The Lessons (3 page)

Emmanuella noticed me then. I was bending over, stretching my hamstrings, a deeply undignified position. Her face was still pillow-creased, her hair dishevelled. I caught her eye and she smiled.

‘You are in Ivar’s tutor group, yes? James?’

‘Yes.’

‘He says you are quite good.’

It was the ‘quite’ that destroyed me.

‘Aha?’

‘Oh,’ she laughed softly, reached out and touched my arm. Her fingertips were warm and brown against my goose-prickled white. ‘That means he thinks you’re very clever. Don’t be offended. He’s not …’ She broke off and looked at me. ‘You run?’

‘Only for … yes. Yes, I run.’

‘Of course. Don’t race Ivar. He likes to win.’

I smiled.

‘Perhaps if we raced, I would win.’

She smiled back.

‘Perhaps.’

And she turned and walked towards Broad Street.

When I ran I thought of her, and of him. I thought of them entwined together, pressed up against the iron curls of the library gate. I thought of them, and of Guntersen’s hard work and Kendall’s tea-breath and of the work that still awaited me in my room. I thought of the Oxford life that, it seemed to me, was always happening somewhere else.

I rounded another bend, a sharp one, and began the downhill part of the run. My breath was coming in quick clear gasps, I was not yet tired. I ran along the edge of a water meadow. I thought of the work I had left to do that day. I had reached number five out of twelve on the question sheet. Tomorrow was tutorial day. I could perhaps finish another question today. I let the thought go. The birdsong was louder here. I wondered if Guntersen ever came this way, if he ever heard these birds sing. My feet hit the hard dry earth, one-two, one-two, and I thought of Guntersen and Emmanuella and wondered if they ever came here together, in the early morning, she putting her arms around his neck and he leaning her against a rough-barked tree. I closed my eyes for a moment, imagining it and, and. And this was enough.

My right foot came down not on hard earth but slid across ice. It turned right, and then round, and, with a wrenching tearing twist, further round and away. I tumbled and, as I fell, the leg twisted further, buckling under my weight, and there was a sick sensation in the joint and in my stomach and I found I was thinking of my sister Anne, again, and of her twisting the drumstick off the chicken, revealing the inner white of bone and string-like sinews and the gristle of the joint. And then there was violent, loud, aggressive pain, drowning out everything else, and then there was nothing at all.

2

First year, November, fifth week of term

When I woke, it was to pain again. And to a confusion so intense and overpowering that my senses became muddled and mingled. A dizzying panoply of vomit and earth, of the sound of jagged sinews and the taste of cold, and a sound like the iron tongue of pain on my leg. Confusion and then silence. Another burst of noise and light and stench and pain and metal. And then silence.

There was a dream, or perhaps a vision, in which a girl with long dark curly hair came to sit at my bedside. She pressed against my knee and the pain was holy and progressive. Later, there was a doctor, who grasped my heel and the back of my calf and said, ‘This may hurt a little,’ and the pain was not sacred but frantic bubbling agony.

I still dream of this, and sometimes in my dreams I imagine that I already knew Mark at this moment. He is there by my bed, his head tilted to one side, saying, ‘Pain, James, is the answer not the question.’ It’s because of his Catholicism, which I took so long to understand, and his insistence that a life without pain has no meaning. I suppose in a way I wish I had known him then, and this is why he appears in my dreams. Perhaps his respect for suffering might have kept me from such self-pity.

But I had yet to meet Mark. There was no one to rescue me but my parents and they had little to say. The hospital gave me medication for the pain, a fibreglass brace for my leg, and a pair of crutches. The college moved me to a ground-floor room.

My mother said, ‘Are you sure, darling? You don’t want to come home?’

My father stared out of the window, on to Turl Street, where girls in long woollen scarves were loitering by lamp posts.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, quite sure.’

My father said, at last, ‘No sense in missing more work.’

Pain was the repeated refrain of my days, punctuating them with clear and resonant chimes. I began to learn how to make it sound and how to silence it. Pain when I twist suddenly to the left, but not the right. When I descend a staircase but not when I ascend. When I roll to the right in my sleep. The doctors had given me exercises, had told me that my injury was serious but that it would improve. They had said the discomfort would decrease. But would it disappear entirely? On that, they frowned and sighed and said, ‘Perhaps.’ Perhaps it would always hurt? They wrung their hands before they muttered, ‘Yes.’

I had missed a week by the time I was well enough to return to physics. I composed a note to Dr Boycott and, by return of pigeon post, he asked me to come to his rooms. At 4.30 he opened the door in response to my knock with every appearance of astonishment.

‘Ah, Mr, er …?’

He looked at me hopefully, waiting for assistance.

‘Stieff. James Stieff. I’m a first year.’

A pause.

‘I sent you a note, Dr Boycott. You replied.’

He blinked. ‘Ah, you are the student who has hurt your … hurt your …’ He stared at the thick case around my knee. ‘Your leg?’

He showed me into his office. It was large with a deep-piled leaf-green carpet and mahogany bookcases. He motioned me to sit in an armchair next to the fireplace. I lowered myself into it with difficulty, keeping my leg as straight as possible. I could not prevent a moment of ice-sharp pain, the separation of flesh. I gasped. Dr Boycott looked at me.

‘Yes, the problem is, Dr Boycott, that I missed last week’s work. And now I can’t seem to –’ I laughed, trying to indicate that this was a minor problem, one which must be easily rectified. ‘Well, this week’s work seems pretty much impossible to me.’

Dr Boycott observed me through his half-moon glasses.

‘I see. It is unfortunate. Last week’s work was crucial. Yes, I can’t see how you can carry on without having understood that.’

He chuckled, amused by the idea of such a hare-brained plan.

‘Well then,’ I said with relief, ‘obviously I’ll be a week behind for the rest of term. You won’t mind my taking my tutorials a week later?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh no, I’m afraid not. I work to a strict schedule. All work must be marked together. I can hardly –’ he laughed again, hands clasped over his stomach, amused beyond measure – ‘hardly arrange special tutorials just for you.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘Dr Boycott, you just said yourself that I couldn’t hope to understand the next worksheet without –’

There was a knock at the door.

‘Come in!’ called Dr Boycott.

A man entered, one of Dr Boycott’s graduate students.

‘Ah, Trevor, just in time. I’ll make tea. Mr Stieff was just leaving, weren’t you, Mr Stieff?’

‘But I –’

‘Very good. I’m sure you’ll work it out. Yes, yes.’

And I found that I was standing at the top of the winding stair outside Dr Boycott’s office, the white-panelled door with its battered brass doorknob closed firmly behind me. Gingerly, step by awkward step, I made my way down the stairs.

In the group tutorial the following morning Dr Boycott called on me again and again for answers that he must have known I could not possess.

‘Mr Stieff, did you find problem eight particularly tricky?’

‘Well, Dr Boycott, I …’

I squirmed in my seat. There was a lick of pain at my knee, a pointed tongue of it.

‘Come, Mr Stieff, why not attempt it now? What about problem three? You must at least see that those two are practically identical.’

‘But, Dr Boycott, I told you that –’

‘It was your knee you bashed, wasn’t it, Mr Stieff, and not your head?’

The other students laughed. Dr Boycott looked around contentedly, a classroom comedian satisfied with his reward. I felt the blush slowly rising up my face, creeping from the concealment of my collar to the burning-red tips of my ears.

Guntersen said, ‘Actually, Dr Boycott, I used a different methodology for problem eight.’

Dr Boycott turned his attention to Guntersen, leaving me still red-faced and ashamed.

After the tutorial, two women were waiting for Guntersen in the quad: Emmanuella and someone I had not seen before – she was shortish, well proportioned, with long straight brown hair. She wore a red sweater over a crisp white shirt and a pair of dark grey woollen trousers. She was a member of my college, I knew – in my year – but I had no idea of her name. Guntersen kissed first Emmanuella and then this woman on the cheek.

‘We’ve been at Mark’s,’ I heard her say. A slight, yet discernible look of irritation flickered across Guntersen’s face. I considered this look long after they had left the quad.

As term drove on, my weekly telephone calls to my parents became ever more brief. Yes, I told them, the knee was healing well. It wasn’t. The thing the doctors had feared had come to pass. I could walk on it reasonably much of the time, but any attempt to run brought back the glacial, nauseating pain. And they had shaken their heads further, to tell me that although I might expect a little more improvement I would not, no, I would not run again. Yes, I told my parents, I had mostly caught up with the work I had missed; I might just have to stay up a little longer than planned at Christmas to finish things off. I hadn’t caught up; each week that went past, I slipped lower in the class rankings. And yes, I said again, I was making friends. I wasn’t. My injury had isolated me. Or, it would be more accurate to say, my injury hastened the isolation I myself had encouraged.

For this is the heart of the matter: disasters occur where accidents meet character.

Here’s the truth: two inexplicable things occurred, one outside me and the other within. My knee was shattered, my work disrupted, my understanding fractured. No action of mine could have prevented this. But then. Well. Let me be very clear. I could have worked, as I’d told my parents I would. I could have buckled down, pulled up my socks, rolled up my sleeves and made all the other sartorial adjustments that indicate determination of mind. I could have regained my place somewhere in the middle of the physics pack. I say I ‘could’ in the certain knowledge that this action wasn’t beyond me. And yet … it was beyond me.

Term came to an end and I remained in Oxford. I told myself every morning, ‘Today I must work,’ and sat at my desk or took my books to the library. And did not work, but stared at the page with a mist in front of my eyes, unable to concentrate for fear of not being able to concentrate, hating myself so intensely that I was forced to twist my right leg out violently, to be erased by the all-engulfing, stereoscopic, clean white pain. Sometimes I sat in the stale JCR, staring at the television. At other times, I told myself I needed a quick nap, and woke hours later, groggy and confused, a headache pulsing in my eyeballs. I did not understand why I behaved as I did.

Things would have been different, I told myself, if Guntersen had gone home along with the other students. In fact, I was waiting only for him to leave and then I would begin work. But he sat day after day in the almost-empty library, remorselessly working. I became paranoid. Guntersen had clearly only stayed in Oxford because he knew I was waiting for him to leave, to stop me working. Emmanuella began to accompany him to the library. They sat in the central well, clearly visible from the gallery, where I took my position. They were side by side, heads bent over their books, breaking off occasionally for a variety of kisses, which I began to categorize. The quick affectionate peck as if to say ‘here I am’, the triumphant hug-and-kiss at the end of a section of work, the long voluptuous embrace which was often followed by an hour’s absence from the library and a shower-damp, flushed return.

At times, they were joined by friends. Guntersen’s friends: other members of the college rowing team. Or Emmanuella’s friends: the woman in the red sweater, her long straight hair brushing her music notation paper as she hunched over it; another woman, short and large-bosomed with corkscrewing spirals of curly hair and a pair of serious black glasses.

Emmanuella’s friends passed notes to one another on slips of paper torn from their notebooks, read them, smiled and returned to work. Once, they left one of these tiny notes on the table. After I was sure they would not return, I walked stiffly down to the lower level and picked up the scrap of squared paper. On it were written two sentences. The first, in Emmanuella’s flowing hand, said, ‘Mark doesn’t think he is.’ The second, in staccato, spiky handwriting, said, ‘Well then, it must be true.’ I kept it, between the pages of my own unused notebook.

So there was no escape. Either Guntersen and Emmanuella were with friends, or they were alone. If alone, either they were kissing, or they were working. Either I was in the library, watching them, or in my room, drowsily coming to rest over my work, head swimming. I tried walking but could not go for any distance before the pain returned, at first soggy – a filmy mist of discomfort – and then, if I went on, whip-sharp, teeth and claws. I tried sitting in other locations around the library, but then I simply imagined what they were doing, picking up on tiny sounds and suggestions to weave a writhing erotic tableau.

It was three weeks to Christmas and then two weeks, and soon it would be absolutely time to leave and my work was vile to me. I found more and more that I could not even think of it, that my mind glanced off as I tried to approach it. I would, I knew, have to go home soon. My parents would insist on my ‘resting’. And no work would be done as no work had been done and then, and then … But I could see no further than this, the terror was too immense.

It was Sunday, two weeks before Christmas. At 4 p.m. the sky was already darkening over Gloucester College, dark-painted clouds on an ink-wash sky. The lamps had been lit around Chapel Quad, pools of weak yellow against the ancient stones. My knee was hurting again, a gnawing pain that faded in and out of my conscious mind, grasping the joint in its strong jaws, relaxing the pressure and then applying it again. I had thought I would use the telephone in Chapel Quad to call my parents, to tell them I was ready to come home. Instead, I sat on one of the benches and wrapped my fleece around me. White-cold wind set the pain in my knee thrumming like a metal cord. If I didn’t call now, then what? And then what? I couldn’t see. The future had shrunk away from me, days contracting to hours, hours to minutes. The fingers of my hands were very white, the nail beds pale blue-purple.