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even made it past the door, it began to dawn on Benedict what a high price he was going to have to pay for his cowardice and indecision. Had he simply missed his chance or was there some other undercurrent, something going on with Lucien, despite their studied indifference around each other? She’d never told him and he’d never plucked up the courage to ask. How could it be so easy to talk about some things and not others? He flattered himself to think that he was Eva’s closest confidant, or at least a close second to Sylvie. He knew her hopes and dreams and fears, how she was in turns insecure and defiant about her unconventional upbringing alone with her father and how unwilling she was to let herself use it as an excuse for anything. He’d opened up to her too, in ways that he’d never done with anyone else. Only yesterday they’d got up really early and walked all the way to the top of Mount Pantokrator, where they found a gaggle of floppy-eared goats mooching about the ruins of an ancient church.
    They sat side by side on a dusty boulder looking out across the water, legs aching and eyes dazzled by the sunlight, and it had felt so natural to voice his excitement about the research he would be beginning after the summer and his hopes that it would eventually land him a job at the particle accelerator at CERN. As they sat together high above the world, he heard himself explaining how he loved particle physics because it gave him a different sort of perch, one that granted him the ability to see far beyond a normal human lifespan, back to the beginning of the universe and perhaps even forward to the end. There was no one else he talked to like this, no one with whom it would even occur to him to share these thoughts that he’d barely even articulated to himself and yet now tumbled from his lips like poetry.
    ‘Wow. That’s quite the motivation for choosing what to do with your life,’ Eva told him when he finished his breathless outpouring. ‘It almost makes me feel bad about my own choices. Sometimes I wonder if I’m more motivated by fear than anything else. I’m scared that I’ll make a mess of this new job and never succeed at anything, and I’ll just go back to being Eva Nobody from Sussex, boring and unexceptional, which perhaps is just what I really am deep down,’ she concluded with a smile that was only half-ironic.
    How ridiculous that sounded as he replayed the conversation in his head now, lying next to her by pool: Eva Nobody. Everything about her was exceptional, and how she didn’t know that he couldn’t imagine. The afternoon air was lavender-scented and vibrated with the buzz of industrious insects. Through the gap between his eyelids Benedict watched as Eva opened her eyes, then rolled lazily onto her side and looked at him. At first he thought she was about to speak, but she remained silent and he suddenly realised from the unfaltering way her eyes were making their way up and down his body that she didn’t know he was watching her. Was she…could she be...?
    ‘Eva Andrews, are you checking me out?’ he demanded.
    Eva started. ‘No, I’m not checking you out!’ she yelped. ‘I was admiring the view. Anyway, how would you know who was checking you out even if anyone was, which they absolutely weren’t? You didn’t even have your eyes open.’
    ‘How would you know if I had my eyes open if you weren’t looking at me?’ He turned over to lie on one side and posed with one hand on his hip and his head propped up on the other. ‘You carry on. Don’t worry about leaving me feeling soiled by your naked lust, I can handle it.’
    Eva threw her magazine at him and stomped off towards the pool. He watched the way her breasts jiggled as she stomped and the way she emerged seal-sleek after diving into the water, and then found he had to roll onto his front and think about differential equations for quite some time before he could join her.

Chapter 4
Goa, August 1997
    Porta, 10th