Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

‘Accident. Really. I’m not kidding, it was honestly an accident,’ she repeated when he looked at her with narrowed eyes. ‘I was drunk, I tripped and went face first into a mirror. Anyway, you don’t look so great yourself.’

‘Yeah, well. I had a big night last night. It’s my job, remember.’ He lowered himself into a chair, rubbing his bloodshot eyes.

‘How are you doing? Really, I mean?’ she asked.

‘Fine. What’s up? Not that it isn’t always a delight to see you, but I’m feeling a bit jaded and you haven’t been over for ages.’

‘I know. I haven’t been feeling great lately. To tell you the truth, I’ve been a bit of a wreck. I’m going to spend the summer with Papi and Mamie, try to sort myself out a bit.’

He looked up, surprised. ‘What’s been happening? Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have helped you out. I know the job thing’s been getting you down for a while but I didn’t know things were bad enough for you to exile yourself to rural France with the relics.’

‘I’m sorry. I haven’t been talking to anyone really, just drinking myself into oblivion. It’s all got pretty bad and I need a break, need to get away. I’ll be back after the summer. Or maybe I won’t. I need a plan, Lucien, a proper long-term plan for my life.’ At that moment she noticed a trickle of blood making its way from his nostril towards his upper lip. ‘Your nose is bleeding. Here.’ She handed him a tissue from her pocket and he swiped it across his upper lip before discarding it on the floor.

‘Sounds heavy. But whatever you need, sis. You know where I am. You can always come and stay here for a bit when you get back.’

She looked at him closely. ‘Listen, Lucien, why don’t you come with me? You’ve been caning it for quite a while now, and you’re not looking great.’

‘I’m doing just fine, thank you.’ He sounded tetchy. ‘Bought myself a new car yesterday as a matter of fact, a BMW. There’s nothing wrong with me. Besides, that’s the last place I’d go if I wanted to clean up. Do you remember how the old bastard thrashed me after I smashed that window in his precious greenhouse when we were kids?’

Sylvie sighed. ‘Yes, and I don’t think he should have done that but it was a long time ago. When I look back now, my happiest childhood memories were of the summers we spent with them. Which is weird, because remember how much we used to complain about how boring it was there?’

‘Yeah. Because it was boring. And if those are your happiest memories it just means that being bored was marginally better than being miserable.’

‘Well, I’m miserable now, so I guess I’m ready to trade it in for a dose of boredom. I know they weren’t perfect, but there aren’t that many people in the world who are there to help you out when you’re on the ropes. You don’t get to choose your family, you just make the best of what you’ve got.’

‘Don’t I know it, sis.’ Lucien jumped onto the sofa beside her and pulled her into a headlock, dragging his knuckles across her skull until she screamed and wriggled away laughing. They settled back on either end of the sofa as the laughter subsided and a quiet came over them.

‘You’re right,’ said Lucien suddenly. ‘I do need to get myself together a bit. Lay off the blow a bit more.’

‘Why don’t you come with me then? Seriously.’

‘Look, Sylvie, I know we don’t have much in the way of family, but I just don’t see it the way you do. For me it’s way past the time when I could have done with their help. If they wanted to help me out they could have done it any time in the first fifteen years of my life. Anyway, I honestly don’t need it now. I’m doing all right.’

‘So long as you’re sure you’re really okay.’

‘Haven’t I always been here for you? You go and do what you need to do and I’ll be right here when you get back.’

He pulled her up off the sofa and engulfed her in a hug, then pushed her towards the door.

*

I’ve made a terrible mistake, Sylvie thought to herself a thousand times a day It was too hot, there were too many insects, the sun was too bright and scorched her skin, her eyes, her soul. Papi and Mamie were gentle but watchful. The first night she drank two bottles of wine and after that there had been no more wine in the house, and though she woke every morning with a clear head, as evening approached she felt restless and stunted and had to go out for long walks just to quell the urge to scream into the still darkness. They were miles from the nearest town, and Papi and Mamie drove there only once a week to do the shopping, so she couldn’t have laid her hands on any booze even if she’d wanted to. She wondered how they didn’t go mad without anything to drink or any company or even a TV. She herself cycled between being agitated and enervated, pacing and lying limply on the sofa. She’d stay for a few weeks and then leave, she told herself over and over again.

Then, during the third week, at the end of which she had decided it would be possible to go without appearing too rude and ungrateful, something began to change. Life began to get easier, almost imperceptibly at first, and then distinctly and noticeably as the periods in which she felt calm grew longer and longer. The days had an irresistible rhythm to them. Each morning, she woke early and walked down into the valley before the sun had fully risen. Where her surroundings had seemed oppressively still and quiet at first, she now found herself tuning in to more subtle sounds and movements, leaves stroked by the breeze, drifting butterflies, warbling birdsong. Some days Papi walked with her, and though he slowed her down and quickly got tired so that they had to turn back much sooner than she would have done alone, she enjoyed his company. He was quick to point out and name some of the creatures they came across, the two-tailed pasha butterfly, the ocellated lizard, and as a special treat one morning, a short-toed eagle overhead.

During the day she helped with the laborious housework that was still carried out with little electronic intervention, sweeping floors and washing clothes by hand. When she wasn’t doing chores, she was working her way through the eclectic selection of paperbacks that Mamie picked up for her in the second-hand bookshop in town. She read everything from P. G. Wodehouse to Jilly Cooper, eventually resorting to slowly ploughing through a battered copy of Albert Camus’s L’Été with her rusty French when she’d run out of English books. In the last essay in the book, ‘Retour à Tipasa’, Camus returned to the Algiers of his childhood to wander among the Roman ruins and reflect on his life. One passage in particular kept niggling at her, so she sat down with a pen and translated it properly:

It seemed as if the morning were motionless, the sun stopped for an incalculable moment. In this light and this silence, the years of rage and night melted away. I heard in myself an almost forgotten sound as though my heart, long since stopped, began to softly beat again. Now awake, I recognized one by one the imperceptible sounds that made up the silence: the birdsong, the faint sigh of the sea at the foot of the rocks, the vibrations of the trees, the blind singing of the columns, the swish of the wormwood plants, the furtive lizards. I heard these noises, and listened also to the waves of joy rising within me. It felt as if I had finally returned to harbour, for a moment at least, and that this moment would never end. Soon after, though, the sun rose visibly by a degree in the sky. A magpie sang a brief prelude and at once the songs of other birds burst forth from all around me with energy, jubilation, joyful discordance, an infinite rapture. The day started up again.

She viscerally understood what he said about the light, the silence, the melting away of wrath and night. Was it ridiculously lofty to compare herself to Camus? He was writing about Europe after two wars whereas she was drying out at her grandparents after a drinking binge, but then again, weren’t they both living lives shaped by forces greater than themselves? She lived in a time of great freedom, true, but also a time in which house prices, globalization, the threat of war and terrorism, pressed down hard on people. Art and music had mostly been replaced by shallow facsimiles of the real thing, she felt, ruled by markets and commercial imperatives rather than passion or anger or a thirst to reflect the world back at itself in a way that might change it. Wasn’t she united with Camus by a longing for beauty, a search for a lost piece of their youth and innocence, just as all humans were? She went back to the essay and read it aloud to herself.