Alice Adams: Invincible Summer

What else? Benedict’s brother is terribly good-looking. I started out by loathing Carla, the girlfriend, on principle for being so exquisitely beautiful that she makes me look like a goblin by comparison (I’ve spent the entire week draping a towel over my wobbly bits whenever she’s around), but we got totally sloshed at dinner (sorry, ‘supper’) the other night and stayed up chatting after everyone else had gone to bed, and it turns out she’s really nice. She says she knows perfectly well that Benedict’s family think she’s a vapid exhibitionist, so she makes a point of wearing minimal clothing and talking about how great it is that Tony Blair won the election just to watch the steam rising off Hugo.

I feel a bit sad for her though, because you get the impression that she adores the brother but is scared he won’t stick with her because his folks don’t think much of her intellectual or social credentials. I don’t know whether she’s right about that, they seem pretty indiscriminately friendly to me, but she reckons she’s the only one of his girlfriends that Hugo and Marina haven’t attempted to march him up the aisle with. They’re only in their mid-twenties but apparently getting hitched ludicrously young is a thing in Benedict’s family.

And now, a small confession. Today the sun must have gone to my head, because for a moment Benedict started to look. . well, you know. I’m leaving tomorrow and we spent the afternoon swimming and lounging around by the pool. So anyway, there I was, um, checking Benedict out in his budgie-smugglers. You know, for science. And don’t laugh but he’s sort of not all that bad with a tan, and you don’t usually realize it, but under that awful green jumper he’s always wearing there’s a pretty decent bod. He’s much more chilled out in his own environment too, not half as gawky as he seems back home. There was a moment today when I thought he was going to kiss me, and I have to admit I actually wanted him to. We both went to walk back into the house at the same time and sort of got wedged in the doorway together and, honestly, if he’d kissed me then. .

Oh well, no point going on about it. It’s not like I’m going to have time for a boyfriend seeing as how I’m going back to a new life that’s going to be chock-full of glamour and excitement, plus it’s not like he actually had the guts to kiss me today. So what really happened is absolutely nothing, which is just fine because my flight leaves first thing in the morning. I must confess that I’m fantasizing about staying here forever instead of returning to the real world. However, it has become apparent to me that I’m very cut out for a life of luxury, and I’m going to need the scary new job to pay for it!

Right, I’m off to collapse into my thousand-thread-count sheets. (Tosses shining mane of hair and sinks into billowing cloud of Egyptian cotton.)

Much love to you, and to Lucien.

Eva xx

In an insalubrious room in a hostel in Goa, Lucien carelessly tossed the letter onto a crowded table, unconcerned by its landing in a pool of beer dripping from an overturned bottle, before returning to the task of carefully counting out a pile of blue pills into little plastic bags.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘So Fauntleroy really was born with a silver spoon in his gob. He plays that down, doesn’t he? And he still hasn’t got the cojones to kiss Eva after making puppy-eyes at her for three years.’

Sylvie, who was sprawled across a seamy mattress on the floor on the other side of the room, looked up from the paperback she was reading.

‘Give the poor guy a break. They can’t all be Lucien-style lotharios.’

‘I know, but he’s so wet it’s comedy. I mean, I like the guy, but. .’

Sylvie looked thoughtful. ‘Interesting, though. I thought it had all died down but if it’s still going on after all this time. . I wonder if those two might actually end up together one of these days. You know they were all flirty with each other when they first met?’

‘Not really. Vaguely, I guess. Just tailed off, didn’t it?’

‘Sort of. He had a girlfriend back home that he’d carefully omitted to mention. Eva was spitting blood when he finally owned up. He broke up with her in the summer after the first year, but we were all good mates by then, so Eva kept things that way. You know what it’s like, you can’t have two people in a group like ours getting it on, it would have totally wrecked things.’

Lucien didn’t answer immediately and fidgeted self-consciously, but Sylvie had resumed reading and didn’t notice.

‘Well, he’s blown it now, hasn’t he?’ he said finally. ‘She’s off to her job in London and he’ll be stuck in Bristol. It’s not like they’re going to be seeing much of each other.’

Sylvie frowned. ‘It’s only temporary, all of this though, isn’t it? Everyone scattering to the four winds? You and I will go and live in London when we get back, and Eva will already be there, and Benedict will wash up there sooner or later and then the whole gang will be back together again. And then in, like, fifteen years’ time when we’re all grown up and our idea of a good time is drinking cocoa and doing jigsaws, Eva and Benedict can get married and have a couple of kids—’

‘— called Tarquin and Octavia—’

‘— and a golden Labrador. And I’ll be a famous artist with my own gallery and you’ll be, oh, I don’t know, a mid-level advertising executive or something. .’

‘Oh, do fuck off. I’ll have some really cool business empire and I’ll sit in my corner office every day wearing sunglasses, with women feeding me peeled grapes and fanning me with palm fronds. .’

Sylvie folded over the corner of the page she was on and put down her novel. ‘Doesn’t it drive you insane sometimes, not knowing how it’s all going to turn out? Like, literally anything could happen.’

‘Not really.’ Lucien shrugged. ‘I just figure that whatever adulthood’s like, it’s got to be better than our childhood.’

She hated the split in her loyalties that opened up when her brother said things like this. ‘It wasn’t all bad, though, was it? We’ve always had each other, and I know Mum was pretty useless but she’s got a good heart, just a lot of her own problems too. There are some happy memories in there.’

‘Like what?’

She gave it some thought. ‘Summers in the Languedoc with Mamie and Papi? I mean, obviously they were a bit boring but at least it was sunny and we could swim in the river and go on bike rides.’

‘Yeah, well. That was the upside of having grandparents in France. On the other hand, the downside of having grandparents in France is that they were nowhere to be seen when Mum was barely functioning enough to do the shopping so that I could pack you a proper lunch for school, or when she had another one of those fucking boyfriends who’d give me a clout whatever I did. I’m not saying you had it easy, but I did protect you a fair bit. Maybe that’s why you feel more forgiving about it all than I do now.’ Lucien yawned and stretched his arms. ‘Anyway, I can’t be bothered to have this conversation again. We’re never going to agree on this stuff. Let’s get going, these pills aren’t going to sell themselves.’ He stood up and pulled a dirty cotton vest on over his bronzed shoulders, only partially obscuring a recently acquired tattoo of a Chinese dragon, snarling face reaching over his collarbone and tail running halfway down his back. ‘Full moon party, here we come.’

The obelisk towers of Canary Wharf, gleaming monuments to financial might, flashed bright semaphores in the morning sun as Eva walked towards them from the station, the block heels of her smart new court shoes clicking satisfyingly against the concrete. Almost a year into her new job she still experienced a frisson of excitement as she stepped into the cavernous lobby of the Morton Brothers building and swiped her security pass at the turnstile before striding towards the lifts. Her internal monologue was still that of an impostor: tee hee, look where I am, do they really think I belong here? But the pass that got her into the building and onto the trading floor said otherwise; she was an insider, and today would be her first day as a real insider now that she had been promoted to a seat on a proper trading desk and was no longer a graduate trainee on a boring government bonds book.