The Lessons

14

About a year later someone — I think it was Franny — made telephone calls and said, ‘Let’s get the gang back together. I can’t believe it’s been so long.’ And we all said yes, we couldn’t believe it either. So long and what with one thing and another we’d barely seen each other, not the whole gang together. Astonishing.

So we arranged to meet in a pub near Simon’s office. Jess had a night off. Franny got the train down from Cambridge. Emmanuella was in London working on a travel piece. And Mark, I tried to ask casually, what about Mark? Oh yes, said Jess, Franny had arranged it with him. He was with Simon’s family in Dorset, wasn’t that funny, and he’d drive up. I thought, can I say no? I thought, can I pretend to be ill? I thought, for God’s sake, pull yourself together. So I went.

We arrived first at the bar, Jess and I. It was a Monday night at the start of summer, the place wasn’t crowded. We sipped our beers and talked about nothing: my coursework and her practice and our plans for a break.

Franny was the next to arrive, only twenty minutes later, flustered, her hair twisted in a bun at the nape of her neck, fastened with a pencil.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said as she kissed us, ‘the bus was late, traffic.’

And we said, it’s fine, no problem, Simon said he’d be late anyway.

And the whole thing jarred, and was wrong, but I said nothing.

Franny said, ‘Simon’s coming? He said so? Is he bringing that girl with him, that new girl he’s seeing?’

And she said it with such brightness I thought she’d crack every glass in the room.

Jess said, ‘He didn’t say anything about a girl.’

And Franny said, ‘They work together,’ and bought another round.

After forty-five minutes Emmanuella came, perfumed and delicious as ever and always. She’d cut her hair short, that was the first thing, and we admired it, the curl and the lustrous shine. She showed us a ring too, bought for her by her new boyfriend — not an engagement ring, she laughed at the thought. But a gift, a token. He was a Bourbon, or some kind of royalty, and she thought this a good sign and we thought so too.

‘A Bourbon,’ said Franny, a little tipsy already, ‘like the biscuit. Do you dunk him, Manny? Do you give him a liddle dip?’

And she winked and snorted, but Emmanuella frowned and said nothing and ordered more wine.

At 7.45 there was Simon, at last, after phone calls and messages. He’d been delayed, it was unavoidable, but bloody hell he was sorry and how the fuck were we and what were we drinking and he’d get the round. He bought bottles of expensive wine and talked about markets and explained that next year he’d be working in Chile. Or maybe in Mexico, possibly Greece. He joked, as he spoke about bull and bear markets and emerging sectors for growth, and I looked at Jess and I wondered how I had ever been friends with this man.

By 9 we were hungry. Even Franny and Simon, who’d been jousting with each other all evening. Little digs, little mentions of the past they had shared. She brought up the new girl, what was her name, Xena? Xenia, he said, and how now was Rob? Eventually, starving, I mentioned pizza, and Franny, dismayed, said, ‘But how will Mark find us?’

And Jess said, ‘It’s 9 now. Surely he’s a no-show?’

And this led to grumbling, which we did with gusto, because at least this was a topic we shared. It had only been twelve months but already it was obvious that we no longer had much to say to each other. There was affection, certainly, and memories of kindness, but not much of substance except about Mark.

At 9.30, a message, much delayed and much regretted, but Mark would not come. Stuck in Dorblish, he said, with Si’s family. And we sighed and said how like Mark, how typical. Except perhaps I saw a flicker of annoyance cross Simon’s face, but he ordered another bottle and more crisps and more nuts.

The conversation lulled and grew stiff. There were awkward pauses. Franny smoked cigarette after cigarette and Emmanuella stole from her pack, and when she said, ‘These are not as good as Mark’s cigarettes,’ Franny said, ‘Then why don’t you …’ and then paused and said, ‘Bloody Mark. Getting us all here and not showing up.’ And we agreed and muttered that it was all Mark’s fault.

We drifted away from the bar just after 10. The last few minutes had been better, brighter, after I’d said I needed an early night — school teaching, you know — and I knew that the others had been thankful to get away too. We promised to stay in touch, to see each other more often, but without Mark I could not imagine how it would work. He had been the centre, the one who bound us together, because beside him we seemed more similar to each other. Without him, Emmanuella was too rich, and Franny too opinionated, and Simon too shallow. Without him, we were just a scattering of people.

Jess and I went home together, and I felt so relieved and so full of gratitude that of all these people she was the one I could go home with. I held her hand as we walked to the station, and I thought, if I had to choose again, right now, from the beginning, I would still choose her.

I suppose that some men might have broken with Jess after what happened with Mark. Those men might have joyfully explored the possibilities now laid before them without shame or hesitation. But I had never been such a man — so open to myself, so tolerant of my own person, so optimistic that life was bound to bring me joy. There are other men, more like me I think, who would have confessed all to Jess, put themselves in her hands, begged for forgiveness and understanding. I have more difficulty in explaining why I did not do this. I think the meagre truth is that I was too frightened to tell her. I couldn’t imagine how she’d react. And, more than that, I was frightened by the idea of who I might be without her. She was the very centre and focus of my life, she was my rudder. I feared leaving her as I might have feared travelling without possessions or money to a distant land where I knew neither any living soul nor a single word of the native language, with no passage home.

This is not wise. To hang one’s life so completely on another person is not sensible. But it’s a line written in my character, like a vein of metal scribbled through a stone. I cannot love in any other way than this, so it is for me to choose whom I love with care. Or can one choose at all? But Jess is a good person; she never hurt me intentionally, and this is quite a thing to say about another human being.

In any case, I had not spent my time miserably. Jess and I both had new jobs. Teaching kept me busy most of the time. Jess’s work with the orchestra kept her out late, and occasionally travelling, so that we were constantly experiencing joyful reunion. We had our little flat to decorate and domestic life to arrange. And we had each other finally, alone at last. Any fear in me that my desire for Jess might have evaporated was utterly dissipated within a day of moving into our new flat. We made love in our own home, under our own sheets, with our belongings still half in bags and boxes around the bedroom and in the hall. My desire for her was still as strong as ever, my pleasure in her body as intense. And so it continued from then on.

Only sometimes I would think about that night in the kitchen with Mark and a kind of longing would overcome me so that I thought I might fall to my knees. It was a longing filled with self-loathing, with desperation and embarrassment and fear. Like a whiff of solvents, it stunned for a moment and then evaporated. Or sometimes I would hide in the toilet and just think around those events, breathing, feeling them, until the thoughts overwhelmed me. I didn’t know what to do with these feelings, so I cut them off from the rest of my life. It’s an easy trick to master.

So perhaps it was down to me as much as any of us that ‘the gang’ didn’t get together. I didn’t want to see Mark, didn’t want to be reminded.

It was Jess who arranged such reunions as there were. Franny was our most frequent visitor; she often came down from Cambridge to sleep on our sofa, eat mushroom pie in front of the telly, drink red wine and tell tall tales of Cambridge dons. Emmanuella we saw nothing of. She sent us a videotape of the arts and culture programme she presented, but, as it was in Spanish, we could do no more than verify her identity.

Simon was always sending apologies. We didn’t want to see him and Franny together, not any more, so Jess suggested dinners in town, evenings out, a play or two — although plays and dinners and evenings out were always contaminated by the memory of Mark’s money. With new friends, we didn’t feel ashamed to suggest supermarket pizza and a video. With Simon or with Franny or with Emmanuella, we all wondered why it could not be a Maison Blanc supper or the stalls at an opening night.

Simon, in any case, rarely turned up. Dinners would be cancelled because he had to fly to Aarhus, weekend pub lunches postponed because he was needed in Berlin. There was one stilted and awkward evening of drinks with Simon and his latest girlfriend, Frieda. She had hair like Franny, corkscrew curls with a centre parting, and had similarly angular, dark-framed glasses. She wasn’t Franny, though. She didn’t understand our jokes, declared herself completely uninterested in politics, and was faintly amused by Simon’s protestations that ‘everything’s politics’. Their relationship didn’t last long. The next time we heard from him, he cheerfully told us she’d buggered off back to Switzerland and he wouldn’t mind except he knew he’d never get his skis back.

As for Mark, for a long time there was silence. After Oxford, after graduation, nothing. We learned, via an obituary in the paper, that he had lost his father and thus come into more money than he could hope to spend in a dozen lifetimes. We tried to contact him, to express our sorrow, but our phone calls and letters went unanswered. Eventually, though, there were postcards. First, after the failed pub trip, a picture of a bull, horns down, from Seville. He was sorry, so sorry he’d let us down. He’d shut up Annulet House, was travelling, but he’d see us soon, he promised, soon. I hoped he was wrong and said nothing. A few months later, Franny reported a postcard from Argentina, telling how he had made special friends with a gaucho. Later, Emmanuella said she’d had a letter from him postmarked Stockholm, but describing some adventure at the races in Hong Kong. A few months after that, Jess and I had another postcard. It was from Venice, a picture of a line of the key-like structures on the prows of gondolas. On the back was written:

Darlings —

Can’t see a gondola without thinking of you both. Punting, strawberries, champagne etc. Young love. Writing this, I want to be with you now, snuggled between you in a punt, like three bugs in a bed. Missing you both. Especially Jess. And especially James.

Best love,

M.

Jess laughed when she read this, and stuck the card into the frame of the mirror in our hallway. A few days later, when she was out, I took it down. I turned it over in my hands, reading the words again, tracing the curves of the letter M with my fingertip. I ripped it up and threw it in the outside bin. When Jess wondered what had happened to it, I shrugged and said nothing and thought, if I stay very still, perhaps life will ignore me.

Jess and I found new friends in any case. I was by this time working as a maths teacher at a private school for boys in west London. Some of the other teachers were pleasant company. One, Ajit, reminded me of Simon with his constant talk of ‘going on the pull’. He used to say, ‘You and your missus, it’s like you’ve been married twenty years,’ and this pleased me. Jess’s friends from her orchestra often found their way back to our flat after rehearsals, and we settled into a habit of hosting boisterous Sunday night suppers. Because she was often out late, I learned to cook, and found that I enjoyed it. The role-reversal pleased me, the surprise of being the one to pull a whole ham, fragrant and juicy, or a massive glistening lasagne from the oven to feed a tribe of musicians. I came to enjoy the girls’ sighs of, ‘James, if you weren’t taken, I’d marry you myself,’ as they dug their spoons through the glittering sugar crust of an apple pie or ladled out piping-hot servings of creamy rice pudding, aromatic with cinnamon and raisins.

They spoke a secret language to which I did not have access, these musicians. They burst into impromptu song, discussed conductors and techniques I’d never heard of, demonstrated bowing techniques using a loaf of French bread and a butter knife. But it was fine. At night after they left and when Jess and I were lying in bed together, she would curl up under my arm and enquire, into my chest, whether I had minded their noise, how late they had stayed. And I would shake my head and tell her that, no, I had enjoyed myself, would be happy to cook for them again next week. And she would snuggle closer.

And this was my life; it was perfectly satisfactory within the limits of what was possible.

I don’t know whether I would ever have changed anything of my own volition. I suspect not. I was two years out of university but my pleasant life still felt so tenuous to me, and so fragile, that I could not imagine disturbing it by choice. Better to walk a narrow path, to enjoy what was offered, not to seek for more. I might have remained like that forever, I think, if allowed to do so. But even if we wish to remain stationary, the world around us turns and so we move too. And thus, one Sunday afternoon, as I was waiting for Jess and her friends to return from rehearsals I had a phone call. A leg of lamb was roasting in the oven, the smell of caramelized onions and tenderizing meat beginning to pervade the house with mellow savouriness. I picked up the receiver. I expected it was Jess, calling to say they’d be late.

‘James? Is that you?’

It was Mark. My stomach dipped and swirled. I thought, how ridiculous, how utterly absurd, that I should still be afraid now at the sound of his voice.

‘James,’ he said. ‘James?’

I made my voice cold and hard.

‘Yes, Mark, how are you?’

‘James,’ he said, ‘mate, congratulate me. I’m getting married.’

I said, ‘Married?’

He laughed, a little chuckle in the back of his throat, and all at once I could see him, as I had not seen him all these years.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s wild. I’m getting married. Guess who to?’

‘Who?’

He paused, and I knew that he was smirking, as he always did before saying something shocking.

‘Nicola,’ he said.

‘Nicola?’ I said. ‘Nicola who?’

He made a mock-sigh.

‘Nicola,’ he said. ‘Simon’s sister Nicola.’

15

‘Simon’s hopping mad. Absolutely bloody hopping mad.’ Franny nodded, agreeing with herself, poured another glass of wine and went on, ‘He’s every right to be. Mark’s done a real number on his parents.’

‘Mark can be very impressive if he tries,’ Jess said evenly.

‘Too bloody right,’ said Franny. ‘Too bloody right. All those houses and money, very impressive. I mean, what the hell is he playing at?’

The anger in her was tight-coiled, as if Mark had done her some personal injustice.

‘You think he’s definitely serious?’ asked Jess.

Franny picked at her casserole and took a swig of wine.

‘Simon thinks he is. Simon’s parents think he is. Bloody hell, more importantly Nicola thinks he is.’

‘It’s not some kind of joke, is it?’

‘What, playing a joke on Nicola? God, even Mark couldn’t be that cruel, surely?’

She lit a cigarette without asking our permission. I surreptitiously pushed a window open as I carried the plates through into the kitchen.

When I came back out, Franny was sitting on the sofa, one foot curled under her, saying, ‘He can’t get back from Chile for two weeks. He’s trying to talk some sense into his parents in the meantime, but they’re not listening.’

Jess said, ‘Has Simon mentioned that Mark’s gay? Surely that’s the clincher.’

Franny tutted and sighed.

‘Well, that’s the thing. He says he’s changed. And they’re old enough to go, “Oh, yes, that’s how it works. Everyone’s a bit gay when they’re young and then they grow out of it.” ’

She shrugged and stubbed her cigarette out in the earth of a pot plant.

I breathed in and out, controlling the slight flutter in the pit of my stomach.

I said, ‘Couldn’t he have? Changed?’

‘Changed? Can you really see Mark ever changing? You know what he’s like. It’ll be marriage this year and then next year, I don’t know, water polo. God, how can Simon’s family possibly buy it?’

We sat for a minute or two in silence. I contemplated how differently Franny felt about Mark now, compared to our time at university, when she had been his staunchest ally. I wondered what he could have done to her. Perhaps it was simply what he had done to everyone — ignored us, fallen out of contact, moved on with his life of wealth and privilege.

After a little while, Jess said, ‘Don’t forget about Leo. I’m sure they still remember.’

We fell silent again. It was so easy to forget that about Mark, now that he no longer went about reminding us. He had once, actually, saved someone’s life.

Franny poured another glass of wine.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, they’d believe anything he said, wouldn’t they?’

I brought in dessert, a pavlova, and cut it into large wedges, the strawberries bleeding into the meringue and cream. We picked at it. None of us had much of an appetite.

Jess said, ‘What does Emmanuella think? Do you know?’

Franny nodded, swallowing.

‘Spoke to her yesterday. She doesn’t believe it, thinks it’s some kind of wheeze of Mark’s. She laughed when I told her. She thought it was that English humour she doesn’t understand.’

‘Is she coming back? For the wedding?’

Franny raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, what wedding? There can’t really be a wedding. She’s seventeen, for fuck’s sake. She was supposed to go to college next year but now she’s saying that, no, she’ll go and keep house with him.’

Jess, becoming more mild as Franny became more ferocious, said, ‘She’s quite religious, after all. They believe in that sort of thing.’

‘Oh yes, that’s another bloody thing. Now she’s suddenly converting. Roman Catholicism. So yes, I’m sure they won’t use contraception and then there’ll be a whole brood before long. That’s if he doesn’t get distracted and jilt her for some bloke.’

As she lit another cigarette, I noticed that her hands were shaking.

Later, after we’d finished the meal, Franny returned to the question again, this time pushing it from another direction. She was more drunk, more calm.

‘Perhaps it is a joke. Maybe they’re both in on it: she’s just about smitten enough to participate in any tease with him. He’s probably terribly amused to imagine us all having anxious conversations like this about him.’

There was a long pause while we contemplated how like Mark it would be: something to have us all talking about him.

Franny was lying on her back on the carpet now, staring at the ceiling, balancing her wine glass with one hand on her chest. There was an expression of dissatisfaction on her face, a twist of the mouth as if she had tasted something which disgusted her.

She said, ‘It’s not a joke. I know it’s not, not really.’

She spoke so quietly that it was difficult to hear her, as if she herself did not want to hear her own words.

‘It’s not a joke,’ she said again. ‘This is what he’s always wanted and he’s found a way to get it.’

She sat up and leaned against the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest. She dug the fingers of one hand deep into the pile of the carpet. Her hands were quite pale and her face set. She looked up at the ceiling.

She said, ‘This is what he’s been looking for, you know? You remember how much he loved being on the farm with Simon’s family, how much he wanted to be part of that kind of Englishness? That wholesome, salt-of-the-earth, country lifestyle? Like the bloody Hay Wain. Well, he’s found a way to step into the painting. He’ll marry Nicola, they’ll be blissfully happy, he’ll supply the money, she’ll supply the homeliness, it’ll be perfect.’

She took another swig from her glass.

‘I’m only surprised he never thought of marrying you, Jess. Only I expect you wouldn’t have gone for it.’

Jess, speaking softly, said, ‘Surely … I mean, he’s never even slept with a girl, has he?’

Franny ran her finger round the wine glass. She swirled the dregs, staining the bowl of the glass.

‘I slept with him.’ She drained the glass. ‘More than once actually. It was quite good — very vigorous, if you know what I mean — so he can’t be completely, well not exclusively. I mean, he seemed to enjoy it, it wasn’t as if there was any coercion involved.’

She tipped back her head and gave a short barking laugh then, hiccuping, began to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, in heaving gasps. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … I’m sorry.’

Jess knelt down on the carpet next to Franny and put her arm around her shoulders.

‘Shhh,’ she said, ‘shhh. It’s OK, it’s OK.’

Jess stroked her hair and after a while Franny gulped and brought her tears to an ebb.

We helped her to the spare room, drunk and staggering as she was, and at the doorpost she wished us goodnight. Leaning against the jamb, she said, ‘It’s not that I thought it would be me, you know. I was never so stupid as that.’

Jess smiled. ‘We know.’

And Franny went to bed.

In the kitchen, washing up, we said little. I stood at the sink, washing and rinsing mechanically, handing the plates to Jess to be dried, thinking all the time of how little I had known of Franny in the past few years. We had shared a house, I had known the little intimate details of her daily life: that at times of stress she could eat a whole jar of Nutella with a spoon, that she and Simon used condoms not the Pill, that she suffered from a day a month of agonizing period pain. I had known all this, but not this thing we shared. Or might have shared. Or would have shared if he had wanted me as he’d evidently wanted her. As I washed and scraped and soaked, I imagined Franny and Mark together. I did not want to imagine this but, once I had thought of it, I found myself unable to turn my inner eyes away.

‘How long do you think this has been going on with her?’ said Jess.

I started, then shrugged.

‘Don’t know. I had no idea. Didn’t she mention anything to you?’

Jess shook her head.

‘Not a word. I suppose she was embarrassed.’

‘Mmm,’ I said.

‘Poor Fran,’ said Jess. ‘What a painful person Mark must be to love.’

16

I picked the receiver up. I put it down again. I sat down. I stood up. I breathed deeply. I rehearsed the different ways of saying, ‘Hi, it’s James.’ I picked the receiver up. I dialled the number. In the heartbeat before it began to ring, I put it down again. I drummed my fingers on the table. I looked at the clock: 6 p.m. An hour or so before Jess would be home. I poured a whisky. I took a gulp. I drank too quickly, choked and spluttered. I drank more slowly. After twenty minutes a slight mellowness began to prickle me. Now, I thought, now. I picked up the receiver. I dialled the number. I listened to it ring and to the click of the receiver on the other end being picked up and to Mark — oh God, Mark — saying, ‘Hello.’

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘it’s James.’

‘Hi, James!’ he said, and there was a smile in his voice. ‘How the fuck are you?’

I resisted the urge to slam the phone down.

‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’m fine. Listen. Do you want to meet up? Have a beer? Something? Would be good to talk.’

‘Oh, sure,’ he said, ‘that’d be great. This evening?’

And my pulse pounded and throbbed in my throat, because that wasn’t in my plan.

‘Um,’ I said, ‘not tonight.’

‘You free tomorrow? I’m all time, you know. Ain’t got nothing but time, baby.’

Jesus.

‘Um. Yeah. OK. Tomorrow afternoon? I finish school at …’ I tried to calculate: how long, how short, how much time did I need to prepare for it? ‘I could be in Islington at 5 p.m. That’s where you are, right, Islington?’

‘Your spies are everywhere, Mr Stieff.’

I said nothing. My heart was crashing in my chest.

‘But yeah,’ he said, ‘that’d be fine. Wanna come to the flat?’

‘No,’ I said, a little too quickly. ‘That is, nah, let’s go for a beer.’

He named a pub off Upper Street. ‘At 5 tomorrow. Cool. Looking forward to it, mate.’

And it was done. The adrenalin coursing through my system left me shaking when I put the phone down.

He was waiting for me when I arrived. It had been raining and his hair was damp, his fringe plastered to his forehead. He didn’t see me at first and I had a few seconds to look him over before he noticed my presence. He looked older. Partly it was his clothing. A camel-coloured coat, an indigo suit with winkle-picker boots and a white shirt. Not a serious suit, but I’d never seen him wear a suit at all before. There was a new stillness to his body. I hadn’t realized until then that, in the past, he’d always been a little jittery. Playing with matchbooks and cigarettes, or jiggling one knee. Now he was still.

He looked up and a smile, uncalculated and uncomplicated, broke over his face.

‘James!’ he said. ‘Brilliant!’

He stood up and reached out to hug me, but I stepped awkwardly to the side, my hands up. He looked puzzled, but said again, ‘Brilliant!’ and we sat down. I was silent for too long. I had various things in my mind to say, had stored them up, but none of them were opening lines, and none of them seemed promising here, on a Wednesday afternoon in a half-empty gastropub. They were, I realized, things that were more suitable for shouting, in a kitchen in Oxford, two years earlier.

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.

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.

17

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.’

I had not realized how much of a wedding is show until I saw this one. No one ever wants to look beyond the trimmings on a wedding day, to see the doubts and the insecurities, the compromises and the fears that lie beneath. It is a parade, a theatrical performance in which all lines have been learned in advance. It is a necessary fiction; without our beguiling fictions how would we ever dream grandly or live boldly? We need the trappings as much as the substance.

I watched Mark’s face during his first dance with Nicola, looking for signs of discomfort or pleasure. There was nothing, though, but a smooth confidence which was so new that I could not help but stare at his face. And I saw as he flicked his eyes from the surrounding tables back to his bride — his wife, how astonishing — and turned the full power of his smile on her. And she, excited, smiled back and moved her head a little towards him, and he moved in towards her. And they kissed. I could not help watching; this was what we had all come to see, after all.

The dancing turned, soon enough, from sedate and ceremonial to fast and energetic. They played the Macarena and all Nicola’s friends charged forwards, with Mark at their head, to dance, clapping and shimmying and jumping and placing their hands on their hips and swaying. A few of the older relatives began to make their way home. This was not their time any more, after all. Jess knew better than to suggest I’d want to dance; my knee could not bear it. But I sat comfortably while she and Franny joined in with the jumping, staccato throng. Sweat gleamed on Mark’s forehead. Nicola rotated her hips and leapt.

A short while later, at our table, Franny became definitively drunk. She had found a man, one of Simon’s schoolfriends, and was engaging him in vehement, incomprehensible conversation until she noticed me. She wheeled around in her seat and said, ‘James! At last. I need … you are the one I need to talk to.’

She had a glass of whisky in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, and fiddled with her hair so indiscriminately, not caring which hand she put up to it, that she was in constant danger of setting herself alight.

‘Oh yes?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, and leaned towards me.

Her dress, a loose wrap of black silk which clung to the curves of her body, had fallen a little too low, so that when she leaned forward her nipples popped over the top. I tried not to look, but my eyes were drawn inexorably back down as they disappeared, reappeared.

‘So,’ she said, ‘honestly, honestly now, how long d’you think it’ll last?’

She gestured towards Mark and Nicola with her whisky glass, slopping a few heavy drops over the side. I looked at Mark and Nicola. They were exchanging goodbyes with Nicola’s grandparents: tears and hugs.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It could last a lifetime. It does sometimes happen.’

Franny gave her short bark of a laugh. Her breasts wobbled and one nipple poked over the top of her dress and stayed there.

‘A lifetime! Two years, tops. Maybe a bit more if Nicola pops a sprog.’ She leered at me. ‘But he’ll be back in the cottages within a year, I say.’

I smiled and said that I could see Jess calling me from the other side of the room.

On my way across the room, I was caught by Isabella. She was older now, her age was beginning to be unconcealable, her bosom in her sequinned dress was growing crêpey and she herself was strangely vacant. I wondered if she’d taken a tranquillizer to get through the day, as Mark said had often been her habit.

‘James!’ she said. ‘Do you remember me?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Congratulations. You must be very happy.’

She nodded complacently. ‘It is what I always wished for him.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nicola’s a lovely girl.’

‘After his terrible trouble,’ she said, and looked at me intently, beetling her brows.

‘Mmmm.’ I was only half paying attention.

‘There was one time,’ she said, plucking at my sleeve, ‘I thought he would surely kill me! Or worse! We consulted an exorcist, you know, in case there was a demon in him. But it was long ago now.’

‘Really?’ I said, suddenly intrigued.

‘He is safe now,’ she said, ‘safe from all of that.’ And she would not be drawn further on the subject.

I found Emmanuella sitting at a table, calm and smiling, an undrunk glass of champagne by her elbow and her hand resting on the knee of her dark-skinned, blond-haired boyfriend. She smiled when she saw me, tipping her head to one side and allowing a curtain of hair to fall like water.

‘Ola, James,’ she said. ‘Have you met Alfonso?’

The boyfriend stood up smartly — almost, but not quite, clicking his heels together — and shook my hand. So this was His Excellency Alfonso Urdangarín y de Borbón — a name Jess and I had sniggered at when we spotted it on the table plan.

‘Charming,’ said Alfonso. ‘Tell me, is this the house where Mark and Nicola intend to live when they are married?’

I laughed. This was a country house rented for the occasion by Mark because Nicola had wanted the wedding to be near her family and he had wanted it to be far away from his.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘People often rent houses for the day for their wedding.’

Alfonso frowned. ‘But I thought …’ He turned to Emmanuella and they exchanged a few short sentences in Spanish. He turned back to me and bowed gravely. ‘I apologize, you are entirely correct.’

I wondered what would happen if I refused to accept his apology. Rapiers at dawn did not seem out of the question.

‘No problem,’ I said. And then, because I could not think of anything else, I said, ‘So … what do you do?’

He frowned at me and said, ‘Do?’

‘Ah,’ I nodded. ‘Right, yes, OK.’

I made my excuses and moved on.

I found Jess again, talking to Simon. Or standing next to Simon while he watched the dance floor balefully. I slipped beside her and took her hand. Simon said, ‘Hi,’ and went back to staring at his sister, who was now dancing a vigorous jive with Mark.

Simon had not brought a girl to the wedding. Instead he was flanked by two tall broad-shouldered farming men, friends from schooldays with dark tans from outdoor work.

‘Hello,’ said one, ‘I’m Dick.’

‘I’m Richard,’ said the other.

We shook hands.

‘I’ll get the beers in,’ said Richard. Or it might have been Dick.

‘Top man,’ said Simon, ‘I’m too bloody sober.’

Mark and Nicola had taken swing lessons. They were dancing together, eyes wide, mouths open with excitement, feet kicking out to the sides. Mark pulled at Nicola’s hand and spun her energetically three, four, five times.

Simon said, low and several times, ‘Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.’

I nodded, unsure what to respond.

Dick, or it might have been Richard, said, ‘Too true, mate, too true,’ and the other came back with the beers.

They were all three leaning back in their chairs, tilting as far as they could without falling over. They began to talk while tilting, taking swigs of beer, like commentators at a cricket match.

‘I see Amanda is on the pull tonight,’ said one, nodding at a blonde woman in her thirties wearing a short purple dress and matching heels.

‘She’ll be after you if you don’t mind,’ said another, and they laughed — deep, humourless laughs.

My final memory of Mark from that day is of the minutes before their going-away, when he came racing up to me, conspiratorial, pulling on my hand to bring me close to his lips as he whispered, ‘Did you hear? Franny’s thrown up all down the front steps!’

I looked at him. He was very close to me — so close that I could smell the sharp scent of his cologne and the musky scent of his sweat. His face was that of an excited schoolboy, flushed and delighted. He raised his eyebrows, grinned, and raced off again.

Jess had to go then, to see to Franny, to help her wash her face, to find a place for her to rest, to get a cab to take her to the hotel. I tried to help too, but Franny was sobbing and swearing, and Jess shook her head at me and mouthed, ‘I’ll come and find you.’

I thought of her saying, ‘What a painful person Mark must be to love,’ and I nodded and walked away.

In the main marquee, several teenage couples were kissing each other hungrily on the dance floor, hands under clothes, inside dresses and dress shirts. On the tables, brandy-snap baskets of ice cream were melting into puddles of sticky, milky foam. I took my jacket from the back of my chair, pulled it on and walked out into the cool night air.

The night was cloudless, the moon paper-bright and high in the sky. The walkways all around were lit by flaming torches. Couples were talking, flirting, snogging. Friends were drinking or sharing a joint. I walked around the lake at the bottom of the hill, where the torches showed a path. After a few hundred yards I passed a clump of bushes where a couple were unmistakably fucking. The branches of the bushes were shaking rhythmically and I could hear the ‘hn, hn, hn’ grunting of the man, the woman’s half-excited, half-pained ‘ah, ah, ah’. I walked past as quietly as I could and if they heard me they gave no sign of it.

The lake was fed by a thunderously tumbling weir. An overhanging branch trailed across my face and I remembered that it was in a similar spot, far from people, by a river, that I had injured myself so severely that I had never quite risen again. As I walked, the loud crashing water soon blotted out the noise of the party.

On a wall covered in a soggy sponge of moss, I sat down, stretching my legs in front of me. I found I could not help thinking of Mark. I hadn’t seen a great deal of him in the past months. But when I had seen him I’d felt glad to be his friend. Yes, that was it. Glad to hear the little woes and triumphs of the business of the wedding. A wedding is bound to make the bride and groom seem glamorous. Mark and Nicola had been like movie stars today; one could not help wanting to be close to them. That was it, too.

But this thinking could not hold. I began, almost without willing it, to observe my own thoughts. And I laughed. I could not help it. I sat in the roaring silence of the weir and laughed like a madman. What a pathetic thing to realize. What a stupid thing to want. How typical of myself I always was. For it had become suddenly clear to me, horrifically and hilariously clear, that I was in love with Mark.

18

At first, I simply kept on saying no. No, I said, to the mirror in the mornings, no I won’t. No, I said, to my mind when its thoughts strayed, and they did stray, and they would not cease from straying. No, I said to Nicola when she called from the country and said would we come for a weekend, it’s so beautiful this time of year. And she was a child, just a child really, and could not keep the hurt from her voice when I kept on saying no and no and once again no. No, I said, to Jess when she said wouldn’t it be nice, Nic and Mark were in town, wouldn’t it be lovely to see them for dinner? No, I said, I don’t want to. And I felt like a child, sticking out my lower lip, offering no further explanation but no, and no, and no.

‘I don’t understand why you won’t, that’s all.’

Jess was packing. She spoke in her calm and sensible voice.

‘I just don’t want to.’

I knew it would seem I was being unreasonable.

‘If you don’t want to tell me I suppose you don’t have to, but I do think that you’re being unreasonable.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. I don’t want to come. I’ve got marking to do and I’d rather have a quiet weekend at home. I wish you’d stay with me.’

She folded her cream cardigan over the top of her clothes and closed the case briskly. She took a deep breath, then let it out again. I wondered if she was going to shout at me, but she never did, it was not in her. She said, ‘You know I’m not going to do that. I promised them. You said you probably would.’

‘But I can’t,’ I said. And that at least was true.

No, and no, and no. It could not hold.

It wasn’t a good weekend for me. Jess telephoned to say she had arrived safely and in the background I heard Mark saying, ‘Tell him he’s a silly boy for not coming himself. We’ll expect him next time.’ And I felt as though I might vomit. My home, our quiet safe home, had been invaded by something I could not contain or control.

That weekend I had a recurrence of my old problem. It was mid-December, seven months after the wedding, and the days grew dark at 3 p.m. I found myself simultaneously terrified and numb, staring at the lowering sky from the window, unwilling to leave the flat. I could not control my moods, could not stop fear rising in my throat. The winter was cold and dark and never-ending. I imagined Jess sitting by the fire in Mark and Nicola’s home, warmed and encircled by golden light and laughing with her feet up on the sofa and the dogs leaping up to demand her attention. I did not eat much that weekend, I barely stirred from bed. It was clear to me that this was my natural condition; that without Jess I would return to the state in which she had found me — incapable, bleak, desperate. It was only late on Sunday night, when I heard her key in the door, when I saw her face, that the mood lifted, suddenly, all at once, as though it had never been.

I described this to Jess as best I could. I told her I had felt low while she had been gone. She, because she is good, did not say, ‘Well, you should have come with then.’

She kissed my forehead, ruffled my hair and said, ‘I’m home now. I missed you too. Come and help me unpack.’

Things with her were always as simple as this. She was good for me, in this way as in so many others. But why do we so often want the things that are not good for us at all?

There is no safety that does not also restrict us. And many needless restrictions feel safe and comfortable. It is so hard to know, at any moment, the distinction between being safe and being caged. It is hard to know when it is better to choose freedom and fear, and when it is simply foolhardy. I have often, I think, too often erred on the side of caution.

Jess said, ‘James, I really think you should see Mark.’

I felt a line of fear work through me, like a swallowed needle.

‘No,’ I said.

She looked at me. We were in bed, she warming her hands on a mug of tea.

‘What’s he done to you, James? What’s this about?’

What could I possibly say? I reached around in my mind for something that was not, ‘I am afraid, Jessica. I am afraid that if I see him I will well up with longing so that I cannot bear it.’

‘Look, I don’t know. He’s just not our sort of people, is he?’

She frowned. A thin layer of ice glistened on her surface. This had been the wrong thing to say.

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

I pushed on. ‘Just … Look, he’s so … I mean, I think he wants to be friends with a different kind of person to us. I mean, Emmanuella’s more his sort of …’

Jess said, ‘I think you’re totally wrong. In fact, he spent all weekend telling me how much he wanted to see you, how disappointed he was you hadn’t come, how he misses your chats.’

At this there was a kind of stirring in me, a detestable hope unfurling.

‘If you’re just staying away because you think we’re not rich enough for him …’

I gulped unhappily and stared at her. Her frown melted away. She snuggled up to me.

‘It’s just the silly winter depression, love. Mark loves you, you know he does, and he’s never cared about other people having money.’

I nodded.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m a bit worried about him. He’s restless down there in the country. Edgy. It’s not good for him, and it’s not good for Nicola. I said he should come to London when your holidays start, to get away for a few days.’

She finished her tea, put the mug on the bedside table and, looking away, said, ‘None of us know how long this marriage will last, but he needs a friend, James. Whether they stay together or not. You shouldn’t keep away from him. Promise me you won’t.’

And I thought of what it would take to say no, again, to this.

‘All right,’ I said, as she turned off the light.

*

I said the following things to myself. Number one, Mark doesn’t know. If Jess doesn’t know — and she didn’t, of that I was sure — then Mark could not know how I felt. Number two, he doesn’t want you. He’s got his own ideas about the right way to live, about what he’s doing now. You don’t figure in them, except as a friend, so pull yourself together. Number three, if he doesn’t know and he doesn’t want you, then the only thing that can make anything go wrong is you. It’s just a matter of willpower, James, just like resisting an extra Yorkshire pudding at Sunday lunch. All you have to do is not act, not say anything, not do anything that would make him think you wanted him. Come on, James, you’re good at not doing things. This should be easy.

He pulled up at our door around lunchtime on the first day of my holidays in his little red sports car. His hair had grown longer than before, touching his collar and creeping around the sides of his face. In jeans, a white shirt with thin blue stripes and a battered blazer, he looked like the boy in school who was always on the verge of expulsion. He beeped the horn and leapt out of the car, all energy, and hugged me.

That first day, we were like students again. We went to Piccadilly Circus, where Mark declared loudly how much better the lights were in Times Square. He bought a disposable camera and insisted I take pictures of him posing next to Eros, one foot off the ground, as if about to take flight.

‘He’s supposed,’ he shouted, although I was only three feet away from him, ‘to be facing the other way. He’s supposed to be firing his arrow down Shaftesbury Avenue. It’s a joke, you see — he’s supposed to be burying his shaft in Shaftesbury Avenue. Do you see, James? Do you understand?’

I nodded and went red. The tourists sitting on the statue’s steps looked at us. I thought, they must think we’re lovers.

In the British Museum, walking through the hushed marble halls, he began to talk nonsense at the loudest possible volume.

‘I mean, what do you think, James?’ he said. ‘I think she’s making a fuss about nothing. After all, I only gave her a BLACK EYE.’

This directed at full blast towards an elderly couple peering at a Greek fresco.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I mean HONESTLY, if she’s going to provoke me, she’ll have to expect to get a HOT IRON IN THE FACE FROM TIME TO TIME.’

‘What?!’ I said.

The elderly couple looked at us in horror and scurried away.

He grinned. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you try one. How about the sketchers?’

He motioned with his head towards two young men sitting at the foot of a broken statue, pencilling furiously in their sketchbooks.

We strolled towards them and I searched my mind for something funny to say. As we walked past, I found myself declaring, ‘He’s making such a bloody fuss, you’d think I’d given him AIDS. After all, it was only CHLAMYDIA.’

And Mark replied, not missing a beat, ‘But he did get it in his THROAT, DARLING.’

The adrenalin pumped in my throat and my heart and my brain. I thought, this is exactly what I need. This, exactly this. I cast a glance over my shoulder as we left the room. The sketchers were staring at us, their drawing momentarily forgotten. When we walked into the next room I began to laugh and soon I could not stop, and the frowns and the stares of the serious museum-goers were nothing to me.

On the way out of the museum, we went to the lavatories. Under the eyes of the other men, he pulled me into a cubicle with him and I thought, another tease? I could not tell and I thought, perhaps, James, he does know and perhaps he does want. But he only pulled a tiny plastic bag filled with white powder out of his pocket and said in, at last, a whisper, ‘Powder your nose?’

‘We’re in the British Museum, Mark.’ I could not keep the tone of shock out of my voice. ‘The British Museum. You can’t do that in the British Museum.’

We were crammed into the cubicle, almost touching but not quite.

He said, ‘You don’t imagine I’m the first person to have done this?’

He tipped a little of the powder on to the toilet cistern, pulled a credit card out of his wallet and began to chop at it, scraping it into two orderly lines.

‘Someone will catch us,’ I hissed.

He leaned in very close to me and whispered, ‘Only if you don’t stop talking.’

I tried to look through the gap at the hinge of the toilet door to see if anyone was staring at us: two men together in a cubicle, surely doing something offensive to someone. But there was no staring anywhere. I turned back. Mark had rolled a £50 note into a tube. He proffered it to me.

‘Go on,’ he said.

I thought, I am being offered drugs in the toilets of the British Museum. This is what my life has been missing up to this moment. I shook my head again. Mark shrugged.

‘Your loss,’ he said, and snorted both lines. As he tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling and his eyes watered and he began to grin I thought, yes, perhaps this is all that I need. Just this is quite sufficient.

The next day, Mark arrived at 2 p.m., beeping his horn and doing a handstand in the streets while he waited for me.

‘Do you know,’ I said, bending over to talk to his head, ‘that there are two parking tickets on your windscreen?’

‘Oh, those!’ he said. ‘I just wait for the letters to come and send them to the banker. Come on. Let’s go and see the wizard.’

And I thought of the energy it would take to explain to Mark the workings of the Penalty Charge system and how intensely useless it would be and instead just said, ‘The wizard?’

The wizard lived in a grimy basement flat in Clerkenwell. His name was Jee, he had pale skin, dirty blond hair and wore a patterned smock and brightly coloured hat.

He greeted Mark warmly with a hug, looked me up and down through narrowed eyes and said to Mark, ‘You sure?’

‘Oh, totally. He’s never done a thing wrong in his life, have you, James?’

‘S’what I mean,’ said Jee.

‘Nah, he’s all right,’ Mark said, and we walked through the door.

It was clear to me at once that he was rich, that he had been born rich. My time spent with Mark and his friends had accustomed me to sifting the long-term rich from the nouveau from the purely aspirational. The key is the possession of objects which are clearly tremendously expensive but are treated with disdain and often held in surroundings of squalor. In Jee’s case, the kitchen with its broken orange plastic dish rack and dirty cupboards was enlivened by an enormous espresso machine, worth at least £1,000. But the machine had not been cared for: its surface was already pockmarked with kitchen grease and old coffee grounds had been dumped on the top. No one who had had to work to acquire this thing — either to buy it or to steal it — would have treated it in this way.

In Jee’s living room, a group of men were hunched over a low mosaic-topped table, examining a collection of small coloured tablets and printed paper squares. From a distance, they looked like schoolboys admiring a selection of marbles and stickers.

I thought I recognized one of them: a tall, thin man wearing drain-pipe trousers and with a slicked-back hairstyle. When he looked up I realized with a shock that he was a television presenter; famous for an anarchic programme he hosted on the subject of, in roughly equal parts, pop music, high culture and his genitals. He stared at me for a moment, grunted, then said to Jee, ‘Fine, fine, but what if I just want to lose, like, three whole weeks?’

Jee nodded sagely, reached under his kaftan and produced a small bag of white tablets and a sheet of red paper squares.

‘Very mellow, my friend, extremely sybaritic.’

The television star grimaced.

‘Will it get me off the fucking planet?’

And Jee nodded slowly.

On the other side of the table, next to Mark, was another face I found vaguely familiar. A muscular man in an open-necked shirt and jeans. He, however, recognized me as well.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘It’s Jack, isn’t it?’

‘James,’ I said.

I placed him; he was an acquaintance of Mark’s and had attended that first New Year’s Eve party at Annulet House.

‘Know anything about steel?’ he said.

I blinked.

He drew his attention away from the collection of coloured powders and tablets.

‘Only I’m thinking of going all in on steel. If they’re right and all the planes are going to fall out of the sky, what will we need?’

‘Ambulances?’ I ventured.

He puffed out his cheeks and shook his head.

‘Too late by then. No one survives a plane crash, no one. Safety cards and “brace, brace” are just to stop people panicking. It’s true. I’ve looked into it.’ He pursed his lips. ‘No, if the planes fall out of the sky, what are we going to need? Steel. To rebuild them, see?’

‘Are planes made out of steel?’

‘What else would they be made of?’

‘Ummm,’ I said, ‘maybe aluminium? Or some kind of composite? Something light like that?’

He thought about this for a long time, while fiddling with a 10-pence piece, turning it over and over, flipping it between his fingers, throwing and catching it.

‘Very good point,’ he said, ‘very good indeed. Yes. Very good. Aluminium. You might have saved me a bundle there, fella, an absolute bundle.’ He leaned towards Mark and said, ‘Clever chap, your friend. Positively insightful.’

Mark looked at me, smiled and said, ‘Yes. Yes, he is.’ And a crazy happiness spread warm and liquid in my chest.

Mark made a large and expansive purchase. So large, in fact, and so expansive that Jee thoughtfully provided him with a Marks & Spencer bag to carry it away in.

‘Where to now?’ I said.

‘Home,’ said Mark decisively. ‘Get some of these babies down me.’

I could not keep the disappointment from my face.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking at me, ‘what a face you have, James! Like a sad little puppy. Do not worry, my darling, there will be treats tomorrow.’

And he kissed me lightly on the cheek, jumped into his car and disappeared in it before I could think of how to persuade him to stay.

We’d arranged to meet the next day at his flat in Islington at 2.30 p.m., but when I arrived he was surprised to see me. He was dressed in only pyjama bottoms, his hair still sleep-muddled.

He said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming till the afternoon?’

I said, ‘This is the afternoon.’

He said, ‘Oh.’

And he shook his head sadly and went to get dressed.

We drove to my flat — his windscreen had acquired another two tickets, I noticed. Jess was out rehearsing and wouldn’t be back until the evening. Mark lay on his back on our sofa, holding his head in his hands. I made a late lunch and we ate in the kitchen. I realized that I hadn’t seen him eat since he arrived in London and this thought filled me with compassion for him. He seemed smaller now than he had been.

Mark poured himself a large whisky and we talked about Oxford people, about what had become of them since we left. Mark had heard that Dr McGowan had finally been arrested for his cottaging activities and that the college had asked him to resign. He had, however, been immediately offered an even more prestigious chair at the Sorbonne so, as Mark said, ‘no harm done’. We talked of Franny, who’d coincidentally spent a few weeks of the summer at the Sorbonne. We wondered whether she’d seen Dr McGowan, and whether she’d managed to keep a straight face if so. Mark became more and more animated during this conversation, wildly fantasizing that they had met, that they had become great friends, that they were together right now, that if we called her we would find that he was in her rooms.

‘I’ll call her now!’ Mark said. ‘She could come down from Cambridge tonight. And then —’ a wild gleam flared in his eye — ‘we could go and see Emmanuella at the weekend! In Madrid! Or she could come here! I could fly her over. Maybe Simon could come from Chile, or Peru, or wherever he is.’

He frowned, acknowledging that this was unlikely, but he had still not given up on the idea entirely. He picked up the phone and dialled Franny’s number in Cambridge.

‘Hello, my darling. Guess who it is.’

A pause. A grin on his face.

‘S’right! And guess who I’m with.’

Another pause, a wider grin.

‘No! Wrong! Guess again …’

A shorter pause.

‘It’s James! I’m with James in London, and Jess is going to be home in a few hours, and we thought …’

Another pause. A slight wrinkling of the brow.

‘No, she’s not. She’s still in Doorbl … Doorbi … She’s in Doorbell.’ A giggle from Mark.

A pause. Mark bit his upper lip.

‘Well, yes I am, as a matter of fact, but there’s nothing wrong with that, is there, darling?’

A short pause.

‘No, listen! Jess will be home soon, and we thought you could come down to London tonight and it’ll be just like old times, do you remember? In the house?’

A longer pause. More lip chewing.

‘Oh, but darling Franny, it won’t take very long …’

Cut off. A short pause.

‘I’m sure you can stay here tonight. Can’t she, James?’

I nodded.

‘He’s nodding. Of course you can stay here tonight.’

A long pause.

‘Oh, but you’ll have a wonderful time. We’re all here and we can go out on the town, or stay in and order some food, and I’ve got some lovely stuff, haven’t I, James?’

He did not look at me this time to see whether I nodded or not.

‘Oh, but Fran …’

Pause.

‘But you know that you’ll …’

Pause.

‘But it’s our last chance in …’

Long pause. Frown deepening on Mark’s face. A twist of the mouth.

‘I really can’t persuade you …?’

Lines appearing at the sides of his mouth. A slight scrunch to his eyes.

‘OK, bye then.’

He put the phone down and looked at the receiver for a moment.

He said, ‘Uptight bitch.’

I said nothing.

He sat on the sofa for a while, staring out of the window at the blank grey sky. At last he said, ‘We had an argument.’

I did not have to ask who he meant. I didn’t know how to reply to him. Instead, I simply waited.

‘She said she thinks this all might have been a mistake.’

‘She probably didn’t mean it.’

He looked at me, a broken smile. He shrugged.

‘But it can’t be perfect any more, not like it was. Nothing ever stays.’

‘It’s not …’ I began, and then did not know how to proceed. I wanted to tell him something about how it was with Jess and me, how I had found that love was a constant cycle of coming together and breaking apart. But I did not want to talk or think about Jess just then. And perhaps I did not at that time have the ability to explain the truth about relationships: that they produce their fruit intermittently, unpredictably. That every relationship has moments when someone says, or thinks, or feels that it might not be worth doing. Every relationship has moments of exasperation and fear. And the work of the thing is to come through it, to learn how to bear it. And even if I could have explained this, Mark would never have understood it. He has always been rich enough that if something breaks he can simply throw it away and buy a new one. He had never used string or glue to bind something together again. He had never been forced to learn how to mend.

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.

19

‘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?’

She was kneeling in the long conservatory, jabbing at the earth around a ficus bush with a trowel.

‘They do,’ said Mark in a whining tone. ‘James wants to see them, don’t you, James?’

It was our second or third visit to Mark and Nicola’s gargantuan farmhouse-villa in Dorset. Mark and I had been together five or six times by then and I was still full of wonder and desire and excitement; every time we met there were new things to try, new explorations to be made. But this was a difficult situation. I couldn’t say, ‘Yes, I want to see your planes.’ I couldn’t say, with Nicola, ‘No, I don’t want to,’ even though it was true: I did not want to see his planes, I did not want to stand next to him in a chilly field, with Nicola and Jess looking on, while each of my joints ached to move closer to him or share some secret word. I found that my knee started to ache with its old sensitivity on these visits; perhaps from the damp, or perhaps from the country walks, or perhaps from the longing that devoured me.

‘I, um, I don’t know much about planes,’ I said.

‘See?’ said Nicola. ‘No one’s interested, Mark.’

‘That’s not what he said,’ said Mark. ‘He said he doesn’t know much about planes, ergo he needs someone to teach him. Like me!’

Nicola stood up and frowned at me, and at Mark. When had she become so constantly angry over trivial things?

‘I know,’ said Jess. ‘Why don’t James and Mark go off to fly the planes and you can show me the garden, Nicola?’

And Nicola, red-faced and snorting slightly, let us go.

In the field, damp creeping in through my trainers, I stood with Mark in the concealment of a clump of trees and kissed and groped and wished for more until Mark, perhaps feeling some sudden sense of propriety, broke away.

‘Come on,’ he said, panting, ‘enough of this. Let me do a loop the loop for you.’

On the next visit she became irrationally angry again. It was at dinner on our first night. She was handing plates around and when she came to me she stopped, hand half-outstretched, as though her motor had wound down.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, ‘but seeing you makes me angry, James.’

And I thought, God, not now, not yet, for perhaps some part of my brain had already begun to accept that this conversation must happen one day.

‘I know it’s not really your fault. I know what he’s like.’ She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, an angry agitated gesture. ‘James, I just —’ and she smiled, as though she knew she was being foolish — ‘all it is is that I think you’re getting what belongs to me. And it makes me angry, OK? That’s all.’

I swallowed, a hard lump building in my throat. I thought, God, am I going to cry? I said, ‘Well, I …’

And Jess stopped me, with a hand over my hand, and said, ‘James, let her finish. Go on, Nicola, why don’t you tell us what’s troubling you?’

And I wondered for a moment if the two of them had planned this together. Could it be, could it possibly be that Jess knew?

Nicola pouted and sat down. ‘All the bloody trips to London,’ she said, ‘the two of you together. It’s —’ her voice became very small and hushed — ‘I want to come too, sometimes. I just wish you’d take me too, Mark.’

‘Oh!’ said Mark.

The world started to move again. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. My pulse crashed in my ears.

‘I know it’s silly,’ she said, staring at her plate, ‘but I just feel so left out, down here by myself while you’re having fun in town.’

Mark smiled, and if he was a little pale Nicola did not seem to notice. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

So our simple pattern became a little more complex. Sometimes Mark would come to town alone, and then I would meet him at his flat. Sometimes he and Nicola would come together, and then he would book a hotel room nearby, somewhere small and discreet. Often, when I arrived at these rendezvous, he was late and I would have to wait for him, flipping through a newspaper, certain that the staff knew exactly what I was here for.

Once, as I sat waiting in the lobby, I thought I saw someone I knew — one of Jess’s friends from the orchestra. Had he looked my way? Had he seen me? Was he about to come over and say hello? Would Mark arrive then, at that moment? And would this orchestra friend then speak idly to Jess and would Jess then say, ‘Darling, why were you meeting Mark in the Patrum Hotel?’ I stood up sharply and walked to the bathroom where I was out of sight. I waited there, trembling, for almost half an hour and when I emerged Mark was waiting at my table, smoking a cigarette, wanting to know if I’d got the runs. ‘If so,’ he said, ‘you should really go home. You know?’

On another occasion, Mark had told me to meet him at the flat on a particular afternoon. It was almost five weeks since I’d last seen him and I waited with a sense of mounting excitement. When he arrived though, breezing through the door with an armful of glossy paper carrier bags, Nicola was with him. Her hair was windswept, her cheeks red. She beamed when she saw me.

‘It doesn’t bother you, does it, James?’ She had that earnestness of youth. ‘I wanted to tell you I was coming, but Mark said you liked being surprised.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s a lovely surprise.’

As she bent down to kiss my cheek, I looked at Mark. He opened his eyes very wide and smiled a close-mouthed smile as if to say, ‘Who, me?’

We managed to have sex on that visit, a breathless few minutes when Nicola, bemoaning the lack of dogs in the city, went for an afternoon walk. We barely had time to smooth our clothes down before she returned.

Once or twice Nicola asked me, in a half-joking voice, illuminating her interest by pretence of non-interest, what I thought Mark did in London.

‘Not when he’s with you, obviously.’

This was the visit when she had surprised me with her presence. It was a little after her walk and Mark had left on some unexplained errand.

She lit another cigarette — I couldn’t remember her smoking before Mark. She was so young, and this thought did give me pause. So young, and trying to pretend to be older. Perhaps that was part of Mark’s attraction to her: to feel herself an adult, in the company of adults. But she was still so young, and trusting like a child. She trusted me to tell her the truth. I felt ashamed that I would not.

‘I don’t mean you,’ she continued, ‘I know you’re old friends. But what do you think he does when he goes off by himself?’ She tried laughing. ‘He’s like oooooh —’ she waved her hands in the air — ‘big mystery, you know? Like he’s a spy or something.’

The truth was, I had wondered this myself. I tormented myself with the possibility, the probability that he was with other men. I had no right to feel angry. Nicola had far more right than I and she suspected nothing, it seemed. But late at night, curled in bed around Jess’s soft-breathing body, I would find myself imagining over and over again scenes of Mark in a bar, a club, an alley, doing with another man what he did with me but better, of course, more fiercely, with more glory.

It lasted about a year, this interlude. A little more. A year and three or four months before things began to slip, as things do. It was spring, the sky a rich blue. I arrived early at the hotel and flipped through the newspaper, but my mind snagged on an anecdote I’d heard that morning in the staffroom. It was nothing: one of the boys, a lesson, an amusing gaffe, but I thought it might make Mark laugh. I ran over the story several times in my mind, noting the points where I should pause in telling it, where I might emphasize a word and where to trim it slightly to improve its style. Mark could make me laugh easily with his blend of bawdy and archness. I had to work harder.

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.

20

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.

After the ceremony, we stood in the street with our families, taking photographs of each other in our robes. Emmanuella’s family were polite to us, but distant; more interested in talking with her boyfriend. Franny’s family and Simon’s embraced. My parents and Jess’s greeted each other slightly nervously — they had met several times before but not often enough to have become easy in one another’s company. Jess’s father bent in to kiss my mother, who simultaneously took a step backwards and made an awkward little noise, so he missed her face completely. Eloise, Simon’s little sister, tugged on Jess’s father’s sleeve and asked if he was really a doctor and if so what were the symptoms of rickets. And it was there that the photograph was taken. Nicola was holding Daisy: a little girl, half-baby, half-toddler, babbling and charming in red leather sandals and a white embroidered dress over her nappy-clothed bottom. Mark borrowed Jess’s camera, Nicola hoisted Daisy on to one hip, Mark waved, Nicola smiled, Daisy grabbed for her earring and the picture was taken.

And then what happened? Then, I think, Mark grabbed her from Nicola’s arms, clasped her to him and then made as if to drop her, catching her before she fell, swinging her into the air as she laughed and gasped. Nicola watched with a frown.

‘Mind her arms, Mark. She’s too heavy to swing.’

Mark wrapped his arms around Daisy’s waist and brought his face close to the place where her neck met her shoulder.

‘You’re not too heavy, are you, darling?’

Daisy was wriggling, trying to escape down to the ground.

‘What’s more, you are brilliant. You are my brilliant, beautiful daughter and one day you’ll come to Oxford just like your father.’

Daisy chuckled and babbled at him. He lifted up her dress, blew a raspberry on her tummy and she screamed with fear and delight.

She grew tired later, as children do, and we were all surprised, I think, by how tiresome it can be to spend time with a cross child. Mark and Nicola were the first people we knew to have a baby, we had not yet learned of their trials and difficulties. Nicola strapped her into the pushchair and Daisy did not like this at all. We were in the entrance hall of the Randolph — Mark had booked us all rooms there and though our parents had tried to protest, they had not done so strenuously. Mark paid for things in Oxford; it was not worth fighting the inevitable. On arrival, there was a little wait and Daisy became fractious, struggling against the bindings of her chair, desperately trying to push them out of the way so she could escape. Nicola offered her pieces of cut apple or dried apricots in an attempt to distract her, but she rejected these angrily.

Daisy writhed in her chair, whimpering and bellowing, pushing the straps down again and again, fiddling with the buckle over her stomach. She was trying, it was clear, to open it the way she had seen her parents open it so many times in the past. But her coordination wasn’t good enough; she twisted and screamed and yelled.

‘I’m going to let her out,’ said Mark.

‘No,’ said Nicola, firm as a rap on the hand. ‘Look at this place. She’ll just spill people’s coffees on them, and break things and hurt herself. Leave her there. It’ll only be another few minutes. She can have a nice run around outside soon.’

Daisy was working herself into a furious rage, twisting and turning, plucking at the straps. Jess and I, Franny and Simon looked at her mutely. Despite our inexperience it was clear that we couldn’t just let someone else’s child out.

‘I have to find a bathroom,’ said Nicola. ‘Try her again with the apple?’

Nicola disappeared around the corner. Mark, holding a limp plastic bag containing brown apple chunks, looked at us, then at Daisy. He put one finger to his lips, winked and knelt down in front of the pushchair. Daisy, with red, tear-filled eyes, grew quiet staring at him as he stared at her.

‘Look, Daisy,’ he said.

He took one of her little pudgy hands and pressed it on to the pushchair buckle. He pressed down himself too, until the buckle sprang open. Daisy wriggled free, hiccuping and stumbling in her haste to get out of the chair.

‘You all saw,’ said Mark. ‘She let herself out, didn’t she? There was nothing we could do.’ He leaned over to kiss Daisy’s head.

She, now calming down, put her hand out for his and led him off to try to eat the bowls of potpourri.

When Nicola returned, Mark shrugged and said, ‘She must have learned how to do it herself,’ and Nicola was too distracted preventing Daisy from hurling herself into the fireplace to consider this very carefully.

For memory’s sake in the late afternoon we visited the old house in Jericho, rather like grandchildren paying a visit to an elderly relative — hoping for treats, dreading to see signs of decrepitude. The house had been shut up for several years now, and the garden was almost as overgrown as when I had first visited it. The base of the sundial was covered by long grass, the brambles had made the pathway to the frog pond impassable. The house itself had that damp smell again, a smell of old rot.

We were charmed to find Franny’s elaborate revision timetable still on the wall in her old bedroom, with the days counting down to finals crossed out until the very last one, still left uncrossed. Simon’s old room contained piles of his lecture notes — most of which started hopefully at the top of the page, but quickly degenerated into elaborate doodles with the occasional jotted word or book title. Emmanuella had left clothing, books, a shelf full of CDs and video cassettes. When questioned she shrugged and said, ‘But these are not my favourites, you know.’

I think, that if Mark had suggested then that we all come back to live in the house we might have agreed. We had been sufficiently bruised by the difficulties of adult life to make this house seem more of a paradise. But he was too busy with Daisy. He walked down to the carp-pond with her, held her so she could see the orange fish circling under the water and sprinkled breadcrumbs on the surface for them to rise, open-mouthed, to feed. Daisy made the same motions with her mouth, opening it into a wide circle of O and closing it again. It occurred to me that if the fish were still alive, someone must have arranged for a gardener to be tending them. But the functioning of Mark’s life was still opaque to me then.

Later on, we all lay on our backs in the long grass next to the sundial.

‘This is the wonderful thing about loving Oxford,’ said Mark. ‘She will never change. Our youth will always be here waiting for us if we want it.’

I was expecting him to make the same promises and plans he always did: come back and live with me, stay here, let’s be here forever. But he didn’t. Daisy had changed something. I suppose he finally had a reason to want to separate from us.

I had been surprised in general by how much Mark doted on Daisy. When they were together he was constantly holding her, tickling her, singing to her, making faces for her. I had expected that he would be uninterested in fatherhood until the baby became an alert toddler — because then she would be able to give him her attention. Instead, he was transfixed from her first puzzled, finger-grasping days, blinking at the world with dark blue eyes.

He sang ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’ to her when she was a baby and a little later in life she would believe that he’d written the song specifically for her. Jess and I had visited for her christening and I watched him rock her to sleep in the nursery. The room was small, just enough for a cot, a changing table, a child’s wardrobe filled with expensive Italian baby clothes sent by Mark’s mother and little cardigans knitted by Nicola’s grandparents. It smelled of faeces and nappy-rash cream and talcum powder.

Mark laid Daisy down on her back, pulled the blanket halfway over her and beckoned me to stand and look into the cot. As I did so, he put his arm around my waist and thrust his hand into the back pocket of my jeans. He never found such combinations in any way incongruous. I believe that was the visit during which we made love in his father-in-law’s corrugated-iron barn, behind a tractor with clumps of mud and horse shit caught in its tyres, while a sudden spring rainstorm clattered on the roof and passed on.

‘Are we damned, do you think?’ I remember saying to Mark afterwards.

He looked at me and smiled.

‘Damned?’

‘For this. You and me. According to your God, are we damned?’ He pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his back jeans pocket and lit one.

‘Only if I die unexpectedly between now and my next confession. You’re damned anyway, of course. Atheists are.’

‘You go to confession?’

Mark grinned.

‘When the mood takes me.’

‘Do you confess this?’

‘This?’

‘What we do, all of this. You know.’

‘I confess everything. It feels wonderful. I come out and feel that I’ve never done anything wrong in my life, that God has forgiven all and I am utterly new again.’

‘And then what? Start your wickedness all over again?’

Mark flicked his eyes up at me and held my gaze. His eyes looked deep blue, cornflower blue and hooded, more mysterious than ever.

‘This isn’t wickedness, James.’ He leaned forward and planted a kiss lightly on my lips, pulling away when I tried to draw him closer. ‘Don’t you realize that you are the thing that allows me to be a good husband?’

He jumped to his feet faster than I could manage and was off and out of the barn while I was still struggling to pull myself upright and go after him.

Mark and I did not always have sex when I visited Dorblish. During Daisy’s first two years of life, he came to London half a dozen times, and on each occasion we reverted to our usual ways, but the distance between each visit was so great that, each time, I began to wonder whether in fact we had now finished with that episode in our lives, whether the occasional lapse was a mere aberration. I was even able to convince myself that this was what I wanted. After all — I was able to think away from Mark’s presence — hadn’t our affair run its course?

And then he would call some afternoon and say, ‘Oh, James, I thought you might like to know I’m running up to town for a few days next week. It’s half-term, isn’t it, James? Would you like to meet up? At my flat, on Tuesday afternoon?’ And I would say yes. And when we met he would stand above me and gently insist that I admitted the truth, and I might enquire, ‘What truth?’ and he would explain that I knew quite well what he meant, and prove it to me until I could only shout out that yes, I still desired him, that yes, I wanted him, and this gave him satisfaction.

Daisy grew sturdy and sweet. She learned to say her own name, ‘Daidy’, and mine. She began to recognize Jess and me, to trust us as she trusted her family. Once, on a walk, she could not quite clamber over a fallen log and held out her little hand to mine with such an expectation of my aid that I felt suddenly heartsick at the charm of her. I wondered then what she might make of me when she was grown. If she knew the truth, what would she think? Dirty old man, corrupter of parents, breaker of sacred trusts. She already knew how to place her hands together to pray with Nicola before bed; she would grow up a Catholic child, and I doubted that her views on morality would be as flexible as Mark’s. I took her hand and grabbed her around the waist, lifting her high into the air as she giggled and shrieked. But she’d already grown too old to enjoy being held. As soon as we were past the log, she struggled and wriggled until I put her down.

Did I imagine it, or did Nicola not want me around her child? I began to notice this, or think I noticed it, when Daisy was nearly two. There began to be a little habit. Jess and I would arrive for a weekend and Nicola would say, ‘Good news, my parents are taking Daisy for the weekend. You’ve just got time to say goodnight to her and Mark will drive her round.’

And we’d protest of course, but Nicola would say, ‘No, we grownups should be allowed to talk. I’m sure that’s what Mark wants, isn’t it? Grown-up talk like you have in London.’

And there was a little business of bringing Daisy out, beginning to be sleepy in her pyjamas and socks, and a round of kissing and maybe a story or a game, and then Mark would buckle her into the car seat and drive her around to Nicola’s family. They were so close that this back and forth was constant; they drove to each other for meals, to watch television in the evening, and to ferry Daisy between all the places she was loved the best. Mark had his wish: to be at the heart of such a family.

And at this point, Mark would say, ‘Oh, James, keep me company on the drive?’

And I would say yes of course, certainly I will.

And on the way back there was a place, invisible from both houses, a sharp bend in the road where we would stop the car and allow ourselves to be overtaken by desire. Cars rocketed past us round the bend, faster than I thought safe, but we were parked on the verge and Mark would say, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, they go faster in the country than we do in the city.’ And I thought of making some joke about how fast we were going now, but the moment had passed and his scent was too intoxicating and his hand on the bare skin at the small of my back was too great for thought.

*

And one night, after one of these visits, driving back home to London, Jess said, ‘Darling, something awful.’

She was driving. I was lolling in the passenger seat, drifting on the edge of sleep.

‘Mmmm?’

‘Nicola thinks Mark’s having an affair.’

I was cold. Just that. As if I might have been cold for a long time but had only just noticed. I tried to decide what sort of noise an innocent man might make.

‘Really?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

A click, a tick-tock. Jess changed lanes.

It seemed plausible to sit up a little, to open my eyes.

‘Does she know who with?’

Jess shook her head, keeping her eyes on the road.

‘She thinks it’s someone he sees in town.’

Cold again. Very cold. Cold and empty.

‘Huh,’ I said.

‘Have you ever seen him with anyone?’

I swallowed, made a noncommittal hmming sound.

‘Don’t think so. Not that I’ve noticed.’

Jess nodded.

The traffic thickened a little. The car slowed. I opened the window a crack. To the right and left of us were luminous yellow fields of rape and lanes of traffic, fumes, honking.

I swallowed. ‘It’d hardly be surprising, would it? I mean, we know what Mark’s like.’

Jess nodded. ‘Yes,’ she rolled her shoulders, stretching the joints. ‘I think Nicola wants us to talk to him for her … but there’s nothing we can say really, is there? He is how he is. He always has been.’

A pause. The traffic inched to a standstill. An engine revving behind us.

‘What’s she going to do?’

Jess pursed her lips. ‘I tried to explain that maybe it’s not about her. And perhaps she should talk to him. Or find a way to let him know she knows. Because it needn’t mean the end to a relationship. Not everyone thinks that way. Perhaps Nicola could find a way to accept it.’ She sighed. ‘But I don’t think she understood. I think, if she found out it was true, she would take Daisy and leave.’

The cars ahead started to move again. Jess nudged the car into gear and began to gather speed.

21

Nicola’s voice, whispering from behind the hedge, said, ‘Yes, I’m sure she does, but you’ll have to tell her they aren’t suitable.’

Then Mark’s voice, angry but restrained: ‘I’m not telling her anything of the sort. They’re family stones. Daisy can have them set differently when she’s older.’

‘She’s not having them set at all. I don’t want any presents from your mother. You know how she spoke to me when we …’

‘She speaks to everyone like that. It’s only that you take everything so bloody personally. Look —’ now he was wheedling slightly — ‘it’s not for you or me, it’s for Daisy …’

‘I don’t care, I don’t bloody care. She doesn’t need your family’s presents.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nic …’

‘Don’t use that language with me.’

‘Oh, what, fucking what?’

A caught-back sob from Nicola, could have been a laugh or a cry of despair.

And then from Mark simply, ‘Nic …’

And then, ‘Don’t you touch me.’

At my elbow Nicola’s little sister Eloise said, ‘Uncle James, I think Daisy’s done a poo in her knickers.’

Eloise, who had reached the stage of braces and awkwardness, was holding Daisy at arm’s length towards me. From the smell of her, Eloise was right. Daisy’s face was screwed up, her body trying to wriggle away.

‘Dowwwwwwn,’ she wailed, ‘want go dowwwwn.’

When we rounded the end of the hedge, Mark and Nicola were gone.

*

And then again, later, in the conservatory. Dark clouds lowering at the horizon, wind whipping up although the day was still bright in our little square of green. Daisy reached out her chubby little arm to her birthday cake and said, ‘Cick! Cick!’ so Mark cut her another slice and placed it in her reverently open hands. She looked at it with rapt attention — her mother had fed her some earlier with a spoon — then, decisively, buried her face in the cake, came up smothered in chocolate and wiped her hands down her dress.

I was just beginning to laugh when Nicola turned round, looked at her daughter and said, ‘For God’s sake, Mark, why the hell did you do that? Look at her! Just look at her!’

And it was too sharp, too angry, too loud. It was disproportionate, so that for a moment we were all staring at Nicola. And she felt it too, the heat of inappropriate rage.

‘Come here, Daisy,’ she said, and pulled the child to her a little too roughly, crouched down and began to scrub at her face with a napkin a little too forcefully.

Daisy, feeling the pressure of so many eyes on her, burst into noisy tears. Nicola sat back on her haunches with a sigh, releasing Daisy’s arm, and the little girl ran stumbling to her father, burying her face in his cream trouser leg, covering it in chocolate.

Mark lifted her up, cuddled her to his chest, more chocolate everywhere.

‘Shhh,’ he said, ‘it’s all right, Mummy didn’t mean to upset you, did you, Mummy?’

And Nicola looked up from her crouch at the circle of her family around her, and at Mark holding Daisy, and at Daisy’s smiling complacent face, now that she had attained her father’s arms. Nicola made a low noise at the back of her throat, got to her feet and reached for Daisy, but Daisy snuggled closer to her father. Nicola’s mouth turned down, her arms still outstretched for her daughter. Her brow darkened, she took a breath to speak but instead turned on her heel and marched back into the house and upstairs.

There was a moment of silence.

Nicola’s father said, ‘Well then.’

Rebecca said, ‘More cake for anyone?’

But soon many of us had to leave.

Nicola did not come down to see us off. We stood in the outer atrium with Mark, next to the piles of presents which had been sent by Simon, who could not come, and Emmanuella, who could not come, and Franny, who also, for some reason, could not come. Daisy was climbing over Mark, as if he were a tree, biting at his neck and ear, pulling on his shirt, popping off buttons as she clambered and dangled.

‘I’m sorry about Nic,’ he said. ‘She’s got a headache.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Jess. ‘Tell her we send our love. We’ll see her next time we’re down.’

I leaned in to hug Mark goodbye, and as I did so Daisy detached herself from him and, for a moment, put her arms around my neck. With her softness, she planted a wet kiss on my cheek, unbidden. I have remembered this so often that the memory is worn through and now I wonder if I imagined it entirely.

Mark waved us off as we drove away. I looked back, and saw Daisy still clambering and exploring the contours of her father. And when I think of Daisy now, that is how I remember her still. Slung in Mark’s arms like a monkey swinging in a tree. Climbing over him like he was the most solid thing she knew.

About six weeks after that, Mark called me.

He said, ‘James?’ in a broken voice. ‘I’m in London, because Nicola,’ but he could not finish the sentence. The tears overran him and he gulped to a wheezing halt.

‘Are you at the flat?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes please.’

It surprised me, considering the matter as I drove to Mark’s flat, that he was so devastated. Perhaps it surprised me that Nicola had managed to accomplish this thing; to pierce the armour and wound him. I have never been able to hurt him myself. I might say I have never wanted to hurt him, but it’s not true. I wish he cared enough about me that I could hurt him. I wish I thought that my leaving would cause him pain. I wish I felt I had ever meant more to him than someone convenient to pass a pleasant afternoon or weekend with. I wish that I could break him by telling him I have ceased to love him, but I can’t. He will never cry those tears for me. Sometimes contemplating this makes me so angry that I find I want to hurt him. But, of course, that is the one thing I can’t do.

When I arrived at the flat, Mark was crumpled in a brown leather sofa by the window. His eyes were bloodshot; the tip of his nose was red. He was wearing a ragged jumper and a pair of old, paint-stained jeans. I let myself in, and he opened his arms wide, like a toddler looking for comfort. I hugged him, his head on my shoulder and the wet of his weeping trickling on to my shirt. After a while, he dis entangled himself from me and I poured us both whiskies.

Mark said, ‘This is it. She wants a divorce.’

I nodded.

‘She thinks I’m seeing someone else. I tried to tell her she was being silly but she’s so … she’s very final, you know?’

I knew.

‘And anyway, look. You’re not someone else, are you?’

Suddenly I was afraid, with a fear louder than my concern for Mark’s marriage.

‘Did you tell her it was me?’

He shook his head. ‘I mean, it’s not just …’ He chewed at his thumbnail. ‘You knew that, didn’t you, James? You knew that it wasn’t just you, didn’t you?’

I nodded creakily. I supposed I had known, in a way. He began to sniff again.

‘But … can’t you tell her you’ll stop?’

‘She won’t listen.’

‘Do you want her back?’ I said. ‘Do you still —’ I stopped, reflecting on how little I wanted to know the answer to this question — ‘love her?’

Mark curled his lip at his empty tumbler. He refilled it.

‘No,’ he said. Then, ‘Maybe I do. Maybe.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘So it’s not …’

‘It’s not that. It’s Daisy.’ Mark looked past me at the bookshelves behind my head. ‘Don’t you see? She could take Daisy away from me.’

Ah, I thought. Melodrama. This was the Mark I knew. I spoke gently.

‘She can’t do that, Mark. It’s not legal.’ I thought of the thin veneer of gold covering Mark’s body, of his touching lack of comprehension of what it could purchase. Children could not simply be taken away from a man with money.

‘You’ll get good lawyers, Mark. You can afford it and she can’t stop you from —’

He turned his head to stare out of the window. He was calm now.

‘She can though,’ he said, ‘and she will. I might have the money, but there’s enough dirt to be dredged up, and she knows most of it already. The drugs and the boys and the cottaging — there’re police records of that. You should know.’ He placed the flat of his palm against his forehead and rubbed in a circular motion two or three times, as if trying to ease some sudden pain. ‘No judge in the world would choose me over her.’

‘It can’t happen.’ I moved over and sat next to him. ‘Fine, maybe she’ll get custody and you’ll have to visit and … it’s just life, Mark.’

He said, ‘But this isn’t …’ and he stopped and gasped and said finally, ‘I didn’t want this for Daisy.’

And I thought I could see what the trouble was. Mark had come to a real limit. He would not be able to buy Daisy from Nicola. There was no price. When they divorced, Mark might have to understand that someone else could limit him: like his mother or the word of God.

As if he had pulled the thought from my mind, he sniffed, blew his nose and said, ‘Fuck, my mother’s going to have a field day. My mother and Nicola, how did I not see that …’ and he muttered something half into his jersey.

I rubbed his back. ‘Love,’ I said, ‘we’ll sort it out, you’ll sort it out, it’ll be …’

But he was talking over me. ‘You’ve seen what my mother’s like, you’ve seen her. Always too close. I know Franny thinks it was Ample-forth that made me go wrong, or Catholicism, but it wasn’t. It was my mother, taking me away, wanting me so close to her. She always wanted me too close, never could let me go. And now I’ll be right back where she wants me.’ He looked at me, the broken veins in his eyes red, face swollen. ‘We got much too close, James, when I was a teenager. Much too close.’

‘Mark,’ I said, ‘do you mean that …’ but he cut me off.

‘Don’t ask me what I mean, all right? I don’t want to talk about any of it any more. That’s all.’

He laid his head on my shoulder and kissed me softly — almost pathetically — tugging at my bottom lip. I felt the warmth of his body down my side. I pulled him towards me with a strength I hadn’t intended, and our lips mashed together painfully, and I could taste salt, but I did not stop to consider this as I pulled off his shirt.

Later, we lay in bed together, he smoking and I curled up next to him, stroking his chest, his head, his shoulder. I could not help inscribing lines of kisses along his arms and up his neck, writing my worship with my lips.

‘I think I should tell her,’ he said. ‘I think I should just come clean.’

I rolled away on to my back and stared at the spider’s web of cracks frosting the ceiling.

‘Tell her what?’

He took another pull on his cigarette, exhaled the smoke slowly.

‘Tell her about us. I mean —’ he leaned up on one elbow and looked at me — ‘I don’t think she’d mind so much if she knew it was just you. It’d be containable, you know? And then we could give it another go. I think I want that. Another go. I want it for Daisy.’

An icicle of fear.

‘You’d tell her it was me? Specifically me?’

‘I think it’d make her feel better, you know? I mean, it’s only you.’

And I wondered then, with a rush of heat, whether this had always been my purpose. I was always someone Mark could give up if necessary. I could always be thrown out to confuse pursuers.

‘And what do you think’s going to happen then, Mark? She’ll tell Jess and Jess will leave, and then …’

Mark sat up in bed and watched me impassively, his cigarette held in calm fingers.

‘It’s time you two broke up anyway.’ He ground out the cigarette in the saucer by the bed and stood up. ‘You can’t really expect she’ll stay with you forever, can you? I’m sorry, James, I have to go.’

He was pulling on his jeans then, and I was sitting in bed, and a madness touched me on the inside of my skull. It was the thought of losing both of them, both at one stroke. I thought, and it is only now that I begin to understand that perhaps I was wrong in this, that in losing them I would no longer know where to find myself. There are those who can love without losing themselves: and Jess is one of these and Mark, for all his wild ecstasies, is one of these. And there are those of us who love unboundedly, giving everything, offering up their whole selves as a sacrifice of love. Nothing short of total love was ever enough for me.

I said, ‘You can’t tell her, Mark.’

He bent down, groped around under the bed for a stray sock and said quite casually, ‘I’m sorry, James, honestly. I know it’ll be an inconvenience for you, but you can’t have expected this to last forever, can you?’

He kissed me on the forehead as if I was a child and I think this was what broke the spine holding me upright. I should emphasize that I loathe myself for what I did next. But desire has very little to do with morality.

I said, ‘I’ll tell her about the music box. I’ll tell your mother.’

And he frowned and half-smiled as he pulled on his socks, because he’d almost forgotten, of course, that I knew things about him he would rather not have revealed.

I spoke slowly. I was working it out as I went.

I said, ‘If you tell Nicola about me, about you and me, I’ll call your mother in Italy and tell her it was you who smashed the music box that time in Oxford. And I’ll tell her about the time you were arrested, and I’ll tell her about the drugs, and your other friends in London. I’ll tell her you’re out of control, mad. Mad like you were before.’

And this pulled the last traces of a smile from him and left him grey, like a man who has seen the open grave before him.

He stopped, one shoe on and one shoe off, and said, with an unconvincing flick of the wrist, ‘She won’t care. She won’t … It’s all a long time ago. I’m older now.’

‘So you won’t mind if I tell her. You won’t mind if your family know all about the life you’ve been leading. If Nicola knows, you won’t mind.’ And, remembering something I had heard long ago, I said, ‘You won’t mind if they think your trouble has come back?’

He stood up suddenly and took a step back, away from the bed.

‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, James, and fuck your bloody threats. As if you’d even know how to do it … as if you’d even know how to make it convincing.’

‘I would,’ I said. And then, although I knew this was not likely to be true. ‘Your mother would take Nicola’s side, you know, if it came to it. She would, with all the things I could tell her about how you’ve been living. And Daisy would be brought up by Nicola and her family and your mother and they’d shut you out forever.’

Mark began to speak but did not speak. He was shaking now, an erupting storm passing through his body. I could see the anger rising up his throat, clenching his jaw, bunching his muscles at the temples, and for the first time I was a little afraid. I thought, I really don’t know what he could do.

He looked around the room and grabbed a thick glass ashtray from the bookcase. He glanced at it and then, with a fluid strength, hurled it at my head. I dodged to the side. It hit the wall behind me, shattering into several large pieces, and a shower of glass dust fell over my naked shoulders.

‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘Jesus. Jesus, Mark …’

His face was cold and still.

‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘I’m not staying in London. I’m going to Nic’s family to get my daughter and I’m taking her home with me. Put your clothes on and go.’

He picked up his other shoe and fitted it to his foot. He brushed his hands on his jacket and walked out of the flat, slamming the door behind him.

I sat in the bed for another twenty minutes before I levered myself out, avoiding the chunks of broken glass. I found I’d been nicked; once on the shoulder and once on the ear. I reached over for one of the packets of cigarettes he left everywhere in that flat, pulled one out and lit it. It was years since I’d last smoked; I’d never got much beyond schoolboy experimentation. But the sensation was calming. I opened the window and smoked it slowly. It was November, the day was very cold, an early snow predicted. The cool air was peaceful, bringing up delicious goosebumps over my torso.

I thought, he won’t do it. He won’t tell her. Not now. I stared at the pieces of broken glass in the bed.

I thought, I’ll call him tomorrow, after school. I’ll call him then, and he’ll be calmer and we’ll work something out. I even felt a certain wry satisfaction. I felt sure our argument could be papered over. Nicola and Mark wouldn’t last much longer together, that was clear enough. And as long as he didn’t go through with his plan of confession, things would be better for us afterwards. Perhaps he would take a house in London; perhaps he would after all have custody of Daisy. Perhaps he’d live around the corner from Jess and me, his great friends, and we’d always be wandering from one house to the other, which would make everything very easy.

I found a dustpan and brush under the sink in the kitchen and swept up the broken glass. I shook out the sheets and remade the bed. He had been angry, of course he had, but that was only to be expected. He would calm down, I thought. He would see that it made sense.

I was lying to myself. Just as I was lying when I decided he had not meant the ashtray to hit me, that it had been an accident it had come so close. And the question I ask myself now, years later, is: would I really have done it? Really? In the moment, would I have poured venom into the ears of Mark’s family, revenging myself upon him for all the slights and all the bad grace and all his failure to want me as I wanted him? Or would I have continued to hold his secrets for him, waiting for the moment he might turn back and see me carrying his burdens and feel grateful at last?

It doesn’t really matter. He believed that I might speak, and that was enough.

I smoked another cigarette, watching the people walking about the streets. And as the day turned to evening and the cafés and restaurants of Islington began to tinkle and rattle, I let myself out of the flat and went home.

Night, rising from the sea-green depths of a dream I forgot instantly on waking to the insistent sound of a telephone.

Jess, awake fractionally sooner than me, switched on her bedside light. A cloud of yellow and blinking resolved at last into her face looking at mine and the sound of a telephone still. She frowned at me. I attempted to frown back, furrowed with sleep.

She walked into the hall and picked up the telephone.

I heard her say, ‘Hello?’

Then, ‘It’s all right. What is it?’

Then a long pause. Then, ‘Oh, God. No.’

She walked back into the bedroom, holding the phone to her ear. Her expression was unreadable.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ll tell him. Yes, he’s here now. Do you want us to come?’ A pause. ‘All right. We’ll see you tomorrow.’

She sat on the end of our bed and took hold of my hand, turning it over to put her palm against mine.

‘Oh, James,’ she said, and I think I knew then. Nothing other than this would have caused such horror, nothing less would have stretched the skin around her eyes or made her mouth convulse. ‘Oh, James, there’s been an accident.’

22

There was an inquest, of course. There had to be. A slow judicial uncovering of facts, a piecing together of shattered things, laying out the bones of the matter and noting: first this happened, then this, then this. This is how we make sense of the world, by trapping it in words and sentences, by pinning it like a butterfly to a felt backcloth, killing it to keep it still, so we may trace its lines.

So, there was this: the November night was cold and the road was icy. Slides were shown of the ice on the road, the place where the tyres failed in their grip, the long, dark streaks where Mark’s foot had hit the brake but the car had not stopped, and had not stopped, and had not stopped. The depth of the tread had been measured, the length of the skid marks, the distance to the point of impact. The figures were carefully recorded.

And there was Mark’s condition. Not drunk, it was ascertained, not over the limit. His blood and urine had been tested, but nothing of note had been discovered. He was lucky in that, if one can call it luck. If he and I had not argued he might have stayed in London for his usual excursions which would have left their traces. But if we had not argued and he had stayed in London everything might have happened differently. At the least, if we had not argued his mood might have been different. Mr Winters, they said, was in an agitated state. He and his wife had argued, the coroner heard. A separation had been discussed. A highly agitated state. It was recorded.

But was he speeding? No. At the point when the brakes were applied, it could be calculated using various models, the car was travelling at between 40 and 45 miles per hour. Perhaps a little fast for an icy country road late at night, with a child fast asleep, he thought, strapped into her car seat. Perhaps a little fast, but not excessive. One would not criticize him, said the police witness, on that score alone. And we who knew how Mark drove when he was in a highly agitated state, we who had seen him take his eyes from the road … I who had seen the bead of sweat on his upper lip and known that he himself did not understand why he did what he did … We did not speak up, of course we didn’t. It was too late for that, too late for it to do any good. No one could know, now, precisely what had happened despite all tests and calculations. The night was cold. The bend was sharp. The speed was not excessive. These were the preliminary conclusions. Mr Winters, approaching a sharp bend, did not perceive the patches of black ice on the road. The front nearside wheel of his car hit the ice, causing the car to skid. Mr Winters wrenched the wheel, an overcorrection. The car hit a second patch of ice and skidded for several yards before colliding first with a fence and then, careening sideways, a tree at the side of the road. On impact, the car was travelling at approximately 20–25 miles per hour.

And the child. Yes, here we came to it. I heard the sigh in the fingers of the coroner as he turned the page to look once more at the photo-graphic evidence. I did not see the photographs, did not wish to see them. I believe that Franny looked, with Simon. I believe that he wanted to see. Mr Winters, they said, naturally thought the child was asleep in the back seat. He had picked her up from her grandparents’ house — ‘wildly demanded her,’ one testimony reported. They did not think it wise to withhold the child from him although the hour was late and the child already asleep. She could in any case be carried to the car, fastened into her seat and taken to her own bed without waking her.

He would have held her close to him, as he always did. The inquest did not go into this point, but it is clear to me. He would have smelled the milky, honeydew-melon scent of her breath and heard the quiet snuffle of her snore. Daisy, asleep, always had a look of tremendous seriousness; a frown between her closed eyes. He would have held her close to him and kissed the side of her neck and placed her, with such care, sleeping into the car seat, and fastened the buckle at her waist.

On this point, a great deal of time was spent. Who had seen him buckle it? Who had heard the harness snap shut? Had they been certain the click was heard? It was a matter of grave importance, not least for the manufacturers of this brand of child’s car seat, and for the several thousand other parents who had purchased the same brand in the past three years. It was necessary to apportion blame, if blame there were to be apportioned. For when the car was examined it was clear that the buckle was undone. Could she have done this herself? The evidence was inconclusive. It had been known for children to undo their car seats, although a parent carelessly fastening a seat was more common. Mrs Winters had in the past seen the child trying to undo the buckle, little fingers and thumbs pressing down on the central latch, tongue out in concentration, pressing and pulling. Daisy was always trying to free herself from harness. Mark encouraged her. But there was no way, at this stage, to be certain.

The child had been in a deep sleep when she was placed in the car, it was concluded, but the cold might have woken her. Would Mark not have noticed that she had awoken? Would she not have cried out? Would he not have seen her move? Ah, but he was in a highly agitated state. And she, sleepy and confused, might have made a little noise but been drowned out by the roar of the engine through the cold and frosted night. Perhaps Mr Winters had not, in his agitated state, fastened the buckle correctly. Perhaps it had already been open. Or perhaps Daisy had worked her little fingers down under the tight-fitting straps to the buckle, where she had pushed and wiggled until the webbing holding her in place released. It is so hard, sometimes, to tell the difference between the bindings that trap and those which secure; too hard for a child to know.

It was impossible now to ascertain which of these scenarios had occurred. But certain it was that, at the moment of impact, the child was unsecured. At the first impact, she had been thrown forward, upward and to the side, into the window. She did not, as the expert witness averred, ‘exit the vehicle’, but the impact was sufficient to crack the window’s toughened glass. It was then that the most serious injury was sustained: the fracture of the skull, the unstaunchable cerebral haemorrhage. The second impact had thrown her back against the floor of the car, but the damage this had caused was by comparison minor. If the parents might find a modicum of comfort in it, the coroner said, they could be assured that the child had died without regaining consciousness.

The verdict was accidental death. The coroner expressed his sorrow. The grieving parents could not look at one another as they passed from the court into the brittle winter day without.

For several days, it seemed that no one spoke. There was a rushing sound constantly, like the sound of planes taking off, a blanket of noise which made speech intolerable. For several days, there was nothing in the world but the sound of weeping.

But there was madness, too. A hideous, scrabbling, madness which blew in great choking lungfuls through us so that we cried out suddenly, or woke terrified in the night, or looked at ourselves in the mirror and thought, I do not know who that person is, I do not know at all. There was no reasonable response but madness. There was no reason.

Jess developed again the eczema which had not troubled her since childhood. Long raw streaks appeared on her legs and on her back and on her freckled chest, burning weeping flaking patches as if she had been licked by flame. She could not bear to be touched; even the flick of a bedsheet as she turned in the night could make her cry out.

Mark did not attempt to hide from us the fresh scars, red and raging down his arms. He had come to stay with us because Nicola did not, because she could not, because they were not, there were no words between them. Even the language of glances or of touch had gone, even that. And because she blamed him, yes of course that too. There was no evidence of dangerous driving and yet we knew, we all knew, every one of us knew. It might have happened to anyone, the coroner had said, and yet it had happened to Mark. An icy road, an un fastened buckle, a highly agitated state.

And so there was a taking of sides. Simon, of course, was with Nicola. The family wrapped itself tightly, a nexus of guilt and pain. I did not hear their conversations, but I can imagine how they would have spoken between themselves, each one saying to the other, ‘Why didn’t I stop him? Why didn’t I tell you to stop him? Why did we hand over that sleeping bundle, why? What were we thinking?’

Franny attempted, at first, to go between sides. She loved Mark, she did, and hung on his neck and wept with him, and all her sardonic wit was gone and instead she lit cigarette after cigarette for him, holding two between her lips and lighting them both and passing one to him as if she were giving him oxygen or vital medication. But she loved Simon too, and it was hard for her. She grew pinched and drawn as the days went on, harder and with her grief inside her like a stone.

It came to an end one day while Jess was in the bathroom of our flat dressing the fresh wounds on Mark’s arms and Franny and Emmanuella had walked on to the balcony to smoke. We were talking of nothing, as we did, and Franny became silent and then said, with a return of her sardonic smile, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that, if Jesus and God are the same person, and God made Jesus suffer on the Cross, then Jesus is a self-harmer?’

There was a shift in the atmosphere. Emmanuella moved her weight from one leg to the other and threw her cigarette over the balcony.

‘A self-harmer too, I mean,’ Franny persisted, ‘like Mark.’

Emmanuella moved suddenly, with a jerky motion unlike her accustomed grace, half hesitating as she acted. She took a pace forward and slapped Franny hard across the cheek.

Franny staggered back, her hand clutching her face.

‘Fuck!’ she said. ‘Fuck, what did you do that for?’

Emmanuella was impassive, her features calm.

‘It is not to joke, Franny, not about such things, not now.’

‘Fuck,’ said Franny, nursing her face.

Emmanuella watched her and said nothing.

And after that Franny did not come to our flat any more.

There were days and days to wait before the funeral. Acres of time to fill. And after the first numbness, the days were long and the nights were terrifying. Mark raved and stamped and wailed in the night, not sleeping or waking from sleep to find the knowledge new and fresh and all horror once more. We put a photograph of Daisy in the living room and it seemed both too much and not enough. Father Hugh visited Mark and sat with him for an hour in silence. Mark’s mother telephoned, but he would not speak to her. Jess applied aqueous cream to her red-raw streaks and Mark came home with pills in tiny bags or with folded pieces of paper and we waited for the funeral.

It was for Nicola’s family, that responsibility. There was never any argument about that.

Rebecca telephoned to let us know the arrangements. Here the location, here suitable hotels (and here, she told us, the family’s hotel, the hotel we were to keep Mark away from). She preferred not to speak to Mark. Once, he leapt up as I was talking to Rebecca and grabbed the phone from my hand.

‘Where’s Nicola?’ he demanded. ‘I want to talk to my wife.’

In the silence of his listening we heard Rebecca’s crisp tones buzzing through the receiver.

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you, Mark.’

The old Mark would have wheedled and persuaded. This Mark said nothing; like a broken prisoner, he hung his head and passed the telephone back to me.

Later, I said to Jess, ‘I expect they wish they’d never met him.’

Jess said, ‘He saved Leo’s life. He still did.’

So few things in life permit clear calculations. Unlike the equations of velocity and heat transfer I’d learned at Oxford, the effect of one person’s life on another cannot be weighed in micrograms. ‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Something disturbed me before dawn in the hotel on the morning of the funeral. I awoke quivering, alert. A thump, a series of clanks, a muffled thud from the connecting room; Mark’s room.

The door was unlocked and he was not in bed. The bedsheets and duvet were tangled and twisted. The drawers of the dresser had been flung about the room, the table upended. A keening sound came from the bathroom. I opened the door. Mark was leaning over the sink, breathing heavily. In his right hand he held a razor blade, which he was pressing deeply into the surface of his chest, just below the collarbone. Blood was running down his arm and chest, thick like syrup. There was blood in the basin, and on the wooden floor, on the white towels. There was a bloody handprint on the mirror, where he’d been leaning. He looked up, his pupils large and dark.

He said, ‘James.’

He said, ‘I can’t. I mean, it’s not. It’s not a good time for a party, James.’

I felt my heart thump in my throat.

I caught at his arm, the one with the razor, trying to pull the blade from his grasp.

I said, ‘Stop, Mark, stop.’

And he started to scream.

Jess called her father, the GP, staying in a hotel a few miles away. Mark was seeing things. He talked about ghosts and demons, horses and angry avenging angels. I walked him up and down on the balcony. The night air calmed him a little and the screaming stopped but not the muttering, the slow murmur of sibilant syllables.

‘Somewhere,’ he said, ‘somewhere something, I can’t I can’t stop, stop them, ask, she didn’t ask, she says.’ He picked at the gushing wound on his chest.

Jess’s father was all cool medical professionalism. He shone a light into Mark’s eyes and tipped out one tiny white pill from a brown bottle.

‘Now,’ he said, looking directly at Mark and holding his gaze, ‘I’m going to give you something to make you feel better. Do you think you can swallow this little pill?’

Mark nodded abruptly several times.

I washed the blood from my hands, brought him a glass of water and he took the pill.

Jess’s father said, ‘It’ll take about twenty minutes to kick in.’

He took Mark’s hand in his and laid Mark’s head on his chest. And then Jess, stroking the hair at the nape of Mark’s neck, began to sing:

‘Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot,

Prête-moi ta plume, pour écrire un mot.

Ma chandelle est morte, je n’ai plus de feu.

Ouvre-moi ta porte, pour l’amour de Dieu.’

I wouldn’t have thought she’d remember, but memory is a strange thing and pulls what is necessary from secret crevices at urgent times. It was the tune of the music box, the sound he had loved as a boy, and after a while Mark did begin to calm. His muttering ceased, his fidgeting grew still and, a little later, he yawned.

Jess’s father looked over Mark’s cuts with professional calm. Seven deep lacerations above the heart; we could see the sickening white of rib at the bottom of some of them.

‘I’m going to suture these now,’ he said. ‘It might sting a bit. We could go to the hospital if you’d prefer.’

Mark shook his head. No, he would not prefer. His eyelids were sagging and then creeping open again, whites of his eyes flashing.

It was a slow and meticulous process, sewing Mark back together. It reminded me of my mother, when I was a child, sewing up an old toy whose stuffing was falling out. The needle went in through the flesh and slowly the thread was pulled after it. And again. And again. Sewing the skin together with even, elegant stitches until all the raw edges were gone. While he worked, Jess’s father muttered to Mark, telling him the stitching was going well, that it would soon be over, that he was a good boy. Mark meanwhile lay perfectly still, breathing in and out, his raked chest rising and falling.

When it was over Mark slept, and we changed from our bloodstained clothes and went downstairs to drink coffee.

Jess’s father said, ‘He was lucky you found him, James. Another few minutes with that razor and he could have done very serious damage. If he’d passed out from the blood loss he …’

He paused. We understood what could have happened if Mark had passed out, bleeding heavily, alone in a hotel room in the middle of the night.

He continued,‘You know, when Jess was little, I thought about this constantly. Constantly. How many ways there are to hurt a child.’

He took a gulp of coffee.

‘One tries not to let them know, naturally, but one begins to be haunted by these visions the moment they’re born.’

He took Jess’s hand and pressed the back of it to his lips.

Mark held my hand through the funeral like there was no other thing in the world he knew for certain. He threaded his fingers through mine and gripped so that he could lean into me. His feet did not know how to walk. His toes pointed in. He was lamed.

There were crowds there. They washed around us like the tide, sweeping in and out, impersonal in their scale. Mark clearly did not know a great number of the people who approached and pressed his hand between theirs and told him they were so sorry, so very sorry. And some of them were sincere, of this I am perfectly certain. But one or two were there for quite different reasons. At one point, a man turned from us and said distinctly, ‘That’s Mark Winters, I know, but where’s cousin Tom? I want a word with him; I’ve some business he’d be interested in.’ And a woman, seeing Mark’s mother behind her veil, turned to her companion and said, ‘Isabella’s looking old, do you see?’ And I would not have believed, had I not been there, that such crassness was possible. But for some people nothing that happens to someone like Mark can ever be real. It is Mark’s money, his shining golden armour. They make his very essence appear unreal. This, too, is Mark’s problem: the details of his life are so dazzling that most people cannot see past them. His false exterior is so grand that no one can quite understand, that even I can sometimes scarcely grasp, that he is real, there, behind the trappings.

I don’t know who had chosen the priest. He was a little man; not imposing, like Father Hugh. He was small and mostly bald, with wispy tufts of hair at the sides of his head and for all I knew he had never met Daisy and never seen the sweetness of her, never known the delight she took in blowing bubbles into her milk through a straw. He stood before the small coffin, in the full and buzzing church, robed in his authority, and said, ‘This life is but a garment that we wear for a little time.’ And slowly but insistently silence spread throughout the church. Because we wanted sense, that day.

He said, ‘Grief is a journey which, if we undertake it, can bring us closer to God.’ And he said, ‘The death of little Daisy may cause us to ask if God is really here, if He is indeed real. How could a loving God, a just God, a merciful God allow such a terrible thing to happen?’ He paused. ‘If there is no God, then these things are truly meaningless. And for some, that meaningless life is enough. But there are those of us who look at this world, and its mystery and beauty — at the beauty of Daisy’s life, however brief — and cannot accept that it is all for nothing. There is meaning even here, if we can see it. We trust in the promise of the Cross and know that —’ and here he read from the lesson — ‘ “now we see as through a glass, darkly; but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully.”

‘We cannot know the purposes of God. But if life has any meaning then this too has meaning. And it must. It is simply impossible that it does not. We trust in the resurrection to eternal life. And we know that the living God can speak through the smallest of us, the least of us. He speaks to us now through the short life of Daisy. We know that her precious life was full of joy and significance. We must trust that the best of her continues. God has even now enfolded Daisy in His arms. She has gone home to be with Him who waits for all of us.’ And here the man’s voice broke. ‘ “While we are at home with the body, we are away from the Lord.” ’

Mark was sobbing then, silently. And as the tears poured down his face he turned and put his lips close to my ear and he said, quite clearly, ‘All I want now is to be with her. Everything in this world is broken. Everything here in this world is wrong. It is not our home.’

I grasped his hand very tightly and I thought, then this is what I am here for. Here, to save him from this. To wed him to the earth. I had not yet thought of what might come next for me, after this cracking open of the ground beneath our feet, but it became clear to me that whatever happened, I could not leave him.

Mark tried to speak to Nicola after the funeral — went up to her, murmured a few words. She listened, stony-faced. He spoke a little more, gesticulating as he always did when he was nervous or unhappy. He reached for her hand. She pulled away, her face suddenly angry. Or perhaps simply desperate, for I saw tears starting in her eyes. She spoke a few words to him. He blinked and swallowed. She turned her back on him and walked towards the roadside, where Simon and the family were waiting.

Out of the massed ranks of the family, only one figure separated itself and walked towards us. It was Leo, awkward in his black suit. He must have been eleven or twelve by then? He had shot up like a leggy plant, tall and skinny, very unlike the little boy he had been. Mark flinched when he saw him. His hand went up to his forehead, to the little crescent-shaped scar half-hidden at his hairline.

Leo smiled. I think it was the first smile we’d seen that day.

He stuck out his hand and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mark, I’m so sorry,’ as though the whole thing had been his fault.

I think Mark barely even noticed who was speaking to him. He stared at Nicola until the car drove up and she was taken away from him as surely as if she had sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Emmanuella came back to London with us, sitting in the back of the car with Mark while Jess and I shared the driving. Jess’s father had given Mark a sedative immediately after the funeral. He lolled on the back seat quietly, sometimes falling asleep, waking a little and then dozing off again.

We brought him into the flat and he sat on the sofa next to me, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. We did not talk a great deal. There was nothing to say. Mark was woozy, confused, his eyes focusing and defocusing.

After a little while I said, ‘Mark, we should get you to bed.’

And he leaned over and kissed me, hard, on the mouth, pushing his body into mine, rubbing his thumb at the nape of my neck. It was a lover’s kiss, not a friend’s or even an attempt at seduction. It was a kiss of intimacy. I jumped away, stood up, took a few paces back from the couch. I looked around the room. Emmanuella was smiling slightly, a confused smile as though she hadn’t quite understood a joke. Jess’s face was unreadable, quietly calm.

Mark smiled at me, wrinkling his nose. ‘C’mon then, lover. Let’s go to bed.’

Jess said, ‘Can I talk to you for a moment, James?’

I followed her out into the hall.

In the darkened passage I said, trying to bring a laugh into my voice, ‘I don’t know what that was about. It’s just, it must be Mark thinking that I’m … well, you know Mark.’

Jess nodded slowly. I barrelled on.

‘God knows what that cocktail of drugs has done to him. He’s so confused he doesn’t know where he is.’

Jess nodded again. She pursed her lips. I tried to say something else but she held up a hand.

She said, ‘He’s in pain, James. You should go to him. Be with him tonight.’

I didn’t understand. I said, ‘He’s confused. He doesn’t really want me. Maybe Emmanuella? Or you, maybe you could talk to him.’

An odd expression flickered across her face then — almost amusement, almost affection. I still think of that sometimes, trying, as always, to understand her. In her way, she was always more opaque to me than even Mark.

She said, ‘James. You should sleep in the spare bed with Mark tonight. You should be with him. He needs you.’

It’s a strange thing to say, but I think I loved her more in that moment than I’d ever done before, and I had loved her a great deal. It wasn’t gratitude, or guilt, simply a fleeting understanding of what she was, this short, slight woman standing in a darkened hallway, wearing jogging bottoms and an old jumper, with her hands on her hips and peeling eczema scars on her arms. I couldn’t think, then, why I’d ever wanted anyone but her, how she could ever have seemed nothing to me when, so clearly, she was everything.

‘Jess,’ I said, wanting to express all of these things.

She shook her head.

‘Not tonight. I’m tired. You’re tired. We can talk about it in the morning.’ She looked at me, her eyes unreadable. ‘It’s all right. I’m OK.’

And she turned and walked down the hall away from me.