The Lessons (12 page)

I thought he needed to be saved and that it was for me to do. In that moment I was lost.

‘It was me,’ I said.

Isabella turned astonished eyes to me.

‘
You
, James? But why? Why would you do this?’

‘I, er, it was an accident,’ I said. ‘I, um, I dropped it.’

There was no going back now, only plunging onward.

‘I, er, well, I dropped it from the attic. Yes,’ I said, warming to my theme, ‘I often go there to, you know, get away from everything. I took it there yesterday afternoon. I just wanted to play with it but I was really stupid and I was hanging out of the window and fiddling with the box and, bang, dropped it. Four storeys. And then I, um … well, it bounced off the flagstones and fell into the undergrowth, and I had to go trampling around to find it, and I think I must have trodden on it a few times. When I found it …’ I trailed off, gazing at the broken thing.

Isabella stared at me, then back at the box, then back to my face.

‘But,’ she said, ‘but why did you not tell me? Why did you put it back into the box?’

‘I was embarrassed,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you I’d done something so stupid. I thought I could confess to Mark after you left. I’m … I’m really sorry. Mark, I’m so, so sorry. I know it meant a lot to you, your grandmother …’ I looked into his eyes.

‘Mark?’ I said. ‘Mark, can you forgive me?’

He blinked. He became, again, Mark. Cool in repose, elegant in outline.

‘Oh, James,’ he said, and his voice was warm, ‘of course I forgive you. Of course, of course, it was only a silly, silly mistake, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it, Mamma?’

Isabella could scarcely fail to concur.

‘Oh yes, James, you are forgiven.’

Mark stretched out his arms and welcomed me into his embrace.

8

First year, Preliminary Examinations and the Long Vacation

Mark talks a great deal about sacrifice. It’s one of his themes, although at times he places himself in the martyr’s role and at times in the place of the one for whom sacrifices are made, depending on his mood. After debating the matter with himself – my own ideas do not figure in his theology – he comes to the conclusion that both partners in a sacrifice are one. Like God and His son, the one who demands the sacrifice and the one who is sacrificed are the same.

Mark enjoys these paradoxes. He sometimes returns to the music-box episode in his entanglements but is always careful to point out that it was not a true sacrifice, because I had nothing to lose. At the worst, Isabella would have asked me to pay for the box and Mark would have given me the money. He says it was a piece of theatre. ‘You’ve always been the more dramatic of the two of us, you know. You’re just quieter about it.’

In a sense, he is right. At his moments of high drama he is silent, acting without debate or announcement. I think of him poised like a half-folded penknife on the edge of the water, or of his face like a stone at the funeral. It’s only when there’s nothing worth saying that he can’t stop talking.

‘One slice or two?’ asked Mark, poised bread in hand at the toaster. ‘I don’t know why I say one or two, actually. It could easily be three or four or five or a whole toasted loaf. Or, for that matter, a half a slice, a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth. James, you understand maths, so maybe you can continue?’

‘A thirty-second,’ I said, looking over my notes again, and munching my Weetabix. ‘A sixty-fourth, a one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth, a two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth, a five-hundred-and-twelfth. I think,’ I said, looking up, ‘that to all practical purposes that’d surely be a crumb of toast. Do I need to go on into atoms?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Jess. ‘You’d never find the atomic marmalade to have with it. Two please. Slices, not atoms. Why don’t
you
sit down and have some breakfast?’

Mark bounced on the balls of his feet, fiddled with the glass jars of pasta and rice, almost dropped one of the lids, recovered, spun on his heel, replaced the lid and jumped back to attention when the toaster popped.

‘I think better on an empty stomach.’ He frowned. ‘Or is that sex?’

‘You’d better work it out before you start the exam,’ said Jess, ‘or you’ll confuse the invigilators.’

‘Confuse or delight,’ said Mark. ‘Don’t you know you’re allowed to take off anything you like once you’re inside Exam Schools?’

We knew. We knew all such ridiculous, beautiful tales and traditions. We were dressed in subfusc: black trousers, white shirts, black ties, academic gowns and mortarboards – the compulsory attire for university examinations. Franny, who had already started the reading for next year’s sociology paper, called it ‘a typical assertion of financial and intellectual superiority by a potlatch-like act: Oxford students demonstrate that they’re so rich they can afford special exam clothes and so clever they can be brilliant even when uncomfortable’.

But Franny and Simon had finished their exams the day before and were still in bed, and I rather enjoyed the ceremonial. The previous afternoon I’d purchased red carnations, which showed that this was our last day of exams.

Jess finished her toast, took a swig of tea and said, ‘Flower me.’

I pinned the carnation carefully to her gown.

Mark leaned forward to watch and when I was finished said, ‘Now do me,’ and puffed out his chest towards me.

I pinned a flower to him willingly. Things had changed between us since the music box. Not drastically, not violently, but the change was clear to me. I felt warmer towards him.

Jess leaned up on tiptoes for a kiss and Mark hugged me. ‘Champagne on the lawn at 6, all right?’ he said.

‘Good luck,’ I said.

‘See you on the other side,’ he said.

Exams were over just before the longest day in the year, when the light of the evening lasted until past 10 p.m., and the night was gentle. We lay in the sun on the lawn that afternoon, our bodies extended like spokes around the sundial, warmed and drowsy. Mark rolled a joint and passed it round.

Franny lay with her head in Simon’s lap as they compared choices, rubric by rubric.

She said, ‘You did the one on de Gaulle? It didn’t look like it offered much opportunity to be clever.’

Simon patted her curls gently. ‘I’m not as clever as you though, so it doesn’t matter.’

Franny made a ‘come come’ noise, but I could tell this remark had pleased her.

Emmanuella smoked a long white cigarette from a packet with a Scandinavian name, leaned back and streamed the smoke into the air. She was wearing a loose orange halter dress, her hair pouring down her bare back.

She said, ‘I was not surprised by any question. Not at all.’

Simon leaned forward, pulled her hair and said, ‘Stop showing off.’

Emmanuella pinked and pouted and took some more champagne.

The bottle passed around again. We brought out food and wound the radio cord through the grass to play Fox FM, tinny and distorted. When ‘Boys and Girls’ came on, with its creaking, insistent beat, Mark and Franny danced on the lawn. The sky turned from pale blue to a deeper, more magnanimous hue. It became a glorious, silk-black evening filled with glow-worms, a plethora of tiny lights winking and flashing from the bushes, like the stars which were that night almost musically bright.

At midnight, Simon yawned and said, ‘Mates, I’ve got to get to bed.’

After the general protest had died down he said, ‘Got to. Start work on Thursday, Dad’s coming tomorrow at 8 and I haven’t started packing yet.’

There was more argument. The champagne bottle lolled on the blue velvet grass and the stars swam, and eventually it was Mark who said, ‘He’s got work. He has to.’

And Simon said, ‘I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks anyway, right?’

‘At your parents’, yeah,’ said Jess.

‘Not me,’ said Emmanuella. ‘I must be in Madrid all summer.’

And Simon let out a roar and charged at Emmanuella. She screamed as he lifted her up to the stars and crunched a martini glass under his sandal, letting out all the glitter and bubbles. He spun her around, the orange dress streaming out behind her like underwater seaweed, and crushed her to him in a hug and set her down giggling and gasping on to the grass.

He looked around.

‘Anyone else?’

We shook our heads.

‘Right then,’ and he beat his chest at the sky and he and Franny went to bed.

Not long after that Lars arrived for Emmanuella. He crashed through the garden to reach us, and when he emerged, he appeared downcast and serious, even though he had arrived so late, and so clumsily and with such an obvious purpose. Emmanuella allowed him to help her to her feet and I thought, I never understood her at all, never knew a particle of who she was. She wished us goodnight graciously and the orange dress swirled in the grass and I could tell that Lars was impatient to his fingers’ ends to be touching her. I found I felt amused, with only the tiniest flicker of smoky jealousy at the edge of my thoughts.

And then we were three. We sat among the remnants of the picnic, eating an olive or quail’s egg from time to time. We lit several of the storm-lantern candles dotted around the edges of the lawn and they cast a gentle light. We drank a little more, peering into the bottles’ ends to see whether every drop had gone, and buoyed by our own lightness we stayed up a little longer and a little longer.

It was 3 a.m. and Jess had already fallen asleep several times for a moment or two in my arms when she whispered that she was so tired she had to go to bed. Through her starched pale pink shirt, her breasts pushed against my chest as she kissed me goodnight. I placed my hand between her shoulder blades and pulled her down for a kiss: wet, open-mouthed, her body resting on mine, pushing down into me. Her left leg was between mine. I could feel the pressure of her pelvis on my stomach, the slight friction. Mark, lying on his back next to me, heel to head, sat up and said, ‘Oh, just go and fuck already.’ Jess’s eyes were half-closing with sleep and she smiled and shook her head a little. She lay for a while along my body, and then gently disentangled herself and went to bed.

‘It’s nearly dawn,’ said Mark. ‘We should be facing east at a time like this.’

I looked and saw that at the edge of the world a thin line of blue had cracked open the black and glittering sky. One or two birds had noticed this too; a bubbling warble came from the holly hedge. So we repaired, with the final bottle of champagne, to the huge swing chair suspended from a low-hanging oak branch and sat in silence for a while watching the crack of light widen and day enter the world again. I found myself thinking, perhaps this will be the last time, perhaps I’ll be sent down after those exams, perhaps this is all I was ever going to get.

And without quite meaning to I said aloud, ‘I’m afraid I’ll never get to come here again.’

Mark was lying back in the swing chair, one foot trailing near the ground. He gave it a push and we rocked gently.

‘I’m not going to throw you out, am I?’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not that.’

‘You can come here whenever you like.’

I took a breath and spoke. ‘I might fail,’ I said. ‘I might be sent down. I really might.’

I hadn’t said it to Jess, not like this. She believed in thinking positively, in not allowing doubts to enter one’s mind.

‘Yeah,’ said Mark. ‘I might too, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?’

‘I’d have to go back home.’

‘Don’t see why. If you get sent down you can carry on living here, can’t you?’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. You could go to Brookes or something if you wanted. There’s no reason …’ He toed the grass thoughtfully. ‘There’s no reason we all can’t go on living here forever, you know.’

‘Forever?’

Mark dug his heel into the ground and set the swing going again.

‘Why not? Why not forever? The house is big enough, and we could make it as we liked it, and change it when we wanted. Why should it ever end?’

‘I should think we’ll want to get jobs, won’t we? Simon wants to be Prime Minister.’

Mark wrinkled his nose. ‘Oh, jobs. Well, he can be Prime Minister from here, can’t he?’

He sat up and jabbed at the ground with both heels, sending the swing arcing back, his legs held stiff in front of him.

‘Yes, if you just rename the house Chequers, I expect that’d sort it.’

Mark laughed.

‘See? It’s not so hard. But really, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re welcome here. Especially after …’

He looked at me and then at his feet. The swing had come to a halt again, and he kicked gently at the dandelion clouds among the grass.

‘It was OK. She couldn’t be as angry with me as she could with you, you know? It was fine.’

‘It was good,’ said Mark. ‘You were good. It was more than I deserved. Do you know,’ he spoke quickly, ‘do you know I mentioned you in confession? What I did to you the first night, I am sorry for it, with the hash cake. I am sorry. I had a penance for it particularly. And all the other clumsy things. I am so often stupid, but I am sorry. Do you think we can be friends?’

He said this with the simple sincerity of a child and I found that I could not help responding in the same way.

‘Yes, I hope so,’ I said.

He hugged me then, briefly, one arm thrown around my shoulders, and I hugged him back.

Afterwards, we sat for a while in silence beneath the vast, lightening skyful of stars. While some cover of darkness still remained, he started to talk, quite slowly and precisely, about his mother. He told me about her four marriages ‘so far’ and her lovers and her strange oeuvre of 1960s movies and her exotically aristocratic relatives and her house in California with the macrobiotic chef.

‘For a long time we only had each other,’ he said at one point.

Then later, after he had told the story of how his mother set one of his father’s Jaguars on fire during their divorce, he said, ‘It doesn’t sound quite normal, does it?’

And I said, ‘She’s not like my mother. But I don’t think normal’s so great either.’

He said, ‘I’m so fucking embarrassed, you know? That you all had to put up with her and her weirdness and Father Hugh and … I’m just so fucking embarrassed.’