A Heart Bent Out of Shape (19 page)

She was out of her chair and hurrying across the room, without another thought. She burst on to the street, her eyes searching left and right, and almost fell into him. Joel was standing just outside, a cigarette between his lips, a struck match in his hand.

‘Hadley,’ he said, his voice lifted with surprise.

She realised that she didn’t know what to say. Between his fingers the match carried on burning. He dropped it to the ground and stamped on it. He took the cigarette from his lips. He shook his head.

‘Were you in there the whole time?’ he said.

‘No, I just arrived. I only saw you as you were leaving. Why were you leaving?’

‘Because I finished my coffee.’

‘Not because of me?’

‘Hadley, I didn’t even see you. In fact, I haven’t seen you in nine days. No, ten. Where have you been? I was worried.’

‘You were?’

‘Of course I was. I wondered if you’d got the same bug as me, but then Caroline said she saw you and you looked fine.’

‘I was ill,’ said Hadley, ‘but a cold, nothing to do with any bad Chinese food.’

‘Serves me right for taking you there, doesn’t it? But no one has a cold for ten days straight. Where were you?’

‘I had some things to do,’ Hadley said. They stepped aside as a group left the café, girls and boys with bright cheeks and dark coats, laughing and linking arms. Hadley watched them go, then spoke again. ‘I did try and find you, Joel. Everything got turned upside down. I heard about Kristina and the car and I had to see you. I wanted to see you so badly, but you weren’t there.’

‘What about Kristina and a car?’

‘You don’t know? I thought you knew. I thought everybody knew. It was in the paper. I left you a note, in your pigeon-hole.’

‘I didn’t see it, I hardly ever look in there. You must know that I’d never ignore a note from you. Hadley, tell me, I don’t know.’

Some part of her wilted with relief. He set a hand on each of her shoulders, steadying her, as she talked. She told him everything: Hugo, Lisette, her search, the door knocking all along the street, and for all of it Kristina still gone. She felt the press of every single one of his fingers.

‘Hadley,’ he said, ‘Hadley, Hadley. I don’t know what to say.’

‘I didn’t think it could get any worse and then it did.’

‘I never would have wanted to leave you alone with that. Why didn’t you come and find me again? Why didn’t you try? You weren’t in class, I didn’t know what to think.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to see me,’ she said, ‘not after Geneva.’

‘I thought it was
you
who didn’t want to see me,’ he said. ‘Damn it, Hadley, what a mess. I handled it so badly. I’m sorry. For all of it. What about the police? I expect they say there’s nothing they can do?’

‘I thought they’d given up without really trying, but then I tried and didn’t get anywhere either. Joel, how can someone do that? Just drive on? And then just carry on with life, as if nothing happened?’

‘If we think about it we’ll go crazy,’ he said, and she heard the ‘we’ and felt its comfort and knew how much she’d missed it. He took his hands from her shoulders and folded his arms across his chest. He looked bigger, then, like an American footballer barrelling forward, as frill-skirted girls leapt in the stands. ‘In fact, I don’t know how you haven’t gone crazy,’ he said.

‘I found an unexpected friend.’

‘You did? Look, Hadley, I hate to do this but I’m late for someone. Maybe we could talk about all this later? Will you call me?’

‘There’s nothing more to be said, not about this. I want to talk about other things. Happy things.’

‘So call me. Call me for that too.’

‘I don’t have your number.’

‘I never gave it to you?’ He gave her a rueful smile. ‘That was careless of me.’

He took out a pen from his pocket and went to tear a corner off his newspaper. Hadley held out her hand, palm upwards.

‘Write it on me,’ she said.

She smiled as she spoke, for it didn’t sound much like her at all. It was a bolder, brighter Hadley. It was, she thought later, more like Kristina than her. Joel took her hand and he wrote slowly, the pen tickling her palm. When he’d finished she folded her fingers over it.

‘I will call, you know,’ she said.

‘I hope you do.’

She tapped her cheek with her finger. ‘You’ve a mark here. Newsprint.’

He found the spot and wiped it away. He studied the tips of his fingers, and then looked back at her. He smiled, absently.

‘Gone?’

‘Gone. Joel . . .’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s felt strange, not seeing you. I mean, everything’s felt strange lately, but . . . that’s been part of it. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong.’

Joel didn’t look to see if anyone was watching. He didn’t glance down the street, to the left and to the right, or through the windows of the Café Grand. He simply leant forward, and kissed her. If anyone had seen, perhaps it would have appeared as simply a quick peck, their lips meeting but only just. Hadley, however, felt the heat, and the firm press, and then the pressure of his fingers as they curled around her shoulders. She knew then that the kiss in the car wasn’t the end of something. It was, perhaps just as Luca had said, only the beginning.

Back inside the café Hadley worked hard to keep her features still. She’d slipped between the tables, her feet barely touching the ground.

‘Where did you go?’ cried Loretta.

‘Sorry,’ she said, laughing in a gulp, ‘sorry. I had to see someone. Now, Bruno, what were you saying? You sounded like you had a fantastic piece of gossip.’ She shuffled in close to them and gave them all of her attention. Their indignant faces softened.

‘Only that I think angelic Jenny and our American friend Chase are up to no good. Nothing interesting or anything,’ said Bruno, pouting.

‘What about Jenny’s boyfriend?’ asked Hadley.

Loretta shook her head. ‘Over, I think, and you’ve never seen anyone look less sad.’

The waiter came and recharged their glasses. Hadley watched the bubbles explode in her flute, and let Bruno and Loretta run on, happy that the conversation had turned away from her. They spent the rest of the afternoon drinking Prosecco, Bruno and Loretta revelling in speculation over other people’s love lives. Hadley sat with one hand resting on her knee, her fingers curled around Joel’s carefully inked telephone number. She drifted on a tide of amber fizz, and did a passable impression of someone who cared about the same things as them. She smiled in almost all of the right places.

twenty-one

She rang him in the early evening, just as the kitchen at
Les Ormes was humming with activity. Chase and Jenny were absorbed in the making of a macaroni cheese, and Hadley spied their romance for herself then: their close-bobbing heads, their secret smiles. Without anyone really noticing, she slipped away to call Joel Wilson. The numbers on her palm were precise and deliberate. She traced their shape with her finger and dialled his number. It rang and rang, and just when she thought she’d have to leave a stumbling answerphone message, he answered.

‘Joel Wilson.’

He spoke quickly and abruptly. It almost threw her off.

‘Oh, hi. You said to call. It’s Hadley.’

‘Hadley! Hadley, Hadley. Yes, I did.’

‘So . . . I’m calling.’

‘Yes, you are. Thank you. Look, I’m just going to come right out and say it. I haven’t been very professional, and I apologise for that.’

‘I never asked for
professional
.’

‘It’s implicit. A student-teacher relationship has to be professional. There’s a code, something I probably signed, along the way. Everybody else, in this place, is the very model of
professional
.’

‘And they gave Kristina one minute in class, and then they moved on. Didn’t you tell me that? I think I prefer unprofessional, don’t you?’

There was silence on the line.

‘Joel?’

‘The problem is, Hadley,’ he said, in a quieter voice, that made him sound as though he was speaking from a long way away, the heights of the ice-white peaks or the bottom of the searing-cold lake, ‘I’m not normally like this. It’s a strange version of me, this me in Switzerland. I seem to have come here and turned into somebody else.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘I don’t normally tell anybody anything, and I seem to be telling you everything.’

‘But you can,’ she said.

‘No, I can’t. It’s not very smart, none of it’s very smart.’

‘Well, I’ve got something I have to tell you, so please listen. Hugo made me realise it. The Jacques hunt, me roping you into it all, dragging you to Geneva. Even yesterday, making all the right noises when I said I’d done all that door knocking, all that retracing of footsteps. I’m sure you thought it was all pointless. I’m sure you were just being kind, pretending that any of it was a good idea. But then I realised something else. Maybe there’s another reason why you wanted to help me with all this.’

‘What do you mean? What kind of reason?’

‘Well . . . maybe you like me. Maybe you like spending time with me. Maybe that was why we went to Geneva. Maybe it’s complicated but, also, maybe it’s really simple.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘Joel?’

He still didn’t say anything, so she went on, ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to answer. I don’t really know what I feel about anything at the moment but you, and the way you are with me, I like it. I know that much. And I think you like it too.’

‘Is that what you think, Hadley?’

‘Well, don’t you?’

He laughed then, a great eruption. Something swelled inside of her and she clamped her teeth to ride it out.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘It’s laugh or cry,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Am I that obvious?’ His voice was still thickened with mirth. ‘I thought I was being a little cooler than that. No, I guess two kisses gives it away.’ She started to laugh too, then, a lighter, uneasy sound beneath his far deeper one. ‘Oh God, Hadley, if you knew what was good for you, you’d walk away now. Really you would.’

‘Maybe I don’t want what’s good for me.’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘I do. For once, I really do.’

‘This is your chance. I’m serious, you should take it. Hang up on me now. Find yourself a Swiss boy, with neat hair and good shoes and the right manners. It’s not too late for that.’

‘I think it probably is,’ she said.

‘You’re too nice a girl for this.’

‘I’m not. Or, I don’t want to be. Nice doesn’t count for anything. Joel, these past few weeks, everything’s come crashing down. But you’re still here.’

He seemed to disappear and then come back. He spoke slowly.

‘So, you’re telling me you want to do this?’

‘I want to do this.’

‘Whatever “this” turns out to be . . .’

‘Yes.’

‘No one can ever know,’ he said, and he sounded like he was talking to himself as much as to her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But we will, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and that’s all that ever matters.’

There was no setting up of their next meeting; he’d just said
Goodnight Hadley, try and sleep well
, as if they both had a big day ahead of them. The next morning on campus she inexplicably found herself avoiding the English department. She took a table in the library’s Natural History section, by the books on rock formations, and alpine flora. She had over a week of catching up to do, and she hid behind a stack of books and papers, ploughing through all that she’d missed. When she returned to Les
Ormes in the evening, her cheeks drawn pink by her fast climb up the hill, there was a note waiting in her mailbox. It bore no stamp; perhaps he had slipped in with a hat pulled low over his eyes, or handed it to a passing student with a muffled remark about news from home or a graded paper. Either way, it lay in her mailbox, a page torn from a jotter and slipped into an envelope, with the quick-dashed handwriting that she recognised from the margins of her essays.

New Year. It needs to be marked and I’d like you to mark it with me. Skiing, then?

Her first thought was that he’d sent it to her by mistake. That it was intended for a friend back home, or a colleague from the department, deposited in her mailbox in error. And then she knew. They had said that they were doing this, whatever
this
was. Maybe
this
meant a trip into the mountains. Perhaps he’d remembered what she’d told him on her birthday. That Kristina had been going to teach her. And what had been her words, as she sat across from him in the cafeteria, her legs crossed self-consciously, as somewhere behind them a girl exploded with sudden laughter?
Speed,
she’d said
. Danger.
She only remembered afterwards, when she was trying to fall asleep and failing, that it was Joel who’d talked like this, that they hadn’t been her words at all. But she’d nodded, agreeing, because he was right. It was exactly what she wanted.

twenty-two

There was less than two weeks left of term, and Christmas
was everywhere. At Les Ormes, doors banged late into the night, and small-hours revellers giggled in the corridors. One morning a raggedy tree had appeared in the foyer, as if by flat magic, its silver-grey plastic arms bent by gaudy baubles. Kitchens were strung with fairy lights and looping paper chains. Hadley had gone in one night and discovered Jenny and Loretta busy at the table cutting out paper stars. Chase was balancing on a chair, his T-shirt riding up as he stretched to fasten tangled lengths of tinsel to odd hooks and cupboard corners. Bruno was stirring a pan of mulled wine, and cramming cinnamon biscuits in his mouth. He ladled out a sloppy serving and passed it to her, and she joined their uncharacteristically familial scene, realising it was the first evening that they’d all spent together in weeks. She also realised that she remembered how to fold and snip paper to make a string of cut out figures, rows of girls and boys holding hands. She concentrated on the task, sipping the sweet, warm wine and listening to the aimless talk of the others. Chase nudged her with his elbow.

‘Going home for Christmas, Hadley?’

Chase had seemed to lose his barbed edges lately, and Hadley preferred this softer version of himself.

‘My mum and dad can’t wait,’ she said. ‘What about you? Back to the States?’

He nodded. ‘I wouldn’t mind staying here, seeing a bit more of Europe, just hanging out, but there’s no way my mom would let that happen. It’s home to New Jersey, and my kid brothers and sisters. And I still don’t have plans for New Year, there’s something wrong about that. I think my friends have forgotten I even exist.’

‘No kisses for you at midnight, then,’ said Jenny, licking the edges of a blue-tipped paper chain. ‘That’s a shame. What about you, Hadley? Are you meeting up with university friends?’

There were a few ways to answer and none was quite the truth, but she wanted to run close to it. She wanted to feel the words, and hear how they sounded.

‘I’ll be back here, actually,’ she said. ‘I’m going skiing for a few days.’

‘Oh, wonderful! Who with?’ piped Loretta. ‘Luca’s parents have an apartment in Cortina.’

‘It’s not with Luca,’ she said, quickly. ‘Just some Swiss friends.’

‘Have you got Swiss friends, Hadley?’ said Jenny. ‘I haven’t so much as talked to anyone who actually comes from Lausanne. There’s a guy from Zurich in my class but he’s kind of weird.’

‘A couple,’ she said, cautiously, ‘not many.’

‘A guy?’ said Loretta, twinkling at Hadley.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s not definite yet, it’s just an idea.’

‘Hadley,’ Jenny gasped, ‘you’re such a dark horse! Don’t hold out on us . . . who is he?’

‘He’s no one yet,’ she said, ‘it’s only the beginning. Honestly, there’s nothing to say. If there is, I’ll tell you. I promise.’

‘That’s a promise that won’t be kept,’ said Chase.

‘Oh, and why?’ Hadley said.

‘Girls love secrets,’ he said, shrugging. ‘You and Kristina were always whispering together.’

‘We weren’t whispering, we were talking to each other, that’s what people do.’

‘That secret boyfriend of hers,’ piped up Jenny, ‘I just think it’s really strange he never came here, after everything that happened.’

‘It’s really not that strange when you think about it,’ said Hadley quickly. ‘He was nothing to do with us.’

‘Not even you?’ said Jenny.

‘Not even me. Chase, Jenny, come on, do you really want to talk about this now? You don’t know anything about it. Neither do I, barely, and that’s the sorry truth.’

‘I actually didn’t mean to make it about Kristina,’ said Chase, ‘just girls and their secrets, that’s all.’

‘It’s okay. It’s fine.’ Hadley picked up one of the paper stars and turned its edges. ‘She’d have loved this, you know. Not the talking about her bit, but all the Christmassy things. She’d have loved it.’

She could picture Kristina at the table with them, sipping from her cup of wine, cutting love hearts to hang on the kitchen cupboards. Or could she? More likely she would have blasted in, her cheeks kissed pink, just as they were all thinking of going to bed. And Hadley knew she’d have stayed up with her, stifling a yawn, wanting to hear another Jacques story. There would have been squares of silver-wrapped chocolate and whispers, their laughter muffled as someone passed in the corridor. Kristina was the only person in the world that she wanted to tell about Joel.

‘Hadley,’ said Jenny, leaning across and squeezing her hand, ‘I think it’s great if you’ve got a boyfriend. You deserve someone to make you happy. It’s been a really crappy term.’

Hadley smiled. She fished an orange slice from the bottom of her cup and nibbled it.

‘It’s just skiing,’ she said.

She’d had boyfriends before but never anyone like him. There was Ed, who had a prickle of white-blond hair and liked Chaucer and French hip-hop, and Paul, who played centre forward for Tonridge reserves, and could never shake the endearing habit of calling her dad ‘Sir’. But they were boys she saw without ever really using her imagination, just ways to pass the small-town summers that stretched out, never-ending, someone to be with just as everyone was pairing off, sitting side-by-side on park benches, and sharing headphones. She’d never been in love, not really; not in her first year of university, and not at home either.

Joel was nineteen years older than Hadley, thirty-nine to her twenty, and she was sure he’d had his fair share of romance. He smiled too easily, he watched you too avidly, he had altogether too much dash, not to have seduced a line of women before her, but she never felt that any of them, or any of that, mattered. What had losing Kristina proven? That the future could never be known. That on the most ordinary of days, when fast-falling snowflakes filled the air, when candles on a cake flickered beneath the breathy song of ‘Happy Birthday’, when Lausanne people folded their clothes and removed their shoes and made for their goose-down beds, someone’s world, at least one person’s, could fall apart. In the face of such a fact, the past counted for little. All that remained was the present.

Joel and Hadley couldn’t stroll arm in arm through the streets of Lausanne like other couples, kissing beneath the chestnut trees, or by the Ouchy fountains. They couldn’t sit at corner tables in cafés, and hold hands past the sugar bowl. Sometimes she tried to picture them doing such things and she never could. She wondered if that mattered, the inability to imagine an ordinary future. Often, she couldn’t believe he was there with her at all; he seemed too reckless for a place like Lausanne. His hair kicked up at too rough an angle, his cheeks weren’t shaven enough, he didn’t shine his shoes and he wore odd socks. Instead, she could see him yanking giant fish from a salted ocean, cramming into the crowds at a bullring, throwing back drinks in a sawdust-strewn bar. With such pictures she made him into her version of Hemingway, and she became his bob-headed consort; lithe and devoted, lips stinging with kisses.

The day after the skiing message, Hadley stayed behind after class. She hung at the back of the room as Joel threw his papers and books into his case. She scratched her arm idly, and glanced away. When the last student left, the door closing behind them, she approached the lectern, and slipped her hand tentatively into his. Joel’s breath was hot and whispery in her ear. They clattered up the stairs to his office and kissed there, pushing up against his creaking bookshelves, sinking into his well-worn sofa, perching on the corner of his desk, as his hands raked through her hair. The door was locked, the blinds were drawn, Coltrane, as ever, drowned out the ringing phone or the passing tap of a visitor. He slipped off her top, a plaid shirt with usually testy buttons, zipping through it without blinking, peeling it from her shoulders, and letting it drop to the floor. He kissed her breasts, teasing down the lace of her bra, his lips brushing her nipples. Hadley gasped, and ran her hands over the curve of his back, pushing him closer into her. But then he stopped. He tidied her bra. He stooped to pick up her shirt and gently slipped it back over her shoulders. He kissed her on the tip of her nose.

‘You’re undoing me, Hadley Dunn,’ he said.

‘I’m already undone,’ she said, reaching for him again.

He took her hand and held it firmly. ‘Soon we’ll be in the mountains. A long way from this place. There won’t be any stopping then.’

‘That’s not until next year, days and days and days away. Might as well be months.’

‘You need more time to decide that I’m not too bad for you,’ he said.

‘You’re not,’ she said, ‘you’re good. You’re great.’

He buttoned up her shirt, one by one, as though he was putting her back together after taking her apart.

‘It would be nice if I was,’ he said.

‘You sound like Jake Barnes. In a minute you’ll say something like “
Pretty to think so, isn’t it?
”’

‘You can’t talk about
The Sun Also Rises
,’ he said, ‘and expect it to end there.’ He began to unbutton her shirt again and then stopped. ‘Actually, I’m tougher than that,’ he said, ‘but nice try, Hadley.’

She sighed and reached for her coat. ‘There won’t be much skiing, will there?’

He shook his head from side to side. Smiled.

They didn’t only meet behind closed doors. For all its manicured presentation, L’Institut Vaudois had some wilder parts. Between the Language block and the Arts building there was a patch of brush-like grasses and scrawny pine trees and they kissed there once, with dazzling brazenness. One moment they were walking along, Joel with a folder tucked under his arm, Hadley with a stack of library books, then they stepped off the path. Within a couple of paces they were unseen; the perfect place for a
rendezvous
, a
tête-à-tête
. She wondered why it was that French words were often used at these moments. Perhaps it was because they carried with them a hint of mystique, not found in phrases like ‘we need to talk’ or ‘can we meet?’ She knew the word for ‘affair’ in French was
une aventure
. An adventure. There was something impossibly perfect about that, it was spry and thrilling, and held the recognition that it might not last, that it probably wouldn’t, but it would be no less shiny because of it. She knew this was how Kristina had felt about Jacques. Just steps away from the campus path Joel kissed her, and later she remembered how they’d heard approaching footsteps and he’d held his hand gently to her mouth to still her; she’d pressed her tongue flat against his palm and tasted salt, wanting more. She knew he was holding back because he felt guilty, and she understood it, them both pretending that a line had been crossed, but not entirely kicked away. She also knew that it couldn’t last much longer, the waiting. She thought of this as she picked pine needles from her hair. There was mud on the soles of her shoes and she smiled.

One afternoon, when Hadley came home to Les Ormes she opened her mailbox to find a package. Her first thought was of the man she had just left. A gift perhaps, a Hemingway first edition or a copy of Joel’s own collection of critical essays printed by an American college publisher, with a note written in his sloping hand; the kind that years later a teenage grandchild might find, and run their fingers over with a romantic fizzle in their eyes.
Who was Joel?
they would ask, their lips a tiny crescent smile. She was running away with herself and she knew it. Joel’s place in her history was still uncertain. The handwriting, however, wasn’t his. It was calligraphic and gigantic, sprawling unapologetically across the brown-wrapped parcel. Hadley opened it standing in the hallway and found a book inside, a yellowing paperback with a corny cover: a gloved hand, a gun, a rose. A postcard was slipped inside its pages, and the picture was of the Hôtel
Le Nouveau Monde. On the back, in the same extravagant hand, a message was written, tamed and miniaturised to fit the space.

‘Hugo!’ she gasped, with happiness and relief.

For all her distraction, she hadn’t forgotten Hugo – not the sharpness of her last words to him, nor the resignation in his. She had tried going back to the Hôtel
Le Nouveau Monde, but he was never there. She’d stopped at the chocolate shop, but he wasn’t there either. She’d found herself walking along Rue des Mirages, not looking for clues, not with eyes darting left and right, just slowly, sadly. A few days later she had tried again at the hotel, and the waiter she recognised from before had asked her if she was looking for
Monsieur Bézier
. She’d nodded.
He isn’t always well, mademoiselle
, she was told,
he does not always come
. Hadley trailed back outside.
He always came before
, she’d wanted to say, and then she wondered what was wrong. She worried, irrationally, that she wouldn’t see him again. For some reason she had avoided saying anything to Joel about him. She could still hear the tang in Hugo’s voice as he said
your professor
. They were better kept as separate worlds.

She read the card now, with relief.

Forgive me for my foolish insinuations. They were the ramblings of a childish old man. On the subject of which . . . I offer you this . . . one of my better books, I think. Ignore the cover, it has aged about as well as its author. The words inside are not as bad as they might have been. It’s in French, so you might require a dictionary. Unless of course your interest in American Literature has been replaced by a keener study of the French language (again – I’m sorry) in which case you will find it pitifully easy to read. Happy Christmas, Hadley Dunn. My very best wishes, Hugo Bézier. Post-script: I am, in fact, Henri Jérôme. Un nom de plume, as you can see from the cover. Perhaps we could meet again in the New Year. The days seem awfully tired without you.

Hadley flicked through the novel and saw the tightly packed type, blotchy and aged. She wished she knew enough French to be able to read it. Perhaps she would take it home with her at Christmas, armed with a dictionary. She flicked to the back and saw the author photograph: a thirty-something man but unmistakably Hugo. The slant of his jaw was the same, as were the roguishly hooded eyes; had the picture been in full colour, they would have beamed treacle-brown. He wore a black roll-neck, a perfect sweep of blond hair falling across his forehead. His lip was curled with insouciance.
Henri Jérôme.
Hadley wondered why he’d chosen that name, for it seemed unremarkable to her. Perhaps she would ask him, if they met again. In the New Year, when she would perfect an insouciant smile of her own and say,
Actually, Hugo, you were right. Joel was only interested in one thing. I’m not half as nice as you thought I was
.
And they’d laugh and he’d shake his head indulgently and they’d order a couple of stiff drinks.