Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

I found myself wondering how it would be to have these people’s lives instead of my own, to go back to their homes, let myself in with their keys, understand all the objects they owned. What faint traces keep us harnessed to our own lives, unable to wander off and inhabit the lives of others.

Mark said, ‘Don’t you think so, James?’

I said, ‘What?’

‘Don’t you think that we should just all get married to each other?’

I stared at him.

‘I mean, you get married to Jess, obviously, and Franny can marry Simon, Emmanuella can marry Franny’s older brother — what’s his name? — Miles. He’s tall and blond. And I’ll marry Nicola. And we should all live together in a big house in, let’s say, Tuscany. Or Provence. Or Oxford.’

He stretched out on the chaise longue, showing a slice of hairless stomach as he did so.

‘Don’t you think so, James? I mean, really, don’t you think so? We should all be together. It’s so silly that we’re not. Together, all the time. I could do it. I’ll buy a house, a huge one so we can all have separate kitchens and living rooms: you and me and Franny and Jess and Emmanuella and Simon. All together like in Oxford.’

‘We can’t, Mark. That’s just not the way things work.’

He sat up, cross-legged.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘but why not? Doesn’t everyone want this? To stay together with their university friends forever? For things to stay just as they were at college?’

‘Well, perhaps,’ I said. It was like talking to a child. ‘But it can’t be like that, can it? We have to go out, get jobs, make a living.’

‘Oh, a living. I can take care of all of that. Really, I can. It’s no problem.’

I sighed. ‘I know you can, Mark. But we don’t want you to.’

‘I don’t see why. I mean, I’m marrying Nicola now and so it’s OK for me to pay for things for her. Why can’t I just pay for things for all of us? Why can’t I, sort of, marry all of you? You don’t have to stop doing things. You don’t even need to be there all the time. Franny can write her books on economics, and Simon can live there when he’s not travelling around the world, and Jess can play her music and you can, oh, I don’t know, just lie around all day in a pair of swimming trunks.’

He smiled his wolfish grin and I thought again with surprise, oh, it can be like this, then. We can talk like this and it needn’t mean anything at all.

And Mark is so persuasive; his vision for a moment seemed reasonable to me. We could live like children forever: in freedom and unknowing, dependent on the good graces of others. Even Mark’s dependence was absolute, for his money had come to him as a gift and if he were ever to reach the bottom of it, he would have no way to replace it. Isn’t this the paradise that the religious always imagine themselves to be in? Dependent forever on the beneficence of Almighty God and forever grateful for His bounty?

He yawned, suddenly, as cats do — a yawn that looked as though it might dislocate his jaw.

‘Sorry,’ he said, stifling another yawn, ‘I’m awfully tired. I’ve been driving back and forth to Dorset a lot and it’s making me sleepy.’

He rolled on to his stomach and pulled a rug over himself. I stood up to leave, but he caught me by the cuff.

‘No,’ he said, ‘stay. Until I go to sleep. Like we used to do in Oxford.’

I couldn’t remember having done such a thing for him in Oxford. I wanted to remember it, though. He made me want to remember it.

I sat down.

I looked out of the window at the restaurant with its little busy lives. I looked at Mark, his fair hair fallen across his eyes like a schoolboy. I waited. When his breath became deep and regular, I put on my jacket. I pulled the blind down and lit one of the smaller electric lamps. It cast a slight orange glow across the room. I pulled the door closed quietly behind me and walked down the passage to the front door.

I felt something then, as I let myself out of his flat. I didn’t know what it was. I thought of him lying there asleep and how easy, how terribly easy that conversation had been. And his flat, the smell of cigarettes around the walls, the discarded clothes among the first editions. The squalor of it and yet the beauty. I stood with his front door open, staring at the green wallpaper of his hallway for a long time.

Mark and Nicola married in May, in an open-air ceremony in the grounds of a house near to the Wedmore family home. The day was sunny, the venue picturesque, the flowers eloquent in their simplicity. Nicola carried a bouquet of Michaelmas daisies, Mark wore a yolk-yellow tie, and the guests kept their doubts in check even at the moment of ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’.

I was an usher, but my duties were soon over. I had handed out Orders of Service and directed honoured relatives to front-row seats, but after the service began there was nothing for me to do other than listen to the words of God and hold Jess’s hand. The thing was stiff, it seemed to me. Formal and so strictly ordained that Mark and Nicola were like characters in a play and we the audience. Mass, a sermon and words from the Bible, Simon bravely working his way through ‘love is not jealous, it does not boast’ with seeming conviction, although half the people there knew that, even until the previous day, he had been suggesting with increasing force that the wedding should be postponed.

But Mark and Nicola had continued doggedly through all protestations and concerns. ‘Love is patient, love is kind.’ I would not have thought Mark had such persistence in him; he had never shown it before. ‘Love is not rude, it is not self-seeking.’ They had simply made their plans, booked the venue, talked to caterers, decided on colour schemes, while all around them shells of anxiety and anger burst and left them unscathed. ‘Love always trusts, always hopes, always per— severes.’ Was this love? Nicola, seventeen years old and shining-eyed, thought so. Mark, delivered from dilettantism, thought so. Franny said, ‘It won’t last a year,’ and even Jess said, ‘They do seem to be hurrying it rather.’

‘But where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled.’ They made telephone calls, they filed important papers in ring binders, they invited Mark’s mother with all due graciousness. They held each other’s hands throughout. And they came to their reward. This very moment: ‘What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,’ and an eruption of applause.

As we watched Nicola’s aunt apply powder to her bosom before the photographs were taken, Jess leaned in to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Promise me we’ll never have to do this.’

I said, ‘I promise.’

‘What are you two up to?’ said Franny from behind us. ‘Planning your own announcement?’

She was a little drunk already and of course it was a wedding, but I wondered when I had last seen her without a drink, or spent an evening with her which she had not ended tottering and staggering. I felt for her, though, remembering what had gone before.

I said, ‘You needn’t worry about us. We’ll never do it. Jess wants to be free to have affairs and ditch me at a moment’s notice, don’t you?’

And Jess smiled and said nothing.

There were speeches later; Mark was less entertaining than he could be, but irreverent and self-mocking. He said, ‘Now that I’ve found Nicola, I’m delighted to announce that no one can accuse me any more of having more money than sense,’ and raucous laughter and scattered applause followed. I was astonished; he had never joked about money before. He made his new bride a little presentation: a gift from his childhood. I knew what it was before she had the box open: the music box, glittering glass and gold, finally finding a suitable home. Nicola and Simon’s father, David, gave a rambling, slightly choked speech, remembering Nicola when she was a little girl and saying how quickly this day had come. I was almost certain I heard someone whisper, ‘A damn sight too quickly, if you ask me.’ Mark gave gifts to the little flower-girls, hoisting them up towards the tiered canopy in his arms, pretending to drop them as they screamed and giggled. He hugged them and planted kisses on their foreheads and Franny, sitting next to me, muttered, ‘Yeah, yeah, Mark, we get it.’