A Heart Bent Out of Shape

Copyright © 2013 Emylia Hall

The right of Emylia Hall to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in this ebook edition in 2013 by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

Epub conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Warwickshire

eISBN 978 0 7553 9090 8

Jacket photographs: girl in snow © Patty Maher/ Arcangel images;
Background © Jürgen Wackenhut/ imagebroker/Corbis
All other images © Shutterstock

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About the Author

Emylia Hall was born in 1978 and grew up in the Devon countryside, the daughter of an English artist and a Hungarian quilt-maker. After studying English and Related Literature at the universities of York and Lausanne, she spent five years working in a London ad agency, before moving to the French Alps. It was there that she began to write. Emylia now lives in Bristol with her husband, the comic-book writer and children’s author Robin Etherington. Her first novel,
The Book of Summers
, was a Richard & Judy Bookclub pick in 2012.

Praise for Emylia Hall:

‘Enchanting and vivid . . . an amazing debut’
Cosmopolitan

‘Fantastically evocative and sun-drenched’
Stylist

‘Beautifully nuanced’
Spectator

‘[A] vivid coming-of-age story’
Woman & Home

‘Heartfelt and evocative’
Grazia

‘Emylia Hall’s enchantingly evocative debut glimmers with the magic of hot days, cool ponds, delicious meals and lost love’
Marie Claire

Also by Emylia Hall:

The Book of Summers

About the Book

For Hadley Dunn, life so far has been uneventful – no great loves, no searing losses. But that’s before she decides to spend a year studying in the glittering Swiss city of Lausanne, a place that feels alive with promise. Here Hadley meets Kristina, a beautiful but elusive Danish girl, and the two quickly form the strongest of bonds. Yet one November night, as the first snows of winter arrive, tragedy strikes.

Hadley, left reeling and guilt-stricken, begins to lean on the only other person to whom she feels close, her American Literature professor Joel Wilson. But as the pair try to uncover the truth of what happened that night, their tentative friendship heads into forbidden territory. And before long a line is irrevocably crossed, everything changes, and two already complicated lives take an even more dangerous course . . . 
A Heart Bent Out of Shape
is the story of a first love, a terrible tragedy, a snow-filled paradise; a year that will never be forgotten.

For Bobby

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my earliest readers, my friend Kate and my husband Robin. You braved my messy first draft and our kitchen table sessions set me on the right path. Without your well-timed help, I’m not sure I would have stayed sane.

Thank you to my editors and agent, Leah, Erika and Rowan. This book is better because of you, and for that I’m forever grateful. The last months of writing, with your words and wisdom filling my sails, proved to be the most enjoyable of all. Thank you.

Thanks also to everyone else at Headline – particularly Ben, Vicky, Emily and Leah again – you continue to make this writer’s working life a pleasure.

Thank you to my dear family, the Halls and the Etheringtons, and brilliant friends for always cheering me on. Sonya, Jo and Aisling, while Hadley’s year is not
our
year, I hope I’ve written something of our joy into the story. Special thanks to my parents and sister, Szilvia, Alwyn and Emese, for reading early drafts and being unfailingly enthusiastic in your support. I couldn’t ask for more.

And again, Robin. Thank you for everything, always.

Finally, this book began with a place. I was lucky enough to have lived in Lausanne for a year as a student, and even luckier to be able to put it in a novel and share it with you now. I hope I’ve done its beauty justice. Of all the books that talk of Lausanne,
A Farewell To Arms
and
A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway, and
The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain, were particularly important to the writing of this one.

prologue

Before Hadley, there was Lausanne. Before Kristina, and Jacques, and Joel, there was still Lausanne. Their presence in the city was only passing; the lake did not burst its banks, no mountainsides were sent crumbling, and no shutters broke from immaculate buildings to go clattering to the ground. Yet between the striding bridges and the turreted apartment blocks, the tree-lined streets and the looping parks, they played out their trysts and tragedies. Through it all, Lausanne remained unaltered, but the same could not be said for the lives of the people who lived there.

It was Hadley’s second year of university and she was spending it abroad, in Switzerland.
La Suisse
. Her idea of the place belonged to cartoons – cuckoo clocks and soupy cheese, triangular chocolate and cool neutrality – but then she looked in a guidebook and saw the words ‘Swiss Riviera’. She read about Lausanne; a city of vertical streets, rising spires and tumbling rooftops. She’d seen a picture of Lac Léman, shining like a polished mirror, with the serrated edges of Les Dents du Midi and Mont Blanc rising behind. There were palm trees and vineyards and palatial hotels with striped awnings that flapped in the breeze. Lausanne seemed possessed of a quiet glamour, discreet but with a rippling undercurrent,
un frisson
. Hadley had only been too happy to leave her university back home, with its huddled, squat buildings that were grey as elephant-hide, boys who smelt of yesterday’s beer, and girls who twittered like birds on a line. She imagined herself in this new Swiss landscape, and was in its grip from the very beginning. Until the end of her days, she will probably always be able to picture the lakeside bathed in September sun; the clutches of international students sitting on the steps by the marina, laughing at the fountain spray, shielding the light from their eyes. At the start of the academic year Lausanne was always full of such types; slipshod groups who were yet to find their way, united by little more than being aliens, in the same place at the same time. If only someone had taken them each by the hand, said,
You are in a place of dreams but tread carefully. And look after one another
.

She will probably always remember the Hôtel Le Nouveau Monde, its delicate bulk like a glamorous but portly
femme d’un certain age
. Her heart will flutter, as it forever did, for there will be something about the place that will draw her still. She’ll think of the gold and primrose dining room, the delicate squares of chocolate resting on the saucers of coffee cups, and Hugo Bézier rolling a cigar between nimble fingers, his creased smile glinting through his cognac glass. He told her once that it was her very greenness that had attracted him in the beginning. How she’d stood so upright, looking somehow poised for flight. And it was true, for she was light as a butterfly as she danced into her new life, and she had shed her old one as easily as a chrysalis. How cocooned, how grey, how very dull it had felt in comparison. At the time she had felt quite certain that her future lay in Lausanne and, despite all the things that happened, she supposed she was still right. For it was just as Joel Wilson had said in his very first lecture, as he appropriated the words of Ernest Hemingway in a loose Californian drawl,
There is never any end to Lausanne.
He had told them that after their year, each of their memories would be completely different; that was how it was with Lausanne, just as it was with Paris. With hindsight she wondered if perhaps he was trying to prepare them, to warn them that Lausanne wasn’t the kind of city to take its place among their memories with obedience and grace. Rather it would permeate everything that came afterwards, and all of them, including him, would return to it again and again in their minds. They wouldn’t be able to help themselves. Joel couldn’t have known what lay ahead at that point, but it was almost as if he did. His light eyes clouding, as he turned his back on the lecture group and stared from the window at the sliver of lake that lay beyond.

Hadley’s year abroad was always going to be a love story. When you long to feel another’s beating heart pushed close to your own, you don’t think about those same hearts one day breaking; nor the splinters that will run beneath your skin, prickling and burning for the longest time. But this is a story about more than heartbreak. It’s about an old man sitting at a typewriter, his fingers darting over the keys as a young girl watches in complicit quiet. It is about a city; a place at once fairy-tale and reality-bitten, glorious and imperfect, sun-soaked and winter-whipped. More than anything, it is a story about old lives ending and new lives beginning, and it turns on the sweetest of moments; when two perfect strangers chance upon one another, and instead of letting the day blow them past they pause. They turn. They speak. The story starts.