Invincible Summer (9 page)

Eva couldn't think of anything to say. She'd always assumed he was a default atheist of the same rather unthinking sort as she was, the sort who believed in things for which there was empirical evidence and didn't see any merit in giving much thought to anything else. How much more was there that she didn't know about Benedict? Somewhere out there in an alternate universe she'd have a lifetime to learn it all. In that universe, a woman very much like her would be waking up every day to continue this conversation, a conversation that she realised now they had begun years earlier and had carried on through days and nights, emails and phone calls, glances and laughter. That Eva, although she looked and sounded like this one, was just subtly different enough to have known a good thing when she saw it, and as a result hadn't just watched the man who might possibly be the love of her life get married to somebody else.

‘Well, religion's not all good,' she said finally, for want of anything else to say. ‘Look at what just happened at the World Trade Center.'

‘God, yes. Your bank's American, isn't it? Did you have people there?'

‘Several thousand. Six dead, no one I knew. It would have been a lot worse if it hadn't been for the security guy there. He's a legend among the staff now. An ex-military guy who took his job really seriously and managed to evacuate nearly everyone.'

‘”Took?” Past tense?'

‘Yes. He was still evacuating people when the tower went down. Presumed dead, though no remains have been found yet. Maybe they never will be. He was originally from Cornwall and apparently he sang Cornish songs from his youth to keep everyone calm as he evacuated them. In amongst all the chaos and destruction, there was this sixty-year-old guy standing in the stairwell, directing people down and belting out, “Men of Cornwall, stand ye steady, stand and never yield.” And he phoned his wife and told her to stop crying, that he'd never been happier and that he loved her and she'd made his life.'

They stood quietly looking out into the night and thinking about this new world in which planes flew into towers and people fell from the sky and in which there were men who so hated their world that they were willing to die a spectacular death to make their point. Eva thought, too, about who she'd have called as the tower went down, and whether if Benedict had been there he would have called Lydia and been able to say that to her, that he loved her and she'd made his life. She was sure he was thinking the same thing but she could only see his profile in the dark, and it gave nothing away. Eventually he broke the silence.

‘I love it out here in the country, where you can still actually see the stars. You don't get that in the city, do you? Too much light pollution. When I was a child everything seemed to stop at night. I remember my father driving us to Gatwick to catch a flight at three o'clock in the morning and being the only car on the road. It was magical. You felt as if you were getting a glimpse of a secret world while everyone else slept. Now the cars never stop and the lights never go out. But out here you can still just about make out the constellations and it puts things in perspective, makes you feel like what you really are, a tiny mammal on the surface of a planet spinning through infinite space amidst a billion stars. Easy to forget that, don't you find?'

‘I suppose so.' Why wasn't she saying anything? He was pouring out his innermost thoughts, and that was all she could offer? But if she started talking now she knew she wouldn't stop. She'd tell him how stupid and blind she had been, and try to convince him that his future lay with her. And what if she succeeded? What if he turned round and said, I feel the same way, let's run away together? Then for the rest of her life she would be the woman who had gone to a wedding and run away with the groom, leaving the pregnant bride devastated and the baby fatherless. Anyway, even if she was a terrible enough person to do that, Benedict had already proven he wasn't that day on Hampstead Heath, and if anything she loved him more for it.

She leant towards him so that her arm was pressed against his and rested her head on his shoulder and felt him leaning back towards her. They stood like that wordlessly for a minute and then Benedict said, ‘You're shivering. Come on, let's get you back inside.' He put an arm around her and leant down to kiss her on the top of the head, then led her back towards the lights and music and a world in which Benedict was married to Lydia and they were having a baby together and Eva was going back to her life tomorrow, alone.

Back inside, Lucien was slumped in a chair at the edge of the dance floor on his own, swigging from the neck of a champagne bottle.

‘I think I'm going to call it a night,' Eva told him. ‘Where's Sylvie?'

‘She's already gone upstairs.' And then in response to Eva's questioning look he added, ‘Chas drank too much and Sylvie found her throwing up in the ladies, so she's gone to put her to bed.'

Eva mustered a smirk. ‘Ah. Looks like you won't be having a night of passion after all.'

 ‘Looks that way, doesn't it. Unless you're offering to step in and fill the gap.'

‘Not me, fella. Far be it from me to try to fill the size twelves of the lovely Chas.' Then, ‘Why do you call her Chas, anyway? Bit of an odd name for a girl, isn't it?'

Lucien paused and frowned before finally answering. ‘It's short for Chastity, alright. Her name's Chastity.'

A smile spread across Eva's face, wider and wider until she was unable to stop the laughter from bursting out of her mouth.

‘Priceless. Just priceless,' she gasped when she finally managed to take a breath, collapsing into the chair beside Lucien's and heaving with mirth until even he couldn't help but join in, and Eva and Lucien ended the evening of Benedict's wedding side by side beneath the coloured disco lights at the edge of the dancefloor, crying with laughter.

S
UMMER IN THE
city: you had to love it. For nine months of the year London was relentlessly grim, but everything about it got better in the sunshine. The light twinkled on the river, sheered off the glass sides of the skyscrapers, and brought pallid, scantily-clad city dwellers blinking out into the streets. Chairs and tables sprouted from the pavement outside pubs and cafés, immediately filling up with people sipping wine and nibbling snacks. Even the hazy pall of traffic fumes added a misty beauty to the place, Eva thought fondly as she walked along the riverside towards the gym. Feeling virtuous, she allowed herself a moment of satisfaction with her life. That day, a Saturday, had begun with a wheatgrass smoothie. She had phoned her father and tidied her flat, a smart rental in a converted warehouse with a balcony over the water in up-and-coming Limehouse, just three stops on the DLR or thirty minutes' walk from the office in Canary Wharf.

She'd even scheduled a personal training session at the gym, meaning there was no way to get out of going. Eva was getting the hang of it now, the female banking aesthetic. It was all in the detail. The hair a little lighter, the teeth a little whiter, the skin just bronzed enough to suggest outdoorsy good health but still far short of a couple of weeks in Magaluf. Of course, all this was all quite difficult to achieve when you were spending eighty hours a week at a desk on a huge trading floor so that you barely saw daylight between October and April each year. Big Paul claimed that trading floors were designed that way for the same reason that casinos never have windows: you want your traders and punters to be oblivious to the passage of time. You certainly wouldn't want them noticing that it was getting dark and thinking,
oh well, time to call it a day
, or spotting the sunshine outside and suddenly feeling that breaking for a spot of lunch might be just the ticket.

The other part of the alpha look was of course the gym body, the hardest of all to achieve because of the impossibility of faking it. While a few extra pounds could be considered characterful on a broker, they certainly weren't much in evidence on the female traders. After her last bonus Eva had signed up for a year's membership at the Canary Wharf gym with the subterranean spa and the swimming pool right on the edge of the river, so that as you pounded out your sixty lengths you could pretend you were actually swimming along the Thames, only without the risk of contracting Weil's disease from all the rat urine. Signing the contract had proven highly motivating; unable to bear the thought of the massive monthly subscription fee going to waste, she had sweated her way through spin classes, attempted to find her inner goddess in hatha yoga sessions, and almost given herself a coronary in the aptly named Body Attack, billed as a ‘rocket-fuelled combination of music and hip moves'. As she'd lain groaning on the floor at the end of the previous week's class, the instructor had strolled over and peered down at her.

‘Should I be calling an ambulance?' he enquired. ‘Only I might get fired if I actually hospitalise the clients.'

Lying there gasping for breath in an old Pixies t-shirt and misshapen tracksuit bottoms, Eva looked up the lycra-clad vision of male beauty hovering above her, barely perspiring after an hour of savage exercise, and let out an appalled involuntary giggle.

‘Well, you can't be dying if you can still laugh at my jokes,' he said, reaching out a hand to pull her up. ‘Don't worry, it's a tough class, this one. What you should do is sign up for a few one-on-one sessions with me. You get them as part of your joining package, so if you haven't used them yet, and between you and me I suspect that you haven't…' He paused and winked at her. ‘Ask at the front desk for them to pop you in Julian's personal training diary.'

‘Julian being you.'

‘Julian being me. Hi.' He shook the hand he was apparently still holding long after he'd finished using it to haul her upright.

‘Hi. Eva,' she told him, withdrawing the hand which was as embarrassingly hot and sweaty as the rest of her. ‘And I may have humiliated myself enough already, thank you. I don't know whether my ego could withstand more scrutiny of my athletic prowess. Or lack thereof,' she continued, but it was beginning to look as though she was losing him so she allowed the gabble to trail off.

‘Hey, don't worry about it. If you were an Olympic athlete we'd have nothing to work on, right? Tell them I said to put you in my diary. I'll see you soon then, Eva?'

He was backing away from her now, and doing that thing where you make your hand into a gun to point at someone, so she smiled and half-nodded-half-shook her head in what she hoped was an ambiguous gesture of possible agreement but almost certainly just made her look like a lunatic. Safely back in the changing room and under a pounding hot shower, she wondered whether he was encouraging her to book a free session with him because he got paid by the hour or whether he might actually have been flirting. Figuring that the worst that could happen was that she got fit and made the most of her gym membership, she found herself standing at the front desk on the way out.

‘Does it have to be the weekend?' asked the flicky-haired receptionist, drumming long pink fingernails on the counter.

‘Yes, sorry, I work long hours in the week.'

‘And it has to be Julian and not one of our other trainers?' Hair flick. ‘He's
very
popular you know, particularly among our female clients,' she continued, giving Eva the once over with a meaningful smile. ‘It does make it difficult to find an opening with him.'

Having eventually been granted the honour of being booked into Julian's special 5pm reserve slot the following Saturday, Eva had taken herself off to buy some new gym kit, arriving at the checkout with a pair of soft charcoal yoga pants and a sleek black support vest with fluorescent pink panels at the sides. The sales assistant assured her that this was
de rigueur
for the well-turned-out gym-goer these days and ignored Eva's wince as she rang up the total. Even now that she was making good money by most people's standards, Eva hadn't quite got used to casually spending on a gym outfit what she would have been able to live on for several weeks during her university years.

As she waited for Julian in the reception area, she shuffled about in her new outfit feeling self-conscious and trying to catch a glimpse of herself in the glass cabinet fronts. It had seemed okay in the changing room, but under these unforgiving lights she looked like a sack-full of oranges, she thought with a grimace. Not only that, but it was such a drastic transformation from the previous week that he was bound to notice and conclude it was for his benefit, which it most certainly wasn't since they had nothing in common, what with his being a Greek god who spent his days stretching out the hamstrings of perfectly toned gym-bunnies. Yes, she'd been anticipating this session with rather more relish than she'd usually feel at the prospect of exercise, but that was just the inevitable frisson of having some rare one-on-one time with an attractive man, even one in whom she had no romantic interest.

In the three years since Benedict's wedding, Eva's love life had been a barren wasteland, home only to drifting tumbleweed. Most of her time and energy went into her job, and her social life consisted mostly of work events or nights in with a bottle of wine, which was Sylvie's usual preference as she was now working as a receptionist and always skint. Once in a while they got Lucien to put them on the guest list for one of his club nights, but Eva didn't enjoy them much anymore; whether it was watching Lucien seduce his way through an endless supply of pneumatic dancers, or just that it was hard to summon up much enthusiasm for hundred-decibel house music when one preferred not to addle one's brain with pills, the shine had gone off clubbing for Eva.

Forty minutes later Eva had long since ceased to fret about her clothing, but only because it was the least of her worries.

‘Twenty-four! Twenty-three! Twenty-two! Keep going!' Julian was bawling at her, counting down from fifty stomach crunches.

‘I…can't,' she panted, letting the medicine ball slip from her grasp and roll away across the floor.

‘You can! Come on, just another few to go! You can do it!'

‘No, you don't understand,' Eva collapsed onto the mat. ‘I physically can't. I'm telling my body to carry on but it's staging a mutiny.'

‘Keep going!' Julian hollered. ‘It's all about mind over matter!'

‘No, it's bloody not,' she snapped back. ‘I've got a bloody physics degree and I'm telling you that my matter is utterly impervious to my mind. You can yell at me as much as you want but it won't change the fact that I can't bloody do it.'

‘Oh.' Julian stopped and looked crestfallen and she felt her anger dissipating and being replaced by the urge to ruffle his light brown hair. ‘Too much? Am I pushing you too hard? I was just trying to be motivational. And I don't get many clients who can't do a bit more than that, if I'm honest. Well, maybe the odd pensioner.'

She laughed at his cheek. ‘Look, it's not you, it's me. I've spent the last five years working on a trading floor in the conditions of a battery chicken and my body has withered. And I wasn't exactly Linda Hamilton in
Terminator II
to begin with. I think this whole thing may have been a mistake.'

 ‘Please don't give up,' he begged. ‘We can take it more slowly. Your pace, I promise. The first session's always the hardest. I have to push you to establish your limits, and now that I know them I can ease up on you. Let's wind down with some assisted stretching and massage, then you'll see it's not all misery.'

At that point she'd have agreed to gnaw off her own limbs if it meant she could stop, so she meekly allowed herself to be led to a mat in an alcove at the rear of the gym, where he ground his elbows into her buttocks ‘to release trapped nerves' and then practically lay on top of her to pull and stretch her leg muscles into a sort of agonising bliss. She had to admit that some of it felt good, but she was far too tense to enjoy it. Lying on the floor sweating profusely under the most attractive man she had ever been within ten metres of was a lot less sexy than she would have imagined. Finally the clock ticked round to the hour and he released her to limp towards the showers. Apparently his day was over too, because he followed her down the stairs to the changing rooms, chatting about the triathlon he had coming up. She was about to scuttle into the ladies changing room when he put a hand on her arm and said, ‘You're not coming back, are you?'

‘Um, no. Probably not. I think maybe I'm cut out for more cerebral pursuits. Life of the mind, and all that.'

Julian looked mortified. ‘Look what I've done. My job is to make people love exercise and instead I've put you off for life. You must think I'm a total sadist.'

‘No, really, it's fine,' Eva stuttered, embarrassed.

‘At least let me take you for a drink to make up for it. You're my last client today. Are you free after we shower?'

‘You mean like an alcoholic drink? Do you fitness freaks actually do that?'

‘Well, not that often to be honest,' he admitted. ‘But I can make an exception this once. You'll come then? That's great! I'll see you out the front in ten, okay?' He bounded away without waiting for her answer.