Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

He arrived late and in high spirits, dancing from foot to foot. Before I could stand up he swiftly looked around the almost-empty lobby and dipped down to kiss me on the mouth. This was not a thing we did in public, not so incautiously. He hauled on my arm.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

I gathered up my newspaper, my backpack full of exercise books. Some of his excitement had caught me too and as we made for the lifts I wished I could break into a run, or jump. His jeans were tight, outlining his bottom. I longed, as ever, to be touching him. As the doors closed in the little wood-panelled cabin he grabbed my belt, pulled me towards him and kissed me hard, his hands reaching around my back and under my shirt.

I pushed him away, frightened that the lift doors might open again or, irrationally, that we had failed to observe someone else standing in the tiny space with us. Mark pouted. He knew behaving like this in public frightened me.

‘What’s this about, Mark?’

He slouched back against the wood panels.

‘Maybe I’m not going to tell you now.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, all right then. But not till we get to the room. Don’t want to do anything in public we shouldn’t, do we, James?’

By the time we reached the room, though, he was bouncing again. He placed me in a chair, bent across me, kissed me and then stood up again, drawing breath for his announcement. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. Perhaps his mother was divorcing again; Mark didn’t like her new husband much. Or perhaps Nicola was going away for a while and we could spend more time together.

He stretched out his arms, the right directly above the left, both clutched into fists, as if he were reading a proclamation. He made a noise like a trumpet, then grinned at me, threw away the proclamation and said, ‘Nicola’s pregnant.’

He stuck his hands in his pockets, bit his lower lip.

‘What?’

‘Nicola,’ he said, ‘is expecting a baby.’

I didn’t understand at first. I had assumed, but had not realized that I’d assumed, that they didn’t sleep together any more, or at least that they used contraception.

‘Is it, I mean, do you want it?’

Mark looked at me. And I understood. I could not fathom how it had taken me so long.

In my dreams, this is where it happens. It is here, the fulcrum of my life. When I dream, or daydream, this is where I exert a gentle pressure and move the world. Sometimes, I am the noble one. I say, ‘But Mark, we can’t carry on now . Not now you’re going to be a father. It wouldn’t be right.’ I can’t convince myself of that though.

More often I imagine it the other way. I imagine Mark teasing me. That is easier to bring to mind. He says, ‘Well, of course, you know what this means, James.’ I shake my head. He says, ‘We can’t very well carry on sleeping together, can we ? Not now I’m going to be a father.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘It wouldn’t be right, would it? Would it, James?’ I think he’s mocking me, making fun of some imagined James with moral convictions and high ideals. But he’s serious. ‘Come now, James,’ he says. ‘You must have realized I wouldn’t want to carry on like this forever. It’s been fun, but now it’s over.’ I lunge for him and he dances out of reach. He leaves the room and I remain.

But it did not happen this way.

Instead, we made love and Mark was so filled with delight that it seeped through his skin and into my body, and when I held him he was radiating warmth like a star. And when he came, he was shouting and panting and telling me in my ear that I was the best, the most wonderful, the sexiest, the most glorious, that I was Christmas and the Fourth of July, and St Patrick’s Day and, yes, the Feast of the Holy Virgin all in one, and I saw that, yes, yes, this was a holiday, a celebration of life, and all things that celebrate life should be done upon it.

And later, when we lay in bed with his arm thrown across me, it still seemed that way, a day of rejoicing and celebration.

That evening, after Mark was gone, after Jess was asleep, I remained awake, staring at the ceiling of our bedroom. I found a thought coiled inside me, kept at bay by the hum of daily life but now stronger and louder. I shied away from it even as I recognized it as a true wish, a heart’s cry. Can I confess it now? I have never whispered it to Mark, tried never even to think it in his presence. I could never tell him. It is my own particular evil. It is this. I wished for his child to die. Then, before the child was born, when it was only a mixture of blood and water, I wished it dead, flushed, gone.

I think of this sometimes, on the worst days here in San Ceterino, when I wonder why I ever came, or what keeps me here. When I clean up his mess or make his telephone calls or comfort his weeping, I remind myself that I wished his child gone because I saw that our lives could not continue as they had done. I wished it gone so that I could keep him near me. Because of wanting, because of the amount I wanted him, I could not see anyone else.

Once, about a year ago, I came upon a picture of Nicola and Daisy unexpectedly. I had been searching through the drawer next to Mark’s bed — he was raving by the pool in the moonlight. I wanted to know what he’d taken. I looked in the vitamin-pill bottles, ran my fingertips along the seam of the drawer lining feeling for loose places, flipped open his sunglasses case and there they were. Nicola and Daisy in the sun smiling. The photograph was creased, carefully fitted to the curve of the case lid. Nicola was wearing a blue and white patterned dress, with dangling earrings, three slim squares of porcelain held together by silver rings. She was holding Daisy — who looked to be about eighteen months old in the picture — on her right hip. Daisy’s hair was very blonde. In the photograph you could see the sun shining on it. She was reaching out to grab one of Nicola’s earrings, and Nicola had caught her arm at an awkward angle to stop her. Nicola was smiling into Daisy’s face. Daisy’s mouth was set in a determined line, her eyes focused on the earring, oblivious of photographer and surroundings.

This photograph stopped me. In the courtyard, Mark was still shouting at the moon and I thought, I could take this out now, show it to him and it would stop him too. I sat on the corner of his bed and looked at the photograph, feeling as though I could walk straight through it and out into the sunny day, where Nicola was holding Daisy on her hip and her earrings were moving in the sunlight. I wanted to do that. I knew just where this photograph was taken. On Broad Street, by the Sheldonian Theatre. Just out of sight to the left was Blackwell’s, then the White Horse, then Trinity College. I could almost hear the sounds of the street — there would be music playing out of some open window, and the air would be a little too thick with exhaust fumes. It was Oxford, on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the start of May. It was the day we graduated.

Oxford, which likes to do things differently, dissociates graduation from the end of the degree course. It’s possible to graduate only a few months after finishing a degree but most people do what we did — wait four years and then take both the BA and the honorary MA at the same time. The MA is another piece of antiquity, lovingly carried in cupped hands into the modern day. We didn’t have to do any extra work for it, or take another exam. Seven years after joining the university, provided we passed our finals and survived that long, the degree of Master of Arts was awarded us.

So, for a day, we took our place in the Oxford clockwork mechanism again. There was a great business of putting on robes, of learning the correct Latin words and gestures for the occasion. There was something comforting about it. After so long away, we returned and Oxford still had a role for us. People pass from school to school, from job to job, and though a great fuss is made when we leave — parties, cakes, gifts and farewells — a year later we might never have been there. No record is kept. There would be no special welcome if we returned to our old job four or five years after we left. But Oxford, whose speciality is remembrance, remembers. After BA there is MA, and after MA there are gaudies, decade after decade. And at the end of our days, if we have made our college proud, there will be an obituary, sent in the College Record to every eager first year, saying, until the end, this one belonged to us.