The Art of Losing Read online

  I realised with a start that Barnbrook had turned viper-like towards me and posed me a question. ‘I couldn’t really say,’ I said. ‘This is fascinating, but it’s not my area.’

  The professor turned away with a contemptuous sniff and fell to polishing his glasses with a yellow silk cloth. I could feel Martin’s eyes reproachfully on me. My lack of participation seemed to set the death knell on the evening; after a few more desultory minutes, Barnbrook gathered himself to his feet and announced his departure. The other chemist fawned after him, snuffling his goodbyes to Martin and ignoring me entirely. Martin pumped them both warmly by the hand, wringing out a final few drops of praise, and waved them off, calling after them that he would see them the next day. On the basis of this, I wondered whether the situation really called for such an extravagant farewell, but I said nothing.

  ‘Dear me, Nicholas, you must have been bored to tears,’ Martin commented when the chemists were safely out of sight. He was trying to look sympathetic, but it came out as something of a rebuke.

  ‘No, no,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’m sorry if it seemed that way. I simply didn’t feel I could contribute much.’

  ‘Of course,’ Martin said, visibly softening. It was one of his virtues that he could never be bad tempered for long. ‘Well, in any case, I’m glad you enjoyed the talk. It makes quite a change to have someone to accompany me to this sort of thing.’

  Here, then, was the answer to the question I had posed myself. ‘Lydia isn’t interested?’ I asked.

  Martin looked regretful. ‘Not especially,’ he admitted. ‘As you know, she’s more inclined towards the arts.’

  ‘Did you never think of marrying somebody who shared your passion?’ I asked. I knew it sounded blunt, and besides, one didn’t ‘think of marrying’ anyone; life wasn’t like that. But I wanted to hear what he would say, if only to convince myself that the Knights’ marriage was all wrong, so that I could keep on feeling sorry for them.

  To my surprise Martin laughed, rocking back and forth in his seat rather like a mirthful garden gnome. ‘Good heavens, no,’ he said. ‘Female scientists are quite a breed apart. Besides, if I had married somebody like myself, how on earth would the house get run? Lydia manages me, and that suits me completely. And if I may be so bold, I think it suits her too.’ He paused, the rocking slowing to a stop, his pinched, tweed-clad elbows coming to rest on the table between us. ‘Our marriage surprises people,’ he said. ‘I believe I told you something to that effect last week. But it works extremely well.’

  His confidence was impenetrable. He was gently smiling. I could have sworn that nothing in his words was designed to warn me off, or that he even remotely suspected that anything untoward had ever gone on between me and his wife. My first instinct had been correct: it was Lydia and Lydia alone who was unhappy in the marriage. Again, I felt sorry for her. Martin would never leave her, and she would probably go on drifting through the years, every so often having some dalliance with attractive men if they came her way. In any case, it was no longer my problem. Looking across at Martin’s slightly stooped figure, as he squirrelled up a handful of peanuts and happily drained the dregs of his wine, I felt sorry for him too – the kind of sorrow you might feel for an uncomprehending circus bear dressed up in human clothes, unaware that he is being made a fool of.

  I devoted myself to Adam and Naomi, applying myself to the task with a meticulousness that made me realise I had been neglecting it of late. With Adam, I reinstated the nightly bath-times that had always been our ritual, but which had dwindled to once or twice a week over the past few months. I don’t pretend to believe that, at just six months old, he consciously noticed the change, but he certainly seemed to take to it readily enough, shouting and splashing away quite happily. I read him stories too, something I had always shied away from in the past: the forced simplicity of children’s books bored and irritated me and I had always maintained that until Adam was old enough to talk I might as well have been reading Dostoevsky. Naomi thought otherwise, however, and accordingly I applied myself to the hungry caterpillar and his ilk with a new vigour. At the weekends, too, I made sure to spend plenty of time with Adam, something that was no hardship but which had all too often fallen by the wayside in favour of poring over some dusty tome or other or preparing for the next week’s work. I swung him in the garden hammock, pushed him to the shops and back, encouraged him to take crayons and create offbeat modern masterpieces of artwork as soon as his chubby fingers could grasp a pen. Raising a baby was a twenty-four-hour job, I realised, something that should have been apparent long before.

  With Naomi, the task was rather more complicated: I seemed to be able to read babies’ minds easier than I could read women’s. My initial attempts to take over some household chores were met with puzzlement and suspicion rather than delight. One day, she came downstairs to find me diligently loading the washing machine, and, hands on hips, asked what I thought I was doing. I thought the answer to be patently obvious, but no – what I was doing, apparently, was trying to steal her day from her. A naturally busy and active woman, Naomi had not adapted to giving up work without a fight. I had thought that the daily grind of housework would have aggravated her slight frustration rather than soothed it, but it emerged that shaping her day around snatches of non-baby-related pursuits was in fact a merciful respite. I gave up the chores without much of a fight; in any case, I wasn’t as domesticated as she was, and had a habit of getting things wrong. It took me another week or so to work out that it was what I had always thought of as empty gestures that she wanted, rather than actions. I took to buying a weekly bunch of flowers, the odd box of chocolates. I left little notes on the bathroom mirror when I left for work. I sometimes called her from the faculty telephone at lunchtimes to check how she was getting on with Adam. All this went down wonderfully. Before long the adult equivalents of Adam’s contented gurgling and shrieks of joy were coming my way more frequently than I could remember in years.

  ‘You’re such a good husband to me,’ she said fondly to me one night, leaning back against my chest, her bouncing red curls flattening themselves against me. She smelt of the shampoo she always used – coconut oil and lemongrass, a sweet, sharp smell that I had always found powerfully evocative. I drank it in, kissed the top of her head and murmured some thanks. I wondered why I felt so empty.

  The truth was that my efforts with Adam had made me feel closer to him, whereas my efforts with Naomi seemed only to be serving to make me feel more and more detached, like an actor playing out the part of the perfect husband. With Adam, I gathered the rewards of my attention greedily, and every time his face split in an open-mouthed smile or his pudgy hands clapped in praise of me, I felt a pang of love twist in my heart. I was glad of it, because it showed me that I wasn’t dead inside, but at the same time it made the contrast sharper. When Naomi thanked me for my latest offering, I felt like a nodding dog, mechanically accepting her affection. When she showered me with kisses in bed on a Sunday morning, I pretended that I could hear Adam stirring. My first thought was that it was guilt at the illicit kiss which was warping my feelings, and that perhaps it would wear off with time. I had, after all, done what I had sworn on our wedding day that I would never do, even if it had only been a kiss and nothing more, and I was bound to feel uncomfortable about it. As time went on, though, I was forced to admit that there was more to it than that. I still enjoyed being with Naomi; she made me laugh, brightened up my days and would chat good-naturedly with me for hours about things in which she had little or no interest. When it came to anything more intimate, however, my thoughts were elsewhere.

  The smug superiority I had talked myself into feeling for Lydia had not lasted long. If she was unhappy, it was not her fault: she had married the wrong man, that I still firmly believed, but she had a daughter, a house, she didn’t want to break up a family. What was she to do? I found myself thinking about her at the strangest times – mid-lecture in front of a gathering of a hundred students or more
, on the telephone to my mother. Sometimes these thoughts were restricted to a vague flitting over her features or some long-forgotten memory. At other times, late at night, I physically ached for her. As I lay in bed, it was as if the taut curves of her body were tattooed on to the insides of my eyelids, always waiting for me when I tried to sleep. I fantasised about her and it took all my strength not to carry these fantasies over into my infrequent sexual encounters with Naomi. With a young child in the house, sex had settled into a pattern more cosy than erotic, and this seemed to be what Naomi had expected, for she never mentioned it or expressed any concern. If it hadn’t have been for Lydia, I might have accepted it too and trusted that things would get back on track when Adam was a little older, but in the event I interpreted it as yet one more ominous sign that something was wrong with my marriage, and with me.

  The phone call that I had been half expecting ever since the night of the dinner party came five weeks after it. When I heard her voice on the other end of the line, I had a crazy, light-headed impulse to ask what had taken her so long. I took the call in the hall. It was a hot day, and we had the back door open; in the garden, I could see Naomi basking in the sunshine with Adam in a pram at her side.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t be calling you,’ she said.

  ‘But you called anyway.’

  ‘So it seems.’ We were both quiet for a moment, listening to each other’s breathing down the line.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you.’ It was such an understatement that I felt a laugh rise miserably in my throat.

  ‘Do you want to meet up?’ she asked urgently, cutting to the chase quicker than I had expected. ‘We need to work out what we’re going to do.’

  A couple of weeks earlier I might have said that I didn’t understand what she meant. There was no question of doing anything, surely, only of laying our guilt to rest. Now I agreed. ‘Where do you want to meet?’ I asked.

  ‘This might sound stupid, but I thought we could take a boat out on the river,’ she said haltingly. ‘At least then we won’t run the risk of bumping into … anyone.’

  By ‘anyone’ it was clear she meant our respective spouses, and I felt a brief flash of irritation; say what you mean, I thought, since we’re doing this. At the same time, I half appreciated her sensitivity at not saying Naomi’s name. ‘Now?’ I asked.

  ‘If you can get away.’ She sighed, causing the line to hum and vibrate. ‘I don’t like this secrecy, but …’

  ‘I don’t think this is the sort of conversation we can have in my back garden,’ I said drily. ‘I’ll see you at St James’s Dock in about half an hour.’

  I rang off feeling a curious mix of despair and excitement. Speaking to Lydia had woken something up inside me, and it was a sad kind of relief not to have to let it lie dormant any more. She had been thinking about me, too, and she had called me first. I went through to the garden, where Naomi was now singing a lullaby to Adam, sprawled out on the grass with her full skirt gathered around her thighs. The sun shone on her red hair, setting it ablaze with light. Together they made a picture-perfect vignette of family life. The only thing missing was me. I swallowed the lump in my throat and stepped on to the lawn to join them.

  ‘Darling, I’m going to have to pop out for a couple of hours,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go down to the faculty.’

  Naomi rolled over and squinted up at me. ‘On a Saturday?’ she asked in disbelief.

  ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve just realised I left some papers there which I really need to look over before Monday, and I don’t want to bring them back here now and spoil any more of the weekend. I’ll just go down, have a look through them and make some notes, and then come back. You’re all right here, aren’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said dramatically, flinging her arms up before flopping back to her prone position. ‘No, it’s OK, off you go. I’ll probably still be here when you get back.’

  I crossed over to the pram and pushed it back and forth gently. Adam was half asleep, eyes drooping in sleepy slits. He blinked up at me, his face screwing up in recognition. I touched his cheek with a fingertip, feeling uneasy. For a stupid moment I thought about taking him with me; he would probably enjoy rowing on the river. ‘Don’t let him overheat,’ I said. Naomi made a vague noise of reassurance, not looking up. As far as she was concerned I was clearly already gone. Heart thumping, I turned and strode back across the lawn, grabbed my wallet from the kitchen table and left the house before I could give myself time to change my mind.

  There was a long queue at the river, the hot June day bringing out hordes of families and teenage couples. The air was sticky with the scent of ice creams melting in the heat. I scanned the morass of bored children shifting from foot to foot, overexcited students splashing each other by the bank. It was a full minute before I caught sight of Lydia, standing near the front of the queue in a white linen dress, her blonde hair tied decorously up in a ponytail. I hurried towards her.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said. Instantly I could tell she was on edge, her body quivering with adrenalin, green eyes intent and bright.

  ‘What would you have done?’

  She laughed despite herself. ‘Got on and rowed around by myself, I suppose,’ she said. ‘How have you been?’

  We passed the next few minutes in polite small talk until we reached the front of the queue. Chatting about my recent lectures and my plans for the rest of the weekend, I found myself wondering how we would ever break through this cordial barrier. It was difficult to imagine that the woman in front of me was the same person who had kissed me so fervently in the kitchen a few weeks before. She seemed self-contained, holding herself back from me, her slim body enclosed in its white wrapper, precious and untouchable.

  She reached out for a hand to help steady her as she climbed into the boat. Her legs were lightly tanned, brushing against mine as she settled down opposite me. Neither of us spoke a word as we rowed away from the bank, out towards the farthest curve of the river. Her face was taut with concentration in the sun, watching her oar cut evenly through the sparkling water with every stroke. Guided by her, I let her steer us away from the river’s central line, towards the large willow tree that hung over the water. The boat came to rest in the shallows underneath the tree, hiding us from view of the bank. She looked around her, as if to satisfy herself that she had chosen the right spot. In the pale greenish light that the tree cast down on us, she looked vulnerable and ethereal, as if she might vanish at any moment. I didn’t want to speak, and for a few minutes we just sat there watching the river.

  ‘I thought about saying that what happened at your dinner party was a mistake,’ she began at last. ‘I thought it would help to clear the air and then we could just go on as before. The problem is, it wasn’t a mistake, was it?’ She didn’t look at me as she asked the question, winding along drooping stem of willow intently around her finger.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. In reality I wasn’t as convinced as she was that the kiss hadn’t been a mistake, if a mistake meant something inadvisable which could well lead to unnecessary complications. Somehow, though, sitting across from her, I couldn’t be as rational as I had hoped.

  ‘I’ve been faithful to Martin since we moved here,’ she said without further preamble, looking at me sharply, as if she thought I wouldn’t believe her. ‘Even when he told me he had bumped into you, the thought never crossed my mind that we would get involved again.’

  ‘Never?’ I felt absurdly hurt.

  ‘Well …’ She spread her hands out hopelessly. ‘Only in the way that a dream might cross your mind, nothing that I ever would have thought of putting into practice.’

  ‘So are we?’ I asked. ‘Involved, I mean?’ The word sounded silly and juvenile to my ears, something a blushing schoolgirl might apply to her latest beau, but I couldn’t think of a better one.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think I want us to be.’

  This was clearly t
he moment where I was supposed to announce that so did I, and we would fall into a rapturous embrace. I couldn’t get the words past the lump in my throat. I felt pulled painfully in two directions, unsure which way to turn. If I managed not to look at her, I felt I would be able to say that I didn’t want to see her again, not ever, and stick to it, but the instant I glanced at her again the sight of her seemed to make the words impossible to say. Her bright blonde head, the subtle swell of her breasts under the linen dress, her bare feet with carefully painted nails, all so achingly familiar and precious that I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I felt the same sensation that had assaulted me the very first time I had seen her – that sense of homecoming, that whether I liked it or not, this was where I was meant to be.

  My silence had lasted too long. She looked flushed, embarrassed, as if she was about to cry. ‘I don’t like this situation any more than you do,’ she said, ‘but I have to point out, you didn’t seem so moral about adultery six years ago. In fact, you chased me, Nicholas. What’s the difference?’

  Because this time, it’s immoral for me, I almost said, but didn’t. I didn’t point out the obvious, that it was fairly easy to be relaxed about committing adultery when you weren’t the one committing it. ‘It’s not that,’ I said instead. ‘Last time, I was ready to give you everything it was in my power to give. I wanted a life with you – but you didn’t want that, did you? You left, with him. I never understood why you did it, and to be honest I still don’t. What would be the point of starting it up again, just so that you could leave me again once things got too much? Can you tell me that? What would be the point?’ I realised I was shouting. I hadn’t known how angry I was, or how long these words had been building up inside me. Lydia was crying now, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand. I couldn’t resist a final twist of the knife. ‘You’re nothing but a prick-tease,’ I said, and heard her gasp, as if I had struck her. As soon as I had said the words I wanted them back.