Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Still, it had been a good visit. Yesterday they had taken Josh and Will to Kew Gardens, followed by lunch at the Angel Inn and the Sunday afternoon kids’ showing of the latest Star Wars movie at the Everyman. She had initially approached her new role of de facto stepmother with a high degree of trepidation, but the boys had quickly shown her what to do. They could be a handful at times, but they were quite straightforward once you grasped that if you made sure that they had sufficient food, sleep and exercise the rest would follow. And it had turned out that kids were a lot more fun than she’d realized, or at least Benedict’s were. They were as messy and noisy as she’d expected they would be, but they also found uncomplicated joy in everything around them and they were entertainingly like their father, giving her strange glimpses of what Benedict must have been like growing up. Heredity was a fascinating thing when you observed it close up to see the ways in which a child resembled and differed from someone you loved. They’d certainly inherited his scientific bent, she thought grumpily as she stepped out of bed and onto the sharp corner of a solar-powered rocket lying on the floor. Eva limped into the kitchen where Benedict was standing at the sink and slid her arms around his waist from behind, savouring the solidity and warmth of his body.

‘Got to run,’ he said, turning round and kissing her on the mouth. He tasted of toast and coffee. ‘Busy day.’ He brushed her hair off her face and kissed her again.

‘Aren’t they all?’

‘Listen, thanks for being so great with Josh and Will this weekend,’ he told her. ‘I know we could do with some more time to ourselves.’

‘One of these days,’ she said. ‘We’ve got the next fifty years, remember?’

Benedict stroked her cheek and smiled, before reluctantly peeling her arms from around him and slinging his bag over his shoulder. ‘Right, I’ve got to get going. Oh, and by the way, there’s a gift for you on the coffee table. It’s not a big thing so don’t get excited, just a little something I picked up when I took the boys to the Science Museum on Saturday.’

‘Yeah, well, I think I’ve got a little something from the Science Museum embedded in the bottom of my foot. Not to mention scattered across our bedroom floor.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. Leave it and I’ll clear it up when I get home tonight, promise.’ He dropped a last kiss onto her face and headed for the door.

The cafetière was still warm, so she poured herself a mug of coffee and took a swig from it as she padded through to the sitting room to find out what Benedict had left her. There was a plastic bag in the middle of the coffee table and she picked it up and slid out what at first glance appeared to be just a picture frame, but on closer examination was actually a framed Carl Sagan quote printed on a page of a calculus book, so that a graph and a series of formulae were visible in the background. It read: For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love .

How very Benedict, she thought. One of these days she would teach him how to get extra Brownie points by actually wrapping a gift, but she didn’t really mind. It was strange how good, how loved and inspired, something like this made her feel, when a similar sort of gesture from Julian would have made her queasy. Though she did feel a bit nauseous, now she came to think of it. The feeling had been coming and going over the last couple of days but she’d been trying to ignore it, partly because she was rushed off her feet and partly because lately she’d learned the hard way that it was easy to imagine things and there was no point in continually getting your hopes up.

She didn’t feel like she was imagining it now, though. Did she have time to pop out to the shops? As ParcelBox had taken off, her working day had grown longer and Benedict had been under pressure too, with frequent trips to Switzerland and the ever-pressing need to analyse the vast amounts of data being spewed out by the Large Hadron Collider for telltale traces of a Higgs-like particle. They were barely managing to keep on top of their workloads let alone spend a decent amount of time together, but it was a crucial time for both of them. The ParcelBox London presence was gathering momentum with thousands already installed, and it felt like they were close to reaching a tipping point in the capital, when they would stop being a novelty product for early-adopters and start to establish themselves as a standard accessory for working households. Then they would begin the planned big push into Birmingham and Bristol. Sylvie was doing a brilliant job on product development; her retro design based on the old red post boxes had been by far the most popular of the range. Eva had had her doubts about taking on Lucien as a full-time salesman but he’d worn her down using every tactic he’d learned in his year of telesales, as well as offering to work on commission and promising not to seduce clients on visits. He seemed to be enjoying the job so much that she occasionally wondered whether he stuck to the letter of this agreement, but since his skills as a salesman were indisputable she avoided probing too deeply.

Eva glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece and made a swift decision. She would nip out to the chemist while her laptop was booting. There was a faint chill in the air outside, but she could feel it dissipating even as she walked. The air was soft with morning haze and laden with a summery feeling of abundance. A little way along the street she startled a squirrel on the ground, sending it scurrying up the trunk of a nearby cherry tree, where it knocked off a blossom that fluttered down to the pavement in front of her. It was an almost laughably idyllic morning, she thought, feeling rather as though she ought to be clicking her heels together as she went. Even the irritable traffic queue and barging pedestrians on the High Street couldn’t puncture her mood; it just reminded her how lucky she was to be out of the rat-race and not having to battle her way across London to an office each morning.

In the chemist, a bored-looking assistant was positioned beside the aisle wielding a fragrance bottle. It was the only route to the counter and Eva readied herself to fend her off, but before she had a chance to protest the trigger-happy perfumier engulfed her in a cloud of something strongly reminiscent of Toilet Duck. Her body’s response was instantaneous and unstoppable: the coffee she’d drunk shot up from her gullet without warning, forcing her to bend forward and deposit it noisily on the mat in front of the make-up counter. The physical relief was immediate but as she straightened up she was confronted with the face of the assistant, whose complacent expression had given way to barely concealed revulsion.

‘I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me,’ Eva gasped. ‘Can I help to clean it up?’

They both looked down at the mess and the assistant shook her head. ‘Do you know, I think I’m just going to put that whole mat into a bin bag and chuck it out.’

For a moment Eva considered bolting but she knew there was no other chemist open nearby, so she staggered to the front, grabbed a pink box from a display next to the checkout and threw it onto the counter. The young woman on the till looked down at the box and then back up at Eva, the distaste on her face slowly being replaced with a look of dawning comprehension. She winked as she ran it under the scanner, whispering, ‘I think we both know what that’s going to say!’

*

Ten minutes later Eva was sitting in her bathroom watching a single blue line stubbornly refuse to turn to a cross. Three minutes, then four, then five ticked past until it was clear that the pregnancy test was not going to change from negative to positive. But what about her churning stomach? Could the test be wrong? Could it just be too soon? Her phone started to ring in the sitting room and Eva went to answer it, still holding the stubbornly unchanging test.