Invincible Summer (24 page)

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I think I'm going to need something harder.'

‘It's at least a ten minute wait at the bar. This place is a lot more crowded than it used to be. Also, it's full of all these hideous
young
people. Shall we go somewhere else?'

As they pushed their way through the crowd and towards the door of the bar Eva could feel Benedict close behind her, and when they made it out into the open air she hesitated only a moment before taking his proffered arm.

Once they were safely seated in a pub a few minutes' walk away from the river, they found themselves looking across the table at one another tongue-tied. Where could they possibly begin?

Eva was the first to break the silence. ‘Well. This is nice. And by nice, what I mean is, very, very weird.'

Benedict grinned. ‘It is, isn't it? Seeing you takes me back to a time before our adult lives had really begun. It makes me think how shocked the old Benedict and Eva would have been if they'd known everything that was going to happen to them.'

‘God, I know just what you mean. When I spotted you in the other bar, I had a sudden flashback to an afternoon we spent lying out on Brandon Hill. It might even have been our last day in Bristol, come to think of it, and I think we were having one of those ridiculous conversations about the meaning of life or something. We really didn't have a clue, did we?'

‘Don't say that. It makes me feel like I should warn the poor, unsuspecting bastard.' Benedict cupped his hands around his mouth and mock-shouted through them into the past: ‘Do everything differently! Every decision you're going to make over the next ten years, do the total opposite!'

Eva laughed. ‘It's not been that bad, has it?'

‘No, I suppose not. I'll never be sorry I had my kids, and it's been a great time to be working in my field. So that's two things I got right. What about you? What would you tell the old Eva?'

‘That patchwork skirts are not a good look?'

‘I thought you carried them off with panache.'

They smiled at each other across the table, the gap bridged, before Benedict's expression became serious. ‘Listen, tell me about Sylvie. I'm really, really sorry I wasn't around when she was going through the mill. I suppose after you guys left Bristol we mostly conducted our friendship through you, but I always considered her a friend. I doubt she feels the same now, though. I haven't been there for anyone, have I?'

Eva shrugged, unwilling to contradict him on that point. ‘Sylvie's doing okay. She's so different now you'd hardly recognise her. I mean, she's the same old Sylvie, but she's grown up so much. I don't know what I would have done without her over the last few years. She's had so much to cope with herself, and still managed to kick me into shape when I was wallowing in self-pity after I lost my job. And don't hate me for saying this, but I wondered after I read your message whether you couldn't do with a dose of that yourself, to be honest.'

‘I can see how it could have sounded like that. But actually, I'm feeling pretty positive about things these days. The boys seem happy again now that everything's settled between me and Lydia, and work's picking up. We had a lot of setbacks, not least because a passing bird dropped a baguette down a vent into the particle accelerator last year, but things are really starting to move forward now. It's only a matter of time before we find the Higgs. We only moved back to London because Lydia insisted after…after I…' Benedict looked down at the table.

‘Shagged a colleague?'

He held up his hands. ‘Fine, I'll bloody say it if you're going to make me. It's no more than I deserve. We only moved back after I shagged a colleague, but actually it's turned out fine. Most of the interesting work now is analysing the data from the experiments and I can just as easily do that from London. I'm happy at Imperial. I've even got my own office, with a spectacular view of the car park. Obviously, it's a struggle not to let the prestige go to my head.' He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘So I've nothing to complain about. It's just that…God, you know how you said that we're old enough to speak openly? It's just that this is so bittersweet. Seeing you, I mean. Have you ever had a moment when you look back over your life and see really clearly all the moments when you could have done something differently and then your life might have taken a whole other direction?'

Eva took a sip of her drink. ‘We did miss a few opportunities, didn't we? Somehow we never quite got into sync.'

Benedict's eyes bored into hers, and his voice was urgent. ‘Is that it then? We missed our moment?'

She smiled. ‘Well, we definitely missed one or two. But who's to say how many you get in a lifetime?'

Benedict stood up and moved around the table towards her. ‘Right now it feels like all the chances I ever missed are laid out in front of me. I'm not going to miss another one.'

He took her wrist and pulled her up to standing in front of him. As he reached out and put his arms around her and drew her body close to his and lowered his mouth to hers for their second kiss, almost a decade after the first, Eva had a sensation of shedding a skin, as if the past was sliding away from her.

Several hours later, Eva bent a bare arm behind her head, looked up at the ceiling above Benedict's bed and let out a long sigh.

‘Really? That bad? Not worth the wait?' laughed Benedict.

‘Ha. Hardly. It's just…why haven't we been doing that for the last fifteen years?'

‘Well, that would mostly be down to all the time you spent ignoring my soulful stares.'

‘If I recall correctly, the initial barrier was your having a girlfriend, a fact that you kept remarkably quiet about when we first met.'

‘Well, all the time you subsequently spent mooning about over Lucifer wasn't exactly conducive to romance, even when I'd ditched said girlfriend in the hope of getting it on with you.'

‘Fair point. But of course, your impregnating and marrying someone else was also a bit of a stumbling block. Not to mention the emigrating. Oh, and the four year hiatus in replying to emails.'

Benedict rolled onto his side to face her. ‘How is this all so easy to say to each other now, when it was impossible back then?'

‘I know. How is it possible for two people to arse around for fifteen years, only for it to just fall into place one day?'

‘It does seem crazy, doesn't it? But, well…maybe it wouldn't have worked out back then. Maybe we didn't miss our moment at all. Maybe this is it, this is the only moment we ever could have had.' His voice brightened. ‘And what's a piffling fifteen years compared to the fifty we've got left, anyway?'

Eva smiled at the implication that the remainder of their lives might be spent together, a ridiculous suggestion after a single shag, and yet at the same time one that seemed as natural as rolling naked over to the other side of the bed and climbing on top of Benedict, a man she knew so well and yet so little that she could indeed imagine spending a lifetime getting to know him.

T
HE ALARM WENT
off at 7am, just as it did every Monday morning. Without opening her eyes Eva shoved the clock off the bedside table, and then rolled over with the aim of stretching herself out against Benedict for a last blissful five minutes of slumber. Encountering only a cool expanse of sheet, she extended an arm and felt around for him, then raised a reluctant eyelid. Big mistake. The sunshine streaming in around the curtains might as well have been airborne caffeine for all the chance she now had of getting back to sleep. The other eyelid begrudgingly followed suit, and she lay there adjusting to the daylight and listening to Benedict banging around in the kitchen of the flat they had been renting in a Hampstead mansion block for the eighteen months. With a bit of luck he was making an early start on restoring the place to some semblance of order. By the time they'd finally decanted the boys into Lydia's car last night they were both so exhausted that they'd collapsed onto the sofa, lacking the will to repair the wreckage that their home was reduced to every other weekend. Eva didn't really resent the socks and comic books and half-eaten apples that lay strewn over every available surface, but she did wish that she had a bit more time to recuperate before launching herself into another week.

Still, it had been a good visit. Yesterday they had taken Josh and Will to Kew Gardens, followed by lunch at the Angel Inn and the Sunday afternoon kids' showing of
the latest Star Wars movie at the Everyman. She had initially approached her new role of
de facto
stepmother with a high degree of trepidation, but the boys had quickly shown her what to do. They could be a handful at times, but they were quite straightforward once you grasped that if you made sure that they had sufficient food, sleep and exercise the rest would follow. And it had turned out that kids were a lot more fun than she'd realised, or at least Benedict's were. They were as messy and noisy as she'd expected they would be, but they also found uncomplicated joy in everything around them and they were entertainingly like their father, giving her strange glimpses of what Benedict must have been like growing up. Heredity was a fascinating thing when you observed it close up to see the ways in which a child resembled and differed from someone you loved. They'd certainly inherited his scientific bent, she thought grumpily as she stepped out of bed and onto the sharp corner of a solar-powered rocket lying on the floor. Eva limped into the kitchen where Benedict was standing at the sink and slid her arms around his waist from behind, savouring the solidity and warmth of his body.

‘Got to run,' he said turning round and kissing her on the mouth. He tasted of toast and coffee. ‘Busy day.' He brushed her hair off her face and kissed her again.

‘Aren't they all?'

‘Listen, thanks for being so great with Josh and Will this weekend,' he told her. ‘I know we could do with some more time to ourselves.'

‘One of these days,' she said. ‘We've got the next fifty years, remember?'

Benedict stroked her cheek and smiled, before reluctantly peeling her arms from around him and slinging his bag over his shoulder. ‘Right, I've got to get going. Oh, and by the way, there's a gift for you on the coffee table. It's not a big thing so don't get excited, just a little something I picked up when I took the boys to the Science Museum on Saturday.'

‘Yeah, well, I think I've got a little something from the Science Museum embedded in the bottom of my foot. Not to mention scattered across our bedroom floor.'

‘I know, I'm sorry. Leave it and I'll clear it up when I get home tonight, promise.' He dropped a last kiss onto her face and headed for the door.

The cafetière was still warm, so she poured herself a mug of coffee and took a swig from it as she padded through to the sitting room to find out what Benedict had left her. There was a plastic bag in the middle of the coffee table and she picked it up and slid out what at first glance appeared to be just a picture frame, but on closer examination was actually a framed Carl Sagan quote printed on a page of a calculus book, so that a graph and a series of formulae were visible in the background. It read:
For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.

How very Benedict, she thought. One of these days she would teach him how to get extra Brownie points by actually wrapping a gift, but she didn't really mind. It was strange how good, how loved and inspired, something like this made her feel when a similar sort of gesture from Julian would have made her queasy. Though she did feel a bit nauseous, now she came to think of it. The feeling had been coming and going over the last couple of days but she'd been trying to ignore it, partly because she was rushed off her feet and partly because lately she'd learnt the hard way that it was easy to imagine things and there was no point in continually getting your hopes up.

She didn't feel like she was imagining it now, though. Did she have time to pop out to the shops? As ParcelBox had taken off her working day had grown longer and Benedict had been under pressure too, with frequent trips to Switzerland and the ever-pressing need to analyse the vast amounts of data being spewed out by the Large Hadron Collider for tell-tale traces of a Higgs-like particle. They were barely managing to keep on top of their workloads let alone spend a decent amount of time together, but it was a crucial time for both of them. The ParcelBox London presence was gathering momentum with thousands already installed and it felt like they were close to reaching a tipping point in the capital, when they would stop being a novelty product for early-adopters and start to establish themselves as a standard accessory for working households. Then they would begin the planned big push into Birmingham and Bristol. Sylvie was doing a brilliant job on product development; her retro design based on the old red post boxes had been by far the most popular of the range. Eva had had her doubts about taking on Lucien as a full-time salesman but he'd worn her down using every tactic he'd learnt in his year of telesales, as well as offering to work on commission and promising not to seduce clients on visits. He seemed to be enjoying the job so much that Eva occasionally wondered whether he stuck to the letter of this agreement, but since his skills as a salesman were indisputable she avoided probing too deeply.

Eva glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece and made a swift decision. She would nip out to the chemist while her laptop was booting. There was a faint chill in the air outside, but she could feel it dissipating even as she walked. The air was soft with morning haze and laden with a summery feeling of abundance. A little way along the street she startled a squirrel on the ground, sending it scurrying up the trunk of a nearby cherry tree where it knocked off a blossom that fluttered down to the pavement in front of her. It was an almost laughably idyllic morning, she thought, feeling rather as though she ought to be clicking her heels together as she went. Even the irritable traffic queue and barging pedestrians on the High Street couldn't puncture her mood; it just reminded her how lucky she was to be out of the rat-race and not having to battle her way across London to an office each morning.

In the chemist, a bored-looking assistant was positioned beside the aisle wielding a fragrance bottle. It was the only route to the counter and Eva readied herself to fend her off, but before she had a chance to protest the trigger-happy perfumier engulfed her in a cloud of something strongly reminiscent of Toilet Duck. Her body's response was instantaneous and unstoppable: the coffee she'd drunk shot up from her gullet without warning, forcing her to bend forward and deposit it noisily on the mat in front of the makeup counter. The physical relief was immediate but as she straightened up she was confronted with the face of the assistant, whose complacent expression had given way to barely concealed revulsion.

‘I'm so sorry, I don't know what came over me,' Eva gasped. ‘Can I help to clean it up?'

They both looked down at the mess and the assistant shook her head. ‘Do you know, I think I'm just going to put that whole mat into a bin bag and chuck it out.'

For a moment Eva considered bolting but she knew there was no other chemist open nearby, so she staggered to the front, grabbed a pink box from a display next to the checkout and threw it onto the counter. The young woman on the till looked down at the box and then back up at Eva, the distaste on her face slowly being replaced by a look of dawning comprehension. She winked as she ran it under the scanner, whispering, ‘I think we both know what that's going to say!'

Ten minutes later Eva was sitting in her bathroom watching a single blue line stubbornly refuse to turn to a cross. Three minutes, then four, then five ticked past until it was clear that the pregnancy test was not going to change from negative to positive. But what about her churning stomach? Could the test be wrong? Could it just be too soon? Her phone started to ring in the sitting room and Eva went to answer it, still holding the stubbornly unchanging test.

‘Eva? It's Sylvie. There's no way you could look after Allegra today is there? I've got a stomach bug, been up half the night vomiting.'

Eva groaned. ‘I think I've got it too. But I could come over and help if you're completely out of action. Give me a few minutes to pack up my laptop and paperwork and I'll bring it over and we can do some combination of work, throwing up and looking after Allegra together.'

She hung up and carried the pregnancy test into the kitchen to bury it at the bottom of the bin where Benedict wouldn't see it. She wouldn't bring it up; if anything, the continual focus on it was making it less likely to happen. Sex could almost be a chore when you had to do it to schedule. It was becoming a lonely journey for this sort of reason, both of them leaving things unvoiced because they feared that talking about them would only make it harder. It was a horrible feeling after the closeness that had enveloped them for most of the two years they'd been a couple, and an unwelcome reminder of the time there had been too many things they couldn't talk about and their friendship had faltered then spluttered out.

Being together was so overwhelmingly right
that it seemed impossible they could ever return to such a state, but now a distance was starting to open up between them, no one's fault, but a function of a situation that neither of them could fix. She couldn't count the number of times she'd imagined telling him, saying the words,
I'm pregnant
, and watching his face as he realised that in her belly was a baby that was theirs, that belonged to them both. Now the fantasy brought tears to her eyes and she pushed it roughly from her mind. Eva closed the bin lid and was just about to go and pack a bag to take to Sylvie's when her phone rang again. It was still in her hand and she looked down at the screen, noting before answering that this time the call came from an unfamiliar number.

Benedict was strolling along the Brompton Road towards Imperial College when his phone started to ring. He tugged it out of his pocket and saw that it was Eva, which was strange because he'd seen her only half an hour ago. It couldn't mean…could it? Benedict was painfully aware that her period was due; he didn't mention it, tried to keep the pressure off, but each month he was on tenterhooks. He was starting to worry that it would never happen for them. It had been well over a year since they'd ditched the condoms, and as the months rolled by it was getting harder and harder for them both to act nonchalant each time her period arrived.

He'd known what she was thinking: that Lydia had got pregnant at the drop of a hat, so there was nothing wrong with him and it must be her. You couldn't open a newspaper these days for articles about how female fertility drops off a cliff after the age of thirty-five. Rationally, they both knew that what the GP said was true, that it could take a while to happen for some people, but there had been that nagging voice in his head saying, it's all too good to be true, nothing's ever perfect, you can't have it all.

He so desperately wanted for Eva to experience what he had with his kids, the love, the enchantment, the sheer wonder. He still regularly burned with a mixture of adoration and shame when he saw them. He'd been such an imperfect father, and watching the pain and confusion that the divorce had caused Josh and Will had been agonising. In the dark of night a small voice whispered to him that this was the reason that he and Eva couldn't conceive, that he was being punished for not being a good enough father to his existing children.

Still, the boys seemed happy enough these days, in fact once everything had been settled they had seemed to take the new arrangements in their stride almost better than he had. After he and Eva had got together she'd insisted he read a book on helping children to cope with divorce and stepparents and try to follow the advice in it. It hadn't always gone to plan, he remembered, thinking back to the last time he'd tried to give them the recommended ‘safe space in which to express their emotions.'

‘Boys,' he'd said, clearing his throat. ‘I thought this might be a good time for a bit of a chat. Obviously there has been a lot going on, and Mum and I both know you've had to cope with a lot of uncertainty. I know that my moving in with Eva is a big change for you. Is there anything you want to talk about?'

‘Oh, Dad,' grumbled Josh. ‘Do we have to talk about the divorce again?'

‘Well, no, we don't have to,' said Benedict, taken aback. ‘Not if you'd rather not. It's just that it's better to talk about things that are upsetting you and not keep them bottled up inside.'

Will and Josh looked at one another.

‘The thing is,' Will piped up, ‘we're not really that upset about it anymore. Loads of kids at school have divorced parents, and stepparents too. In my class there's James, and Tom and Rufus, and probably a bunch more.'