Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

As the four reassembled in the square at the front of the cathedral, they were each so wrapped up in their own thoughts that it took a while for anyone to notice Lucien dabbing at his face with his sleeve.

‘Lucien,’ said Benedict after a while. ‘Are you. . blubbing? Are we witnessing a miracle? The most cynical man on earth having some sort of religious experience?’

‘Oh, fuck off. I’m not blubbing, mate.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s just. . that Spanish guy I was chatting to, the one next to me in church with the withered leg and crutches. He came all the way from Sarria like that, just to be blessed here. Can you imagine doing the walk we’ve done, but on crutches?’

‘Wow. That must have been tough,’ said Eva, whose legs were so sore she wasn’t certain she’d ever want to walk anywhere again.

‘It’s taken him over a month and he said it was the hardest thing he’s ever done. His leg’s been like that all his life. Seemed really happy to have made it. Look, he gave me this.’ Lucien pulled a shell out of his pocket with a loop of string hanging from a hole drilled through it. ‘Said he’d worn it round his neck for the journey, that it had brought him good luck and now he wanted to share it. Don’t you hate it when people do stuff like that? I can put up with any amount of arseholes but that shit just pushes my buttons.’ Lucien’s voice grew husky again.

Benedict stifled a laugh. ‘Seriously? You’re crying because someone did something nice for you? I’ve seen it all now. Come on over here, Snugglepops, you look like you could use that cuddle you were trying to give me this morning.’

Lucien glared but allowed Benedict to envelop him in a bear hug, quickly followed by Eva and Sylvie, who threw their arms around him too. The four of them stood like that for a long time as pilgrims and tourists bustled around them, huddled together with arms stretched out to encompass as many of the others as possible, each of their bodies aching with tiredness and elation and relief and sadness that it was over.

Benedict rubbed a hand across his unshaven chin and cast a gloomy look around what he loosely referred to as his office. It was rather an aggrandizing term for a cluttered desk in the corner of the basement of the physics department. True, the basement was the right place to keep the experiments, what with its being easier to control light and temperature, but spending so much time down there was getting a bit much. Every time he left the building he would emerge squinting into the light, like coming out of a daytime showing at the cinema and with much the same feeling of discombobulation.

In winter it hardly bothered him, but now that another summer had rolled around it was wearing a bit thin. At least he was about to have a break. He was mostly tying up loose ends now, archiving data and annotating his code for when he came back to finish writing up his thesis in the autumn. The university would be dead over the summer and in a few weeks’ time he’d be off to Corfu for a lengthy holiday, more at the behest of his parents than through any great desire of his own. It would be pleasant enough, he supposed, so long as he manoeuvred himself into a room as far away as possible from his brother and Carla and their noisy new baby, but he was feeling restless and ready for a change.

He’d moved back into the postgrad hall this year to avoid having to find another flatmate now that the old one had decamped to Fermilab to immerse himself in the heady world of high-energy particle physics, leaving Benedict behind tinkering around in the dungeon and dining nightly on Pot Noodles in the shared kitchen that was barely more hygienic than the one in his undergraduate halls of residence.

Doing a PhD forced you into a sort of extended adolescence, he thought ruefully. He was working at the cutting edge of particle physics, and yet there was just something uniquely infantilizing about the student lifestyle. The email he had received that morning from Eva — an increasingly rare occurrence — had only served to underline this. The picture she painted was, as ever, very much one of bright lights, big city; big deals, big nights out. She mentioned Sylvie but not Lucien, making Benedict wonder whether she saw much of him these days. The email hadn’t really felt as though it was from his old friend. It contained none of the shared jokes they used to shoehorn into their messages to show that nothing had changed, that underneath it all they were still the same old Benedict and Eva. Of course, they had never really been Benedict and Eva, at least not in the way that he would have liked, and perhaps she really had changed. Certainly it sounded as though Eva was more excited by bonuses than bosons these days.

There had been that moment, a few years ago, when he’d thought it might actually happen between them. She’d joined him in Corfu the summer they’d graduated, and over the course of a week she’d grown browner and more relaxed until the last day when they’d come in from the pool together and made to enter the house at the same time. They’d got sort of wedged in the doorway, he in shorts and she in a bathing suit, and though their bodies hadn’t actually been touching electricity had seemed to crackle and arc between them.

Benedict shifted uncomfortably in his chair, relieving the pressure from the fly of his jeans. Just thinking about it gave him a combined flush of desire and humiliation even now. He should have just kissed her. This wasn’t a new thought; it was the same one he’d been having, oh, four or five times a day in the several years since, give or take. He should have kissed her but instead he’d stepped back out of the doorway, almost but not quite brushing her body with his own, and the spell had been broken and he’d mumbled an apology and she’d darted off to her room.

He wondered whether he’d die an old man still cursing himself for not having taken what could easily turn out to have been his best shot at happiness. After three long years of watching Eva pining for Lucien and being roundly ignored himself, he’d finally had his chance and he’d blown it. The savage rage he’d felt at himself for the first year afterwards had largely subsided, but the thought of it was still enough to make him cringe at his own inadequacy.

He glanced up at the clock: 9 p.m. He might as well head home, picking up a Pot Noodle from the Spar on the way. He’d just write his data back down ready for the morning, and make a start on a reply to Eva’s message while he was waiting for the job to finish. Benedict sent the command and listened for the telltale signs from the cupboard in the corner of the room, where Boris the data-management robot would be busying himself. The sheer volume of data for his PhD on the search for first-generation leptoquarks in decay channel collisions was so enormous, petabyte upon petabyte of the stuff, that it couldn’t be stored on local computers and was instead written onto cartridges which were lifted in and out of the reader by the robotic arm. Most of what he spent his days doing was writing computer programs to sift through massive datasets looking for signature patterns of his particle, isolating traces in amongst all the other distracting and irrelevant data and allowing him to zero in on these tiny signals and separate them out from the background noise.

He opened the email from Eva and read it again. New York, blah blah , client dinner, blah blah blah , broker night, blah-di-blah. He was losing her, that much was clear. She was jetting around the world attending important meetings, hobnobbing with movers and shakers, while he festered in a basement. She never mentioned men these days but he knew they must be there, coming and going. He probably wouldn’t know until one day a wedding invitation would plop through his letterbox, and then it really would be too late.