The Art of Losing Page 23

  She is trembling, her perfectly painted lips parting to violently draw in air. I take her by the shoulders and stare at her. Under the white-blonde hair, the make-up and the white dress, I can see the other Lydia, the one I had met only as my son’s lover, the one that I had thought I barely knew. Now I can see I never knew her at all. Facts and instincts fit together in my head. Names jumble, all mixed up. Lydia, Louise, Lydia, Louise. My daughter.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she says, so softly that I can barely catch her words. She is staring right back into my eyes, her own unblinking and fringed with dark lashes, the sweep of emerald across her lids coaxing out the green of her irises beneath the dark brown pools that I know now must be just like mine. Her tone is not plaintive. It’s accusing, bitter. When she tosses her hair back from her face and lifts her chin, I see her mother’s mannerism, queasily brought to life.

  ‘Nor did I,’ I say, and although we are talking at cross-purposes, we are both aware that the knowledge we both have and the gaps in that knowledge match up, fit us together, whether we want it or not.

  She takes a short, sharp breath, as if unsure how to continue. I can feel my legs shaking beneath me, but I force myself to keep standing there, my hands on her shoulders. ‘I’ve always blamed you,’ she says. As she speaks she shrugs off my hands and steps backwards, the small of her back pressed into the chair against the door.

  I don’t need to ask her what for. There are so many things that she doesn’t know and couldn’t understand, but all the same I can’t tell her that she is wrong and that I am blameless. I have always known that Lydia’s death would not have happened without me in her life. I have always known that I tainted things, my love working like an unlucky charm, steering both of us towards disaster. I feel myself nodding mechanically, but even as I do I feel the inequality of my burden.

  ‘It isn’t the full story,’ I say.

  ‘I know that now.’ She pauses. ‘She should have told you about me. She should have told us both,’ she says. She sounds reflective, almost cold. I wonder whether she too is imagining the family that she might have had, and whether she too is unable to tell if it would have been a happy one, and whether it might have been worth the pain of its inception.

  ‘I know you don’t want me,’ she says, and then frowns a little, the line that deepens between her brows so strangely and suddenly familiar that I shiver. ‘I know you never did,’ she amends, as if for clarification.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ I say, and mean it.

  She shakes her head. ‘You have your family already,’ she says. ‘There’s no space.’

  In my heart I know she is right. The past two decades have bound me to my wife and son so tightly that the bonds feel impossible to unpick, even if I wanted to. Unwanted, a picture flashes into my head: Naomi’s face, twisted with pain and dismay, if I were ever to take this trembling girl to her and explain who she is, ask her to accept her. We have spent years rubbing at the dark stain that shadows our relationship. In the past few, it seemed that it had all but disappeared, and the thought of reopening those wounds makes me feel dizzy and sick. I can’t contemplate facing her, or facing Adam. And at the thought of Adam, something deeper stirs, something as yet nameless. Pictures I do not want to fit together with words. His hand on Louise’s back, his lips touching hers, and more than this; the images flashing at me with sudden shock, my mind closing down from what they mean. I look at her. For a moment the thought darts through my mind, so quickly that I have no time to stifle it: she’s just a woman – beautiful, desirable, dangerous. The knowledge half frightens me. Without wanting to, I wince and blink, turning my face away to hide the sudden smart of tears. When I look back Louise is nodding, as if I have confirmed her words.

  ‘You have to understand something,’ I say nevertheless, and suddenly it feels desperately important that she know this. ‘However hideous things were at the end, I loved your mother. I loved her so much that I couldn’t imagine my life without her, and if she was still alive, I think we would have found a way to be together in the end, despite everything.’ I have never voiced these thoughts before, even to myself, but they pour out of me with such readiness that I know they have been lurking beneath the surface all along, and I can’t stop them, even though I know that they may hurt her. ‘I don’t mean to imply that she never loved Martin,’ I say, ‘because she did, I know she did, but the relationship between us was different. I can’t begin to make you understand—’ I break off, all too aware of the truth of these words. ‘However wrong it was, I loved her,’ I say again. ‘I still love her.’

  Louise is staring down at her feet, at the red shoes with their silly silver buckles. ‘But not me,’ she says.

  I swallow. Sudden sharp injustice pierces my chest, makes it hard to breathe. ‘God,’ I say. ‘I never had the chance.’

  She raises her eyes to mine, tips her head a little to one side, puzzled, thoughtful. All at once I want to step forward and take her in my arms, enfold her, protect her, but my limbs feel frozen. It’s impossible. But she opens her mouth to speak again, and takes a step towards me, and I see her eyes glaze over, her hand go to her forehead, and she crumples to the ground, and suddenly it’s possible after all.

  I go and kneel beside her, gather her unconscious body against me and hold her tightly. I examine her, put my hand to her forehead and find it burning hot. I look around, unsure of what to do. The room is totally silent, watching me. Kneeling by Louise’s side, for the first time in my life, I almost feel like praying.

  Only a couple of minutes pass before I see her eyelids flicker, as if dreams are running hectically under their surface. Her lashes peel apart. She sighs, a long, slow sigh that seems to exhaust her. ‘My father,’ she says.

  My heart thuds faster with the exhilarating shock of the words. ‘Yes,’ I say.

  Her face creases. ‘No,’ she says, and I realise how stupid I have been. ‘We have to call Martin. We have to call my father.’

  We wait for Martin in a tiny shop-soiled café at the station. I have bought Louise a cup of coffee, and every now and then she takes a sip and then reverts to her huddled position, her hands clasped around the cup, my black coat around her shivering shoulders. I don’t know what she said to him. Whatever it was, it was enough for him to say that he would be on the next available train. I want to ask, but the words stick in my throat. We have barely spoken since we left the café, but every now and then she looks at me from under curiously veiled eyelids, as if she is searching my face for something. Once, she half smiles, and I smile back, but as soon as she sees my response the smile drops from her own face and she looks away.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ I say at last. I’m not sure whether it’s wholly true, but part of me does feel glad. For so long now she’s been a spectre at the back of my mind, stuck in time at five years old, still the grave, pigtailed little girl in her buttoned boots. Seeing her now, my heart already aches with her loss, but at least I have another picture to add to my memories.

  She half shrugs, acknowledging me. ‘I’ll never forget this,’ she says, and although she has not said that she is glad too, her words somehow seem closer to how I feel than my own.

  ‘Louise,’ I say. I want to say that I wish things had been different and that she could be a part of my life, I a part of hers. As I struggle to frame the words, her mobile lights up on the table in front of us, buzzing impatiently. She snatches it and listens. ‘I’m still in the café,’ she says. ‘You just turn right.’ When she puts the phone down her face is flushed and almost fearful. ‘He’s here,’ she says.

  I barely have time to prepare myself for the sight of Martin before he appears in the doorway. Silhouetted against the greying skyline as he flings the door open, he is taller than I remembered. As he comes closer I see that his face is strangely unchanged. Somehow, now that he is in his mid-sixties, it fits him in a way that it never did before. It is as if all his life he has been growing awkwardly towards this age, and now that he has rea
ched it, he looks right, dignified and serene.

  He crosses to Louise, with the short, quick steps that I remember, and embraces her. I watch her lean her head against his neck, bury her face against him. Her shoulders shake briefly, as if convulsed by a burst of tears. He smooths the hair back from her face, his eyes wide and shocked at its colour. Quietly, he speaks to her, words that I cannot hear, and she answers.

  Minutes later he turns to me. ‘Nicholas,’ he says, and inclines his head. There is restraint in his look, but he has not lost the politeness of decades before. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Too long, I want to say, but I don’t want to risk a denial. Instead I simply nod. Martin looks back and forth between us, one delicate hand betraying his calm, scratching at the back of his neck uncertainly. His eyes prompt Louise.

  ‘I went to a lecture Nicholas was giving,’ she says. ‘I was curious to see him after all this time. Afterwards, I felt ill, and I fainted. He helped me. He had no idea who I was. When I explained, he insisted on waiting with me while you came, and bought me a drink.’ The lies pour out of her fluently, her voice mellow and sweet. She has her mother’s knack for fabrication, and mine. I see Martin nodding, accepting her story, turning to me with some awkwardness.

  ‘Well, I suppose I must thank you for that,’ he says, ‘but I think I should take Louise home now.’

  At his cue she shifts and approaches me. ‘Goodbye,’ she says. I see a sadness flit across her eyes, elusive but unmistakable. I try to smile, and for just an instant she takes my hand and presses it. When she releases me, I feel her touch still burning into my palm. They go to the door together. I see Martin stop and speak to her again. She nods, and steps outside, out of my sight, away from me, and that’s it. She’s vanished, and at once, far quicker and with a bleaker finality than I could have imagined, it feels as if she was never there.

  Martin is still lingering at the doorway. Sharply, he looks back into the café to where I am standing. He steps back inside, comes quickly to stand in front of me. I can see the wrinkles etched into his face, bathed in the harsh fluorescence of the strip lights above us. The tortoiseshell glasses that he always wore have been replaced with a more sober pair, black rimmed and delicate. They give him the air of a preacher, someone both sanctified and irreproachable.

  He clears his throat. ‘Nicholas,’ he says. ‘I also wanted to thank you for something else.’

  The surprise of it forces a sharp, embarrassed laugh out of me. ‘What on earth for?’ I ask.

  He is silent for a long time. I can hear the strip lights humming above our heads, the background bustle of plates being served and customers chatting. ‘For my daughter,’ he says at last. ‘For Louise.’

  Looking at him then, I realise that he is very far from the fool I once thought he was, walking around with his eyes closed and his head in the air. He knows, and although I have no way of telling whether the realisation has come to him over many years of thought and painful discovery, or whether the sight of us together a few moments before has picked up some faint and telling resemblance that even I myself can barely see, I realise that he knows as well as I do that this truth is inescapable. It can never be unknown. I want to say that I am sorry. I want to try to explain. All the years of lying; the betrayal of a friendship that should never have happened; the failure to do him the justice of the truth many years before. I open my mouth to speak, but he shakes his head. There are some secrets that do not need to be told. Looking steadily at me, he holds out his hand, and I take it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My lovely agent Hannah Westland, Peter Straus, and everyone

  else at Rogers, Coleridge & White

  Clare Reihill, Mark Richards and everyone at Fourth Estate

  Dr Chris Greenhalgh

  Charlotte Duckworth and the Ms B girls

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Fourth Estate

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  Copyright © Rebecca Connell 2009

  The right of Rebecca Connell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  EPub Edition MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007319985

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