Eva rubbed her eyes. ‘Some days it’s almost too painful to keep hoping. And now it’s even worse, because if I could have a baby, he’d be in that baby, his genes. Maybe it would even look like him. But now all that’s left of him is in me, and yet there’s nothing inside me that I can find any comfort in. I’m full of broken glass.’ She put her head down on her hands. ‘And this, this should be your moment of glory, right when the Higgs discovery has just been announced, and instead you’re left sitting here with me like this. You must wish you weren’t here, how could you not.’
Benedict took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. ‘Don’t ever say that again,’ he said fiercely. ‘Eva, you’re not spoiling anything for me. This is all that matters, this, here, us. It’s the only place in the world I’d want to be. And of course I’m excited that we found the Higgs but it’s not as if we haven’t known we were closing in on it for a long time.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Let’s face it, even the media seemed to think that the most surprising thing about it was that the world’s most brilliant physicists considered Comic Sans an appropriate font in which to announce their historic findings.’ He pulled her back against his shoulder and she managed a weak smile. ‘Eva, I’m right here with you, not just for the good times, but for the bad times too. We’re all going to have pain in our lives, sooner or later. Sometimes it can even be a gift.’
Eva snorted wetly. ‘How can pain be a gift? That would be a worse present than the bloody bath salts your aunt gave us at Christmas. If this is a gift, I want the receipt so I can take it back and exchange it for a nice scarf or some attractive stationery.’
Benedict laughed. ‘Look, I know the religious stuff all seems crazy to you. Some days it seems crazy to me too, but other days it seems to make perfect sense. Is it really so mad to look for something bigger than ourselves?’
‘Well, I don’t know about mad. The thing that really matters is whether it’s true, whether there’s any evidence for it. Otherwise it just seems a bit cynical, like Pascal’s wager that you might as well believe in God because if he doesn’t exist you haven’t lost anything, and if he does you win the bet.’
‘Ah, but there’s a less cynical formulation of the same argument. Camus, I think: “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.”
‘The thing is, no one really knows anything, not you, not me, not even the bloody Pope. And I know you can argue that if you start to believe things without evidence you might as well believe any old arbitrary thing, and yes, we could be just a bunch of mammals floating through infinite space on a rock, scrabbling around in the dirt until the lights go out, but in that case nothing really matters, does it, not your father’s death, not factory farms or Houla or Beslan, not Auschwitz, not anything. And yet deep down we know that these things do matter. So is it really such an arbitrary thing to hope for? That suffering matters, that love survives?’
Eva leant her head back and rested it against his hand. ‘No. Right now that doesn’t seem like such an arbitrary thing to hope for. Some days I can almost believe it myself.’ She straightened up. ‘Not that Keith wouldn’t be laughing if he could hear this. Not really his bag, religion. But I think he knew a bit about love. He and my mother weren’t married, you know, because they didn’t believe in such bourgeois constructs, but I’m certain she was the love of his life. It’s strange to think of them feeling about each other the way we do.’ She pushed a wet strand of hair back from her cheek.
‘Well, yes,’ said Benedict. ‘You’re lucky if you find that sort of love once in a lifetime. Not to mention how he felt about you. I know you sometimes thought he could be a bit too wrapped up in his politics, but it was always obvious to me how proud he was of you.’
In front of them on the stand, the tea-light Eva had lit was guttering. They sat quietly watching it for a few minutes, and then Benedict stood and took her hand.
‘Come home with me now,’ he told her. ‘You’re not alone.’
His hand was warm against the small of her back as they walked back along the aisle beneath the glowing gaze of stained-glass saints and through the heavy doors into the daylight beyond.
33 Dorset, August 2015
‘What was the spirit of our age, do you think?’ said Eva to no one in particular.
She was lying on the shingly sand of a Dorset beach watching Allegra blundering around excitedly in the shallows with Josh and Will, overseen by Benedict. In her bathing suit the stiffness of Allegra’s left side was pronounced, her arm curled and her leg inflexible, but the boys, now aged eleven and thirteen and strong and tanned from a holiday in Greece, were used to playing with her much less roughly than they did with each other. Eva watched as Allegra splashed them and in mock fury they lifted her up by her shoulders and legs and threatened to dunk her, before depositing her very gently in the inch or two of water at the sea’s edge. It was an idyllic English summer’s afternoon: azure sky, gentle breeze flicking the corner of an unopened paperback, the faint tinny beat of a pop song drifting across from the radio of a group of teenagers further up the beach.
Lucien, who was lying on his back beside her wearing a pointy cardboard party hat, shielded his eyes with a hand and looked up. ‘Oh, we’re having one of those conversations? It’s been a while. What brought this on?’
‘The music, I think,’ said Eva, who was also thinking about the fact that she would turn forty this year. ‘That song, “Another Girl”, it’s by the Beatles, isn’t it? It made me think about how the Sixties was the era of free love and all that, and then it occurred to me that I don’t really know what our era was all about. I feel like we were a sort of in-between generation. We weren’t quite the internet generation and in any case, who wants to be known for looking at a lot of porn and pictures of cats? But I don’t feel like we were defined by a particular set of ideals either. So I was wondering what our zeitgeist was supposed to be.’ She picked at the remains of Allegra’s birthday cake, which had started the day as a glitter-covered figure nine but had now been reduced to a pile of crumbs and smears of sticky red icing.
‘Nihilism?’ suggested Lucien, who’d got into Nietzsche in the prison library some years earlier.
‘No, that’s not true, we did care,’ interjected Sylvie, turning her face to the breeze to blow thick strands of copper hair from her eyes. ‘We cared about all sorts of things. Global warming. Iraq. GMOs.’
‘Well, yeah, just not enough to actually do anything about them,’ said Lucien.
‘Really? Is that all we can say for ourselves?’ Eva sighed and rearranged herself slightly to catch the sun. ‘“We cared, but not enough.” That was the ethos of our era? Instead of standing up and fighting for something we believed in, we just stepped away and each tended to our own corner of the world?’ She pondered this for a moment, and reached a conclusion. ‘It’s awful, but in many ways that does seem about right when I look back on my life.’
‘Not just you,’ said Sylvie. ‘It took us all a while to work out what life was supposed to be about. Benedict was the only one of us who had his priorities straight from the start, and in the nicest possible way, he is a bit of a freak of nature.’
‘True,’ agreed Eva. ‘He’s always had this unswerving sense of purpose. I’ve often envied it, actually. When I was making plans I mostly thought about what I wanted to get away from, not what I actually wanted to achieve.’