Harm's Way Read online

  Beth seated herself opposite me, while Christian sat at the end of the oval table in between us. We hadn’t exchanged a word since our encounter that afternoon, which had left me feeling quenched, sophisticated and pleasantly debauched. As he sat down now, his knee knocking into mine, I felt a wave of heat travel through my face and neck.

  ‘I’m not cramping you, am I?’

  Beth wasn’t listening, having been called on to examine Stephen’s latest mosquito bite.

  ‘No.’ I laid a finger, so light it might have been a stray hair, on the muscled undulation of his thigh.

  ‘Right, you two.’

  Beth was suddenly fixing us both with her clear blue gaze.

  I willed Christian to be brave enough not to pull away.

  ‘What are we having to eat? If you want we could all share one of those things.’

  She pointed to an enormous seafood platter on the next table which neither Christian nor I could have cared less about.

  ‘No, I think I’d prefer to start with the salade d’endive, and then …’

  He was showing her now, on the badly typed menu with its slightly elevated ‘r’s, what he had decided on, leaving my hand resting, quite naturally, where it was.

  We spanned many topics that night, conscious that it was our last together. We were due to leave the following evening and it felt as though we were back in Paris already. We spoke about death, Houellebecq, the French health service and Johnny Hallyday. Finally, with a kind of meandering grace, the subject turned to love.

  I had said very little, Christian even less, but Pierre was gesticulating, moist-eyed as he made an impassioned yet entirely abstract speech on the subject.

  ‘Now it’s very clear to me,’ he finished, ‘that this little one here has never been in love.’

  For all the frivolity of the atmosphere I took this badly. I thought it a rude comment to make at the time and I am still offended by it now. The reason for my indignation was that it was true. But he knew nothing about me or my past, and that night particularly, when I felt like one of them, the statement seemed like a slur. Strange that the thing we criticise most in ourselves provokes the greatest sense of outrage when pointed out by someone else. I knew that, at eighteen, my smiles were not yet backlit with secret emotion, and that when I was sad I was simply sad, without any of the sweetness that an éducation sentimentale provides.

  Luckily, there was no call for me to respond. The subject was swiftly buried when Pierre nearly overturned the table by jumping up to ask the waiter to take a group photograph. I still have a copy of it today. Occasionally I take it out from between the leaves of the book in which it is placed and examine it, marvelling at how much information there is in a single, over-exposed snapshot. There is always one person – in this case Pierre – who, in photographs as in life, seems to be partially cut from the frame. He leans in, as though his life depends on it, grasping Stephen around the neck in an act of aggressive friendship. Stephen is red-eyed and waxy-faced – the only person out of focus. He is looking at the camera with the same polite discomfort one reserves for chance encounters with people who have long since dissolved into one’s past.

  The only gap in the bouquet of our five seated figures lies between Stephen and me. In retrospect this seems to confirm what I always suspected: that there was never any real bond between us. Christian sits at the centre, any dominance of the scene lost by the fact that his eyes are closed. And while my left arm is hidden behind his back (where unknown to everyone, and to the camera, my thumb was travelling slowly up and down his spine), his is draped loosely around Beth’s shoulders, while she attempts to hide her stomach with a casually placed hand. Next to her, I look like a gangly adolescent, uneasy in my own skin, my furtive eyes avoiding the camera. The events of that afternoon, those of the future, and the false jollity of that dinner, are there for everyone to see.

  I hadn’t expected to get much sleep that night and sure enough I couldn’t: my tongue felt gigantic in my mouth, my limbs heavy. My lower stomach ached with the excesses of the afternoon, refusing to let me forget what had happened. Images of Beth’s smiling face alternated with Christian’s looking down at me, made ugly by pleasure. But I was too excited, too pleased with myself, to feel guilt.

  Our last day unfolded quietly, every action tainted by our imminent departure. Beth had come down late, and sat hunched on a chair by the pool wrapped in an old Japanese kimono she had found in the cupboard in her room. I watched her and Christian above the tightly typed pages of my book, noticing how they interacted with one another, and how much more needy Beth had become. Even with her eyes closed, she kept her hand on a part of him at all times. When he spoke to her, she began to smile at the first word, unaware of what he was about to say. My thoughts dissolved as an icy jet of water burned through the base of my back, and down my bikini bottoms. It was Stephen.

  ‘Stop it,’ I cried. My book fell to the ground with a muted thud.

  ‘I thought you looked a little too comfortable there,’ he smiled.

  ‘I didn’t even hear you coming. Have you only just woken up?’

  ‘Yes. I had an interesting night.’

  Assuming Stephen was about to go into typically whingeing details about the mattress or the noises of the plumbing, and failing to register the discomposure in his eyes, I lay back down on my sunlounger and sighed with lack of interest in what I was about to ask: ‘Why, what happened?’

  ‘Well … I’ll tell you later. Beth! Do you still want to go and get those things for your old man?’

  ‘Yes please!’

  Beth was up now, making her way into the house, the delicate silk of her kimono catching against the stone steps on the way.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘These boxes of crystallised fruit she saw in a confiserie next to the supermarket the other day. Apparently her dad couldn’t get enough of them when they once had a family holiday in Toulouse, so she wants to send him some.’

  ‘And you’re going to drive her down there? That’s very sweet.’

  And very convenient for me, I added to myself.

  ‘We won’t be long. I want to make the most of all this before we leave this evening.’

  But there was one last impediment before I could be alone with Christian.

  ‘Where’s Pierre?’ I called out to Stephen’s retreating back.

  ‘He went to get the papers a while ago. Oh, and it’s true what they told us. Apparently people really are dying in Paris: it’s a massive heat wave.’

  I waited, so still that the pulse in the vein on the underside of my arm seemed to beat aloud, until I heard the slam of the front door and the throttle of the engine. Lying on my front, with my head turned away from Christian and my arm bent up over my face, I wondered how long it would take him to come over. Would he stroke my hair first? Or just turn me over and kiss me straight away? Minutes passed, and still I heard and felt nothing. My excitement turned to mortification: he was better at this game than I was, and he knew that I was waiting.

  ‘If you want it so much why don’t you come here?’

  I might not have heard him, had I not been straining for the slightest sound. Submissive, forgetting my dignity, I stood up and walked over to him, sheltering the sun from my eyes with one hand. Suddenly shy, and unsure of what to do next, I perched on the edge of his chair and put a hand, tentatively, on his foot. Christian withdrew it as he pulled his body into an upright position. Seizing me with both hands by the nape of my neck he bent forward. The kiss was good: warm, not too devouring, long and tranquil. A kiss that, after the first shiver, imbued me with lethargic contentment and did not disturb the perfect equilibrium of our two bodies. A familiar wheezing noise was all the while growing louder, its source suddenly coming into view in the reflective brown irises of Christian’s eyes. It was the gardener, standing perfectly still a few feet away, his eyes buried deep within their hollows.

  We sprang apart, turning what should have been perfectly natural i
nto the guilty secret that it was. There was no need to worry. He did not know which of we five were couples, and besides, I was beginning to think there was something voyeuristic about the old man.

  ‘Can we help you?’ I asked him coldly in French.

  ‘Monsieur Pierre …?’

  ‘Is not here. I’ll tell him you came by.’

  The exchange was over and yet still he stood there, the pink flesh on the inside of his bottom lip slick with saliva.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ asked Christian, jerking his chin at him with unmistakable rudeness.

  ‘No … I don’t think so,’ mumbled the old man, beginning his slow journey back to the cottage at the bottom of the garden.

  We had no reason to be scared but the interruption had broken the moment, and when Pierre came back ten minutes later, we were at a respectable distance from each other. Our host, too, seemed on edge. He flitted to and fro from the kitchen all afternoon, bringing full glasses, and taking away empty ones, until Beth, relaxing after her morning’s expedition, had to forcibly sit him down.

  ‘Pierre, you’ve been spoiling us all weekend, now just relax. Think how wonderful it’ll be when you wake up tomorrow morning and we’ve gone.’

  ‘How can you say that? Do you know how much fun I’ve had this weekend? I’ll miss you all terribly.’

  He looked at me as he said this, and I wondered if the reason for his mood was the realisation that he would never succeed in seducing me. His extended parting hug early that evening, our bags crammed into the boot of the car and Stephen already at the wheel, confirmed as much.

  ‘You will come back next summer, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course!’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We’d love to,’ we all cried in unison, knowing full well that none of us would. Pierre’s dry goodbye kiss missed my mouth by a fraction of an inch, but I managed to check my revulsion, pressing his hands and saying: ‘It has been wonderful: I shall never forget it.’

  For once, I wasn’t lying.

  I hadn’t minded the fifteen-minute silence with which our drive back to Paris began, spending the time gazing unseeingly at the countryside and replaying, for the tenth time that day, the events of the night before. The truth was that I felt closer to Beth than ever before: we had tasted the same sensations and I would know now, when she spoke of Christian, exactly what she meant. After twenty minutes of no one saying a word, I suddenly remembered Stephen’s cryptic comment earlier. ‘So what were you going to tell me, Stephen?’

  ‘Well, you won’t believe it.’

  ‘Tell us.’

  I had never seen Stephen blush before but his forehead and the corners of his nose had begun to redden.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Ahem, well, Pierre, as it turns out – how shall I put this – wasn’t interested in you, Anna.’

  It was my turn to redden.

  ‘He was interested in me.’

  ‘What?’

  Beth was sitting in the back with Christian, but I could hear the broad smile in her voice.

  ‘No way. Stephen, what happened?’

  And as we drove through the centre of Deauville, past the marble-fronted casino towards the motorway, Stephen described how, when the rest of us had gone to bed the night before, Pierre had convinced him to have one last glass of Calvados. The temperature had dropped, and they had come in from the balcony and sat on Stephen’s makeshift bed in the sitting room, deconstructing a couple of their work colleagues, until, apropos of nothing, Pierre began to speak of his loneliness. His flat in Paris was too big for him after the divorce, he said, and the house in Normandy was a painful reminder of his little girl.

  ‘You just need to find another woman to share those things with,’ Stephen had attempted reassuringly.

  ‘But that’s the thing,’ Pierre had replied, draining his glass with one last gulp. ‘I broke up with Nicole because I realised that no woman could ever really make me happy.’

  It had taken Stephen a few seconds to register what Pierre was saying, but only one to predict what was about to happen. An arm had slid behind his back, threatening to curl around his shoulder at any moment.

  ‘Please don’t say any more, please don’t,’ Stephen had silently prayed.

  ‘But I think maybe you know all this. And I don’t think I’d be wrong to say that it was, perhaps, the reason that you agreed to come down here?’

  ‘But you are wrong, and it’s not the reason I came here at all.’ Stephen had leapt up now, appalled but full of pity for the poignant picture before him: a middle-aged man who had realised too late in life who he was, and was unable to make the transition gracefully.

  We listened open-mouthed, each one of us no doubt drawing our own conclusions, no one knowing quite what to say. I was surprised, but my chief concern was that no one should remember my embarrassing pronouncements about Pierre flirting with me.

  ‘But we all thought – well, Anna thought – that he was trying it on with her.’

  ‘I didn’t quite say that, Beth. I never said that.’

  ‘No, I know, darling, but …’

  ‘Well, Anna,’ Stephen laughed bitterly. ‘I guess the world doesn’t revolve around you after all.’

  In the rear-view mirror I could see Christian looking out of the window, smiling.

  Seven

  Confronted once again at the museum by Berthe Morisot’s reproachful eyes, I had the disconcerting feeling that nothing had changed. Out of the elaborate confines of her frame she stared at me as if to say: ‘Well, what did you expect?’ The truth was that I had expected everything to be different. I had expected what happened in Normandy to be the beginning of something fun – if not a full-blown fling, then at least a series of amusing, secret meetings. Instead, I had returned to my sedentary job and a phone that refused to ring.

  It had been nearly a week since Normandy and I’d heard nothing. I knew as much about Christian and Beth’s movements as I could find out from Stephen, whom I had seen only once since our return to Paris. Apparently Christian had been working nights, and as the restaurant was nearer Beth’s flat than his own she had given him a key so that he could let himself in between two and three o’clock every morning and slip into her bed. I was outraged by the ease with which their relationship had resumed its course – even progressed – in this way, not having wavered for a second, and felt confused by the permanency this new regime seemed to suggest.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea to start settling into that kind of pattern so early,’ I told Beth on the phone, after enduring the description of an idyllic evening Christian had treated her to at Le Comptoir off Saint Michel – a restaurant I had planned to introduce her to. ‘It’ll take all the excitement out of things. I mean, you may as well move in together.’

  I spat out this last part as if it were the worst eventuality I could think of, convinced that I was offering my beloved friend genuinely good advice. Wasn’t she the first to say that she often became too clingy?

  ‘Anna listen, I’m not bothered about that any more. I sort of want to move things on now. It’s complicated, but you’ll understand one day. He’s just so easy to be with – so different to Irish guys. Have you noticed how Frenchmen don’t seem to be afraid of feminine things? The other day he was actually giving me advice on some of my designs, and whenever he has a night off, he cooks for me. It’s so refreshing.’

  Angrily predicting that she would yet again postpone our plans to meet, I told Beth that I had a call waiting, and hung up.

  My father, sensing that all was not right, had once again offered to come and spend a weekend with me. It was the first time I was tempted to agree.

  ‘What about Mum – would she be able to come too?’

  ‘I’m not sure, darling. I could ask,’ he added brightly, the subtext being ‘although I daren’t’. ‘The problem is that she’s got this big case on at the moment – the one I told you about – so it might be tricky this time …’

  I stopped listening at that point,
reassuring my father that I was fine and didn’t need him to come out, that I was becoming quite grown-up in fact, and that he might not recognise the jeune Parisienne who was once his daughter.

  * * *

  Over the next few days a mood settled over me as grim and determined as a London sky. Again, I had been made a fool of. It wasn’t the fact that I had slept with Christian that pricked my vanity: it was the knowledge that, despite everything, I was still being excluded. Then I would remember that afternoon in Normandy and look around stealthily, hoping that nobody could read my mind. Blind to the tourists passing in and out of my line of vision, I developed a knack of pressing my thighs together until – unnoticed by anyone – the hard wooden seat sent a jolt of pleasure through me.

  That was where he found me, one late August morning, ten days later. I had seen him coming, spotting the crown of his head as it made faltering progress through the atrium behind a gaggle of lycéens. I prided myself on being above girls for whom the purr of the telephone was an emotional barometer, but as the days thudded by, and that tiny corner of possibility darkened like the last chink of light against a wall, I had wondered whether this might be it: the first time something didn’t go my way.

  I smiled now, complacently, though with that perverse dip of disappointment that occurs when there is nothing left to wish for. Hidden by one of the Egyptian-style tombs lining the main hall, I watched him trying to find me, peering into each gallery, dwarfed by the bronze sculptures in the lobby, before finally asking an attendant. His studied nonchalance made it all the more enjoyable to watch. Doesn’t the real charm of hide and seek lie in the knowledge that someone is desperately trying to find you? I knew that he would manage, eventually, and returned to my seat, assuming an unruffled attitude as I waited for him to arrive.

  ‘How have you been?’

  ‘Busy, you know. You?’

  ‘Same.’

  He turned and stared impassively at the adjacent still life.

  ‘Just look at all this,’ he said, sounding vaguely irritated and passing a hand behind his neck in a familiar gesture that made me queasy with longing. ‘These must be worth a fortune.’