Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Benedict had felt much better after this conversation, and as the wedding got closer he had grown more and more certain that his mother was right. And there had been so much to do, what with the move to Switzerland and Josh’s arrival and starting work at CERN, that he hadn’t had time to dwell too much on things as the days sped past in a blur. Between the baby and his job he barely had a second to spare, but he found he was ecstatically happy despite surviving on sometimes as little as five hours’ sleep a night. He came to feel everything his mother had said he would about his son and more. And being at CERN was something else, working with some of the most brilliant minds in physics to get these huge, groundbreaking experiments up and running, and everyone feeling as if they were truly on the brink of something momentous, a new era in understanding the universe.

And then there was Lydia. At first she’d seemed as happy as he was. They’d rented a beautiful old apartment on Rue Pecolat, close to Lake Geneva, and had been surprised and relieved at how the sky didn’t fall when the baby arrived. During the pregnancy there seemed to be a queue of people lining up to issue warnings about how difficult having a baby was, how dreadful giving birth would be, how much life would change, how likely it was that Lydia would miss the intellectual stimulation of her work, and how hard it would be to live in another country away from friends and family. By the time the baby was due they had been so petrified by all the well-meant warnings that the reality turned out to be far less apocalyptic than they’d been led to expect, and a haze of contentment had descended. When, a year after Josh had popped into their world, Lydia had announced that she was pregnant again, Benedict had taken it in his stride.

As it turned out, the reality failed to match his expectations once again, this time for very different reasons. The second pregnancy was much harder than the first, with Lydia suffering terrible morning sickness for most of the nine months, and by the time Will arrived she was already resentful of Benedict, how much time he spent working and how little he helped at home. Unlike Josh, who had emerged with a sort of serenity about him, Will was a colicky baby and would scream for hours on end, defiant in the face of all attempts to soothe him. Benedict would start each day with the best of intentions about getting home early and giving Lydia a break, but by the time he finished his work he would be so exhausted that the prospect of returning to a tearful and angry Lydia and a screaming Will was enough to have him finding reasons to stay even later.

He’d suggested a nanny; he couldn’t have afforded it on his salary but there was no question that his parents would be willing to help out, and besides, if they had a nanny perhaps Lydia would be able to work too. But Lydia wouldn’t hear of it, saying that she wanted the boys to be cared for by their parents. That might be how certain sorts of people do things, she’d said pointedly, but she wasn’t about to palm her children off on some stranger and then pack them off to boarding school in short trousers only to retrieve them ten years later physically grown but emotionally stunted. Benedict resented the implicit criticism of his family. If she wouldn’t accept the solutions that he offered he could hardly be to blame if she was unhappy. Still, he could perhaps have been a better husband, and that was before one even mentioned the incident in the stationery cupboard.

The incident in the stationery cupboard, as he now thought of it, had been an act of utter insanity at the CERN Christmas party. He’d asked Lydia whether she wanted to come with him and even offered to arrange a babysitter, but in a masterstroke of passive aggression she had insisted that Will’s colic was too bad to leave him, and that in any case she was simply too exhausted for parties and he should go along on his own. He’d taken her at face value, knowing full well that face value was the exact opposite of how these statements were intended but not feeling like spending an hour jollying her into coming only to have her monitor his every drink and insist they get a taxi home by ten because she’d have to be up for the 4 a.m. feed.

By then it had been many months since he’d been out socializing, or had a drink, or, for that matter, had sex. Since the baby had arrived he’d tried very hard to make Lydia happy, but nothing seemed to work. When he stayed out late she got angry, but his presence at home seemed to annoy her too. If he came home after a long day and sat down with the newspaper for even fifteen minutes she would ostentatiously tidy up around him with the baby on one hip, silently making the point that she had no such luxury. But if he attempted to help with the housework, or with the kids, he invariably did it wrong: the washing needed to be split into whites and coloureds or things would run, the nappies needed the frills pulled out properly around the legs or they would leak and just make more work for her than if she’d changed them herself in the first place. Attempts at love-making were coldly rebuffed and sometimes even met with a stern talk on how tired she was and how insensitive it was of him not to realize that it was normal for women not to feel like sex for months after giving birth, though he recalled sadly how they’d been back in the saddle within weeks of Josh’s arrival.

The Christmas party had felt like a much-needed opportunity to let off some steam, a release valve, as he saw it. He hadn’t intended to get legless, just to have a couple of beers, but there had only been wine on offer and after the first few glasses a few more had seemed like a marvellous idea. The other thing that had seemed like a marvellous idea after those additional few glasses of wine had been allowing himself to be tugged into the stationery cupboard by a young colleague named Stephanie, who had cornered him in the corridor and quizzed him on the finer points of lepton production, hanging on to his every word as though he was some sort of rock star, which in a funny way of course he was, a rock star of the world of particle physics, if you will. Then she’d made a rather outre joke about confusing hadrons and hard-ons, and things had gone from there. It had stopped seeming like such a good idea when another giggling couple had stumbled into the same cupboard and discovered him on top of Stephanie with his trousers down, illuminated from the doorway in what must have been a profoundly undignified tableau.

The following day, in the wretchedness of the early morning light, he’d reasoned that he would have to tell Lydia. CERN was such a small community that it could easily get back to her, and besides, he wasn’t sure he could live with the self-loathing. It transpired too late that his discoverers had been models of discretion; he’d already told Lydia by the time he realized that he could have got away with it, and even though the aftermath had been too dreadful for words, he still felt that it had been the right thing to do. A painful but cleansing period of honesty had followed. Lydia’s recriminations had been bitter and, he could see now, largely justified. Benedict hadn’t been a good husband. He had avoided his responsibilities as a father and his infidelity was merely a manifestation of a deficit of the respect he should have accorded her. He had failed to fully commit to the partnership in a spirit of love and generosity. It had been brutal, yes, but at the end of it he felt as though they understood each other much better, and they eventually resolved to work on their marriage in a new spirit of honesty and reconciliation. It did mean that he had to give in to Lydia’s demands to return to London when a suitable position could be found, since she could hardly be expected to move on knowing that he still regularly ran into the person with whom he had been caught in flagrante delicto, and in any case Benedict couldn’t bear the knowing, flirtatious glances Stephanie still gave him, and had taken to darting into the loos whenever she passed.