Alice Adams: Invincible Summer

He’d thought it as long as he’d known her, right from the moment they’d met at the icebreaker party during Freshers’ Week, when she’d spilt a pint of cider down his trousers and then spent half an hour drunkenly apologizing. Was it possible to be both clumsy and poised at the same time? Eva embodied a strange contradiction both in looks and temperament, shambling but upright, uncertain but determined. She wore an unfashionable selection of outfits, long flowing skirts and big boots and slogan T-shirts. Sometimes he suspected she was hiding behind her voluminous clothing, but her naturally straight-backed posture belied her five-feet-five-inches and made her stand out like a peacock in a flock of geese, at least to his eyes.

It was her face, though, that really got to him. He often had to remind himself to stop staring at the way her green eyes seemed to flicker from humour to concentration to determination at a second’s notice, in a face framed by silky, tangled brown hair that gave the impression of never being brushed. Her mouth, too, was perfect, wide and upturned at the corners, though he’d noticed that she often kept a hand in front of it to hide the crop of spots that invariably broke out on her chin whenever she had an exam or a heavy night.

They’d met at a party in his hall of residence so he’d guessed she lived nearby but hadn’t been able to believe his luck when she’d turned out to be studying physics too. They’d quickly fallen into the habit of going to lectures and then grabbing a coffee or three together afterwards. They were naturally on the same wavelength; he never got tired of talking to her and she seemed to feel the same way. She was interested in everything, wanted to experience all that life had to offer. He worried that he would seem boring to her by comparison, too focused on physics and narrow in his horizons, and he rued the fact that their natural rapport had translated so quickly into matey familiarity, the shackles of which had proven impossible to throw off even once he’d broken up with Emily halfway through the first year.

Emily: what a mistake that had been, and the consequences still echoed with him now. She’d been his back-home girlfriend, approved of by his parents and slotting frictionlessly into his group of friends from school. When he’d left for university and she’d been shipped off to finishing school in Switzerland he’d gone along with her assumption that they would stay together without giving it much thought, but his error had quickly become apparent after arriving in Bristol and meeting Eva. At first he’d avoided the subject, but their friendship had bloomed with an intensity that left him with no choice but to mention his girlfriend, which he’d done with a studied casualness designed to imply the relationship wasn’t serious. He’d hoped and expected that Eva would give him the shove he needed to end it, but instead he found himself watching helplessly as something slammed shut behind her eyes. Then before there had been time to redeem himself, Lucien had appeared on the scene and all he’d been able to do was look on miserably at Eva’s transparent attempts to make him notice her.

The thing with Emily had finally met its grisly and inevitable end during the summer after the first year, and the night he returned to Bristol he’d girded himself with a few pints and then gone to see Eva with the intention of confessing his feelings. That night, trudging back to his room after Eva had pleaded tiredness and he hadn’t even made it past the door, it began to dawn on Benedict what a high price he was going to have to pay for his cowardice and indecision. Had he simply missed his chance or was there some other undercurrent, something going on with Lucien, despite their studied indifference around each other? She’d never told him and he’d never plucked up the courage to ask.

How could it be so easy to talk about some things and not others? He flattered himself to think that he was Eva’s closest confidant, or at least a close second to Sylvie. He knew her hopes and dreams and fears, how she was in turns insecure and defiant about her unconventional upbringing alone with her father and how unwilling she was to let herself use it as an excuse for anything. He’d opened up to her too, in ways that he’d never done with anyone else. Only yesterday they’d got up really early and walked all the way to the top of Mount Pantokrator, where they found a gaggle of floppy-eared goats mooching about the ruins of an ancient church.

They sat side by side on a dusty boulder looking out across the water, legs aching and eyes dazzled by the sunlight, and it had felt so natural to voice his excitement about the research he would be beginning after the summer and his hopes that it would eventually land him a job at the particle accelerator at CERN. As they sat together high above the world, he heard himself explaining how he loved particle physics because it gave him a different sort of perch, one that granted him the ability to see far beyond a normal human lifespan, back to the beginning of the universe and perhaps even forward to the end. There was no one else he talked to like this, no one with whom it would even occur to him to share these thoughts that he’d barely articulated to himself and yet now tumbled from his lips like poetry.

‘Wow. That’s quite the motivation for choosing what to do with your life,’ Eva told him when he finished his breathless outpouring. ‘It almost makes me feel bad about my own choices. Sometimes I wonder if I’m more motivated by fear than anything else. I’m scared that I’ll make a mess of this new job and never succeed at anything, and I’ll just go back to being Eva Nobody from Sussex, boring and unexceptional, which perhaps is just what I really am deep down,’ she concluded with a smile that was only half ironic.

How ridiculous that sounded as he replayed the conversation in his head now, lying next to her by the pool: Eva Nobody. Everything about her was exceptional, and how she didn’t know that he couldn’t imagine. The afternoon air was lavender-scented and vibrated with the buzz of industrious insects. Through the gap between his eyelids Benedict watched as Eva opened her eyes, then rolled lazily onto her side and looked at him. At first he thought she was about to speak, but she remained silent and he suddenly realized from the unfaltering manner in which her eyes were making their way up and down his body that she didn’t know he was watching her. Was she. . could she be. .?

‘Eva Andrews, are you checking me out?’ he demanded.

Eva started. ‘No, I’m not checking you out!’ she yelped. ‘I was admiring the view. Anyway, how would you know who was checking you out even if anyone was, which they absolutely weren’t? You didn’t even have your eyes open.’

‘How would you know whether I had my eyes open if you weren’t looking at me?’ He turned over to lie on one side and posed with one hand on his hip and his head propped up on the other. ‘You carry on. Don’t worry about leaving me feeling soiled by your naked lust, I can handle it.’

Eva threw her magazine at him and stomped off towards the pool. He watched the way her breasts jiggled as she stomped and the way she emerged seal-sleek after diving into the water, and then found he had to roll onto his front and think about differential equations for quite some time before he could join her.

Porta, 10th August 1997

Dearest Sylvie,

Greetings from Corfu, where the sun is shining, the scenery is breathtaking, and the grasshoppers are huge and bitey. Oh, and did I mention that I’m basically staying in a palace hewn from the mountainside? Okay, so I exaggerate un soupçon, but Benedict’s clan are LOADED. I mean, obviously we always knew he was a posho but this place is ridiculous. His brother Harry and his girlfriend are here too, and she’s some sort of supermodel who barely bothers with such trivialities as clothing. Obviously I showed up with not much more than a pair of flip-flops and that lurid old yellow sundress (which yes, I confess, I have ‘borrowed’ from you). His parents are lovely and have generously overlooked my being a peasant to make me feel very welcome. I do worry though, that that’s just one of those rich people things. I have a slight suspicion that I could have turned up dressed as a banana and they would simply have embraced me warmly and pressed a drink into my hand without mentioning it. (I may have to test this hypothesis if I’m ever invited back.)