Harm's Way Read online

  With a sinking heart, I took the wheel and manoeuvred us out of the small streets of Paris and on to the périphérique. Only then did the atmosphere in the car relax. I hadn’t dared look at Christian in the rear-view mirror, but when I did, I saw that his arm was around Beth, and her body curved towards his. A few minutes later he pointed at a grey enclave of housing blocks, just visible in the distance, and whispered something in her ear. As Beth turned to look at the dark mass, I remained transfixed by Christian’s slow blinks: waiting for any perceptible emotion to fill the vacuum of his face. Their voices, murmurous and uninflected, reached me in snatches from the back seat.

  ‘If you ever did want to go and see him, we could do it together,’ said Beth.

  I didn’t catch his reply, but I recognised the reverential way in which he looked at her as she spoke – as though she knew all the answers. I looked at her the same way.

  Although enjoying my role as driver, I had made little contribution to the conversation so far and, after nearly an hour, was beginning to feel ignored.

  ‘Does anyone mind if we stop for a coffee?’ I asked hopefully, spotting cryptic French signs, which I took to indicate a nearby petrol station. There was a murmur of approval and minutes later we pulled in to a service station. Leaning against the wall by a cash point flashing the word ‘defective’, the yellow letters bleeding in the heat, we sipped shots of coffee from plastic cups. Christian was wearing a flecked grey T-shirt and low jeans above which, when he ran his hand across the back of his head, as he sometimes did, a flash of hipbone jutted. When I looked at him squarely, which I rarely allowed myself to do unless I was talking to him, I felt a dog-like hunger. Perhaps it was because I now knew things about his body, through Beth, which only a lover should know. The skin around my eyes felt dry and tight from squinting at the road.

  ‘I’ll drive now if you want, Anna,’ said Beth, as though reading my mind.

  I forced myself not to appear unnaturally happy at the thought of being crammed in the back seat alongside Christian. As the engine started up, shoving the case of Sancerre we’d bought as a present for Pierre into my thigh, I felt my left hipbone slam against Christian. After an initial tension I could not believe I was alone in feeling, our bodies began to ease against one another. With every speed-bump, every traffic light that suddenly turned red, the corner of the cardboard box dug deeper and deeper into the soft flesh of my thigh, yet still I had no desire to push it away. The drive seemed eternal, soothingly rhythmic, and eventually I fell asleep, waking only once, to a wave of night air as Stephen took over from Beth in the driving seat.

  The car finally climbed a dirt track through a pine forest, and we soon pulled up to what was clearly Pierre’s house. Before us, in the headlights, stood a man in camel drawstring trousers and espadrilles. Framed by the open door and silhouetted against the pink light within, he gave a large, theatrical wave.

  ‘Welcome! Welcome my friends,’ chuckled Pierre, rubbing his hands in anticipation and gallantly taking my case as we walked up the stone steps. The four of us stood inside the house, bags hanging listlessly from our fingertips, wearily entranced by the sight that greeted us. A mosaic floor tiled in earthy orange and brown stretched towards an L-shaped staircase, curving enticingly into the upper levels of the house.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there! Put your bags down and come and have a drink. You must all be exhausted. Is it too cold for you on the balcony? No?’

  As Stephen and Pierre walked ahead of us, discussing the intricacies of our route in the way men do, Christian, Beth and I followed in silence. I circled her waist with one arm and wondered if Christian, at least, was preoccupied by the same thought: the proximity of our rooms. But once seated on the dusky balcony on a low wicker chair, I felt my mood lulled by the digital chanting of the crickets. I remembered, as a child, imagining the insects to be amorously inebriated by the heat. Years later, when it was explained to me that they were merely rubbing their legs together, I felt cheated.

  ‘Ready money for your thoughts, Mademoiselle.’ Pierre, who was sitting closest to me, leant forward and flicked a mosquito from my knee. ‘I’m afraid there are rather a lot of them around here, and they seem to prefer the ladies.’

  I felt prematurely fatigued at the idea of spending a weekend deflecting our host’s advances. He was neither attractive nor impressive enough for me to use as a weapon of jealousy. True, he did not look his age, but his teeth had a peculiar brownish cast which bore testament to several decades of Gauloises Blondes, and the blue-blackness of his hair shone unnaturally in the porch light. His eyes were his most appealing feature: moss green with brown flecks, surrounded by a kindly mass of lines.

  ‘Oh, I’m just suddenly quite tired,’ I smiled apologetically.

  ‘You probably haven’t eaten. How rude of me. There’s some cold chicken in the fridge, and some ratatouille I bought for lunch but could heat up. Would anybody like…’

  But Beth, rising from her chair with a graceful yawn and motioning Christian to do the same, cut him short.

  ‘Actually, I think we might turn in. It’s been a long night.’

  ‘No problem. Let me show you to your rooms. Stephen!’

  Pierre shouted down to Stephen, who was smoking distractedly in the garden below. The petit salon on the ground floor had been transformed into an adequate temporary bedroom for him.

  Pierre left the table and we followed him. As we reached the top of the staircase I felt my heart beat a little faster. The second floor was far from being the enormous space I had envisioned. The narrow strip of landing had just three doors, terrifyingly close to one another. Pierre leant forward and opened the door on the far right.

  ‘Now this,’ he announced, ‘is your room, Anna. It used to be my daughter’s. Well, when I say used to be … it still is, I suppose. But she lives with her mother now in Lyon and only comes here during the summer holidays.’

  My curiosity aroused by the remaining two doors, I failed to register the significance of this information.

  ‘And this,’ he continued, flinging the middle one open theatrically, ‘is the bathroom.’

  I hadn’t expected that: my own bathroom.

  ‘Finally: you two lovebirds are in here.’

  I wasn’t able to see into Beth and Christian’s room without appearing too obvious, but I caught the edge of a mosquito-netted bed covered in an elaborate toile de Jouy quilt. It looked idyllic.

  ‘Now I’m afraid the house does have this one peculiarity, which I’ve never got around to changing. Both of your rooms have connecting doors into the bathroom, so you’ll just have to remember to lock them from the inside when you’re in there.’

  While Beth and Pierre giggled at this, I turned my head away slightly lest my confusion should show. Christian, as always, gave nothing away.

  ‘I hope you’re comfortable here, and if you hear any weird noises during the night,’ grinned Pierre at me, ‘I’m just down the hall.’ An ambiguous remark that did nothing to raise my confidence in him. ‘Well, bonne nuit you lot. I expect to see you all bright and early for a pre-breakfast swim.’

  ‘Goodnight. Goodnight, Anna.’ Beth kissed me warmly on the cheek. Christian gave me a half-wave as they disappeared into their room.

  Undressing in the solitude of my room, I noticed a mulberry-coloured score, like a fingerprint in jam, smudged across my thigh. The friction from the case of wine had stopped just short of drawing blood.

  Stretching myself on the slim bed, too short for my long limbs, I tried to place when I had first had this feeling. It was the sense of exclusion I had experienced as a child, when my parents disappeared into their bedroom. Before children even have the most basic understanding of sex, they sense the otherness of that room: the indefinable scent in the mornings, the muted laughter that can be heard through the walls.

  No laughter came from Christian and Beth’s room that night, although I lay awake, straining to hear even the slightest sound. I longed to hear Beth
moan – just once, just softly. Perhaps if I had, everything that followed might have been avoided. The reality of their unity might have cancelled out my childish desire to spoil things. But after twice hearing running water and the flush of the cistern before myself tiptoeing into the bathroom to wash, letting the tap dribble rather than wake them up with my painfully prosaic activities, the only noise was the rhythmical bleating of crickets.

  Stirring restlessly in bed, trying to locate a fresh corner of sheet, I wondered how to turn our unexpected proximity to my advantage. A few feet away, Christian was lying next to Beth, both of them naked, perhaps, and my confused desire could not alight on one vision or the other.

  My surroundings, too, conspired to haunt my dreams. A large one-eyed doll slumped in a deathly pose on the bookshelf opposite me, her remaining eye staring, infuriatingly, just above my head. The shelf itself was filled with oddly named children’s books, and on the floor by the door lay a small pair of battered summer sandals, still encrusted with sand. I remembered the way Pierre had spoken about his daughter, in the deliberately matter-of-fact manner emotional men do, and the sight made my throat catch with sadness.

  I awoke to the sound of water flushing somewhere behind my head. The pipes clanked louder and louder until I opened an eye. Someone, I suspected Beth, was brushing their teeth with an electric toothbrush. In the foreground was the grid-work pattern of my cotton sheet. A little further off, the buzzing hesitations of a fly. I swivelled my head to look at the Mickey Mouse clock by my bedside: a yellow gloved arm pointed to eight-thirty. I had slept nine hours. Falling back into the pillows I breathed in the jasmine air, the sweet child scent that still hung about the room, and contemplated the slit of light above the shuttered window. It flickered intermittently, obscured every now and again by a travelling shadow – a swaying branch perhaps – and I smiled at the prospect of the days that lay before me. Remembering the new bikini Beth had picked out for me finally acted as incentive enough for me to throw back the sheet.

  Downstairs the house was cool and deserted, but I could hear Stephen’s distinct guttural laugh, followed by a loud splash, coming from the back garden. Tiptoeing down a shallow flight of steps that led to the swimming pool, I began to add a touch more momentum to the swing of my narrow hips, seeking to emulate the lazy sensuality I had so often admired in Beth’s own walk. I wandered over to the pool’s edge and sat down, immersing my legs in the water.

  ‘Good morning, sleepyhead.’

  Stephen’s face, level with my knees, rushed up through the water towards me, as he pulled my feet playfully to his chest.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ I warned. ‘How long have you all been up?’

  As he began detailing his night’s sleep and the morning’s discoveries, I took the opportunity to cast a glance around the pool. Pierre was nowhere to be seen, but Beth and Christian’s tonally contrasting figures lay extended on parallel sunloungers on the far side of the pool. Beth propped herself on to an elbow and blew me a kiss. Christian lay on his front, a towel wrapped around his waist, apparently engrossed in a magazine. He made no move to follow Beth as she got up, stretched, and padded towards Stephen and me.

  I’d all but seen her naked in the fitting rooms or whilst preparing for an evening out together, but had never had the chance to contemplate her body in its entirety. An expensive-looking red bikini – not the one we’d bought together – broke up her body into appealing segments, smooth elastic digging into her hips so that an enticing swell of flesh curved outwards above it. The milky skin of her thighs and stomach looked as unmarked as a twenty-year-old’s. Beneath the sun’s unforgiving electric glare, the brazenly seductive nature of that body was shocking. I glanced down at my legs – long, straight, boyish, every pore magnified by the water – and wondered whether Christian had ever compared our two bodies. A flash of white in the corner of my eye warned me of his approach.

  ‘Morning, Anna.’

  He smiled and knelt down by the pool, steadying himself on Beth’s shoulder. As he did this, she inclined her body towards him in a movement so intimate that it seemed indecent.

  ‘Ah, Christian,’ exclaimed Stephen, letting go of my feet for a second to submerge his head in water. ‘You’ll come and join me, won’t you?’ he said as he resurfaced. ‘I can’t believe none of you have been in yet. You must be mad. It’s gorgeous in here.’

  Christian took a flying leap, clutching his knees to his chest, and landed with an impressive explosion in the middle of the pool.

  ‘Jesus! I can hear you lot from a mile away,’ boomed a voice behind us.

  We turned to see Pierre’s supercilious face advancing beyond the box hedge. As he turned the corner, I saw that he was carrying several small greaseproof bags and a baguette beneath one arm. After a series of trips back and forth from the kitchen, we seated ourselves by the pool at the iron-legged table, laden with a multitude of dishes none of us felt hungry enough to eat. I watched, entranced, as Christian’s arm, still glistening with water, reached for the jam.

  ‘So, what do you all fancy doing today?’

  Pierre turned over-energised eyes towards us, eyes that perhaps lingered a fraction too long on me, as he thickly buttered a croissant.

  ‘There’s not that much to see around here. There’s a beautiful castle about half an hour away which is worth taking a look at. Oh, and today’s market day in Honfleur, so we could go and get some supplies, if that appeals.’

  Rather than endearing him to me, Pierre’s desperate desire to please was irritating and a little sad. The prospect of the market was greeted with greater interest than the castle, and it was decided that we would drive to Honfleur immediately after breakfast. Dismayed by the notion of having to do anything, and reluctantly pushing my hopes of a lazy morning by the pool aside, I nodded in response to Pierre’s questioning expression.

  ‘We won’t all fit in to one car, so, Anna, why don’t you come with me and you lot can follow in the hire car.’

  While the others went upstairs to get their things, I helped Pierre clear the table and answered a few perfunctory questions about my life, unable to feign enough interest in him to reciprocate with some questions about his own.

  Luckily the journey into town took a matter of minutes. The leather seats stuck to my thighs in the heat and I felt aggrieved at being coupled with this slightly sinister older man. As I had feared, by the time we had found a parking space near enough to the market, we had managed to lose the others.

  ‘Let’s start off with the fruit and vegetables, shall we?’

  I followed Pierre down a narrow pathway between the stalls, lagging a little way behind, wondering how easy it would be for me to accidentally wander off. It was then that I spotted Christian, alone, his head bobbing with laughter as he bantered with an Algerian man selling belts and counterfeit designer bags. Diving behind a white van selling pizzas, I walked deliberately towards him, taking care to look in the opposite direction. If he calls out, he’s mine, was my simple thought.

  ‘Anna! Over here!’

  I turned with a look of surprise.

  ‘Christian,’ my tone was flat, bored even. ‘Where’s Beth?’

  I looked around me for any sign of Pierre and prayed he would not suddenly appear, asking me to test the ripeness of a tomato, and ruin this precious opportunity to be alone with Christian.

  ‘She’s just gone to the chemist. We’ve been instructed to find her strawberries.’

  ‘Ah yes, she’s always going on about how you can’t get nice ones in Paris,’ I answered automatically, annoyed with myself for having turned the conversation to Beth.

  The market was grid-locked with people trying to complete their weekly shopping at the myriad stalls filling the square. Assailed by a powerful combination of smells – chicken, lavender soap and moules marinière – we stumbled on in search of the red fruit that had become our mission. A farmer selling eggs was bawling out the same refrain: ‘Deux euros les six; trois euros les douze,’ until I b
egan to think he was deliberately trying to provoke a reaction in me. A pair of hands, attempting to remove me from an alley I was blocking, placed themselves firmly around my waist. I turned to vent my anger about the heat, the egg-seller, the curdling odours fuelling my on-coming headache and saw that the hands belonged to Christian, who was smiling down at my mouth.

  ‘Look.’ I wondered whether he might lean forward just a fraction and kiss me. ‘We’re too late.’

  To my left were piled crates of strawberries, the top punnets bubblegum pink and amorphous in the heat. And there, bent over change she was counting out loud in adorably bad French, was Beth.

  ‘Ha! I knew I’d get there before you,’ she smirked, pulling Christian towards her and planting a kiss on his cheek. ‘Where are the others?’

  I hoped that the fact we both rushed to answer that innocent question together might be significant, but doubted that it was.

  ‘Stephen’s having a coffee in a bar around the corner …’ said Christian.

  ‘… and I’ve just lost Pierre,’ I added, as we began to seek a way out of the market.

  ‘So, go on: what do we reckon about our host then? What do we think about Pierre?’ Beth stuck her lips forward in a mocking French pout as she pronounced his name, fixing us both with eyes avid for gossip. The question and the look encompassed everything I liked about her. It was about genuine curiosity, yes, but it also bore testament to her ever-present generosity: the desire to pull me into a conversation, make me feel included. She would, of course, have discussed Pierre with Christian at length – the ‘we’ was simply for my benefit.