Invincible Summer, page 9
‘Isn’t it? We’re terribly proud of him, and of course it’s lovely to see him so happy with Lydia. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, of course, but aren’t all the best romances?’
Was it Eva’s imagination or was this just a little too pointed?
‘Thought it might be you, actually, at one point,’ chuckled Hugo.
Eva struggled to prevent her facial features from arranging themselves into a look of mortification but Marina had already dug a sharp elbow into her husband’s ribcage and begun to tug him away, reaching back to pat Eva’s arm and say that they would have to catch up again later and oh, was that Martin Wentworth-Oxley over there?
Out on the dancefloor, Lucien and Chas were grinding their pelvises together to a medley of eighties classics. Eva looked around for Sylvie but couldn’t see her anywhere so she wandered out onto the terrace, moving to the far end away from the muffled thud of the music and the glow of the lights from the ballroom doors. She dug a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it, blowing the smoke in satisfying jets out into the darkness. Eva had barely smoked in the last couple of years but she’d had a premonition that she might need a cigarette before the day was up, and had bought a packet of Marlboro Lights and a cheap lighter when they’d stopped for petrol on the motorway. Now she savoured the treacly rasp of tobacco hitting the back of her throat and the welcome light-headedness that followed.
‘Room for one more?’
The voice startled her, making Eva jump and spin around so fast that she almost knocked the lit end of her cigarette off on the morning-suited figure behind her.
‘Benedict! Christ, you startled me, creeping up like a bloody ninja penguin. I thought I was alone. What are you doing out here?’
‘Just getting some air. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for Agadoo hot on the heels of Love Shack.’ He reached out and gently extracted the cigarette from between her fingers before taking a long pull on it.
‘You won’t be able to do that for much longer.’
‘I know. Not once the baby comes. Lydia would kill me now, actually, if she caught me,’ he added, exhaling through his nostrils so that the smoke emerged in two swirling streams.
‘She looked lovely today,’ Eva told him, trying to inject some sincerity and goodwill into her voice. ‘You both did. I’m really happy for you. I don’t know if I should even be saying this on your wedding day, but Benedict, I know things got a bit awkward there for a moment, but I’ve got my head straight now. You’re leaving soon and I so want it to be on a good note.’
‘Thanks.’ He nudged her with his shoulder. ‘Thanks for saying that, and for coming today. I’m really happy and I’m glad you’re happy for me.’
Eva shrugged. ‘How could I not be? It only hit me today how close you must be to Lydia. She mentioned something about how important it was to you to get married in a church. I didn’t even really know you were religious, Benedict. After all these years.’ She tried to keep her tone light and not allow a note of reproach to creep into it.
‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘it’s mostly not been a big deal in my life, just something I grew up with I suppose. Anyway, I’d never have mentioned it when we were at uni because I’d never have heard the last of it from you lot, particularly Lucien, who, by the way, appears to have brought an extremely drunk stripper as his plus-one. Last I saw she was practically giving a lapdance to my highly appreciative father while my mother expended all her energies pretending to be deep in conversation with Great-Aunt Gwendoline.’
‘Ah. That would be Chas. She’s a podium dancer, apparently. Just be thankful that you aren’t the one driving them back tomorrow. If I have to put up with another two hours of dry-humping on my back seat I may be forced to set fire to the upholstery.’
Benedict took another drag and handed the cigarette back to Eva and they both stood in silence for a minute, leaning forward against the balustrade and looking out across the darkened gardens.
‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot more recently, I suppose,’ Benedict said eventually, prompting Eva to spend a confused few seconds trying to work out why he would have been thinking about Lucien frotting on the back seat of her car. ‘The religious side of things, I mean. I’m about to become a father of an actual baby. As we stand here a tiny human with my DNA is growing from nothing. That seems like a sort of miracle. An everyday miracle to be sure, but then, perhaps the miracle is that something so astonishing, so remarkable, can just happen every day, that something so miraculous is available to everyone, rich and poor, no qualifications needed.
‘I know you probably just find all this weird. Do I believe in the absolute specifics of Christianity, the virgin birth and the Resurrection and all that? Maybe not. But I do believe there’s a mystery at the heart of human existence that I don’t have the answer to, or even the tools to answer. I suppose I’m with Shakespeare: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ He retrieved the cigarette from Eva’s hand and took another drag before passing it back. ‘And that’s the nice thing about the Anglican church if you ask me. It doesn’t really bother to insist that everyone ascribes to a rigid set of doctrines. Some people think that makes it a tepid, wishy-washy religion but to me that’s actually its strength. Everyone has their own conception of God and mine is to do with a sort of awe at the balance of the natural world that only deepens the more I learn about the universe.’
Eva couldn’t think of anything to say. She’d always assumed he was a default atheist of the same rather unthinking sort as she was, the sort who believed in things for which there was empirical evidence and didn’t see any merit in giving much thought to anything else. How much more was there that she didn’t know about Benedict? Somewhere out there in an alternate universe she’d have a lifetime to learn it all. In that universe, a woman very much like her would be waking up every day to continue this conversation, a conversation that she realised now they had begun years earlier and had carried on through days and nights, emails and phone calls, glances and laughter. That Eva, although she looked and sounded like this one, was just subtly different enough to have known a good thing when she saw it, and as a result hadn’t just watched the man who might possibly be the love of her life get married to somebody else.
‘Well, religion’s not all good,’ she said finally, for want of anything else to say. ‘Look at what just happened at the World Trade Center.’
‘God, yes. Your bank’s American, isn’t it? Did you have people there?’
‘Several thousand. Six dead, no one I knew. It would have been a lot worse if it hadn’t been for the security guy there. He’s a legend among the staff now. An ex-military guy who took his job really seriously and managed to evacuate nearly everyone.’
‘”Took?” Past tense?’
‘Yes. He was still evacuating people when the tower went down. Presumed dead, though no remains have been found yet. Maybe they never will be. He was originally from Cornwall and apparently he sang Cornish songs from his youth to keep everyone calm as he evacuated them. In amongst all the chaos and destruction, there was this sixty-year-old guy standing in the stairwell, directing people down and belting out, “Men of Cornwall, stand ye steady, stand and never yield.” And he phoned his wife and told her to stop crying, that he’d never been happier and that he loved her and she’d made his life.’
They stood quietly looking out into the night and thinking about this new world in which planes flew into towers and people fell from the sky and in which there were men who so hated their world that they were willing to die a spectacular death to make their point. Eva thought, too, about who she’d have called as the tower went down, and whether if Benedict had been there he would have called Lydia and been able to say that to her, that he loved her and she’d made his life. She was sure he was thinking the same thing but she could only see his profile in the dark, and it gave nothing away. Eventually he broke the silence.
‘I love it out here in the country, where you can still actually see the stars. You don’t get that in the city, do you? Too much light pollution. When I was a child everything seemed to stop at night. I remember my father driving us to Gatwick to catch a flight at three o’clock in the morning and being the only car on the road. It was magical. You felt as if you were getting a glimpse of a secret world while everyone else slept. Now the cars never stop and the lights never go out. But out here you can still just about make out the constellations and it puts things in perspective, makes you feel like what you really are, a tiny mammal on the surface of a planet spinning through infinite space amidst a billion stars. Easy to forget that, don’t you find?’
‘I suppose so.’ Why wasn’t she saying anything? He was pouring out his innermost thoughts, and that was all she could offer? But if she started talking now she knew she wouldn’t stop. She’d tell him how stupid and blind she had been, and try to convince him that his future lay with her. And what if she succeeded? What if he turned round and said, I feel the same way, let’s run away together? Then for the rest of her life she would be the woman who had gone to a wedding and run away with the groom, leaving the pregnant bride devastated and the baby fatherless. Anyway, even if she was a terrible enough person to do that, Benedict had already proven he wasn’t that day on Hampstead Heath, and if anything she loved him more for it.
She leant towards him so that her arm was pressed against his and rested her head on his shoulder and felt him leaning back towards her. They stood like that wordlessly for a minute and then Benedict said, ‘You’re shivering. Come on, let’s get you back inside.’ He put an arm around her and leant down to kiss her on the top of the head, then led her back towards the lights and music and a world in which Benedict was married to Lydia and they were having a baby together and Eva was going back to her life tomorrow, alone.
Back inside, Lucien was slumped in a chair at the edge of the dance floor on his own, swigging from the neck of a champagne bottle.
‘I think I’m going to call it a night,’ Eva told him. ‘Where’s Sylvie?’
‘She’s already gone upstairs.’ And then in response to Eva’s questioning look he added, ‘Chas drank too much and Sylvie found her throwing up in the ladies, so she’s gone to put her to bed.’
Eva mustered a smirk. ‘Ah. Looks like you won’t be having a night of passion after all.’
‘Looks that way, doesn’t it. Unless you’re offering to step in and fill the gap.’
‘Not me, fella. Far be it from me to try to fill the size twelves of the lovely Chas.’ Then, ‘Why do you call her Chas, anyway? Bit of an odd name for a girl, isn’t it?’
Lucien paused and frowned before finally answering. ‘It’s short for Chastity, alright. Her name’s Chastity.’
A smile spread across Eva’s face, wider and wider until she was unable to stop the laughter from bursting out of her mouth.
‘Priceless. Just priceless,’ she gasped when she finally managed to take a breath, collapsing into the chair beside Lucien’s and heaving with mirth until even he couldn’t help but join in, and Eva and Lucien ended the evening of Benedict’s wedding side by side beneath the coloured disco lights at the edge of the dancefloor, crying with laughter.
Chapter 12
Canary Wharf, August 2004
SUMMER IN THE city: you had to love it. For nine months of the year London was relentlessly grim, but everything about it got better in the sunshine. The light twinkled on the river, sheered off the glass sides of the skyscrapers, and brought pallid, scantily-clad city dwellers blinking out into the streets. Chairs and tables sprouted from the pavement outside pubs and cafés, immediately filling up with people sipping wine and nibbling snacks. Even the hazy pall of traffic fumes added a misty beauty to the place, Eva thought fondly as she walked along the riverside towards the gym. Feeling virtuous, she allowed herself a moment of satisfaction with her life. That day, a Saturday, had begun with a wheatgrass smoothie. She had phoned her father and tidied her flat, a smart rental in a converted warehouse with a balcony over the water in up-and-coming Limehouse, just three stops on the DLR or thirty minutes’ walk from the office in Canary Wharf.
She’d even scheduled a personal training session at the gym, meaning there was no way to get out of going. Eva was getting the hang of it now, the female banking aesthetic. It was all in the detail. The hair a little lighter, the teeth a little whiter, the skin just bronzed enough to suggest outdoorsy good health but still far short of a couple of weeks in Magaluf. Of course, all this was all quite difficult to achieve when you were spending eighty hours a week at a desk on a huge trading floor so that you barely saw daylight between October and April each year. Big Paul claimed that trading floors were designed that way for the same reason that casinos never have windows: you want your traders and punters to be oblivious to the passage of time. You certainly wouldn’t want them noticing that it was getting dark and thinking, oh well, time to call it a day, or spotting the sunshine outside and suddenly feeling that breaking for a spot of lunch might be just the ticket.
The other part of the alpha look was of course the gym body, the hardest of all to achieve because of the impossibility of faking it. While a few extra pounds could be considered characterful on a broker, they certainly weren’t much in evidence on the female traders. After her last bonus Eva had signed up for a year’s membership at the Canary Wharf gym with the subterranean spa and the swimming pool right on the edge of the river, so that as you pounded out your sixty lengths you could pretend you were actually swimming along the Thames, only without the risk of contracting Weil’s disease from all the rat urine. Signing the contract had proven highly motivating; unable to bear the thought of the massive monthly subscription fee going to waste, she had sweated her way through spin classes, attempted to find her inner goddess in hatha yoga sessions, and almost given herself a coronary in the aptly named Body Attack, billed as a ‘rocket-fuelled combination of music and hip moves’. As she’d lain groaning on the floor at the end of the previous week’s class, the instructor had strolled over and peered down at her.
‘Should I be calling an ambulance?’ he enquired. ‘Only I might get fired if I actually hospitalise the clients.’
Lying there gasping for breath in an old Pixies t-shirt and misshapen tracksuit bottoms, Eva looked up the lycra-clad vision of male beauty hovering above her, barely perspiring after an hour of savage exercise, and let out an appalled involuntary giggle.
‘Well, you can’t be dying if you can still laugh at my jokes,’ he said, reaching out a hand to pull her up. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a tough class, this one. What you should do is sign up for a few one-on-one sessions with me. You get them as part of your joining package, so if you haven’t used them yet, and between you and me I suspect that you haven’t…’ He paused and winked at her. ‘Ask at the front desk for them to pop you in Julian’s personal training diary.’
‘Julian being you.’
‘Julian being me. Hi.’ He shook the hand he was apparently still holding long after he’d finished using it to haul her upright.
‘Hi. Eva,’ she told him, withdrawing the hand which was as embarrassingly hot and sweaty as the rest of her. ‘And I may have humiliated myself enough already, thank you. I don’t know whether my ego could withstand more scrutiny of my athletic prowess. Or lack thereof,’ she continued, but it was beginning to look as though she was losing him so she allowed the gabble to trail off.
‘Hey, don’t worry about it. If you were an Olympic athlete we’d have nothing to work on, right? Tell them I said to put you in my diary. I’ll see you soon then, Eva?’
He was backing away from her now, and doing that thing where you make your hand into a gun to point at someone, so she smiled and half-nodded-half-shook her head in what she hoped was an ambiguous gesture of possible agreement but almost certainly just made her look like a lunatic. Safely back in the changing room and under a pounding hot shower, she wondered whether he was encouraging her to book a free session with him because he got paid by the hour or whether he might actually have been flirting. Figuring that the worst that could happen was that she got fit and made the most of her gym membership, she found herself standing at the front desk on the way out.
‘Does it have to be the weekend?’ asked the flicky-haired receptionist, drumming long pink fingernails on the counter.
‘Yes, sorry, I work long hours in the week.’
‘And it has to be Julian and not one of our other trainers?’ Hair flick. ‘He’s very popular you know, particularly among our female clients,’ she continued, giving Eva the once over with a meaningful smile. ‘It does make it difficult to find an opening with him.’
Having eventually been granted the honour of being booked into Julian’s special 5pm reserve slot the following Saturday, Eva had taken herself off to buy some new gym kit, arriving at the checkout with a pair of soft charcoal yoga pants and a sleek black support vest with fluorescent pink panels at the sides. The sales assistant assured her that this was de rigueur for the well-turned-out gym-goer these days and ignored Eva’s wince as she rang up the total. Even now that she was making good money by most people’s standards, Eva hadn’t quite got used to casually spending on a gym outfit what she would have been able to live on for several weeks during her university years.
As she waited for Julian in the reception area, she shuffled about in her new outfit feeling self-conscious and trying to catch a glimpse of herself in the glass cabinet fronts. It had seemed okay in the changing room, but under these unforgiving lights she looked like a sack-full of oranges, she thought with a grimace. Not only that, but it was such a drastic transformation from the previous week that he was bound to notice and conclude it was for his benefit, which it most certainly wasn’t since they had nothing in common, what with his being a Greek god who spent his days stretching out the hamstrings of perfectly toned gym-bunnies. Yes, she’d been anticipating this session with rather more relish than she’d usually feel at the prospect of exercise, but that was just the inevitable frisson of having some rare one-on-one time with an attractive man, even one in whom she had no romantic interest.
