Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Hars got us a ticket, Hars Daswani?’ he said, as music started to play on the stage behind us. ‘Thought I’d come back and see how the old place’s doing. How are you, mate?’

‘I’m … yeah, I’m good. How’s Manchester?’

‘Oh yeah, God …’ Did I imagine a catch in his voice? ‘Yeah, it’s great. It’s not —’ he looked around the quad at the thousands of silver fairy lights winking like stars among the ivy — ‘it’s not all this, you know. But it’s good.’

He sounded momentarily unconvinced. Denise caught my eye and beamed.

‘Come on.’ She wrapped herself around his arm. ‘It’s too bloody cold when we’re not dancing!’

Kendall smiled at me apologetically. I watched them go and wondered if he knew what he’d escaped, or if he still pined for the quads and rooms lined with ancient books.

We always value things that are hard to get, regardless of their intrinsic worth.

Jess and I walked through the ball mostly arm in arm. I danced a little, but could not continue for long; the cold made my knee ache. She understood. We tried to get in to see the graphologist but the queues were too long, and the hypnotist forgot his patter halfway through when his victims started giggling. The booze was plentiful, though. At one point I thought I spotted Mark and Nicola in the crowds around the fortune-teller’s tent, but could not reach them.

At 5.30 a.m. the sun had not yet risen but the breakfast muffins and steaming dishes of scrambled eggs and trays of smoked salmon began to emerge from the kitchens and we called ourselves ‘survivors’.

At the trestle tables, Jess and I found Franny, her hair wild, her dress slightly askew.

‘Have you seen Mark?’ she said, struggling to manage plate and champagne glass and cigarette at once. ‘Si’s been looking for Nic for an hour.’

Jess and I shook our heads.

‘They can’t have left, can they?’ said Jess, and I thought nervously of where Mark might have taken her, of what escapades he might have suggested.

‘I expect they’ll turn up,’ I said, helping myself to a ladleful of buttery eggs.

*

When the sun was fully up, we went to look for them. We looked in the massage room, where a girl was crying noisily. We looked in the fortune-teller’s booth, where a man was slumped by a neat puddle of vomit. We looked in the long dining hall, where Ball Committee members were already patrolling with black rubbish bags and weary expressions. We found them at last beneath one of the arched alcoves in the undercroft, where the noise from the last remaining dance floor above was muffled to a fuzzy pulse of sound, a rapid muted heartbeat. They were nestled close together, Nicola’s head resting on Mark’s lap, using his folded jacket as a pillow. Her legs were curled under her, the millefeuille layers of her white petticoats surrounding her like sea-foam. He was leaning back against the interior wall of the alcove, one hand protectively around her shoulders, the other stroking her hair. She was asleep and looked so young, so much younger than when awake, her profile as calm as a child’s. She was breathing softly and Mark’s head was tipped back. But as we approached, Mark looked up, smiled and raised one finger to his lips. And although we knew it was time to leave, we stood back, for a moment, and were silent.

Soon after that, Oxford was over. It was the work that did it, first of all. The growling chasm of finals towards which we were being swept. Mark, probably driven by a dread of what his family would say if he failed, began spending up to ten hours a day in the library. Jess resigned from the orchestra and Franny became so obsessive in her work timetable that she even started noting down how long she’d spent in the bathroom and added that on to the end of her working day. This is Oxford: it need not be all or nothing, but it lends itself to that way of thinking.

And we began to spiral apart, slowly at first so we did not have to acknowledge what was happening. Franny took to spending part of her week back in college. Simon spent several weekends on recruitment retreats in Surrey or Hampshire, where he participated in group exercises, was interviewed and tested and asked to build a kayak using only three car tyres and a selection of rubber bands. Soon he triumphantly presented us with a letter confirming that, from the end of August, he would be employed by a well-known firm of management consultants. Jess and I spent a similarly fraught few days in London. She auditioned and was offered a position with a prestigious orchestra. I, less grandly, was accepted on to a PGCE course. One night over dinner at the house Emmanuella announced that she would be working as a TV-journalist in Madrid from the autumn, and we all toasted our success in good red wine.

All this news was merely the backdrop to finals, though. They were punishing; the insistent, inescapable mental pressure of Oxford condensed into a single, migraine-like week. Exam after exam after exam, a test of nerve and stamina rather than education or intellect. My exams were earlier than the others’, at the end of March. When I came out of each one, someone in the house would make me tea or soup and say, ‘How was it?’ Meaning ‘Tell us the secret. What is this thing, finals? How is it to be conquered?’

And I did not know how to tell them that it was simply an exam. Like a hundred other exams. Like collections, like penals, like A-levels, like GCSEs, like mocks. For ten days I sat in Exam Schools. I raised my hand if I wanted to go to the bathroom, I tied my papers together using green cord tags with silver ends, I wrote legibly, I showed my workings. The only difference was in the show of the thing: the subfusc and the marble floors and the regulations concerning the holstering of swords.

This external show is meant to impress and terrify, but knowledge acquired at Oxford is no different from knowledge acquired anywhere else. And when the others began their finals, they knew this too.

But finals, for all their hugeness, lasted barely a moment. They were over as soon as they had begun, and then there was only waiting for results, lying in the sun and packing up belongings. We greeted each other with flowers and champagne, and threw flour or glitter on each other’s heads. But the end of finals meant the end of other things as well, and this became increasingly clear.

Jess and I put a deposit down on a rented one-bedroom flat in London. Simon, using money saved from his lucrative summer jobs, got a mortgage and bought a small flat in London, which seemed to us to be the most grown-up thing we’d ever heard of. Mark’s owning a house was one thing; Simon’s persuading a bank to lend him money to buy one was quite another. Franny was accepted to read for a PhD at Cambridge and would be moving into graduate accommodation there. By our last night in the house, we had already reached the point where it took some effort to gather the six of us together.

The last night was a week after our results were announced. There were some surprises — Emmanuella received a lower second, while Simon got an upper second, and none of us could ever account for this except that it seemed often to be how things happened between men and women at Oxford, the men appearing to be marked with slightly surprising leniency, the women with surprising strictness. Franny got her first though, as did Jess. Mark received a bare third but redeemed himself ridiculously by winning a prize for his paper on ‘Religions and Mythology of the Ancient Near East’. There was even a prize-giving where, according to him, he was presented with a leather-bound copy of Cory’s Ancient Fragments by seventeen senior dons, each with a long beard and tattered gown. I got a lower second and was pleasantly surprised my mark was no worse. Other than that, I barely felt anything: no disappointment, no anger. Relief, mostly. Relief that it was over. Anne had been right: Oxford is a race and my race was run. I was no longer limping along behind the pack. It was done.