Harm's Way (19 page)

‘Beth v low. Help me cheer her up tonight?'

Unable to wait until after lunch to find out more, I excused myself and rang Stephen back from the shoebox-sized lavatory out the back of the restaurant.

‘It's me. Hi. What do you mean low? Why?'

‘Her father, you know.' I covered my mouth with my hand, lest he should hear my sigh of relief. ‘Beth's aunt rang last night: apparently he's not in a good way. Anyway, there's not much we can do, but …'

‘Of course there is. Why don't I come over and bring some lovely take-away from Le Mille-Pâtes. That way neither of you have to cook.'

Beth, who had declined to share a bottle of wine with us that evening, stopped peeling the label off the Evian bottle for a moment and looked up with a smile.

‘This is delicious, Anna. You shouldn't have – you must have spent a fortune.'

She looked lovely that night: clear-skinned and full-faced with the lights in her eyes dancing genially, the last waltz of lovers who would not be spending the night together.

‘My dad rang this morning,' she'd said, as soon as she opened the door, desperate to confide her fears in me.

I pressed my lips together in silent sympathy, wishing I could stem the morose thoughts seeping from her, but
knowing that the truth was inexorable, and that the guilt that paid for every carefree second she spent in Paris away from her father would curdle all that was good in her until she returned, if only briefly, to Ireland.

‘Beth, why don't you take some time off work and spend a couple of weeks with him back home? I just think it's the only thing that will put your mind at rest. And I'm sure your boss would understand.'

The suggestion had been made out of friendship, but the possibilities for Christian and me surfaced amidst a wave of other thoughts.

‘It's not that, Anna. I know I can go back there any time I like. But what's the fucking point? He wouldn't even recognise me. Do you have any idea what that's like? For your own father to look straight through you?'

I didn't. And I had never heard Beth swear before. I was as shocked as when, as a pious ten-year-old, I'd peered down the stairs at a dinner party my parents were holding to see my mother smoking a cigarette. It wasn't so much the fact that she occasionally smoked that had enraged me, but the sensual languor of her pose. The next morning over breakfast I'd lost my temper with her, then, quite without explanation, had burst into tears.

‘Anyway, it's boring, so boring for you two to have to listen to this. Hell, even I'm bored by the whole thing. Anna, do you mind if I just go to bed? I'm afraid I'm not great company tonight.'

‘Of course not.'

I made a move to hug her, but she had already got up and begun clearing the table.

‘Leave that – for God's sake. Just get yourself to bed.'

We waited, eyes downcast, until we heard her bedroom door clicking shut. Stephen sighed and lit a cigarette.

‘Jesus. That poor girl. Do you know how long she's had to live with this? Her whole life. I can even remember Ruth telling me that, at school, when they were both studying for A levels, Beth would have to leave early at least twice a week to drive her mother to the hospital for check-ups. The teachers all knew, of course, but she'd have to get up in the middle of their maths class, pack her things and walk out, in front of everyone. Then she had to cut short an internship with some amazing Italian designer and return home. Her dad had been found miles away from the house in his pyjamas trying to climb on to one of the neighbours' horses.'

‘God.'

I was uncomfortable with details, seldom able to mould my sympathy into an adequate phrase. Giving advice or reassurance felt as unnatural to me as a foreign language: fearful of saying the wrong thing I stumbled over every word.

‘I know so little about Alzheimer's … but it's horrid, isn't it?'

‘Yup.'

Conscious of how banal our conversation sounded, how little it helped Beth, we sat in silence until Stephen regretfully finished his cigarette and I wondered whether to leave.

‘Where's Christian?'

I hadn't been ready for the question and my rushed answer sounded defensive.

‘I've no idea. Why?'

‘No reason. But she could probably do with a shoulder to cry on right now, and I'm beginning to wonder whether he gives her enough support about this.' Stephen closed his eyes
and drew his fingers symmetrically together from the furthest edge of both cheekbones to the end of his nose in a manner that betrayed his enjoyment at passing judgement.

‘Sometimes I think there's just too much history between us for me to be of any real help. I know that sounds odd, but knowing someone too well sort of makes their advice redundant somehow. Should we call Christian and get him to come over?'

I shook my head, a little too vigorously. Any jealousy I had felt towards Beth had almost entirely dissipated over the past few weeks, but there were enough taut emotions that night without Christian's presence adding to the mix.

‘No. I think she just needs to have her friends around her. Besides, he's probably working. Let me go in and talk to her.'

She responded to my knock immediately, gentle though it was, and I shut the door behind me and perched beside her on the bed. She had changed into a pair of dusky pink pyjamas, decorated with bears, coffee cups and the words:
métro, boulot, dodo.
The overall effect was laughably saccharine.

‘Where on earth do they come from?' I joked, placing a cup of camomile tea on the bedside table and a comforting hand on her leg.

A smile, blurred by its contact with the pillow, turned into a forced giggle.

‘Aren't they hideous? My aunt bought them for me when she came over last Christmas. I think they're meant for people younger than me, probably younger than you even, but they're really comfortable, and don't worry: I keep them hidden in my bottom drawer for emergency situations like these. I would never let Christian see them.'

It was my turn to force a smile. I hated the way his name punctured every conversation, making all my words feel like lies. Her own smile faded. Her feverish cheeks and bright eyes made her look like the consumptive heroine of a Brontë novel, and I felt an almost unbearable throb of compassion for her.

‘Beth …' I stopped, realising I had nothing to say.

‘I know. I know, my darling,' and somehow she was comforting me. ‘Please don't worry. I'll be fine. It just gets to me every now and then, that's all.'

I lay down beside her on the bed for a further half-hour, turning the lights out at her request, and for the first time we discussed death, what it meant, the strangeness of it. I could no longer see her face, and unexpectedly, I found myself telling her about the girl on the bridge. I was careful enough to amend the details of course, explaining that it had been on my way back from the date I'd told her about the week before, and that I would doubtless never see the boy again. But quite abruptly, Beth stopped murmuring sleepy words of acquiescence, and fell asleep. I tiptoed out, whispering more to myself than to her:

‘Just get a good night's sleep and it'll all look a whole lot different in the morning.'

I doubted that the realisation that your own father was dying could look a whole lot different. And as I kissed her forehead, unknowingly for the last time, I breathed in the mis-match of scent and lotion that I have spent every day since trying to forget.

Stephen was stubbing out a cigarette in front of a French game show in which the host spanked bikini-clad women with a giant inflatable hand. As he did so, staring at the butt as
if it were to blame for his mood, a vaudeville slapping noise resonated and the studio audience guffawed with laughter.

‘How is she?' he asked without looking up.

‘I think she'll be all right.'

I said it because I wanted it to be true, because it made my life easier to believe that Beth would be fine. But someone else's grief is always oddly distancing. You care, of course you do, but in the end it is still someone else's grief.

It was just before seven by the time I got home from work. After a day of delightful anticipation, broken by twinges of concern for Beth, I'd rushed home, cursing the wiry-haired Japanese woman sitting beside me on the métro who breathed in short, whistling nasal bursts. Once through the ticket barriers, I'd broken into a semi-run. Back at the flat I changed clothes twice and sat bolt upright at the table, with nearly an hour to spare, feeling foolish in the expensive new underwear hidden beneath my jeans and T-shirt.

He was twenty minutes late, and I had remained immobile, willing myself to send Beth a reassuring text, put a CD on or turn the pages of the magazine on the table. Never before had I realised that the air around me made a noise, that you could hear silence. My paralysis was shattered only by the sound of his footsteps on the landing. I felt myself breathe again. Then that breath was mingled with his, his kisses dry, his mouth tasting of cashew nuts and red wine, so that when I finally heard the phone, I realised it had been ringing for some time.

‘Ignore it,' said Christian into my open mouth.

But his arms had already loosened their hold around my hips, and I got up, wrapping the duvet around myself, as if worried the caller might sense my nakedness. It was Stephen. First I wrongly interpreted his tone as bored. Then something in the flattened consonants became clearer: he was worried.

‘Is Beth with you? Only I'm at Fred and Valerie's and she hasn't turned up yet. I've tried her mobile but it just goes straight to answerphone. She's an hour and a half late. We're going to have to start dinner without her.'

‘She's not here,' I said quickly, filled with an irrational fear that Stephen knew, that this was all a ruse, that he was standing outside the door of my flat.

‘Oh.' He sounded deflated. ‘How weird.'

‘She's probably just stuck in a meeting. I tell you what,' I said, keen to get him off the line. ‘I'll give her a try too.'

‘OK. Well, let me know if you have any luck, and I'll give Christian a call. Have you got his number?'

‘No. Why would I have his number?'

‘I thought Beth gave it to you that night we …'

‘You're right. Maybe I do. Let me have a look.'

‘No, don't worry. I think I've got it here.'

Stephen hung up and I turned to Christian, propped up against two grey-blue pillows, his face as tenderly crumpled as them. He looked like a gay man's fantasy, decadent and unravelled, his absolute good looks rendering him utterly soulless.

‘That was Stephen, by the way. Beth hasn't turned up to that dinner they were going to tonight. They don't know where she is. He's going to call you.' I gestured towards his mobile, which lay expectantly on the table by his discarded jacket. ‘And I think you should answer or he might think something's up.'

Nevertheless, the urgent vibrations we were both expecting made me jump.

As I was lying next to Christian, I could hear, disconcertingly, both sides of the conversation. I listened as Stephen
automatically repeated the same terse phrases he'd said to me only moments earlier. Christian uttered a series of monosyllabic replies, his French accent rounding the vowels, endowing his words with a greater eloquence than mine. He was more in control than I, less wavering in his tone, and I watched admiringly. When he clipped his phone shut, two parallel lines divided his smooth brow and he swung his legs out of bed. ‘Where the hell's she got to?'

He was angry now. I wondered if it were really because we hadn't had time to finish.

‘She's probably forgotten and gone off drinking with people from work,' I suggested, tapping into my phone ‘Where are you?' and pressing send. ‘And she's always forgetting to charge her mobile, you know that.'

I kicked off a corner of duvet that was covering too much of my thigh, hoping the sight of it might bring him back to bed.

‘I don't know. She's not really like that; she never forgets appointments.'

He was pulling his jeans on; I was going to have to take drastic action. I wasn't going to let Beth's delayed journey home, forgetfulness or overrun meeting ruin my moment. I propped myself on to one arm, letting the covers fall off me, and lay there naked, staring at him unflinchingly.

He stopped buttoning his jeans, his hand still on the fly, and watched me in silence. As each second ticked over, I began to feel cold and embarrassed. If I had known then what I know now, I would have felt the impropriety of our situation even more acutely. After what seemed like longer but must have been just a minute, Christian continued to dress and I let him,
neither of us wanting to voice our common fear that Beth, for whatever motive, was on her way to my flat.

For that reason alone I was relieved that he hadn't stayed – though until his civil goodbye-smile I'd half expected him to. Still, I hadn't wanted our first real night together to be fraught, and I was woken by involuntary muscle spasms, which shook my body, as a sense of guilt gradually fought its way to the surface.

At St Paul métro station the next morning, the sight of a beggar sitting cross-legged on a sleeping bag soaked with his own urine, tendrils of wetness creeping towards commuters, compounded my malaise. As soon as I reached the staffroom at the museum, I texted Stephen.

‘Forgot, did she?'

Minutes passed and I stared at the blank screen on my telephone, willing that little envelope to appear. And there it was.

‘Still not heard from her. Am worried now.'

Someone in the corner of the room dropped something light, a pencil perhaps: Isabelle.

‘Beth didn't come home last night,' I said, still looking at the phone, trying to master the tremor in my voice. ‘Stephen doesn't know where she is.'