Rebecca Connell - The Art of Losing

I could easily have sought Lydia out after our assignation in the churchyard, but I grimly resisted the temptation. I had never been involved with a married woman before, but already I was glimpsing the rules: she called the shots and she made the choices, because she undoubtedly had more to lose. It took three long days for her to make up her mind not to write the churchyard off as an insane aberration. On the fourth day, she turned up at the door of my flat after dark. At first I could barely believe she was there and thought I was hallucinating, that my wanting her so much had magically made an elusive image of her appear. She stood at the doorway in a long green dress and gold jewellery, dressed for the opera or a cocktail party. She was breathing heavily, as if she had been running.

‘I got your address from the school files,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I was at a dinner party, and all of a sudden I knew I had to come and see you, so I said I was feeling ill and I was going home. I told Martin to stay, but he won’t stay out late, so I probably don’t have long.’ She laughed nervously, giddily. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said again.

I unwrapped her like a present in front of the two-bar fire, glowing in the dark room and subtly illuminating her body. It was slower than the first time, more intimate. She whispered my name over and over again as we moved together, every whisper sending an almost painful reverberation straight to my heart. Afterwards she buried her face in my shoulder and I knew she was crying. I didn’t ask her why, but I held her and stroked her hair as if I understood.

After that we started meeting whenever we could. Most of our meetings were snatched half-hours around the school, at break times and before class. I often went to the library between lessons just to say a brief hello and have two minutes’ worth of chat. The rest of the time I was on call, watching for notes in my pigeonhole written on the trademark yellow notepaper that she used. Some days there would be no note at all, and I knew that I wouldn’t see her. Other days there would be a few scrawled words: Can’t get away. Missing you. Thinking of you . And other days, less regularly, the notes would take a triumphal tone . M out for the evening! Will come to you at seven . It never occurred to me to rebuff any of her plans or invitations. On the contrary, my social diary was even emptier than it had been before, permanently cleared for Lydia. When we did meet, perhaps twice a week, it wasn’t always for sex. We spent hours talking. She was intelligent, much too intelligent to be wasting time working in a library. I said as much several times, but she claimed she liked it. It went against the grain to think of her whiling away the hours be hind that desk, when she should have been with me.

When I think of the summer that followed, it’s as a series of picture-perfect snapshots, all blurring into one. Lydia on her back in the churchyard, singing with her eyes closed. Her hair, just glimpsed through the darkness in the tower at the top of the library, deserted in the summer holidays, where she waited for me. The two of us trailing our feet in the river, sharing a bottle of wine on a rare Saturday afternoon together. We were happy, as happy as we could be in the circumstances. I never got used to not having her full time, but I accepted it. Sometimes I felt guilty. I had kept up my friendship with Martin, as much out of habit as anything else. The sight of his friendly, earnest face occasionally set off a pang of nausea in me as I thought of how little he knew. I spent very little time with the two of them together, partly because it was simply too hard for me to keep my feelings to myself around Lydia, and partly because it was painful in some nebulous, craven way to see Martin taking such pride in her. He seemed to find every move she made endlessly fascinating. I would catch him looking at her intently in the course of some prosaic task like peeling an orange, and I could tell that he was marvelling at the way her fingers flexed and worked at its skin. He was quick to join in her laughter, even if he plainly did not understand the joke. He praised her dress sense, her skill at cooking, her sensitivity, to me on numerous occasions. It took all I had to smile and nod, and not to shout that he knew nothing, and that his beautiful, talented wife was spending her time away from him fucking the closest thing he had to a friend. Sometimes I thought I hated him. Other times I wished that I had met Lydia first, and that the three of us could have been friends.

Rarely, I wished that I had never met her at all. Once, towards the end of the summer, we were arguing, the same old argument that we always had. I wanted to see her the next night, and she said that it was impossible. I was always chasing her in those days. We were standing facing each other in my flat, both brimming with sour indignation. The conversation was to all intents and purposes over, but I wanted to give a final twist of the knife.

‘It would be better if we had never started this,’ I said. Her head jerked up sharply and I saw the blood drain from her face.

‘You don’t mean that,’ she said.

‘Maybe I do,’ I shot back, unable to stop goading her now that I had got a reaction. ‘It’s not going anywhere, is it? Where could it go? Sometimes I think it’s pointless.’ I couldn’t go on. She had slumped to the floor, knees drawn up to her chin, as if shielding herself against my words.

‘Well, we can stop it, if you like,’ she said, so quietly that I could barely hear her. The words hung in the air between us, and for a moment I thought, yes, this thing has run its course. Leave it now, and maybe you can paper over the cracks and it’ll be as if it was never there. I knew I was fooling myself. In another moment I was at her side, putting my arms around her shaking shoulders.

‘I know this is hard for you,’ she said, her voice muffled by my embrace. ‘It’s hard for me, too. I don’t know what to do.’

It was the first hint she had given that there was a choice to be made. Naively, I had thought that this precarious middle ground could continue. Now I saw that she had gone farther, and that in the not so distant future there were two possible paths calling her; Martin or me. The knowledge frightened me. I couldn’t see how the affair between us could end, but nor could I imagine her standing in front of Martin, peaceable, unsuspecting Martin, and saying that she wanted a divorce.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said then, moving to face her. ‘I was frustrated, that’s all. You know I want to be with you. And if you’re thinking that you need to make a choice, I want you to know that I’m ready to give you whatever you want. If you want us to go away, start a life somewhere new, we can do it. I’ll get a new job, we’ll buy a place, I’ll do whatever it takes. It’s all I want, you know that.’ I was talking fast now, words tumbling out one over the other. ‘I can’t imagine being without you. I won’t be without you. You’re right, we have to do something, I can’t carry on like this.’

We didn’t talk any more about it that night. I knew, though, that the conversation had started off a chain of thoughts and possibilities in her, and that they daunted her. In early September, when we had returned to school, I saw her a few times around the campus, walking with her arms crossed in front of her, so lost in her thoughts that she looked through me blankly. I think she would have come to a decision soon after of her own accord, although even now I’m still not sure what it would have been. In the event, without even meaning to, I pushed her to make the choice before she was truly ready.