The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

‘Well. About work. Have you been doing any writing?’

  ‘What do you think? I’m hardly sitting around twiddling my thumbs.’ Eva is snappier than she meant to be; Penelope looks away, her face reddening again – she has always worn her emotions close to the surface. But neither is she easily deterred. ‘You had a baby, Eva. It’s not a prison sentence. You have your mother here – Jakob, Anton, David, when he’s around. David’s parents. You could easily take on some work. Or find time to write. After all, I’ll know exactly who to show your novel to soon, won’t I?’

  They are silent again. Eva, through her tiredness, knows that Penelope is right. She should be writing: she has half a novel upstairs, in notebooks, hidden away under their bed, not to mention her stuttering, lifeless attempts at short stories. But Eva’s desire to write – the need to shape the world into a form she can understand, an impulse that had always seemed as natural as breathing – seems to have almost entirely deserted her since that terrible night when they had returned from Ely – she and Jim – and she had allowed him no explanation but that letter; had left it at his porters’ lodge like the coward she was.

  Jim hadn’t tried to find her. Eva reminded herself that this was what she’d planned – that she’d presented him with a fait accompli because she hadn’t wanted Jim to try to change her mind – but still, in the deepest part of her, she’d carried some small flicker of hope.

  She had withdrawn from Newnham immediately. Eva was still unable to shift from her mind the expression her director of studies had worn as they talked – sympathy tempered by discomfort and the faint trace of distaste – as she delivered the college’s official decision of rustication. Professor Jean McMaster was a brisk, plain woman, of the sort who would once have been called a bluestocking – and perhaps, in some quarters of the university, still was. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you, Eva,’ she had said. ‘I can only hope that the rules will one day come into line with life as it is actually lived, not as men wish women to live it – but I know that is of no comfort to you now.’

  The wedding took place a few weeks later, in a back room at St Pancras Town Hall. It was a small, hushed affair, though Jakob and Miriam did their best to lighten the mood, making determined conversation with Abraham and Judith Katz: the former reciprocally jovial, the latter thin-lipped, clasping her new daughter-in-law in only the briefest of embraces.

  Then, in January, Eva and David had moved back to Cambridge, into the married accommodation provided by King’s: a damp, sour-smelling flat on Mill Road, which Eva did her best to make comfortable – sewing cushion covers, filling the rooms with books – but which remained resolutely dark, musty and cold.

  Through much of that endless Fenland winter, Eva had stayed indoors, as her stomach swelled, and David came home later and later in the evenings – there was always a play, a reading, a party. She couldn’t find a job. Soon after their return to the city, she walked into a bookshop, a café, asking for casual shifts, but each time the owner had looked her over, and then given her the same answer: ‘Not in your condition.’

  And so she tried to write. She lacked the energy to return to the novel she had started over the summer – her notebooks remained where she had put them, under the bed – but she began a short story, then another, only to find that she couldn’t seem to get past the third or fourth paragraph. The characters Eva had grown so used to observing in her mind – shaping their thoughts, their physical appearance, their turns of phrase until she quite often struggled to remind herself that they weren’t actually flesh and blood – no longer felt real to her; they had become fleeting, insubstantial. After a few weeks, Eva had given up trying to chase after them; and then there was nothing for her to do but read, listen to the wireless, work through the recipes in the Elizabeth David book her mother had given her (the mutton carbonade was a success; the dauphinoise potatoes, less so), and wait for the coming of her child.

  No, she had not looked for Jim, and she worked as hard as she could not to think of him; and then one day, there he was. It was March, a few days before her twentieth birthday; she was six months pregnant. The sun was out for the first time in what seemed like years: Eva had wanted to get out, to feel its warmth on her face. She had walked into town, forcing herself to pass along King’s Parade, past the Senate House, from which she would never graduate, admiring the play of light on stone. At Heffers bookshop on Petty Cury, Eva paused – she was desperate for something new to read – and then she saw him, pushing open the door, carrying two books in a paper bag, wearing that same tweed jacket, that same college scarf. Eva hardly dared breathe. She stood still, hoping he wouldn’t notice her; but hoping also that he wouldn’t walk away without looking back.

  He did look back. Eva’s heart slipped into her mouth, and she had watched a curious expression cross his face: it was as if he were about to smile, but then remembered, and thought better of it. Jim had turned away, then, and she had watched his back as he walked the short distance to Sidney Street, and disappeared.

  She saw him a few more times, after that – passing the flat on his bicycle one day; on Market Square in June the following year, on David’s graduation day, as she stood beside her in-laws with Rebecca in her arms. And then David and Eva had packed their things into boxes and driven to London, to her parents’ empty flat (she had drawn the line at moving in with the Katzes, insisting that she would need her mother’s help with the baby) and that had been that: no chance of seeing Jim again, no chance at all.

  The next day, unpacking, Eva had again placed her notebooks under their bed; and that is where they have stayed ever since.

  ‘I did have a thought,’ Penelope says. Eva recognises that voice: it is the one Penelope uses on Gerald when suggesting something she suspects he might not want to do.

  Eva leans forward, pours the last of the tea. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Well. Publishers always need readers, don’t they? People to tell them which manuscripts to take on, and which to reject.’

  Eva hands her a cup.

  ‘Thank you.’ Penelope takes another biscuit from the plate. ‘So perhaps I could put in a good word for you at Penguin. Tell them how brilliant you are, how nobody knows more about books than you.’

  Eva is touched, despite herself: it seems a long time, suddenly, since she has thought of herself as brilliant at anything other than quieting her daughter, reading her moods, mashing last night’s leftovers into something resembling a meal. ‘Nobody other than you, you mean.’

  Penelope smiles, relieved. ‘Shall I, then? Mention you?’

  At the window, Rebecca is whispering soft sounds into her doll’s ear. Eva thinks of her mother, of their own whispered confidences, exchanged on this sofa a few weeks ago, when they had finally rocked Rebecca back to sleep.

  ‘You really must find something to do with your time besides being her mother, darling,’ Miriam had said. ‘Motherhood is wonderful – important – but if you simply draw down the shutters on your creative life, you’ll end up resenting her.’

  Eva – delirious with lack of sleep – had looked down at her daughter, her eyes closed, her expression now absolutely serene. ‘Is that how you felt when you fell pregnant? When you had to leave the conservatoire?’

  Miriam had been silent for a moment. ‘Perhaps at first, a little. But then, when he left me – when we understood what was really happening in Vienna – it was all about getting out, getting away. And once I had you – and Anton, of course – you were both the centre of my life. But still, when I could, I returned to singing.’

  Eva had lain back, closed her eyes; she could see Judith Katz, presiding over the table at the last Friday-night meal (they had arrived late: Rebecca had been fussing as Eva put her to bed), and reminding her son and daughter-in-law that as it was their money – hers and Abraham’s – that was facilitating their very comfortable life, the least Eva and David might do was show them the respect of arriving for Shabbat dinner on time.

  Yes, Eva thinks now
, a little money of my own would make all the difference.

  She reaches across to Penelope, takes her hand. ‘Thanks, Pen. It would be wonderful if you could.’

  VERSION TWO

  Bridge

  Bristol, September 1961

  On Fridays, the clerks have a strict arrangement to meet in the pub after work.

  Today, Jim is a little later leaving than the others: he has stayed behind to tie up one of the many loose ends that sometimes, in his bleaker moments, he imagines as hundreds of thick, coarse threads, vine-like, wrapping themselves around him.

  These excursions to the pub, he thinks as he walks the short journey from the office, are just another example of his colleagues’ unwavering devotion to routine. Nine o’clock sharp – clerks arrive. Half past nine – clerks enter morning meeting. One o’clock – clerks exit to eat toasted cheese sandwiches at the corner café. Two o’clock – clerks return to desks. Five o’clock on Fridays – clerks repair to the White Lion to get tipsy on warm beer and try their luck with the barmaid, Louise.

  Here they are now, bunched around an outside table. The week has been unseasonably warm, and the suspension bridge stands high and beautiful behind them, the lowering sun gilding the ironwork. The lads, their bosses call them, though there is nothing particularly laddish about these men, who are mostly university-educated, with soft hands and precision-parted hair: young men already beginning to resemble their fathers. At their desks, they trade jokes from Beyond Our Ken, or school-dormitory smut – but outside, confronted by other, more vigorous working men, their easy bonhomie seems to wither. There is only one – Peter Hartford: not a graduate, but the son of a stevedore, putting himself through his five-year articles by working Saturdays as a postman – whom Jim would tentatively call a friend.

  He finds Peter inside, at the bar. Louise is leaning towards him, her large breasts splayed over the bar-top, her frosted-pink mouth curved into a smile. Seeing Jim, she snaps sharply back, readopts her customary froideur. Peter turns, smiles at him. ‘What can I get you?’

  They take their pints out onto the terrace, find a table at a discreet distance from the other clerks.

  ‘Here’s to another week at the coalface.’ Peter lifts his glass to meet Jim’s. He is short, stocky, with reddish hair and a broad, guileless face, the first in five generations not to follow his father onto the docks. Cleverer than any of us, Jim thinks, and he feels a rush of affection for him, decides anew not to confide too honestly, not to admit how deeply he despises the profession that Peter has worked so hard to enter, while he, Jim, has sleepwalked into it, pushed by … What? Fear, he supposes: fear and the centrifugal force of his mother’s illness.

  After graduation, he had hitchhiked to France with Sweeting, spent a happy fortnight pottering around villages and vineyards, painting watercolours – bare-legged girls drinking citron pressé at a pavement café; a cornfield, yellow-tipped, shimmering – with an energy he hadn’t felt in years. He had returned resolved to inform his mother that he’d be applying to art school – to the Slade – but he had arrived in Bristol to discover that she was back in hospital. Her doctor would release her only on the condition that someone at home take charge of her day-to-day care. ‘She mustn’t be left alone, Mr Taylor,’ the doctor had said. ‘Not until we can be sure she’s more stable, at any rate. Will you be living with her?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Jim replied, watching his plans slip away into the distance, like a foreign landscape receding through the window of a train.

  But then there was the matter of what he would do. In her more lucid moments, Vivian was insistent that he shouldn’t abandon the law, and Jim himself could think of no other career that might keep him at home; but he still had his part-two exams to take, and there was no law school in Bristol. In the end, his aunt Patsy had come to the rescue: she’d move in with Vivian, leaving his uncle John to fend for himself in Budleigh Salterton, while Jim went off to Guildford to take his exams; then go home when Jim returned for the holidays. In a few weeks, it had all been arranged. Arndale & Thompson – the first firm of Bristol solicitors Jim found listed in the phone book – accepted him for his articles. After six months in Guildford – he was billeted with a widower named Sid Stanley, a rather sad, lonely figure, with whom Jim spent most of his evenings watching television sitcoms – he was back in Bristol, a fully fledged articled clerk, living with his mother.

  It is not how Jim ever thought things would turn out – even when he allowed Vivian to persuade him to apply to Cambridge to study law. (He’d wanted to put down history of art, but there’d been a row, and he’d changed to law in a fit of pique, hardly thinking he’d get in; but it had turned out that, despite himself, he had an aptitude for the law’s quiet logic, for the measured apportioning of right and wrong.) Perhaps, he thinks, his life would look quite different now if he’d met a woman at university – someone with whom he wished to start a life of his own. And there have been some, since Veronica – in his final term, he was briefly taken with an extremely pretty first-year history student named Angela Smith, but she’d broken it off, citing some old boyfriend from school – but no one about whom he has felt remotely serious.

  ‘It’s not such a bad place, really, is it?’ Jim says aloud. ‘Even old Croggan seems to be warming to me a bit.’

  Peter nods. ‘I find it’s best to avoid him until early afternoon – he’s usually just back from lunch then, and half-cut on port.’

  They exchange weak smiles, sip their pints. Jim, facing the bridge, admires its great struts and curves, the way it seems to thrust out organically from the thick green foliage on either bank. Peter, like most of Bristol’s natives, seems not even to notice it, but Jim is continually struck by the way Brunel’s great construction hangs above the Avon like a huge, still bird, its grey wings outstretched.

  The first time they came to the White Lion, Peter had told him a story: a factory girl, jilted by her lover, had thrown herself from the parapet and floated gently down to safety, her wide Victorian skirts billowing into a parachute. ‘She lived to eighty-five,’ Peter said. ‘A legend in her own lifetime.’

  Jim had shivered, thinking of the nights – how many had there been since he’d moved back to Bristol: three? four? – when he had run out onto the Clifton streets after his mother. Vivian was usually barefoot, her raincoat loosely belted over her nightdress. Once, she had already stepped out onto the parapet before he reached her. He had caught her by the collar like a cat, tried not to look down at the deep, silted darkness below.

  Now, to dispel the memory, Jim asks Peter what plans he has for the weekend. ‘Not much. Working tomorrow, of course. I might take Sheila out on Sunday. Clevedon, maybe, if it’s still nice. Ice cream, stroll on the pier. All that jazz.’

  Jim has met Sheila once, at Peter’s birthday party: she is wide-hipped, tall (taller than Peter, in fact, though neither of them seems to mind), with a tumble of blonde curls and a low, infectious cackle. They are newly married, with a little house in Bedminster, a few streets away from where they both grew up. ‘That’s right,’ Peter had said proudly when he introduced her to Jim, ‘I really did fall for the girl next door. How lucky was I that she fell for me too?’

  ‘What about you?’ Peter says now, eyeing Jim carefully over his pint glass. ‘Up to anything? How are … well, things?’

  Jim has sketched out the bare framework of his situation for Peter: his mother’s illness; his decision – if Jim could call it that, for it had certainly not felt like one – to forget art school, forget London, and stay here with her.

  ‘All right,’ he says.

  It’s true, in relative terms: Vivian is back on an upswing. Last night, she woke him at three a.m., playing Sinatra at full volume in the living-room. ‘Dance with me, Lewis,’ she said, her eyes unnaturally bright. And so Jim had danced with her, for a song or two, because he hadn’t the heart to tell her for the millionth time that he was not his father, that his father was long gone.

  ‘Find
time to do some painting this weekend, will you?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Jim has set up his easel in a corner of his bedroom; the light isn’t good, and he often wakes with a headache from the turps, but at least he can turn the key when he goes out. A month or so ago, when he forgot to lock the room, he came back to find great sweeps of paint smeared across the blank canvas he had left there, and the half-empty tubes bleeding stickily onto the carpet. ‘Hope so.’

  They are quiet then, enjoying the silence of men happy to leave the finer details of their feelings between parentheses. Soon their glasses are empty; another of the clerks, passing on his way to the bar, asks if they’d like another drink. Both say yes: Peter because he feels Jim could use the company, and Jim because it is a warm Friday evening, already carrying the sweet, resiny scents of autumn, and he wants to stay here, in the fading light, for as long as he can.

  VERSION THREE

  Face

  Bristol, July 1961

  He sees her face on a Sunday afternoon.

  He is out walking, carrying his sketchbook and pencils in his satchel: his aunt Patsy and uncle John have come up to see his mother, so he has the day entirely to himself. He is thinking of going down to the docks, sketching the lowered heads of the cranes, the still bulk of the William Sloan steamer, just in from Glasgow. Perhaps later he will see a film, or drive over to Richard and Hannah’s for dinner: he has an open invitation to eat with them in Long Ashton whenever he likes. There will be roast chicken, salad from the garden, the cat curled on Hannah’s lap. Richard will open a good bottle of wine, and they’ll play records, and talk about art, and, for a while, he’ll feel something akin to happiness: he’ll forget about his mother and her vast, insufferable neediness; about the void that still lies at the very heart of him. All this Jim is thinking, idly, pleasurably – and then he sees her. Eva.