The Art of Losing Page 3

  Strangely, I seemed to be able to fool myself with these false premonitions again and again. I thought they were harmless, but in retrospect they turned me into the boy who cried wolf. When the familiar sense came to me as I crossed the bridge on that bright morning of 17 May, I had no way of divining that, for once, the bubbling anticipation and queasy, faint foreboding sifting beneath my skin were genuine.

  I had been working at the school for two and a half years, bumping along the middle ranks of the English department. Thirty-one, living alone in a box flat in Wimbledon, I had far too much time to convince myself that I was a misunderstood genius who was condemned to a life of a monotony as unremarkable as the recognition after my death would be ecstatic. I was writing poetry around this time: oblique fragments which aimed at Ted Hughes but fell anticlimactically short of the mark. I deliberately kept my flat in little better state than that of a hovel, telling myself as I drank cheap soup out of a grey chipped mug in front of my two-bar fire that I was the typical starving artist in his garret. At these times I conveniently forgot about the school, and my underpaid but decidedly middle-class position there. I hadn’t had a girlfriend for three years. Not because I didn’t want one, and not because I couldn’t get one, but because the two states of wanting and attaining never seemed to coincide. I sometimes thought about becoming a monk. All in all I was ripe for a major life overhaul, and that is exactly what I got.

  When I reached the school that morning I had twenty minutes before I was due to teach my first class at nine. It needed no preparation; the collection of oiks and devils that made up my fourth form were so laughably beyond reach that I had given up on them in all but name months ago. I toyed with the idea of going to the classroom early, sitting at my desk and staring at the whitewashed walls, but the restless mood generated by the walk was still on me. I prowled the campus instead. Sprawling and unstructured, a peculiar mix of original Gothic towers and tacked-on post-war concrete blocks, the school must have once been beautiful, I knew. Now it had the air of an institution gone to seed, an impression only reinforced by the grubby teenage louts crammed into its every crevice. I found myself turning towards one of the few unspoilt buildings remaining on the campus – the library, a converted church with honeyed, yellowing stone walls and candles that lit up its long arched windows when darkness fell. I often wandered its aisles when I was at a loose end, enjoying the temporary tranquillity, for few of the students ever ventured in except under sulky duress. That morning I hesitated before entering. I didn’t feel like browsing, but I still had a quarter of an hour to kill. I pushed open the stone door and slipped into the silence inside.

  I saw her almost at once. Sitting behind the check-out desk, she was slumped forward, reading a newspaper. Her face was shaded by her hand, but the curve of her blonde head, the long fingers splayed over her forehead and the narrowness of her sloping shoulders in their pink wool cardigan leapt out at me, as shockingly and unexpectedly as if she had jumped out of her seat and shouted at me across the library. I know you, I thought. It was an irrational thought, and I knew even as the words formed in my head that I had never seen this woman before, but that’s what it felt like: seeing a much-missed friend again after a long absence. I had to stop myself from going straight up to the desk and telling her so. Instead I crossed softly to the rows of desks that flanked the library’s darkest corner, and settled myself down to watch her. After a few minutes, she pushed the paper aside and looked up. Her face was finely sculpted, delicate yet sensual, dark brows and lashes framing large ethereal eyes. The way she looked, her ash-blonde hair falling primly over the pink cardigan, reminded me of a sixties fashion model, polished and restrained, but nursing a secret abandon. She was beautiful, but not really my type. I liked exotic girls, Mediterranean lips and curves, not wistful English roses who looked as if they should be clutching on to something at all times – a posy of flowers, a prayer book, a man’s hand. And yet somehow, looking at her, I realised that the preferences I had thought I had were all muddled up and wrong, belonging to someone else.

  I went over to the nearest bookshelf and picked a book at random, an obscure Henry James. Without giving myself time to think, I walked up to the check-out desk and slapped the book down, making her look up with a start.

  ‘Have you read this?’ I asked.

  She glanced at the title, then back up at me. ‘I haven’t,’ she answered. When she spoke, something seemed to light up inside her, animating her face and making her eyes shine. She was smiling quizzically. ‘Should I have?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t read it either.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was a pause; she was clearly baffled. I couldn’t blame her. As an opening gambit, it hadn’t been one of my best – I was obviously out of practice.

  I cleared my throat. ‘My name’s Nicholas Steiner. I work in the English department. When I asked if you’d read it, it was really just a way of saying hello.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. I couldn’t read the expression on her face. ‘Well, hello. Nice to meet you. I’m Lydia. I just started here this week.’

  ‘Great,’ I said inanely. The library walls suddenly felt oppressive and hot, closing in on me. ‘So. I should probably go to my class, but … well, perhaps we could meet up later, go for lunch or something?’

  She hesitated and brushed her hair back from her face, and in that instant I saw what I hadn’t before: the pale gold ring on her slim finger. ‘I said I’d meet my husband for lunch,’ she said. ‘He works in the chemistry department. You could always join us, if—’

  I was already backing away. ‘No, no, don’t worry,’ I said distantly. ‘I just thought you might want someone to show you round.’

  ‘Your book …’ she began plaintively as I turned and strode away. I pretended not to hear and battled my way out of the stone doors, back out to the shrieking chaos of the campus. A dense tidal wave of pupils was surging across the square towards lessons, a contraflow to my own intended direction. Nine bells sounded out from the clock tower. I was going to be late.

  It took me another week to work out who Lydia’s husband was. I kept myself deliberately aloof from most of my colleagues, and I knew no one in the chemistry department whom I would have trusted to make discreet enquiries. On the face of it, few of the six chemists under sixty seemed like plausible canddates. Ranging from the prematurely aged Henry White, who spent his free periods huddled over textbooks and muttering in the corner of the staffroom, to the cocksure Terry Hudson, who was not long out of university and spent most of his time eyeing up the bustier sixth-formers, they were a singularly unappealing bunch. The front-runner was Simon Shaw, a good-looking, well-dressed man in his late twenties, who wore a wedding ring and who was conspicuous by his absence from the staff dining room at lunchtimes. Over the course of that week I imagined him with Lydia, laughing over their shared lunches elsewhere, enjoying a quiet evening in front of the TV, entwined together in bed … until I became convinced that the unpleasant images I was imagining were fact. Wanting to have my suspicion confirmed, I dropped Simon into conversation with one of the stalwarts of the school, Evelyn, who had been pushing sixty-five for the past five years and who was passionately fond of a gossip.

  ‘I think I met Simon’s wife the other day,’ I said, gesticulating over towards where Simon was marking some papers in the corner of the staffroom.

  Evelyn looked briefly shocked, then amused. ‘Simon hasn’t got a wife,’ she said.

  I was thrown off base by this. I assumed she was implying he was divorced. ‘He still wears a wedding ring,’ I pointed out.

  Evelyn leant forward confidentially, her bright, ferrety eyes gleaming with the unexpected excitement of imparting knowledge. ‘That’s not a wedding ring,’ she breathed significantly. ‘It’s more … well, how shall I put this? More of a commitment ring.’ In case I hadn’t picked up on the subtext, she clarified it for me. ‘Simon’s partner is a man,’ she ended in an audible whisper, with a triumphant flouris
h.

  The news jolted me more than might have been expected. It was 1983, and although the gay rights movement was in full swing, there was still something of a ‘not in my back yard’ mentality clinging to me, however enlightened and progressive I may have thought I was. Evelyn was watching me intently as I struggled to keep the shock from my face.

  ‘You didn’t suspect?’ she asked, a hint of glee in her voice.

  ‘Really, I barely know the man,’ I said brusquely. ‘I simply must have got him confused with somebody else.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, her tone implying that she did see, but not in the way I was wanting her to. ‘I believe they haven’t been together all that long,’ she added. She obviously thought I had secret designs on Simon Shaw and had invented a mythical wife under some complex pretext. I battled down the rise of discomfort that such a thought provoked in me. Let her think it, if it kept her in staffroom gossip for a week.

  ‘Excellent news,’ I said sarcastically. ‘I must just go and talk to him now.’ Somehow, the news that Simon was homosexual freed something up in my mind, made it easier for me to decide to ask him about Lydia. I went over to the corner table, where his dark head was still bent over the pile of exercise books, and sat down opposite him. He shot me a polite glance of enquiry before returning to the books. We had done no more than nod a brief hello occasionally around the campus, after a hurried introduction on his first day several months ago.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said briskly. He looked up again, expectant now.

  ‘Yes? Nicholas, isn’t it?’ he said. I wasn’t given to stereotypes, but I thought I caught the faintest whiff of something about his manner, something that should have given me the clue as to the true nature of that ring. He was smartly dressed, as always, with a handkerchief tucked into his top pocket. I noticed that his fingernails were very clean, very white and finely shaped.

  ‘Yes.’ Now that I had begun, I didn’t know how to go on. Instinctively I felt that I couldn’t pussyfoot around the topic with this man. ‘There’s a woman,’ I said bluntly. That got his attention. He put down his pen, a faint amused smile playing around the corners of his mouth. ‘She works in the school library. She’s married to someone in your department.’

  Simon nodded. ‘Martin Knight,’ he said instantly.

  I took a moment to digest the pill of information, which was even bitterer than I had imagined it would be. I had eliminated Martin from my suspicions early on, on the grounds that he was far too pedestrian a character to hold any allure for someone like Lydia. In his mid-forties, greying at the temples, with a face too forgettable to be termed ugly, he had few obvious attractions. Incomprehension was what I felt, and a petulant, steadily rising indignation.

  ‘You’re sure you know who I mean?’ I said, just to make sure.

  ‘Blonde hair,’ Simon said eagerly. ‘About thirty. And, of course, very beautiful.’ He spoke with the detached relish of a professional connoisseur. I wondered whether he was trying to pretend that he himself had some interest in Lydia, to generate some sort of comradely atmosphere.

  ‘That’s her,’ I agreed. ‘Martin Knight. Well, no accounting for tastes.’

  I had taken a risk, not knowing whether Simon and Martin were particular friends. From the smile that broke over his face I assumed that it had paid off, but he said nothing. The exercise books forgotten, he was leaning forward in his seat now, obviously awaiting my next move.

  I didn’t like to be toyed with. ‘That’s all I wanted to know,’ I said, forcing a smile. There was no point in trying to backtrack or explain. ‘I trust you won’t mention this to Martin.’

  ‘My lips are sealed,’ Simon assured me. He hesitated, taking a furtive glance around the room before leaning farther in. His eyes fixed earnestly on mine. ‘So,’ he asked, with no little anticipation, ‘are you in love with her?’

  The directness of the question should not have surprised me – after all, I had been the one to break the norms of social convention between us – but for a second it made my breath catch in my throat. ‘Yes,’ I said, entirely without thinking, and saw his face blossom into delighted approval.

  Later that day I made a half-hearted attempt to berate myself for my foolish declaration, but I didn’t regret it. I tried to despise myself for falling in love on such scanty grounds; it didn’t fit with who I thought I was, to be so ridiculously besotted over a look and a few awkward words. Try as I might, I couldn’t make myself doubt my feelings, and the knowledge that I was not mistaken made me feel excited, righteous and determined all at the same time. I knew I could take her away from him. I did love her, I did want her, and in that moment, as thereafter, I made no apology for it. Not to anyone.

  I struck up a casual friendship with Martin Knight. It wasn’t difficult to do; he was the sort of person doomed to be overlooked and to blend into the background. The unexpected attention I showed him seemed to please him. I started off small – a cordial comment or two around the campus, an offer to borrow my newspaper in the staffroom – then progressed to lengthier conversation, commenting on current affairs or the steadily improving weather. Not forthcoming by nature, Martin nevertheless responded to these overtures with eagerness. Within a couple of weeks he was singling me out in the staffroom between lessons, giving me a brisk, confident wave in the knowledge that we were more than mere acquaintances. I don’t know whether he ever stopped to consider why this unknown colleague, more than a decade his junior, had started to take an interest in him. With all that I came to know of him afterwards, I suspect that the question never arose in his mind. He had that peculiar yet surprisingly common combination, an acute academic brain coupled with a near-total lack of interest in human nature. He would wrestle with the finer points of molecular evolution with all the energy of a genuine truth-seeker, but when it came to emotion, he swallowed all that was told him without further question or argument.

  As I got to know him better, I understood that he did have his qualities, however hidden they may have been on first inspection. He was cheerful and sanguine by nature, and spending time in his company was strangely reassuring. He had occasional flashes of quick, dry humour, invariably delivered with a sly look over the top of his glasses. He was automatically generous, often offering me things – a spare snack, a book to read in free periods. He didn’t seem to feel the need to show off or to impress me with his knowledge as so many of my colleagues did. Attractive though these things were, though, none of them made me sit back and think, Ah, so that’s what she sees in him. None of them seemed significant enough; there was nothing extraordinary about him, and I felt instinctively that Lydia deserved, wanted, something extraordinary.

  I had decided early on not to mention Lydia until he did, but I didn’t have long to wait. I think it took only two days of desultory chat before Martin dropped the phrase ‘my wife’ into the conversation. ‘My wife always tells me I would make a terrible bachelor,’ he said, in response to some casual remark of mine about living alone. As he said the words, his face was suffused pinkly with something between embarrassment and pleasure. Watching him shift self-consciously in his seat and stifle a smile, I realised that he worshipped her. The knowledge didn’t soften me; on the contrary, it half angered me.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked, biting back my annoyance.

  ‘Well, I’ve never been very good at the domestic side of things,’ he explained. ‘Cooking, cleaning, tidying,’ he added, as if this needed clarification. ‘Lydia does all that.’

  I adjusted my mental picture. I had assumed that she was the sort of woman who sat back and was waited on. ‘She must be very capable,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, very, very,’ Martin agreed with enthusiasm. I waited for some elaboration, but after a pause he shifted the conversation back to my own living arrangements and Lydia was not mentioned again. Nor was I ever invited along to their private lunches, which seemed to take place every Monday and Wednesday. I noticed that he often came back from these lunches buoyant and brim
ming with bonhomie, his greying hair ruffled, and I envied him.

  One morning we were walking across the campus together at the end of the school assembly, which Ioccasionally attended out of lack of anything else to do. I was holding forth about the latest Thatcher debacle, and I noticed that Martin’s sporadic grunts of approval and murmurs of agreement had abruptly stopped. He was beaming, entirely distracted; I followed his gaze across the courtyard and saw that Lydia was approaching from the opposite direction. Clutching a bulging green carrier bag, books threatening to spill from its confines, she didn’t see us at first. It was only when we were within speaking distance that Martin gave a curious whistle of greeting, obviously some private signal between the two of them. She looked up sharply and smiled as she saw him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and then her eyes flickered to me. Her expression changed in a second, but I caught the signals I wanted: surprise and dismay. In another heartbeat she was moving on gaily, rolling her eyes laughingly at the pile of books in her arms, and calling ‘See you later!’ back at Martin, but I wasn’t fooled. She didn’t want me around her husband. If I had ever had any doubts that that brief minute in the library had stayed with her as it had with me, they were instantly discarded, never to return.

  I excused myself to Martin on the pretext that I had forgotten a textbook and hurried back in the direction in which Lydia had gone. At the library, I saw her. She had stopped, leaning back against one of its yellowing stone walls and shifting the bag of books to sit more comfortably in her arms. I walked up behind her and put my hand on her shoulder.

  I expected her to start, but she turned round with something close to resignation. ‘Hello,’ she said again. Her voice this time was softer, sadder. Her blonde hair was falling about her face, green eyes peeking up from under her fringe to meet mine.

  ‘I’m sorry if I scared you,’ I said, though it was obvious I hadn’t.