The Lessons (8 page)

Emmanuella sat up abruptly.

‘If it has reached the time for the vomit tales, I also must go to bed.’

‘Quite right,’ said Mark, ‘quite right. No sort of stories for a lady.’

‘I wonder, James,’ said Emmanuella, ‘whether you would be kind and escort me to bed?’ She exchanged a look with Mark, a look I could not quite understand. A meeting of eyes, like the sealing of an agreement.

She took my arm. Her perfume had mellowed over the evening, combining with the wine to become an amber glowing scent, rich and honey-dropped. I found myself wondering, without intending to do so, whether she smelled like this inside her clothes. Whether it was perfume at all, or just the warm brown scent of her skin.

She led me slowly to her room on the first floor. I went to leave her at the door but she tugged on my arm and said, ‘No, no, I will fall without you. Take me to the bed.’

There were fresh flowers in her room, jugs of white roses. Above the bed was a crucifix, the blood painted a wet red but the face serene. I looked away from it and noticed a small holdall by the bed and a book on the nightstand. She had known already that she would be staying, then. How much thought had gone into this apparently artless afternoon?

Emmanuella sat down on the bed, took off her boots and stretched her stockinged toes. The counterpane was very smooth and white. She patted it, inviting me to sit by her. I sat down. She rested her head on my shoulder and ran her arm around my waist. I could feel the outline of her breast against my side.

‘Do you like me?’ she said, so low that I had to incline my head towards her to catch the words.

‘I … yes. Yes, I like you,’ I said.

She snuggled closer.

‘I like you too. You are very handsome,’ she said.

She raised her head, brought it close to mine and, very softly, breathed into my ear. A thrill of pleasure went through me. I risked a mistake and moved my hand across her legs, squeezing her knee gently. She sighed.

‘Mark has told me so many good things about you,’ she said.

Mark. Was it possible that this had been
planned
? Had he guessed I liked her? Had he told her?

Emmanuella bit my earlobe very gently. The sensation was exhilarating.

‘Close the door,’ she whispered.

I stood up, walked to the door. Outside in the corridor the light was still on. To my surprise, at the far end of the passage, I could see the door to Simon’s room half ajar. Inside, Mark and Simon were sprawled on the gigantic four-poster bed, giggling. I looked back to Emmanuella. Her eyes were half-closed, her head nodding forwards. Is it to my credit or discredit that this alone convinced me?

I walked back into the room, leaving the door open. I brushed the hair out of her eyes and pushed her back gently on to the bed. She sighed happily. I leaned forward and whispered, ‘Time for you to sleep.’

She nodded, and wrapped her arms around the pillow, clutching it like a child with a teddy bear.

Out in the corridor I closed the door and stood for a moment, resting my back on it. It was then that I saw Mark at the other end of the passage. He pushed open the door to Simon’s room, carrying something in his hand. Simon lay sprawled still on the bed, his shirt open to the waist. Mark turned, saw me watching him and winked, then went into Simon’s room and closed the door behind him.

Upstairs Jess was still asleep, snoring softly. I sat on the sofa and looked out of the window at the dark garden shifting in the wind. I wondered what I would do with this invitation – at once sensible and ludicrous. If I took it, then what? I would have a group of friends ready-made, a way out of the misery of college life. I had longed, since arriving in Oxford, to move away – my whole trajectory seemed to me an attempt to run away from the place, to take up residence somewhere smaller.

And if I did not take it, then what? Back to college, and to struggle, and to the life I had hated so much last term. And what could I say to Jess to make her understand? ‘I think perhaps he invited us all here, and plied us with alcohol, to give me the chance to sleep with Emmanuella if I wanted’? She would go on with this life and I would have to return to mine. No. It was this that drove me, in the end. Not a running-to, but a running-from. I did not want to end like Kendall, bolting from an exam hall, with nowhere to go.

I saw Kendall a few days later in Chapel Quad. He was lying on a bench by the ivy-covered wall, his head resting on his rucksack. I thought he was asleep, but as I walked past he lifted his head and called to me.

‘Stieff!’ he said. ‘Off to Boycott?’

‘Yup,’ I said. It was my ten-minute slot with the tutor to receive the results of my collections. I could not delay.

‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘Hope it goes well. I suppose …’ He frowned. ‘I might not see you again.’

I stared at him, puzzled.

‘I’m … er, well, I’m leaving Oxford. Talked it through with Boycott. It’s all for the best, probably. It only gets harder from here and, you know, if it hasn’t been good so far …’

I was aware of the seconds ticking by. Dr Boycott would be caustic if I was late. Nonetheless.

‘But where are you going?’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘Manchester. My UCCA reserve. Jumped to take me when I called.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Um.’ I did not know what to say. It was as if Kendall had told me he had been diagnosed with a chronic and painful disease. I do not defend this; this is how we thought.

‘It’ll be good,’ I said at last. ‘Better than here. Big fish, small pond – be nice not to be running to catch up all the time.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kendall. ‘Not so many bloody tutorials, away from Boycott and all this …’

He stopped and looked around. The quad was peaceful in its medieval splendour, with ivy-covered walls, clipped grass and stone arches. Beauty is a lie, but it is so hard to spot.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘good to get away from all this. But sorry, I have to run. Good luck with everything!’

I started to walk away.

‘No problem,’ said Kendall. ‘I might catch you later, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sure.’

‘I need not tell you, Mr Stieff,’ said Dr Boycott, ‘that these are disappointing results.’

Dr Strong, sitting by his side, nodded silently.

My knee ached – I had forced it upstairs at a sprint to reach the office on time. It was displeased with this treatment and produced short, stabbing pains, enough to make me gasp.

‘We had such high hopes of you, but you seem to have –’ Dr Boycott paused – ‘fallen far below them this term.’

‘I’m sorry Dr Boycott, but I –’

Dr Boycott interrupted me.

‘Nonetheless!’ he flourished the exam paper. ‘Your answer to the question on Lagrangian dynamics was good. Thus, I think we may say,’ and he looked to the right and left, as though speaking to a large and attentive audience rather than merely to myself and the taciturn Dr Strong, ‘that we have hope! Put your back into it, Mr Stieff. We need a sprint from you this term, a sprint!’

‘Yes, Dr Boycott,’ I said. I found I was a little overwhelmed by having been told that a single answer of mine was good.

‘Run along, then,’ said Dr Boycott. ‘More effort is what you need this term. More effort.’

I hobbled from the room, strangely elated. I would go and see Kendall again, I thought, put my arm around his shoulders and commiserate with him properly. I walked back as fast as I could manage, my knee spitting embers in the cold, but when I reached Chapel Quad Kendall was gone.

6

First year, April, first week of term

We took up Mark’s offer. Of course we did. Jess discussed the matter with her eminently reasonable parents, who, having assured themselves that the house was adequate and the friends not intolerable, took the view that this was a natural stage in their daughter’s fledging and if she wanted to live with her friends she should not be prevented.

My parents were suspicious and wondered not unnaturally – though at the time it seemed wholly unreasonable – whether after my bad first term I should be changing my living arrangements. Strangely, it was Anne’s intervention that swayed them in the end. She had been at college with a third cousin of Mark’s – on his father’s side, which contained a lot of House of Lords relations of whom Mark was entirely dismissive – and convinced my parents that I was finally ‘mixing with the right people’ and that rent-free living arrangements were common among this group.

The Junior Dean of Gloucester College initially frowned upon the idea, saying, ‘We are keen to integrate all members into college life, at least in their first year.’ There it was Jess who argued the point, drawing attention to her membership of the college choir, attendance at chapel and excellent reports from her tutors. Little was expected of me, perhaps because I was known in college primarily for my injury. The arrangement was grudgingly allowed, although – it was made clear – we could not expect any reimbursement of rent and other fees paid in advance.

Jess and I became closer over that term, partly because of the joint battles with college authorities but also quite naturally. I wanted her and was surprised to find that she liked me too. She seemed quite as content in my company as I was in hers, and I found I did not really need other friends in college. We would spend the days at lectures or in the library, and then in the evenings we ate dinner together in hall and Jess – if she did not have orchestra rehearsals – would practise her violin while I read. It was, for Oxford, a very settled time. Franny joked that we already seemed to have been going out for years and this pleased me. After a few weeks of this life I wondered if we needed to move into Mark’s house at all, or whether we could continue just as we had been.

But the wheels were already in motion. We moved into the house in March, towards the end of Hilary term, and began to get to know one another’s habits and routines. I learned, for example, that Mark suffered from insomnia and frequently read his theology set books in the music room at 3 a.m., listening to 1930s dance records, and that for all her apparent nonchalance Franny worked harder than anyone I’d ever known – even Jess or Guntersen. Simon already harboured ambitions – he read, with intense seriousness, a multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill and Tony Benn’s diaries, and I once walked into his room to find him addressing an empty armchair with the words ‘Now really, Prime Minister …’. Emmanuella, despite her privilege, was an excellent cook, and the house was frequently filled with the aromas of Spanish cuisine.

One morning in April, Jess and I knew instantly from the insistent staccato of the knock at the door that the person trying to wake us up was Franny and no other.

Jess opened the door. Wordlessly, Franny marched into the room and slammed the door behind her. She was in her long white night-dress, her hair frizzy and wild.

‘Have you
seen
who’s in the kitchen?’ she said at last.

We shook our heads.

‘We’ve only just woken up,’ I said.

‘You’ll never guess who he’s bloody brought home this time.’

At least twice a week, Mark brought a young man home – often a ‘townie’ rather than another undergraduate. Once there had been a boy from sixth-form college. All of these had been agreeable if taciturn – a succession of crop-headed young men shovelling down cornflakes and leaving with a brisk ‘cheers’. There was the slight matter of illegality to detain us, but as Mark himself was officially below the age of consent for gay sex at that time the whole thing seemed so uncertain as to be better ignored.

‘It’s only bloody Rufus McGowan!’ said Franny.

We looked blank.

‘Junior Dean of St Thomas’s? Wrote
Thinking the State
? Gave the Stimfield lectures in political thought?’ More blank looks. ‘He was my
tutor
last term?’

‘Oh, Good Lord,’ said Jess.

‘Too bloody right. I
heard
them last night. Heard them, Jess! At it! The author of
Thinking the State
.’

She breathed in and out slowly. ‘I walked into the kitchen, saw him, he looked at me, I looked at him, and I turned and ran. Actually ran.’

‘Perhaps Mark didn’t know he was your tutor when he, um, found him?’ I ventured.

‘Oh yes, I’m sure of that,’ spat Franny. ‘I’m sure he didn’t walk up to him at the urinals and go, “Fancy coming back to mine for a shag? By the way, did you ever teach British political history to any of the following people? I just ask because it might be awkward at breakfast?” ’

We went down to breakfast together, to face off against Rufus McGowan en masse. He was the oldest person Mark had ever brought to the breakfast table by at least fifteen years, serious-faced, with a deep furrow in his brow and an untidy mop of curly red-brown hair. When we entered the kitchen, he was reading
The Times
and wearing a pair of pyjamas evidently intended for a much larger man – the striped top billowed around him and the trousers flopped over his feet. But for all his absurd appearance, it was unquestionably like having breakfast with a tutor. He rattled his paper, harrumphed and poured himself a cup of tea without offering any of us a drop. Mark himself sat contentedly at the other end of the table, munching his toast and reading a novel, apparently unaware of all that was going on around him.

Having become accustomed to Mark’s night-time conquests needing to be put at ease, Jess wished Dr McGowan a good morning. He peered at her, nodded without saying a word and returned to his reading. The experience was miserably reminiscent of attending a tutorial, at least in my case: the tutors had very little to say in response to whatever I happened to offer them.

After a few moments Dr McGowan said, ‘I see an UNPROFOR force has been ambushed in Bosnia. A clear example that rules of engagement are worthless. They can never anticipate battlefield conditions. Don’t you agree, Miss Roth?’

Franny blanched and paused halfway through taking a piece of toast.

‘Um,’ she said. ‘I, um …’

‘And can you tell me who drafted the rules of engagement in Bosnia?’

‘Um. General Cot?’