A Heart Bent Out of Shape (11 page)

There was a knock at her door and she groaned.

‘Hang on!’ she called. ‘Wait a minute.’

She stumbled out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown. It would be Kristina, gushing apology. And she knew that she would instantly accept it, an apology of her own not far behind. Even though Kristina had no way of knowing where they’d ended up last night, Hadley had still found herself looking for her as they danced in the crush of the basement bar. She had kept one eye always on the entrance, turning whenever she saw a sleek blonde head or heard a sudden burst of laughter. Simply, Lausanne wasn’t Lausanne without Kristina. She opened the door, a ready smile at her lips.

A police officer stared back. And when he started to speak, even though his French was slow and measured, she couldn’t understand what he was saying. She heard the name
Rue des Mirages
but it meant nothing to her. Then he said Kristina’s name. Hadley spoke in English,
I’m sorry
,
she said,
I don’t understand
.
He turned his hat in his hands. His next words came very kindly, very softly, so gently, in fact, that she still thought she was mistaken, right up until the moment when she fainted in a fierce blaze of white light.

eleven

The officer, with his slanting shoulders
and startling
uniform, stood over her. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, sipping a glass of water gingerly. He told her that Kristina had died straight away and that it was nobody’s fault. It was the blizzard of snowflakes, a slippery street, a sudden fall, and the unyielding corner of the kerb meeting her head.
A tragic accident
, he said, framing it with oft-used words that only served to place it with all the other tragic accidents that occurred all around the globe each and every day. He had tried to smile for her then, a half smile, lifting just one corner of his sandy moustache.
She probably wouldn’t have felt anything
, he said, in well-intentioned English, but it was as though he was saying that, because of that, Hadley shouldn’t either. At least not more than you normally did, when one of those tragic accidents occurred. She couldn’t meet his eye, and yet when the moment came for him to leave she didn’t want him to. He had given her something she had never had before, this terrible piece of news passed so gently to her, its weight no less terrific. He couldn’t just turn and go now, could he? Back out into the other world? She stared at the door as he closed it behind him, and it stared back at her.

The day that followed was made of strange details, blurred and imprecise. Jenny wore a hazy pink cardigan and made cup after cup of tea, pressing them into Hadley’s hands as though a gentle form of medication. Chase smoked cigarettes out of the kitchen window, shivering in the blasts of cold air, a nervous red rash she hadn’t seen before creeping up his neck. Bruno and Loretta sat beside one another, their fingers woven, their dark heads bent. The police officer had spoken briefly to each of them, careful questions that were met with shaken heads and incomprehension, and when he left, Chase chewed at the edge of his thumb and said to them all,
Is this real?
Outside the snow continued to fall steadily, but there was nothing picturesque about it any more. Clouds hung heavy and smearing. The streetlights clicked on early. At some point Bruno ordered pizzas and the unopened boxes littered the table. Hadley took one of Chase’s cigarettes and smoked it on the balcony in the dark. She leant all the way over, until her head filled with stars. Her teeth chattered and the sound was so loud, so involuntary, she didn’t realise at first that it was coming from her. She began to cry, new tears sticking to where the old ones had fallen. She felt a hand on her arm, and let Jenny draw her back inside.

‘She was on her way to meet us, Jenny,’ Hadley said. The tips of her fingers were turning blue and she yanked the sleeves of her sweater down. ‘She was probably only in those back streets because she was trying to take a short cut to the restaurant.’

Hadley wanted to add that Kristina was only rushing, not looking and hurrying, her feet moving too fast over the white-iced pavement, because of her harsh words. She had made her feel so guilty, and said such horrible things, things that weren’t even true. But she choked back the words.

‘People fall over all the time, don’t they?’ she said, instead. ‘I don’t get it. How could she slip, and bang her head, and have it
kill
her? How can we be so fragile, that the slightest fall means the end? People take all kinds of risks and they’re fine, totally fine. Kristina was walking down a street. Or running, whatever, but that’s all. She didn’t jump off a building. She wasn’t in a war.’

‘Sometimes things just happen,’ said Jenny, ‘and we can’t explain them. You know, I heard about a boy when I was at school, the friend of a friend’s friend, or something like that, anyway, he fell down dead on the rugby pitch. Just from nowhere his heart gave out. Imagine . . .’

‘What, he just died?’ said Bruno, looking up.

‘Collapsed. I think it was a really important game, and he was the star player, and . . .’

Hadley stopped listening and pulled at a loose thread in her sleeve. It ran a couple of stitches and she pulled it some more. The pavements could be treacherous when icy, she knew that. She had skidded herself, flung out a hand to catch at a railing, and once fell down on her backside as they were rushing for the bus. She had laughed with the shock of it and Kristina had held out her hand and pulled her back to her feet. How could it be possible that a person’s head, one so solid, so strong, so full of ideas and dreams and hopes and fears and cravings for rum-dashed hot chocolate and lime-lit cocktails and sweet-centred almond croissants and a Genevan man called Jacques, could just stop at the slightest knock? Or perhaps it was heavy. A crashing to the ground. A hard smack to the softest part of the head. But were we so badly put together that life could be swiped away so very easily? As snow fell and people laughed in restaurants and said things that they didn’t mean on the telephone?

‘Hadley?’

She looked up. The four of them appeared to swim before her. Somewhere, deep in Les Ormes, a door banged and there was a shout of laughter, and running footsteps.

‘We were just saying,’ said Jenny, biting down on her lip as she spoke, ‘Kristina’s boyfriend, the one she thought we didn’t know about . . . how will he know what happened? How will anyone tell him?’

Kristina’s parents arrived at Les Ormes on Sunday morning. There were voices in the corridor and the clacking of a key against a lock. Hadley pushed open her door and peered out. They were standing with the porter, an elderly man who was bent double in his blue overalls, stooping with apology. And there was a woman she recognised from campus, with tightly curled brown hair and an officious air. She had always imagined Kristina’s mother and father to be a storybook pair, impeccable and quietly dazzling. Instead she saw a dumpy man and woman, with old coats and cheap shoes. They held on to one another, their heads dipped. She began to close the door but the woman from the university saw her.

‘
Excusez-moi, bonjour, vous êtes . . . ?
’

‘Hadley Dunn.’

Hadley hadn’t slept the night before, and her hair was matted, her eyes sore. She stood blinking in her pyjamas.

‘
Une amie de Kristina?
’

‘
Oui
,’ she said. She glanced at Kristina’s parents and saw that they’d turned to her. They still clung to one another but their heads were raised now. Hadley tried to meet their eyes and failed.

‘Kristina’s parents are here to collect her things,’ the woman said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘Of course,’ Hadley said, glancing at them again.

Kristina’s mother came towards her then and Hadley resisted the urge to step back.

‘Were you good friends, you and Kristina?’ she said, in careful English.

‘Yes,’ Hadley said. ‘We were.’

She had a thickset sort of face, but Hadley recognised the shades of Kristina. Her grey hair was threaded with gold. Her cheeks were dappled with freckles. The pale washed blue of her eyes brimmed with tears. She kissed Hadley on both cheeks, and her lips were cold and scratchy.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and Hadley felt weak with pity. She had no words to make any of it better. In the end all she had was this.

‘Mrs Hartmann, I’m really going to miss Kristina. More than I’ve ever missed anyone. She was so . . .’

She wanted to say ‘full of life’ because it was true, she had been bursting with it. Kristina had so much life that it spilled over into yours too. She hesitated, and then said it anyway. Kristina’s mother clasped a hand to her heart, her five fingers pressing like a starfish, her mouth agape. Hadley regretted it instantly. But everything else was no good either. How did a short-lived friendship, however important, compare to a whole life? The changing of nappies and kissing of her sleep-warm head? Helping with homework at the kitchen table, and mopping the tears of first heartbreak? She knew her own grief was incomparable, but anything beyond it was impossible to imagine.

‘Was she happy here?’ Kristina’s mum whispered.

Hadley nodded.

‘And you were a good friend to her, weren’t you? I can see that.’

Hadley had ended the call so abruptly, and she had no idea how long Kristina had carried on speaking, after the click. Whether she had rung again, only to find Hadley’s phone deliberately turned off, as they whirled back out into the night with no intention of telling her where they were going. Hadley was seized by the sudden desire to tell Kristina’s mother everything, to fall into her arms and have her stroke her hair as her own mother would have. To hear her say,
Oh, Kristina drove us all wild with her ways, never you mind, Hadley, she knew you loved her, of course she did
. But she couldn’t do it. Hadley walked two steps towards her and opened her arms. Kristina’s mother stepped into them as obediently as a child. Despite the press of Kristina’s mother’s body, the thick weight of her bosom pushing against her and her hot, gasping breath, there was an intolerable absence in the embrace; the inescapable feeling that they should never have met, never have needed to hold one another, and that they were each hanging on to the wrong person. The right person had wisped clean away.

Kristina’s father took his wife gently by the elbow. He nodded at Hadley in brief acknowledgement, but his eyes looked through and beyond her. They went into Kristina’s room and quietly closed the door. The porter idled in the corridor.
Triste
, he said, looking down at his feet, ‘
very sad
’, and Hadley answered
oui
in soft reply
.
She closed her bedroom door by degrees. She leant her head against the wall. She thought of Kristina’s parents folding their daughter’s clothes, her silky shirts and mini dresses. Taking her bursting make-up bag, and the rows of dribbling bottles from beside her bathroom mirror. Her books, not neatly stacked like Hadley’s but scattered carelessly, with cracked spines and bent pages.

They didn’t take long to clear her room, about as long as it took Hadley to shrug off her dressing gown and put on some clothes, tug a brush through her hair and wash her hands and face. Kristina’s parents were hollowed by grief, all scooped out. They would be back in Copenhagen by nightfall, Lausanne only a nightmarish memory, and there was nothing she could do to change any of it. There was nothing she could do at all.

Jenny’s question about Kristina’s boyfriend came to mind, then.
Jacques
. Worse than knowing had to be not knowing. To still be walking around, dogged by trivial worries, frowning at the snow clouds, tutting at a crowded bus or bemoaning the length of the queue for the train. Perhaps their connection ran deeper. Maybe Jacques was somewhere feeling a sharp yet indescribable sense of
wrong,
like a sudden blast of headache or sickness. One that made him pause in the street to look over his shoulder, feel in his pocket for his wallet, or telephone his mother just to check that she still answered. She doubted that he would ever think of fearing for Kristina.

As Hadley splashed water in her bathroom she heard the door open and the murmur of voices, the squeak of a rubber shoe on the linoleum floor. She hurried to her door and stepped out. They were standing in a cluster, the four of them again, Kristina’s brown suitcases bunched at their feet.

‘Mrs Hartmann?’ she said.

She turned to her, and for just a second Hadley saw something like hope cross her face. She stumbled over her words. She asked if they knew Jacques.

‘Did she ever mention him to you?’ she said.

Kristina’s father picked up a case in each hand and began to turn away. Her mother took a woollen hat from her bag and placed it on her head, tugging it down over her ears.

‘There were always a lot of boys,’ she said. ‘My daughter,’ she paused, ‘my daughter was very much loved.’

‘Yes,’ said Hadley, her voice a whisper, as quiet as the falling snow, ‘yes, she was.’

twelve

Another day like yesterday would have been
unbearable
; the claustrophobia of the kitchen at Les Ormes, everybody sitting around, Kristina’s absence all the more noticeable because the rest of them were together. They might have felt surprise and shock with equal fervency but their grief was separate and wildly different. Jenny had said yesterday, ‘I never felt like I really knew her,’ and Hadley wanted to say,
That’s because you didn’t
. Chase and Bruno had murmured assent and meanwhile she thought of Kristina playing with the three little boys in the French garden, the particular way she ate an almond croissant, swiping all of the filling with the tip of her finger and licking it quickly, and her ‘I’m talking about Jacques’ smile, which was rueful and joyous all at once.

There was a knocking at Hadley’s door and she opened it to find Jenny.

‘We’re thinking of going for a drive along the lake,’ Jenny said, in a peppy voice, ‘do you want to come?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Oh, go on, you’re not doing anything else, are you?’

‘I think I just want to be on my own today.’

‘But that’s no good,’ Jenny said.

‘No,’ said Hadley, ‘you’re right. Nothing’s good.’

‘Oh, Hadley, I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘I know you didn’t.’

‘Then why won’t you come? We need to cheer each other up.’

Hadley shook her head, and a wave of tears threatened to take her. It was the wrong girl standing at her door.

‘Sorry, Jenny,’ she said, ‘and thanks. Really. But I’m just not in the mood.’

Hadley forced the smallest smile for Jenny’s sake as she closed the door on her. She didn’t need
cheering up
. Children who felt poorly needed cheering up. Soft-willed girls who’ve been snubbed by a boy needed cheering up. She thought of the four of them in Bruno’s car, batting questions around just to fill the silence. They would stare blankly at the sights of lake and mountain and palm, then drink too much in a gaudy-looking bar in Vevey, eat anaemic croque-monsieurs
,
and then wind home later proclaiming that the trip had been just the thing. All cheered up. She had lied when she’d said she wanted to be alone. She just didn’t want to be with them, not without Kristina.

Hadley picked up her phone and started to dial her parents’ number. She stopped. What would she say? That she had never felt sadder, or further from home? She couldn’t do it. Perhaps it made no sense, but as long as they didn’t know, she felt as though some part of her world could carry on. She stared instead at her desk. The pages of her essay for Joel Wilson’s class were scattered across it. She considered sitting down to work, trying to lose herself in Hemingway. But she knew that for all the sparse, crisp words, all the things he didn’t say would rise up out of the page and engulf her, and instead of being moved, or inspired, all she would feel was the pointlessness of it all. In her pile of books she spotted one with a candy-pink spine. She drew it out, and turned it in her hand. Kristina had lent it to her a couple of weeks ago. It was a schmaltzy romance that was set on the French Riviera and Kristina had found it amusing.
It might as well be my fling with Jacques
, she’d said,
kissing under the palm trees, cocktails at dawn, it’s all there. Here, I’ll lend it to you
. Hadley had taken it and thanked Kristina, then added it to her pile and forgotten all about it, doubting it was to her taste. She hadn’t known to treasure it, then.

The cover bore traces of beach life; it was sun-faded, with sand crystals buried in the spine. Hadley imagined Kristina lying on her front, her shades sliding down her nose. Jacques would be rubbing sunscreen over her shoulders, dropping a kiss between applications. Hadley held the book to her nose and could almost believe she caught the scent of Ambre Solaire. The silly cover, with its abandoned bikini and sparkling martini glass, blurred before her. She flicked through the pages and saw that a postcard had been slipped between them. It was one of those flat-painted vintage pictures, the ubiquitous kind that Joel had on the wall in his office. It showed undulations of distant purple mountains, stacked villas, explosions of palm and orange trees.
Côte d’Azur
was written in elegant capitals. She flipped it over and read the message.
There’s nothing real about this place. Only you are real. Only being with you is real
.
It was written in a messy, uneven scrawl, as though its author had consumed one too many drinks in the midday sun, or was writing on a bobbing yacht, eyes on the horizon. Hadley knew Kristina’s writing and it wasn’t hers. It could only be Jacques.

Hadley stared at the postcard, willing it to reveal some other detail, some clue to his identity, but there was nothing; just a standard scene of beauty, and a chaotic, lovelorn scribble. Hadley read it aloud, tasting each word. She thought then of her own unsent card from the mountain village; another flattened and perfect picture of blue skies, white snow, and a bronzed and happy girl leaning on her skis, her face to the sun.
A privilege and a trespass
. It could have been the same author. A couple of lines, jotted down because they refused to stay in your own head. She returned the card to its place in the book, and felt again the pull between her and Jacques. A sweep of pity threatened to knock her from her feet. She staggered, and flopped back on her bed to stare at the ceiling. She felt as though it might fall, and she knew then that she had to get out.

It took her nearly an hour to reach the lakeside and yet later she would be able to remember nothing of the walk. She didn’t know it but she marched across a road in full traffic, a cyclist swerving, a driver slamming his horn. She barged into a teenage boy as he wove on his skateboard and his face contorted with irritation, until he saw that she was only a pale-faced girl with tear-whipped cheeks. He watched her walk on. She only snapped back to life when her foot caught the open guitar case of a busker, sending his meagre scattering of coins rolling across the pavement. She bent to her knees to apologise, knocking heads with him as she stooped to retrieve his money. He laid a hand on her shoulder and she saw the note of pity in his face. She got to her feet and went on, and as she walked, she found herself consumed with one idea. Leaving Lausanne. Not because she wanted to go, but because she didn’t know if she could stay. Without Kristina, nothing felt the same any more. The city’s spell was broken.

Hadley didn’t particularly choose Hôtel
Le Nouveau Monde
that day; rather, she would come to think that it chose her. She had come as far as Ouchy, drawn, as she always was, by the water and the mountains and the flat, wide sky, and there it was, the Hôtel
Le Nouveau Monde. The place where Kristina had slipped her arm through Hadley’s and said,
That’s beautiful
. And then,
All we have to do is smile. And look like we belong
, and they’d waltzed into luxury, covering their giggles with the flats of their hands. She wiped her eyes and walked up to the revolving door. The doorman stood to attention in his red coat and gold buttons.
Bonjour, mademoiselle
, she heard him say, and his words spirited her into the vast, shining lobby.

In the café, a waiter motioned Hadley to a corner table. She took off her coat and sat back in her chair. Through the plate-glass windows the sky was iron-grey and the surface of the lake chopped angrily; inside, the atmosphere was one of cosseted warmth. She ordered a coffee and when her drink came she avoided looking at the waiter, feeling the quick heat rising behind her eyes.

Hadley had always believed in the sanctity of a café, a place of cocoon and comfort. Back home in Tonridge there was a place called Le Boulevard. It had a poorly painted mural of the Eiffel Tower on the back wall and French accordion music played through the stereo. Hadley used to go there after her college classes, and always imagined that it was the sort of place for beginnings and endings: the dipped heads and sorry mumbles of a fracturing couple, the locked and loaded looks of a new love affair. An appropriate stage set for the peaks and troughs of feeling. The Hôtel
Le Nouveau Monde, however, seemed only made for beginnings. Everybody looked in the prime of their life, riding their luck with elegance and grace. Hadley watched them, her eyes as flat as windows. What had they done to deserve to carry on living? And did they know, as she now knew, that it could all be snapped out at any moment? She sat stiff-backed, and stirred her coffee round and round. She glanced up and met the eyes of an elderly man across the room. It was Hugo Bézier again.

He lifted his hand, performing a funny sort of wave, halfway between one the Queen might throw and a two-fingered salute. Hadley nodded back. She didn’t have any words for other people, not today. He kept his eyes on her and she shifted in her seat, looking away. When she looked back again he was still staring at her. She saw him set down his newspaper and get to his feet. He looked taller than she remembered and he held himself very straight. His shirt was powder-pink and an indigo tie was held in place by a neat gold clip.

‘You again . . .’ he said.

‘Yes . . .’

‘I hardly would have recognised you, Hadley,
ma chérie
.’

He pronounced each word as though he was feeling its edges, rolling them across his tongue. His bright eyes startled her, as they had twice before.
Ma chérie
he’d said, softly as a whisper, and it meant
my dear
, or
my darling
.

‘When I saw you in the
chocolaterie
, you were so light, you appeared to blow in off the street and I could sense your every pleasure. But today, you’re different. There’s a heaviness, light and heavy all at once. How is that possible?’

She picked up her cup but found her hand was shaking. She reset it, spilling coffee in the saucer.

‘I don’t know if that’s true,’ she said.

‘I’ve spent my whole life making people up. Rarely do they surprise me with their stories, any more. Would you like another drink? Something stronger, perhaps? You know my habits a little now, I think.’

She shook her head.

‘It’s good for the spirit.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘no, thank you.’ Her voice cracked.

He smiled, and it was so plain and true that without him saying a word, Hadley felt as though he understood. The small touch of kindness tipped her, and she began to cry. He reached into his pocket and took out a cotton handkerchief. It was starchy white, with a blue lined edge. He passed it to her, and she dabbed her eyes with it. She sniffed. She blew her nose.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He dipped a slight bow, and retreated.

Hadley hid her face in his handkerchief. It smelt of washing powder and the homely press of a hot iron. She blew her nose again and looked up. Hugo was back at his table across the room, reading his newspaper again, as though nothing had happened. She took a note from her purse and left it beside her unfinished coffee. She had to pass his table in order to leave.

‘Please,’ he said, lowering his paper just as she skirted past him, ‘I beg you, don’t go on account of me.’

‘It’s not you,’ she said.

‘I made you uncomfortable. Really, it’s the last thing I wanted to do. I have a blundering sort of way about me, that’s all.’

‘It’s not that,’ Hadley said.

‘Would you sit, then?’ He gestured to the chair opposite him. She shook her head again.

‘I need to be somewhere else,’ she said.

‘Your friends are expecting you?’

‘No.’

‘Then, you have other plans. Places to be?’

She hesitated. When her voice came it was small and tight. ‘I’ll wash your handkerchief,’ she said. ‘If you give me your address then I’ll post it back to you.’

Hugo narrowed his eyes. She didn’t fool him, and she could see that.

‘You can just bring it here. I’m at the hotel most days. I’d say you could keep it but I might not see you again, that way. Although I must say, we do have a habit of running in to one another.’

Hadley sat down on the very edge of the chair. She smoothed her hands over her jeans.

‘I don’t feel much like company,’ she said.

‘That’s not like you,’ he said, ‘is it?’

The waiter appeared then with two voluminous glasses of brandy. He set one before Hadley and dipped a bow to Hugo.

‘I must say, I do like it here,’ he said. ‘They seem to know exactly how to make you feel a little better, at precisely the right time.’

He picked up his glass and tipped it in her direction, then drank. Hadley hesitated then did the same. The brandy burned her throat in a sweet blaze and she shut her eyes. When she opened them again she saw that Hugo was watching her from across the rim of his glass. In that particular light his eyes seemed to be some of the kindest she’d ever seen.

She hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, but there was something about Hugo Bézier that drew her out. Perhaps it was no more than his age; an implicit reassurance that whatever she was feeling, he must surely have felt it himself. As they sat across from one another she felt calm descend. The clamour and claustrophobia of Les Ormes felt a long way away. She told him the only thing that mattered.

‘My friend just died.’

His eyes widened, just the smallest amount. His fingers tapped the cloth.

‘A close friend?’

‘Yes.’

Hadley waited but he didn’t say anything. Too much time passed. She started to get up, scooping her bag from the floor.

‘Where are you going?’ he said.

‘I thought I could stay,’ Hadley said, ‘but I don’t think I can. I’m sorry.’

‘No,
c’est moi
, I apologise. I’m not very good at talking to people in out-of-the-ordinary situations. Perhaps I never was, but I’m certainly out of practice now.’

‘It’s really okay,’ she said, ‘you didn’t know her. You hardly know me.’

‘Hadley, please sit down again. Tell me about your friend.’

He was sitting a little back from the table, with his hands dropped loosely in his lap. His tie was nipped very tightly at the neck. Hadley saw an awkwardness then, a sudden shyness. She sat back down. She folded her arms across her chest and dipped her head.