The Lessons

by Naomi Alderman

  Jess pursed her lips. ‘I tried to explain that maybe it’s not about her. And perhaps she should talk to him. Or find a way to let him know she knows. Because it needn’t mean the end to a relationship. Not everyone thinks that way. Perhaps Nicola could find a way to accept it.’ She sighed. ‘But I don’t think she understood. I think, if she found out it was true, she would take Daisy and leave.’

  The cars ahead started to move again. Jess nudged the car into gear and began to gather speed.

  21

  Nicola’s voice, whispering from behind the hedge, said, ‘Yes, I’m sure she does, but you’ll have to tell her they aren’t suitable.’

  Then Mark’s voice, angry but restrained: ‘I’m not telling her anything of the sort. They’re family stones. Daisy can have them set differently when she’s older.’

  ‘She’s not having them set at all. I don’t want any presents from your mother. You know how she spoke to me when we …’

  ‘She speaks to everyone like that. It’s only that you take everything so bloody personally. Look –’ now he was wheedling slightly – ‘it’s not for you or me, it’s for Daisy …’

  ‘I don’t care, I don’t bloody care. She doesn’t need your family’s presents.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nic …’

  ‘Don’t use that language with me.’

  ‘Oh, what, fucking what?’

  A caught-back sob from Nicola, could have been a laugh or a cry of despair.

  And then from Mark simply, ‘Nic …’

  And then, ‘Don’t you touch me.’

  At my elbow Nicola’s little sister Eloise said, ‘Uncle James, I think Daisy’s done a poo in her knickers.’

  Eloise, who had reached the stage of braces and awkwardness, was holding Daisy at arm’s length towards me. From the smell of her, Eloise was right. Daisy’s face was screwed up, her body trying to wriggle away.

  ‘Dowwwwwwn,’ she wailed, ‘want go dowwwwn.’

  When we rounded the end of the hedge, Mark and Nicola were gone.

  *

  And then again, later, in the conservatory. Dark clouds lowering at the horizon, wind whipping up although the day was still bright in our little square of green. Daisy reached out her chubby little arm to her birthday cake and said, ‘Cick! Cick!’ so Mark cut her another slice and placed it in her reverently open hands. She looked at it with rapt attention – her mother had fed her some earlier with a spoon – then, decisively, buried her face in the cake, came up smothered in chocolate and wiped her hands down her dress.

  I was just beginning to laugh when Nicola turned round, looked at her daughter and said, ‘For God’s sake, Mark, why the hell did you do that? Look at her! Just look at her!’

  And it was too sharp, too angry, too loud. It was disproportionate, so that for a moment we were all staring at Nicola. And she felt it too, the heat of inappropriate rage.

  ‘Come here, Daisy,’ she said, and pulled the child to her a little too roughly, crouched down and began to scrub at her face with a napkin a little too forcefully.

  Daisy, feeling the pressure of so many eyes on her, burst into noisy tears. Nicola sat back on her haunches with a sigh, releasing Daisy’s arm, and the little girl ran stumbling to her father, burying her face in his cream trouser leg, covering it in chocolate.

  Mark lifted her up, cuddled her to his chest, more chocolate everywhere.

  ‘Shhh,’ he said, ‘it’s all right, Mummy didn’t mean to upset you, did you, Mummy?’

  And Nicola looked up from her crouch at the circle of her family around her, and at Mark holding Daisy, and at Daisy’s smiling complacent face, now that she had attained her father’s arms. Nicola made a low noise at the back of her throat, got to her feet and reached for Daisy, but Daisy snuggled closer to her father. Nicola’s mouth turned down, her arms still outstretched for her daughter. Her brow darkened, she took a breath to speak but instead turned on her heel and marched back into the house and upstairs.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Nicola’s father said, ‘Well then.’

  Rebecca said, ‘More cake for anyone?’

  But soon many of us had to leave.

  Nicola did not come down to see us off. We stood in the outer atrium with Mark, next to the piles of presents which had been sent by Simon, who could not come, and Emmanuella, who could not come, and Franny, who also, for some reason, could not come. Daisy was climbing over Mark, as if he were a tree, biting at his neck and ear, pulling on his shirt, popping off buttons as she clambered and dangled.

  ‘I’m sorry about Nic,’ he said. ‘She’s got a headache.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Jess. ‘Tell her we send our love. We’ll see her next time we’re down.’

  I leaned in to hug Mark goodbye, and as I did so Daisy detached herself from him and, for a moment, put her arms around my neck. With her softness, she planted a wet kiss on my cheek, unbidden. I have remembered this so often that the memory is worn through and now I wonder if I imagined it entirely.

  Mark waved us off as we drove away. I looked back, and saw Daisy still clambering and exploring the contours of her father. And when I think of Daisy now, that is how I remember her still. Slung in Mark’s arms like a monkey swinging in a tree. Climbing over him like he was the most solid thing she knew.

  About six weeks after that, Mark called me.

  He said, ‘James?’ in a broken voice. ‘I’m in London, because Nicola,’ but he could not finish the sentence. The tears overran him and he gulped to a wheezing halt.

  ‘Are you at the flat?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes please.’

  It surprised me, considering the matter as I drove to Mark’s flat, that he was so devastated. Perhaps it surprised me that Nicola had managed to accomplish this thing; to pierce the armour and wound him. I have never been able to hurt him myself. I might say I have never wanted to hurt him, but it’s not true. I wish he cared enough about me that I could hurt him. I wish I thought that my leaving would cause him pain. I wish I felt I had ever meant more to him than someone convenient to pass a pleasant afternoon or weekend with. I wish that I could break him by telling him I have ceased to love him, but I can’t. He will never cry those tears for me. Sometimes contemplating this makes me so angry that I find I want to hurt him. But, of course, that is the one thing I can’t do.

  When I arrived at the flat, Mark was crumpled in a brown leather sofa by the window. His eyes were bloodshot; the tip of his nose was red. He was wearing a ragged jumper and a pair of old, paint-stained jeans. I let myself in, and he opened his arms wide, like a toddler looking for comfort. I hugged him, his head on my shoulder and the wet of his weeping trickling on to my shirt. After a while, he dis entangled himself from me and I poured us both whiskies.

  Mark said, ‘This is it. She wants a divorce.’

  I nodded.

  ‘She thinks I’m seeing someone else. I tried to tell her she was being silly but she’s so … she’s very final, you know?’

  I knew.

  ‘And anyway, look. You’re not someone else, are you?’

  Suddenly I was afraid, with a fear louder than my concern for Mark’s marriage.

  ‘Did you tell her it was me?’

  He shook his head. ‘I mean, it’s not just …’ He chewed at his thumbnail. ‘You knew that, didn’t you, James? You knew that it wasn’t just you, didn’t you?’

  I nodded creakily. I supposed I had known, in a way. He began to sniff again.

  ‘But … can’t you tell her you’ll stop?’

  ‘She won’t listen.’

  ‘Do you want her back?’ I said. ‘Do you still –’ I stopped, reflecting on how little I wanted to know the answer to this question – ‘love her?’

  Mark curled his lip at his empty tumbler. He refilled it.

  ‘No,’ he said. Then, ‘Maybe I do. Maybe.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘So it’s not …’

  ‘I
t’s not that. It’s Daisy.’ Mark looked past me at the bookshelves behind my head. ‘Don’t you see? She could take Daisy away from me.’

  Ah, I thought. Melodrama. This was the Mark I knew. I spoke gently.

  ‘She can’t do that, Mark. It’s not legal.’ I thought of the thin veneer of gold covering Mark’s body, of his touching lack of comprehension of what it could purchase. Children could not simply be taken away from a man with money.

  ‘You’ll get good lawyers, Mark. You can afford it and she can’t stop you from –’

  He turned his head to stare out of the window. He was calm now.

  ‘She can though,’ he said, ‘and she will. I might have the money, but there’s enough dirt to be dredged up, and she knows most of it already. The drugs and the boys and the cottaging – there’re police records of that. You should know.’ He placed the flat of his palm against his forehead and rubbed in a circular motion two or three times, as if trying to ease some sudden pain. ‘No judge in the world would choose me over her.’

  ‘It can’t happen.’ I moved over and sat next to him. ‘Fine, maybe she’ll get custody and you’ll have to visit and … it’s just life, Mark.’

  He said, ‘But this isn’t …’ and he stopped and gasped and said finally, ‘I didn’t want this for Daisy.’

  And I thought I could see what the trouble was. Mark had come to a real limit. He would not be able to buy Daisy from Nicola. There was no price. When they divorced, Mark might have to understand that someone else could limit him: like his mother or the word of God.

  As if he had pulled the thought from my mind, he sniffed, blew his nose and said, ‘Fuck, my mother’s going to have a field day. My mother and Nicola, how did I not see that …’ and he muttered something half into his jersey.

  I rubbed his back. ‘Love,’ I said, ‘we’ll sort it out, you’ll sort it out, it’ll be …’

  But he was talking over me. ‘You’ve seen what my mother’s like, you’ve seen her. Always too close. I know Franny thinks it was Ample-forth that made me go wrong, or Catholicism, but it wasn’t. It was my mother, taking me away, wanting me so close to her. She always wanted me too close, never could let me go. And now I’ll be right back where she wants me.’ He looked at me, the broken veins in his eyes red, face swollen. ‘We got much too close, James, when I was a teenager. Much too close.’

  ‘Mark,’ I said, ‘do you mean that …’ but he cut me off.

  ‘Don’t ask me what I mean, all right? I don’t want to talk about any of it any more. That’s all.’

  He laid his head on my shoulder and kissed me softly – almost pathetically – tugging at my bottom lip. I felt the warmth of his body down my side. I pulled him towards me with a strength I hadn’t intended, and our lips mashed together painfully, and I could taste salt, but I did not stop to consider this as I pulled off his shirt.

  Later, we lay in bed together, he smoking and I curled up next to him, stroking his chest, his head, his shoulder. I could not help inscribing lines of kisses along his arms and up his neck, writing my worship with my lips.

  ‘I think I should tell her,’ he said. ‘I think I should just come clean.’

  I rolled away on to my back and stared at the spider’s web of cracks frosting the ceiling.

  ‘Tell her what?’

  He took another pull on his cigarette, exhaled the smoke slowly.

  ‘Tell her about us. I mean –’ he leaned up on one elbow and looked at me – ‘I don’t think she’d mind so much if she knew it was just you. It’d be containable, you know? And then we could give it another go. I think I want that. Another go. I want it for Daisy.’

  An icicle of fear.

  ‘You’d tell her it was me? Specifically me?’

  ‘I think it’d make her feel better, you know? I mean, it’s only you.’

  And I wondered then, with a rush of heat, whether this had always been my purpose. I was always someone Mark could give up if necessary. I could always be thrown out to confuse pursuers.

  ‘And what do you think’s going to happen then, Mark? She’ll tell Jess and Jess will leave, and then …’

  Mark sat up in bed and watched me impassively, his cigarette held in calm fingers.

  ‘It’s time you two broke up anyway.’ He ground out the cigarette in the saucer by the bed and stood up. ‘You can’t really expect she’ll stay with you forever, can you? I’m sorry, James, I have to go.’

  He was pulling on his jeans then, and I was sitting in bed, and a madness touched me on the inside of my skull. It was the thought of losing both of them, both at one stroke. I thought, and it is only now that I begin to understand that perhaps I was wrong in this, that in losing them I would no longer know where to find myself. There are those who can love without losing themselves: and Jess is one of these and Mark, for all his wild ecstasies, is one of these. And there are those of us who love unboundedly, giving everything, offering up their whole selves as a sacrifice of love. Nothing short of total love was ever enough for me.

  I said, ‘You can’t tell her, Mark.’

  He bent down, groped around under the bed for a stray sock and said quite casually, ‘I’m sorry, James, honestly. I know it’ll be an inconvenience for you, but you can’t have expected this to last forever, can you?’

  He kissed me on the forehead as if I was a child and I think this was what broke the spine holding me upright. I should emphasize that I loathe myself for what I did next. But desire has very little to do with morality.

  I said, ‘I’ll tell her about the music box. I’ll tell your mother.’

  And he frowned and half-smiled as he pulled on his socks, because he’d almost forgotten, of course, that I knew things about him he would rather not have revealed.

  I spoke slowly. I was working it out as I went.

  I said, ‘If you tell Nicola about me, about you and me, I’ll call your mother in Italy and tell her it was you who smashed the music box that time in Oxford. And I’ll tell her about the time you were arrested, and I’ll tell her about the drugs, and your other friends in London. I’ll tell her you’re out of control, mad. Mad like you were before.’

  And this pulled the last traces of a smile from him and left him grey, like a man who has seen the open grave before him.

  He stopped, one shoe on and one shoe off, and said, with an unconvincing flick of the wrist, ‘She won’t care. She won’t … It’s all a long time ago. I’m older now.’

  ‘So you won’t mind if I tell her. You won’t mind if your family know all about the life you’ve been leading. If Nicola knows, you won’t mind.’ And, remembering something I had heard long ago, I said, ‘You won’t mind if they think your trouble has come back?’

  He stood up suddenly and took a step back, away from the bed.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, James, and fuck your bloody threats. As if you’d even know how to do it … as if you’d even know how to make it convincing.’

  ‘I would,’ I said. And then, although I knew this was not likely to be true. ‘Your mother would take Nicola’s side, you know, if it came to it. She would, with all the things I could tell her about how you’ve been living. And Daisy would be brought up by Nicola and her family and your mother and they’d shut you out forever.’

  Mark began to speak but did not speak. He was shaking now, an erupting storm passing through his body. I could see the anger rising up his throat, clenching his jaw, bunching his muscles at the temples, and for the first time I was a little afraid. I thought, I really don’t know what he could do.

  He looked around the room and grabbed a thick glass ashtray from the bookcase. He glanced at it and then, with a fluid strength, hurled it at my head. I dodged to the side. It hit the wall behind me, shattering into several large pieces, and a shower of glass dust fell over my naked shoulders.

  ‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘Jesus. Jesus, Mark …’

  His face was cold and still.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘I’m not staying i
n London. I’m going to Nic’s family to get my daughter and I’m taking her home with me. Put your clothes on and go.’

  He picked up his other shoe and fitted it to his foot. He brushed his hands on his jacket and walked out of the flat, slamming the door behind him.

  I sat in the bed for another twenty minutes before I levered myself out, avoiding the chunks of broken glass. I found I’d been nicked; once on the shoulder and once on the ear. I reached over for one of the packets of cigarettes he left everywhere in that flat, pulled one out and lit it. It was years since I’d last smoked; I’d never got much beyond schoolboy experimentation. But the sensation was calming. I opened the window and smoked it slowly. It was November, the day was very cold, an early snow predicted. The cool air was peaceful, bringing up delicious goosebumps over my torso.

  I thought, he won’t do it. He won’t tell her. Not now. I stared at the pieces of broken glass in the bed.

  I thought, I’ll call him tomorrow, after school. I’ll call him then, and he’ll be calmer and we’ll work something out. I even felt a certain wry satisfaction. I felt sure our argument could be papered over. Nicola and Mark wouldn’t last much longer together, that was clear enough. And as long as he didn’t go through with his plan of confession, things would be better for us afterwards. Perhaps he would take a house in London; perhaps he would after all have custody of Daisy. Perhaps he’d live around the corner from Jess and me, his great friends, and we’d always be wandering from one house to the other, which would make everything very easy.

  I found a dustpan and brush under the sink in the kitchen and swept up the broken glass. I shook out the sheets and remade the bed. He had been angry, of course he had, but that was only to be expected. He would calm down, I thought. He would see that it made sense.

  I was lying to myself. Just as I was lying when I decided he had not meant the ashtray to hit me, that it had been an accident it had come so close. And the question I ask myself now, years later, is: would I really have done it? Really? In the moment, would I have poured venom into the ears of Mark’s family, revenging myself upon him for all the slights and all the bad grace and all his failure to want me as I wanted him? Or would I have continued to hold his secrets for him, waiting for the moment he might turn back and see me carrying his burdens and feel grateful at last?