Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Benedict stopped pacing and swung round to face her. ‘Fuck you, Eva, fuck you,’ he shouted, bringing startled tears to her eyes. ‘Why would you do this to me now? You could have done it any time in the last seven years and I’d have been the happiest man on earth, but now?’

She reached out and tried to take his hand. ‘Benedict, I know there couldn’t be a worse time but, oh God, do we want to regret not doing this for the rest of our lives?’

He wrenched his hand away. ‘Actually there could be a worse time, or at least, this is a worse time than you can possibly imagine. Lydia’s pregnant, Eva, she’s pregnant. We’re having a baby. And I love her, and I love that baby and no matter how many years I’ve spent pining for you, it was never real . You were always off doing something else, looking for something else, and you always will be. But this, Lydia, the baby, this is real. You’ve never been anything more than a fantasy for me and now it’s time to grow up.’

Eva felt a chasm open up inside her chest. ‘God, Benedict, I didn’t know. I swear if I’d known she was pregnant. . Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘We haven’t told anyone, not our families, no one. It’s the twelve-week scan on Thursday. You don’t tell people till after that.’ He rubbed his eyes in a suddenly crumpled-looking face. ‘Look, I just can’t do this. I’ve got to go.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’ Eva was crying now. ‘Please don’t go, we can talk about this. I’m so sorry. I’m not going to make this hard for you. I don’t even have to come to the wedding.’

‘How’s it going to look if you suddenly pull out of the wedding? If you’ve ever been a friend to me you’ll come and you’ll be happy for me, for us. And for God’s sake don’t tell anyone about this, not even Sylvie, just forget it.’ His voice grew quieter as he spoke, and she watched as his anger was replaced by calm resolve. ‘You know I care about you, Eva, but it has to be just as a friend now. Things have changed and this is how it has to be.’

He leant down and kissed her forehead, then turned and walked away. She watched him go, racked with shock and shame, heart pounding painfully inside her ribcage. Eva lowered herself onto a nearby bench and watched him grow smaller as he strode away from her down the hill. For a long time after he’d finally disappeared she remained sitting there alone, letting the air darken around her and her hands grow cold and her mind go numb.

On the day of the wedding Eva drove out to the village in the Cotswolds with Sylvie in the front passenger seat and Lucien and his plus-one in the back. Chas, as she’d introduced herself whilst clambering into the back of Eva’s car, was a six-foot podium dancer from one of Lucien’s increasingly successful club nights.

‘As in “. . and Dave”?’ Eva had joked. ‘Seventies pop-rock duo credited with popularizing the musical style colloquially known as “rockney”?’ she added in desperation when that failed to elicit a laugh, but Chas had just stared at her blankly and then shifted over to allow Lucien to ooze in beside her with a cat-that-got-the-cream look on his face.

Lucien and Chas were in an extremely intimate relationship. Eva knew this because they’d spent much of the two-hour drive being extremely intimate on the back seat of her car, until she’d been forced to tilt the rear-view mirror away and turn up the radio in order to stifle the steadily building urge to swerve into a tree.

They were booked into the country spa hotel where the reception was taking place, and as they approached the Georgian manor house along the gravel drive, sandstone walls glowing golden in the sun, Lucien let out a low whistle. ‘They’re certainly doing it in style. Not bad for a shotgun wedding.’

Eva had to admit that he was right. She had certainly never been the sort to fantasize about her wedding day, what with growing up with Keith’s lectures on gender oppression and the patriarchal nature of marriage, but if she’d given it any thought this would have been just the sort of place she’d have wanted to do it.

It was a relief to finally arrive so that she could escape the car to go and get changed in the room she was now apparently sharing with Sylvie. Eva had booked two rooms for the trip, waving away Sylvie’s faint mutters about repaying her. She knew that Sylvie couldn’t have afforded to come if she’d had to pay for the hotel so taking care of the booking had seemed the easiest way to avoid any awkwardness. But what hadn’t occurred to her was that Lucien would bring a date, so that she would end up sharing a twin room and shelling out the best part of two hundred quid for him to get his rocks off. The thought made her seethe. Dressed for the wedding, they reconvened in the hotel lobby, where Lucien, clad in a foppish sky-blue designer suit, was leaning against an enormous carved wooden fireplace, somehow looking at once utterly ludicrous and devastatingly handsome.

‘Shall we?’ he said, proffering Eva the arm that didn’t have Chas hanging from it in a gold lamé dress.

The ceremony took place in an old chapel half a mile away, sunlight trickling in through stained-glass windows and threadbare prayer cushions hanging from the backs of the pews. Eva had lain awake in her bed the night before with a knot in her stomach thinking about what it would be like to watch Benedict say his vows, but sitting here now she found herself feeling remarkably detached. It was all so surreal and removed from their real lives, Lydia with her bump just visible through her roman-style gown, luminous with pregnancy or bridal joy, Benedict stumbling over his words but generally looking happy and a bit dazed. Eva found herself feeling strangely peaceful, perhaps because of the calm of the chapel, or perhaps because of the finality of Benedict actually being married to somebody else, the relief that comes of being behind a closed door.

*

After the wedding breakfast Benedict’s brother Harry, who was his best man, made a speech that trod a deft line between joking that the marriage had been prompted by the imminent arrival and implying that it would have been only a matter of time anyway, and then the music had started up, allowing Eva to take a much-needed breather to compose herself in the bathroom. She stood at the basin washing her hands and examining her weary face in the mirror, assessing the cumulative damage from an eighty-hour working week topped off with a good four or five glasses of champagne. Even to her own eyes she looked tired and sad. She pulled a few faces at her reflection and then practised a smile. Only a few more hours to get through before she could slink off to her room and then the whole ordeal would be over and she could go back to her life, which would, after all, be much the same as it had been before the wedding invitation had arrived.

It didn’t feel like it was going to be the same, though. It felt as though she was staring down the barrel of a long, lonely winter, and perhaps even a long, lonely life of regretting having been too stupid to know what she had until it was lost. This too shall pass, she reminded herself. She wouldn’t always be drunk and tired and emotional. New days would roll by, new men would come and go. That was life: you put one foot in front of the other. She was just steeling herself to rejoin the fray when a cubicle door swung open behind her and Lydia staggered out.

‘Oh hi,’ squeaked Eva, sounding artificially bright. And then, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, ‘Congratulations. How does it feel to be Mrs Waverley?’

‘The Honourable Mrs Benedict Waverley, to be precise,’ said Lydia, coming over to the sink next to her and rinsing out her mouth with a handful of water from the tap. ‘And right at this moment, it feels utterly nauseating, if you must know.’