Harm's Way by Celia Walden Page A

how many times I re-ran the evening in my mind, the truth was that when Beth had interrupted my conversation with Christian, ushering us out of the kitchen, for a split second I had hated her.
    When she called by the flat on Sunday night looking pallid and wanton after a weekend spent in and out of bed withChristian, I noticed that her eyes had acquired a glaze nothing could penetrate. We sat, shoulders touching, on my window-box-sized balcony. And while Beth kept her excitement warm by recounting snippets of her conversations with Christian, compliments he had given her (‘He says he likes the birth mark I have on the inside of my thigh; he says it looks like Italy’) and described, with a complete lack of modesty, the sexual epiphany she had experienced, I stared across at the dirty plastictubing of the Centre Pompidou, wondering how on earth they would ever clean it, and how dull women can become when speaking about the objects of their affections.
    That evening something in our friendship was displaced, though only one of us felt it.

Four
    Summer was in full flow, and Paris was heady with expectation. Beth had kept her honeymoon period with Christian to an impressive minimum. Although the two had more or less vanished for ten days, her gregarious nature soon prevailed. When the four of us began to meet up again in the evenings I had felt as much excitement about our outings as a teenager preparing for a date; I never asked myself why, or whom I wanted to impress more: Beth or Christian.
    I had not exchanged a single private word with him since the night of the party, having put the tensions of that night down to drunken paranoia. I knew no more about Christian than the little Beth had told me, but I did know that she, like all excessively kind women, liked to collect broken men. Christian was no different: his father had left when he was twelve, leaving him to support his mother and a younger half-brother, now a small-time drug dealer living in one of the vast concrete jungles on the outskirts of Paris that the government had built to deal with their immigration problem. Eyes glossy with admiration, Beth had told me that every month, Christian sent his mother over half the salary he earned managing a large, impersonal restaurant in Bastille, subsisting on what remained by living in a tiny
‘chambre de bonne’
in the sixteenth. One night, when walking behind them to a café on boulevard Voltaire, I noticed Christian’s gently tapered fingers, their tips iridescent on the naked small of Beth’s back where her shirt had ridden up. I feltoddly indignant at their apparently genuine attachment to each other after so little time. Unable to understand the sourness of my emotions towards the first friend I had come to love, and increasingly crazed by the nocturnal banging on the wall, I decided to seek out a diversion.
    That Thursday was funk night at the Rex Club. Stephen and I had arranged to join the others there after a brief catch-up of our own. A quick drink beforehand turned into several mojitos so strong they made your eyes water, and by the time we decided to leave, alcohol had stolen two hours from the evening. It was well past eleven. Conscious that my gestures were extravagant and my laughter too loud, I followed the blue strips of lighting lining the staircase into the club. Beth and Christian were standing, self-conscious in their sobriety, by the back wall. Annoyed by the obvious dislocation of our moods, I was pleased to spot Anne-Sophie, a girl from the museum gift shop, dancing with a large group of friends in the middle of the floor. I made my way over to her, and with a nod of recognition, placed myself on the fringe of their circle.
    Opposite me was Vincent, a friend of Anne-Sophie’s I’d met once before and registered as having something attractive about him, if only in the shadowed groove of the line leading from his nose to the central join of his top lip. Taller than most