The Lessons

  ‘How long do you think this has been going on with her?’ said Jess.

  I started, then shrugged.

  ‘Don’t know. I had no idea. Didn’t she mention anything to you?’

  Jess shook her head.

  ‘Not a word. I suppose she was embarrassed.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said.

  ‘Poor Fran,’ said Jess. ‘What a painful person Mark must be to love.’

  16

  I picked the receiver up. I put it down again. I sat down. I stood up. I breathed deeply. I rehearsed the different ways of saying, ‘Hi, it’s James.’ I picked the receiver up. I dialled the number. In the heartbeat before it began to ring, I put it down again. I drummed my fingers on the table. I looked at the clock: 6 p.m. An hour or so before Jess would be home. I poured a whisky. I took a gulp. I drank too quickly, choked and spluttered. I drank more slowly. After twenty minutes a slight mellowness began to prickle me. Now, I thought, now. I picked up the receiver. I dialled the number. I listened to it ring and to the click of the receiver on the other end being picked up and to Mark – oh God, Mark – saying, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘it’s James.’

  ‘Hi, James!’ he said, and there was a smile in his voice. ‘How the fuck are you?’

  I resisted the urge to slam the phone down.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’m fine. Listen. Do you want to meet up? Have a beer? Something? Would be good to talk.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ he said, ‘that’d be great. This evening?’

  And my pulse pounded and throbbed in my throat, because that wasn’t in my plan.

  ‘Um,’ I said, ‘not tonight.’

  ‘You free tomorrow? I’m all time, you know. Ain’t got nothing but time, baby.’

  Jesus.

  ‘Um. Yeah. OK. Tomorrow afternoon? I finish school at …’ I tried to calculate: how long, how short, how much time did I need to prepare for it? ‘I could be in Islington at 5 p.m. That’s where you are, right, Islington?’

  ‘Your spies are everywhere, Mr Stieff.’

  I said nothing. My heart was crashing in my chest.

  ‘But yeah,’ he said, ‘that’d be fine. Wanna come to the flat?’

  ‘No,’ I said, a little too quickly. ‘That is, nah, let’s go for a beer.’

  He named a pub off Upper Street. ‘At 5 tomorrow. Cool. Looking forward to it, mate.’

  And it was done. The adrenalin coursing through my system left me shaking when I put the phone down.

  He was waiting for me when I arrived. It had been raining and his hair was damp, his fringe plastered to his forehead. He didn’t see me at first and I had a few seconds to look him over before he noticed my presence. He looked older. Partly it was his clothing. A camel-coloured coat, an indigo suit with winkle-picker boots and a white shirt. Not a serious suit, but I’d never seen him wear a suit at all before. There was a new stillness to his body. I hadn’t realized until then that, in the past, he’d always been a little jittery. Playing with matchbooks and cigarettes, or jiggling one knee. Now he was still.

  He looked up and a smile, uncalculated and uncomplicated, broke over his face.

  ‘James!’ he said. ‘Brilliant!’

  He stood up and reached out to hug me, but I stepped awkwardly to the side, my hands up. He looked puzzled, but said again, ‘Brilliant!’ and we sat down. I was silent for too long. I had various things in my mind to say, had stored them up, but none of them were opening lines, and none of them seemed promising here, on a Wednesday afternoon in a half-empty gastropub. They were, I realized, things that were more suitable for shouting, in a kitchen in Oxford, two years earlier.

  After a long moment, Mark drew in breath, exhaled – and I remembered his breath hot on my neck, I couldn’t help myself, and I thought, oh God, is this madness? – and he said, ‘So. Right. What are you drinking?’

  Mark went to the bar, giving me time to think, to settle, to stop my leg from twitching, to place my hand on my knee and remind myself that nothing was going to happen here. And when we were sitting back in the armchairs with our beers he said, ‘Mate, how the fuck have you been? I’m a bloody idiot not to have been in touch sooner. How is everything? How’s Jess?’

  I told him about my work at the school. I described Jess’s burgeoning career, her concerts, her friends, her small reviews in the papers. I told him the amusing stories from her tour. I explained that she was much in demand. He nodded and looked interested, normal. He was sane. Suddenly, startlingly sane. Was this Nicola? Had she taken all the madness from him?

  Mark said, ‘Are you and Jess planning to get married?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t believe in it.’

  Mark looked at me. He raised his eyebrows and I noticed that, when he did so, fine lines became visible across his forehead. He took another swallow of beer.

  ‘I suppose you think that I’m doing something very stupid indeed.’

  I realized that, because I had been unable to do so, he had brought the conversation around to the point.

  He took a swig and continued, ‘Franny came to see me over the weekend, you know. Utterly lashed. Do you think she’s turning into a drunk? Anyway. Yes. She accused me of terrible things, leading Nicola on, lying to her family, taking advantage of Simon. And Manny called me yesterday, wanted to know if it’s all a joke. So I hope you’re not here to give me the same bloody speech, James, because I’m not interested in hearing it again.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’ And it was true; I wasn’t.

  He frowned at me, then broke into a grin.

  ‘Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t. You can understand it, can’t you? It’s like you and Jess. I do love her.’

  I stared at him. He and Nicola were like me and Jess? Was it an accusation or an attempt at comfort?

  ‘I love the whole family … even Simon, though he’s not being especially pleasant to me right now. And Nicola’s so perfect, you see, so simple and sane. Just, normal. Sweet and loving and normal. She’s exactly what I need, James. And of course my mother and Father Hugh are delighted. An end to all the old trouble at last.’

  A spurt of hot madness erupted in my head. I wanted to throw the glasses to the floor, to shout and overturn tables, as I should have done two years earlier. None of this was what I’d expected. Not this sanity, not this calmness, not this normality. The idea that Mark and I should be talking like this, when I knew the truth of him, when I still thought of him and the memory of his fingers and his palm could still glow hot on my flesh.

  ‘But Mark, you’re gay. Aren’t you? I mean, aren’t you? Really? You’re really gay and being with Nicola … aren’t you going to … You’re just going to end up hurting her.’

  Mark sat back in his chair with a huff, folded his arms across his chest, looked at me for a few moments.

  ‘But you understand this, don’t you? What are any of us really, James? What is really? Why do we have to decide this when we’re sixteen and then stick with it forever? Why can’t it be like food? When I was a kid I liked strawberry milkshakes but now I don’t. I like dark chocolate instead. Have I perverted my natural desire for strawberry milkshakes into an unnatural desire for dark chocolate? Or was my desire for milkshakes wrong and now I’ve come to my senses? No. People change. Our tastes develop. I used to like sleeping with boys and now I like sleeping with Nicola. My tastes have changed, that’s all. I mean, you must know. It’s the same with you.’

  I stared at him.

  I said slowly, ‘It’s the same with me. Yes.’ And for the first time I thought this might be the truth.

  There were words I’d come here to say. They began with ‘Mark, what happened between us …’ and went on I knew not where. A declaration? A rejection? I had hoped that he would at least provide an answer for me. To explain what had happened between us, to explain myself to me.

  I had been stupid, had put too much weight on something that would carry no weight at all. For him, it had bee
n a silly game. He had, as he said, simply wanted to know; and he had known and that was the end of that. And what had he known? That for one moment, one late-night last-day-of-Oxford insanity, I had wanted him. It meant nothing more than that. I felt suddenly, joyfully, relieved. Perhaps I need never think of any of it again.

  It was the past; a dream. Here we were, in the present, two happily partnered men, old friends from university, catching up on news. It was as wholesome as Nicola’s family picnics, as simple as Enid Blyton, as natural as a walk in the country.

  After a few moments, Mark said, ‘Come on, mate. My flat’s only ten minutes away. Let me show you it.’

  He edged his hand along the tabletop and nudged my knuckles with his. It was the first time he had touched me in two years.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  Even if he hadn’t told me so already, I would have known at once that Mark’s flat was ‘one of the family’s places’. It consisted of five large rooms above a bookshop in Islington, along with a kitchen and bathroom. It had that same air of expensive shabbiness that Mark’s house in Oxford had possessed. The rooms were linked together by archways and doorless doorframes off a hallway – it was impossible to say which was bedroom, which living room, which dining room or study. An enormous oak table with eight legs was in the same room as the divan bed with curled velvet-covered bolsters at each end. In another room, the walls were covered with bookshelves, up to the ceiling, with three chaise longues tucked under the wall-mounted shelves; the books were antique hardbacks. A third room was half stacked with paintings. Throughout, the atmosphere was heavy with the smell of those French cigarettes Mark liked, and cloisonné saucers full of butts were strewn through the rooms. The place looked as if a rake of the 1890s had shut up his home as the century ended and Mark had moved in 100 years later, smoked a large number of cigar ettes but otherwise left everything untouched.

  ‘Nicola says she’s going to smarten the place up,’ he remarked, throwing his coat down on to a pile of washing.

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘What does she want to do with it?’

  Mark grinned. ‘Burn it to the ground, I think. She anticipates I might do that by myself anyway. But –’ he waved a hand at the bookshelves, the window with its view of an Islington side street – ‘we’re not likely to spend much time in London anyway, so maybe I’ll keep it as a piedà-terre. We’ve bought a bigger place in Dorset, near her parents.’

  Ah yes. The money. The relentless, unstoppable tide of money. The money that made all things possible and thus left nothing to be simply desirable.

  ‘And my mother’s letting me have one of her places in Italy,’ he continued. ‘San Ceterino. Nice to have a winter getaway. Although Nicola says we mustn’t spend Christmas there. They believe in family Christmases.’ He threw himself on to an overstuffed chaise longue next to the window. ‘Oh, how marvellous to have a family Christmas!’

  I sat on a chair near to the window and looked out at the red-painted restaurant across the way. Inside couples, families, single people were eating or chatting to each other. Mark was still talking, something about how Nicola had a plan to ‘get rid of all the silly books’, but I wasn’t listening. I had become entranced, as occasionally happens to me, by the idea of other people’s lives. Each one of those people in that restaurant had their own life. There, a father wiping sauce off his small daughter’s chin. There, a woman with short steel-grey hair, eating alone. There, a couple chatting, waiting for their food.

  I found myself wondering how it would be to have these people’s lives instead of my own, to go back to their homes, let myself in with their keys, understand all the objects they owned. What faint traces keep us harnessed to our own lives, unable to wander off and inhabit the lives of others.

  Mark said, ‘Don’t you think so, James?’

  I said, ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you think that we should just all get married to each other?’

  I stared at him.

  ‘I mean, you get married to Jess, obviously, and Franny can marry Simon, Emmanuella can marry Franny’s older brother – what’s his name? – Miles. He’s tall and blond. And I’ll marry Nicola. And we should all live together in a big house in, let’s say, Tuscany. Or Provence. Or Oxford.’

  He stretched out on the chaise longue, showing a slice of hairless stomach as he did so.

  ‘Don’t you think so, James? I mean, really, don’t you think so? We should all be together. It’s so silly that we’re not. Together, all the time. I could do it. I’ll buy a house, a huge one so we can all have separate kitchens and living rooms: you and me and Franny and Jess and Emmanuella and Simon. All together like in Oxford.’

  ‘We can’t, Mark. That’s just not the way things work.’

  He sat up, cross-legged.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but why not? Doesn’t everyone want this? To stay together with their university friends forever? For things to stay just as they were at college?’

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ I said. It was like talking to a child. ‘But it can’t be like that, can it? We have to go out, get jobs, make a living.’

  ‘Oh, a living. I can take care of all of that. Really, I can. It’s no problem.’

  I sighed. ‘I know you can, Mark. But we don’t want you to.’

  ‘I don’t see why. I mean, I’m marrying Nicola now and so it’s OK for me to pay for things for her. Why can’t I just pay for things for all of us? Why can’t I, sort of, marry all of you? You don’t have to stop doing things. You don’t even need to be there all the time. Franny can write her books on economics, and Simon can live there when he’s not travelling around the world, and Jess can play her music and you can, oh, I don’t know, just lie around all day in a pair of swimming trunks.’

  He smiled his wolfish grin and I thought again with surprise, oh, it can be like this, then. We can talk like this and it needn’t mean anything at all.

  And Mark is so persuasive; his vision for a moment seemed reasonable to me. We could live like children forever: in freedom and unknowing, dependent on the good graces of others. Even Mark’s dependence was absolute, for his money had come to him as a gift and if he were ever to reach the bottom of it, he would have no way to replace it. Isn’t this the paradise that the religious always imagine themselves to be in? Dependent forever on the beneficence of Almighty God and forever grateful for His bounty?

  He yawned, suddenly, as cats do – a yawn that looked as though it might dislocate his jaw.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, stifling another yawn, ‘I’m awfully tired. I’ve been driving back and forth to Dorset a lot and it’s making me sleepy.’

  He rolled on to his stomach and pulled a rug over himself. I stood up to leave, but he caught me by the cuff.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘stay. Until I go to sleep. Like we used to do in Oxford.’

  I couldn’t remember having done such a thing for him in Oxford. I wanted to remember it, though. He made me want to remember it.

  I sat down.

  I looked out of the window at the restaurant with its little busy lives. I looked at Mark, his fair hair fallen across his eyes like a schoolboy. I waited. When his breath became deep and regular, I put on my jacket. I pulled the blind down and lit one of the smaller electric lamps. It cast a slight orange glow across the room. I pulled the door closed quietly behind me and walked down the passage to the front door.

  I felt something then, as I let myself out of his flat. I didn’t know what it was. I thought of him lying there asleep and how easy, how terribly easy that conversation had been. And his flat, the smell of cigarettes around the walls, the discarded clothes among the first editions. The squalor of it and yet the beauty. I stood with his front door open, staring at the green wallpaper of his hallway for a long time.

  17

  Mark and Nicola married in May, in an open-air ceremony in the grounds of a house near to the Wedmore family home. The day was sunny, the venue picturesque, the flowers eloquent in their simplicity. Nicola carr
ied a bouquet of Michaelmas daisies, Mark wore a yolk-yellow tie, and the guests kept their doubts in check even at the moment of ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’.

  I was an usher, but my duties were soon over. I had handed out Orders of Service and directed honoured relatives to front-row seats, but after the service began there was nothing for me to do other than listen to the words of God and hold Jess’s hand. The thing was stiff, it seemed to me. Formal and so strictly ordained that Mark and Nicola were like characters in a play and we the audience. Mass, a sermon and words from the Bible, Simon bravely working his way through ‘love is not jealous, it does not boast’ with seeming conviction, although half the people there knew that, even until the previous day, he had been suggesting with increasing force that the wedding should be postponed.

  But Mark and Nicola had continued doggedly through all protestations and concerns. ‘Love is patient, love is kind.’ I would not have thought Mark had such persistence in him; he had never shown it before. ‘Love is not rude, it is not self-seeking.’ They had simply made their plans, booked the venue, talked to caterers, decided on colour schemes, while all around them shells of anxiety and anger burst and left them unscathed. ‘Love always trusts, always hopes, always per— severes.’ Was this love? Nicola, seventeen years old and shining-eyed, thought so. Mark, delivered from dilettantism, thought so. Franny said, ‘It won’t last a year,’ and even Jess said, ‘They do seem to be hurrying it rather.’