Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

After a long moment, Mark drew in breath, exhaled — and I remembered his breath hot on my neck, I couldn’t help myself, and I thought, oh God, is this madness? — and he said, ‘So. Right. What are you drinking?’

Mark went to the bar, giving me time to think, to settle, to stop my leg from twitching, to place my hand on my knee and remind myself that nothing was going to happen here. And when we were sitting back in the armchairs with our beers he said, ‘Mate, how the fuck have you been? I’m a bloody idiot not to have been in touch sooner. How is everything? How’s Jess?’

I told him about my work at the school. I described Jess’s burgeoning career, her concerts, her friends, her small reviews in the papers. I told him the amusing stories from her tour. I explained that she was much in demand. He nodded and looked interested, normal. He was sane. Suddenly, startlingly sane. Was this Nicola? Had she taken all the madness from him?

Mark said, ‘Are you and Jess planning to get married?’

I shook my head.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t believe in it.’

Mark looked at me. He raised his eyebrows and I noticed that, when he did so, fine lines became visible across his forehead. He took another swallow of beer.

‘I suppose you think that I’m doing something very stupid indeed.’

I realized that, because I had been unable to do so, he had brought the conversation around to the point.

He took a swig and continued, ‘Franny came to see me over the weekend, you know. Utterly lashed. Do you think she’s turning into a drunk? Anyway. Yes. She accused me of terrible things, leading Nicola on, lying to her family, taking advantage of Simon. And Manny called me yesterday, wanted to know if it’s all a joke. So I hope you’re not here to give me the same bloody speech, James, because I’m not interested in hearing it again.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’ And it was true; I wasn’t.

He frowned at me, then broke into a grin.

‘Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t. You can understand it, can’t you? It’s like you and Jess. I do love her.’

I stared at him. He and Nicola were like me and Jess? Was it an accusation or an attempt at comfort?

‘I love the whole family … even Simon, though he’s not being especially pleasant to me right now. And Nicola’s so perfect, you see, so simple and sane. Just, normal. Sweet and loving and normal. She’s exactly what I need, James. And of course my mother and Father Hugh are delighted. An end to all the old trouble at last.’

A spurt of hot madness erupted in my head. I wanted to throw the glasses to the floor, to shout and overturn tables, as I should have done two years earlier. None of this was what I’d expected. Not this sanity, not this calmness, not this normality. The idea that Mark and I should be talking like this, when I knew the truth of him, when I still thought of him and the memory of his fingers and his palm could still glow hot on my flesh.

‘But Mark, you’re gay. Aren’t you? I mean, aren’t you? Really? You’re really gay and being with Nicola … aren’t you going to … You’re just going to end up hurting her.’

Mark sat back in his chair with a huff, folded his arms across his chest, looked at me for a few moments.

‘But you understand this, don’t you? What are any of us really, James? What is really ? Why do we have to decide this when we’re sixteen and then stick with it forever? Why can’t it be like food? When I was a kid I liked strawberry milkshakes but now I don’t. I like dark chocolate instead. Have I perverted my natural desire for strawberry milkshakes into an unnatural desire for dark chocolate? Or was my desire for milkshakes wrong and now I’ve come to my senses? No. People change. Our tastes develop. I used to like sleeping with boys and now I like sleeping with Nicola. My tastes have changed, that’s all. I mean, you must know. It’s the same with you.’

I stared at him.

I said slowly, ‘It’s the same with me. Yes.’ And for the first time I thought this might be the truth.

There were words I’d come here to say. They began with ‘Mark, what happened between us …’ and went on I knew not where. A declaration? A rejection? I had hoped that he would at least provide an answer for me. To explain what had happened between us, to explain myself to me.

I had been stupid, had put too much weight on something that would carry no weight at all. For him, it had been a silly game. He had, as he said, simply wanted to know; and he had known and that was the end of that. And what had he known? That for one moment, one late-night last-day-of-Oxford insanity, I had wanted him. It meant nothing more than that. I felt suddenly, joyfully, relieved. Perhaps I need never think of any of it again.

It was the past; a dream. Here we were, in the present, two happily partnered men, old friends from university, catching up on news. It was as wholesome as Nicola’s family picnics, as simple as Enid Blyton, as natural as a walk in the country.

After a few moments, Mark said, ‘Come on, mate. My flat’s only ten minutes away. Let me show you it.’

He edged his hand along the tabletop and nudged my knuckles with his. It was the first time he had touched me in two years.

‘All right,’ I said.

Even if he hadn’t told me so already, I would have known at once that Mark’s flat was ‘one of the family’s places’. It consisted of five large rooms above a bookshop in Islington, along with a kitchen and bathroom. It had that same air of expensive shabbiness that Mark’s house in Oxford had possessed. The rooms were linked together by archways and doorless doorframes off a hallway — it was impossible to say which was bedroom, which living room, which dining room or study. An enormous oak table with eight legs was in the same room as the divan bed with curled velvet-covered bolsters at each end. In another room, the walls were covered with bookshelves, up to the ceiling, with three chaise longues tucked under the wall-mounted shelves; the books were antique hardbacks. A third room was half stacked with paintings. Throughout, the atmosphere was heavy with the smell of those French cigarettes Mark liked, and cloisonné saucers full of butts were strewn through the rooms. The place looked as if a rake of the 1890s had shut up his home as the century ended and Mark had moved in 100 years later, smoked a large number of cigar ettes but otherwise left everything untouched.

‘Nicola says she’s going to smarten the place up,’ he remarked, throwing his coat down on to a pile of washing.

‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘What does she want to do with it?’

Mark grinned. ‘Burn it to the ground, I think. She anticipates I might do that by myself anyway. But —’ he waved a hand at the bookshelves, the window with its view of an Islington side street — ‘we’re not likely to spend much time in London anyway, so maybe I’ll keep it as a piedà-terre. We’ve bought a bigger place in Dorset, near her parents.’

Ah yes. The money. The relentless, unstoppable tide of money. The money that made all things possible and thus left nothing to be simply desirable.

‘And my mother’s letting me have one of her places in Italy,’ he continued. ‘San Ceterino. Nice to have a winter getaway. Although Nicola says we mustn’t spend Christmas there. They believe in family Christmases.’ He threw himself on to an overstuffed chaise longue next to the window. ‘Oh, how marvellous to have a family Christmas!’

I sat on a chair near to the window and looked out at the red-painted restaurant across the way. Inside couples, families, single people were eating or chatting to each other. Mark was still talking, something about how Nicola had a plan to ‘get rid of all the silly books’, but I wasn’t listening. I had become entranced, as occasionally happens to me, by the idea of other people’s lives. Each one of those people in that restaurant had their own life. There, a father wiping sauce off his small daughter’s chin. There, a woman with short steel-grey hair, eating alone. There, a couple chatting, waiting for their food.