Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

She’d even scheduled a personal training session at the gym, meaning there was no way to get out of going. Eva was getting the hang of it now, the female banking aesthetic. It was all in the detail. The hair a little lighter, the teeth a little whiter, the skin just bronzed enough to suggest outdoorsy good health but still far short of a couple of weeks in Magaluf. Of course, all this was quite difficult to achieve when you were spending eighty hours a week at a desk on a huge trading floor so that you barely saw daylight between October and April each year. Big Paul claimed that trading floors were designed that way for the same reason that casinos never have windows: you want your traders and punters to be oblivious to the passage of time. You certainly wouldn’t want them noticing that it was getting dark and thinking, oh well, time to call it a day , or spotting the sunshine outside and suddenly feeling that breaking for a spot of lunch might be just the ticket.

The other part of the alpha look was of course the gym body, the hardest of all to achieve because of the impossibility of faking it. While a few extra pounds could be considered characterful on a broker, they certainly weren’t much in evidence on the female traders. After her last bonus Eva had signed up for a year’s membership at the Canary Wharf gym with the subterranean spa and the swimming pool right on the edge of the river, so that as you pounded out your sixty lengths you could pretend you were actually swimming along the Thames, only without the risk of contracting Weil’s disease from all the rat urine. Signing the contract had proven highly motivating; unable to bear the thought of the massive monthly subscription fee going to waste, she had sweated her way through spin classes, attempted to find her inner goddess in hatha yoga sessions, and almost given herself a coronary in the aptly named Body Attack, billed as a ‘rocket-fuelled combination of music and hip moves’. As she’d lain groaning on the floor at the end of the previous week’s class, the instructor had strolled over and peered down at her.

‘Should I be calling an ambulance?’ he enquired. ‘Only I might get fired if I actually hospitalize the clients.’

Lying there gasping for breath in an old Pixies T-shirt and misshapen tracksuit bottoms, Eva looked up at the Lycra-clad vision of male beauty hovering above her, barely perspiring after an hour of savage exercise, and let out an appalled involuntary giggle.

‘Well, you can’t be dying if you can still laugh at my jokes,’ he said, reaching out a hand to pull her up. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a tough class, this one. What you should do is sign up for a few one-on-one sessions with me. You get them as part of your joining package, so if you haven’t used them yet, and between you and me I suspect that you haven’t. .’ He paused and winked at her. ‘Ask at the front desk for them to pop you in Julian’s personal training diary.’

‘Julian being you.’

‘Julian being me. Hi.’ He shook the hand he was apparently still holding long after he’d finished using it to haul her upright.

‘Hi. Eva,’ she told him, withdrawing the hand, which was as embarrassingly hot and sweaty as the rest of her. ‘And I may have humiliated myself enough already, thank you. I don’t know whether my ego could withstand more scrutiny of my athletic prowess. Or lack thereof,’ she continued, but it was beginning to look as though she was losing him so she allowed the gabble to trail off.

‘Hey, don’t worry about it. If you were an Olympic athlete we’d have nothing to work on, right? Tell them I said to put you in my diary. I’ll see you soon then, Eva?’

He was backing away from her now, and doing that thing where you make your hand into a gun to point at someone, so she smiled and half-nodded, half-shook her head in what she hoped was an ambiguous gesture of possible agreement but almost certainly just made her look like a lunatic. Safely back in the changing room and under a pounding hot shower, she wondered whether he was encouraging her to book a free session with him because he got paid by the hour or whether he might actually have been flirting. Figuring that the worst that could happen was that she got fit and made the most of her gym membership, she found herself standing at the front desk on the way out.

‘Does it have to be the weekend?’ asked the flicky-haired receptionist, drumming long pink fingernails on the counter.

‘Yes, sorry, I work long hours in the week.’

‘And it has to be Julian and not one of our other trainers?’ Hair flick. ‘He’s very popular you know, particularly among our female clients,’ she continued, giving Eva the once-over with a meaningful smile. ‘It does make it difficult to find an opening with him.’

*

Having eventually been granted the honour of being booked into Julian’s special 5 p.m. reserve slot the following Saturday, Eva had taken herself off to buy some new gym kit, arriving at the checkout with a pair of soft charcoal yoga pants and a sleek black support vest with fluorescent pink panels at the sides. The sales assistant assured her that this was de rigueur for the well-turned-out gym-goer these days and ignored Eva’s wince as she rang up the total. Even now that she was making good money by most people’s standards, Eva hadn’t quite got used to casually spending on a gym outfit what she would have been able to live on for several weeks during her university years.

As she waited for Julian in the reception area, she shuffled about in her new outfit feeling self-conscious and trying to catch a glimpse of herself in the glass cabinet fronts. It had seemed okay in the changing room, but under these unforgiving lights she looked like a sackful of oranges, she thought with a grimace. Not only that, but it was such a drastic transformation from the previous week that he was bound to notice and conclude it was for his benefit, which it most certainly wasn’t since they had nothing in common, what with his being a Greek god who spent his days stretching out the hamstrings of perfectly toned gym-bunnies. Yes, she’d been anticipating this session with rather more relish than she’d usually feel at the prospect of exercise, but that was just the inevitable frisson of having some rare one-on-one time with an attractive man, even one in whom she had no romantic interest.

In the three years since Benedict’s wedding, Eva’s love life had been a barren wasteland, home only to drifting tumbleweed. Most of her time and energy went into her job, and her social life consisted mainly of work events or nights in with a bottle of wine, which was Sylvie’s usual preference as she was now working as a receptionist and always skint. Once in a while they got Lucien to put them on the guest list for one of his club nights, but Eva didn’t enjoy them much anymore; whether it was watching Lucien seduce his way through an endless supply of pneumatic dancers, or just that it was hard to summon up much enthusiasm for hundred-decibel house music when one preferred not to addle one’s brain with pills, the shine had gone off clubbing for Eva.

*

Forty minutes later Eva had long since ceased to fret about her clothing, but only because it was the least of her worries.

‘Twenty-four! Twenty-three! Twenty-two! Keep going!’ Julian was bellowing at her, counting down from fifty stomach crunches.

‘I. . can’t,’ she panted, letting the medicine ball slip from her grasp and roll away across the floor.

‘You can! Come on, just another few to go! You can do it!’

‘No, you don’t understand.’ Eva collapsed onto the mat. ‘I physically can’t. I’m telling my body to carry on but it’s staging a mutiny.’

‘Keep going!’ Julian hollered. ‘It’s all about mind over matter!’