The Lessons (32 page)

It came to an end one day while Jess was in the bathroom of our flat dressing the fresh wounds on Mark’s arms and Franny and Emmanuella had walked on to the balcony to smoke. We were talking of nothing, as we did, and Franny became silent and then said, with a return of her sardonic smile, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that, if Jesus and God are the same person, and God made Jesus suffer on the Cross, then Jesus is a self-harmer?’

There was a shift in the atmosphere. Emmanuella moved her weight from one leg to the other and threw her cigarette over the balcony.

‘A self-harmer too, I mean,’ Franny persisted, ‘like Mark.’

Emmanuella moved suddenly, with a jerky motion unlike her accustomed grace, half hesitating as she acted. She took a pace forward and slapped Franny hard across the cheek.

Franny staggered back, her hand clutching her face.

‘Fuck!’ she said. ‘Fuck, what did you do that for?’

Emmanuella was impassive, her features calm.

‘It is not to joke, Franny, not about such things, not now.’

‘Fuck,’ said Franny, nursing her face.

Emmanuella watched her and said nothing.

And after that Franny did not come to our flat any more.

There were days and days to wait before the funeral. Acres of time to fill. And after the first numbness, the days were long and the nights were terrifying. Mark raved and stamped and wailed in the night, not sleeping or waking from sleep to find the knowledge new and fresh and all horror once more. We put a photograph of Daisy in the living room and it seemed both too much and not enough. Father Hugh visited Mark and sat with him for an hour in silence. Mark’s mother telephoned, but he would not speak to her. Jess applied aqueous cream to her red-raw streaks and Mark came home with pills in tiny bags or with folded pieces of paper and we waited for the funeral.

It was for Nicola’s family, that responsibility. There was never any argument about that.

Rebecca telephoned to let us know the arrangements. Here the location, here suitable hotels (and here, she told us, the family’s hotel, the hotel we were to keep Mark away from). She preferred not to speak to Mark. Once, he leapt up as I was talking to Rebecca and grabbed the phone from my hand.

‘Where’s Nicola?’ he demanded. ‘I want to talk to my wife.’

In the silence of his listening we heard Rebecca’s crisp tones buzzing through the receiver.

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you, Mark.’

The old Mark would have wheedled and persuaded. This Mark said nothing; like a broken prisoner, he hung his head and passed the telephone back to me.

Later, I said to Jess, ‘I expect they wish they’d never met him.’

Jess said, ‘He saved Leo’s life. He still did.’

So few things in life permit clear calculations. Unlike the equations of velocity and heat transfer I’d learned at Oxford, the effect of one person’s life on another cannot be weighed in micrograms. ‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Something disturbed me before dawn in the hotel on the morning of the funeral. I awoke quivering, alert. A thump, a series of clanks, a muffled thud from the connecting room; Mark’s room.

The door was unlocked and he was not in bed. The bedsheets and duvet were tangled and twisted. The drawers of the dresser had been flung about the room, the table upended. A keening sound came from the bathroom. I opened the door. Mark was leaning over the sink, breathing heavily. In his right hand he held a razor blade, which he was pressing deeply into the surface of his chest, just below the collarbone. Blood was running down his arm and chest, thick like syrup. There was blood in the basin, and on the wooden floor, on the white towels. There was a bloody handprint on the mirror, where he’d been leaning. He looked up, his pupils large and dark.

He said, ‘James.’

He said, ‘I can’t. I mean, it’s not. It’s not a good time for a party, James.’

I felt my heart thump in my throat.

I caught at his arm, the one with the razor, trying to pull the blade from his grasp.

I said, ‘Stop, Mark, stop.’

And he started to scream.

Jess called her father, the GP, staying in a hotel a few miles away. Mark was seeing things. He talked about ghosts and demons, horses and angry avenging angels. I walked him up and down on the balcony. The night air calmed him a little and the screaming stopped but not the muttering, the slow murmur of sibilant syllables.

‘Somewhere,’ he said, ‘somewhere something, I can’t I can’t stop, stop them, ask, she didn’t ask, she says.’ He picked at the gushing wound on his chest.

Jess’s father was all cool medical professionalism. He shone a light into Mark’s eyes and tipped out one tiny white pill from a brown bottle.

‘Now,’ he said, looking directly at Mark and holding his gaze, ‘I’m going to give you something to make you feel better. Do you think you can swallow this little pill?’

Mark nodded abruptly several times.

I washed the blood from my hands, brought him a glass of water and he took the pill.

Jess’s father said, ‘It’ll take about twenty minutes to kick in.’

He took Mark’s hand in his and laid Mark’s head on his chest. And then Jess, stroking the hair at the nape of Mark’s neck, began to sing:

‘Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot,

Prête-moi ta plume, pour écrire un mot.

Ma chandelle est morte, je n’ai plus de feu.

Ouvre-moi ta porte, pour l’amour de Dieu.’

I wouldn’t have thought she’d remember, but memory is a strange thing and pulls what is necessary from secret crevices at urgent times. It was the tune of the music box, the sound he had loved as a boy, and after a while Mark did begin to calm. His muttering ceased, his fidgeting grew still and, a little later, he yawned.

Jess’s father looked over Mark’s cuts with professional calm. Seven deep lacerations above the heart; we could see the sickening white of rib at the bottom of some of them.

‘I’m going to suture these now,’ he said. ‘It might sting a bit. We could go to the hospital if you’d prefer.’

Mark shook his head. No, he would not prefer. His eyelids were sagging and then creeping open again, whites of his eyes flashing.

It was a slow and meticulous process, sewing Mark back together. It reminded me of my mother, when I was a child, sewing up an old toy whose stuffing was falling out. The needle went in through the flesh and slowly the thread was pulled after it. And again. And again. Sewing the skin together with even, elegant stitches until all the raw edges were gone. While he worked, Jess’s father muttered to Mark, telling him the stitching was going well, that it would soon be over, that he was a good boy. Mark meanwhile lay perfectly still, breathing in and out, his raked chest rising and falling.

When it was over Mark slept, and we changed from our bloodstained clothes and went downstairs to drink coffee.

Jess’s father said, ‘He was lucky you found him, James. Another few minutes with that razor and he could have done very serious damage. If he’d passed out from the blood loss he …’

He paused. We understood what could have happened if Mark had passed out, bleeding heavily, alone in a hotel room in the middle of the night.

He continued,‘You know, when Jess was little, I thought about this constantly. Constantly. How many ways there are to hurt a child.’

He took a gulp of coffee.

‘One tries not to let them know, naturally, but one begins to be haunted by these visions the moment they’re born.’

He took Jess’s hand and pressed the back of it to his lips.

Mark held my hand through the funeral like there was no other thing in the world he knew for certain. He threaded his fingers through mine and gripped so that he could lean into me. His feet did not know how to walk. His toes pointed in. He was lamed.

There were crowds there. They washed around us like the tide, sweeping in and out, impersonal in their scale. Mark clearly did not know a great number of the people who approached and pressed his hand between theirs and told him they were so sorry, so very sorry. And some of them were sincere, of this I am perfectly certain. But one or two were there for quite different reasons. At one point, a man turned from us and said distinctly, ‘That’s Mark Winters, I know, but where’s cousin Tom? I want a word with him; I’ve some business he’d be interested in.’ And a woman, seeing Mark’s mother behind her veil, turned to her companion and said, ‘Isabella’s looking old, do you see?’ And I would not have believed, had I not been there, that such crassness was possible. But for some people nothing that happens to someone like Mark can ever be real. It is Mark’s money, his shining golden armour. They make his very essence appear unreal. This, too, is Mark’s problem: the details of his life are so dazzling that most people cannot see past them. His false exterior is so grand that no one can quite understand, that even I can sometimes scarcely grasp, that he is real, there, behind the trappings.

I don’t know who had chosen the priest. He was a little man; not imposing, like Father Hugh. He was small and mostly bald, with wispy tufts of hair at the sides of his head and for all I knew he had never met Daisy and never seen the sweetness of her, never known the delight she took in blowing bubbles into her milk through a straw. He stood before the small coffin, in the full and buzzing church, robed in his authority, and said, ‘This life is but a garment that we wear for a little time.’ And slowly but insistently silence spread throughout the church. Because we wanted sense, that day.

He said, ‘Grief is a journey which, if we undertake it, can bring us closer to God.’ And he said, ‘The death of little Daisy may cause us to ask if God is really here, if He is indeed real. How could a loving God, a just God, a merciful God allow such a terrible thing to happen?’ He paused. ‘If there is no God, then these things are truly meaningless. And for some, that meaningless life is enough. But there are those of us who look at this world, and its mystery and beauty – at the beauty of Daisy’s life, however brief – and cannot accept that it is all for nothing. There is meaning even here, if we can see it. We trust in the promise of the Cross and know that –’ and here he read from the lesson – ‘ “now we see as through a glass, darkly; but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully.”

‘We cannot know the purposes of God. But if life has any meaning then this too has meaning. And it must. It is simply impossible that it does not. We trust in the resurrection to eternal life. And we know that the living God can speak through the smallest of us, the least of us. He speaks to us now through the short life of Daisy. We know that her precious life was full of joy and significance. We must trust that the best of her continues. God has even now enfolded Daisy in His arms. She has gone home to be with Him who waits for all of us.’ And here the man’s voice broke. ‘ “While we are at home with the body, we are away from the Lord.” ’

Mark was sobbing then, silently. And as the tears poured down his face he turned and put his lips close to my ear and he said, quite clearly, ‘All I want now is to be with her. Everything in this world is broken. Everything here in this world is wrong. It is not our home.’

I grasped his hand very tightly and I thought, then this is what I am here for. Here, to save him from this. To wed him to the earth. I had not yet thought of what might come next for me, after this cracking open of the ground beneath our feet, but it became clear to me that whatever happened, I could not leave him.

Mark tried to speak to Nicola after the funeral – went up to her, murmured a few words. She listened, stony-faced. He spoke a little more, gesticulating as he always did when he was nervous or unhappy. He reached for her hand. She pulled away, her face suddenly angry. Or perhaps simply desperate, for I saw tears starting in her eyes. She spoke a few words to him. He blinked and swallowed. She turned her back on him and walked towards the roadside, where Simon and the family were waiting.

Out of the massed ranks of the family, only one figure separated itself and walked towards us. It was Leo, awkward in his black suit. He must have been eleven or twelve by then? He had shot up like a leggy plant, tall and skinny, very unlike the little boy he had been. Mark flinched when he saw him. His hand went up to his forehead, to the little crescent-shaped scar half-hidden at his hairline.

Leo smiled. I think it was the first smile we’d seen that day.

He stuck out his hand and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mark, I’m so sorry,’ as though the whole thing had been his fault.

I think Mark barely even noticed who was speaking to him. He stared at Nicola until the car drove up and she was taken away from him as surely as if she had sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Emmanuella came back to London with us, sitting in the back of the car with Mark while Jess and I shared the driving. Jess’s father had given Mark a sedative immediately after the funeral. He lolled on the back seat quietly, sometimes falling asleep, waking a little and then dozing off again.

We brought him into the flat and he sat on the sofa next to me, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. We did not talk a great deal. There was nothing to say. Mark was woozy, confused, his eyes focusing and defocusing.

After a little while I said, ‘Mark, we should get you to bed.’

And he leaned over and kissed me, hard, on the mouth, pushing his body into mine, rubbing his thumb at the nape of my neck. It was a lover’s kiss, not a friend’s or even an attempt at seduction. It was a kiss of intimacy. I jumped away, stood up, took a few paces back from the couch. I looked around the room. Emmanuella was smiling slightly, a confused smile as though she hadn’t quite understood a joke. Jess’s face was unreadable, quietly calm.

Mark smiled at me, wrinkling his nose. ‘C’mon then, lover. Let’s go to bed.’

Jess said, ‘Can I talk to you for a moment, James?’

I followed her out into the hall.

In the darkened passage I said, trying to bring a laugh into my voice, ‘I don’t know what that was about. It’s just, it must be Mark thinking that I’m … well, you know Mark.’