The Lessons

by Naomi Alderman

  ‘And you and me, James, we were always good friends, weren’t we? Very good friends. Better than friends.’ He leaned closer. ‘You always fancied me, didn’t you? Do you remember that day, the day you left Oxford, in the kitchen? Do you remember, James?’

  He was quite drunk; I was much less so. I should have called a cab for him, sent him home. But he smiled at me, stretched, and touched my cheek with the back of his hand. I could smell his skin, that faint scent of raspberries still, as though he had taken summer into him, as though high heat and sun were just below the surface of his skin.

  I tried to resist. I did try. In so far as I was able. When he put his hand up to my face, I pulled back. He was still for a moment, looked at me. I looked at him. I tried to shake my head, or say something: you should go, I don’t want. Something along those lines. But I didn’t. Mark smiled his easy, lazy smile and moved forward again.

  I kissed him. He kissed me.

  He muttered, ‘I’ve been thinking about this for years, you know,’ and I wanted to remind him that he’d said that before, he’d said it the last time, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything at all.

  That evening, after Mark left, after I’d showered and shaved and gathered up my clothes and put them through the washing machine, I tried to start an argument with Jess.

  Jess and I rarely quarrelled. It’s difficult to quarrel with Jess, because she’s so essentially self-contained there’s no purchase, nowhere to get a handhold, pull her open, make her angry. And, truthfully, I disgusted myself even for wanting to. And I did want to. I wanted to make her cry. I wanted her to tell me to fuck off, or to throw something at me. I wanted her to say, ‘How dare you?’ or ‘I hate you.’ I wanted to know what it was would make her do those things, because it wasn’t anything I’d been doing up till then.

  And if I could have broken her open, what then? If I could have found the right place to direct my hammer-blow, or wedged my chisel into a hairline crack on her shell and smashed or levered her apart, what would I have done next? She would have just been shattered, the parts of herself which fitted together so neatly now suddenly painful, never again as comfortable as they had been. There are enough of us in that condition already, without wanting to create any more.

  19

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oh, hello, Nicola. It’s James. How’re you?’

  ‘Mmmm, fine. Leo and Eloise are staying with us for the weekend while my parents are away, did Mark tell you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think he mentioned it. Does your sister still think she’s got glandular fever?’

  Nicola laughed. ‘Either that or dengue fever, she’s not sure. Mark diagnosed her with beriberi. She enjoyed looking up the symptoms to that one.’

  ‘I bet she did. Is he there by any chance?’

  As though she had reminded me of his existence.

  ‘Just a moment. Mark!’ A pause. ‘It’s James on the phone for you! He’s going to take it in the study. Just a sec.’

  And then Mark’s drawled ‘Jaaaames’, and the click, always waiting for the click of her putting down the phone.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘you rang?’

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Planning a trip to London next week. Are you free at all? After work? Free to come over to the flat, that is?’

  And I said yes. Every time, I said yes. I couldn’t not.

  I had told myself repeatedly not to expect that we would continue. It wasn’t just that he had a wife, but also that he had never been one for revisiting his old grounds. Mark had been maudlin, it meant nothing. But Mark came up to town again two weeks later and it happened again. Wine and conversation, nostalgia and regret, intimacy and sex. And then again. And then again.

  And I remember thinking one morning, while attempting to bash the rudiments of differential equations into the heads of twenty-six recalcitrant boys, oh, I am having an affair. It was a thought that occurred between one word and the next, making me stumble in my sentence. I would not have thought myself the kind of person capable of having an affair. But life teaches us who we are.

  But then, of course, there had to be visits with Nicola. I was spending so much time with Mark that failing to see Nicola would have been an insult. And there was this too: now that I had dealt her this invisible blow, I wanted to see for myself whether she had guessed yet. To see if I could tell from the tiny turns of her head whether she knew that in the privacy of his flat Mark and I had screwed until I had shouted out all the breath in my lungs, until I thought by my trembling legs that I would never stand up again, until I thought, now I must be sated, now I must, and yet my appetite proved otherwise. I sometimes thought it must be obvious from every look between us that all I wanted, every moment I was near him, was to feel his naked skin on mine and to see him hard and willing and ready.

  But apparently I was wrong. It wasn’t obvious. Mark always flirted with everyone, of course. So that the first time he slapped my arse as he walked past me from sitting room to kitchen, my stomach turned to meltwater. But Nicola looked on mildly and Jess smiled and I remembered, oh yes, he does this with everyone. And me? Perhaps I had looked at Mark with dog-like yearning for so long that no difference was discernible.

  Nicola had become a little tetchy since I last saw her.

  ‘Oh, my God, Mark,’ she said, when he wanted to show us his collection of remote-controlled aircraft, newly acquired at considerable expense, ‘no one wants to see your toys, all right?’

  She was kneeling in the long conservatory, jabbing at the earth around a ficus bush with a trowel.

  ‘They do,’ said Mark in a whining tone. ‘James wants to see them, don’t you, James?’

  It was our second or third visit to Mark and Nicola’s gargantuan farmhouse-villa in Dorset. Mark and I had been together five or six times by then and I was still full of wonder and desire and excitement; every time we met there were new things to try, new explorations to be made. But this was a difficult situation. I couldn’t say, ‘Yes, I want to see your planes.’ I couldn’t say, with Nicola, ‘No, I don’t want to,’ even though it was true: I did not want to see his planes, I did not want to stand next to him in a chilly field, with Nicola and Jess looking on, while each of my joints ached to move closer to him or share some secret word. I found that my knee started to ache with its old sensitivity on these visits; perhaps from the damp, or perhaps from the country walks, or perhaps from the longing that devoured me.

  ‘I, um, I don’t know much about planes,’ I said.

  ‘See?’ said Nicola. ‘No one’s interested, Mark.’

  ‘That’s not what he said,’ said Mark. ‘He said he doesn’t know much about planes, ergo he needs someone to teach him. Like me!’

  Nicola stood up and frowned at me, and at Mark. When had she become so constantly angry over trivial things?

  ‘I know,’ said Jess. ‘Why don’t James and Mark go off to fly the planes and you can show me the garden, Nicola?’

  And Nicola, red-faced and snorting slightly, let us go.

  In the field, damp creeping in through my trainers, I stood with Mark in the concealment of a clump of trees and kissed and groped and wished for more until Mark, perhaps feeling some sudden sense of propriety, broke away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, panting, ‘enough of this. Let me do a loop the loop for you.’

  On the next visit she became irrationally angry again. It was at dinner on our first night. She was handing plates around and when she came to me she stopped, hand half-outstretched, as though her motor had wound down.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, ‘but seeing you makes me angry, James.’

  And I thought, God, not now, not yet, for perhaps some part of my brain had already begun to accept that this conversation must happen one day.

  ‘I know it’s not really your fault. I know what he’s like.’ She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, an angry agitated gesture. ‘James, I just –’ and she smiled, as though she knew she was being foolish – ‘all
it is is that I think you’re getting what belongs to me. And it makes me angry, OK? That’s all.’

  I swallowed, a hard lump building in my throat. I thought, God, am I going to cry? I said, ‘Well, I …’

  And Jess stopped me, with a hand over my hand, and said, ‘James, let her finish. Go on, Nicola, why don’t you tell us what’s troubling you?’

  And I wondered for a moment if the two of them had planned this together. Could it be, could it possibly be that Jess knew?

  Nicola pouted and sat down. ‘All the bloody trips to London,’ she said, ‘the two of you together. It’s –’ her voice became very small and hushed – ‘I want to come too, sometimes. I just wish you’d take me too, Mark.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Mark.

  The world started to move again. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. My pulse crashed in my ears.

  ‘I know it’s silly,’ she said, staring at her plate, ‘but I just feel so left out, down here by myself while you’re having fun in town.’

  Mark smiled, and if he was a little pale Nicola did not seem to notice. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

  So our simple pattern became a little more complex. Sometimes Mark would come to town alone, and then I would meet him at his flat. Sometimes he and Nicola would come together, and then he would book a hotel room nearby, somewhere small and discreet. Often, when I arrived at these rendezvous, he was late and I would have to wait for him, flipping through a newspaper, certain that the staff knew exactly what I was here for.

  Once, as I sat waiting in the lobby, I thought I saw someone I knew – one of Jess’s friends from the orchestra. Had he looked my way? Had he seen me? Was he about to come over and say hello? Would Mark arrive then, at that moment? And would this orchestra friend then speak idly to Jess and would Jess then say, ‘Darling, why were you meeting Mark in the Patrum Hotel?’ I stood up sharply and walked to the bathroom where I was out of sight. I waited there, trembling, for almost half an hour and when I emerged Mark was waiting at my table, smoking a cigarette, wanting to know if I’d got the runs. ‘If so,’ he said, ‘you should really go home. You know?’

  On another occasion, Mark had told me to meet him at the flat on a particular afternoon. It was almost five weeks since I’d last seen him and I waited with a sense of mounting excitement. When he arrived though, breezing through the door with an armful of glossy paper carrier bags, Nicola was with him. Her hair was windswept, her cheeks red. She beamed when she saw me.

  ‘It doesn’t bother you, does it, James?’ She had that earnestness of youth. ‘I wanted to tell you I was coming, but Mark said you liked being surprised.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s a lovely surprise.’

  As she bent down to kiss my cheek, I looked at Mark. He opened his eyes very wide and smiled a close-mouthed smile as if to say, ‘Who, me?’

  We managed to have sex on that visit, a breathless few minutes when Nicola, bemoaning the lack of dogs in the city, went for an afternoon walk. We barely had time to smooth our clothes down before she returned.

  Once or twice Nicola asked me, in a half-joking voice, illuminating her interest by pretence of non-interest, what I thought Mark did in London.

  ‘Not when he’s with you, obviously.’

  This was the visit when she had surprised me with her presence. It was a little after her walk and Mark had left on some unexplained errand.

  She lit another cigarette – I couldn’t remember her smoking before Mark. She was so young, and this thought did give me pause. So young, and trying to pretend to be older. Perhaps that was part of Mark’s attraction to her: to feel herself an adult, in the company of adults. But she was still so young, and trusting like a child. She trusted me to tell her the truth. I felt ashamed that I would not.

  ‘I don’t mean you,’ she continued, ‘I know you’re old friends. But what do you think he does when he goes off by himself?’ She tried laughing. ‘He’s like oooooh –’ she waved her hands in the air – ‘big mystery, you know? Like he’s a spy or something.’

  The truth was, I had wondered this myself. I tormented myself with the possibility, the probability that he was with other men. I had no right to feel angry. Nicola had far more right than I and she suspected nothing, it seemed. But late at night, curled in bed around Jess’s soft-breathing body, I would find myself imagining over and over again scenes of Mark in a bar, a club, an alley, doing with another man what he did with me but better, of course, more fiercely, with more glory.

  It lasted about a year, this interlude. A little more. A year and three or four months before things began to slip, as things do. It was spring, the sky a rich blue. I arrived early at the hotel and flipped through the newspaper, but my mind snagged on an anecdote I’d heard that morning in the staffroom. It was nothing: one of the boys, a lesson, an amusing gaffe, but I thought it might make Mark laugh. I ran over the story several times in my mind, noting the points where I should pause in telling it, where I might emphasize a word and where to trim it slightly to improve its style. Mark could make me laugh easily with his blend of bawdy and archness. I had to work harder.

  He arrived late and in high spirits, dancing from foot to foot. Before I could stand up he swiftly looked around the almost-empty lobby and dipped down to kiss me on the mouth. This was not a thing we did in public, not so incautiously. He hauled on my arm.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  I gathered up my newspaper, my backpack full of exercise books. Some of his excitement had caught me too and as we made for the lifts I wished I could break into a run, or jump. His jeans were tight, outlining his bottom. I longed, as ever, to be touching him. As the doors closed in the little wood-panelled cabin he grabbed my belt, pulled me towards him and kissed me hard, his hands reaching around my back and under my shirt.

  I pushed him away, frightened that the lift doors might open again or, irrationally, that we had failed to observe someone else standing in the tiny space with us. Mark pouted. He knew behaving like this in public frightened me.

  ‘What’s this about, Mark?’

  He slouched back against the wood panels.

  ‘Maybe I’m not going to tell you now.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, all right then. But not till we get to the room. Don’t want to do anything in public we shouldn’t, do we, James?’

  By the time we reached the room, though, he was bouncing again. He placed me in a chair, bent across me, kissed me and then stood up again, drawing breath for his announcement. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. Perhaps his mother was divorcing again; Mark didn’t like her new husband much. Or perhaps Nicola was going away for a while and we could spend more time together.

  He stretched out his arms, the right directly above the left, both clutched into fists, as if he were reading a proclamation. He made a noise like a trumpet, then grinned at me, threw away the proclamation and said, ‘Nicola’s pregnant.’

  He stuck his hands in his pockets, bit his lower lip.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nicola,’ he said, ‘is expecting a baby.’

  I didn’t understand at first. I had assumed, but had not realized that I’d assumed, that they didn’t sleep together any more, or at least that they used contraception.

  ‘Is it, I mean, do you want it?’

  Mark looked at me. And I understood. I could not fathom how it had taken me so long.

  In my dreams, this is where it happens. It is here, the fulcrum of my life. When I dream, or daydream, this is where I exert a gentle pressure and move the world. Sometimes, I am the noble one. I say, ‘But Mark, we can’t carry on now. Not now you’re going to be a father. It wouldn’t be right.’ I can’t convince myself of that though.

  More often I imagine it the other way. I imagine Mark teasing me. That is easier to bring to mind. He says, ‘Well, of course, you know what this means, James.’ I shake my head. He says, ‘We can’t very well carry on sleeping together, can we? Not now I’m going to be a fat
her.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘It wouldn’t be right, would it? Would it, James?’ I think he’s mocking me, making fun of some imagined James with moral convictions and high ideals. But he’s serious. ‘Come now, James,’ he says. ‘You must have realized I wouldn’t want to carry on like this forever. It’s been fun, but now it’s over.’ I lunge for him and he dances out of reach. He leaves the room and I remain.

  But it did not happen this way.

  Instead, we made love and Mark was so filled with delight that it seeped through his skin and into my body, and when I held him he was radiating warmth like a star. And when he came, he was shouting and panting and telling me in my ear that I was the best, the most wonderful, the sexiest, the most glorious, that I was Christmas and the Fourth of July, and St Patrick’s Day and, yes, the Feast of the Holy Virgin all in one, and I saw that, yes, yes, this was a holiday, a celebration of life, and all things that celebrate life should be done upon it.

  And later, when we lay in bed with his arm thrown across me, it still seemed that way, a day of rejoicing and celebration.

  That evening, after Mark was gone, after Jess was asleep, I remained awake, staring at the ceiling of our bedroom. I found a thought coiled inside me, kept at bay by the hum of daily life but now stronger and louder. I shied away from it even as I recognized it as a true wish, a heart’s cry. Can I confess it now? I have never whispered it to Mark, tried never even to think it in his presence. I could never tell him. It is my own particular evil. It is this. I wished for his child to die. Then, before the child was born, when it was only a mixture of blood and water, I wished it dead, flushed, gone.

  I think of this sometimes, on the worst days here in San Ceterino, when I wonder why I ever came, or what keeps me here. When I clean up his mess or make his telephone calls or comfort his weeping, I remind myself that I wished his child gone because I saw that our lives could not continue as they had done. I wished it gone so that I could keep him near me. Because of wanting, because of the amount I wanted him, I could not see anyone else.