The Lessons (36 page)

‘Sounds nice,’ said Jess, stirring her coffee. ‘Do you travel a lot?’

I remembered the time, about three years earlier, when, after watching a late-night National Geographic programme Mark had developed a burning desire to see Peru. For days he was full of excitement about Machu Picchu and the sites of human sacrifice, talking with glee about the marvellous Incas and the wicked Spanish who had forced them to stop their wholly excellent practices. He booked plane tickets within the week, and paid for hotels and excursions from Lima, but the day before we were due to go to Rome to start the first leg of the journey he changed his mind. Sulking, he said that he’d rather stay home after all, and no persuasion of mine could move him from his bed. When the time came the next day for the planes we were supposed to be on to depart I thought of how I would have behaved if I had paid for the tickets with my own money, if I had had to scrimp and save to afford them, to dream for months of the trip. This is a feature of wealth: by allowing one to do more, it prevents one from doing anything.

‘No,’ I said, ‘we don’t travel a great deal.’

There was a long silence.

Eventually, realizing it was expected, I said, ‘What about you? Do you have news? How are your family? How’s Franny?’

Jess smiled. ‘Hmmm … news.’ She put her hand to her lips; her nails were neatly manicured, with pale pink polish, perfect half-moons of white at the tips of her fingers.

‘You know Simon asked Franny to marry him?’

I shook my head. It was like hearing about events on Mars. I could hardly believe that lives continued in this sensible, joyful fashion.

‘She said no. Well, first she said yes and then she said no, so it was a bit difficult. They got back together after, well, you know –’ she looked down – ‘after Daisy. She said it was too much, too fast, too intense. I understood what she meant, but Simon obviously didn’t take it well. In a way, I can see what he meant too. I mean, they’ve known each other for more than ten years, so it’s hardly
too fast
, is it?’

I shook my head, unsure of how to respond.

‘Anyway, it’s all done now. Franny’s teaching something clever at Harvard: psychology of consumption. Oh,
and
I think she’s a lesbian now. Or bisexual. She’s in a relationship with a neuroscientist woman anyway. Her name’s … ummm … Rachel something. She wrote a very popular book –
How to Work Your Brain
? Something like that.’

‘And Simon?’

She pursed her lips. ‘He’s back to the usual. Working all hours – I think he’s in Rio now. The last time I saw him he brought along a French lawyer called Béatrice – very glamorous, about six feet tall. But I can’t see it lasting really.’

I nodded.

‘Emmanuella’s become rather unexpected. You remember she was seeing that man with fifteen titles and a pedigree back to the thirteenth century?’

‘Mmm-hmmm.’

‘Well,
she
broke it off. No one quite knows what happened, because he was absolutely the best catch her parents could have envisaged. I think they were pretty cross. She went a bit strange, actually – it was a few months after … after you and Mark left the country. She kept sending me bits of cloth blessed by saints, and now she’s gone off to volunteer in Africa. With nuns, if you can believe it, working with AIDS patients.’

I blinked. I tried to imagine glamorous Emmanuella working with the terminally ill in Africa.

‘Oh!’ said Jess suddenly. ‘Do you remember Leo? Simon’s little brother? The one Mark rescued from drowning?’

How could I possibly not remember Leo? He was Mark’s one good deed, his saving grace.

‘Can you believe he’s off to college next year?’

‘God, not Oxford?’

Jess laughed, then stopped and flicked her eyes towards Seth and then back to me again.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not Oxford. Agricultural college. In Wales. He’s turned out rather the healthy outdoors sort.’

‘That’s great,’ I said, and meant it. I found this thought pleasing – of little Leo grown to manhood, healthy and strong.

‘And how,’ said Jess, ‘is Mark? How are you and Mark?’

I looked down at the table, then up at Seth, his smooth face still blandly interested.

‘We’re fine,’ I said brightly. ‘Still the same, just fine. Nothing much to report.’

She looked at me and chewed on her upper lip. The clock in the square tolled out the quarter-hour with sonorous slowness.

‘Seth, darling,’ she said. ‘James and I have a few things to talk through. Could you maybe get me some of those soaps we saw in the little shop by the harbour this morning? I want to give some to Granny.’

Seth gave me a thoughtful look, as if he were deciding precisely how quickly he could knock me cold should it prove necessary.

‘Right-o,’ he said, and leaned over to give her a swift kiss on the mouth. I felt emotions rising in me at this to which I had no right at all. With his water-bottle carrier slung over his shoulder, Seth loped off towards the harbour.

‘Don’t mind Seth,’ she said. ‘He’s only a bit jealous. He doesn’t mean any harm.’

I nodded and made a noncommittal noise.

‘He knows we were together for a long time and he’s worried you might have gone stalker, that’s all.’

Jess poured herself a glass of red wine and held it up to the sun.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘What were you doing climbing that tower today? With your knee? Were you following us?’

‘Yes,’ I said simply. Then, thinking that this needed some explanation: ‘I saw you from a distance. I thought it was you, but I wasn’t sure, so I followed. OK?’

She traced the edge of the ashtray with one fingertip.

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘My turn?’ I said.

‘OK.’

‘Why are you here? Why are you in San Ceterino, really?’

She looked up swiftly and then down again.

‘We’re here on holiday,’ she said.

‘Here? Of all places?’

‘We are,’ she said. ‘We had holiday, we wanted to do something with it. And Italy’s so lovely at this time of year.’

‘And that’s the only reason you’re here?’

She frowned.

‘Well, there’s also –’ she spoke quickly – ‘Nicola’s getting married again. In the autumn, she’s marrying a Yorkshireman, a farmer. We’re all invited to the wedding – well, Franny and Emmanuella and me and Simon of course. And it made me think of you both, and how someone should tell you, and I suppose I could have written but you never answer letters, so Seth and I were planning a holiday and I thought if we came here for a couple of days maybe we’d, you know, bump into each other. Which we did. So …’

She trailed off and went back to playing with the cocktail sticks on her side plate.

I wondered if her answer contained the same measure of truth as mine.

‘And that’s all you wanted to tell me? That Nicola’s getting married?’

‘I thought maybe you’d write to her. I know that Mark wouldn’t. But I thought maybe you could just tell her … well, that’s what I thought, anyway.’

The evening chimed around us. A flock of doves paced the piazza floor, pecking at stones and crumbs. Across the square an accordion player started up a melody with lambent brio. Three children chased over the paving stones.

Jess raised her hand to my face and traced her finger around the outline of the blossoming bruise. The sensation reminded me so strikingly of the first times we had touched in Oxford that it made me hold my breath.

‘James, what’s this?’ she said.

‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘I walked into a door. Stupid of me.’

She looked at me, her eyes very clear and light, and shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not what it is.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Is it the marks of love, James?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is it?’

She pursed her lips and paused, then spoke very softly. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. He’s poison for you, James.’

I looked down at my hands and then out across the square.

‘That wasn’t what you said six years ago.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t. But I think I’ve changed my mind. I think that’s what I came here to tell you. Perhaps I didn’t know it until now.’

I remained silent.

‘And,’ she said, ‘something else as well. I want to say you don’t owe me anything, there’s no debt between us. I knew, or thought I knew, about you and Mark for a long time. Maybe even before it started. It was that last day in Oxford, wasn’t it?’

I nodded, dumbly.

‘I’ve always thought, well, it was a different sort of thing. It wasn’t that you didn’t love me, I knew that you did. But I couldn’t be that for you. And you were so happy,
we
were so happy when it was happening. You were happier than I’d ever known you.’

‘You didn’t mind?’ I was bewildered.

‘I think,’ she said, running her finger around the rim of the ashtray again, ‘I think that I didn’t. I wish it hadn’t been Mark, for your sake. And I wish we could have spoken plainly with each other. But that’s all.’

Jess took a sip of wine. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Seth’s coming.’

I looked up and there he was, the gorilla-man, hulking his way through the crowd. He was still a little way off. We had time for a few more sentences before he arrived.

I thought, I could say now what I thought while I was following her. I could say, ‘I saw you from a distance and knew that you could be the love of my life.’ I could say, ‘Take me back. You are all I desire.’ I could say, ‘I love you. And I know you love me.’

Instead, I said, ‘Jess, do you remember the first violin from your orchestra in Oxford? Rudolph something?’

She frowned. ‘Randolph,’ she said, ‘Randolph Black. Yes, why?’

‘Did you sleep with him, in Michaelmas term of our third year?’

Seth was approaching rapidly across the square, smiling.

Jess remained silent.

‘Did you?’

She looked at me and shook her head.

‘Really?’

‘James,’ she said, ‘after all this, why would I lie to you?’

26

Jess and Seth left me the details of their itinerary, where I could find them if I wanted to find them. She did not specify why I might want to find them again. She copied the names of hotels and phone numbers and dates on to a square of card and pressed it into my hand. As she did so she said, ‘Remember.’ Just that.

In my room at the hotel, I stripped naked and stood in front of the mirror. I observed myself, turning one way and the other. That, I thought, is me. There, that man is me. I could not quite make the connection. That man, I thought more slowly, that man with the pale skin and the gammy knee and the decent arse and the dark arrow of hair pointing towards the genitals. That is me. I lifted my arm and let it flop down, watching how it was me. That face, long, with a sorrowful arrangement of nose and eyes, more like my father with every passing year. That face is me.

I heard once that a puppy raised among kittens will grow up thinking it is a cat, will behave like a cat, will move like a cat, will not recognize dogs as its own kind. I thought of the society in which I’d spent the past fourteen years of my life: the rich and the glamorous, the successful, the driven, the talented. Mark and Emmanuella, Franny, Simon, Jess.

But that man there in the mirror, that man is me. I have done less with these past years than Anne with her edible oils or Paul with his position as a Junior Minister. Even those accomplishments, which once struck me as so crass, now seemed solid to me. More solid than myself, a man made of smoke. They would be something to hold up against my body and say this too is who I am. I had never desired accomplishments, never longed to be a doer of great feats. But, it occurred to me, I should have tried to desire
something
. Or can one try to desire at all?

What is it that one learns from life? I had always supposed that I would accumulate some wisdom as my life progressed. That, as in my progress through Oxford, some knowledge would inevitably adhere to me. I suppose I hoped that love would teach me.

But the very question is redundant. It is ridiculous to think we can learn anything from so arbitrary an experience as life. It forms no kind of curriculum and its gifts and punishments are bestowed too arbitrarily to constitute a mark scheme. There is only one subject on which the lessons are in any way informative.

That man in the mirror is me, I thought. For good or ill, that’s me.

After two nights and three days in the hotel, my bruises had faded from livid purple and red to yellows, greens and browns. I kept my sunglasses on even in the hotel lobby. In the privacy of my own room I examined the bruises in the mirror.

And on the third day I returned to the villa above the city. Mark was waiting for me by the swimming pool. Ricardo, a boy who had been one of Mark’s favourites but, at twenty-four, had grown too old, was sitting on the stone wall by the patio, flipping through a magazine. Seeing it was me, Mark leapt to his feet, smiled almost shyly, turned to Ricardo and said, in Italian, ‘Get out of here.’

Ricardo grunted, looked between me and Mark, then jumped off the wall and walked sullenly back towards the house.

Mark walked to me slowly, smiling, holding his arms wide in a gesture of welcome, or surrender.

‘I’m so glad you came back,’ he said softly.

He pulled me close to him, lifted off my sunglasses and examined the side of my face, my eye, my nose. He breathed out a heavy sorrowful sigh.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered into my neck. ‘I’m so so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it, you know I didn’t mean it. You know how I am.’

I nodded and wrapped my arms around him. I thought about how-he-is. Was that an explanation for anything? I had once thought that I could come to some deeper understanding.

He lifted his face contritely for a kiss and I bent to kiss him, tasting again the taste of Mark: cigarettes and mint chewing gum and black-currant wine gums.

‘Listen,’ he said after a while, ‘I’ve been thinking, we should get away from here. I hate this place. It’s horrible, being cooped up here day after day. What do you think about moving to Rome for a few months? Or out of Italy? How about autumn in New York?’