The Art of Losing Read online

Page 7


  ‘No,’ she says, not knowing why. The word is dragged up from somewhere deep inside her, and she can’t take it back. He doesn’t look hurt. He almost looks relieved, and this to her is even stranger than her own uncertainty.

  She lies down beside him, and he wraps his arms around her, pulling her close against him. Still they don’t kiss. She can tell from the rhythm of his breathing that he is losing his grip on everything, slipping away from her. In another five minutes he is fast asleep, snuggled into her, his head buried in the crook of her arm. She stays awake a long while, watching the rolling dark clouds outside the window shift and lighten as dawn starts to break. Despite the warmth of Adam’s body curled around her, she is very cold. She thinks of her mother, of Nicholas, and it takes all her strength to push the thoughts away. Tiny hairs on her arms stand up and bristle underneath the covers. Small changes in the rhythm of his breathing, a cold draught running down the back of her neck. The whole of the universe outside, the dark and lightening sky sweeping out far beyond everything she can see. She feels her consciousness shifted brutally back and forth from the minute to the immense. And above it all, a tremulous sense of dread, that she has started something that she may not be able to finish, or that when it does finish will teach her things that she never wanted to know. Once or twice Adam says something indistinct, talking in his sleep. In her fuzzy, half-drunk state, she thinks that if only she could know what it is he is saying, it will help her unlock the key to her fears, and bends her ear intently to his mouth. She can’t make out the sounds that spill from his lips. Violently, she shakes him awake. What were you saying? she hisses urgently. He doesn’t reply, just looks up at her in sleepy-eyed confusion, blinking gently in the sharp light of the dawn.

  The next morning everything is normal again, or as normal as it has ever been between them. They catch each other’s eyes she epishly as they dress, and laugh, acknowledging the strangeness of the night before. For whatever reason, it seems that an unspoken decision has been made to take things slowly. The mutual realisation takes a huge weight off Lydia, leaving her feeling light and airy. Infused with energy, she helps Adam tidy up the bedroom. What would normally be a chore becomes fun; they compete to throw empty cans and crisp packets into the open mouth of the bin-liner, cheering when they score a hit. Because of this it takes much longer than it would have done if Adam had been on his own, and it is almost midday before Lydia leaves. He walks her down to the porter’s lodge, his arm around her shoulders. The rain of the previous night has cleared the air of all its oppressiveness, leaving it sharp and fresh.

  ‘Term’s over in a week or so,’ he says at the gate. ‘Maybe we can spend a bit more time together then.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ she replies. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a figure that could be Isobel, blonde and petite, lurking at the far end of the quad behind them. She reaches up and kisses Adam fleetingly on the lips, a chaste kiss, but enough to mark her territory. He looks surprised, but pleased, she thinks.

  Lydia stops off at a café on the way back to Sandra’s house for some food. She hasn’t eaten for twenty-four hours, and her limbs feel shaky and tired. She orders a plate of fried food that would normally turn her stomach; bacon and eggs, sausages and mushrooms swimming in a sea of grease. When it comes she wolfs it down as if it’s the most delicious thing she has ever been offered. She has almost cleared the plate when she feels her mobile vibrating in her bag, buzzing urgently against the side of her jeans. She digs it out and the luminous screen signals a voicemail alert – she must have missed the call as she was walking down the High Street. She presses the voicemail number and holds the phone close to her ear, shielding it from the buzz of noise that fills the café. She has to strain to hear, but there’s no mistaking the voice.

  ‘This is Martin Knight for Louise Knight,’ it begins formally. Martin is still not accustomed to mobiles, and harbours a vague notion that any message left must be properly announced if it is to stand any chance of reaching its intended recipient. It’s something they used to joke about, and for a while he stopped doing it, but the old habit has obviously crept back. Hearing his voice, ridiculously formal, brings sadness on her in a rush, and tears prickle the back of her eyes as he continues after a pause, presumably intended to allow enough time for the message to be miraculously connected.

  ‘Louise, I wanted to leave you alone, as that’s what you wanted,’ he says. ‘But we’re … I’m worried about you. I don’t like to think of you there, and I’m still not sure what you think you will achieve. I can’t see what it’s going to do for you, except maybe bring back painful memories. It was so long ago that we were there that I doubt you even remember our house. If this is about feeling closer to your mother, I don’t think you will find what you’re looking for. I don’t …’ His voice trails off. As he has been talking it has grown steadily quieter, sadder and somehow remote, as if halfway through the message he had begun talking to himself, not to her at all. ‘Just call me,’ he says finally. ‘And come back soon. I love you.’ There is another pause, then a soft click as he hangs up.

  Lydia can’t help replaying the slip he made at the start of the message in her head: the habit, never quite lost in the seventeen years that should have beaten it out of him, of saying ‘we’, rather than just ‘I’. I’m worried about you. She had told him that she wanted to come to Oxford to be by herself for a while, that she needed to set things straight in her head. She had mentioned nothing about seeking out Nicholas, reasoning that what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. Now she sees that the opposite is true. It’s the not knowing, the blank space where knowledge should be, which has made him pick up the phone. All of a sudden she becomes aware of the cloying stench of fried bacon and mushrooms from the plate in front of her. She doesn’t want it any more; the smell is making her feel sick and she pushes the plate violently away and stands up. When she has left the café she stands aimlessly in the street for a few minutes, watching the city moving with people. She has the sense of being plucked out of the scene she is in, observing it from somewhere high above the rest. She will call Martin back later. For now, his unwitting words have sparked something off in her, and once thought of, she can’t let it go. She wants to go back there, to the house where they used to live. The thought has scarcely formed when she sees a taxi winding its way down the street, the little orange light winking out at her. It’s a sign. Without stopping to think further, she steps out into the road and raises her hand.

  ‘Sixteen Grassmere Road, Kirtlington,’ she says. Her father may be right when he says that she doesn’t remember the house, but she remembers the address. She has always been better with words than pictures. As the taxi carries her out of the city centre towards Kirtlington, she concentrates on the few memories she thinks she has of the years that she lived there. She was born there, and she lived there until she was five years old. It was the first place she saw, whether she remembers it or not, and she has a right to go back there.

  It takes almost half an hour to reach Kirtlington, but Lydia is so lost in her thoughts that she feels as if she has blinked and been instantly transported. As the taxi drives slowly through the narrow village lanes, she starts to feel the memories waking up. A corner shop, baskets of yellow and purple flowers hanging over its windows. A village green, flanked by rows of tall oak trees. Curving, uneven pavements that she thinks she used to trip on in furry laced-up boots almost twenty years ago. The streets are almost deserted, and it’s like driving through a dream town, painted in unreal colours. When they take a right turn, the road sign swims to the front of her vision, and she realises that this is the street where they used to live. As the taxi trundles down the road she finds herself leaning forward, searching for the house. She is too far away to see the number painted on the wooden gate outside, but she knows. Smaller than she had imagined, it’s more like a cottage, with sleepy-eyed windows set in sloping stone, and flower beds planted with ice-white winter roses flanking its walls. It doesn�
��t match the blurred picture she has had in her head, but nonetheless it’s instantly, inevitably familiar. Her heart constricts. She remembers sitting on the high front step in summer, swinging her legs and stroking their cat, stretched out purring beside her and baking in the heat. The warmth of its fur comes back to her, so strongly that her fingers start to tingle. She remembers her mother coming out to find her there on the step, looking up at her and squinting in the sun, her blonde hair sparkling around her head like a spotlight. Her long slim hand reaching out to pull her up.

  ‘Twenty pounds,’ the cab driver says, cutting into Lydia’s thoughts. His voice is testy and impatient, as if it’s not the first time he’s asked for the fare. ‘This is the place, isn’t it?’ With a start she realises that the taxi has stopped. She digs the money out of her bag and clambers out. Standing at the gate, she rests her elbows on the cold wood, peering in.

  ‘Are you going in, then, or what?’ she hears the driver whine, still hovering impatiently behind her.

  ‘Just go away,’ she shouts, wheeling round. It comes out with more force than she had intended and she sees him visibly flinch as he pulls the handbrake up sharply and drags the taxi away from the kerb. Clearly in his eyes she has crossed the line from stupid to mad. She watches him turn in the road with a defiant screech of tyres and zoom away. Briefly, she wonders how she is going to get back. She hasn’t thought this through, but she wants to be here.

  Lydia turns back to the house again. Her head is flooding with pictures now. The kitchen was long and narrow, an old metal Aga running the width of one of its walls. Her mother followed the seasons with her cooking: the kitchen collected all the heady smells of boiling fruit in summer as she made jams from peaches, apples, plums that they collected together from the ancient tree in the back garden. The plums were ripe and shiny when they picked them, almost violet, making a soft squashing noise against each other as they were thrown into her red plastic pail. Sometimes they abandoned the collecting and just sat on the grass together, threading flowers through their stems to make bracelets and earrings which they hooked over each other’s ears. Her mother had a yellow pair, made out of buttercups, which dangled like gold and mingled with her hair.

  In the winter they had snowball fights with her father, boy against girls, him ducking and cowering behind the garden shed, shouting mirthfully in protest as they pelted him. Her hands were so cold that she thought they would freeze completely, turning her whole body into ice. After those fights in the garden she and her mother would sit on the squashy sofas in the living room, looking out at the snow falling darkly against the windowpane. There was a little lamp which always burnt in the corner of that room, shaped like a seashell. It got brighter and brighter the blacker it got outside, until it was the brightest thing there. Her father would come and join them, taking off his glasses and polishing them until they glinted. Sometimes he put them on her nose and the whole world grew and shrank and shimmered before her eyes. ‘Martin, take them off,’ her mother would say, rolling her eyes indulgently, and smiling.

  There is nothing sad about these memories. Lydia knows, because of them, and because her father has told her, that they were a happy family. They were happy, before Nicholas came.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a voice asks behind her. She swings round and sees a plump woman with a kind face, her hair done up in plaits around her head. Her hand rests on the gate, possessively. The other hand grips a pushchair. A baby, no more than a few months old, stares up at her with round solemn eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lydia says, stepping back. ‘Do you live here?’

  The woman nods, a little uncertainly. ‘Are you selling something, love?’ she asks. ‘I’m afraid we don’t go in much for—’

  ‘No,’ Lydia interrupts, ‘I live here too. I mean, I used to live here.’ Despite her self-correction, it’s the first statement that feels right. She has not expected this place still to feel so much like home.

  ‘I see,’ the woman says politely, not seeing at all. ‘Well, we’ve been here ten years, so it must have been a long time ago.’

  ‘It was a long time ago, yes.’ A lifetime ago. She backs away from the gate. Her eyes feel hot and prickly and she can tell that tears are not too far away. She can see the woman’s lips moving, a look of concern on her face, but she can’t hear what she’s saying. She is blocking her out. She turns and walks briskly down the street, away from the house. She doesn’t stop walking until it’s too late to look back and see it in the distance, too late to let her body do what it really wants to do and claw its way past the woman and her baby to the front door and shut them out somehow so that she can be alone there. She was wrong that there were no sad memories. As she walks they press in on her in a rush, so vivid that she can barely breathe with the strength of them. A rainy winter morning that turned so dark so fast that it was as if the sun had been blocked out. Her father shouting without words, doubled up with grief. The emptiness of the weeks and months afterwards, when three had swiftly and inexplicably become two. She starts walking faster to try to shut them out, but it doesn’t work, and even when she is sitting on the bus back to Oxford and leaving Kirtlington behind, they come back to her, again and again and again.

  Nicholas

  1989

  On our wedding day I vowed in front of seventy people that I would stand by Naomi until death did us part, and I meant it. I had never intended to marry, clinging to the clichéd belief that it killed the passion in a relationship, but with Naomi it seemed like the natural thing to do. She was conventional, had grown up with the equally clichéd dreams of a white dress and a lavish ceremony, and was not about to let them go. When it became evident, about four months in, that our relationship was serious, I could see the expected path stretching out ahead of me – a path that led inevitably up to a country church and a host of smiling guests. I didn’t see the point in spending five or six years getting there. We planned a whirlwind wedding that pleased both our families, who presumably saw it as evidence of our desperate need to be publicly committed. Standing at the altar, I knew that I would never marry again. This was what I wanted, after all: security, legality, someone who was indisputably all mine.

  Physically, Naomi was something new for me. Energetic and voluptuous, with a mass of red curly hair and a fine dusting of freckles over her pert nose and pink cheeks, she was the sort of girl who frequently got cast as a milkmaid in school plays, as she told me wryly on our first date. Once she showed me an effusive poem that an ex-boyfriend had written for her, painting her as a modern-day Nell Gwynn, and while I snorted and scoffed over the badly composed pentameter and the dubious rhymes, privately I thought that as far as imagery went, he had got her spot on. Men stared at her in bars, on the street, in crowded tube carriages. She wasn’t beautiful, strictly speaking, if you broke it down objectively. Her chin was a little pronounced, her face a little too asymmetric, her teeth a little too crooked. She was sexy, though, and the knowledge that these men wanted her and envied me gave me a frisson that made me feel possessive and protective of her very early on. I was her bodyguard, constantly shielding her from a rioting barrage of lustful looks. She laughed a lot in bed, something that threw me at first. Sex had never been fun for me, exactly, but suddenly with her I saw how it was done, and how doing it that way could hold some appeal. In fact, it seemed for the first few months that everything was fun with Naomi, even prosaic chores like trailing around the supermarket or putting a wash on. This faded, of course, more quickly than I would have liked, but nevertheless, being with her made me happy.

  Shortly after we married, I left the school that I had continued to teach at since my affair with Lydia. Although I never told Naomi the details, she knew that I had at one point had a relationship that had gone wrong with one of the staff. It wasn’t her style to express jealousy or uncertainty, but I knew she wondered about the memories that being there might evoke for me. There were memories, of course, and I didn’t like confronting them. Coming home to Naomi afte
r work sometimes felt almost sordid, there minders of my time with Lydia that the day had thrown up still clinging to my skin. Besides, I had had enough of the school and my indifferent middle-ranking position in it. I had also had enough of teaching. I wasn’t a natural arbitrator, and being in class too often felt like a vain attempt at mediation between warring factions of pupils, with very little actual teaching to relieve the stress. I considered moving to a quieter school, but the problem ran deeper than that. I didn’t want to stand up in front of a class of scornful fourteen-year-olds with little or no interest in literature any more. It wasn’t what I had ever really envisaged doing, and looking back on the way I had fallen into the job, I realised that teaching had been intended as little more than a stopgap, a stopgap that had somehow endured for over a decade.

  I wanted to go back to Oxford, become a tutor and lecturer. When I told Naomi my plan I expected her to laugh, but she embraced the idea with characteristic enthusiasm. She had had enough of London, she said, and would be happy to live in Oxford. Her own job in human resources was easily transferable, and besides, living somewhere quieter might have other advantages. It was an oblique reference to starting a family; she had often expressed reservations over bringing up children in London’s messy sprawl. I didn’t respond to it, but I didn’t challenge her over it either. I didn’t know what I thought about having children. It wasn’t something that had ever been part of my life plan, but then I had said the same about marriage. In any case, it wasn’t an immediate concern.