Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

The church was a place that didn’t recoil from sorrow; its business went on around her with quiet acceptance of her private loss. Each of these carved stones would have been laid by someone feeling something akin to what she now felt. That one there, for a boy of only eighteen killed at Flanders: what devastation must his parents have felt as they stood in this place a century earlier, as the memorial to their son was pushed into place? Eva knew that losing a child must be worse than losing a father, and yet she didn’t see how it was possible to feel more pain than she did now.

It was supposed to get easier. That was what everyone kept telling her: it gets easier. But it didn’t feel like it was getting easier, in fact some days she was so exhausted she almost wanted to let go of the life-raft and drown. The passing of weeks and months somehow didn’t seem to be taking her any further away from the day that she’d stood in the kitchen with her hand still on the rubbish bin in which she’d just buried her dashed hopes of a baby, and learned that she would also be burying her father. Was she the next of kin to Keith Andrews? the nurse on the other end of the phone had asked. There was some bad news, did she have someone with her? A massive coronary , she’d said, I’m so sorry , and just like that her father, the last of her flesh and blood, who’d raised and fed and taught and encouraged and been proud of and disapproved of her in almost equal measure, was gone.

*

Behind her, Eva heard the church door open and then close with a soft thud, and she lowered her head as if in prayer to hide her blotchy face and deter anyone from attempting to talk to her. She glared at her knees, wishing the interloper away as the footsteps progressed down the aisle and then stopped a few feet away from her.

‘Eva?’ came a familiar voice, and she jerked round to see Benedict standing there. For a moment they gaped at each other before he slipped into the row behind her.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, resting his arms on the back of her pew.

Eva turned back to face the altar. ‘I could ask you the same question.’

‘I took the afternoon off. I thought I’d come home and spend it with you but you weren’t answering your phone so I walked around a bit and ended up here. For a chat, you know.’ He gestured vaguely upwards. ‘We used to come here when I was a kid. Christmas and Easter, mainly. I pop in every now and again when I’m passing. Not that often and usually when things aren’t going brilliantly, I have to admit.’ A wry smile crossed his face and faded again. ‘I didn’t know you came here though. You hadn’t mentioned it.’

Eva sighed. ‘No. Bit embarrassed, I suppose. What with the way I usually dismiss religion as being for nutters. But, well, they leave the doors open and let me sit here as long as I want. I don’t know what else to do all day. I can’t seem to concentrate on work anymore.’ She paused and they sat in silence for a few seconds before she spoke again. ‘It’s just. . Benedict, I just can’t seem to find a way to make sense of it all. I mean, I know there’s not much to make sense of. He wasn’t that old, but he wasn’t that young either. People die, of course they do, and at our age it’s normal for people’s parents to die.

‘But. . I just can’t seem to process it. And people seem to expect me to get on with things like it’s nothing. Even Sylvie seems a bit uncomprehending, though obviously she’s being amazing, shouldering most of the workload for the business. And to be honest, I would have expected me to be getting on with it by now. When other people lost parents, you know, colleagues at work or whatever, I sort of expected them to be over it pretty quickly. It’s just the natural order, isn’t it? But sometimes I feel like I can hardly breathe. Maybe it’s worse because he was both parents to me. I feel like I’ve just lost both my parents at once.’ Her voice was gravelly. ‘I feel like I’m grieving for my mother too, and for the life we never got to have together. Does that sound crazy?’

‘Of course it doesn’t. And you don’t need to rush to get over it. Honestly, I still feel quite shocked and heartbroken that I’m never going to see him again, and that must be nothing compared to what you’re feeling.’

‘It’s just that. . I can’t really believe he’s gone. And. . oh, Benedict,’ Eva’s voice cracked, ‘maybe if we’d managed to have a baby, maybe it would be easier, but the reality is that I have no family left now.’

Benedict reached out a hand and tangled his fingers in her hair. ‘I’m here. I’m your family. And Sylvie and Allegra and Josh and Will. And Lucien, too.’ He sighed. ‘Eva, I’m sorry. About all of it, all of the disappointments. We can still try IVF. It could still happen for us, we just have to keep the faith.’

Eva rubbed her eyes. ‘Some days it’s almost too painful to keep hoping. And now it’s even worse, because if I could have a baby, he’d be in that baby, his genes. Maybe it would even look like him. But now all that’s left of him is in me, and yet there’s nothing inside me that I can find any comfort in. I’m full of broken glass.’ She put her head down on her hands. ‘And this, this should be your moment of glory, right when the Higgs discovery has just been announced, and instead you’re left sitting here with me like this. You must wish you weren’t here, how could you not.’

Benedict took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. ‘Don’t ever say that again,’ he said fiercely. ‘Eva, you’re not spoiling anything for me. This is all that matters, this, here, us. It’s the only place in the world I’d want to be. And of course I’m excited that we found the Higgs but it’s not as if we haven’t known we were closing in on it for a long time.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Let’s face it, even the media seemed to think that the most surprising thing about it was that the world’s most brilliant physicists considered Comic Sans an appropriate font in which to announce their historic findings.’ He pulled her back against his shoulder and she managed a weak smile. ‘Eva, I’m right here with you, not just for the good times, but for the bad times too. We’re all going to have pain in our lives, sooner or later. Sometimes it can even be a gift.’

Eva snorted wetly. ‘How can pain be a gift? That would be a worse present than the bloody bath salts your aunt gave us at Christmas. If this is a gift, I want the receipt so I can take it back and exchange it for a nice scarf or some attractive stationery.’

Benedict laughed. ‘Look, I know the religious stuff all seems crazy to you. Some days it seems crazy to me too, but other days it seems to make perfect sense. Is it really so mad to look for something bigger than ourselves?’

‘Well, I don’t know about mad. The thing that really matters is whether it’s true, whether there’s any evidence for it. Otherwise it just seems a bit cynical, like Pascal’s wager that you might as well believe in God because if he doesn’t exist you haven’t lost anything, and if he does you win the bet.’

‘Ah, but there’s a less cynical formulation of the same argument. Camus, I think: “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.”

‘The thing is, no one really knows anything, not you, not me, not even the bloody Pope. And I know you can argue that if you start to believe things without evidence you might as well believe any old arbitrary thing, and yes, we could be just a bunch of mammals floating through infinite space on a rock, scrabbling around in the dirt until the lights go out, but in that case nothing really matters, does it, not your father’s death, not factory farms or Houla or Beslan, not Auschwitz, not anything. And yet deep down we know that these things do matter. So is it really such an arbitrary thing to hope for? That suffering matters, that love survives?’