Harm's Way

by Celia Walden

  ‘I love it here,’ I told Christian, as he stood with his back to me scraping the remaining grains of couscous into the bin.

  He turned with a look of surprise. ‘Do you? You’re easily pleased. If things were different, I’d get another place, but for the moment, well, it has to do.’

  I hated seeing him look so serious. Choosing a sweet Turkish pastry from a box on the floor, I raised myself up on my knees and carried it slowly to his mouth, watching as an amber tear of honey fell idly on to his shirt.

  ‘Anna,’ he scolded smilingly, wiping his chin. ‘It’s all a game to you, isn’t it?’

  I was up in an instant, wrapping my arms around his waist, breathing in the scent of sweat and stale aftershave imbued in his collar. He pushed his mouth hard against mine, refusing to let me open it with my tongue, until I could no longer breathe.

  Ten

  ‘So how come you’re staying with Isabelle?’ asked Stephen, as I hung my coat up in his hallway. ‘I didn’t think you two were that close.’

  Unprepared for the question, I feigned surprise.

  ‘I think Isabelle’s great, I always have. She’s very kindly letting me stay in her spare room for a few weeks until I find another flat, and it’s all working out fine.’

  ‘What I don’t get is why you’d rather stay there than here. I could really do with the company at the moment. You could have stayed in Beth’s room until she gets back.’

  Caught in the knot of my own lies, and excited at spending every night with Christian, Stephen’s logic hadn’t even occurred to me.

  ‘Oh, Stephen.’ It was perfectly obvious that I should be staying there. Of course I should. I had to think fast now. ‘To be completely honest,’ I began hesitantly, as though forcing myself to pronounce a difficult truth, ‘the idea of staying here … in Beth’s bedroom …’

  He looked baffled.

  ‘I mean she’ll be coming back soon, won’t she? So it just doesn’t seem right.’

  But he needed more.

  ‘It felt odd, that night I spent here in her bed, sort of wrong, if that makes sense.’

  A glimmer of something akin to understanding had appeared in his eyes, and I knew that I was on to something.

  ‘Fair enough. So where is it?’

  ‘Where’s what?’

  ‘Isabelle’s flat?’

  ‘In the sixteenth,’ I replied without thinking.

  ‘Really? Crikey, I thought the museum didn’t pay very much.’

  I waited for the mental connection to be established.

  ‘Doesn’t Christian live in the sixteenth? In Auteuil somewhere? According to Beth, his place is absolutely tiny. I think she only went there once. Are you anywhere near him?’

  ‘I don’t think so, it’s a fairly big neighbourhood and Isabelle’s on the other side.’ I scrabbled around in my head for a convincing detail. ‘Near the Musée Marmottan.’ I had once taken Beth there to show her a darkened basement full of Monet’s water lilies. ‘I get off at métro La Muette, so it’s not that bad a journey home from work. Here, shall we open this bottle of white or is it too early?’

  ‘It’s Beth’s but I don’t suppose she’ll mind. Having said that, I got into huge amounts of trouble the last time you and I did that. Do you remember? It turned out it was some really special burgundy her boss had given her for Christmas.’

  He gave a sad little laugh and I realised how much he was missing her.

  ‘So you haven’t heard anything more?’

  ‘No. The police say they are finding out for sure whether she’s left the country or not, which she obviously has, but it’ll put my mind at rest to know for certain. As soon as they tell me that, I’ll feel much better. And I think I won’t even mind so much that she felt she couldn’t, well, confide in me.’

  ‘It’s not just you, Stephen, it’s all of us. I mean Christ, Christian’s her boyfriend and she hasn’t even been in touch with him.’

  ‘I know. And when she gets back I’m going to tell her that she needs to let us in a bit more. I mean, haven’t we all endlessly bored her with our problems?’

  He had stopped talking and was scrutinising me with a quizzical expression.

  ‘Look at you …’

  ‘What?’ I asked twitchily, getting up and wandering out of his line of vision into the sitting room.

  ‘Have you had your hair cut or something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know. You look … good.’

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

  ‘No, I mean … different. Sort of … oh, I don’t know. I think I’m suffering from sleep deprivation or something. Every morning I wake up just before six when I hear the water come on next door. I keep thinking she’s let herself in and is having a shower.’

  ‘Have another glass of wine: it’ll help knock you out.’

  Suffocated by those mustard-coloured walls and the turn of the conversation, I suggested we continue our drinking in a local bar on the boulevard St Denis. But as we walked past Beth’s open bedroom door on our way out, we both fell silent.

  ‘I miss her,’ Stephen admitted.

  ‘Me too. But she’ll be back soon.’

  It was while we were waiting for the lift that the call came. I recognised the brutal slang of Inspector Verbier’s voice from a foot away, as soon as Stephen answered his mobile phone. The conversation lasted a mere second, before he pulled his keys from the pocket of his jeans and turned back towards the front door.

  ‘That was the police. They’ve got some news apparently. They’re on their way here.’

  The landing seemed to shift around me as I tried to take in the significance of those three clipped sentences.

  ‘Did they say why? Have they found her?’ I put a hand on his arm: ‘Stephen, they must have said something.’

  ‘They didn’t,’ he said, trying to control the wobble in his voice. ‘Just that – and that they’d be here in a second. OK?’

  Had the news been good, surely they would have said? They would not have wanted to put us through this. The reflux of all the fears, all the suspicions I had pushed out of my head caused my legs to buckle. Leaning against the wall as Stephen struggled with the lock, I felt the unfamiliar sensation of tears needling the corners of my eyes. Stephen turned towards me, just in time to see me blot one away.

  ‘Anna, for God’s sake, don’t. You’re so strong, and you’ve been amazing over the past few days. Do you know what Beth says she loves about you? That you’re young enough always to be confident that everything will be fine.’

  Stephen enveloped me in a protracted, soothing hug, and for once I felt no need to pull away.

  ‘Everything will be fine, I’m sure of it,’ I murmured into his neck.

  ‘You’re right, but God, am I going to have words with that woman when she does come home.’

  Minutes later the gulp of the lift, like an apprehensive messenger, informed us that they were on their way up.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur, Bonjour, Mademoiselle.’

  Verbier was alone this time, wearing a long waxed coat, like a British Barbour jacket but down to his knees, and a burgundy scarf wrapped in the kind of contrived knot that only the French can achieve, high around his throat.

  ‘Well, I thought we should tell you that we’ve spoken to passport control and checked all the immigration software on our computers: there’s no sign of any Beth Murphy leaving the country.’

  We stared back at him.

  ‘Is there anywhere else she might have gone? A friend or an ex-boyfriend in another part of France she might be visiting?’

  Stephen was shaking his head.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I explained. ‘She must have gone to see her father. It’s the only thing that makes sense. If she hasn’t, then this is something different … if she hasn’t, then something terrible must have happened.’

  I didn’t hear what the inspector said next, sitting down heavily and waiting for the cumbrous calculations of my mind to produce t
heir result. Luckily, Stephen short-circuited the process.

  ‘So what does all this mean, exactly?’

  ‘It means that your friend is still in France, and most definitely a missing person.’

  ‘But you do …’ My throat was dry and I swallowed hard. ‘You do think she’s all right though?’

  It was an infantile question, full of hope and devoid of logic. I thought I saw a flicker of pity cross his face.

  ‘Well, it’s not good news, obviously. But I can assure you that in many instances of this kind there is a reasonable explanation and the person either returns home or is found safe and well.’

  ‘How many days …?’ I asked falteringly. ‘Because that’s the way it works, isn’t it? How many days before you guys accept that something has happened to her?’

  The colour had drained from Stephen’s face, sickly white now with frondy blond eyelashes which gave his eyes a rabbitlike quality.

  ‘We don’t like to say …’

  ‘How many?’ cut in Stephen.

  ‘After seven,’ Verbier was looking at the lino floor now, delineating a hexagonal outline with his foot, ‘we generally fear the worst.’

  Stephen began to sob.

  I took the inspector to the door.

  ‘Please let us know immediately if you hear anything.’

  He traced a flat line through the air with his right hand, which signified ‘That goes without saying’, and left.

  Bent over the table with his head in his hands, Stephen was whimpering now. It was the annoying, pining sound of a dog trapped. Incapable of consolation I went straight to the phone.

  ‘I’d better call Christian and tell him what’s happened.’

  He was at work when I reached him, the clatter of the kitchen too loud for us to have a proper conversation. A half-hour later he stood, grim-faced, outside the front door of the flat.

  ‘She’s not gone to Ireland,’ I filled him in, walking briskly in front of him towards the kitchen. ‘In fact, there’s no record of her leaving the country at all.’

  I was aware that I sounded cold, that my speech was measured and its intonations duller than they should be. But I didn’t care. If the alternative was to let myself succumb to the mawkish grief Stephen was displaying, hunched over the table as he still was, then I preferred to deal with it my way.

  ‘Stephen.’ Christian stood in the doorway with his legs apart in a way which ordinarily would have provoked desire in me. ‘Stephen, look at me.’

  He made no attempt to look up. I watched with fascination the blood discolouring the back of his neck in large, flower-shaped patches. In one deft movement Christian was beside him, inserting four fingers beneath his chin and jolting it sharply upwards.

  ‘What are you crying about? Stephen, look at me. Why are you in this state? We don’t know any more than we did before. So what that she didn’t go to Ireland. What does that prove?’

  ‘Everything!’ His growl of rage echoed throughout the flat. A creaking door on the landing opposite answered its call, and then, hearing nothing more, slammed shut again. ‘It means everything! Don’t you see? It means Beth could be dead.’

  Stephen’s eyes were so red and sticky that it looked like the corneas were bleeding; even Christian was struggling to maintain his composure.

  ‘Or the police may have got it wrong: they don’t know everything, Stephen. They do sometimes get things wrong.’

  I noted with alarm the pleading in his voice. He was asking somebody else to believe that Beth was still all right, and the realisation that he might still be in love with her, had ever been in love with her, hit me.

  ‘He’s right, Stephen,’ I interjected, knowing he was wrong, wrong, wrong. ‘She might still be OK. Let’s try her father again, try Ruth again, try everyone – I don’t believe that she can just disappear like this.’

  I knew as I spoke that we wouldn’t be reassured, but those few remaining minutes of hope seemed precious beyond anything.

  ‘You all keep on asking me this question,’ crackled Mr Murphy’s voice on the line, ‘and I’ll tell you what I told the others: she’s not here. She’s coming to see me though. My Beth did promise she would come.’

  His voice grew faint, and I suspected he had wandered away from the phone, picturing the receiver hanging limply across a dusty wooden chair in a farmhouse kitchen.

  ‘Mr Murphy? Are you still there?’

  ‘Of course I am. And there’s no need to shout: I’m not deaf, you know, but I do wish you’d stop bothering me. She always gets back in time to do her homework. Always. What do you want my daughter for, anyway?’

  ‘Do you understand how serious this is?’ I raised my voice, feeling my right temple beginning to throb. ‘Your daughter is missing, and we’ve had to call the police. We’re all very worried, so if she turns up, you have to tell us.’

  I was preparing myself for the ordeal of reading out digits down the phone, but Beth’s father had already hung up. Christian, I couldn’t face, somehow beginning to feel that he was the reason for all this. I turned to Stephen. ‘There’s only one thing to do. We’ll have to go to Ireland ourselves, speak to her dad and to the neighbours, and find out what’s going on. That’s what the police should already have done. I just don’t think they’re trying their best to sort this thing out.’

  Stephen had calmed down, and began nodding his approval.

  ‘If we leave tomorrow morning we’ll be there by Friday. My boss knows what’s going on but it might be trickier for you to get the time off …’

  ‘I don’t think you both need go,’ Christian cut in with suddenly authority. ‘I should be around at my place in case she decides to go there, and someone should really stay here, just in case.’

  ‘He’s right.’

  That night, we sat around the kitchen table planning Stephen’s trip, all three of us trying to ignore the grinning photograph of Beth pinned to the noticeboard just above our heads, alongside her redundant shopping list and a flyer for a local gym she’d insisted she was going to join every week since I’d known her.

  Early the following morning, Christian drove Stephen to the Gare du Nord. Even though we were taking steps to put everything right, the world around me seemed wildly out of kilter. Isabelle’s constant appearances throughout the day in my section of the gallery meant that I reluctantly gave in and allowed her to become my confidante. Mid-afternoon, standing beneath the cloud-shaped awnings of the museum with my eyes on the river, I told her the news.

  ‘Oh my God, Anna.’ She raised a hand to her cheek, but the little smile was still there. ‘You must be feeling terrible about everything. Sort of guilty too, I guess. It’s brave of you to come into work.’

  The words were there, each one picked out with care, but I began to suspect that under their bland surface was a more sinister motive. Isabelle saw herself as a friend, yet I had started to sense an enemy in her.

  ‘Well, Stephen’s gone to Ireland today to try to track her down, so things could still turn out OK.’

  It sounded unconvincing, even to me, and I spent the remainder of the day cursing myself for having told her anything at all.

  It was the first time I had gone back to Christian’s flat alone, and the darkness of the stairwell felt desolating. Everything ordered and pure had ricocheted into another world, one where nothing made sense. I longed for my father’s advice, but knew I could not call him. What would I say? Christian would be home in under an hour, so I resolved to busy myself by playing at domesticity, and prepare dinner for him. In a kitchen that size, this was easier said than done. At that point his little garret still held a residual charm. Only a few days later, those walls would begin to symbolise the prison of guilt we had built around ourselves.

  I was distracted by a light going on across the street. The occupant had just seated himself low down in a velvet chair with one green corduroy-clad leg balanced on his knee. I wondered whether, if I stared at him long enough, he would sense me watching, look away f
rom the book he was reading, stub his Gitane out in the marble ashtray on the coffee table beside him, and glance up. He didn’t, and the spinach I had immersed in shallow water began to spit with annoyance. I turned it off and resumed my post at the window, determined to make the man aware of my existence.

  ‘If he turns around,’ I said to myself, ‘everything will be all right, and life will return to normal.’

  I stared and stared, but the onset of tears made his outline nebulous, washing the colours from the scene, and still he refused to lift his eyes from his book.

  When Christian walked through the door twenty minutes later, no food had been prepared, and he would perhaps wonder why there was a mass of burnt spinach lying like a clump of dried seaweed at the bottom of the bin. I, however, was perfectly made-up, lying on the bed in one of his shirts reading a magazine. No one would ever have guessed that minutes earlier I had been pressed against the kitchen window-pane, crying about the obstinacy of a man I had never met.

  ‘Tu es très belle,’ he said, kissing me lightly on the mouth before putting his bag down.

  I lifted my eyes from the article I wasn’t reading and attempted a smile.

  ‘Good day?’

  ‘Uneventful.’

  Tugging harshly at the zip of his coat, he freed himself in one noiseless gesture, and squared up to me in the same way he’d confronted an Arab who had commented on the length of my skirt in a bar the week before.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  I swallowed twice, willing myself not to cry but feeling a burning sensation behind my eyes. Then his arm was round me, my nose buried in the groove of his neck.

  ‘Promise me that it’ll all be all right.’

  ‘I promise.’

  But they were only words, words you use to try to make everything better.

  That night our movements were automatic, loveless, drawn out as long as we could. I turned my back to him, knowing that if our eyes met I would have to stop what we were doing. But sleep would have been impossible. Afterwards, we lay breathless beside one another, not touching. I noticed for the first time that the bed sheets needed washing, and that the damp had inscribed nicotine-rimmed clouds on the walls. There was nothing poetic about the flat; it was the accommodation of a student, and that was all. Christian began to speak. He sounded strange in the murky orange dawn, and I wanted to cover up his mouth, to smother him with kisses, anything to make him stop talking.