The Lessons (31 page)

And this pulled the last traces of a smile from him and left him grey, like a man who has seen the open grave before him.

He stopped, one shoe on and one shoe off, and said, with an unconvincing flick of the wrist, ‘She won’t care. She won’t … It’s all a long time ago. I’m older now.’

‘So you won’t mind if I tell her. You won’t mind if your family know all about the life you’ve been leading. If Nicola knows, you won’t mind.’ And, remembering something I had heard long ago, I said, ‘You won’t mind if they think your
trouble
has come back?’

He stood up suddenly and took a step back, away from the bed.

‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, James, and fuck your bloody threats. As if you’d even know how to do it … as if you’d even know how to make it convincing.’

‘I would,’ I said. And then, although I knew this was not likely to be true. ‘Your mother would take Nicola’s side, you know, if it came to it. She would, with all the things I could tell her about how you’ve been living. And Daisy would be brought up by Nicola and her family and your mother and they’d shut you out forever.’

Mark began to speak but did not speak. He was shaking now, an erupting storm passing through his body. I could see the anger rising up his throat, clenching his jaw, bunching his muscles at the temples, and for the first time I was a little afraid. I thought, I really don’t know what he could do.

He looked around the room and grabbed a thick glass ashtray from the bookcase. He glanced at it and then, with a fluid strength, hurled it at my head. I dodged to the side. It hit the wall behind me, shattering into several large pieces, and a shower of glass dust fell over my naked shoulders.

‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘Jesus. Jesus, Mark …’

His face was cold and still.

‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘I’m not staying in London. I’m going to Nic’s family to get my daughter and I’m taking her home with me. Put your clothes on and go.’

He picked up his other shoe and fitted it to his foot. He brushed his hands on his jacket and walked out of the flat, slamming the door behind him.

I sat in the bed for another twenty minutes before I levered myself out, avoiding the chunks of broken glass. I found I’d been nicked; once on the shoulder and once on the ear. I reached over for one of the packets of cigarettes he left everywhere in that flat, pulled one out and lit it. It was years since I’d last smoked; I’d never got much beyond schoolboy experimentation. But the sensation was calming. I opened the window and smoked it slowly. It was November, the day was very cold, an early snow predicted. The cool air was peaceful, bringing up delicious goosebumps over my torso.

I thought, he won’t do it. He won’t tell her. Not now. I stared at the pieces of broken glass in the bed.

I thought, I’ll call him tomorrow, after school. I’ll call him then, and he’ll be calmer and we’ll work something out. I even felt a certain wry satisfaction. I felt sure our argument could be papered over. Nicola and Mark wouldn’t last much longer together, that was clear enough. And as long as he didn’t go through with his plan of confession, things would be better for us afterwards. Perhaps he would take a house in London; perhaps he would after all have custody of Daisy. Perhaps he’d live around the corner from Jess and me, his great friends, and we’d always be wandering from one house to the other, which would make everything very easy.

I found a dustpan and brush under the sink in the kitchen and swept up the broken glass. I shook out the sheets and remade the bed. He had been angry, of course he had, but that was only to be expected. He would calm down, I thought. He would see that it made sense.

I was lying to myself. Just as I was lying when I decided he had not meant the ashtray to hit me, that it had been an accident it had come so close. And the question I ask myself now, years later, is: would I really have done it? Really? In the moment, would I have poured venom into the ears of Mark’s family, revenging myself upon him for all the slights and all the bad grace and all his failure to want me as I wanted him? Or would I have continued to hold his secrets for him, waiting for the moment he might turn back and see me carrying his burdens and feel grateful at last?

It doesn’t really matter. He believed that I might speak, and that was enough.

I smoked another cigarette, watching the people walking about the streets. And as the day turned to evening and the cafés and restaurants of Islington began to tinkle and rattle, I let myself out of the flat and went home.

Night, rising from the sea-green depths of a dream I forgot instantly on waking to the insistent sound of a telephone.

Jess, awake fractionally sooner than me, switched on her bedside light. A cloud of yellow and blinking resolved at last into her face looking at mine and the sound of a telephone still. She frowned at me. I attempted to frown back, furrowed with sleep.

She walked into the hall and picked up the telephone.

I heard her say, ‘Hello?’

Then, ‘It’s all right. What is it?’

Then a long pause. Then, ‘Oh, God. No.’

She walked back into the bedroom, holding the phone to her ear. Her expression was unreadable.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ll tell him. Yes, he’s here now. Do you want us to come?’ A pause. ‘All right. We’ll see you tomorrow.’

She sat on the end of our bed and took hold of my hand, turning it over to put her palm against mine.

‘Oh, James,’ she said, and I think I knew then. Nothing other than this would have caused such horror, nothing less would have stretched the skin around her eyes or made her mouth convulse. ‘Oh, James, there’s been an accident.’

22

There was an inquest, of course. There had to be. A slow judicial uncovering of facts, a piecing together of shattered things, laying out the bones of the matter and noting: first this happened, then this, then this. This is how we make sense of the world, by trapping it in words and sentences, by pinning it like a butterfly to a felt backcloth, killing it to keep it still, so we may trace its lines.

So, there was this: the November night was cold and the road was icy. Slides were shown of the ice on the road, the place where the tyres failed in their grip, the long, dark streaks where Mark’s foot had hit the brake but the car had not stopped, and had not stopped, and had not stopped. The depth of the tread had been measured, the length of the skid marks, the distance to the point of impact. The figures were carefully recorded.

And there was Mark’s condition. Not drunk, it was ascertained, not over the limit. His blood and urine had been tested, but nothing of note had been discovered. He was lucky in that, if one can call it luck. If he and I had not argued he might have stayed in London for his usual excursions which would have left their traces. But if we had not argued and he had stayed in London everything might have happened differently. At the least, if we had not argued his mood might have been different. Mr Winters, they said, was in an agitated state. He and his wife had argued, the coroner heard. A separation had been discussed. A highly agitated state. It was recorded.

But was he speeding? No. At the point when the brakes were applied, it could be calculated using various models, the car was travelling at between 40 and 45 miles per hour. Perhaps a little fast for an icy country road late at night, with a child fast asleep, he thought, strapped into her car seat. Perhaps a little fast, but not excessive. One would not criticize him, said the police witness, on that score alone. And we who knew how Mark drove when he was in a highly agitated state, we who had seen him take his eyes from the road … I who had seen the bead of sweat on his upper lip and known that he himself did not understand why he did what he did … We did not speak up, of course we didn’t. It was too late for that, too late for it to do any good. No one could know, now, precisely what had happened despite all tests and calculations. The night was cold. The bend was sharp. The speed was not excessive. These were the preliminary conclusions. Mr Winters, approaching a sharp bend, did not perceive the patches of black ice on the road. The front nearside wheel of his car hit the ice, causing the car to skid. Mr Winters wrenched the wheel, an overcorrection. The car hit a second patch of ice and skidded for several yards before colliding first with a fence and then, careening sideways, a tree at the side of the road. On impact, the car was travelling at approximately 20–25 miles per hour.

And the child. Yes, here we came to it. I heard the sigh in the fingers of the coroner as he turned the page to look once more at the photo-graphic evidence. I did not see the photographs, did not wish to see them. I believe that Franny looked, with Simon. I believe that he wanted to see. Mr Winters, they said, naturally thought the child was asleep in the back seat. He had picked her up from her grandparents’ house – ‘wildly demanded her,’ one testimony reported. They did not think it wise to withhold the child from him although the hour was late and the child already asleep. She could in any case be carried to the car, fastened into her seat and taken to her own bed without waking her.

He would have held her close to him, as he always did. The inquest did not go into this point, but it is clear to me. He would have smelled the milky, honeydew-melon scent of her breath and heard the quiet snuffle of her snore. Daisy, asleep, always had a look of tremendous seriousness; a frown between her closed eyes. He would have held her close to him and kissed the side of her neck and placed her, with such care, sleeping into the car seat, and fastened the buckle at her waist.

On this point, a great deal of time was spent. Who had seen him buckle it? Who had heard the harness snap shut? Had they been certain the click was heard? It was a matter of grave importance, not least for the manufacturers of this brand of child’s car seat, and for the several thousand other parents who had purchased the same brand in the past three years. It was necessary to apportion blame, if blame there were to be apportioned. For when the car was examined it was clear that the buckle was undone. Could she have done this herself? The evidence was inconclusive. It had been known for children to undo their car seats, although a parent carelessly fastening a seat was more common. Mrs Winters had in the past seen the child trying to undo the buckle, little fingers and thumbs pressing down on the central latch, tongue out in concentration, pressing and pulling. Daisy was always trying to free herself from harness. Mark encouraged her. But there was no way, at this stage, to be certain.

The child had been in a deep sleep when she was placed in the car, it was concluded, but the cold might have woken her. Would Mark not have noticed that she had awoken? Would she not have cried out? Would he not have seen her move? Ah, but he was in a highly agitated state. And she, sleepy and confused, might have made a little noise but been drowned out by the roar of the engine through the cold and frosted night. Perhaps Mr Winters had not, in his agitated state, fastened the buckle correctly. Perhaps it had already been open. Or perhaps Daisy had worked her little fingers down under the tight-fitting straps to the buckle, where she had pushed and wiggled until the webbing holding her in place released. It is so hard, sometimes, to tell the difference between the bindings that trap and those which secure; too hard for a child to know.

It was impossible now to ascertain which of these scenarios had occurred. But certain it was that, at the moment of impact, the child was unsecured. At the first impact, she had been thrown forward, upward and to the side, into the window. She did not, as the expert witness averred, ‘exit the vehicle’, but the impact was sufficient to crack the window’s toughened glass. It was then that the most serious injury was sustained: the fracture of the skull, the unstaunchable cerebral haemorrhage. The second impact had thrown her back against the floor of the car, but the damage this had caused was by comparison minor. If the parents might find a modicum of comfort in it, the coroner said, they could be assured that the child had died without regaining consciousness.

The verdict was accidental death. The coroner expressed his sorrow. The grieving parents could not look at one another as they passed from the court into the brittle winter day without.

For several days, it seemed that no one spoke. There was a rushing sound constantly, like the sound of planes taking off, a blanket of noise which made speech intolerable. For several days, there was nothing in the world but the sound of weeping.

But there was madness, too. A hideous, scrabbling, madness which blew in great choking lungfuls through us so that we cried out suddenly, or woke terrified in the night, or looked at ourselves in the mirror and thought, I do not know who that person is, I do not know at all. There was no reasonable response but madness. There was no reason.

Jess developed again the eczema which had not troubled her since childhood. Long raw streaks appeared on her legs and on her back and on her freckled chest, burning weeping flaking patches as if she had been licked by flame. She could not bear to be touched; even the flick of a bedsheet as she turned in the night could make her cry out.

Mark did not attempt to hide from us the fresh scars, red and raging down his arms. He had come to stay with us because Nicola did not, because she could not, because they were not, there were no words between them. Even the language of glances or of touch had gone, even that. And because she blamed him, yes of course that too. There was no evidence of dangerous driving and yet we knew, we all knew, every one of us knew. It might have happened to anyone, the coroner had said, and yet it had happened to Mark. An icy road, an un fastened buckle, a highly agitated state.

And so there was a taking of sides. Simon, of course, was with Nicola. The family wrapped itself tightly, a nexus of guilt and pain. I did not hear their conversations, but I can imagine how they would have spoken between themselves, each one saying to the other, ‘Why didn’t I stop him? Why didn’t I tell you to stop him? Why did we hand over that sleeping bundle, why? What were we thinking?’

Franny attempted, at first, to go between sides. She loved Mark, she did, and hung on his neck and wept with him, and all her sardonic wit was gone and instead she lit cigarette after cigarette for him, holding two between her lips and lighting them both and passing one to him as if she were giving him oxygen or vital medication. But she loved Simon too, and it was hard for her. She grew pinched and drawn as the days went on, harder and with her grief inside her like a stone.