Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

Mark poured himself a second whisky, or was it his third now?

‘I don’t know why things have fallen apart like this.’

‘Between you and Nicola?’

His face dropped. He stared into his glass.

‘No, between us, all of us. We used to be such good friends, didn’t we? I mean, didn’t we? You and me and Jess and Franny and Simon and even Emman … Emmanuella, although —’ he gestured with his glass, sloshing a little of the auburn liquid on to the carpet — ‘I never could get to the bottom of her. So to speak.’ He giggled. ‘So to speak.’

‘Yes, we used to be good friends.’

‘When we were all together. It was better then, when we were together in the house.’

‘It was a good time.’

‘No,’ he said, sitting forward, suddenly earnest. ‘No, it wasn’t a good time. It wasn’t just that. We were all more ourselves then. We were all who we really are, only we forget because of bills and responsibility and having to go to work and be married and that sort of thing. We’ve forgotten, but we have to try to remember.’

His voice softened, lowered.

‘You, James, you were just so beautiful then. You’re still beautiful now. But then, when you were really yourself. God, I remember that just watching you cross the lawn, you know, just seeing you lying in the hammock, made me …’ He breathed out loudly. ‘You should all come back and live in the house again.’

I thought back to that time. It was already brighter now than it had been; I could feel already the days of rain erasing themselves in my mind, the days when I had been lonely or sad. It was beginning to seem utterly golden, although I knew that it had been life, only life, with no mystery to it or redemptive quality or unattainable glories.

Being with Mark I felt I could hear again the sound of rain on the conservatory roof, smell the ham hock cooking in the kitchen, see Franny and Jess arguing over their card game. I heard the shrieks of laughter as Simon pushed Emmanuella around the garden in the old wheelbarrow, or tasted the lip balm Jess used then, something with a hint of vanilla. Being with Mark, I remembered happiness, not as it had been for me, but as I imagined it was for him: rich, unending and enveloping.

‘And you and me, James, we were always good friends, weren’t we? Very good friends. Better than friends.’ He leaned closer. ‘You always fancied me, didn’t you? Do you remember that day, the day you left Oxford, in the kitchen? Do you remember, James?’

He was quite drunk; I was much less so. I should have called a cab for him, sent him home. But he smiled at me, stretched, and touched my cheek with the back of his hand. I could smell his skin, that faint scent of raspberries still, as though he had taken summer into him, as though high heat and sun were just below the surface of his skin.

I tried to resist. I did try. In so far as I was able. When he put his hand up to my face, I pulled back. He was still for a moment, looked at me. I looked at him. I tried to shake my head, or say something: you should go, I don’t want. Something along those lines. But I didn’t. Mark smiled his easy, lazy smile and moved forward again.

I kissed him. He kissed me.

He muttered, ‘I’ve been thinking about this for years, you know,’ and I wanted to remind him that he’d said that before, he’d said it the last time, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything at all.

That evening, after Mark left, after I’d showered and shaved and gathered up my clothes and put them through the washing machine, I tried to start an argument with Jess.

Jess and I rarely quarrelled. It’s difficult to quarrel with Jess, because she’s so essentially self-contained there’s no purchase, nowhere to get a handhold, pull her open, make her angry. And, truthfully, I disgusted myself even for wanting to. And I did want to. I wanted to make her cry. I wanted her to tell me to fuck off, or to throw something at me. I wanted her to say, ‘How dare you?’ or ‘I hate you.’ I wanted to know what it was would make her do those things, because it wasn’t anything I’d been doing up till then.

And if I could have broken her open, what then? If I could have found the right place to direct my hammer-blow, or wedged my chisel into a hairline crack on her shell and smashed or levered her apart, what would I have done next? She would have just been shattered, the parts of herself which fitted together so neatly now suddenly painful, never again as comfortable as they had been. There are enough of us in that condition already, without wanting to create any more.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, hello, Nicola. It’s James. How’re you?’

‘Mmmm, fine. Leo and Eloise are staying with us for the weekend while my parents are away, did Mark tell you?’

‘Oh yes, I think he mentioned it. Does your sister still think she’s got glandular fever?’

Nicola laughed. ‘Either that or dengue fever, she’s not sure. Mark diagnosed her with beriberi. She enjoyed looking up the symptoms to that one.’

‘I bet she did. Is he there by any chance?’

As though she had reminded me of his existence.

‘Just a moment. Mark!’ A pause. ‘It’s James on the phone for you! He’s going to take it in the study. Just a sec.’

And then Mark’s drawled ‘Jaaaames’, and the click, always waiting for the click of her putting down the phone.

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘you rang?’

‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Planning a trip to London next week. Are you free at all? After work? Free to come over to the flat, that is?’

And I said yes. Every time, I said yes. I couldn’t not.

I had told myself repeatedly not to expect that we would continue. It wasn’t just that he had a wife, but also that he had never been one for revisiting his old grounds. Mark had been maudlin, it meant nothing. But Mark came up to town again two weeks later and it happened again. Wine and conversation, nostalgia and regret, intimacy and sex. And then again. And then again.

And I remember thinking one morning, while attempting to bash the rudiments of differential equations into the heads of twenty-six recalcitrant boys, oh, I am having an affair. It was a thought that occurred between one word and the next, making me stumble in my sentence. I would not have thought myself the kind of person capable of having an affair. But life teaches us who we are.

But then, of course, there had to be visits with Nicola. I was spending so much time with Mark that failing to see Nicola would have been an insult. And there was this too: now that I had dealt her this invisible blow, I wanted to see for myself whether she had guessed yet. To see if I could tell from the tiny turns of her head whether she knew that in the privacy of his flat Mark and I had screwed until I had shouted out all the breath in my lungs, until I thought by my trembling legs that I would never stand up again, until I thought, now I must be sated, now I must, and yet my appetite proved otherwise. I sometimes thought it must be obvious from every look between us that all I wanted, every moment I was near him, was to feel his naked skin on mine and to see him hard and willing and ready.

But apparently I was wrong. It wasn’t obvious. Mark always flirted with everyone, of course. So that the first time he slapped my arse as he walked past me from sitting room to kitchen, my stomach turned to meltwater. But Nicola looked on mildly and Jess smiled and I remembered, oh yes, he does this with everyone. And me? Perhaps I had looked at Mark with dog-like yearning for so long that no difference was discernible.

Nicola had become a little tetchy since I last saw her.

‘Oh, my God, Mark,’ she said, when he wanted to show us his collection of remote-controlled aircraft, newly acquired at considerable expense, ‘no one wants to see your toys, all right?’