The Art of Losing

She carried on as if she hadn’t heard me, talking to herself. ‘How could I never have thought about anyone else seeing those notes?’ she said. ‘I put them in a public place where anyone could find them. We’ve been so stupid.’ She stood up, dusting off her skirt. I leapt up to stop her, but she pushed me away, avoiding my eyes. ‘I want to be by myself,’ she said, and in another moment she was gone. I could have run after her, but I didn’t want to arouse suspicion in anyone in the library downstairs. I told myself she would get over it, but I couldn’t shake off the dread that was slowly trickling through my veins, the feeling that I had ruined everything.

The next day she wasn’t at work. I waited at the library long past the time when I should have been teaching my first lesson. She didn’t appear on Thursday either. It took until Friday for me to crack and approach Martin. I gave him some cock-and-bull story about having needed to borrow a new set of books for my sixth-form class, and having noticed that Lydia was not there. Immediately I could tell that there was something he was keeping from me. He had a smug, self-satisfied look about him, as if he were cherishing a special secret that excluded me and everyone else. I pushed him harder than I had thought my pride would allow, desperate to get to the root of Lydia’s disappearance. Eventually he capitulated, with all the laughing good humour of a man who had everything he wanted. I was not to tell anyone just yet, but he and Lydia were leaving, he said. She had grown tired of London and wanted to settle down somewhere quieter, maybe start a family. At this point he blushed visibly with pleasure. She had always been impulsive, and ideally he would have liked to stay in London a little longer, but what was a man to do? The headmaster had been very understanding, and was allowing him gardening leave from the end of next week. He knew they would be happy, and he hoped that I would come and visit them, wherever they ended up. All at once he faltered, obviously realising that I was not heaping congratulations on his head. With a heart so full of panic, pain and incomprehension that I thought it was impossible that he should not see it, I shook his hand and wished him joy.

I saw Lydia once more before they left. She came to toast Martin at his leaving drinks – he had been at the school for six years, and although he had been consistently passed over for promotion, friendship and approbation, his colleagues apparently felt an urgent need to celebrate his reign. I watched her from the other side of the room, laughing and clinking glasses with all the suddenly gallant scientists flocking around her like bees round an exotic flower. She was wearing a tight black dress, her hair piled on top of her head, soft tendrils escaping and caressing her bare shoulders. I was furious with her, for looking so beautiful and happy, for leaving me. I thought that she had not seen that I was there at all, but when she and Martin turned to leave, hand in hand, she looked straight across the room at me for an instant. Her eyes were pleading, full of longing. I knew she was trying to tell me that she still loved me, but I looked back coldly, giving her no sign that I had understood, and then looked away. When I turned back she was gone.

I spent the next three years trying to get over her. I was promoted at work, and became head of department. I started tutoring the more demanding pupils one on one for an extra fee, and soon I could afford to move out of my box flat into somewhere far nicer. After those three years had passed I met Naomi, and she woke up the faintest echo of something in me that I had thought had died. We married a year later, and when I thought of Lydia, it was with the certain belief that I would never see her again. And for almost six years, I was proved right.

Louise 2007 (#u6f354975-6248-5096-99a6-131987812659)

Lydia cannot always trust her memories. Scenes and events from her childhood swim into her mind with disturbing frequency, but she seems to have no way of sorting truth from fiction. She used to have a favourite memory – her father kneeling down to present her with a hot pink flower, her mother clapping her hands delightedly in the background, the setting luminous and imbued with well-being. One day she switched on the television and saw the very same scene eerily played out in some old film she must have seen years before, the faces blurred into unfamiliarity, but everything else identical to the picture in her head. It was the first but not the last time that she realised that her mind had played a trick on her. The memory had felt like hers, but it belonged to someone else. And as the years go by, she loses more and more memories, not by forgetting them, but by handing them back to their rightful owners.

She doesn’t know why, but she has always been this way. Her name, her age, all those everyday and automatically known things, have never seemed to be part of her in the way that they seem to be of other people. She is liable to misplace them, muddle them up in her head. So taking on her mother’s name feels strange to her, and yet not strange. It is just as much bound up with her as her own, and it needs to be used. It’s been hanging around unspoken for too long. She supposes that it is her mother’s memory she’s marking. However little Lydia remembers about her, and however unreliable it may be, she existed. That shouldn’t be forgotten. Least of all by him.

Adam’s flowers are starting to wilt. She has kept them in a vase by her bed for the past week, and for days they stayed in full bloom, their crimson petals so plushly perfect that she had to inspect them several times to make sure they were real. She knows that Sandra has noticed them; a sly hint was dropped at the dinner table, a jocular attempt to find out the identity of the sender, but she pretended not to understand. Now the roses are curling and browning slightly at the edges. In another day or two they will be dead, and she will have to decide whether to throw them out, or whether to swallow her pride and press them into dried-out husks, as she secretly wants to. Sitting at her dressing table, she plucks a petal off and crushes it between her fingers, the sweet scent rubbing off on to her skin. He cannot have known that roses were her favourite flowers, although she supposes it is a common enough choice.

This is not the first time she has sat like this, staring at the flowers. In fact, since she collected them from the pavement seven days ago, it has become something of a mid-morning habit. So when she hears the doorbell downstairs, Sandra’s voice raised in polite enquiry, and the almost inaudible but unmistakable tones answering back, it is perhaps not as much of a coincidence as it might seem. Still, it is enough to make her start up from her chair and run to the door, heart hammering. She can hear him more clearly now – he is asking whether she is around, his voice strained and embarrassed. Mentally, she wills a message down to Sandra. Tell him I’m out, tell himI don’t live here any more. And then finds with a guilty start that this is not what she wants at all.

Footsteps are approaching now, coming up the stairs to find her. She darts back to the dressing table and opens a book, pretends to study it. The door is pushed open and Sandra peeks around it – she never knocks, presumably clinging to the knowledge that despite the fact that she has been forced to take in a lodger, it is her house and therefore hers to do as she likes in. She’s a big woman, comfortable and matronly with a peroxide bob and meticulously plastered make-up. Such is the size of her that for a moment, Lydia doesn’t see Adam lurking behind in the shadows of the hall.

‘You’ve got a visitor,’ Sandra announces, beaming. ‘The same visitor you’ve had every day for the past week, in fact. He finally tracked you down!’ Behind her, Lydia sees Adam experiencing a silent agony of embarrassment and feels sorry for him. She suddenly realises that he must only be nineteen, and still has something of a teenager’s gaucheness. He’s several years younger than her, although of course there is no way he could know this. ‘So!’ Sandra prattles on, oblivious to the mortification she is causing. ‘I suppose this clears up one mystery!’ With a flourish, she indicates the roses, which have clearly been given an elegant vase and set in pride of place. Lydia feels her cheeks flame up, so that by the time Sandra retreats, with much innuendo about leaving them alone for a good chat, she and Adam are equally mute and self-conscious.

He recovers first, wiping a hand across his mouth and shrugging as if to slough off the temporary awkwardness. ‘Tracked you down is about right,’ he says. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

She is tempted to ask why but can’t quite get the words out. Standing in her bedroom, where she has only imagined him up to now, he seems larger than life. His scuffed trainers, his big hands and his muscular body don’t fit the quiet chintz of Sandra’s box room.

‘I’ve been quite busy,’ she says. ‘I did want to thank you for these, though.’

He dismisses the roses with a wave of the hand. ‘Least I could do,’ he says. The allusion to what happened in the club upsets her. She has been trying not to think about Isobel, or the lust-drunk look on Adam’s face as she danced, and much less what happened after. ‘Listen,’ he continues, sitting down with a bump on her bed, ‘I have been round a few times. Not quite as many as your interfering landlady might have suggested, obviously, but still, a few. I wanted to see you.’ He pats the bed and she goes and joins him there, thinking that this at least cannot hurt.

‘That’s very flattering,’ she says. ‘But I can’t imagine your girlfriend is too pleased.’

‘It’s not like that,’ he says, a trifle too quickly. ‘Isobel and I – we’re friends, sometimes we have fun.’

‘Have sex, you mean,’ she snaps, aware that she is sounding jealous, but unable to help herself.

‘Yeah, OK – have sex,’ he agrees, shrugging his shoulders helplessly. He’s trying to look contrite, but he can’t entirely hide the ghost of a smirk. ‘But that doesn’t mean she’s my girlfriend. Look, I feel really bad about going off and leaving you like that. I don’t know why I did it. It was you I wanted to—’ He breaks off and in her head she finishes the sentence with forbidden words, words that she has never said aloud. They make her feel hot, bewildered. She stares down at her hands.

‘Would she like to be?’ she asks then. ‘Your girlfriend, I mean?’

Adam shrugs again and frowns, as if weighing up an entirely new concept. ‘She might do,’ he says. ‘But she isn’t. And besides, term ends in a fortnight. She’ll be going home to Kent, and obviously I live here.’ She doesn’t like the inference, and looks at him sharply. He corrects himself with commendable swiftness. ‘I mean, I don’t mean … it wouldn’t be going behind her back for us to spend some more time together. Because, like I say, there’s nothing going on.’

‘Mmm.’ She isn’t convinced, but wants to leave the subject of Isobel until she can think about it, alone. ‘What makes you think I’m not going home for the holidays myself?’ she demands. As soon as she asks, she sees a shift in Adam; he looks surer of himself, even a little angry, and with a flash of insight she realises that she is about to be challenged.

‘This is the thing,’ he says. ‘After I’d been here a couple of times and you weren’t in, I went over to Jesus and tried to get hold of you that way. But you’re not a student there, are you?’

Lydia knows she will have to think fast, but she can’t get rid of the nagging question in her mind. ‘But you don’t even know my surname,’ she says.

‘I know that,’ he replies. Her comment seems to have taken away some of his anger; he leans back against the headboard, stretching his legs out across the duvet until they almost graze her own. ‘I left a note in every pigeonhole with the first initial L.’ The matter-of-fact tone in which he makes the admission suggests that, amazingly, it doesn’t seem to embarrass him. As she takes in what he has done, she finds that she is flattered and more than a little amused. She can’t help smiling.

‘That was very enterprising of you,’ she murmurs.

‘Yes,’ he snaps back, irritated again now. ‘And I left my number so you could get in touch with me, and I’ve had crank calls from about a dozen people all week, mostly blokes taking the piss.’

She can’t hold back the laughter that bubbles up in her throat, and has to clamp a hand over her mouth. To her relief he joins in, and for a few moments they abandon themselves to a mutual paroxysm of mirth, flapping their hands at each other in wheezing protest. ‘I might have got your note, and just decided not to reply,’ she points out when she has calmed down, wiping her eyes.

Adam shakes his head confidently. ‘You would have replied,’ he says, and for an instant she wonders what else was in the note besides his phone number. ‘Besides, you’ve just given yourself away a bit there.’ There is a pause; he looks slyly up at her, hands clasped behind his head, waiting for her to speak. ‘So what is it with you?’ he asks when she doesn’t. ‘You’re living here with some middle-aged battleaxe, you say you’re at college when you’re not, and you can make yourself disappear for days on end. What are you really doing here?’

She can’t blame him for the directness of the question, but it brings her back down to earth. She thinks of Nicholas, and feels sick. Adam’s face looks sad now, reflective, as he takes in her silence. The winter sun streaming through the window picks out his features and, more than before, she sees Nicholas’s strong brow imprinted on his, Nicholas’s lips softened into Adam’s. Just for a moment, the resemblance is so strong that she feels a surge of hatred for him, but almost as soon as it has come she forces herself to lock it back up in its box. It isn’t fair to blame him, or to assume that all the unpleasant qualities she knows his father has have been passed on down the generations with Adam’s birth, like gifts from a malevolent fairy godmother. She sighs and tucks her legs up under her chin, pulling her skirt down over her knees.

‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘I’m not at the university. I wish I was. The truth is that I had a bit of a falling out with my parents a month or so ago. I was at uni in Manchester, but I dropped out of my course – I wasn’t enjoying it, I don’t think it was really what I wanted to do – and they weren’t happy about it. It got to the point where I just needed to get away, so I came here – I always liked Oxford, and I thought I’d be able to get a job. I still might … I haven’t been looking very hard.’ She stops for breath, marvelling at how easily the words have come, without her even having to formulate a story in her head beforehand. Adam has straightened up on the bed, his dark brown eyes serious and sympathetic.

‘This falling out with your parents, is it bad?’ he asks.

Lydia weighs up the possibilities. She doesn’t want to be seen as a martyr, complete with a complicated family feud that she might well have to keep enhancing and adding to as the weeks go by. ‘Not really,’ she says carefully. ‘They understood that I needed some space. They expect that I’ll go back to studying eventually, and I’m sure I will. I think they think of this as more of a gap year.’

Adam nods, relieved; this is safer ground. ‘I don’t know why you didn’t just tell me in the first place,’ he says a little aggrievedly. ‘Did you think I only talk to Oxford girls?’

‘No, of course not,’ she says hurriedly. ‘But, you know, when we met … in the lecture theatre … it seemed the obvious thing to say. I know I shouldn’t really have been at that lecture, but I’m … I’m interested in literature.’ Again, Adam appears to accept this, half-truth as it is, without thinking it too strange. He visibly relaxes, obviously relieved at having solved the puzzle, and for the first time he shoots her a warm and genuine smile.

‘Well, I like a woman of mystery anyway,’ he says flirtatiously. ‘Look, I’m due at a tutorial in half an hour, so I’m going to have to go. But do you want to meet up tomorrow? I’m having a few people round for drinks in my room in the evening, about nine probably – nothing major, but if you want to come it would be good to see you. Again.’

‘Will—’ she begins, and then cuts herself short. She had been going to ask whether Isobel would be there, but realises it is none of her business. ‘Will you give me your number?’ she covers up. ‘Then perhaps I can call you tomorrow and we’ll see.’

‘Sure.’ She watches him cross to her dressing table and jot down the number on the edge of her notebook. From behind, he looks tall and imposing, a grown man already, and it makes her feel young and, briefly, inadequate. She shakes the thought off, going to join him.

‘Just one thing,’ she says, putting her hand hesitantly on the sleeve of his coat. ‘If I do come along tomorrow, I’d rather that nobody else knows my situation. I’d rather they thought I was at the university. It makes things easier,’ she finishes lamely. She knows it sounds foolish, and can’t really understand her reluctance herself for one lie to be replaced with another. Adam looks as if he might argue, then he nods.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘It’ll be our secret.’ The words please him, it seems. He’s standing very close to her, so close that his citrus-spiked aftershave prickles her nose. Very lightly, he puts one hand on the small of her back and the other to her cheek, two fleeting caresses that leave the parts he has touched tingling. Only two or three times before has she been this close to being kissed. On every occasion, the moment itself proved a letdown, a damp squib instead of an exploding rocket. She moves away from Adam and holds the door open for him. She won’t risk the disappointment again.

‘See you tomorrow,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’ He nods and brushes her arm briefly as he leaves. From her vantage point in the attic room, she watches him as he steps out on to the street, strolls down it with his hands in his pockets and then, restlessly, as if he can’t keep all his jolting and jumping nerves still, breaks into a brisk jog. She stays at the window until he has become little more than a bobbing shape on the horizon. Turning back into the room, she starts to remove the heads of the scarlet roses carefully one by one, discarding the dripping stems.

The next night Lydia stands in the porter’s lodge at Lincoln College, shivering in her thin coat. It’s raining again, and she has been sheltering in the lodge for almost quarter of an hour. When she arrived, she sent Adam a text message: ‘By the entrance to your college. I don’t know where your room is – come down and meet me if you like.’ She knows she should have called him, but when it came to it, she couldn’t face the possibility of hearing his voice turn distant and unfriendly, regretting the invitation. Cursing herself, she hugs her arms around her chest, shifting from foot to foot. This is ridiculous, but she can’t face turning round and going back out into the cold, hailing a taxi and spending another night alone with Sandra’s television blaring downstairs.

Suddenly she hears a commotion across the quad. Peering into the dark, she can just make out a figure running towards her, feet pounding wetly on stone. Part of her already knows, but it’s only when he passes under a solitary floodlight that she sees it is Adam. He runs into the lodge and envelops her in a sudden hug, crushing her against him. He’s brought the smell of the rain with him – damp grass and the faint, musty scent of earth. In the fuzzy half-light of the lodge, Lydia looks into his eyes and feels dizzy.

‘Sorry,’ he gasps, panting from his exertions. ‘I had some music on and didn’t hear my phone, I only just got your text. Have you been waiting ages?’

‘Not at all,’ she lies, smiling radiantly. ‘Am I late?’

‘Not at all,’ he says in turn. ‘Come with me.’

They run back across the quad together in the dark, hand in hand, her unreliable high heels slipping and sliding along the rain-washed stone. By the time they reach the other side her hair is soaked and plastered to her scalp. Laughing, she wrings it out as she hurries up the staircase after Adam. They climb several flights of stairs, each one winding closer and tighter than the last. He has an attic room too, she thinks, and feels stupidly pleased at the note of similarity. When they near the door she hears the music thumping behind it, and the shouts and screeches of laughter tumbling over each other from what sounds like a dozen or more voices. She freezes; she isn’t used to this. She had vaguely imagined a select group of Oxford students, sitting sedately around a bottle of wine and talking about literature, but this sounds more like a lunatic asylum. Adam sees her apprehension and grins, steering her towards the door.

‘Don’t worry, no one’s that pissed yet,’ he says. His words have the opposite effect of their calming intention on Lydia, who finds it hard to envisage the carnage that could come later. Numbly she allows herself to be shepherded through the door and into the bedroom. People are draped over the bed and chairs, lounging on the floor and perched on the windowsill. A couple are smoking a joint out of the window, deep in animated conversation. Others are bellowing along to the thrash metal track that is blaring from the stereo, so absorbed in it that they don’t even turn round. A couple of girls shout Adam’s name drunkenly, beaming red-lipsticked smiles and raising their arms to the air in delight. She recognises one of them as Carla, the Latin-looking girl in the club. As they approach Carla points at her and smiles again, her dark eyes half closing in recognition.