The Lessons

by Naomi Alderman

  Love

  Mummy

  At the bottom, my father had added a postscript:

  Learn to live according to your means. It’ll serve you well in life. Dad

  This was something of a blow. It was probably true that my charges to that card had grown in the past year. In my first term I had purchased only the absolutely required texts, and those I had sought out in the second-hand department at Blackwell’s. But then in my first term I’d been almost suicidally depressed, had had no friends, had not wanted to go anywhere or do anything. Since then, although Mark had provided most necessities, we’d had dinners out at pleasant Oxford restaurants and evening trips to the London theatre, and I’d thought that, after all his generosity, it was only fair for me to buy the odd bottle of wine to contribute. I felt rather angry with my parents. The cost of purchasing that happiness seemed so ridiculously small that I could not believe they wouldn’t see it my way if I phoned the next day and spoke to them directly.

  They did not see it my way. I talked first with my mother, who, in pleading tones, asked me not to upset my father. ‘He was very angry when he saw that bill,’ she said, ‘very very angry.’ My heart quailed somewhat at this news. ‘You must remember,’ and there was iron in her voice, and I knew to whom she had been speaking, ‘that we never had to pay Anne’s way like this.’

  ‘Maybe Anne didn’t have so many expenses?’ I chanced.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t associate with such high-living friends,’ my mother said peevishly.

  I heard my father rumble in the background, ‘Is that James on the phone? Tell him I’d like a word with him, if you’d be so good.’

  ‘Your father wants to speak to you.’

  I felt tears starting in my eyes. Actual hot, aching, terrified tears, as if I were a young child again and had been caught scribbling on the living-room curtains.

  ‘Fine,’ I yelped, ‘fine. I don’t know what else he can say though.’

  There was a clattering as the phone changed hands.

  ‘James, it’s your father. Your mother and I are very unhappy with you. We’re not prepared to continue to underwrite this frivolous lifestyle. This house nonsense,’ he harrumphed, ‘it’s no good for you. Look what’s happened to your work.’

  There was a pause. I imagined the way that he would be turning to my mother and she would be nodding and giving him encouragement.

  ‘We’d like you to move back into college,’ he said, ‘but until then we can’t keep paying these bills.’

  ‘What? Any of my bills?’

  In the background, my mother said, ‘How many bills does he have?’ She must have had her ear pressed to the back of the receiver.

  ‘Yes,’ said my father, ‘how many bills do you have, James? You’re living in that house rent-free, your tuition is free, the libraries are free. So, you need a bit for books and a bit for food. We’ll give you … £50 a month, all right?’

  ‘A month! No, £50 is not all right! Not all right! That’s nothing …’

  ‘If we see your results improve, we’ll think again. It’s for your own good, James.’

  ‘But I …’

  ‘That’s our final decision, James.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘We’ll talk to you soon, darling.’ This was my mother again. ‘Work hard. You’ll thank us for this later, dear.’

  I slumped on the sofa and covered my face with my hands. What would this mean? An end to the casual London jaunts and restaurant meals; an end to being able to pay my way at all.

  There was a noise in the sitting room. I lifted my face and saw that Mark was standing a few feet away, hands in his pockets, head tilted quizzically to one side.

  ‘Parents?’ he said.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘May God take all parents and drop them into the sea.’

  ‘Yup,’ I said. I was trying to keep the hot tears behind my eyelids from leaking out.

  Mark reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, slid out eight unwrinkled £50 notes and held them out to me. He crumpled them slightly as he held them, as if they were napkins or a sheet of notepaper.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I can’t. I couldn’t. Thanks, but I really can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ he said. He pulled my right wrist towards him and pressed the money into my palm, closing my hand over the crackling paper.

  ‘I really can’t. I don’t know when I’d ever pay you back.’

  He shrugged. ‘So don’t pay me back. I owe you anyway. Services rendered.’

  ‘What, you’re paying me?’ I said, suddenly disgusted.

  He wriggled his shoulders uncomfortably and held his hands up as if to ward me off.

  ‘Don’t look at it like that, all right?’ he said. ‘It’s not like that. Look, mate.’ He ran his hands through his hair and began to speak very quickly in the slight cockney accent he sometimes took on when embarrassed. ‘I’ve got enough, more than enough, too much maybe, and if I can make your life easier like this, then it’s fine, OK? It’s no worries. It’s …’ He twisted uncomfortably again and the cockney fell away. ‘It’s not that much to me, OK?’

  I looked at the crumpled notes in my hand. They represented freedom from my parents at that moment. Freedom from having to confess to them that I did not have enough money left to last me the term. Freedom from having to ask them for more.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  Jess and I made it up. We were always going to. I was hardly likely to treat Jess’s hands roughly in future, nor was it hard to understand that her ambitions had their demands.

  A few days before the concert, she suggested that I come with her as she shopped for a suitable evening gown. And when she found one which wouldn’t chafe her neck as she played, or interfere with her arm movements – a crimson silk dress with a high neckline – she put it on for me once more in our bedroom. And I undid the dress and we made love in the waning afternoon sunlight.

  ‘Do you forgive me?’ I said later, when we lay among the tumbled sheets, moisture cooling from our bodies.

  She kissed the bridge of my nose, and my forehead, and the lids of my eyes.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘absolution. Satisfied?’

  She rolled over on to her back, one hand loosely ruffled in my hair.

  ‘It’s good we got used to this now, though,’ she said, ‘because it’s never going to be that different. Rehearsals and concerts, I mean. When I join an orchestra, it’s not going to be so different.’

  This is a quality of Jess too. She has no self-doubt where it is not warranted. She has never had difficulty in understanding her own capabilities or in failing to believe the indicators of her talent. Sometimes I think that it is this quality – the self-determining spirit, the knowledge of her own purpose – that I have envied the most in her.

  At around 5 p.m. on the day of the concert, she began to get ready. Emmanuella helped her, putting on her make-up and pinning her hair back into a bun-style knot, fastened with two long pins. She checked and rechecked her violin, placing it finally into its case with the gentle attention of a mother for a newborn. She flexed her fingers and stretched her limbs. She did not look at the score again, but as we sat in the hallway in our evening wear her hands were practising fingering.

  Mark had ordered a taxi and the six of us rode down together, squashed up on the slippery seats, in silence for the most part. At the cathedral, Jess disappeared immediately to one of the back rooms and the rest of us took our places several rows from the front.

  As the people began to gather I started to understand quite how important this day was. Many of the attendees were extremely eminent: I spotted the Vice-Chancellor, the Bishop of Oxford and a couple of famous ‘telly-dons’. The cathedral was not full – it would take a mighty crowd to fill that grand medieval space – but the nave was certainly well populated. By the time the lights dimmed, at least 250 people were there.

  Before she even appeared, while the orchestra were still tuning their
instruments, aligning them in an enormous buzzing thrum, I found that my heart was beating faster, that I was, in my mind, with Jess in her dressing room, watching her flex her fingers, tune her violin, twist her neck from side to side as she always did before beginning to play.

  Franny batted me on the shoulder with her programme, leaned over and whispered, ‘She’ll be fine.’

  I nodded. The audience grew quiet. Jess walked out. The thing began.

  She was calm and still, her face reflective. She smiled in recognition of the applause, exchanged a few words with the conductor and then, almost without warning, they began.

  I could not take my eyes from her, not even to scan the orchestra, to see which faces I recognized. Emotions I had never seen before on her flickered across her features: from grotesque revulsion to icy anger to majestic calm. I noted, though, that as she played, tossing her head from side to side, the intricate hair-knot Emmanuella had constructed for her began to slip. I saw her glance to the side and twist her head, trying to shift her hair, to keep it up. It was no use. She pursed her lips. I wondered, for a breath-catching instant, whether she would stop playing entirely in order to rearrange her hair. No. She knew the music too well for that. She waited for a pause of, perhaps, three or four seconds, reached around and, in one motion, swept out the long pins holding up her hair, dropped them on the floor and took up her bow to begin playing again. Liquid, her hair poured down her back, but she was oblivious. She was within the music again, impervious to mere physical considerations.

  I could barely wait to get her home that night. Through the applause, the encores, the mulled wine drunk afterwards in a draughty side chapel, the suggestion that we all go out for dinner – vetoed by Jess on the grounds of exhaustion – through all of that I was thinking of the moment when the door would be closed between us and the world. As we sipped our wine, as she was congratulated, I thought of standing behind her, slipping the dress down her shoulder to expose the bare, freckled joint. I imagined myself holding her, arm around her waist, pulling her close to me, placing kisses on her shoulder and the side of her neck, unzipping her, taking her from her dress as carefully and reverently as she removed her violin from its case. As we walked home, a messy crowd spilling from the pavement on to the road, I caught her hand. I thought of the rise of her breasts, which none of these would have shared, of the unexpected darkness of her nipples. I knew I was clutching at straws.

  I persuaded her into sex that night. Not forced, never that, but persuaded, seduced. I wanted to be sure I could still do the things I had done before, that I could still hear her soft sighing in the dark and know that I had been responsible for it. She agreed with patience, as ever, and took me to her shoulder and her breast; they were hers to give, of course, not mine to take. She sighed and gasped, but I did not find what I had come for. I could not put my fingers through her skin. I could not hold her in my hand.

  10

  Second year, January, first week of term

  ‘I think,’ said Dr Boycott, ‘that for you, Mr Stieff, we must begin to use the stick, in addition to the carrot, wouldn’t you agree, Dr Strong?’

  Dr Strong nodded his stern confirmation.

  ‘It pains us to do this, of course,’ said Dr Boycott, ‘but I cannot see that you have left us much choice. These results –’ he waved his hand at my collection papers on the table in front of him – ‘what have you been doing with your time, Mr Stieff? What? Did you spend the whole of Michaelmas term in a daze?’

  I had, in fact, spent most of the previous term in a state of confusion, panic about money and sexual jealousy, but I couldn’t see that telling Boycott this would do any good.

  ‘We cannot allow this to continue, you must understand. You risk exposing the good name of Gloucester College physics to ridicule. Yours is the accusing finger which wields the dagger thrusting at our soft underbelly to stab us in the back!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Boycott, I … I’m sorry, I had a bad term.’

  ‘You did indeed, Mr Stieff. And if you repeat this performance in your examinations you will take a bad degree, if any degree at all. Tell me, are you thinking of continuing to the fourth year?’

  Almost everyone took the optional fourth year to get the MSc in physics. I’d intended to take it when I began the course. But now the idea of staying on in Oxford after Mark, Jess and the others had left did not entice me. I hadn’t discussed this with my parents; in fact I’d spent most of the Christmas break either in Annulet House or with Jess’s family.

  ‘I …’ I paused. The circle of my little universe halted too. The plans my parents and I had made together were clear; with a single word I could commit myself to them. Give me a single word and I can move the earth. ‘I think … not,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be a good use of my time. My girlfriend and I are planning to move to London when she finishes her degree – she’s a musician.’

  Dr Boycott looked bored. It occurred to me that my personal plans mattered not at all to him and this realization, instead of cowing me, made me unafraid.

  ‘Yes, you see, Dr Strong,’ I continued, ‘you see, my girlfriend and I plan to move in together in London. I’m going to teach. Secondary school, that is, probably maths. The hours will combine well with her career.’

  We had not, in fact, firmly committed to this plan but every day made me surer that I did not want to take Simon’s route, of milk-round jobs or a City career, and I was unsuited to Jess’s vocation or Franny’s academic path. It seemed as good a time as any to take a stand.

  ‘A … secondary school teacher. That’s certainly –’ Dr Boycott gave a lizard-like blink – ‘commendable. Nonetheless, you will be fit for nothing at all if you cannot achieve a degree. You will take penal collections in four weeks’ time on last term’s work. You understand, Mr Stieff? You must repeat the examinations which you have just failed so abominably. If you do not pass them on your second attempt, we will be forced to consider your place here.’

  It was Mark’s twenty-first birthday in the third week of that term. He was a year older than most of us, though he did not advertise this fact, nor did he have any exotic stories of housebuilding in rural Ghana or backpacking across south-east Asia like those who had taken a formal gap year. When asked about the missing year, Mark sometimes said that, with the variety of tutors and stop-gap education he’d had after his parents divorced and his mother took him out of Ampleforth, he’d simply fallen a year behind, and sometimes that he had been ill. I wondered if those few words he’d spoken to me regarding his ‘breakdown’ were the answer to his missing year, but I had not asked.

  In any case, he didn’t mark his birthday with any particularly debauched revelry. The most noteworthy event was that Mark received a gift from his father. It startles me now to realize that I never exchanged a word in person with Mark’s father. Mark spent the summers at his father’s house in the north or travelling when he could not bear to see his mother, but his father never came to Annulet House to see us, only ever arriving when Mark was alone. If it were not for the newspaper profiles of the elderly Sir Mewan Winters, of Winters Industrial, or the eventual obituaries, or the car, one might have suspected he had never existed at all. He was old, and had been old when Mark was born. He sent occasional cards with clipped greetings, he never telephoned and he died a year after we finished Oxford. But on that one occasion – his son’s twenty-first birthday – he sent him a car.

  It was by far the glossiest vehicle I’d ever seen, sleek red lines and fluidity of composition, like a Vorticist painting. Mark had a battered Citroën which he kept for countryside driving but this was something else. A Ferrari Dino. A classic.

  ‘Bloody nice car,’ said Simon. ‘Time for a test-drive, I reckon.’

  Mark shrugged.

  ‘Tell you what –’ he tossed the keys to Simon – ‘you take it out for me, tell me what you think.’

  Simon’s smile was large and incredulous. He weighed the keys in his hand, sat down gravely in the front seat of
the car, curling his fingers around the steering wheel with slow intensity. He revved the engine twice, grinned at us and then roared towards the city centre.

  ‘He’ll love you forever for that,’ said Franny. Then, after a few moments, ‘Don’t you want to drive it?’

  Mark smiled. ‘It’s all of ours. All of ours, all together. You should all use it whenever you want. It’s all of ours.’

  Later that evening, Mark put in his usual telephone call to have food and wine sent over for a birthday feast. Meanwhile, we pulled out stacks of board games. Simon and I were making a ham-fisted attempt at a serious chess game when the doorbell rang downstairs.

  ‘I think that must be Maison Blanc,’ said Mark. Then, casually, ‘James, would you do me a favour and give them their money?’

  He drew a few notes from his wallet and passed them to me.

  ‘That ought to cover it,’ and, as I walked out, he called behind me, ‘Let me know if it’s not enough!’

  Downstairs, the delivery men carried the boxes through to the kitchen, loading some into the refrigerator. I looked at the notes Mark had given me. It was almost double the cost of the food. I paid the men, giving them an extra £10 each for their trouble.

  Upstairs, Jess and Emmanuella were playing Scrabble. Mark suggested they might find it interesting to make this strip Scrabble.

  Quietly, I said, ‘Mark, your change.’

  He frowned at me and at my closed fist, bunched around the money.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘Keep it, or throw it in the lake. I don’t care.’

  None of the others showed any interest in this exchange. I felt my hand bunch around the money, the £50 notes stiff in my palm.

  ‘But Mark, it’s …’ I extended my arm minutely towards him.

  ‘I said don’t worry about it.’