The Lessons

by Naomi Alderman

  Dr Strong stroked his beard impassively. His legs were stretched out in front of him, feet clad only in sandals although the cold of autumn had already begun to bite.

  Dr Boycott broke into a smile. ‘I’m sure you’ll find yourselves more than capable, with a little application. And if not –’ his smile deepened – ‘Oxford’s not for you. And best to find that out now, eh?’

  We seven Gloucester College physicists walked out of Dr Boycott’s book-lined study and stood, a little dazed, in the quad. The sun was passing in and out of shadow. The creeping plants covering the walls were dying russet. We looked at each other, half-friendly, half-appraising, and, with smiles, loped towards the library. I remember this as the last moment I believed without question in my intellectual powers. My dreams were there: the influential friends, the first, the running blue. All this was within my grasp. And here I was, running. Surely all must be well?

  I rounded the second sharp bend, feet digging into mud and ice to gain traction. The morning mist had not yet dissipated, and as I left the grove of overhanging trees my surroundings blurred and dissolved. I ran on, my feet dislodging small stones and pebbles, and, once or twice, almost sliding from under me. The cold became delicious, my pace was strong. I came to a forking of the ways and chose the longer path.

  ‘Oxford is a race,’ Anne had said. ‘No more, no less. Remember that.’ We all knew it, each of the physics men. We did not discuss our first assignment, did not sit together in the library. Later, when times became more desperate, we pulled each other by the collar over fences and hurdles, copying one another’s work in a manner we would have scorned at school. But this first time, we worked as each of us was accustomed to work, each the best in his class, each entirely alone. I chose a seat sheltered on three sides by long walls of books. The sun, shining through stained glass, illuminated motes of dust and cast gules and amethyst on my squared paper. I attempted a question, expecting to find it simple. My work at school had always been simple. But this was not so easy. I made some notes. I looked around at the other students, then back down to my work. I tried again. I was uncertain. In the gallery and in the deep central book well the other students were hard at work. Soon, their industry began to seem oppressive to me. They made notes. They flicked through books. Would none of them ever take a break? Were none of them puzzled, as I was, with a hot itch of incomprehension at the base of my skull?

  It was that itch, and my inability to tolerate it, which proved my eventual undoing. I was not undone on that day, or the next, or the next. But the slow increase of days pulled me downward. I have blamed the fall for what happened, but it seems to me that it had begun to happen even before. Even in that first week I began to work in my bare little college room and not in the library. Away from distraction, I said to myself. But also away from the companionship of labour. I slept a little more each day. After the second tutor group meeting, I took a nap in the middle of the day. I wondered if I was sickening for something.

  I understand now that I should have drawn comfort from that second meeting. After my days of quiet intense effort, I sat somewhere around the middle of the pack. Not as good as Everard or Panapoulou, but not as lost as Kendall or Daswani.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Strong as he handed me back my work, ‘keep at it.’

  These were words of encouragement. I see that now. At the time, I tasted ashes. Like every student in Oxford, I had only ever been the best. To be average, to be ‘normal’, seemed beyond humiliation to me. The true star of the group was Guntersen. He alone received the plaudits of Dr Strong. He alone had solved the eleventh question. In the quad, a tall willowy woman was waiting for him. She greeted him in Spanish and he spoke to her in the same language. As they embraced I caught a hint of her perfume: cinnamon and cloves. They walked towards the lodge arm in arm, her hair dark and curly, his blond and straight.

  ‘To the winner –’ Kendall leaned in uncomfortably close. I could smell old cups of tea on his breath – ‘go the spoils.’

  I slept that afternoon until it was dark outside and the college bell was ringing to summon us for dinner. I looked at the next tutorial sheet on my desk, pristine and unconquered. I wondered if Guntersen was already hard at work in the library. In the corridor, I heard the sound of girls laughing and wondered, with a pang, who they were, what they were talking about. I thought of Guntersen’s Spanish girlfriend, of the easy way he rested his arm around her shoulders. A run, I thought, to clear my head.

  I ran then without any firm idea of destination or direction. I rounded Hertford, under the Bridge of Sighs, headed towards the University Parks. It was only after a week of exploration that I had found my favourite route. A long quiet trail through the open country to the south of Oxford. I could guarantee to be almost alone if I came out early enough in the morning. On that day, I had set out at 6.30 a.m., just before dawn. The path would not be in heavy use for two hours yet. This thought pleased me. I ran between two saplings, breaking a spider’s web strung between them. A memory tickled. Wasn’t there a parable of an inspirational spider, representing diligence or resilience?

  I should have been more resilient, I thought. I should have been more diligent. I had worked hard, certainly, but had I worked hard enough? Guntersen had worked harder. He was probably working even now. If he wasn’t in bed with that Spanish woman.

  I had found myself thinking of this woman more frequently than was sensible. It was not that no other opportunities presented themselves to me. Two girls on my staircase, Judy and Hannah, had separately made drunken attempts at conversation. Judy had found me in the Gloucester College bar, spent twenty minutes telling me about her parents’ divorce, then put her hand on my knee, at which point I made my excuses. Hannah I encountered in the corridor outside my room on the way to get milk from the fridge. She was pretty, in a tousled and bleary way, but stank of cider and cigarettes.

  ‘James!’ she said. ‘James, James gorgeous James, Mr James Stieff.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The corridor was narrow. She put her hand on my chest and pushed me back towards the wall.

  ‘Mysterious James,’ she said, ‘prettiest boy on staircase eight, no doubt about it.’

  She pressed her body against me. She smelled faintly of vomit.

  ‘Lots of girls would like to get to know you, Mr James Stieff. We all talk about you because you are so very …’ She wriggled slightly, a stale odour of sweat and smoke in her hair. ‘Just so very …’ She reached her hand down to my crotch. ‘Are you stiff, Mr Stieff?’

  I wasn’t. Not by any means. I pushed her away from me.

  ‘You should go to bed,’ I said, and I think she said, ‘With you?’ but by then I was letting myself back into my room and closing the door behind me.

  A few days later the Gloucester College gossip sheet, pinned up in every lavatory in the college, named me ‘5th hottest male fresher’, said that I had indulged in a ‘four-in-a-bed sex romp’ with Judy, Hannah and a girl I had never met called Elaine, and that the next JCR Meeting would vote on whether I had won the crown of College Slag from someone called Mick. I pulled down the sheets whenever I saw them and did not attend the JCR Meeting.

  But Guntersen’s Spanish woman obsessed me. Her name, I had learned from Kendall, who made it his business to know such things, was Emmanuella. She was from Madrid, studying law at St Catherine’s. How had Guntersen met her? This Kendall did not know and I dared not press him to find out.

  ‘Foreign students,’ Kendall had said, ‘they stick together.’

  ‘Rich students you mean,’ said Daswani.

  I did not quite know how it had come about that I spent so much time in the college bar with these two. I did not like them. I felt myself their intellectual superior; this both repelled me from them and drew me to them.

  ‘Same thing,’ said Kendall. ‘Massive fees for foreign students, only the rich ones can pay them.’

  Daswani nodded sagely into his beer.

  Can this be it, I tho
ught? Is this all Oxford has to offer? For all the promises of glamour and glory, is this it? Passes from drunken stale-smelling girls? To be mediocre, sitting in a damp-walled bar on a Wednesday night with other mediocrities, tracing shapes in beer with my finger on a scratched table? I could not accept it. Guntersen and his girlfriend spoke of other possibilities.

  I talked to her, once. It was early in the morning, I was returning from my run as she and Guntersen were kissing at the gates to the college library. They kissed with intent, his hand sliding down her back, grasping her leg at the top of her thigh, her arms encircling his waist, reaching up under his cable-knit sweater. I stopped to stretch my calves on the low stone wall next to the library gates. They didn’t notice me. As the 8 a.m. bell rang, the great curved wooden doors to the building opened from the inside. Guntersen pulled away, returned, kissed her again, his hand in her hair, and then was gone, into the library to do battle on the plains of physics.

  Emmanuella noticed me then. I was bending over, stretching my hamstrings, a deeply undignified position. Her face was still pillow-creased, her hair dishevelled. I caught her eye and she smiled.

  ‘You are in Ivar’s tutor group, yes? James?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He says you are quite good.’

  It was the ‘quite’ that destroyed me.

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘Oh,’ she laughed softly, reached out and touched my arm. Her fingertips were warm and brown against my goose-prickled white. ‘That means he thinks you’re very clever. Don’t be offended. He’s not …’ She broke off and looked at me. ‘You run?’

  ‘Only for … yes. Yes, I run.’

  ‘Of course. Don’t race Ivar. He likes to win.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Perhaps if we raced, I would win.’

  She smiled back.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  And she turned and walked towards Broad Street.

  When I ran I thought of her, and of him. I thought of them entwined together, pressed up against the iron curls of the library gate. I thought of them, and of Guntersen’s hard work and Kendall’s tea-breath and of the work that still awaited me in my room. I thought of the Oxford life that, it seemed to me, was always happening somewhere else.

  I rounded another bend, a sharp one, and began the downhill part of the run. My breath was coming in quick clear gasps, I was not yet tired. I ran along the edge of a water meadow. I thought of the work I had left to do that day. I had reached number five out of twelve on the question sheet. Tomorrow was tutorial day. I could perhaps finish another question today. I let the thought go. The birdsong was louder here. I wondered if Guntersen ever came this way, if he ever heard these birds sing. My feet hit the hard dry earth, one-two, one-two, and I thought of Guntersen and Emmanuella and wondered if they ever came here together, in the early morning, she putting her arms around his neck and he leaning her against a rough-barked tree. I closed my eyes for a moment, imagining it and, and. And this was enough.

  My right foot came down not on hard earth but slid across ice. It turned right, and then round, and, with a wrenching tearing twist, further round and away. I tumbled and, as I fell, the leg twisted further, buckling under my weight, and there was a sick sensation in the joint and in my stomach and I found I was thinking of my sister Anne, again, and of her twisting the drumstick off the chicken, revealing the inner white of bone and string-like sinews and the gristle of the joint. And then there was violent, loud, aggressive pain, drowning out everything else, and then there was nothing at all.

  2

  First year, November, fifth week of term

  When I woke, it was to pain again. And to a confusion so intense and overpowering that my senses became muddled and mingled. A dizzying panoply of vomit and earth, of the sound of jagged sinews and the taste of cold, and a sound like the iron tongue of pain on my leg. Confusion and then silence. Another burst of noise and light and stench and pain and metal. And then silence.

  There was a dream, or perhaps a vision, in which a girl with long dark curly hair came to sit at my bedside. She pressed against my knee and the pain was holy and progressive. Later, there was a doctor, who grasped my heel and the back of my calf and said, ‘This may hurt a little,’ and the pain was not sacred but frantic bubbling agony.

  I still dream of this, and sometimes in my dreams I imagine that I already knew Mark at this moment. He is there by my bed, his head tilted to one side, saying, ‘Pain, James, is the answer not the question.’ It’s because of his Catholicism, which I took so long to understand, and his insistence that a life without pain has no meaning. I suppose in a way I wish I had known him then, and this is why he appears in my dreams. Perhaps his respect for suffering might have kept me from such self-pity.

  But I had yet to meet Mark. There was no one to rescue me but my parents and they had little to say. The hospital gave me medication for the pain, a fibreglass brace for my leg, and a pair of crutches. The college moved me to a ground-floor room.

  My mother said, ‘Are you sure, darling? You don’t want to come home?’

  My father stared out of the window, on to Turl Street, where girls in long woollen scarves were loitering by lamp posts.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, quite sure.’

  My father said, at last, ‘No sense in missing more work.’

  Pain was the repeated refrain of my days, punctuating them with clear and resonant chimes. I began to learn how to make it sound and how to silence it. Pain when I twist suddenly to the left, but not the right. When I descend a staircase but not when I ascend. When I roll to the right in my sleep. The doctors had given me exercises, had told me that my injury was serious but that it would improve. They had said the discomfort would decrease. But would it disappear entirely? On that, they frowned and sighed and said, ‘Perhaps.’ Perhaps it would always hurt? They wrung their hands before they muttered, ‘Yes.’

  I had missed a week by the time I was well enough to return to physics. I composed a note to Dr Boycott and, by return of pigeon post, he asked me to come to his rooms. At 4.30 he opened the door in response to my knock with every appearance of astonishment.

  ‘Ah, Mr, er …?’

  He looked at me hopefully, waiting for assistance.

  ‘Stieff. James Stieff. I’m a first year.’

  A pause.

  ‘I sent you a note, Dr Boycott. You replied.’

  He blinked. ‘Ah, you are the student who has hurt your … hurt your …’ He stared at the thick case around my knee. ‘Your leg?’

  He showed me into his office. It was large with a deep-piled leaf-green carpet and mahogany bookcases. He motioned me to sit in an armchair next to the fireplace. I lowered myself into it with difficulty, keeping my leg as straight as possible. I could not prevent a moment of ice-sharp pain, the separation of flesh. I gasped. Dr Boycott looked at me.

  ‘Yes, the problem is, Dr Boycott, that I missed last week’s work. And now I can’t seem to –’ I laughed, trying to indicate that this was a minor problem, one which must be easily rectified. ‘Well, this week’s work seems pretty much impossible to me.’

  Dr Boycott observed me through his half-moon glasses.

  ‘I see. It is unfortunate. Last week’s work was crucial. Yes, I can’t see how you can carry on without having understood that.’

  He chuckled, amused by the idea of such a hare-brained plan.

  ‘Well then,’ I said with relief, ‘obviously I’ll be a week behind for the rest of term. You won’t mind my taking my tutorials a week later?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh no, I’m afraid not. I work to a strict schedule. All work must be marked together. I can hardly –’ he laughed again, hands clasped over his stomach, amused beyond measure – ‘hardly arrange special tutorials just for you.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘Dr Boycott, you just said yourself that I couldn’t hope to understand the next worksheet without –’

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in!’ called Dr Boyco
tt.

  A man entered, one of Dr Boycott’s graduate students.

  ‘Ah, Trevor, just in time. I’ll make tea. Mr Stieff was just leaving, weren’t you, Mr Stieff?’

  ‘But I –’

  ‘Very good. I’m sure you’ll work it out. Yes, yes.’

  And I found that I was standing at the top of the winding stair outside Dr Boycott’s office, the white-panelled door with its battered brass doorknob closed firmly behind me. Gingerly, step by awkward step, I made my way down the stairs.

  In the group tutorial the following morning Dr Boycott called on me again and again for answers that he must have known I could not possess.

  ‘Mr Stieff, did you find problem eight particularly tricky?’

  ‘Well, Dr Boycott, I …’

  I squirmed in my seat. There was a lick of pain at my knee, a pointed tongue of it.

  ‘Come, Mr Stieff, why not attempt it now? What about problem three? You must at least see that those two are practically identical.’

  ‘But, Dr Boycott, I told you that –’

  ‘It was your knee you bashed, wasn’t it, Mr Stieff, and not your head?’

  The other students laughed. Dr Boycott looked around contentedly, a classroom comedian satisfied with his reward. I felt the blush slowly rising up my face, creeping from the concealment of my collar to the burning-red tips of my ears.

  Guntersen said, ‘Actually, Dr Boycott, I used a different methodology for problem eight.’

  Dr Boycott turned his attention to Guntersen, leaving me still red-faced and ashamed.

  After the tutorial, two women were waiting for Guntersen in the quad: Emmanuella and someone I had not seen before – she was shortish, well proportioned, with long straight brown hair. She wore a red sweater over a crisp white shirt and a pair of dark grey woollen trousers. She was a member of my college, I knew – in my year – but I had no idea of her name. Guntersen kissed first Emmanuella and then this woman on the cheek.

  ‘We’ve been at Mark’s,’ I heard her say. A slight, yet discernible look of irritation flickered across Guntersen’s face. I considered this look long after they had left the quad.