, and this thought did give me pause. So young, and trying to pretend to be older. Perhaps that was part of Mark’s attraction to her: to feel herself an adult, in the company of adults. But she was still so young, and trusting like a child. She trusted me to tell her the truth. I felt ashamed that I would not.

‘I don’t mean you,’ she continued, ‘I know you’re old friends. But what do you think he does when he goes off by himself?’ She tried laughing. ‘He’s like
oooooh
–’ she waved her hands in the air – ‘big mystery, you know? Like he’s a spy or something.’

The truth was, I had wondered this myself. I tormented myself with the possibility, the probability that he was with other men. I had no right to feel angry. Nicola had far more right than I and she suspected nothing, it seemed. But late at night, curled in bed around Jess’s soft-breathing body, I would find myself imagining over and over again scenes of Mark in a bar, a club, an alley, doing with another man what he did with me but better, of course, more fiercely, with more glory.

It lasted about a year, this interlude. A little more. A year and three or four months before things began to slip, as things do. It was spring, the sky a rich blue. I arrived early at the hotel and flipped through the newspaper, but my mind snagged on an anecdote I’d heard that morning in the staffroom. It was nothing: one of the boys, a lesson, an amusing gaffe, but I thought it might make Mark laugh. I ran over the story several times in my mind, noting the points where I should pause in telling it, where I might emphasize a word and where to trim it slightly to improve its style. Mark could make me laugh easily with his blend of bawdy and archness. I had to work harder.

He arrived late and in high spirits, dancing from foot to foot. Before I could stand up he swiftly looked around the almost-empty lobby and dipped down to kiss me on the mouth. This was not a thing we did in public, not so incautiously. He hauled on my arm.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

I gathered up my newspaper, my backpack full of exercise books. Some of his excitement had caught me too and as we made for the lifts I wished I could break into a run, or jump. His jeans were tight, outlining his bottom. I longed, as ever, to be touching him. As the doors closed in the little wood-panelled cabin he grabbed my belt, pulled me towards him and kissed me hard, his hands reaching around my back and under my shirt.

I pushed him away, frightened that the lift doors might open again or, irrationally, that we had failed to observe someone else standing in the tiny space with us. Mark pouted. He knew behaving like this in public frightened me.

‘What’s this about, Mark?’

He slouched back against the wood panels.

‘Maybe I’m not going to tell you now.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, all
right
then. But not till we get to the room. Don’t want to do anything in public we shouldn’t, do we, James?’

By the time we reached the room, though, he was bouncing again. He placed me in a chair, bent across me, kissed me and then stood up again, drawing breath for his announcement. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. Perhaps his mother was divorcing again; Mark didn’t like her new husband much. Or perhaps Nicola was going away for a while and we could spend more time together.

He stretched out his arms, the right directly above the left, both clutched into fists, as if he were reading a proclamation. He made a noise like a trumpet, then grinned at me, threw away the proclamation and said, ‘Nicola’s pregnant.’

He stuck his hands in his pockets, bit his lower lip.

‘What?’

‘Nicola,’ he said, ‘is expecting a baby.’

I didn’t understand at first. I had assumed, but had not realized that I’d assumed, that they didn’t sleep together any more, or at least that they used contraception.

‘Is it, I mean, do you want it?’

Mark looked at me. And I understood. I could not fathom how it had taken me so long.

In my dreams, this is where it happens. It is here, the fulcrum of my life. When I dream, or daydream, this is where I exert a gentle pressure and move the world. Sometimes, I am the noble one. I say, ‘But Mark, we can’t carry on
now
. Not now you’re going to be a father. It wouldn’t be right.’ I can’t convince myself of that though.

More often I imagine it the other way. I imagine Mark teasing me. That is easier to bring to mind. He says, ‘Well, of course, you know what
this
means, James.’ I shake my head. He says, ‘We can’t very well carry on sleeping together,
can we
? Not now I’m going to be a father.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘It wouldn’t be right, would it? Would it, James?’ I think he’s mocking me, making fun of some imagined James with moral convictions and high ideals. But he’s serious. ‘Come now, James,’ he says. ‘You must have realized I wouldn’t want to carry on like this forever. It’s been fun, but now it’s over.’ I lunge for him and he dances out of reach. He leaves the room and I remain.

But it did not happen this way.

Instead, we made love and Mark was so filled with delight that it seeped through his skin and into my body, and when I held him he was radiating warmth like a star. And when he came, he was shouting and panting and telling me in my ear that I was the best, the most wonderful, the sexiest, the most glorious, that I was Christmas and the Fourth of July, and St Patrick’s Day and, yes, the Feast of the Holy Virgin all in one, and I saw that, yes, yes, this was a holiday, a celebration of life, and all things that celebrate life should be done upon it.

And later, when we lay in bed with his arm thrown across me, it still seemed that way, a day of rejoicing and celebration.

That evening, after Mark was gone, after Jess was asleep, I remained awake, staring at the ceiling of our bedroom. I found a thought coiled inside me, kept at bay by the hum of daily life but now stronger and louder. I shied away from it even as I recognized it as a true wish, a heart’s cry. Can I confess it now? I have never whispered it to Mark, tried never even to think it in his presence. I could never tell him. It is my own particular evil. It is this. I wished for his child to die. Then, before the child was born, when it was only a mixture of blood and water, I wished it dead, flushed, gone.

I think of this sometimes, on the worst days here in San Ceterino, when I wonder why I ever came, or what keeps me here. When I clean up his mess or make his telephone calls or comfort his weeping, I remind myself that I wished his child gone because I saw that our lives could not continue as they had done. I wished it gone so that I could keep him near me. Because of wanting, because of the amount I wanted him, I could not see anyone else.

20

Once, about a year ago, I came upon a picture of Nicola and Daisy unexpectedly. I had been searching through the drawer next to Mark’s bed – he was raving by the pool in the moonlight. I wanted to know what he’d taken. I looked in the vitamin-pill bottles, ran my fingertips along the seam of the drawer lining feeling for loose places, flipped open his sunglasses case and there they were. Nicola and Daisy in the sun smiling. The photograph was creased, carefully fitted to the curve of the case lid. Nicola was wearing a blue and white patterned dress, with dangling earrings, three slim squares of porcelain held together by silver rings. She was holding Daisy – who looked to be about eighteen months old in the picture – on her right hip. Daisy’s hair was very blonde. In the photograph you could see the sun shining on it. She was reaching out to grab one of Nicola’s earrings, and Nicola had caught her arm at an awkward angle to stop her. Nicola was smiling into Daisy’s face. Daisy’s mouth was set in a determined line, her eyes focused on the earring, oblivious of photographer and surroundings.

This photograph stopped me. In the courtyard, Mark was still shouting at the moon and I thought, I could take this out now, show it to him and it would stop him too. I sat on the corner of his bed and looked at the photograph, feeling as though I could walk straight through it and out into the sunny day, where Nicola was holding Daisy on her hip and her earrings were moving in the sunlight. I wanted to do that. I knew just where this photograph was taken. On Broad Street, by the Sheldonian Theatre. Just out of sight to the left was Blackwell’s, then the White Horse, then Trinity College. I could almost hear the sounds of the street – there would be music playing out of some open window, and the air would be a little too thick with exhaust fumes. It was Oxford, on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the start of May. It was the day we graduated.

Oxford, which likes to do things differently, dissociates graduation from the end of the degree course. It’s possible to graduate only a few months after finishing a degree but most people do what we did – wait four years and then take both the BA and the honorary MA at the same time. The MA is another piece of antiquity, lovingly carried in cupped hands into the modern day. We didn’t have to do any extra work for it, or take another exam. Seven years after joining the university, provided we passed our finals and survived that long, the degree of Master of Arts was awarded us.

So, for a day, we took our place in the Oxford clockwork mechanism again. There was a great business of putting on robes, of learning the correct Latin words and gestures for the occasion. There was something comforting about it. After so long away, we returned and Oxford still had a role for us. People pass from school to school, from job to job, and though a great fuss is made when we leave – parties, cakes, gifts and farewells – a year later we might never have been there. No record is kept. There would be no special welcome if we returned to our old job four or five years after we left. But Oxford, whose speciality is remembrance, remembers. After BA there is MA, and after MA there are gaudies, decade after decade. And at the end of our days, if we have made our college proud, there will be an obituary, sent in the
College Record
to every eager first year, saying, until the end, this one belonged to us.