A Heart Bent Out of Shape (17 page)

‘I’ve already dragged you about enough,’ said Hadley.

‘But you’ll tell me of your progress?’

‘I will. Do I need to say anything to the police? Let them know that we’re doing this?’

‘Only if you find something.’

‘Okay. Hugo, I’d never have thought of all those things on my own. I’ll do them, every one, no matter how long it takes. I couldn’t care less about classes at the moment. Anyway, my professor’s off sick.’

‘Fortunate timing, then.’

Her hand went to her chin abstractedly again, and she saw him notice, his eyes widening just the smallest amount. She dropped her hand. She didn’t know what else to say so she wished him goodnight, and watched him walk slowly away. She hoped he’d take a taxi home, for it was cold out, and for all his bright words he looked ghost-pale. He turned and they waved at one another. Then Hadley walked the length of Rue des Mirages
on her own, her feet crunching on the ice-bitten pavements, listening for cars.

eighteen

Over the days that followed, Hadley
kept away from
everyone at Les Ormes. She waved briskly as she passed Chase in the hallway, she didn’t answer the door to Jenny’s soft tap-tap, and she slipped out of the kitchen before Bruno could appear with his bottles of wine and eagerness for conversation. They’d all made it clear that they thought her efforts were well intentioned but pointless, and that judgement was too disheartening and infuriating to hear again and again. Once she overheard Bruno and Chase as they sauntered past her room.
How long is she going to be like this?
It’s tragic but you have to move on
, Chase said. Bruno murmured a reply she couldn’t catch, but she was sure it was agreement.

She was a wanderer before, but the thought of the car charged her grief, and made her restless. She began to avoid the kitchen at Les Ormes altogether, skipping breakfast in favour of hastily grabbed cafeteria coffees. She took supper in bland and anonymous department store cafés, glasses of expensive Coca-Cola, triangles of quiche and bitter curls of red lettuce, eaten from a sticky tray. Wherever she went, Hadley watched the seemingly respectable Lausanne people: their smart and formal kisses, their ceremonial
cafés-croissants
and their impeccable tight-lipped smiles as they bid you
bonne journée
, ‘have a good day’, without any of the American fizzle and pop. Was it one such person, fiddling with their car stereo, turning to answer a child’s question, their attention diverted for just one moment from the business of the road, who’d killed Kristina? Such a person that peered from behind their door when faced with the old man and the young girl, and said,
Non, monsieur, mademoiselle, je suis désolé, j’ai rien vu; I’m sorry, I saw nothing
.

Meanwhile she saw Kristina everywhere: flitting across the city, just a flash of apple-green satchel and honey hair to mark her; her perfect profile through the window of a bus as it passed in the opposite direction, the delicate v-shape her face made as she turned; fifty yards ahead on the hill up to Les Ormes, her languid, unhurried steps, as Hadley bustled breathlessly to catch up. These apparitions deserted her as soon as she made it to her room. She’d lean against the scratchy wall that once separated them, or go on to the balcony and peer round at the dark glass of her windows, and she’d see and feel and hear nothing. It seemed that whenever she tried to conjure Kristina, she was unforthcoming, but when she wasn’t looking, Kristina was all that she could see.

She heard nothing from Joel, and his absence haunted her too, in smaller but no less disturbing ways. Despite the tarnishing effects of uncertainty, the idea of him still burnt gem bright. In the bustle of Place Saint-François Hadley once turned at the sound of an American voice, only to see a bearded, big-bellied man, dressed in mountaineering regalia, swinging his walking poles. He grinned at her and cracked a
bonjour
. And another time, at the entrance to the metro, she glimpsed someone from behind: dark leather, brown-black hair, faded jeans, but it wasn’t Joel, even though she followed him three, four, five steps to be sure. If it wasn’t for Hugo Bézier, his belief and insistence, sometimes she felt sure that Lausanne would turn into a city of ghosts and take her with it.

Hugo’s suggestions gave her focus, and she took them all on, even though they didn’t feel anything like real life. She printed a picture of Kristina, and carried it folded in her pocket to show blue-capped railway workers, hoping for a sign of recognition. She traced Kristina’s footsteps, out of the back of the station, down the steps, across the alley, around the corner into Rue des Mirages. She walked slowly and deliberately, looking left and right, down at the ground and then up at the sky. She looped back and did it again, faster this time, running like someone who was late for a party. The last snows hadn’t settled and the streets were wet and black. She didn’t slip, there was no fall, no car came roaring from behind her, and traces of Kristina were nowhere to be found. Once she saw Lisette again, hurrying from the station’s back exit, but the woman looked right through her as she said her name, not the slightest flutter of recognition crossing her face.
Lisette!
she called again, and a passer-by glanced at her sharply, nostrils flaring with disapproval.

Hadley went to the flower shop and inhaled its tough, bright scents all over again. She spoke poor French and tried to mime a security camera, waving her arms as she did so, the sleeve of her jacket streaked with the dark stain of lilies, and was met only with blank looks. She returned to the police station where she asked for information and got nothing.
There is nothing new to report
, she was told, and she shook her head and said all the French words she had written down precisely for the purpose. Leads. Inquiry. Perpetrator. Cold, hard-edged words that she’d found in the dictionary, one finger marking the page as she scribbled them in her notebook. She went back a second time, later on the same day, and a third on the day after that. The sandy-haired policeman became too busy to see her. He said this as his radio crackled at his hip and a fellow officer stood watching, chewing on the rim of a plastic coffee cup.

Nearly five days had passed since she had first gone to the police, and most of them she’d spent in the city. Joel’s uncomfortable silence and Caroline Dubois’s inquiring eyes had kept her away from the campus. She’d attended a French language class, just for appearances’ sake, and checked out three books from the library if anyone cared to look; the kind of track-covering that Hugo approved of. Otherwise she went back, again and again, to the Hôtel
Le Nouveau Monde
;
the café and Hugo sometimes felt like her only consistencies. Every time, Hadley thought of her first night with Kristina in that very spot, soaking in late summer rain, their cocktail laughter and talk of unimaginable snow. How Kristina had taken her arm, and she’d liked that version of herself, the easy, breezy girl who tripped along by the lakeside in a strange and beautiful city. That was the thing about Kristina, her friendship somehow came with a new you, as well. Hadley had said that to her once, or something like that, and Kristina had laughed sweetly and said, ‘It’s nothing to do with me, it’s Lausanne,’ and perhaps that was partly true, for the two had always been perfectly entwined.

Hugo was always waiting for her, in his usual spot, and when all her efforts got her nowhere, he reassured her that it had still been worth it, that trying her best was all that she could do. He listened as she told him about the unforthcoming police, the perplexed but kind lady at the station’s ticket office who simply saw Kristina’s picture and smiled, saying ‘belle’, the woman in the flower shop who had laughed when she asked about
un caméra de sécurité
and said, ‘Who wants to steal flowers?’ When she floundered, he tried very hard to right her.

‘It’s all useless, Hugo, useless,’ she said to him. ‘I’m scrabbling around, trying to change things, and why? Kristina’s still gone.’

‘You don’t see the point of it?’

‘I just don’t know what to do next. Perhaps there isn’t a next. Perhaps this is it.’

‘It’s better to have run out of ideas than to have had none at all,’ he said.

‘But they’ve all been your ideas. Every one.’

‘Well, you’re still here, aren’t you? You didn’t run away. That counts for an awful lot.’

‘I would have, if you hadn’t stopped me.’

‘You underestimate yourself. You’re a force, Hadley.’

‘A force? What kind of force? I don’t feel like one.’

‘Life,’ he said, ‘you’re brim full of it. And that gives you a responsibility, a responsibility to do as much as you can with it. Why don’t the young know that? Somebody said as much to me once, and I laughed at them; I pointed to all the books I’d written, my latest fine review. Oh yes, I thought that all counted for something very grand indeed.’

‘I don’t see how that has anything to do with . . .’

‘I’m rambling, I know I am. Forgive me,
ma chérie
. But take the knocks and carry on, because that’s what life is. Real life, that is. Now, I have failures of my own to report. Not failures, exactly, but lack of progress . . .’

Caught in her story, he burnt brightly. His eyes darted, his mind whirred. He was so easy to talk to that sometimes she even thought of telling him about Joel. Then she remembered the way that he had stared at the mark on her chin, accusingly, almost. When he was a student, professors wouldn’t have gone about in leather jackets and torn jeans, kissing girls in dark cars. He would probably have said that he was right to stay away, that he was doing her a favour, in the end. Or perhaps she was doing him a disservice, maybe once his life had been full of dash, and Hugo a rakish type, with a sweep of fair hair, dark eyes and a darker mind. She wondered if there had ever been a Madame Bézier, a straw-thin Swiss woman, with a slick of insouciant lipstick, and a doll-faced dog tucked under her arm. Perhaps someone who had brought him his
petits
bowl-glasses of cognac as he wrote, stealing the cigar from between his lips before bending for a kiss. For all his consummate good manners and ready geniality, under the veneer a part of him remained that she knew she’d never know. Sometimes she caught him looking at her, and just like the time that he had talked about his puzzles, his planning and plotting, the years fell away; she saw it in his blue-black eyes and all the things he didn’t say and some of the things that he did.

‘What is it, Hadley?’ he said, on the fifth day, as they sat across from one another at their usual table. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’

Hadley didn’t think she’d said or done anything to give him such an idea.

‘There’s nothing. Nothing more, anyway. Have you got anywhere with the list?’

‘In the next day or so, I hope. But that wasn’t what you were thinking about. What’s new?’

‘Nothing’s new.’

‘No?’

Hugo was watching her, and his stare was comfortably penetrating. She found she didn’t mind his attention.

‘Nothing that’s relevant, anyway. Nothing that’s important, especially not compared to everything else.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘then I was right.’ He ran his fingers over his chin, pointedly, it seemed to Hadley, and in the exact spot where her own had been marked. It had faded to nothing, but that didn’t matter to Hugo.

‘Right about what?’ she said.

‘There’s a boy, I suppose.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ she said.

‘It ought to be,’ he said, ‘for a girl like you. You should have the world at your feet.’

Hadley looked down. ‘I don’t even want that,’ she said. ‘I just thought someone would be around this week, and they’re not. It’s my fault, I guess. I made a mistake. Actually, we both made it, but . . . I let it happen. I even wanted it to happen.’

‘I like a brain-teaser,’ said Hugo, ‘a plot to unravel, but you,
ma chérie
, are talking in riddles.’

‘I shouldn’t be talking like this at all. Not with Kristina gone. I shouldn’t be thinking about anything except her.’

‘I suppose she knew all about this boy of yours?’

‘No, she didn’t. I wish she did, but . . . there wasn’t much to tell . . . before. In a weird way, it’s because of her that anything’s happened with him at all. It was starting to feel like a good thing, and then it all went wrong.’

Hugo smiled quickly, clicking his tongue. ‘I see,’ he said, and as Hadley looked at him she felt sure suddenly that, without her saying a thing, he did see. She tried to think back to whether she had ever mentioned Joel –
my professor,
said deliberately casually, her cheeks tingeing pink. Nothing escaped Hugo.

‘I miss Kristina so much,’ she said. ‘Thinking about anything else, feeling anything else, just seems wrong.’

Hugo took a cigar from his jacket pocket and ran his fingers the length of it, a touch at once casual and reverential.

‘Missing something,’ he said. ‘I wonder, is that better than never having had it in the first place? We all know what the poets say, of course.’

Hadley met his stare. She held it.

‘You’re a writer, what do you think?’

‘
Was
a writer.’

‘Was, is . . .’

‘Do you know, I couldn’t possibly say. The more I think about it, I’m convinced that I saved most of my living for the page.’

His voice was a little rackety, then, devoid of its usual aplomb, and she wondered for the first time if Hugo was, for all his fine clothes and quick wits, a lonely sort of man.

nineteen

As she walked back to Les Ormes
a cold rain started
to
fall, intermittently at first, and then with real intent. She had neglected to bring an umbrella and her hair grew slick and seal-like. Her beret was folded and forgotten in the depths of her bag. She sneezed, and sneezed again. The back of her throat was starting to burn and it felt like the beginnings of a cold. When Hadley had finished
A Farewell to Arms
, on a drizzling day back in the English summer, the image of Frederic Henry walking through the rain-soaked streets of Lausanne had stayed with her. For all its desolation, it had a picturesque quality, and a sense of
rightness
that had appealed to her. But reality was an awful lot colder, the sad days of real life encouraging no such appreciation. She didn’t give Frederic Henry a moment’s thought as she cut up some steps and on to a side street. She had inadvertently wandered on to Rue des Mirages
again. She began to run, her feet slapping in the puddles. She ran all the way back to Les Ormes.

As she opened her door her phone was ringing. She dashed to it and grabbed the receiver, her mind flashing immediately to Joel.

‘Yes, hello?’

‘Hadley! We’ve been so worried. Your dad told me not to fret but I couldn’t help it.’

He didn’t have her number. Of course it wouldn’t be him.

‘Hadley, dear, are you all right?’

How do you drop in the news of a death? With Joel and Hugo she had blurted it right out, as if her words were magnetised, irrepressibly drawn by their respective force fields. Her parents were worriers. For all their puff-cheeked rallying, she knew they’d rather she wasn’t so far away. She had kept her postcards home warm and jolly, conjuring a world of Twenties-style pleasure seekers, tempered with honest graft in the university library. If they thought she’d flown their nest then she wanted them at least to think that her trajectory was smooth.

‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ she said. ‘I kept meaning to phone, and then something always happened.’

‘You’re busy, of course you’re busy, that’s wonderful and how it should be, you don’t want to bother with us. But a quick call now and again . . .’

‘I know . . .’

‘And your birthday, we never did hear from you after your evening out. Did you all have a lovely time? It sounds so glamorous, Hadley, a birthday in Switzerland.’

She felt her throat tightening and worried that when she spoke it’d be with a croak. She willed her mum to keep talking.

‘We’ve been reading about all the snow you’ve had. All across Europe, it said. I expect you’ve been out playing in it. Or are you too old for all that? Here, have a word with your dad. He’s snorting in my ear like an old dog, bless him. He’s been desperate to hear from you. Sammy’s at school, he’ll be cross I rang without him but I couldn’t wait a minute longer.’

There was a small ruckus on the line as her mum passed over the phone. Hadley heard her dad settling himself on the stool in the hallway. Hadley knew then that she wouldn’t be telling them anything about Kristina, not this time. Instead they talked of a goose for Christmas in place of the usual turkey, and she said that maybe, just maybe, she’d be persuaded to go with her mum to midnight mass, for once.

‘Tickle Sam from me,’ she said, ‘right under his arms where he hates it. And give him a kiss. Tell him . . . tell him I miss him.’

Hadley hung up then, leaving them excited, and counting down the remaining three weeks before the break. She didn’t want to tell them lies, but nor did she think she could manage the truth. Their sympathy, sent down the line and from miles away, would batter her heart. And when they asked her if she wanted to come home, as they inevitably would, she worried she’d fall apart, burst at the seams, and forget everything except the words
yes, please yes
.

Perhaps it was due to the soaking she had received or her ceaseless tramping about the city, but Hadley developed a cold that sent her to bed for the rest of the week. She had all the usual afflictions, a rasping throat and an unstoppably runny nose, but she was also haunted by headaches, and a listless feeling that she couldn’t shift. Jenny brought a stack of English magazines to Hadley’s door, much-thumbed, dog-eared copies that carried with them wafts of the doctor’s surgery. She never stayed long, for Hadley, with her flushed cheeks and rumpled pyjamas, looked too contagious for company. Jenny would back away, depositing her offering and smiling her dimpled smile as she made for the door.

She fell in and out of sleep, and unsettling dreams pushed up from the inside. Kristina and Joel had appeared together in her dreams before; when Joel had been no more than a silver-tongued stranger and Kristina simply held the sparkling promise of a new friend. In her illness, Hadley dreamt about them both again, and for all the intimacies of their shared reality, in her dreams they were indistinct and barely recognisable. Kristina was wispily beautiful but pale and fading, and Hadley couldn’t focus on her; it was as though every time she looked in her direction she had the sensation that she was falling into a faint. There was no solace in this glimpse of her, no otherworldly reassurance, just an emptying sense of dislocation. Joel was there, but he offered no comfort, no company; instead he turned his back and refused to meet her eye. In the dream it wasn’t clear if they’d ever kissed. She didn’t think they had, but the longing she felt as she pulled at his back, willing him to face her, was unpredictable, a baseless, rabid want. Jacques was there too but just in spirit, a ghost-voice that taunted from the sidelines. Only Hugo was clear and sharp-edged. Whenever Hadley turned he was at her shoulder, stepping back as neatly as a dancer, smiling kindly but always maintaining his distance. They moved in quick patterns, the five of them, like in an amateur magician’s game of cups where the coin never reveals itself and the truth remains unknown.

The residue of her dream lingered into the following morning. She awoke exhausted, feeling like she hadn’t slept at all, and cold with the knowledge that Kristina was gone and never coming back. For all her moonstruck glimpses, she had never felt more out of reach. Hadley tried to concentrate on real, solid things, to wash away the uncertainties of the night. Hugo would likely have the list by now, and he would be wondering where she was. And she had missed another of Joel’s lectures. She wondered if he would have turned up as usual, sauntering to the front of the class and spreading his arms in that way he had, a grin of welcome on his face. Perhaps he would have noted her absence and read too much into it, faltering in his delivery or losing his place in his notes, doubling his smile for cover. She hadn’t meant to stay away as long as she had, but he didn’t know that. Perhaps, in a very different way, he was disappearing too; slipping away from her, a little more day by day.

Just as the interminable afternoon was finally rolling towards evening there was a tap at her door. She heard a man’s voice call out
Hadley?
Because she had been thinking about him, and really, when she thought about it later, that was all it was, she felt sure, beyond any clouding doubt, that it would be Joel. Her heart leapt in her chest. She looked down at her faded pyjamas, raked her hand through her limp hair. She didn’t dare face a mirror for she knew a washed out version of herself would be staring back; eyes bleary, a feverish speckle to her cheeks.

‘I’m in bed,’ she called out, ‘I look awful. You can come in, but only if you shut your eyes.’

She heard the door open, and the squeak of a shoe. She tried to arrange herself more comfortably on her pillows. She threw a wad of balled-up tissues under the bed. He stepped around the corner and into her room.

He had his eyes closed, just as she’d asked. His long lashes were dark against his olive skin and his curly hair was pulled back into a half ponytail. He was holding a bunch of yellow tulips, his lips parted in a foolish sort of smile. There had been no sly remarks from Chase, no airy droppings of his name by Loretta.
Luca.
Their kisses in the snow-filled street, their hot tangle in the cavern bar, his fingers teasing the edges of her dress – she realised she hadn’t given him a moment’s thought; it had all been wiped out by everything that had happened since.

‘I wanted to come sooner, but Loretta said it wasn’t a good idea,’ he said. ‘And then I came anyway, and knocked, but you were never here. Then I saw Bruno in the city and he said you were ill so I knew I had to come.’

He kept his eyes closed as he spoke. Hadley stared at him, and realised he looked awkward by day. She remembered how he’d seemed so slick and self-assured before, and how she had let him kiss her, despite herself. She didn’t even know what she thought of him that night, if she’d liked him even a little bit. It was horrible, not to be the person that someone else wanted.

‘Luca, you can open your eyes,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’

He opened them and smiled at her. ‘Hello Hadley,’ he said. ‘Things have been difficult up here for you all, haven’t they? I should have come before. I’m sorry. I suppose I didn’t know if you wanted to see me. You look beautiful, by the way.
Bella
.’

‘You’re a good liar,’ she said. ‘I mean, about looking okay, not the rest of it. But thanks. Thanks for, well, both things.’

‘Is it all right that I’m here?’

‘Of course,’ said Hadley. ‘I mean, I don’t recommend you stay long. I’m probably still contagious, you’ll catch something, for sure. If you go down the hall I’m sure Bruno’s about. He’s always ready for company.’

‘I don’t want to see Bruno.’

‘Oh, okay.’ Hadley shifted on her pillows and folded her arms across her chest. ‘But perhaps we should go into the kitchen. I could make us some tea. Maybe Jenny’s around, she always has a good stash of biscuits.’

‘I’m not interested in Jenny and her biscuits.’

‘You would if you knew what she had. She gets them sent from England, pink wafers and marshmallow things and all sorts.’ She realised she was gabbling and slowed down. ‘Actually I think it’d do me good to stretch my legs; I haven’t left this room in days. Shall we go and see if anyone’s about?’

‘I came to see you, Hadley. You and only you. Ever since your birthday I’ve been thinking about you.’

‘Oh.’

‘Hadley, I . . .’

She interrupted him. ‘It was a weird night, Luca. Nothing ran properly. Kristina should have been there and she wasn’t. I had too much to drink, and I really wasn’t myself. I’m still not. Nothing felt right then, and nothing feels right now. I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you want to hear.’

‘You’re upset about the accident, Loretta and Bruno told me. Of course, everyone is. And I know you probably can’t separate the two events in your head, you know, the night that we were having, Hadley, and then what happened to Kristina. That’s okay, I understand that. But I really like you,
bella
. I’d like to make you happy.’

Hadley shook her head, and pulled the sheet closer to her chin. She wanted him to leave, and take his bouquet with him. Her head soared to an ache.

‘You’re really kind, Luca, you are, but I feel like I gave you the wrong idea. Before,
definitely
before, and now too. To be honest, when you knocked on the door I only said come in because I thought you were someone else,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You didn’t mind who I was on your birthday,’ he said. ‘You liked me then.’

‘We were all drunk, Luca, you know we were.’

‘Not that drunk. And I don’t think you can kiss someone and then just forget about it.’

‘Well, I’ve had a lot on my mind since then,’ she said. She felt tired suddenly. She’d given him a chance to exit gracefully and he hadn’t taken it. ‘And anyway,’ she said, quietly but distinctly, ‘there’s someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘Nothing’s really happened with them but I want it to. That’s all that matters. I want it with someone else, Luca. I’m sorry.’

He laid the bouquet down on Hadley’s bedside table, beside her empty bottles of water and discarded magazines and box of spilling tissues.

‘I don’t care about anyone else,’ he said. ‘A kiss is always the start of something.’

‘Not always. Sometimes it’s the end.’

He glared down at her, his cheeks reddening. ‘I don’t give up that easily,’ he said.

He banged the door behind him on his way out. Hadley rolled over on to her side and faced the wall. She ran her finger over the whitewashed concrete. They couldn’t both be right, Luca and her, but they had to be, otherwise it wouldn’t work. None of it would work. In the end it was Luca’s words that she held on to, as she drifted into an early night’s sleep.
A kiss is always the start of something.
A convenient fragment that threaded its way through her dreams. Breaking and coming together again, like the flimsiest of promises.