The Art of Losing Page 21

  The rain had slowed to a faint drizzle. I started walking. I didn’t know myself where I was going. When I reached the end of the drive, something told me to turn left, and I did. The road was deserted, and in the back of my mind I found my self thinking that this was strange. It was only when I turned the tautly curving bend that I saw it. A thin cordon, white striped with orange, drawn across the road ahead. I shaded a hand across my eyes as I walked closer. An ambulance, tawny lights warmly blinking in the grey haze. The white car, snarled and crushed at the side of the road against the stone wall, as if someone had picked it up and thrown it where it fell. Two men in uniform, clustered together around the car, their heads bowed.

  As they heard my footsteps they turned. I saw their faces, and didn’t need to see any more, but I kept walking. When I reached the cordon I stopped, and took hold of it with my hands. In the shadows through the splintered window I saw her hair tumbled out like a fountain across the wheel. I couldn’t see her face. I felt a soft internal blow to the heart, a tangible thud that left my head swimming. The car, her hair, the sweep of road seemed bright and false, like colours in a dream. The two men approached, and I saw their mouths move and heard them saying something to me, but I couldn’t catch the words; they splashed through my fingers like mercury and, try as I might, I couldn’t hold them.

  One of the men walked me home. I handed him my keys at the front door. When he opened it, Naomi was standing there. Her blue eyes were round and anxious.

  ‘Where did you go?’ she asked, addressing me but looking at the man in the yellow-striped coat by my side. ‘What’s going on?’

  I walked through the hallway, went into the lounge and closed the door. I sat down on the sofa and rested my head against its cushioned surface. The door was not enough to keep their voices out. I heard him explaining to her: a crash, my appearance at the scene, a state of distress. I heard him describe the vehicle, read out its number plate, and her gasp of recognition. She cried out, once, in disbelief: ‘No!’ I could not be sure, but I thought she was crying. I heard her say Martin’s name. The man’s voice dropped lower, and I couldn’t make out his words, only a soft rhythmic murmur that made me feel tired, very tired.

  I heard the front door close. A few minutes later, Naomi appeared in front of me. She was holding two cups of tea, one of which she extended to me, and for a moment I had the urge to laugh. She must have heard that it was good for shock. I took it and my mouth felt the cloying sweetness of the sugar I never normally took.

  She sat down beside me. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she was holding the thick, dark blue material of her skirt between her fingertips, pulling and twisting at it. She was shaking her head slowly back and forth, as if trying to assimilate and settle the information that was seeping through her brain. ‘We only saw her last night. The ambulance man said there was no indication that another vehicle was involved. It looks like she simply lost control of the car. Was she coming to see us, do you think? It’s terrible to think of it happening so close.’ She shook her head again, more briskly this time, swatting thoughts away.

  I realised that I should say something, but my mind was blank. She was watching me, waiting, obviously wanting to dissect the tragedy, chew it over from every angle until we could spit it out and put it behind us. I knew that my silence seemed unnatural, but I didn’t care. I drained the last few drops of tea, glutinous and clogged by the sugar that had settled in the bottom of the cup.

  ‘You must have had a dreadful shock,’ Naomi said. She put her hand on my arm, tentatively, her fingers fluttering on my sleeve. ‘To come across it like that.’ There was a pause; no more than a few seconds, but taut with unanswered questions. ‘What were you doing, anyway, walking down that way?’ she asked eventually, her voice diffident and light. ‘I thought you were just downstairs.’

  I didn’t reply. I thought she would ask again, but she didn’t. She simply collected up the teacups and took them out to the kitchen. When she came back, she stroked the top of my head and said that if I wanted we could do something, get out of the house, or if I would prefer it we could stay in. Stay in, go out, stay in, go out. The words echoed in my head, singsong like a nursery rhyme, draining themselves of meaning with each repetition. We stayed in, the television set rattling cheerily in the corner of the room, the light gradually darkening until we were sitting in the gloom. At some point, I vaguely registered Naomi standing up, going to switch on a lamp. I saw her face as she sat back down. She looked pale, stunned, as if she was uncovering piece by piece a truth that she would rather had stayed hidden. We sat together, the room full of conflicting sorrow. She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the evening. I knew that she had never been impulsive or irrational. She wanted to be sure that she was right before accusing me of what she now knew, and what she was realising that perhaps she had always known.

  I got up early the next day, before Naomi woke, or so I assumed – I had fallen asleep on the sofa, and there was no sign of her downstairs except for an envelope, Martin’s name written across the front in her handwriting. I dressed quickly, put the card in my pocket, and set out to see him. As I walked up the path to his house, my feet felt unsteady and treacherous. The cold had hardened into ice, a faint slippery sheen covering the ground. I rang the doorbell, but no answer came. I stepped back and looked at the house. Its windows were dark and motionless. I rang the bell again. When a few more moments had passed I put my hand to the door and pushed. It swung open, left on the latch. Quietly, I entered. I saw him through the hallway, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the boiling kettle sending up a faint whine. It was the only sound. When I cleared my throat it felt as if I was shattering the air.

  Martin looked up, his grey eyes vague and distracted behind glasses. ‘Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  I came forward into the kitchen, taking it in. Unwashed plates and coffee cups sat on the sideboard. Martin made a faint gesture with his hand, motioning me to sit down; it would take more than a family tragedy to burn out his ingrained courtesy. I sat.

  ‘I thought I should,’ I said. ‘Naomi wanted to come, too, but I thought I should see you alone first. She sent you this.’ I held out the card in my hand. Sadly drooping lilies in a long dark vase, a message of sympathy. Martin took it and looked at it for a long time before setting it aside.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. I waited for him to continue, and when he did he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, his fists muffling his words. ‘It’s very peculiar, you know,’ he said slowly. ‘A scientist is used to the cycle of life. A scientist is also used to life’s randomness, to there being no kindly regulating God. But it is very strange the way that at times like this something else takes over. All that I can think is that it seems very unfair. The concept of fairness – it has no place in science, really. But then neither, I suppose, does love,’ he added. His voice was melancholy and detached.

  ‘I suppose not,’ I said.

  Martin tipped his head back, placing two straight fingers neatly under his chin. It was a pose that I had seen him adopt before, usually when he was deep in thought, and it was a moment before I realised that he was simply using gravity to roll back tears into his eyes. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said again. ‘I’m afraid I must insist that you leave now, though.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  He sighed, replaced his glasses and stood up. Martin was not a tall man, but looming over me as I sat at the kitchen table, he somehow seemed imposing. ‘Lydia said something to me before she left,’ he said. ‘I don’t intend to tell you what it was. I have been thinking it over and over, though, ever since she left this house, and I have come to the conclusion that it can only mean one thing. I don’t wish to dignify you with the chance to explain. I am sure that in the circumstances you will understand why our friendship has to end, and why I have to insist that you do not attempt to contact me again.’

  I swallowed. I felt sick. ‘Martin,
’ I began, standing up, stretching out a hand. He shook his head, a short clipped motion. The cold, haughty look on his face should have made his small, kindly features look ridiculous. Instead it gave him a kind of dignity so profound that I had to look away. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and turned to leave. Unexpectedly, he followed me through the hallway. As he held the front door open a flash of insight came to me. He wanted to show me out of his house, to finish things between us once and for all, to close the door and find some comfort in the meaning that the simple act reflected back to him.

  I could not leave before asking a final question. ‘Where is Louise?’ I asked.

  ‘My daughter is with her grandmother,’ Martin said. He spoke the words confidently, and I realised that this, at least, was something he did not know, and perhaps had not thought to guess. I looked at him for a long moment. In other circumstances I might perhaps have fought for my daughter. For an instant I felt an angry righteousness thrum through my veins. She was mine by rights, my flesh and blood, and I had already been kept apart from her for too long, but as I looked at Martin, I realised my limitations. I had always thought of myself, with a mixture of contempt and pride, as more devoid of conscience than any man had a right to be. I had fucked his wife so many times and in so many different ways that they had all become muddled up in my head, and shared companionable drinks and conversations with him all the while, but somehow, I couldn’t do him this final indignity. As I nodded and left, hearing the door slam behind me with bleak, crashing finality, I let her go.

  I had walked the five miles to Martin’s house that morning, and I would have to walk them back. I set out, already knowing what awaited me when I returned. As clearly as a video playing inside my head, I could see the shock, the tears, the recriminations, the rehabilitation that could last months or maybe years. I knew despite this that I would stay with Naomi, and she with me. At that moment, I couldn’t vocalise why, but I knew it and it brought me a kind of cold comfort. As I walked back through the frozen streets, I thought how beautiful and sad the black branches of the trees looked against the greying skyline. Looking at them almost hurt me. I barely wanted to admit it, but something told me that this was how it would be from now on. There was no way to get rid of this weight in my heart. There was no way to divorce the pleasure of whatever was to come from this pain that seemed to numb my skin and narrow my veins. Lydia had been right. I couldn’t escape her, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, and this was the price that I had paid and that I would have to keep on paying, for ever, for the rest of my life.

  Louise

  2007

  As Nicholas speaks, emotion ripples across his face. He is not looking at Lydia, his eyes distant, as if he is seeing the past played out on a screen inside his head. He paints a picture that would have made anybody else feel sorry for him. A daughter, briefly found, then lost again, irretrievably so, by a choice that seemed closer to necessity. As he tells her of the many times since those days when he has wondered where his daughter is and what she is doing, Lydia has a sudden hysterical urge to laugh. As he tells her that in a way he is glad that he does not know his daughter, because the memories of the affair would then be too concrete, ambushing him every day, she wants to scratch her nails across his haughty reflective face and draw blood. But he sees none of this. Years of self-control over her emotions have made her face a mask. When she catches sight of herself in the mirror beyond his desk, the woman she sees staring back at her looks coolly serene, politely sympathetic, nothing more.

  After what seems an eternity, his voice stops. He reaches for the green glass bottle at his feet and pours a slow, deliberate measure into the cut-crystal glass. The liquid sparkles as he raises it to his lips. When he has drunk, he sets the glass down again, so quietly that it seems they are in a soundless bubble, cocooned and apart from the world. She gets to her feet. Blood and air rush to her head.

  ‘I should go to bed,’ she says, her words cutting through the silence like knives.

  He looks up, and nods. He doesn’t see her for what she is, only this painted doll who means nothing to him. ‘I shouldn’t have said those things to you,’ he says mildly. ‘I expect I can count on your discretion.’

  In the darkening shadows of the study, his face is lit by the green lamplight in such a way that she feels she can see his soul. She thinks that if she were to reach forward she could touch it, pull it out of him and leave him as nothing but an empty shell. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You can count on me.’

  She leaves the room and walks down the corridor, counting her steps in her head. She has used this strategy before, blinding her mind with numbers so as to avoid the unpleasant, vicious thoughts crowding in on her. It takes her forty-eight steps to reach the bathroom. Inside, she locks the door and touches her fingertips to her forehead. It is burning hot, a pulse humming beneath the surface of the skin like a caged bird trying to escape. The nausea overtakes her so swiftly and inevitably that she barely has time to drop to her knees. She rakes her hair back from her face and vomits into the toilet bowl, painfully, feeling her guts twisting and emptying. She leans her forehead on the cool white marble of the bowl, fighting dizziness, counting her heartbeats one by one until they have slowed into rhythm.

  It feels as if a poison has been purged from somewhere deep inside. When I raise my head I realise that I’m not hiding any longer. False names, false identities … these things can’t help now. She isn’t part of me any longer, not the way she was; I’ve let my grip on her slip. I’m just me. I’m just Louise.

  After my mother died, I didn’t see my father for over two weeks. He was in no state to deal with me, so numbed and shell-shocked by the sudden violence of her vanishing that he could barely rouse himself to draw the curtains in the evening, let alone cope with a tearful five-year-old girl. This I found out later, much later. At the time, I understood his disappearance as little as I understood my mother’s. When seventeen days had passed and he turned up at my grandmother’s door, tired and grey and old but heart-wrenchingly familiar and loved, I ran to him and buried my face in his coat. I expected the pain to halve; only one parent lost instead of two. I soon realised that it didn’t work like that.

  I had always been a quiet child, but after my mother’s death I became a parody of myself. I didn’t want anyone else to enter our world, and I knew my father would never remarry. Finding Lydia had been a gift from the gods for him, an unexpected and unearned pearl landing in his lap. No one else would ever compare. We were on our own, then, and that was the way I wanted it too. I had watched my father carefully, and I had learnt his lesson. Love was not worth the risk. Even if the object of your love didn’t end up crumpled across a steering wheel with their brains blown out against a stone wall, you could still get hurt.

  I knew what Nicholas had done. A few weeks after she died, I found the letter he had sent her, pushed into the slats under their bed where I had crawled to sit in the hot dark air. I had no way of knowing whether my father had hidden it there, or whether he had not known it existed. In the thin shaft of light that filtered in under the bed, I slowly spelt out its words. Only time made sense of them. By the time I was old enough to appreciate the reality of the affair, I couldn’t even contemplate the possibility of my mother being anything other – anything lesser – than what I remembered her to be. Nicholas, then, must be to blame. He had held some kind of power over her, tricked her into making a mistake, gathered her to him and then thrown her away. I don’t want to see you, speak to you, touch you: you are dead to me. I wondered whether he had known that she would die, that his words had such power. I took the letter and hid it in my bedroom, and when we moved away a few months later, I kept it.

  From then on three figures dominated me. One was my father. The second was dead; the third I never saw.

  Martin I was with so much that if I closed my eyes he was still there. Round, kind, sad face. Long delicate fingers that knitted themselves together when he thought. Someone who would never leave you and w
ho was always so close that despite his fragility it sometimes felt as if he was the only thing you could depend on.

  Lydia I met only in my dreams. Blonde, smiling, unchanging, perfect, like an airbrushed photograph. Beautiful clothes and soft skin. Eyes that looked at you as if they understood you, both loving and distant at once. Someone you wanted to be close to, longed for, ached for.

  Nicholas I barely remembered in reality, but I knew him. Clever, dangerous, cold. Black hair and dark eyes that made him look like the devil brought to life. A sharp, husky voice that could hypnotise women. Someone who could break things, who had the power to ruin a life and the detachment to walk away from it as if it had not mattered.

  I wait outside Adam’s bedroom, my hand on the door handle, delaying the moment when I have to see him again. I remember that only half an hour earlier I was desperate to be with him, to throw myself on to him and entangle my body with his, mingling sweat and skin. Already it feels like another life. I push the door open. Adam is lying on the bed, wearing nothing but a pair of black boxer shorts, hugging the tops of his thighs like slicked-on oil. I don’t want to look at his body, to feel any stirring of desire, but I can’t help it. Longing and revulsion fight inside my chest as I come and sit down on the edge of his bed. His hand travels lazily over the small of my back, round my waist and over my stomach, then lower, lower. I take his hand and hold it tightly, push it away.