A Heart Bent Out of Shape (14 page)

‘Kristina said some things about the places they used to go together.’

‘Hadley, honey, why didn’t you say that before?’

‘Because she was always so vague. There’s really nothing to go on, but . . . I could at least try.’

‘What sort of places?’

‘The waterside. The old town. There was a café, I think, near the cathedral. I know it’s not much to go on but I don’t know what else to do.’

Hadley saw Joel think about it. She’d noticed that he always took his time with an answer; he had the same unhurried way about him in class and you always waited to hear his answer. His fingers tapped a rhythm on his desk. He nodded slowly.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to get out of Lausanne. Try something different.’

‘I’ll get the train, just like Kristina did. I’ll go now. I might as well.’

‘Hadley, wait. Let me drive you.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘I do,’ said Joel. ‘You’re not going on your own.’ He picked up his car keys from the desk, and shrugged on his jacket. ‘Two conditions, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That maybe after tonight we draw a line. Accept that maybe Jacques just can’t be found.’

‘I don’t want to give up yet.’

‘Give up? Hadley, I think it’s the opposite. Accepting something is never giving up. I’ve one other condition too.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘That you let me buy you dinner. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten properly in a while.’

Hadley reached for his hand. She held it like it was the first hand she had ever come across. She inspected its farmhand thickness, the tawny-brown skin, the giant half-moons of his nails. She dropped it quickly.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Back in September she had flown in to Geneva,
Genève
, on the very first day she’d arrived. She’d seen little of the city as the train flashed through its peripheries, just the usual high-rises, splashes of inexpert graffiti, and the inexplicably depressing hangars of light industry. Nonetheless she had shaped the idea of Geneva as a dull, older brother to the playful Lausanne: stuffy and stiff-natured, in an expensive but ill-fitting sweater and box-fresh brogues. Lausanne, on the other hand, was artsy, and definitely a girl. No less pedigreed, no less moneyed, but with a blowsy edge. Against the backdrop of Geneva she saw the lake as a mere water feature, a placid piece of architecturally inspired landscaping for the flag-waving hotels. Along the Lausanne shore Lac Léman was so much more arresting; you looked out over the rakish outline of mountains, saw the wild slapping of water against the jetties, and profusions of indignant gulls, and you were convinced of its vitality; its sunlit ripples hiding darker depths.

Kristina’s accounts of meeting Jacques in Geneva had done little to change Hadley’s view. She only ever pictured them in snatches: leaning on a railing watching the fountain, their legs touching from hip to toe; eating from an international menu in a gold-lit restaurant, champagne fizzing in frosted flutes. The city itself seemed like nothing more than a bland backdrop to their stop-start romance. Then Hadley went to Geneva with Joel Wilson.

The restaurant Joel chose was tucked off a lamplit boulevard. It was Chinese, and had a festive entrance decked with paper lanterns and papier-mâché cats. A girl with her hair tied in two tight bunches and wearing a wine-coloured waistcoat led them to a table at the back. The paper cloth rumpled as Hadley drew her chair in. She flicked a stray pea, left from the previous diners, to the floor. One wall of the restaurant consisted entirely of mirrors, while the other was vividly painted with a giant waterside scene. Sway-bottomed junks trailing coloured lights floated nose-to-nose, as behind blue mountains gave way to a rose-pink sky.

‘Have you been here before?’ she asked Joel.

‘Never.’

‘But you thought it looked good?’

‘No, but I thought maybe it’d be fun.’

She looked at the giant menu. There were at least two hundred dishes listed in tight type.

‘I’ll take seventeen and forty-one,’ she said.

‘Pot luck?’

‘Why not?’

‘See, I knew it’d be fun. I’m going twenty-one, fifty and, hell, let’s chuck in eighty. But only if you split it with me.’

They ordered tall glasses of fizzy lager and sat back in their chairs. It was ten o’clock and they were the only diners. Hadley ate a prawn cracker and tried not to laugh. It was, she realised, the first time that she had felt like laughter in several days. She drank her beer and stayed calm. It had been a strange evening so far. They had arrived in Geneva without a real plan. Joel had parked in a cavernous underground car park, and their feet had echoed on the concrete as they looked for the exit. They’d climbed a set of sour-smelling stairs, the crunch of broken glass beneath their feet. She’d felt Joel’s hand fall lightly on her waist as he motioned her through a swing door and out into the street. It’d seemed colder in Geneva than in Lausanne; the air snapped her cheeks and seemed to cut through the layers of coat and sweater. She’d shivered, and Joel had wrapped an arm around her.

‘You’ll soon warm up,’ he’d said, walking in step with her for a moment. She’d leant into him and he squeezed her shoulder before breaking away. She had taken a folded map from her pocket and smoothed it with her gloved hand.

‘I think the old town’s this way,’ she’d said.

Had there been a plan that night? Yes, as much of one as there ever could have been. In the car she’d searched her memory and written down all the places that Kristina had ever mentioned, a feeble list of oft-visited landmarks and imprecise locations. She read it back to Joel and he’d heaved a sigh, turned the music in the car up louder.

‘You know, this is crazy, Hadley,’ he’d shouted over John Coltrane’s frantic rhythms, ‘how do you feel about that?’

‘But what else is there?’ she shouted back.

‘Just so long as you know,’ he said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

If you asked Hadley what she hoped to find that night she would have told you this: she simply wanted to be close to where Jacques lived and worked. She felt that if she passed him in the street she would recognise him, and perhaps he would recognise her; her hope marking her out like a shining beacon. She knew that didn’t make a lot of sense, but what else was there? Together Joel and Hadley trekked all over the city. They stood in a cobbled square and watched a bar fill with young and beautiful
Genevois
, as outside chalk boards offered cups of mulled wine and
coupes de champagne
. They looked up at the yellow squares of windows set beneath steeply tiled roofs, saw the shapes of people moving behind them, and once a child’s face peeping up at the night sky as though counting stars. They walked through a dark and silent park, where statues stood hunched and watching. Neither talked, they were both lost in their own thoughts.

‘Is that enough for tonight?’ Joel had asked eventually, turning to her. They were back on one of the main streets, with weaving tramlines and brightly lit shoe shops. He blew on his bare hands and rubbed them together. She thought of her gloves with their sheepskin lining, and how natural it would be to cover his hands with hers and warm them. Instead she’d stuffed them deeper into the pockets of her coat. She’d nodded.

‘Will you tell everyone what a waste of time this was?’ she’d said.

‘Tell everyone? I haven’t said a word about this to anyone.’

‘Not to your colleagues? Your boss?’

‘I didn’t think you’d want me to.’

‘But they know about Kristina?’

‘Everyone knows about Kristina,’ he’d paused, then said, ‘but, in the English department, we didn’t know her. I heard that her Art History professor held a minute’s silence in his class.’

‘A minute’s silence,’ Hadley had said, ‘one minute, then everyone rushes on just as before.’

‘The world has to keep turning, Hadley, it’s the only way.’

‘Yeah, that, I know.’

‘And it was well-intentioned,’ he’d said. ‘It was a way of remembering. Everyone remembers in different ways.’

They’d walked on in silence.

‘Are you hungry?’ Joel had asked, suddenly.

They’d stopped at the next restaurant they came across. The Chinese. They ordered too much food and watched each other across the table, past the bowls of sticky rice and orange-red sweet ‘n’ sour, and drapes of wilted greens. They ordered more fizzy lager. Hadley chewed carefully, her nose wrinkling.

‘Not good?’

‘Not good.’

Everything was either too salty or too bland. The meat was ragged and shot through with seams of fat. The prawns were woody, with pink eggs clustered in their folds.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pushing her plate away, ‘I guess I’m not hungry, after all.’

‘Only because I brought you to the worst place in town,’ Joel said. ‘Unwittingly, by the way. I felt like taking a chance. Bad move, huh?’

‘I suppose it’s not right to be enjoying ourselves, anyway,’ Hadley said. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and the lipstick she had applied earlier smudged on the cloth. She turned it over quickly, before he saw. ‘It’s not why we came, is it?’

‘I certainly set out to have a terrible time,’ said Joel. A smile pushed at his lips and he let it break. ‘C’mon, Hadley, cut yourself some slack.’

She smiled back at him, and felt a lifting in her chest.

‘Why did you say that you think it’s time we stopped looking for Jacques?’ she said. ‘I feel like we’ve hardly begun.’

‘I just think,’ said Joel carefully, ‘that maybe we need to accept that if he wants to be found, he’ll be found.’ Hadley stared at him blankly so he went on. ‘I mean, he knew about you, right?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘I’m sure she would have talked about you, Hadley,’ he said. He paused then went on, ‘Look, think about it. It’s far easier for this guy Jacques to connect with Kristina’s world than it is for us to try and connect with his. We don’t know anything about him, and even if Kristina didn’t tell him much about herself, he’d still know enough to ask the right questions in the right places if he wanted to. If he were worried about where she was, or that he hadn’t heard anything from her for a few days, if he knows
nothing
about her accident, then he’d be able to find out fairly easily, wouldn’t he? And if he
does
know, if he saw the piece in the newspaper or heard about it some other way, maybe he wants to be alone with his grief. Maybe he doesn’t want to try and know her friends. Maybe he thinks he doesn’t belong with them. Maybe we should respect that.’

‘That’s a lot of maybes,’ she said, looking forlorn. ‘But I hadn’t thought of it like that. Why didn’t I think of it like that?’

Joel shrugged. ‘It’s just logic,’ he said gently. He folded his paper napkin over and over until it was a tight square. He dropped it to the bottom of his empty glass. ‘But then, the heart doesn’t always follow logic, does it? That’s why we came here tonight.’

Hadley picked up her beer and swirled the last of it. ‘There was something strange about her voice when we spoke that last time,’ she ventured. ‘She wasn’t happy, Joel. And it wasn’t just guilt about being late for my stupid birthday, it was more than that. I think she and Jacques had argued. I think she was upset.’

‘Every couple in the world argues, Hadley. And if he was married, they’d have had more to argue about than most.’

‘I just want to know what happened that night.’

‘We do know. It’s senseless and terrible, but we do know.’

‘So, what, we stop?’ A single tear trickled down Hadley’s cheek. ‘I guess we do.’

Joel leant forward, and with the tip of his finger he lightly caught it. He glanced sideways, noticing the waitress watching them in the mirrored wall. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘time to call it a night, I think.’

They sped fast along the
autoroute
, and she willed the signs for Lausanne to grow further apart, to carry a larger number, at least to be in miles and not kilometres. It was dark in the car, and she sat upright, her hands folded in her lap. She glanced across at him from time to time, noting the forceful outline of his features; the curl of his lip and the jut of his chin. He appeared rough-hewn, his eyes two dark scoops. He stared straight ahead as he drove and his fingers thrummed a beat on the wheel. She turned away from him.

‘Hadley? Are you crying again? Please don’t cry.’

‘It’s just been a strange day.’

‘It’s okay. They’re all strange days,’ he said.

‘I’ve had a good time,’ she said quietly. ‘I shouldn’t have had a good time tonight, but I have.’

In the dark car, lit only by the passing flashes of other vehicles, Joel found her hand. He lifted it to his lips and pressed her fingers to his mouth. He kissed them. Once. Then again. She felt his warm skin, rough with stubble.

‘We can’t help feeling guilty,’ he said, his voice muffled by her hand. ‘We can’t help looking back over the things we did or didn’t do, the things we did or didn’t say.’

He had slowed right down and a car sped past, blasting its horn. Joel gently dropped her hand. He shook his head and clenched the wheel, speeding back up. Hadley’s hand stayed on his leg. She felt the heat of him beneath her palm. She moved her hand away.

‘Maybe that’s why I can’t let this go. The last words I said to her were in anger, Joel. I think I told you before, but I’m not sure. I know I told Hugo, but . . .’

‘Who’s Hugo?’

‘Just someone I’ve got to know a little bit. An old man. He’s the one who said I should stay in Lausanne. Even you said I should go, but he said stay.’

‘I didn’t really want you to go anywhere.’

‘But you thought it’d be good for me, didn’t you?’

‘Maybe I thought it’d be good for me.’

She glanced across at him. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Yes, you do.’

The neon signs of a petrol station loomed suddenly, and he swung into the forecourt. He pulled over, away from the bright lights and the luminous pumps.

‘Hadley,’ he whispered, as he leant towards her, ‘I shouldn’t do this.’

‘I want you to,’ she said, ‘I always did.’

Their two faces were close together. In the half-dark, Hadley felt his lips meet hers. She wondered if this was how they would stay, not quite kissing, a warm press, sharing breath. Then she felt his mouth open, and the hot flick of his tongue. She shut her eyes, and tasted the salt of her own tears. His kisses, when they came, were hard and insistent. It was as though he had been keeping them for a long time.