The evening chimed around us. A flock of doves paced the piazza floor, pecking at stones and crumbs. Across the square an accordion player started up a melody with lambent brio. Three children chased over the paving stones.
Jess raised her hand to my face and traced her finger around the outline of the blossoming bruise. The sensation reminded me so strikingly of the first times we had touched in Oxford that it made me hold my breath.
‘James, what’s this?’ she said.
‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘I walked into a door. Stupid of me.’
She looked at me, her eyes very clear and light, and shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not what it is.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Is it the marks of love, James?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is it?’
She pursed her lips and paused, then spoke very softly. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. He’s poison for you, James.’
I looked down at my hands and then out across the square.
‘That wasn’t what you said six years ago.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t. But I think I’ve changed my mind. I think that’s what I came here to tell you. Perhaps I didn’t know it until now.’
I remained silent.
‘And,’ she said, ‘something else as well. I want to say you don’t owe me anything, there’s no debt between us. I knew, or thought I knew, about you and Mark for a long time. Maybe even before it started. It was that last day in Oxford, wasn’t it?’
I nodded, dumbly.
‘I’ve always thought, well, it was a different sort of thing. It wasn’t that you didn’t love me, I knew that you did. But I couldn’t be that for you. And you were so happy, we were so happy when it was happening. You were happier than I’d ever known you.’
‘You didn’t mind?’ I was bewildered.
‘I think,’ she said, running her finger around the rim of the ashtray again, ‘I think that I didn’t. I wish it hadn’t been Mark, for your sake. And I wish we could have spoken plainly with each other. But that’s all.’
Jess took a sip of wine. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Seth’s coming.’
I looked up and there he was, the gorilla-man, hulking his way through the crowd. He was still a little way off. We had time for a few more sentences before he arrived.
I thought, I could say now what I thought while I was following her. I could say, ‘I saw you from a distance and knew that you could be the love of my life.’ I could say, ‘Take me back. You are all I desire.’ I could say, ‘I love you. And I know you love me.’
Instead, I said, ‘Jess, do you remember the first violin from your orchestra in Oxford? Rudolph something?’
She frowned. ‘Randolph,’ she said, ‘Randolph Black. Yes, why?’
‘Did you sleep with him, in Michaelmas term of our third year?’
Seth was approaching rapidly across the square, smiling.
Jess remained silent.
‘Did you?’
She looked at me and shook her head.
‘Really?’
‘James,’ she said, ‘after all this, why would I lie to you?’
26
Jess and Seth left me the details of their itinerary, where I could find them if I wanted to find them. She did not specify why I might want to find them again. She copied the names of hotels and phone numbers and dates on to a square of card and pressed it into my hand. As she did so she said, ‘Remember.’ Just that.
In my room at the hotel, I stripped naked and stood in front of the mirror. I observed myself, turning one way and the other. That, I thought, is me. There, that man is me. I could not quite make the connection. That man, I thought more slowly, that man with the pale skin and the gammy knee and the decent arse and the dark arrow of hair pointing towards the genitals. That is me. I lifted my arm and let it flop down, watching how it was me. That face, long, with a sorrowful arrangement of nose and eyes, more like my father with every passing year. That face is me.
I heard once that a puppy raised among kittens will grow up thinking it is a cat, will behave like a cat, will move like a cat, will not recognize dogs as its own kind. I thought of the society in which I’d spent the past fourteen years of my life: the rich and the glamorous, the successful, the driven, the talented. Mark and Emmanuella, Franny, Simon, Jess.
But that man there in the mirror, that man is me. I have done less with these past years than Anne with her edible oils or Paul with his position as a Junior Minister. Even those accomplishments, which once struck me as so crass, now seemed solid to me. More solid than myself, a man made of smoke. They would be something to hold up against my body and say this too is who I am. I had never desired accomplishments, never longed to be a doer of great feats. But, it occurred to me, I should have tried to desire something. Or can one try to desire at all?
What is it that one learns from life? I had always supposed that I would accumulate some wisdom as my life progressed. That, as in my progress through Oxford, some knowledge would inevitably adhere to me. I suppose I hoped that love would teach me.
But the very question is redundant. It is ridiculous to think we can learn anything from so arbitrary an experience as life. It forms no kind of curriculum and its gifts and punishments are bestowed too arbitrarily to constitute a mark scheme. There is only one subject on which the lessons are in any way informative.
That man in the mirror is me, I thought. For good or ill, that’s me.
After two nights and three days in the hotel, my bruises had faded from livid purple and red to yellows, greens and browns. I kept my sunglasses on even in the hotel lobby. In the privacy of my own room I examined the bruises in the mirror.
And on the third day I returned to the villa above the city. Mark was waiting for me by the swimming pool. Ricardo, a boy who had been one of Mark’s favourites but, at twenty-four, had grown too old, was sitting on the stone wall by the patio, flipping through a magazine. Seeing it was me, Mark leapt to his feet, smiled almost shyly, turned to Ricardo and said, in Italian, ‘Get out of here.’
Ricardo grunted, looked between me and Mark, then jumped off the wall and walked sullenly back towards the house.
Mark walked to me slowly, smiling, holding his arms wide in a gesture of welcome, or surrender.
‘I’m so glad you came back,’ he said softly.
He pulled me close to him, lifted off my sunglasses and examined the side of my face, my eye, my nose. He breathed out a heavy sorrowful sigh.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered into my neck. ‘I’m so so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it, you know I didn’t mean it. You know how I am.’
I nodded and wrapped my arms around him. I thought about how-he-is. Was that an explanation for anything? I had once thought that I could come to some deeper understanding.
He lifted his face contritely for a kiss and I bent to kiss him, tasting again the taste of Mark: cigarettes and mint chewing gum and black-currant wine gums.
‘Listen,’ he said after a while, ‘I’ve been thinking, we should get away from here. I hate this place. It’s horrible, being cooped up here day after day. What do you think about moving to Rome for a few months? Or out of Italy? How about autumn in New York?’
He was eager and excited. I brushed the hair out of his eyes and he blinked at me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’
He tipped his head to one side.
‘OK,’ he said. Then, as if a little aggrieved, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to go away,’ I said. ‘Maybe travel, or maybe go back to England. I’m not sure yet. Not be here, anyway.’