*
Eva and Julian gazed out at the endless vista stretching down the hill, taking in the classical grandeur of the Queen’s House before sweeping on past the English Baroque of Wren’s Old Royal Naval College and across the Thames towards Docklands, the City and St Paul’s beyond. The sun burned down, making Eva’s hair feel slightly itchy as it dried. Her skin gave off a faint smell of chlorine that mingled with the scent of recently cut grass. The air was almost still, the breeze only just perceptible as it trickled past her ears.
‘This view is to die for, isn’t it?’ said Eva. ‘I defy anyone to look out at all this and not fall in love with the city. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this,’ she continued, ‘but with hindsight I think that one of the really important events of my life took place here.’
‘You hadn’t ever told me that,’ he said when she finished telling him about the trip to the Planetarium. ‘But what changed? How come you ended up in banking instead of being a physicist like that mate of yours at CERN?’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t fancy another five years doing a PhD, piling up a load more loans and never getting out into the real world. It’s all very well looking up at the stars when you’re eight, but the real world’s not quite like that, is it?’
‘I suppose not. But in any case, your story makes this the perfect place.’
‘What do you mean? Perfect how?’
‘Well, I’m hoping it’s not the only life-changing event that you’re going to have here. The thing is, I brought you here to ask you something.’
Julian shifted around until he was kneeling in front of her, down the hill slightly so that even though Eva was still seated on the grass he was just about looking up at her. For a few seconds she wondered idly what he was doing and allowed her face to arrange itself into an expression of mild enquiry, before a sudden cold certainty snapped into place in her mind as he carefully arranged himself on one knee.
He gazed up at her with shining eyes. ‘I know this is cheesy but I wanted to do it properly. Eva, you know how I feel about you. Will you marry me?’
Eva stared at him open-mouthed. She knew she needed to formulate a response but her mind seemed to have frozen. The harder she pushed herself to think, the more her mental gears refused to shift, as though an iron rod had been thrust into the cogs of her thinking machinery. She registered an elderly couple and their basset hound standing a short distance away smiling encouragingly at them, having stopped to watch the heart-warming scene unfold. Eva tried her hardest to force the wheels to turn but when they finally creaked into action they accelerated out of control, producing not some sensible response to the question of whether she wanted to marry the man down on one knee in front of her, but instead a series of increasingly fantastical imaginings in which the basset hound suddenly ran over and savaged Julian, or she herself levitated into a nearby tree, or a bomb went off, hurling them down the hill, or a meteorite fell from the sky, obliterating them and everything around them so that only a smoking crater was left.
Her mind was still spooling through this series of unlikely events that would prevent her from having to answer the question when the silence was finally broken by the tinny and unmistakable sound of the Crazy Frog song. The noise offered a momentary relief, an external distraction and an excuse to look away from Julian, still waiting on bended knee, and glance around, until after a few seconds it became apparent that the sound was coming from her own pocket. She realized with an inward groan that she must have left her phone unlocked on her desk yesterday while Big Paul was around and he’d changed her ringtone to the most annoying tune yet produced by the twenty-first century.
‘Don’t answer that!’ Julian yelped as she stood up and reached into her jeans pocket.
‘I’m not, I’m just stopping it ringing.’ She glanced at the number. Sylvie. Eva hit the Reject Call button and stuffed it back in her pocket. Julian remained looking up at her expectantly. The phone resumed ringing again almost immediately. Sylvie again. She silenced it and crammed it back into her pocket.
‘This isn’t exactly going to plan,’ Julian said. ‘But just so you know, this is the bit where you fall into my arms and tell me that you’d love to marry me.’
‘Julian, get up. I’m really sorry, but. . just get up.’
She looked down at her feet as Julian’s face slackened and paled and he clambered upright and brushed the dirt off his legs. The elderly couple hurried off towards the observatory followed by the basset hound, which turned away slowly with a mournful parting look.
‘So that’s a no then,’ said Julian quietly. ‘You don’t want to marry me.’
‘Julian, it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s not a yes or a no. It’s just that I didn’t see this coming. I haven’t had a chance to think it through. I know this is awful but I can’t just say yes on the spot if I’m not totally sure. Changing my mind later would be even worse.’
‘We’ve been together for two years. I’d say that’s plenty of time to think about it. Where did you think our relationship was going? Oh, that’s right, you haven’t thought about it. You think about where your career is going, you have time to think about that, but not about where we’re going.’
The phone started ringing again.
‘Julian, I’m really sorry but I’m going to have to answer this. It’s Sylvie and she wouldn’t keep calling if it wasn’t urgent. She could have gone into labour early and Robert’s in New York this week. I’m going to have to take this, okay?’
But he was already striding away from her down the hill and she had a sudden overpowering sense of déjà vu, remembering a time when five years earlier another man had strode away from her down a hill, and in the same moment realized that it didn’t feel as bad this time, and wondered whether that was because it got easier the more times it happened or whether it was simply because she had wanted Benedict to stay so much more than she wanted Julian to.
She hit the Accept Call button on her phone. ‘Sylvie? What is it? Is the baby coming?’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s Lucien. Eva, he’s in prison.’
23 HMP Brixton, July 2006
Eva spotted him as soon as she entered the visiting room, slouched on a plastic chair at a melamine table of the sort she remembered from her school canteen. He was wearing his own clothes, jeans and a hoodie, and looked skinnier than when she’d last seen him at Sylvie’s wedding a few months earlier. At the table to his left, a weaselly-looking hard-nut with full-sleeve tattoos was growling at a lank-haired sobbing woman. To his right, a boy with a crew cut and a shell-shocked expression on his face, who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen, sat with what must have been his mum, trying not to look as petrified as he obviously felt.
It seemed incredible to her that Lucien could be forcibly held in this place. She hated herself for thinking it, knew that Keith would despise her for voicing such a thing, but most of the other men in that room at least looked like they belonged there. But Lucien? Sure, he was a rogue but he’d always been easy to forgive; his penchant for mischief and his unreliability were inextricable from his sheer appetite for life, encompassing whatever passed before him: people, sex, drugs, alcohol, adventure, it almost didn’t matter what, so long as it wasn’t boring. Over the years she’d never quite managed to shake off the slight hunger he provoked in her with his reckless smile, full of mingled awareness and disregard for the spark that crackled between them, which had never burst into flame since that one time, years ago, but had still prevented them from ever quite settling into the comfort of friendship. But Lucien wasn’t laughing now, and he wasn’t a lovable rogue to the police and the courts; he was just another bloke who’d been caught with a lot of class A drugs. He hadn’t seen her as she entered the room and she watched him for a few moments, overwhelmed by a rush of something softer yet fiercer than what she usually felt for him.