The Versions of Us (40 page)

‘Yes, let’s.’

They are in the usual house seats: row F of the stalls. At row H, David stops to greet a man Eva doesn’t know. She smiles faintly in his direction, and then settles herself, removing her jacket, placing her bag under the seat. The set is brightly illuminated: high faux-brick walls, violent splashes of dreadful conceptual art, a battered metal kitchenette. New York, circa 1974: Hamlet as a chain-smoking queen, lazy artist and sometime protégé of Andy Warhol. Gertrude – Rebecca; a little young for the role, really, at thirty-six, but the loyal Harry had overruled his casting director’s qualms – as a drunken soak.

Rebecca has described Harry’s concept for the production to her mother at length, and Eva isn’t at all sure what she will make of it. But she knows, however bizarre the production might prove, that Rebecca will be good: her daughter has three Olivier awards lined up on her mantelpiece at home. And yet the old, familiar anxiety for Rebecca – costumed, nervous, waiting in the wings – is still there, just as it always was for David. How clearly Eva can see herself and Penelope, sitting in the stalls at the ADC, silently running through the lines as David and Gerald spoke them aloud; their eyes roaming around the stalls, seeking out anyone who might dare to criticise.

David comes to sit beside her, and she says, ‘Remember that production of
Oedipus Rex
you were in at Cambridge?’

‘Yes. What about it?’

‘You did all look a fright, didn’t you?’

He looks pointedly at her, and Eva worries for a moment that he won’t take the joke: he has never been good at laughing at himself. But he does laugh. ‘Bloody hell, you’re right, we did. Callow youth, eh? We didn’t have a clue.’

Then Eva finds herself laughing too. They are both still spluttering as the house-lights dim, and Francisco and Bernardo stride out in biker boots, their hair tugged into high, punkish crests. Then David leans in to whisper, ‘Not as much of a fright as this lot, though, eh?’

She has to smother her laughter with her sleeve. The elderly woman in the next seat turns to glare at them, and Eva falls silent, watching, wondering how it is that their own grand drama – a marriage for convention as much as desire; a divorce too long in coming – has faded to nothing but laughter, and the faint residue of shared memory.

‘You’re not looking, Daddy.’

A Tuesday afternoon, a quarter to four; Jim is walking his daughter home from school. It hasn’t snowed for days, but the last covering is still banked up against the edges of the pavement in sooted drifts; where the kerb meets the road, it has turned to ugly yellow slush. Robyn has caught a handful of fresher, paler snow from a garden wall. He looks down at her small, mittened hand, at the misshapen ball slowly melting into pink and purple wool.

‘I am, darling. That’s very good. But put it down now, all right?’

Robyn shakes her head, and the bobble on her pink hat shifts violently from side to side. ‘No, Daddy. You don’t put a snowball down. You
throw
it.’

She lets go of his hand, takes aim; he reaches out to stop her, but is too late. The snowball traces a low arc through the air, threatening to collide with a passing dog.

‘Robyn,’ Jim says sharply. ‘Don’t do that.’

Luckily, she’s not much of a shot: the ball lands fatly on the kerb, several inches wide of the dog. Still, Jim meets the owner’s eye as he passes. ‘Sorry about that.’

The man smiles from beneath his pork-pie hat, showing three gold teeth. ‘Don’t worry, mate. Kids, eh?’

‘Kids,’ Jim agrees.

Robyn stops still, sucking on the damp wool of her mitten, watching the dog owner’s retreating back. ‘Daddy,’ she says loudly, while the stranger is still within earshot, ‘did you see that man’s teeth? They were made of
gold
.’

‘Come on, missy.’ He tugs on her other hand. ‘Let’s get you home.’

Home, for seven years, has been an early Victorian house in Hackney: two-storeyed, with a snubbed, flat facade, white-painted trim and a high wrought-iron side gate dividing it from its twin next door. The house had been empty for some years when he and Bella moved in – not as squatters: Jim had drawn the line at that; had bought the place with a portion of the inheritance that came to him after Sinclair’s death. The wallpaper in the back bedroom was a world map of mould, bare wires were hanging perilously from ceilings, and the floorboards were rotting away to nothing. But Bella had fallen in love with it, and as it was Jim who had insisted they move out of the New Cross house – at weekends, the crumbling walls shook to deep bass while he hid upstairs with earplugs, trying to read – he felt he should not stand in her way.

Bella had at once set about restoring the house: chipping off the wet plaster, stripping back the wallpaper, painting the living-room ceiling from the top rung of a ladder even when she was eight months pregnant, and stubbornly ignoring Jim’s pleas to take care. He’d been reminded, inevitably, of the summer of 1962 (his mind struggled to compute how distant that was now), when he and Eva had moved into the house on Gipsy Hill, with its salmon-pink stucco, and the old artist’s shed in which Jim had expected to achieve great things. He had lived in that house for almost thirty years; he couldn’t just banish all memory of the place. He and Eva had worked so hard, together, to make it their home: she’d come back from the
Courier
in the evenings, change into one of his old shirts, tie a scarf over her hair, and set to painting.

He’d made the unsettling mistake, one day, of coming downstairs, seeing Bella up on the ladder – her back was to him, her dark curls wrapped in a scarf – and calling out Eva’s name. Bella hadn’t spoken to him for four days. Sending him to Coventry – he believes the modern term is ‘stonewalling’ – is something she does with unnerving frequency. He didn’t know it when he fell in love with her, but he certainly knows it now.

In the hallway, Jim strips his daughter of her rucksack, her hat and mittens, her plump padded coat. She stamps her feet in her tiny striped wellingtons, sending nuggets of stale snow spinning across the floorboards. So much about Robyn – her clear blue eyes (she has not inherited her mother’s mismatched irises), the pink-lined seashells of her ears, her comically intense expression of deep thought – reminds him of Jennifer, even of Daniel. And yet he is wary of making too many comparisons: Bella had snapped at him the first time he saw Robyn smile and said – giddy with paternal joy – that it might have been Jennifer looking back at him. ‘Don’t make me feel,’ she’d replied, ‘that everything we do together must be measured against the life you had with her.’

Later, Bella had apologised, put her overreaction down to postnatal exhaustion. But he’d remained unsettled; for this was not at all the woman – the girl – who’d walked into the school art room that day in September, who’d talked to him for hours in the pub, the studio, even over that ill-advised dinner with Eva, about art, freedom, a life uncircumscribed by convention. The time Jim spent with Bella had been as refreshing as a cool glass of water to a dreadful thirst: her youth, her beauty, the sheer
ease
of being with her, with none of the responsibilities, the expectations, of a long marriage.

He was, for many months, unable to believe that his fascination might be reciprocated: and yet it seemed, joy of joys, that it was. One Saturday afternoon, while they were working in the studio – it was early spring; they’d thrown open the windows for the first time in months, put on a CD (something loud, jarring: Bella’s choice) – she had come through to his room from hers and stood silently for a while at his elbow, watching him paint. He’d said nothing, instinctively aware that something was about to change. She’d moved closer until he could feel her breath on his neck. Then, into his right ear, she’d whispered, ‘I think I love you, Jim Taylor. Do you think you could love me?’ Turning, drawing her into the circle of his arms, he’d given her his answer.

Then, Jim would not have thought Bella capable of petty jealousy, nor through the delirious early months of their affair. And when he went to Bella – when he arrived at the New Cross house with his suitcase, his marriage over, his choice made – she had welcomed him: folded him into her arms, and told him the next morning – over a fried breakfast in a nearby greasy spoon – that she had never been happier than in that moment.

He can’t quite work out when things changed. Perhaps, he thinks now, he’s never really known Bella, seen her clearly for who she is, rather than who he wishes her to be: his saviour; the woman who restored his faith in art, and in his own ability to create; who’s cured him of his need to drink – he stopped drinking to excess as soon as they met, as if afraid of losing even a second in her company. Or perhaps there has simply been a shift in her, brought on by motherhood, or by the pressure of Jim’s ending his marriage. Whatever its source, the result is much the same.

The night he returned from Rome to discover Eva sitting in the kitchen, her eyes fierce, a Man Ray postcard lying on the table in front of her, had taken Jim entirely by surprise. He hadn’t recognised the card at first: it was only when Eva turned it over that he’d felt his stomach fold in on itself. He had simply not, during his snatched evenings with Bella (he had usually gone to the New Cross house after school, told Eva he’d been caught in a staff meeting) allowed his fantasy vision of the future to collide with the present as it actually was. He had pictured himself making great work, with Bella at his side; had imagined telling Alan Dunn where he could stick his job. But he had not prepared for this moment – and so he had stared at his wife, the sound of his heartbeat loud as the roar of the sea.

Eva hadn’t wanted an explanation – she had driven straight off, apparently, to confront Bella herself. At this, Jim had felt a nausea so profound he’d been convinced that he was about to be sick. Eva hadn’t even, in that moment, seemed angry; she just wanted to know what he was going to do.

‘Do?’ he’d said dumbly.

Eva had fixed him with those eyes, the eyes that had looked up at him that first time, on the path, as she crouched beside her stricken bicycle. The eyes that had watched him for thirty-one years – wise, quizzical, almost as familiar to him as his own.

‘Surely the one thing you owe me now, Jim,’ she said crisply, her tone carefully measured, as if her composure depended on choosing the correct words, and then placing them in the correct order, ‘is to tell me whether you are planning to leave.’

He’d left at once – it had seemed the kindest thing. He’d simply turned round, told Eva that he was sorry and that he loved her – had always loved her. She was crying, and he’d wanted so much to go to her, to comfort her – but he could not, of course, and he’d had the awful realisation that he would probably never hold her in his arms again. And so he’d made himself turn and leave; had picked up his weekend case from the hallway. Only after he’d closed the door had it occurred to him that he hadn’t taken the car keys – and then that the car was probably no longer his to take. Eva had bought it. Eva had bought so much of what was theirs.

He’d wheeled his case out onto the pavement, looking for the amber light of a taxi, feeling utterly empty, exhausted, and yet aware – he couldn’t deny it – of a creeping sense of elation. Bella was his: there could be no going back. He was turning the page, opening a new chapter in his life. At the New Cross house, one of Bella’s flatmates had opened the door; told him, with dull-eyed disinterest, that she was asleep upstairs. He’d carried his case up, quietly pushed open her door, sought the warmth of her small, slender body.

Now, in the Hackney kitchen, Jim makes Robyn a sandwich: brown bread and strawberry jam, without crusts. He sits with her at the table as she eats and twists around on her chair, pausing to offer him cryptic snapshots of her day at school: ‘We drew Australia, Daddy’; ‘Harry did throw up at break time’; ‘Miss Smith has a hole in her jumper. Under the arm.’

Jim doesn’t remember many of these moments – the ebb and flow of everyday life with a small child – from Jennifer and Daniel’s childhood. He has come to realise that he was rarely alone with them in their early years: Eva, and then the au pair, Juliane, had done so much of the day-to-day parenting. He wonders now how Eva managed it – she was as busy as he was, with her work at the
Courier
, and her writing. And yet she did, and he can’t remember her ever chiding him for his lack of involvement. No, the resentment had been all on
his
side, and the knowledge of it shames him now, adds to his mounting debt, one that his older children won’t easily let him forget. Jennifer, appraised of his betrayal, had withdrawn his invitation to her wedding; on the telephone, her voice icy, remote, she had told him she never wanted to see him again. (This hadn’t lasted – they now see each other every few months – but she’d held firm for a good year.) Daniel had been less emphatic, but no less upset. ‘Mum’s in pieces, Dad,’ he’d told Jim over a rather desolate lunch at a carvery near Gipsy Hill. ‘Why can’t you just come home?’