Invincible Summer (3 page)

‘Eva, you simply must try the souvlaki,' she urged as they sat down at the candle- and flower-strewn table on the terrace. ‘It's Eleni's specialty, she makes it with swordfish.'

‘Ah,' said Eva, shooting a furious look at Benedict. ‘Did Benedict forget to tell you that I'm a vegetarian?'

‘Oh, one of the Latter Day Saints lot, you mean?' boomed Hugo. ‘With the funny underpants? I met a chap like that at the Athenaeum a while back. Queer sort of a fellow actually, but I'm sure you're not all that way.'

‘No, darling, that's not what she means at all,' said Marina. ‘She's not a cult member, it's more like being a sort of hippy. Don't mind him, Eva,' she continued with a restraining hand on her husband's arm. ‘He's not very modern. I don't mind telling you that I once danced naked around Stonehenge on the summer solstice myself. Well, it was the Sixties,' she continued in response to Benedict and Harry's appalled stares. ‘Everyone was doing that sort of thing back then.' She turned back to Eva. ‘Now, why don't you try some of these meatballs? They're simply divine.'

Benedict lay face down on his lounger next to the pool and peered at Eva through the crack in his eyelids. The sun was too bright to open them any wider, and besides, it was a great opportunity to scrutinise her in a swimsuit unnoticed. Make the most of it, he told himself. Their week together was almost over; her flight was the following day and he didn't even know when he'd next see her, let alone in a bathing costume. What exquisite agony it was to let his eyes roam over her body, especially on a rare occasion when she appeared to be lying there unselfconsciously. All week she'd seemed to be hiding under a towel or pulling her dress on just to go from the pool to the bathroom. Was she making sure he didn't get any ideas, or did she genuinely not know how beautiful she was?

 He'd thought it as long as he'd known her, right from the moment they'd met at the icebreaker party during Fresher's Week, when she'd spilt a pint of cider down his trousers and then spent half an hour drunkenly apologising. Was it possible to be both clumsy and poised at the same time? Eva embodied a strange contradiction both in looks and temperament, shambling but upright, uncertain but determined. She wore an unfashionable selection of outfits, long flowing skirts and big boots and slogan T-shirts. Sometimes he suspected she was hiding behind her voluminous clothing, but her naturally straight-backed posture belied her five-feet-five-inches and made her stand out like a peacock in a flock of geese, at least to his eyes.

It was her face, though, that really got to him. He often had to remind himself to stop staring at the way her green eyes seemed to flicker from humour to concentration to determination at a second's notice, in a face framed by silky, tangled brown hair that gave the impression of never being brushed. Her mouth too, was perfect, wide and upturned at the corners, though he'd noticed that she often kept a hand in front of it to hide the crop of spots that invariably broke out on her chin whenever she had an exam or a heavy night.

They'd met at a party in his hall of residence so he'd guessed she lived nearby but hadn't been able to believe his luck when she'd turned out to be studying Physics too. They'd quickly fallen into the habit of going to lectures and then grabbing a coffee or three together afterwards. They were naturally on the same wavelength; he never got tired of talking to her and she seemed to feel the same way. She was interested in everything, wanted to experience all that life had to offer. He worried that he would seem boring to her by comparison, too focused on physics and narrow in his horizons, and he rued the fact that their natural rapport had translated so quickly into matey familiarity, the shackles of which had proven impossible to throw off even once he'd broken up with Emily halfway through the first year.

Emily: what a mistake that had been, and the consequences still echoed with him now. She'd been his back-home girlfriend, approved of by his parents and slotting frictionlessly into his group of friends from school. When he'd left for university and she'd been shipped off to finishing school in Switzerland he'd gone along with her assumption that they would stay together without giving it much thought, but his error had quickly become apparent after arriving in Bristol and meeting Eva. At first he'd avoided the subject, but their friendship had bloomed with an intensity that left him with no choice but to mention his girlfriend, which he'd done with a studied casualness designed to imply the relationship wasn't serious. He'd hoped and expected that Eva would give him the shove he needed to end it, but instead he found himself watching helplessly as something slammed shut behind her eyes. Then before there had been time to redeem himself, Lucien had appeared on the scene and all he'd been able to do was to look on miserably at Eva's transparent attempts to make him notice her.

The thing with Emily had finally met its grisly and inevitable end during the summer after the first year, and the night he returned to Bristol he'd girded himself with a few pints and then gone to see Eva with the intention of confessing his feelings. That night, trudging back to his room after Eva had pleaded tiredness and he hadn't even made it past the door, it began to dawn on Benedict what a high price he was going to have to pay for his cowardice and indecision. Had he simply missed his chance or was there some other undercurrent, something going on with Lucien, despite their studied indifference around each other? She'd never told him and he'd never plucked up the courage to ask. How could it be so easy to talk about some things and not others? He flattered himself to think that he was Eva's closest confidant, or at least a close second to Sylvie. He knew her hopes and dreams and fears, how she was in turns insecure and defiant about her unconventional upbringing alone with her father and how unwilling she was to let herself use it as an excuse for anything. He'd opened up to her too, in ways that he'd never done with anyone else. Only yesterday they'd got up really early and walked all the way to the top of Mount Pantokrator, where they found a gaggle of floppy-eared goats mooching about the ruins of an ancient church.

They sat side by side on a dusty boulder looking out across the water, legs aching and eyes dazzled by the sunlight, and it had felt so natural to voice his excitement about the research he would be beginning after the summer and his hopes that it would eventually land him a job at the particle accelerator at CERN. As they sat together high above the world, he heard himself explaining how he loved particle physics because it gave him a different sort of perch, one that granted him the ability to see far beyond a normal human lifespan, back to the beginning of the universe and perhaps even forward to the end. There was no one else he talked to like this, no one with whom it would even occur to him to share these thoughts that he'd barely even articulated to himself and yet now tumbled from his lips like poetry.

‘Wow. That's quite the motivation for choosing what to do with your life,' Eva told him when he finished his breathless outpouring. ‘It almost makes me feel bad about my own choices. Sometimes I wonder if I'm more motivated by fear than anything else. I'm scared that I'll make a mess of this new job and never succeed at anything, and I'll just go back to being Eva Nobody from Sussex, boring and unexceptional, which perhaps is just what I really am deep down,' she concluded with a smile that was only half-ironic.

How ridiculous that sounded as he replayed the conversation in his head now, lying next to her by pool: Eva Nobody. Everything about her was exceptional, and how she didn't know that he couldn't imagine. The afternoon air was lavender-scented and vibrated with the buzz of industrious insects. Through the gap between his eyelids Benedict watched as Eva opened her eyes, then rolled lazily onto her side and looked at him. At first he thought she was about to speak, but she remained silent and he suddenly realised from the unfaltering way her eyes were making their way up and down his body that she didn't know he was watching her. Was she…could she be...?

‘Eva Andrews, are you checking me out?' he demanded.

Eva started. ‘No, I'm not checking you out!' she yelped. ‘I was admiring the view. Anyway, how would you know who was checking you out even if anyone was, which they absolutely weren't? You didn't even have your eyes open.'

‘How would you know if I had my eyes open if you weren't looking at me?' He turned over to lie on one side and posed with one hand on his hip and his head propped up on the other. ‘You carry on. Don't worry about leaving me feeling soiled by your naked lust, I can handle it.'

Eva threw her magazine at him and stomped off towards the pool. He watched the way her breasts jiggled as she stomped and the way she emerged seal-sleek after diving into the water, and then found he had to roll onto his front and think about differential equations for quite some time before he could join her.

In an insalubrious room in a hostel in Goa Lucien carelessly tossed the letter onto a crowded table, unconcerned by its landing in a pool of beer dripping from an overturned bottle, before returning to the task of carefully counting out a pile of blue pills into little plastic bags.

 ‘Well, well,' he said. ‘So Fauntleroy really was born with a silver spoon in his gob. He plays that down, doesn't he? And he still hasn't got the
cojones
to kiss Eva after making puppy-eyes at her for three years.'

Sylvie, who was sprawled across a seamy mattress on the floor on the other side of the room, looked up from the paperback she was reading.

‘Give the poor guy a break. They can't all be Lucien-style lotharios.'

‘I know, but he's so wet it's comedy. I mean, I like the guy, but…'

Sylvie looked thoughtful. ‘Interesting, though. I thought it had all died down but if it's still going on after all this time…I wonder if those two might actually end up together one of these days. You know they were all flirty with each other when they first met?'

‘Not really. Vaguely, I guess. Just tailed off, didn't it?'

‘Sort of. He had a girlfriend back home that he'd carefully omitted to mention. Eva was spitting blood when he finally owned up. He broke up with her in the summer after the first year, but we were all good mates by then, so Eva kept things that way. You know what it's like, you can't have two people in a group like ours getting it on, it would have totally wrecked things.'

Lucien didn't answer immediately and fidgeted self-consciously, but Sylvie had resumed reading and didn't notice.

‘Well, he's blown it now, hasn't he?' he said finally. ‘She's off to her job in London and he'll be stuck in Bristol. It's not like they're going to be seeing much of each other.'

 Sylvie frowned. ‘It's only temporary, all of this though, isn't it? Everyone scattering to the four winds? You and I will go and live in London when we get back, and Eva will already be there and Benedict will wash up there sooner or later and then the whole gang will be back together again. And then in, like, fifteen years time when we're all grown up and our idea of a good time is drinking cocoa and doing jigsaws, Eva and Benedict can get married and have a couple of kids—'

‘—called Tarquin and Octavia—,'

‘—and a golden Labrador. And I'll be a famous artist with my own gallery and you'll be, oh, I don't know, a mid-level advertising executive or something…'

‘Oh, do fuck off. I'll have some really cool business empire and I'll sit in my corner office every day wearing sunglasses with women feeding me peeled grapes and fanning me with palm fronds…'

Sylvie folded over the corner of the page she was on put down her novel. ‘Doesn't it drive you insane sometimes not knowing how it's all going to turn out? Like, literally anything could happen.'

‘Not really.' Lucien shrugged. ‘I just figure that whatever adulthood's like, it's got to be better than our childhood.'

She hated the split in her loyalties that opened up when her brother said things like this. ‘It wasn't all bad, though, was it? We've always had each other, and I know mum was pretty useless but she's got a good heart, just a lot of her own problems too. There are some happy memories in there.'

‘Like what?'

She gave it some thought. ‘Summers in the Languedoc with Mami and Papi? I mean, obviously they were a bit boring but at least it was sunny and we could swim in the river and go on bike rides.'

‘Yeah, well. That was the upside of having grandparents in France. On the other hand, the downside of having grandparents in France is that they were nowhere to be seen when mum was barely functioning enough to do the shopping so that I could pack you a proper lunch for school, or when she had another one of those fucking boyfriends who'd give me a clout whatever I did. I'm not saying you had it easy, but I did protect you a fair bit. Maybe that's why you feel more forgiving about it all than I do now.' Lucien yawned and stretched his arms. ‘Anyway, I can't be bothered to have this conversation again. We're never going to agree on this stuff. Let's get going, these pills aren't going to sell themselves.' He stood up and pulled a dirty cotton vest on over his bronzed shoulders, only partially obscuring a recently-acquired tattoo of a Chinese dragon, snarling face reaching over his collarbone and tail running halfway down his back.  ‘Full moon party, here we come.'