The Versions of Us (20 page)

‘Daddy
sleeping
,’ Jennifer had said. Quickly, Eva picked her daughter up, took her inside, set her down to play with her toys in the living-room, where Eva could still keep an eye on her through the patio doors. Back in the studio, she shook Jim awake. Roused, he stared at her, his expression so nakedly bleak that Eva was suddenly afraid.

‘What
is
it, darling?’ she said. ‘What can I do?’

He closed his eyes. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

She had moved closer to him, placed her hand on the back of his neck, stroked his down-soft hair. ‘My love. Don’t do this. Why are you punishing yourself? You have your work; you have time to paint; we have Jennifer; we have each other. Isn’t that enough?’

‘It’s easy for you to say, Eva.’ He spoke softly, without venom, and yet she felt the weight of every word. ‘You have everything you’ve ever wanted. How can you possibly know how I feel?’

‘Eva.’ Here is Penelope, in a paisley-patterned dress; she has gained more weight since having Adam and Charlotte, and it gives her a rather fetching, queenly air. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

Eva smiles, grateful for the interruption to her thoughts. She has made her way out to the garden again; the night has come on, and Thea has lit candles, placed them all round the perimeter flower-beds in glass jars, a second string of lights beneath the coloured bulbs. ‘Babysitter was late.’

‘Not that sulky girl from down the road?’

Eva nods. ‘She’s not so bad, really.’

‘So you think. Do you know, when Gerald was off sick last week – some kind of stomach bug; poor thing couldn’t move for two days – Luisa actually went into our room in a bikini top and shorts, and asked if there was anything she could do for him?’

‘Perhaps she was concerned …’

‘Not likely.’ The topic of Luisa, Penelope’s Spanish au pair, is a familiar one: Penelope suspects her of nymphomania. Eva cannot imagine loyal Gerald – who is also starting to turn plump, while his hair grows thinner – succumbing to temptation or, indeed, of a lissom twenty-year-old with eyes like molten chocolate choosing to tempt him. But she supposes that you never know. Eva would never have thought it possible of Jim, either.

‘That woman’s a menace,’ Penelope adds.

‘Now, now, Pen. That’s not very sisterly.’

‘She doesn’t make me
feel
very sisterly.’ Penelope sips her drink; she has rejected the punch in favour of white wine. Eva, already starting to feel a little drunk, begins to wish she had done the same. ‘But no, you’re right. I shouldn’t go on about her. She’s a godsend, really. Have you thought any more about getting someone in?’

‘An au pair?’ Eva has thought about it often: with both she and Jim out at work, arranging care for Jennifer is a haphazard, piecemeal affair, and she knows that she depends rather too heavily on Miriam. Jakob said as much, tactfully, last Sunday: he mentioned Juliane, the granddaughter of some old friends from Vienna, who was planning to come to London to study. ‘She’s worked with children before. It could work out well,
Liebling
.’

Eva had nodded, said it could, though she still feels the same reluctance to bring a young stranger into their home. It is a nasty, private thing that she can’t bring herself to say aloud. She had found a letter once, with a German postmark, when she was cleaning his studio; it was from Greta, the recently departed language assistant at his school. Her English was stilted, Germanic:
I am wondering when my body you will touch again. My heart calls at you.
Eva had felt sick; she had actually run inside, to the bathroom, and bent low over the toilet bowl. But she had not been sick; instead, she had sat at the kitchen table, working her way steadily through a packet of cigarettes. By the time she’d smoked the last stub, she’d resolved to put the letter back where she’d found it, and say nothing: she could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t bring a response she couldn’t stand to hear. To imagine that Jim had loved that girl – that his decision to stay with Eva and Jennifer, rather than leave with Greta, had sprung from duty rather than desire – was impossible enough; but to have that fact in any way confirmed would, Eva felt, be too much to bear.

‘Papa says there’s a girl coming over in September from Vienna,’ she says now. ‘Juliane. The granddaughter of some friends of theirs – remember the Dührers? I might meet her. See what she’s like.’

‘Good idea. Now let’s get another drink.’

They do so – Eva deciding, against her better judgement, to stick with the punch. As she drains her second glass, she is suffused with a giddy, infectious warmth. Anton ladles her out another, and then leads her back to the garden to dance. Everyone is there: Anton’s old schoolfriends (there, dancing close together, are Ian Liebnitz and his new wife, Angela); his shipbroker colleagues; Thea and her barrister friends; Penelope and Gerald; Jim’s cousin Toby and his friends from the BBC – and Jim, coming up behind her, taking her in his arms so that they are dancing together to the Rolling Stones – ‘Wild Horses’ – her back against his chest. She turns to face him. He is drunk, of course, but so is she, and they are smiling, moving in time with the music.

He draws her face close to his, so that his features are huge, magnified: his blue eyes, so startling when she first saw them, are snatches of sky, and she can feel the rough texture of his beard against her cheek.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says into her ear. ‘I love you. Always have, always will.’

‘I believe you,’ Eva says, because she does, despite her doubts, despite her nagging fears. And because really, if she can’t believe in that, then what is there left to believe in?

He meets his cousin Toby, as arranged, in a pub off Regent Street.

Toby is with friends at a table in the small courtyard garden – relaxed in short sleeves, laughing over a pint of beer. He gets up as Jim approaches, and the men shake hands, their touch warm but a little uncertain: it is some years since they last saw each other, and the thought of contacting his cousin, of arranging to meet him, had only occurred to Jim quite late the previous day.

His aunt Frances had telephoned a few weeks before to congratulate him on his first London exhibition: she’d seen the article in the
Daily Courier
. ‘We’ll all come,’ she said. ‘Do call Toby, won’t you, when you’re up? I know he’d love to see you.’ And so, last night, just before Helena drove him to St Ives to board the sleeper, that is what Jim had done. He had not been angling for a place to stay – Stephen had offered to book him into a hotel – but Toby had insisted: Jim should come out with his friends; a bunch of them were meeting in a pub, then going on to someone’s thirtieth birthday party. ‘It’ll make a nice change,’ Toby had said drily, ‘from all those sheep.’

Jim had resisted the urge to correct him, to explain that there were no sheep at Trelawney House: just fields, and cliffs, and an indolent black-and-white cat named Marcel who had appeared at the kitchen door one day, skinny and threadbare, and refused to leave. But Toby was right about London being a change: just how much of a change, Jim hadn’t quite imagined. The train lurched into Paddington at six a.m. Blinking sleep from his eyes, Jim opened the curtain of his compartment window to the city, its grime and bustle, its crowds already surging and parting under the high vaulted roof. Back at home, in Cornwall, everyone would still be sleeping; Dylan would be curled like a comma against the bracket of his mother’s warm body.

It was years since he’d last been to London, and Jim found that he was not prepared. After stepping from the train, he stood on the platform awhile, taking it all in. Out on the Bishop’s Bridge Road, he found a café, sat drinking coffee and eating a greasy bacon sandwich while the traffic ebbed and flowed, and strangers strode resolutely by in suits and high-heeled shoes.
Why
, he wondered,
are they all in such a hurry?

Toby’s friends, he discovers now, are mainly colleagues from the BBC: a TV producer, a script editor, a news presenter named Martin Saunders. They are incredulous when they hear that Jim doesn’t even own a television, hasn’t watched it in years, but they listen with growing interest to his description of Trelawney House: the shared studio, the vegetable garden, the strict division of duties.

‘A
commune
,’ one of them says; Jim can’t recall his name.

Jim shifts uncomfortably on his seat. He knows what ‘commune’ means to most people. ‘We prefer “colony”. An artists’ colony.’

The man is nodding at him, but Jim can see he’s not really listening. ‘A colony. Right. So how did you end up there?’

That Bristol warehouse: the still shadows of the boats, the black water, the wonderful freshness of Helena’s lips on his. Later, she had taken him to bed – she was staying at a friend’s house in Redland; a crowd of people waved at them from the living-room through a cloud of dope. Helena’s skin was pale and warm to the touch; the feel of her body, moving with him, was something entirely new, something wonderful. Afterwards, they lay awake, and she said, ‘Why don’t you come to Cornwall with me, Jim? Today?’ He’d opened his mouth to say no, of course he couldn’t, and instead he’d heard himself saying, ‘Yes, all right, why not? Just for the weekend.’

On Monday, he’d called Arndale & Thompson from St Ives to say that he was sick, and would return the following day. And he had; but a week later, he’d handed in his notice, and the month after that, he’d packed his things into his car and left Bristol for good. There had been none of his mother’s histrionics – his aunt Patsy had made sure of it by coming to stay – and even Vivian’s doctor had wished him well. ‘You’ve done much more for her,’ he’d told Jim, ‘than many sons would have done.’

Now, to this man whose name has quite slipped Jim’s mind, he says only, ‘Oh, I met a woman, of course. Followed her there. How else?’

The man grins, raises his glass. ‘Well, I’ll drink to that. And you’ve got an exhibition opening soon, on Cork Street?’

‘Yes. The private view’s on Monday.’

‘Great. Do you know, Jim, I’d really like to talk to my editor about you. See about getting a crew down there. Could be great for our culture slot.’

‘I’m not sure …’ Jim can just imagine Howard and Cath’s reaction: Howard’s fleshy face colouring, his fist slamming down on the tabletop, with its topography of ancient scars.
Absolutely not
.
How can you even suggest such a thing?
‘I don’t think that’s quite our style.’

‘Well, let’s see, eh? Why don’t I come to the show on Monday anyway, take a look?’

Jim lifts his beer, says untruthfully, ‘You’ll be very welcome.’

When their pints are finished, Toby tells them it’s time to go. ‘Whose birthday is it again?’ Martin asks.

‘Anton Edelstein’s,’ says Toby. ‘My friend from school – you remember, you met him at my Christmas party. The shipbroker.’

‘Oh yes.’ Martin nods vigorously. ‘Eva Katz’s brother. Or should that be Eva Edelstein now?’

Jim’s heart seems to lodge in his mouth. Slowly, carefully, he chances saying her name aloud. ‘Eva Katz?’

Martin turns to look at him. ‘Yes, Eva Katz, the writer. David Katz’s wife – or
ex-wife
, I should say. He watches Jim, his grey eyes shrewd. ‘Why – do you know her?’

He shrugs. ‘Not really. We met once, in New York. I went to see
The Bohemians
on Broadway.’

Martin gives a slow nod. ‘Lovely woman. Thought I might have had a chance with her, once. But I hear she’s hooked up with Ted Simpson from the
Daily Courier
. Good on him, I say. He’s at least fifty if he’s a day.’

On Regent Street, they hail two taxis in quick succession. As his cab ducks and noses its way across Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Millbank, Jim is quiet, thinking about Eva Katz. How long has it been since they met? Eight years – and even then it was only for, what, an hour? And yet if he reels through all the people he has met in the interim, all the fleeting conversations he has had at parties – there have been fewer of those in Cornwall, but still, those brief, inconsequential meetings must be in the hundreds – it is
her
face,
her
conversation that has lingered in his mind with greater tenacity than any other.

Jim even painted Eva once, from memory. (Well, not entirely: he had seen a photograph of her in a newspaper, in a slip of a dress, at some film premiere, standing next to Katz.) Helena was intrigued, possibly even a little jealous. But the painting did not turn out well: he couldn’t quite catch the expression – intelligent, a little stern – that had so intrigued him, and eventually, caught up in fatherhood, in the daily demands of his work, she slipped from his mind. But now that the taxi is drawing up outside a narrow Georgian house, its windows ablaze with light and the trailing party-sounds of music and voices, he feels a sudden excitement at the prospect of seeing her again.

Inside, the house is aggressively elegant, the sparse furniture white, sleek. Jim is introduced to Anton Edelstein – heavy-browed, friendly; Jim can see Eva in his dark brown eyes – and his wife, Thea, slender, coolly blonde. Toby and his friends congregate by the food, laid out on a trestle table in the walled garden. Jim stands with them, loading a plate with cheese, cold meats, Coronation chicken, but he is distracted, looking around him, searching the unfamiliar faces for hers. And then, turning, he sees her: there she is in the kitchen, talking to Anton, refilling her glass.