Harm's Way (16 page)

We sprang apart, turning what should have been perfectly natural into the guilty secret that it was. There was no need to worry. He did not know which of we five were couples, and
besides, I was beginning to think there was something voyeuristic about the old man.

‘Can we help you?' I asked him coldly in French.

‘Monsieur Pierre …?'

‘Is not here. I'll tell him you came by.'

The exchange was over and yet still he stood there, the pink flesh on the inside of his bottom lip slick with saliva.

‘Was there anything else?' asked Christian, jerking his chin at him with unmistakable rudeness.

‘No … I don't think so,' mumbled the old man, beginning his slow journey back to the cottage at the bottom of the garden.

We had no reason to be scared but the interruption had broken the moment, and when Pierre came back ten minutes later, we were at a respectable distance from each other. Our host, too, seemed on edge. He flitted to and fro from the kitchen all afternoon, bringing full glasses, and taking away empty ones, until Beth, relaxing after her morning's expedition, had to forcibly sit him down.

‘Pierre, you've been spoiling us all weekend, now just relax. Think how wonderful it'll be when you wake up tomorrow morning and we've gone.'

‘How can you say that? Do you know how much fun I've had this weekend? I'll miss you all terribly.'

He looked at me as he said this, and I wondered if the reason for his mood was the realisation that he would never succeed in seducing me. His extended parting hug early that evening, our bags crammed into the boot of the car and Stephen already at the wheel, confirmed as much.

‘You will come back next summer, won't you?'

‘Of course!' ‘Yes.' ‘We'd love to,' we all cried in unison,
knowing full well that none of us would. Pierre's dry goodbye kiss missed my mouth by a fraction of an inch, but I managed to check my revulsion, pressing his hands and saying: ‘It has been wonderful: I shall never forget it.'

For once, I wasn't lying.

I hadn't minded the fifteen-minute silence with which our drive back to Paris began, spending the time gazing unseeingly at the countryside and replaying, for the tenth time that day, the events of the night before. The truth was that I felt closer to Beth than ever before: we had tasted the same sensations and I would know now, when she spoke of Christian, exactly what she meant. After twenty minutes of no one saying a word, I suddenly remembered Stephen's cryptic comment earlier. ‘So what were you going to tell me, Stephen?'

‘Well, you won't believe it.'

‘Tell us.'

I had never seen Stephen blush before but his forehead and the corners of his nose had begun to redden.

‘Go on.'

‘Ahem, well, Pierre, as it turns out – how shall I put this – wasn't interested in you, Anna.'

It was my turn to redden.

‘He was interested in me.'

‘What?'

Beth was sitting in the back with Christian, but I could hear the broad smile in her voice.

‘No way. Stephen, what happened?'

And as we drove through the centre of Deauville, past the marble-fronted casino towards the motorway, Stephen described
how, when the rest of us had gone to bed the night before, Pierre had convinced him to have one last glass of Calvados. The temperature had dropped, and they had come in from the balcony and sat on Stephen's makeshift bed in the sitting room, deconstructing a couple of their work colleagues, until, apropos of nothing, Pierre began to speak of his loneliness. His flat in Paris was too big for him after the divorce, he said, and the house in Normandy was a painful reminder of his little girl.

‘You just need to find another woman to share those things with,' Stephen had attempted reassuringly.

‘But that's the thing,' Pierre had replied, draining his glass with one last gulp. ‘I broke up with Nicole because I realised that no woman could ever really make me happy.'

It had taken Stephen a few seconds to register what Pierre was saying, but only one to predict what was about to happen. An arm had slid behind his back, threatening to curl around his shoulder at any moment.

‘Please don't say any more, please don't,' Stephen had silently prayed.

‘But I think maybe you know all this. And I don't think I'd be wrong to say that it was, perhaps, the reason that you agreed to come down here?'

‘But you are wrong, and it's not the reason I came here at all.' Stephen had leapt up now, appalled but full of pity for the poignant picture before him: a middle-aged man who had realised too late in life who he was, and was unable to make the transition gracefully.

We listened open-mouthed, each one of us no doubt drawing our own conclusions, no one knowing quite what to say. I was surprised, but my chief concern was that no one
should remember my embarrassing pronouncements about Pierre flirting with me.

‘But we all thought – well, Anna thought – that he was trying it on with her.'

‘I didn't quite say that, Beth. I never said that.'

‘No, I know, darling, but …'

‘Well, Anna,' Stephen laughed bitterly. ‘I guess the world doesn't revolve around you after all.'

In the rear-view mirror I could see Christian looking out of the window, smiling.

Confronted once again at the museum by Berthe Morisot's reproachful eyes, I had the disconcerting feeling that nothing had changed. Out of the elaborate confines of her frame she stared at me as if to say: ‘Well, what did you expect?' The truth was that I had expected everything to be different. I had expected what happened in Normandy to be the beginning of something fun – if not a full-blown fling, then at least a series of amusing, secret meetings. Instead, I had returned to my sedentary job and a phone that refused to ring.

It had been nearly a week since Normandy and I'd heard nothing. I knew as much about Christian and Beth's movements as I could find out from Stephen, whom I had seen only once since our return to Paris. Apparently Christian had been working nights, and as the restaurant was nearer Beth's flat than his own she had given him a key so that he could let himself in between two and three o'clock every morning and slip into her bed. I was outraged by the ease with which their relationship had resumed its course – even progressed – in this way, not having wavered for a second, and felt confused by the permanency this new regime seemed to suggest.

‘I'm not sure it's a good idea to start settling into that kind of pattern so early,' I told Beth on the phone, after enduring the description of an idyllic evening Christian had treated her
to at Le Comptoir off Saint Michel – a restaurant I had planned to introduce her to. ‘It'll take all the excitement out of things. I mean, you may as well move in together.'

I spat out this last part as if it were the worst eventuality I could think of, convinced that I was offering my beloved friend genuinely good advice. Wasn't she the first to say that she often became too clingy?

‘Anna listen, I'm not bothered about that any more. I sort of want to move things on now. It's complicated, but you'll understand one day. He's just so easy to be with – so different to Irish guys. Have you noticed how Frenchmen don't seem to be afraid of feminine things? The other day he was actually giving me advice on some of my designs, and whenever he has a night off, he cooks for me. It's so refreshing.'

Angrily predicting that she would yet again postpone our plans to meet, I told Beth that I had a call waiting, and hung up.

My father, sensing that all was not right, had once again offered to come and spend a weekend with me. It was the first time I was tempted to agree.

‘What about Mum – would she be able to come too?'

‘I'm not sure, darling. I could ask,' he added brightly, the subtext being ‘although I daren't'. ‘The problem is that she's got this big case on at the moment – the one I told you about – so it might be tricky this time …'

I stopped listening at that point, reassuring my father that I was fine and didn't need him to come out, that I was becoming quite grown-up in fact, and that he might not recognise the
jeune Parisienne
who was once his daughter.

*    *    *

Over the next few days a mood settled over me as grim and determined as a London sky. Again, I had been made a fool of. It wasn't the fact that I had slept with Christian that pricked my vanity: it was the knowledge that, despite everything, I was still being excluded. Then I would remember that afternoon in Normandy and look around stealthily, hoping that nobody could read my mind. Blind to the tourists passing in and out of my line of vision, I developed a knack of pressing my thighs together until – unnoticed by anyone – the hard wooden seat sent a jolt of pleasure through me.

That was where he found me, one late August morning, ten days later. I had seen him coming, spotting the crown of his head as it made faltering progress through the atrium behind a gaggle of
lycéens.
I prided myself on being above girls for whom the purr of the telephone was an emotional barometer, but as the days thudded by, and that tiny corner of possibility darkened like the last chink of light against a wall, I had wondered whether this might be it: the first time something didn't go my way.

I smiled now, complacently, though with that perverse dip of disappointment that occurs when there is nothing left to wish for. Hidden by one of the Egyptian-style tombs lining the main hall, I watched him trying to find me, peering into each gallery, dwarfed by the bronze sculptures in the lobby, before finally asking an attendant. His studied nonchalance made it all the more enjoyable to watch. Doesn't the real charm of hide and seek lie in the knowledge that someone is desperately trying to find you? I knew that he would manage, eventually, and returned to my seat, assuming an unruffled attitude as I waited for him to arrive.

‘How have you been?'

‘Busy, you know. You?'

‘Same.'

He turned and stared impassively at the adjacent still life.

‘Just look at all this,' he said, sounding vaguely irritated and passing a hand behind his neck in a familiar gesture that made me queasy with longing. ‘These must be worth a fortune.'

‘They are. But that's not the point.'

‘Listen, Anna, I just want to see you, even for a night. But it's too risky here in Paris. So I was thinking, that you and I could … I mean, if you wanted to …'

I had difficulty interpreting his scattered speech.

‘I do want to. But where?'

‘I've got my brother's birthday in Aubervilliers this Friday. Come with me to that.'

It was a long way from the elaborate montages I had constructed in my head. We both turned to stare at an Italian woman who had yelped with laughter a little way off, grateful for the distraction.

‘She's got a work dinner that night,' he continued, ‘and I've got to be back at the restaurant by seven the next morning to take a delivery. I'll just say I went out with the boys after work, and no one will ever know we've gone.'

He couldn't bring himself to say her name, and it stirred me up. I nodded, noting that the Italian lady and her noisy companion were leaving the room.

‘So you'll pick me up from here at what time?'

‘Six o'clock.'

‘Six o'clock on Friday.'

And he was gone.

*    *    *

It was hard to contain my happiness. On the journey home every mundane action was gilded with excitement. I mouthed the word ‘lover' to myself over and over again, enjoying the shape of it in my mouth, and revelled in the knowledge that the man selling me my bus ticket had no idea what I would be doing that weekend, treating him with undue kindness, as if to compensate for his ignorance.

There had been an awkward moment that evening when, during the course of dinner with Beth and Stephen, she had suggested that we meet up after her work event the following night to see a late-night film. Unprepared, I had made up the only thing I knew would put her off: a man.

‘Ah! So you're going on a date?'

‘No, no. Just a friend.'

‘Well, if he's only a friend you won't mind if I join you two later on, will you?'

I looked so obviously put out that they both started laughing.

‘I knew it: she's going on a date. You're a mysterious little soul sometimes, Anna, aren't you?'

Enjoying Beth's complete attention, I began to tell them the fictional circumstances in which I had met this man, borrowing details from the past and sprinkling them with a smattering from my own imagination. Satisfied I had quashed their curiosity, and pleased with my lies, I opened another bottle of Chablis no one wanted to finish. As I left and got into the lift that night I was surprised by the flushed face staring back at me in the mirror and my very apparent lack of conscience.

I hadn't doubted he would be there, parked directly outside the visitors' entrance, the hazard lights on his car causing the
air around them to quiver in the heat. I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. A gentle embarrassment, which I luxuriated in, hung in the air for the first few minutes as we decided whether to put my bag in the boot and he cleared away an accumulation of empty Evian bottles and fast-food wrappers from beneath my feet. Craving intimacy I leant across, tried to kiss him on the cheek, missed and grazed an ear. He laughed quietly, projecting little puffs of hot air against my cheek, and the knot in my stomach relaxed.

It was the last hot day of summer, and as we drove along the Seine sequins of light winked their goodbyes from the water's surface. Kicking off my shoes and putting my feet on the dashboard I pretended I was not myself, but the plaything of a married man. To complete the picture I lit a cigarette, inserting the tip of it through a slit of open window every ten seconds, watching the ash being snatched away by the wind. We had only exchanged a few words; I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, my cigarette too obvious in its intent. Deciding to empty the ashtray out of the window, I held it too close to the air current and watched helplessly as the plastic tray was ripped from my hand and carried away, as lightly as a piece of confetti.