Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

‘I know you probably just find all this weird. Do I believe in the absolute specifics of Christianity, the virgin birth and the Resurrection and all that? Maybe not. But I do believe there’s a mystery at the heart of human existence that I don’t have the answer to, or even the tools to answer. I suppose I’m with Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’ He retrieved the cigarette from Eva’s hand and took another drag before passing it back. ‘And that’s the nice thing about the Anglican Church, if you ask me. It doesn’t really bother to insist that everyone subscribes to a rigid set of doctrines. Some people think that makes it a tepid, wishy-washy religion but to me that’s actually its strength. Everyone has their own conception of God and mine is to do with a sort of awe at the balance of the natural world that only deepens the more I learn about the universe.’

Eva couldn’t think of anything to say. She’d always assumed he was a default atheist of the same rather unthinking sort that she was, the sort who believed in things for which there was empirical evidence and didn’t see any merit in giving much thought to anything else. How much more was there that she didn’t know about Benedict? Somewhere out there in an alternate universe she’d have a lifetime to learn it all. In that universe, a woman very much like her would be waking up every day to continue this conversation, a conversation that she realized now they had begun years earlier and had carried on through days and nights, emails and phone calls, glances and laughter. That Eva, although she looked and sounded like this one, was just subtly different enough to have known a good thing when she saw it, and as a result hadn’t just watched the man who might possibly be the love of her life get married to somebody else.

‘Well, religion’s not all good,’ she said finally, for want of anything else to say. ‘Look at what just happened at the World Trade Center.’

‘God, yes. Your bank’s American, isn’t it? Did you have people there?’

‘Several thousand. Six dead, no one I knew. It would have been a lot worse if it hadn’t been for the security guy there. He’s a legend among the staff now. An ex-military guy who took his job really seriously and managed to evacuate nearly everyone.’

‘“Took?” Past tense?’

‘Yes. He was still evacuating people when the tower went down. Presumed dead, though no remains have been found yet. Maybe they never will be. He was originally from Cornwall and apparently he sang Cornish songs from his youth to keep everyone calm as he evacuated them. In amongst all the chaos and destruction, there was this sixty-year-old guy standing in the stairwell, directing people down and belting out, “Men of Cornwall, stand ye steady, stand and never yield.” And he phoned his wife and told her to stop crying, that he’d never been happier and that he loved her and she’d made his life.’

They stood quietly looking out into the night and thinking about this new world in which planes flew into towers and people fell from the sky, and in which there were men who so hated their world that they were willing to die a spectacular death to make their point. Eva thought, too, about who she’d have called as the tower went down, and whether if Benedict had been there he would have called Lydia and been able to say that to her, that he loved her and she’d made his life. She was sure he was thinking the same thing but she could only see his profile in the dark, and it gave nothing away. Eventually he broke the silence.

‘I love it out here in the country, where you can still actually see the stars. You don’t get that in the city, do you? Too much light pollution. When I was a child everything seemed to stop at night. I remember my father driving us to Gatwick to catch a flight at three o’clock in the morning and being the only car on the road. It was magical. You felt as if you were getting a glimpse of a secret world while everyone else slept. Now the cars never stop and the lights never go out. But out here you can still just about make out the constellations and it puts things in perspective, makes you feel like what you really are, a tiny mammal on the surface of a planet spinning through infinite space amidst a billion stars. Easy to forget that, don’t you find?’

‘I suppose so.’ Why wasn’t she saying anything? He was pouring out his innermost thoughts, and that was all she could offer? But if she started talking now she knew she wouldn’t stop. She’d tell him how stupid and blind she had been, and try to convince him that his future lay with her. And what if she succeeded? What if he turned round and said, I feel the same way, let’s run away together? Then for the rest of her life she would be the woman who had gone to a wedding and run away with the groom, leaving the pregnant bride devastated and the baby fatherless. Anyway, even if she was a terrible enough person to do that, Benedict had already proven he wasn’t, that day on Hampstead Heath, and if anything she loved him more for it.

She leant towards him so that her arm was pressed against his and rested her head on his shoulder and felt him leaning back towards her. They stood like that wordlessly for a minute and then Benedict said, ‘You’re shivering. Come on, let’s get you back inside.’ He put an arm around her and leant down to kiss her on the top of the head, then led her back towards the lights and music and a world in which Benedict was married to Lydia and they were having a baby together and Eva was going back to her life tomorrow, alone.

*

Back inside, Lucien was slumped in a chair at the edge of the dance floor on his own, swigging from the neck of a champagne bottle.

‘I think I’m going to call it a night,’ Eva told him. ‘Where’s Sylvie?’

‘She’s already gone upstairs.’ And then in response to Eva’s questioning look he added, ‘Chas drank too much and Sylvie found her throwing up in the ladies, so she’s gone to put her to bed.’

Eva mustered a smirk. ‘Ah. Looks like you won’t be having a night of passion after all.’

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it. Unless you’re offering to step in and fill the gap.’

‘Not me, fella. Far be it from me to try to fill the size twelves of the lovely Chas.’ Then, ‘Why do you call her Chas, anyway? Bit of an odd name for a girl, isn’t it?’

Lucien paused and frowned before finally answering. ‘It’s short for Chastity, all right. Her name’s Chastity.’

A smile spread across Eva’s face, wider and wider, until she was unable to stop the laughter from bursting out of her mouth.

‘Priceless. Just priceless,’ she gasped when she finally managed to take a breath, collapsing into the chair beside Lucien’s and heaving with mirth until even he couldn’t help but join in, and Eva and Lucien ended the evening of Benedict’s wedding side by side beneath the coloured disco lights at the edge of the dance floor, crying with laughter.

Summer in the city: you had to love it. For nine months of the year London was relentlessly grim, but everything about it got better in the sunshine. The light twinkled on the river, sheered off the glass sides of the skyscrapers, and brought pallid, scantily clad city dwellers blinking out into the streets. Chairs and tables sprouted from the pavement outside pubs and cafes, immediately filling up with people sipping wine and nibbling snacks. Even the hazy pall of traffic fumes added a misty beauty to the place, Eva thought fondly as she walked along the riverside towards the gym. Feeling virtuous, she allowed herself a moment of satisfaction with her life. That day, a Saturday, had begun with a wheatgrass smoothie. She had phoned her father and tidied her flat, a smart rental in a converted warehouse with a balcony over the water in up-and-coming Limehouse, just three stops on the DLR or thirty minutes’ walk from the office in Canary Wharf.