Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Sylvie laughed and sipped cautiously at her drink, not wanting Eva to think that she was unwilling to celebrate her success. That would look like sour grapes of the sort that had caused them to fall out in the first place and in any case, half a glass wouldn’t hurt. They’d stay for one, and then she and Eva could go on to another bar where there would be enough privacy to explain why she was having a break from drinking, which she could hardly do with Eva’s workmates earwigging. It was strange and nice to have a little bit of a drink after so long, anyway. She’d never said that she would never touch another drop. Now that she had her life on an even keel maybe she could do this once in a while, have just the one and then stop.

Robert slid along the bench towards them with his best charming face on until he was inches away from Sylvie, and Eva groaned inwardly at his blatant lechery. Tall and well built with close-cropped dark hair and slightly crooked front teeth, she had to admit he was good-looking enough in a certain light, but she almost felt sorry for him, given the certainty of the impending rebuff.

‘So, how come Eva never told us she had such a beautiful friend?’ Robert was saying. ‘Is she ashamed of us? Or of you?’

Eva cringed at his smarminess and prayed that Sylvie wouldn’t cut him down too ruthlessly; after all, she was the one who still had to get up and work for the guy tomorrow. Eva watched as Sylvie broke into a faintly evil smile and parted her lips to speak, but she never actually caught her reply because the raucous group at the table behind them spilled a tray of drinks, drenching the back of Eva’s shirt with red wine and sending her rushing to the bathroom to wash it out. On the other side of the table, Big Paul was already topping up the glasses and signalling to the waiter to bring another bottle.

*

From:eva.andrews21@hotmail.com

To:sylvie_marchant_artist@yahoo.com

Date:Friday 3rd November 2005 08:04

Subject:Please tell me you didn’t

A question. What the TWATTING TWAT do you think you’re doing? We were supposed to be meeting up last night so that we could bury the hatchet, not so you could get pissed and insist we stay out half the night. I’m sorry I ditched you but it was one in the morning and I had to be up for work in five hours. As did Robert. You know, my boss. Who, incidentally, is still not on the desk despite the fact the markets opened more than an hour ago.

Now, I apologize in advance if it turns out that the reason you’re not answering your phone is because you have in fact been dismembered by a serial killer. However, the evidence is all pointing to a far more sinister possibility: that you’ve shagged my boss.

I can think of at least five reasons why you’d better bloody not have:

He’s got a girlfriend (or more likely three or four at any given moment).

He constantly tries to take the credit for my work and thinks it’s amusing to tell me to fetch him coffee.

He will try to get you to tell him things about me to undermine my professionalism.

He’s a complete and utter tool. Trust me on this.

HE’S MY BOSS. Of all the people in the world, only one of them is my boss. Let’s have a rule whereby you’re allowed to shag any one of the three billion men on the planet except for the one that’s MY BOSS.

NOW PICK UP THE DAMN PHONE.

Sylvie’s phone was still going straight through to voicemail at 9 a.m. when Robert swaggered in across the trading floor. Even without his dishevelled and triumphant appearance, Eva already knew what had happened. By the time she’d got the wine out of her shirt in the bathroom the night before, Robert and Paul seemed to have persuaded Sylvie to stay for another drink, so they did, and then that had sort of segued into the next one because the glasses just kept being topped up and Eva hadn’t been as careful as she usually was, what with having started drinking at 4.30 p.m. and skipping dinner. Sylvie had seemed to get plastered unusually quickly too, and then suddenly it was midnight and they were all still in the bar. There had been no chance to catch up properly with Sylvie because she’d been pinned in the corner by Robert for most of the evening, while Big Paul had monopolized Eva with an endless series of compliments about how gutsy she’d been that day, interspersed with hilarious tales of buccaneering in the markets of yore. She felt both annoyed and guilty. Sylvie had clearly wanted to leave when she’d arrived, but what could Eva do when her boss was virtually ordering her to stay?

In hindsight, it was obvious how it had all come about. Robert had taken one look at Sylvie and got a big toothy smile on his face, and Big Paul was his practised wingman, clearly figuring that getting your boss laid could only improve your bonus prospects. She’d watched them in action enough times but had never been close to the receiving end, so she simply hadn’t realized that she and Sylvie were being played. She felt bad about having led Sylvie into the shark pool, especially after what she’d said on the phone about hating herself for sleeping with random guys. But after a couple of drinks Sylvie had acquired her old sheen of drunken recklessness, and then she had been the one resisting Eva’s suggestions that they head off. Eva had spent at least an hour trying to persuade her to come home with her and sleep in the spare room until, exhausted and nauseous, she had eventually given up and left, having extracted a promise from Sylvie that she would get a taxi home when the bar closed.

What had happened was doubly galling, because she’d always been so careful not to let the different parts of her life collide, keeping her carefully constructed professional persona well clear of the incompatible elements. Early on in her career she’d studied the bomb-proof veneers of her most successful colleagues, noting the relaxed, confident chumminess which spoke of an upbringing that had revolved more around ski trips to Verbier than sitting in the corner at SWP meetings with a packet of Quavers, and concluded that it was best to keep her life firmly compartmentalized. This had been a generally successful strategy, though there had been that one rather excruciating time her father insisted on meeting her at her office on a trip to London, no doubt thinking an incursion into the citadels of capitalism would be a good opportunity to size up the enemy. Quite by chance, Robert had chosen the same moment to leave for the evening as Eva met her father in reception, giving her no choice but to introduce them. She’d been distracted for a few minutes by a work call and had been mortified to turn round when she finished to find Keith lecturing a smirking Robert on the finer points of socialism.

She should have learned her lesson then, she thought, remembering how, cheeks burning, she’d had to practically drag her father out of the building. She’d thought taking him out for a nice meal would temper some of his criticisms of her work and lifestyle but there had followed an awkward dinner during which Keith had managed to make her feel horribly guilty for being part of a financial system that stripped workers of their protections and in which the benefits mostly accrued to a few winners like her. At the end, instead of thanking her for picking up the tab, he snatched the bill from her hands and calculated how many Bolivian peasants could live for a month on the cost of this single meal.

Of course he had a point, she thought, but it wasn’t a straightforward one, and it also wasn’t as if she was single-handedly responsible for global inequality. Keith had at least perked up later that evening after she’d handed over a five-grand cheque for cleft palate operations for African orphans, but the next day she had walked onto the trading floor to find a picture of a hammer and sickle stuck to the back of her chair and everyone calling her Red Eva.