Invincible Summer (16 page)

O
NE FINE MORNING
in an office at Imperial College London, Benedict Waverley could be found upending the contents of a small cardboard box onto his new desk and propping a photo of Lydia and the boys against his new computer monitor. He was very happy about the desk, the first he'd ever had that was next to a window. From where he sat he could see an actual living tree and a patch of blue sky. The office would be shared with two other people, one of whom it turned out he'd already met and got on well with at various conferences, and he felt that this was a good sign, a sign that coming back to London had been the right decision. Of course, regardless of whether the signs were good or bad it wasn't as if he had much choice in the matter, at least not if he wanted to keep his family together. He would be sad not to be around when the Large Hadron Collider went live but at least he would still be involved in analysing the data from it, and he recognised he was lucky to have landed such a plum research and supervisory role when competition for these posts was so stiff.

Yes, he told himself, there was every reason to feel optimistic about the future. Lydia would surely be a lot happier back in London. It hadn't been a great life for her with him working all hours at CERN, and lately she'd been spending huge swathes of time back in England with her parents. He'd missed them terribly, the kids anyway, though in fact it had been a bit of a relief to have a break from Lydia. It had been a long time since he'd felt as though he could do anything right as far as she was concerned.

It had been a couple of years since their marriage had started to fray around the edges. With hindsight they had rushed into things, but Lydia getting pregnant so quickly had rather clinched matters, and it had been easy to get swept along on a tide of doing the right thing. When he'd voiced his doubts to his mother shortly before the wedding she'd marched him off for a walk on the Heath and talked to him in a new way, a grown up way in which she'd never spoken to him before or indeed since.

‘Your marriage will work if you make it work,' she told him. ‘That's something that your generation seems to have lost sight of. A good marriage is not one where both people have spent a decade or more sampling all the delights that the opposite sex has to offer and then suddenly stumble across another person whom they immediately recognise as the missing part of their soul. It's simply one in which you make a choice and then bloody well stick to it. You get up every morning and renew your decision to be the best husband or wife you can be, and you forgive each other when you fall short, which of course you often will.'

‘That doesn't sound much like you and Dad,' he'd responded doubtfully. ‘He's always telling people how he fell in love the first time he saw you across a crowded room and decided then and there that he would marry you.'

‘Oh, darling. Don't you know by now that that's all just so much hyperbole? Daddy and I have had as many ups and downs as anyone else, and God knows there's been plenty to forgive. You can hardly have failed to notice your father's roving eye. I was pregnant when we married too, you know. Who knows whether we'd have ended up together otherwise.'

Benedict digested this as they strolled through the grounds of Kenwood House, genuinely surprised. He'd always unthinkingly accepted his father's fairy-tale version of events, in which the prince swept the princess off her feet and they lived happily ever after. No one had ever suggested that there had been any falling short or forgiving to be done. And what on earth did she mean by his father's roving eye? Christ, he didn't want to know. He had enough problems of his own without having to process a bunch of new and unpalatable facts about his parents. Benedict took his mother's arm and steered her towards the Brew House coffee shop, changing the subject back to his own situation.

‘But what if…there's someone else that I have feelings for?'

His mother fixed a beady eye on him. ‘Then you'll just have to be mature enough to recognise that in time they will pass. Daddy and I like Eva too, darling, she's very charming.'

Benedict blanched at the mention of Eva. He hadn't done a terribly good job of hiding his feelings, he realised now, but it was startling and unsettling to hear his mother speak so matter of factly about what he thought was his secret torment.

‘I remember when you brought her out to Corfu,' Marina continued, oblivious to his discomfort. ‘She was such a sweet little thing, so awkward and gauche. I just wanted to take her under my wing. And that awful tattered bright yellow sundress she wore all week. I was itching to lend her something but didn't dare offer in case she felt criticised. One could tell how badly she would have felt if she'd thought she wasn't fitting in.' She drew to a halt in front of the café entrance. ‘But darling, if things were going to work out between the two of you they would have done so a long time ago. Lydia's a splendid girl and she's absolutely dying to marry you. You don't get a better foundation for a marriage than that. And you're having a baby together. A baby! You don't know yet what an incredible thing that is, but you'll love that baby more than you ever thought possible. You're going to have a wonderful life together, I just know it.'

Benedict had felt much better after this conversation, and as the wedding got closer he had grown more and more certain that his mother was right. And there had been so much to do, what with the move to Switzerland and Josh's arrival and starting work at CERN, that he hadn't had time to dwell too much on things as the days sped past in a blur. Between the baby and his job he barely had a second to spare, but he found he was ecstatically happy despite surviving on sometimes as little as five hours sleep a night. He came to feel everything his mother had said he would about his son and more. And being at CERN was something else, working with some of the most brilliant minds in physics to get these huge, groundbreaking experiments up and running and everyone feeling as if they were truly on the brink of something huge, a new era in understanding the universe.

And then there was Lydia. At first she'd seemed as happy as he was. They'd rented a beautiful old apartment on Rue Pécolat close to Lake Geneva, and had been surprised and relieved at how the sky didn't fall when the baby arrived. During the pregnancy there seemed to be a queue of people lining up to issue warnings about how difficult having a baby was, how dreadful giving birth would be, how much life would change, how likely it was that Lydia would miss the intellectual stimulation of her work and how hard it would be to live in another country away from friends and family. By the time the baby was due they had been so petrified by all the well-meant warnings that the reality turned out to be far less apocalyptic than they'd been led to expect and a haze of contentment had descended. When, a year after Josh had popped into their world Lydia had announced that she was pregnant again, Benedict had taken it in his stride.

As it turned out, the reality failed to match his expectations once again, this time for very different reasons. The second pregnancy was much harder than the first, with Lydia suffering terrible morning sickness for most of the nine months, and by the time Will arrived she was already resentful of Benedict, how much time he spent working and how little he helped at home. Unlike Josh, who had emerged with a sort of serenity about him, Will was a colicky baby and would scream for hours on end, defiant in the face of all attempts to soothe him. Benedict would start each day with the best of intentions about getting home early and giving Lydia a break, but by the time he finished his work he would be so exhausted that the prospect of returning to a tearful and angry Lydia and a screaming Will was enough to have him finding reasons to stay even later.

He'd suggested a nanny; he couldn't have afforded it on his salary but there was no question that his parents would be willing to help out and besides, if they had a nanny perhaps Lydia would be able to work too. But Lydia wouldn't hear of it, saying that she wanted the boys to be cared for by their parents. That might be how certain sorts of people do things, she'd said pointedly, but she, Lydia, wasn't about to palm her children off on some stranger and then pack them off to boarding school in short trousers only to retrieve them ten years later physically grown but emotionally stunted. Benedict resented the implicit criticism of his family and his social class, which she had previously seemed all too eager to join (he thought, but refrained from saying aloud). If she wouldn't accept the solutions that he offered he could hardly be to blame if she was unhappy. Still, with hindsight he could perhaps have been a better husband, and that was before one even mentioned the incident in the stationery cupboard.

The incident in the stationery cupboard, as he now thought of it, had been an act of utter insanity at the CERN Christmas party. He'd asked Lydia whether she wanted to come with him and even offered to arrange a babysitter, but in a masterstroke of passive aggression she had insisted that Will's colic was too bad to leave him, and that in any case she was simply too exhausted for parties and he should go along on his own. He'd taken her at face value, knowing full well that face value was the exact opposite of how these statements were intended but not feeling like spending an hour jollying her into coming only to have her monitoring his every drink and insisting they get a taxi home by ten because she'd have to be up for the 4am feed.

By then it had been many months since he'd been out socialising, or had a drink, or, for that matter, had sex. Since the baby had arrived he'd tried very hard to make Lydia happy, but nothing seemed to work. When he stayed out late she got angry, but his presence at home seemed to annoy her too. If he came home after a long day and sat down with the newspaper for even fifteen minutes she would ostentatiously tidy up around him with the baby on one hip, silently making the point that she had no such luxury. But if he attempted to help with the housework, or with the kids, he invariably did it wrong: the washing needed to be split into whites and coloureds or things would run, the nappies needed the frills pulled out properly around the legs or they would leak and just make more work for her than if she'd changed them herself in the first place. Attempts at lovemaking were coldly rebuffed and sometimes even met with a stern talk on how tired she was and how insensitive it was of him not to realise that it was normal for women not to feel like sex for months after giving birth, though he recalled sadly how they'd been back in the saddle within weeks of Josh's arrival.

The Christmas party had felt like a much-needed opportunity to let off some steam, a release valve, as he saw it. He hadn't intended to get legless, just to have a couple of beers, but there had only been wine on offer and after the first few glasses a few more had seemed like a marvellous idea. After all, he didn't get much chance to have fun these days. The other thing that had seemed like a marvellous idea after those additional few glasses of wine had been allowing himself to be tugged into the stationery cupboard by a young colleague named Stephanie, who had cornered him in the corridor and quizzed him on the finer points of lepton production, hanging onto his every word as though he was some sort of rock star, which in a funny way of course he was, a rock star of the world of particle physics if you will. Then she'd made a rather outré joke about confusing hadrons and hard-ons, and things had gone from there. It had stopped seeming like such a good idea when another giggling couple had stumbled into the same cupboard and discovered him on top of Stephanie with his trousers down, illuminated from the doorway in what must have been a profoundly undignified tableau.

The following day, in the wretchedness of the early morning light, he'd reasoned that he would have to tell Lydia. CERN was such a small community that it could easily get back to her, and besides, he wasn't sure he could live with the self-loathing. It transpired too late that his discoverers had been models of discretion; he'd already told Lydia by the time he realised that he could have got away with it, and even though the aftermath had been too dreadful for words, he still felt that it had been the right thing to do.

A painful but cleansing period of honesty had followed. Lydia's recriminations had been bitter and, he could see now, largely justified. Benedict hadn't been a good husband. He had avoided his responsibilities as a father and his infidelity was merely a manifestation of a deficit of the respect he should have accorded her. He had failed to fully commit to the partnership in a spirit of love and generosity. It had been brutal, yes, but at the end of it he felt as though they understood each other much better than they ever had, and they eventually resolved to work on their marriage in a new spirit of honesty and reconciliation. It did mean that he had to give in to Lydia's demands to return to London when a suitable position could be found, since she could hardly be expected to move on knowing that he still regularly ran into the person with whom he had been caught
in flagrante delicto,
and in any case Benedict couldn't bear the knowing, flirtatious glances Stephanie still gave him and had taken to darting into the loos whenever she passed.

It surprised Benedict as much as anyone that he had turned out to be a cheat, a man who had committed adultery, twice if you counted kissing Eva, which he supposed Lydia would had she known about it. (He hadn't confessed to that one. It had only been a kiss, after all, and it would have been unforgivably cruel to tell her when she'd been pregnant and about to marry him.) He'd always assumed that cheats were despicable people, but it turned out that it was easy to condemn adulterers if you were a person for whom the opportunity had never arisen. Having never anticipated that the opportunity to be unfaithful would materialise, he had never steeled himself against it and therein lay the problem. He had been, if not defenceless exactly, then unready, lacking the wit to take good decisions quickly when circumstances called for it. Now that he knew such things could happen, he would take precautions and that in turn would make him a better husband. Simple, really.