The Art of Losing Read online

  ‘He’s going to be a mineralogist,’ Naomi hissed. It was her favourite game to link anything at which Adam did not show active disgust with his future destiny.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ I said, equally quietly for fear of setting him off. I didn’t care much for geology, and preferred to think of Adam as the next Poet Laureate.

  ‘No, it’s a good career,’ Naomi whispered, snorting with laughter. ‘Let the boy go his own way.’ For some reason, I started laughing too, and we stood at the volcanic display, rocking with suppressed mirth. Naomi was enchanting when she laughed, the effort of it lighting up her eyes and reddening her cheeks so that her pale brown freckles faded to rosy pink. I put my arm around her shoulders, feeling a surge of affection for my little family, and she leaned into me automatically. At that moment Adam started up again, a siren wail that cut through the silence of the museum like a red alert. I saw the curator wheel around, frowning heavily, and start to walk towards us.

  ‘Come on, for God’s sake,’ I murmured, ‘let’s leave before we get thrown out.’ Hastily, we pushed the chair along the aisles, shushing Adam ineffectually, and escaped on to the grassy quadrangle outside. Naomi flopped down on the grass, stretching languorously in the sunshine, and laughed again.

  ‘He’s incorrigible, isn’t he?’ she exclaimed. ‘You’d think he could keep quiet for half an hour.’

  ‘Darling, he’s five months old,’ I said indulgently. ‘Sometimes I believe you think of him as an adult trapped in a baby’s body.’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ she said, suddenly serious. ‘I mean, that’s what he is, isn’t he? The person he’s going to be one day has got to be inside him somewhere. It’s our job to make sure he gets to be that person, that he gets it right.’ She was frowning up at the sun, her eyes creased into thoughtful slits.

  ‘All a bit deep for me on a Saturday afternoon,’ I said lightly. In truth, her words unsettled me. I wasn’t sure yet what kind of role model I would turn out to be, and I didn’t like the idea of it potentially being my fault if our son went off the rails or failed to be whatever it was that Naomi was hoping he would be. I tickled the inside of her bare arm, hoping to jolly her back into the carefree mood we had shared a few minutes before, but she only sighed and sat up, shaking off my hand.

  ‘I suppose we’d better be getting back,’ she said. ‘I have to be at Mum’s by three.’

  ‘What?’ I had no recollection of her mentioning the visit, and it intensified my dissatisfaction.

  Naomi sighed again, rolling her eyes in exasperation. ‘I told you this two days ago,’ she said. ‘Mum wants to spend the afternoon with Adam and I said we’d go over there. In fact, I asked you if you wanted to come too, and you said yes.’

  Now that she had mentioned it, I did vaguely remember agreeing to the trip, and the knowledge that she was right irked me even more. ‘I don’t remember this at all,’ I lied. ‘I don’t want to trek down to Reading today. I’ve got things to prepare for Monday, and I want a relaxing day at home.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said shortly, taking hold of the pushchair and moving it away from me. ‘We’ll go on our own, then.’ It was ridiculous of her to try to make an ally out of the uncomprehending baby, but nonetheless I felt an irrational stab of pain at the thought of them being united against me. I shrugged, affecting not to care.

  ‘Then I suppose I’ll see you later,’ I said. It was a small challenge; if she had softened I would probably have agreed to go with her. Instead she twitched her head angrily so that her curls shook from side to side, a funny little mannerism that normally made me laugh. That day it just irritated me, and I stalked off across the grass, leaving her. When I was out on the road I looked back and saw her pushing Adam off in the opposite direction, her back small and defeated. An immediate pang of regret shivered through me, and for a moment I thought about running to catch them up, but before I could decide she was hailing a bus and lifting the pushchair up out of sight.

  I watched the bus move away, at a loss as to what to do next. I had overstated my preparations for Monday, and besides, I didn’t feel like working. It was a bright, inviting May day, the air heavy with the scent of flowers and newly mown grass. As I strolled back towards home, I felt strangely sad, nostalgic. It took me a while to realise that it was the weather which was provoking me. This was the time of year when Lydia and I had begun our affair all those years ago. I remembered lying next to her under the sprawling cherry tree in the churchyard, drinking wine gently warmed by the spring sun. The memory caught me off guard, as did its accompanying sadness. I had thought more about Lydia in the last few days than I had done in years, sometimes fondly, sometimes with contempt. Meeting Martin had obviously been the trigger – it had unsettled me more than I had thought. I felt for my wallet, to which I had transferred the scrap of paper bearing his number. Perhaps I should call after all. I had been swinging back and forth on the decision all week, feeling one moment that I didn’t care much either way, and the next that the choice was important, more important than I wanted to admit.

  I was passing a phone box, and it felt like a sign. I stopped and went inside. It was baking hot, the glass reflecting and concentrating sunbeams like a greenhouse. A clutch of flies hummed in the corner, clustering around an abandoned sweet-smelling apple core. I tapped in the number and fed in some change before I could think any more about it. It rang five, six times. My heart felt light, relieved. No one was home, and I would not bother to call again. I was about to put the phone down when the ringing abruptly stopped and for a moment there was silence, but for a faint rustling noise at the other end of the line.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ a voice said. ‘Hello?’ It was Lydia. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Together, we listened to the silence. ‘Hello?’ she said again after a few moments, louder and more uncertain this time.

  ‘Hello,’ I answered finally. There was another silence, taut like a string pulled across the distance between us.

  ‘Who is this?’ she asked, but I knew that she already knew.

  ‘It’s Nicholas,’ I said. ‘Nicholas Steiner.’

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, trying to sound surprised but offhand, as if I were a minor acquaintance from the dim and distant past. ‘Martin said that he’d run into you the other day. What a coincidence, that you’ve ended up in this area too. He said you were married.’ The last sentence came out like a non sequitur, following on too quickly from the rest of her little speech, and she covered it up with an embarrassed laugh. ‘I’m afraid you’ve missed him, he’s not here right now. But I’ll be sure to tell him that you called, and …’ She trailed off. I stayed silent, unsure how to respond. The heat of the phone box was making me feel dazed and soporific, the quiet buzz of the flies hypnotic and soothing. I waited. Miles away, down the line, I heard a soft sigh. ‘This is strange,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’

  I found my voice. ‘It’s strange for me too. I probably shouldn’t have called, but when I saw Martin, it made me think about everything – about how I’m sorry that we couldn’t have kept in touch.’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious why not, isn’t it?’ The words were sharp but her tone was sad, belying the snub I suspected she was trying to give me.

  ‘Maybe.’ I thought about it. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I wonder if the time has come when we can be friends.’

  There was a pause; I could almost feel her turning the words over in her head, trying to knock some sense out of them the way a cat plays with a ball. ‘I can’t see how that’s possible,’ she answered finally.

  ‘Why don’t I come over?’ I asked. I hadn’t planned to make the suggestion but it just spilled out of me. I didn’t know myself why I was asking.

  There was no pause this time. ‘Definitely not,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m going to have to go. I’ve got a lot going on here today.’ For the first time I became aware of the faint background noises behind her voice; something that sounded like running footsteps, snatches of jangling
, jaunty music that seemed to start and stop in unexpected places.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said again. ‘I think it would be better if you didn’t call here again.’ Before I could answer, there was a series of beeps and the line went dead. Glancing down at the monitor, I couldn’t be entirely sure whether my money had run out or whether Lydia had hung up on me. Either way, the conversation was over. I leant back against the baking wall of the phone box and closed my eyes. For some reason the few minutes on the phone had drained me of all energy and I felt limp, wrung out like a rag. I stayed there until my head started to ache with the force of the sun on my forehead and the sweet cloying smell of the apple core was beginning to make me feel sick. I pushed the door open and stumbled out on to the street. It felt cold by contrast, and I walked quickly back to the car, knowing what I was going to do. The knowledge that Lydia was there without Martin was too much for me to ignore. I would go over there now, talk to her and set all the thoughts that had disrupted me over the past week at rest. Part of me knew it was a bad decision, but I gave myself no time to talk myself out of it, swinging the car away from the route home and out on to the A road, towards Kirtlington.

  I followed the signs until I was at the outskirts of the village, then wound down my window and showed a passing couple the address that Martin had scribbled down for me. Their directions were vague and it took me another twenty minutes to find the right road, crawling around the narrow streets until I felt that I must have covered the whole town. When I found it, I parked at the end of the road and went in search of number 16. It was a picture-pretty little cottage, with flower beds planted primly around its outskirts so that yellow-tendrilled flowers crept up towards the windows. I couldn’t imagine Lydia tending those flower beds, but then I couldn’t imagine her doing anything domestic; it was a side of her I had never had the chance to see. As I quietly unhinged the gate and walked up the path, I could hear echoes of the same jaunty musical sounds that I had strained to hear on the phone, and mingled among them, children shouting and laughing. For the first time I wondered whether I should turn back, but it was too late; my hand had taken on a will of its own and pressed the doorbell. I heard footsteps running lightly through the hall, and the door was flung open.

  Lydia was standing in the doorway, frozen to the spot. Blonde hair a little shorter than it had once been, brushing her shoulders and layered around her face in a way that made her look modern, edgier. Free of make-up, green eyes wide and accusing in the pale oval of her face. The same slim, compact body lurking under a baggy shirt and shorts. I had once or twice over the years imagined how she might have changed. The hair aside, the answer was not at all. She still looked like the same woman I had dreamt about every night for months after she left – dreams that persisted long beyond my consciously missing her and wishing for her back – but at the same time she was different, because I was seeing her through new eyes. I looked at her and thought, she’s just a woman. Still beautiful, that couldn’t be denied, but just a woman like any other, made out of flesh and bone. Not the elusive angel I had thought I had lost, and yet a small, stupid part of me still wanted to hold her and make sure that she was real.

  ‘I told you not to come,’ she said, her voice dangerously calm.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, ‘but I wanted to see you. I knew it wouldn’t go away, so I came over, just to set things at rest … come full circle, if you like.’ I could see that she didn’t like. She could barely meet my eyes, staring furiously down instead at the red rug under her bare feet. Her toenails were delicately painted with pale pink polish.

  ‘Well, that was a stupid thing to do,’ she muttered.

  ‘I know,’ I said simply, and I did know, even then. ‘But now that I’m here, can I come in?’

  She hesitated, clearly agitated. ‘Wait here,’ she said, and hurried away through the hall, looking back as if daring me to disobey. I waited on the step, not moving a muscle, until she returned. ‘Fine,’ she said, as if in surrender. ‘Come in.’

  I followed her into a country-style kitchen, all rustic wood cupboards and tiled floors. Its wide shuttered windows looked out on to a long narrow lawn. As I followed her gaze I saw the children that I had heard outside, six or seven little girls, all playing some kind of complicated game, running and tagging each other, dancing in a circle and then breaking away again. Lydia went to the window, watching them intently, ignoring me.

  ‘Not all yours, I presume,’ I said drily, to cover up my confusion.

  ‘It’s my daughter’s birthday party,’ she answered flatly. ‘Now perhaps you see why I didn’t think it was such a good idea for you to come round.’

  I swallowed, feeling like the intruder that I was. Looking around, I saw that the low oak table in the corner of the room was laden with party food – jellies in individual pots, gaudy coloured cupcakes and piles of sausage rolls. In the centre stood a large bright pink iced cake, leaning unsteadily to one side. Four pink and white candles were stuck into the mounds of icing.

  I worked it out. ‘You didn’t waste much time.’

  ‘I had her over a year and a half after we left London,’ Lydia said, wheeling round to face me. ‘I think I put it off long enough, don’t you?’

  ‘So you were putting it off?’ I answered.

  ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ We stood facing each other, both hurt and defensive. Again the memories from our affair flitted through my mind: I couldn’t keep them out, couldn’t erase the pictures of her lying naked next to me, looking into my eyes, as close as it was possible for two people to be. When she was that close, I couldn’t focus on her properly, her face blurring into a fuzzy halo of light and dark. I used to trace my fingertips over her features, run them along the straight bridge of her nose and up to the arches of her eyebrows. I told her that it was like being blind, feeling her but not seeing. Sometimes she would close her eyes, and I would touch my fingers very lightly to her quivering eyeballs and her long dark lashes, committing them to a memory that was deeper and more instinctive than sight or sound. It was the texture of her skin which came to me then, so clearly that it was as if I really did feel it under my fingertips again. The thoughts made me feel guilty and irritated with myself. I hadn’t come here to drown in lust-filled memories. If anything the opposite was true; I had wanted to purge her from my system once and for all, extract the tiny residual sting of poison that she had left. Looking at her, I suspected that I couldn’t do it, and that I would never fully be able to understand how things had turned out as they had – why she had chosen him back then, and left me alone.

  Lydia’s face was sad and remote. Perhaps she was troubled by her own memories. We stayed like that for a long time, standing in silence in the kitchen and looking at each other, trying to make sense of things. It was only the sound of the back door slamming, footsteps running towards us, which made her start and look away.

  ‘Louise?’ she called. A moment later a little girl appeared in the doorway. Her dark brown hair was parted into plaits, giving her face a solemn, Pre-Raphaelite air. She was wearing a short blue pinafore dress, with buttons the shape of daisies running down the front, and a badge with ‘Birthday Girl’ emblazoned across it.

  ‘Mummy, I’m bored of the game,’ she said in a small voice, shooting me a puzzled look out of the corner of her eye as she sidled over to Lydia and put her hand in hers.

  ‘Really?’ Lydia exclaimed gaily. ‘Oh well, never mind. We’ll call the others in and then we can have some tea.’

  The child glanced over at the table, saw the cake and promptly burst into floods of tears. Lydia instantly dropped to her knees and put her arms around her, ineffectually trying to shush her, but Louise appeared to be completely distraught, hiccuping for breath through her sobs.

  ‘It’s … it’s not right,’ she howled at last, stamping one button-booted foot on the floor. Lydia looked up at me, a long-suffering expression on her fac
e. I laughed despite my awkwardness.

  ‘Kids, eh?’ I said. The child gave me a poisonous stare before returning to her agonies.

  ‘All right, darling,’ Lydia soothed, biting her lip to hold back the laughter I knew was lurking beneath her sympathetic tone. ‘I’ll fix the cake, I promise. Why don’t you run back outside and let everyone know it’s time for tea?’

  Louise sniffed, rubbed her fists into her eyes and reluctantly withdrew. Lydia got to her feet, smiling ruefully.

  ‘What will you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Get a cheesecake out of the freezer, or something, I suppose,’ she said, raising her shoulders helplessly. ‘She loved pink last week. I can’t keep up.’

  ‘I suppose I’ve got all this to come,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, looking at me differently now. ‘Martin said you had a boy.’

  I nodded. ‘He’s only five months, so he has plenty of tantrums, but at least he can’t complain in words just yet.’

  Lydia’s eyes were soft and bright, filled with something that could have been close to tenderness. ‘I am happy for you, you know,’ she said quietly, and her voice was gentle too, stripped of all the false aggression of her earlier comments. ‘I thought of you often over the years and hoped that you were happy.’

  ‘I wasn’t, for a long time.’ I thought about saying more, but I couldn’t find the words.

  ‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I know I hurt you, and believe me, I regret it every day. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t feel bad for what I did – to both of you.’

  Hearing her say that made me feel sad, and yet triumphant. The way she put it, she had suffered more than I had. I had been able to make a fresh start with Naomi, and I had forgotten her, or as much as was possible, but she had had to carry on in the same tainted relationship as if nothing had gone wrong. I tried to imagine her with Martin, lying by omission every single moment they were together, and suddenly the violence went out of my feelings. I pitied her. It made me feel superior somehow, knowing that she would have to go on living with the knowledge that she had betrayed him, and that she could never take it back.