Invincible Summer (25 page)

‘Oh. Ah. Right.' Benedict rubbed his chin. ‘So you're okay with it all then? We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.'

Josh sighed and then said patiently as if explaining to somebody very slow on the uptake, ‘We can talk about it if you want, Dad. It's just that we've talked about it quite a lot already, and we don't really have anything else to say. We'd rather watch
Finding Nemo
. You did say we could see a film today, remember.'

So apparently the children didn't feel that their lives had been totally ruined by what he'd done. Was it too much to hope that he and Eva could have a child too, that their life together could contain the richness and joy that he got from Josh and Will? The night they'd got together they had talked about whether they'd missed their moment, and he'd said that perhaps this was the only moment they could ever have had. But what if this moment was too late for them to have a baby? That was the fear that kept him awake at night, listening to Eva's breathing to try to ascertain whether she was already asleep or lying awake worrying beside him. And now, the phone was ringing and Benedict had a sudden bolt of certainty that it was finally going to happen for them, that she was ringing to tell him she was pregnant, and he couldn't keep the smile out of his voice as he flipped open the phone and said, ‘Hi, Eva?'

T
HE DAYLIGHT FILTERED
through the stained glass, casting a blue glow across Eva's cheek as she sat in a pew near the front of the church watching the candle she'd lit flicker in the shadowy corner. She'd been coming here most days in the four months since Keith had died; barely able to concentrate on work, she found being alone in the empty flat intolerable. It didn't seem fair to spend too much time at Sylvie's, alternating between sitting frozen or crying as Sylvie tried to usher a curious Allegra away from her. In the weeks since the call from the hospital Eva had wept everywhere, in the street, on the tube, in Starbucks, amid stares and glares from the people around her. Then, on one of the endless walks that she took to get out of the flat and tire out her body, she'd come past St John-at-Hampstead and realised the doors were open.

There was a sign up saying visitors were welcome to come in, sit quietly, light a candle, and so this was what Eva had done nearly every day since. Usually she had the place to herself; a few times a churchwarden had cautiously approached offering a listening ear, but each time she'd waved them away and soon they left her alone. This was where she felt most calm. Alone at home her grief felt like fear, like staring into an abyss that threatened to engulf her, but here in the muffled almost-silence beneath the soaring ceilings and surrounded by the engraved memorial stones, it felt less frightening, like something natural and part of the greater mass of human experience.

The church was a place that didn't recoil from sorrow; its business went on around her with quiet acceptance of her private loss. Each of these carved stones would have been laid by someone feeling something akin to what she now felt. That one there, for a boy of only eighteen killed at Flanders: what devastation must his parents have felt as they stood in this place a century earlier, as the memorial to their son was pushed into place? Eva knew that losing a child must be worse than losing a father, and yet she didn't see how it was possible to feel more pain than she did now.

It was supposed to get easier. That was what everyone kept telling her: it gets easier. But it didn't feel like it was getting easier, in fact some days she was so exhausted she almost wanted to let go of the life-raft and drown. The passing of weeks and months somehow didn't seem to be taking her any further away from the day that she'd stood in the kitchen with her hand still on the rubbish bin in which she'd just buried her dashed hopes of a baby, and learned that she would also be burying her father.
Was she the next of kin to Keith Andrews
, the nurse on the other end of the phone had asked.
There was some bad news, did she have someone with her? A massive coronary
, she'd said,
I'm so sorry
, and just like that her father, the last of her flesh and blood, who'd raised and fed and taught and encouraged and been proud of and disapproved of her in almost equal measure, was gone.

Behind her, Eva heard the church door open and then close with a soft thud, and she lowered her head as if in prayer to hide her blotchy face and deter anyone from attempting to talk to her. She glared at her knees, wishing the interloper away as the footsteps progressed down the aisle and then stopped a few feet away from her.

‘Eva?' came a familiar voice, and she jerked around to see Benedict standing there. For a moment they gaped at each other before he slipped into the row behind her.

‘What are you doing here?' he asked, resting his arms on the back of her pew.

Eva turned back to face the altar. ‘I could ask you the same question.'

‘I took the afternoon off. I thought I'd come home and spend it with you but you weren't answering your phone so I walked around a bit and ended up here. For a chat, you know.' He gestured vaguely upwards. ‘We used to come here when I was a kid. Christmas and Easter, mainly. I pop in every now and again when I'm passing. Not that often and usually when things aren't going brilliantly, I have to admit.' A wry smile crossed his face and faded again. ‘I didn't know you came here though. You hadn't mentioned it.'

Eva sighed. ‘No. Bit embarrassed, I suppose. What with the way I usually dismiss religion as being for nutters. But, well, they leave the doors open and let me sit here as long as I want. I don't know what else to do all day. I can't seem to concentrate on work anymore.' She paused and they sat in silence for a few seconds before she spoke again. ‘It's just…Benedict, I just can't seem to find a way to make sense of it all. I mean, I know there's not much to make sense of. He wasn't that old, but he wasn't that young either. People die, of course they do, and at our age it's normal for people's parents to die.

‘But…I just can't seem to process it. And people seem to expect me to get on with things like it's nothing. Even Sylvie seems a bit uncomprehending, though obviously she's being amazing, shouldering most of the workload for the business. And to be honest,
I
would have expected me to be getting on with it by now. When other people lost parents, you know, colleagues at work or whatever, I sort of expected them to be over it pretty quickly. It's just the natural order, isn't it? But sometimes I feel like I can hardly breathe. Maybe it's worse because he was both parents to me. I feel like I've just lost both my parents at once.' Her voice was gravelly. ‘I feel like I'm grieving for my mother too, and for the life we never got to have together. Does that sound crazy?'

‘Of course it doesn't. And you don't need to rush to get over it. Honestly, I still feel quite shocked and heartbroken that I'm never going to see him again, and that must be nothing compared to what you're feeling.'

‘It's just that…I can't really believe he's gone. And…oh Benedict,' Eva's voice cracked, ‘maybe if we'd managed to have a baby, maybe it would be easier, but the reality is that I have no family left now.'

Benedict reached out a hand and tangled his fingers in her hair. ‘I'm here. I'm your family. And Sylvie and Allegra and Josh and Will. And Lucien, too.' He sighed. ‘Eva, I'm sorry. About all of it, all of the disappointments. We can still try IVF. It could still happen for us, we just have to keep the faith.'

Eva's rubbed her eyes. ‘Some days it's almost too painful to keep hoping. And now it's even worse, because if I could have a baby, he'd be in that baby, his genes. Maybe it would even look like him. But now all that's left of him is in me, and yet there's nothing inside me that I can find any comfort in. I'm full of broken glass.' She put her head down on her hands. ‘And this, this should be your moment of glory, right when the Higgs discovery has just been announced, and instead you're left sitting here with me like this. You must wish you weren't here, how could you not.'

Benedict took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him and said fiercely, ‘Don't ever say that again. Eva, you're not spoiling anything for me. This is all that matters, this, here, us. It's the only place in the world I'd want to be. And of course I'm excited that we found the Higgs but it's not as if we haven't known we were closing in on it for a long time.' He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Let's face it, even the media seemed to think that the most surprising thing about it was that the world's most brilliant physicists considered Comic Sans an appropriate font in which to announce their historic findings.' He pulled her back against his shoulder and she managed a weak smile. ‘Eva, I'm right here with you, not just for the good times, but for the bad times too. We're all going to have pain in our lives, sooner or later. Sometimes it can even be a gift.'

Eva snorted wetly. ‘How can pain be a gift? That would be a worse present than the bloody bath salts your aunt gave us at Christmas. If this is a gift, I want the receipt so I can take it back and exchange it for a nice scarf or some attractive stationery.'

Benedict laughed. ‘Look, I know the religious stuff all seems crazy to you. Some days it seems crazy to me too, but other days it seems to make perfect sense. Is it really so mad to look for something bigger than ourselves?'

‘Well, I don't know about mad. The thing that really matters is whether it's true, whether there's any evidence for it. Otherwise it just seems a bit cynical, like Pascal's wager that you might as well believe in God because if he doesn't exist you haven't lost anything, and if he does you win the bet.'

‘Ah, but there's a less cynical formulation of the same argument. Camus, I think: “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.”

‘The thing is, no one really knows anything, not you, not me, not even the bloody Pope. And I know you can argue that if you start to believe things without evidence you might as well believe any old arbitrary thing, and yes, we could be just a bunch of mammals floating through infinite space on a rock, scrabbling around in the dirt until the lights go out, but in that case nothing really matters does it, not your father's death, not factory farms or Houla or Beslan, not Auschwitz, not anything. And yet deep down we know that these things do matter. So is it really such an arbitrary thing to hope for? That suffering matters, that love survives?'

Eva leant her head back and rested it against his hand. ‘No. Right now that doesn't seem like such an arbitrary thing to hope for. Some days I can almost believe it myself.' She straightened up. ‘Not that Keith wouldn't be laughing if he could hear this. Not really his bag, religion. But I think he knew a bit about love. He and my mother weren't married, you know, because they didn't believe in such bourgeois constructs, but I'm certain she was the love of his life. It's strange to think of them feeling about one another the way we do.' She pushed a wet strand of hair back from her cheek.

‘Well, yes,' said Benedict. ‘You're lucky if you find that sort of love once in a lifetime. Not to mention how he felt about you. I know you sometimes thought he could be a bit too wrapped up in his politics, but it was always obvious to me how proud he was of you.'

In front of them on the stand, the tea-light Eva had lit was guttering. They sat quietly watching it for a few minutes, and then Benedict stood and took her hand.

‘Come home with me now,' he told her. ‘You're not alone.'

His hand was warm against the small of her back as they walked back along the aisle beneath the glowing gaze of stained-glass saints and through the heavy doors into the daylight beyond.

W
HAT WAS THE
spirit of our age, do you think?' said Eva to no one in particular.

She was lying on the shingly sand of a Dorset beach watching Allegra blundering around excitedly in the shallows with Josh and Will, overseen by Benedict. In her bathing suit the stiffness of Allegra's left side was pronounced, her arm curled and her leg inflexible, but the boys, now aged eleven and thirteen and strong and tanned from a holiday in Greece, were used to playing with her much less roughly than they did with each other. Eva watched as Allegra splashed them and in mock fury they lifted her up by her shoulders and legs and threatened to dunk her, before depositing her very gently in the inch or two of water at the sea's edge. It was an idyllic English summer's afternoon: azure sky, gentle breeze flicking the corner of an unopened paperback, the faint tinny beat of a pop song drifting across from the radio of a group of teenagers farther up the beach.

Lucien, who was lying on his back beside her wearing a pointy cardboard party hat, shielded his eyes with a hand and looked up. ‘Oh, we're having one of those conversations? It's been a while. What brought this on?'

‘The music, I think,' said Eva, who was also thinking about the fact that she would turn forty this year. ‘That song,
Another Girl
, it's by The Beatles, isn't it? It made me think about how the Sixties was the era of free love and all that, and then it occurred to me that I don't really know what our era was all about. I feel like we were a sort of in-between generation. We weren't quite the internet generation and in any case, who wants to be known for looking at a lot of porn and pictures of cats? But I don't feel like we were defined by a particular set of ideals either. So I was wondering what our zeitgeist was supposed to be.' She picked at the remains of Allegra's birthday cake, which had started the day as a glitter-covered figure nine but had now been reduced to a pile of crumbs and smears of sticky red icing.

‘Nihilism?' suggested Lucien, who'd got into Nietzsche in the prison library some years earlier.

‘No, that's not true, we did care,' interjected Sylvie, turning her face to the breeze to blow thick strands of copper hair from her eyes. ‘We cared about all sorts of things. Global warming. Iraq. GMOs.'

‘Well, yeah, just not enough to actually do anything about them,' said Lucien.

‘Really? Is that all we can say for ourselves?' Eva sighed and rearranged herself slightly to catch the sun. ‘”We cared, but not enough.” That was the ethos of our era? Instead of standing up and fighting for something we believed in, we just stepped away and each tended to our own corner of the world?' She pondered this for a moment, and reached a conclusion. ‘It's awful, but in many ways that does seem about right when I look back on my life.'

‘Not just you,' said Sylvie. ‘It took us all a while to work out what life was supposed to be about. Benedict was the only one of us who had his priorities straight from the start, and in the nicest possible way, he is a bit of a freak of nature.'

‘True,' agreed Eva. ‘He's always had this unswerving sense of purpose. I've often envied it actually. When I was making plans I mostly thought about what I wanted to get away from, not what I actually wanted to achieve.'

‘So you made out like a bandit in the City till the economy broke,' teased Lucien.

‘Hey.' She punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘That's not fair. I was a tiny cog in a huge machine at a time when nobody was really seeing the big picture.'

‘Hmm. Didn't you get sacked for insider trading?'

‘No I bloody didn't! I left by mutual agreement, and it was market manipulation, not insider trading.' Eva paused and then continued more slowly. ‘But with hindsight I realise that I may have done some…questionable things.' She lowered her voice. ‘I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Markets moving fifty basis points in milliseconds, billion dollar fortunes made and lost. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.'

Lucien grinned. ‘Yeah, yeah, alright, Deckard.'

Eva grinned back, but quickly returned to looking serious. ‘The thing is, at the time, everything we did felt like it happened in isolation from the rest of the world. It's only when you get older you really understand how everything's connected: money, power, politics, markets, people's actual lives.'

The song on the radio changed abruptly, replacing The Beatles with the angry staccato of the latest Rihanna hit, and all three of them looked towards the shore where Allegra was busy trying to put a bucket on Will's head.

 ‘This new generation though,' continued Eva waving a hand in the direction of the radio, ‘they seem worse than we ever were. To read the news you'd think it was all meow-meow and donkey punching. We thought we were pretty wild, but this new crop, it's like they're dead inside. Or does every generation think this about the next one? I dunno, maybe it's just that I'm getting old.' Eva reached up unthinkingly and smoothed away the lines by her eyes that seemed to grow deeper every morning in the bathroom mirror. She had realised just the other day that she was now older than her own mother had been when she died.

Sylvie laughed. ‘I think we're all fundamentally the same. Us, them, every other generation. We all think we're unique snowflakes, but we're not really. Do you remember how we thought we were so different when we were young, like we were on the fringes of society because we dyed our hair and did drugs at parties? Christ, we'd have loathed it then if we knew how like everyone else we are, how people are just the same the world over. Funny, because it feels rather comforting now, I feel sort of grounded by it.'

The children had quietened down now and were collecting pieces of shell washed up on the shore, and the teenagers had packed up and taken the radio with them so that the only sound was the sloshing of the water and the occasional call of a seagull. The air was warm and the glare bounced off the water with dazzling intensity, making them squint and transporting them to other places of shimmering light. For a moment Sylvie was far away in a valley in the Languedoc, and Eva was haring along a road in Corfu, Benedict beside her.

‘Nothing really turned out how we expected, did it?' said Eva.

‘Nope.' Sylvie shook her head. ‘I didn't realise how much things would change and how little we would be able to control.'

‘It felt like we were invincible,' said Lucien. ‘Back in the day, I mean. We weren't stupid, I knew life didn't stay the same forever, but I didn't really
know
it, y'know?'

Sylvie took up the theme. ‘And there was always going to be a way out. You'd go over a cliff in a Ferrari, or overdose in a squat in a tragic-yet-glamorous act of artistic excess. I never really thought about having people relying on me. Let alone trying to raise a child on my own.'

 A mischievous look crept over Eva's face. ‘By the way, Sylvie, Big Paul happened to let slip the other day that he'd been over to your place last week. Called it an “investor update” when he cottoned on to the fact you hadn't mentioned it to me. But of course, you two wouldn't be conducting investor meetings without your CEO there, would you now?'

‘Oh, jog on. He just comes by for a coffee and a walk on the Heath with me and Allegra every now and again. He gets a bit moony-eyed sometimes but I don't really think there's anything in it. Believe it or not, men aren't queuing around the block to take on a single mother with a disabled child. Anyway, I'm not even sure I'd want one. I haven't done too badly on my own, have I?'

‘You've been brilliant,' Lucien told her. ‘I'd never have dreamt of having kids what with how messed up our own childhood was. You know how that shit runs in families. So double pat on the back to you.'

‘Oh, Lucien, I know we're going to still be having this argument when we're eighty, but having Allegra has made me sympathise with Mum more. I mean, it's really tough, being a parent. She asked how you were doing when she phoned the other day, you know. And I think she's drinking a bit less now.'

‘Whatever.' He held his hand up in the air, last two fingers looking pinker and shinier than usual in contrast with the tanned skin of the rest of his hand, and turned it around slowly in front of his face. ‘I know who my real family are. They're right here on this beach.'

‘Speaking of which, Sylvie, you do know you're not really on your own, don't you?' said Eva. ‘Even if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, there'd still be me and Benedict and Lucien to look after Allegra. And when we're gone, Will and Josh will be here to make sure she's alright, she's virtually a sister to them. If there's one thing that I've realised since Keith died, it's that friendship and love are pretty much all we've got that's worth anything. Everything else is noise.' She reached out and took her friend's hand, and they all fell quiet.

‘Talking of love,' said Lucien eventually without opening his eyes, ‘did you know that Eva used to be in love with me?'

‘Yep,' answered Sylvie casually, and then at Eva's squeak of horror, added, ‘You could hardly miss the way you used to hang on to his every word. I used to wish he'd just put you out of your misery.'

‘Bloody hell! Put me out of my misery? It wasn't all unrequited pining, I'll have you know.' Eva glanced towards the shore to make sure Benedict was out of earshot. ‘Do you know what he did? He slept with me. Back in Bristol, in our first year. And then acted like it never happened, the complete bastard.'

Sylvie looked up and arched an eyebrow first at Lucien and then at Eva.

‘Really? You actually shagged her? And
you
didn't tell me?' This last directed at Eva.

‘Yeah. Sorry. I didn't know how you'd take it. I figure you can't bollock me for it now, seeing as it happened a good couple of decades ago.'

‘Christ. You could have ended up my sister-in-law.'

‘Not exactly,' said Lucien. ‘I wasn't really looking for the white picket fence experience back then, and she was way out of my league by the time I realised what she was worth.' He tugged her towards him so that his arm was around her neck, half-embrace and half-headlock.

Eva laughed and inhaled deeply, her face in his neck. ‘You still smell the same,' she told him quietly.

Sylvie made a gagging noise. ‘I heard that, you know. Now you're really grossing me out.'

They all laughed and settled back down against the blanket. Eva stared out at the luminescent water and thought back to the day when she had scattered Keith's ashes into the sea. She wriggled out of Lucien's embrace and peeled off her dress to the bikini underneath, then walked down to join Benedict and the children at the water's edge.

‘Find any sea monsters?'

‘No, but we did find some seaweed and a dead starfish to decorate our sandcastle.' Benedict waved towards the elaborately moated and turreted fortress that the boys had built, which was now being demolished under the onslaught of Allegra's enthusiastic embellishment.

Eva smiled weakly but didn't say anything, so he took her hand and led her into the water, close enough to keep an eye on the kids but far enough away to talk.

‘What's up?'

She looked down at her feet. ‘I got my period this morning.'

‘Ah.' Benedict rubbed his eyes. ‘Eva, I'm sorry.'

‘Me too.'

‘So that's it then.'

‘Yes.'

‘Unless you want to keep going.'

‘I don't think so. Do you? It's not like the odds aren't stacked against us, what with my age and four failed IVF cycles under our belt.'

‘No,' he said slowly. ‘I don't want to keep going. I'd do it for you, but I don't want it for myself. I don't want to live under the shadow of it anymore, I feel like it's suffocating us and sucking all the joy out of the other things in our lives. And there
are
lots of good things in our lives.'

‘There are, aren't there? Maybe it's time to start focussing on them again. Look at what we've got: each other, Allegra, Josh, Will, our friends, my business, your research. That's a lot, right? More than most people have. Shouldn't this be enough?'

Benedict slid his arms around her waist and pulled her body close to his. ‘I'm not sure there's any “should” about these things. But I know it's enough for me.' He paused. ‘Eva, do you think it can be enough for you? Really? Because I have everything I need so long as you're happy.'

‘It's not perfect, but then, what is? I'll get used to it. To be honest I think I already have. I think I stopped daring to really hope for it quite a long time ago.' She tightened her arms around him and rested her head against his shoulder, savouring the warmth and the salty smell of his skin. They stood leaning against each other up to their knees in the water, watching the children and swaying slightly with the waves.

After a while she said, ‘Yes.'

‘”Yes?”'

‘I can be happy with this, with what I've got. I'm happy right now, in fact.' Eva turned her face up to his and smiled. ‘Now, you get back to your sandcastle. I'm going for a swim.'

Benedict looked at her like she was crazy. ‘You do realise the water's freezing further out?'

But Eva was already heading away from him. She waded a little way along the beach so that the children wouldn't notice and try to follow her, then plunged into the sea. The cold paralysed her momentarily, pressing the breath from her chest so that she came up kicking and gasping, but within a few minutes she had swum out far enough that her body was beginning to acclimatise. She loved the elemental feeling of the ocean, its vastness. The way a human was a mere speck within it, the way its sheer force and indifference was both frightening and compelling at the same time. Something washed past her leg and she shivered because you never knew whether it was a skein of seaweed or a giant squid, and to quell that thought she swam further out, feeling her muscles straining pleasurably at the effort.