The Art of Losing Page 19

  ‘We don’t have long,’ she said quietly. ‘I said I was going to check on Louise.’

  She made as if to draw me towards her, but I moved away and went to the chest of drawers, sliding open the drawer where I had hidden the necklace. My hands were shaking as I took the box from its hiding place and gave it to her. She gave me a brief, questioning look, then snapped it open. Her eyes glistened in the dark. She blinked once, twice, as if to keep tears away. Then she kissed me, deeply, more fervently than she had done in a long time, entwining her body with mine. I held her, midnight blue silk sliding through my hands, ran my fingers through her hair. I felt the tears wet on my cheek, and no longer knew whether they belonged to me or her.

  ‘Enough,’ I heard myself say. I broke away from her, swallowing down panic and indecision. I knew what I was about to say and it terrified me, but all at once I felt that I had no choice. ‘This has gone on too long. I want to resolve this, one way or the other, and I want to do it soon.’

  She nodded. ‘I know,’ she said, so softly that I could barely hear. ‘But which way do you want?’

  I felt a faint, obscure sting of resentment that she should make me say it. ‘I want you,’ I said. ‘You know that.’ Until a few moments earlier, I hadn’t even fully realised it myself, but nevertheless I knew that I was right in what I said: she had known before me, always had, that this was the way it would go. My words seemed to have put her in the driving seat; I felt the authority of a few seconds before drain away, but I continued to stare at her steadily, not betraying myself. ‘And if you feel the same, we have to tell them,’ I said.

  She gave a sudden shiver, a convulsion that shook her body and made her wrap her arms around herself. ‘It’s just not that simple,’ she said unhappily. ‘You know that. If I could do it, I would, but I can’t. It’s not losing me – he would get over that eventually, I’m sure of it – but taking Louise away from him. How can I do it, Nicholas? He’s not a bad man, you know that. He doesn’t deserve to lose his child.’

  She had said this sort of thing several times before, and I had a stack of well-used retorts. If he could swallow his pride and agree to joint custody, Martin would still see Louise. What about my own fears about losing Adam? Was keeping her family together really more important to her than I was? The realisation came to me then, sharp and long overdue, that all of these were missing the point. What she was really doing was asking for my help. She was telling me that she had an impossible decision to make, and that she needed me to make it for her, to push her off the precipice. If I took the decision into my own hands, and told Naomi about us, there would be no going back and she wouldn’t have to agonise any more. I took her face in my hands, the perfect oval cupping warmly, perfectly into my palms.

  ‘Lydia,’ I said. ‘Do you really love me? Are you sure that you want us to be together?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do,’ she whispered. We were so close together that I felt the breath that came with the words, lightly across my lips.

  ‘Then that’s all I need to know,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. I could feel her fingers clutching convulsively at the loops of my belt, pulling and twisting them like worry beads. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing, tonight,’ I said. ‘I’ll send you a message tomorrow.’ I saw confusion and worry pass across her face and her lips opening to speak; I stopped her with a kiss, silencing her, sealing up her words. When I released her she glanced towards the bedroom door. We had been longer than we had intended, and she moved reluctantly away.

  At the doorway to the landing she stopped, looked back at me. She didn’t have to tell me to wait a minute or two before following her back down; we were all too used to this kind of unhappy subterfuge. All the same she hesitated, looking at me with eyes full of longing and sadness. ‘I do love you, Nicholas,’ she said, as if I had contradicted her.

  ‘I know,’ I said. I didn’t say it back, not out loud; I didn’t think I needed to. If I had known then that I would never say it to her again, I might have acted differently. Instead I simply watched her turn away, watched her shadow recede down the hallway until she was gone from view. I stood counting seconds in my head, thinking that when I reached a hundred I would go back downstairs, but I found that I didn’t want to. I had no stomach to carry out this pretence any more. I lay down on the bed, loosening my shirt, still smelling the faintest hint of Lydia’s perfume clinging to its folds, and closed my eyes.

  I felt an intense weariness come over me. I wanted to sleep, but when Naomi came softly into the bedroom, later, much later, I was still conscious. I lay motionless, my face turned away, listening to her undress. She slipped in beside me, and I felt her hand on my shoulder, shaking it gently and insistently. She whispered my name. I didn’t respond, lying stiff and still. A minute’s pregnant pause later, she sighed and lay down, her head resting on my back. As we lay together, I truly believed that it would be the last time, and I didn’t know how I felt, didn’t know how to measure what I would be losing and gaining. I didn’t know whether I was doing the right thing, whether it was too late to change or whether I could even if I wanted to. I knew only that I would never be able to cut Lydia out of my life, and knowing that made all the other thoughts, inevitable though they were, seem entirely futile.

  New Year’s Day dawned dull and miserable, rain dirtying the bedroom windowpane. I lay and listened to it falling. I had slept for only a couple of hours, but I felt strangely energised. My doubts of the night before had hardened into certainty. Breaking my relationship with Naomi would be painful, hideous even, but it was the only way out of the vicious circle. I wanted to give her some warning, a small, stupid part of me thinking that it would help her, and so when she woke and rolled over, stretching her hand out to caress my shoulder, I inched away from her. Puzzled, she touched me again, and I felt myself flinch.

  ‘Are you OK, Nick?’ she asked. I was silent. ‘I was worried about you last night,’ she said appealingly. ‘You didn’t even say goodbye to the Knights. Were you just tired, or is there something else?’

  I glanced at her, forcing a small, tight smile. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, the coldness of my tone belying my words. Inside, my mind was whirring over the possibilities. I could come out with it now, but the situation felt surreal and wrong: the two of us in bed together, half naked, with our son asleep in the next room. Much better to let her believe that I was angry for some unidentifiable reason and leave her alone for the morning, so that when I returned she would be well and truly prepared for some kind of showdown. Selfishly, I didn’t want her to make things any more difficult than they had to be, and the thought of her being affectionate, cajoling and good tempered was almost enough to make me lose my resolve altogether.

  I got out of bed, reaching for my dressing gown. ‘I’m going for a shower,’ I said. I felt Naomi’s eyes on me, hurt and puzzled, as I left the room. ‘Happy New Year,’ I thought I heard her say as I closed the door behind me. I may have been mistaken.

  By the time I came back to the bedroom she was gone. I towelled off my hair and dressed in funeral clothes – black high-necked shirt, pressed black trousers. Looking at myself in the mirror, I straightened my collar. I felt a heavy sense of things coming together, sorting themselves in to the solution that I had always known would come. For a moment I tried to imagine living with Lydia, our relationship stripped of all its secrecy and danger: saw us sitting cosily round the breakfast table, kissing and holding hands in public, introducing each other at parties. I had no idea whether these things would drain the passion steadily away from us, the way that I now saw they had done with me and Naomi. The idea of desiring Lydia any less than I did now, of the day coming when the sight of her naked body would prompt nothing in me beyond a mild, automatic stirring of familiarity, was so foreign to me that I saw no point in worrying about it. I brushed my hair in front of the mirror, sweeping it back from my forehead in a way that Naomi had once said made me look like a vampire. As I
recalled her words I smiled, then frowned. I couldn’t deny the affection I still had for her, but it wasn’t enough, not any more. I switched the thought off, turning away from the mirror.

  I went to Adam’s room. He was still sleeping, lulled as he often was by the hypnotic mood music of the rain pattering on to the skylight above his bed. I went and sat beside him, resting my hand lightly on his outflung arm where it protruded clumsily from the bedclothes. He stirred slightly in his sleep, expelling a sigh, like an old man. The thought of not being there when he woke up every morning made me drop my head and blink. I had always scorned parents who stayed together for the sake of their children, but I suddenly realised how easily it could be done – although in reality, it was purely for my own sake that I wanted to keep Adam with me. He was far too young for a divorce to make any real impact, particularly if I still saw him regularly. I couldn’t believe that Naomi would exclude me from him out of spite, and I didn’t even want to entertain it as a possibility.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ I said out loud, my empty words echoing stupidly around the bedroom. ‘I still love you,’ I tried again. Speaking to Adam felt meaningless, a pathetic attempt to make myself feel better. I stood up, my shadow falling across his cot, feeling my heart twisted up painfully inside my chest, leaving me gasping temporarily for breath. I left the room without a backward glance and went downstairs.

  Naomi was reading the paper in the lounge, her eyes glazed in that way which betrayed that she was not really reading at all. She looked up hopefully when I came in, but before she could speak the telephone rang. I crossed swiftly to it, grateful for the lifeline, and said hello into the receiver, glancing across at Naomi as I did so. She had retreated back into her paper, resigned to being patient for my attention.

  ‘Good morning,’ a voice said cheerfully, and I realised that it was Martin. ‘And Happy New Year! Just calling to say thank you for last night.’

  ‘That’s fine – I’m glad you enjoyed it,’ I said awkwardly. ‘Sorry I disappeared without warning towards the end. I was rather tired.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Martin breezed on. ‘I quite understand, it was rather a late night, after all.’

  There was a pause, and I became aware that I was expected to carry on the conversation. ‘So … what are you doing today?’ I asked, at a loss for what else to say.

  ‘Well, I’ve been abandoned, I’m afraid,’ Martin rattled on, still relentlessly chirpy. ‘Lydia has taken Louise swimming, so I rather thought I might do a spot of DIY. We were planning to put some shelves up a good while ago, but you know how it is, these things get delayed. I’m not much good with a hammer, unfortunately, but I’m sure I’ll manage. Of course, if you were at a loose end …’ He trailed off hopefully. I saw that the call was his elaborate way of asking for company and assistance. I opened my mouth to make some excuse, but the rush of sudden affection that I felt for Martin surprised me. Even in my wildest dreams, I could not envisage any way in which our friendship could continue after he was told that I had been having an affair with his wife, no matter what the circumstances. To all intents and purposes, then, this was undoubtedly the friendship’s last day, and perhaps it was fitting that we should spend it together. Martin had never been anything approaching a soulmate, but he was a decent man, and not someone whom I would have chosen to hurt. Besides, joining him for the morning would get me away from Naomi in the way I had planned, and was surely preferable to wandering around the park in the rain or sitting in some grey, depressing café.

  These thoughts flashed through my head so fast that I barely hesitated before answering him. ‘I’ll come over, if you like,’ I said. ‘I could bring some tools, if you’re short of anything.’

  I let Martin get through his usual effusive burst of thanks and hung up. When I turned back to Naomi she was looking at me with a mixture of accusation and plaintiveness. ‘You’re going out?’ she said unnecessarily.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in a few hours.’

  ‘If you’re going to see Martin, Adam and I could come with you?’ she suggested tentatively.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said shortly.

  My words flicked the switch in her from conciliation to anger. ‘Nick, I don’t understand what I’ve done wrong,’ she burst out, her face twisted with the injustice of it. ‘Everything was fine last night, so why are you being like this?’ She was on her feet now, gesticulating as she talked as if she would like to grab hold of me and shake some sense into me. I battled with the desire to shout that she had no idea, that everything had not been fine, not for months, or even years, and that almost every time we had slept together recently I had been thinking of Lydia and not her. I bit my lip, so hard that I tasted blood, and walked out of the house. Behind me I heard her screaming for me to come back, but I swiftly got into the car and reversed down the driveway, switching the radio on loud as I did so to block out her voice and my thoughts.

  Martin answered the door to me some twenty minutes later, his hands covered in sawdust. He was wearing a beige T-shirt and ill-fitting jeans that looked several years old, and with a start I realised that I had never before seen him out of formal wear. He caught my look and laughed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m not often in mufti. I thought it might be more appropriate, on this occasion.’ He padded through to the kitchen, where he had laid out a tea tray. ‘Perhaps a cup of tea before I show you my handiwork thus far,’ he said.

  We sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea and eating the digestives that Martin had arranged carefully on a willow-pattern plate. He talked about his plans for the coming term, the upcoming events in the chemistry department that he would have a hand in, his enthusiasm for guiding his students through the run-up to their O-levels. Looking at his animated, guileless face, I couldn’t help wondering how he would cope. Perhaps he would throw himself even farther in to his work, letting it absorb him so thoroughly that his colleagues would be hard pushed to see that anything was wrong. I comforted myself with the possibility, unlikely though it was, that he would find Lydia’s departure to somehow be a blessing in disguise.

  After we had drained the pot of tea, Martin took me through to the garage, where he seemed to have made some attempt to saw uneven blocks of wood into something resembling shelves. His success was dubious, but I smiled and made suitably impressed noises. Obviously pleased, he showed me the plans that he had drawn up for how they would be assembled and mounted. We sat down together on the garage floor.

  ‘Perhaps if I put these brackets on,’ he said doubtfully. He brandished a screwdriver and reached for the first bracket, clearly at a loss as to how to continue. I helped him hold it in place. Soon we had settled into a routine, and the shelves began to take some sort of shape.

  ‘This is only the start, of course,’ Martin pointed out after a while. ‘Once these are done, I’ll look at doing up the kitchen, and perhaps adding a bathroom unit as well.’

  ‘Quite a bit of effort you’re going to,’ I commented. ‘Are you looking to add value?’

  Martin rolled his head from side to side in a yes-no motion. ‘Well, perhaps eventually,’ he conceded. ‘But to be perfectly honest, we’re not really thinking about selling the house, not for some years at least. We’re quite settled here.’

  I felt a lump in my throat and swallowed it down. This was no time to be getting sentimental. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t want to move any distance for quite a while anyway,’ I said, taking refuge in practicalities. ‘What with Louise only being four, she must have just started school here, and of course you wouldn’t want to uproot her.’

  Martin said something indistinctly, his words muffled by the screws that he was holding between his teeth as he grappled with a bracket.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said. I waited as he finished his task, laid down the screwdriver, took the screws from his mouth, wiped his hand across his lips.

  ‘Five,’ he said, smiling indulgently. ‘Louise is five.’

  Sometimes, the pain of discovery i
s made all the sharper by the random way that it hits you, a bolt from the blue. When Martin threw out those words, casually and without a second thought, that pain struck me like an unseen assailant, lurking with intent in the darkness. But that wasn’t all. In that moment, I found that discovery can be even more bitter if, just as you are ambushed, you realise that you should have seen that faceless assailant all along. Should have paid more attention to the light footsteps behind you, the moving shadows out of the corner of your eye. Instead, you pushed your awareness to the back of your mind, never acknowledged it, put your instinctual knowledge down to paranoia, and strode blithely on down that street towards the danger. As I stared at Martin, happily working away again, intent on his task, I remembered. Lydia’s face when I appeared at the door that day, panic stricken and wild; waiting in the doorway while she disappeared; a cake with four wonky candles stuck in its surface and a small child crying and complaining, It’s not right, it isn’t right. Perhaps, even then, I knew what was wrong, and chose not to see it.

  Somehow I got to my feet and excused myself. Upstairs in the bathroom, I locked the door. I felt my legs unsteady under me, and sat down with my back to the wall. I tried to trace the lines of Louise’s face in my mind. I couldn’t see her, only a hotch-potch of features: dark eyes, like mine, dark plaits of hair falling either side of a serious oval face. I didn’t know whether she looked like me. Bowled over by Lydia, I found it hard to see anyone else when she was in the room, and I realised that I had barely looked at her child, not really, not for more than a couple of seconds at a time. I found myself trawling back through the years. When Lydia had left me six years before, I had thought that I would never get over the pain of losing her, but I had rationalised it. She had bound herself to Martin. She had gone with what I had always thought to be her strongest claim – her marriage. Had she known, even then at what must have been little more than a few weeks into her pregnancy, that she was carrying my child? How else to explain her disappearance? I remembered the passion of that first summer, the hundreds of times that Lydia and I had made love, not always planned, not always as careful as we should have been. She had told me, not once but several times over that summer, that she was barely sleeping with Martin. A heavily regimented, once-monthly performance, barricading herself against him. Even if the odds had not pointed to the truth, her guilt confirmed it, and more and deeper than this, the sudden instinctive certainty that I felt, as if my eyes had been opened to a truth so obvious that I must have been blind not to see it.