The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  For my mother, Jan Bild, who has lived many lives; and for my godfather, Bob Williamson, who is much missed

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1938

  Part One

  Version One: Puncture

  Version Two: Pierrot

  Version Three: Fall

  Version One: Rain

  Version Two: Mother

  Version Three: Cathedral

  Version One: Home

  Version Two: Gypsophila

  Version Three: Tide

  Version Two: Bridge

  Version Three: Face

  Version One: Pink house

  Version Two: Hostess

  Version One: Dancer

  Version Two: Algonquin

  Version Three: Algonquin

  Part Two

  Version One: Exhibition

  Version Two: Warehouse

  Version Three: Sandworms

  Version One: Miracle

  Version Two: Leaving

  Version Three: Frost

  Version One: Thirty

  Version Two: Thirty

  Version Three: Thirty

  Version Two: Invitation

  Version Three: Invitation

  Version One: Expecting

  Version Two: Montmartre

  Version Three: Interview

  Version One: Island

  Version Two: Homecoming

  Version Three: Geraniums

  Version One: Poets

  Version Two: Gingerbread

  Version Three: Afterglow

  Version One: Ground

  Version Two: Breakfast

  Version Three: Ground

  Part Three

  Version One: Bella

  Version Two: Pronto soccorso

  Version Three: Landing

  Version One: Man Ray

  Version Two: Father

  Version Three: Hamlet

  Version One: Snowball

  Version Two: Advice

  Version Three: Missing

  Version One: Sixty

  Version Two: Detour

  Version Three: Sixty

  Version One: Rescue

  Version Two: Pines

  Version Three: Beach

  Version One: Kaddish

  Version Two: Kaddish

  Version Three: Kaddish

  2014

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  More on W&N

  Copyright

  ‘Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led.’

  Anne Tyler, The Amateur Marriage

  ‘You and me making history.

  This is us.’

  Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris

  1938

  This is how it begins.

  A woman stands on a station platform, a suitcase in her right hand, in her left a yellow handkerchief, with which she is dabbing at her face. The bluish skin around her eyes is wet, and the coal-smoke catches in her throat.

  There is nobody to wave her off – she forbade them from coming, though her mother wept, as she herself is doing now – and yet still she stands on tiptoe to peer over the milling hats and fox furs. Perhaps Anton, tired of their mother’s tears, relented, lifted her down the long flights of stairs in her bath chair, dressed her hands in mittens. But there is no Anton, no Mama. The concourse is crowded with strangers.

  Miriam steps onto the train, stands blinking in the dim light of the corridor. A man with a black moustache and a violin case looks from her face to the great swelling dome of her stomach.

  ‘Where is your husband?’ he asks.

  ‘In England.’ The man regards her, his head cocked, like a bird’s. Then he leans forward, takes up her suitcase in his free hand. She opens her mouth to protest, but he is already walking ahead.

  ‘There is a spare seat in my compartment.’

  All through the long journey west, they talk. He offers her herring and pickles from a damp paper bag, and Miriam takes them, though she loathes herring, because it is almost a day since she last ate. She never says aloud that there is no husband in England, but he knows. When the train shudders to a halt on the border and the guards order all passengers to disembark, Jakob keeps her close to him as they stand shivering, snowmelt softening the loose soles of her shoes.

  ‘Your wife?’ the guard says to Jakob as he reaches for her papers.

  Jakob nods. Six months later, on a clear, bright day in Margate, the baby sleeping in the plump, upholstered arms of the rabbi’s wife, that is what Miriam becomes.

  It also begins here.

  Another woman stands in a garden, among roses, rubbing the small of her back. She wears a long blue painter’s smock, her husband’s. He is painting now, indoors, while she moves her other hand to the great swelling dome of her stomach.

  There was a movement, a quickening, but it has passed. A trug, half filled with cut flowers, lies on the ground by her feet. She takes a deep breath, drawing in the crisp apple smell of clipped grass – she hacked at the lawn earlier, in the cool of the morning, with the pruning shears. She must keep busy: she has a horror of staying still, of allowing the blankness to roll over her like a sheet. It is so soft, so comforting. She is afraid she will fall asleep beneath it, and the baby will fall with her.

  Vivian bends to retrieve the trug. As she does so, she feels something rip and tear. She stumbles, lets out a cry. Lewis does not hear her: he plays music while he’s working. Chopin mostly, Wagner sometimes, when his colours are taking a darker turn. She is on the ground, the trug upended next to her, roses strewn across the paving, red and pink, their petals crushed and browning, exuding their sickly perfume. The pain comes again and Vivian gasps; then she remembers her neighbour, Mrs Dawes, and calls out her name.

  In a moment, Mrs Dawes is grasping Vivian’s shoulders with her capable hands, lifting her to the bench by the door, in the shade. She sends the grocer’s boy, standing fish-mouthed at the front gate, scuttling off to fetch the doctor, while she runs upstairs to find Mr Taylor – such an odd little man, with his pot-belly and snub gnome’s nose: not at all how she’d thought an artist would look. But sweet with it. Charming.

  Vivian knows nothing but the waves of pain, the sudden coolness of bed sheets on her skin, the elasticity of minutes and hours, stretching out beyond limit until the doctor says, ‘Your son. Here is your son.’ Then she looks down and sees him, recognises him, winking up at her with an old man’s knowing eyes.

  VERSION ONE

  Puncture

  Cambridge, October 1958

  Later, Eva will think, If it hadn’t been for that rusty nail, Jim and I would never have met.

  The thought will slip into her mind, fully formed, with a force that will snatch her breath. She’ll lie still, watching the light slide around the curtains, considering the precise angle of her tyre on the rutted grass; the nail itself, old and crooked; the small dog, snouting the verge, failing to heed the sound of gear and tyre. She had swerved to miss him, and her tyre had met the rusty nail. How easy – how much more probable – would it have been for none of these things to happen?

  But that will be later, when her life before Jim will already seem soundless, drained of colour, as if it had hardly been a life at all. Now, at the moment of impact, there is only a faint tearing sound, and a soft exhalation of air.

  ‘Damn,’ Eva says. She presses down on the pedals, but her front tyre is jittering like a nervous horse. She brakes, dismounts, kneels to make her diagnosis. The little dog hovers penitently at a distance, barks as if in apology, then scuttles off after its owner – who is, by now, a go
od deal ahead, a departing figure in a beige trench coat.

  There is the nail, lodged above a jagged rip, at least two inches long. Eva presses the lips of the tear and air emerges in a hoarse wheeze. The tyre’s already almost flat: she’ll have to walk the bicycle back to college, and she’s already late for supervision. Professor Farley will assume she hasn’t done her essay on the Four Quartets, when actually it has kept her up for two full nights – it’s in her satchel now, neatly copied, five pages long, excluding footnotes. She is rather proud of it, was looking forward to reading it aloud, watching old Farley from the corner of her eye as he leaned forward, twitching his eyebrows in the way he does when something really interests him.

  ‘Scheiße,’ Eva says: in a situation of this gravity, only German seems to do.

  ‘Are you all right there?’

  She is still kneeling, the bicycle weighing heavily against her side. She examines the nail, wonders whether it would do more harm than good to take it out. She doesn’t look up.

  ‘Fine, thanks. It’s just a puncture.’

  The passer-by, whoever he is, is silent. She assumes he has walked on, but then his shadow – the silhouette of a man, hatless, reaching into his jacket pocket – begins to shift across the grass towards her. ‘Do let me help. I have a kit here.’

  She looks up now. The sun is dipping behind a row of trees – just a few weeks into Michaelmas term and already the days are shortening – and the light is behind him, darkening his face. His shadow, now attached to feet in scuffed brown brogues, appears grossly tall, though the man seems of average height. Pale brown hair, in need of a cut; a Penguin paperback in his free hand. Eva can just make out the title on the spine, Brave New World, and she remembers, quite suddenly, an afternoon – a wintry Sunday; her mother making Vanillekipferl in the kitchen, the sound of her father’s violin drifting up from the music room – when she had lost herself completely in Huxley’s strange, frightening vision of the future.

  She lays the bicycle down carefully on its side, gets to her feet. ‘That’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid I’ve no idea how to use one. The porter’s boy always fixes mine.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ His tone is light, but he’s frowning, searching the other pocket. ‘I may have spoken too soon, I’m afraid. I’ve no idea where it is. So sorry. I usually have it with me.’

  ‘Even when you’re not cycling?’

  ‘Yes.’ He’s more a boy than a man: about her own age, and a student; he has a college scarf – a bee’s black and yellow stripes – looped loosely round his neck. The town boys don’t sound like him, and they surely don’t carry copies of Brave New World. ‘Be prepared and all that. And I usually do. Cycle, I mean.’

  He smiles, and Eva notices that his eyes are a very deep blue, almost violet, and framed by lashes longer than her own. In a woman, the effect would be called beautiful. In a man, it is a little unsettling; she is finding it difficult to meet his gaze.

  ‘Are you German, then?’

  ‘No.’ She speaks too sharply; he looks away, embarrassed.

  ‘Oh. Sorry. Heard you swear. Scheiße.’

  ‘You speak German?’

  ‘Not really. But I can say “shit” in ten languages.’

  Eva laughs: she shouldn’t have snapped. ‘My parents are Austrian.’

  ‘Ach so.’

  ‘You do speak German!’

  ‘Nein, mein Liebling. Only a little.’

  His eyes catch hers and Eva is gripped by the curious sensation that they have met before, though his name is a blank. ‘Are you reading English? Who’s got you on to Huxley? I didn’t think they let any of us read anything more modern than Tom Jones.’

  He looks down at the paperback, shakes his head. ‘Oh no – Huxley’s just for fun. I’m reading law. But we are still allowed to read novels, you know.’

  She smiles. ‘Of course.’ She can’t, then, have seen him around the English faculty; perhaps they were introduced at a party once. David knows so many people – what was the name of that friend of his Penelope danced with at the Caius May Ball, before she took up with Gerald? He had bright blue eyes, but surely not quite like these. ‘You do look familiar. Have we met?’

  The man regards her again, his head on one side. He’s pale, very English-looking, a smattering of freckles littering his nose. She bets they gather and thicken at the first glance of sun, and that he hates it, curses his fragile northern skin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I feel as if we have, but I’m sure I’d remember your name.’

  ‘It’s Eva. Edelstein.’

  ‘Well.’ He smiles again. ‘I’d definitely remember that. I’m Jim Taylor. Second year, Clare. You at Newnham?’

  She nods. ‘Second year. And I’m about to get in serious trouble for missing a supervision, just because some idiot left a nail lying around.’

  ‘I’m meant to be in a supervision too. But to be honest, I was thinking of not going.’

  Eva eyes him appraisingly; she has little time for those students – men, mostly, and the most expensively educated men at that – who regard their degrees with lazy, self-satisfied contempt. She hadn’t taken him for one of them. ‘Is that something you make a habit of?’

  He shrugs. ‘Not really. I wasn’t feeling well. But I’m suddenly feeling a good deal better.’

  They are silent for a moment, each feeling they ought to make a move to leave, but not quite wanting to. On the path, a girl in a navy duffel coat hurries past, throws them a quick glance. Then, recognising Eva, she looks again. It’s that Girton girl, the one who played Emilia to David’s Iago at the ADC. She’d had her sights set on David: any fool could see it. But Eva doesn’t want to think about David now.

  ‘Well,’ Eva says. ‘I suppose I’d better be getting back. See if the porter’s boy can fix my bike.’

  ‘Or you could let me fix it for you. We’re much closer to Clare than Newnham. I’ll find the kit, fix your puncture, and then you can let me take you for a drink.’

  She watches his face, and it strikes Eva, with a certainty that she can’t possibly explain – she wouldn’t even want to try – that this is the moment: the moment after which nothing will ever be quite the same again. She could – should – say no, turn away, wheel her bicycle through the late-afternoon streets to the college gates, let the porter’s boy come blushing to her aid, offer him a four-bob tip. But that is not what she does. Instead, she turns her bicycle in the opposite direction and walks beside this boy, this Jim, their twin shadows nipping at their heels, merging and overlapping on the long grass.

  VERSION TWO

  Pierrot

  Cambridge, October 1958

  In the dressing-room, she says to David, ‘I almost ran over a dog with my bike.’

  David squints at her in the mirror; he is applying a thick layer of white pan-stick to his face. ‘When?’

  ‘On my way to Farley’s.’ Odd that she should have remembered it now. It was alarming: the little white dog at the edge of the path hadn’t moved away as she approached, but skittered towards her, wagging its stump of a tail. She’d prepared to swerve, but at the very last moment – barely inches from her front wheel – the dog had suddenly bounded away with a frightened yelp.

  Eva had stopped, shaken; someone called out, ‘I say – look where you’re going, won’t you?’ She turned, saw a man in a beige trench coat a few feet away, glaring at her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, though what she meant to say was, You should really keep your damn dog on a lead.

  ‘Are you all right there?’ Another man was approaching from the opposite direction: a boy, really, about her age, a college scarf looped loosely over his tweed jacket.

  ‘Quite all right, thank you,’ she said primly. Their eyes met briefly as she remounted – his an uncommonly dark blue, framed by long, girlish lashes – and for a second she was sure she knew him, so sure that she opened her mouth to frame a greeting. But then, just as quickly, she doubted herself, said nothing, and pe
dalled on. As soon as she arrived at Professor Farley’s rooms and began to read out her essay on the Four Quartets, the whole thing slipped from her mind.

  ‘Oh, Eva,’ David says now. ‘You do get yourself into the most absurd situations.’

  ‘Do I?’ She frowns, feeling the distance between his version of her – disorganised, endearingly scatty – and her own. ‘It wasn’t my fault. The stupid dog ran right at me.’

  But he isn’t listening: he’s staring hard at his reflection, blending the make-up down onto his neck. The effect is both clownish and melancholy, like one of those French Pierrots.

  ‘Here,’ she says, ‘you’ve missed a bit.’ She leans forward, rubs at his chin with her hand.

  ‘Don’t,’ he says sharply, and she moves her hand away.

  ‘Katz.’ Gerald Smith is at the door, dressed, like David, in a long white robe, his face unevenly smeared with white. ‘Cast warm-up. Oh, hello, Eva. You wouldn’t go and find Pen, would you? She’s hanging around out front.’