The Art of Losing. Rebecca Connell

wouldn’t know where to start,’ she says, shrugging and smiling shakily. ‘It’s just … the sadness of things.’

      He doesn’t know how to respond to this. He inclines his head, perhaps respectfully. ‘Life can be very hard,’ he says eventually. To her shock she hears a raw edge of pain scraping his voice. He is frowning down at his paper, momentarily lost to her. She takes a moment to study him – the profile set into something close to cruelty, the strong Roman nose, lips hardened into a thin line. The sun pours a sharp radiance across his face, casting him in light. She knows what he is thinking of, and it makes her want to seize his hands roughly across the table and shout, You see? You see what you have done?

      ‘I should go,’ she says instead, not moving. He looks up at her again, nodding.

      ‘Well, I hope you feel better soon,’ he says. ‘Take care, ah—’ He pauses expectantly, waiting for her to fill in her name.

      ‘Lydia,’ she says, and watches him closely. This time the emotion spills across his face and he can’t hold it back. She knows her reaction is crucial. She frowns as if puzzled. ‘What’s the matter? Are you all right?’ she asks. He looks at her again, more intently this time.

      ‘It’s an unusual name,’ he says. ‘These days.’

      ‘Is it?’ she replies lightly. ‘My mum always says it was my dad who chose it.’

      ‘Does she,’ he mumbles, retreating back into himself. Her words have dismissed any lurking suspicion that has pricked him. She can see he wants to be alone with his thoughts. As she moves towards the door she looks back and sees him fending these thoughts off, his shoulders hunched against them, his back rigid. She feels a surge of anger so great that she wants to hit something, so hard that she draws blood, but she simply turns and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.

      Back in my room I study my face in the mirror for traces of my mother. I’ve done this a thousand times but I never tire of it. When you lose someone, you take any small comfort that you can get, and it warms me to see any echo of a resemblance. We did not look alike, not really, but when I look closely I can see the line of her jaw beneath mine, the tinge of her eerily green eyes making its impression on my own. She’s there inside me somewhere, but I don’t want her there. I want her here, so badly I can taste it, the acid tang of need sickeningly fresh and surprising every time. The face in the mirror is blurring before me and suddenly it doesn’t look like either of us. It doesn’t look like anyone I know. I blink the tears away. I whisper my own name to myself, wanting to hear it as she used to say it. Louise. It’s not the same, never the same.

      I step back from the mirror, addressing myself in my head. You thought that this would be enough – to see him, to satisfy your curiosity. You were wrong. Nothing you can do will bring her back, but you have the right to know. This man murdered your mother. You need to understand why.

       Nicholas 1983

      I walked in to work across Waterloo Bridge every morning. I told myself that it saved me money, but in reality the walk was more about building a sense of occasion than anything else. It was something to do with height: the feeling that I was walking above the world and that the grey industrial sweeps of office buildings and the cloudy river beneath were somehow watching me and cheering me on. As I paced the bridge, I would often be hit by the sudden knowledge that the day was to be a momentous one, holding events that could alter the course of my life. It was one way – sometimes the only way – of getting me into the school and precipitating the same stultifying routine.

      Strangely, I seemed to be able to fool myself with these false premonitions again and again. I thought they were harmless, but in retrospect they turned me into the boy who cried wolf. When the familiar sense came to me as I crossed the bridge on that bright morning of 17 May, I had no way of divining that, for once, the bubbling anticipation and queasy, faint foreboding sifting beneath my skin were genuine.

      I had been working at the school for two and a half years, bumping along the middle ranks of the English department. Thirty-one, living alone in a box flat in Wimbledon, I had far too much time to convince myself that I was a misunderstood genius who was condemned to a life of a monotony as unremarkable as the recognition after my death would be ecstatic. I was writing poetry around this time: oblique fragments which aimed at Ted Hughes but fell anticlimactically short of the mark. I deliberately kept my flat in little better state than that of a hovel, telling myself as I drank cheap soup out of a grey chipped mug in front of my two-bar fire that I was the typical starving artist in his garret. At these times I conveniently forgot about the school, and my underpaid but decidedly middle-class position there. I hadn’t had a girlfriend for three years. Not because I didn’t want one, and not because I couldn’t get one, but because the two states of wanting and attaining never seemed to coincide. I sometimes thought about becoming a monk. All in all I was ripe for a major life overhaul, and that is exactly what I got.

      When I reached the school that morning I had twenty minutes before I was due to teach my first class at nine. It needed no preparation; the collection of oiks and devils that made up my fourth form were so laughably beyond reach that I had given up on them in all but name months ago. I toyed with the idea of going to the classroom early, sitting at my desk and staring at the whitewashed walls, but the restless mood generated by the walk was still on me. I prowled the campus instead. Sprawling and unstructured, a peculiar mix of original Gothic towers and tacked-on post-war concrete blocks, the school must have once been beautiful, I knew. Now it had the air of an institution gone to seed, an impression only reinforced by the grubby teenage louts crammed into its every crevice. I found myself turning towards one of the few unspoilt buildings remaining on the campus – the library, a converted church with honeyed, yellowing stone walls and candles that lit up its long arched windows when darkness fell. I often wandered its aisles when I was at a loose end, enjoying the temporary tranquillity, for few of the students ever ventured in except under sulky duress. That morning I hesitated before entering. I didn’t feel like browsing, but I still had a quarter of an hour to kill. I pushed open the stone door and slipped into the silence inside.

      I saw her almost at once. Sitting behind the check-out desk, she was slumped forward, reading a newspaper. Her face was shaded by her hand, but the curve of her blonde head, the long fingers splayed over her forehead and the narrowness of her sloping shoulders in their pink wool cardigan leapt out at me, as shockingly and unexpectedly as if she had jumped out of her seat and shouted at me across the library. I know you, I thought. It was an irrational thought, and I knew even as the words formed in my head that I had never seen this woman before, but that’s what it felt like: seeing a much-missed friend again after a long absence. I had to stop myself from going straight up to the desk and telling her so. Instead I crossed softly to the rows of desks that flanked the library’s darkest corner, and settled myself down to watch her. After a few minutes, she pushed the paper aside and looked up. Her face was finely sculpted, delicate yet sensual, dark brows and lashes framing large ethereal eyes. The way she looked, her ash-blonde hair falling primly over the pink cardigan, reminded me of a sixties fashion model, polished and restrained, but nursing a secret abandon. She was beautiful, but not really my type. I liked exotic girls, Mediterranean lips and curves, not wistful English roses who looked as if they should be clutching on to something at all times – a posy of flowers, a prayer book, a man’s hand. And yet somehow, looking at her, I realised that the preferences I had thought I had were all muddled up and wrong, belonging to someone else.

      I went over to the nearest bookshelf and picked a book at random, an obscure Henry James. Without giving myself time to think, I walked up to the check-out desk and slapped the book down, making her look up with a start.

      ‘Have you read this?’ I asked.

      She glanced at the title, then back up at me. ‘I haven’t,’ she answered. When she spoke, something seemed to light up inside her, animating her face and making her eyes shine.