A Heart Bent Out of Shape (6 page)

Unlike Caroline Dubois, Joel Wilson matched every idea. His muscular frame was clearly delineated by his white T-shirt, and a lock of dark hair rolled across his forehead. His look dared the camera to take his picture. He perhaps wasn’t immediately handsome, not to ordinary eyes, but he seemed to have conviction, a kind of strength, that made even this flattened print of him, this two-dimensional likeness, difficult to resist. She wondered if, in class, he would recognise her as she had recognised him. That first night he must have guessed her to be a newly arrived student for she was so obvious, wasn’t she? Her loose band of friends, her roving eyes, her self-consciousness that seemed to seep from every pore; a longing for experience that marked out all the green girls and boys. And yet there had been no distance between them, no line of authority marking the edges of their conversation. On the street they had seemed like equals, fairly matched, and all the while his identity had remained a mystery.

Hadley didn’t have to wait very long, for Joel Wilson’s first lecture was that Friday morning. Overnight the seasons had turned; it was a day that owed more to the approaching winter than the last days of summer, but the air was still bright with sunshine and the sky a new painted blue. Kristina had left early for class and the others seemed to be sleeping in, so Hadley travelled to campus alone.

The bus ride took her along sweeping residential streets. She could see into passing windows, and she liked to imagine the people who lived inside those stately blocks. She pictured their elegant feet treading over the parquet floors, their arms throwing open the casement windows to greet the day. There would be old ladies whose hands creaked with the weight of costume jewellery, possessed of small dogs with peeping tongues. Young men, soulful and accomplished, their lives complete except for the love of an English girl. Her imagination always grew skittish at this point. Hadley didn’t know what she wanted, only what she didn’t. No more childish college boys, with their drinking contests and dirty sheets, their deodorant stains and ill-written lecture notes. No more disappointment served in a chipped mug the next morning, and goodbyes that tasted of toothpaste and stale lager. She found herself wondering again about Kristina’s mention of Jacques. She didn’t seem like one half of a long-distance couple; there weren’t lengthy, teary telephone calls or piles of kiss-printed letters in her room. Nor did Kristina turn her head from the spry looks of Swiss boys. Hadley thought sometimes about raising the topic, saying his name out loud:
Jacques
.
Surely it wouldn’t be too much, just a conversation between two friends, both looking for reasons to say,
I know
and
me too
, the spaces between their lives ever closing. But upon this one subject Kristina still stayed tight-lipped.

‘If you talk about it, you’ll lose it,’ Joel Wilson told them. ‘Hemingway always believed that, and I’m with him.’

It was her first American Literature class and she had taken a seat somewhere near the middle, beside a ferrety-looking boy with an earnest stack of books.

‘I guess that makes this the shortest course at this college,’ he said, ‘and my job a whole lot easier.’

Hadley laughed, and her pen skidded on the page. The boy beside her turned to stare, his brow peaking quizzically. Joel Wilson glanced Hadley’s way and she smiled in acknowledgement. He nodded, briefly but perceptibly, in the way that you might if you were reminding yourself of something you already knew.

He had arrived five minutes late for his own lecture, shrugging his jacket from his shoulders on his way from the door, throwing his tattered briefcase at the lectern and narrowly missing it. He had shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and grinned at them all, as the contents of his case lay scattered on the floor.
The land of clocks and watches, and still I’m late
, he’d said.
What are you gonna do?
He was already unlike any of the teachers she’d had at school, and any of the lecturers in her first year at university. Hadley was on his side right from the beginning.

‘Where shall we start?’ he asked them, leaving beat pauses as though he was genuinely seeking their suggestions. ‘Here’s an idea. Let’s begin with the kind of attraction that can only end in misery. How does that sound? A romance, whose only consummation will be one of failure.’ He looked around the room as he spoke, and Hadley twitched in her seat. ‘Do you think you can handle that? Can your hearts bear the breaking? Okay, then. Let’s talk about
The Sun Also Rises
.’

Standing at the front of the class, Joel Wilson looked as if he knew a secret, and that if you listened carefully enough, he’d let you in on it. He had slides, and he clicked through them at a rapid pace and with staccato rhythm. Some showed sections of type, blown up and fuzzy at the edges. Some were photographs: the dazzling red of a torero’s cape, the neat bob of a woman’s head, sleek as a boy, Hemingway himself, the thrust of his chest, eyes like bullets. Joel, as he told them to call him, was fast on his feet, spinning on his heel whenever he wanted to make a point, almost seeming to pirouette his way across the room. But when he stopped still the world appeared to stop turning with him, and everybody held his gaze. Hadley wrote frantically, without ever looking down at the page for long. Later in the library she would try to decipher these notes and find it impossible. She would write it all out again from memory, hearing the thrum of Joel’s voice in her head. Especially the part where he talked about her.

‘I’ve got a class list here,’ he said. ‘Stand up, please, Hadley Dunn.’

Hadley felt her cheeks burn. She got up, knocking her pen to the floor as she did so. She couldn’t remember swapping names with him on the street.

‘You’re Hadley?’ he said. ‘I might have guessed. You’re aware of your namesake, I take it?’

It had been her mum’s idea, but was not due to any literary enthusiasms, as Joel Wilson must have imagined. Hadley had been the name of the singer in a pub band that was playing on the night her mum first met her dad. This other Hadley, a girl with bare feet and hair to her waist, had walked on to the stage, the microphone squeaking, and sung of love won and lost, in a voice that thrilled and haunted with equal measure. The story went that after her song, James Dunn had made his own professions of love at first sight, whispering into Hadley’s mum’s ear as she stood in line for a drink at the bar. The girl packed up her guitar and went back into the night, stardust in her wake, as the soon-to-be Dunns fell into the sweetest kiss they’d ever known. Hadley was the daughter of romantics, if not book lovers.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am.’

‘Then I’m pleased to have you in my class.’

His gaze cut her clean in two. Joel clapped his hands together and dismissed them, throwing in a breezy reminder about the upcoming drinks party. Hadley liked the fact that he hadn’t told the others his reason for singling her out; that Hadley was the name of Hemingway’s first wife. It was as though he expected them all to know already. Or if they didn’t, it didn’t matter anyway, because maybe you did lose things if you talked about them. As Hadley walked out of the room she felt the eyes of some of her classmates on her. She fiddled with her scarf and affected nonchalance. She didn’t dare look back to see if he was watching her too, but she felt somehow that he probably was. It was just like before, when he’d stood and smiled on the dark street, lighting his cigarette before turning away. She walked away now as she walked away then, a new kick in her step that was only obvious to those who knew to look.

five

In those early days and weeks, nights out would often last through till morning. Kristina and Hadley would come home in the pale pink dawn, sometimes accompanied by straggles of the others, a rambling Chase, a wan-cheeked Jenny, a lustrous Bruno. After one such night, Kristina and Hadley trailed back up the hill to Les Ormes
,
and there was serenity in the city’s stillness. The clamour and hot press of the club they had left behind was like a muddled dream. As they walked they both inhaled the morning air at exactly the same moment, then broke into criss-crossing laughter.

‘It feels so good, doesn’t it?’ said Kristina. ‘I swear I don’t get hangovers in Lausanne. The air’s so . . . what’s the word?
Restorative
.’

‘People used to do that, didn’t they? Go to a place to “take the air”. I like that. It’s so civilised.’

‘Maybe that’s what we’re doing here,’ said Kristina. ‘Taking the air. Recovering. Recuperating on the Swiss Riviera.’ She paused. ‘Hiding,’ she added.

Hadley thought of how the night before, they’d danced through the fountains of the Ouchy
waterfront, their jeans wet and slapping. How two boys had passed them in the library the next day and waved, calling,
Hey,
fountain girls
.

‘I don’t think anyone could accuse us of hiding,’ said Hadley, with a snicker of a laugh. She caught Kristina’s eye. ‘Definitely not.’

‘Maybe that’s the trouble, then.’

‘Jacques?’ she said, and it was the first time that she had mentioned him again.

Kristina made a small, exasperated noise and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She spun it round her fingers and fixed it with a clip.

‘Yes. No. I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Am I supposed to guess? Okay. He’s your boyfriend back in Copenhagen. A childhood sweetheart. Only now you’re here, and he’s not, you’re having second thoughts. Maybe like Jenny.’

‘Nothing like Jenny. And I don’t want you to guess.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘But why not? We’re friends, aren’t we?’

‘Friends?’ Kristina grabbed her hands and squeezed them. ‘Hadley, of course we are.’

‘Well, I don’t understand then.’

‘Shouldn’t some things just stay private?’

‘So it’s a secret?’

‘It’s not a secret. It’s just private.’

‘Okay,’ said Hadley. ‘It’s just, when you said before that it was a long story, it felt like maybe you wanted to tell.’

‘Not really,’ said Kristina. ‘But if I did, you’d be the first person . . .’

‘It’s okay,’ said Hadley, ‘you don’t have to say all that.’

‘You would be! Hadley, I promise you would. There’s no one else here I’d rather tell. You’re my best friend.’

Hadley felt a ripple of pleasure. Kristina had tossed it so lightly, yet it didn’t make it any less true. ‘Well, you’re mine too,’ she said back.

Kristina leant in and kissed her on the cheek. Her breath smelt of the sweet apple liqueur the barman had poured them to send them on their way. Her lips were cool as glass.

L’Institut Vaudois was a constant, the point to which they all returned, no matter how full their days and nights. One afternoon they met up after their classes had finished and Hadley suggested walking back into town. It would take them an hour and a half, perhaps more, but it was a brisk and beautiful day. Only the turning of the leaves on the trees, the canary-yellow patterns that stuck to the bottom of their shoes, gave away the true season. They came back into the outskirts of Lausanne through streets they had never walked before. They fell into slow step with an elderly lady and her lapdog, Hadley bending to ruffle the poodle’s ears as Kristina chattered away in fluid French. As their ways parted they wished each other
bonne journée
and walked on.

‘Your French is so good. Is Jacques . . .’

‘He’s Swiss,’ Kristina interrupted.

Hadley blinked. ‘Swiss?’ she said carefully, quietly, as though too much emphasis would send Kristina running.

‘Did I tell you that I spent the summer on the Riviera? By St Tropez?’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘That’s where I met him.’

‘But that’s so romantic.’

‘Not really. I think you’d disapprove of the whole thing.’

‘How could I disapprove?’

Kristina hesitated, and her lips moved, as though there were lots of things she could say but she chose just one.

‘Hadley, he’s married. And that’s why I can’t talk about it. Because it’s not right. None of it’s right.’

Hadley stared at her friend. She wanted to ask,
Why him? Why someone married?
but Kristina’s cheeks had turned so pale, and her eyes were suddenly so distant, that Hadley knew she meant it when she said she didn’t want to talk. She slipped her arm through Kristina’s and they walked on towards the town. Soon the hum of the approaching city, the rattling bicycle wheels, the wheezing buses, the clattering heels, filled the spaces in between.

Three weeks into term the English department at L’Institut Vaudois organised the promised drinks for students and faculty. They were held at a hotel on the shoreline, a place that from the outside promised some prestige and romance but inside had a faded, institutionalised quality. The hotel’s small bar was hired for the occasion, and about forty people crowded in among the wicker chairs and smeared glass tables. A thin-faced barman kept up with Joel’s bombastic flow of drinks orders, while Caroline moved with an airy sort of elegance, floating from student to student, exchanging a word here, a greeting there, never getting caught for too long. Joel, in contrast, was quickly buried by a clan of groupies: wilder boys who liked his style, and girls with heavy bangs and polo-necked sweaters, their chests criss-crossed with satchel straps. The bar’s thinly piped music was drowned out by loudly voiced opinions on everything from the better places in which they could be drinking to the merits of Byron over Shelley. The counter grew sticky with spilt drinks. Joel took off his jacket and threw it over a chair and Hadley saw the dark patches under the arms of his grey T-shirt, and the unexpected blueness of his leather belt. A girl wearing feathery earrings flittered her hands as she talked to him, twirling the ends of her hair with the tips of her fingers.

Hadley found herself trapped in a conversation about Shakespeare with a droning boy whose chin was stitched with the beginnings of a beard. He stood too close and insisted on tapping her arm with one finger every time he made a point. Earlier she’d spoken with a girl from Basel who’d introduced herself as Irene. She seemed sweet and unassuming, her eyes a cosy brown. She said she wanted to study abroad in England the following year, and when she spoke English it was perfect, and with a halfway American accent. Hadley tried to see the university that she had left behind through the eyes of a stranger. She pictured the tall blocks of student accommodation, separated by featureless hillocks and lines of spindly trees. The miles and miles of paint-scratched railing that anchored fallen bicycles, flapping notices advertising club nights and fundraising efforts, and, once, a dazed Fresher wearing only his underpants, handcuffed by his new friends, the steam of a night’s booze rising from his sleeping form. What else? She pictured the library café with its gritty Eccles cakes and burning metal teapots, and the old town that was a short bus ride from the concrete campus, where ancient buildings clung to the peripheries of a sixties high street. The pub that everyone went to, purported to be one of the most ancient in England, where beef and ale pies were served to the tune of whizzing, whirring fruit machines, and was also the setting for one of the worst dates of her life.

‘Don’t you like England, at all?’ the girl had asked Hadley, her face crackling with amusement.

‘No, it’s not that,’ began Hadley.

‘It’s okay,’ she interrupted, ‘you don’t have to answer. I know what it’s like when we talk about the place we come from. I could tell you about the snobby students in Lausanne. The impenetrable cliques. The foreign professors who come here only to play, not work. The classrooms that are crammed full of too many students. The exams that last for eight hours, more designed for torture than for testing. The drug addicts who sit every day on the church steps of Bel Air, everybody pretending they aren’t there. The way anyone who isn’t Swiss doesn’t quite cut it, you know, isn’t quite the first-rate citizen. But, Hadley – that’s your name, isn’t it? I know you won’t see these things. I know that’s not the place you want.’

‘Is that what you really think?’ said Hadley.

‘I love Lausanne,’ said the girl, ‘I’m just saying. Just offering a different view.’

‘Kind of a bleak one.’

The girl shrugged. ‘Just playing devil’s advocate. I can’t stop you from thinking something’s perfect.’

‘But I don’t.’

‘I’ll tell you who is perfect, though. We’re in the same class, aren’t we? American Lit?’

‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ said Hadley, cutting her short. ‘On any of it.’

‘Oh, sure you haven’t,’ she said, offering a smile that was somewhere between a twinkle and a sneer.

The Shakespeare fan interrupted them then and the girl from Basel moved away. Hadley looked for her later in the evening and saw her laughing in a group, talking Swiss-German double fast, holding her thin-stemmed glass between slimmer fingers. Hadley drank another glass of wine as she watched her, imagining her in the Union bar back home. Would she revel in lunchtimes of tuna-fish jacket potatoes and weak coffee? Evenings of cheap pints and neon bottles? Would she join huddled groups: the theatre club students tossing their hair and laughing in screeches; the hockey girls, stout-legged and hard-faced; the science boys, in misshapen T-shirts and with faces scotched with acne? Would she declare it all charming, and be embraced, in turn, for her own exoticness? The thought that Hadley could find out the answer to these questions, for next year she’d be back home too, her spell in Lausanne over, startled her into a mild form of action. As the evening wound to a close and the barman made ready to pull the shutters she sought out Joel Wilson.

‘Do you think it’s naïve to believe in the good of a place?’ Hadley said, the words falling a little loosely from her lips.

‘The good of a place?’ he said. ‘That’s an interesting question, Hadley.’ His voice was gravelly from talking and his eyes shone with the temporary light of whisky and soda. ‘Have you been here all night?’ he asked.

‘I have.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.’

This didn’t feel true. He had seen her just as she had seen him, but she didn’t say that. ‘You were always surrounded,’ she said instead.

‘You’ve caught me as I’m just about to leave.’

‘You’re leaving your own party early?’

‘It’s not my party,’ he said. ‘It’s your party. It’s for you students to get to know one another. And I’m not sure it’s early any more.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Hadley. ‘We’d better stop talking. We’re breaking all the rules.’

‘But I haven’t answered your question yet.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘Hadley,’ he said, tapping her arm just at the elbow, ‘I’d go so far as to say that ignoring what other people think is the trick of life itself.’

Instead of it irking her, as had the touch of the boy earlier, she found herself noting it, already knowing she’d want to remember it later.

‘I’m not sure that’s what I asked,’ she said.

He laughed, and she saw the tiny scar that ran above his lip, a slight puckering of the skin.

‘Do you remember speaking to me on the street, before term started?’ she said in a rush.

‘Hmm?’

He leant closer to hear her in the din.

‘It was my first night here. I was walking home on my own. You said you were worried.’

‘That doesn’t sound like me.’

‘It was you. I didn’t expect your voice, it stayed with me.’

‘What was unexpected about it? That it came at all, or that when it did I was American?’

‘I don’t know. It was my first night, so I guess everything was unexpected. It was all new, exciting.’

‘Exciting?’

‘Afterwards I decided you were probably from the university.’

‘You thought about it afterwards?’

‘Definitely a tutor. You had that air about you.’

‘I’m willing to bet that’s not what you thought.’

‘Well, you don’t look like a banker.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

It seemed as though he was about to say something else and then changed his mind. He glanced at his watch.

‘I’ve got to run, unfortunately,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t have more time.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘See you in class?’

‘Of course,’ said Hadley.

As soon as he left, the party was over. She rode the bus home to Les Ormes, through the first splashes of a night-time downpour. Rain streaked the window and she thought again of the brief pressure of his fingers on her arm. It was so small a thing and yet she hung on to it, without quite knowing why.