Harm's Way (10 page)

The photo shoot was finished now, and a browbeaten photographer's assistant was busy clearing away what seemed an unnecessary amount of equipment. I spent the remainder of the day pacing my flat, berating myself for having let a Parisian backdrop temporarily erase the cynicism I was so proud of.

An interminable succession of covered, over-ripe days followed. In the evenings I tried to keep busy, spending one suffocating night with desiccated friends of my parents, another accompanying Isabelle to an art launch, and the rest of the week insatiably drinking in the lesser-known parts of Paris. But my discoveries were less exultant without Beth by my side: standing before Moreau's lurid depiction of Salomé in the eccentric one-man museum it had taken me nearly an hour to find, I half turned to share my thoughts with her, only to find that she was not there. I found squares, shops and lost corners of Paris so wonderful that I would pretend to discover them weeks later with Beth by my side, simply to be able to relive the moment with her. I was dismayed when, having sent her an excited text message about a period costume shop behind the Place Monge that I had chanced upon, I received a perfunctory ‘sounds fun' in return. Since she had left, her messages had been short and sparse, with a ring of politeness about them I couldn't stand. And yet the information I crammed into my otherwise empty days failed to block her out. Still I found time to picture Beth brushing a strand of hair out of Christian's eyes, imagining, with a shiver, his hands on her hips, the way, she had once blushingly told me, he liked to hold her steady.

*    *    *

Vincent never called again. But Stephen was not so easily dismissed.

‘What do you mean
nothing,'
he said so loudly in the halls of the Louvre that a far more conscientious guard than I immediately shushed us.

‘Just that nothing's happening there. We haven't spoken to each other in a while. It was never a big deal.' I shrugged.

‘Oh, I know what's going on here.' He grinned, inadvertently obscuring
Rubens' Wife
from the collective gaze of a group of Japanese. ‘I was the same at your age – too many temptations out there to stick to just the one person.'

I laughed, thinking how little he knew me, and how our friendship would probably not exist if it weren't for Beth.

‘So you've changed a lot over the years,' I murmured sarcastically. ‘Seriously, though, I just didn't particularly like him. He was wet … you know I can't bear that.'

We went on to Georges, a new restaurant that fascinated us both on the top floor of the Centre Pompidou. The waitresses, in skin-tight leather trousers, were so beautiful that nobody cared if the service was a little slack. I was unable to concentrate on the conversation, waiting in vain for Beth to reply to a message I'd sent hours earlier. Despite my best efforts, the subject turned to Christian.

‘So come on: what do you think of him?' Stephen leant forward expectantly across the white Formica table. ‘Because I thought he was OK when I first met him, but now I'm beginning to wonder. I mean, Beth's no fool, I know that, but she's at the time of life where she wants things – things I can't imagine he's going to give her. And you want to see some of his friends.' His face was lowered to within an inch of the table. ‘They look like the cast of
La Haine.'

Stephen was a snob, which usually amused me, but this time I decided not to give him the answer he wanted.

‘Maybe she's just enjoying herself.' I got a kick out of saying the exact opposite of what I thought. ‘Do you know any other forty-year-olds like her? Because I don't.'

‘Yes, but don't you think there's something dodgy about him?'

I thought for a second before answering with total sincerity: ‘No. I think he's had a messed-up childhood, a bit like Beth, but otherwise he seems to be a pretty gentle guy.'

‘Look, I'm not saying he's sleeping around but none of us know anything about him. And Beth's gone into this thing head on.' He paused. ‘Anyway, who am I to judge? She said she was having a great time a couple of days ago, so unless they've got sick of each other since then …'

‘She rang you?'

‘No – just sent a text saying she was having a ball. Over here!' he cried out to a lost-looking pair of leather trousers carrying our two drinks on a tray, and changed the subject to women.

I walked home incensed by the fact that Stephen came first in Beth's affections, especially when there appeared to be nothing he wanted more than to see her relationship fail. Stephen had grown up with Beth, watched her go through all that had made her what she now was, yet he begrudged her this happy episode. Because that was undoubtedly what it was in my view: an ‘episode' – not something for us to start theorising about. I had connected so little with his concerns that I hadn't even felt tempted to tell him about the kiss. Back at the flat I put the telly on mute and sat on the floor eating leftovers from my fridge and watching the
images move on the screen. I missed Beth. For the third time that day I ran my eye over the pencilled list of places for us to visit which I had drawn up in a fit of excitement at the prospect of her return. Embarrassed by the childish optimism in each rounded letter, I screwed it up and threw it in the bin. I wanted to make her laugh with tales of yet more banging on the wall during the early hours, tell her that I suspected Isabelle had a crush on Stephen. It was also, absurdly, to her that I most wanted to confide about Christian. ‘Like a Virgin' was playing in a club across the street and as I washed my face I could hear Monsieur Abitbol enjoying an abusive phone call on the other side of the wall. Didn't he ever tire of swearing? It soon transpired that the abuse was directed at me.

‘She's a bitch, keeping me up all night with her knocking. I'm going to get the police round, that's what I'll do. Bitch. And if that doesn't work I'll go around there and sort her out myself. That's what I'll do. Bitch.'

‘Just you try,' I mouthed to myself in the mirror.

I knew that the next day, no matter how hard I tried, would be spent awaiting Beth's return. Might she have fallen in love with Christian? Surely she would be cautious, and not become too attached. Did she really, as Stephen had insinuated, want to settle down and have children? Perhaps, but it was hardly going to be with Christian. No, this was an insignificant fling, something to boost her confidence.

Leaning from my balcony watching families in the street making their way home after extended Sunday lunches, I felt I'd been offered a view of life that helped put things into perspective. Later, I went to see a French film whose only
point lay in giving the semblance of significance where there was none. The protagonist, a sultry French girl prone to spouting tiresome oxymorons – ‘I love you, but I hate you' – sat in a series of identikit Marseilles cafés smoking, eventually killing herself over her love for an uninspiring flower-shop owner. Back at the flat I sat in my tiny Parisian bath watching the skin on my feet whiten and shrivel. The purr of the phone made me slop bath water on the floor, drenching the mat, discolouring the grooves between the tiling. It was Beth, every syllable she uttered plumped with happiness. I didn't dare ask too many questions. Besides, she promised that when we met the following evening she would tell me all about it.

As the machine spat out the purple tip of my métro ticket the next morning, I decided that the only way to break this gathering storm cloud was to tell Beth everything. The underground stops flitted by and I covered every eventuality in my mind at a furious pace. The two of them had not been together long enough for a split to be traumatic. Christian would disappear into the Parisian suburbs, like one or two of the boys in my short past, leaving me with only the odd pinch of regret. Beth would forgive me because of the generosity of spirit that was her very essence. It would, perhaps, even bring us closer. One day, soon, we would laugh at the ease with which we'd both been taken in by this man.

Besides, my fixation with him and the memories of that night had left me feeling humiliated. There was no room for him in my vision of this year in Paris, the first of my real years – no room for him in Beth's future or in mine.

Content with my lightened conscience, I found that my
working day unfolded easily. At lunchtime I ran into Isabelle in a cheap Chinese restaurant decorated with paper tigers, a place I thought I was alone in having discovered, and we talked about Stephen, her plumbing difficulties and the museum's measly pay rates over dim sum.

Mid-afternoon I rang Beth's office and arranged to meet her at the Lizard Lounge, a hectic bar in the Marais I knew she liked, though it was largely populated by Brits behaving as they would do in their front rooms. Still, it was somewhere I could count on for enough background noise to dilute the seriousness of the discussion we were about to have. As I made the arrangements with Beth, I felt a pang of guilt about Isabelle, who was pretending to read in the corner of the room, the velvet Chinese slippers she always wore turned inwards in the attitude of a penitent schoolgirl. Another time, I thought to myself. This was not set to be a pleasant evening.

By the time I got there, Beth had two kirs waiting on the table and was sitting back in her chair, radiant and relaxed, her breath shallow in the heat, the blue material of her dress stretched into a series of neat, horizontal lines across her lap. As she fanned her face with a flyer, I noted that she was as fair as when she'd left, and that her hair – with all the liberated confidence of a woman sure that she is loved – was less groomed than usual. When she saw me, she smiled with such utter, warm sincerity that I adored her all over again. As soon as I could disengage myself from her embrace – the warm length of our bodies against each other like a testament to a friendship I was about to forsake – I sank down into a chair.

‘You look great,' I said, as airily as I could.

‘Really? It poured with rain the whole week.'

‘You're joking.'

For a second I thought I might be spared: the week had been a disaster, her fantasies of a romantic beach idyll dashed by bad weather.

‘Of course I am. Although it wasn't actually that hot, which was fine really, because you know what I'm like in the heat,' she went on, ‘but God, did we have fun.'

She launched into an effusive account of the holiday, sparing no detail, from the exact layout of Christian's uncle's house to the exhausting cycle rides they endured to get anywhere on the island, and for a moment I found myself enjoying it with her, encouraging her description of their long siestas every afternoon. And then the loud chunterings of a group of Englishmen at the bar distracted me.

‘Hey – boring you, am I?' Beth joked.

‘No, no, sorry. I was just thinking what idiots the English always are abroad.'

I smiled weakly, gesturing with my chin towards the group of men and wondered if now was the right time. Beth made a small, acquiescent ‘o' with her mouth and in its hardened contour I read disappointment at what she had interpreted as my lack of enthusiasm. I encouraged her to continue, fixing on a tiny scratch by her mouth as she told me that she was in love with Christian, that she felt closer to him now than she had ever thought possible. I realised in an instant that I could not tell her. I remember, at fifteen, breaking a boy's heart while he was halfway through a bowl of spaghetti carbonara. He'd stared at me incoherently, tears welling up in his eyes, while I'd wondered whether to point out the creamy smear on his chin. I didn't, and he will have returned home, bruised, to discover it himself in the mirror.

Until that moment I'd imagined that my confession to Beth would come easily, a simple person-to-person discussion about a man neither of us even knew two months ago. It would have been uncomfortable, but honest, and the idea of honesty appealed to me with such sudden force that it might just have been invented. The incident would, perhaps, even bring us closer than we had been before. Besides, I was not too young to appreciate the transience of someone like Christian in both of our lives. But my logic had omitted those details that made Beth, like everyone else, human, fallible – able to bleed and hurt. In the face of that small, hurt mouth, I felt weak. A second round of drinks arrived and I brightened: it had only been a kiss. Why on earth did I feel I had to tell her? I would forget about Christian – let this thing go. After all, it wasn't as if I was in love with him. The trouble was that at eighteen, I'd never renounced anything in my life: I just didn't see why I should have to.

My resolve was aided by the arrival of a childhood friend, Kate, for the weekend. The truth was that I had forgotten all about her coming until a knock on my door late that Friday night. It had been impossible for my heart not to miss a beat; I was foolishly hoping that it might be Christian. When I saw Kate's expectant face, masking her weariness from the trip, I nevertheless felt a rush of happiness. Like cicadas, we spent the following days engaged in the sort of meaningless patter that is incomprehensible to outsiders.

‘So how's X? Is she still with Y?'

‘Oh yes.'

Languidly drawn circles on the sand, their only purpose was to maintain a current of inconsequential chat. The
weekend had flown past this way: in a blizzard of semi-confidences. Kate had been curious to meet Beth, joking that she'd felt increasingly put out by my emails, which were peppered with references to ‘my friend Beth'. And she was intrigued by the age gap.

‘Isn't it weird going out to clubs and stuff with, well, a much older woman?'

‘No,' I countered. ‘She's not like anyone else I know. She's …' I felt powerless to describe her. ‘… so wise about life. But she's fun too. You'd understand if you met her.'

‘I'm dying to, but you say she's busy this weekend.'