Invincible Summer (19 page)

A
ND THEN, A
descent into darkness. It began with Sylvie's voice on the phone, crying and afraid,
something's wrong, please come
. Then the rush to the hospital in the middle of the night, Julian's hands taut on the wheel as they ran red lights. The nervous wait outside the doors of the maternity unit, an hour of agonised not-knowing until they were taken through to a cubicle where Sylvie, face white and pinched, ramblingly told them how the baby had been distressed so they'd done a caesarean, lifting the limp creature from her belly as she watched and immediately rushing her away to the ICU, that Robert had gone with her, and that she'd heard someone say something about oxygen deprivation and oh God, is the baby okay, is the baby okay, won't someone please tell me that the baby's going to be okay?

The maternity unit seemed in chaos. Eva sat with Sylvie while Julian went to find a doctor, eventually returning with an exhausted-looking consultant in scrubs who quietly explained that the baby was being cared for on the neonatal unit, that she was stable and the father was with her, and they would take Sylvie there in a few hours, once she'd had a chance to recover from the operation and could get into a wheelchair. Would the baby be okay? When the consultant had left they still didn't know.

Sylvie was sinking in and out of consciousness, and eventually Eva sent Julian home and got into bed beside her for the several hours it took Robert to return, pale and shaking. A midwife followed and removed Sylvie's catheter before loading her into a wheelchair and pushing her through the striplit corridors, Eva beside her, to the neonatal ICU and up to the incubator where a tiny baby lay on her front wearing just a nappy, bent legs tucked up beneath her, body covered in leads and monitor pads and a breathing mask over her face.

There in the early morning light, in the antiseptic- and plastic-scented hospital unit, Sylvie's world stopped turning and for an incalculable moment, the beeping monitors and whooshing breathing apparatus fell still. The universe shrank to a single point, a bright speck of life within the incubator in front of her, and when the world started up again it was the same and yet completely and irrevocably changed.

Later Sylvie would tell Eva that it had been like looking up and seeing the sky for the first time, something vast and silent that had been there all along, like noticing a truth so huge that it was almost impossible to widen your perspective enough to actually see it.

‘And what
was
it, this truth?' asked Eva in frustration, but all Sylvie could say was, ‘Love,' and though she tried she wasn't able to explain any better.

A moment of brightness, and then the plummet into night. Sylvie chose a name, Allegra, and sat beside the incubator for all her waking hours, often singing, occasionally crying but as quietly as possible so as not to distress the baby. Sometimes Allegra was well enough to be held, sometimes not.

Would the baby be okay? That depended on what you meant by okay, because being okay was now a much more elastic concept than it had previously been.

The baby in the next incubator died suddenly in the night two weeks after Allegra had arrived. Sylvie and Eva held each other and wept silently as his parents, their previously shining, hopeful faces now collapsing in on themselves like dying stars, had returned to the unit in the morning to collect their son's belongings: a tiny hat, the paper teddy with his name, Miles, and birthweight that had been stuck to the end of his incubator.

Robert told Eva to take as much time off as she needed; he'd hold the fort. Of course, this meant that he'd be in the office all hours covering her work as well as his own while she was with Sylvie in the hospital, but that was probably best for everyone anyway.

Every evening Julian collected Eva and Sylvie and drove them home, arriving each time with snacks, magazines, bags of baby clothes and nappies. Sylvie had been kicked off the maternity ward after a few days; they needed the bed and couldn't house every parent with a baby in the hospital. Didn't she know that London maternity wards were overcrowded and in crisis? She'd been lucky to be allowed to stay as long as she had.

Julian picked up Sylvie's washing as they dropped her off at home at night and brought it back cleaned and ironed, smilingly waving away her tearful thanks. Eva watched him, touching her ring finger with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. She couldn't hope to meet a man with a better heart beating in his chest, she thought to herself. Next time he asked, she'd say yes.

Slowly, slowly, over the weeks, Allegra's monitors were removed until finally, three months after she'd been born, she was ready to go home. It was such a relief to leave the hospital with her, even with a feeding tube and oxygen canister, away from the horror and tragedy and the inhuman need to inure yourself to it just to survive. Yet the future was uncertain and full of its own terrors.

Cerebral palsy, the doctors said, but they were reluctant to make too many predictions. She'd definitely have some cognitive impairment, and some loss of control over one side of her body. Beyond that it was hard to say, though when Sylvie asked straight out whether she'd ever live independently the neonatal doctor said gently that it was unlikely.

When a few weeks later Robert had to go to New York, Eva stayed over, ending up in the double bed with Sylvie, who lay rigid and sleepless, checking the cot beside her every few minutes to make sure Allegra was still breathing. Late in the night she heard Sylvie whisper something into the darkness so quietly that Eva, who was half-asleep, wondered if she had dreamt it.

‘Don't leave me, will you?'

Eva rolled over. ‘What are you talking about? It's bloody 2am. I'm not going anywhere till morning.'

‘That's not what I meant. Please don't leave me to cope with this alone. I love her so much, but I don't know if I can do this on my own.'

Eva was properly awake now. ‘I'll never leave you, you idiot,' she promised in a fierce whisper. ‘I swear you won't have to do this on your own, whatever happens.'

 ‘Robert's not going to last much longer. We both know it. He won't even look at her, hardly touches her. It's like she disgusts him. We both do. Even when he's here, he comes in at ten at night, sleeps in the other room, leaves again at 6am.'

‘Fuck him. He'll be here or he won't. We'll do it without him. Between the two of us we'll love her as much as any child was ever loved. Twice as much.'

A silence.

‘You'll think I'm a monster, but sometimes I think... I think about getting up and walking out the door. Just keeping on going. Starting a new life somewhere else. Or just walking until I reach the sea. And then carrying on walking.'

Eva sighed and rested a hand on Sylvie's arm. ‘Of course you do. You wouldn't be human if you didn't. It's okay to have those thoughts. But here's a thing my father used to say to me: you are what you do. Not what you think, not even what you say you'll do, but what you actually do. So every mother of a disabled baby who plunges into despair in the middle of the night and thinks about walking away, or even darker thoughts,
if only my child had died
instead of this,
and then gets up in the morning and loves and cares for that child, that's who she is. She's a mother who gets up in the morning and loves and cares for her child. The rest means nothing, nothing at all.' Allegra stirred in her cot and Eva lowered her voice back to a whisper. ‘Go to sleep now. I'll be here in the morning, and every morning that you and Allegra need me.'

I
T HAD BEEN
a strange meeting and Eva wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. Brad Whitman had called her into a side room at the end of the day, and Eva had approached with a feeling of trepidation. It was unlikely to be good news; though it had been a relief when Robert had taken a job in the States, since it had been all Eva could do to remain coldly civil to him after he'd left Sylvie and Allegra, he hadn't yet been replaced. That had meant she couldn't be cut any more slack at work, and balancing the long hours with the need to support Sylvie, let alone spend time with Julian had left her exhausted and stretched to the limit. As she entered the meeting room she saw that Brad was already sitting there with a man and a woman, whom she vaguely recognised as being from HR. They talked briefly about a compliance audit of old trades and produced some print-outs from the booking system.

Her stomach sank when she realised they were from the Bellwether Trust trade from a couple of years back. At the time she had been nervous that she'd ramped the market a bit too conspicuously, but as time had passed it had seemed as though nothing would come of it and she'd eventually stopped looking over her shoulder. Could it really come back to bite her after all this time? Apparently the answer was yes. The HR man had used words like ‘market manipulation' and ‘internal review' and ‘formal warning'. None of them would meet her eye, and after he had finished speaking Brad stood up and held the door open, leaving her in no doubt that the meeting was over.

As she walked back to her desk with her heart pounding, her phone started to ring in her pocket. Julian. He'd rung several times today and each time she'd put him straight through to voicemail. She just didn't have time for it.

Alert as ever to anything out of the ordinary, Big Paul turned around as she sat down.

‘What's up?' he asked.

‘I've just been given a warning,' she said slowly.

‘How do you mean, a warning?'

‘A formal warning from HR over a trade. Do you remember that Bellwether Trust one I made all that money on a couple of years back? The one I pre-hedged by buying all those bonds in the market? They're saying what I did was market manipulation, that I deliberately ramped the market. I mean, you could argue it either way, you always can. But apparently there's a regulatory review going on.' She spoke the words as if feeling her way through a fog.

Big Paul swivelled his chair so that he was facing away from her and looked at his bank of screens as he spoke.

‘Listen. Meet me downstairs in five. Not in reception. In the coffee shop by the dock.'

‘What? Why? I need to start closing the curves. I guess I could come out for ten minutes if it's important. But why don't we just walk down together now?'

‘Christ, you really don't get it, do you? Seriously, wait five minutes, and then come and meet me, understand?' He stood up and pulled his jacket of the back of his chair, walking away towards the lift before she had a chance to say anything more.

When she reached the café he already had two cups of coffee on the table in front of him and he pushed one towards her as she sat down.

‘Here you go. I'm doing you a favour by being here and I don't want to stay long enough to risk being seen by anyone, so sit down and listen up. I'm about to explain a few things that you clearly haven't been around long enough to work out for yourself. That HR meeting you just had? That's the start of the dismissal process. You're out.'

‘Out? What do you mean, I'm out?'

‘You're out of a job, one way or another. They're going to take whatever they've got on you, and believe me they've got stuff on you the same as they have on all of us, and they're going to use it to force you out of the bank. How you handle the next few weeks will determine how nasty this gets for you. Worst case scenario, they fire you and you leave with no payoff and a revoked FSA authorisation so that you'll never work in the City again. But if you play it right you should be able to swing it so that they make you redundant with a severance payoff, or at least let you leave by mutual agreement with all your deferred stock from your previous bonuses.'

She stared at him. ‘What? But why would they want to get rid of me? For fuck's sake, look at my P'n'L, it's as good as anyone else's.'

He leant back in his chair. ‘Shit, I can't believe you're still this wet behind the ears. This is just the game, Eva. It's a regulatory review and you got caught in the net. They've got to throw someone to the wolves and this time it's you. You're a dead man walking. I can't be seen to be associated with that, but you're a good kid and I don't want to see you get screwed over too badly. Don't take it personally, it happens to everyone sooner or later.'

‘It hasn't happened to you.'

‘Yeah, well, I'm different. I'm a lot better connected than you are, and I know where more than a few bodies are buried.' He sat back in his chair. ‘Anyway, it
has
happened to me. At a different bank, a long time ago, and the reason I've still got a career is that I handled it right. That's not common knowledge, so don't go shouting it about.'

She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. ‘What am I going to do if they fire me? This is the only thing I've ever done. It's who I am.'

‘Yeah, well. You need to hold your shit together. Here's what you're going to do. Don't talk to anyone about this, you don't want to taint yourself. You got that? You don't want anyone to know this is happening. You come into the office every day and you act exactly the same as you always do, but every free minute you have, you call all the contacts and headhunters you know and try to wangle another job offer pronto. That way you can just resign with your reputation intact and everybody's happy. Apart from that, you need to position yourself internally so that HR and Brad know they can't just sack you without a fight. They don't like unfair dismissal lawsuits, especially from minorities and women, so you need to hire yourself an absolute fucking hellbeast of a lawyer and take him along to the rest of your HR meetings so they know you won't just roll over. That won't be cheap, but it will be worth every penny.' He stood up to leave. ‘That's about as much as I can tell you. Good luck.'

As he turned to go, she asked, ‘Paul? Why me? Do you know why this is happening to me?'

He paused, one hand on the back of the chair. ‘Shit, it's not personal. They get rid of ten percent of the front office headcount every year, so the chances are this will happen sooner or later in a trader's career. Why do you think there are no old traders? Sure, the successful ones sometimes bail out once they've got enough to retire on, but where do you think the rest of ‘em go? I better get back to the desk now. Wait at least five minutes before you follow me, understand?'

Eva sat and finished her coffee, giving Big Paul the five minutes he'd requested before returning to the office. There was no sign of anyone on the desk, so she closed the curves and then picked up her bag and left. As she walked out of the building her mobile started ringing. It was Julian again, but she didn't answer it. She'd be home in a few minutes and she didn't want to tell him about this on the phone. Besides, she needed to think things through on the walk back. She was certain that she was freaking out underneath it all, but her thoughts were oozing through her mind like mud. She was being fired. In a matter of weeks she would be out of a job. After all the long hours and late nights, the endless, relentless, grinding sacrifice of everything else in her life, everything she had worked for was about to disappear. Eva turned to look back at the office, the windows glowing orange in the fading light. Why would this happen now, when she had finally got to a point in her career where she had felt if not exactly indispensable, then at least as if she belonged? An insider, almost. She had experience, she knew her job, and she was good at it. How could this be happening?

Outside in the open air, she suddenly found herself struggling to breathe, inhaling and exhaling suddenly an effortful process that her body actually needed to be instructed to perform. She started to walk, one foot in front of another until she reached a nearby park. The sky felt low and ominous. Was it possible to feel claustrophobic outdoors? In a tree above her, a crow shifted its feet and then dropped off its branch like a stone, startling her before it turned and swooped upwards. She stopped and watched until it was a vanishing speck against the grey clouds, trying to shake off the feeling of the sky closing in on her.

As she reached her front door and turned the key in the lock, a spurt of stomach acid rose into her mouth, and she had to swallow hard to force it back down. The door swung open but instead of the empty hallway that she was expecting, Julian was standing there. A strange energy buzzed in the air as they looked at each other, both of them surprised. He had a weird expression on his face, and for a split second she thought that somehow he already knew. For a moment her muscles slackened in relief and she leant forward, about to take a step towards him and fall into his arms, when something at the edge of her vision stopped her. There was a row of suitcases and bags lined up along the wall by his feet. Her mind tried to process the scene but she didn't seem able to gain purchase on the facts, they darted or slithered out of her grasp as she reached for them. But something old and instinctive, deep within the lizard-brain, stopped her from moving forward to embrace him. Eva let her arms drop to her sides and they stood and stared at each other.

‘You haven't been answering your phone,' said Julian.

‘No.'

‘I needed to talk to you. I didn't want you to come home to this.'

‘What have I come home to, Julian? I'm going to need you to explain it to me.'

He paused. ‘It is what it looks like. I'm leaving.'

Eva felt as though she was encased in a bubble. His words bounced off its surface. She opened her mouth, but only a strange bark of laughter emerged.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I've met someone else.'

At last. Something she could understand.

‘You've been cheating on me?'

‘Not really. Not exactly. Would it even matter to you if I had? You've known for a long time that I haven't been happy and you haven't cared enough to do anything about it. You didn't want to marry me. Now I've met someone who actively wants a future with me instead of reluctantly defaulting to it.'

‘Let me guess. A personal training client? Tammy? Candida?'

‘So what if it is a client?' The plea for forgiveness in his eyes flattened into something more defensive. ‘That's mostly how I meet people. I'm not ashamed of it. It's how I met you, remember?'

Eva groped around for a reaction, but she couldn't work out what she felt. Pain? Anger? Relief? All she could think about was how she wanted to sit down on her own in quiet room with a drink. She just didn't have the emotional resources to deal with this, on top of everything else. If this was going to happen no matter what she said or did, it was best for it to happen fast.

‘Right,' she said. ‘I'll let you get on and move your stuff then. Put your key on the table as you leave. I'll give you an hour, will that be enough?'

‘That's it?' he demanded. ‘That's all you have to say to me after nearly three years together? My God, you really never gave a shit about me, did you?'

‘You're lucky I'm making this so easy on you, Julian. And you aren't really the one in a position to get angry here, so spare me the histrionics.' The barb flew out, a tiny poisonous dart precisely aimed to exact a sliver of revenge, and she saw that it had reached its intended target.

His expression darkened and closed and when he spoke his voice was flat. ‘You always were cold-blooded, Eva, but this is incredible. It just proves I'm making the right decision. I don't even know why I was so worried about upsetting you. Have a nice-'

She presumed the last word was ‘life', but the end of the sentence was lost in the sound of the door that she slammed shut behind her. Eva walked away down the corridor towards the lift.