Harm's Way Read online

  Perhaps I listened when she talked more than I would have done with my contemporaries, and asked many more questions, but otherwise I behaved almost exactly as I might with friends of my own age. Gone was the initial restraint, the swallowed swear words. Still, Beth had a disconcerting way of making me realise before I said something that it was childish, brash, or simply calculated to achieve a reaction. The first time we got drunk together I enjoyed watching the alcohol take effect, softening the more authoritative aspects of her manner, deflating her serenity, and giving me an inkling of the messier human being she must have been at my age. I wished then that I could see my mother, just once, in that same malleable state, and that we might share such an intimacy.

  To begin with, I suffered pangs of guilt about not devoting more effort to making French friends, but my absorption with Beth quickly immobilised me, rendering virtually everyone outside her small circle worthless in my eyes.

  I was fascinated by the dichotomy in her personality. Professionally, she could appear terrifyingly grown-up, but with me, although her opinions were more mature than mine, no subject seemed too juvenile to discuss. I had never been interested in fashion as a concept, not through any aversion to clothes but simply because I was reluctant to bother educating myself in trends I would never follow or dresses I was too young to afford. Yet after hearing Beth describing a Jean Paul Gaultier show she’d attended the previous week – she liked to check out the competition – I happily accepted her invitation to the Ungaro collection for the following season.

  It was staged in a disused monastery in the Latin Quarter, now part of the Sorbonne University, and I drank in every detail of the cluster of industry insiders gathered outside. The women seemed to me dressed with studied negligence, the men in a deliberately outmoded manner as if to elevate themselves above the world they inhabited. Once inside we were seated on velvet-cushioned chairs to observe the procession of limp-limbed models saunter by, their blank eyes fixed on a distant point, like over-made-up sleepwalkers. Earnest-looking journalists from Le Monde or Le Figaro made incisive scribbles in notebooks to praise or dismiss in a single, devastating word the quality of a certain style or cloth, thereby establishing a whole psychology of fashion for the year to come.

  Fashion in Paris, Beth explained later in an overflowing brasserie on the carrefour de l’Odéon, was not the frivolous pastiche it had become in London. It was seen as a valid art form that serious men, as well as women, talked about over dinner. People laughed at fashion for being out of touch with everyday existence, but a deliberate sense of dissociation from reality was what these shows were really about: an entire industry built not on the way people actually lived or behaved, but on their aspirations.

  Later she took me to the after-show party held in Les Bains Douches, so called because the premises were in a converted public baths. The bovine bouncer at the door, standing with his legs apart as if braced for a stampede, grabbed our invitations and surveyed them with indifference.

  ‘Allez-y,’ he relented, having impressed upon us his all-encompassing power. We stepped into a roaring din of fake laughter and the resounding smacks of air-kissing. As I listened to men with spray-on T-shirts discussing the benefits of cardio-vascular activity, I began to see what Beth had meant by dissociation from reality. My lack of attraction towards Stephen meant that I had begun secretly to resent his presence on our outings. I wanted Beth to myself, and disliked the habit he had of turning our conversations away from us, as if determined to rob us of our companionship. When we were alone, Beth with her face propped in a frame of freckled hand, I found her willingness to listen to whatever I had to say infinitely reassuring.

  ‘You look quite lovely tonight …’ she’d interrupted that night, eyes lazy and dark with drink. ‘I do wish you’d let me dress you next time we go out – I keep seeing things at work which would look great on you.’

  I was unused to compliments from women, and took another sip of my drink.

  ‘Do you want to know a secret? This is the first time I’ve been to one of these “after” things since I moved here. I was dreading it,’ she continued. ‘I only came becasue I thought you might enjoy it, but it’s turned out to be quite good fun, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Is that true?’ I replied.

  She was charming in the blue light, unaware of how beautiful she was, and I watched out of the corner of my eye as two men at the bar looked appraisingly in her direction.

  ‘I swear. I’ve always felt, well, a bit awkward about coming to these places that are always filled with beautiful young things.’

  ‘And by that you mean beautiful young men?’

  ‘Yes,’ she flushed, ‘I suppose I do. I can’t help but imagine that they must wonder what someone of, well …’

  ‘… of your age is doing here? Beth, look around: there are people of all ages. And isn’t it just a question of confidence?’ I added, touching her finger lightly with mine across the table. ‘I always think that if you walk around thinking you can have anything you want, you usually can.’

  Beth gave me a brief look, ironical but indulgent, before breaking into a laugh made up of a trio of ascending notes, which didn’t quite ring true. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Anna. Let’s drink to that.’

  That night, not wishing to be alone, and feigning excessive drunkenness, I contrived to spend the night with Beth.

  ‘The sofa’s not very comfortable, but my bed’s massive, so you’re welcome to share it with me as long as you don’t wriggle.’

  As she tripped gently back and forth across her room, with the hooded eyes and stupid smile of the inebriated, I slipped quickly into bed and waited for her to join me, surprised by the bite of disappointment I felt when, after emerging from the bathroom ready for bed, she turned the light out and promptly fell asleep.

  Waking beside Beth the next morning, I leant across her to switch off the alarm clock, smiling at the creases the sheets had made on her sleeping face. Ignoring the fact that it would make me late for work, I sank back down and allowed myself ten more minutes. Asleep, she looked half her age, with a faintly questioning expression about her eyebrows which made me smile. Her lips were closed, but a steady and invisible vent rhythmically tickled my propped forearm.

  ‘Is it time to get up?’ Suddenly, she was awake, although her eyes still struggled to focus. I sat up quickly.

  ‘I’m afraid so. I’ll grab the first shower, shall I?’

  * * *

  Wearing one of Beth’s jumpers over the previous night’s outfit, I tried to shuffle into the vestibule of the staff entrance as inconspicuously as I could. Avoiding Céline’s gaze, I deposited my bag in the staff room with what I hoped was aplomb. The besmocked girl I’d met on my first day looked up from her book.

  ‘It’s Anna, isn’t it? We met the other day. I’m Isabelle.’

  Isabelle was half-Romanian and had moved to Paris from Lyon a year ago. A dark fringe of hair and glasses disguised the pretty face of a girl in her mid-twenties: a dusky complexion, full curved lips overshadowed by a slight down. Yet there was an insecurity in her eyes that, had I been a man, would have immediately put me on my guard. As fellow history of art student, Isabelle was one of the few who found themselves working at the museum through vocation. I earmarked her as a possible work friend, someone to while away my empty lunch breaks with, and thought nothing more of her.

  I had begun to settle into my flat. The nocturnal knocking had eased – it now troubled my sleep only one night in three – and although my job at the museum still seemed a world away from the nightlife I was discovering, come six o’clock I could retrieve my belongings from my locker and wind my way slowly home through the back streets, pausing from time to time to catch a glimpse of enchanting secret courtyards behind slowly closing double doors. And Stephen was right: there was a lot to be said for my occupation, the educational solace of watching.

  I had been instructed, for one day only, to sit in on an exhibition of photographs by Henri Cart
ier-Bresson. Robert Doisneau I’d always found a little too posed, but I loved Cartier-Bresson. Living in Paris had heightened my appreciation of his work: it occurred to me that, were it not for changes in fashion, I could still have been observing the city through his delicately angled lens. A wan-faced businessman with a blonde prone to splutters of laughter were first to arrive. Then came an old man with birch-silver hair who, in his green-flash trainers, squeaked gently from photograph to photograph, taking care not to get too close to the prints, lest the images should fly away like rare birds. When he reached the penultimate exhibit – a picture of a soulful young man sitting outside a Bastille café clinking a cloudy glass of Pastis with a young woman – he stopped and looked around nervously. The picture had done what only a photograph of genius can do; it had captured the essence of life at the very moment it expired, like the last dance of a butterfly. It was the millisecond of anticipation prior to the first sip of a shared drink; the instant two people lean a fraction closer, that moment somehow encapsulating all that was most intimate and exciting about human companionship. The old man sighed and turned abruptly towards me, the frayed corners of his mouth approaching a smile. It was then that I understood his veneration.

  ‘C’est moi.’

  I rose from my chair, unsure of what he meant and a little apprehensive. Then a closer inspection eliminated all doubt: the man in the picture was him.

  ‘It’s exquisite,’ I told him, touched by his look but conscious of the banality of my words. Having nothing more significant to add I directed him to the gift shop, telling him he could buy a copy of the picture there. I watched him grow smaller and smaller as he walked jerkily through the atrium, rendered a little pathetic by the surrounding grandeur, occasionally pausing on his way, as though to contemplate in silence this miraculous recovery of a moment in his past.

  That night I moved restlessly in my sleep, my dreams overrun by armies of Cartier-Bresson images. At five in the morning, rather later than I had become used to, I was awoken by the now familiar sound of a fist pounding against the wall. This time I got up determined to find out the cause of the knocking. After a fruitless phone call to Madame Guigou, I went to the boulangerie beneath my flat to buy a chausson aux pommes for breakfast.

  ‘Vous avez l’air fatigué, Mademoiselle,’ the florid boulangére reflected.

  I reached for my paper bag, transparent with seeping butter, and told her about the knocking that had been keeping me up every few nights since I’d moved in.

  ‘Which flat are you in? Not the sixth floor?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Ah,’ she exclaimed with a dismissive gesture, as though the reason was self-explanatory. ‘That’ll be Monsieur Abitbol. He’s a troubled man. In fact,’ she added brightly, ‘the last girl who lived in your flat, poor mite, had such a terrible time she had to move out.’

  I wanted to discover more, but a small and impatient queue was forming behind me, so I left. No wonder my wreck of a landlady had neglected to tell me that I was renting a property next to a well-known sociopath.

  Beth looked concerned when I recounted the exchange, while Stephen, caught in the vortex of his own laughter, rocked back and forth on his chair, helplessly trying to bring himself back from the brink.

  ‘The thing is that I’m not even surprised,’ he finally managed. ‘The French go about in that decorous way of theirs, as if their lives were perfectly normal, but I swear this city is full of madmen. It comes from them living on top of each other. And all that self-control: it’s got to crack sometime.’ The impact of this remark was diminished when he reached for a cigarette and ran his index finger and thumb down the length of it before lighting up, a gesture I suspected he had only acquired since moving to Paris.

  Stephen was right. Paris had little of the space or greenery of London, added to which the sense of people being piled on top of one another intensified the general mood, from the scowls on pedestrians’ faces to the angry behaviour of the drivers hunting them down. But there was a fruitful nervous energy I had never come across in London, as though the annoyances of city life conspired to create a general sense of purpose.

  I dragged Beth to one event after another, ignoring her pleas for a quiet night in. After her initial reluctance subsided, she displayed a boundless energy which, exceeding even mine, left me bemused. I never even considered her age a factor – something she sensed and which, she once told me, set me apart from everyone else she knew. A condition of our jaunts was that she be allowed to dress me, forcing me to parade back and forth across her sitting room in sample garments brought back from the office until she found something she was satisfied with.

  The weekends were my favourite time. I spent the week mapping out our pleasures, gratified by the look of wonder on her face as I guided her into Delacroix’s studio, off the lovely place Furstenberg, hidden behind St Germain des Prés. ‘How did you know about this place?’ she would ask. ‘I must have walked past here a thousand times without even knowing it existed.’ In a Saturday ritual she claimed to look forward to all week, I would text her a house number, street name and a time, like an old-fashioned telegram, punctuated only with full stops. Like lonely heart assignations we would meet, without any prior phone calls, but with the certitude that hours of enjoyment lay before us. Sunday afternoons were spent sitting by the fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg reading, with barely a sentence exchanged between us.

  Once (on Beth’s insistence) we even joined the little children at the puppet show. I liked to buy French gossip magazines, peopled with characters I neither cared about nor could identify. I would thrust their sleek pages under Beth’s nose, pointing out the celebrities. Bemused by my interest in such trivia she would glance from the page to me, shake her head with a half-smile, and return to her book. We had built up a sense of complicity which relied for its intimacy on us being utterly different. Beth was the kind of woman who, when she asked someone a question cared about the answer. She was gentler than I, wiser and less impulsive, which made it easier for her to tolerate my bouts of egoism. Only rarely did she ask for something in return.

  Her father’s health, I soon discovered, was a serious source of concern.

  ‘He has his sister there with him, but I can’t help thinking that I should be there too.’ She looked at me entreatingly. ‘The thing is that I spent years with him, years, and in lots of ways they were just a complete waste of time. He didn’t even know I was there, you see. I do pay my aunt – she used to be a ward sister in Dublin – to look after him, and Ruth pops in on him most weekends, so he is well catered for. And, well, I can’t just leave all this, can I?’

  There was nothing I could say to assuage her sense of guilt. I would appease her as best I could, tell her that – unlike her siblings – she had already devoted years to him, done what she could and should, and that she only had one life to live. But I could see she was only voicing an ever-present fear about his precarious health, and that many of her nights were troubled by the decision not to sacrifice what remained of her life, her work and her youth to his illness. One of the most chilling aspects of the disease, she had explained, was that it was so alienating to loved ones.

  ‘I remember seeing the world from the top of his great strong shoulders as a child. Now he looks like an old woman, and when I try to have a conversation with him all I want to do is scream, “Stop pretending not to understand!” It’s as if he’s acting a part, deliberately, to annoy me.’

  But Beth’s father was old, and as anyone with elderly relatives can testify, it is not so much laziness or lack of feeling that resists contact but rather the reverse. It is the horror of seeing the face you know best afflicted by the whimsical deformations of senility.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she once said, ‘because even when my mother was alive, I somehow always felt closer to my father, you know? I suppose most people find that odd.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I had replied. ‘My mother …’ and suddenly I couldn’t think what to say about he
r. ‘Well, she’s very busy, and when she’s not, she’s tired, so … It’s been that way as long as I can remember. Still, Dad always says that if it weren’t for her job I wouldn’t have gone to such a good school – or be here now, I suppose.’

  ‘Or met me,’ Beth added with a calm smile.

  Our discussions about heartbreak were similarly lopsided. I had never lost anyone, always lived in a womb of comfort sheltered from pain and loss. Of course I’d split up with boyfriends; most of them were an obvious reaction to the one before: if one had been wild and jealous, the next would be understanding and quiet. But to date no one experience had given my character the roundness and depth I admired in Beth: I had not once cried over another human being.

  I didn’t hanker for suffering, but I was impressed by the effects it could have. And there was something else. I had noticed the physical change such experience can bring. Nothing as brutal and disfiguring as scoring lines across a face, but a certain sharpness about the eyes that my face lacked. It was there in Beth’s eyes, and in the resigned expression on Berthe Morisot’s face. Its absence in my own made me scowl at the mirror with perverse frustration.

  That Saturday Stephen was unable to convince me to join him at Queen, a vast gay club reminiscent of a sado-masochistic multi-levelled car park, with oily-skinned men in overhead cages undergoing live nipple-piercing, their pupils avid and dry with drugs they’d taken. Beth was easily won-over, impatient to fully embrace the Parisian nightlife she had shunned for so long, but I declined, spending the evening reading the first chapter of a novel on my university syllabus and waiting for the call my mother had promised me before falling asleep with the phone still in my hand.

  When Stephen answered the door to their flat late the following afternoon, damson thumb-prints pressed into the grooves beneath his eyes, I was surprised to find Beth still in bed. Wearing only one of Stephen’s old T-shirts, the cotton rendered almost transparent with age, and in that quietly voluptuous state that too much alcohol and too little sleep can induce, she recounted, squirming girlishly beneath the duvet, the events of the night before. Queen had been so packed at first that she had wanted to leave. But Stephen, with the mixture of petulance and voracity Beth and I had often noted whenever there were possibilities of new sexual encounters, had persuaded her to stay on for an hour, buying her a drink to cement the deal. She caught the first words of an eighties song that she loved (discussing music, I had realised, always made Beth’s age shockingly apparent) and the next time she looked at her watch it was two in the morning. The dance floor was thinning out. Making her way towards the bar to get a glass of water she had walked past two men: an Arab with long black hair that curled around the nape of his neck and a scar under his eye, and a serious-faced thirty-something man in a short-sleeved grey shirt and low-slung jeans.