Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

It surprised Benedict as much as anyone that he had turned out to be a cheat, a man who had committed adultery, twice if you counted kissing Eva, which he supposed Lydia would had she known about it. (He hadn’t confessed to that one. It had only been a kiss, after all, and it would have been unforgivably cruel to tell her when she’d been pregnant and about to marry him.) He’d always assumed that cheats were despicable people, but it turned out that it was easy to condemn adulterers if you were a person for whom the opportunity had never arisen. Having never anticipated that the opportunity to be unfaithful would materialize, he had never steeled himself against it, and therein lay the problem. He had been, if not defenceless exactly, then unready, lacking the wit to take good decisions quickly when circumstances called for it. Now that he knew such things could happen, he would take precautions and that in turn would make him a better husband. Simple, really.

One other good thing had come out of the whole mess: he was feeling more understanding towards his father again. Since the day his mother had hinted at his father’s infidelities he hadn’t been able to help but view him in a different light. A distance had opened up between them and was, if not so marked as to be a source of sadness for both men, at least the cause of a niggling sense of perplexed discomfort that some of the ease had gone out of their relationship.

Benedict had avoided examining any of this too closely, but in his newfound spirit of honesty he thought about it all now, and felt that he had perhaps judged his father too harshly. If a good and well-intentioned man like Benedict could end up in such a situation, perhaps something similar had happened to his father. Perhaps he had made a mistake or two, and was as sorry as Benedict was. Perhaps he had even spent many years devoting himself to his family to try to make up for it, as Benedict intended to. After all, he concluded, who can ever understand the intricacies of any marriage except for the two people in it?

Benedict’s reverie was broken by the ping of an email arriving. That was good news, confirmation that he’d at least managed to redirect his messages to the Imperial server. He’d spent most of the morning simply trying to connect to a printer. If it took a particle physicist several hours to get a printer to work he could only wonder how the rest of the world coped. How many physicists does it take to port to a printer? There was a joke in there somewhere.

From:eva.andrews21@hotmail.com

To:benedict.waverley@cern.ch

Date:Monday 24th July 2006 16:32

Subject:Hi

Dearest Benedict,

It’s about time one of us sent a proper email, so here goes. .

Hope Lydia and the rugrats are fine and everything’s tickety-boo at CERN.

There’s plenty to catch up on this end, since it seems like you haven’t been in touch with anyone for a while? Anyway, Julian has moved in to my place, so that’s all very grown-up and not at all commitment-phobic of me. It’s really nice, better than I thought it would be. I know I was wondering about whether moving in together was the right thing to do when we last met up but it’s actually completely fine. You never know, one day maybe we’ll be in marital bliss a la Benedict and Lydia!

Speaking of which, here’s the other big news: Sylvie boinked my boss, got pregnant, and married him a few months ago in a flurry of confetti and insincerity. I feel you doing a double-take — yes, you did read that right. All of this happened in the space of the last eight months and I guess you’ve been busy with work and kids. Have you changed your number? We’ve all tried to phone you with no luck. Anyway, the wedding was a small and hurriedly-put-together affair at Marylebone registry office followed by the groom and the witnesses (me and Lucien) getting plastered at the Marylebone Tap while Sylvie looked on, pregnant, sober and fuming. They’ve bought a house in Hampstead, your old stomping ground, and the baby’s due soon.

It’s starting to feel like shotgun weddings are quite the thing, what with you and Lydia and now Sylvie and Robert. I used to think they only happened in Victorian novels and that these were the days of happy promiscuity but apparently you lot are more traditional than I ever realized. Hopefully they’ll be as good together as you two are, but knowing Robert as I do after five years working with him I have to admit I have my doubts, as the man’s a total dick.

We can at least still count on Lucien not to get hitched during a bout of chivalry. He’s the same as ever, brought his latest squeeze to the wedding — some species of model apparently. I suspect glamour rather than catwalk, but didn’t get a chance to ask as she spent most of the night in the loo, emerging only occasionally to down another vodka and slimline tonic while sniffing furiously.

Are you in London any time soon? Meet me for lunch?

Eva

Benedict sighed. He’d have loved to meet up with Eva and confide in her about everything that had happened, but he didn’t think that would go down well with Lydia, who, with the impeccable radar women seemed to have about such things, had always sensed a threat. After that excruciating lunch at Giraffe he’d tried to smooth things over but just made it worse. She had ended up accusing him of siding with Eva and made it clear that if he was any sort of a husband he wouldn’t consort with people who belittled his wife. Matters hadn’t been helped by Josh wandering around singing forfucksake, forfucksake in a cheery little voice for weeks afterwards. He knew he should explain but he needed some time to work out how to phrase it, and so he’d avoided Eva’s calls and that had made it impossible to take Sylvie and Lucien’s calls too. Still, there was always email; he felt hurt that they hadn’t at least emailed him to ask him to the wedding when they couldn’t get through to his phone, even if it had been a rush job. Now he thought about it, though, the truth was that they’d all been going their separate ways for a long time, and this just confirmed it.

Anyway, the most important thing was keeping his family together. If he was honest with himself, which of course he must be now because that was the new way of doing things, somewhere deep inside he had never really let go of the fantasy of one day being with Eva. But that wasn’t real life. He had Lydia and the kids, and Eva was living with that prettified personal trainer of hers. She had evidently long since moved on, and it was time that he did the same. And Sylvie and Lucien had barely made any effort to stay in touch since he’d had kids, instead conducting the friendship by proxy through Eva. He just wasn’t fun enough for them anymore, he supposed; their eyes glazed over at the slightest mention of his family or his work, which was basically the whole of his life now. That hurt, of course it did, but there was no point in dwelling on it. Times changed, people moved on. He nudged the mouse so that the pointer was no longer hovering above the Reply button, and went back to unpacking his box.

Several miles across the city, another box was being unpacked. Sylvie unwrapped the tissue paper from around a small sculpture of a hippopotamus and placed it on the shelf next to the dancer already positioned there. The contrast between the slender ballerina and the bulbous open-mouthed hippo was pleasing. It almost looked as if the figurine was serenading him, a gracious hand outstretched towards the toothy gaping maw. Sylvie had made these little statues years ago at school, and while they weren’t going to win any prizes they had a certain childish joy to them, making them well suited to the nursery.