The Art of Losing Read online

  She took a few minutes to compose herself, breathing deeply and wiping away the last of her tears. ‘I’m not going to pretend that didn’t hurt, but I expect I deserved it,’ she said. ‘Listen, Nicholas, I want to make this absolutely clear to you. I loved my husband when I married him, but falling in love with you was something entirely different. I wasn’t prepared for it, and frankly I didn’t enjoy it, because I hated what I was doing to both of you. I decided to try and make my marriage work because I thought I owed it to Martin, and since we have had Louise things have been better, a lot better. I thought that the feelings I had for you had long since died, or at least faded away. When I thought about you, the colour seemed to have gone out of my memories – it all felt so long ago that I never thought those feelings could come back. But since I’ve been seeing you again, I’ve realised that it wasn’t a question of them coming back – they never really went away in the first place, I just pushed them underground until they didn’t feel part of me any more. I don’t want to start an affair with you now because I enjoy the secrecy, or find deceiving my husband exciting – far from it. What I want is to find out, for both of us to find out, whether being together in the long term is something that might be worth all the pain that it would cause, and unfortunately, that means that the secrecy is unavoidable. If you know that you don’t want this, you should tell me now, because then I can start trying to get over you.’

  She fell silent, looking at me levelly, her chin raised slightly in what could have been pride or defiance. The length and fluency of her speech had the unmistakable air of something well thought out and rehearsed in advance, but nevertheless hearing her deliver it was like hearing my own thoughts played out loud. I couldn’t stop myself; I crouched forward across the boat and pulled her into my arms. She was shaking under my touch, her hands searching for mine, grasping them tightly. I kissed her eyelids, her cheek, her lips, the base of her neck, not caring who saw. In between kisses I told her that I was sorry and that I loved her, I loved her, and I couldn’t bear it if she left me again. It wasn’t what I had planned, but somehow that felt unimportant. Even as I kissed her I felt a sliding sense of inevitability, the falling back into a familiar pattern that I might find impossible to break a second time, but I didn’t care. When we finally pulled apart she was half laughing, half crying, her face lit up by love like that of a teenager half her age.

  ‘Let’s get this boat back and go to a hotel,’ she said, and what happened after that felt strange and familiar and comforting and dangerous and right and wrong, all at once.

  Although I had said on the boat that I loved her, the next few weeks felt like falling in love with Lydia all over again. When I thought about her, I got an itchy, restless feeling that made me want to do something, anything but sit around. When I was with her, I kept on noticing new and incredible things about her – the way she interlaced her fingers when she concentrated, the slightly husky, dreamy quality of her voice when she first woke up, the way she lay on her back and counted stars out of skylight windows when she couldn’t sleep. When I wasn’t with her, I wanted to talk about her all the time, because everything reminded me of her, and the urge to do this, even with Naomi, was so strong that it took all my willpower to fight it. We spent the night together whenever we could, inventing family visits and overnight conferences, but more often than not our meetings were restricted to the odd snatched hour here and there. In this respect nothing had changed in the intervening years since our last affair –if anything, making arrangements had got harder rather than easier. It was frustrating, but I put up with it.

  Occasionally, Lydia and Naomi went out for the afternoon together: against all the odds their friendship seemed to have flourished. I never asked exactly what they did, but judging by the drop in the balance of our joint account after these jaunts, shopping seemed to feature heavily. The first time they went out together, I spent the afternoon in an intense state of panic, unable to relax. I paced from room to room, holding a grizzling Adam tightly in my arms and murmuring words of reassurance as much to myself as to him. I imagined Lydia breaking down, sobbing out her guilt to Naomi over the coffee cups, swearing that she would never see me again. Even in the height of my panic I knew that it was singularly unlikely – Lydia was far more adept than I was at separating the various components of her life and shutting off her morals. In my less generous moments, I remembered that she had had more practice.

  Still, when I heard the key turn in the lock at the end of the afternoon I had never felt so sick. The two women came in beaming and chattering, dispelling my fears instantly, and I felt an elation far beyond reason, so great that I almost looked forward to their next outing together – simply for the relief that hit me when I realised that nothing had been revealed, nothing had been suspected, and I was safe.

  Once, Lydia and I rented a room on the other side of the city and spent the day there. It was mid-July and the heat was so stifling that as soon as we arrived she stripped off down to her underwear, bright white lace clinging to her hot skin. She sat in the window seat, looking out from our third-floor vantage point, legs folded decorously underneath her despite her near nudity. We ate raspberries out of the punnet; the blood-red juice stained my fingers and I rubbed it off on her skin, a hazy red smudge lingering below the curve of her breast. As we had done many times before, we talked for an hour or so before making love. It was our unspoken fantasy that we were something more than furtive lovers; just an ordinary married couple who had all the time in the world. We talked about the future – castles in the air, nothing more – her as a brilliant and celebrated painter, me as the uncontested authorial voice of my generation. It was a game we liked playing. Somehow it felt too dangerous to talk about a future that we might reasonably attain; after that afternoon on the river, Lydia had never since made reference to any long-term plans between us. I pretended that I went along with this on sufferance, but deep down it suited me. I loved her – sometimes I felt that I would die for her, but at other times, when I was away from her and back in my comfortable domestic bliss with Naomi and Adam, I found it hard to believe that I would ever leave my family. It was an uncomfortable tug of war that I tried to avoid considering too deeply.

  ‘I wish I had met you ten years ago,’ Lydia said suddenly that afternoon. She didn’t look at me as she said it, instead frowning out over the apple orchard spread beneath us, eyes narrowed in the brightness of the sun. It was the first hint she had given me that if the choice had been a fair one, Martin and me in front of her as equal eager suitors, the tide might have turned in my favour. Somehow, as soon as she said it, the mood changed, as if a black cloud had come down over us. There was something intensely unfair about what she was implying, something I couldn’t even articulate, but it stung the back of my throat and made me want to cry.

  ‘What good is it saying that now?’ I said. She turned to me, pushing her shining blonde hair back from her face, sweeping it behind her ears so that I could see her expression more clearly. She looked troubled, as if she was considering my question and not finding the answer she wanted.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘It is some good, surely.’

  I thought about it for a while. ‘If you mean that it’s some good to know that in some parallel universe we might be together, without either of us being married to other people, then …’ I had been gearing up to say that it was no help at all, but as I spoke the words I was flooded with an unexpected well-being. ‘Yes, it is some good,’ I said abruptly, surprised at myself. ‘At least I know we could have been happy together.’

  ‘Aren’t we happy together now?’ she asked.

  ‘While we are together, yes,’ I said, ‘but more often than not we aren’t.’

  She moved her head half impatiently, half tenderly. ‘I don’t want to think about that now,’ she said. She swung her legs down from the window ledge and slipped off, bare feet sinking into the fluffy cream carpet. She unhooked her bra from the back, slipped out of her
pants and pressed herself appealingly up against me, sparking all my senses into action. I took her to bed as I had done so many times before and covered her with kisses, and it took me a few minutes to work out that there was something different. I had never consciously registered Lydia’s wedding ring during sex before, but I registered its absence, the unbroken smoothness of her fingers running over my skin. I took her left hand and drew it up to the light. The finger was bare, a slight pale ring mark signalling itself against her lightly tanned skin.

  ‘You’ve taken it off,’ I whispered into her ear. ‘Your wedding ring.’

  Her body twisted in my arms so that she was looking straight up at me, her green eyes hypnotic and intense. ‘I’m not married, Nicholas,’ she said. It didn’t feel like a game. Inside her, I felt myself constrict and tense. ‘I belong to you,’ she said clearly, spacing out each word as if she was anxious for me not to miss it. In the back of my mind I knew that this was nothing but another fantasy, but it felt so real that it took no effort at all to believe it, because she did belong to me, she was mine, and I was hers. We stayed too long at the hotel that afternoon, and leaving her at the end of the day was even worse than usual. Watching the taxi carrying her away in the opposite direction when we had got the bus back to town, I felt as if the subtle threads connecting us were being painfully stretched, not broken but tightened until it was almost unbearable.

  The rest of that summer passed much in the same way as the summer of six years before, and as the days turned colder I felt myself waiting for some turn in Lydia’s affections, some decision as before that would cut her off from me for good. The change came, but not in the way that I expected. As autumn came she seemed to become clingier, more dependent on me than she had ever been before. Although I didn’t like to admit it, I had always been the lover in our relationship, she the loved. I didn’t doubt that she loved me, but my feelings had always seemed to overshadow hers; I felt them to be stronger, more passionate, more certain. In the autumn, so subtly that I couldn’t put my finger on how it had happened, that changed. Now she was the one calling our house frequently and barely managing to disguise the impatience and tension in her voice on the rare occasions when Naomi answered, so that my wife once asked me worriedly whether I thought that Lydia and Martin might be having problems. Now Lydia was the one watching sorrowfully after me as I left after our covert assignations, eyes brimming with tears at the thought of us being apart for another few days or more.

  Sometimes she would fly into a rage with me, asking whether Naomi and I still slept together. Experimentally, I tried different answers at different times, but nothing seemed to please her. If I said that we didn’t, she accused me of lying; if I said that we did, she winced as if I had hit her, and asked whether she was not enough for me. Her moods exasperated me, but I always tried my best to placate her, holding her in my arms until her sobbing stopped, telling her that I loved her and only her. Somewhere along the line these protestations started feeling marginally less true; nothing to really give me pause for thought or consider ending the affair, but all the same it surprised me, used as I was to hankering after her so completely that it physically hurt. As the months passed I realised that she wasn’t as perfect as I had once thought, far from it, and in a bizarre way this made me feel closer to her, but more complacent. I secretly enjoyed the new feeling of power that this knowledge gave me, wrong though it felt to think that way.

  Once or twice Lydia brought up what she had said in the boat on the river – that the ultimate purpose of this affair was to determine whether we could be together in the long term, and that she felt that I had forgotten that. On these occasions I found that if I challenged her and asked her whether she herself had decided whether she should leave Martin, she rapidly changed her tune, as if she was almost afraid of the question. She cited Louise as her major reason for not wanting to make too hasty a decision, demanding to know whether I thought that she could disrupt her child’s fate at a moment’s notice without being absolutely sure that the end justified the means. Of course, I could throw that argument right back at her, young and uncomprehending though Adam was, and so we were locked back into our vicious circle. At these times, harrowing and exhausting as they were, I wondered whether it was really worth all the effort. And then, the next time we met, she would be so enchanting, intuitively understanding exactly what I wanted, that I felt we were bound together so irrevocably that I couldn’t see a way to ever disentangle myself from her.

  In quiet moments on my own, I wondered how this would all end. Various scenarios flashed through my mind. Lydia and myself finally making the painful break from our families and setting off to a new life together with the children in some rural idyll. One or other of us deciding that the affair should end, messily breaking the ties and pushing it underground. A mutual decision between us to forget our plans and make a success of things with Martin and Naomi, remaining friends, or perhaps cutting contact altogether. Somehow none of these solutions felt right, or even plausible, and I spent many hours turning over the possibilities in my head and worrying about how they could ever come to pass. Of course, as it turned out, I need not have wasted my time. By the time six months had passed it was all over, and Lydia was dead.

  Louise

  2007

  There is more than one way to kill someone. Some murderers are brash and unapologetic about what they do: holding a gun and pulling a trigger, fastening hands tightly around a throat. These murderers can’t escape their crimes, because they are right there in front of them; it takes a certain kind of man, or woman, to stand and watch someone die. Others are less brave. Slipping poison into a waiting cup of coffee, for instance, is no less a murder than the drama of blowing brains out across a whitewashed wall, but perhaps it lacks the same conviction. Lydia has no experience of killing anyone, but she imagines that the less hands-on the crime is, the easier it is to smother your conscience and convince yourself that really, in some alternative reality, you have done nothing wrong after all.

  The man who killed her mother is more divorced from his crime than most. He didn’t stand in front of his victim with a gun, or beat her to death with his bare hands, or even hire someone else to do his dirty work for him. If he had ever stood up in a court of law and been accused of her death, he would never have been convicted. It doesn’t mean he’s not responsible. He might still be here, rather than locked up in prison, but Lydia knows that he is responsible. If you hurt someone so much that their life no longer seems worth living, then their blood is on your hands. If she thinks about it that way, it feels like a simple, unquestionable truth, striking her straight in the heart.

  In the morning Naomi puts croissants in the oven and then piles them high on the breakfast table and surrounds them with little china pots containing jewel-like pools of jam: ruby, topaz, amber. A dish of golden butter sits in the centre of the pots, a sprig of holly at its side. It strikes Lydia as a lot of effort to go to for an ordinary family breakfast. At first she suspects that the extra attention to detail is for her, but when she sees the nonchalance with which Nicholas and Adam sit down and devour their breakfast, she readjusts her ideas. This is obviously how Naomi likes to do things. All the same, she makes a couple of desultory comments to the effect that she hopes no special effort has been made on her behalf, and Naomi smiles and repudiates the charge gaily. The argument with Nicholas seems to have been settled overnight. He is not overly talkative, but seems content, spooning cherry jam on to his croissant and eating absent-mindedly, one eye on the newspaper spread out across the table.

  ‘So who’s for some Christmas shopping this morning, then?’ Naomi asks, eyes darting hopefully around the table. Nicholas gives no outward sign of having heard, while Adam slouches in his seat, an exaggerated pantomime of a gargoyle in distress, and exhales heavily.

  ‘I’ll do it next week,’ he says. ‘You get better bargains then anyway.’ With a shock Lydia realises that Christmas is less than a fortnight away. Now that she think
s about it, she remembers seeing rows of rather sad-looking decorations slung down the High Street, bristling with artificial sprigs of pine, but they haven’t really registered with her. She thinks of her father, and feels a pang of guilt. Perhaps she will go home for Christmas after all.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about you, Lydia, but I’m not a fan of leaving it to the last minute,’ Naomi says heartily. Lydia realises she is being recruited for the shopping trip, and finds that she doesn’t mind – in a way it will be a relief to get away from Adam and Nicholas for a while.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she says, shooting a glance at Adam to see whether he minds. He doesn’t seem to; in fact he seems amused, half choking on the remnants of his croissant.

  ‘Good luck,’ he snorts.

  Naomi looks at him reproachfully. ‘Someone might not be getting any birthday or Christmas presents this year,’ she says ominously.