The Versions of Us (35 page)

Bella Hurst enters Jim’s life on a fresh September day, the sky high and cloud-swept, the playing fields still damp from last night’s rain.

It is the first day of term: the smell of paint lingers in the classrooms, and the parquet in the great hall is newly lacquered, shining. The corridors are almost silent – the boys won’t arrive until the following day – and Jim is in the art-room store cupboard, lining the shelves with pots of poster paint, tubes of oils. He is taking his time, enjoying the quiet, the sense of order; tomorrow, all will be noise and bustle once again.

‘Mr Taylor?’

The girl – later, he will know her as a woman, but it is as a girl that he first sees her – is standing just beyond the open door, as if unsure whether to come in. The light – the high windows have just been cleaned, and the easels and workbenches and screen-print tables are doused in sunshine – is behind her, so he can see only her outline. A shadowed cloud of curly hair, a loose white shirt. Leggings, ankle boots. A leather satchel dangling from her left shoulder.

He lays down the box of paints. ‘Yes?’

‘Bella Hurst.’ She extends her hand, and he offers his own. Her grip is firm.

‘Ah,’ he says.

‘Weren’t you expecting me?’

‘I was. Well, I knew you were coming. But I didn’t …’

He wants to say,
I didn’t have any idea you’d be so absurdly young.
Alan’s secretary, Deirdre, had telephoned back in August to say that Gerry, Jim’s deputy head of department, had broken his leg on a cycling holiday in France, and that a supply teacher would have to be found. It hadn’t taken long: a few days later, she had phoned again to say that a new teacher had already been secured. Jim, Eva and the children were just about to leave for Cornwall – a fortnight at Penelope and Gerald’s beach house near St Ives. And so, with Eva standing beside him in the hallway, staring pointedly at her watch, Jim had nodded at the name –
Bella Hurst
– thanked Deirdre, and not thought of it again.

‘Do call me Jim,’ he says now, to fill the silence. ‘Only the boys call me Mr Taylor.’

‘All right. Jim.’ Bella steps back, shrugs off the satchel. ‘Do you want to give me the grand tour?’

He shows her round, opening drawers and cupboards, switching on the projector, indicating the stacks of coarse paper for the lower years, and the good drawing sheets for the sixth form. She is not quite as young as he imagined (in silhouette, she seemed barely older than Jennifer): mid-twenties, perhaps. Her hair is a dark, unruly mass, and when he meets her gaze, he notes that one of her eyes is blue, and the other almost black.

‘Like Bowie,’ she says. He has just switched on the projector, throwing a lopsided image of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
onto the far wall.

‘What?’

‘My freaky eyes. David Bowie has one blue and one dark eye, too.’

‘Oh.’ Jim flicks the switch, and the flowers disappear. ‘I really wasn’t …’

‘Staring? No, I know you weren’t. I just like telling people that Bowie and I have something in common.’

Back in the store cupboard, he sets the ancient, paint-spattered kettle to boil, makes two mugs of tea. They sit on tall stools before the pupils’ workbenches, arranged in a C-shape, with Jim’s desk completing the square. Bella tells him she did her foundation course at Camberwell, her degree at St Martin’s and her master’s at the Royal College. She rents a studio space in Peckham and lives in a squat in New Cross. (Jim shudders instinctively at this, picturing loose floorboards, mice, a leaking roof, and will later chide himself for his small-mindedness.
Since when
, he’ll think,
did you become so bleeding bourgeois?
) She rides a bicycle; has never taught before (it was her tutor at the Royal, an old schoolfriend of Alan’s, who suggested her for the job); and disapproves wholeheartedly of private education.

This she says with a smile, lifting her mug to her lips. ‘I suppose that makes me an awful hypocrite.’

‘It does, rather.’ Jim has finished his tea: drunk it in awed silence, mute before this whirlwind of a girl – woman – with her mobcap of curls, her loose, artless clothes, her scattergun speech, veering wildly from one subject to the next. ‘I’d maybe keep that to yourself.’

Bella lays down her mug. ‘Yes. Maybe I will.’ From her satchel, she takes a packet of tobacco. ‘Roll-up?’

Jim smiles. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

They smoke on the fire escape, where Jim and Gerry usually take a breather during morning break, steeling themselves before confronting the next batch of bored adolescent boys. They are, Jim has decided, simply unaware of how lucky they are; of how rare a privilege it is to attend a school such as this, with its red-brick turrets, ancient oak trees and wide swathes of lawn. These boys are the sons of bankers and barristers: sleek, entitled men, men with money, men whom Thatcher is making richer by the month.

Art, for most of Jim’s pupils, is a subject devoid of meaning: an easy ride, a chance to muck around with paints and scissors before getting back to the serious business of maths tests, debating societies, rugby practice. But there is always the odd boy – perhaps one or two a year – who stands out, who bends his head low over his life-drawing (an ageing actress, fully clothed), as his pencil brings her form to life. It is for these boys that Jim is able to keep getting up in the morning, looping his tie, smoothing down his hair. It is for these boys – as much as for Eva, Jennifer and Daniel – that he is able, most evenings, to stop at the fifth drink, before the sixth and seventh deliver him to sweet, obliterating sleep.

‘You were at the Slade, weren’t you?’ Bella is standing in a strip of sunshine, lifting her face to its warmth. Always, afterwards, Jim will think of her as a pattern of light and shade. A Man Ray photograph, caught in grainy monochrome.

‘I was. How did you know that?’

She opens her eyes. The contrasting colours of her irises lend her face a disquieting, lopsided look. ‘Victor said. My old tutor. He knows your work. And we all know your father’s, of course. The great Lewis Taylor.’

He wonders whether she is teasing him. ‘It’s years since I did any real work.’

‘Well.’ Bella has finished her cigarette, stubs it out in the sand-filled plant pot he and Gerry keep out here for that purpose. ‘I’m sure you have your reasons.’

Jim nods, unsure whether to say more; but she is turning to go. ‘Got a one-to-one with the colonel.’ Noting his confusion, she laughs. ‘Alan Dunn, of course. Victor says he still runs the place like a regiment.’

And then she is gone, and the art room feels suddenly empty. Jim returns to his work in the store cupboard. Soon it will be lunchtime, and the rest of the day will be lost to meetings, timetabling, preparation. It will only be when he climbs into his car and waves to Bella Hurst, pedalling off on her bicycle, that he will think again of what she said.

He must have his reasons.
And yet, as he draws the car out onto the steep road home to Gipsy Hill, Jim will find himself struggling to remember what they are.

‘Darling?’

Eva lays her shopping bags down on the tiled floor of the hallway. She stands for a moment at the foot of the stairs, listening to the silence.

‘Ted, I’m making lunch – are you coming down?’

Still no answer. He must have gone out: Ted’s schedule is unpredictable, dictated by the morning headlines, or by urgent phone calls from London. His latest editor, Chris Powers – an impossibly youthful, smooth-featured type just in from the
Mail
– manages to make Eva feel she is wasting vital time even in the seconds it takes her to climb the stairs with the telephone.

She gathers up the shopping, carries it through to the kitchen. Umberto, lying prone on the worktop, lifts his head and mewls out a greeting. She ought to tell him off; they have been unsuccessfully trying to teach him some manners since taking him in shortly after their arrival in Rome. He was a pathetic, stringy little thing then, riddled with fleas and mange. But Eva rarely has the heart to chide him: instead, she tickles the cat under his chin, finds the velvet-soft place behind his ears. Umberto purrs and preens, rolls over onto his back. It is then, while running her hand over the cat’s belly, that her gaze rests on the kitchen table. Ted’s wallet, keys and driving licence. The three things her husband never leaves the house without.

Eva’s hand lies still on the cat’s fur. She strains to catch a sound from upstairs: the low murmur of Ted’s voice on the telephone; the typewriter’s artillery patter. (He is wary of the word processor she bought him for his sixtieth, says he mistrusts the speed with which the blurred green letters imprint themselves on the screen.) But there is nothing – only the purring of the cat, the shudder and hum of the ancient fridge, a muffled bellow from Signora Finelli next door, calling her half-deaf husband to
pranzo
. And then she hears it – the most peculiar sound: a deep, inarticulate keening, like the whimper of an injured animal.

In seconds, Eva has crossed the hallway, climbed the stairs. Outside the closed door to Ted’s study, she hesitates, catching her breath. The keening has acquired greater urgency: it is as if he is trying desperately to reach for words, and finding only senseless, elongated vowels. She opens the door, rushes over to his desk, where Ted is sitting perfectly still, his back to her. Her first thought is,
There’s no blood.
Her second, as she reaches him, takes his face in her hands, is,
My God
.

Ted’s face is rigid, expressionless: only his eyes seem alive. He stares at her, bewildered as a child (she thinks fleetingly of Sarah at two, with chickenpox, wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets), as she strokes his cheek.

‘Darling, what on earth’s happened? Are you in pain?’ Eva does not expect an answer: at least none other than the sound still coming from his mouth, which is half open, as if he were midway through framing a word when his body froze. ‘I’m calling an ambulance. Please try to be quiet, darling. I’m here now. We’ll get you to hospital, all right? As soon as we can.’

Ted watches as she reaches across his desk for the phone. Next to it is his spiral-bound notebook; as she dials the emergency number, she sees that the uppermost page is covered in a tiny, crablike scrawl. Not a single word is legible.

She takes Ted’s left hand in hers. ‘
Ambulanza
,’ she says into the telephone.

Hours later, Eva is sitting on a hard metal chair in the waiting area of the
pronto soccorso
hospital. It is a low, modern building, not five minutes’ walk from the house – she has passed it countless times on her usual, ambling route to Trastevere. Their house clings to the steep hill of Monteverde Vecchio; it is tucked away behind iron gates, and accessed by a vertiginous series of steps. Here, their neighbours have planted fragrant herbs, tufted grasses and a purple bougainvillea that, in the last days of summer, strews the cobbled path with discarded blooms.

Eva traces that same route most mornings – her descent leisurely, pausing to offer Signora Finelli, out sweeping her front step,
buongiorno
; and to admire the Roman light, soft and yellowish, glancing off loose roof-slates and crumbling
palazzi
. She orders a cappuccino and a
cornetto
at the bar in the piazza, sometimes with a friend, but most often alone. She tours the market with her shopping bags, lines them with peppers, tomatoes, courgettes and seeping balls of mozzarella suspended inside polythene bags like prize fish. Then she walks slowly back, passing the hospital where the words
pronto soccorso
glow red and urgent from the perimeter wall.

She has taken note of those words – filed them away in her mind, with the many other Italian words she’s encountered every day for the past four years. (Her Italian is not quite as fluent as her French, but it is good enough to plane away the rougher angles of life abroad.) Not once had Eva considered what might be concealed behind that wall, or thought that she might find herself, one day, sitting here in the waiting-room, observing the steady rhythm of the second hand on the wall clock.

The wait for the ambulance had seemed interminable.
How
, Eva had thought, sitting with Ted, uselessly stroking his face,
can they take so long to get here, when the hospital is so close?
When the paramedics had finally arrived, they’d complained at length about the impossibility of finding a place to park. They were armed with a stretcher, first-aid kit and breathing apparatus – but by then, Ted’s condition seemed to be improving. He had regained feeling in his limbs, could move and speak, and attempted to persuade both Eva and the paramedics that he didn’t require hospital attention.

‘
Non è niente
,’ Ted had assured them, in his clumsy, schoolboyish Italian.