The Versions of Us (47 page)

Howard, watching the horizon, slowly nods. ‘Yes, I know. It was all a very long time ago.’

Jim would like to tell him how much he had always admired him; how he had always felt, deep down, that Howard was the better artist. But he can’t quite seem to shape the words. ‘Are you still working?’

‘Oh no. Not for years.’ A smile creases Howard’s lips. ‘Burned the lot, didn’t I? Got mad at Cath one night, drank a bottle of whisky, and set light to it all. Cath called the fire brigade. Very nearly torched the whole street.’

‘God, Howard.’ Jim is laughing, though the image in his mind – drawn from the newspaper story he read about it, and no doubt sensationalised by memory – is a terrible one. Smoke rising above a row of cottages. Howard standing bare-foot on the patio, watching his life’s work go up in flames. ‘I saw the story. I should have written. I should have asked how you were.’

‘Oh, it was small fry, really. Nothing to bother a proper art-world type like you.’

‘Howard—’ Jim begins, but he is prevented from saying more by Alice, now turning from the water’s edge, calling for him, the breakers nipping at her toes.

‘Go,’ Howard says. ‘I’ll find Eva. Thank her again for dragging me out of my cave.’

Jim gets to his feet, grasps the other man’s hand. ‘I’m glad you came. It’s good to see you. And I’m sorry. About Cath. I loved her, you know. We all did.’

‘I know.’ Howard nods. ‘Happy birthday, Jim. You’ve a lovely family. Never mind the bumps along the way.’

In the shallows, Jim sets a steadying hand on each of Alice’s shoulders. She is a small, quivering thing, crying out again at the sudden shock of cool water on her skin. Alice is more precious to him – though he would never admit it to anyone – than Alona and Miriam, not only for the blood that connects them (odd that this should make any difference, when of course the woman he loves most in all the world is not of his blood), but for the fact that she was lost to him for so long.

Alice was two years old when Jim finally met her: Sophie had simply appeared on their doorstep one afternoon, grey-faced and shivering. A man they didn’t know was waiting in a car on the drive; later, they’d remember that he hadn’t even extinguished the engine. ‘Take her for a bit, will you?’ Sophie had said. And then she was gone, running, slamming the passenger door shut before they could reply.

The small child hadn’t cried as her mother left. She had watched the car turn, spit gravel, and then disappear. Then Alice had reached for Jim’s hand, and said, quite calmly, ‘Hungry.’

Over the next few years, they had Alice to stay many times, their despair for Sophie still colouring each day. And then, just before Alice was due to start school – they had found a place for her in the village primary, assuming that Sophie would not have made the necessary arrangements in Hastings – she had reappeared just as suddenly to take her daughter home. ‘It’s over, Dad,’ Sophie had said. ‘Really over this time. I promise you.’

And Sophie has, as far as Jim and Eva know, remained true to her word: she has found work as a teaching assistant at Alice’s school, is attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings four times a week. It was there that she met Pete. He is here now: a mild, unremarkable-looking man, not one you would ever pinpoint as an addict, but if there is anything Jim has learned, it is never to put too much trust in appearances. He has always felt the potential for addiction in himself: an inchoate longing to loosen his grip. Had things turned out differently, Jim thinks, he might easily have allowed that longing to overwhelm him.

He is grateful to Pete, too, for the calming influence he appears to exert over Sophie’s life. And Alice adores him: she is struggling free from Jim’s grasp now, scrambling back up the beach, calling out his name. ‘Pete! Me and Grandpa went in the sea! It
bit
us …’

Jim follows Alice at a more sedate pace, the pebbles hard and smooth under his deck shoes. He rejoins the group around the table – Penelope and Gerald, Anton and Thea, Toby; Eva, topping up everyone’s wine. Seeing him approach, Eva smiles, hands him a fresh glass. ‘Having a good time?’

‘The best.’

He sits in an empty chair, next to Penelope. ‘Thanks so much for this, Pen. I couldn’t have asked for a better celebration.’

Penelope – draped in a blue kaftan, a white silk scarf knotted at her throat – shakes her head. ‘It’s all Eva’s doing, I promise. All we did was sit back and let things happen.’

‘Since when, my darling Pen,’ Gerald says mildly, ‘have you
ever
just let things happen?’

Eva comes up behind Jim, places a hand on the back of his neck. ‘How was it with Howard?’

‘Good. Great.’ He twists round to look at her. ‘How on earth did you find him?’

She smiles. ‘Helena, would you believe? I emailed her. She said he and Cath had moved to St Agnes – then it was a simple Google search. Howard’s the president of the St Agnes Residents’ Association.’

‘Is he really? Well, he
has
gone straight in his old age …’

‘Hey,’ says Toby. ‘Less of the old. Not
all
of us are seventy yet.’

‘All right. Less of the old.’

Seventy
: an age that once seemed inconceivable to Jim, that of a stooped, shuffling ancient, waiting for his moment to step quietly from the room. But Jim is neither stooped nor shuffling: a little soft around the middle, perhaps, his face pouched and lined – but still alert and vigorous, alive to the inconceivable preciousness of each moment as it passes.

He reaches back, over his shoulder, for Eva’s hand; grasps it tightly, as if the pressure of his hand on hers can convey his gratitude. And perhaps it can: Eva squeezes back, holding on; both of them looking to the horizon, to where the great waves are breaking, drawing with them the deep, unanswered loneliness of the open sea.

A colourless London winter’s day: damp, windblown, the pavements slick with intermittent rain. At the entrance to the crematorium, the mourners huddle, the older women clutching at their billowing skirts. A gaggle of smokers stands a little apart, cupping their lighters with their hands.

Eva watches from the passenger window of the family car. She is holding Thea’s hand tightly, and thinking of other funerals – Vivian’s, in Bristol, frost clinging to the grass beside the grave; Miriam’s, on a fresh Thursday in spring, daffodils in glass bowls around the synagogue; Jakob’s, spare and simple, as he had wanted it. Anything not to think of the hearse, now slowing to a halt in front of them; of the flowers – calla lilies and irises, Anton’s favourite, Thea had said, with a certainty Eva hadn’t dared to question – arranged around the coffin. Plain oak with brass handles. They’d agreed that Anton would not have wanted anything fancier than that.

Her brother had made no arrangements for a funeral. A will, yes – they’d drawn those up shortly after they married, Thea said, during one of the blurred, wakeful nights the sisters-in-law spent at the kitchen table in the days after his death, waiting for the dawn to bleed into the next interminable day. But he’d been superstitious about funerals: hadn’t wanted to think about his own, for fear of tempting fate. Eva – raw, exhausted, finishing her sixth mug of coffee – had found it difficult to reconcile this information with the man Anton had become: a grandfather, a shipbroker, a man of substance. It was, she decided, in some way comforting to think that the boy he once was – chaotic, full of mischief – had lived on in this childish reluctance to acknowledge the administrative processes of death.

Without instructions, then, Thea and Eva had put their plans into place. A cremation: non-denominational, Thea insisted, and Eva – though thinking privately of the soothing ritual motions of their parents’ Jewish ceremonies – did not disagree. Thea, alert to Eva’s feelings, suggested that somebody (Ian Liebnitz, perhaps?) could say Kaddish. In the first hours after Anton’s heart attack – he and Thea had been at a New Year’s Eve party; in A&E, the family had been surrounded by bedraggled revellers in party clothes – the sisters-in-law had found their long-established affection deepening to something wordless, the terrible intimacy of grief. They would, they had decided, write the eulogy together, to be delivered by the celebrant: neither woman felt she would be strong enough to stand up and speak herself. Hanna would read some Dylan Thomas. Jakob’s recording of the Kreutzer Sonata would be played as the velvet curtains slid shut.

There was a certain satisfaction in the making of these arrangements: a tick-list efficiently completed. But none of it quite prepared Eva for how it would feel to sit in the car following her brother’s body, or to step out under the crematorium’s covered entrance, feeling Thea shrink and buckle beside her.

Hanna, emerging from the back seat with her husband, Jeremy, comes forward to take Thea’s arm. Eva presses her niece’s shoulder gratefully, and then moves among the gathered mourners, thanking them; accepting embraces, condolences, tears. Jennifer falls into step beside her; Susannah (a late baby, conceived after many fruitless rounds of IVF, and now a quiet, watchful four-year-old) is standing with her father, Henry. Beside them are Daniel and Hattie, the latter wearing a vintage fur muffler, a dark blue dress cradling the swell of her pregnancy. Next to Hattie, Jim: a slight, white-haired figure in a black coat. He has lost weight since giving up drinking; seems somehow diminished, though nobody considers this a change for the worse.

‘Eva.’ Jim steps forward, places a gloved hand on each of her arms. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She nods. ‘I know. Thank you for coming.’

The celebrant is politely ushering them inside; at the door, Eva feels a hand slip into hers. Carl. He has driven himself to the crematorium; hung back as Eva made her greetings, allowed her the air she needed, as is his way. But she is grateful for him now, for the reassuring pressure of his hand, for the tall form of him, slim and solid as a sail-ship.

‘Glad you’re here,’ she whispers.

‘Me too.’

It is, everyone will agree later, a particularly beautiful service. The florist has placed three large displays of lilies and irises around the central plinth. Ian Liebnitz says Kaddish in a fine, strong baritone. The eulogy is both informal and dignified, with a respectful smattering of jokes, and the celebrant makes no mistakes. Hanna chokes a little over the poem, but manages, after a few seconds, to gather herself, and carry on. The sound of Jakob’s violin – swooping, plangent, as if mining a deep, atavistic seam of sadness – fills the room as the curtains slowly close.

The wake is held at the house in Pimlico, where the caterers have laid out roast chicken and potato salad, Norwegian meatballs, a baked salmon. Waiters move soundlessly from room to room, offering drinks. Eva, accepting a glass of white wine, thinks of the countless times she has raised such a glass to toast her brother’s health; of his sixtieth birthday party, more than a decade ago, when he and Thea had so astutely seated her next to Carl Friedlander.

Carl had – quietly, unobtrusively – slipped into Eva’s life with a speed and ease that had taken both of them by surprise. They had started with coffee, then a concert, then a Saturday-afternoon visit to Tate Modern that had turned into drinks and dinner; a few days later, a supper at Eva’s house in Wimbledon had become an invitation to stay the night. He had taken her sailing for the weekend, out of Cowes. She had asked him to come for Christmas; he’d invited her to spend his birthday in Guildford with his daughter, Diana – a friendly, plain-speaking woman, to whom Eva had immediately warmed – and granddaughter, Holly. The following year, Carl had presented her, early in December, with an unexpected gift: flights to Vienna, three nights in a good hotel. They hid from the cold inside wood-panelled cafés, eating Sachertorte (delicious, but not a patch on Miriam’s) and drinking milky coffee. They saw
Die Fledermaus.
They found the apartment where Miriam was born – a tall, unremarkable building, its ground floor now occupied by a shoe shop – and stood on the station concourse where she had said goodbye to her mother and brother, not knowing that she would never see them again. Eva had cried, then, and Carl had held her, without self-consciousness, until she had no tears left.

He is a deeply intelligent, considerate man, and essentially light of heart: the grief Eva sensed at their first meeting has eased with time, and with this new possibility of love. Eva can’t help contrasting Carl with Jim: with the restlessness that always resided at Jim’s core. She had loved it, once, as she had loved every part of him; had seen it as the natural undertow of his need to draw, to paint, to shape the world into a form he could understand. And perhaps it was: perhaps, had life not carried them down the path it did, that unease would simply have led him towards becoming a better artist, as it had his father.

She had taken no satisfaction in the fact that Jim’s leaving her for Bella had rebounded on him, that it had not afforded him the new burst of energy (for art, for love, for life) he must have believed it would. Eva’s anger had long since faded. Jim was a part of her: he always would be. She had remembered, in considering this, a Paul Simon song that she had played over and over for months in the early eighties, as if it might contain the answer to a question she hadn’t yet formed.
You take two bodies and you twirl them into one. Their hearts and their bones. And they won’t come undone.