Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Eva put down her bag in the hallway and closed the door quietly behind her so as not to wake Julian. She didn’t feel as bad as she could have done, a little bleary perhaps, but she could definitely have been excused for feeling worse. She’d managed to sleep on the plane and in the taxi from the airport so that helped, and of course there was a certain amount of euphoria at the trip having been so successful. Eleven client meetings in six countries in eight days was close to the limits of human endurance, but it was finally over and she was pretty sure she had set up a decent pipeline of trades for the year, meaning a decent bonus with a bit of luck. That would be good news professionally, and helped to ease her mind about the ridiculous amount she had spent on this place.

This place, her new home, was a penthouse in a tower in Docklands with an impressive view of the east London skyline and beyond. Big Paul and Sylvie had both said she was crazy spending such an enormous sum on a new-build in Docklands, but she considered it a sanctuary, an investment that enabled her to keep doing such a demanding job. Of course, she needed the job to pay the mortgage so in one sense the argument was circular, but still. Most of the men at her level of seniority had wives who did their laundry, stocked their fridges and bought their mothers’ birthday gifts, leaving them free to concentrate on making the big bucks. Eva didn’t have a wife but she did have the apartment, and she felt a far more sensual connection with it than she suspected half of those men did with their spouses. She ran her fingers over the Corian worktop, sank her stockinged feet into the deep pile of the rug and then stepped onto the terrace and looked out over the city, its buildings gently blurred by the evaporating vestiges of last night’s mist.

The apartment (she’d taken on the Americanism and no longer called it a flat, a word redolent of council estates) was designed specifically for people like her, short on time and long on cash. You could actually order room service, proper meals on china that you didn’t even have to wash up. There was a laundry service, and she’d given the concierge a key so that her washing simply disappeared and then reappeared a day later hanging in her walk-in wardrobe, perfectly pressed. The concierge service didn’t quite stretch to buying her mother a birthday gift but then, she didn’t have a mother, and her father barely knew when his own birthday was. In any case, there were plenty of high-end shops in the commercial precinct willing to wrap anonymous trinkets with expensive-looking ribbons when the occasion called for it, and she could reach them through a tunnel from her building without ever having to set foot outside in the open air.

Eva glanced at the clock: 6 a.m. Better grab a couple of hours’ sleep and then head into the office. She checked her phone and groaned when she saw she had four voicemails, two work calls and two messages from Sylvie, who sounded dejected. Eva felt a pang of guilt. She hadn’t had an awful lot of time to spend with her friend lately, what with the demands of her job and her boyfriend, and whenever they did get together these days the disparity in the success they were each having in realizing their dreams was an unspoken barrier between them. While Eva’s career trajectory had been little less than meteoric, Sylvie’s was resolutely earthbound. Over the last five years her increasingly desperate attempts to earn a living had seen her working as a casino croupier, a drug-testing guinea pig and very nearly a lap dancer at one point, which Eva had only just managed to talk her out of by insisting on buying several of her paintings at grossly inflated prices, claiming that they were a sound investment in a great artist.

Eva wasn’t being entirely disingenuous; she always had believed in Sylvie’s talent, she just no longer believed that talent was always recognized and rewarded. The first time she’d gone back to Sylvie’s room in halls a couple of weeks after she’d arrived in Bristol she had been agog at the canvases and portfolio books stacked against every wall. Sylvie’s sheer obsessive devotion had astonished her and made her wonder whether something similar was lacking in her own make-up. The room was dominated by a large canvas on an easel in the corner, a detailed study of a face which at the time she didn’t know to be Lucien’s. Eva had been even more impressed by a meticulous pencil drawing of a snake coiled around the branch of a tree, with each individual scale picked out and the texture of the tree’s bark so intricately rendered that it defied the viewer to believe that the page was flat. Sylvie had dismissed that picture as showing off, a mere technical exercise, but Eva remained in awe of her ability to sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper and create something so lifelike with nothing more than a pencil.

Now both of these pictures as well as several other original Sylvie Marchants adorned Eva’s walls, and she enjoyed holding forth to visitors about her friend the up-and-coming artist. True, she wasn’t certain that having a painting of Lucien on her wall was entirely psychologically healthy, but she honestly felt it was one of Sylvie’s best and in occasional maudlin moments told herself that it was a good reminder that being too trusting often meant making an idiot of yourself.

Still, in these days of pickled sharks and soiled bedclothes, Sylvie’s oil-on-canvas had few cheerleaders. Eva had always loved her work, but then, it wasn’t really her field of expertise. Even Sylvie had called her ‘parochial’ and ‘overliteral’ when she’d laughed at Sylvie’s description of a painting of a house in a storm as a self-portrait.

There had been a few flares of hope over the years, in particular the show at a Hoxton gallery just around the corner from White Cube, which Eva had felt certain would be the start of something big. In the event the private view had degenerated into a melancholy evening in which she and Sylvie had hoovered up the excessive quantities of cheap wine left over after the last of a meagre handful of punters had passed through.

*

Eva undressed and padded through to the bedroom, where the curtains were letting in just enough light for her to see that Julian was fast asleep with his legs tangled up in the sheet. Stumbling over his jeans in the gloom, she reflected grumpily that she might as well let him move in properly if having his own cupboard would mean he wouldn’t throw his stuff on the floor. They’d been together for about seven months and he was starting to make increasingly insistent noises about living together, and her generally making more room in her life for him.

She stood for a moment admiring his sleeping form in the dim light. In the early days of the relationship she had basked in the envy of other women and felt flattered that someone like him would fall for someone like her. A solid seven with plenty of make-up on, Big Paul had once teased her after several drinks, and though she’d retaliated with a furious torrent of insults centring on his own expanding belly and receding hairline, afterwards she admitted to herself that she couldn’t honestly disagree with his assessment.

Still, the full effect of Julian’s looks wore off after a while. Eva wasn’t the first girlfriend he’d met at the gym, he’d admitted sulkily when they’d eventually had ‘the conversation’ about their sexual histories, and though he clearly didn’t want to talk about it at length she gleaned enough information to suspect that more than one had viewed him as a quick fling and then dumped him once they’d shown him off to their friends.

Eva slipped into bed beside him and he stirred and rolled towards her.