Invincible Summer (20 page)

I
N THE YEAR
since she'd lost her job and Julian had left, Eva had barely been back to her own place. She had her own bedroom at Sylvie's and spent most of her time there helping with Allegra, which was a lifeline for Sylvie but also for Eva since the alternative was aimless, miserable days alone in the empty rooms of the apartment she had once loved but had long since become a part of a life she could no longer occupy. Allegra was two years old now, and a new kind of normal was establishing itself. The oxygen tank and the feeding tube were gone, but managing her fits and feeding her without choking could still be difficult.

The weeks between Eva's first HR warning and the final termination of her contract had been agony, filled with hours spent pacing around outside of her office on the phone to headhunters and contacts in other banks, trying to scope out the territory without betraying her desperation. Whether word had got around the markets or whether people just weren't hiring she had no idea, but in any case it had all been to no avail. The wind had already been starting to blow in a different direction and as the days and weeks passed, unprecedented upheavals were taking place in the global economy.

Tectonic plates had begun to shift, slowly at first as the US data had begun to turn bad with housing numbers and non-farm payrolls sliding, and then more quickly, as Northern Rock experienced the first UK bank run in a century as the extent of its liabilities became apparent. The bad news snowballed into an unstoppable avalanche as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and governments scrambled to bail out their financial institutions. Eva followed the stories obsessively and impotently, as events that weren't ever supposed to happen started occurring one after the other with frightening regularity. Mingled with the horror was fascination at watching these economic, political, and maybe even historical forces ripple through the stratosphere.

Trying to steer a derivatives book through this perfect storm would have been nightmarish, and she felt a certain schadenfreude at the thought of Brad Whitman working hundred-hour weeks trying to stem haemorrhaging losses while watching his bonus and probably his career evaporate before his eyes. When she tried to calculate the impact of these market moves on some of the positions she'd left behind in her trading book her eyes watered. But, oh, to be an outsider at such a time was maddening too. No Bloomberg, no market gossip or inside info, just another civilian standing by. The bit of her that wasn't appalled by the thought of all the people losing jobs and pensions and savings was frustrated at being sidelined in such remarkable times, a mere onlooker to the sort of turbulence that traders see once in a lifetime, if that. She'd come into the market at the beginning of her career at just the time of the Russian default and subsequent failure of Long Term Capital Management, and had been able to do nothing but stand and watch open-mouthed as the real players made and lost fortunes on the back of unprecedented volatility. Now it was happening again, only worse.

Like everyone else, she was kicking herself for not paying attention. The signs had been there all along for those who had been able and willing to break away from the groupthink and look on with disinterested eyes. She'd always thought she was one of those people, but now she could see how much she'd bought into the crowd mentality, virtually ignoring the housing bubble inflating and the massive increases in consumer and government borrowing around the globe. Of course, she'd known that these things couldn't go on forever but for a trader it wasn't enough to be able to say that; when your time horizons were only ever as far ahead as your next bonus it wasn't in your interest to constantly focus on the long-term macroeconomic picture. Beneath all the shock and panic on the surface, she thought that if you sat quietly you could hear other rumbles running through the deeper tributaries of social consciousness, as people began to question the very foundations of western civilisation.

In the light of all this, Eva had mixed feelings about going back home. On the one hand a bit of familial support wouldn't go amiss; on the other, she was far from certain that support was what she would be met with. Her arguments with Keith were usually good-natured, but she was feeling more in need of comfort than ideological debate, and she was aware spending a decade watching the rise of what he viewed as a capitalist kleptocracy had not been easy for her father. Eva eventually took a gloomy train ride down to Sussex and arrived to find him clearly feeling vindicated. She had been there only ten minutes when he rather pointedly turned the volume up several notches for a Robert Peston special on the radio.

‘You're actually enjoying all this, aren't you?' she demanded. ‘My losing my job, the credit crisis? Go on then, just say it. You think I brought down the economy, but it's bullshit.'

‘Yes, well,' he said in measured tones that made clear the ‘well' neutralised any agreement implied by the ‘yes'. ‘I'm not saying that you caused the crisis, of course, but you were a small cog in a big machine that enabled it to happen. The derivatives you traded were so complex that almost no one understands them, so the few people who did could use them to make the numbers look any old way in the short term. Then by the time it all comes out they're sitting in the Cayman Islands in a Jacuzzi full of dollar bills.'

Eva stared at him across the kitchen. ‘It's all so simple in your head, isn't it? Good people are socialists, and capitalists are greedy and evil. Except the world is more complicated than that. Here's what I really did: I provided liquidity to markets and facilitated the efficient allocation of risk. I helped people to hedge their exposure to inflation and interest rates on things like railways and infrastructure projects, real social goods that simply wouldn't have gone ahead otherwise.'

‘Well, now. The Victorians managed to build the railways without CDOs.'

Eva rolled her eyes. ‘You're nostalgic for the days of chimney sweeps and Gin Alley? Give me a break. If you want to bring history into it, you barely need to glance at a textbook to see that markets are what make people free and affluent.'

Keith delivered what he clearly felt was the killer blow in an infuriatingly complacent tone. ‘I don't even know why you're defending a system that chewed you up and spat you out.'

 ‘Because I actually believe in what I'm saying!' Eva banged her hands against the sides of her head.  ‘I don't think you've ever really got
that. I know you've always thought I was a victim of false consciousness, or else just bending my ideals to fit my self-interest but I'm an intelligent adult, and I believe in liberal democracy and capitalism and well-run markets. I find you just as incomprehensible as you find me, clinging to ideals that have been shown to cause massive harm every time they've been implemented.'

Unused to the argument veering into personal territory, Keith chose to focus on the political. ‘I'm not saying socialism's perfect, but you of all people should know there's no such thing as a free market. It's a Platonic form, an unreachable ideal. Here in the real world, markets aren't free. There are natural monopolies, geographical constraints, regulatory barriers to entry, cartels as far as the eye can see.'

‘Jesus. If you want to talk about utopian ideals, take a look at your precious communism. It runs completely counter to human nature. No one is going to work harder than the guy next to him with his feet up if they get paid the same regardless. It's a race to the bottom, or even worse if you look at history, spawns dictatorships under which millions of people die in gulags, as much as your lot like to gloss over those inconvenient truths.'

Eva was infuriated to find herself growing tearful as she spoke, and Keith was clearly taken aback by her display of emotion.

‘I don't want to argue with you, Eva. We simply disagree on this.'

‘Yeah, but it's not just a disagreement about whether cats are better than dogs, is it? Underlying it is the fact that you've never approved of anything about the way I've lived my life. To most people I was a success, and I worked so hard. But you, you never once told me you were proud of me, do you know that? And now, when I could really do with some support, all I get is a bunch of Trotskyite self-righteousness. All you care about is your precious ideological purity. It's more important to you than your own daughter.' Even as she said the words she knew she wasn't being entirely fair, but she was too upset to care.

‘I don't have to always agree with your values to be proud of what you've achieved, Eva,' he said slowly, reaching around for a type of language he was unaccustomed to using. ‘And I know your mother would have been too.'

But Eva wasn't listening. She upended the cold remainder of her coffee into the sink and walked out of the door to head back to London.

Her flat was on the market but things weren't looking good; the torrent of money that had been pouring into bricks and mortar during the early part of the decade had suddenly dried to a trickle, and words like
asset bubble
and
negative equity
were increasingly being bandied around. The estate agent had advised her to ‘price it realistically for a quick sale', which apparently translated into an asking price that would mean taking a substantial loss on what she'd paid for it. Even so, there had only been a handful of viewings.

Every time she thought about what she was going to do next, she came up against the immovable wall of uncertainty. If the flat sold quickly and for a reasonable price, she could buy something smaller closer to Sylvie and Allegra and somehow start again. But if not…well, it didn't bear thinking about. She'd be stuck in this limbo or forced to absorb the sort of loss that would leave her if not completely destitute then jobless and without any of the financial security she'd thought she'd achieved in a decade of hard toil. Thinking about the future was like staring into a void: the job had consumed everything, all of the time and energy that other people had spent on husbands, children, hobbies, creative fulfilment. There had been no Plan B.

A
NOTHER DAY, ANOTHER
trudge around the leaf-carpeted streets of Hampstead. The daily walks with Allegra weren't really a chore, more a way to pass the time. The front wheel of the buggy was clogging up with sodden leaves, forcing Eva to stop on the footpath in Flask Walk and kick at it to try and dislodge them. She glanced at her watch. It was an hour before Allegra's teatime and she knew that Sylvie would appreciate the break if she kept her out till then.

Eva pushed the buggy out on to New End and down through the back streets in the direction of South End Green. The thing she liked most about this part of London was the way the houses all seemed to have little individual touches, bird-boxes or shutters with heart shapes cut out, or panels of elaborate plasterwork above the windows. Eva tried to remember to look up when she was walking, because that's when you saw the things no one else noticed, an ornate chimney pot here, a pre-war advertising sign there. Of course, not watching where you were going came with its own hazards, and only the day before an elderly lady had whacked her in the shins with her umbrella after she'd almost mown down her gaggle of Chihuahuas with the buggy. The streets of Hampstead teemed with belligerent old ladies and their posses of tiny canines, and they weren't to be trifled with.

The whole texture of the place was so different to her Docklands home. In some ways one was a monument to the past and the other to the future, the sheer unanswerable force of money versus the power of the class system and hereditary privilege. Undoubtedly both had their winners and losers, but Eva had always felt that the former was at least open to anyone and was transparent about its true nature, whereas class was exclusive and all the more pernicious for hiding its true nature under cover of notions of gentility and
noblesse oblige
. Even the window panes had a different quality to them here, a sort of rippled, watery imperfection that contrasted with the invisible smoothness of the sliding doors to her own apartment terrace.

The day was starting to fade to dusk. Eva liked this time of evening, when lights were beginning to be switched on but before curtains had been drawn, so that she could peer through the windows to catch snippets of activity, a mother ushering her overexcited children to the dinner table, an old man sitting on the sofa with a Jack Russell and a book in his lap. They were quietly idyllic, these scenes, and spoke to her of a sort of domesticity that had never really featured in her own life. This thought reminded her that now she had fallen out with Keith she had no real home of her own to go back to, and gave her an ache deep inside her ribcage. A ridiculous response to these glimpses of other people's lives playing out, she chided herself, because if life had taught her one thing it was that appearances rarely tell the real story. She'd spent long enough tending to her own carefully cultivated work persona to know that apparently calm exteriors could have all sorts of things seething underneath. You could look through the windows at any one of these people, but you would only ever see what was there, not what wasn't. The losses and absences didn't show, despite so often being the immovable facts around which a life orbited.

That woman, laughing as she herded her protesting children to the table, she might have a story you wouldn't see at a glance. You wouldn't be able to see the miscarriages she had before she those children came along, or the brother who'd died, or the father she'd had to put into a home because his dementia had become too much to handle. All you saw was the bright flash of happiness, and it wasn't anything close to the whole truth.

Even so, looking in from the outside, these rooms full of books and cats, rocking horses and pianos, seemed infused by the lives richly lived within them. They weren't particularly ostentatious in any modern way, though there were endless understated touches of period grandeur played down or gently mocked by flourishes of eccentricity: a mermaid figurehead from a ship's bow on the front of a house on Pilgrims Lane, and around the corner, a plaster bust with a jaunty hat surveying the world from an upstairs window.

Benedict had grown up around here, though she didn't know exactly where. It had been two years since he'd stopped answering her emails and phone calls, and after a while she'd given up trying. On one level it made sense; how long could you keep a friendship going when it so often felt strained? Ever since that row with Lydia their meetings had become more infrequent, and when they did meet up the conversation had been much harder going than it used to be. The problem was the accumulation of subjects that they couldn't talk about. Lydia and the kids seemed to be off limits—since their disastrous lunch it had sounded insincere or even sarcastic whenever she'd asked after them, even to her own ears. And any mention of Julian seemed to render Benedict stiff and unresponsive, and of course they could never speak of the kiss they'd shared on Hampstead Heath. That left their jobs and maybe Sylvie and Lucien to chat about but it wasn't enough, really. There was too much of a sense of dancing around the subjects that they couldn't talk about, now that those subjects had expanded to cover most of their separate lives. And Benedict had drifted apart from Sylvie and Lucien by mutual consent since he'd married and had kids, so it had been strangely easy to simply disappear from each other's lives.

And yet Eva would never have been the one to allow the friendship to just wither and die. She'd assumed they would soldier on through the awkward patches and out the other side, just like they always had. But evidently dissolving the friendship hadn't been unthinkable to Benedict. What's the point in flogging a dead horse when our lives have so clearly and permanently diverged? he must have asked to himself. And what
was
the point? After all, one of the things she'd always felt about Benedict was that she knew him, really understood what went on inside his head and heart. He'd never been very good at hiding how he felt. Even after he got together with Lydia, she'd been sure that he still cared about her. It was one of those things that in her more naïve days she had just assumed was a constant.

These were the streets and houses of his childhood landscape, the environment that had shaped him. It couldn't be more different to her own. Was that why she'd been so easy for him to cast off? Had there always been an undercurrent that she'd failed to notice, an innate sense that they were simply cut from a different cloth?

Her own childhood had been spent in a house unbowed by aesthetic considerations. Once in a while her father had rolled up his sleeves and given the place a perfunctory clean, but the two of them had generally lived perfectly happily among the old tins of paint, broken vases and suppurating coffee mugs. It hadn't seemed all that much like her friends' homes but there had been plenty to like about growing up with a parent who absent-mindedly treated you like a miniature adult. Keith would rarely remember to usher her to bed at a sensible hour, so during her formative years Eva had been able to enjoy plenty of boisterous dinners punctuated by drunken arguments about Hegelian dialectics, one of which, she vividly recalled, had descended into a punch-up that had left a Media Studies lecturer named Geoffrey with a bloody nose. She hadn't often dwelt on the fact that it was just the two of them. One parent seemed fine, plenty even. Anyone else would surely have felt like an intruder. And yet she could see now that something had been missing. Keith had never seen her point of view or understood her decisions, and they never really talked about their lives or how they felt about anything. She'd always seen it as a strength that they were the sort of people who didn't need big soppy heart-to-hearts, that they cared about loftier, more important things, but his political beliefs seemed to her now suspiciously like something to hide behind to avoid any emotional connection; now that her world, not some abstract political ideology but her real, actual life, had fallen apart around her, all he wanted to do was score political points. And when she looked at her own life now, it too seemed defined by the things that were missing: a mother, a career, a home. Benedict. A cluster of black holes exerting their irresistible gravitational pulls, warping and distorting all that remained.

And then, of course, there was the other loss, not even really her own but nevertheless the one in front of her every day. Eva had fallen in love with Allegra right alongside Sylvie, and the baby had seemed to blossom with their love, making progress even as the doctors warned them not to expect too much, slowly but surely learning to eat and take a few steps and say a few words. But even as they celebrated each milestone, they both knew that the loss was profound. At the moment of Allegra's birth, they had lost a part of her that would prevent her from ever growing into the person she should have been, and in private they each grieved for the Allegra who would one day have reached her full potential without the agonies of learning difficulties and cerebral palsy, the Allegra who should have been looking forward to a life of first kisses and first days at university instead of leg braces and Statements of Educational Need.

The sky darkened and the rain began to fall, softly at first and then harder as Eva turned and headed for home along the edge of the Heath. She paused to fix the rain cover over the buggy, ensconcing Allegra in a warm, dry bubble. The raindrops hit the ground as she walked, splashing into puddles and rustling into piles of leaves and sliding onto the tarmac under the roaring wheels of the cars that were making their way up East Heath Road in ever-increasing numbers as rush hour took hold. The watery symphony prevented Allegra from hearing Eva crying quietly, the sound floating up into the sky unheard and out into a universe in which babies were born disabled and mothers died and people were deserted by those they loved.