A Heart Bent Out of Shape (5 page)

‘We’re going swimming,’ she said, with glee. ‘And you’re coming!’

‘Swimming? Swimming where?’

‘In the lake! It was Philippe’s idea. Hadley, he’s crazy. You’ll love him.’

‘Really?’ said Hadley, doubting both assertions. ‘But we only just got here. I was about to have a drink . . .’

She turned back to Hugo, but he was already getting to his feet. A fedora was on his head and he shrugged a camel-coloured woollen coat over his shoulders.

‘It’s time for my beauty sleep,’ he said.

‘What, no more cognac?’ said Hadley.

He picked up his glass, of which there was half a centimetre remaining. He offered it to her.

‘Dutch courage,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that what you English would say? The water’s a little cold at this time of night, if I remember.’

Hadley tossed the drink back, her throat burning sweetly. Hugo Bézier was walking away before she could say thank you, or goodnight, or anything else at all.

They didn’t swim. It was one of those wild ideas, tossed with great bravado, which then fell with a whimper when the moment actually came. By the time they got to the water the skies had broken and rain fell in giant drops. The three men made a great show of seeking shelter, they suggested more drinks, another bar, but the light had gone from the night. Hadley said she was happy to go home, Kristina agreed, and the others sulked back to their hotel. Hadley and Kristina strolled together in the rain, their bare legs slick, their hair hanging in tendrils.

‘It still feels like summer here,’ said Hadley. ‘Even the rain’s warm.’

‘You wait until the snow comes,’ said Kristina. ‘Enjoy this while it lasts. Winter will be amazing, though. I’ll teach you to ski.’

‘Really? Would you?’

‘Of course,’ she shrugged, ‘it’s easy, and you’ll love it. Hey, who was that old man? That’s not your type, is it?’

‘What? No!’

‘A sugar daddy?’

‘He was interesting. I liked him.’

‘Just very, very old.’

They ducked under a bus stop and squeezed the rain from their hair. Hadley shivered, and Kristina threw an arm around her.

‘I shouldn’t even have been talking to those guys,’ she said, with a slightly drunken hiccup. ‘Jacques would hate it.’

‘Who’s Jacques?’ said Hadley.

The bus came then, splashing through puddles and wheezing to a stop. They boarded, staggering into a seat as it quickly moved away again, narrowly avoiding treading on a miniature poodle that belonged to a sour-faced lady.

‘Is it only midnight?’ said Kristina. ‘It feels so much later.’

‘Is Jacques your boyfriend?’

‘Oh, Jacques, Jacques . . . I can’t even begin, Hadley. It’s too long a story for a nice night like this.’

She leant her head on Hadley’s shoulder, her spun-gold hair falling across her friend’s damp cardigan, and closed her eyes. After a moment they flicked open again.

‘What about your love life? Is it horrifically complicated?’

‘I don’t actually have one,’ said Hadley.

‘You don’t? But you’re beautiful.’

‘I’m really not.’

‘Well, you’re lucky.’

With that she closed her eyes again and fell sweetly to sleep.

four

Their first days in Lausanne passed in a blur of exploration. The students of Les Ormes were not-quite visitors and not quite natives, so they circled the sights of the city and took road trips, they hunted out side-street bars and ate off
prix-fixe
menus in budget restaurants. Until the semester started they were at liberty, so Hadley, Kristina, Bruno, Chase and Jenny spent their time largely with each other. They had been thrown together, and somehow they stuck. Jenny, Bruno and Chase were a tightly knitted trio, with Hadley and Kristina willingly on the peripheries.

Hadley had always had friends, loose formations shaped mostly by circumstance; girls she had trooped about with, sharing perfume and spilling laughter, but there had never been anyone quite like Kristina. Perhaps it was the combination, Kristina and Lausanne, Lausanne and Kristina, really, the two were inextricable, but there was something golden about her. When a new idea seized Kristina, her whole being appeared to glow. She believed in ‘
il faut profiter
’ just as much as Hadley did. If they went for afternoon coffee it would turn easily to sticky-rimmed cocktails and a dawn homecoming. A black-and-white film at the arts cinema, all stolen glances and brooding looks, would be followed with a garish romantic comedy and belly-stitching laughter. Even cooking a simple supper at Les Ormes felt like an adventure; they giggled as they wept over the chopping of onions, shared a spoon to taste their creations, swilled cheap wine as they leant against the kitchen counter. As much as they spent their time together, Kristina didn’t mention Jacques again. For all her openness, the way she linked arms with Hadley, offered her forkfuls of food from her plate, answered the door in the scantiest slip of a towel, it seemed that on this one subject, she didn’t want to be pressed. So Hadley left it alone. Sometimes, they would just sit on their balcony railings in one or the other’s room, legs dangling as they looked out over the black-night city. Kristina would light a cigarette and hold it delicately between her finger and thumb, a precise and pretty smoker.

‘Don’t you feel like you could just jump?’ Hadley said one night.

‘I’m actually a little afraid of heights,’ Kristina said, shyly almost, as though she was sharing a secret.

‘Really? You don’t seem like you’d be afraid of anything. Kristina, look at it, all the buildings lit up, the lights at the edge of the lake, the mountains behind, going on forever and ever. I just want to dive in.’

‘You’re the one who doesn’t seem afraid of anything.’

‘Me? I don’t think so. I’m afraid of everything. I was nervous about coming here.’

‘Why?’

‘It felt like a risk. I’m not usually the risk-taking type.’

‘There’s nothing risky about being in Lausanne, Hadley. It’s just another city, another country.’

‘You would say that, you’re . . . jet-set.’

‘Jet-set?’ She snorted with laughter. ‘I don’t think so. Anyway, we’re both here, so that makes us the same. And we do dive in, every day we do.’

‘Of course we do. The city’s ours.’ Hadley waved her hand and her bracelet, a linked chain of silver stars, slipped from her wrist. She let out a cry and Kristina reached to grab her, thinking it was Hadley who was falling. The bracelet had plummeted out of sight into the canopy of elm trees. They clung to one another, laughing.

‘I loved that bracelet!’ wailed Hadley.

‘Oh no, was it precious?’

‘It was to me.’

‘Did a boy give it to you?’

‘No, my mum.’

‘Oh God, it wasn’t an heirloom?’

‘Not exactly. It was two pounds, from a car boot sale. Nobody’s heirloom.’

‘You want to go and look for it?’

‘We’ll never find it. It’d be impossible.’

‘I don’t mean in the dark, but in the morning.’

‘It’s too steep, we’d practically need crampons and ropes. No, it’s gone. It’s okay, Kristina, it’s gone.’

‘We’ll get you a new one,’ said Kristina. ‘It was pretty. I noticed it the first day we met. It was made out of little silver stars, wasn’t it?’

‘They were all different sizes, and it looked kind of imperfect. That’s what I liked about it.’

‘We should go to one of those
ateliers
by the cathedral. You could draw it and I bet someone would be able to recreate it for you.’

‘I think it’d cost more than two pounds,’ said Hadley, ‘and it wouldn’t be the same anyway. No, it’s lost.
Au revoir
, my
petit
bracelet.’

With a last wistful look below, Hadley climbed down from the railing. She held out her hand to Kristina who took it and jumped down beside her, landing as lightly as a dancer.

When Hadley knocked for Kristina the next morning she wasn’t there. She breakfasted alone, for it was still too early for the others to rise. They had been in Lausanne for over a week now and she was beginning to understand their rhythms; she and Kristina were the only ones who chose to get up before midday unless they had to. Hadley made coffee and sat cross-legged in a chair, watching the light on the water. It was especially silvery that morning, and mist trailed its edges. She was mesmerised and still waking. She didn’t hear the door open and jumped as she felt a hand on her shoulder.

‘God, you scared me.’ Hadley took in Kristina’s heavy boots and jogging top, the blush of her cheeks, and light sheen of perspiration on her brow. ‘You look . . . odd. Have you been out already?’

‘Since dawn, practically. I’ve been climbing. And scrambling. Little bit of sliding. I nearly gave up and then there it was, glinting at me.’

Hadley’s mouth dropped open. ‘You didn’t . . .’ she began.

Kristina opened her palm, and there it lay; a tiny heap of tangled silver stars.

The day before the semester started, Bruno proposed an excursion. It was dry and bright, and from the balconies at Les Ormes you could see all the way into the mountains. The waters of Lac Léman invited voyage and adventure. Bruno was the only one among them who had a car, and he suggested that they all drive into the hills. He took the wheel, with Chase beside him, and Hadley, Kristina and Jenny packed into the back seat. They set off along the lake road, cutting through vineyards and shoreline villages. They saw houses that seemed to climb on top of one another with haphazard arrangements of rooftop and gable, pushing ever closer to the deep water’s edge. Chase popped a CD of hard rock into the player and Bruno took the corners faster than ever. Hadley wound down the window and let the whipping air slap her cheeks, until Jenny complained that her ears hurt and Kristina’s bare arms were dotted with goose pimples. She closed it reluctantly.

Bruno drove them to an out of season ski town, where they strolled the leaf-blown streets and walked beneath the robotic structures of shutdown chair lifts. Jackets and scarves, unnecessary in the lowlands, were hurriedly pulled on. Soon, they all scattered, lured in different directions. Bruno hiked the steep stretch to a turreted hotel that clung to the edges of the high slopes. Jenny went to a gift shop, where she shook row after row of snow globes and chose a stuffed bear in Lederhosen as a gift for a niece. Chase sat on a bench in the chalet-lined main street, sketching in the notebook he carried, looking distinctly urban in his navy parka. He curved an arm around his picture as Hadley passed. Kristina found a clothing boutique, and twined real furs about her shoulders, turning in a mirror to admire herself as a white-haired assistant stooped and smiled. Hadley watched her for a while then wandered off on her own too.

She bought a postcard with bent edges, a replica vintage picture. It showed a woman in a sporty pose, leaning on her skis. She wore a knitted sweater and had a red scarf tied jauntily at her neck. Her face was turned to the sun, and an unending blue sky fell behind her. Hadley wrote her card at a table in a bakery, as a spinach tart wilted beside her and her hot chocolate formed a slippery skin.
Without the snow, it feels like we’re here when we shouldn’t be
, she wrote.
It feels like a privilege and a trespass
.
She didn’t know whom she was writing it for, not her parents, certainly. She tucked it into the pages of a book in her bag. She bought another card on her way out, showing a marmot, a mountain creature somewhere between a squirrel and a guinea pig, with jagged front teeth and a goofy grin. That one would be for them, she decided; her brother Sam would love it. She imagined it propped on their mantelpiece at home, beside the one she’d sent of Lac Léman. ‘Our daughter’s spending the year abroad,’ they’d tell their visitors, with a puff of pride and only the smallest creak of sadness. Sam would stand on tiptoes to pull faces at the marmot.

A privilege and a trespass
. Hadley turned over the words that had come to mind. She wondered if they were meant for more than this ski town, with its shuttered hotels and padlocked restaurants, suspended in the no-man’s land of autumn. What if it was the whole year abroad? She liked the feeling of having chosen to be somewhere, rather than it having chosen you, but Lausanne wasn’t quite real to her yet. She felt like a child who had slipped through the gate of a secret garden; the grass underfoot was soft, she could hear all the birds singing, but she couldn’t help looking over her shoulder, wondering if, at any moment, she’d be spotted; an interloper in paradise. Kristina seemed to have no such qualms. She tripped about with a happy sense of entitlement. She’d told Hadley that she had spent the summer on the French Riviera, from which Lausanne was a mere train ride away; one of those fast French trains you read about in the papers, that leant close to the rushing ground, champagne corks popping in the restaurant car. Perhaps to Kristina, Lausanne was just another beauty spot in an already scenic life, between the painted Danish houses and palm-shaded terraces of St Tropez. Hadley liked the idea that whatever happened that year, Lausanne would remain hers. She would always be able to talk about ‘her year in Switzerland’, and she’d feel like someone different then. Would her skin be sun-blushed golden? Her pose nonchalant and cultured? The seasoned Francophile, with a hatful of traveller’s tales, and thanks to Kristina and her promise, a skier’s swagger. Or would she be the same as she always was, just possessed of new memory; a perfectly contained world that she could take out and shake like a snow globe whenever she wanted? There would be something different. She already knew that much.

Later, they all regrouped in an inn on the fringes of the town, and drank pale beer out of tall stem glasses. The interior was dark and smelt of age-old wood, and stag heads were mounted on the walls. The barman spoke Swiss-German, in a lilting dialect, and wore a felt hat tipped low over his eyes. They settled at a table by the window and Hadley couldn’t stop staring. The view extended down the valley: mist strung the tops of the evergreens and a torrent of river was just visible.

‘Does anyone else feel as though they shouldn’t be here?’ she said, turning back to the others. ‘It’s like we’re skipping class.’

‘The semester doesn’t start until tomorrow, Hadley,’ said Kristina.

‘I know that, I mean, just being here, so far away from everything. It’s like another world. Not just this place, but Switzerland. The fact that we’re here at all.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Jenny. ‘We’re miles from anywhere. Dave might as well not exist. I hate it.’

‘You hate it?’ Hadley was open-mouthed.

‘I don’t mean I hate it
here
. I just hate the fact of it. He’s in England, I’m here, it’s pointless.’

Chase shrugged. ‘You can always leave a place if you want. Or break up with your boyfriend. That, of course, is the other option.’

‘I’m not saying that . . .’ Jenny began in reply.

‘Sounds to me like love’s the problem here,’ said Bruno, holding up his glass. ‘So, here’s to not being in love! Here’s to freedom!’ He waggled his glass for a toast but the others were slow to oblige. ‘Chase? Come on!’

‘Cheers,’ Chase said, chinking glasses. ‘To new beginnings.’

Jenny smiled at him and gulped down her beer. Hadley glanced across at Kristina, but she was fiddling with her nails and didn’t appear to be listening.

On the way back to the car Kristina caught Hadley’s elbow.

‘What do you think Bruno meant when he said love’s the problem?’

‘I’m not sure he meant much at all,’ said Hadley. ‘Jenny’s just missing her boyfriend, that’s all. Or maybe she’s not, and that’s part of it too.’

They kicked through the crumpled brown leaves together, walking behind the rest of the group. The air had turned and had a chill in it now.

‘But they’re right,’ Kristina said. ‘It’s a trap. A trap as much as a release.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Hadley asked. Before she could ask,
Is it Jacques?
Kristina had quickened her pace and fallen in to step with the others. Hadley was left wondering.

As soon as the semester began, Hadley and Kristina’s timetables took them in different directions across campus. Kristina became swept up in crowds of other students, art history types with velvet jackets, half-moon glasses and consciously dishevelled hair. Hadley’s time was spent between the French language school, where internationals took classes on grammar and made cautious forays into French fiction, and the English department. At L’Institut Vaudois
,
if you chose to study English Literature, all the teaching and coursework was in the English language; so as well as a scattering of Swiss, there were a number of professors from the UK and America among the staff. On her first day in the corridors of the English department, Hadley saw a poster on a noticeboard saying that Professors Caroline Dubois and Joel Wilson would be hosting welcome drinks for student and faculty, near the beginning of term. According to her timetable she had Professor Wilson for American Literature, and her first lecture was that Friday. Hadley decided that she would see what the class was like before she committed to going to the drinks; she pictured everyone standing around stiffly, chewing peanuts solemnly and nursing plastic cups of wine.

She wandered along the corridor and saw another noticeboard, with a parade of photographs of every staff member. Hadley stopped beside it, and tried to spot Professors Dubois and Wilson. She saw Caroline Dubois first. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a tightly coiled chignon, and her peach-coloured blouse shone silkily. ‘Caroline Dubois, expert on the Romantics’, it said beneath. Her look was too steely, not soft enough to be romantic, Hadley thought. It was always a disappointment when people’s looks didn’t match their interests. Hadley looked on along the line of pictures and was surprised to see a face she knew. Even without the spilling streetlight, and the unexpected crackle of his voice, she recognised the American from her first night in Lausanne. She remembered the plume of his cigarette smoke and the pale oceans of his eyes.
Joel Wilson
. ‘Specialism: Hemingway and The Lost Generation’, it said. Hadley glanced left and right along the corridor, inexplicably feeling as though she had stumbled across something illicit. Satisfied that she was alone, she stepped closer and studied his picture.