The Lessons (2 page)

I made coffee and we sat in the living room. We talked a little about the house, the trip to the mountains we’d planned but which he kept putting off. It was a peace offering. He wore me down, as he always does. My anger dissipates as soon as we begin to speak, and I remember how he used to be. He knows this.

After we’d talked for a while, he said, ‘What I like about having you here, James, is that you remember me. You
know
. No one that we see here knows. To them I’m just some English bloke with too much money who drinks too much and smokes too much and takes too many drugs. But as long as you’re here, as long as you remember how I used to be, I’m more than that. Do you see?’

I did see. I’d known all this for a long time. We’d talked about it before.

When the sun began to rise, we took cans of cider into the orchard, disturbing clouds of spindle-legged crane flies as we walked through the grass. There are benches placed at odd intervals – some whim of Mark’s from the days he still imagined holding frequent parties here. But he never had the wood properly treated and many of them have already rotted through.

We found one which still had all its struts intact, next to a rusted oil drum in which he’d once hoped to plant creeping violets. It stood empty now, half-filled with rain water, another reminder of Mark’s problem – or at least one of Mark’s definitions of his problem: that his ambition has never been quite large enough to fill up his money. We sat in silence as the sun came up, taking long pulls on our drinks and listening to the cacophonous cackle of birds awaking in the trees.

Eventually Mark said, ‘I want her back. I want Daisy back.’

I said, ‘I know.’

He said, ‘She’s all I want, all the time. Even when I’m … all the time.’

I said, ‘I know.’

He leaned closer and I put my arm around his shoulder. I kicked my legs against the oil drum. The noise of it was louder than I’d expected – a wild clanging, as though I’d struck a huge brass gong. Above us three geese honked, flying in triangular formation across the blue-white sky.

SECTION 1

The Lies

1

First year, November, third week of term

For me, it began with a fall. Not, as Mark might have said, a fall from grace. Nor was it the hopeless, headlong capitulation of love. That came later. It began simply with a tumble on an icy path. I stumbled, I tottered, I teetered, I fell. There’s no disgrace in falling. Everyone falls. But I have found that getting up has proved more difficult than I could have anticipated on that icy path in Oxford long ago.

I ran, in the first faint hum of early-morning light, along a quiet path by the river. I ran for pleasure. Night had licked the leaves of the overhanging willow trees with frost. The path was muddy, but the mud had frozen into crackling shards. My breath came in quick gasps, achingly cold, steam-snorting.

I ran in steady, effortless, piston rhythm. A full-body rhythm: my feet on the path, my thighs bunching and loosening, vertebrae and diaphragm, flexors and extensors, all the mechanisms of the human body running smooth and true. The blood thumped in my ears. I was cold but I did not feel it. I ducked my head under a low-hanging branch of ice-prickled hawthorn, moving without thinking. Running emptied me of all thought. This was why I ran. It was three weeks since I’d arrived in Oxford, and things weren’t going to plan.

There had been a plan. At least, it seemed to me there had been. My sister Anne, an Oxford graduate, had told me what to do. She had come to our parents’ house, my mother had roasted a chicken for dinner, so that she could tell me these things. I was to join societies, I was to participate in activities, I was to work extremely hard. Oh yes, Anne had said, leaning forward to wrench a leg off the chicken carcass, and I was to make friends with the right sort of people. She herself had fallen in with the Labour Club during John Major’s premiership, when the Conservative Party lay bloated and dully throbbing, like a dying star. Her boyfriend, Paul, a pale and blinking specimen, worked for the Labour Party. Great things were expected of him. I’d do well, Anne said, to find similarly influential friends. Our parents smiled as we talked. My father poured another half-glass of wine. Anne bit into her chicken leg down to the white bone and gelatinous gristle at the joint. I noticed that I was thinking of Anne. I quickened my running pace a little. My breath became more ragged. I rounded a bend, and thought vanished into a new vista of half-thawed ice-river.

Oxford is beautiful; its beauty is its plumage, its method of procreation. The beauty of the dream of Oxford, of spires and quiet learning, of the life of the mind, of effortless superiority, all these had beguiled me. Oxford was a tree decked with presents; all I had to do was reach out my hand and pluck them. I would achieve a first, I would gain a blue, I would make rich, influential, powerful friends. Oxford would paint me with a thin layer of gold.

In my first meeting with my tutors, Dr Strong and Dr Boycott, I had taken down the list of books on the smooth, white page of my notebook in clear fountain-pen strokes. The very thought of it thrilled me: an Oxford reading list in preparation for an Oxford tutorial.

One of the other men in the group – Ivar, a Norwegian – said, ‘Isn’t this rather a lot? For one week?’

Dr Strong and Dr Boycott exchanged a glance. The rest of the students looked down at the swirling green and gold curlicues of the carpet. We knew that Ivar had shamed us.

‘We expect a lot, Mr Guntersen,’ said Dr Boycott at last. ‘That is why you are here.’

Dr Strong stroked his beard impassively. His legs were stretched out in front of him, feet clad only in sandals although the cold of autumn had already begun to bite.

Dr Boycott broke into a smile. ‘I’m sure you’ll find yourselves more than capable, with a little application. And if not –’ his smile deepened – ‘Oxford’s not for you. And best to find that out now, eh?’

We seven Gloucester College physicists walked out of Dr Boycott’s book-lined study and stood, a little dazed, in the quad. The sun was passing in and out of shadow. The creeping plants covering the walls were dying russet. We looked at each other, half-friendly, half-appraising, and, with smiles, loped towards the library. I remember this as the last moment I believed without question in my intellectual powers. My dreams were there: the influential friends, the first, the running blue. All this was within my grasp. And here I was, running. Surely all must be well?

I rounded the second sharp bend, feet digging into mud and ice to gain traction. The morning mist had not yet dissipated, and as I left the grove of overhanging trees my surroundings blurred and dissolved. I ran on, my feet dislodging small stones and pebbles, and, once or twice, almost sliding from under me. The cold became delicious, my pace was strong. I came to a forking of the ways and chose the longer path.

‘Oxford is a race,’ Anne had said. ‘No more, no less. Remember that.’ We all knew it, each of the physics men. We did not discuss our first assignment, did not sit together in the library. Later, when times became more desperate, we pulled each other by the collar over fences and hurdles, copying one another’s work in a manner we would have scorned at school. But this first time, we worked as each of us was accustomed to work, each the best in his class, each entirely alone. I chose a seat sheltered on three sides by long walls of books. The sun, shining through stained glass, illuminated motes of dust and cast gules and amethyst on my squared paper. I attempted a question, expecting to find it simple. My work at school had always been simple. But this was not so easy. I made some notes. I looked around at the other students, then back down to my work. I tried again. I was uncertain. In the gallery and in the deep central book well the other students were hard at work. Soon, their industry began to seem oppressive to me. They made notes. They flicked through books. Would none of them ever take a break? Were none of them puzzled, as I was, with a hot itch of incomprehension at the base of my skull?

It was that itch, and my inability to tolerate it, which proved my eventual undoing. I was not undone on that day, or the next, or the next. But the slow increase of days pulled me downward. I have blamed the fall for what happened, but it seems to me that it had begun to happen even before. Even in that first week I began to work in my bare little college room and not in the library. Away from distraction, I said to myself. But also away from the companionship of labour. I slept a little more each day. After the second tutor group meeting, I took a nap in the middle of the day. I wondered if I was sickening for something.

I understand now that I should have drawn comfort from that second meeting. After my days of quiet intense effort, I sat somewhere around the middle of the pack. Not as good as Everard or Panapoulou, but not as lost as Kendall or Daswani.

‘Yes,’ said Dr Strong as he handed me back my work, ‘keep at it.’

These were words of encouragement. I see that now. At the time, I tasted ashes. Like every student in Oxford, I had only ever been the best. To be average, to be ‘normal’, seemed beyond humiliation to me. The true star of the group was Guntersen. He alone received the plaudits of Dr Strong. He alone had solved the eleventh question. In the quad, a tall willowy woman was waiting for him. She greeted him in Spanish and he spoke to her in the same language. As they embraced I caught a hint of her perfume: cinnamon and cloves. They walked towards the lodge arm in arm, her hair dark and curly, his blond and straight.

‘To the winner –’ Kendall leaned in uncomfortably close. I could smell old cups of tea on his breath – ‘go the spoils.’

I slept that afternoon until it was dark outside and the college bell was ringing to summon us for dinner. I looked at the next tutorial sheet on my desk, pristine and unconquered. I wondered if Guntersen was already hard at work in the library. In the corridor, I heard the sound of girls laughing and wondered, with a pang, who they were, what they were talking about. I thought of Guntersen’s Spanish girlfriend, of the easy way he rested his arm around her shoulders. A run, I thought, to clear my head.

I ran then without any firm idea of destination or direction. I rounded Hertford, under the Bridge of Sighs, headed towards the University Parks. It was only after a week of exploration that I had found my favourite route. A long quiet trail through the open country to the south of Oxford. I could guarantee to be almost alone if I came out early enough in the morning. On that day, I had set out at 6.30 a.m., just before dawn. The path would not be in heavy use for two hours yet. This thought pleased me. I ran between two saplings, breaking a spider’s web strung between them. A memory tickled. Wasn’t there a parable of an inspirational spider, representing diligence or resilience?

I should have been more resilient, I thought. I should have been more diligent. I had worked hard, certainly, but had I worked hard enough? Guntersen had worked harder. He was probably working even now. If he wasn’t in bed with that Spanish woman.

I had found myself thinking of this woman more frequently than was sensible. It was not that no other opportunities presented themselves to me. Two girls on my staircase, Judy and Hannah, had separately made drunken attempts at conversation. Judy had found me in the Gloucester College bar, spent twenty minutes telling me about her parents’ divorce, then put her hand on my knee, at which point I made my excuses. Hannah I encountered in the corridor outside my room on the way to get milk from the fridge. She was pretty, in a tousled and bleary way, but stank of cider and cigarettes.

‘James!’ she said. ‘James, James gorgeous James, Mr James Stieff.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

The corridor was narrow. She put her hand on my chest and pushed me back towards the wall.

‘Mysterious James,’ she said, ‘prettiest boy on staircase eight, no doubt about it.’

She pressed her body against me. She smelled faintly of vomit.

‘Lots of girls would like to get to know you, Mr James Stieff. We all talk about you because you are so very …’ She wriggled slightly, a stale odour of sweat and smoke in her hair. ‘Just so very …’ She reached her hand down to my crotch. ‘Are you stiff, Mr Stieff?’

I wasn’t. Not by any means. I pushed her away from me.

‘You should go to bed,’ I said, and I think she said, ‘With you?’ but by then I was letting myself back into my room and closing the door behind me.

A few days later the Gloucester College gossip sheet, pinned up in every lavatory in the college, named me ‘5th hottest male fresher’, said that I had indulged in a ‘four-in-a-bed sex romp’ with Judy, Hannah and a girl I had never met called Elaine, and that the next JCR Meeting would vote on whether I had won the crown of College Slag from someone called Mick. I pulled down the sheets whenever I saw them and did not attend the JCR Meeting.

But Guntersen’s Spanish woman obsessed me. Her name, I had learned from Kendall, who made it his business to know such things, was Emmanuella. She was from Madrid, studying law at St Catherine’s. How had Guntersen met her? This Kendall did not know and I dared not press him to find out.

‘Foreign students,’ Kendall had said, ‘they stick together.’

‘Rich students you mean,’ said Daswani.

I did not quite know how it had come about that I spent so much time in the college bar with these two. I did not like them. I felt myself their intellectual superior; this both repelled me from them and drew me to them.

‘Same thing,’ said Kendall. ‘Massive fees for foreign students, only the rich ones can pay them.’

Daswani nodded sagely into his beer.

Can this be it, I thought? Is this all Oxford has to offer? For all the promises of glamour and glory, is this it? Passes from drunken stale-smelling girls? To be mediocre, sitting in a damp-walled bar on a Wednesday night with other mediocrities, tracing shapes in beer with my finger on a scratched table? I could not accept it. Guntersen and his girlfriend spoke of other possibilities.

I talked to her, once. It was early in the morning, I was returning from my run as she and Guntersen were kissing at the gates to the college library. They kissed with intent, his hand sliding down her back, grasping her leg at the top of her thigh, her arms encircling his waist, reaching up under his cable-knit sweater. I stopped to stretch my calves on the low stone wall next to the library gates. They didn’t notice me. As the 8 a.m. bell rang, the great curved wooden doors to the building opened from the inside. Guntersen pulled away, returned, kissed her again, his hand in her hair, and then was gone, into the library to do battle on the plains of physics.