Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Eva leant her head back and rested it against his hand. ‘No. Right now that doesn’t seem like such an arbitrary thing to hope for. Some days I can almost believe it myself.’ She straightened up. ‘Not that Keith wouldn’t be laughing if he could hear this. Not really his bag, religion. But I think he knew a bit about love. He and my mother weren’t married, you know, because they didn’t believe in such bourgeois constructs, but I’m certain she was the love of his life. It’s strange to think of them feeling about each other the way we do.’ She pushed a wet strand of hair back from her cheek.

‘Well, yes,’ said Benedict. ‘You’re lucky if you find that sort of love once in a lifetime. Not to mention how he felt about you. I know you sometimes thought he could be a bit too wrapped up in his politics, but it was always obvious to me how proud he was of you.’

In front of them on the stand, the tea-light Eva had lit was guttering. They sat quietly watching it for a few minutes, and then Benedict stood and took her hand.

‘Come home with me now,’ he told her. ‘You’re not alone.’

His hand was warm against the small of her back as they walked back along the aisle beneath the glowing gaze of stained-glass saints and through the heavy doors into the daylight beyond.

‘What was the spirit of our age, do you think?’ said Eva to no one in particular.

She was lying on the shingly sand of a Dorset beach watching Allegra blundering around excitedly in the shallows with Josh and Will, overseen by Benedict. In her bathing suit the stiffness of Allegra’s left side was pronounced, her arm curled and her leg inflexible, but the boys, now aged eleven and thirteen and strong and tanned from a holiday in Greece, were used to playing with her much less roughly than they did with each other. Eva watched as Allegra splashed them and in mock fury they lifted her up by her shoulders and legs and threatened to dunk her, before depositing her very gently in the inch or two of water at the sea’s edge. It was an idyllic English summer’s afternoon: azure sky, gentle breeze flicking the corner of an unopened paperback, the faint tinny beat of a pop song drifting across from the radio of a group of teenagers further up the beach.

Lucien, who was lying on his back beside her wearing a pointy cardboard party hat, shielded his eyes with a hand and looked up. ‘Oh, we’re having one of those conversations? It’s been a while. What brought this on?’

‘The music, I think,’ said Eva, who was also thinking about the fact that she would turn forty this year. ‘That song, “Another Girl”, it’s by the Beatles, isn’t it? It made me think about how the Sixties was the era of free love and all that, and then it occurred to me that I don’t really know what our era was all about. I feel like we were a sort of in-between generation. We weren’t quite the internet generation and in any case, who wants to be known for looking at a lot of porn and pictures of cats? But I don’t feel like we were defined by a particular set of ideals either. So I was wondering what our zeitgeist was supposed to be.’ She picked at the remains of Allegra’s birthday cake, which had started the day as a glitter-covered figure nine but had now been reduced to a pile of crumbs and smears of sticky red icing.

‘Nihilism?’ suggested Lucien, who’d got into Nietzsche in the prison library some years earlier.

‘No, that’s not true, we did care,’ interjected Sylvie, turning her face to the breeze to blow thick strands of copper hair from her eyes. ‘We cared about all sorts of things. Global warming. Iraq. GMOs.’

‘Well, yeah, just not enough to actually do anything about them,’ said Lucien.

‘Really? Is that all we can say for ourselves?’ Eva sighed and rearranged herself slightly to catch the sun. ‘“We cared, but not enough.” That was the ethos of our era? Instead of standing up and fighting for something we believed in, we just stepped away and each tended to our own corner of the world?’ She pondered this for a moment, and reached a conclusion. ‘It’s awful, but in many ways that does seem about right when I look back on my life.’

‘Not just you,’ said Sylvie. ‘It took us all a while to work out what life was supposed to be about. Benedict was the only one of us who had his priorities straight from the start, and in the nicest possible way, he is a bit of a freak of nature.’

‘True,’ agreed Eva. ‘He’s always had this unswerving sense of purpose. I’ve often envied it, actually. When I was making plans I mostly thought about what I wanted to get away from, not what I actually wanted to achieve.’

‘So you made out like a bandit in the City till the economy broke,’ teased Lucien.

‘Hey.’ She punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘That’s not fair. I was a tiny cog in a huge machine at a time when nobody was really seeing the big picture.’

‘Hmm. Didn’t you get sacked for insider trading?’

‘No I bloody didn’t! I left by mutual agreement, and it was market manipulation, not insider trading.’ Eva paused and then continued more slowly. ‘But with hindsight I realize that I may have done some. . questionable things.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Markets moving fifty basis points in milliseconds, billion-dollar fortunes made and lost. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.’

Lucien grinned. ‘Yeah, yeah, all right, Deckard.’

Eva grinned back, but quickly returned to looking serious. ‘The thing is, at the time, everything we did felt like it happened in isolation from the rest of the world. It’s only when you get older you really understand how everything’s connected: money, power, politics, markets, people’s actual lives.’

The song on the radio changed abruptly, replacing the Beatles with the angry staccato of the latest Rihanna hit, and all three of them looked towards the shore, where Allegra was busy trying to put a bucket on Will’s head.

‘This new generation, though,’ continued Eva, waving a hand in the direction of the radio, ‘they seem worse than we ever were. To read the news you’d think it was all meow-meow and donkey punching. We thought we were pretty wild, but this new crop, it’s like they’re dead inside. Or does every generation think that about the next one? I dunno, maybe it’s just that I’m getting old.’ Eva reached up unthinkingly and smoothed away the lines by her eyes that seemed to grow deeper every morning in the bathroom mirror. She had realized just the other day that she was now older than her own mother had been when she died.

Sylvie laughed. ‘I think we’re all fundamentally the same. Us, them, every other generation. We all think we’re unique snowflakes, but we’re not really. Do you remember how we thought we were so different when we were young, like we were on the fringes of society because we dyed our hair and did drugs at parties? Christ, we’d have loathed it then if we knew how like everyone else we are, how people are just the same the world over. Funny, because it feels rather comforting now, I feel sort of grounded by it.’

The children had quietened down now and were collecting pieces of shell washed up on the shore, and the teenagers had packed up and taken the radio with them so that the only sound was the sloshing of the water and the occasional call of a seagull. The air was warm and the glare bounced off the water with dazzling intensity, making them squint and transporting them to other places of shimmering light. For a moment Sylvie was far away in a valley in the Languedoc, and Eva was haring along a road in Corfu, Benedict beside her.

‘Nothing really turned out how we expected, did it?’ said Eva.