The Lessons (4 page)

I wanted … I wanted … But I did not know what to want. I wanted to be a child again, for my own desires to be unimportant, to be taken up into greater arms than mine and not need to think. Was it then that the music struck up? Can it really have been just then? Or was it that I only noticed it then? Notes splashed on my inner ear, bursting in fat droplets. And I noticed that the chapel lights were on. A service was in progress, some part of Advent. Notes rising and falling and a choir singing and all the memory of Christmas carol services leapt upon my heart. I stood up and limped into the chapel.

The choir sang ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. I took an empty seat at the end of one of the rows and listened with the kind of intensity I had never before known for music. The two simple lines of melody conversed with each other, a simplicity of constant joy beneath the rising and falling of speech. Each note, each leaping phrase, was addressed to me only – a message of hope, an acknowledgement of despair. It was a pulse, soft and sustained; it was a word of consolation for the echoes of existence. It was the beauty that might contain truth.

And then it was over, and there was silence and a shuffling of prayer books and a muttering as a new reader walked to the lectern, ready to deliver one of the Advent lessons. I found I could not bear this. The music might have contained truth, but these lessons never would, for me, and so it was all revealed a lie. And my knee hurt and my fear rose, and nothing had been resolved.

‘Hello,’ whispered a woman’s voice next to me.

I looked, and saw that I had sat down next to that girl, the friend of Emmanuella’s, the girl who seemed always to be wearing a red sweater. Her eyes were clear blue-grey, and she looked at me directly.

This, this was the chance I’d waited for. Here, if I said the right things, I could enfold her into my life, and wrap myself in hers, in the Oxford life I had somehow missed. Fear and panic engulfed me again, that I would not find those right words. Before I could reply, she spoke again.

‘I’ve seen you. In the library. You’re one of Ivar’s friends, aren’t you? Aren’t you James? I’m Jess.’

And, to my own surprise and horror, I began to cry.

3

First year, December, tenth week of term

The service was soon over, with a collective mutter and closing of prayer books. The tears that rolled silently down my cheeks had ceased, for the moment, and I scrubbed at my face with my sweater sleeve. Jess, looking at me kindly, said, ‘Hey, do you want to come back to my room? For a cup of tea?’ and I knew it was pity, though the Kendall in me winked and nudged me in the ribs. I felt raw from the bone-heart to the skin. I had not known I was lonely; it had been so all-engulfing as to be invisible.

Jess’s room was smaller than mine but warmer. The quality of the light was different, yellow not blue. A half-full suitcase was on her floor, her wardrobe open for the packing. She busied herself boiling the kettle, finding tea bags, running to the communal fridge in the hall for milk. I sat on her desk chair, sniffed and wept some more and hated myself and apologized and she said, ‘Don’t apologize,’ and I apologized again.

I said, ‘I don’t usually do this, I never, never, I …’

She placed a warm mug into my hands and said, ‘It’s fine. Tell me what’s up.’

And, in gulps and gasps, I told her.

There was a relief in it, pouring out everything, from the shame of the tutorial to the humiliation of Anne’s instructions, from Kendall’s tea-breath to the girl I had seen but could not possess. I did not tell Jess who that unpossessable girl was, this was my one privacy, a tinfoil shield over the centre of my heart. But Jess smiled when I mentioned her and I knew that she had guessed.

I did not know I had so much to say, so many words stored up. As I spoke, she folded her clothes and slowly filled her suitcase. Nothing I said seemed to shock her. There was a pleasing precision to her movements. When she sat, she crossed one ankle over the other, or tucked one leg under her. When she walked, it was concise and purposeful. I liked this. I liked watching her move.

At one point she said, ‘I have a friend who says that Oxford is hell. Perfect hell without redemption. But the people make it heaven.’ She tipped her head to one side as if easing stiff muscles in her neck.

I looked around her room. It did not seem to me the room of a person whose experience of Oxford was hell. She had a teapot decorated with multicoloured polka dots, pictures of her friends and postcards were stuck in the frame of the mirror, Christmas cards were arrayed on her bookshelves, a violin case sat on a chair by her music stand, there were neatly labelled lever-arch files stacked by her desk and various fliers for concerts and theatre productions pinned to the board. It looked to me to be a full life, and an ordered one, a purposeful one. An Oxford life, as I had imagined it.

She began to take the books from the shelves.

‘I think I’ll leave the stuff on the walls till last. It’s horrible seeing naked walls, isn’t it?’

I thought of my own bare room, the tangle of unwashed laundry, the half-pint of soured milk by the bedside, the work which chattered and muttered at me from the desk.

She said, ‘We all have blue days. I have them too.’

I imagined her blue days. Days when she might need to talk to a friend, or read a novel, or treat herself to a chocolate. Blue, I wanted to say, is a different colour to black. But already I was a little afraid of frightening her off.

She knelt on the ground and leaned forward, rolling a poster into a tight tube. Her jumper rode up, exposing a slice of freckled back. I could not help staring. They were real, those freckles. This girl seemed more real to me than anything in the world. More real than my terror, more real than my ambition, more real than my fantasies of Emmanuella. I remembered how it felt to want something real. Something that might be within my grasp.

At 1 a.m. her packing was done. Files were tidily stacked in plastic bags, the wardrobe was empty, the bookcases cleared. Only her bedclothes and toothbrush remained.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for keeping me company. I’m really grateful, you know! I only stayed up for the Christmas concert; everyone else went home yesterday.’

I looked at her, aware I should say something, unable to find anything more to say.

‘Still, time for bed now.’

I nodded and went to scurry away, and she smiled and said, ‘Come back here a moment.’

And I thought, this is fast, too fast, but my heart was thumping and I thought, yes, just take me with you wherever you are going, I don’t need my life any more, I will take yours. I bent towards her, expecting an embrace, uncertain what might happen next, waiting for her lead. She kissed me chastely on the cheek.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘are you busy over the break? After Christmas, I mean?’

‘No.’ One or two friends from school had written to me, hoping to meet up. I hoped fervently never to see any of them again.

‘Only a few of us … well, one or two of us, well. It’s nothing exciting, we’re just getting together in someone’s house, in Oxford. And I thought you might like to. Well.’

Some look must have passed over my face. A shadow of something uncontrollable.

‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing strenuous, not with your –’ She motioned to my knee but then grimaced. ‘Now I’ve said the wrong thing.’

‘No, no, it’s not. Not at all. I’m free, I’d love to.’

‘Oh
good
.’ She grinned again. ‘Emmanuella said she thought you were nice and look how …’

‘Oh.’ I gulped and swallowed and said, ‘Is Emmanuella coming too?’

‘Sadly not.’ Jess smiled. ‘She’s in Spain for the break.’

‘And … Guntersen?’

Jess laughed.

‘God, no. Mark can’t stand him. To be honest –’ Jess lowered her voice – ‘I think Emmanuella’s starting to be of the same opinion. Sorry, I know he’s your friend, but –’

‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘he’s not my friend.’

‘Oh.’ A pause, and then, ‘So there’s nothing to worry about.’

We exchanged home addresses and phone numbers before we parted, written in blue ballpoint on torn-off corners of paper from her notebook. I held hers in my hand and stared at it, admiring the curl of her rounded letters: the fat s, the jaunty j. She smiled and yawned and stretched.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk next week.’

I stood dazed at the top of her staircase. The stairs swam before my vision, my eyes defocusing uncontrollably. I prepared to wince my way down the staircase, sighed and gasped and waited for redemption and realized it had already come to pass.

In the morning, my pain came in dull twinges, like a blurred telegraph signal nagging and then falling silent and nagging again. I woke early and sat in bed, with the blankets tented over my one good knee, the other a thickened mound by its side, as the dawn slowly revealed the room. At 8 a.m., without thinking too hard or for too long, I limped down the staircase and into Chapel Quad. The quad was deserted, the flagstones mossed up with frost. I placed the foot of my crutch with care, glad I had brought it, and thought again, with an echoing flutter in the centre of my being, that I would always be afraid of falling now.

It was early to call but my parents are early risers.

‘It’s time to come home,’ I said. ‘Can you pick me up tomorrow? Or Wednesday?’

‘Oh!’ said my mother, a half-mocking half-laugh behind her words, ‘you’re not staying there for Christmas after all?’

I said nothing.

‘Have you finished your work?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I’m finished.’

I wondered and worried over when might be the right moment to call her. Not too soon, for fear of being too demanding. But not too late, for fear of seeming uninterested. But she telephoned me first. It was Boxing Day and there had been dinner the day before with Anne and Paul and talk of Major and Heseltine and the threat from the Liberal Democrats. Anne had asked searchingly about my work, the societies I had joined, and seemed only partially mollified by my mother’s explanation about my knee.

‘Next term,’ she said. ‘Hilary term is when it all kicks off. You have to be ready.’

Later that evening, the telephone rang.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘it’s Jess. Do you remember me?’

‘Yes, of course I …’

There was laughter in the background, a man’s voice.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’m driving to Oxford the day after tomorrow, almost past you. It’d be no trouble. Do you want to be rescued?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered into the telephone. ‘Yes, I do.’

She picked me up in an elderly estate car. My parents, grateful to see me with a friend, a girl, had been over-enthusiastic, winking and smiling. We bundled my bag into the car and left as soon as we could.

‘I’m sorry about them,’ I said.

‘If we’re going to get on,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to stop apologizing.’

‘Oh, I –’

‘Don’t do it.’ She was smiling, still looking at the road. Her lips were pressed together hard and I could see a dimple in her left cheek.

‘I … what?’

‘Don’t apologize for apologizing.’

‘I … um …’

‘What?’

I furrowed my brow. The conversation seemed to have escaped from me rather more quickly than I’d hoped.

‘I’m just, well. I don’t know what to say now.’

She grinned. We were nearing a red traffic light. As the car came to a halt she leaned towards me and kissed my right cheek, then turned back to her driving.

‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you tell me how your Christmas was? How were the dreaded Anne and the leech-like Paul? Did you get any good presents? Any good arguments?’

And so I did.

I noticed something on that drive that continued to be true for as long as I knew Jess. Her presence calmed me, like a soothing hand in the centre of my chest bringing quiet to every muscle fibre and threaded sinew. Infatuation cannot last, and even love may be less certain than I’d once hoped, but this essential quiet, the stillness she brought to me, that lasted. Mark said to me once, ‘She’s like God to you: she inexplicably calms inexplicable fears.’ And in this, as in so much, he is irritatingly right.

We arrived in Oxford at 3 p.m., when the sun was low on the horizon. We drove north, through the city centre and up into Jericho, a maze-like Oxford district, its tangled streets lined with Victorian labourers’ cottages. It had been a cold, bright day but now the clouds had begun to gather and a few spots of rain burst on the windscreen.

‘Is it Mark’s house we’re going to?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Jess, ‘it’s his house. He’s … yes.’

‘Is he a second year? Living out?’

‘No, he’s a first year like us but he’s …’ She breathed out a long breath. ‘Well, he’s rich. You’ll see. He’s good fun though. A bit … unexpected at times, that’s all.’

We turned a corner on to another terraced Jericho street and saw that it was a dead end. The end of the street was a high wall.

‘Is it one of these terraced houses?’ I said.

She smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not Mark.’

We parked the car and walked to the end of the road. It was only as I levered myself from the car and felt a sudden thrust of pain in my knee that I realized I had forgotten about it all this time. I eyed my stick, half-hidden by my suitcase on the back seat of the car, but could not bear to take it with me. I wanted so much to appear normal to this girl. Ahead, Jess was already striding towards a battered green door set into the dead-end wall at the end of the road. The wall was high, almost as high as the houses, and the top was covered with rusty barbed wire. Jess pulled a key out of her pocket, raised her eyebrows, fitted the key into the lock in the green door and turned. She opened the door and we walked through.

*

Beyond was a garden, or what might once have been a garden.

It was large and dark and dense. So large, in fact, that it was impossible to gain any sense of its size from where we stood. Trees, perhaps once planted in ornamental fans, had broken through the rusted metal staples holding them back and grown together to form a tight mass of branches. To our left and right, we could make out the traces of paved paths heading through the undergrowth, but these were too densely thicketed to admit us.