The Art of Losing Read online

  I renewed some old contacts, discovered an unadvertised vacancy, and persuaded a former tutor of mine, unorthodox though it was given my comparatively humble career background, to give me a trial. Perhaps it was simply fate – being in the right place at the right time – but even so, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t done it years before. That was the thing about being with Naomi in those days; she always made things that had seemed fraught with difficulty clear and simple. All my reservations melted away. We found a rented house in Oxford while we searched for something more permanent. Packing up and leaving London felt like the right thing to do. I didn’t think about Lydia much in these days, but I do remember feeling a sense of release as the removal van carried us up the motorway. I think it was only then that I glimpsed how much subconscious effort had gone into forcing back those memories, not allowing them to hurt me. I glanced across at Naomi, leaning out of the window of the van and waving goodbye to our old home. When she slipped back into her seat her cheeks were flushed and she was laughing, her unruly hair sliding from its clasp. Well-being flooded my veins. I loved her. We were moving away together, and I was going to a good job. I won’t say that I thought, What can possibly go wrong?, or anything so clearly setting myself up for a fall, but nevertheless I was optimistic about the future.

  For a while my optimism seemed to be justified. We settled quickly into Oxford, and I found that tutoring and lecturing satisfied all my dictatorial impulses with none of the soul-destroying grind that had worn me down in teaching. Naomi made friends quickly and introduced me to her social circle, so that we never had to deal with the isolation and uncomfortable codependence that sometimes comes with moving away. This honeymoon period lasted us through a good couple of years, and then it stopped. I couldn’t put my finger on what changed. It was nothing dramatic, nothing as definite and self-explanatory as a growing tendency to argue more or the cessation of our sex life, which I had always presumed were the main culprits that sabotaged married life. It was more like a subtle, gradual cooling off, and it happened so insidiously that by the time I realised it had happened I couldn’t work out how we had got from there to here. I knew that something had shifted in our relationship, perhaps for ever, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. When I looked at Naomi I still felt affection, protectiveness, sometimes desire. I still loved her, too. These things don’t just disappear overnight. Something was missing, though, and from the way I sometimes caught her staring at me across the table in a restaurant, as if I were momentarily a stranger, and one she didn’t especially want to sit across from for the next two hours, I knew she felt it too.

  One afternoon in 1988 I came home after my last tutorial to find her already there. This was unusual; I generally had a good couple of hours to myself before she returned from work. Even more unusually, she was cooking, standing at the stove vigorously stirring a vat of some indefinable stew. I entered the kitchen cautiously, trying to gauge her mood. Seen as she was from behind, her body language gave nothing away. It was only when she spun round, hearing me, that I saw her face was radiant and excited, her eyes shining with emotion.

  ‘Nick, I have some news,’ she burst out before I could speak. ‘I’m pregnant – we’re going to have a baby. I was going to wait until the weekend to do the test, but I couldn’t wait and I bought one at lunchtime and did it in the toilets at work. I’m sure they must all have thought I was mad when I came back in, but I just told them I needed to take the rest of the day off. I wanted to be here when you got back and cook you dinner so that we could celebrate.’ She drew breath and buried her face in my shoulder. When she spoke again her voice was thick with tears, and this too was unusual. ‘We need this,’ she said, drawing back briefly to look me full in the face. It was her first acknowledgement that our relationship ‘needed’ anything. I wouldn’t have put a baby at the top of the list of things that might help – if anything quite the reverse – but suddenly, standing there hugging her in the kitchen, I felt electrifyingly happy.

  Naomi had an easy pregnancy. I saw as the months went on that her body was made for being pregnant, unlike those of some women, who look awkward and ungainly with the alien bump tacked on to their former frames. Her whole body responded to the change; breasts ripening and tautening, hips and belly swelling effortlessly to accommodate the new arrival. She had little or no morning sickness, which her visiting mother claimed to be a surefire sign of having a boy, and then, half an hour later, a girl. I said that I didn’t care which we had, but secretly I wanted a boy. I suspected that I would be awkward with a little girl, find it difficult to play with her or delight in her probable penchant for frills and dolls. Ironically, I was pretty sure that the baby was indeed going to be a girl, but I kept my suspicions to myself. I contented myself with ministering to Naomi in the final months, cooking dinner for her as she lay in state like a vast empress on the sofa and washing and soaping her feet as she dangled them in the bath. I remember doing this the day before her due date, 17 December, and agreeing with her that babies were never on time and that we probably had at least another week to wait.

  I was woken in the middle of the night by her gasping for breath, her hand clutching mine with more force than I had thought she possessed. The baby was coming, she said. For a wild moment I considered asking her how she could be sure, but I bit it back. Of course she was sure. For the first time in the pregnancy I felt a fleeting sense of being an outsider, bereft of a mother’s knowledge and powerless to influence events in any way. I helped her fumble her way into a dressing gown and guided her downstairs. The drive to the hospital was eerily beautiful, trees lit up by garlanded Christmas lights, sparkling drops of ice blue and green flanking the streets as I whizzed past. I kept up a running commentary all the way, telling her that everything would be fine and it would all be over soon, but she didn’t speak.

  She had a dreadful labour, almost as if to punish her for the ease of the pregnancy. I spent almost twenty-four hours alternating between patrolling the dank grey hospital corridors drinking coffee and Coca-Cola to stay awake, and standing by Naomi’s bedside, watching her face, tight with pain and fear. It shamed me, but I didn’t want to see her like that. She was sanguine, a coper. Foolishly I had expected these traits to endure through everything she had to face. In those hours I saw them gradually stripped away, peeled back to reveal someone who was just as vulnerable as anyone else. The baby was finally born at one the following morning. Naomi was too exhausted to do anything but hold him briefly, then relinquish him to me. I held him in the way I had been shown, and he stopped crying. He had tiny perfect features, spiky eyelashes jutting out from his face, and a fine covering of black hair.

  ‘He looks like me,’ I said, half to Naomi, half to myself. Standing there with him, all the fatherly feelings I had been secretly concerned I would never develop came on me in a rush. I realised that what I had been told was true: when it was right, loving someone was easy, like instinct. This little creature who didn’t even have a name yet had broken through the freeze on my heart, a freeze that I sometimes felt Naomi was still penetrating inch by inch, so quickly that it left me bewildered. The matter of the name suddenly seemed very urgent. We had argued gently over our choice in the weeks leading up to his birth, and had reached a tactical stalemate which we had planned to resolve after the event, but now that the baby was here it seemed terribly wrong for us not to have named him. I knew Naomi favoured James, but as I looked at the baby, I knew it had to be Adam. I leaned over Naomi’s bed, holding him up to her, and she smiled weakly.

  ‘He looks like an Adam,’ I said eagerly. ‘Don’t you think so? I think we should name him now.’

  Naomi’s lips parted as if she was about to speak. A ripple of exhaustion passed over her face and she nodded, lying back and closing her eyes. So Adam it was. A small part of me sometimes felt bad at the circumstances under which I had convinced her that it was the right choice, but another, larger part of me felt pride and exultation at having named our
son; it made him feel more like mine. I stroked the top of his head lightly, and he started crying again, but it didn’t matter. He was here. And actually, for the first few months, his presence did work on our relationship like a lucky charm. We were softer with each other, kinder. When I felt angry with Naomi I looked at Adam and saw the curve of her cheek written in his, and my anger melted away. Her body snapped quickly back to its natural shape after the birth, as if it were a piece of elastic that had been stretched and then released. Everything was as it had been, except better, much better. It was one chance meeting on one afternoon, when Adam was five months old, which changed everything. In the years that have followed I have often wondered if, given an informed choice, I would have turned down a different street that day. Everything – logic, emotion, common decency – points towards it being the best course of action, but somehow I still can’t regret it. In my darkest moments that makes me feel evil, corrupted. I try to reason with myself, but it’s like throwing pebbles to hold back the sea. If there is anything that has made me doubt what sort of a man I really am, it’s this lack of regret.

  I was running late for my first lecture of the day. Adam had kept us both up late, or early, with one of his rare but agonising night-long rants against the world. I was halfway to the English faculty when I remembered that I had to pay a cheque into the bank that morning. Cursing, I swung the car around and nosed it down the High Street, searching for a space. I found one on a yellow line that might have been a double once, but which was sufficiently worn away for me to be able to claim ignorance. I walked briskly down the street towards the bank and found it closed. Through its heavy glass door I could see a cleaner, doggedly pushing a Hoover back and forth across the carpet. A suited zombie walked infuriatingly slowly down the aisle, checking each paying station for pens and slips. I banged on the door, which brought a response about half a minute later from the bank clerk. His eyes looked at me vacantly through the glass. ‘Ten minutes,’ his lips said. I thought about arguing – it was dead on nine o’clock – but even I could see it was ridiculous and pointless to try to argue through a locked door.

  Swerving away, I talked myself down. It was childish to be so worked up over a late opening at a bank. Pacing the street, I decided to go and get a coffee while I waited. I passed a couple of my usual cafés, but the queues stretched out of the door and I couldn’t face the waiting. On an impulse I turned down a side street. Sure enough, I could see a small café at the end of the road, and I quickened my steps, my heart lifting at the small victory. Intent as I was on my goal, he saw me before I saw him.

  ‘Nicholas!’ I heard a voice shout. It was familiar, and yet so obscurely so that I couldn’t quite place it. I turned, searching for the source of the voice. When I saw him standing there, I didn’t recognise him for a split second either. He was shorter than I remembered, his shoulders more stooped. The glasses were new, too, tortoiseshell rims lending an eccentric quirk to his face. He was beaming at me, moving forward to clap his hand on my back. To see him there was so strange that it was as if time had jolted backwards and transported me six years into the past.

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘Martin Knight.’ I clapped him on the back in turn, giving a sharp bark of laughter. My heart was hammering in my chest with the unexpected adrenalin. ‘What brings you here?’

  Martin blinked excitedly behind his glasses, as if he was finding our meeting as difficult to comprehend as I was. ‘We live here now, old man,’ he exclaimed, and for an instant the thought flashed viciously through my head, Who are you calling old? I supposed he must be nearly fifty now, but he looked far older, and not of the modern world, like a character from a Dickens novel.

  ‘So do we,’ I said. ‘Not far from the city centre. Are you still teaching?’

  ‘I am, yes, a private boys’ school,’ Martin said eagerly. ‘But “we”? Nicholas, you’re married, I’m so glad.’

  His remark struck me as strange; our friendship, after all, had been brief, and I doubted he had bothered much about my marital status in the intervening years. Unless, of course, he meant, So glad that you’re not still fucking my wife, but the remark hardly would have been delivered with such innocent bonhomie if so. ‘Yes, for over two years now,’ I said.

  Martin nodded, digesting this. ‘Well, it really is extraordinarily good to see you,’ he said, running a hand distractedly through what was left of his sparse grey hair. ‘I always meant to keep up contact after we left, but you know how it is – life runs away with you.’ In fact, Martin had sent a letter, not long after he and Lydia had left, but I had never answered it. Perhaps he was recasting history in a more diplomatic light, or possibly he had genuinely forgotten.

  ‘And you,’ I said, shaking him by the hand again. Strangely, I half meant it. Despite the old bitterness that seeing him had stirred up, I found a residual fondness for Martin and his endearing ways lurking beneath the surface. My friends these days belonged more to Naomi than to me, and it was always the women who were the more interesting partner of the couple; the men were mostly emasculated stuffed shirts with few original thoughts in their head.

  ‘Look,’ he said, digging into his pocket and bringing out a biro and a crumpled notepad. ‘I’ll give you our address and our number. You must get in touch and come round some time soon – bring your wife too, of course. Lydia would love to see you, I’m sure. She always liked you. Do call.’

  I took the scribbled bit of paper. ‘I will. I must go now, I’m running late.’

  ‘Goodbye for now, then,’ Martin said affably. I was halfway down the road when he called after me, an eager shout, as if he had just thought of something that couldn’t wait. ‘Nicholas! Do you have children?’

  ‘One,’ I called back, turning on my heel. ‘A boy.’

  ‘Wonderful! We have a girl!’ he shouted, half hopping on the spot with glee. I smiled stiffly to mark my delight at this turn of events, then carried on up the road, faster than before. When I was back on the High Street, I had to look around me to reassure myself that everything was as it had been ten minutes before. Seeing Martin had catapulted me back in time, and left an eerie sense of unease behind it, the feeling I sometimes got when I woke in the middle of the night after a vivid dream and briefly couldn’t remember where I was. As I walked back to the car, I ran back over the conversation. I realised that, subconsciously, I had not expected Martin and Lydia to stay together. Throughout our time together, she had never denied that she loved him, but it had seemed to me more like the kind of love you might bestow on a grateful pet than on someone with whom you would choose to spend the rest of your life. This at any rate was what I had wanted to believe. The discovery that she had lived through the last six years by his side made me think that perhaps I had been mistaken. Of course, she could be having other affairs, but some how I thought not. At any rate, I would never get the opportunity to find out. I would throw away Martin’s number and the chances were that I would never bump into him again – and if I did, I would do what I should have done in the first place and blank him completely. I reached for the scrap of paper, but in the instant of my fingers closing around it I changed my mind.

  Why, after all, should I not see Martin again – and Lydia too, for that matter? Whatever had happened between us had happened a long time ago. I was over her, thoroughly so. I had a wife whom I loved, a child whom I adored. It might not have been safe once for me to see Lydia, but now, surely, the danger was past. She had chosen him all those years ago; she had made her bed and it seemed that she was still lying in it. It might do me good to confront the past and to confirm that our three-month liaison had been little more than a foolish mistake. And as for Martin and Lydia meeting Naomi … well, again, why not? Lydia was hardly likely to blurt out our past involvement over the dinner table. It would be satisfying to compare the two and to confirm that I had chosen the more suitable woman for me, the more desirable, the more stable. At that moment I conveniently forgot that it had not been a choice.

  I
had been driving the car on autopilot, barely registering the traffic that I was manoeuvring my way round. As I pulled into the faculty car park it seemed that I had been standing on the street with Martin just moments before. I walked swiftly to the lecture hall, greeted the students and launched into a speech that I knew by heart. All the way through, I was dimly conscious of the scrap of paper Martin had given me, rustling faintly whenever I moved against the cheque that I had forgotten to pay in, burning a hole in my top pocket. After the lecture I dug it out, just to make sure that it was still there.

  That Saturday Naomi and I took Adam to the Museum of Natural History. Having read a book on early learning, Naomi thought that it was a good idea to expose him to culture as early as possible, just to get him into the swing of things. Privately I thought that at five months Adam was entirely incapable of telling a woolly mammoth from next door’s cat, but I admired her persistence. Over the course of the preceding few Saturdays, we had been to an exhibition of modern sculpture, an art-house cinema screening and a choral rendition of Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ and he had resolutely screamed his way through all of them. That Saturday was no exception. We trundled the pushchair grimly past stuffed lynxes and fossilised ammonites, muttering apologies to the grimacing museumgoers as we went. In front of an illuminated display of volcanic minerals, Adam quietened briefly. We stood there, dumbly staring at the glittering lumps of rock, hardly able to believe our luck.