*
It took her a moment to recognize him, hunched over a cup of coffee in the corner, surrounded by bright young things banging up against him and sloshing their drinks onto his table. Perhaps not the best choice of venue, Eva thought. She stood by the door for a few seconds and took him in. He looked older, not in a bad way exactly, but greying around the temples and where he’d always been a bit gangly, he seemed more solid now. He looked sort of. . grown up.
At that moment he looked up and spotted her and broke into a smile, and the years seemed to drop away from him. A picture popped into her mind unbidden, a much younger Benedict silhouetted against a bright summer sky at the top of Brandon Hill. She walked towards him, reflecting self-consciously that the passage of time since they last saw each other had been kinder to him than it had been to her. The years of working long hours, the shock of losing her job, the anxiety over Allegra, the weight of supporting Sylvie, had all etched themselves onto her face, she knew.
‘You look amazing,’ exclaimed Benedict, standing and moving around the table to hug her as she reached him.
‘Ha, sure,’ she said, waving off the compliment and stepping back when he finally released her from the embrace. ‘It’s been a long decade,’ she added by way of explanation.
‘Are you mad? You look. .’ he paused, evidently casting around for the right word.
‘Old?’
‘No. Well, actually, yes. Old-er. But in a good way. Not bland like the kids in this bar. You’ve gained. . poise.’
‘I’ve gained laughter lines and crow’s feet, is what you mean. Still, what can you do? I guess we’re not kids anymore.’
Benedict gestured at the table without sitting down. ‘I got you a coffee. I have no idea why.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘I think I’m going to need something harder.’
‘It’s at least a ten-minute wait at the bar. This place is a lot more crowded than it used to be. Also, it’s full of all these hideous young people. Shall we go somewhere else?’
As they pushed their way through the crowd and towards the door of the bar Eva could feel Benedict close behind her, and when they made it out into the open air she hesitated only a moment before taking his proffered arm.
Once they were safely seated in a pub a few minutes’ walk away from the river, they found themselves looking across the table at each other tongue-tied. Where could they possibly begin?
Eva was the first to break the silence. ‘Well. This is nice. And by nice, what I mean is, very, very weird.’
Benedict grinned. ‘It is, isn’t it? Seeing you takes me back to a time before our adult lives had really begun. It makes me think how shocked the old Benedict and Eva would have been if they’d known everything that was going to happen to them.’
‘God, I know just what you mean. When I spotted you in the other bar, I had a sudden flashback to an afternoon we spent lying out on Brandon Hill. It might even have been our last day in Bristol, come to think of it, and I think we were having one of those ridiculous conversations about the meaning of life or something. We really didn’t have a clue, did we?’
‘Don’t say that. It makes me feel like I should warn the poor, unsuspecting bastard.’ Benedict cupped his hands around his mouth and mock-shouted through them into the past: ‘Do everything differently! Every decision you’re going to make over the next ten years, do the total opposite!’
Eva laughed. ‘It’s not been that bad, has it?’
‘No, I suppose not. I’ll never be sorry I had my kids, and it’s been a great time to be working in my field. So that’s two things I got right. What about you? What would you tell the old Eva?’
‘That patchwork skirts are not a good look?’
‘I thought you carried them off with panache.’
They smiled at each other across the table, the gap bridged, before Benedict’s expression became serious. ‘Listen, tell me about Sylvie. I’m really, really sorry I wasn’t around when she was going through the mill. I suppose after you guys left Bristol we mostly conducted our friendship through you, but I always considered her a friend. I doubt she feels the same now, though. I haven’t been there for anyone, have I?’
Eva shrugged, unwilling to contradict him on that point. ‘Sylvie’s doing okay. She’s so different now you’d hardly recognize her. I mean, she’s the same old Sylvie, but she’s grown up so much. I don’t know what I would have done without her over the last few years. She’s had so much to cope with herself, and still managed to kick me into shape when I was wallowing in self-pity after I lost my job. And don’t hate me for saying this, but I wondered after I read your message whether you couldn’t do with a dose of that yourself, to be honest.’
‘I can see how it could have sounded like that. But, actually, I’m feeling pretty positive about things these days. The boys seem happy again now that everything’s settled between me and Lydia, and work’s picking up. We had a lot of setbacks, not least because a passing bird dropped a baguette down a vent into the particle accelerator last year, but things are really starting to move forward now. It’s only a matter of time before we find the Higgs. We only moved back to London because Lydia insisted after. . after I. .’ Benedict looked down at the table.
‘Shagged a colleague?’
He held up his hands. ‘Fine, I’ll bloody say it if you’re going to make me. It’s no more than I deserve. We only moved back after I shagged a colleague, but actually it’s turned out fine. Most of the interesting work now is analysing the data from the experiments and I can just as easily do that from London. I’m happy at Imperial. I’ve even got my own office, with a spectacular view of the car park. Obviously, it’s a struggle not to let the prestige go to my head.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘So I’ve nothing to complain about. It’s just that. . God, you know how you said that we’re old enough to speak openly? It’s just that this is so bittersweet. Seeing you, I mean. Have you ever had a moment when you look back over your life and see really clearly all the moments when you could have done something differently and then your life might have taken a whole other direction?’
Eva took a sip of her drink. ‘We did miss a few opportunities, didn’t we? Somehow we never quite got into sync.’
Benedict’s eyes bored into hers, and his voice was urgent. ‘Is that it then? We missed our moment?’
She smiled. ‘Well, we definitely missed one or two. But who’s to say how many you get in a lifetime?’
Benedict stood up and moved around the table towards her. ‘Right now it feels like all the chances I ever missed are laid out in front of me. I’m not going to miss another one.’
He took her wrist and pulled her up to standing in front of him. As he reached out and put his arms around her and drew her body close to his and lowered his mouth to hers for their second kiss, almost a decade after the first, Eva had a sensation of shedding a skin, as if the past was sliding away from her.
*
Several hours later, Eva bent a bare arm behind her head, looked up at the ceiling above Benedict’s bed and let out a long sigh.