Harm's Way (15 page)

I awoke to a disconcerting sight: the beach looked like the aftermath of a genocide, bodies lying twisted across their towels as though struck down in the midst of building a sandcastle, or putting on suncream. The babies had stopped crying, the birds were silent, even the drinks seller was nowhere to be seen. There was only the sound, incessant and haunting, of the waves beating their monotonous hymn to eternity. A pool of sweat had formed in the hollow of my breastbone, and the downy blonde hairs leading down from my navel glittered silver.

Between the twin hillocks of my bent knees I could see that there was bare sand where the teenage boys had been. Pierre was still sleeping, and there was no sound from Christian or Beth to my left. I turned on my side and imagined what the consequences would be were I to move a fraction closer and gently slip my arm around his waist. I was so close that my world was made up entirely of the skin on his back. Before I could imagine what it would be like to touch it, I watched with half-closed eyes my own forefinger running gently along the biscuit-coloured mid-section of his spine. He didn't jump, but when I repeated the gesture, made a tiny movement towards me with the lower part of his body – the kind a sleeper unconsciously makes towards his lover.

At three o'clock, Pierre caved in, and we all followed suit.

‘
Ah non
,' he panted. ‘It's just too hot. I don't think we should be out here any longer.'

‘You're right. And we've run out of water.'

‘Lets go back.'

The return journey was subdued. Pierre drove with the bad grace that follows a nap. Crowded in the back seat, I was forced against the door, while Beth and Christian slumped
against each other silently, still half-asleep. Stephen was the only one attempting to be lively.

‘Why don't we all go out for dinner later? Pierre, what do you say? It would be nice to try somewhere local. Do you know anywhere good?'

Pierre began eulogising a seafood restaurant overlooking the sea in Deauville. When he became excited about something, his throat whirred with enthusiasm: the phlegm accumulated from years of smoking Gauloises Blondes bubbling out greasily into words. I was keen to go out that night, but yearned first for my cool bed sheets.

Back at the house, I was surprised to find that I was the only one to retire directly to my room. The others, revived or perhaps still feverish with sun, began their evening then, despite the early hour. The late-afternoon sun was still strong enough for me to rush to close the shutters as soon as I entered my room. Even the white bedspread – exposed to its glare all afternoon – had sucked in the heat and felt uncomfortable beneath my prickling limbs. A whoop of laughter and the sounds of clinking ice rose from the terrace, while Pierre's old record player crackled out the first bars of Bing Crosby's ‘Night and Day'. Pink spots danced before my closed eyes, and I tried to picture the scene below. A second burst of laughter made me think that someone, probably Stephen, had grabbed Beth, and was waltzing with her across the balcony, gracelessly dipping her, while an inadvertent snort from Pierre sprayed rosé down his shirt front. Craving sleep, but realising it was impossible until my body temperature had dropped a few degrees, I staggered into the bathroom and pulled the twin ties on either sides of my bikini bottoms, letting them slip to the floor, before switching the shower on.

I knew, without turning around, that he was behind me, though not how long he'd been there. The thin jets of water were battering the bath's enamel with enough force to drown out the noise of the door opening. Oddly, I felt no embarrassment at my nakedness. And it seemed natural, a few seconds later, to feel the damp waistband of his shorts against my still-warm back. Twisting my neck around, still holding the shower head awkwardly in my right hand, I kissed him.

But he wasn't interested in my mouth, and was looking down at my body with greed. As he tasted it all, methodically, kneeling so as to reach me better, I became impatient, pulling his head up by the hair, untying the cord of his trunks and marvelling at the perfect symmetry, the delicate craftsmanship of that V-shaped shadow. But my dizzying desire made it impossible for me to settle on a single part of his salty flesh. Because I couldn't wait any longer, I pulled him back on the tiled floor, making my body his cushion, inhaling the burnt smell of his hair and closing my eyes. Far from being transported into another place, I could still hear the shower jets beating against the bath, feel the unexpectedly cold sole of his right foot against my ankle. And then, the suddenness hurting a little, we began to move together and I was Beth, graceful, compliant, providing a rich shelter for this body as familiar as my own. Later, while I struggled to regain my vision, with my head pressed against the curved porcelain foot of the basin, Christian leant over and slowly ran his tongue over my lips, made dry with breathlessness. I smiled at him, and the memories that were now mine for ever. He was silent. His ruffled head turned away from me, a leg still threaded between mine.

*    *    *

‘I've given you our very best table, Monsieur Lhermite,' said the Poisson d'Avril's maître d' as he led us out on to a crowded veranda speckled with fairy lights. It was late and the sea was a sinister blanket on the horizon, hiding its wares from the sky. The other diners were already on their main courses, and Stephen was becoming peevish with hunger. The patron slapped Pierre's back a great deal before allowing him to sit down, and I was grateful to be able to pour myself a glass of iced-water from the jug on the table and pass it along my burning brow. We were all lightly sunstruck. The skin on my face and shoulders felt tight, as though it had been slapped, and Pierre's nose was crimson.

I looked at Beth, who was standing behind Christian, arms loosely linked around his waist, speaking in broken French to the patron. She was wearing a dress of indefinable fabric, in midnight blue, and emanated the air of absolute calm special to women who have been beautiful all their lives.

‘God, I'm starving. I wish everyone would just sit down so we could eat,' seethed Stephen in my ear.

‘
Un petit Calvados pour commencer?'
suggested the patron.

‘I don't see why not.' Pierre sat down noisily, and began to flick through the menu, unable to keep still. ‘Sorry about him. He does go on a bit. Are you hungry?'

‘She's all right. It's me you need to worry about,' said Stephen with a humourless laugh.

Beth seated herself opposite me, while Christian sat at the end of the oval table in between us. We hadn't exchanged a word since our encounter that afternoon, which had left me feeling quenched, sophisticated and pleasantly debauched. As
he sat down now, his knee knocking into mine, I felt a wave of heat travel through my face and neck.

‘I'm not cramping you, am I?'

Beth wasn't listening, having been called on to examine Stephen's latest mosquito bite.

‘No.' I laid a finger, so light it might have been a stray hair, on the muscled undulation of his thigh.

‘Right, you two.'

Beth was suddenly fixing us both with her clear blue gaze.

I willed Christian to be brave enough not to pull away.

‘What are we having to eat? If you want we could all share one of those things.'

She pointed to an enormous seafood platter on the next table which neither Christian nor I could have cared less about.

‘No, I think I'd prefer to start with the
salade d'endive,
and then …'

He was showing her now, on the badly typed menu with its slightly elevated ‘r's, what he had decided on, leaving my hand resting, quite naturally, where it was.

We spanned many topics that night, conscious that it was our last together. We were due to leave the following evening and it felt as though we were back in Paris already. We spoke about death, Houellebecq, the French health service and Johnny Hallyday. Finally, with a kind of meandering grace, the subject turned to love.

I had said very little, Christian even less, but Pierre was gesticulating, moist-eyed as he made an impassioned yet entirely abstract speech on the subject.

‘Now it's very clear to me,' he finished, ‘that this little one here has never been in love.'

For all the frivolity of the atmosphere I took this badly. I thought it a rude comment to make at the time and I am still offended by it now. The reason for my indignation was that it was true. But he knew nothing about me or my past, and that night particularly, when I felt like one of them, the statement seemed like a slur. Strange that the thing we criticise most in ourselves provokes the greatest sense of outrage when pointed out by someone else. I knew that, at eighteen, my smiles were not yet backlit with secret emotion, and that when I was sad I was simply sad, without any of the sweetness that an
éducation sentimentale
provides.

Luckily, there was no call for me to respond. The subject was swiftly buried when Pierre nearly overturned the table by jumping up to ask the waiter to take a group photograph. I still have a copy of it today. Occasionally I take it out from between the leaves of the book in which it is placed and examine it, marvelling at how much information there is in a single, over-exposed snapshot. There is always one person – in this case Pierre – who, in photographs as in life, seems to be partially cut from the frame. He leans in, as though his life depends on it, grasping Stephen around the neck in an act of aggressive friendship. Stephen is red-eyed and waxy-faced – the only person out of focus. He is looking at the camera with the same polite discomfort one reserves for chance encounters with people who have long since dissolved into one's past.

The only gap in the bouquet of our five seated figures lies between Stephen and me. In retrospect this seems to confirm what I always suspected: that there was never any real bond between us. Christian sits at the centre, any dominance of the
scene lost by the fact that his eyes are closed. And while my left arm is hidden behind his back (where unknown to everyone, and to the camera, my thumb was travelling slowly up and down his spine), his is draped loosely around Beth's shoulders, while she attempts to hide her stomach with a casually placed hand. Next to her, I look like a gangly adolescent, uneasy in my own skin, my furtive eyes avoiding the camera. The events of that afternoon, those of the future, and the false jollity of that dinner, are there for everyone to see.

I hadn't expected to get much sleep that night and sure enough I couldn't: my tongue felt gigantic in my mouth, my limbs heavy. My lower stomach ached with the excesses of the afternoon, refusing to let me forget what had happened. Images of Beth's smiling face alternated with Christian's looking down at me, made ugly by pleasure. But I was too excited, too pleased with myself, to feel guilt.

Our last day unfolded quietly, every action tainted by our imminent departure. Beth had come down late, and sat hunched on a chair by the pool wrapped in an old Japanese kimono she had found in the cupboard in her room. I watched her and Christian above the tightly typed pages of my book, noticing how they interacted with one another, and how much more needy Beth had become. Even with her eyes closed, she kept her hand on a part of him at all times. When he spoke to her, she began to smile at the first word, unaware of what he was about to say. My thoughts dissolved as an icy jet of water burned through the base of my back, and down my bikini bottoms. It was Stephen.

‘Stop it,' I cried. My book fell to the ground with a muted thud.

‘I thought you looked a little too comfortable there,' he smiled.

‘I didn't even hear you coming. Have you only just woken up?'

‘Yes. I had an interesting night.'

Assuming Stephen was about to go into typically whingeing details about the mattress or the noises of the plumbing, and failing to register the discomposure in his eyes, I lay back down on my sunlounger and sighed with lack of interest in what I was about to ask: ‘Why, what happened?'

‘Well … I'll tell you later. Beth! Do you still want to go and get those things for your old man?'

‘Yes please!'

Beth was up now, making her way into the house, the delicate silk of her kimono catching against the stone steps on the way.

‘What things?'

‘These boxes of crystallised fruit she saw in a confiserie next to the supermarket the other day. Apparently her dad couldn't get enough of them when they once had a family holiday in Toulouse, so she wants to send him some.'

‘And you're going to drive her down there? That's very sweet.'

And very convenient for me, I added to myself.

‘We won't be long. I want to make the most of all this before we leave this evening.'

But there was one last impediment before I could be alone with Christian.

‘Where's Pierre?' I called out to Stephen's retreating back.

‘He went to get the papers a while ago. Oh, and it's true
what they told us. Apparently people really are dying in Paris: it's a massive heat wave.'

I waited, so still that the pulse in the vein on the underside of my arm seemed to beat aloud, until I heard the slam of the front door and the throttle of the engine. Lying on my front, with my head turned away from Christian and my arm bent up over my face, I wondered how long it would take him to come over. Would he stroke my hair first? Or just turn me over and kiss me straight away? Minutes passed, and still I heard and felt nothing. My excitement turned to mortification: he was better at this game than I was, and he knew that I was waiting.

‘If you want it so much why don't you come here?'

I might not have heard him, had I not been straining for the slightest sound. Submissive, forgetting my dignity, I stood up and walked over to him, sheltering the sun from my eyes with one hand. Suddenly shy, and unsure of what to do next, I perched on the edge of his chair and put a hand, tentatively, on his foot. Christian withdrew it as he pulled his body into an upright position. Seizing me with both hands by the nape of my neck he bent forward. The kiss was good: warm, not too devouring, long and tranquil. A kiss that, after the first shiver, imbued me with lethargic contentment and did not disturb the perfect equilibrium of our two bodies. A familiar wheezing noise was all the while growing louder, its source suddenly coming into view in the reflective brown irises of Christian's eyes. It was the gardener, standing perfectly still a few feet away, his eyes buried deep within their hollows.