Invincible Summer (10 page)

A
CTUALLY, DO YOU
mind if we go to Pizza Express instead?'

Eva and Benedict both turned to look at Lydia in bemusement. They were standing at the entrance to Hampstead tube station, where they had arranged to meet. As Eva had pushed her way out of the lift and through the turnstiles her initial cheer at spotting Benedict's face had turned to surprise as she panned down to the baby snuggled in a carrier against his chest, then finally dissolved into horror as she'd spotted Lydia a few metres away grappling with an enraged toddler, who seemed extremely unhappy about being impeded from hurling himself under the feet of the crowd marching towards the exit. With a show of force from Benedict the group managed to assemble in front of the ticket machine, shuffling uncomfortably close together each time a glaring traveller needed to purchase a fare.

‘Though maybe Giraffe would be better,' Lydia continued. ‘They'll have crayons and stickers for Josh. And a kids' menu. Trust me, we'll be in a world of pain if we go to Jin Kichi, there's nothing for little ones and nowhere to put the buggy. We can hardly expect Josh to eat raw fish.'

‘I don't eat raw fish either, remember?' parried Eva. Judging by the last thirty seconds, during which Josh had turned his demonic attentions to battering her shins with a plastic digger, they were going to be in a world of pain wherever they went. ‘There's plenty of vegetarian stuff on the menu at Jin Kichi.'

Maybe if she stood firm and insisted they go somewhere unsuitable for children Lydia would get the message and decide to take the kids back to Benedict's parents' instead.

Benedict shot her a pleading look. She knew that he hadn't planned this but it still rankled. When he suggested lunch she'd assumed he meant the two of them, and had pictured a leisurely afternoon lingering over coffee and catching up with everything that had been happening since they last saw each other almost a year ago. She'd imagined telling him how well her job was going, mentioning the
very
handsome personal trainer she'd been seeing, flirting a little, making him laugh, and generally savouring the bitter-sweetness of a love affair that never was. She'd hoped it would be…was
healing
too strong a word?

Eva had wondered after the wedding whether a clean break might not be best but time had softened the sense of shame and rejection she felt until it was an almost-pleasurable sore spot, like pressing a bruise. She and Benedict hadn't spoken for several months afterwards and the first time he'd called it had been a bit strained, but after that he had diligently emailed and phoned every week or two and it hadn't taken long for them to slip back into their old friendship and for her to conclude that her life was the better for having him in it in whatever capacity he could manage.

‘I suppose we
could
go somewhere else,' Eva relented after another pleading look from Benedict, who, she couldn't help noticing, appeared tired and rumpled and generally deserving of pity.

They shuffled out of the station and made their way down the high street towards Giraffe, a chain restaurant that Eva normally made a point of avoiding because of the unpleasant preponderance of children. It was a short walk, during which Josh nevertheless managed a couple of passable attempts at
hari kiri
by wriggling free and charging towards the traffic at random intervals. They'd only just sat down at a sticky table in the heaving restaurant when Benedict announced that he needed the loo.

‘Do you fancy holding Will for a minute?' he asked Eva, not waiting for a response before unfastening the sling and depositing ten pounds of squishy, drooling infant onto her lap. Eva held the baby awkwardly under the arms and looked at it. The baby looked back. He had deep blue eyes and a solemn expression on his face. She forced her face into a smile.

‘Well, hello there,' she tried.

Will gazed up at her intently and then broke into a huge gummy smile. Emboldened by this early success, Eva poked out her tongue at the baby, who looked appalled and promptly screwed his face up into ball of angry wrinkles before turning an improbable shade of puce and emitting a piercing wail.

‘How about you, Eva? Getting broody yet?' Lydia shouted above the continuing screams, which by now were competing with the noise of Josh's concerted efforts to demolish his high chair with his truck.

‘Strangely not,' Eva shouted back, holding the writhing infant at arm's length. A pungent smell was now wafting upwards.

‘It'll hit you, don't you worry. What are you now, twenty-eight? I give you another two years. So many of my friends said a few years ago when we were having Josh that they didn't want their own, and now they're all procreating like crazy.'

Eva's expression grew steely. She was long-accustomed to variations on this speech from supposedly well-meaning acquaintances but it was particularly galling coming from Lydia, who was apparently labouring under the misapprehension that her family was straight out of a Boden catalogue and blissfully unaware that in actual fact Eva couldn't think of a single better advertisement for the judicious use of contraception.

Was she merely being insensitive, or was this an act of passive-aggression intended to underline what Lydia saw as her superior status as wife and mother? Either way, it was just as infuriating as all the other times she'd had to tolerate speculation on when her body clock would kick in. It was surprisingly difficult to deflect the pitying assumption that she was putting a brave face on not having a man to do it with rather than the true reason, which was that she had absolutely no aspirations to join the ranks of breeders stacked into Giraffe on a Saturday. Any idiot could pop out a sprog, while she had a career that most people could only dream of. Plus, it wasn't as though she was sufficiently optimistic about the future of the world to want a stake in it. Having a baby would be like going long human race futures in a position that you had to constantly monitor and could never hedge or close out. That wasn't a trade she'd want on her book.

‘I expect your friends changed their minds when they saw your two,' said Eva sarcastically, and then immediately felt mean-spirited when Lydia looked up from trying to prevent Josh hurling the salt cellar onto the floor and beamed at her.

‘Eva, what a lovely thing to say. Gorgeous, aren't they? Hard work, obviously, but worth every minute. Don't you worry, your turn will come.'

At that moment Benedict came back to the table and Eva wasted no time in thrusting the yelling baby into his arms.

‘Ew, Will ponks a bit, Lydia. Do you mind doing the honours? Give me and Eva a few minutes to catch up?'

‘I suppose so. What about you, Josh? Might as well do them both I suppose, while we're somewhere with proper changing facilities.'

Benedict sat down and looked at Eva across the newly silent table. ‘Sorry about this,' he said. ‘I know it's not what you bargained for but Lydia really wanted to join us. She hasn't seen you in ages, and we're staying with my parents so I think she fancied getting out of the house. My mother's driving her a bit mad with her parenting advice. Which mostly amounts to “why on earth don't you get a nanny?”'

‘That's okay, it's nice to meet the new baby,' muttered Eva, sounding as insincere as she felt. ‘He looks like you,' she added automatically, having grown accustomed to what was expected of her in these situations.

Benedict's tired face brightened. ‘Do you think so?'

Eva grinned. ‘Well, if you're going to force me to be honest, mostly he looks like Jabba the Hutt. Have you considered a paternity test?' For a split second she worried that she'd overstepped the mark, but Benedict didn't miss a beat.

‘We're booked onto Jerry Springer next week. You can catch us on the
I Think My Wife was Impregnated by a Gargantuan Space Monster
episode.' He caught her eye and they both laughed, their old rapport returning at last.

‘Seriously though, how's it going with two of the little blighters?' she asked. ‘Looks like a handful.'

‘Fine, mostly. I'm well aware that it looks like the seventh circle of hell from the outside but so much of it is wonderful. You can't really explain the joys of parenting to non-parents, but they're there and they more than make up for the copious excrement and deadly assaults with diggers. Lydia finds it a bit tough at times, what with living away from friends and family. And my having to work such long hours doesn't help. But it's just the early bit that's hard, when you don't get much sleep. It'll get easier once Will's a bit older.'

‘And have you glimpsed any wondrous particles lately?' Eva asked.

‘No, we're still a way off firing up the hadron collider. How about you? How's being a Master of the Universe working out?'

‘Work's going great. Done a few big trades this year, looking forward to a big bonus.'

‘Yes, I've been hearing about those City bonuses,' chirped Lydia, arriving back at the table with the boys. ‘It's a bit obscene, isn't it, the way they pay millions to you lot just for shuffling money around when there are people starving in the world? Just don't become one of those awful people who are obsessed with money and status, Eva, whatever you do. There's more to life than making money.'

Eva couldn't believe what she was hearing. She saw Benedict look from her to his wife and back again and open his mouth to say something placatory but she didn't wait for him to speak. ‘Well, Lydia, some of us have to work for a living. And I work bloody hard for mine.'

It was Lydia's turn to bridle. ‘Yes, well. Raising kids is hard work too. It doesn't come with a big bonus, but then, not everything that counts can be counted. You know who said that? Albert Einstein.'

‘For fuck's sake,' Eva blurted out more forcefully than she'd intended, causing several parents at the surrounding tables to glare at her. ‘Those of us who didn't grow up with our own pet pony don't have the luxury of swanning through life pretending that money doesn't matter. It does bloody matter. It dictates where you live, what education you get, whether your cancer is diagnosed before it's the size of a walrus and whether you get a thrombosis flying economy. Yes, there are things that money can't buy, but I'd still rather cry about them in the back of a Mercedes than on a bicycle.' Eva glanced at the mother still tutting at her from the next table and lowered her voice to a growl. ‘And by the way, if you understood anything about basic economics you'd know that my bonuses aren't taking money out of other people's pockets. A rising tide lifts all boats. I make money, and then I pay other people to clean my flat, and buy a new jacket that I wouldn't otherwise have bought, and that creates jobs and puts money in the pockets of the people who clean flats and make jackets.'

In the time she'd been speaking, Lydia's expression had progressed from shock to defensiveness to grim-faced rage. Had she gone too far? Benedict leant back from the table, perhaps bracing himself for Lydia's response, but this time Josh beat her to it.

‘Forfucksake,' he shouted joyfully, and hurled the saltcellar onto the floor where it shattered into tiny pieces.

‘So that went rather well, I thought,' said Eva sheepishly as she said goodbye to Benedict in the street outside the restaurant after the most interminably long lunch of her life.

‘You think?' he asked. ‘I mean, you only managed to mortally offend Lydia and taught Josh his first swearword, which, if I know my son at all will be his absolute favourite word from here on in. If you really wanted to be sure I didn't turn up for lunch with my family again you should have gone for the hat-trick and shown Will how to stick a fork in a plug socket.' He grinned, but also glanced nervously over his shoulder to where Lydia was herding Josh out into the street to join them. ‘Are you walking back up to the station?'

‘No, I think I'm going to stay and do some shopping. Cheerio then!' Before Lydia had a chance to reach them, Eva bustled off down the high street with a jaunty wave and darted round the next corner into an alleyway, where she remained gently and repeatedly banging her forehead against the side of a building for the several minutes it took for her to be certain the coast was clear.

E
VA PUT DOWN
her bag in the hallway and closed the door quietly behind her so as not to wake Julian. She didn't feel as bad as she could have done, a little bleary perhaps, but she could definitely have been excused for feeling worse. She'd managed to sleep on the plane and in the taxi from the airport so that helped, and of course there was a certain amount of euphoria at the trip having been so successful. Eleven client meetings in six countries in eight days was close to the limits of human endurance, but it was finally over and she was pretty sure she had set up a decent pipeline of trades for the year, meaning a decent bonus with a bit of luck. That would be good news professionally, and helped to ease her mind about the ridiculous amount she had spent on this place.

This place, her new home, was a penthouse in a tower in Docklands with an impressive view of the East London skyline and beyond. Big Paul and Sylvie had both said she was crazy spending such an enormous sum on a new-build in Docklands, but she considered it a sanctuary, an investment that enabled her to keep doing such a demanding job. Of course, she needed the job to pay the mortgage so in one sense the argument was circular, but still. Most of the men at her level of seniority had wives who did their laundry, stocked their fridges and bought their mothers' birthday gifts, leaving them free to concentrate on making the big bucks. Eva didn't have a wife but she did have the apartment, and she felt a far more sensual connection with it than she suspected half of those men did with their spouses. She ran her fingers over the Corian worktop, sank her stockinged feet into the deep pile of the rug and then stepped onto the terrace and looked out over the city, its buildings gently blurred by the evaporating vestiges of last night's mist.

The apartment (she'd taken on the Americanism and no longer called it a flat, a word redolent of council estates) was designed specifically for people like her, short on time and long on cash. You could actually order room service, proper meals on china that you didn't even have to wash up. There was a laundry service, and she'd given the concierge a key so that her washing simply disappeared and then reappeared a day later hanging in her walk-in wardrobe, perfectly pressed. The concierge service didn't quite stretch to buying her mother a birthday gift but then, she didn't have a mother and her father barely knew when his own birthday was. In any case, there were plenty of high-end shops in the commercial precinct willing to wrap anonymous trinkets with expensive-looking ribbons when the occasion called for it, and she could reach them through a tunnel from her building without ever having to set foot outside in the open air.

Eva glanced at the clock: 6am. Better grab a couple of hours' sleep and then head into the office. She checked her phone and groaned when she saw she had four voicemails, two work calls and two messages from Sylvie, who sounded dejected. Eva felt a pang of guilt. She hadn't had an awful lot of time to spend with her friend lately, what with the demands of her job and her boyfriend, and whenever they did get together these days the disparity in the success they were each having in realising their dreams was an unspoken barrier between them. While Eva's career trajectory had been little less than meteoric, Sylvie's was resolutely earthbound. Over the last five years her increasingly desperate attempts to earn a living had seen her working as a casino croupier, a drug-testing guinea pig and very nearly a lap dancer at one point, which Eva had only just managed to talk her out of by insisting on buying several of her paintings at grossly inflated prices, claiming that they were a sound investment in a great artist.

Eva wasn't being entirely disingenuous; she always had believed in Sylvie's talent, she just no longer believed that talent was always recognised and rewarded. The first time she'd gone back to Sylvie's room in halls a couple of weeks after she'd arrived in Bristol she had been agog at the canvases and portfolio books stacked against every wall. Sylvie's sheer obsessive devotion had astonished her and made her wonder whether something similar was lacking in her own makeup. The room was dominated by a large canvas on an easel in the corner, a detailed study of a face that at the time she didn't know to be Lucien's. Eva had been even more impressed by a meticulous pencil drawing of a snake coiled around the branch of a tree, with each individual scale picked out and the texture of the tree's bark so intricately rendered that it defied the viewer to believe that the page was flat. Sylvie had dismissed that picture as showing off, a mere technical exercise, but Eva remained in awe of her ability to sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper and create something so lifelike with nothing more than a pencil.

Now both of these pictures as well as several other original Sylvie Marchants adorned her walls, and she enjoyed holding forth to visitors about her friend, the up-and-coming artist. True, she wasn't certain that having a painting of Lucien on her wall was entirely psychologically healthy, but she honestly felt it was one of Sylvie's best and in occasional maudlin moments told herself that it was a good reminder that being too trusting often meant making an idiot of yourself.

Still, in these days of pickled sharks and soiled bedclothes, Sylvie's oilpaint-on-canvas had few cheerleaders. Eva had always loved her work, but then, it wasn't really her field of expertise. Even Sylvie had called her ‘parochial' and ‘over-literal' when she'd laughed at her description of a painting of a house in a storm as a self-portrait.

There had been a few flares of hope over the years, in particular the show at a Hoxton gallery just around the corner from White Cube, which Eva had felt certain would be the start of something big. In the event the private view had degenerated into a melancholy evening in which she and Sylvie had hoovered up the excessive quantities of cheap wine left over after the last of a meagre handful of punters had passed through.

Eva undressed and padded through to the bedroom where the curtains were letting in just enough light for her to see that Julian was fast asleep with his legs tangled up in the sheet. Stumbling over his jeans in the gloom, she reflected grumpily that she might as well let him move in properly if having his own cupboard would mean he wouldn't throw his stuff on the floor. They'd been together nearly a year, and he was starting to make increasingly insistent noises about living together, and generally making more room in her life for him.

She stood for a moment admiring his sleeping form in the dim light. In the early days of the relationship she had basked in the envy of other women and felt flattered that someone like him would fall for someone like her. A solid seven with plenty of makeup on, Big Paul had once teased her after several drinks, and though she'd retaliated with a furious torrent of insults centring on his own expanding belly and receding hairline, afterwards she admitted to herself that she couldn't honestly disagree with his assessment.

Still, the full effect of Julian's looks wore off after a while. Eva wasn't the first girlfriend he'd met at the gym, he'd admitted sulkily when they'd eventually had ‘the conversation' about their sexual histories, and though he clearly didn't want to talk about it at length she gleaned enough information to suspect that more than one had viewed him as a quick fling and then dumped him once they'd shown him off to their friends.

Eva slipped into bed beside him and he stirred and rolled towards her.

‘I missed you,' he mumbled sleepily, throwing a warm, heavy arm across her and tugging her towards his side of the bed. ‘Come here, you little minky.'

Eva cringed internally. This was a recent and wholly undesirable development. She wasn't actually sure what a minky was, some bastard chimera of ‘minx' and ‘sweetie' she presumed, but she was very sure that she didn't want to be called either of those things, and she was absolutely certain that the place in the world that she least wanted to be called them was in bed.

‘I
said,
get over here, my minky-minky,' he said, moving his weight on top of her just as she felt every last ounce of sexual desire drain out of her body.

‘Mm, not now, babe. I'm exhausted and I've just got time for a bit of sleep before I head into the office for a meeting.'

It was true; she was exhausted. But somewhere at the back of her mind lurked the uneasy truth that for the first few months of the relationship she had found ways to make time for sex, and it had always taken precedence over her tiredness. A brush of the hand had been enough to send them hurtling towards the bedroom (or the kitchen or on one particularly daring occasion, the balcony) at every opportunity in the early days. But you couldn't survive on caffeine and lust forever.

Of course, she reflected as she levered herself out of her now-empty bed a couple of hours later, it was inevitable that any relationship would calm down a bit after the initial shag-fest. It didn't mean he wasn't the right man for her. There were still the days when he turned up on her doorstep wearing that old grey t-shirt with his hair tousled and damp from the shower and holding a flower he'd picked for her on the way over between his teeth, and she'd think, why wouldn't I want him to move in with me? She wasn't always certain she loved him, not exactly, but what was love anyway? The intense, almost obsessional passion she had once felt for Lucien? That could hardly be the foundation of a functioning adult relationship. Or the painful sense of loss that been present in her life ever since Benedict had got married, fading, true, but never quite disappearing? Much good that had done her. And it wasn't as if there was a queue of eligible men at her door clamouring to make her life complete.

No, relationships were a compromise and the people who were prepared to compromise were the ones who didn't end up dying alone and being eaten by their cats. Benedict, for instance, had almost certainly compromised: she doubted that he'd been in love with Lydia at the outset but he had got her pregnant, married her, and was now, judging by his occasional emails, perfectly content. Could she be happy with Julian?

She wished she could talk to Benedict about all this, ask him if he really was happy and what he thought she should do, but they hadn't spoken much lately. Things had been awkward since that disastrous lunch with Lydia and the kids; he'd mentioned being in London a number of times since, but with Lydia in tow neither of them really fancied meeting up. She hoped he'd be over on his own sometime soon, so that they could get together and have a good laugh about the awfulness of that lunch and smooth things over properly. Putting things right was hard to do by email, and whenever she phoned it was clear from the slight but detectable stiltedness in his voice that Lydia was within earshot. Still, at least she could talk things over with Sylvie. Eva picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Hi, this is Sylvie Marchant. Leave a message.'

‘Sylvie, it's me, Eva. Sorry, I only just arrived back from my trip and got your voicemail. Let's meet up tonight, somewhere near my work if that's okay. Say seven thirty in Smollensky's?'