The Lessons Read Online Free PDF Page B

blankets tented over my one good knee, the other a thickened mound by its side, as the dawn slowly revealed the room. At 8 a.m., without thinking too hard or for too long, I limped down the staircase and into Chapel Quad. The quad was deserted, the flagstones mossed up with frost. I placed the foot of my crutch with care, glad I had brought it, and thought again, with an echoing flutter in the centre of my being, that I would always be afraid of falling now.
    It was early to call but my parents are early risers.
    ‘It’s time to come home,’ I said. ‘Can you pick me up tomorrow? Or Wednesday?’
    ‘Oh!’ said my mother, a half-mocking half-laugh behind her words, ‘you’re not staying there for Christmas after all?’
    I said nothing.
    ‘Have you finished your work?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I’m finished.’
    I wondered and worried over when might be the right moment to call her. Not too soon, for fear of being too demanding. But not too late, for fear of seeming uninterested. But she telephoned me first. It was Boxing Day and there had been dinner the day before with Anne and Paul and talk of Major and Heseltine and the threat from the Liberal Democrats. Anne had asked searchingly about my work, the societies I had joined, and seemed only partially mollified by my mother’s explanation about my knee.
    ‘Next term,’ she said. ‘Hilary term is when it all kicks off. You have to be ready.’
    Later that evening, the telephone rang.
    ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘it’s Jess. Do you remember me?’
    ‘Yes, of course I …’
    There was laughter in the background, a man’s voice.
    ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’m driving to Oxford the day after tomorrow, almost past you. It’d be no trouble. Do you want to be rescued?’
    ‘Yes,’ I whispered into the telephone. ‘Yes, I do.’
    She picked me up in an elderly estate car. My parents, grateful to see me with a friend, a girl, had been over-enthusiastic, winking and smiling. We bundled my bag into the car and left as soon as we could.
    ‘I’m sorry about them,’ I said.
    ‘If we’re going to get on,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to stop apologizing.’
    ‘Oh, I –’
    ‘Don’t do it.’ She was smiling, still looking at the road. Her lips were pressed together hard and I could see a dimple in her left cheek.
    ‘I … what?’
    ‘Don’t apologize for apologizing.’
    ‘I … um …’
    ‘What?’
    I furrowed my brow. The conversation seemed to have escaped from me rather more quickly than I’d hoped.
    ‘I’m just, well. I don’t know what to say now.’
    She grinned. We were nearing a red traffic light. As the car came to a halt she leaned towards me and kissed my right cheek, then turned back to her driving.
    ‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you tell me how your Christmas was? How were the dreaded Anne and the leech-like Paul? Did you get any good presents? Any good arguments?’
    And so I did.
    I noticed something on that drive that continued to be true for as long as I knew Jess. Her presence calmed me, like a soothing hand in the centre of my chest bringing quiet to every muscle fibre and threaded sinew. Infatuation cannot last, and even love may be less certain than I’d once hoped, but this essential quiet, the stillness she brought to me, that lasted. Mark said to me once, ‘She’s like God to you: she inexplicably calms inexplicable fears.’ And in this, as in so much, he is irritatingly right.
    We arrived in Oxford at 3 p.m., when the sun was low on the horizon. We drove north, through the city centre and up into Jericho, a maze-like Oxford district, its tangled streets lined with Victorian labourers’ cottages. It had been a cold, bright day but now the clouds had begun to gather and a few spots of rain burst on the windscreen.
    ‘Is it Mark’s house we’re going to?’ I said.
    ‘Yes,’ said Jess, ‘it’s his house. He’s … yes.’
    ‘Is he a second year? Living out?’
    ‘No, he’s a first year like us but