Harm's Way by Celia Walden Page A

waiting for something, I knew not what, to be said.
    â€˜I can see that – and I love hearing about you doing all thisstuff, sounding so … energised, I suppose. Look: she seems fine, it’s just that … does she care much about anything except having a good time?’ Beth snorted with laughter.
    â€˜Probably not! She’s eighteen, Ruth. Can you remember what you were like at eighteen? I can, and God, it was a good place to be. And there’s another thing: she …’
    â€˜What are you doing, Anna?’
    It was Christian, bringing with him a breeze of cold tobacco.
    â€˜Jesus, you made me jump. I’m just checking out the music down here.’
    â€˜You go first.’
    I made sure that Ruth knew, by my smile as I poured her a glass of rosé she didn’t want, that I had heard everything. Something had crossed her face when the two of us had appeared from below, and I felt confident that she would be less vocal with some of her opinions during the rest of her stay in Paris. I fell asleep that night wondering how Beth had ended her sentence, replaying her words in my head, and imagining the rise and fall of that lightly freckled shoulder beside me.
    The biggest celebration of the French year, Bastille Day, fell on the Saturday that Ruth went back to Dublin. My sense of jubilation was increased by the knowledge that I would be spending it with Beth and Christian, among others. The whole weekend was a
fête nationale.
The streets were lined with red, white and blue, and after the presidential parade down the Champs-Elysées, every bar in the city opened its doors to revellers, serving up trays of
eau de vie.
    Vincent and I joined the rest of the group after lunch, and our small party began to straggle up the banks of the river towards the Champs-Elysées. Beth had had the foresight to arrange for us all to go to the Bastille party being held at the Salle Wagram, a huge eighteenth-century converted theatre and music hall. Nearly a thousand people were expected, and the dress code was strictly red, white and blue. I’d bought a blue dress that buttoned down the front, retouched a pair of battered red Minnie Mouse-style shoes found in a bargain basket at a second-hand shop, and completed the outfit with a white ribbon in my hair.
    As usual, the men had made the minimum effort, simply wearing striped shirts and jeans, but Beth drew glances in the street, fresh and beautiful in a 1950s-style blue and white polka-dot dress with a red sash that enticed the eye to her neat waist. I could smell the heat of the midday sun in my hair, rich and pungent like a sunbathing cat’s fur, and a rivulet of perspiration had already formed between my breasts. Although Beth, regretting her choice of shoes, clung to my arm through the crowds, her skin was not clammy like mine, which stuck to hers, reawakening waves of her scent with every perspiring step. Even in pain, she was dignified in the animalistic way that only women can be, and I felt weak in the face of it. There was something about Beth that made you want to feed off her strength: I derived more pleasure looking at her than I did watching Christian that day.
    Instinctively we both stopped walking as we saw that the normally uniform grey upward expanse of the Champs stretching before us was filled with an impressionistic mass of daubed colour, cluttered with people of all sizes.
    The men carried children on their shoulders, while rows of damp, pink faces shone around steaming crêperie stalls. Periscopes being sold on street corners, in order to afford onlookers a better view, captured solid gold prisms of light and projected them randomly across the crowds. Stephen had made sangria in an old two-litre Evian bottle which began to be passed around as soon as we’d found a spot by the roadside. Standing in front of Vincent I could feel his body giving off heat, while the arms around my waist could have been anyone’s for all