The Versions of Us (17 page)

Now, on this beach, against this wide, empty sky, Eva no longer sees any point in burying the truth.

‘It’s true, Mama. I am very unhappy. I think I have been for a while.’

Miriam squeezes her arm, pressing Eva’s gloved hand tighter against the thick wool of her coat. ‘You have made a cage for yourself, my love. You think it is impossible to get out. But it is not impossible. You need only to open the door.’

‘Like you did, you mean?’

Miriam does not turn her head; she keeps looking out to sea, to where Rebecca is tracing a broad circle in the sand with the heel of her shoe. Her mother’s profile is neat, handsome, bearing only the faintest tracery of wrinkles around her eyes, spanning down from the corners of her mouth.

‘Yes, like I did,’ she says. ‘And like anyone can who is lucky enough to have a choice.’

Jennifer Miriam Taylor is born at nine a.m. on a fresh spring morning, clouds sculling through a watercolour sky, blossom weighting the tops of the trees outside the maternity ward.

Years later, his daughter’s timing will strike Jim as entirely in keeping with her character: she will be a neat, ordered child, and then a neat, ordered woman – a solicitor, in fact, and a better one than he would ever have made. But now, holding her in his arms, feeling the fractional rise and fall of her breathing, he is barely aware of time. The minutes, the hours, seem to have slipped their usual markers and turned loose.

He had wanted to stay with Eva – to somehow share her pain, make it bearable – but the midwife had clucked at him and sent him home. He’d spent the night at the kitchen table with the cat, drinking coffee, anxiously watching the clock, waiting for the call that would tell him it was time to return. It was just after nine when the telephone finally rang; morning was settling over the street as Jim went out to the car, drove back to the hospital. He found his wife asleep.

‘Don’t wake her,’ the sister warned, wagging a finger at him. He feels powerless before the nurses, who all seem like minor variations on the same woman, each brisk and capable in her white starched cap.

The sister allowed him to see his daughter, though. Peering through the window of the baby unit, it took him a moment or two to find her, and Jim panicked, fearing the significance of this, fearing that he might already be failing. And then he saw Jennifer, and realised he would have known her anywhere: that miniature skull with its translucent covering of skin; that sweep of dark hair, unexpectedly thick; those wise, lucid eyes – blue, like his, he saw, and the discovery delighted him, though the sister told him they would likely turn dark as she grew.

Now Eva is awake, her face unnaturally sallow, etched with tiredness. But she is smiling, and to Jim, she seems somehow transformed: he is a little in awe of her, in awe of the conjuring trick she has performed. This tiny miracle. He sits beside her bed, on the uncomfortable plastic chair, Jennifer staring up at him with her startling blue eyes, opening and closing her tiny fists. He has heard about the strangeness of newborns, how they seem like shrunken old men and women, carrying as they do the inchoate knowledge of what comes before; Ewan spoke of it when his son, George, was born last year. But Jim hasn’t known it himself until now, hasn’t experienced the unworldliness of looking into a newly minted face, and understanding that the child knows all there is to know of life’s great mysteries, but will quickly forget it all and have to start over again.

During the long wakeful night at the kitchen table, Jim’s excitement had been tempered by a hot sense of shame: he had found himself thinking of that woman in New York, the dancer. Pamela. He hadn’t seen her again: the guilt had risen in him as quickly as the hangover had faded, and he realised how casually, how easily, he had betrayed his wife and everything she meant to him.
A mistake
, he had told himself by way of comfort.
It won’t happen again
. And yet it had, a year or so later, when Eva was away on a story: and in their own bed, with Greta, the young German assistant at the school. She was nineteen, her body soft and pliant, her breasts full; she had clung to him afterwards, cried a little, and he had realised the depth of his mistake. Luckily for him – for all of them – she had returned to Munich a week later, citing a family illness; wrote him two heartfelt letters, which he managed to intercept before anyone noticed the German postmark, and then fell mercifully quiet. For weeks, Jim had been disgusted with himself; could barely meet his own eyes in the mirror; couldn’t understand how it was that Eva carried on as if everything was just as it had been. But eventually the guilt faded, became something like tinnitus: a low-level white noise, always present, but liveable with. Not life-threatening.

He began to wonder whether his father had always lived with that feeling, too. Lewis Taylor, bright star of the postwar English art scene, fallen from fashion now, though he had still loomed large in the minds of Jim’s tutors at the Slade. Some had even studied with him; they remembered him as a skinny boy with a lopsided smile and a cigarette always dangling from his mouth. Jim had always had the impression that his tutors were especially hard on him for being Lewis Taylor’s son. One, in particular, had seemed to take pleasure in accusing Jim of drawing too heavily on his father’s work; the slight had made Jim stubborn as well as angry, reluctant to please. He had wanted to set himself apart – and yet he had known, at the same time, that the only approval he would ever crave was from his father, and that was the one thing he would never have.

Jim is old enough now to know that Lewis had never been faithful to Vivian: he had slept with the majority of his models, and fallen in love with several. Jim can remember, as a boy, watching his father pack a suitcase as Sonia, the girl from the paintings with the dandelion cloud of orange hair, sat outside in the car, and his mother raged, running up and down the stairs, her screams drawing out Mr and Mrs Dawes from next door. The timid voice of Mr Dawes from across the garden fence. ‘Now, now, Mrs Taylor, I’m sure there’s no need for all this.’

But his mother was inconsolable: she had cried for days after his father had placed his cases in the car, gently wrested her grip from his arm. Jim had had to make their meals, take them up to her on a tray. He was only nine years old; it did not occur to him to blame his father, who had returned a few weeks later, without explanation. Vivian had got up again then, painted her face. Jim could hear her singing tunelessly in the kitchen as she cooked, and other, deeper night-noises coming from their bedroom that he didn’t understand. All was normal again, it seemed – and then a year later, his father was dead, and a few days after that, the hospital van came to take his mother away for the first time.

Jim had, for a while, consoled himself with the fact that he had never subjected Eva to such indignities. He had not loved Pamela, after all; and he had certainly not loved Greta. His desire for them had been purely physical – a reflex action; this, at least, was what he’d told himself at first. But more recently, he has found himself considering the fact that there was something else behind his infidelities: the need, perhaps, to meet a woman’s body anew, free from the sedimented strata that underpin a marriage – the memories, the disagreements, the highs and lows; and yes, the love. Of course he loves Eva: after betraying her, he had felt washed through with love, overflowing. And yet he is aware of the growing distance between them, and he hates himself for it. Hates himself for the resentment that he can’t swallow, however hard he tries. Resentment of the fact that her career is set on an upward trajectory, straight and true, while his lies trapped beneath the tedious demands of teaching.

Eva’s refusal to have a child had lain between them for years: a grenade picked up and lobbed, at intervals, to cause maximum damage. He had thought it selfishness, even called it so to Eva’s face, and then, seeing how much he had hurt her, regretted the words he was unable to retrieve. And then, one wonderful day last summer, she had told him that she was pregnant (they had been careful, but not, it appeared, quite careful enough) and had seemed as delighted by the news as he. And now Jennifer is tumbling into the world: their daughter; their love – the hope and promise of their marriage – made manifest.

Towards four, the cat had stretched out on the table in front of him, twitching through some deep animal dream, and Jim had fallen into a fitful doze, still sitting upright in the chair, his head resting on his hand. He had seen himself in his studio in the garden – ‘the shed’, he calls it now; ‘studio’ seems too grandiose a word for the inconsequential work he does out there on Sunday afternoons. In the dream, he was finishing a self-portrait. The canvas was blurred, impossible to make out, but he knew that the painting was good, perhaps the best he had ever done, the work that would finally get his stunted career off the ground. He had called for Eva, wanting to show it to her, and she had come running down from the house; but when he looked round, it was his mother standing there, not his wife. The painting had resolved itself: in the place of his eyes were two ragged, gaping holes. ‘Not good enough,’ he heard his mother whisper sharply behind him. ‘Not good enough at all.’

At the hospital, he drinks watery coffee in the canteen, leaving Eva to sleep, telling anyone who will listen – a harassed-looking doctor in a suit and bow tie; an elderly woman with a sad, pinched face – that he is a father. Sometime in the afternoon, Jakob and Miriam arrive; they are beaming, rapt, taking turns to hold Jennifer. When visiting hours are over – all is well, the sister says, but they’ll keep mother and baby for another few days ‘to get them shipshape’ – the three of them linger uncertainly at the hospital doors.

Jakob clears his throat. ‘It seems a shame just to go home now, doesn’t it, Jim? Perhaps we could have some dinner?’

They find a French restaurant a few streets away, where the men order steak frites and red wine, Miriam a bouillabaisse. They raise their glasses, toast Jennifer’s future, and Jim looks from Miriam, elegant in a pale yellow blouse, a silk scarf knotted at her throat, to Jakob, easy, large-featured, the shadow of a beard already creeping across his freshly shaved chin. He has been a good father to Eva, Jim thinks, and he is not even her flesh and blood. Perhaps fatherhood is not just biology; perhaps it is simply a decision.

‘And your mother?’ Miriam says. ‘Will she be coming down?’

Fleetingly, Jim sees his mother as she was in the dream last night: young, about the age she had been when his father died, her skin smooth and unlined, her arms bare. There has been an improvement in her condition: a new medication, a levelling out of her extremes. He telephoned her just after Eva went into labour, and found her a little strange: her voice seemed dulled, as if heard in echo. But dulled, echoing, was better than the alternative. Perhaps he would invite her to stay.

‘I’ll telephone her tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to make too many plans – you know, in case Eva doesn’t feel up to it.’

Miriam nods. Jakob, next to her, smiles at him, sips his wine. ‘You have a daughter now, Jim,’ he says. ‘Nothing will ever be quite the same.’

‘I know,’ Jim says, and he smiles back at Jakob, overwhelmed with the newness of his baby daughter, with the sense of a life stretching before her like a blank page, waiting to be filled.

Eva gets home from the
Daily Courier
to find David in the bedroom, his suitcase splayed open on the bed.

‘You’re back early,’ she says.

He looks up at her. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt that she doesn’t recognise. The white cotton is stark against his tanned skin – after a month in Italy, he could pass for Italian himself. Meeting his gaze, she feels oddly shy: it’s been weeks since he was last home – he went straight to Italy from New York – and they have hardly spoken on the telephone; each time he calls, he talks mainly to Sarah. When they do speak, Eva finds herself struggling to think of anything to say: the world David inhabits – one of call-sheets, sides, days in trailers, late nights of drinking – is so distant from her own. It feels increasingly as if neither speaks the other’s language, and each lacks the impetus to learn.