The Versions of Us (22 page)

Jim sips his red wine, his expression inscrutable. ‘How do you know I went?’

She swallows. In picturing their meeting – and it is pointless to pretend she hasn’t pictured it – she has never quite imagined this coldness. She had known Jim would be angry, yes – but she had, in her mind, seen his anger fade quickly to forgiveness, even joy. ‘I wasn’t sure.’

More gently, he says, ‘Of course I went, Eva. I waited for you. I waited there outside the library for hours.’

She holds his gaze until she can’t any longer. ‘I was afraid, suddenly … I’m so sorry, Jim. It was a terrible thing to do.’

From the corner of her eye, she sees him nod. She thinks,
Perhaps it was no worse than that first terrible thing – but I did that for the right reasons, Jim. I really believed that I was setting you free.
She considers saying this aloud, but it is surely too late, too little. She blinks hard, takes a sip of punch to distract herself from the incessant thrumming of her heartbeat. She has never pictured him like this: not only his manner, but his appearance. In her mind, he is either as he was in New York – casually bohemian in his jeans and loose shirt, his hair messy, unbrushed – or in Cambridge, layered in shirts and jumpers to keep out the Fenland chill. Some mornings, when she woke before him in his narrow bed in Clare, his skin would look so pale and cold, it was almost blue; and she loved, too, the dark tracery of veins on his forearms, spanning down from his elbow to his wrist.

‘I read about your exhibition,’ she says now, with some effort. ‘I’m so glad you found a way to set out on your own.’

‘Thanks.’ Jim sets down his wine glass. From his pocket, he takes a cigarette paper, a pouch of rolling tobacco, a small nugget of grass. ‘It was easy, in the end. Easier than I’d thought it would be, anyway.’

Eva breathes a little more easily, noting the slight thaw. ‘You met someone …’

He lets the ellipsis hang; she watches the deft movement of his fingers as he pats down the tobacco, breaks off a portion of the grass and worries it into crumbs, lays them at intervals along the shaft of the joint. ‘I did.’ Holding the open paper in one hand, while with the other he closes the tobacco pouch, returns it to his pocket. ‘Her name’s Helena. We have a daughter. Sophie.’

‘Sophie.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘After your grandmother.’

He looks at her as he rolls the paper, pinching out the joint expertly between his thumbs. ‘That’s right. Mum was over the moon.’

Vivian. Eva had met her once, in Cambridge: she had come up from Bristol for the day, and Jim had taken them all to lunch at the University Arms. Vivian was skittish, high, dressed in clashing colours: a blue suit, a pink scarf, red artificial roses twined round the brim of her hat. After coffee, while Jim went to the bathroom, she’d turned to Eva and said, ‘I
do
like you, dear: you’re ever so pretty, and very clever too, I can see. But I have the most terrible feeling that you’re going to break my son’s heart.’

Eva had never mentioned this to Jim, fearing that it would constitute a small betrayal. But she thinks of it now, and his mother’s prescience strikes her with some force. ‘How is Vivian?’

‘Not too bad, actually.’ He has lit the joint now, taken a couple of deep drags. He hands it to her, and she takes it, though weed doesn’t tend to agree with her – and what will Emma think if she rolls home stoned? Still, just a little can’t do any harm. She takes a puff, and Jim says, ‘They put her on a new drug – it seems to help. She’s met someone, too: they got married. He’s nice. A retired bank manager, of all things. Steady.’

‘That’s good. I’m really glad.’ Beneath its vegetable tang, the grass carries a pleasant sweetness. Eva takes another drag, hands it back to Jim.

‘No more?’ She shakes her head, and he shrugs, continues smoking. ‘What about you, anyway? I heard you had another child. A boy, is that right?’

‘Yes. Sam. He’ll be four next month.’

Sam: her gorgeous boy, her surprise. It had happened soon after her mother’s birthday weekend in Suffolk. She had decided to speak to David when he got back from Spain – to tell him that she was leaving. But on the night of his return, he was in a grand, expansive mood: he’d taken her to dinner at the Arts Club, bought champagne, told her amusing stories about Oliver Reed. That night, Eva had seen her husband as he’d been when they first met: the shiny brilliance of him; the way the head of almost every woman in the room turned to observe his arrival. How deeply she had wounded him, all those years ago, by leaving him for Jim; and how resolute David had been later. There, under the club’s great glass chandeliers, Eva could recall his eyes shining as he agreed emphatically that the only option was for them to marry.
Let me take care of you
, David had said.
Let me take care of you both.
And he had meant it, in his way; perhaps he still did. Later that night, after stumbling home from the Arts Club in the early hours, they had made love for the first time in months. Sam was the result.

Eva knew, then, that she wouldn’t ask David for a divorce. She didn’t want her son to grow up knowing only the idea of a father; nor did she want to have to explain the whole sordid business to Rebecca, who still idolises David. And David himself appeared to be happy enough with the arrangement: it suits him to stay married, to keep the flocks of admirers at bay (or to provide cover for one admirer in particular). But since he took the house in Los Angeles last year – he had several films lined up, and was tired of living in hotels – he has already become a husband and father more in theory than in practice. He is supposed to fly home to London whenever he can; but in the last nine months, he has spent only two weekends there.

Eva could have moved to America with him, of course, but the idea was never mooted, and she certainly applied no pressure. On their honeymoon, she had disliked Los Angeles intensely: the strip malls, the featureless freeways, the exhausting sense that everyone was grafting, wheeler-dealing, out for what they could get. And David, of course, has a particular reason to keep the house in LA for himself: Juliet Franks. Eva knows they are lovers. She has known it for a long time.

‘The full set,’ Jim says, and Eva looks up sharply, wondering if he is mocking her. She wouldn’t blame him if he were. ‘And you? What are you doing these days?’

‘Still reading manuscripts for publishers. The odd book review.’

He must know, better than anyone, that it is not enough.

‘And your writing?’

‘I’m not really … It’s tough, you know, with the children …’

‘No excuses. If you’ve got to do it, you do it. It’s that simple.’

She feels her cheeks flush. ‘It’s always simpler for a man.’

‘Oh, I see. It’s like
that
, is it?’

They are glaring at each other now. Eva’s blood is rising again, but with anger this time, so much hotter, so much purer, than the blend of guilt and fear and loss. ‘I don’t remember you being such a chauvinist.’

His joint is almost finished. Jim takes a last puff, drops the butt onto the ground, crushes it under the sole of his shoe. ‘I don’t remember
you
being such a wet rag.’

Eva turns then and walks away, striding back up the garden, pushing through the crowd on the patio – past Penelope, who says under her breath, ‘Are you all right? What did he say?’ Pen must have seen them – they were deluded to act as though they were alone in the middle of a party. But Eva doesn’t care: she is running upstairs, thinking only of finding her jacket in the spare room, then walking out into the cool shadows of the square, hailing a taxi, checking on her sleeping children before crawling gratefully into bed, drawing the covers over her and leaving all this behind.

I’ll apologise to Anton
, she thinks as she rifles through the pile of jackets and cardigans,
though he’s probably so drunk by now, he won’t even notice I’m gone
. And then she feels a hand on her shoulder, pulling her round. An arm around her waist, warm lips on hers, and there is grass and tobacco and red wine, and that other familiar, indefinable taste that is his, and his alone.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’

Ted, settled on the terrace with a gin and tonic and the evening paper, looks up, smiles. ‘Of course not, darling. You go. Enjoy yourself. Sarah and I will be fine.’

Eva leans forward, places a kiss on his warm cheek. It is just after six, and still hot, though the sun is dipping behind the trees, and the terrace will soon be in shadow. ‘There are stuffed tomatoes in the fridge. All you need to do is put them in the oven for a few minutes, make up a salad.’

‘Eva.’ He cups her face with his hand. ‘We’ll be
fine.
Go.’

‘Thank you. I’ll see you later.’

Sarah is in her room, reading; she is a thoughtful, rather private child, and Eva worries for her a little, forgets that she was just the same, preferring the world of books to the tough, disordered world of other children. She wishes they had a garden for her to play in.
In Paris
, she thinks,
might we have a garden?

‘I’m off, darling. I won’t be late. Ted will get dinner for you.’

‘All right.’ Sarah, tearing her eyes away from the page – she has almost finished
Little Women
, and is transfixed by the plight of Beth – fixes her with an expression that seems, in its quiet resignation, terribly adult. ‘Have a nice time, Mum.’

In the hallway, Eva slips on her sandals, checks her bag for the invitation Jim Taylor pressed into her hand at Anton’s party, just before he left. She has resolved to walk: Cork Street isn’t far, and she has spent most of the day indoors, editing a tricky section of her second book. Her central character, Fiona, is an actress who finds fame, and is forced further and further away from her husband, a barrister – flatteringly devoted, but rather dull: a playful reversal of Eva’s own situation with David. But Eva is, to her frustration, struggling to make the husband step out from the page.
Why
, her editor, Daphne, had written in her last sheaf of notes,
would he put up with Fiona’s selfishness for so long?

Eva is finding it difficult to answer Daphne’s question, and today she has allowed herself to fall prey to distractions: a clutch of letters, delivered by the postman just after lunch; a telephone call from Daphne, asking how she is getting on. Eva has accomplished little of any substance, and the day has bequeathed a sense of unease, multiplied now by Eva’s suspicion that she should not be leaving Ted to look after her daughter while she goes off alone to meet another man – however innocent their meeting might be. From the street, she looks up at the terrace, hoping to catch Ted’s eye. But he is engrossed in the paper, and does not return her gaze.

It is almost a year now since Eva first agreed to have dinner with Ted. He’d been asking for weeks, scribbling little notes that she’d find in her office pigeonhole, or tucked inside a book on her desk; sending bouquets that flooded the office she shared with Bob Masters, the literary editor, and Frank Jarvis, editor of the women’s pages, with their sickly perfume. They reminded her – not unpleasantly – of the roses David used to bring to her on Friday nights. Frank begged her to put the man out of his misery, if only to keep the office from becoming a florist’s shop. (Lilies made him sneeze.) Bob was more circumspect, but he seemed to think well of Ted: they had been colleagues for more than twenty years. There was, he told Eva as if it were reason enough to accept Ted’s advances, no better reporter on Fleet Street.

Eva, however, was unsure. The divorce had taken more than a year to come through; the whole thing had proved more difficult, more upsetting – especially for Sarah – than she’d imagined, and Eva had no intention of rushing straight into a new relationship. And besides, she wasn’t at all sure she even liked Ted Simpson – he seemed humourless, even arrogant. He was a man whom even the editor stopped to listen to, whose opinions, stated with a politician’s persuasive rhetoric, mattered. Also, though Eva wasn’t sure of his exact age, she suspected he was at least fifteen years her senior.

Then, of course, there was Sarah. Eva still wondered whether her daughter had truly grasped the facts of the divorce, and was wary of confusing her any further. She still woke in the night, sometimes, calling for David; Eva would go to her, stroke her hair until she fell asleep – or even carry her to her own bed, read to her as she hadn’t since Sarah was a small child. How might Sarah react to the presence of a new man in their home, disturbing the fragile domesticity that Eva has worked so hard to protect?

And yet, as the weeks went on, Eva found that she was beginning to revise her first opinion of Ted; even to look forward to receiving his flowers, his notes. She began to notice that he was rather handsome; to look for him in the corridors, and return his greetings, his smiles. One day, she discovered a particularly amusing card inserted into her review copy of
Lives of Girls and Women
by Alice Munro.
A most disappointing read
, Ted had written,
given that not one of these lives is Eva Edelstein’s, and hers is the only woman’s life this reader is interested in discovering
. She found herself laughing out loud, and then composing a short, careful note back.
I’m sorry to hear you didn’t enjoy the book – but your review made me smile. I’ve been thinking that it might be very nice to have that dinner after all.