Invincible Summer (8 page)

Benedict stopped pacing and swung round to face her. ‘Fuck you, Eva, fuck you,' he shouted, bringing startled tears to her eyes. ‘Why would you do this to me now? You could have done it any time in the last seven years and I'd have been the happiest man on earth, but now?'

She reached out and tried to take his hand. ‘Benedict, I know there couldn't be a worse time but, oh God, do we want to regret not doing this for the rest of our lives?'

He wrenched his hand away. ‘Actually there could be a worse time, or at least, this is a worse time than you can possibly imagine. Lydia's pregnant Eva, she's pregnant. We're having a baby. And I love her, and I love that baby and no matter how many years I've spent pining for you, it was never
real
. You were always off doing something else, looking for something else, and you always will be. But this, Lydia, the baby, this is real. You've never been anything more than a fantasy for me and now it's time to grow up.'

Eva felt a chasm open up inside her chest. ‘God, Benedict, I didn't know, I swear if I'd known she was pregnant…Why didn't you tell me?'

‘We haven't told anyone, not our families, no one. It's the twelve-week scan on Thursday. You don't tell people till after that.' He rubbed his eyes in a suddenly crumpled-looking face. ‘Look, I just can't do this. I've got to go.'

‘You don't have to do that.' Eva was crying now. ‘Please don't go, we can talk about this. I'm so sorry. I'm not going to make this hard for you. I don't even have to come to the wedding.'

‘How's it going to look if you suddenly pull out of the wedding? If you've ever been a friend to me you'll come and you'll be happy for me, for us. And for God's sake don't tell anyone about this, not even Sylvie, just forget it.' His voice grew quieter as he spoke, and she watched as his anger was replaced by calm resolve. ‘You know I care about you, Eva, but it has to be just as a friend now. Things have changed and this is how it has to be.'

He leant down and kissed her forehead, then turned and walked away. She watched him go, wracked with shock and shame, heart pounding painfully inside her rib cage. Eva lowered herself onto a nearby bench and watched him grow smaller as he strode away from her down the hill. For a long time after he'd finally disappeared she remained sitting there alone, letting the air darken around her and her hands grow cold and her mind go numb.

O
N THE DAY
of the wedding Eva drove out to the village in the Cotswolds with Sylvie in the front passenger seat and Lucien and his plus-one in the back. Chas, as she introduced herself whilst clambering into the back of Eva's car, was a six-foot podium dancer from one of Lucien's increasingly successful club nights.

‘As in “…and Dave”?' Eva had joked. ‘Seventies pop-rock duo credited with popularising the musical style colloquially known as “rockney”?' she added in desperation when that failed to elicit a laugh, but Chas had just stared at her blankly and then shifted over to allow Lucien to ooze in beside her with a cat-that-got-the-cream look on his face.

Lucien and Chas were in an extremely intimate relationship. Eva knew this because they'd spent much of the two-hour drive being extremely intimate on the back seat of her car, until she'd been forced to tilt the rear-view mirror away and turn up the radio in order to stifle the steadily building urge to swerve into a tree.

They were booked into the country spa hotel where the reception was taking place, and as they approached the Georgian manor house along the gravel drive, sandstone walls glowing golden in the sun, Lucien let out a low whistle.

‘They're certainly doing it in style. Not bad for a shotgun wedding.'

Eva had to admit that he was right. She had certainly never been the sort to fantasise about her wedding day, what with growing up with Keith's lectures on gender oppression and the patriarchal nature of marriage, but if she'd given it any thought this would have been just the sort of place she'd have wanted to do it.

It was a relief to finally arrive so that she could escape the car to go and get changed in the room she was now apparently sharing with Sylvie. Eva had booked two rooms for the trip, waving away Sylvie's faint mutters about repaying her. She knew that Sylvie couldn't have afforded to come if she'd had to pay for the hotel so taking care of the booking had seemed the easiest way to avoid any awkwardness. But what hadn't occurred to her was that Lucien would bring a date, so that she would end up sharing a twin room and shelling out the best part of two hundred quid for him to get his rocks off. The thought made her seethe. Dressed for the wedding, they reconvened in the hotel lobby where Lucien, clad in a foppish sky-blue designer suit, was leaning against an enormous carved wooden fireplace, somehow looking at once utterly ludicrous and devastatingly handsome.

‘Shall we?' he said, proffering Eva the arm that didn't have Chas hanging from it in a gold lamé dress.

The ceremony took place in an old chapel half a mile away, sunlight trickling in through stained glass windows and threadbare old prayer cushions hanging from the backs of the pews. Eva had lain awake in her bed the night before with a knot in her stomach thinking about what it would be like to watch Benedict say his vows but sitting here now, she found herself feeling remarkably detached. It was all so surreal and removed from their real lives, Lydia with her bump just visible through her roman-style gown, luminous with pregnancy or bridal joy, Benedict stumbling over his words but generally looking happy and a bit dazed. Eva found herself feeling strangely peaceful, perhaps because of the calm of the chapel, or perhaps because of the finality of Benedict actually being married to somebody else, the relief that comes of being behind a closed door.

After the wedding breakfast Benedict's brother Harry, who was his best man, made a speech that trod a deft line between joking that the marriage had been prompted by the imminent arrival and implying that it would have been only a matter of time anyway, and then the music had started up, allowing Eva to take a much-needed breather to compose herself in the bathroom. She stood at the basin washing her hands and examining her weary face in the mirror, assessing the cumulative damage from an eighty-hour working week topped off with a good four or five glasses of champagne. Even to her own eyes she looked tired and sad. She pulled a few faces at her reflection and then practised a smile. Only a few more hours to get through before she could slink off to her room and then the whole ordeal would be over and she could go back to her life, which would, after all, be much the same as it had been before the wedding invitation had arrived.

It didn't feel like it was going to be the same, though. It felt as though she was staring down the barrel of a long, lonely winter, and perhaps even a long, lonely life of regretting having been too stupid to know what she had until it was lost. This too shall pass, she reminded herself. She wouldn't always be drunk and tired and emotional. New days would roll by, new men would come and go. That was life: you put one foot in front of the other. She was just steeling herself to rejoin the fray when a cubicle door swung open behind her and Lydia staggered out.

‘Oh hi,' squeaked Eva, sounding artificially bright. And then, because she couldn't think of anything else to say, ‘Congratulations. How does it feel to be Mrs Waverley?'

‘The Honorable Mrs Benedict Waverley, to be precise,' said Lydia, coming over to the sink next to her and rinsing out her mouth with a handful of water from the tap. ‘And right at this moment, it feels utterly nauseating if you must know.'

Eva tried a joke. ‘Well, Benedict has been known to have that effect on women.'

‘Ha ha,' said Lydia without actually laughing. ‘No, it's the morning sickness. Except that's the biggest lie in history, because it doesn't begin and end in the morning, or if it does it's followed by the afternoon sickness. Which lasts just until the evening sickness kicks in.'

‘Oh. Sorry. You'd never know it to look at you. You were positively radiant today in church.'

‘That's just the sweat.' Lydia wiped her brow and underarms with a paper towel. ‘Another thing they don't tell you about pregnancy, the amount you perspire. Plus, I gained a certain sheen from throwing up five minutes before the ceremony.'

‘Oh dear. In any case, the chapel was beautiful,' Eva said, clutching at straws.

Lydia brightened. ‘It was, wasn't it? If it had been up to me we'd have just run off and done it in Vegas, but I'm really glad that we did it this way now. I wasn't sure about going for the whole church thing at first, but you know how Benedict is about all that.'

Eva shot her a quizzical look. ‘I don't, actually. I mean, I didn't know it was a big deal to him. It was Benedict who was keen to have a church wedding?'

‘Oh yes. Hugely important to him. I found it a bit strange at first because let's face it, you don't meet many religious physicists, but he absolutely insisted. I thought that your little gang was as thick as thieves, I'm surprised you wouldn't know that about him.'

‘Well, I suppose we don't know him as well as you do, obviously,' Eva said, adding internally, or anything like as well as I thought I did, as it turns out.

The first few bars of Spandau Ballet's
Gold
floated in from the dance floor.

‘God, this DJ. Where did my mother find him? Still, it seems like everyone's up and dancing so he must be doing something right. Better get back out there.' Lydia took Eva's hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘I'm glad we had the chance to have a chat, I do want to get to know my husband's friends better. You'll have to come out for a weekend once we're settled in Geneva.' She swept away, leaving Eva mumbling something about how nice that would be.

Back in the ballroom Marina was working the room like a pro, towing a visibly reluctant Hugo behind her. The long, cowl-necked russet dress she had chosen for the occasion was draped glamorously over her shoulders, a rather fashion-forward selection for the mother of the groom, Eva thought, but of course perfectly in tune with the season, and beautifully offset by a messy chignon of grey-blonde hair.

‘Eva, my dear, how lovely to see you again,' she cried on spotting her. ‘Benedict tells us you're a rising star in the City these days. It's always marvellous to see one of us ladies giving the other side a run for their money.'

‘Well, “rising star” might be a bit of an exaggeration,' Eva smiled, genuinely pleased to see them. ‘But yes, the job's going pretty well. Exciting that Benedict's off to CERN.'

‘Isn't it? We're terribly proud of him, and of course it's lovely to see him so happy with Lydia. It's been a bit of a whirlwind, of course, but aren't all the best romances?'

Was it Eva's imagination or was this just a little too pointed?

‘Thought it might be you, actually, at one point,' chuckled Hugo.

Eva struggled to prevent her facial features from arranging themselves into a look of mortification but Marina had already dug a sharp elbow into her husband's ribcage and begun to tug him away, reaching back to pat Eva's arm and say that they would have to catch up again later and oh, was that Martin Wentworth-Oxley over there?

Out on the dancefloor, Lucien and Chas were grinding their pelvises together to a medley of eighties classics. Eva looked around for Sylvie but couldn't see her anywhere so she wandered out onto the terrace, moving to the far end away from the muffled thud of the music and the glow of the lights from the ballroom doors. She dug a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it, blowing the smoke in satisfying jets out into the darkness. Eva had barely smoked in the last couple of years but she'd had a premonition that she might need a cigarette before the day was up, and had bought a packet of Marlboro Lights and a cheap lighter when they'd stopped for petrol on the motorway. Now she savoured the treacly rasp of tobacco hitting the back of her throat and the welcome light-headedness that followed.

‘Room for one more?'

The voice startled her, making Eva jump and spin around so fast that she almost knocked the lit end of her cigarette off on the morning-suited figure behind her.

‘Benedict! Christ, you startled me, creeping up like a bloody ninja penguin. I thought I was alone. What are you doing out here?'

‘Just getting some air. I wasn't sure I had the stomach for
Agadoo
hot on the heels of
Love Shack.'
He reached out and gently extracted the cigarette from between her fingers before taking a long pull on it.

‘You won't be able to do that for much longer.'

‘I know. Not once the baby comes. Lydia would kill me now, actually, if she caught me,' he added, exhaling through his nostrils so that the smoke emerged in two swirling streams.

‘She looked lovely today,' Eva told him, trying to inject some sincerity and goodwill into her voice. ‘You both did. I'm really happy for you. I don't know if I should even be saying this on your wedding day, but Benedict, I know things got a bit awkward there for a moment, but I've got my head straight now. You're leaving soon and I so want it to be on a good note.'

‘Thanks.' He nudged her with his shoulder. ‘Thanks for saying that, and for coming today. I'm really happy and I'm glad you're happy for me.'

Eva shrugged. ‘How could I not be? It only hit me today how close you must be to Lydia. She mentioned something about how important it was to you to get married in a church. I didn't even really know you were religious, Benedict. After all these years.' She tried to keep her tone light and not allow a note of reproach to creep into it.

‘Well,' he said slowly, ‘it's mostly not been a big deal in my life, just something I grew up with I suppose. Anyway, I'd never have mentioned it when we were at uni because I'd never have heard the last of it from you lot, particularly Lucien, who, by the way, appears to have brought an extremely drunk stripper as his plus-one. Last I saw she was practically giving a lapdance to my highly appreciative father while my mother expended all her energies pretending to be deep in conversation with Great-Aunt Gwendoline.'

‘Ah. That would be Chas. She's a podium dancer, apparently. Just be thankful that you aren't the one driving them back tomorrow. If I have to put up with another two hours of dry-humping on my back seat I may be forced to set fire to the upholstery.'

Benedict took another drag and handed the cigarette back to Eva and they both stood in silence for a minute, leaning forward against the balustrade and looking out across the darkened gardens.

‘I've been thinking about it a lot more recently, I suppose,' Benedict said eventually, prompting Eva to spend a confused few seconds trying to work out why he would have been thinking about Lucien frotting on the back seat of her car. ‘The religious side of things, I mean. I'm about to become a father of an actual baby. As we stand here a tiny human with my DNA is growing from nothing. That seems like a sort of miracle. An everyday miracle to be sure, but then, perhaps the miracle is that something so astonishing, so remarkable, can just happen every day, that something so miraculous is available to everyone, rich and poor, no qualifications needed.

‘I know you probably just find all this weird. Do I believe in the absolute specifics of Christianity, the virgin birth and the Resurrection and all that? Maybe not. But I do believe there's a mystery at the heart of human existence that I don't have the answer to, or even the tools to answer. I suppose I'm with Shakespeare:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
' He retrieved the cigarette from Eva's hand and took another drag before passing it back. ‘And that's the nice thing about the Anglican church if you ask me. It doesn't really bother to insist that everyone ascribes to a rigid set of doctrines. Some people think that makes it a tepid, wishy-washy religion but to me that's actually its strength. Everyone has their own conception of God and mine is to do with a sort of awe at the balance of the natural world that only deepens the more I learn about the universe.'