Harm's Way Page 15

  I shook my head, a little too vigorously. Any jealousy I had felt towards Beth had almost entirely dissipated over the past few weeks, but there were enough taut emotions that night without Christian’s presence adding to the mix.

  ‘No. I think she just needs to have her friends around her. Besides, he’s probably working. Let me go in and talk to her.’

  She responded to my knock immediately, gentle though it was, and I shut the door behind me and perched beside her on the bed. She had changed into a pair of dusky pink pyjamas, decorated with bears, coffee cups and the words: métro, boulot, dodo. The overall effect was laughably saccharine.

  ‘Where on earth do they come from?’ I joked, placing a cup of camomile tea on the bedside table and a comforting hand on her leg.

  A smile, blurred by its contact with the pillow, turned into a forced giggle.

  ‘Aren’t they hideous? My aunt bought them for me when she came over last Christmas. I think they’re meant for people younger than me, probably younger than you even, but they’re really comfortable, and don’t worry: I keep them hidden in my bottom drawer for emergency situations like these. I would never let Christian see them.’

  It was my turn to force a smile. I hated the way his name punctured every conversation, making all my words feel like lies. Her own smile faded. Her feverish cheeks and bright eyes made her look like the consumptive heroine of a Brontë novel, and I felt an almost unbearable throb of compassion for her.

  ‘Beth …’ I stopped, realising I had nothing to say.

  ‘I know. I know, my darling,’ and somehow she was comforting me. ‘Please don’t worry. I’ll be fine. It just gets to me every now and then, that’s all.’

  I lay down beside her on the bed for a further half-hour, turning the lights out at her request, and for the first time we discussed death, what it meant, the strangeness of it. I could no longer see her face, and unexpectedly, I found myself telling her about the girl on the bridge. I was careful enough to amend the details of course, explaining that it had been on my way back from the date I’d told her about the week before, and that I would doubtless never see the boy again. But quite abruptly, Beth stopped murmuring sleepy words of acquiescence, and fell asleep. I tiptoed out, whispering more to myself than to her:

  ‘Just get a good night’s sleep and it’ll all look a whole lot different in the morning.’

  I doubted that the realisation that your own father was dying could look a whole lot different. And as I kissed her forehead, unknowingly for the last time, I breathed in the mis-match of scent and lotion that I have spent every day since trying to forget.

  Stephen was stubbing out a cigarette in front of a French game show in which the host spanked bikini-clad women with a giant inflatable hand. As he did so, staring at the butt as if it were to blame for his mood, a vaudeville slapping noise resonated and the studio audience guffawed with laughter.

  ‘How is she?’ he asked without looking up.

  ‘I think she’ll be all right.’

  I said it because I wanted it to be true, because it made my life easier to believe that Beth would be fine. But someone else’s grief is always oddly distancing. You care, of course you do, but in the end it is still someone else’s grief.

  Nine

  It was just before seven by the time I got home from work. After a day of delightful anticipation, broken by twinges of concern for Beth, I’d rushed home, cursing the wiry-haired Japanese woman sitting beside me on the métro who breathed in short, whistling nasal bursts. Once through the ticket barriers, I’d broken into a semi-run. Back at the flat I changed clothes twice and sat bolt upright at the table, with nearly an hour to spare, feeling foolish in the expensive new underwear hidden beneath my jeans and T-shirt.

  He was twenty minutes late, and I had remained immobile, willing myself to send Beth a reassuring text, put a CD on or turn the pages of the magazine on the table. Never before had I realised that the air around me made a noise, that you could hear silence. My paralysis was shattered only by the sound of his footsteps on the landing. I felt myself breathe again. Then that breath was mingled with his, his kisses dry, his mouth tasting of cashew nuts and red wine, so that when I finally heard the phone, I realised it had been ringing for some time.

  ‘Ignore it,’ said Christian into my open mouth.

  But his arms had already loosened their hold around my hips, and I got up, wrapping the duvet around myself, as if worried the caller might sense my nakedness. It was Stephen. First I wrongly interpreted his tone as bored. Then something in the flattened consonants became clearer: he was worried.

  ‘Is Beth with you? Only I’m at Fred and Valerie’s and she hasn’t turned up yet. I’ve tried her mobile but it just goes straight to answerphone. She’s an hour and a half late. We’re going to have to start dinner without her.’

  ‘She’s not here,’ I said quickly, filled with an irrational fear that Stephen knew, that this was all a ruse, that he was standing outside the door of my flat.

  ‘Oh.’ He sounded deflated. ‘How weird.’

  ‘She’s probably just stuck in a meeting. I tell you what,’ I said, keen to get him off the line. ‘I’ll give her a try too.’

  ‘OK. Well, let me know if you have any luck, and I’ll give Christian a call. Have you got his number?’

  ‘No. Why would I have his number?’

  ‘I thought Beth gave it to you that night we …’

  ‘You’re right. Maybe I do. Let me have a look.’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I think I’ve got it here.’

  Stephen hung up and I turned to Christian, propped up against two grey-blue pillows, his face as tenderly crumpled as them. He looked like a gay man’s fantasy, decadent and unravelled, his absolute good looks rendering him utterly soulless.

  ‘That was Stephen, by the way. Beth hasn’t turned up to that dinner they were going to tonight. They don’t know where she is. He’s going to call you.’ I gestured towards his mobile, which lay expectantly on the table by his discarded jacket. ‘And I think you should answer or he might think something’s up.’

  Nevertheless, the urgent vibrations we were both expecting made me jump.

  As I was lying next to Christian, I could hear, disconcertingly, both sides of the conversation. I listened as Stephen automatically repeated the same terse phrases he’d said to me only moments earlier. Christian uttered a series of monosyllabic replies, his French accent rounding the vowels, endowing his words with a greater eloquence than mine. He was more in control than I, less wavering in his tone, and I watched admiringly. When he clipped his phone shut, two parallel lines divided his smooth brow and he swung his legs out of bed. ‘Where the hell’s she got to?’

  He was angry now. I wondered if it were really because we hadn’t had time to finish.

  ‘She’s probably forgotten and gone off drinking with people from work,’ I suggested, tapping into my phone ‘Where are you?’ and pressing send. ‘And she’s always forgetting to charge her mobile, you know that.’

  I kicked off a corner of duvet that was covering too much of my thigh, hoping the sight of it might bring him back to bed.

  ‘I don’t know. She’s not really like that; she never forgets appointments.’

  He was pulling his jeans on; I was going to have to take drastic action. I wasn’t going to let Beth’s delayed journey home, forgetfulness or overrun meeting ruin my moment. I propped myself on to one arm, letting the covers fall off me, and lay there naked, staring at him unflinchingly.

  He stopped buttoning his jeans, his hand still on the fly, and watched me in silence. As each second ticked over, I began to feel cold and embarrassed. If I had known then what I know now, I would have felt the impropriety of our situation even more acutely. After what seemed like longer but must have been just a minute, Christian continued to dress and I let him, neither of us wanting to voice our common fear that Beth, for whatever motive, was on her way to my flat.

  For that reason alone I was rel
ieved that he hadn’t stayed – though until his civil goodbye-smile I’d half expected him to. Still, I hadn’t wanted our first real night together to be fraught, and I was woken by involuntary muscle spasms, which shook my body, as a sense of guilt gradually fought its way to the surface.

  At St Paul métro station the next morning, the sight of a beggar sitting cross-legged on a sleeping bag soaked with his own urine, tendrils of wetness creeping towards commuters, compounded my malaise. As soon as I reached the staffroom at the museum, I texted Stephen.

  ‘Forgot, did she?’

  Minutes passed and I stared at the blank screen on my telephone, willing that little envelope to appear. And there it was.

  ‘Still not heard from her. Am worried now.’

  Someone in the corner of the room dropped something light, a pencil perhaps: Isabelle.

  ‘Beth didn’t come home last night,’ I said, still looking at the phone, trying to master the tremor in my voice. ‘Stephen doesn’t know where she is.’

  Panic hit me.

  ‘She will have been with Christian, won’t she?’

  I looked up at her.

  ‘No. I … we know she wasn’t. Where the hell is she? What on earth is she playing at?’

  More people were beginning to shuffle noisily into the room, dumping bags and taking off their coats. Ignoring Isabelle, who was walking towards me with a look of concern on her face, I dialled Stephen’s number and covered one ear.

  ‘I’ve tried her work but no one’s in yet,’ he explained. ‘And I can’t even remember whether she starts at nine or ten in the morning, can you? I always leave before her.’

  ‘Well, let’s both keep trying her there. She’ll turn up.’

  I caught sight of the clock on the wall and began to stash my belongings in a locker.

  ‘I know,’ Stephen breathed deeply into the receiver. ‘We’ll have heard from her by this evening, I’m sure, and I’m going to tell her to have a bit more bloody consideration next time she decides to go AWOL, believe me.’

  I had missed breakfast and by the middle of the day was light-headed with hunger. Shifting uncomfortably on my chair, I watched the endless sequence of tourists shuffle in and out of the room like dispirited actors at an audition they knew they weren’t right for, nipping back to the staff room every hour to try Beth’s phone again. There were two messages from Stephen. The first a garbled voicemail, informing me that, according to her colleagues, Beth had left work at the usual time the night before. The second a stark text message: ‘We have to do something.’ I rang Stephen back immediately, arranging to go straight to the flat after work. There, we would decide on ‘a course of action’. Those were my words, because we were both too scared, as yet, to mention the police.

  I chose to walk, and with every dull click my heels made against the sodden pavements, the reality of Beth’s disappearance began to sink in. I had worked through, and rejected, every conceivable possibility, except the worst, which I refused to let my mind entertain. Until now I had been sure that she would suddenly appear, pale and contrite, but bursting with excitement at the unexpected adventure she’d had. Touched by our concern, she would apologise before launching into a detailed account of her evening. I thought about the last time I had seen her, a forty-year-old woman looking like a child in those absurd pyjamas, and my heart contracted. Suppose she had taken my advice and gone to visit her father? Surely she would not have done so without telling Stephen and me? And although I hated to admit it, the notion that she would not have rung her work to explain seemed even more improbable; Beth would not simply disappear. Minutes before I turned into Beth and Stephen’s street, the rain began in earnest. My thoughts turned to Christian, who I hoped would not be there to see me with wet hair which had begun to curl at the base of my neck.

  The up-beat attitude I had been simulating dissolved instantly at the sight of Stephen’s eyes as he opened the door. They were hooded over, the irises turned from blue to a purulent green. He took me through to the kitchen. Dressed in crumpled beige cords spattered with ochre-coloured paint and a T-shirt bearing a butch American logo, he mechanically put the kettle on. There was a red spot forming at the wing of his left nostril, where its inward curve met his cheek.

  ‘Still nothing?’ I asked pointlessly, hanging my coat up beside a velvet jacket Beth and I had bought together at a sample sale but which she’d never worn, claiming it made her look ‘wide’.

  ‘Nope.’

  On the table, a cafetiére gummed up with sodden coffee stood untouched, and beside it, a half-made sandwich oozed a lip of Camembert from between two hard crusts.

  ‘Eat something – you look terrible.’

  I found his demeanour out of keeping with the situation – far too melodramatic. But it made sense: Stephen took everything personally, making everything that happened – good or bad – his. He was probably enjoying this.

  ‘I know,’ he breathed heavily as we both edged ourselves on to the high barstools he and Beth had bought on a whim.

  ‘I just can’t help thinking that something awful has happened. This is so unlike her, Anna … so unlike her.’

  I fought the impulse to shout back at him: ‘Oh for God’s sake, Stephen, she’s old enough to be my mother. She’s probably got bored of your constant dependency, and gone to meet an old friend. Either that or fancied a bit of time on her own!’ Instead I silently emptied the coffee into the sink, watching the water carry each grain down the plughole in a circular motion, like a complicated molecular diagram.

  ‘What does Ruth think?’

  ‘That she may be heading back home, but that it’s totally unlike her not to tell anyone,’ he groaned. ‘She thinks we should call the police.’

  The doorbell rang as if to underscore that thought, and I started.

  ‘You see, that’ll be her.’ I laughed, without thinking.

  ‘No. She’s got her key. It’s Christian. I told him to come over.’

  As he padded down the hallway to answer the door, I pulled the kitchen blind up halfway so that I could check myself in the pane of glass mirrored by the darkness. And by the time Christian walked in, looking different, tense, like I’d never seen him, I had recomposed my face and was able to greet him with the appropriate sobriety.

  ‘Have you checked her room?’ I suggested, keen to extricate us all from the stagnant, hopeless atmosphere Stephen had created. ‘I think the first thing we should do is see if her passport’s there. If it’s not then we can all relax: we’ll know she’s on her way back to Ireland to see her dad.’

  We walked into Beth’s light-blue-painted room illuminated only by a skylight in the slanting roof above her perfectly made bed. It suddenly seemed obscene that all three of us were here. Christian and Beth had made love on that bed, maybe lain there whispering afterwards. Perhaps it showed on my face; I caught Christian looking at me with an expression of unease. For an instant I blamed Beth and Stephen for everything: for being so complacent and shortsighted that neither of them had seen it coming, for failing to spot what was going on under their noses.

  ‘I think Anna’s right: she’s obviously gone to see her father,’ Christian said with sudden conviction. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s been calling lots, and sounding more and more …’ he drew an invisible, unintentionally elegant semicircle in the air with his index finger. I could see that Stephen found the gesture offensive.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Stephen copied the movement, exaggeratedly, and the tension in the room rose a notch.

  Christian, his voice steeled, continued, ‘Well, you know … loopy.’

  I suppressed the urge to laugh at his heavily accented use of such an old-fashioned word. Where had he picked it up from? With a rush of affection I thought of him poring over an out-of-date English phrase book as a soft-haired schoolboy. Rummaging through the drawer in her bedside table Stephen murmured, ‘I think she usually keeps it here.’ And then triumphantly: ‘Well, it’s not here. So you’re right
. She must have taken off without thinking to tell us. If she has, then I’m sorry, but that’s bloody inconsiderate. I don’t care how upset she is, it bloody is …’ he added in a hurt voice, retreating to the kitchen.

  We could breathe easy now. I smiled at Christian. His lack of obvious interest in me since he had arrived at the flat was making me desire him for the first time since Beth had disappeared. The situation was resolving itself: we would call Beth’s father, and, if she had not yet arrived in Skibbereen, keep calling until she did. Christian didn’t smile back at me. I followed his gaze to Beth’s desk, where a cup was filled with the charcoal pencils she used to sketch, a single poppy peering shyly out between them. I smiled again then, convinced that Beth was all right, and reassured that I could not be a bad person if I, like Beth, always found it impossible to throw poppies away. In the ashtray on her desk a single half-smoked, lipstick-soiled cigarette had been squashed like a bent knuckle. It lay there shamelessly, delighting in its own tackiness. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Beth smoke.

  ‘Since when has she smoked?’ I asked absently.

  ‘She does occasionally, when she’s really wound up about something.’

  I was surprised at his authoritative tone. Did Christian imagine for a moment that he knew Beth better than I? I looked at him, disliking him briefly, and because of that, suddenly wanting him so badly that I had to sit down.

  ‘Right. Get up. Come on. Let’s go and try her father.’

  I looked up at him standing before me by the bed, at the branches of lines on his palm extended towards me. He met my inviting eyes once, and then twice just to make sure, and threw my hand back disbelievingly.

  ‘Jesus, Anna. You scare me sometimes, you really do.’

  In the kitchen Stephen was holding the receiver to his ear. For what seemed like an age he said nothing, before finally speaking into it.