The Versions of Us (27 page)

Jim remembers donkeys, too: rickety and fly-blown, left to stand in the midday sun; he had been quite upset, and Eva, surprising him, had said he mustn’t judge by his own standards. But he can see no donkeys now, and the town itself appears to have doubled in size: new houses – some still unfinished, metal struts rising up from bald concrete blocks – line the upper tiers, and the bars and tavernas have proliferated. A few feet back from the quay, a couple dressed entirely in white are sipping cocktails in the shade of a striped awning, to the sound of an Elton John record spilling from the bar’s open door.

He has a sudden memory, bright and clear. He and Eva sitting by the harbour at sundown with their glasses of retsina. Petros the barman pouring out measures of ouzo to fishermen, their faces thick and pocked as tooled leather. But there is no sign of Petros now: the man emerging from the bar with a tray of glasses tipped by cocktail umbrellas and glacé cherries is young, muscled, seal-sleek. Petros’s grandson, perhaps. Or no relation at all.

As they wait in line at the gangplank with their suitcases, Jim turns to Eva. ‘God, it’s really changed, hasn’t it?’

‘We had to expect that, after all this time.’

A boy is waiting for them, carrying their name, misspelled, on a white card. He loads their suitcases onto a trolley, sets off without a word. They follow behind, and Jim feels his spirits dip. It was his idea, and a good one, he felt, to spend their fifteenth wedding anniversary on the island they had loved so much: a week together, just the two of them. Eva had been unsure at first; Daniel wasn’t quite three – too little, she felt, to be left for a whole week. But slowly, Jim had convinced her: Daniel would be with Juliane. (The au pair, the Dührers’ granddaughter, had arrived from Vienna four years ago, and by now they couldn’t imagine life without her.) They would both be fine, he said. Eventually Eva had agreed, on the condition that they didn’t stay in the same hotel as before. ‘It would be too awful,’ she said, ‘if we found that it had changed beyond recognition.’

It seemed that she was prepared for the changes worked by time in a way that he was not. He is, Jim knows, far more afflicted by nostalgia than his wife: it is he who captures each new episode in the children’s lives – birthdays, first steps, outings to the theatre – with his camera, who sends off each roll of film to be developed, pores endlessly over each clutch of photographs. It is, Jim supposes, the same urge that once drove him to paint – the need to capture a moment, whether real or imagined, before it disappears. And yet the attempt, it seems to him now, is always doomed to fail, whether in art (those meaningless abstract daubs on which he’d wasted so much time, and which now induce in him only a slight embarrassment, and, yes, a certain sadness) or in those family snapshots. There is always a slippage between the image in his memory – Eva brushing a lock of hair away from her face; Jennifer in her school uniform, so smart, so quietly grown-up; Daniel grinning messily from his high-chair – and the photographs he spreads out on the kitchen table.

Now, as they walk up the steep cobbled street to their apartment – he had telephoned the island’s tourist office, asked for a place with a sea view, a terrace to breakfast on – a phrase slips into Jim’s mind. Some fortune-cookie aphorism:
nothing is permanent except change
. It plays on repeat, a stuck record, until they reach the apartment – admire its dazzling whitewash; the blessed coolness of the shuttered rooms; the terrace, bright with red bougainvillea; the sea below mirrored and glinting. And then a weight seems to fall from Jim’s shoulders, and he thinks,
But surely change needn’t always be for the worse.

When the boy has gone off with his tip, dragging the empty trolley, they fall gratefully into bed, exhausted from the long journey. Jim wakes first. It is still warm – to air the room, they opened the shutters, drew the lace curtains between the bedroom and the terrace – but the sun is lowering, a light breeze lifting the curtains. He lies for a while, halfway between sleep and dream. He had been dreaming of their garden at home: he was there with Jennifer and Daniel, playing hide and seek; his mother was there too, and Sinclair, and everyone was asking where Eva was, but he didn’t know. Jim moves onto his side, gripped by irrational anxiety; but she is there, of course, soundly sleeping, her right arm crooked above her head as if frozen in the act of waving.

He would like to reach for her, draw her warm body to his. He would have done so, fifteen years ago, without thinking – or, if he thought of anything, it would only have been how lucky he was to have met her; how inconceivable it was to live his life alone. But now, he hesitates – Eva is so deeply asleep, and he knows how exhausted she is: two radio interviews this week, and all that toing and froing with the BBC about the screenplay for
Pressed
. As the date of their departure loomed, Daniel was fractious, troublesome: waking in the night, asking for Eva, consoled only by crawling into their bed, where he would shift and snuffle, robbing them both of sleep. So now, Jim does not reach for his wife. Instead, he gets up from the bed, finds his cigarettes, and goes out onto the terrace.

It is a beautiful evening; the flagstones are warm beneath his feet, the light soft and diffuse. Snatches of sound travel up from the houses below – a mother calling her child, a girl laughing, the jaunty burble of a television cartoon. Jim watches a small speedboat round the harbour wall, carve its V-shaped path through the still water. His mind is also beautifully still, and he remembers now that this was the effect the island had – the ability to pause the maelstrom of thought, to focus the mind on this moment, this place.

On their honeymoon, he had assumed that it was because he was so in love, so happy, drunk on visions of the future; and so he is surprised to find, now, that it still has a similar effect, everything falling away. All the silted build-up of the intervening decades: the years of teaching; the heavy disappointment of his failed ambitions; his infidelity, distant now (he has not taken anyone but his wife to bed since Greta); his jealousy of Eva’s effortless success (not effortless, surely – he, of all people, knows how hard she works – and yet, in his darker moments, he can’t help feeling how
easy
it has all been for her). All of it simply evaporates, leaving only these warm tiles, this indigo sky, this stretch of darkening sea.

He could cry with relief, but does not. He goes back into the bedroom, moulds his body to the shape of Eva’s, rests his head against the dip of her collarbone until she wakes, turns to him sleepily, and he says, ‘I’m glad we came.’

The call comes just after nine o’clock.

It is lucky that Eva is at home to answer it. She has just dropped Sarah off at school, and would have gone straight to the university had her first tutorial not been cancelled – Ida, the faculty secretary, had telephoned earlier to tell Eva that two of her students were unwell, her slow Mississippi drawl conveying her contempt for their excuses. And so Eva had found herself with several spare hours: time, she resolved on the short walk back to the apartment – stopping at their favourite
boulangerie
for croissants and fresh rolls; admiring the cotton-bursts of blossom on the trees that line their street – that she would dedicate to tackling the new biography of Simone de Beauvoir that Bob has sent from London for review.

But she has only just removed her jacket, laid her keys and shopping bag on the hall table, when the telephone rings.

‘Eva?’ It’s Anton. She knows immediately, from his tone, that something is wrong. ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been ringing for half an hour.’

‘I’m just back from taking Sarah to school, Anton.’ There is a chair beside the hall table: a beautiful, rickety old thing Eva picked up at Les Puces flea-market, with the intention of reupholstering its balding seat. She sits down, aware of a cold, gaping sensation at her core. ‘Didn’t you try the office? What is it? Is it Mama?’

There is a pause, during which she hears her brother sigh. ‘She’s in hospital, Eva. The Whittington. Pneumonia. It’s not good. Can you come today?’

Pneumonia: such a curious word. All through the making of arrangements – telephoning Ted, telephoning Ida, telephoning Highgate, because she wants to hear Jakob’s voice, and has forgotten that he won’t be at home – Eva sees the word projected in her mind, in chalk-white letters, imagines a bearded professor pointing at it with a stick.
Observe the Greek ‘
pn
’ – strange to our ears. From ‘
pneumon
’, meaning ‘lung’.
Miriam’s lungs: she has spent decades wheezing into bags, gasping on inhalers, shaking her head as she did so, as if it were no more than a minor inconvenience.

Ted, back early from the office, holds Eva in his arms, strokes her hair. She pictures her mother’s twin lungs, disembodied, failing, like two limp, punctured balloons.

They decide, after some discussion, that Eva will go to London alone. It is a Thursday: Ted has two pieces to file for the Saturday paper, and Sarah has a French test the next morning.

‘Come on Saturday,’ Eva says firmly as she shuts her case. ‘Just let me see how she is.’

Ted, doubtful, frowns at her across the bedroom. ‘Well … if you’re sure, darling. But I’d much rather we came with you now.’

On the train to Calais, the de Beauvoir biography lying unopened on her lap, Eva wonders why she insisted they didn’t come. Ted might have held off his deadlines, or filed from London, and Sarah could surely have missed her test. But she had, for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, felt an instinctive need to go to her mother unaccompanied.

She thinks of the last time she saw Miriam. Christmas – or ‘Hanumas’, as Ted has affectionately dubbed it; since his arrival in the family, along with Anton’s wife, Thea, the Edelsteins have incorporated into their celebrations turkey, fairy lights, even a tree. They had all crowded round the sagging dining-room table, eating by candlelight; Anton’s daughter, Hanna, was button-eyed and gurgling on Thea’s lap.

Afterwards, as was their custom, they had gathered in the music room. Jakob played his violin – the sad old tunes that seemed to come from some deep well of collective memory – and Sarah stepped up to the piano, performed the Satie
Gymnopédie
with which she had recently earned distinction at grade six. Miriam had sat curled in her usual chair; she looked tired – Eva and Thea had insisted she let them cook – and seemed a little short of breath, but not unusually so. She had watched her granddaughter’s hands intently as they moved over the keys. Then she had closed her eyes and leaned her head back against a cushion, a small smile arching her lips.

And yet, thinking back now, Eva remembers that her mother had gone to bed very early – and on Boxing Day, she had bowed out of their usual walk in Highgate Wood. ‘
You
go, darlings,’ she had said brightly over breakfast. ‘I’ll be fine right here with my new books.’ Jakob, Eva sees now, had been worried. ‘Your mother’s doing too much,’ he had said to her as they walked the short distance to the wood, arm in arm, the rest of the group striding out ahead. ‘Talk to her, Eva. Make her understand that she needs to rest.’ And Eva, patting Jakob’s arm, had agreed that she would; but the rest of the day had been lost to eating, clearing up, watching Sarah and Hanna play together, and her promise had slipped from her mind.

The train pursues its steady, rhythmic course north, and regret – so useless, so impossible to ignore – grips Eva. Why did she not press her mother, ask her how she was really feeling; offer to stay with her, even, for a few weeks; insist that she take a break? But really, Eva knows her efforts would have been futile. Miriam has always gone her own way, made her own choices. Eva can’t begin to criticise her for it: it is one of the qualities she most admires.

At Calais, Eva joins the queue of foot-passengers waiting to embark. It is a bright, still day, as it was in Paris: the Channel is dark blue and glassy, and the crossing smooth. At Dover, it takes her a moment or two to recognise her brother: he is wearing a new, expensive-looking camel coat, and is standing beside an unfamiliar car, low-slung and sleek.

‘How is she?’ she asks as they embrace.

Anton swallows. Close up, he does not carry his usual gloss: he is pale, and dark thumbprints are stamped beneath his eyes. ‘She seemed a little better when I left.’

In the car, they talk of other things: Hanna, who is still not sleeping through the night; Thea; Ted and Sarah; Eva’s work at the university. She tells her brother about the writing course she has designed, about the joy she feels in bringing on the better students, and coaxing the weaker ones. She is surprised to note the pride in her voice: teaching was only meant to be a stopgap, a way to fill the empty hours after she and her agent, Jasper, parted ways. It was not a complete separation; he still passes on the occasional cheque, and asks, from time to time, whether she has started working on anything new; and Eva is still in touch, too, with Daphne, her old editor and friend. But in both cases, their brief, affectionate telephone calls are underpinned by the tacit acceptance that another book is now only a remote possibility, that Eva just doesn’t seem to have the same urge to write. The stories in her mind that had once seemed so insistent, so impossible to ignore, have faded to faint shadows, if they are there at all. She has become self-conscious: looking over the last draft of the third book – she had limped through it, aware with each paragraph that it was becoming less and less of a pleasure – Eva felt that she could so clearly see the joins; that, in short, she was less interested in creating this fictional version of a woman’s life than in living out her own.