In that moment, Jim felt something shift in him: he resolved to care a little less. Whether his mother has noticed the change, he can’t say – and yet things have started to improve. Her doctor has prescribed a new medication: the high dosage leaves Vivian puffy-eyed and lethargic, but it seems to be evening out her extremes, and she has begun to sleep through the night. And anything is better, surely, than hospital, than ECT. (Jim can remember, quite vividly, going to visit her that first time, after his father’s death. The cool white corridors. The kindly nurse who had poured his orange squash into a plastic cup. The terrible, uncomprehending blankness of his mother’s face.)
His sleeplessness is not aided by the fact that he has begun painting again: late at night, usually; Bob Dylan or Duke Ellington on the record player, turned down low. His time in New York seems to have reinvigorated him. The other lawyers there were fast-talking, obsessed with money, cars, drink. Jim had nothing in common with them; he had spent most of his time at MoMA – the British sculptor Richard Salles, whose work Jim had seen before in Bristol, had a retrospective there; he went along, intrigued, and returned twice more, drinking in the swoop and thrust of bronze, granite, poured concrete. Or he wandered the streets of the Village, peering into gallery windows, walking through open doorways and finding himself part of some spontaneous ‘happening’. Once, in a basement gallery on Christopher Street, he stood among a small, solemn crowd as a young woman removed her clothes and began, slowly and reverently, to cover herself in liquid clay.
At first, painting in his room in the Bristol flat (how he hates the place, longs to get away; but while her night-time escapades continue, Jim knows how dangerous it would be for Vivian to be left alone), he feared his mother’s reaction; he remembered, too well, the times he’d come home from the office to find his canvases spoiled, his oil paints ruined. But she has not reacted with the vitriol he was expecting. Last weekend, she even came into his room, sat on his bed and watched him working, her legs curled under her like a girl’s. He let her stay, though he hates an audience. After a while, she said, ‘You’re good, you know, darling. You’ll never be as good as your father. But you’re really not bad at all.’
Warehouse 59 is easy to spot: someone has painted flowers over the rough brick, sent them spilling from the window frames, over the chipped pediments. Inside is a large open space, divided by an iron staircase. The walls are lined with paintings, the stone floor crowded with sculptures and installations: to Jim’s right is an old supermarket trolley, twisted and soldered into an animalistic skeleton; to his left, a mound of rubble on a plinth.
Jim sees right away that most of the art is second-rate – though as soon as the thought has formed, his confidence deserts him: who is he to judge, after all? A solicitor, a Sunday painter. The son of a great artist, but a man too fearful, too tied to the ebb and flow of his mother’s illness, to lay any claim to the word ‘artist’ himself.
He takes a beer from a trestle table at one end of the room, in exchange for a few coins, and begins a slow circuit of the room, aware that he recognises no one: he had seen the flyer in the White Lion, left Peter and the others finishing their first round. He asked Peter to come, but Sheila was expecting him for dinner, and it wasn’t quite his thing.
Jim can’t deny that he is jealous, sometimes, of his friend’s marriage: of their easy intimacy; of the instinctive protectiveness, the love, that he senses in Peter every time his wife’s name is mentioned. There have been women, of course – in New York, a secretary named Chiara, Italian-American, with a wide, generous body; Diane, a student actress, pale-haired, thin; several others in Bristol, including, most recently, a primary-school teacher named Annie. They have spent several months circling each other, neither quite ready to show their hand, though Jim knows, with what is surely insufferable arrogance but also nothing less than the truth, that Annie is falling for him, and that he doesn’t, won’t ever, feel the same. Sometimes, when he looks at her, it is as if he is looking at someone else: a woman with a small, intelligent face, dark eyes, skin lightly tanned, as if spun under a glaze.
Eva. Eva Katz – or should that be Curtis now? Married to the man they’re calling the next great British actor, heir to Olivier. Jim had spoken to her at the Algonquin for what, half an hour, before she rushed away? He had asked someone – that pretty girl in the white dress – where Eva was going; looking at him curiously, she had told him that Eva’s daughter was unwell. At the mention of the child, Jim had felt shame wash over him – what kind of man was he to sit exchanging intimacies with another man’s wife, some poor sick child’s mother? And yet he had done so, and her face has stayed with him; and her words. Are you still painting? … No … Well, Jim Taylor, Lewis Taylor’s son, I’d say you’d better get back to it.
One painting holds his attention more than the rest. It is that most unfashionable of things, a seascape – the canvas layered in shades of blue and grey; the merging wash of sky and sea. Jim stands in front of it, trying to place the view: there is a crop of rock in the foreground, sprigged with coarse, bleached grass. Cornwall, he thinks, and a voice behind him says, as if in response, ‘St Ives.’
He turns. The woman is tall – her eyes are almost level with his own – with clear, pale skin. Her long brown hair is parted neatly at the centre. She is wearing a loose white top that reminds him of his father’s old painting smocks. Blue jeans and brown suede boots, fringed like a cowboy’s.
‘Helena,’ she says, as if he’d asked her name. ‘That one’s mine.’
‘Is it? It’s very good.’ He gives his own name, extends his hand. She doesn’t take it, just smiles. ‘What are you – a banker?’
He feels his cheeks colour. ‘A solicitor. But don’t worry. Dullness isn’t contagious. At least, I don’t think it is.’
‘No. Maybe not.’ She regards him for a moment. She has blue eyes, a wide, sensual mouth; a kind of freshness seems to come from her: the scent of clean linen, sea air. ‘Are you hungry? There’s food upstairs.’
They eat cross-legged on the floor, in an upstairs room hung with cheap Indian tapestries and dyed cotton sheets. One corner of the room is equipped with a small kitchenette; in another stands a record player, balanced on a stack of bricks. Someone has put on music, turned it up: Jim can hardly hear what Helena is saying, but he enjoys watching her lips move, and the way she eats, neat and efficient, not a mouthful going to waste.
Later, they move outside, where the music dulls, and the quayside is dark, the empty boats casting long shadows across the water. Helena has a joint in her bag, ready-rolled. She lights it, offers it to Jim, and they sit down on the cobblestones, backs against the warehouse brick, smoking. She lives in Cornwall, she says; not in St Ives itself, but just outside – they have a community there, an artists’ colony. The old one in St Ives is dying, killed off by in-fighting and old age. Theirs is a new way, free of ego, just artists living together, sharing thoughts, ideas, techniques. No art-world cronies telling them what to paint, how to think, how to sell their work: just a crumbling old house, a vegetable garden to tend, the limitless freedom of sea and sky.
Jim says it sounds wonderful, idyllic – a world away from painting at an easel in the spare room of his mother’s flat. And Helena looks at him and says that it is wonderful – that he should come, stay for a while: visitors are always welcome.
He says he might just do that, though he’s not sure he means it. Not yet.
When he kisses her, she tastes of garlic, tobacco and the sweet, cloying undertow of marijuana – and, yes, he is sure of it, though later he will admit it was fanciful, there is also the soft, salty tang of the sea.
VERSION THREE
Sandworms
Suffolk, October 1966
For Miriam’s birthday, Eva treats her to a weekend in Suffolk.
Penelope and Gerald have recently spent their anniversary in Southwold, in a smart seafront hotel. They returned with the telephone number of a local woman who had an old fishermen’s cottage t
o let right on the coast – ‘The loveliest little place you ever saw, Eva, really – Rebecca would love it.’ It is a long time, Eva realises, since she and Rebecca have had a holiday – even longer for her mother. With Jakob so often away on tour, her parents seldom travel; they prefer to spend their rare weekends together pottering, gardening, nodding silently in twin armchairs to their beloved stack of opera LPs.
This birthday, it will be just the three of them – Eva, Miriam and Rebecca. Jakob is in Hamburg with the orchestra. Anton is on a work trip to Glasgow. (He has, much to the bemusement of his family, settled on shipbroking for a career.) And David – well, David is also away, of course, filming: when, these days, is David not away?
They drive up on Friday, after school, in Eva’s new Citroën (a present from David, bought with his pay-cheque from the last film; much as she is grateful for the car, she can’t help thinking of it as the symptom of an uneasy conscience). Rebecca is breathless, excited – she insists that Oma sit with her on the back seat, look at the drawing she did that afternoon. The teacher, Rebecca explains at length, asked each child to imagine their perfect weekend. She has drawn herself, her mother and her grandmother as stick figures on a beach, against a strip of sky; each wave a pencilled curlicue, the sun an orange ball, rays fanning out like wheel-spokes.
‘You see, Oma, this is what I’ll actually be doing this weekend. Miss Ellis said I was a very lucky girl.’
Miriam, laughing, says she does see. She asks after a fourth figure: taller, placed some distance away from the others. ‘That’s Daddy, silly,’ the child replies scornfully. ‘In my imagination, he will be there too.’
‘Don’t call Oma “silly”, Rebecca.’ Eva speaks firmly from the driving-seat. ‘That’s not nice.’ Rebecca bites her bottom lip, a gesture that always threatens tears. In the rear-view mirror, Eva catches her mother’s eye.
‘I know a song about going on an adventure,’ says Miriam. ‘Do you want to hear it?’
It is dark when they arrive at the cottage. Eva edges the Citroën down the narrow path between the terraces and into the cottage’s tiny courtyard, which is barely wider than the car.
‘I don’t fancy doing that again,’ Eva says when she has brought the car to a shuddering halt.
Miriam nods. ‘We shan’t need to drive much. Now, shall we wake Rebecca, or carry her in?’
Eva looks over at her daughter, curled on the seat, her face perfectly composed. She is small for a seven-year-old – she takes after Eva and Miriam in that respect, though her features are more like David’s: she has his persuasive black eyes and wide, expressive lips. It seems a shame to wake her.
‘I’ll carry her. Can you manage the bags?’
The cottage is flat-fronted, boxy, with a scrubby front garden stretching down to the seawall. Inside, it is freezing, the cold undercut by the strong, vegetable smell of damp. For a moment, standing exhausted in the doorway with Rebecca in her arms – she had two manuscripts to finish for Penguin before lunchtime, and their bags to pack – the prospect of making it habitable seems too much for Eva to bear. Thank heaven, then, for Miriam, striding in with the bags, issuing instructions. ‘Make up a bed for Rebecca, Schatzi. Open all the windows for ten minutes – just keep your coat on – and then I’ll light a fire. We’ll have the place gemütlich in no time.’
Quickly, deftly, Miriam sweeps out the grate and lines it with crushed newspaper and kindling, while the open windows flood the rooms with the fresh chill of the sea. Upstairs, in the small back bedroom – she has insisted Miriam take the larger room at the front – Eva smoothes sheets and blankets across the double mattress, and lays her sleeping daughter down.
Then she sits awhile with her mother before the fire, sharing a bottle of Riesling. The smell of damp has been overlaid by the deep, peaty scent of firewood, and the room is dark but for the fire’s orange flare and the greenish light of the table lamp. They talk of family matters – Jakob’s last concert; Anton’s latest girlfriend, a brittle blonde secretary named Susan whom both Eva and Miriam are struggling to like; Miriam’s health – she has suffered for years, uncomplainingly, with the drawn-out after-effects of a chest infection caught in her thirties, during a lengthy recital tour.
They do not talk of David, though he is there, lurking at the fringes of their conversation. Eva last saw him the night before he left for the shoot. It was late – Rebecca had been asleep for hours – and David was just back from some party to which Eva had not been invited. She had sat on the corner of their bed, smoking, watching him pack.
David had loved her once – he had told her so, that night in the Eagle pub. (How long ago it seemed now; how spent and deflated all that panic, that urgent making of plans.) He had never hesitated, never taken advantage of the balance of power now tipped decisively in his favour, in which he might – many men had done it before him – have refused to acknowledge her, or their child.
And Eva had believed, then, that she could love him too: this beautiful, clever, charming man, with his absolute belief in his own talent. She has come to love David, in her way, as he has her; and yet Eva feels now – she has considered the matter in her mind, examined it from every angle as if it were an object under glass – that he has never truly allowed her to know him, to slip beneath the various masks he presents to the world.
That night six weeks ago, as David moved silently around their room, she’d found herself wondering whether it was all simply a role he was playing: a part he’d once liked the look of – dutiful husband and father – and of which he’d grown tired. Or perhaps, more likely, the fault was hers; how could she be a proper wife to him, form a proper family, when he knew – he must know – that she had left her heart with another? And yet she had tried – oh, how she had tried; and she couldn’t forgive David easily for simply stepping away, absenting himself with the easy excuse of work. And of course it wasn’t only for work that he was absenting himself; of that she was fully aware.
The next morning, Miriam’s birthday, Eva wakes to wintry sun, the smell of woodsmoke, voices carrying faintly from downstairs. There is a space in the bed where Rebecca should be. Eva brushes her hair, pulls on clothes. She finds her mother and daughter in the kitchen preparing breakfast, a fresh fire already burning in the grate.
‘Happy birthday, Mama. What time is it? I should be making breakfast for you.’
Miriam, at the stove, waves a hand. ‘Don’t worry, darling, I don’t need waiting on. It’s ten o’clock. I thought you could use some sleep. Anyway, Rebecca and I have been having a fine old time.’
Rebecca tugs at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Come and sit here, Mummy. I set a place for you.’
They breakfast on fried eggs and milky instant coffee, thoughtfully left for them in the larder. From her suitcase, Eva produces her mother’s gifts. A silk Liberty scarf from herself and David. A pair of woollen gloves from Rebecca, bought with the carefully hoarded contents of her piggy-bank. A bottle of Fleurs de Rocaille perfume from Jakob. The 1964 Joan Sutherland recording of Bellini’s Norma from Anton, acting on his father’s advice.
‘What riches,’ Miriam says, and she fastens the scarf around her neck, sprays the perfume and slips on the gloves, so that Rebecca cries out, outraged at such a breach of protocol, ‘Oma, you can’t wear your gloves indoors!’
Later, they walk down to the beach. The tide is out, the sea a distant glimmer; the coarse sand is wet, littered with the discarded cases of sandworms. Rebecca runs ahead, towards the waterline, her arms flung wide. Eva calls her back, afraid of quicksand or other unknown dangers, but Miriam places a restraining hand on her arm. ‘Don’t worry so much, Schatzi. Let her play.’
Eva takes her mother’s hand, links her arm through hers. An image slips into her mind: her mother and Jakob, walking arm in arm along another eastern seafront, another beach. The tale of their arrival in England – and Eva’s own arrival a few months later – is as worn and familiar to her as an old photograph carried in a wallet. Docking in Dover; boardin
g a train for Margate, the address of Jakob’s cousin’s boarding-house written on a slip of paper. The cousin had found jobs for them both – Miriam cleaning, Jakob washing dishes. Two young musicians with a new baby, tidying up after an assortment of oddballs in a dilapidated dosshouse at the very edge of the world.
And yet they had been happy, Miriam always said; even later, in the camp on the Isle of Man, where they had organised evening concerts, and Miriam had taught rudimentary English to those who spoke only German, Polish, Hungarian, Czech. Then, they had still believed, despite the gathering weight of reports from across the Channel, that their families would eventually be able to join them in England: Miriam’s brother, Anton, and their elderly mother, Josefa, whose poor health had prevented them from leaving with Miriam; Jakob’s parents, Anna and Franz; his sisters, Fanny and Marianne; and all their cousins, uncles, aunts.
There was pain later, of course, a pain that never left them, only softened its edges with time. But Eva has always envied her mother’s ability to be happy: a facility for making do, for making better, that must surely spring from having had to leave everything behind.
‘Does this remind you of Margate?’ Eva says aloud. ‘Of how England looked when you first saw it?’
‘A little.’ Miriam is quiet for a moment. ‘The sky, perhaps – how huge it is, how pale, like a watercolour. A Turner. Your father would like it here.’
‘He would,’ Eva says, knowing she means Jakob, not that other father, his face shadowy, unknown. Just the idea of a father, really.
They walk on in silence, their shoes slapping faintly against the sand. Eva thinks of David, wherever he may be: in Spain, somewhere south of Madrid. He is due home in a fortnight. It is a long, complex shoot – a version of Don Quixote, directed by David Lean, with Oliver Reed in the title role. David has telephoned twice, spent most of each short conversation talking to Rebecca; told Eva only that Lean is working them hard, but he is enjoying himself – he and Reed stayed up till dawn the previous night, drinking rough local liquor. David did not mention Juliet Franks, though her name loomed large between them: she has a small part in the film, and was due to arrive halfway through the shoot. They both know who put her forward for the part, and why.
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