Invincible Summer (17 page)

One other good thing had come out of the whole mess: he was feeling more understanding towards his father again. Since the day his mother had hinted at his father's infidelities he hadn't been able to help but view him in a different light. A distance had opened up between them and was, if not so marked as to be a source of sadness for both men, at least the cause of a niggling sense of perplexed discomfort that some of the ease had gone out of their relationship.

Benedict had avoided examining any of this too closely, but in his newfound spirit of honesty he thought about it all now, and felt that he had perhaps judged his father too harshly. If a good and well-intentioned man like Benedict could end up in such a situation, perhaps something similar had happened to his father. Perhaps he had made a mistake or two, and was as sorry as Benedict was. Perhaps he had even spent many years devoting himself to his family to try to make up for it, as Benedict intended to. After all, he concluded, who can ever understand the intricacies of any marriage except for the two people in it?

Benedict's reverie was broken by the ping of an email arriving. That was good news, confirmation that he'd at least managed to redirect his messages to the Imperial server. He'd spent most of the morning simply trying to connect to a printer. If it took a particle physicist several hours to get a printer to work he could only wonder how the rest of the world coped. How many physicists does it take to port to a printer? There was a joke in there somewhere.

Benedict sighed. He'd have loved to meet up with Eva and confide in her about everything that had happened, but he didn't think that would go down well with Lydia who, with the impeccable radar women seemed to have about such things, had always sensed a threat. After that excruciating lunch at Giraffe he'd tried to smooth things over but just made it worse. She ended up accusing him of siding with Eva and made it clear that if he was any sort of a husband he wouldn't consort with people who belittled his wife. Matters hadn't been helped by Josh wandering around singing
forfucksake, forfucksake
in a cheery little voice for weeks afterwards. He knew he should explain but he'd need some time to work out how to phrase it, and so he'd avoided her calls and that had made it impossible to take Sylvie and Lucien's calls too. Still, there was always email; he felt hurt that they hadn't at least emailed him to ask him to the wedding when they couldn't get through to his phone, even if it had been a rush job. Now he thought about it, though, the truth was that they'd all been going their separate ways for a long time, and this just confirmed it.

Anyway, the most important thing was keeping his family together. If he was honest with himself, which of course he must be now because that was the new way of doing things, somewhere deep inside he had never really let go of the fantasy of one day being with Eva. But that wasn't real life. He had Lydia and the kids, and Eva was living with that prettified personal trainer of hers. She had evidently long since moved on, and it was time that he did the same. And Sylvie and Lucien had barely made any effort to stay in touch since he'd had kids, instead conducting the friendship by proxy through Eva. He just wasn't fun enough for them anymore, he supposed; their eyes glazed over at the slightest mention of his family or his work, which was basically the whole of his life now. That hurt, of course it did, but there was no point in dwelling on it. Times changed, people moved on. He nudged the mouse so that the pointer was no longer hovering above the reply button, and went back to unpacking his box.

S
EVERAL MILES ACROSS
the city, another box was being unpacked. Sylvie unwrapped the tissue paper from around a small sculpture of a hippopotamus and placed it on the shelf next to the dancer already positioned there. The contrast between the slender ballerina and the bulbous open-mouthed hippo was pleasing. It almost looked as if the figurine was serenading him, a gracious hand outstretched towards the toothy gaping maw. Sylvie had made these little statues years ago at school, and while they weren't going to win any prizes they had a certain childish joy to them, making them well suited to the nursery.

This must be the nesting phase, Sylvie thought to herself. The wretched tiredness had finally been lifting over the last week and she'd decided with a sudden sense of urgency that it was time to get the house ready. After much nagging Lucien had agreed to hire a van and collect her belongings from the various different addresses where they had accrued over the years and bring them to the new home that she now shared with her husband, and, in a few weeks' time, their daughter. She turned the words over in her mind. Husband. Daughter. They seemed alien to her, not words that could really apply to her life. How had she wound up here?

The answer was of course prosaic: she'd got knocked up by accident. She didn't really know why she'd refused to even consider an abortion. It wasn't as if she were in ideal circumstances to raise a child on her own, which is how it had initially looked like things would be. Perhaps it was partly that she hadn't realised until she was so far along, when she was already sixteen weeks' pregnant. What she had thought was her period had arrived only a few days late, and she'd been on the pill so when she missed the next period she figured it was just a hormonal blip. When the following one also didn't arrive she went to the GP, who seemed astonished by her obtuseness. Lots of women have some bleeding in pregnancy around the time of their first missed period, he told her. About a third of them, to be precise. And no form of contraception was a hundred percent reliable, not even the contraceptive pill. Had she had a tummy bug a few months ago?

That was the moment she finally believed she was pregnant, because suddenly she knew exactly how it had happened. That first night she'd spent with Robert, the night she went to meet Eva after work and ended up falling off the wagon, she'd drunk so much that she had thrown up several times the next day. And then the day after that she'd felt better, and that evening Robert had paid her a follow-up booty call.

It was hardly the most auspicious start to a life. If she'd realised when she'd been four or five weeks along maybe things would have been different, but the GP had sent her to the hospital for a scan the very next day and there was the baby, waggling its arms and legs, and she had known immediately that, despite never having particularly liked children and regularly thinking that if she heard Tony Blair or Gordon Brown say ‘hardworking families' one more time she might actually puke, despite all of this, she was going to be a mother.

‘Looks like a girl to me,' the sonographer had told her, taking her hand and adding, ‘Want a tissue, love?' when he noticed her eyes reddening.

Of course, this wasn't exactly what she'd planned, she thought as she walked out of the antenatal clinic, but then, what in life actually
had
turned out as planned? She hadn't made much of a success of anything else so far, but Sylvie found herself suffused with a weird hopefulness that she was going to make a success of this one thing. She would be a good mother, bohemian enough not to be hidebound by convention but caring and attentive enough to raise a daughter who didn't pass through the world slashing and burning all before her as she went. Sylvie could teach her all the things she'd learnt the hard way so that her daughter wouldn't have to learn them the hard way too: how important it was to have the humility to work hard and value the things you achieved for yourself, but also the confidence and breadth of perspective not to look for happiness in the wrong places, like the bottoms of wine bottles and wraps of coke and the beds of people who couldn't care less about you. The baby hadn't been planned but Sylvie felt…what was this unfamiliar sensation? That was it: she felt ready.

Once Robert had accepted she wouldn't change her mind about keeping the baby, they had fallen back into the habit of tumbling into bed together several times a week. She suspected he would simply fade away to a name against an incoming amount on her bank statement each month once the baby arrived, but Sylvie was making the most of the sex and the feeling of intimacy while it lasted; it was probably going to be a long time before there was much of either of those things in her life again. Because of this, it came as a shock when, lying together in his bed one night, naked and satiated, covers tangled around their legs and both looking down at her swollen belly, he said, ‘Do you think we should just get married and have done with it?'

‘No, hear me out,' Robert continued when she snorted with laughter and whacked him with a pillow. ‘You're having this baby and I'm on the hook for it financially whether I like it or not. I've always half-fancied the idea of having a mini-me eventually, and it's going to look whole a lot better at work if we go down the marriage route. You'd be surprised at how conservative some of the management are at American banks. I'm up for a big promotion next year and I don't want it getting around that I have a messy personal life. I don't think they actually mind that much if you're going to strip clubs and banging some twenty-year-old, but a veneer of respectability at least is smiled upon. Christ, it would be worth it just to put an end to the evils I'm getting from Eva when I arrive at work every morning. She's like Medusa, that one, her glare could turn a lesser man to stone.'

Warming to the idea as he spoke, he went on, ‘Now, from your point of view there's plenty of upside. There'd be a prenup of course, but I'd buy a nice house for us in some expensive spawning ground and pay for the kid to go to a decent school and all that. You wouldn't have to live in a broom cupboard in the Outer Hebrides and shine shoes anymore or whatever the fuck it is you do for money.' He wrinkled his nose at the thought of her living and working arrangements. ‘I can't guarantee that I'm
not
going to bang the odd twenty-year-old, obviously. And you'd have to do the corporate wife bit, throw the occasional dinner party and get your nails done with the other wives or whatever the job description says. But basically it makes good sense all round, given where we are. What do you say?'

Sylvie grinned. ‘That I've waited for this moment ever since I was a little girl and it's everything I ever dreamt of?'

He rolled over onto his side towards her and brushed a few strands of hair away from her face and then dropped his hand down to her stomach in a gesture that could almost be described as tender.

‘Yeah well, we're not really the hearts-and-flowers type, are we, you and I? No point in pretending we haven't both been around the block a few times but maybe that's the beauty of the thing. It might not be Romeo and Juliet, but look where that got those buggers anyway.'

And he wasn't entirely wrong, when she thought about it. You had to admire his straightforwardness, his complete lack of guile. Robert was a shagger, but a lot of his charm lay in his unwillingness to dissemble about it, and once she'd agreed he'd been as good as his word. They'd done the deed swiftly and then bought a house in Hampstead, an area which appealed to her because of the artistic and literary associations of the place, and to him because despite its pretentious lefty reputation it was these days being colonised by wealthy bankers much like all the other desirable parts of London.

So that was how Sylvie had found herself in her beautiful house and enviable life, reeling from the suddenness of it all. She nudged the dancer a little closer to the hippo, picked up the now empty cardboard box, and closed the door of the nursery behind her.

Perhaps a townhouse hadn't been the wisest choice, Sylvie reflected as she hefted her ever-expanding bulk down the last flight of steps into the kitchen. Sometimes she felt that she would never get back upstairs again and would have to ask Robert to haul a mattress down to the ground floor so that she could sleep there until the baby came. She'd been intending to make a sandwich but the armchair in the corner of the room was too inviting, and with a sigh she lowered herself into it. It was impossible to get into a comfortable position to sleep at night when you were the size of a cruise liner. Outside the window, the early afternoon sunlight filtered through the leaves of the oak tree in the garden, casting a shifting filigree of shadow across the kitchen wall. How peaceful it is here, she thought, allowing her eyes to close.

Sylvie didn't know whether she had been asleep for two minutes or an hour when she was jolted awake by a loud ringing. Heart thudding, she heaved herself out of the chair and over to the kitchen table where she had left her phone.

‘Hello?'

‘Will you accept a call from HMP Brixton?' came an unfamiliar voice on the line.

‘Sorry, what?'

‘You have a call coming through from Her Majesty's Prison Brixton,' came the voice again, with an edge of impatience this time. ‘Will you take the call?'

‘I'm not sure you've got the right number. But okay, yes, put it through.'

‘Sylvie? It's me. Can you hear me?'

It took her a moment or two to realise that the panicky voice was her brother's. Her knees felt weak and she had to lean forward against the edge of the table.

‘Yes, I can hear you. Lucian, are you really calling from prison? What the hell's going on?'

‘Sylvie, things have gone really wrong here. I've fucked up big time.'

‘What's happened? How can you be in prison?'

‘God, Sylvie, I'm sorry. I didn't want to call you what with the baby about to arrive and everything, but I tried mum and the old bitch didn't want to know. It's just…things have gone really wrong at my end.'

Sylvie steadied herself to reply with a confidence that she didn't feel.

‘Calm down. It's fine. Just tell me what's happened.'

‘I'm on remand. I got caught with a couple of keys of coke.'

‘Shit, don't say that on the phone. If you're calling from prison they're probably listening in.'

‘Doesn't matter. They caught me red-handed. I'm going to have to plead guilty, try to get a reduced sentence. I thought they'd let me out on bail but they've remanded me in custody. I need someone I can trust to help me. I know you're due any day and there's no way I'm going to ask you to come and visit me here but I need some help. Can you get Eva to come if I put her name on my visitor's ticket?'

‘Yes. Yes, of course, don't worry. We're going to sort this out. I can send Eva, no problem. Put her name down and I'll call her right now and get there as soon as possible, today if we can work out the logistics. Lucien, don't worry, we're going to fix this, I promise you.'

‘Listen, don't worry, sis, I'm a big boy, I can look after myself. I'm just going to need a bit of help sorting things on the outside, my flat and all that,' he was saying, and her heart started really pounding then, because she could hear how frightened he was and she hadn't heard Lucien actually scared and trying to be brave since he was ten years old and about to get a beating from one of their mother's boyfriends for some act of insurgence or another. ‘Listen, I'm going to get cut off in a minute. You will send Eva, won't you?'

And then the line went dead and she was standing in the kitchen listening to just a crackle and he was gone and she was married to Robert and about to have a baby and her brother was in prison and she wasn't sure how they'd got here but she had better phone Eva right now, Eva would help, Eva would know what to do, and she dialled her number but there was no answer so she hung up and dialled again.