Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

It was clear that there was nothing to be gained from allowing the different parts of her world to collide. Why on earth had she told Sylvie to meet her at the bar? It had seemed like a good way to make a polite escape from an evening of work drinks, and the thought that Sylvie and Robert would look twice at each other hadn’t even crossed her mind, since they had nothing in common and each held everything the other stood for in contempt. Ah well, she thought, that was the upside: it wasn’t as if anything would come of it. She would put her life back into separate boxes and not make the same mistake again.

Besides, she had other things to worry about. A nagging feeling had been bothering her since she dragged herself out of bed that morning, and it wasn’t just a function of her ferocious hangover. As the morning passed and she spoke to brokers and other people on the trading floor, she was starting to realize that what she’d done yesterday was being talked about all over the market. With hindsight, she thought, it might have been a little on the aggressive side of things. The line between pre-hedging a client trade by buying what you needed in advance to fill their order, and using your buying power to move prices in the market was a hazy one. On one side of that line was what they did every day, and on the other the murky area of market manipulation, an offence technically punishable with jail. There was nothing glaringly wrong with what she’d done, she reflected uneasily, except maybe that bit right at the end where she’d ramped the price and left it there to force the market to close on a high. It would have left a funny-looking spike in the data, now she thought about it. At that moment one of the sales guys wandered over to her desk and leant against it.

‘You must have made a fair whack on that Bellwether Trust trade yesterday,’ he remarked casually.

Eva avoided looking up. ‘Yeah, we did.’

‘I mean, that would have been some serious P’n’L, right?’ he persevered.

She frowned and put down the pen she was fiddling with. ‘Yes, Toby. We’re a trading desk. We make money from trading. That’s what we do.’

‘Ooh, touchy.’ He laughed. ‘It’s just that it was a bit ballsy, that’s all I was going to say.’

Calm , she told herself. It wasn’t smart to let people see that she was feeling nervous about it. It was only natural that people were going to make comments on a trade of that size, and she was going to have to brazen it out with a bit more composure.

‘Sorry, look, I’m just a bit busy right now. And maybe one too many drinks last night, you know how it is.’

Mollified, Toby wandered away, but Eva’s heightened sense of anxiety lingered.

One fine morning in an office at Imperial College London, Benedict Waverley could be found upending the contents of a small cardboard box onto his new desk and propping a photo of Lydia and the boys against his new computer monitor. He was very happy about the desk, the first he’d ever had that was next to a window. From where he sat he could see an actual living tree and a patch of blue sky. The office would be shared with two other people, one of whom, it turned out, he’d already met and got on well with at various conferences. He felt that this was a good sign, a sign that coming back to London had been the right decision. Of course, regardless of whether the signs were good or bad it wasn’t as if he had much choice in the matter, at least not if he wanted to keep his family together. He would be sad not to be around when the Large Hadron Collider went live but at least he would still be involved in analysing the data from it, and he recognized he was lucky to have landed such a plum research and supervisory role when competition for these posts was so stiff.

Yes, he told himself, there was every reason to feel optimistic about the future. Lydia would surely be a lot happier back in London. It hadn’t been a great life for her with him working all hours at CERN, and lately she’d been spending huge swathes of time back in England with her parents. He’d missed them terribly, the kids anyway, though in fact it had been a bit of a relief to have a break from Lydia. It had been a long time since he’d felt as though he could do anything right as far as she was concerned.

It had been a couple of years since their marriage had started to fray around the edges. With hindsight they had rushed into things, but Lydia getting pregnant so quickly had rather clinched matters, and it had been easy to get swept along on a tide of doing the right thing. When he’d voiced his doubts to his mother shortly before the wedding, she’d marched him off for a walk on the Heath and talked to him in a new way, a grown-up way in which she’d never spoken to him before, or indeed since.

‘Your marriage will work if you make it work,’ she told him. ‘That’s something that your generation seems to have lost sight of. A good marriage is not one where both people have spent a decade or more sampling all the delights that the opposite sex has to offer and then suddenly stumble across another person whom they immediately recognize as the missing part of their soul. It’s simply one in which you make a choice and then bloody well stick to it. You get up every morning and renew your decision to be the best husband or wife you can be, and you forgive each other when you fall short, which of course you often will.’

‘That doesn’t sound much like you and Dad,’ he’d responded doubtfully. ‘He’s always telling people how he fell in love the first time he saw you across a crowded room and decided then and there that he would marry you.’

‘Oh, darling. Don’t you know by now that that’s all just so much hyperbole? Daddy and I have had as many ups and downs as anyone else, and God knows there’s been plenty to forgive. You can hardly have failed to notice your father’s roving eye. I was pregnant when we married too, you know. Who knows whether we’d have ended up together otherwise?’

Benedict digested this as they strolled through the grounds of Kenwood House, genuinely surprised. He’d always unthinkingly accepted his father’s fairy-tale version of events, in which the prince swept the princess off her feet and they lived happily ever after. No one had ever suggested that there had been any falling short or forgiving to be done. And what on earth did she mean by his father’s roving eye? Christ, he didn’t want to know. He had enough problems of his own without having to process a bunch of new and unpalatable facts about his parents. Benedict took his mother’s arm and steered her towards the Brew House coffee shop, changing the subject back to his own situation.

‘But what if. . there’s someone else that I have feelings for?’

His mother fixed a beady eye on him. ‘Then you’ll just have to be mature enough to recognize that in time they will pass. Daddy and I like Eva too, darling, she’s very charming.’

Benedict blanched at the mention of Eva. He hadn’t done a terribly good job of hiding his feelings, he realized now, but it was startling and unsettling to hear his mother speak so matter-of-factly about what he thought was his secret torment.

‘I remember when you brought her out to Corfu,’ Marina continued, oblivious to his discomfort. ‘She was such a sweet little thing, so awkward and gauche. I just wanted to take her under my wing. And that awful tattered bright yellow sundress she wore all week. I was itching to lend her something but didn’t dare offer in case she felt criticized. One could tell how badly she would have felt if she’d thought she wasn’t fitting in.’ She drew to a halt in front of the cafe entrance. ‘But darling, if things were going to work out between the two of you they would have done so a long time ago. Lydia’s a splendid girl and she’s absolutely dying to marry you. You don’t get a better foundation for a marriage than that. And you’re having a baby together. A baby! You don’t know yet what an incredible thing that is, but you’ll love that baby more than you ever thought possible. You’re going to have a wonderful life together, I just know it.’