The Versions of Us (44 page)

Now, on the train, eating his breakfast, Jim thinks again of Eva, allows himself to acknowledge the fact that he had been looking forward to seeing her at the party. His invitation hadn’t come from Anton directly – Jim doesn’t really know him well enough – but from Toby: Marie was taking their daughter, Delphine, to France for a fortnight, leaving Toby behind to finish the edits to his latest documentary. ‘Come with me, old man,’ Toby had commanded over the telephone. ‘We can be two old crocs together. Show those young things what we’re made of.’

As he agreed to go, Jim had thought of Eva, whose voice he heard often on the radio, whose
Daily Courier
advice column he had taken to reading carefully each week. He liked the woman he had come to know through her writing: wise, self-deprecating, empathetic. He’d imagined seeing her again at this boat party of Anton’s, carrying this deeper knowledge of her. Ted had died just over a year ago: Jim had seen his obituary. He wanted to tell Eva how sorry he was. He pictured her eyes on him – dark brown, insightful – speaking (and here, perhaps, his imagination had departed entirely from reality, and yet he’d allowed himself that indulgence) of a possible future.

But now he is travelling north, to his son, his granddaughter. Dylan insisted that Jim didn’t have to come right away – ‘We’re all over the place. You could wait a few days if you want’ – but his need to go to them was immediate, instinctive. He adores his clever, sensitive son, already making a name for himself as a printmaker; is fiercely proud of his talent, his vision; of the precocious maturity with which Dylan had, so quickly, adapted to his parents’ parting and his mother’s relationship with Iris, and found a way to keep them all close. Jim loves his daughter-in-law, too: loves Maya’s warmth, her intelligence, the many small ways – a glance; an encouraging word; the light touch of her hand on Dylan’s back – in which she shows Jim how deeply she loves his son. Jim wants to see his granddaughter
now
: that tiny girl, Dylan’s girl, looking out at this strange new world for the first time.

And so it is of Jessica – with Dylan’s blue eyes and Maya’s dark skin and her own messy crop of black hair (Dylan has emailed a photograph of her, propped in the crook of Maya’s arm) – that Jim thinks now, as the train carries him north, past fields, over bridges, skirting the fleeting sprawls of towns; carving its silvery path through the life he is already living, not the one that might have been.

She finds Jim standing alone on the top deck, at the prow.

‘Darling, are you coming? Thea’s calling everyone in for dinner.’

He turns, and she is shocked for a moment by how tired he looks, how defeated. The situation with Sophie has aged him. In the weeks after her disappearance, it was as if Eva suddenly saw the decades written on Jim’s face, where before she had seen him only as he always was: angular, tousle-haired, fired by his own particular form of inner energy. Pulling her through that gap in the hedge outside Clare; squinting at her in the half-light of his attic room, as his pencil moved fluently over his sketchpad. Slowly tracing the line of her collarbone with his hand.

‘Just taking a breather,’ he says. ‘I’m coming.’

They go down to the ballroom together. The family is seated at the top table, as at a wedding: Anton and Thea; Rebecca and Garth; Sam and his wife, Kate, their two daughters, Alona and Miriam, arranged between them, fidgety in their smart summer dresses. Thea’s mother, Bente, over from Oslo, sits beside Eva’s niece, Hanna. On Bente’s other side are Ian and Angela Liebnitz; and on Eva’s right, a man named Carl Friedlander, Anton’s new partner in the firm. (Eva is surprised, at first, to see him seated with them – later, she remembers Anton saying that Carl had lost his wife to cancer, and admires the gesture.)

‘You have a lovely family,’ Carl says to her, as the wine is poured, and Eva, thanking him, looks around the table, and thinks,
Yes, I do.
Rebecca is glamorous in a red sheath dress, her dark hair swept up into a chignon; Garth is leaning in close, sharing a private joke. Sam is quieter, more reserved, as he has always been. (How keenly Eva remembers him as a small boy: compact, chubby-kneed, patient; never grasping for things or issuing imperious demands, as his sister had done.) But Sam’s reserve, Eva knows, is the product of a certain innate shyness – he certainly didn’t inherit that from David – that he wears only in public: with Kate and his girls, and with Sophie, too, he is easy, open, affectionate. There he is now, reaching across to Alona, placing a firm hand on her shoulder: ‘Sit quietly, darling.’ And she, rather than scowling or complaining, inclines her head to meet her father’s hand, brushes her cheek against it, in a small gesture of love that touches Eva deeply.

Their family: the family she shares with Jim, who now slips his hand into hers. All of them here but one: Sophie. She could not be persuaded, though Sam went to visit her in Hastings, told her how much it would mean to him – to all of them – if she would come; and bring Alice with her too.

It was Sam who had found Sophie. She had phoned him, about six weeks after Eva and Jim’s fruitless trip to Brighton, and had given him an address, but told him not to pass it on. He’d kept his promise. ‘What choice do I have?’ he’d said to Jim, who had been cold with impotent fury. ‘If I tell you, she may not speak to any of us again, and where would that leave us?’

Painful as it was, Jim had been forced to concede that Sam was right. So Sam had gone to her – taken Kate, Alona and Miriam to Hastings, as if for an ordinary family day out. From the seafront, he had driven on alone to the address Sophie had given him. It was a small flat on the third floor of a rather daunting block: ‘Clean, though,’ Sam had reported later. ‘Very clean.’ Sophie, too, was clean, in every sense. She was also six months pregnant. ‘Tell them I’m not using,’ she’d urged Sam, and he had; but she hadn’t wanted them to know anything more.

When the baby was born, Sophie had named her Alice, and emailed Sam a photograph. That is all Jim has of his granddaughter: a small, grainy image of a two-day-old girl, wrinkled, faintly cross-eyed. Sophie will not allow Helena to see her either – she has cut herself off from both of them, like a branch sliced cleanly from a tree. Eva had thought at first that the fact Sophie would see neither of her parents – that her hatred wasn’t reserved for Jim alone – might offer him some meagre comfort, but Jim takes none from it at all.

It is an excellent dinner: lobster cocktail, rump steak, key lime pie. ‘Anton’s death-row meal,’ Thea explains, placing an affectionate hand on the back of his neck. She is still slender, unfussily elegant in a slip-dress of fine grey silk. ‘My husband should really have been born an American.’

Anton smiles, strokes his wife’s arm. He is the image of a successful businessman in late middle age: sleek, signet-ringed, running comfortably to fat. Eva has to strain a little to remember the boy he once was, standing in the hallway of the Highgate house in his cricket whites; tunelessly intoning the Torah at his bar mitzvah. But then sometimes her brother will look at her, and she will see that the boy is still there: restless, mischievous, ready for anything.

‘She’s a feeder,’ Anton says now. ‘There’s no way I can call this puppy fat any more.’

Jim spends much of the meal talking to Angela about his last exhibition: a small, strictly commercial assembly of paintings at Stephen’s gallery, at which it had been impossible to pretend that Jim’s work still inspired the interest it once had. ‘How
do
you decide what to paint?’ Eva hears Angela asking as she turns back to Carl: a tall, rather austere-looking man, with a perceptible air of sadness. He asks if he is right in thinking that she recently published a novel (a small nod from Eva at this: she can still hardly believe it is true); wonders shyly whether she was once married to the actor David Curtis. Accustomed to the question, Eva says yes, indeed she was; selects a few of the usual stories about Oliver Reed (‘charming’), Los Angeles (‘desolate somehow’), David Lean (‘quite brilliant’).

Eva asks Carl how he is finding the business, and he tells her about his time in the merchant navy; his German background (they exchange a couple of jokes dredged up from their respective childhoods: his German is not as fluent as hers, but she laughs all the same); his wife, Frances, with whom he shared twenty-seven years of marriage.

‘You must miss her very much,’ Eva says as the pudding plates are cleared away.

‘I do.’ Carl turns to thank the waiter hovering at his right elbow. ‘But life is for the living, isn’t it? We all have to find some way to carry on.’

After the coffee, the speeches. Thea stands first, proposing a toast. Then it is Eva’s turn. She rises to her feet, suddenly nervous. Across the room, she catches Penelope’s eye; her friend smiles her encouragement, and Jim, next to her, reaches up to squeeze her hand. It is enough: the words return to her. Afterwards, Eva raises her glass to her brother, and the whole room does the same.

Back up on deck, Eva and Jim share a cigarette. It’s getting late: the band is playing slow tunes, and the embankment is deserted, strobe-lit by the headlamps of passing cars. Behind them, on the boat’s starboard side, is the looming tower of the old Bankside power station, now the new gallery, Tate Modern. Eva would have liked to stand and look at it, this grand symbol of a London transformed, but Jim is resolutely facing the other way.

‘Great speech,’ he says.

‘Thanks.’

She hands him the cigarette. ‘Can’t believe Anton’s sixty. Can’t believe
we’re
sixty.’

‘I know.’

She watches Jim’s profile: the fine lashes framing his blue eyes, the softening contours of his chin and neck. ‘Doesn’t seem real, does it?’

They are silent for a moment. From the ballroom, a Paul Weller song –
You Do Something To Me
– floats out over the upper deck.

‘I miss her, Eva,’ Jim says. ‘I miss her so much.’

She thinks of Carl Friedlander, alone for the first time in almost thirty years. Of Jakob and Miriam. Of Vivian and Sinclair. Of Jim’s father. Of the absences torn from the weft of all their lives. ‘I know you do.’

He passes her the dwindling stub. ‘Do you think Sophie will ever come round?’

Eva drags in the last puff of smoke. She is reluctant to be the carrier of false hope. ‘I think so. Eventually.’

‘She’s just so
angry
with me.’ Jim turns to look at her, and his face, eerily struck by the flicker of the car lights, seems deflated, structureless. ‘And with Helena. We did everything wrong, didn’t we, Helena and me? We lived in that absurd hippy setup, with people coming and going, and all of Howard’s petty rules, and me out in the studio all day, never spending any time with her.’

Eva crushes the cigarette into an ashtray mounted on the handrail. On the riverbank, a young couple is walking slowly past: the man in low-slung jeans and baseball cap; the woman tottering in high heels. The woman looks round at the boat – takes them in, standing there on the top deck, with a bold, appraising stare – and Eva is reminded of the time Sophie had stood in the doorway to their bedroom in the Sussex house, watching Eva carefully apply her make-up before a party. Eva had turned, beckoned her in, thinking she might like to try on some lipstick. But Sophie had shaken her head. ‘Mum says wearing make-up is slutty,’ she’d said, her voice monotonous, matter-of-fact. ‘I suppose that means you’re a slut.’

And then she had turned on her heel and disappeared back into her room, before Eva could work out how to respond; in fact, Eva had not responded, and had never told Jim about the incident, either. It was one of the few times Sophie had shown Eva, overtly, how much she disliked her – and though Eva hopes she has done everything she could, over time, to make an ally of her stepdaughter (and still believes that she may yet), the memory of it has never quite deserted her.

‘Jim, she was a baby then,’ Eva says. ‘She’ll hardly remember any of that. And anyway, you were working hard at something you believed in. She should be proud of you. Her father, the artist.’

This, too, is a misstep: Eva sees him wince. ‘Well.’ His voice is tight with contained emotion. ‘We both know how well that’s turned out.’

She reaches for his hand. He takes it in a firm grip, says with greater intensity, ‘Sometimes I wish so much, Eva, that we were back in Ely, on that day we took the bus from Cambridge: do you remember?’

She nods: of course she remembers. ‘I have this terrible feeling that everything from then on has just been wrong, somehow. That none of it was meant to happen.’

‘You don’t really believe that anything is meant to happen, do you?’ Eva speaks quietly, so that only he can hear.

‘No. Maybe not. Who knows?’

Eva folds her arms around him. He smells of shaving foam and toothpaste and, faintly, of the generous measure of whisky he drank after dinner. ‘No regrets, Jim, all right?’

Into her hair, he says, ‘No regrets, Eva. Not now. Not ever.’