The Art of Losing. Rebecca Connell

      I struck up a casual friendship with Martin Knight. It wasn’t difficult to do; he was the sort of person doomed to be overlooked and to blend into the background. The unexpected attention I showed him seemed to please him. I started off small – a cordial comment or two around the campus, an offer to borrow my newspaper in the staffroom – then progressed to lengthier conversation, commenting on current affairs or the steadily improving weather. Not forthcoming by nature, Martin nevertheless responded to these overtures with eagerness. Within a couple of weeks he was singling me out in the staffroom between lessons, giving me a brisk, confident wave in the knowledge that we were more than mere acquaintances. I don’t know whether he ever stopped to consider why this unknown colleague, more than a decade his junior, had started to take an interest in him. With all that I came to know of him afterwards, I suspect that the question never arose in his mind. He had that peculiar yet surprisingly common combination, an acute academic brain coupled with a near-total lack of interest in human nature. He would wrestle with the finer points of molecular evolution with all the energy of a genuine truth-seeker, but when it came to emotion, he swallowed all that was told him without further question or argument.

      As I got to know him better, I understood that he did have his qualities, however hidden they may have been on first inspection. He was cheerful and sanguine by nature, and spending time in his company was strangely reassuring. He had occasional flashes of quick, dry humour, invariably delivered with a sly look over the top of his glasses. He was automatically generous, often offering me things – a spare snack, a book to read in free periods. He didn’t seem to feel the need to show off or to impress me with his knowledge as so many of my colleagues did. Attractive though these things were, though, none of them made me sit back and think, Ah, so that’s what she sees in him. None of them seemed significant enough; there was nothing extraordinary about him, and I felt instinctively that Lydia deserved, wanted, something extraordinary.

      I had decided early on not to mention Lydia until he did, but I didn’t have long to wait. I think it took only two days of desultory chat before Martin dropped the phrase ‘my wife’ into the conversation. ‘My wife always tells me I would make a terrible bachelor,’ he said, in response to some casual remark of mine about living alone. As he said the words, his face was suffused pinkly with something between embarrassment and pleasure. Watching him shift self-consciously in his seat and stifle a smile, I realised that he worshipped her. The knowledge didn’t soften me; on the contrary, it half angered me.

      ‘Why’s that?’ I asked, biting back my annoyance.

      ‘Well, I’ve never been very good at the domestic side of things,’ he explained. ‘Cooking, cleaning, tidying,’ he added, as if this needed clarification. ‘Lydia does all that.’

      I adjusted my mental picture. I had assumed that she was the sort of woman who sat back and was waited on. ‘She must be very capable,’ I said.

      ‘Oh, very, very,’ Martin agreed with enthusiasm. I waited for some elaboration, but after a pause he shifted the conversation back to my own living arrangements and Lydia was not mentioned again. Nor was I ever invited along to their private lunches, which seemed to take place every Monday and Wednesday. I noticed that he often came back from these lunches buoyant and brimming with bonhomie, his greying hair ruffled, and I envied him.

      One morning we were walking across the campus together at the end of the school assembly, which Ioccasionally attended out of lack of anything else to do. I was holding forth about the latest Thatcher debacle, and I noticed that Martin’s sporadic grunts of approval and murmurs of agreement had abruptly stopped. He was beaming, entirely distracted; I followed his gaze across the courtyard and saw that Lydia was approaching from the opposite direction. Clutching a bulging green carrier bag, books threatening to spill from its confines, she didn’t see us at first. It was only when we were within speaking distance that Martin gave a curious whistle of greeting, obviously some private signal between the two of them. She looked up sharply and smiled as she saw him.

      ‘Hello,’ she said, and then her eyes flickered to me. Her expression changed in a second, but I caught the signals I wanted: surprise and dismay. In another heartbeat she was moving on gaily, rolling her eyes laughingly at the pile of books in her arms, and calling ‘See you later!’ back at Martin, but I wasn’t fooled. She didn’t want me around her husband. If I had ever had any doubts that that brief minute in the library had stayed with her as it had with me, they were instantly discarded, never to return.

      I excused myself to Martin on the pretext that I had forgotten a textbook and hurried back in the direction in which Lydia had gone. At the library, I saw her. She had stopped, leaning back against one of its yellowing stone walls and shifting the bag of books to sit more comfortably in her arms. I walked up behind her and put my hand on her shoulder.

      I expected her to start, but she turned round with something close to resignation. ‘Hello,’ she said again. Her voice this time was softer, sadder. Her blonde hair was falling about her face, green eyes peeking up from under her fringe to meet mine.

      ‘I’m sorry if I scared you,’ I said, though it was obvious I hadn’t.

      She shook her head and made an effort to drag some normality between us. ‘I didn’t know you knew Martin,’ she said cheerfully. The false brightness masked something closer to panic; I could see it in the aggrieved set of her mouth, the way she couldn’t look me in the face for more than a second at a time. ‘I assume you know he’s my husband?’

      ‘Yes. I only found out recently,’ I lied. ‘Not that it matters.’

      She frowned, unsure of what I meant and whether to be offended.

      ‘Well, I suppose not,’ she said. ‘After all, why should you care?’

      ‘I do care,’ I said. She gave a short exasperated laugh at this, hoisting the bag back into her arms and moving away from me.

      ‘I don’t know why we’re having this conversation,’ she said. ‘Listen, I’m not stupid. I can see you’re interested in me, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m married, and even if I wasn’t—’ She stopped short, and I caught the first hint of another of her qualities that I would later come to know well; an inability to give voice to the harsh thoughts that formed so clearly in her head. ‘It’s embarrassing,’ she contented herself with.

      Silhouetted against the library, with the sun casting her in light, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. ‘Well, I’m happy enough to be embarrassing,’ I said. ‘I like being underestimated.’

      ‘Nicholas,’ she said, and hearing her pronounce my name for the first time set off a strange erotic pang that felt as if it came from somewhere so deep inside I couldn’t locate it. I expected her to follow it with some condemnation or other. I think you should leave me alone. You’re being ridiculous. I would never be interested in a man like you. But she didn’t. After a long silence, she just said my name again, softly and caressingly, as if rolling it around her mouth. She didn’t seem to know what else to say.