The Lessons by Naomi Alderman Read Free Book Online Page A

beaded choker lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings.
    Mark put his arms around two of the women nearest to him and said, ‘Come along. If you’re good I’ll show you my gazebo.’
    He laughed and walked the girls towards the back of the house. I wanted to follow but did not wish to appear pathetic.
    The air was soupy, thick with conversation, smoke and perfume. I wondered where Jess was, then jabbed at myself for wondering. I mustn’t be following her around all evening. It was a party, after all. It couldn’t be so very hard to talk to people.
    I recognized Franny and stood next to her for a few minutes.
    ‘Mum and Dad insist that I have to find a husband who is of the blood pure,’ she said, holding Simon’s arm tightly.
    ‘What’s Si,’ said a girl, ‘too mongrel?’
    ‘Oh no,’ said Franny, ‘just mongrel enough.’
    In a sitting room by a side door to the garden a young man was drawing on a hookah, while another lay sprawled on the rose-patterned carpet next to him.
    ‘Don’t bother Dev,’ the first man said, ‘he’s mashed. Fancy a draw?’
    He extended the pipe to me. A thin line of spittle hung between it and his lip for a moment before collapsing.
    ‘No thank you,’ I said.
    In a black and white tiled room, a couple was having sex on a mildewed sofa. They seemed oblivious of the people passing by the open doorway. His chest was bare. She was dressed as a 1920s flapper with black feathers in her hair and a beaded cocktail dress that shook as she moved on top of him. Her fishnet tights were ripped between her thighs. His head was back, staring unseeing at the ceiling. Hers was down, looking at her red-nailed hands on his chest. They were making no noise at all, and I wondered whether they were a couple, and this public display was something they always did or whether they had met here, perhaps only minutes before, and each was participating for their own private reasons.
    In a green-papered room looking out on the statues, a group was engaged in conversation.
    ‘I think I’m drunk.’
    ‘Obviously you’re not, or you wouldn’t be able to think it.’
    ‘Isn’t that madness , not drunkenness?’
    ‘Why, do you think you’re mad?’
    A wing-backed armchair was free. I sat in it and listened to the strangeness. On a table was an array of produce from Fortnum & Mason nestled in duck-egg-blue paper: a wheel of cheese, a tower of chocolate fairy cakes and brightly coloured jellies in vodka glasses. Several small jars containing caviar had been thrust into a fire bucket filled with ice.
    ‘Is that caviar?’ someone said.
    ‘Of course,’ said someone else.
    ‘I wonder what would happen if you snorted it.’
    ‘I’d pay £50 to see you try.’
    The lighting in the room was dim and unsettling. Around the walls were photographs of film stars. Some I recognized and some I did not; some were signed and some unsigned. I squinted at them for a little while, challenging myself to name them, but the chatter soon became soporific. My eyelids grew heavy. I was on the edge of a dream when a loud sound alerted me that, across the room, something was going on.
    I opened my eyes.
    Mark had entered, accompanied by a crowd. He gestured at the pictures in one corner of the room, a group of five shots of the same delicate-featured woman. In one arty black and white photograph she was wearing dark glasses, with a cigarette holder clamped between her teeth. In another she was lying back on a chaise longue, wearing a beaded evening gown that was slit all along the leg. Her left leg was raised and her arms spread wide.
    Mark leaned towards the woman standing next to him and whispered something in her ear. The other guests smiled and muttered. The woman turned her head and I saw that it was Jess. I must have made a sound of some sort, for Mark swung round quickly, pirouetting on the ball of one foot.
    ‘James!’ he crowed. ‘You are quite the man I was looking for, a man of taste, a man of refinement. Tell me,