A Heart Bent Out of Shape (13 page)

fourteen

Student services had offered a counsellor and she
took
them up on it. In a blast of Swiss efficiency Hadley’s appointment was that first Monday morning. She was shown into a room that seemed to promote caution and comfort in equal measure; lavender scented, cushioned seats, a noticeboard patched with bold posters for contraceptive methods and diseases she had never heard of. The counsellor offered tea and spoke in gently accented English as Hadley listened with her hands resting on her knees. When she said Hadley’s name she dropped the H and it came out like
Ad-lee
, French and lilting, and she felt as if it wasn’t her sitting there at all, then; that it was some other girl, in a too-warm room, thinking about death as though it was a real thing that could happen to anyone. When it was Hadley’s turn to speak she noticed that she was being excessively polite, even remembering a little French, until the moment when she realised she was crying soundlessly and she stopped talking altogether. Afterwards, when she walked out into the corridor, wrapping her scarf around her neck twice, three times, there was only one thing the counsellor said that she remembered:
Talking to someone who knows the nature of grief is the best thing you can do
.
She was probably referring to herself, and gentle as she was, as warm as her palms were as she shook hands in farewell, Hadley didn’t make another appointment. Instead she thought of Joel Wilson, and the tiny, white puckered scar above his lip. A mark you wouldn’t know the meaning of, unless he had told you about it.

‘Hadley, I’m sorry, now’s not a good time.’

Joel Wilson opened the door of his office just wide enough for her to see that behind him, things were in disarray. Uneven stacks of books littered the floor, his desk had disappeared under a mess of papers, and a dim smell of cigarette smoke yellowed the air. He rubbed his face with the flats of his hands and squinted back at her. He looked, for the first time since she’d met him, like a much older man.

‘I’m behind on an article for a publication back home. Don’t even ask. You students think you’re the only ones with pressing deadlines, well, let me tell you . . .’

She waited for him to finish but the end of his sentence fell away in a sudden drop. He was so slick in class that it was a stretch to imagine him being late with his own assignments. She felt angry suddenly, that he should choose today of all days to lose his hallway swagger, and replace it with the desperate demeanour of an inferior, absent-minded professor.

‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.

‘Hadley,’ he pleaded, his eyes taking on a hunted expression, ‘I hate to turn a student away, but I really am up against a wall. I mean,’ he swept his arm, ‘look at this place, it’s chaos. I can’t find any of the things I need. I’m feeling useless, right now.’

‘Kristina died,’ she said.

He was standing with his back half-turned, his arm still engaged in a full sweep. He held still.

‘It’s a real mess in here,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’

‘My friend was killed at the weekend. She’s dead.’

His hand went to his head and pulled at his hair. The kind of thing someone does when they’re clean out of ideas.

‘That can’t be, Hadley.’

‘I know you’re busy, and that this is a really bad time, and I’m sorry for that, but . . .’

‘Come in,’ he said, ‘don’t just stand there, come in. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

He kicked the door shut with his heel and dragged her towards him in an embrace. She almost tripped on the crumpled rug beneath her feet, and her bag fell from her shoulder. It was a fierce, hard hug, and she clung on to him. Her breath was stifled, her face pushed into his shirt, and for a second she thought she’d stopped breathing. She broke away.

‘Why didn’t you shut me up when I went on about my work?’ he said. ‘You should have told me to shut up.’

‘I thought everyone here knew. Someone made me an appointment with a counsellor. I’ve just come from there.’

‘I didn’t know,’ he said, ‘I’ve locked myself away in here. In hell.’ He quickly corrected himself. ‘What am I saying? You’re in hell.’

Hadley set her satchel on the floor then picked it up again. She folded her arms across her chest. Her breath came raggedly.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Here, wait.’

He shifted a pile of papers from the low chair and Hadley sank into it. When she looked up at him, her breath coming surer, the colour in her cheeks dropping, he was pouring two glasses of liquor.

‘Whisky,’ he said, handing her a half-full glass. ‘It helps, when words stop working.’

She sipped from the glass he gave her, cradling it to her chest then sipping again. It tasted hard and angry, nothing like the sweet heat of Hugo’s cognac. But it loosened the knot in her chest and she breathed in and out.

‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ he said.

So she did. Everything she knew. If she stopped for a minute she was afraid she would burst, so she ran on and on, and he was carried with her, just like she’d known he would be. He looked as shocked, as angry, as upset as she was. She realised that was what she had wanted to see in someone else. Fury.

‘I knew if I came to you you’d want to help,’ she said, ‘I knew it.’

‘I’ll help you in any way I can, Hadley, if you ever need someone to talk to, or . . .’

‘I mean something else,’ she said.

She told him about finding Jacques. As she explained it to him, as he crouched on one knee on the mat before her, his whisky glass tilting in his hand, she knew without any doubt that she had come to the right person, and that looking for Jacques was the only thing to do. Joel dropped his head and when he looked back up his eyes were glazed over.

‘You really want to try and find this guy?’

Hadley nodded.

‘Why?’

‘He deserves to know,’ Hadley said. ‘Things weren’t exactly straightforward with him and Kristina, but as far as I could see, he was always honest with her. And I do think he loved her. It must be terrible to not know the truth about someone you love. To think they’ve just disappeared, or just stopped caring.’ Her voice had grown cracked and hoarse. She smoothed her hair with trembling fingers. ‘I can’t think of anyone else who could tell him. She kept him at such a distance, always such a mystery.’

‘Are you angry with her?’

‘Of course not, how could I be?’

‘But before . . . were you angry with her then? Over how she was with Jacques?’

‘No, I mean, I didn’t know enough to be angry, really,’ said Hadley, ‘but it didn’t stop me, did it? I was rotten when I spoke to her on the phone. I just felt like she was making a drama out of it, expecting him to be someone he wasn’t. But that’s easy to say, isn’t it, when it’s not happening to you.’

‘And now you regret it.’

‘Yes, I regret it. I regret it massively. I hate myself for it. But I can’t let it go, and I want to know what happened that night. For all the good it’ll do, I want to know.’

‘Are you sure it’ll help you? I’m not certain it will, Hadley.’

‘Joel, it’s the only thing I am sure of. I did think about leaving, I was beginning to think that that was the right thing to do, and then someone made me realise that it wasn’t. I owe it to Kristina to stay.’

He sat back in his chair, thinking over her words.

‘Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to go home, Hadley,’ he said, after a time, ‘at least for a little while. Just to get yourself together. Find some balance.’

‘I don’t want balance. Not yet. I need to do this.’

‘You could always come back again later in the semester. It doesn’t have to be the end.’

‘I wanted to ask you for your help.’

‘Oh, Hadley.’

‘Will you help me? Find Jacques? Figure it all out?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Joel, please?’

‘Isn’t it better just to let this go,’ he said carefully, ‘this terrible, sad thing. Keep your head above water. Remember all the ways in which she was . . . great. And somehow find a way to let the rest go.’

‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Well, do you have a friend who can help you do this? A boyfriend?’

She shook her head. ‘I came to you because I thought you’d understand why it mattered. I know that’s stupid. It’s got nothing to do with you, but . . .’

Her voice broke off. She felt a tear run down her cheek, and she quickly wiped it away. Another tear came and she wiped that one too. Joel turned away abruptly, and set down his empty glass heavily on the desk. There must have been a crack in it, a fault line, and it shattered at the impact. Splintered shards covered his papers. He swore, and held up his finger to the light.

‘Goddammit.’

‘Are you cut?’

‘Shit, there’s glass in there,’ he said, and a trickle of blood ran down his hand.

‘Let me,’ said Hadley. ‘Here, it’s only tiny.’ With a delicate touch she bent close and picked out the scrap of glass. ‘I’ve got it. See?’

A drop of blood fell on the pale carpet. He held his hand to his chest and it smeared his shirt. ‘I’m getting it everywhere,’ he said.

Hadley rushed to her bag and dug out Hugo’s handkerchief. She folded it over and over, then bound Joel’s hand. An elaborate dressing, for so small a wound.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ he began.

She stepped back. ‘You’re fixed.’

‘That thing’s the size of a tablecloth.’

‘It’s not mine,’ she said. ‘I guess I’ll need it back afterwards.’

‘Hadley . . .’

‘Yes?’

He sat down on the sofa as she hovered by the desk. His good hand fiddled with the bandage. A dark red stain had begun to bloom through Hugo’s handkerchief.

‘It matters to you, doesn’t it? Trying to find this Jacques.’

‘It’s beginning to feel like the only thing to do.’

‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘I don’t know where we’d start. And I don’t know if we’d ever get to the end.’

‘I know.’

‘But if you want to look, if you want some help doing that, if you really think it’ll make you feel better . . . Okay, then.’

Hadley went to him. Without thinking, she sat down beside him and leant into his side, weak with relief. She rested her head on his shoulder and she felt him stiffen. She closed her aching eyes, expecting him to move away. But instead he shifted in his seat. He drew his arm up around her shoulder and pulled her closer towards him.

‘When my little brother died,’ he said, ‘my grandmother told me that I’d feel better about it one day, I just had to get through the shitty part first. And I hated her for saying that because I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to hurt. I wanted to hurt like hell, because it was all I had left of him and I didn’t want to believe that someone you loved, someone who mattered more to you than anyone else, could die and how, after a while, that’d seem like it was okay, for them to have gone and died. So I held on to all of that hurt and all of that anger and I didn’t want to ever let it go. But then one day, without even noticing, it happened.

‘I woke up in the morning and you know what the first thing that I thought of was, Hadley? Coffee. A big, steaming, black-as-night cup of it. And then in the next second I remembered that Winston was gone. I hadn’t forgotten, but the hole he’d left had just shrunk back, ever so slightly, just the smallest amount. I’d woken up every morning for three months and as soon as I opened my eyes I thought,
Oh Jesus . . . Winston
. But not that morning. Not at first. So I got up, and I drank my coffee, and I thought about him and I missed him still. And then I went on to the next thing, which that morning happened to be toast. A square of it, with a scrape of butter and burnt edges. And it tasted like toast too. For the first time since Winston died, it actually tasted like toast.

‘Hadley, it’s small stuff, it’s stupid stuff, but when it happens you’re ready for it, and you want it, because you’re worn out, and you’re tired of railing. You never let the grief go but somehow it begins to let go of you. Just a little, just enough. Enough to let you live again. Eat toast, drink coffee, breathe in and out without wondering how you’re even able to do it. So here’s the thing, Hadley.
This
is the worst time. Right now, you’re in hell. And nothing anybody says, or does, is going to get you out of it. God knows it’ll feel like mourning Kristina is all you’ll ever do and all you’ll ever be. But it will get better. One day, down the road, it will get better. And when that day comes you’ll be ready for it, Hadley. Okay? You don’t believe me, but that’s all right, I didn’t used to believe it either. But you know what? People say that there’s only one certainty in life and that’s death. Well, let me tell you that they’re wrong. There’s two. The other is that eventually we’ll always find a way to live with it. And that’s the best thing and the worst thing about it.’

fifteen

Rue des Mirages
ran a few streets below
the station, and
on the way back from campus Hadley braved it for the first time. With Joel’s promise, she was emboldened, and it felt as if he was with her, even when he wasn’t. It appeared like any other Lausanne backstreet, with olive-coloured apartment buildings and a bank of graffiti-blanched garages, more down at heel than most, perhaps, but not a dangerous place, not the kind of place where lives were snapped out with sudden ferocity. She looked up and down the street and there was no one about; a sideways step off the main thoroughfare and you could find yourself entirely alone. She looked up at the shuttered windows and the rear ends of old blocks. She looked down at the ground. That night there might have been a pool of spreading blood, ruby red against the snow. Now there was only grey, grit-streaked slush. Kristina had dashed along Rue des Mirages, and
fallen, and there wasn’t the slightest trace to show that any of it had ever happened. Hadley had seen memorials before, sad spots marked by spindly bouquets and rain-smeared messages, tied to the railings of a bridge or at a busy intersection. To a passing stranger they gave pause for thought, but what were they to the bereaved? It wasn’t like taking flowers to a graveyard, a laying to rest; perhaps it was that same instinct she felt now, to stop the earth’s spinning for just a moment, refuse to let the next day and the next erase all that had passed before. A desperate act, really, trying to make something matter, when the world rushed on regardless.

At the end of the street was a flower shop and she went in, selecting a bouquet of twelve snow-white roses. She walked back up
Rue des Mirages
,
looking for a spot to lay them. She chose the foot of a lamppost, and she set them gently down.
I didn’t mean the things I said
, she began to whisper, then stopped. The only sounds were the far-off rumbles of traffic, the crunch of her feet as she shifted in the snow, and the rustle of wind as it caught the plastic wrapping of Kristina’s lonely bouquet. She walked away, and her words stayed zipped inside.

Back at Les Ormes, the cleaners were in Kristina’s room. Hadley heard the whine of their vacuums as she approached, and the clump of their plastic clogs as they moved across the floor. She listened and waited, loitering outside her own room, and when they left and didn’t lock the door afterwards she saw her chance. She was about to slip inside and then she stopped, first glancing up and down the corridor. She held her hand up to the door and pressed her fist to it. She’d knocked so many times before, a quick rat-a-tat to say,
Fancy a coffee? Shall we catch the bus together? The sun’s shining, so let’s go somewhere, anywhere, how about the lake?
She knocked now, just once, gently.
Kristina?
Nobody answered.
I’m coming in
,
she said.

It was empty, just as she knew it would be. The bed was stripped, and a new white bag lined the wastepaper bin. They’d forgotten to take her pinboard down, and it still hung brazenly, stuck all over with signs of life: Kristina’s study timetable, all neon streaks of highlight and underlined notes; the flyer from La Folie, the club they’d been to at the start of term, where they danced until their hair grew sticky and the soles of their feet ached; and a picture postcard showing deep blue sea and bluer sky. She unpinned the last and flipped it over, but there was no message this time. Hadley glanced around the room. What had she expected? A business card bearing the name Jacques, tucked into the mirror’s frame? An inkily written telephone number, blotted on a paper napkin? But there was no trace, nothing to make her search the smallest bit easier. There was only the sorrowful feeling of a recently evacuated room; the inescapable air of sadness in the crookedly pulled blind, and the folded blanket at the foot of the bed. On her way back out Hadley closed the door quietly behind her. She noticed Kristina’s name was still there, in the little panel just below the room number.
Kristina Hartmann
. It was strangely comforting, to see it still.

Joel kept his promise and was there for her just as he said he would be. In those first few days he was the only person she wanted to be around and she didn’t stop to examine the feeling or wonder at their growing intimacy; she only knew that he, more than anyone, understood. Between classes they pulled the blind down low, leafing through fat blue-paged telephone directories and student records. Joel dragged his laptop on to his knees and looked online, conducting exhaustive internet searches with every combination of suitable words they could think of.
Jacques Kristina
.
Jacques Geneva St Tropez. Jacques Danish girlfriend
.
Nothing ever came up.

‘Maybe some of the students here might know something. Maybe you could try that,’ said Joel.

‘What, Kristina’s classmates? I don’t think she would have told them anything.’

‘Sometimes it’s easier to talk when there’s a distance.’

‘Not about something like this. I was the only one who knew.’

‘I don’t know, Hadley, it’s just a place to start.’

Joel rubbed his face with both hands. Hadley wondered if he’d turned insomniac just as she had, for the same telltale dark scoops were beneath his eyes, the mark of endless sleepless nights.

‘You’re right, I suppose they might know when she left for Geneva. She might have said something to someone. It’s a good idea.’

‘Hadley, is this helping?’ he said. ‘I mean, am
I
helping?’

‘Of course you are. You know you are.’

‘I know how much I want to.’

‘Joel, you’re helping me in ways you probably don’t even realise.’

‘I just wonder if this fruitless searching only makes everything worse.’

‘It’s about the only thing that makes it better,’ said Hadley.

As she left, she leant forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek. It was only afterwards when she was walking down the corridor that she realised what she’d done, and she thought of how his hand had gone to his face afterwards, an action as unconscious as the kiss itself.

She knew she would find Kristina’s course mates in the corner of the main campus café. It was where they had been when she’d had lunch with Joel on her birthday, when she’d affected not to see them with Kristina, wanting only to focus on him. She watched them now as they lolled in their chairs, rolling cigarettes, their table strewn with coffee cups. There was the girl who laughed all the time, her hair falling in flame-red ringlets, the boy who wore the crushed velvet jacket and stomping black boots, and an older blond man, with glasses and freckled cheeks. She said
bonjour
and they looked blankly back at her, but threw a round of greetings in reply. None of them was British. The blond man might have been a Dane. She said that she was a friend of Kristina’s, and he spoke up first.

‘Ah, okay,’ he said, in English, ‘you’re Hadley, then? From her student residence. Of course. Hi, good to meet you.’

He had a detached air, and when he shook Hadley’s hand it was a cool, crisp gesture. The other boy waved his hand and smiled, revealing not quite perfect teeth. The red-headed girl spoke up, and her voice was sonorous, English laced with French, all lingering vowels and floating cadence.

‘
C’est tragique
,’ she said, ‘
vraiment
, we can’t believe it. She talked about you all the time, you know. How are you? Are you okay?’

For a moment Hadley wondered what it would be like to slot in with these strange half-friends of Kristina’s; they seemed to welcome her, they knew her name. But as she stood there she sensed they were already moving on to other things; they stayed sorrow-struck and outraged just about as long as anyone would expect them to. The French-speaking girl was fiddling with the beads of her necklace. The others had spotted someone else they knew. Hadley spoke briskly.

‘Did Kristina ever mention someone called Jacques?’

The girl shook her head and her curls rippled prettily. She turned to the others. ‘Karl, Josef, you guys ever hear Kristina talk about a Jacques?’ They shrugged, their smiles turned contrite, and they flipped quickly back to their conversation.

‘We were friends but, like, campus friends, you know? A coffee after a lecture, a chat in the library, that kind of thing. I’m sorry, okay?
Vraiment
.’

‘What about on Friday? Did Kristina say what she was doing afterwards? Did she say that she was going to Geneva? To
Genève
?’

The girl shook her head again. She took a skinny cigarette and tucked it into the corner of her mouth, a careless, carefree gesture.

‘Listen, nothing was different. We had Art History before lunch, we all came in here afterwards. Then we went different ways for the afternoon. I can’t even remember saying
au revoir
to Kristina, to be honest. And that was the last time I saw her, so that’s pretty terrible, you know? I feel shit about that.’

She pronounced shit like
sheet,
and her version of
sheet
didn’t look all that bad. It was laughter and friends and light-passing regret, and that was just how it was. Kristina’s course mates could give her nothing more, so Hadley thanked them, a tight-lipped
merci
, and walked away.

Instead of getting the bus she took the long way home, her face hidden inside her hood. She thought about how Joel said ‘we’ when they’d talked about finding Jacques, and she felt less alone.

The St Tropez idea came to her in the night. Her mind was looping in all directions, connecting everything she knew and some things she imagined. Jacques striding along Geneva’s Rues Basses. Kristina reading stories to someone else’s children. Jacques standing in his shirtsleeves, under a melting sun. Kristina’s hair falling like a wave, turning for a kiss. She had told Hadley that Jacques had been staying in the neighbouring villa; a real, tangible place. As she realised the link, she jumped out of bed, all set to make a telephone call, but the yellow dial of her alarm clock told her it was only 3.45 a.m. She climbed back into bed, and watched the numbers reshape themselves, clicking ever closer to a reasonable hour. At 7.32 a.m. she telephoned the campus administrative offices. She rang again at 7.40 a.m. and this time someone picked up; the Swiss began their days early. Minutes later she was scribbling down the number of Kristina’s parents in Copenhagen. It had been easy, assuming the role of the distraught friend, desperate to offer her condolences. The digits were given up and Hadley was already clicking off the line as the administrator offered consoling words of her own.

‘
Hej
,’ a voice said, and even though he had barely spoken before, Hadley recognised Kristina’s father.
Hey
, it sounded like, a greeting of unsettling levity, until Hadley remembered in Danish it simply meant ‘hello’.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said, ‘Mr Hartmann. I don’t know if you speak English, but it’s Hadley Dunn. Kristina’s friend. We met very briefly . . .’

‘Kristina’s friend?’

His voice was all hollowed out, so thin it sounded as though it might crack at any moment.

‘I’m so sorry to disturb you at home,’ she said. ‘Are you . . .’ she lost her thread, then picked it up again, ‘I mean, how are you? I hope you’re well. As well as can be, anyway.’

‘Why are you phoning?’

‘I’m sorry, I really don’t want to bother you, I just wondered something. I wondered if you could help.’

‘I think probably not,’ he said, not unkindly, just defeated.

Hadley took a breath and explained, carefully, gently, how she wanted to get in touch with the family that Kristina had au paired for that summer. She wondered if anyone had done that already, and if they could possibly give her a postal address. She expected a volley of questions, but he asked none.

‘Sorry, no,’ he said.

‘No? You mean you don’t have it?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Or what about the house in France, in St Tropez maybe, did you ever write to Kristina there? Or did she write to you?’

‘Kristina was very independent,’ he said, ‘her summer was, how do you say in English . . . her summer was her business. Who is this? You say you are a friend of Kristina’s?’

‘Yes, from Lausanne. I’m Hadley. I’m just trying to . . .’

‘Hadley, here, we are trying to carry on.’

‘Carry on? Yes, of course. I know. I’m sorry, the last thing I wanted to do was upset you, I just thought . . .’

‘We do not have answers to your questions. We did not know everything about our daughter’s life. Perhaps we did not know enough. We were not with her when she died. These are things that we are living with now. Trying to adapt to.’

‘I know . . .’

‘So thank you, for your friendship with our daughter, but we cannot help. There is nothing we can do. Nothing we can do about any of it.’

His words fell away and Hadley heard a muffled sob. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, hating herself for her persistence.

‘Can I just ask, has anyone called Jacques phoned? Has any man phoned at all?’

‘I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

The line clicked off and Hadley groaned. Somewhere in the very south of France two villas sat side by side, but the occupants were ghosted and long gone. The voice of Kristina’s father stayed inside her head, his diffidence turning to sorrow turning to irritation; and the uncomfortable knowledge that she had come across badly, questioning and impervious. She climbed back under her blankets. She cried until she had nothing left.

As the idea of St Tropez flared and faded, Hadley went to Joel and suggested Geneva. She sought movement, the tracing of a line along a map.

‘What, just to wander the streets?’ Joel said. ‘Holler “Jacques, Jacques”?’

It was Wednesday and she was sitting on the windowsill in his office, with her back flat against the glass. Below, the heads of poplar trees shifted in the wind. Scattered students crossed the walkways, their scarves blowing out behind them, their heads bent down to the ground. They looked happy, ordinary. She rubbed her eyes and turned back.