Harm's Way (20 page)

Panic hit me.

‘She will have been with Christian, won't she?'

I looked up at her.

‘No. I … we know she wasn't. Where the hell is she? What on earth is she playing at?'

More people were beginning to shuffle noisily into the room, dumping bags and taking off their coats. Ignoring
Isabelle, who was walking towards me with a look of concern on her face, I dialled Stephen's number and covered one ear.

‘I've tried her work but no one's in yet,' he explained. ‘And I can't even remember whether she starts at nine or ten in the morning, can you? I always leave before her.'

‘Well, let's both keep trying her there. She'll turn up.'

I caught sight of the clock on the wall and began to stash my belongings in a locker.

‘I know,' Stephen breathed deeply into the receiver. ‘We'll have heard from her by this evening, I'm sure, and I'm going to tell her to have a bit more bloody consideration next time she decides to go AWOL, believe me.'

I had missed breakfast and by the middle of the day was light-headed with hunger. Shifting uncomfortably on my chair, I watched the endless sequence of tourists shuffle in and out of the room like dispirited actors at an audition they knew they weren't right for, nipping back to the staff room every hour to try Beth's phone again. There were two messages from Stephen. The first a garbled voicemail, informing me that, according to her colleagues, Beth had left work at the usual time the night before. The second a stark text message: ‘We have to do something.' I rang Stephen back immediately, arranging to go straight to the flat after work. There, we would decide on ‘a course of action'. Those were my words, because we were both too scared, as yet, to mention the police.

I chose to walk, and with every dull click my heels made against the sodden pavements, the reality of Beth's disappearance began to sink in. I had worked through, and rejected, every conceivable possibility, except the worst, which I refused to let my mind entertain. Until now I had been sure
that she would suddenly appear, pale and contrite, but bursting with excitement at the unexpected adventure she'd had. Touched by our concern, she would apologise before launching into a detailed account of her evening. I thought about the last time I had seen her, a forty-year-old woman looking like a child in those absurd pyjamas, and my heart contracted. Suppose she had taken my advice and gone to visit her father? Surely she would not have done so without telling Stephen and me? And although I hated to admit it, the notion that she would not have rung her work to explain seemed even more improbable; Beth would not simply disappear. Minutes before I turned into Beth and Stephen's street, the rain began in earnest. My thoughts turned to Christian, who I hoped would not be there to see me with wet hair which had begun to curl at the base of my neck.

The up-beat attitude I had been simulating dissolved instantly at the sight of Stephen's eyes as he opened the door. They were hooded over, the irises turned from blue to a purulent green. He took me through to the kitchen. Dressed in crumpled beige cords spattered with ochre-coloured paint and a T-shirt bearing a butch American logo, he mechanically put the kettle on. There was a red spot forming at the wing of his left nostril, where its inward curve met his cheek.

‘Still nothing?' I asked pointlessly, hanging my coat up beside a velvet jacket Beth and I had bought together at a sample sale but which she'd never worn, claiming it made her look ‘wide'.

‘Nope.'

On the table, a cafetiére gummed up with sodden coffee stood untouched, and beside it, a half-made sandwich oozed a lip of Camembert from between two hard crusts.

‘Eat something – you look terrible.'

I found his demeanour out of keeping with the situation – far too melodramatic. But it made sense: Stephen took everything personally, making everything that happened – good or bad – his. He was probably enjoying this.

‘I know,' he breathed heavily as we both edged ourselves on to the high barstools he and Beth had bought on a whim.

‘I just can't help thinking that something awful has happened. This is so unlike her, Anna … so unlike her.'

I fought the impulse to shout back at him: ‘Oh for God's sake, Stephen, she's old enough to be my mother. She's probably got bored of your constant dependency, and gone to meet an old friend. Either that or fancied a bit of time on her own!' Instead I silently emptied the coffee into the sink, watching the water carry each grain down the plughole in a circular motion, like a complicated molecular diagram.

‘What does Ruth think?'

‘That she may be heading back home, but that it's totally unlike her not to tell anyone,' he groaned. ‘She thinks we should call the police.'

The doorbell rang as if to underscore that thought, and I started.

‘You see, that'll be her.' I laughed, without thinking.

‘No. She's got her key. It's Christian. I told him to come over.'

As he padded down the hallway to answer the door, I pulled the kitchen blind up halfway so that I could check myself in the pane of glass mirrored by the darkness. And by the time Christian walked in, looking different, tense, like I'd never seen him, I had recomposed my face and was able to greet him with the appropriate sobriety.

‘Have you checked her room?' I suggested, keen to extricate us all from the stagnant, hopeless atmosphere Stephen had created. ‘I think the first thing we should do is see if her passport's there. If it's not then we can all relax: we'll know she's on her way back to Ireland to see her dad.'

We walked into Beth's light-blue-painted room illuminated only by a skylight in the slanting roof above her perfectly made bed. It suddenly seemed obscene that all three of us were here. Christian and Beth had made love on that bed, maybe lain there whispering afterwards. Perhaps it showed on my face; I caught Christian looking at me with an expression of unease. For an instant I blamed Beth and Stephen for everything: for being so complacent and shortsighted that neither of them had seen it coming, for failing to spot what was going on under their noses.

‘I think Anna's right: she's obviously gone to see her father,' Christian said with sudden conviction. ‘It's the only thing that makes sense. He's been calling lots, and sounding more and more …' he drew an invisible, unintentionally elegant semicircle in the air with his index finger. I could see that Stephen found the gesture offensive.

‘What does that mean?' Stephen copied the movement, exaggeratedly, and the tension in the room rose a notch.

Christian, his voice steeled, continued, ‘Well, you know … loopy.'

I suppressed the urge to laugh at his heavily accented use of such an old-fashioned word. Where had he picked it up from? With a rush of affection I thought of him poring over an out-of-date English phrase book as a soft-haired schoolboy. Rummaging through the drawer in her bedside table Stephen murmured, ‘I think she usually keeps it here.' And then
triumphantly: ‘Well, it's not here. So you're right. She must have taken off without thinking to tell us. If she has, then I'm sorry, but that's bloody inconsiderate. I don't care how upset she is, it bloody is …' he added in a hurt voice, retreating to the kitchen.

We could breathe easy now. I smiled at Christian. His lack of obvious interest in me since he had arrived at the flat was making me desire him for the first time since Beth had disappeared. The situation was resolving itself: we would call Beth's father, and, if she had not yet arrived in Skibbereen, keep calling until she did. Christian didn't smile back at me. I followed his gaze to Beth's desk, where a cup was filled with the charcoal pencils she used to sketch, a single poppy peering shyly out between them. I smiled again then, convinced that Beth was all right, and reassured that I could not be a bad person if I, like Beth, always found it impossible to throw poppies away. In the ashtray on her desk a single half-smoked, lipstick-soiled cigarette had been squashed like a bent knuckle. It lay there shamelessly, delighting in its own tackiness. I couldn't remember ever seeing Beth smoke.

‘Since when has she smoked?' I asked absently.

‘She does occasionally, when she's really wound up about something.'

I was surprised at his authoritative tone. Did Christian imagine for a moment that he knew Beth better than I? I looked at him, disliking him briefly, and because of that, suddenly wanting him so badly that I had to sit down.

‘Right. Get up. Come on. Let's go and try her father.'

I looked up at him standing before me by the bed, at the branches of lines on his palm extended towards me. He met
my inviting eyes once, and then twice just to make sure, and threw my hand back disbelievingly.

‘Jesus, Anna. You scare me sometimes, you really do.'

In the kitchen Stephen was holding the receiver to his ear. For what seemed like an age he said nothing, before finally speaking into it.

‘Mr Murphy? Hello, it's Stephen here. Stephen. No, it's not about the television. It's Stephen – Ruth's brother.'

He rubbed at the inflamed pore on his nostril, which had budded into a tiny yellow point.

‘That's right, Stephen, Beth's friend. I'm very well, but listen; I don't want you to worry, but is Beth there with you?'

A pause ensued which was long enough to make me want to grab the receiver and shout down the phone at Beth's decrepit father: ‘We're all going out of our minds here! For God's sake: is your daughter with you or not?'

But Stephen was nodding patiently into the receiver, and raising an eyebrow in our direction.

‘Your daughter Beth. That's right … OK. OK, but will you call me if she turns up? We think she was worried about you, Mr Murphy, and that she may be on her way to see you. I'm sure it's all fine, but please just tell her to call me as soon as she arrives.'

Sinking back down on to his stool Stephen put his head in his hands and laughed with relief, eventually looking up at our expectant faces.

‘Right. Thank God we caught him at a lucid moment. Everything seems to be fine. Apparently he was asking her to come and see him when they spoke on the phone earlier in the
week, so that's obviously what she's done. But God knows how she's planning on getting there.'

Christian and I stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘I don't think you two get just how far Skibbereen is from anywhere,' he laughed. ‘She'd have to fly to Dublin, get a train halfway there and then a bus. It would easily take her a day and a half from Paris – and that's if the connections are good. She's probably asleep on some coach right now. God, I need a drink, I'm going to go down to the shop and get a bottle of wine. Do you two need anything?'

As we both shook our heads I was calculating exactly how long it would take him to get there and back. By the time the front door slammed shut Christian's tongue was already in my mouth, still warm from the gulp of coffee he had just taken, his knee forcing my knees apart. I took a special delight in keeping my eyes open, surprised that far from deadening sensations it gave them an edge. I could see myself in his pupils, framed by the delicate fringe of his lashes, each dark hair thinning and lightening towards its tip.

By the time Stephen returned, we were seated on opposite sofas in the sitting room. Christian was smoking, a bored expression on his face. I was flicking nonchalantly through the TV guide. Only the most meticulous observer would have noticed that the vein in my neck was still beating fast.

Our concern temporarily appeased by Stephen's conversation with Beth's father, and subsequently with Ruth, the three of us talked out our conclusion that she had, in a moment of panic, decided to leave Paris immediately and make her way to Skibbereen, until our worries were entirely dispelled. But we were all pretending to each other, using any excuse to sneak out of the room and try Beth on her mobile phone, only
to be greeted with the same increasingly irritating sing-song answerphone message. I had even begun to imagine that there was a hint of mockery in the upward lilt of ‘and I'll get straight back to you', as though Beth were enjoying our concerted efforts to track her down. I texted her continuously, without telling the others, thinking that she might be in some kind of trouble she could only tell me about.

It was too late to go home, and when I suggested spending the night at the flat, Christian instantly concurred, adding that I could have Beth's bed, and he would sleep on the sofa. After watching the end of a badly dubbed American thriller on television, Stephen got up, stretched, and looked at his watch.

‘It's past one. She'll be nearly there by now, unless she's had to stop off in a hotel overnight.'

Something in the overconfident way he was mapping her steps revived the trepidation I had felt earlier that day. What if Beth was
not
on her way back to Ireland?

‘Stephen,' I cleared my throat. ‘When would we know if she's, well, not heading back home?'

‘It would take her a good day and a half, Anna, like I said, and Ruth said she would spend the whole of tomorrow at the farm with her father, so whatever happens she'll call us when she gets there. But we've been through this, and it all makes sense now. I mean, why else would she have taken her passport with her?'

He bit off a piece of dry skin from the side of his thumb and stood uneasily in the centre of the room like a comedian who'd forgotten his lines.

‘So why the hell is her phone switched off?' Christian said without looking up.

‘She's always forgetting to charge it.'

I could only remember a single instance when she had, yet I was making it a character trait.

‘She obviously left in a real rush, so I really don't think that means anything. Added to which, we have to accept that none of us are exactly her first priority at the moment.'