Harm's Way (7 page)

I stole a sideways glance at Christian. With one brown elbow on the table, he was studying the menu, his eyelashes hard black fans against his cheeks.

‘What are you having, darling?' Beth asked softly in French.

Both Christian and I looked up.

‘Anna.' Beth smiled at my confusion. ‘You'll have the “orange-scented” madeleines, won't you? Just to please me? Oh to have the metabolism of an eighteen-year-old again – and you, Christian?'

‘I'm not that hungry. I'll just have a coffee and a bit of whatever you're having,' he answered in French.

The intimacy of his reply irritated me like an itch beneath the skin. And since when did Beth understand French so well? Complaining of a headache, and ignoring the three surprised upturned faces, I left.

That afternoon I walked from République to the pont de l'Alma, willing every step to alter my mood. Instead, I felt more alone than during my first two weeks in the city. Even the river, glinting placidly in the sunlight like a young girl unaware of her own attractions, served only to heighten my
sense of irritation. I was not an envious person. Nor did I normally covet other people's happiness. And yet something about Christian had upset the balance of my friendship with Beth, bringing my nerves up like a rash.

During my lunch hour the next day, I pulled a folded flyer from my pocket and dialled the seven-figure number scribbled in the corner, conscious of my motivations, but prepared to try anything
‘pour me changer les idées'
. The pleasure in Vincent's voice was audible in the first sentence he uttered, and I appreciated his easy phone manner. He suggested booking a table that night at a seafood restaurant in the eighth arrondissement and I agreed. Over a tiered platter of shellfish, a little embarrassed amusement over the plastic bibs and a bottle of Riesling, I was surprised to find myself enjoying Vincent's company. His features were finer than I'd remembered: a high forehead tumbling into deep-set eyes fringed with donkey-straight lashes. A self-deprecating humour gradually emerged which would have been more attractive were it not for the occasional downtrodden expression betraying various neuroses I had no intention of exploring. Simultaneously I decided two things: that I could never feel anything other than fondness for Vincent and that I would take him home that night.

The following week took an unexpected form. Vincent and I spent nearly every night together. I was taken aback by his ardour, by the pleasure I derived from him in bed, and found the almost daily gifts of flowers and eighteenth-century novels – love and intellect are symbiotic forces in France – both baffling and amusing. One of the things I have always felt
alienates me from most of my sex is the lack of excitement with which I receive flowers. For me the problem lies in the implicit emotional pressure in that seemingly benign gift. If presented to you with a flourish in a restaurant, the gesture is enjoyable for him, but leaves you burdened for the rest of the evening. They betray a kind of desperation in the giver – and remind me of our neighbour back in London, who bought his wife a puppy when he found out she was having an affair.

The determination of Vincent's attack bore results of a kind. I began to adopt the language and gestures of passion, without experiencing any of its emotions, marvelling at my lack of feeling, like a child who runs his finger quickly through a flame and is astonished to feel no pain. I learned then something that has been of value ever since: if, during a relationship's initial stages, one side is too consistently proactive, the other becomes emotionally lazy. Why let yourself feel when someone is doing it for you? I savoured the ease with which I behaved like an object of love, feeling that the role suited me. But there was more to it than that. Beyond the physical satisfaction of this relationship, I experienced a kind of clinical, intellectual pleasure in thinking about love, or rather the lack of it. I had read too much de Beauvoir not to interest myself in its very essence.

Looking back I think I must have behaved like the perfect lover: one's gestures are always more measured, with less chance of bungling, when they are false. Just as adults, sitting silently in their cars at the end of an interminable dinner party, must compliment themselves on their pleasantries – remembering the name of their neighbour's third child, enquiring about a recent job change – I relished pretending
to care. The ease with which I could respond to Vincent's romantic pronouncements shocked me. As I soon discovered, however, life has a habit of throwing up scenarios that are difficult to play out with any semblance of feeling.

It was just over a week into whatever it was that Vincent and I were doing together. On that febrile Tuesday, the covered sky, a low, insistent ceiling above our heads, crushed the spirits of Parisians desperate for air. After much prompting from me, Vincent had bought tickets for Ionesco's
Bald Prima Donna
– Paris's answer to Agatha Christie's
Mousetrap
– which had been playing for forty years at a charming little theatre in the sinuous back streets of the Latin Quarter. I'd skipped up the two flights of stairs to his flat that afternoon feeling almost fond of this man I barely knew, only to find him pale and prostrate on his sofa: a migraine. He might as well have told me he had bowel problems, I could not have found the condition more repugnant. Migraines? Weren't they the fragile woman's affectation? I sat down limply by his feet, conscious that I should touch him in some way, looking at my hand lying useless and upturned in my lap, and willing it to somehow give the required sympathetic pat.

‘I didn't realise you got them. How …' I tried to clear the hostility from my throat, ‘long have you had them for?'

‘God, as long as I can remember,' he winced melodramatically. ‘I used to have these amazing painkillers the doctor prescribed for me but I'm out. You couldn't run down to the chemist over the road and get me some Migraline, could you? It's not great, but it'll help.'

‘Of course I could,' I smiled, relieved to distance myself, if
only for five minutes, from the sight of his feverish eyes and the scaled track of dry skin on his bottom lip.

But an hour and two tablets later Vincent's headache showed no signs of abating, and I wondered whether he might be thoughtful enough to suggest that I go to the play with Beth instead, so as not to waste the tickets. The vulnerable silence emanating from his huddled figure was getting tiresome. Massaging his temple feebly with my finger, I whispered: ‘Do you want me to leave you alone so that you can get some sleep?'

He shook his head and gave me a martyr-like smile tinged with tenderness. In my (admittedly limited) experience, relationships had always run up against one, tangible moment of disgust from which there was no return. It could be provoked by a comment or a seemingly harmless gesture, but once it was there, it festered until the faint revulsion, the sheer disrespect, outweighed every other aspect, eventually forcing me to break it off. Occasionally – through boredom or lethargy – a length of time would pass between the moment of realisation and the end of the relationship. I might have felt more optimistic about Vincent, but for a story my mother once told me about a friend with an adopted baby. The woman had invited my mother round to meet her new child, but later, while making them both a cup of tea, had suddenly dissolved into tears. Empty words of comfort and diffident back-stroking from my mother had eased out a confession: in a dry whisper, her friend admitted to feeling nothing for the child. Four months later she had rung my mother to tell her that as she'd nursed the baby through a fever, she'd felt love for the first time. But just as vulnerability can be the catalyst for love, where there is no love it simply highlights the lack of it.

With Vincent, I was worried that the whole episode might have entrenched terminal disgust too soon, and determined to keep it at arm's length while I still needed him. I did, however, have one thing to thank him for: although he had failed to banish thoughts of Beth and Christian, I felt that he was, at least, endowing me with weapons with which to fight back.

Over the following weeks, I used Vincent, knowingly and without bad conscience. His presence alleviated my nerviness around Beth and Christian, four being so much more comfortable a number than three, and his docile nature nearly always ensured that he didn't overplay his part.

That Friday afternoon was a rare exception. I arrived late outside the only cinema in Paris still showing a Hollywood blockbuster we had all somehow missed. Its obstinate presence in theatres across Paris and its posters in métro stations meant that we had, at first, systematically expunged it from our thoughts. But the film's PR machine continued to chip away at our defences until one by one we succumbed, finally agreeing to endure the thing together.

Stephen was already inside, buying popcorn with Beth, and as the cab drew up outside, I could see Vincent's back, irritating in its familiarity, as he stood chatting to Christian. I had deliberately engineered to be late, but the arrival was not as I had planned it: none of the men – because of Vincent's stupid positioning – were able to witness my approach.

‘Ah, there she is,' Vincent eventually said, smiling in what was meant to be an affectionate way, but which looked to me like more of a queasy sneer.

‘Here I am.' I leaned in and kissed his cheek tenderly, to his surprise. ‘Hello, Christian.'

I was beginning to enjoy the greeting kiss charade.

‘Where are the others?'

‘Inside, stocking up on nibblies.' Vincent used words like that, fey diminutives which emasculated him even further in my eyes. ‘Shall we?'

Christian said nothing, as was his wont. And once inside, the chorus of chatter from Stephen and Beth drowned out his silence. Forcing our little throng to sit in the correct order – with me in between Christian and Vincent, where I wanted to be – had not been difficult. People flail around helplessly when facing the most trivial decisions and are always secretly pleased to have someone take over. Vincent, in the last seat on the row, exhaled with satisfaction as he extended his legs into the aisle, while on the other side of me, Christian was reaching over Beth to help himself to Stephen's popcorn.

‘Why are we here?' I whispered, trying to detect even the faintest glimmer of tension in his demeanour. But his shrug and its accompanying mumble were lost in the dimming lights and inappropriately loud majesty of the opening credits. Ten minutes into the film I was still asking myself that very question.

‘I do this for a living, Mrs Van Den Broek, and the FBI know that I'm damn good at it. I suggest you have a drink: something strong. I'm going to do everything I can to get your son back.'

I wanted to catch the scathing expression I imagined must be present in Christian's eyes, but having him close had contracted the muscles in my neck so tightly I felt unable to move my head. I risked a glance at the hand, which lay on the arm rest, an inch away from mine, as though discarded by the rest of his body. Its stillness seemed a gesture of such defiance that I resolved to block him from my mind, and concentrate on the film.

‘I want this son of a bitch nailed and I'm feeling like I'm on a roll. Friday is pay day.'

Four men had been shot, and Christian's hand still hadn't moved. The paralysis seemed to have pervaded the rest of his body, so that I wondered hopefully whether he might have fallen asleep. But no, nothing about those knees, the caps pronounced cleft domes beneath his jeans, could possibly be relaxed. Someone's arm, Vincent's, was winding itself around my neck now, lightly passing over my right shoulder before alighting on a curling strand of hair tucked behind my ear. Fingers, grotesque tentacles in my mind, filled the corner of my vision with a flesh-coloured haze. The knowledge that Christian was witnessing the whole scene caused me such a sense of mortification I could almost hear it in the darkness.

‘Stop it: you're tickling me,' I hissed, trying to keep the anger from my voice.

‘Am I, baby?' He mistook it for teasing. ‘Do you want me to stop?'

‘Yes. I do. I'm trying to watch the film.'

Giving me a final squeeze of the neck as he withdrew his hand, Vincent put both hands back in his lap and laughed suddenly, too loud, at one of the protagonists' witticisms. Beth hadn't so much as chuckled: having seen her kick off her shoes at the start, I imagined her seeking Christian's feet with her own. During quiet moments in the film, when neither of the actors spoke and the incidental music was kept to a minimum, I could hear my neighbour's shallow breaths punctuated by the occasional swallow.

‘This is surveillance, not narcotics. Shit like this is what makes people hate cops.'

Around us was a plethora of movement: for the past hour people had been wriggling in their seats, sucking sweets, clearing their throats, rustling wrappers and sneezing. Christian and I were a static island, shadows frozen like Hiroshima victims. Finally, having contained itself too long, my discomfort came to the fore, manifesting itself in a hollow twinge down my left leg: cramp. I reached down to rub the offending calf, forgetting that this would instantly rekindle Vincent's attention.

‘You OK, darling? You got cramp?'

‘Yes, just a little,' I whispered, ‘but …'

‘Shhhh!' came an imperious order from the row behind. It broke the paralysis. I turned towards Christian. Where was the harm in looking? But to look was everything. His face – bisected into a Pierrot-like mask by the screen lights – eventually succumbed to my unspoken plea. His soft sigh of frustration had just cemented my sense of victory when he leant abruptly towards Beth, whispered something in her ear, muttered ‘excuse me' to Vincent and me, and left the cinema.

‘What was up with him?' I asked twenty minutes later as, with that peculiar sense of disorientated despondency specific to cinema leavers, we trudged silently through the foyer.