Invincible Summer (13 page)

Late in the afternoon as the sun grew cooler, she would help Papi in the garden, learning how to tend the vegetable plot, before eating dinner and going to bed not long after dusk. She was surprised how easily she was thrown back into memories of childhood summers there by the scent of her grandmother's lavender talcum powder in the bathroom, or the way the light trickled through the panes of blue stained glass in the porch. The sky here had never left her.

By the end of August Sylvie felt strangely both older and younger than she had when she'd arrived. She had brought no art supplies with her, and was full of the sort of urgent creative energy that she hadn't experienced in a long time. But she sensed, too, a stillness inside of her. She knew she couldn't stay forever, but she felt like she had gathered enough strength to go back and start over.

On the morning she was due to leave, she rose early and still in her nightie, stepped out through the door that led directly from her bedroom to the garden. Mamie was sitting in a deck chair under the apricot tree at the far end and spotting her, waved her over. Sylvie picked her way barefoot across the patchy, dried-out grass and sat on the ground next to her. Mamie reached down a hand and touched her hair.

‘You look better than you did when you came, Sylvie. You can hardly see that mark on your forehead now. Do you feel better now?'

‘Yes, I do. Much better. I just really, really needed a break from London. Thanks for giving me somewhere to escape to.'

‘You know that London will be the same when you go back, don't you? If you want things to be different then you will have to be different, because the city, the people, they won't have changed.'

Her grandmother's voice was quiet and whispery, and sounded to Sylvie like leaves falling through the air from the tree above them.

‘I know that. I know I'm going to have to work hard not to fall into the same traps again, but I feel strong enough to do that now.'

Mamie leant her head back and looked up into the branches and was quiet for a few minutes, so that when she spoke again it gave Sylvie a jolt. ‘Sometimes I wish we had done more for you and your brother. Virginie was never a happy person, and I don't think she has been a very good mother to you. I don't know why she was never satisfied. Some people are born that way, I think, and too much drink isn't good for anyone. We thought that if we gave her money or took over and looked after you children then she wouldn't bother to find her own way in the world, so we tried to encourage her to take responsibility. I wish we had let her send you and Lucien here after she left your father. But we did what we thought was best. I want you to know that.'

Sylvie blinked at her grandmother. They'd never had a conversation like this before and if she'd thought about it at all, she would have assumed that Mamie didn't reflect on such things.

‘I know. Thanks.' She reached up and took the dry old hand that was still resting on her hair and squeezed it.

Then as suddenly as it had arrived, the moment passed. Mamie stretched her arms and looked away.

‘Now go and pack your things, Papi won't want to be kept waiting to drive you to the station.'

I
T WAS JUST
as her grandmother had said: London was the same, but she was different. Or rather, London was changing with the seasons, as even cities must. A chill was creeping into the air and the leaves formed sodden heaps on the pavement, giving off an earthy scent as Sylvie ploughed through them, smashing the bigger piles with her boots when she thought no one was looking.

She stayed with Lucien for the first few weeks after she arrived back, but it quickly became clear that wasn't going to work out. On the weekends, which seemed to run from Thursday to Tuesday, the flat filled up with people drinking and smoking and snorting and groping. Even if it hadn't been for the constant temptation, the noise was maddening and set her nerves jangling, calibrated as they now were to the peace of the Languedoc hills.

Sylvie made a plan. She would move a bit further out to a quieter area, somewhere more affordable. As always, she'd have to offset the cheaper rent against the cost of travelling to anywhere she'd be likely to find employment, but for the first time that seemed like a reasonable trade-off. It was going to take a while to sort out housing benefit, but Papi had handed her an envelope at the station containing enough cash for a deposit and a couple of months' rent, and she found a basement flat in a Victorian house in Sydenham, little more than a studio really, but with its own tiny patio garden. It may have been the wilds of Zone 3, but it was a respectable twenty minutes on the train from London Bridge, so she could still apply for jobs in the centre. There was brown woodchip on the walls and the musty smell of the previous occupant's dogs, but she picked up some cheap white paint at a discount store and once she'd thrown a few coats of that around it felt much brighter and more cheerful.

She filled in job application after job application with no luck, so she put an ad in the local shops for babysitting and dog walking and a bit of work started trickling in. Then her landlord, who'd given her permission to paint her flat and been pleased with the results, asked if she'd like to earn a few quid by painting the communal hallway and the larger upstairs flat that the tenants were moving out of, so she'd done that too. She made a good job of it, and the landlord recommended her to a friend a few streets away and she'd ended up painting their house as well. They let her do a robot mural in the kid's bedroom and he'd loved it, and loved her too, spending hours watching and asking questions as she painted, and so they'd started paying her for regular babysitting. Bit by bit, she built up a local client base of people who needed walls painted, or help with their pets and children, and eventually she found that if she didn't spend money on booze and cigarettes and kept her expenses low, she didn't need to go through the rigmarole of signing on anymore. Working like this suited her better than being a waitress or a shop assistant ever had, and without much of a social life she was left with plenty of time to paint, which she found herself doing with more passion and creativity than she'd had in years.

Outwardly her life was unglamorous, checking the price of bread and going to Tesco at the end of the day to buy food nearing its sell-by date that had the price marked down. She didn't have a TV and to use the internet she had to go to the library. New clothes would have to come from Oxfam, she supposed, but it was funny how little this stuff actually bothered her now it came down to it. Her inner world fizzed with an energy and inspiration that she'd though was gone forever, and that mattered more than the any of the rest.

There was still one really big thing that needed sorting out: Eva. She had been waiting to see how long it took her supposed friend to get in touch, the days ticking by filled with hurt disbelief that Eva was willing to just let ten years of friendship end over one stupid argument. Where had Eva been when she had hit rock bottom and sat in that A&E alone? Okay, she didn't know that had happened, but surely a friend should have been able to see that Sylvie hadn't been doing okay and was heading for a disaster? The ball of pain in Sylvie's stomach disguised itself as anger, and every time she picked up the phone it bubbled up and said, Why do you need a friend who isn't there when you need her, and then she would put the phone back down without dialling.

Then one day it occurred to her that it cut both ways: she also didn't know how Eva was doing. What if Eva was having a bad time too, needing a friend, and she, Sylvie hadn't been there for her? She had got so used to the new world in which everything always went brilliantly for Eva and badly for Sylvie that she'd somehow developed a mental block about the fact that this wasn't an immutable law of the universe. That day she didn't put the phone down. She dialled the number and waited.

It was dark when Eva arrived home from work, as it would be every day for many months to come. It wasn't the cold that got her down in winter so much as the lack of daylight, she thought grouchily as she pushed the apartment door closed behind her. She arrived at work in the dark and left in the dark, making the days blur together. The sitting room was empty and she remembered that Julian had mentioned this morning that he had a couple of evening training sessions booked, so she had the place to herself. Because so many of his clients wanted after-work slots, Eva often got home to an empty flat and was grateful to have an hour or two in which she didn't have to string a sentence together at the end of a hectic day.

Pausing only to retrieve an apple from the kitchen, she kicked off her shoes and sunk down onto the sofa, at which point her phone started to ring from the depths of the bag she had dropped in the hallway as she came in. Cursing, she ran to the bag and dumped its contents on the floor in order to find the offending item. The shock of seeing Sylvie's name on the screen made her freeze on her knees on the carpet. It had been well over six months since they'd argued, and neither had made any attempt to contact the other. Eva had thought about it numerous times, always concluding that if Sylvie hadn't meant what she said then she would have phoned and apologised, and if she had, well, then she was better off without her.

Should she answer? What if Sylvie had dialled Eva's number accidentally? But if she didn't answer she might be missing the chance to work things out with her oldest friend, something she wanted more than she cared to admit even to herself.

‘Hello?' she said warily down the line.

‘It's Sylvie.'

So she had meant to call.

‘Yes, I saw. It's been a while, huh?' Eva tried to make her voice sound cautiously friendly.

‘I know. Listen, do you want to meet up?'

Sylvie's own voice was neutral and it still wasn't clear to Eva what was going on in the conversation. ‘I guess. This is a little weird though, isn't it? After all the stuff you said last time I saw you?'

‘Look, I wanted to tell you that I was drunk and I'm sorry. I didn't mean any of it.'

‘I don't know, Sylvie.' Eva sat back against the wall of the hallway and raked her fingers through her hair. ‘It sounded a lot like you did mean it. You were pretty specific. About how smug I am and how I was always your gawky sidekick? Can you imagine how it makes me feel, knowing that was how you thought of me through all those years of supposed friendship?'

Sylvie groaned. ‘You're really going to make me work for this, aren't you? Okay, look. I don't know why I said that stuff. The stupid thing is, it's not even true. I was always glad to have a friend like you because you were so down to earth. Okay, you wore some pretty dodgy clothes, but you were so totally artless. In a good way, I mean, you were never calculating what was in it for you like most people always are.'

‘Oh. Well, that's a nice thing to say. I think.'

‘It's intended that way, honestly. You sort of anchored me to the ground because you used to look up to me and I wanted to be the version of myself that you reflected back at me. But things weren't always exactly how they looked. You used to be impressed by stupid things I did, like sleeping with random guys when I was off my face when you should have been telling me to stop being such a fuckwit.' She sighed down the line.

‘Well, I was always a bit envious of you,' Eva admitted, ‘because everyone fancied you and you got all the attention. Everything always seemed to come so easily to you, which was the complete opposite to me. And of course I never told you to stop, because you always looked like you were having such a good time. At least, you used to. Maybe not so much in recent years.'

‘A lot's changed though, hasn't it? And it
was
weird for me how much everything changed after we left uni. Now you're doing so well and in a lot of ways I really admire you, but sometimes it feels like you've bought into all the City bullshit a bit too much, like you're not the old Eva anymore because the old Eva wouldn't bang on all the time about the size of her fucking bonus or how much her broker spent on a bottle of Petrus at Gordon Ramsay. She might have been a bit wide-eyed, but she would have known deep down that none of that really matters. You taught me that, and I don't think you even know it yourself anymore.' Sylvie paused. ‘Anyway, this is starting to sound like I'm having a go at you again and that's the last thing I want to do, I'm just trying to explain and mainly what I want to say is that I had a really bad patch where I acted like a dick but I'm sorry and I'm doing a lot better now and you're my best friend and I miss you.'

Her voice broke a bit when she said that, and Eva wondered whether maybe she was crying.

‘I'm sorry too,' she told her. ‘I'm sorry if I was boastful. I didn't mean to sound smug or make you feel bad. I've missed you horribly and I've been completely miserable without you, to be honest.'

Only now that she was saying it aloud did she realise just how true it was. Eva had allowed herself to feel anger and outrage, but mostly what they had been doing was masking sadness and now she couldn't understand why she hadn't recognised this and just called her friend sooner. She had been too proud, she realised, and would probably have carried on being too proud forever if Sylvie hadn't phoned. What a pointless thing ego was, how much damage it did. Suppose neither of them had ever called and they had both just gone on forever like that, stubborn and unhappy? The thought made her eyes well up with tears, and she let out an involuntary little sob.

Sylvie audibly blew her nose. ‘How about meeting up and burying the hatchet? When are you free?'

Eva tried to think fast. Her schedule was full, but suggesting a day a week or two away would make it look as though Sylvie was at the bottom of her priority list which was part of what had caused the argument in the first place.

‘I'm going away with Julian for the weekend on Friday, but how about tomorrow night?' she suggested. ‘I've got desk drinks straight after work, but I could escape by eight-thirty. We'll be in the Canary Wharf Corney & Barrow, on the terrace overlooking the dock. Why don't you come and rescue me?'

Eva remained sitting in the gloom of the hallway for several minutes after they hung up, and had only just started to stuff the scattered pens and tampons and other assorted detritus back into her bag when her phone rang again. She sighed to see Big Paul's name on the screen, since it was nearly nine o'clock at night and presumably he was calling because something had gone wrong at work. Julian would be home soon and she could feel her precious minutes of downtime slipping away. She cleared her throat and carefully wiped her eyes with a grubby tissue before picking up, even though he couldn't see her.

‘What's up, big guy? Are you still in the office?'

‘Yeah. I've been stuck on a teleconference with New York for hours. I thought I better give you the heads up on something I picked up from the sales guys at the end of the call. You know that Bellwether Trust order on tomorrow's close? You just got another one and it's double the size. Big day for you tomorrow.'

‘Double the size. Okay, thanks for the warning.'

Eva hung up and sat back against the wall, suddenly alert. This was a big deal, a game-changer even, coming so close to bonus time in what was shaping up to be a decidedly unexceptional year. She was going to need a game plan. By the time she heard Julian's key in the door she'd forgotten all about Sylvie's phone call, and was pacing up and down formulating her strategy for the following day.