Harm's Way (27 page)

I knew the answer all too well, but was ready to try anything to break the stalemate.

‘Those conferences are pretty intense,' he said, cutting off another square of pasta and putting it to his lips, ‘the last thing your mother needs is me hanging around.'

The hum of the fridge seemed to be increasing in volume, but to mention it would have meant admitting to our silence. Another appliance I couldn't identify started up and began to vibrate.

‘Oh for God's sake.' I put my fork down with a clatter.

My father, chewing thoughtfully, looked at me, swallowed, and looked back down at his plate again.

Unable to bear it any longer, but feeling that my limbs had lost their natural elasticity, I got up, emptied the rest of my dinner into the swing bin, and stood beside it for a while watching my father calmly finish his meal.

‘I think I might go to bed, Dad. I'm pretty tired.'

Say something, I prayed quietly to myself, please just say something, or I won't be able to sleep. But as I left the room, all I could hear was the deafening roar of the fridge.

*    *    *

My father's disappointment had permeated the whole house, so that even in my room its molecules seemed to fill the air. After a brief attempt at sleep, an avenue of hope – as thrilling as it was unexpected – suddenly presented itself. He was my father and his love was unconditional: I would use him as my confessional, tell him about Paris, about Beth and Christian, tell him everything. Once, aged thirteen, I had stolen a five-pound note from his wallet to buy a pencil case I had been coveting for weeks. When, in a subsequent frenzy of guilt, I had owned up to him, he had listened quietly, never delivering the chastisement I expected. ‘I'm glad you told me,' had been his only comment. Now, I felt confident of a similar response.

‘You're still up: I thought you might have gone to bed.'

He was sitting in the olive velvet-covered armchair by the window, a glass of cognac in his hand.

‘No. Can't sleep?'

‘No.'

In the long, chaste nightdress my grandmother had once bought me (and which I had felt might help my cause) I sat meekly down beside him on the sofa.

‘Do you remember telling me about this great French saying, one we don't have an equivalent to?'

He put down the paper he was reading. ‘They have several,' he said.

‘
La vie est mal faite
. That was it: life is badly made. You can't deny it, nor can you blame someone for it.'

I said these words with the inward fixed gaze of someone who lies, even to herself.

‘Anna,' he put down his book. ‘What's this about, exactly?
Because jacking in a job is not about life or anything other than you and what you are able to make of the things which you're lucky enough to have handed to you on a plate.'

My father and I had never once discussed emotions; this was not going to be easy.

‘There was more to it than that, Dad. I, well, I got myself into a difficult situation out there.'

Once I had started, it was easy. The whole story came out, all of it, although the sexual nature of my relationship with Christian was left out. And I was right: he listened without interrupting, taking occasional sips from his glass, and looking straight at me. I had nothing more to say and gave an embarrassed laugh.

‘Don't know why I told you all that. Anyway, at least you know now that I wasn't just being flaky, about the job I mean, and …'

A chafed hand, older and more speckled with age spots than I remembered, silenced me.

‘I couldn't care less about that job. I'm more worried about the fact that you haven't understood a thing, Anna. Have you?'

I didn't know what he was talking about, and my expression must have betrayed as much.

‘People are fragile, Anna. They're easy to break. Haven't you grown up enough to know that yet?' He ran a finger along the rough edge of his thumbnail in a way that gave me goose bumps before going on. ‘You can't take away on a whim something which may be another person's reason for everything … for living even.'

A month passed during which I felt as if I was convalescing from an illness. I devoted my energies to shielding my
emotions from even the most remote association with Paris. Unable to listen to the radio, watch a film or read a book, in case something, however tangential, reminded me of Beth, I developed a fascination with observing my own pain, as though monitoring it made it less likely to strike when I least expected, which it sometimes did.

During that period I remember one Sunday being driven to a garden centre by my mother, who had refused to console me or discuss anything with me since my father had told her of our conversation, no doubt thinking it was better that way. Sitting in the passenger seat, wearing an old striped jumper of my father's and the tracksuit bottoms that had become my staple, I realised that that extraordinary expedition came as close as anything could to perforating my sense of numbness. I stood by self-consciously, watching her pick out obscure items from a list my father had drawn up, occasionally feeling the weight of her gaze. It was only then, in a moment so unnatural for both of us, that I sensed her unspoken sympathy.

Then, one day, my father drove me to a job interview at a London publishing house. Unbeknown to me, he had sent off my CV a week earlier in response to an advertisment he had spotted in the paper. Because I didn't care, and because things always came easily to me, I was offered the position on the spot.

I hadn't missed Christian at all. But Beth, Beth I missed far more than I had thought possible, often wondering what she was doing and who she was with, and discovering that even in dreams it is possible to be jealous. But as her face and the contours of her body began to fade from my mind like a
photograph left in sunlight too long, I reasoned that soon I would be able to convince myself that none of it had ever happened. Slowly, my life regained a purpose, and the cast populating my waking dreams began to multiply.

I saw again friends whose lives I was no longer interested in, or perhaps never had been. But I had become better at simulating curiosity, asking questions whose answers signified nothing to me. The real chore was responding to their questions about Paris, because there was nothing I could comfortably extract from my existence there. So I invented a boyfriend who bore a striking resemblance to Vincent, and friends who were nothing like anyone I had actually met in Paris. And gradually, every time I elaborated on my fictional acquaintances, borrowing from films and books, I believed my own lies just a little bit more, resetting my memories accordingly.

Humming tunelessly, with a thumb in his mouth, the child pulled impatiently for the second time on Beth's coat sleeve.

‘We're going to be late, Mummy, we're going to be late.'

‘It's all right, darling.'

We both waited until he resumed his swinging around the nearby lamp-post.

‘I was pregnant, Anna, when I found out,' she said matter-of-factly. ‘I never told you – I never even had the chance to tell him – and well, it hardly matters now.' She laughed but it sounded like a yelp, or a cough. ‘I wasn't sure how I was going to manage. But I did – I suppose everyone does, don't they?'

Tears of remorse sprang to my eyes and I dug my nails into the arm of my chair waiting for the dizzying wave of guilt to wash over me.

‘I'm sorry.'

She gave a little laugh, dry but not bitter, and looked at me for an instant with what I like to think was a glimmer of the old affection in her eyes.

‘But you're happy,' I flung out desperately, crying now as I took in her ringless hand on the table and the slight thickening of her waist.

‘I'd really better go. I'm late,' she declared abruptly.

‘But our drinks? He'll be back in a minute with them.'

She signalled to the child.

‘And what about Stephen?' I asked desperately. ‘Are you in touch with him?'

‘Of course. He's still in Paris, but you know, he's married now.'

‘Stephen? Married? Who on earth did he marry?'

She smiled coolly. ‘Isabelle, of course. It was always obvious those two were meant to be together.'

She rose with the particular grace I had always admired in her, and I panicked as I realised how much I needed her in my life, even after all this time.

‘Just wait a minute, why don't you? Or maybe we could see each other again? Now that we've found each other …'

‘I don't think so, Anna.'

Her response was immediate: just as much as I needed her, she needed to keep out of harm's way.

‘Goodbye.'

‘Goodbye then,' I replied.

I watched her walking off, until my vision was blocked by the two large glasses of white wine that had been placed on the table.

‘Barman says we only do rosé in summer, I'm afraid, so I brought you this instead.'

As I went home down a street I'd walked along so many times that it had become charmless, I caught sight of something in the window of an antique shop. It was neither the silver thimbles nor the Chinese vases that arrested my gaze, but the face I saw staring back at me. It was the same face as before, heart-shaped but irregular, with the same
deep-set eyes, high cheekbones and frame of brown hair. But something about it, a new depth of experience, made me catch my breath. The quality I had admired in the faces of others that resolved them, made them whole, was now etched on my own.

Celia Walden was born in Paris in 1975 and lives in west London. She edits the
Daily Telegraph's
‘Spy' column, having previously worked as a feature writer for the
Mail on Sunday
. She writes a monthly column for
Glamour
and
GQ
and appears regularly on national television. This is her first novel.

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Celia Walden
The moral right of the author has been asserted

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square,
London, WC1B 3DP

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408837276

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