A Heart Bent Out of Shape by Emylia Hall Read Free Book Online Page A

town, where they strolled the leaf-blown streets and walked beneath the robotic structures of shutdown chair lifts. Jackets and scarves, unnecessary in the lowlands, were hurriedly pulled on. Soon, they all scattered, lured in different directions. Bruno hiked the steep stretch to a turreted hotel that clung to the edges of the high slopes. Jenny went to a gift shop, where she shook row after row of snow globes and chose a stuffed bear in Lederhosen as a gift for a niece. Chase sat on a bench in the chalet-lined main street, sketching in the notebook he carried, looking distinctly urban in his navy parka. He curved an arm around his picture as Hadley passed. Kristina found a clothing boutique, and twined real furs about her shoulders, turning in a mirror to admire herself as a white-haired assistant stooped and smiled. Hadley watched her for a while then wandered off on her own too.
    She bought a postcard with bent edges, a replica vintage picture. It showed a woman in a sporty pose, leaning on her skis. She wore a knitted sweater and had a red scarf tied jauntily at her neck. Her face was turned to the sun, and an unending blue sky fell behind her. Hadley wrote her card at a table in a bakery, as a spinach tart wilted beside her and her hot chocolate formed a slippery skin. Without the snow, it feels like we’re here when we shouldn’t be , she wrote. It feels like a privilege and a trespass .She didn’t know whom she was writing it for, not her parents, certainly. She tucked it into the pages of a book in her bag. She bought another card on her way out, showing a marmot, a mountain creature somewhere between a squirrel and a guinea pig, with jagged front teeth and a goofy grin. That one would be for them, she decided; her brother Sam would love it. She imagined it propped on their mantelpiece at home, beside the one she’d sent of Lac Léman. ‘Our daughter’s spending the year abroad,’ they’d tell their visitors, with a puff of pride and only the smallest creak of sadness. Sam would stand on tiptoes to pull faces at the marmot.
    A privilege and a trespass . Hadley turned over the words that had come to mind. She wondered if they were meant for more than this ski town, with its shuttered hotels and padlocked restaurants, suspended in the no-man’s land of autumn. What if it was the whole year abroad? She liked the feeling of having chosen to be somewhere, rather than it having chosen you, but Lausanne wasn’t quite real to her yet. She felt like a child who had slipped through the gate of a secret garden; the grass underfoot was soft, she could hear all the birds singing, but she couldn’t help looking over her shoulder, wondering if, at any moment, she’d be spotted; an interloper in paradise. Kristina seemed to have no such qualms. She tripped about with a happy sense of entitlement. She’d told Hadley that she had spent the summer on the French Riviera, from which Lausanne was a mere train ride away; one of those fast French trains you read about in the papers, that leant close to the rushing ground, champagne corks popping in the restaurant car. Perhaps to Kristina, Lausanne was just another beauty spot in an already scenic life, between the painted Danish houses and palm-shaded terraces of St Tropez. Hadley liked the idea that whatever happened that year, Lausanne would remain hers. She would always be able to talk about ‘her year in Switzerland’, and she’d feel like someone different then. Would her skin be sun-blushed golden? Her pose nonchalant and cultured? The seasoned Francophile, with a hatful of traveller’s tales, and thanks to Kristina and her promise, a skier’s swagger. Or would she be the same as she always was, just possessed of new memory; a perfectly contained world that she could take out and shake like a snow globe whenever she wanted? There would be something different. She already knew that much.
    Later, they all regrouped in an inn on the fringes of the town, and drank pale