The Art of Losing Read online

  Nicholas leaves the house early the next morning. Lying in bed, Lydia hears the swift, decisive slam of the front door downstairs, then footsteps crunching across the driveway, too brisk and heavy to be Naomi’s. She glances at the bedside clock, which reads 7.15. Adam rarely wakes before nine, and she doesn’t want to disturb him. He’s curled up next to her, his hand brought up to his mouth in a fist, curly eyelashes fluttering gently in sleep. He looks wholly innocent, too young to be the man who pinned her down and made love to her last night with such energy and passion. Lydia rolls on to her side, stretching her limbs languorously across his. After her sleep, she feels newly purged and serene, paradoxically virginal.

  ‘Are you going to wake up?’ she asks quietly, smiling to herself as Adam stirs and shakes his head faintly, as if warding off an insect. ‘Or should I leave you to it?’ There is no response, only a deep sigh that seems to shake his whole body. Lydia quietly pulls away and climbs out of bed, dressing quickly in the half-light of dawn breaking through the curtains. She blows a kiss at the sleeping Adam as she leaves the bedroom, feeling sophisticated and adult. She has never been this close to a man before.

  Once on the landing she notices that the door to the master bedroom is ajar. Softly, she crosses the hallway and listens outside. She can hear the slow, even sound of breathing; so Naomi too is asleep. She turns away and wanders back down the corridor. The house is silent, watchful, waiting for her to make a move. Even as her mind rebels from the thought, she knows what she is going to do. Softly, she pads down the corridor, counting the doors as she goes. The third door from the end is shut, as it always is. Although she knows that Nicholas is not there, her breath catches in her throat as she turns the handle, imagining his head raised coolly from his desk as she sidles in, dark eyes raking her accusingly. But as she knows it will be, the study is empty. Its little window is propped open, blowing a sharp cold wind through the room. Shivering, she goes and closes it, then looks around her.

  The heavy dark oak desk stands like an altar in the centre, covered with folders and loose sheets of paper. She had expected everything to be ordered neatly, with killer precision. It comes as a shock to see the chaos of paper spilling over the desk, leaving no inch of space uncovered. She does not approach the desk at first, prowling around the room and examining the paintings on the walls. One abstract print, black and blue concentric circles sucking her eyes into an abyss. A dark landscape punctuated with bare spiked trees. A stark, brash portrait of a woman’s face, her lips raw and parted. The pictures depress her and she turns away. On the mantelpiece stands a photograph: Nicholas with Naomi and a young Adam, probably no more than ten years old. They are all smiling, a catalogue family, the colours of the photograph unnaturally bright and perfect, as if they have been airbrushed. She looks at the photograph for a long time. Nicholas does not belong in this picture, doesn’t deserve to be there. The bile rises in her throat and for an instant she screws her eyes tight shut.

  She moves back to the desk and sits down. Nicholas’s chair is dark wood, extravagantly carved, its arms curling into her body like those on a torturer’s seat. The wood feels smooth and cold, with no sense of his presence remaining. She starts to sift through the papers scattered across the desk, careful not to disturb their alignment. Half hidden under a timetable of lectures she finds a small notebook. Across the open page Nicholas has scrawled a heading – ‘Christmas Memorial Lecture’. She dimly remembers someone mentioning this the previous night: a prestigious alumni event, at which Nicholas is the guest speaker of honour. Glancing back at the timetable, she sees that the lecture is due to take place the following evening; this, then, is the reason for Nicholas’s recent distraction and his long periods in the study and out of the house. She tries to make sense of the scrawled notes in the notebook, but can decipher little: only the odd name – Derrida, Barthes, Foucault – with what must be some shorthand memory-jogging notes beside them. Each name is punctuated by a black full stop, as if Nicholas’s pen has jabbed emphatically through the paper.

  Lydia feels impatient; she isn’t interested in Nicholas’s work, or only from a very detached standpoint, as the student that she might have been. Restlessly, she ripples her hand across the piles of paper. She doesn’t know why she has come here or what she hopes to find. Glancing down, she sees three deep drawers built into the side of the desk, and on impulse drops to her knees beside them. The first two drawers are full of stationery, blank printing paper, bundles of biros bound tightly with elastic bands. The bottom drawer is locked. She tugs ineffectually at the handle, willing it to open. It is only when she pulls away from it impatiently that she sees the glint of the key underneath the desk, glimmering at the corner of her vision. She swoops on it and fits it into the lock. It turns with difficulty, as if the lock has not been used for some time, and when she lets go of the key her fingers are coated with fine dust.

  She sorts through the drawer’s contents. More of the same: labels, pens, stacks of envelopes and notepaper. She almost shuts it up again, but something makes her look further, overturning everything she finds. When her fingers close around the packet of photographs she feels a premonitory shiver run right through the length of her body. Slowly, she opens the flap, on her knees beside the drawer. She pulls out the photographs inside, no more than five or six, protected by a thin layer of tissue paper. Her mother’s face stares up at her across the years. She looks no more than thirty. In the first photograph she is lying on her back, limbs sprawled on the bed of an unfamiliar room. She wears a white sundress, clinging to the lines of her body. She looks as if she is about to speak, her beautiful lips half parted in a teasing smile. It seems that it would take only a tiny shift in time for her to stir and leap up from the printed surface, out of the past and into the present.

  Lydia looks through the photographs one by one. In two of them, her mother looks sad, reflective, almost as if she does not know that her picture is being taken. In another, she seems happy, caught in the act of pouring a glass of wine, smiling into the camera, green eyes fixed hypnotically on the man behind the lens. The last photograph is the worst. Nicholas is holding the camera out at arm’s length, his other arm wrapped around her bare shoulders. The picture is slightly blurred, as if his arm has shaken with laughter as he presses the button to take the photograph. His eyes burn straight out from the print, but her mother is not looking at the camera. She’s looking at him, and there is love written all over her face, as plainly as if she could talk. The print is creased at the corners, its colours slightly worn away, as if it has been handled over and over, many times.

  Lydia stuffs the photographs back into their packet. Her hands shake as she shoves it back underneath the piles of envelopes and locks the drawer. She gets to her feet. She doesn’t want to be here any more. The whole room is tainted, stained with memories that he has no right to. When she catches sight of the family photograph on the mantelpiece again, she has a sudden wild desire to take it and rip it across the centre, leave the pieces scattered on the floor and let him know that she understands, that she knows that the dirty little secrets he keeps locked in his desk have made it into nothing but a sham. She has to fight to calm the impulse, pressing her fist tightly against her chest and feeling it heave and fall. This is too much to let go. Naomi and Adam do not need a man like this. They would be better off alone. In that moment, breathing deeply and swaying slightly against the strength of her anger, she wishes that she could make him disappear. As she wheels around and leaves the study behind, she feels a righteous rage rising inside her, and it feels so pure that she knows it cannot, must not be wrong or ignored.

  Naomi is peeling apples, sitting at the kitchen table, her red hair tied up in a tight bun against the nape of her neck. She runs the knife carefully underneath the apple’s skin, letting the peel curl away in a taut, unbroken spiral. Her concentration is so intense that it is several minutes before she notices Lydia standing in the doorway.

  ‘Hello there,’ she says when she d
oes, smiling, but not raising her eyes from the half-peeled apple in her hands. ‘Come in – I’ll be with you in a minute. I just want to get this done.’

  Lydia comes and sits opposite her. She watches Naomi delicately circle the knife closer and closer to the apple’s stem until the peel drops away in a single piece, perfectly shorn from the glistening fruit. Naomi gives a pleased murmur of satisfaction.

  ‘What are you cooking?’ asks Lydia.

  ‘Oh, just an apple crumble,’ Naomi replies. ‘Silly really, I’ll be cutting them up into pieces anyway. I just like peeling them like that.’

  ‘You do a lot of cooking,’ Lydia observes. From what her father has told her, she knows that her own mother did the same, but still she finds it surprising how much time Naomi spends in the kitchen, tending to her adult brood like a 1950s housewife.

  Naomi shrugs and laughs. ‘I need the practice,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ The compliment sounds stiffer than she intended it, and, embarrassed, Lydia grabs another knife from the table. ‘I’ll do one, if you like.’

  ‘Sure.’ Naomi hands over an apple. As Lydia peels, she feels the other woman’s eyes on her, kind and curious. ‘So,’ she says after a while, her voice pregnant with teasing significance, ‘it seems that things are going well between you and Adam.’

  Lydia feels her cheeks flame up. For a crazy moment she thinks that Naomi has somehow divined the difference in her, that her non-virginity is shining out from her face like a beacon. She looks quickly across at her, but of course the comment is innocent. ‘I suppose so, yes,’ she says cautiously. This isn’t the train of conversation that she wants to follow; she needs to take back the initiative. ‘We’re just taking things as they come,’ she says more confidently.

  ‘Well, that’s very sensible,’ Naomi agrees. ‘I only wish I’d been as measured at your age. Or at any age, really.’ She laughs again.

  ‘You rushed into things too quickly?’

  ‘Well …’ Naomi rocks her head from side to side, weighing up her words. ‘Not exactly, no, not in practical terms, but I suppose in emotional ones. Even with Nicholas, I fell madly in love after a few days – not that I told him that, obviously! And I was in my thirties then, so I think I would have learnt some caution by that point if I was ever going to.’ Her words strike Lydia as intimate, but Naomi spills them out as light-heartedly as if she is chatting about the weather. For Lydia, the confession serves only to set the seal on her convictions. Love at first sight is something close to madness, surely not something on which to base a lifetime relationship. It is almost as if Nicholas has put a spell on her. This whole relationship is a mistake, she thinks savagely. If it had not been, Nicholas never would have strayed elsewhere, in to her own family. Agitated, her hand slips and the knife she is holding skids against the tip of her finger. Blood seeps out on to the apple’s pale green flesh, muddying into a dirty brown, and she winces.

  ‘Oh no!’ Naomi exclaims. She leaps up and tears off a sheet of kitchen roll, running it briefly under the tap. ‘Here,’ she says, crossing over to Lydia and dabbing the wet tissue at her bleeding finger; it stings and she bites her lip, not trusting herself to speak. Naomi binds the tissue tightly around her finger, and suddenly a memory flashes painfully into Lydia’s mind: her mother, bathing her grazed knee after a fall outside on the garden path, cleaning grit and dirt carefully away from the skin.

  Naomi has pulled up a chair next to her, her face full of concern. ‘Lydia,’ she says slowly, her voice faltering slightly over the name, ‘you know, if there’s something bothering you, you can talk to me about it. Forgive me if I’m talking out of turn, but I get the sense that you’re not quite happy, and if there’s anything I can do …’

  She trails off, and in the pause that follows it becomes suddenly clear to Lydia what she must do, how she can make Naomi see what has to be seen. She takes a deep breath, sorting out her thoughts in her head. She doesn’t want to get this wrong. ‘There is something,’ she says quietly. Naomi nods, prompting her encouragingly with her eyes. ‘There’s something I haven’t been completely honest with you about. It’s my parents. When I said they were on holiday … they have gone away together, but it’s less of a holiday than a kind of last-ditch attempt to … well, to save their marriage, I suppose.’

  From the way that Naomi’s shoulders instantly relax, and the fleeting look of relief that passes over her face before she settles her features into an appropriate display of concern, Lydia can see that she had been bracing herself for a different sort of revelation. With a flash of insight, she thinks, She thought I was pregnant. The thought feels so incongruous that she almost wants to smile.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ Naomi says, clasping her hands in front of her. ‘I don’t want to pry, but—’

  ‘My father has been having an affair,’ Lydia cuts in. She sees Naomi’s face tighten, and feels bad, but there is no going back now. ‘It’s been going on for some time. I think he regrets it, but that’s not much use now, is it.’ She doesn’t have to fake the bitterness in her voice.

  Naomi doesn’t reply at first, frowning intently down at her clasped hands. When she does speak, she sounds almost dispassionate. ‘Not really,’ she says, ‘but it is something. If he is sincere, they may be able to work through it.’

  Lydia makes a sceptical face. ‘I can’t see it,’ she says.

  ‘No, believe me,’ Naomi says, her voice gathering in zeal, ‘it is possible. It might not be easy, but they might even find that it—’

  ‘—makes them stronger?’ Lydia cuts in, again brutally. ‘I doubt it.’ She takes a moment to compose herself, thinking about exactly what she wants to say. ‘I don’t think she should forgive him,’ she says, more slowly. ‘If she does, then yes, they may be able to rebuild things, and perhaps it will seem as if they are just as good, or even better than before, but in reality they won’t be, will they? He has done something that can’t ever be changed or taken back, and he isn’t a teenager – unless you walk around with your eyes closed, you know that fucking someone else is going to hurt your wife so much that there’s the chance she might never recover.’ The obscenity slips from her lips cleanly and easily, although she cannot remember ever having said it before. It hangs on the table between them. ‘Who takes that sort of risk, and expects to get away with it?’ Lydia continues. ‘I think that he wanted to get caught, even if he can’t admit it. I know that people get over it. I know that they move on. But I think it’s a cowardly way out of walking away – out of doing what seems on the surface to be harder. The funny thing is, I’m not so sure that it’s harder at all.’

  She can see that Naomi has withdrawn from her, off into some private place which she cannot reach. Her blue eyes look suspiciously bright and liquid, her full lips pressed tightly together as if there is a danger of them betraying her, spilling out her secrets. Lydia knows that her words are nothing that Naomi must not have said to herself dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. Instinctively, though, she knows that there is something different about hearing somebody else give voice to your thoughts. It shapes them, makes them ugly and concrete. She doesn’t want to hurt Naomi, she tells herself, but it is better to be hurt than to stay for the rest of your life with a man who doesn’t really love you. That is as clear as clear. Emboldened by the thought, she glances at Naomi again. She can picture the memories that are running through her mind, so clearly that she wants to take her hands and tell her that she understands the pain she is going through – understands it because it is part of her too.

  ‘You know, nor am I,’ Naomi says, and it is so long since she last spoke that Lydia has to search back through her memory to understand what she is agreeing with.

  Suddenly there is a noise from the doorway. Adam is standing there, barefoot, his hair ruffled, lazy, dark eyes narrowed happily and sleepily. ‘Looks like you guys beat me,’ he says. ‘What you making?’

  The switch of mood is so instant that it throws Lydia off base f
or a second. As she watches Naomi bustle cheerfully back and forth, galvanised by Adam’s presence into chopping up the apples and vigorously assembling the crumble, Lydia realises that she is so used to covering over her own feelings that it comes almost without effort. There is no room in her life for sadness. But Lydia knows now that it is there – beneath the surface, but only minutes deep, and painfully easily scratched into life.

  Lydia stays up late that evening, watching old black-and-white films with Adam and Naomi. As the night draws on, she finds it harder to concentrate on the plot of the last film, and simply lets the monochrome images flicker across her vision, lulling her into relaxation. Naomi has lit a fire in the grate, and its steady crackle and spark are strangely soothing. Upstairs, Nicholas has barricaded himself in his study, and in his absence Lydia feels as if he is barely in the house at all. The picture feels complete: herself, legs stretched out across Adam’s lap, Naomi curled up in the armchair opposite. Now that she thinks she is unobserved, Naomi looks distracted and unhappy, and Lydia averts her eyes. She doesn’t want to think that she has caused this sadness, but she doesn’t regret it. For the moment, it is easier not to think about it at all.

  As a sudden swell of music rises and the credits roll jerkily across the screen, Adam gets to his feet, stretching and yawning in a rather too exaggerated pantomime of fatigue. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he announces, and shoots Lydia a look that leaves her in no doubt that she should follow soon after. A quick anticipatory shiver runs through her, excitement and desire bubbling unexpectedly up from within. She watches him leave the room; lightly muscled shoulders under his blue shirt, lean, strong legs in tight dark jeans. It is less than five minutes before she can wait no longer, and rises from the sofa, rubbing her eyes as a nod to tiredness.