Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

‘Ahhhhh, he told me this. Some friends, to keep him company. Bene . Now James, this is Isabella. I am Mark’s mother.’

She paused, as if knowing that I would need a moment to gather my thoughts. I thought with horror of the photographs in the study of a woman in diaphanous silk, and of the things Mark had told me about his parents.

Mark’s father, Sir Mewan Winters, had ploughed the family money into industry in the 1950s and 1960s, turned his moderate fortune into a vast one and then, in the early 1970s, just after his fiftieth birthday and long a confirmed bachelor — with various cousins and nephews eagerly anticipating the inheritance that would one day be theirs — made a sudden match with Isabella, an actress who had appeared in a few mildly erotic Italian movies and was almost thirty years his junior. Mark had been their only child, and the marriage hadn’t lasted. His mother had been too unstable, his father too distant. Mark was packed off to boarding school at seven, only for Isabella to remove him on a sudden whim at thirteen. According to Mark, she led a rackety life and had dragged him with her through much of it: several husbands, with one not always quite given up when the next was acquired, constant travel and now a great deal of time spent in California with a much younger lover, a weekly colonic irrigation, a personal vegan chef and a psychic counsellor on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘er, hello.’

I think I expected she would suddenly start chanting at me.

‘James,’ she said, in a perfectly sensible voice, ‘can you give to Mark a message from me? Tell him I will be in Oxford at the end of next week, yes? You will all like to meet me? You are not too busy?’

‘Oh,’ I said, trying desperately to stop remembering that I had seen a photograph of her naked breasts, ‘yes I’d love to meet you. Er, that is, um, no, we’re not too busy.’

She made a curt ‘mm’ sound, then said, ‘I am glad. You will tell Mark that we spoke about this? You will not forget?’

‘I won’t forget.’ I certainly wouldn’t.

‘You will give him the message as soon as you see him?’

‘I’ll even leave it for him, in case I’m out.’

She laughed. ‘Good! Very responsible young man, James! Make sure he understands, James. At the end of next week. Friday.’

She gave me a number in Paris where she could be reached and hung up.

I stood in the passage holding the note I’d written. I looked around. Where could I put it that Mark would be sure to find it? The kitchen was cluttered with several days’ worth of breakfast things. Mark employed a cleaner to come in twice a week to tidy up after us. Was today one of her days? Might she throw away this scrap of paper? An obvious solution came to mind.

Upstairs, I pushed open the door to Mark’s bedroom with a jangle of nerves. It felt unexpectedly intimate to be here without his knowledge or permission. The room was large with, at one end, an enormous curved bay window. The bed was huge too — a cream-curtained four-poster. Mark’s clothes were scattered across the floor, heaped in piles and bundled into black rubbish bags.

Books, mostly theology with titles like Blood of Crucifixion and The Annotated Doctrine of Atonement , were stacked neatly at one side of the little walnut desk, and pages of notes were arranged in a half-circle on the floor around the chair. I picked one up idly and read the essay title ‘A God Who Does Not Suffer Cannot Save: Discuss’.

After a few moments I put the essay down, slightly bewildered. I’d known Mark was studying theology, but hadn’t thought anyone could take it seriously. I was not religious. My parents were somewhere between agnostic and the woolliest Church of England. They’d married in a church, Anne and I had been baptized, and that had been that. Anne was a positive and committed atheist, asserting that ‘the whole thing’s rubbish. Not just rubbish. Pernicious rubbish’.

I put the note on his desk. As I stepped back, I noticed the edge of a brown figure hanging on the wall, mostly concealed behind the sweep of the curtains. I walked over to it and gingerly pulled back the edge of the curtain to find, as I’d half-known I would, a dark brown wooden crucifix, the length of my forearm, polished to a burnished gleam. The figure on the cross was emaciated, each rib showing clearly through the skin, a deep hollow between chest and pelvis. The figure’s mouth was open in a grimace of agony, the flesh of the hands was ripped and battered around the nails.

It would have been better if it had been openly on display. That way I might have said to myself that it was a piece of art, appreciated for its skill and technique. But this hidden figure was something else. An object for prayer, for belief. A private ritual. I felt revolted by the image, by its implicit praise for suffering and for humiliation and for pain. I wanted to hold up my wretched grinding knee and say, ‘This? Is there glory in this?’

After a few dizzy and uncertain moments, I pulled the curtain back and limped from the room.

Mark did not return home until past midnight, by which time I had forgotten about the note. Franny had found a box of hats in the cellar labelled ‘Maud, 1936’ and was going through it. We particularly liked the fez decorated with two stuffed pheasants lolling uneasily on wires. Our first-year university exams were only a few weeks away now, and we longed for distractions.

‘What do you think?’ said Franny, sweeping her head from side to side to make the long tail feathers shake. ‘Am I fit to be seen at Ascot?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Simon, making a grab for the hat. ‘You’d frighten the horses.’

Franny laughed and made to grab it back. There was a brief, noisy tussle.

‘What’s all this?’ came a voice from the other side of the door.

It was Mark. I hadn’t heard him come in; none of us had. We eyed each other nervously. We were still uncertain how free we could be with the things we found in the house.

Mark pushed open the door. He held up his hand. He was shaking.

‘Who …’ he began, but could not continue. He breathed in and out twice, then started again. ‘Who left this bloody note for me?’

We looked at each other. For just a second, I felt as bewildered as the rest. I had left a note, but surely he must mean some other note, some more offensive missive?

His voice was almost a whisper. ‘Who left this note in my room?’

I cleared my throat.

‘Erm. I did? Sorry. I mean, sorry, I didn’t mean to go into your room without permission. I just couldn’t think of where else to leave it and your mother seemed so insistent that …’

He stared at me, as if I was an enemy he’d underestimated.

‘You? You spoke to my mother?’

The others were staring at me. I couldn’t imagine what they thought I’d written to Mark. I began to wonder if I’d had some sort of psychotic break and instead of ‘Mark, your mum called, she’s coming to visit next week’ I’d written ‘Mark, your mum called, she’s a filthy whore’, and smeared it with excrement.

‘The phone was ringing,’ I said. ‘When I got in the phone was ringing so I answered it and —’ I looked around — ‘all it says is that Mark’s mum is coming to visit.’

‘Oh,’ said Jess mechanically. ‘That’s lovely news, isn’t it, Mark?’

‘Ahm,’ said Mark, and dropped the hand holding the note to his side. A few drops of blood rolled stickily down his hand and splashed on to the pale green carpet. They made perfect round circles. Mark looked down at his hand and then at all of us. His eyes were afraid, dumb and desperate.

‘Oh!’ said Emmanuella. ‘Mark, you have hurt yourself!’