A Heart Bent Out of Shape (7 page)

six

Hadley and Kristina had arrived in Lausanne as equal outsiders. For all Kristina’s Riviera living and her rapid French tongue, it was as strange a city to her as it was to Hadley. Together, they made it their own. They drank
renversé
, the Swiss
café au lait
, in a coffee house that was tucked at the edge of Place de la Palud. They walked in the full bright autumn sun at Ouchy, watching the swans tangling their necks in the shallows. As they passed the voluptuous exterior of the Hôtel
Le Nouveau Monde Hadley often found herself thinking of the old man she’d met, Hugo Bézier. There was something about him that stuck, although she couldn’t quite say what. Perhaps, surrounded as she was by ex-pats and internationals, it was simply his authenticity, his Lausanne stripes.

As the semester intensified, Hadley was consumed by reading. Meanwhile Kristina had fallen to studying with fervour, spending hours poring over giant art books in the library, her hair tumbling like a curtain. L’Institut Vaudois was a perfectly orchestrated tangle of criss-crossing walkways, upper and lower levels, and glass partitions, so sometimes Hadley would see Kristina without her noticing. She’d spot her apple-green satchel or her blonde head on the stairs, three flights beneath her, or the flick of her hips as she strutted in the opposite direction behind a glass wall, or through a revolving door. Kristina always looked as if she was heading somewhere with purpose. It was in these moments that Hadley thought of Jacques. She imagined an affair with a married man to be conducted in stolen moments, snatches of passion here and there. Kristina could see him every day in this manner, and Hadley would never be any the wiser.

The commencement of the semester had sent them all in different directions. Bruno met a Spanish girl called Loretta, who lived two floors below at Les Ormes. When Hadley saw him it was often through the puff of her dark and frizzy hair, as he stooped to kiss her neck or nibble her ear. Hadley grew to associate Jenny with her mobile phone, for it was perpetually pressed to her ear. Hadley heard snatches of her conversation sometimes as she passed.
And what did he say to her?
And,
Did your mum go in the end?
And,
How’s Dave doing?
She also noticed that Chase never seemed far away from Jenny. Sometimes she’d see them wandering about together, Chase wheeling his bicycle, Jenny strolling beside, a burble of laughter in their wake. Meanwhile they would all still collide in the kitchen. As they boiled their pasta and crumbled their baguettes they swapped talk of incomprehensible lectures, errors in French, and new places they’d seen or heard about. Now that Bruno had Loretta he seemed less eager to make plans to bind them all together. No more trips to the mountains were suggested; instead he talked of a shopping weekend in Milan, but didn’t offer up the extra spaces in his car. He told them he wanted to buy Loretta the most expensive bag he could find, to which Chase made a huffy noise, and Jenny tipped her head to one side and smiled with her eyes.

‘How’s your love life, Hadley?’ Chase asked her once.

‘I’m loving life,’ she answered, ‘thanks for asking.’

And she’d glanced across at Kristina, who always seemed to be deeply distracted at such moments, rubbing at a spot of nail varnish on the sleeve of her sweater or hunting through her bag for a book. Kristina blinked back at Hadley, her face blank, her secret still hidden.

One evening, a little over a month into term, Hadley was working, cocoon-like, at her desk in her room. She had pulled the blinds and turned her lamp on and was bent low over her books. She had an essay to turn in the following week, her first, for Joel Wilson’s course. She had called it ‘An End to Love’ and had been looking forward to writing it but now that the time had come she was struggling. She couldn’t find the words she wanted. Everything that sounded good in her head looked so plain, once it was set down. A knocking at her door made her jump.

‘Come in,’ she called.

‘Hey,’ said Kristina.

She appeared to slide into Hadley’s room, opening the door barely wide enough to enter. She wore a pink dressing gown and her hair was bundled up on top of her head. She took a seat on the edge of Hadley’s bed and twisted her hands in her lap.

‘Do you fancy going out? We could go back to the Hôtel Le Nouveau
Monde. A nice quiet drink.’

‘I can’t,’ said Hadley. ‘I’d love to, but I’ve got to write this essay.’

‘You’re always working these days.’

‘So are you. Or . . . aren’t you?’

‘Mostly.’

She stood up and wandered over to Hadley’s wardrobe. The door was open and she pulled out an emerald-green frock, a slip of a thing, that Hadley had found in the bargain bin of a vintage shop.

‘Can I try this on?’

‘Help yourself,’ she said. ‘But you might take someone’s eye out in it.’

Kristina stepped out of her dressing gown and it fell to the floor in a pink heap. Underneath she wore matching underwear. Red lace. Her back was perfectly smooth and her legs ran on and on. Hadley turned back to her essay.

‘I can’t even get it over my boobs,’ she heard Kristina say with an exasperated giggle. She looked round and saw that she had it stuck on her head, and her arms were waving in the air. Hadley got up and helped her. She carefully pulled the dress back up and at the same time heard a splitting. The stitching had torn at the seam.

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’

Hadley slipped it back on to the hanger. ‘Don’t worry, I can sew it.’

‘I should never have burst in here, and now I’m wrecking your clothes too.’

‘Honestly, it’s nothing. It’s really old, it was always going to rip at some point.’

‘You’re always so nice to me, Hadley.’

Kristina sank down on the bed. She picked up her dressing gown from the floor but instead of putting it on she held it bundled in her lap. Hadley noticed that the lace of her bra was made of hundreds of tiny stitched love hearts. Underneath, her breasts swelled, barely contained.

‘Are you okay?’ Hadley asked.

Kristina looked up at her and her eyes were rimmed red; her usually flawless skin was blotchy.

‘I want to do the right thing,’ she said, ‘but it’s just really, really difficult.’

‘Kristina, what are you talking about?’

‘Jacques. God, I don’t know what I’m doing. For the first time, I don’t know what I’m doing.’

Hadley glanced down at her essay. Work on it would stop now.

‘Shall I make us some tea?’ she said.

Kristina shook her head. ‘I don’t want to be anybody’s “other woman”. I should just end it. Accept the hurt and move on. But I can’t. I can’t do it.’

‘What are you hoping? That he’ll leave her?’

‘He’ll never leave her. Not fully. Not completely. Deep down, he still loves her, Hadley.’

She shivered, and wrapped her gown around her middle.

‘Why don’t you put it on?’ said Hadley.

Kristina rubbed her arms then slowly pulled it up over her shoulders.

‘I just can’t think straight right now.’

Hadley reached into her desk drawer and drew out a bar of Swiss chocolate. She unwrapped the foil and broke it into squares, and held it out. Kristina took a piece, her eyes pooling.

‘It’s something left over from my summer on the Riviera. I told you that much, didn’t I? It’s a dreadful coincidence, really. I didn’t know that we’d both be here.’

‘In Lausanne?’

‘No, no, not Lausanne. He’s in Geneva.’

‘Tell me from the beginning,’ Hadley said.

‘What, really? You want to know it all?’

So, finally, she heard the story of how Jacques and Kristina met, and once again Hadley thought how Kristina belonged to another world. For all her distress, Kristina chose her words carefully, with pretty embellishments and decorative flourishes. Hadley listened, a half-smile at her lips.

Kristina said she was working as an au pair for a wealthy Danish family who were passing the summer in St Tropez. Her charges were three little blond boys with mushroom haircuts and neat manners. As the mother rode palomino horses at a country club in the hills and the father paced the floor of a back office, talking conspiratorially with colleagues who hadn’t been forced to spend the summer down south, Kristina played with the boys in the villa’s long and sloping garden. Or, rather, the boys played and Kristina cast glances at them, from beneath the brim of her hat as she lay purring on a lounger. The villa was on a hillside that was clustered with similar-looking houses, all with smooth sculpted arches, colonnades twisted with bougainvillea, and palm-ringed pools. The villa next door was rented by a couple who, according to Kristina, were spending the last days of their marriage there. As Kristina leafed through magazines and painted her toes in sparkly hues she heard the fierce pops of their arguments. And once, as the three boys chased the wafting trail of a Frisbee, there was the sound of shattering. A vase against a wall, or a fist into a pane. Kristina watched from beneath her lashes. She saw Jacques, for it was Jacques, run on to the lawn like a man escaping a burning house. She saw him turn and stand with his hands clasped to his head, as everything before him appeared to fall to ashes. And then he saw her watching, and instead of faltering under her cool, unwavering eye, his face inexplicably switched to something like relief. That was right at the start of the summer. The woman left, leaving the man, Jacques, alone. Their first kiss was among the squat pineapple-shaped palms that separated their gardens, a little over a week later.

As time went on, Kristina started stealing away from the boys to snatch moments with him. She would slip next door and call up into the cavernous vestibule, waiting for his head to appear on the staircase three spirals up. Within no time at all they were everyday lovers, him lavishing her with sprays of exotic flowers, her painting the rungs of his chest with sunscreen. And by the end of the summer, they were as much a couple as any other that walked the harbour-side promenade at twilight, or leant towards one another across candlelit supper tables high up in the old town.

‘A Riviera romance,’ said Hadley, and Kristina laughed reluctantly, showing all of her bright white teeth.

‘And that’s where it should have stayed,’ she said. ‘Probably. God, I don’t know. You see, he was always married, even when he said he didn’t want to be. Even when he said his wife didn’t want to be. Even when I saw him take his wedding ring and hurl it to the bottom of the sea.’

‘He did that for you?’

‘He was drunk and showing off. He probably went diving for it the next day. Anyway, now he’s back in Geneva and so is she. He says they’re separated, living on opposite sides of the city, but it doesn’t matter. Not if he still loves her.’

‘Do you love him, Kristina?’

‘Love him? As if I could know a thing like that,’ she said, a peal of shrill laughter chasing her words. ‘Oh Hadley, I wanted so much for you to like me. To not think I was a screw-up. Now look what I’ve done.’

Hadley moved over to sit beside her. She slipped an arm around her shoulders.

‘You’re hardly a screw-up. At least you’ve got some drama in your life. Keeps things interesting, right?’

She smiled, weakly. ‘Well, it’s not boring. Never boring.’

‘So, do you go to Geneva to see him? Is that why I haven’t seen so much of you lately?’

‘Or we meet halfway. There are some pretty lakeside towns. Old castles, things like that. We wander around them and scream at each other. Always the same argument. I tell him that I don’t want to see him unless I know it’s really over with his wife, and he’s too honest, Hadley, he’s painfully honest. It hurts.’

Hadley couldn’t picture a Swiss man screaming. In her mind they were all composed, rangy and elegant.
Jacques
.

‘He can’t be all that honest,’ said Hadley, ‘not if he’s with you.’

Kristina stared at her blankly. When she blinked, tears fell from her lashes.

‘Has he ever been here?’ Hadley asked, quickly changing tack.

‘To Les Ormes? No, of course not. It’d shatter all illusions. I think he’s under the impression that I’m quite sophisticated.’

‘I’d have liked to have met him,’ Hadley said.

‘Hadley, you’d only disapprove,’ she said. ‘I know you wouldn’t mean to but you would. You’re too good.’

‘Am I?’ said Hadley. ‘Not deliberately.’

‘Please, let’s change the subject. I’ve gone on and on. What are you writing? Or more like, what am I stopping you from writing?’

‘An essay. For my American Literature class. It’s on Hemingway.’

‘Your favourite.’

‘How did you know?’

‘
A Farewell to Arms
. You told me.’

‘Oh, right. Favourite author. Yes, definitely.’

‘What’s your tutor like?’

Hadley hesitated. ‘He loves himself a bit,’ she said.

She didn’t talk about the way Joel Wilson’s eyes always went to hers first when he made a joke in class. The way he tapped her elbow again as he talked to her after a lecture once, just as he had at the party by the lake. How she passed him in a crowded corridor one time and he doffed an imaginary cap in her direction and she had made to catch it like a blown kiss, only realising her mistake when she was three, four, five steps in the opposite direction. The way her cheeks had burnt red, and the hope, the desperate hope, that he might have thought that she was only waving. A strange, snappy sort of a wave, but only that, nothing more. She didn’t say any of these things, because compared to Kristina’s real romance they felt like nothing. Hadley picked up her pen and began to chew the end. Kristina bent and kissed her, a slight press of lips against her cheek.

‘Thank you, Hadley, for listening. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this before. I guess I’m not that proud of it, that’s all.’ She groaned, ‘Oh, why can’t I have a normal boyfriend?’

‘You could leave him, you know. You don’t need him. He doesn’t deserve you, not like this.’

‘Oh, but I do. And he does.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘Hadley, I lied to you. I do love him. I really, really love him.’

Hadley took her friend’s hand and squeezed it.

‘Maybe I’ll see him tomorrow,’ Kristina went on, ‘maybe I’ll tell him how I really feel. And if he doesn’t feel the same, if he’s not
free
to feel the same . . .’