Alice Adams: Invincible Summer

‘I’ve got to go too,’ said Benedict reluctantly. ‘I’m leaving first thing and I haven’t packed yet.’

Eva and Lucien said goodbye to the others and lay back on the grass, watching them walk away down the hill. A tinge of purple was seeping into the late afternoon light announcing the onset of dusk, and Eva was feeling lightheaded from the cheap, acidic wine. Lucien rolled over onto his side so that he was facing her.

‘And then there were two,’ he said, reaching into the plastic bag beside him. ‘Looks like it’s just you and me left to drink the last bottle, Eva.’

The way Lucien said her name made it sound dark and alluring. It was the most exotic thing about her and she had always liked it. Her socialist father sometimes joked that she was named after Eva Perón, but she knew her mother had chosen it just because she loved it. If it had been left to him she’d probably have been called something drab and unostentatious, like Jane or Susan.

‘Eva,’ he said again. ‘It’s a pretty name.’

‘My mother chose it,’ she told him.

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ he asked, not unkindly.

‘Yes. She died of breast cancer when I was five. I don’t remember her much.’

Lucien rolled over onto his back and turned his face up to the sky, closing his eyes.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That can’t be great. Still, it can’t be much worse than having an alkie for a mother.’

Eva’s eyes widened. Sylvie had told her a bit about how tough it had been for them growing up, how their parents had split up and how their mother drank too much and how often they’d had to move, but Lucien had always seemed to have an impenetrable veneer of invulnerability. This was the first time she’d ever heard him mention their childhood.

‘Sylvie told me your mum’s a bit of a drinker,’ she said cautiously.

‘Yep. And I’ve got the scars to prove it.’

He opened his left hand, holding it out towards her. The last two fingers and part of the palm were swirled with satiny pink tissue, the scarring so extensive that the little finger was noticeably narrower than it ought to have been between the two lowest joints. Eva had asked Sylvie about it not long after they’d met, not wanting to risk offending Lucien, but she’d just shrugged and said something about an accidental burn when he was a kid. At the time Eva had sensed something unsaid but hadn’t wanted to push; although Sylvie could sometimes be voluble and entertaining on the subject of their flaky home life — recounting stories about finding her mother asleep in the shrubbery or getting told off at school for taking in a family pack of KitKats for lunch because that was all there was in the house — Eva had quickly learned that it was something she only talked about on her own terms.

Now Eva reached out and ran her fingers across the taut, glossy flesh. ‘Lucien. I’m so sorry. Your mother did that to you? I had no idea.’

He didn’t look at her. ‘Nah, not exactly. She was passed out drunk with one of those old-style bar heaters on in the room when I was little, three or four maybe, and I reached out and grabbed it. She never hurt me on purpose, though that’s more than I can say for a couple of her boyfriends. She was just a bit of a shit mother when she was drinking, which was quite a lot of the time.’

‘You and Sylvie are lucky to have had each other at least,’ Eva said. ‘No wonder you’re so close.’

‘Yeah. We’ve always looked out for each other.’

His eyes met hers for the first time since he’d held out his hand, and they both realized at the same moment that her fingers were still resting against the damaged tissue. For a fraction of a second she glimpsed something she’d never seen before behind his eyes, something at once more human and more animal than the usual sardonic, bullet-proof version of himself that was all he’d ever shown her. She had a searing feeling of seeing him for the first time, not just what he wanted her to see but the child he’d once been, and the life that had shaped what he’d since become. But even as these thoughts were running through Eva’s mind his gaze was changing, retreating and flattening, and he closed the fingers over the scars and tucked the hand away so that they were no longer visible.

Unable to bear their new intimacy being snatched away, Eva did something she’d never have been bold enough to do before: she leant over and took his hand again, lacing her own fingers between his damaged ones. He was half beneath her on the ground now, her face above his, her hair grazing his cheek. When he lifted his eyes to hers something new passed between them, something electric, and this time he didn’t take his hand away. Instead, he grinned a wolfish grin and raised his other hand and slid the fingers around the back of her neck, tangling them into her hair and tugging her down towards him.

*

More wine, more talk, and then a walk home in the fading light, drunkenly swaying towards each other as they walked, arms brushing, little fingers half entwined, swigging from the cans of beer they’d bought on the way in an attempt to neutralize the strangeness and embarrassment of what they were doing.

Any ambiguity had dissolved the minute they’d got inside her room and closed the door. He’d shoved her up against the wall and kissed her hard and started to unbutton her shirt, and she hadn’t had time to think, only to get lost in the urgency of the moment.

In bed, though, the urgency had dissolved into comedy. There had been clashing teeth and rumbling stomachs, and her jeans had got wedged around her ankles so that she’d nearly fallen over trying to wriggle out of them. There was the first condom that had pinged across the room, and the second one that had fallen into the ashtray. An eventual five minutes of panting and thrusting was rapidly followed by Lucien’s snoring. When she woke furry-mouthed and queasy beside him, with the morning sunlight trickling in around the edges of her curtains, she’d reached out and taken his hand to try to recapture something of the closeness of the night before but he’d pulled it away, kissing her quickly and passionlessly before rolling out of bed to pull on his jeans.

‘Best be off then,’ he said once he’d found his T-shirt. ‘We don’t want Sylvie finding out about this, she hates it when I shag her mates.’

He grinned and made a run for the door, leaving Eva to lie back swathed in her clammy, rumpled sheets and a palpable sense of rejection.

‘Hard to believe it’s finally over, isn’t it?’ said Sylvie. ‘No more lectures, no more exams, no more diabolical vending-machine coffee.’

The friends were back in their spot on Brandon Hill, which over the last few years had been the scene of many a boozy afternoon. The day felt dreamy and momentous all at once. Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something before it was even over? Eva shook her head gently to dislodge the thought that the afternoon, their last all together in Bristol, was slipping away from them minute by minute. She was sharply aware that after today it could be any amount of time before she saw Lucien again. He and Sylvie were leaving to go travelling, and while Sylvie was definitely planning to join her in London afterwards, she knew from bitter experience that Lucien was altogether more unpredictable.

‘It’s not over for all of us, don’t forget,’ grumbled Benedict. ‘Think of me, won’t you, when you’re off swanning around the world and I’m right back here after the summer.’

‘If you’re mad enough to stay on for a PhD you deserve everything you get,’ Sylvie said. ‘I couldn’t be more ready to get out of here.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, a change of scene would be nice but at least the work’s going to start getting interesting. We barely touched on proper particle physics in the undergrad years, so I’ll finally get a chance to get stuck into the really exciting stuff.’