Harm's Way (11 page)

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.

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, admiring 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.

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.