Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

‘I missed you,’ he mumbled sleepily, throwing a warm, heavy arm across her and tugging her towards his side of the bed. ‘Come here, you little minky.’

Eva cringed internally. This was a recent and wholly undesirable development. She wasn’t actually sure what a minky was, some bastard chimera of ‘minx’ and ‘sweetie’ she presumed, but she was very sure that she didn’t want to be called either of those things, and she was absolutely certain that the place in the world that she least wanted to be called them was in bed.

‘I said , get over here, my minky-minky,’ he said, moving his weight on top of her just as she felt every last ounce of sexual desire drain out of her body.

‘Mm, not now, babe. I’m exhausted and I’ve just got time for a bit of sleep before I head into the office for a meeting.’

It was true; she was exhausted. But somewhere at the back of her mind lurked the uneasy truth that for the first few months of the relationship she had found ways to make time for sex, and it had always taken precedence over her tiredness. A brush of the hand had been enough to send them hurtling towards the bedroom (or the kitchen or, on one particularly daring occasion, the balcony) at every opportunity in the early days. But you couldn’t survive on caffeine and lust forever.

*

Of course, she reflected as she levered herself out of her now empty bed a couple of hours later, it was inevitable that any relationship would calm down a bit after the initial shag-fest. It didn’t mean he wasn’t the right man for her. There were still the days when he turned up on her doorstep wearing that old grey T-shirt, with his hair tousled and damp from the shower and holding a flower he’d picked for her on the way over between his teeth, and she’d think, why wouldn’t I want him to move in with me? She wasn’t always certain she loved him, not exactly, but what was love anyway? The intense, almost obsessional passion she had once felt for Lucien? That could hardly be the foundation of a functioning adult relationship. Or the painful sense of loss that had been present in her life ever since Benedict had got married, fading, true, but never quite disappearing? Much good that had done her. And it wasn’t as if there was a queue of eligible men at her door clamouring to make her life complete.

No, relationships were a compromise and the people who were prepared to compromise were the ones who didn’t end up dying alone and being eaten by their cats. Benedict, for instance, had almost certainly compromised: she doubted that he’d been in love with Lydia at the outset but he had got her pregnant, married her, and was now, judging by his occasional emails, perfectly content. Could she be happy with Julian?

She wished she could talk to Benedict about all this, ask him if he really was happy and what he thought she should do, but they hadn’t spoken much lately. Things had been awkward since that disastrous lunch with Lydia and the kids; he’d mentioned being in London a number of times since, but with Lydia in tow neither of them really fancied meeting up. She hoped he’d be over on his own sometime soon, so that they could get together and have a good laugh about the awfulness of that lunch and smooth things over properly. Putting things right was hard to do by email, and whenever she phoned it was clear from the slight but detectable stiltedness in his voice that Lydia was within earshot. Still, at least she could talk things over with Sylvie. Eva picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Hi, this is Sylvie Marchant. Leave a message.’

‘Sylvie, it’s me, Eva. Sorry, I only just arrived back from my trip and got your voicemail. Let’s meet up tonight, somewhere near my work if that’s okay. Say seven thirty in Smollensky’s?’

Eva was running late, as usual. Sylvie sat scraping the remainder of a layer of chipped blue varnish off one of her fingernails with a broken cocktail stick, then finished her second extortionately priced glass of wine and ordered another. She didn’t know why she bothered sometimes. What she should do was give Eva a taste of her own medicine, stop phoning her until she wised up and realized that she needed to be a bit more considerate and put a bit more effort into the friendship. But if she did that, it would probably be at least a year before Eva even noticed, Sylvie thought bitterly. She was feeling increasingly like a small adjunct to her friend’s life, an inconvenient scheduling problem. Everything always had to be on Eva’s terms these days: do you mind coming up my way, are you free to get together in this ten-minute slot between my leaving my extremely important job and tumbling into bed with my ridiculously good-looking boyfriend? Okay, so Sylvie herself was between jobs again and had a bit more flexibility, and yes, Eva would probably pick up the tab for the evening, but was it really too much to ask for her best friend to consider the way it all made her feel ?

God, you sound like a teenager , she chided herself. No one understands me . But it wasn’t really surprising that she sounded like a teenager, seeing as how she was practically living like one despite having turned twenty-nine a few months earlier. Sylvie didn’t have much to show for adult life so far. No husband, no kids, no career, no mortgage. Ten years ago that would have sounded like a good thing, a sign that she hadn’t been sucked into conforming to society, so why was she beginning to feel as if she had taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line? These thoughts were enough to make Sylvie take another big gulp of her wine and start to wonder whether to order yet another drink, when at last Eva glided in through the glass doors.

‘Finally,’ she said as Eva reached the table. ‘You’re only fifty minutes late.’

‘Sorry, I got stuck in a meeting. Thanks for waiting.’

‘I didn’t have much choice, did I? Seeing as it took an hour and cost six quid to get here on the Tube.’

‘Okay, I get it. I’m late. I’m sorry.’ Eva threw her jacket over the back of the chair next to her and sat down. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Well, I just got fired from a job scraping chewing gum off school desks and I’m thinking of selling a kidney to make the rent. But apart from that, tickety-boo.’

‘That bad, huh? Let me know if you need me to help you out again this month.’

‘Nah. It’s all life experience. It will feed my art and give me something to talk about in interviews once I’m famous. I’ll have a ready supply of anecdotes about clambering over piles of unconscious junkies to get to the front door of the squat I’m going to end up living in.’

In truth Sylvie had long since given up the notion that adversity was the soil in which talent grew. What looked like glamorous squalor from a distance had turned out to be grindingly unpleasant to live day to day, and most of her twenties had been spent in the grey-hued no-man’s-land between poverty and the level of financial security needed to stave off anxiety for long enough to flourish. Just having a stable place to live would have helped. She’d been longing for that since she was a child and now here she was, a fully grown adult, moving from one dodgy flatshare to another. It had become impossible to afford a decent place to live in London and paid work was getting harder to find. For anything more than a shop job she was up against all the people who’d got it right first time around, years younger and with all the optimism and confidence that life had already sucked out of her. Sylvie couldn’t compete with that.

Was it London, though, or was it just her? She looked around at the other people in the bar, men and women in their twenties wearing suits and greeting one another with kisses and loud laughter and giving every appearance of thriving. Not everyone was having the same problems that she was. Take Eva. She had landed on her feet with her job and had spent some obscene amount of money on a horrible soulless flat that looked like a hotel room. Sylvie cringed every time she saw her own pictures on the walls of that flat, but at least Eva had a home, money, a job. Look at her now, casually raising a hand to attract the attention of an aproned waiter.