Harm's Way Read online

  ‘Yes, but don’t you think there’s something dodgy about him?’

  I thought for a second before answering with total sincerity: ‘No. I think he’s had a messed-up childhood, a bit like Beth, but otherwise he seems to be a pretty gentle guy.’

  ‘Look, I’m not saying he’s sleeping around but none of us know anything about him. And Beth’s gone into this thing head on.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, who am I to judge? She said she was having a great time a couple of days ago, so unless they’ve got sick of each other since then …’

  ‘She rang you?’

  ‘No – just sent a text saying she was having a ball. Over here!’ he cried out to a lost-looking pair of leather trousers carrying our two drinks on a tray, and changed the subject to women.

  I walked home incensed by the fact that Stephen came first in Beth’s affections, especially when there appeared to be nothing he wanted more than to see her relationship fail. Stephen had grown up with Beth, watched her go through all that had made her what she now was, yet he begrudged her this happy episode. Because that was undoubtedly what it was in my view: an ‘episode’ – not something for us to start theorising about. I had connected so little with his concerns that I hadn’t even felt tempted to tell him about the kiss. Back at the flat I put the telly on mute and sat on the floor eating leftovers from my fridge and watching the images move on the screen. I missed Beth. For the third time that day I ran my eye over the pencilled list of places for us to visit which I had drawn up in a fit of excitement at the prospect of her return. Embarrassed by the childish optimism in each rounded letter, I screwed it up and threw it in the bin. I wanted to make her laugh with tales of yet more banging on the wall during the early hours, tell her that I suspected Isabelle had a crush on Stephen. It was also, absurdly, to her that I most wanted to confide about Christian. ‘Like a Virgin’ was playing in a club across the street and as I washed my face I could hear Monsieur Abitbol enjoying an abusive phone call on the other side of the wall. Didn’t he ever tire of swearing? It soon transpired that the abuse was directed at me.

  ‘She’s a bitch, keeping me up all night with her knocking. I’m going to get the police round, that’s what I’ll do. Bitch. And if that doesn’t work I’ll go around there and sort her out myself. That’s what I’ll do. Bitch.’

  ‘Just you try,’ I mouthed to myself in the mirror.

  I knew that the next day, no matter how hard I tried, would be spent awaiting Beth’s return. Might she have fallen in love with Christian? Surely she would be cautious, and not become too attached. Did she really, as Stephen had insinuated, want to settle down and have children? Perhaps, but it was hardly going to be with Christian. No, this was an insignificant fling, something to boost her confidence.

  Leaning from my balcony watching families in the street making their way home after extended Sunday lunches, I felt I’d been offered a view of life that helped put things into perspective. Later, I went to see a French film whose only point lay in giving the semblance of significance where there was none. The protagonist, a sultry French girl prone to spouting tiresome oxymorons – ‘I love you, but I hate you’ – sat in a series of identikit Marseilles cafés smoking, eventually killing herself over her love for an uninspiring flower-shop owner. Back at the flat I sat in my tiny Parisian bath watching the skin on my feet whiten and shrivel. The purr of the phone made me slop bath water on the floor, drenching the mat, discolouring the grooves between the tiling. It was Beth, every syllable she uttered plumped with happiness. I didn’t dare ask too many questions. Besides, she promised that when we met the following evening she would tell me all about it.

  As the machine spat out the purple tip of my métro ticket the next morning, I decided that the only way to break this gathering storm cloud was to tell Beth everything. The underground stops flitted by and I covered every eventuality in my mind at a furious pace. The two of them had not been together long enough for a split to be traumatic. Christian would disappear into the Parisian suburbs, like one or two of the boys in my short past, leaving me with only the odd pinch of regret. Beth would forgive me because of the generosity of spirit that was her very essence. It would, perhaps, even bring us closer. One day, soon, we would laugh at the ease with which we’d both been taken in by this man.

  Besides, my fixation with him and the memories of that night had left me feeling humiliated. There was no room for him in my vision of this year in Paris, the first of my real years – no room for him in Beth’s future or in mine.

  Content with my lightened conscience, I found that my working day unfolded easily. At lunchtime I ran into Isabelle in a cheap Chinese restaurant decorated with paper tigers, a place I thought I was alone in having discovered, and we talked about Stephen, her plumbing difficulties and the museum’s measly pay rates over dim sum.

  Mid-afternoon I rang Beth’s office and arranged to meet her at the Lizard Lounge, a hectic bar in the Marais I knew she liked, though it was largely populated by Brits behaving as they would do in their front rooms. Still, it was somewhere I could count on for enough background noise to dilute the seriousness of the discussion we were about to have. As I made the arrangements with Beth, I felt a pang of guilt about Isabelle, who was pretending to read in the corner of the room, the velvet Chinese slippers she always wore turned inwards in the attitude of a penitent schoolgirl. Another time, I thought to myself. This was not set to be a pleasant evening.

  By the time I got there, Beth had two kirs waiting on the table and was sitting back in her chair, radiant and relaxed, her breath shallow in the heat, the blue material of her dress stretched into a series of neat, horizontal lines across her lap. As she fanned her face with a flyer, I noted that she was as fair as when she’d left, and that her hair – with all the liberated confidence of a woman sure that she is loved – was less groomed than usual. When she saw me, she smiled with such utter, warm sincerity that I adored her all over again. As soon as I could disengage myself from her embrace – the warm length of our bodies against each other like a testament to a friendship I was about to forsake – I sank down into a chair.

  ‘You look great,’ I said, as airily as I could.

  ‘Really? It poured with rain the whole week.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  For a second I thought I might be spared: the week had been a disaster, her fantasies of a romantic beach idyll dashed by bad weather.

  ‘Of course I am. Although it wasn’t actually that hot, which was fine really, because you know what I’m like in the heat,’ she went on, ‘but God, did we have fun.’

  She launched into an effusive account of the holiday, sparing no detail, from the exact layout of Christian’s uncle’s house to the exhausting cycle rides they endured to get anywhere on the island, and for a moment I found myself enjoying it with her, encouraging her description of their long siestas every afternoon. And then the loud chunterings of a group of Englishmen at the bar distracted me.

  ‘Hey – boring you, am I?’ Beth joked.

  ‘No, no, sorry. I was just thinking what idiots the English always are abroad.’

  I smiled weakly, gesturing with my chin towards the group of men and wondered if now was the right time. Beth made a small, acquiescent ‘o’ with her mouth and in its hardened contour I read disappointment at what she had interpreted as my lack of enthusiasm. I encouraged her to continue, fixing on a tiny scratch by her mouth as she told me that she was in love with Christian, that she felt closer to him now than she had ever thought possible. I realised in an instant that I could not tell her. I remember, at fifteen, breaking a boy’s heart while he was halfway through a bowl of spaghetti carbonara. He’d stared at me incoherently, tears welling up in his eyes, while I’d wondered whether to point out the creamy smear on his chin. I didn’t, and he will have returned home, bruised, to discover it himself in the mirror.

  Until that moment I’d imagined that my confession to Beth would come easily, a simple person-to-person discussion about a man ne
ither of us even knew two months ago. It would have been uncomfortable, but honest, and the idea of honesty appealed to me with such sudden force that it might just have been invented. The incident would, perhaps, even bring us closer than we had been before. Besides, I was not too young to appreciate the transience of someone like Christian in both of our lives. But my logic had omitted those details that made Beth, like everyone else, human, fallible – able to bleed and hurt. In the face of that small, hurt mouth, I felt weak. A second round of drinks arrived and I brightened: it had only been a kiss. Why on earth did I feel I had to tell her? I would forget about Christian – let this thing go. After all, it wasn’t as if I was in love with him. The trouble was that at eighteen, I’d never renounced anything in my life: I just didn’t see why I should have to.

  My resolve was aided by the arrival of a childhood friend, Kate, for the weekend. The truth was that I had forgotten all about her coming until a knock on my door late that Friday night. It had been impossible for my heart not to miss a beat; I was foolishly hoping that it might be Christian. When I saw Kate’s expectant face, masking her weariness from the trip, I nevertheless felt a rush of happiness. Like cicadas, we spent the following days engaged in the sort of meaningless patter that is incomprehensible to outsiders.

  ‘So how’s X? Is she still with Y?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Languidly drawn circles on the sand, their only purpose was to maintain a current of inconsequential chat. The weekend had flown past this way: in a blizzard of semi-confidences. Kate had been curious to meet Beth, joking that she’d felt increasingly put out by my emails, which were peppered with references to ‘my friend Beth’. And she was intrigued by the age gap.

  ‘Isn’t it weird going out to clubs and stuff with, well, a much older woman?’

  ‘No,’ I countered. ‘She’s not like anyone else I know. She’s …’ I felt powerless to describe her. ‘… so wise about life. But she’s fun too. You’d understand if you met her.’

  ‘I’m dying to, but you say she’s busy this weekend.’

  I had no desire for the two to meet. I welcomed this calm period like shade after the midday sun, and ignored Kate’s requests. For her last night in Paris I’d booked us a table at my favourite restaurant, Le Gamin de Paris, a candlelit brasserie with poorly executed amateur frescoes adorning the walls, and where, until they were able to seat you, they provided free aperitifs at the bar. That night Bertrand, the manager whose face was an intricate map of spider veins, kept us waiting for the best part of an hour. Whenever he passed by, juggling a pile of empty plates, his thumb in someone’s unfinished carrot purée, he would bark out to the bartender: ‘Encore deux kirs pour les belles Anglaises.’ We stood contentedly, our backs pressed against the glass, the sweet cassis taking the sting out of the table wine it was mixed with, while Kate nattered on, her soothing continuity echoed by the credit-card machine on the counter as it chattered out receipts. Outside, a streetlamp lit up menu readers’ faces from above, flattening the edges of their features, reducing noses, chins and foreheads to plains of yellow flesh.

  I had stopped listening to Kate. After spending three days away from Beth and Christian, my feelings of deprivation, like those of a dieter, had swollen until the prospect of abstaining altogether had become untenable.

  Six

  It was the 1st of August and the whole of Paris had shut down. Shops were boarded up or displayed scrawled notes in their windows saying: ‘Back on 5th September.’ Even the patisserie beneath my flat had Sellotaped a fragment of lined paper to the door that read: ‘Taken the kids to the seaside. Back in September.’ It was as though the holidays had come as a complete surprise, causing everyone from bank managers to street cleaners to hurriedly pack a bag and head for the coast. The few remaining shopkeepers perched in their doorways, scanning the pavements left and right for potential customers, before flicking their consumed cigarette stubs dejectedly into the gutter.

  The city felt like a department store after closing time, the streets indecent in their bareness, and I loved it all the more for the sense that it now belonged to me. The museum’s staff was not among the sudden exodus, but nowhere else on earth would I have rather been, at that moment, than Paris.

  I hadn’t seen Christian for over a week, and Beth only once for a drink and a stroll through the Luxembourg, cut short by his telephone summons. Still my sense of quiet anticipation wore on. As a heat wave took the city to thirty degrees, Stephen was the first to interrupt the static glaze of high summer by suggesting we join the masses in abandoning the stifling city. Pierre, one of his company’s executives, had a villa just outside Deauville, and we were all invited to spend the bank holiday weekend there. The question Beth immediately asked was why we had not been told this earlier.

  ‘Because,’ he answered, his words laden with joking condescension, ‘I usually wait to be invited before taking a whole troop of people to someone’s house. It’s a courtesy thing: you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘You mean he’ll actually be there?’ I asked, dismayed.

  ‘Yep, but he’s fine.’ Stephen banished our concerns with a movement of his hand. ‘He’s one of those fifty-something divorcés who like having a bunch of young people around. You’ll like him: he’s a nice bloke, probably a bit lonely, but perfectly nice. I think there’s a kid somewhere in the equation … but it won’t be there,’ he added in response to our appalled faces. ‘Anyway, he’s got a pool and a wine-cellar, so whatever happens we’ll have a ball.’

  I nodded agreement, my head buzzing with mischief, and looked over at Beth, who was looking at Christian. The idea of spending four days with them both was delicious. I was already planning outfits, and conjuring up languorous positions in which I would be surprised, immersed in a book.

  I spent the days leading up to our departure oblivious to the Velcro-packaged American tourists hampered by prodigious backpacks who tiptoed reverentially around the museum. Isabelle was curious to know what was making my step so light.

  ‘I just can’t wait to get away,’ I smiled secretively. ‘I haven’t seen that much of France and, well, you know, it’s exciting.’

  I was lying, of course, having spent most of my summer holidays in France as a child, but Isabelle wasn’t to know that.

  ‘I suspect there is, perhaps, something more to it than that?’

  Her tone grated, and I stared blankly back at her.

  ‘No,’ I replied. And then, in an attempt to modify my previous tone, ‘There really isn’t, Isabelle.’

  ‘I just thought that,’ she pulled her sleeve over her hand and looked down at her feet, ‘that maybe you and Stephen…’

  I burst out laughing, relieved without knowing why.

  ‘Oh God, Isabelle – is that what you think? No.’ I leant over and rubbed the billowing tube of black fabric encasing her arm appeasingly.

  ‘Hey – look at me. I really don’t … Stephen really isn’t my type.’

  I paused. Then I said, ‘Is he yours?’

  She looked embarrassed. ‘I like him. Yes. But I’m not sure he … well …’

  ‘Rubbish.’ I cut her off, bored. ‘You should have said. Why don’t you just come out with us when we get back; flirt with him a bit?’

  The idea of Isabelle flirting with anyone was laughable, and I doubted Stephen would be interested, but our foursome was in danger of becoming stale, and I welcomed the idea of a fifth party.

  When the date of our departure – circled in red on the calendar on my kitchen wall – finally arrived, I could barely stand still. Beth and I had spent the past two weeks in delightful preparation, spending hours in Galeries Lafayette choosing bikinis, and an afternoon in the bookshops of the boulevard Saint Germain buying novels to read while we were there. Afterwards we drank bitter hot chocolates in the Café de Flore next door, while laughing at the pseudo-intellectuals in thick-rimmed glasses discussing the state of French film at a neighbouring table. Beth had spoken a great deal about Christian, ad
miring the discreet kindnesses towards his family she was forever discovering.

  ‘I suppose we’ve both been forced to take responsibility very young,’ she’d explained. ‘Do you know that his father hasn’t given his mother a penny since they’ve split up. Isn’t that disgusting? Poor thing’s had to support his mum since he was fifteen.’

  While I wasn’t thrilled by this increasingly close bond, the pleasure I derived from being her confidante, and the sense that I was being included, prevented me from taking her emotions as seriously as I should have done.

  That Friday, I watched the ornate gilt clock in the museum atrium – half visible from where I sat – as the hands, so heavy with gold that they scarcely seemed able to move, limped towards five o’clock. Stephen and I had arranged to meet at La Défense, at the furthest Western edge of Paris, to pick up the hire car. I made the forty-five-minute journey in twenty.

  From the other side of the car park, where reflections from lambent rows of red cars created a liquid metallic gleam, I could see Stephen being handed the keys by a man in a luminous tank-top. By the time I reached them, the forms had already been filled in, and we were off, Stephen at the wheel, I in charge of the map. There was only one thing to stay clear of: the Arc de Triomphe. Anyone in their right mind avoided that roundabout as though their life depended on it – which it did. It was only when we found ourselves racing towards it up the avenue de la Grande-Armée that I realised my error. Stephen fixed widened pupils on me for an instant as he realised what lay ahead. Any motoring rules the French ordinarily follow were disregarded here in a whirlpool of egos. The cars moved in short, brutal spurts towards the maelstrom like a shoal of vicious fish. After some shouted abuse and accusatory looks, we made it out of there. Having extricated ourselves alive, it seemed pointless to worry about taking the wrong exit.

  We picked up Beth and Christian from the flat, where they had been waiting for us for over an hour. Stephen slammed a tense fist down on the horn so hard that I suggested he might let me take the wheel. Christian was the only name omitted from the insurance forms so there were three of us to share the drive. He accepted more readily than I had anticipated, and as I hopped out of the passenger seat, Christian appeared, followed closely by Beth. A shadow of something akin to embarrassment passed across his face as he saw me, and I didn’t like it. It was the kind of look you give someone you would rather wasn’t there.