The Lessons (7 page)

First year, January, first week of term

Kendall jostled me as we crowded into the library.

‘You’ve had a busy vac, eh?’

I supposed he had seen Jess and me kissing before we parted into subject groups, she downstairs to sit with the rest of the music students, I up in the gallery with the physicists.

‘Mmm,’ I said.

There was a bustling of rulers and special pencils and lucky protractors. A few words whispered as we found our places in the ancient library. I was accustomed to a more utilitarian exam setting: the school gym, underneath the basketball hoops, with rubberized floors that squeaked when we shuffled our chairs. But Oxford is defined by its superfluity of beauty, by its application of beauty to the mundane. The morning light filtered through the library windows, splashing crimson on the pale floor tiles. The gold-tooled volumes of the College Record gleamed. Each of us had our own wooden inkwell, lined with indigo glass, in case we should care to write our answers with a dip-pen.

‘Quickly, please!’ called the librarian.

‘Fast work,’ said Kendall, winking. ‘Nice one.’

I smiled. ‘Yeah.’

‘Why do you think they call them collections?’ He was speaking quite loudly, even though the library was becoming hushed. ‘Why collections? Why not exams? Or tests? What are they collecting?’

I made an indeterminate noise. It might have been a ‘hmph’, or perhaps an ‘ahm’.

‘At least we’re in it together, right, Stieff? None of us will do well, not except …’ He jerked his head towards the next table, where Guntersen was laying out pencils, eraser and calculator at right angles. I thought, Mark is right, he is boring. Terribly, terribly boring. The thought pleased me.

‘Did you notice that Spanish girl wasn’t with him today? No good-luck kisses?’

I had noticed.

‘She’s probably got exams now too,’ I said. I took out my clear pencil case.

‘What do you think they’d do if we failed though?’ Kendall whispered. ‘What do you think they’d …’

Kendall’s voice trailed off. I looked at him squarely. He had a soft face: squashy nose, thick lips, ears with long lobes, a round schoolboy haircut. He was sweating and he looked unwell, with a yellow tinge to his face. I suddenly felt pity for Kendall. I had Jess at least, now. We’d spoken daily since the party; at first I’d called her from the phone box at the end of my parents’ road, and then we’d come up early together to Oxford, excited to be near each other. What did Kendall have?

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? They won’t send us down after one term.’

‘Quiet now!’ said the librarian.

The whispered conversations died away. The second hand of the great ornamental clock swooped around. The minute hand ticked: 9.30 a.m.

‘You may turn over your papers and begin now.’

Jess and I had come back to Oxford just after New Year, almost two weeks before the start of term. It had been her suggestion and I, longing to escape the suffocating environment of my parents’ house, eager to see her again, had agreed enthusiastically. We’d holed ourselves up in her bedroom and worked. It was only ten days of effort, but there was a calm, methodical manner to it that had given me hope.

‘I know nothing,’ I’d said. ‘There’s no way I’ll pass.’

‘First thing,’ she said, ‘what’s the mark scheme?’

We pored over past papers, as I remembered the less bright boys at my school had been forced to do. We worked out where answering a question would gain most marks, which marks could be got most easily.

‘Look at it this way,’ said Jess. ‘You could learn all four topics a bit, and you wouldn’t do as well as if you learned one very thoroughly and skipped the rest. Which is your favourite?’

I had never prepared to fail before.

‘Don’t think of it like that,’ said Jess. ‘You’re doing what needs to be done.’

There’s a sense of mastery that comes in examinations. It’s an experience that is rare in the outside world. The number of questions, the different ways they can be presented: these things are limited, and each can be explored, studied, perfected. No wonder we spend our adult lives feeling we’re simply pretending to know what we’re doing. After sixteen years spent doing exams, where the lessons we’ve received perfectly fit the challenges we’re faced with, our preparation for the unpredictable events of normal life will always seem shoddy and haphazard.

Even in the half-baked way we had planned, there was a kind of mastery in my performance that day. I knew where to go and what to do. I read through the questions, found the one I understood and worked through it calmly. While it continued it was all-engaging. For an hour I lived in the rule of the squared paper, the sinusoid, the curves tending to infinity.

After an hour I looked up. I had been dimly aware of a noise to my right, a fidgeting and sighing. Kendall was still sweating, gnawing at the end of his pencil, sinking toothmarks into the wood. By some instinct he knew I was looking at him and grasped my glance.

Clowning, he rolled his eyes, motioned to the paper, shook his head, let out a theatrical sigh. I felt suddenly irritated by him. Did he think we were the same, he and I? Did he think I was also so hopeless that I had to treat all of this as a joke? I may have let out a little tut, and returned to my paper, looking for the questions on which we’d decided I could score at least half-marks.

But Kendall was harder to ignore now that he had perceived me. He tapped his fingers. He shifted in place. He breathed heavily. After a few minutes I looked over again. He was not looking at me. His head was bowed over the exam paper. His eyes were red and wet. As I watched, his shoulders shook in a silent sob.

If I were Jess, I thought, I’d put my arm around him. That’s what a good person does. If I were good like that, I’d stop writing the exam and ask if he was OK. Or I’d pass him a note. But then, if I were caught, my exam paper would be voided. Dr Boycott might accuse me of cheating. Do good people never think of themselves?

Kendall’s shoulders heaved again. He gulped. I should at least offer him a tissue. Did I even have a tissue? I felt in my pockets. No. Hadn’t anyone else noticed he was crying? I looked around the library. Most of the other people were concealed by the bookshelves and carrel partitions. All the people in our section – Guntersen and Daswani, Everard and Panapoulou and Glick – were looking down at their work, writing furiously. Kendall wiped his nose with the back of his hand, gulped and looked at the exam paper again. He picked up his pencil. He glanced at me and gave a resigned shrug, as if to say, ‘Well, back to it.’ I made a little grimace, as if to say, ‘No other choice,’ and continued. I found a question that I thought I might get three-quarters of the way through. I tried to ignore all other thoughts.

At ninety minutes into the exam, and without warning, Kendall made an unnerving noise. It was, perhaps, the beginning of a bellow. The first strangulated note of a roar, cut off before it reached full strength. It was loud, though, loud enough that one or two of the others looked up and the invigilating librarian turned her head sharply to us.

Kendall, aware of the attention, seemed to shrink into himself, wishing our gazes away, then sprang out, jumping up from his chair, giving another of the same anguished half-howls. He stood, mouth open, gazing at the student body of Gloucester College. Like an animal turning to flee, he threw pencils, exam paper and work to the floor and ran from the library.

Guntersen looked at me, shrugged and returned to his writing.

‘I like to think,’ said Mark, pouring himself another glass of red, ‘that he was overcome with a sense of his own deep and abiding un attractiveness. Perhaps he caught a glimpse of himself in a particularly shiny set square – do you still use set squares? – and understood with a terrifying finality that no one will ever sleep with him. I like to think that’s what it was.’

‘Shhhh, Mark,’ said Jess, tapping him on the knee. ‘You didn’t hear that noise he made. It echoed all over the library. Down in the lower level we thought someone must have hurt themselves. Poor thing, we don’t even know where he’s gone.’

‘Home, probably,’ said Franny. ‘If you can’t even deal with a college collection …’ She let the thought drift into silence.

We were in the kitchen of Mark’s house in Jericho. I had not been here since the day after the party, and the place looked different now. The packing cases were gone, the Aga gave the room a mellow warmth, there was a plate of ripe and runny cheese and crusty bread on the table, along with several bottles of good red wine. Mark had summoned us here with handwritten notes: ‘Post-collection celebration, 3 p.m., Annulet House. Do come. Mark.’ This had irritated me when I found the envelope in my pigeonhole. It had irritated me further when I saw that Jess’s identical card contained the postscript ‘Do bring J. the pretty paramour. Drag him if you must.’

‘Who does he think he is?’ I said.

‘He’s just trying to be funny,’ said Jess. ‘Come on. You can always leave if you don’t like it.’

Franny and Simon were already there when we arrived and shortly afterwards there was a tap at the kitchen door.

‘Ah!’ said Mark. ‘At last!’

He pulled the door open with a flourish. It was Emmanuella, more tanned than I remembered her, in a grey wool dress and black calf-length boots with a large iron brooch pinned to her shoulder. She embraced Mark, pulling him to her. Her scent wafted across the room, full of heat and light. I stared at her, and hated myself for staring, and hated myself for finding Jess fleetingly a little colourless by comparison.

Mark made a play of looking around and behind her. ‘Manny …’ he said.

Emmanuella frowned.

‘Do not please call me Manny.’

‘Where’s Grunter?’

‘Who?’

‘Grunter.’

‘Who?’ She placed emphasis on the syllable.

‘Fine, then. Where’s Gunther Snoreson?’

‘We have decided to part. I have come from telling him. I did not think it was –’

My stomach gave a little leap at this, a little involuntary shudder.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mark, interrupting her. ‘That’s all I wanted to know. I’m just glad I’ve finally convinced you to see sense. Can’t put up with another moment of his droning voice … Now,’ he said, leading Emmanuella to the table, ‘I’ve got a proposition for you all.’

‘I’ve told you a million times,’ said Franny. ‘No orgies unless I’m really, really drunk.’

Mark grinned and tipped his head to one side. ‘That can be arranged, darling, but not tonight. Listen.’ He dropped his voice lower. ‘This house is mine now. Properly mine. The trustees have agreed to it. And I can do what I like here. So. Would you come and live with me? Here?’ There was a pause, a silence. ‘For free, I mean,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to charge you rent.’ And for a moment he seemed excruciatingly vulnerable, as he always did when talking about money – as if, paradoxically, it were a conversation about something he didn’t have, could never have, had never even seen. Always afraid he would refer to it incorrectly and reveal his ignorance.

‘Wow,’ said Simon.

‘Goodness,’ said Jess.

‘I’m in,’ said Franny.

This was a complicated offer, more complicated even than we could have known then. Only Emmanuella seemed entirely unperturbed by it, and she was rich; rich enough to know that this was a kindness she could afford to repay if necessary, that she would not be acquiring an ongoing debt.

Nonetheless, and despite all misgivings, we got drunk that afternoon as if it were all settled. The red wine dwindled and Mark replaced it with brandy. As the darkness descended, he lit lamps around the room and produced from the Aga a roast haunch of venison, studded with garlic and rosemary.

‘Will it be like this every night, darling?’ said Franny. She was affectionately drunk, her arms draped around Simon’s shoulders.

‘Oh, every every night,’ said Mark. ‘Come live with me and be my loves and we shall all the pleasures keep.’

‘S’not “loves”, it’s
love
,’ said Jess. Her arms were folded on the table, her head laid on them. Until she spoke, I’d assumed she was asleep. ‘Can’t have more than one love, thass not how it works.’

‘You’ve clearly been going to entirely the wrong parties, my darling,’ he said.

‘Mmmmm …’ she said. ‘I don’ think …’ She lapsed into silence.

Mark walked around the table to Jess and rubbed her back gently between the shoulder blades.

‘C’mon, darling, time for bed. James, why don’t you take her upstairs?’

I stroked the side of Jess’s face, where the freckles met the hairline, by her ear.

‘Jess,’ I said, ‘Jess, it’s time for bed now.’

She turned a smiling face to me and kissed me squarely on the lips. There was no reaction from the others. I felt a strange sensation, a combination of delight and concern. Mark had made up a bed for us both, apparently anticipating that we would only want one. We did only want one, but this was a new development, so new that I was a little surprised Jess had told Mark. Were we together now, decidedly together? What did that mean?

I supported her up the stairs to our room. She lay on the bed and was instantly asleep. I covered her with a blanket and sat by her for a minute or two.

She muttered something. I leaned closer.

‘What’s that?’

She sighed and said again, ‘You’re so beautiful.’

She rolled over and wrapped her arm across my leg. I sat perfectly still and after a few minutes her breathing became steady and even.

Downstairs, the party was winding to its conclusion. Emmanuella was lying on the sofa in the yellow salon, her dress bunched up around her thighs. Mark was on the floor by her side, singing a French song, a children’s lullaby, softly.

Simon was sitting in the large red leather armchair, feet up on the coffee table, puffing thoughtfully at a cigar.

‘Had to carry Franny up to bed,’ he said. ‘Completely overcome by the alcohol. Of course, it hasno effect onme, nonewhassoever.’

Mark smiled, then broke off singing to say, ‘He did carry her, you know. Quite astonishing.’

‘Always happy to help a lady. ’Cept if she’s being sick. I remember once, she spewed up so much that …’