Naomi Alderman - The Lessons

‘Yes, but …’

‘Oxford’s full of secrets. It’s tradition.’

She put her arm companionably around my waist and drew me with her to peer in through the window at the top of the door. We were at the back of the house and through the rippled bottle-bottom glass I could see a large red-flagged kitchen. There was a black range, an oak table that could comfortably seat twelve, and piles of packing cases.

Jess opened the kitchen door and we went in. The house was cold and silent. I looked into the open crates. In one, a bust of a bearded man poking his tongue out nestled among shreds of newspaper written in the Cyrillic alphabet. In another were a dozen blue crystal balls; in a third, a set of extremely impractical-looking massive cast-iron saucepans, each big enough to cook a meal for thirty.

‘But whose house is this?’ I said. ‘I mean, really? It can’t be … This Mark’s a student, isn’t he?’

‘Is someone,’ said a voice from behind us, ‘taking my name in vain?’

I turned. A previously unnoticed door next to the larder had opened, giving a glimpse of a small sitting room beyond. A man was leaning in the doorway, with blond hair that flopped into his eyes, wearing a pair of low-slung jeans with a loose banker’s shirt: blue striped, with white collars and cuffs. The outfit and his demeanour, half-amused half-wary, made him ageless: he could have been a boyish don or a precocious twelve-year-old.

‘Mark!’ said Jess.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘this must be the paramour . Quite as beautiful as you said, Jessica. Yes. It’s our house.’

‘No,’ she said, smiling, ‘it’s yours.’

‘It’s the same thing,’ said Mark, and reached out his arms to embrace her.

I did not like Mark; that much became immediately clear. I did not like his word ‘paramour’. I did not like the way he spoke.

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t take it like that. Any friend of Jess’s is a friend of mine. You are deliciously welcome.’

I did not like the way he looked at me, a tilt of the head, a mocking raised eyebrow, and particularly not the way he looked at Jess. I was territorial already, defensive. I wanted to read a special interest into her behaviour towards me and so I did not like how he touched her, the way she sat so close to him, her knees crossed towards him, his hand resting casually on her thigh. I did not like that at all.

We were the first to arrive, but it became clear from Mark’s enumeration of the guest list that there would be others — many, many others.

‘Sounds like you’ve invited half of Oxford,’ said Jess.

‘Only the best people,’ said Mark, shaking his head. ‘Like the two of you, my dears.’ He squeezed Jess’s thigh and ruffled my hair. I stiffened and sat back.

The short curly-haired woman I’d seen before in the library arrived as Mark was showing us the garden. She was Jess’s friend from school — it was she who had introduced Jess to Mark — and had an air of solidity and good humour. She wore a green velvet jacket and a pair of glasses over which she looked at me and said, to Jess, ‘And who’s this?’

‘This is James,’ said Jess. ‘He’s … a physicist.’

She stuck out her hand. Her handshake was firm, her smile sardonic.

‘Well, how do you do, James-the-physicist? I’m Franny.’

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said, watching Mark greet a group of three blonde girls. ‘Same old. Drinking the blood of Christian children, cursing the name of Jesus.’

She bent towards me and gave a wry half-smile, unblinking.

‘ Jewish .’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No need to be sorry,’ she said, examining a crumbling bird-bath with apparent disdain. ‘Runs in the family.’

Blond, broad-shouldered Simon arrived shortly after Franny.

‘How long have you been together?’ I asked after he’d greeted her with a lingering kiss.

‘Oh, we’re not,’ she replied. ‘We’re just there for each other in times of horniness.’

I rapidly began to lose track of the new arrivals. There were five Norwegian girls, three blonde and two brunette, all of whom seemed to be named Ulla or variations thereof. There were eight members of the Balliol football team, all wearing Balliol jerseys, who set upon the bottles of brandy they found in the kitchen with a great deal of enthusiasm. There were various ex-public schoolboys with names like Rory and Sheridan, each of whom arrived with a matching girl named Tommy or Georgie or, in the case of one particularly svelte girl, Lumpy.

Mark greeted every new arrival with histrionic enthusiasm, clutching and gasping and exclaiming over the magnificence and delightfulness of each of his friends. He could not sit still. He decided he must show us the house, the whole thing, at once.

The place made no sense: one could see its antecedents, but it had been so touched with madness that it no longer cohered at all. There were, we found when we later attempted to count them, somewhere between thirty-nine and forty-two rooms; no counting ever quite reached the same number. The oldest part of the house was Elizabethan: small panelled rooms at the centre of the ground floor. But generations had accreted layers of plaster and brick around stone. The Georgians had concealed it behind a false front. The Victorians were responsible for the broken greenhouses and the pointed extension at the back of the house. The Edwardians had added the tennis court and rockeries and then the place had ceased at the start of the Second World War.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mark, explaining this to us. ‘It belonged to my father’s great-aunt Clytemnestra. No one’s bothered to go over it since she died. So they gave it to me.’

‘They gave it to you?’ I said.

I realized as soon as I’d said it that I should have remained silent. No one else seemed to think this point was worth commenting on. The rest of the group looked at me inquisitively. Only Jess seemed unconcerned; she smiled and winked.

‘Oh yes, well, they were so delighted I’d finally decided to come to heel,’ said Mark. He raised his eyebrows. ‘I believe they planned it all along, you know, although they’d never admit it.’

‘That’s … nice of them?’ I didn’t know who ‘they’ were, but this seemed a safe response to the news that someone had given Mark a house.

He screwed up his nose.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I had to nag them and nag them for it even so. All the uncles and cousins seem to think it’s vulgar to own a house. But my father saw it my way. None of them want the place at all is the thing, because it’s a bit rough around the edges. But —’ he smiled suddenly, pirouetting on the spot, arms outstretched as if to embrace the blue and gold study we were standing in — ‘so am I. I love it! So fuck’em.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Jess squeezed my arm.

Later, we unpacked our things in the Chinese-papered bedrooms Mark had allotted to us. They were two adjoining rooms, with a warped communicating door which was swollen with damp and would not shut though we tugged and pushed at it. The half-open door felt curiously intimate, as though we had been given just one room.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘how it is that if Mark’s so rich… he is rich, isn’t he?’

Jess nodded.

‘And his family are rich. So why is this house in such a state of decay? I mean … where are the marble bathrooms and luxury yachts?’

She frowned. We were in Jess’s room. I sitting in a broken split-cane chair, she on the bed.

‘I think … really rich people, not new rich but generations of richness … don’t think about things in the same way the rest of us do. Maybe because they don’t have to. Mark doesn’t, anyway. He’s really funny about money. But he’s so generous. You’ll see. Look how he’s got this place ready for us.’