Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Sylvie didn’t know whether she had been asleep for two minutes or an hour when she was jolted awake by a loud ringing. Heart thudding, she heaved herself out of the chair and over to the kitchen table where she had left her phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Will you accept a call from HMP Brixton?’ came an unfamiliar voice on the line.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘You have a call coming through from Her Majesty’s Prison Brixton,’ came the voice again, with an edge of impatience this time. ‘Will you take the call?’

‘I’m not sure you’ve got the right number. But okay, yes, put it through.’

‘Sylvie? It’s me. Can you hear me?’

It took her a moment or two to realize that the panicky voice was her brother’s. Her knees felt weak and she had to lean forward against the edge of the table.

‘Yes, I can hear you. Lucien, are you really calling from prison? What the hell’s going on?’

‘Sylvie, things have gone really wrong here. I’ve fucked up big time.’

‘What’s happened? How can you be in prison?’

‘God, Sylvie, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to call you, what with the baby about to arrive and everything, but I tried Mum and the old bitch didn’t want to know. It’s just. . things have gone really wrong at my end.’

Sylvie steadied herself to reply with a confidence that she didn’t feel.

‘Calm down. It’s fine. Just tell me what’s happened.’

‘I’m on remand. I got caught with a couple of keys of coke.’

‘Shit, don’t say that on the phone. If you’re calling from prison they’re probably listening in.’

‘Doesn’t matter. They caught me red-handed. I’m going to have to plead guilty, try to get a reduced sentence. I thought they’d let me out on bail but they’ve remanded me in custody. I need someone I can trust to help me. I know you’re due any day and there’s no way I’m going to ask you to come and visit me here but I need some help. Can you get Eva to come if I put her name on my visitor’s ticket?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course, don’t worry. We’re going to sort this out. I can send Eva, no problem. Put her name down and I’ll call her right now and get her there as soon as possible, today if we can work out the logistics. Lucien, don’t worry, we’re going to fix this, I promise you.’

‘Listen, don’t worry, sis, I’m a big boy, I can look after myself. I’m just going to need a bit of help sorting things on the outside, my flat and all that,’ he was saying, and her heart started really pounding then, because she could hear how frightened he was and she hadn’t heard Lucien actually scared and trying to be brave since he was ten years old and about to get a beating from one of their mother’s boyfriends for some act of insurgence or another. ‘Listen, I’m going to get cut off in a minute. You will send Eva, won’t you?’

And then the line went dead and she was standing in the kitchen listening to just a crackle and he was gone and she was married to Robert and about to have a baby and her brother was in prison and she wasn’t sure how they’d got here but she had better phone Eva right now, Eva would help, Eva would know what to do, so she dialled her number but there was no answer so she hung up and dialled again.

Eva, as it happened, was at that moment otherwise engaged. She and Julian were spending the day together, as was their routine on Saturdays. They rose at nine for coffee and newspapers on the terrace, then strolled along to the gym where they each spent ninety minutes working out before reconvening in the spa for a lengthy wallow. After that there was the walk along to the bagel stand, where she would have rocket and tomato on toasted onion-seed and he would have cheese and pickle on sesame. The day was so predictable, and yet so utterly satisfying. There was a quiet bliss in mornings like this, she felt. Life was good. They had been living together for more than a year now, and after a certain amount of turbulence as they worked out exactly who was expected to load the dishwasher, things had settled down and their home and relationship had become a haven from the pressures of her job. It all just worked.

Julian must have been thinking something similar as they wandered along the river, because he reached down to grab her hand. Noticing this, she deftly slipped her arm through his and squeezed it, thus avoiding the ickiness of public handholding without causing any upset. This, she thought, was just one example of how good she’d got at successfully navigating the pitfalls of the relationship. He’d almost completely stopped calling her a minky, too, she noted with satisfaction.

‘Shall we go across to Greenwich and take a walk in the park?’ he asked, breaking her train of thought.

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know, whatever people take walks in parks on sunny days for,’ he teased. ‘We are allowed to deviate from the routine and do something spontaneous, just for the fun of it.’

Eva grinned. ‘Why not?’

Squeaky-clean and damp-haired from the spa, they caught the DLR across the river and wandered through Greenwich Market and up past the Maritime Museum into the park. They sat down in the grass near to the old observatory, where years ago, she remembered, her father had taken her to the Planetarium and shown her the night sky projected onto the inside of the dome. Her eight-year-old self had been awestruck, stunned by the realization of the hugeness of it all.

‘How do you get to be someone who knows about planets and stars?’ she’d asked Keith on the Tube on the way home.

‘I think you’d need to be a physicist for that,’ he’d told her. It had felt like a momentous day to her, the day she had decided what to be, and she’d thought about it all the way home on the train sitting beside an oblivious Keith, who would no doubt have been astounded to know the extent to which his casual answer was going to affect the course of his daughter’s life.

*

Eva and Julian gazed out at the endless vista stretching down the hill, taking in the classical grandeur of the Queen’s House before sweeping on past the English Baroque of Wren’s Old Royal Naval College and across the Thames towards Docklands, the City and St Paul’s beyond. The sun burned down, making Eva’s hair feel slightly itchy as it dried. Her skin gave off a faint smell of chlorine that mingled with the scent of recently cut grass. The air was almost still, the breeze only just perceptible as it trickled past her ears.

‘This view is to die for, isn’t it?’ said Eva. ‘I defy anyone to look out at all this and not fall in love with the city. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this,’ she continued, ‘but with hindsight I think that one of the really important events of my life took place here.’

‘You hadn’t ever told me that,’ he said when she finished telling him about the trip to the Planetarium. ‘But what changed? How come you ended up in banking instead of being a physicist like that mate of yours at CERN?’

She shrugged. ‘I didn’t fancy another five years doing a PhD, piling up a load more loans and never getting out into the real world. It’s all very well looking up at the stars when you’re eight, but the real world’s not quite like that, is it?’

‘I suppose not. But in any case, your story makes this the perfect place.’

‘What do you mean? Perfect how?’

‘Well, I’m hoping it’s not the only life-changing event that you’re going to have here. The thing is, I brought you here to ask you something.’

Julian shifted around until he was kneeling in front of her, down the hill slightly so that even though Eva was still seated on the grass he was just about looking up at her. For a few seconds she wondered idly what he was doing and allowed her face to arrange itself into an expression of mild enquiry, before a sudden cold certainty snapped into place in her mind as he carefully arranged himself on one knee.