Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Another day, another trudge around the leaf-carpeted streets of Hampstead. The daily walks with Allegra weren’t really a chore, more a way to pass the time. The front wheel of the buggy was clogging up with sodden leaves, forcing Eva to stop on the footpath in Flask Walk and kick at it to try and dislodge them. She glanced at her watch. It was an hour before Allegra’s teatime and she knew that Sylvie would appreciate the break if she kept her out till then.

Eva pushed the buggy out on to New End and down through the back streets in the direction of South End Green. The thing she liked most about this part of London was the way the houses all seemed to have little individual touches, bird-boxes or shutters with heart shapes cut out, or panels of elaborate plasterwork above the windows. She tried to remember to look up when she was walking, because that’s when you saw the things no one else noticed: an ornate chimney pot here, a pre-war advertising sign there. Of course, not watching where you were going came with its own hazards, and only the day before an elderly woman had whacked her in the shins with her umbrella after she’d almost mown down her gaggle of chihuahuas with the buggy. The streets of Hampstead teemed with belligerent old ladies and their posses of tiny canines, and they weren’t to be trifled with.

The whole texture of the place was so different to her Docklands home. In some ways one was a monument to the past and the other to the future, the power of the class system and hereditary privilege versus the sheer unanswerable force of money. Undoubtedly both had their winners and losers, but Eva had always felt that the latter was at least open to anyone and was transparent about its true nature, whereas class was exclusive and all the more pernicious for hiding its true nature under cover of notions of gentility and noblesse oblige. Even the windowpanes had a different quality to them here, a sort of rippled, watery imperfection that contrasted with the invisible smoothness of the sliding doors to her own apartment terrace.

The day was starting to fade to dusk. Eva liked this time of evening, when lights were beginning to be switched on but before curtains had been drawn, so that she could peer through the windows to catch snippets of activity, a mother ushering her overexcited children to the dinner table, an old man sitting on the sofa with a Jack Russell and a book in his lap. They were quietly idyllic, these scenes, and spoke to her of a sort of domesticity that had never really featured in her own life. This thought reminded her that now she had fallen out with Keith she had no real home to go back to, and gave her an ache deep inside her ribcage. A ridiculous response to these glimpses of other people’s lives playing out, she chided herself, because if life had taught her one thing it was that appearances rarely tell the real story. She’d spent long enough tending to her own carefully cultivated work persona to know that apparently calm exteriors could have all sorts of things seething underneath. You could look through the windows at any one of these people, but you would only ever see what was there, not what wasn’t. The losses and absences didn’t show, despite so often being the immovable facts around which a life orbited.

That woman, laughing as she herded her protesting children to the table, she might have a story you wouldn’t see at a glance. You wouldn’t be able to see the miscarriages she had before those children came along, or the brother who’d died, or the father she’d had to put into a home because his dementia had become too much to handle. All you saw was the bright flash of happiness, and it wasn’t anything close to the whole truth.

Even so, looking in from the outside, these rooms full of books and cats, rocking horses and pianos, seemed infused by the lives richly lived within them. They weren’t particularly ostentatious in any modern way, though there were endless understated touches of period grandeur played down or gently mocked by flourishes of eccentricity: a mermaid figurehead from a ship’s bow on the front of a house on Pilgrims Lane, and around the corner, a plaster bust with a jaunty hat surveying the world from an upstairs window. Benedict had grown up around here, though she didn’t know exactly where. It had been two years since he’d stopped answering her emails and phone calls, and after a while she’d given up trying. On one level it made sense; how long could you keep a friendship going when it so often felt strained? Ever since that row with Lydia their meetings had become more infrequent, and when they did meet up the conversation had been much harder going than it used to be. The problem was the accumulation of subjects that they couldn’t talk about. Lydia and the kids seemed to be off limits — since their disastrous lunch it had sounded insincere or even sarcastic whenever she’d asked after them, even to her own ears. And any mention of Julian seemed to render Benedict stiff and unresponsive, and of course they could never speak of the kiss they’d shared on Hampstead Heath. That left their jobs and maybe Sylvie and Lucien to chat about but it wasn’t enough, really. There was too much of a sense of dancing around the subjects that they couldn’t talk about, now that those subjects had expanded to cover most of their separate lives. And Benedict had drifted apart from Sylvie and Lucien by mutual consent since he’d married and had kids, so it had been strangely easy to simply disappear from each other’s lives.

And yet Eva would never have been the one to allow the friendship to just wither and die. She’d assumed they would soldier on through the awkward patches and out the other side, just like they always had. But, evidently, dissolving the friendship hadn’t been unthinkable to Benedict. What’s the point in flogging a dead horse when our lives have so clearly and permanently diverged? he must have asked himself. And what was the point? After all, one of the things she’d always felt about Benedict was that she knew him, really understood what went on inside his head and heart. He’d never been very good at hiding how he felt. Even after he got together with Lydia, she’d been sure that he still cared about her. It was one of those things that in her more naive days she had just assumed was a constant.

These were the streets and houses of his childhood landscape, the environment that had shaped him. It couldn’t be more different to her own. Was that why she’d been so easy for him to cast off? Had there always been an undercurrent that she’d failed to notice, an innate sense that they were simply cut from a different cloth?

Her own childhood had been spent in a house unbowed by aesthetic considerations. Once in a while her father had rolled up his sleeves and given the place a perfunctory clean, but the two of them had generally lived perfectly happily among the old tins of paint, broken vases and suppurating coffee mugs. It hadn’t seemed all that much like her friends’ homes but there had been plenty to like about growing up with a parent who absent-mindedly treated you like a miniature adult. Keith would rarely remember to usher her to bed at a sensible hour, so during her formative years Eva had been able to enjoy plenty of boisterous dinners punctuated by drunken arguments about Hegelian dialectics, one of which, she vividly recalled, had descended into a punch-up that had left a media studies lecturer named Geoffrey with a bloody nose. She hadn’t often dwelt on the fact that it was just the two of them. One parent seemed fine, plenty even. Anyone else would surely have felt like an intruder. And yet she could see now that something had been missing. Keith had never seen her point of view or understood her decisions, and they never really talked about their lives or how they felt about anything. She’d always seen it as a strength that they were the sort of people who didn’t need big soppy heart-to-hearts, that they cared about loftier, more important things, but his political beliefs seemed to her now suspiciously like something to hide behind to avoid any emotional connection; now that her world, not some abstract ideology but her real, actual life, had fallen apart around her, all he wanted to do was score political points. And when she looked at her own life now, it too seemed defined by the things that were missing: a mother, a career, a home. Benedict. A cluster of black holes exerting their irresistible gravitational pulls, warping and distorting all that remained.