The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  They start walking, huddled down into their scarves, towards the looming spires: two of them, square like castle keeps, their walls scarred, pockmarked, catching the winter light. Suddenly Jim stops, turns to her, his face reddening. ‘You don’t mind, do you? Going in? I didn’t even think.’

  She smiles. ‘Of course I don’t mind. As long as God doesn’t.’

  It’s the space that strikes Eva first: the great pillars reaching up through the vastness to the distant, vaulted roof. Beneath their feet is a mosaic of polished tiles – ‘A labyrinth,’ Jim says, ‘with God at the centre’ – and ahead, under huge panes of coloured glass, is a golden screen, beneath which the altar sits, covered with a fine white cloth. They walk slowly along the nave, pausing to gaze up at another extraordinary ceiling, its ribbed panels painted red, green and gold. At its centre is a pointed star that reminds Eva of the one embroidered into her mother’s Shabbat tablecloth – though that has six arms, and this (she counts them silently) has eight.

  ‘The octagon.’ Jim is almost whispering. Eva watches the quick, animated movements of his face, and loves him; is filled with a love for him so overwhelming she can hardly breathe. How, she thinks, am I to leave him? And yet she must; sleepless in her college room, the building creaking and whispering in the night, she has allowed herself hope: imagined telling him, watching his expression change, and then resolve itself. It doesn’t matter, he says – this imaginary Jim – and holds her close. Nothing matters, Eva, as long as we’re together. It is a waking dream, but she knows it could become real, that this Jim standing here before her, staring up at the distant reaches of the roof (how she would love to reach out and cup his chin with her hand, tilt his face down to meet her lips) could really say it. And that is why – as morning creeps over the city, and the college begins to stir into life – she has resolved over and over again not to give him the opportunity, not to permit the man she loves, with his talent, his grand plans – the man already bearing the weight of his mother’s illness – to be trapped by a situation that is not of his making. Father to another man’s child: Jim would say he could do it, and he would do it well; but she will not allow him to make that sacrifice.

  A few nights ago, Eva had sat on her bed in Newnham with Penelope, her head resting on her shoulder; and even her dearest friend hadn’t tried to make her change her mind.

  ‘And what if David refuses?’ Pen had asked. ‘What will we do then?’

  How grateful Eva had been for that ‘we’. ‘He won’t refuse, Pen. And if he does – well. I’ll find a way.’

  ‘We’ll find a way,’ Penelope had corrected her, and Eva had allowed the promise to stand, though she knew the burden was hers – hers and David’s – and no one could carry it for her. Not Penelope, not her parents. She believed Miriam and Jakob would understand – how could they not, given their own history? – and yet she couldn’t bear the idea of returning to her old room in Highgate, her studies abandoned, pregnant and alone.

  In her notebook, she wrote, I chose Jim, and I can’t bear to leave him. But the choice is no longer only mine to make.

  Now, in the cathedral, Jim is still speaking. ‘The monks built it after the original nave pillars collapsed one night. They thought there’d been an earthquake. It must have been their way of proving that the disaster hadn’t defeated them.’

  Eva nods. She doesn’t know how to reply, how to convey the feeling welling inside her: love, yes, but with it sadness – not just for the pain of parting, but for the people they have lost. His father, splayed and broken on the bottom step. Her Oma and Opa, on both sides, and all her aunts and uncles and cousins, herded onto trains, thirsty and blinking, knowing nothing of where they were going – only suspecting, fearing, but still carrying hope. There must have been hope, surely, right until the very last moment, when they knew that there was nothing to be done.

  As if sensing what she is thinking, Jim squeezes her hand. ‘Let’s light a candle.’

  There is a stand beside the West Door: a dozen tapers glowing in the darkness. Others are stacked underneath, below a slot for coins. Eva takes a fistful of pennies from her purse and drops them in, picks a candle for each Oma, each Opa, and then lights them, fitting one after another firmly into a metal base. Jim chooses only one, for his father, Lewis, and then they stand and watch the wicks take light, his rough painter’s hand in hers. She would like to cry, but tears are inadequate to express all that this means: to be here with him, remembering, hoping, when tomorrow she will be gone.

  They eat thin vegetable soup in the refectory, then walk slowly back across town. The sun is fading, the wind whipping their hair; the warmth of the bus is a relief. Inside, Eva removes her shoes, thaws her freezing feet over the radiator underneath her seat. She isn’t intending to fall asleep, but her head quickly lolls back against the headrest, and Jim lets the weight of it fall against his shoulder. In Cambridge, he wakes her gently. ‘We’re here, Eva. You slept all the way.’

  It is only then, as they get off the bus, that Eva tells Jim she is sorry: she can’t spend the evening with him; there is something she has to do. Jim protests: after tomorrow, he says, they won’t see each other for four whole weeks. Eva says she knows. She really is sorry. Then she leans forward, kisses him, and turns and hurries away, though Jim is calling her, and it is all she can do to lift her heavy feet.

  She doesn’t stop until she reaches King’s Parade. The tall towers of King’s gatehouse are throwing their long, angular shadows across the cobblestones. Eva steadies herself against a lamppost, ignoring the curious stares of the men now stepping briskly past her in their black gowns. It is almost time for hall. She will be missing her own dinner at Newnham, but she doesn’t care. She can’t imagine being hungry for anything ever again.

  Inside, the porter doesn’t bother to hide his disapproval. ‘It’s dinner time, miss. Mr Katz will be going in.’

  ‘Please,’ she says again. ‘It really is very important that I see him now.’

  ‘Eva, what is it?’ David says in an urgent whisper a few minutes later. ‘Hall’s just about to start.’ Then, watching her face, his expression softens. She thinks of how he had looked when she’d told him it was over between them, how he had, in that moment, seemed utterly diminished. But I chose you, he’d said, and she’d had nothing to say but, I’m sorry. He shrugs off his gown, folds it over his arm. ‘All right. Come on. We’ll get something at the Eagle.’

  Later, when the talking is over, when the plans have been made, Eva returns to her room in Newnham, and writes a letter. She takes her bicycle from the shed, cycles through the dark streets to Clare College, and asks another porter – this one older, kindlier, smiling at the television when she comes in, and then offering Eva the same smile – to place it in Jim Taylor’s pigeonhole.

  Then Eva hurries away, not wanting to look back in case she sees him. Not wanting to look back on everything that might have been.

  VERSION ONE

  Home

  London, August 1960

  On the night of Eva and Jim’s return from honeymoon, Jakob and Miriam Edelstein serve drinks in the garden.

  It is the softest of English summer evenings: the last rays of sun still warming the terrace, the air placid, rich with the smell of honeysuckle and damp earth. Jim, sipping his whisky soda, is still sleepy, his head cottony and thick – but pleasantly so, his hand resting lightly on Eva’s arm. She is smiling, tanned. Her skin is still, to his mind, carrying the heat of the island; the whitewashed veranda where they breakfasted on melon and yoghurt; the harbour-side where they sat with glasses of retsina as evening came.

  ‘Well,’ Miriam says, ‘we must send you to Greece again. You both look so well.’

  She is sitting to Eva’s left, legs slender and bare beneath her summer dress. They are unmistakably mother and daughter: both so small and quick, birdlike – even their voices are similar, low and fluting, though Miriam’s still bears the faint rough edges of her Austrian accent. Oddly, her singing voice
– she was training at the conservatoire in Vienna when she fell pregnant with Eva – is a good octave higher: a bright soprano, clean and pure as pared bone.

  Anton takes after his father: they are both tall, large-limbed, their movements slow, deliberate. He is nineteen, and has poured himself a whisky to toast his sister and brother-in-law – which he does now, lifting his glass to Jim’s. ‘Welcome home.’

  Home, Jim thinks. We live here too. For they do, at least for now: the Edelsteins have cleared out the three-roomed flat – a bedroom, sitting-room with kitchenette and tiny bathroom – that spans the top floor of their wide, gracious house. It had been occupied, until his death last year, by Herr Fischler, a distant cousin of Jakob’s from Vienna. Since then, it has become a repository for boxes of books, the overspill from the rest of the house, which, like its owners, is given over to music and reading above all other pleasures. Each room is lined with bookcases, and the front room with shelves of sheet music, presided over by a grand piano on which Anton grudgingly, and infrequently, practises his scales. (Eva, too, spent time at the piano as a girl, but proved so prodigiously untalented that the family has acknowledged her as a lost cause.) Over the mahogany bannisters hang sepia portraits of unspecified Edelstein relatives, high-collared, unsmiling. These photographs are precious less for their quality than for the difficult journey they made to London, after the war, sent by the kind Catholic friend to whom Jakob’s father had, after Kristallnacht, entrusted those treasures that remained.

  Eva – his wife; how new and wonderful that word is – takes Jim’s hand. At first, when Jakob had suggested they move into the empty flat – they were having lunch at the University Arms, celebrating both Eva’s twenty-first birthday and their engagement – Jim had been unsure. In his mind, he’d envisaged a place of their own, somewhere they could shut out the world. He had been offered a place at the Slade from September: with Eva’s support, he had finally resolved to abandon the law. Eva went with him to Bristol to break the news to his mother, who cried, a little; but Eva poured the tea, and quickly, cleverly, distracted Vivian with talk of other things, and Jim allowed himself to believe that the weight of his mother’s disappointment might just be bearable after all. Several weeks of uncertainty followed, in which Jim was unsure whether the Ministry of Labour would allow him to defer his blasted national service again; the letter confirming that he was for ever off the hook finally arrived, to his great relief, in the same week as his last examination.

  Eva, meanwhile, went down to London to interview for a job on the Daily Courier. ‘It’s really just dogsbodying on the women’s page,’ she reported on her return. ‘Nothing remotely glamorous.’ But Jim knew perfectly well how much the job meant to her. When the offer came through – it was just a few days after he’d had his own letter from the ministry – they climbed through the window of Jim’s room in Old Court and stood together on the balustrade, looking out across the manicured sweep of lawn, at the punts idling downriver, drinking syrupy port (Jim’s prize for winning a college art competition last term) straight from the bottle.

  ‘To the future,’ Jim said, and Eva laughed and kissed him. He seemed to see that future stretching out before them – their wedding, his art, her writing, the wonderful fact that he would go to sleep each night with Eva beside him – and he felt a rush of happiness so true, so overwhelming, that he had to clutch the stone balustrade with his hand to steady himself. And then one of the porters, crossing the lawn below in his bowler hat, looked up and saw them – ‘You there, get down at once’ – and they waved at him, hand in hand: young, untouchable, free.

  Jim’s vision of the future did not encompass living with the Edelsteins: he had pictured a flat near Hampstead Heath – they’d taken walks there over the summer holiday – with a wide bay window for his easel, a box room in which Eva could write. But Eva was more pragmatic. With only Jim’s tiny stipend from the Slade, and the pittance she’d be getting at the Daily Courier – at least at first – they’d be close to penniless. ‘Better to be poor and warm with Mama and Papa,’ she said, ‘than poor and shivering in some damp basement flat, no?’

  Jim smiled. ‘That sounds rather tempting, actually. We’d have to huddle together for warmth.’ Eva smiled back at him, and stroked his face; but he knew the decision was already made.

  And anyway, Jim thinks now, looking around at his wife’s family, I have been lucky. The Edelsteins have welcomed him with an easy, unforced generosity. Jakob, a first violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra, is a gentle, mild-mannered man, almost shy. On their first meeting, Jim had, on several occasions, caught Jakob watching him with a rather searching expression – he was, Jim supposed, sizing him up, and as he has never seen that expression again since, Jim can only assume that Jakob found in his favour. Anton was delighted to discover, at the wedding, that Jim’s cousin Toby had been in Anton’s own year at school – a fellow prefect, in fact, and much admired member of the first eleven. And Miriam has been kind to Jim from the first. If she or Jakob feel any residue of disappointment about the fact Eva has married outside the faith, they keep it well hidden. They seemed thoroughly happy with Jim and Eva’s plans for a registry-office wedding (Eva in white silk, carrying a posy of blue anemones; a skiffle band playing in the hall downstairs); at no point did Jim feel they’d have preferred to have seen their daughter married in synagogue.

  Not long after their engagement – still giddy on his proposal, and her acceptance – Jim had, during one of their whispered, early morning conversations, offered to convert; he had done so seriously, but Eva had laughed, gently, and told him not to even think about it. ‘Mama and Papa are above all that,’ she had said, her warm body tucked inside the crook of his arm. ‘That tribalism, I mean. They saw where it could lead.’

  By eight o’clock, it is still warm; the sky over Highgate is streaked with pink, the rising moon a faint disc on the horizon. They decide to eat outside – ‘Seems a shame,’ Miriam says, ‘to be stuck in the stuffy old dining-room’ – and Jim helps to carry out glasses, cutlery, candles. Miriam brings through plates of cold chicken, herring in dill sauce (Jakob’s favourite), potato salad and fat tomatoes soused in the rough local olive oil Eva has brought home from Greece. Jakob pours the wine, and as they eat and drink, Jim is suffused with a heady blend of tiredness and warmth and the marvellous nearness of Eva, his wife, the woman who has chosen him above all others, with whom he has lain for most of two full weeks in a tangle of limbs, her warm, salty taste lingering on his tongue.

  ‘Some letters came for you both,’ Miriam says. ‘I put them in the flat, on the mantelpiece. Did you see them?’

  Eva shakes her head. ‘Not yet, Mama. We went straight to sleep. We’ll read them later.’

  Miriam looks at Jim. ‘One of them had a Bristol postmark. From your mother?’

  Jim nods, and looks away. Vivian went back into hospital just a few weeks before their wedding, and even Eva, then, was unable to dissuade him that there could be no connection with his decision to abandon the law. The last time he saw his mother was just after finals. He’d gone straight from Cambridge to the Edelsteins’, was occupying the flat upstairs while Eva slept in her girlhood room. One bright Saturday, he borrowed the Edelsteins’ Morris Minor and drove west to Bristol, to the hospital. Vivian was sitting alone, before a window that looked out over a tall thicket of trees. He had said her name, over and over, but she did not turn round.

  Jakob, sensing Jim’s discomfiture, speaks for him. ‘They’ll have time to read them later, Miriam. Let them settle in first, eh?’ Husband and wife exchange glances, and Miriam gives a quick nod, wipes her lips with her napkin.

  ‘So which day is it that you start at the Slade, Jim? Are you looking forward to it?’

  Later, lying together in the flat, Eva whispers into his ear, ‘Let’s go and see your mother, Jim, next weekend. We can take some wedding photographs. Make her feel as if she was there.’

  He says, ‘Yes, maybe we should,’ and holds her c
loser. He falls into a deep, blackout sleep, dreaming that he is back on the night train, speeding through Italy, the fields dark beyond the half-open window, and his mother sleeping in the next compartment. Her head is lolling back against the seat, and he is watching her through the glass partition, unable to reach her, unwilling to try.

  VERSION TWO

  Gypsophila

  London, August 1960

  Eva Maria Edelstein and David Abraham Katz are married on a Sunday at the Central Synagogue on Hallam Street, with a reception afterwards at the Savoy.

  The bride wears a full, stiff-skirted dress with a low sweetheart neckline, purchased from Selfridges at considerable expense by her mother-in-law, Judith Katz, and carries a bouquet of pink tea-roses and gypsophila. Later, all the guests will comment on how beautiful she looked – though truthfully, it will be the face of the groom they see. So handsome, his light grey suit so well cut, his hair perfectly coiffed. ‘I hardly knew my own nephew,’ one of the Katz aunts will say at the reception to anyone who will listen. ‘I thought it was Rock Hudson himself.’

  It is a sweltering day: the same aunt faints inside the synagogue during the ceremonial drinking of the wine, causing a short, anxious pause in proceedings, but is quickly revived with a lavender-scented handkerchief produced from her younger sister’s handbag. Afterwards, the guests line up on the steps in the heat, carrying handfuls of pink and white rice paper. The couple emerge, blinking, into the light, laughing as the confetti lands on their hair, their eyelids, their shoulders, and the photographer clicks his shutter over and over again.

  At the Savoy, there are drinks and dancing, and a great deal of rich food. Anton Edelstein and his schoolfriend Ian Liebnitz drink too much rum punch, and are discreetly sick in an ornamental urn. After the speeches, Miriam Edelstein sings a Schubert lied, accompanied by Jakob on piano. Privately, Judith Katz considers this a little de trop; but she smiles and claps politely, and is careful to hide any trace of disapproval as the wedding party takes to the dance floor for the hora, and Eva and David are lifted high on silver chairs, each clinging to the end of a white silk handkerchief.