A Heart Bent Out of Shape (29 page)

He paused for breath. Hadley was open-mouthed, her hands clasped. ‘I shouldn’t even have been there. I was a fool to have been there. You want to know why I was? You’d told me you were going to some restaurant, Le Pin, some place near the station. And I was at home, in my apartment, and I suddenly thought, to hell with it, to hell with everything, I’m going to go and see her. I’m going to go and wish Hadley Dunn happy birthday, buy her a drink, and just see, just see what happened when I did those things. Because I liked you, Hadley, because I wanted to take a chance on it, run a risk, and see what happened. So I got in my car and I drove, because the weather was so bad, and the blizzard was so rough. I was looking for a spot to park, and then I saw you. You were with that kid from the mountains, the Italian, and you were kissing him. On the pavement, right there in front of me, in front of everyone, barely coming up for air. And I realised then what a fool I’d been to think that it could have gone any other way. So I carried on past, I drove around the block a couple of times, and maybe I was angry, maybe I was distracted, maybe I was thinking what does this kid have, that made her choose him? and maybe I wasn’t looking where I was going on Rue des Mirages.’

She listened in disbelief, her feet rooted to the ground, everything frozen, but as he reached for her hand she leapt away from him.

‘It was
you
?’

‘It was me.’

‘It can’t have been you. It wasn’t you.’

‘Hadley . . .’

‘You hit her, and then you ran?
You?
’

‘Hadley, I was frightened. I didn’t know what to do. I’d had two glasses of wine, barely two glasses, but it might have looked like more. They might have thought that had something to do with it and it didn’t. Suddenly I was driving away and I didn’t stop.’

‘And you forgave yourself?’ she said, her voice looping with incredulity.

‘Never.’

‘But you lived with yourself,’ she insisted, ‘you did, you know you did.’

‘Barely, Hadley.’

‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘If you hadn’t come to me that day I would have gone to the police. You have to believe that.’

‘You’re lying. Everything’s a lie. You’re a lie.’

‘I was going mad with the weight of it, and it got mixed up with everything else, old grief, old wrongs, Winston and that godforsaken truck. And then you came to the door, and changed everything.
Almost
everything. Hadley, you gave yourself to me. All your despair and need and want, you placed it in my hands with so much trust. And I suddenly thought that here was someone I could help. What good would it have done, if I’d turned myself in then? What use? I could be helpful to you. I could comfort you. I could right a wrong. It felt like the best thing I could do, to make you happy. That was all I tried to be, the person who could make you happy. Then I failed at that too.’

She stepped towards him, and shoved him hard in the chest. They grappled for a moment. His feet were unsteady, the hill was steep and he stumbled, falling back on to the pavement. He went down heavily and he stayed down, as she screamed at him.

‘You’re making this somehow about me? And my need? Whatever I needed it wasn’t this!’

‘Hadley . . .’

‘No! Kristina was . . . so much alive. And she . . . she fell in love when she wasn’t supposed to, and everything she told me about Jacques was true, even though I’d begun to think it wasn’t, even though I’d begun to doubt her every word. And now she’s gone, Joel. She’s
gone
. Her parents came. They drove up this exact street. They stood in Les Ormes and cried. Her mum kissed me on the cheek and her lips were so cold. And I had nothing to say to her. Nothing that would make any difference. And all of it was because of you . . . it was you, all you.’

She gasped and stopped, choked by sobs.

People didn’t ordinarily yell in the streets of Lausanne. They didn’t tussle and brawl on pavements. Respectability was everywhere, or the veneer of it at least. A police car, cruising the quiet mid-week streets, where civilised Swiss were tucked up in bed, rolled down the road towards them. There were no quick-switching lights, no bleating sirens or spinning tyres. There had been no panicked telephone call, no rat-a-tat voice coming over the radio. It was simply a quirk of timing, just as when Joel had turned into Rue des Mirages in a gathering snowstorm, his windscreen blurred and whipped. Just as he had turned his head in a waterside bar and seen a girl he knew he couldn’t forget. It was the work of moments. The police car began to slow down and to the officers inside they must have appeared as the very picture of strife; the kind of image that hangs in a gallery in old Lausanne, a masterful rendering in fine strokes of oil. The man on the street floor, looking as if something had caught him and was pulling him to hell, the girl trying to step away from him, her hands thrown up to heaven.

Hadley saw the car first. She turned from Joel, and for a second she stood quite still. Then she stepped into the middle of the road, her hand raised. One, two, three paces, and she was there. It was a quiet night, and there were no other cars. It came on towards her and she let it. She braced herself, curled her toes inside her shoes, stood straight and kept her gaze level. There was no great drama, no screeching of brakes and screaming of tyres. Instead the Swiss police pulled over tidily and Hadley was left in the middle of the road. The officers slid from their seats. Joel clambered to his feet.

The four of them stood on the hill outside Les Ormes looking at one another. For a second she entertained the dark fantasy that they could carry on pretending, after all. Tell the officers that she hadn’t meant to step into their path, that it was all a mistake. And they’d go to Locarno just as Joel had said they would, see the Italian blue lake and lick ice-cream from each other’s cones, pose for photographs, their laughter turning to kisses. But Joel had his wrists out, upturned, as though he had seen the films and was following the script. He addressed the officers in French, and she understood the words for
accident
, and
girl
, and
dead
. It was dark on the street but she could see his face as clearly as if it was lit by a camera flash. His eyes were blue-black. His mouth a ragged hole. His cheek was battered still, and one of his cuts had opened. His lick of hair had fallen and plastered his forehead. She had never seen him looking as devastated as that. Except, perhaps, that day in his office, when she’d come with news of Kristina, when she had asked him for his help. Hadley moved to him and caught his hands. She wrapped her fingers around his wrists, and she squeezed with all that she had.

‘It’s time,’ was all he said.

Before she knew what she was doing, she tried to kiss him. She leant forward, pushing her lips towards his, but he turned his head away. She caught the bristle of his cheek, the lobe of his ear, the salt-hot part of his neck behind his collar. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder that wasn’t Joel’s. It couldn’t have been, for there was nothing transmitted in the touch. She let herself be blankly, coldly, steered away.

‘We’ll need to talk to you too,
mademoiselle
, just a routine statement,’ one of the officers said, and his voice seemed to come from a long way away. Hadley nodded dumbly. She confirmed her name and address. She reeled off the digits of her phone number, stumbling once, starting again. ‘Tomorrow will be fine,’ he said, and Hadley stared at him as if he’d slipped into a strange language, for the idea of a tomorrow was too abstract, too impossible to conceive of ever happening.

Just as Joel got into the blue-striped car he reached into his pocket. He held a small, battered book in his hands.

‘Please take this, Hadley,’ he said. ‘It’s all true.’

‘I don’t want it,’ she said. Then, ‘What is it?’

‘The first time I saw you I wrote about it. The second time I saw you I wrote about it. And the third. I carried on writing. You, and only you. I want you to know what I saw in you from the beginning. What I kept on seeing in you. Even after what happened,’ he stumbled then collected himself, ‘I kept writing about you. I want you to believe that you existed for me before, and that you’ll never stop existing for me after.’

‘I can’t read it,’ she said.

‘Hadley, I know how wrong this is, but whenever you looked at me, I thought that you could see all the way inside. Without either of us ever saying anything, it was like an absolution.’

‘You really thought that?’

‘In the beginning. Not in the end.’

He looked at her and it felt like a last look, as though he was seeking to remember her before she had quite gone.

‘If you want one true sentence,’ he said, ‘it’s in here.’

Her fingers closed loosely around the book’s cover and its jagged spiral binding. Gradually her hand tightened its hold. By the time the car drove away, the rear windows reflecting nothing but the night, she was gripping it as though she would never let it go. That was how Helena found her. Standing on the pavement, clutching Joel’s words, staring down the hill towards a city that seemed, to all appearances, to carry on regardless.

thirty-four

Spring came overnight to Lausanne, just
as Hugo Bézier
said it would. Early March was milder than usual, and full of sunshine. By April, trees with puffed heads of pink and white blossom lined the streets and parks. At Les Ormes the residents were embracing the turning of the seasons. Balcony doors were propped open, blankets were spread on top of the flat roofs, and a string of sausages was barbecued over hot coals. Hemingway might have written about a false spring, but this one seemed to feel true.

Hugo had insisted that they continue with their old habits, so Hadley still drank coffee and cognac with him at the Hôtel Le Nouveau Monde
,
except he followed his doctor’s orders and took water with sliced lemon instead. As he watched Hadley drink a cognac some part of him seemed to revel in it too. Perhaps he liked the flush it gave her cheeks, and maybe he remembered the taste, how the sweet burn in the throat felt like a long forgotten kiss. Sometimes they took tea at his vast apartment, the one that was just three streets back from the hotel, where from his balcony the fluttering flags and the voluptuous curve of the roof were just visible. A maid called Brigitte brought their tray out to the terrace, her silver hair parted with a girlish clip, and her every movement as light as a dancer’s. Each morning now before breakfast, Hugo slowly walked the gardens of the Musée Olympique. The air was as crisp as it always was at that time of year, but he seemed to take more of it in these days. With every breath, he told Hadley, he could taste the bite of the snow-capped mountains, its crystal edge.

In the end he’d outstayed his welcome at the Résidence Le Printemps,
the clack-clack of his typewriter driving the fellow guests, and particularly the pistachio-coated orderlies, quite mad. For Hugo was becoming Henri again. Word by word, line by line, page by page, he was writing. And Hadley was reading, made easier because for the first time in his life Hugo was writing not in French but in English, and against all traditions it was proving itself the language of love. It was difficult for other reasons, though, the main one being the fact that she knew the characters inside out. Most of them. One, she thought perhaps she didn’t know at all. Maybe that was because she still hadn’t opened Joel’s notebook. Instead she had given it to Hugo and he had read it, once, twice, three times over. Then he had begun to write. It had started as an exercise, to see if he still had it in him, just as one might walk a little further than usual, or climb a flight of stairs. Hadley caught him one day. She saw him sitting straight as a gun at a table by the window, his hands flying over the keys of the typewriter, staccato shots ringing out.

‘You’re writing,’ she said.

‘Is that all right?’ he asked.

And she nodded. She sank into the chair opposite and watched him, her chin resting in the flat of her hand. He got to the end of the page and handed it to her.

‘A terrible liberty,’ he said. ‘I’d change everything, of course, all the details that don’t matter. But all the things that do . . . I’d write them just as they happened. If you’ll let me.’

‘Hadley,’ she said slowly. She tried it for the first time and found herself pleased with the name. ‘
Hadley
.’ She read on.

‘Or, I’ll abandon it. Just say the word and it’s gone. I only know that I want to write again.
You
make me want to write again. You always did. And then you gave me your professor’s notebook. It wasn’t written for me, it wasn’t written for anyone else except you, and yet,
ma chérie
, you refused to read it. A man pours out his heart, his broken, weak-willed heart, but his heart nonetheless, and you ignore it. And I see what that does to you, the strength that takes, and I know that I want to write it. I want to write all of it. Not the crime, not the mystery, but you, the green girl, who desired nothing more than to come to Lausanne and fall in love.’

‘Fall in love? Oh, but I did, Hugo. Don’t you see? In all the ways you could possibly think of.’

A slip of a smile crossed his face.

‘Hadley, for most of my life, I’ve done a very good impression of someone who is living. Only now, at the final stretch, have I discovered my own deception. I never had a Kristina, you see. I never had a Joel.’

‘But you do have me,’ she said.

He raised his glass of lemon water to her. She lifted her cognac in reply.

‘It’s all for you, you know, the writing,’ he said.

‘That’s not true. I can see just by looking at you that that’s not true.’

‘No,’ he said, setting down his glass. He ran his fingers over his typewriter keys in light caress. His eyes gleamed like treacle. ‘No, I suppose it isn’t, not entirely.’

There never were any more words from Joel. No envelope bearing a Swiss prison stamp. She’d visited him just once, at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning. Outside, thick January snow was falling on everything, rendering it perfect; a soft, unquestioning blanket. Inside, Hadley had held his eye and it was Joel who had looked away first. He was crumpled and drawn and had refused his own bail. He wanted everything that was coming to him, and more, he had told her.

‘I came to say goodbye.’

‘You’re not leaving Lausanne?’ he said. ‘Because of me?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not leaving. Not yet anyway, not until I have to.’

‘I didn’t think you’d come. I never expected you to.’

‘I nearly didn’t.’

She had practised what she wanted to say to him. She had tried to say it in front of the mirror in her room, with her pale, angry face staring back at her. Too often she’d been lost in tears, her words cracking and breaking, her reflection streaming and blurred. Faced with him again, she knew she couldn’t, and shouldn’t, remember it all.

‘Joel, I want you to know that for a little while you were the best thing I knew. And then you were the very worst. I guess somehow that should equal things out, but I don’t know if it does. Does it make you disappear? Should it?’

Her voice was softer than in any of her rehearsals, its hard edge lost.

‘I’ll be as good as gone,’ he said. ‘I deserve to be.’

‘No, you won’t,’ she said.

‘Hadley . . .’

‘I have to go now. I’m going to say goodbye.’

‘Did you read the things I wrote? Is that why you came?’

‘No. I gave it to Hugo.’

‘To Hugo?’

‘He needs it more than I do. I’ll read it one day, but only when I’m hard as a stone, when all this feels like someone else’s story. That’s when I’ll read it.’

Looking at him, she thought suddenly of her first night in Lausanne. Before she knew who he was, before she’d met Kristina. A voice from the dark; friendly, inquiring, and rumbling with just-kept laughter.
Take it easy
, he’d said, and all the way home she’d hugged the phrase to her, like a secret shared.

‘Before we went to Geneva that time,’ she said, standing up, ‘you gave me two conditions. Now it’s my turn. I want you to make me a promise. Two promises.’

‘Hadley, say it. Anything.’

‘The first. Please don’t try and contact me. Ever.’

‘I wrecked everything, Hadley. I’d never hope for anything from you, I . . .’

‘And the second,’ she said, her voice breaking but holding, just about holding, ‘the second is that one day, when I’m older, when I’ve lived a lot more, and loved a lot more, and my hair is as grey as Hugo Bézier’s, I want to hear about you again. I want to hear something good about Joel Wilson. I want to know that this wasn’t the end of your life too.’

Behind the glass he stood up and for the briefest moment they were mirrored. He tried to speak and failed. She walked from the room, her arms stiff by her sides.

Later, she thought about him. She couldn’t not, she always would. Joel lying on a hard bunk, staring at a blank ceiling, his hands knotted and resting on his chest. Was it justice? Nothing felt right. But then the picture faded and in its place stood Kristina. Smiling her cat-smile, laughing with a flash of pink tongue. Such stories she spun, and every one was true.

At L’Institut Vaudois Joel’s classes were taken over by an Englishman named Paul Draper, who also taught Canadian Literature that same semester. He had a spiky beard like a medieval merchant and wore battered brogues. He had a problem saying his Rs and he talked quickly, his words falling over one another. In the end, the note-taking students didn’t try to keep up. They left the lecture hall talking about coffee and cigarettes or that night’s plans, not the things they had learnt as once they used to. Nor what Hemingway had meant when he said that the world would break you, just as it breaks everyone, but sometimes you ended up stronger for it. Paul Draper didn’t make them think like that.

As to Jacques, Hadley never heard from him again. He’d come and gone, a ghost in shined shoes, a Genevan city slicker with a bandaged marriage and a private grief. Everything Kristina had said about him was true. And everything she hadn’t was true also. Sometimes she thought of Kristina’s parents, north-east of Lausanne, far away in Copenhagen. Hadley wanted to send a card but she wasn’t sure what she would have said. Perhaps that the days were warmer, that winter was at last beginning to feel like it was behind them. But it wasn’t, was it? Not for them. Then one day Hadley received a parcel with a Danish postmark. The note inside simply said,
She meant this for you, we found it in her things
. There was a book, written in French, and it was called
L’Adieu aux armes
.
Slipped inside the cover was a card without an envelope.
Happy Birthday, dear Hadley
, Kristina had written, messily, as though on the fast-moving train from Geneva to Lausanne,
Sorry I’ve been a pain. I’ll try not to be. You said this was your favourite book, but I bet you haven’t read it in French. Here’s to all the fun we’re going to have, tonight, and for all our time here. Love from me xx

Hadley looked again at the cover of the book, her eyes blurring. It showed a man and woman embracing, and there was something ineffably sad in their posture; it felt like goodbye.

Chase and Jenny, Bruno and Loretta, sometimes with Luca too, continued to thread their way through the Lausanne year. Helena, the not-so-new girl, made a wide and easy gaggle of friends. She drew them from her French language classes, and the shelter where she served hot meals to the homeless on a Saturday and where she was once serenaded on a three-stringed guitar by an old railway worker and his French love song. As Helena laughed and clapped, a woman with stringy plaits caught her eye for a moment and grinned, rolled her eyes, then ambled outside for a cigarette. Helena’s good humour proved infectious, wherever she was, whomever she was with, which was often, but not always, Hadley.

Hadley had planted a small garden on the slope below Les Ormes,
and now that it was spring it was blooming. Sunshine-faced daisies and potted palm trees, head-turning hydrangeas, and elegant lilies. She’d started off on her own, kneeling on the damp grass and inexpertly stabbing the soil with a trowel that still bore its price tag. Luca was lounging on Loretta’s balcony, and saw her. He called out an offer of assistance, and despite Hadley’s resistance he joined her. Everyone came down in the end. Jenny and Chase, Bruno and Loretta, Helena. Other students who were passing, whose names they didn’t yet know but soon would, they all came and helped turn the soil, clear patches of nettles, shuttle pans of water from the kitchens. Hadley didn’t make a plaque, there was no official naming ceremony, but everyone knew it was a garden for Kristina. She saved the best until last, a row of leggy sunflowers that turned their heads to look out over the city. Hadley stood beside one, knowing that by summer it would have outgrown her. She wiped her hands on her jeans. Chase handed her a bottle of beer.

Hadley’s mum and dad and little brother Sam took a leap of their own. They visited for a week in the full blushes of a Swiss spring, as the flowers along the lakeside popped pink, and the steam ships to Montreux passed on the hour. They ate buttered croissants and drank coffee, they peered out over the carpeted city from the top of the cathedral, and bought a hard slab of cheese from the market on the square. They took a bus to the L’Institut Vaudois and Hadley showed them the view from the library, the silver band of lake and sky full of mountains. Her mum said, ‘How you manage to concentrate on your studies, I’ll never know.’ They passed Caroline Dubois as they walked on campus, exchanged a
bonjour
and a smile, and her dad said, ‘They’re a charming sort, the professors here. Nothing like I imagined.’ And Hadley held her breath. She thought of Joel Wilson, spinning on his heel at the front of the class, blasting passion, and how she had felt, for the first time, as though the top of her head had come clean off, and she’d dissolved, tiny stars fizzing in the ether. He took so much away, but he did give her that. That feeling that didn’t belong anywhere on earth, where there were fears and blizzards and dark nights and consequences and loathing and shame and pretending that things were all right when they weren’t, not even close.

Hugo wrote all through the spring and Hadley let him. She saw how it charged him, and so the story changed hands. It became his, not hers, to do with whatever he wanted; to stay tucked forever in a drawer, or passed into the light of day. When she read it, it was almost as though it had all happened to someone else. Everything that mattered was in there but rendered differently, painted in a shifted palette. Except the writing in Joel’s notebook; he refused to change a word of that. So Joel’s words became the notable omission. Hadley let Hugo take just one thing from it, and that was because it was Hemingway who said it first, even though he was talking about Paris: ‘There is never any end to Lausanne.’ Joel had said it in his very first lecture, appropriating his hero’s words, and addressing the room of green-tipped students. Yet how prophetic a statement it had been. In the notebook Joel had written that his days were marked forever, that there was a stain on his soul that no amount of rubbing could shift. That there would never be a morning when he would wake up and think about anything other than what he had done, and what he had not. He could never leave Lausanne, he wrote; all he wished for Hadley was that she could, and forget everything that had been.
Except perhaps one thing. One true thing
. And as Hadley finally found the heart to read Joel’s words she knew that he was right, although she’d never said it back to him. In amongst all the sad things, love in the past tense was surely one of them.