Harm's Way (12 page)

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 began 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.

‘There's definitely something creepy about him,' Christian muttered. Beth looked smilingly at him as he spoke.

‘I think he's quite lecherous,' I said, seeking a reaction.

‘Why? Has he said something to you?'

Both Beth and Christian had stopped walking and were looking at me, wide-eyed. My remark had been customised to provoke, but now that I had their attention, I felt unable to deliver the information they were expecting. At the far corner of the square, outside a café, I spotted the flaxen crown of Stephen's head bowed over a newspaper.

‘Well, no, it's just something you can tell. Look: Stephen's over there. Beth, give me that bag, you always insist on carrying everything.'

But Beth was excited by the subject now, and refused to yield it to me, even though the plastic handles were digging sticky white trenches across her fingers.

‘Leave these to me. Now go on: he must have said something. Or was there a midnight knock on your bedroom door last night?' She raised an eyebrow.

I tried to join in with their laughter, but it sounded hollow.

‘Don't be ridiculous. It's just that he's very, well… tactile,' I attempted.

‘Poor guy,' chuckled Beth, as we reached Stephen, ‘he probably can't believe his luck having this nubile young girl around.'

Thankfully, the thread was broken by the kerfuffle of appropriating chairs from neighbouring tables, and the conversation moved on to Stephen's back; he was suffering
a few twinges after his night on the sofa-bed, poor dear. No one seemed concerned about finding Pierre. We had all resolved to leave our mobile phones switched off for the duration of the trip, and I amused myself with images of him, red-faced and contrite, checking every sweltering alley of the market.