The Art of Losing Page 18

  ‘Goodnight,’ she says to Naomi. She has to say it twice before Naomi looks up.

  ‘’Night,’ she replies, making the effort to smile. It drops from her face as soon as it has come, her mouth springing back into sad, worried lines as if pulled by elastic. ‘Sleep well.’

  Lydia hurries up the stairs, but as she reaches the landing, the brief flare of anticipation she has felt flickers and fades. She remembers the previous night with Adam: his body hotly against hers, his hands searching and urgent, and something tells her that it might be better in the imagining than in the re-enacting. Suddenly she is torn, wanting and yet not wanting. Briefly paralysed, she lingers on the landing. The door to Nicholas’s study is slightly ajar, and she sees her shadow fall across the bright gap of light. She knows that it will shift and darken the quality of the light within, but she does not move.

  ‘Naomi?’ His voice rings sharply out from behind the door. She hesitates for a second. It would be easiest to move quietly away, but all at once she wants perversely to do the opposite. She goes quickly to the door, pushing it open another inch.

  ‘It’s not Naomi,’ she says. ‘It’s only me.’

  Nicholas is sitting at his desk, surrounded by piles of paper, lit by the green light of the desk-lamp. He blinks at her as she stands in the doorway. He looks exhausted, vague and distracted, almost as if he does not recognise her. ‘Lydia,’ he says finally. ‘Was there something you wanted?’

  And yes, she realises, there is something she wants. Something she has been wanting ever since she first saw him. Wordlessly, she steps forward into the room.

  ‘If you’re coming in,’ he says, ‘shut the door.’ There is nothing of the request about his voice; it is an order, softly spoken but unmistakable, and she complies. As she approaches him, she notices that he has not shaved that day. He is normally entirely clean shaven, mercilessly so, the curves of his face smooth like granite. Now she sees the fine black hairs beginning to prickle his jawline, fighting their way to break the surface of his skin. They make him look Mediterranean, earthy. For a second, because she cannot help imagining it, she thinks of the sharpness of his stubble rubbing against soft female skin. She half shakes her head.

  He is looking at her too, his gaze coolly interested – roaming her body curiously as if he has never seen it before. His eyes keep slipping away, and she sees that there is a green glass bottle at his feet, half hidden underneath the desk. The tumbler on his desk is full of what she had taken to be water, but now she wonders.

  ‘Sit down,’ he says. There is a slight slur to his voice, but it doesn’t reek of drunkenness; rather that he is simply very tired. When she does so, he doesn’t say anything else for a while. He looks meditatively around the room, at his computer screen, at the photographs on the mantelpiece, at Lydia herself, all with the same dispassionate, distracted stare. ‘It’s been a long night,’ he says eventually.

  ‘Have you been working on your lecture?’ she asks, because she wants to delay the other question that is nagging to be asked. She knows that the lecture is due to take place the following day, but beyond the few words that she has seen scrawled on his notepad, she knows little else. She doesn’t want to provoke a conversation on it, and is relieved when he merely nods, and rubs a hand over his face as if to signal the end of the topic.

  ‘Lydia,’ he says again, and sighs. She feels an uncomfortable shiver run lightly down the back of her neck; sensing, perhaps, something of what he is thinking.

  ‘The other woman,’ she says. The words are dragged out of her, irretrievably, forcing her to continue, and as she lets them fall she feels a strange sense of release at the knowledge that at last she is facing him head-on. ‘The other woman you knew, with my name. Did you care for her very much?’

  He looks at her for a long moment, measuring her question. For a second, she thinks he will order her out of the room, revert to the safety of his position as host and head of the house. But the lure of the question, the memories it provokes, is too strong. He takes a sip from his tumbler, and slowly nods. ‘I did,’ he says. ‘In fact, I sometimes wonder if she was the only woman I’ve ever really loved.’

  Lydia draws a sharp breath, for strangely, whatever she has expected to hear, it is not this. For Nicholas to be sitting across from her, saying these unthinkable words, is so surreal that her mind will not latch on to it. A flare of anger shoots through her – for herself, for Naomi – and she opts for the safer victim. ‘I doubt Naomi would be pleased to hear you say that,’ she says.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Nicholas fires back. ‘It’s no slight to my wife. Love is different when you’re young. I expect you know that for yourself by now. I believe that it’s only possible to fall in love once, don’t you? To think otherwise makes no logical sense. Why would anyone put themselves in such a position twice?’ He is smiling wolfishly, retreating into intellectual argument.

  ‘What position?’ Lydia asks, forcing the words out behind the dryness in her throat.

  ‘A position of danger,’ Nicholas says, a little impatiently. ‘Of vulnerability.’ He sighs, setting down his glass with a crash. ‘Perhaps you are at the other extreme – too young to understand.’

  Lydia makes some noise of agreement. In that moment she hates him so much that she cannot stand to look at him, and instead she finds herself focusing intently on the greenly glowing lamp at his side, until her eyes blur and she sees spots, like the aftermath of a camera flash.

  When Nicholas speaks again his voice is calmer, melancholy. ‘Lydia died some time ago,’ he says. ‘Part of me was glad. The situation – it was complex, and untenable. But even so, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of her, and when I don’t regret what happened. I really believe I will never get over it.’ His voice is a peculiar mix of detachment and devastation.

  With a great effort, Lydia drags her eyes away from the lamp and looks at him. He is watching her intently, obviously expecting her to speak. She sees his face, stern and sad, through the light that still swims behind her eyes. She regrets having come, having tried to unlock this door. There is nothing behind it that can excuse him or that can lessen the pain. She wants to end the conversation, and she chooses a platitude that strikes her as safe, anodyne, final. ‘I suppose,’ she says, in a voice that doesn’t sound like her own at all, ‘that losing a lover is always hard.’

  He makes a curious sound – something between a laugh and a sob of pain. ‘That wasn’t all I lost,’ he says. And then, before she has the chance to speak, or to close her ears against what she somehow knows she will not want to hear, he tells her something else.

  Nicholas

  1989

  We had a quiet family Christmas that year. Previously, our proximity to Naomi’s parents had meant that we spent most of the festive season sitting in their living room, clutching warm glasses of sherry and stale mince pies. I rarely enjoyed these occasions, dampened down as the atmosphere was by the heavy fug of overindulgence, but had always seen them as no less inevitable than the bright star rising in the east. When Naomi announced that she had delayed the familial celebrations until January, I was astonished and confused. It transpired that she felt that we should celebrate Adam’s first Christmas – technically his second, I pointed out, although even I could appreciate that as a week-old baby Adam had been totally oblivious to the event – together, on our own, as a family. I was glad of her decision. For one thing, it meant that Christmas could become all about Adam, and I could pour all my effort into somehow making it special for him without being distracted by the guilt and regret that sometimes made itself manifest to me on special occasions. Besides, it gave me an excuse not to see Lydia for a few days. I needed to get away from her, needed to think and see for myself what a life without her might be like. I hoped that the break might push me in one direction or the other – show me either that I could live without her or that I couldn’t, and make the decision for me as to what the hell I was going to do.

  In the end
, Adam didn’t much enjoy his first real Christmas, because he was ill. Nothing serious, as it turned out – just one of those eye-watering coughs that seem so alarming in babies at the time. It was enough to leave him red eyed and grizzling all the way through the day, turning his face unhappily away from the painstakingly wrapped presents and beating his fists feebly on my chest in impotent exasperation. We had called the doctor out two days before, and knew that with medicine the cough would soon pass, but all the same it was distressing to see our son in such obvious misery. I caught his tiny balled-up fists and held them in my hands; they fitted neatly and snugly in to my palm. Naomi and I bathed him, got the medicine down his throat with little short of force, and finally put him to bed at almost nine o’clock. After that neither of us felt much like playing charades. We sat on the sofa together and watched the Christmas edition of a soap we never normally followed: beatings and passion and hideous revelations over the half-carved turkey. Naomi fell asleep on my shoulder before the end, gently snoring into my neck. I sat with my arm around her, looking around at the tinsel strung across the lounge and the colourful fairy lights winking out at me from the tree in pride of place in front of the fireplace. I wasn’t sure what I felt.

  Adam remained tired and fractious for another three or four days, and we threw ourselves into caring for him and making the festive season as pleasant as possible despite his illness. When, after half an hour of making a sturdy toy pony dance lumberingly across his bedspread until my hand hurt, I finally received a wan smile, I felt inordinately proud and self-congratulatory. I felt I was succeeding with Adam, forming a bond with him that would stand us in good stead in later life. At times like this, when I got to spend so much more time with him than normal, I felt happy and reassured. Naomi and I had created him together, after all, and surely that fact alone meant that we had something worth saving. Over the course of that Christmas I almost forgot that Lydia existed, or if not forgot, at least tactically pushed her to the back of my mind. It wasn’t always easy. On Boxing Day a song came on the radio that always reminded me of her: it had been playing once when we shared an evening in a hotel and we had lain side by side and listened to it in companionable silence, fresh from making love. The memory came to me so vividly that I had to catch my breath and turn the radio off before Naomi came downstairs.

  For a few minutes afterwards I tried to imagine what she was doing, how her own family Christmas with Martin and Louise was playing out. I wondered if she, too, had had the radio tuned to that particular station and stood listening to the song, her body humming with the same remembrance and longing. We had made a tactical agreement not to contact each other over Christmas – although we never said so out loud, the guilt was getting to us and I don’t think either of us wanted it thrown into stark relief against the backdrop of such a cosy family time. So I resisted the urge to pick up the phone, and within half an hour I was playing Scrabble with Naomi, eating clementines and sparring lightly with her over unlikely words. I could cope with this, I thought, as we went to bed that night, my eyes wide open in the dark as I lay with my arms around her, listening to her breathing. If I kept this up, then thinking of Lydia might eventually lose its pain, just as it had before. Unlike the last time, this time I knew that I could do it – survive losing her, to all intents and purposes get over her. Lying there in bed with my wife, I almost made the decision there and then, but it felt too final to contemplate. I simply turned it over in my head, tentatively accustomed myself to it, as if I were trying on an unfamiliar suit and looking at myself in the mirror from all angles, attempting to decide whether it fitted me.

  On 30 December, Naomi announced that she had invited Martin and Lydia over to our house for New Year’s Eve. I was angry, and told her so. I had assumed that, in keeping with our Christmas, we would spend the evening alone with Adam, and couldn’t understand why she hadn’t asked me first before inviting the Knights. Naomi told me that she was sorry and that she had been thoughtless, but I could see that she didn’t really understand why I was so annoyed at the prospect of two of our closest friends coming over for canapés and champagne. Of course, I couldn’t explain, and felt all the more guilty for it.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ I ended up apologising, my catch-all excuse for unpredictable or erratic behaviour. ‘It’s been a tough week, what with Adam being ill. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

  Shortly before Martin and Lydia were due to arrive, I went upstairs to the bedroom and took a slim red box from where I had hidden it at the back of the chest of drawers. Before Christmas, buying Lydia a present had seemed necessary and inevitable, and I had picked out the filigree silver necklace with instinctive knowledge that she would love it, in stark contrast to the hour I spent vacillating between choices for Naomi. Now I wasn’t so sure that I should give it to her, and yet I didn’t want to face the thought of throwing it away or keeping it, and what that would imply. After a few minutes I slipped the box back in its place at the rear of the drawer without opening it. It was a decision that didn’t yet have to be made. Standing there absorbed in thought, I lost track of time, but it was probably only a few minutes before the sound of the doorbell jolted me into action.

  Looking down from the landing, I could see Martin in one of his trademark buttoned-up suits, his bald head gleaming up at me like a beacon as he launched forward and kissed Naomi on the cheek. The two of them were chattering, comparing notes on their Christmases. Lydia was nowhere to be seen. For a moment I thought he had come without her, and my heart lifted strangely at the thought. I hurried downstairs, ready to welcome him, but just as I reached the bottom of the staircase, Lydia appeared in the doorway. After a week without her, her beauty ambushed me all over again. She wore a short, dark blue cocktail dress that clung to her body like silk, subtly highlighting her curves. Her blonde hair hung straight and sleek over her shoulders, framing her delicate face. I looked away from her, despair seizing up inside me so that I had to fight for breath. I didn’t want to feel this way, but seeing her again I could only think that I loved her and that I wanted everyone else to disappear. Unfairly, I felt furious with Naomi. If she had not arranged this meeting, I could have prolonged the separation for another week, maybe two, maybe indefinitely. Seeing Lydia again now served only to reignite my need for her, like that of an addict blindly craving his next fix.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she was saying, ‘I’m afraid we couldn’t get a babysitter.’ It was only then that I saw Louise, hanging back in the doorway, pigtails flapping over her face as she stared at the ground in embarrassment. Dressed up in a red velvet pinafore and matching boots, she was blushing fit to match her outfit. ‘She’ll probably go to bed in about an hour or so, if she can bed down in your spare room,’ Lydia continued.

  ‘Of course, of course, that’s fine,’ Naomi exclaimed gaily. I couldn’t help noticing how pleased she seemed to have company, and for a second I wondered, with a stab of unwarranted injustice, whether the past week’s enforced togetherness had started to give her cabin fever.

  ‘Hello, Louise,’ I said. The child gave me a cautious smile. Over the past few months I had seen little of her, but I always wondered whether she remembered or connected me with the man in her kitchen on the day of her birthday party. The uncertainty made me more attentive to her than I would have been under other circumstances. ‘Get any good presents?’

  Louise nodded thoughtfully. ‘A Wendy house,’ she said quietly, shooting me a quick glance, as if to appraise what I thought of this. I nodded enthusiastically, forming my features into an expression of delight and amazement. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Lydia watching me, tentatively smiling. We had not acknowledged each other yet, but Naomi and Martin seemed not to notice anything amiss, still chatting animatedly. As they moved into the dining room, where Naomi had set out trays of vol-au-vents, fans of cheese straws and champagne glasses, Lydia put a hand lightly on the small of my back. It was a hesitant, almost shy gesture, and I felt that she was testing the water. I c
ould have ignored her touch, but instead I swept my own hand gently along the back of her neck as we followed them through. At my touch she turned and gave me a radiant smile. Relief was written all over her face. I realised then that she, too, had used the week apart as a test, to see whether she could manage without me. From what I could see, she had missed me more than I had missed her, and the knowledge doused me with heady remorse.

  It seemed like minutes rather than hours before we were lined up in front of the television, champagne glasses held a loft, watching fireworks exploding over the Thames. As we cheered and clinked glasses, I felt strange and choked up. Somehow I knew that this would be the last New Year’s Eve that all four of us would be together this way; whatever happened over the next few weeks would tear the quartet apart, so thoroughly that it could never be put back together again. I kissed Naomi on the mouth, Lydia on the cheek, shook Martin by the hand, and all of a sudden it felt desperately wrong, mixed up. I turned away to hide my agitation, glancing at the baby monitor. Faint staccato dots were leaping on its surface: the festivities had woken Adam up.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Naomi, following my gaze. ‘Shall I go and check on him?’ She had drunk more than usual, and her words were happy and slurred.

  ‘No, I’ll go,’ I said. ‘You stay here and get everyone some coffees, or more champagne, if they fancy it.’ She agreed with alacrity, clearly not feeling up to the task of soothing a possibly fractious Adam. I climbed the dark staircase to his room, peeked inside. Adam’s wide eyes stared up at me for an instant, then drooped again. I stood watching him for a minute or two, but he had dropped back into sleep as easily as he had been roused from it, his small chest heaving and falling deeply under the coverlet. Gently, I stroked the hair, as dark as my own, back from his forehead, then quietly backed out of the room. Instinct made me remain on the landing, listening, waiting. Sure enough, I soon heard the light tread of footsteps up the stairs. Lydia came towards me through the shadows, pressing a finger to her lips. I took her by the hand and led her down the corridor to my bedroom, closed the door behind us.