Harm's Way (24 page)

‘Everything!' His growl of rage echoed throughout the flat. A creaking door on the landing opposite answered its call, and then, hearing nothing more, slammed shut again. ‘It means everything! Don't you see? It means Beth could be dead.'

Stephen's eyes were so red and sticky that it looked like the corneas were bleeding; even Christian was struggling to maintain his composure.

‘Or the police may have got it wrong: they don't know everything, Stephen. They do sometimes get things wrong.'

I noted with alarm the pleading in his voice. He was asking somebody else to believe that Beth was still all right, and the realisation that he might still be in love with her, had ever been in love with her, hit me.

‘He's right, Stephen,' I interjected, knowing he was wrong, wrong, wrong. ‘She might still be OK. Let's try her father again, try Ruth again, try everyone – I don't believe that she can just disappear like this.'

I knew as I spoke that we wouldn't be reassured, but those few remaining minutes of hope seemed precious beyond anything.

‘You all keep on asking me this question,' crackled Mr Murphy's voice on the line, ‘and I'll tell you what I told the others: she's not here. She's coming to see me though. My Beth did promise she would come.'

His voice grew faint, and I suspected he had wandered away from the phone, picturing the receiver hanging limply across a dusty wooden chair in a farmhouse kitchen.

‘Mr Murphy? Are you still there?'

‘Of course I am. And there's no need to shout: I'm not deaf, you know, but I do wish you'd stop bothering me. She always gets back in time to do her homework. Always. What do you want my daughter for, anyway?'

‘Do you understand how serious this is?' I raised my voice, feeling my right temple beginning to throb. ‘Your daughter is missing, and we've had to call the police. We're all very worried, so if she turns up, you have to tell us.'

I was preparing myself for the ordeal of reading out digits down the phone, but Beth's father had already hung up. Christian, I couldn't face, somehow beginning to feel that he was the reason for all this. I turned to Stephen. ‘There's only one thing to do. We'll have to go to Ireland ourselves, speak to her dad and to the neighbours, and find out what's going on. That's what the police should already have done. I just don't think they're trying their best to sort this thing out.'

Stephen had calmed down, and began nodding his approval.

‘If we leave tomorrow morning we'll be there by Friday.
My boss knows what's going on but it might be trickier for you to get the time off …'

‘I don't think you both need go,' Christian cut in with suddenly authority. ‘I should be around at my place in case she decides to go there, and someone should really stay here, just in case.'

‘He's right.'

That night, we sat around the kitchen table planning Stephen's trip, all three of us trying to ignore the grinning photograph of Beth pinned to the noticeboard just above our heads, alongside her redundant shopping list and a flyer for a local gym she'd insisted she was going to join every week since I'd known her.

Early the following morning, Christian drove Stephen to the Gare du Nord. Even though we were taking steps to put everything right, the world around me seemed wildly out of kilter. Isabelle's constant appearances throughout the day in my section of the gallery meant that I reluctantly gave in and allowed her to become my confidante. Mid-afternoon, standing beneath the cloud-shaped awnings of the museum with my eyes on the river, I told her the news.

‘Oh my God, Anna.' She raised a hand to her cheek, but the little smile was still there. ‘You must be feeling terrible about everything. Sort of guilty too, I guess. It's brave of you to come into work.'

The words were there, each one picked out with care, but I began to suspect that under their bland surface was a more sinister motive. Isabelle saw herself as a friend, yet I had started to sense an enemy in her.

‘Well, Stephen's gone to Ireland today to try to track her down, so things could still turn out OK.'

It sounded unconvincing, even to me, and I spent the remainder of the day cursing myself for having told her anything at all.

It was the first time I had gone back to Christian's flat alone, and the darkness of the stairwell felt desolating. Everything ordered and pure had ricocheted into another world, one where nothing made sense. I longed for my father's advice, but knew I could not call him. What would I say? Christian would be home in under an hour, so I resolved to busy myself by playing at domesticity, and prepare dinner for him. In a kitchen that size, this was easier said than done. At that point his little garret still held a residual charm. Only a few days later, those walls would begin to symbolise the prison of guilt we had built around ourselves.

I was distracted by a light going on across the street. The occupant had just seated himself low down in a velvet chair with one green corduroy-clad leg balanced on his knee. I wondered whether, if I stared at him long enough, he would sense me watching, look away from the book he was reading, stub his Gitane out in the marble ashtray on the coffee table beside him, and glance up. He didn't, and the spinach I had immersed in shallow water began to spit with annoyance. I turned it off and resumed my post at the window, determined to make the man aware of my existence.

‘If he turns around,' I said to myself, ‘everything will be all right, and life will return to normal.'

I stared and stared, but the onset of tears made his outline
nebulous, washing the colours from the scene, and still he refused to lift his eyes from his book.

When Christian walked through the door twenty minutes later, no food had been prepared, and he would perhaps wonder why there was a mass of burnt spinach lying like a clump of dried seaweed at the bottom of the bin. I, however, was perfectly made-up, lying on the bed in one of his shirts reading a magazine. No one would ever have guessed that minutes earlier I had been pressed against the kitchen window-pane, crying about the obstinacy of a man I had never met.

‘
Tu es très belle
,' he said, kissing me lightly on the mouth before putting his bag down.

I lifted my eyes from the article I wasn't reading and attempted a smile.

‘Good day?'

‘Uneventful.'

Tugging harshly at the zip of his coat, he freed himself in one noiseless gesture, and squared up to me in the same way he'd confronted an Arab who had commented on the length of my skirt in a bar the week before.

‘What's wrong?'

I swallowed twice, willing myself not to cry but feeling a burning sensation behind my eyes. Then his arm was round me, my nose buried in the groove of his neck.

‘Promise me that it'll all be all right.'

‘I promise.'

But they were only words, words you use to try to make everything better.

That night our movements were automatic, loveless, drawn out as long as we could. I turned my back to him, knowing
that if our eyes met I would have to stop what we were doing. But sleep would have been impossible. Afterwards, we lay breathless beside one another, not touching. I noticed for the first time that the bed sheets needed washing, and that the damp had inscribed nicotine-rimmed clouds on the walls. There was nothing poetic about the flat; it was the accommodation of a student, and that was all. Christian began to speak. He sounded strange in the murky orange dawn, and I wanted to cover up his mouth, to smother him with kisses, anything to make him stop talking.

‘Is it our fault, Anna?'

‘Of course not.'

Involuntarily my toe brushed against his foot; it was cold.

‘You're right.' He had turned towards me now, his faultless face half buried in the pillow, a tiny bleached feather bent backwards against his cheek. ‘There's no way she could have known about us.'

‘Of course there's no way.' I felt impatient now, angry that he was trying to turn something that had nothing to do with us into an act of retribution, and disappointed that he would let something as absurd as superstition get to him.

‘We haven't slept,' I reached for my phone to check the time, ‘and it's 4 a.m. That's the only reason you're thinking like this.'

So typical, so very like a man to seek a convenient release from guilt the moment desire had been quenched – the same desire that had bred this situation to begin with. If he's not strong enough for this, I thought spitefully, he shouldn't have done what he did, and he shouldn't be lying here now.

‘And if you really think that Beth is the kind of girl who would ever do anything to herself, then you know her even
less well than I thought.' I shifted on to my side to avoid the intensifying dislike in his eyes.

‘I know exactly how Beth felt about that, actually,' he muttered.

Refusing to give him the satisfaction of turning around, I replied: ‘So you and she sat about discussing life, death and suicide, did you? How wrong I must have been about your relationship.'

‘Life and death, no,' he began quietly, missing, or choosing to ignore, my sarcasm, ‘but we did discuss suicide once.'

‘Pillow talk, was it?' I couldn't stop myself.

‘No.' A pause. ‘It was the night we came back from my brother's. I know I shouldn't have, but I told her about the girl.'

He moved in closer behind me, tracing the underside of my breast apologetically with a finger. Something jarred in my mind.

‘And don't worry, obviously I didn't tell her that I was with you. I'm not that stupid. No, I told her that I was out with some guys from work, that we were coming back from a big night out together when we saw it, her … whatever.'

I heard myself cry out – a noise that was part animal, part child.

‘Jesus Christ, Anna, what is it? Are you OK?'

Memories slammed into one another, each one gathering momentum, until with agonising lucidity, I replayed the final hour I had spent with Beth, heard my own soothing voice telling her that her father's life had been rich, not cut off in its prime – not like the girl I had seen, the girl on the bridge.

‘You idiot.' I was sobbing now, curled up as far from Christian as the mattress would allow. ‘You idiot.'

Seized by a morbid curiosity to watch his face collapse as the realisation took hold, I turned to look at him. When I think of his expression now, it makes me flinch with sadness. The half-closed lids were drawn right back, their enchanting quality replaced by a kind of vapid disbelief, and for the first time I noticed that there were shallow lines beneath them. The idea that I had ever loved this person was laughable. Where Beth and I had seen mystery, there was only an unexceptional being painted over with our own desire. He was saying something over and over again, so quickly that at first I couldn't catch it.

‘What have we done? Oh God, what have we done?'

I left him there – he wasn't talking to me in any case – and ran to the toilet. Holding my hair back with one hand, I waited. Nothing came except a small jet of saliva, which burst open in the water like a botched firework, then disappeared. When I got back a few minutes later, Christian had gone out. I was thankful to him at least for that, for realising that it wouldn't have helped either of us to have had to face each other at that moment. Still, the thought of lying there alone with my thoughts appalled me. I dressed quickly and tiptoed down the stairs into the somnolent streets below.

The digital clock outside the pharmacy on the rue de la Tour was flashing a quarter to five in the morning, and the whirring of a machine swabbing down the street unlocked a silent world. Turning to check that the figure on the opposite corner was not Christian, I almost collided with a box on wheels which completely obscured the delivery man pushing it along. Muttering ‘
Pardon
', and stuffing my hands in my pockets, I walked down the narrow, dawn-tinted
pavements past rows of overflowing green bins until I reached the avenue Henri Martin. There I felt able to breathe again, as though the width of it alone were reassuring, swallowing me in its ascetic anonymity. In Paris, even in the small hours, some bars are still open. Through a window I watched three workmen drinking Pastis, one throwing his head back with laughter at something the barman had said. I wondered how I would describe the moment to Beth. But Beth was no longer there.

Pushing open the doors of the bar, braving the workmen's stares, I settled on a banquette by the window. I can't remember how long I sat there, taking mechanical sips of the coffee I'd ordered, waiting for my imagination to uncover an escape route which might absolve me of any responsibility. But the scenes I played out in my mind only served to cement the realisation of the damage I had done. Beth had been vulnerable. She had come to Paris to start a new life, away from her sick father and the memories of a broken engagement. There she had lived quite happily with Stephen until I had appeared, falling a little bit in love with her and the way she made me feel, and wanting to take everything that was hers. Guilt and resentment flooded through me: why had she not seen me for what I was?

Did I ever truly believe that Beth might have ended her own life over the discovery? No, I never did. Perhaps because it would have made my shame unbearable, but also because I still believe today that I really did know Beth. And I knew that for all the soft lines of her face and figure, and all the tenderness she bestowed upon others, there was a kernel of toughness, bred in the hard realities of farming
families. She would run from it all, yes, but I felt sure that she would start afresh somewhere else, just as she had tried to do here.

During the autumn months, at precisely half past eight in the morning, every street lamp in Paris goes out, officially announcing the end of night. Walking slowly across the pont des Invalides, nearing the museum, I had only one thought: I had to reach Stephen. The instant he returned from Ireland Christian and I would have to sit him down and tell him what we'd done. I tried to imagine his face, tried to persuade myself that he already knew, that it would not come as the shock I expected it would be, but all that was wishful thinking. Putting a hand in my pocket, I realised that I had left with nothing but my purse. Unwilling to return to the flat, I stopped at a nearby phone box, rang Stephen, and left him Isabelle's number, thinking she, at least, would be sure to relay any message to me. That, it turned out, would be the finishing touch to my catalogue of mistakes.