Invincible Summer, page 8
Eva didn’t feel happy though. She felt stunned and nauseous.
‘So are you really not having a stag do?’ Eva asked Benedict as they picked their way through the long grass on Hampstead Heath ten days after the invitation had dropped through her door.
He smiled. ‘This is it. This is my stag do. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do. Besides, I’m not risking letting the Plasma Physics boys organise something. It’s all good fun till you wake up in Utah in bed with a dead Girl Guide.’
‘Oh, come on.’ Eva gave him a gentle shove with her shoulder. ‘A walk on the Heath isn’t a stag do. At least let me invite Sylvie and Lucien out for drinks. Who knows when you’ll next get the chance to spend time with us once Lydia has the old ball and chain around your ankle.’
‘Well, yes, it could be a while,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve got another bit of news, you see. After the wedding we’re moving to Switzerland.’
Eva stopped walking and looked at him, the cheerful expression she had been effortfully sustaining slipping a little. Not only was he getting married, but he was emigrating. She couldn’t be losing him more completely.
‘So you got the CERN post? Congratulations,’ she said bleakly. ‘You deserve it. And Lydia’s going with you? Doesn’t she mind putting her own life on hold?’
‘She’s decided to take some time off. She’s just finishing her PhD too, and even for a Solid State bod it’s a pretty exciting opportunity to spend time at CERN. We’re at a stage where the theorists don’t know which direction to go in and the results from the Large Hadron Collider will determine that. It might come up with a real surprise but whatever we find, it’s going to keep physicists off street corners for a long time to come.’
They were walking past the Highgate ponds now, the water gleaming in the autumn sunshine, and through the hedge they glimpsed an old man of perhaps seventy diving into the men’s swimming pond.
‘What a nutter,’ commented Eva to save herself having to think of something positive to say about how exciting it would indeed be for Lydia at CERN. ‘I know it’s warm for September, but can you imagine doing that?’
Benedict laughed. ‘I can because I have. My father used to take us when we were kids. The house where I grew up is just the other side of the heath though my parents spend more time in the country than here these days. The real hard-core swim in there in all year round you know.’
‘Hugo used to take you? I thought the men’s pond was a bit of a gay pickup place? No offence, your parents are great, but I can just imagine him fulminating against the queers. God, do you remember how he thought that being vegetarian meant I was some sort of cult member?’ Eva laughed.
‘Funnily enough he doesn’t seem too bothered by that sort of thing. I know he’s a bit of an old reactionary but you have to bear in mind that he was at Eton in the bad old days of fagging so a spot of homosexuality would be unlikely to shock him, though of course he’d think it terribly bad form to actually speak about it. She’d never admit it, but my mother would probably be more scandalised. She’s enquired rather pointedly about what she calls my lifestyle more than once over the last few years, so I think Lydia has come as quite a relief to her. She was no doubt trying to convey that she’d love and support me even if I did bat for the other team, but she looked like she was about to have an attack of the vapours. I’ve tried to explain often enough that I’m just crap at girls.’ He let out what seemed to Eva a rather sad little laugh. ‘God knows it took long enough after that Corfu holiday for her to stop asking hopefully after you.’
She jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘And after all the reassurance you gave me about how they wouldn’t think anything of it if you brought a friend.’
‘Well, I wanted you to come, and you wouldn’t have if I’d told you that my family had been asking to meet you for ages and would descend on you like a pack of raptors, would you?’
The thought of that summer seemed very far away to Eva now, part of a more innocent era when the world sat more lightly on her shoulders. They wandered on, weaving away from the tarmacked path and across the spongy grass until they neared the crest of the hill.
‘Shall we sit down for a minute?’ Eva said. ‘I love the view from up here.’
They lowered themselves onto the grass and looked out past the ponds towards the old Witanhurst mansion and St Michael’s church spire. It was only four in the afternoon but already the sky was hinting at dusk with a streak of purple, a gentle reminder that a warm week in September didn’t mean that autumn could be staved off forever.
‘I guess there won’t be many more chances to do this,’ said Eva, leaning back and propping herself up on her elbows. ‘Hanging out just the two of us, I mean, doing nothing in particular, just wandering around talking about anything and everything. I guess this is what happens when you grow up. People drift off in their own directions. Sometimes I look around at my job and my flat and my car and can’t believe that people have mistaken me for an adult and let me have all of this. But this is it, isn’t it? We’re the grown-ups now.’
Benedict shifted so that he was facing her instead of the view. ‘Yes, I suppose we are. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but some days I’m petrified. I’ve spent the whole of my adult life to date as a student and now I’m going off to a new job in a new country with a new wife.’
Eva sighed. ‘It really is the end of an era, isn’t it? Or maybe the era already ended without our quite having realised it. I’m going to miss you, Benedict. In a funny way, I think I already do even though you’re right here beside me.’
They suddenly seemed to be very close together without either of them having moved.
Are you really going to do it again? Benedict was asking himself. Let her walk away? You’ve spent years regretting not kissing her—do you want it to be the rest of your life? Shit, but Lydia, you’re marrying Lydia, and you love her and she’s…she’s…
And all the time he was thinking these things his mouth was inching lower and Eva was raising hers and once their lips were touching it would be crazy, impossible not to kiss her, was he expected to just sit there with his face on hers and not move his lips like some sort of mad statue, he wasn’t made of stone and now he was kissing her and it felt…
‘Shit!’ yelled Benedict and sprang back, pushing Eva away so hard that she almost rolled backwards into the grass.
‘What?’
‘This! We can’t do this! What are we doing? We can’t do this.’
‘God, I thought you’d been stung by a bee or something. Okay look, calm down, let’s sit on this bench and talk.’
But Benedict was up on his feet and pacing now, hands pressed to his temples.
‘Benedict, this isn’t all bad. It’s not great timing, but it’s happened. And we both wanted it to happen.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
Eva took a deep breath. ‘No, I know, there’s Lydia. And the wedding. Benedict, I know this is the worst possible time for me to say this, but do you really want to go through with it? I’ve got no right to say this, but since I knew you were marrying her I’ve felt, well, bereft. I thought you’d be there forever but now I’m losing you and I haven’t been able to sleep for wondering, what the hell are we doing? Should we be together? And I know it’s impossible, that there’s Lydia and the wedding and CERN, but….’
Benedict stopped pacing and swung round to face her. ‘Fuck you, Eva, fuck you,’ he shouted, bringing startled tears to her eyes. ‘Why would you do this to me now? You could have done it any time in the last seven years and I’d have been the happiest man on earth, but now?’
She reached out and tried to take his hand. ‘Benedict, I know there couldn’t be a worse time but, oh God, do we want to regret not doing this for the rest of our lives?’
He wrenched his hand away. ‘Actually there could be a worse time, or at least, this is a worse time than you can possibly imagine. Lydia’s pregnant Eva, she’s pregnant. We’re having a baby. And I love her, and I love that baby and no matter how many years I’ve spent pining for you, it was never real. You were always off doing something else, looking for something else, and you always will be. But this, Lydia, the baby, this is real. You’ve never been anything more than a fantasy for me and now it’s time to grow up.’
Eva felt a chasm open up inside her chest. ‘God, Benedict, I didn’t know, I swear if I’d known she was pregnant…Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘We haven’t told anyone, not our families, no one. It’s the twelve-week scan on Thursday. You don’t tell people till after that.’ He rubbed his eyes in a suddenly crumpled-looking face. ‘Look, I just can’t do this. I’ve got to go.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’ Eva was crying now. ‘Please don’t go, we can talk about this. I’m so sorry. I’m not going to make this hard for you. I don’t even have to come to the wedding.’
‘How’s it going to look if you suddenly pull out of the wedding? If you’ve ever been a friend to me you’ll come and you’ll be happy for me, for us. And for God’s sake don’t tell anyone about this, not even Sylvie, just forget it.’ His voice grew quieter as he spoke, and she watched as his anger was replaced by calm resolve. ‘You know I care about you, Eva, but it has to be just as a friend now. Things have changed and this is how it has to be.’
He leant down and kissed her forehead, then turned and walked away. She watched him go, wracked with shock and shame, heart pounding painfully inside her rib cage. Eva lowered herself onto a nearby bench and watched him grow smaller as he strode away from her down the hill. For a long time after he’d finally disappeared she remained sitting there alone, letting the air darken around her and her hands grow cold and her mind go numb.
Chapter 11
Cotswolds, October 2001
ON THE DAY of the wedding Eva drove out to the village in the Cotswolds with Sylvie in the front passenger seat and Lucien and his plus-one in the back. Chas, as she introduced herself whilst clambering into the back of Eva’s car, was a six-foot podium dancer from one of Lucien’s increasingly successful club nights.
‘As in “…and Dave”?’ Eva had joked. ‘Seventies pop-rock duo credited with popularising the musical style colloquially known as “rockney”?’ she added in desperation when that failed to elicit a laugh, but Chas had just stared at her blankly and then shifted over to allow Lucien to ooze in beside her with a cat-that-got-the-cream look on his face.
Lucien and Chas were in an extremely intimate relationship. Eva knew this because they’d spent much of the two-hour drive being extremely intimate on the back seat of her car, until she’d been forced to tilt the rear-view mirror away and turn up the radio in order to stifle the steadily building urge to swerve into a tree.
They were booked into the country spa hotel where the reception was taking place, and as they approached the Georgian manor house along the gravel drive, sandstone walls glowing golden in the sun, Lucien let out a low whistle.
‘They’re certainly doing it in style. Not bad for a shotgun wedding.’
Eva had to admit that he was right. She had certainly never been the sort to fantasise about her wedding day, what with growing up with Keith’s lectures on gender oppression and the patriarchal nature of marriage, but if she’d given it any thought this would have been just the sort of place she’d have wanted to do it.
It was a relief to finally arrive so that she could escape the car to go and get changed in the room she was now apparently sharing with Sylvie. Eva had booked two rooms for the trip, waving away Sylvie’s faint mutters about repaying her. She knew that Sylvie couldn’t have afforded to come if she’d had to pay for the hotel so taking care of the booking had seemed the easiest way to avoid any awkwardness. But what hadn’t occurred to her was that Lucien would bring a date, so that she would end up sharing a twin room and shelling out the best part of two hundred quid for him to get his rocks off. The thought made her seethe. Dressed for the wedding, they reconvened in the hotel lobby where Lucien, clad in a foppish sky-blue designer suit, was leaning against an enormous carved wooden fireplace, somehow looking at once utterly ludicrous and devastatingly handsome.
‘Shall we?’ he said, proffering Eva the arm that didn’t have Chas hanging from it in a gold lamé dress.
The ceremony took place in an old chapel half a mile away, sunlight trickling in through stained glass windows and threadbare old prayer cushions hanging from the backs of the pews. Eva had lain awake in her bed the night before with a knot in her stomach thinking about what it would be like to watch Benedict say his vows but sitting here now, she found herself feeling remarkably detached. It was all so surreal and removed from their real lives, Lydia with her bump just visible through her roman-style gown, luminous with pregnancy or bridal joy, Benedict stumbling over his words but generally looking happy and a bit dazed. Eva found herself feeling strangely peaceful, perhaps because of the calm of the chapel, or perhaps because of the finality of Benedict actually being married to somebody else, the relief that comes of being behind a closed door.
After the wedding breakfast Benedict’s brother Harry, who was his best man, made a speech that trod a deft line between joking that the marriage had been prompted by the imminent arrival and implying that it would have been only a matter of time anyway, and then the music had started up, allowing Eva to take a much-needed breather to compose herself in the bathroom. She stood at the basin washing her hands and examining her weary face in the mirror, assessing the cumulative damage from an eighty-hour working week topped off with a good four or five glasses of champagne. Even to her own eyes she looked tired and sad. She pulled a few faces at her reflection and then practised a smile. Only a few more hours to get through before she could slink off to her room and then the whole ordeal would be over and she could go back to her life, which would, after all, be much the same as it had been before the wedding invitation had arrived.
It didn’t feel like it was going to be the same, though. It felt as though she was staring down the barrel of a long, lonely winter, and perhaps even a long, lonely life of regretting having been too stupid to know what she had until it was lost. This too shall pass, she reminded herself. She wouldn’t always be drunk and tired and emotional. New days would roll by, new men would come and go. That was life: you put one foot in front of the other. She was just steeling herself to rejoin the fray when a cubicle door swung open behind her and Lydia staggered out.
‘Oh hi,’ squeaked Eva, sounding artificially bright. And then, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, ‘Congratulations. How does it feel to be Mrs Waverley?’
‘The Honorable Mrs Benedict Waverley, to be precise,’ said Lydia, coming over to the sink next to her and rinsing out her mouth with a handful of water from the tap. ‘And right at this moment, it feels utterly nauseating if you must know.’
Eva tried a joke. ‘Well, Benedict has been known to have that effect on women.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Lydia without actually laughing. ‘No, it’s the morning sickness. Except that’s the biggest lie in history, because it doesn’t begin and end in the morning, or if it does it’s followed by the afternoon sickness. Which lasts just until the evening sickness kicks in.’
‘Oh. Sorry. You’d never know it to look at you. You were positively radiant today in church.’
‘That’s just the sweat.’ Lydia wiped her brow and underarms with a paper towel. ‘Another thing they don’t tell you about pregnancy, the amount you perspire. Plus, I gained a certain sheen from throwing up five minutes before the ceremony.’
‘Oh dear. In any case, the chapel was beautiful,’ Eva said, clutching at straws.
Lydia brightened. ‘It was, wasn’t it? If it had been up to me we’d have just run off and done it in Vegas, but I’m really glad that we did it this way now. I wasn’t sure about going for the whole church thing at first, but you know how Benedict is about all that.’
Eva shot her a quizzical look. ‘I don’t, actually. I mean, I didn’t know it was a big deal to him. It was Benedict who was keen to have a church wedding?’
‘Oh yes. Hugely important to him. I found it a bit strange at first because let’s face it, you don’t meet many religious physicists, but he absolutely insisted. I thought that your little gang was as thick as thieves, I’m surprised you wouldn’t know that about him.’
‘Well, I suppose we don’t know him as well as you do, obviously,’ Eva said, adding internally, or anything like as well as I thought I did, as it turns out.
The first few bars of Spandau Ballet’s Gold floated in from the dance floor.
‘God, this DJ. Where did my mother find him? Still, it seems like everyone’s up and dancing so he must be doing something right. Better get back out there.’ Lydia took Eva’s hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘I’m glad we had the chance to have a chat, I do want to get to know my husband’s friends better. You’ll have to come out for a weekend once we’re settled in Geneva.’ She swept away, leaving Eva mumbling something about how nice that would be.
Back in the ballroom Marina was working the room like a pro, towing a visibly reluctant Hugo behind her. The long, cowl-necked russet dress she had chosen for the occasion was draped glamorously over her shoulders, a rather fashion-forward selection for the mother of the groom, Eva thought, but of course perfectly in tune with the season, and beautifully offset by a messy chignon of grey-blonde hair.
‘Eva, my dear, how lovely to see you again,’ she cried on spotting her. ‘Benedict tells us you’re a rising star in the City these days. It’s always marvellous to see one of us ladies giving the other side a run for their money.’
‘Well, “rising star” might be a bit of an exaggeration,’ Eva smiled, genuinely pleased to see them. ‘But yes, the job’s going pretty well. Exciting that Benedict’s off to CERN.’
