The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  ‘Where will you go?’ she says. And to show she fully understands – to say the woman’s name first, and in doing so to dispel its power – she adds, ‘You and Juliet.’

  He looks at her then, but she doesn’t meet his eyes. Eva would like to think that even now, even here, she still has the capacity to surprise him. ‘You know, you’re not at all as I thought you were when we first met,’ David had said to her, a few years into their marriage. Eva had taken it as a compliment, but recently she has wondered whether the version of her that emerged in its place has proved a disappointment: a dull, tarnished facsimile of the woman who had once so captured his attention.

  But if he is surprised, now, David doesn’t show it. ‘She has a flat in Bayswater. But we’re thinking about Los Angeles.’

  ‘And Sarah?’

  ‘She can come out to visit in the holidays.’ There is the briefest hesitation, in which Eva allows herself to hear regret, anxiety – though she knows her husband well enough to be aware that he is a stranger to such feelings. If they are there now, she thinks unkindly, it is because he has learned them ahead of time; because he has prepared the script. ‘If that’s all right with you.’

  Eva says nothing, and David goes on, more urgently, ‘I have to do this, Eva – you do understand, don’t you? I think you do. I think you know our marriage has been dead for a long time.’

  An image slips into Eva’s mind: the two of them laid out on concrete slabs, quietly sleeping, like the stone effigies on Christian tombs. What was it Jakob had said, in the music room the night before the wedding, as the grandfather clock ticked on in the hallway? I’m afraid he will never love you quite as much as he loves himself. She had known it then, has always known it, really, and yet surely this is too much. To move to Los Angeles, with that woman; to leave it to Eva to tell his daughter that David has gone, and will not be coming back. The anger will come, Eva knows – she is already dimly aware of it, but from a distance, as if viewed from the wrong end of a telescope. For now, there is only this deadening sense of calm.

  ‘Eva.’ She looks at him, and instantly recognises his expression: it is the one David Lean had lingered on in close-up in the last film. At the screening, her husband’s face had been six feet high, his cheeks damp with summoned tears. She had never seen him cry. ‘I did love you, you know. I’m sorry for how it’s turned out. I’ll make everything as … easy for you as I can.’ He places a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Please don’t. Please just go.’

  He stands; swallowing, she adds with as much dignity as she can muster, ‘We’ll work everything out later.’

  Eva waits on the terrace while he packs, finishing her drink, her eyes closed against the sun. He is done in what seems like no time at all. ‘I’ll call tomorrow,’ he says from the living-room. ‘Please try to explain things to Sarah.’

  Surely that is your job, she thinks, and yet of course it will fall to her: who else is there?

  David hovers uncertainly for a moment. She wonders whether he will step back out onto the terrace, perhaps kiss her goodbye, as he has done all the times he has left for rehearsals, shows, auditions, shoots; as if his leave-taking were only temporary. But he doesn’t come.

  ‘Goodbye, Eva,’ he says. ‘Do take care of yourself, now, won’t you?’

  She doesn’t reply – just waits for the conclusive click of the front door. After a moment or two, he emerges again on the street below. She watches the top of her husband’s departing head as he drags his case off down the pavement.

  Halfway down the street, David stops beside a parked car, opens the boot, stows his case inside. There is a woman at the wheel: Eva can just make out a tangle of dark curls, a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses, a slick of pink lipstick. Juliet: she must have been waiting out there all this time, watching them. At the thought of their marriage ending so quietly, with such a lack of ceremony, while that woman sat outside watching them in dumb-show, the tears threaten to spill, and Eva steps quickly back inside.

  In the kitchen, she allows herself to cry, clutching the sink for support, until it is time to collect Sarah. Then she splashes her face with cold water, reapplies her make-up with care, and goes down to their car – her car, now, she supposes, assuming the settlement is fair. She can’t imagine it won’t be: David has always been, beneath his arrogance and bluster, reasonable; kind, even, in the distracted, blurred way of a man primarily devoted to his own happiness.

  It occurs to Eva, with a blunt shock of pain, that she will miss him, despite everything – despite the distance between them; despite his infidelity; despite her knowledge that their romance should never really have been made to last more than a few months; that the deficiency she had perceived in her love for David was, in fact, more than the product of her inexperience. She will miss his laugh, the way he taps out a Morse code pattern on his leg when he is restless. She will miss his hands on her body (though it is many months since they last made love), the way he made her feel – beautiful, all-powerful – when he told her that he loved her. She will miss watching him make their daughter breakfast: a rare occurrence, and yet it strikes her with some force that she is unlikely ever to see him do it again. She will miss hearing the rise and fall of his deep, sonorous voice lulling Sarah to sleep. All this, and more, they have shared; and now it is simply to fade to black, and disappear.

  Eva waits for a moment, sitting motionless at the wheel, taking in great gulps of air. Then she starts the engine and edges the car out onto the road, past the space that Juliet’s car has just left.

  VERSION THREE

  Frost

  Cornwall, October 1969

  There was a frost last night. The first of the year, Jim thinks, standing at the kitchen window, a mug of coffee warming his hands.

  It is seven fifteen. He is the first up – he has taken to rising early again, as he used to, as his father did, to make the most of the morning light: so pale here, unfiltered; brighter than any other place he knows. Today, he woke later than usual, burrowed deeper under the bedclothes, drew Helena’s warm body to him, as if sensing that outside the frost was settling, the tall grass of the back lawn stiffening into peaks, the lettuces huddling in rows under their plastic sheeting. Somebody – Howard, he supposes – had the presence of mind to draw the tunnels over them: he must have seen the forecast, or more likely just read the wind, the precise shade of the darkening sky, in his uncanny, countryman’s way.

  Before moving to Trelawney House, Jim might also have considered himself a man of the country: as a boy, he was accustomed to the rhythms of the Sussex countryside, to its colours and smells, its sudden noises and deep silences. But he knows now that Sussex is not real countryside, not in the same way as Cornwall – not as it seems, at any rate, on this windblown patch of land, a few miles from St Ives: sea before them, fields behind them, and the cliffs their own lunar landscape of black rock, scrub-grass, flowers whose names Howard has tried to teach him, though only some of them will stick: milkwort, eyebright, lady’s bedstraw.

  This last is a four-petalled flower of a vivid, waxy yellow. On a walk that first summer, soon after he’d arrived, Helena lay down in a patch of it, and the flowers were beautifully bright against her red hair. (It was that colour – the same shade, he thought, as Lizzie Siddal’s, at least as Rossetti had captured it – that had first drawn Jim to Helena; he would be disappointed to discover, later, that it was dyed.) There, on the clifftop, he gathered a bunch of the flowers, brought them back to the house, placed them in a jug beside his easel. Helena had cleared a corner of the studio for him – an old barn; freezing in winter, though they draw Indian bedspreads across the doors, bring out an ancient oil heater on the coldest days. That was the first painting Jim had produced in Cornwall: a clutch of lady’s bedstraw, a blue and white jug, a table. It was not much, but he knew instantly that it was better than anything he’d painted in a long time.

  He pours himself another cup of coffee, finds the bread – one of Cath’s tough, seeded
loaves – and cuts himself a slice, layers on butter, jam. He can hear someone moving about upstairs: Howard, probably. He is usually the second one up, and they have spent many early mornings out in the studio, just the two of them, Jim mixing up his paints, drying off brushes, Howard dragging in wood from the yard – driftwood, pared and bleached by the sea; great logs of burnished oak from the sawmill at Zennor; stacks of twigs that he has gathered and roped together, thick and spindled as a witch’s broom. Howard is a sculptor of wood, and his section of the studio resembles a carpenter’s workshop, with its workbenches and lathes, and its clean, medicinal scent of resin and wood shavings.

  At first, Jim was distracted by the sound of Howard at work – the drag and whirr of the saws, the hammering of nails. He had said as much, discreetly, to Helena; asked whether he might colonise one of the empty attic rooms. But she shook her head: the whole idea was that they should all share a workspace, let ideas flow. She had told him this on the night they met – it was at Richard’s fiftieth birthday party, at his house in Long Ashton; Jim had noticed Helena standing by the fireplace in a green dress, her flame-red hair loose across her shoulders. He had walked straight over and asked her name, with a directness that had surprised them both. They’d had to shout at each other to be heard – someone had put on a Led Zeppelin record – but as she described where she lived, the ‘colony’ in St Ives, it had sounded to Jim like a kind of paradise.

  The following week, he’d got into his battered old Renault and driven down to Cornwall to see her; a few weeks after that – high on love, on lust, on the late-night conversations he’d had with them all at the colony, passing round joints, talking about art, sex, everything – he’d told both Richard Salles and his mother that he was leaving. ‘Go, make work,’ Richard had said, ‘and may you find the happiness you deserve.’ Even Vivian had sent him away with what he took to be a kind of blessing. ‘You’re Lewis Taylor’s son, Jim, and you’ve got your father’s stubbornness in you. Just mind that you keep a little part of yourself back for the woman who loves you, won’t you?’

  She had stepped forward, cupped Jim’s chin with her hand, and for a moment he’d been transported back to the Sussex house; to the afternoons when he had often returned from school to find his mother sitting motionless in her armchair, smoking cigarette after cigarette, while his father worked away, oblivious, upstairs.

  Once he was actually living at Trelawney House, Jim wasn’t sure it was really practical, all of them working in the same room, but he let it go. It was Howard’s house, after all; had belonged to his late mother, a society dame and patron of the original St Ives colony. Now, at the distance of more than a year, Jim can see the logic of the rule: his own work has changed, become more muscular, somehow, as if drawing confidence from Howard’s hard, inviolable forms.

  There is the sound of footfall on the stairs. The kitchen door swings open: here is Howard, bear-like in his woollen dressing-gown, his eyes still gummed with sleep. He is an extraordinary-looking man: six foot two in his bare feet, bald, his features huge, fleshy, and ill suited, as if woven together from three different faces. And yet there is something about him – charisma, Jim supposes, though the word seems inadequate to describe the raw, silent power that Howard commands, especially over women. Jim suspects that Howard and Helena were once lovers, though he has never asked, aware that he mightn’t like the answer. If they were, it would have been kept very quiet: Howard and Cath have been together for years. And anyway, it is not that kind of place – Howard had made that very clear when they first discussed his moving in.

  ‘This is not,’ he told Jim, his eyes burning holes in his face, ‘the sort of set-up you read about in the papers. We do not pool our money, and we do not –’ this said with the emphatic thump of a fist on the kitchen table ‘– pool our lovers. We are artists here. We work, we garden, we cook together. If that sounds like the way you’d like to live, then you are welcome to join us.’

  ‘Pour me a mug, would you?’ Howard says now, landing heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. Jim does as he asks. ‘Good man.’

  ‘There was a frost last night,’ Jim says. ‘The first.’

  Howard sips his coffee, closes his eyes. ‘Yes. I covered the lettuces. Firewood’ll need drying out, though. You on wood today?’

  ‘I think so.’ There is a duties rota pinned to the cork-board by the door, written in Cath’s small, neat hand. ‘Helena’s cooking tonight. She said something about cassoulet.’

  Howard nods slowly, his eyes still shut. With his bald head and cowl-like robe, he has the look of a monk at prayer. ‘And Stephen’s coming at twelve, I believe.’

  ‘So he said.’ Jim has spent the last week in preparation: finishing the last of the canvases, sorting through the others, though Stephen said he would make the final selection himself – and Jim wasn’t to worry about packing them; he would bring a man with him to do that. Privately, Jim fears that it can’t really be happening, that Stephen Hargreaves can’t possibly be arriving today to load a clutch of his paintings into a van, and drive off with them back to Bristol, back to his gallery. But he knows such fears for what they are: night-terrors, irrational. For the exhibition is all arranged, the posters printed, one of them pinned proudly by Helena onto the cork-board: Jim Taylor – Paintings, 1966–69. The private view is in three days’ time – they will all be going up, all eight of them, Josie and Simon and Finn and Delia too, in Howard’s shuddering old van. Jim’s aunt Patsy and uncle John are coming, and even his mother, with Sinclair. Jim can’t quite bring himself to call Sinclair her ‘boyfriend’; he could not have been more surprised when Patsy gave him the news, by telephone, a few months after he left for Cornwall. ‘Your mother has met someone. I haven’t seen her this happy – this calm, Jim – since she met your father.’

  ‘Did you and Helena work things out?’ Howard sips his coffee. ‘About the picture, I mean.’

  Jim’s mug is empty. He lifts the coffee jug, hoping to pour another, but it is empty, too. ‘Yes. At least, I think so. She says she’s all right about it now.’

  It was their first proper argument, a painful, drawn-out one that began six months ago, when he started work on a new painting, the largest he had ever done. A portrait, painted from memory, though he asked Helena to sit for the hands and feet (perhaps there lay his error): a woman, curled on a window seat, reading, the light falling in pale shafts across her face. The woman was small, her hair dark and shining, a half-smile playing on her lips as she read: Eva, of course it was Eva; he knew it would be her before he began.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that Helena would be jealous – she is an artist, too; surely she would understand that some ideas emerge fully formed, beyond conscious control. But she was jealous. For days Helena would barely speak to him, wouldn’t allow herself to be comforted – though what comfort, really, could he give her? He had been honest with her from the first; she knew how much he had loved Eva, and how deeply she had wounded him.

  He should never, he supposed during that uncomfortable time, have started the painting – though it was the best portrait he had done; he knew it and Helena knew it. When they mounted their exhibition in St Ives, it had dominated the room, drawn most of the visitors to it as if by some imperceptible magnetic force. One man had stood in front of it for almost a quarter of an hour; this was Stephen Hargreaves, an old friend of Howard’s from the Royal College. His Clifton gallery was, as it turned out, just a few streets away from Vivian’s flat; Jim had walked past it many times. ‘There’s some very good work here, Jim,’ Stephen had said, shaking his hand. ‘We really must think about giving you a show.’

  Of course the Eva portrait (as he called it privately; its official title was Woman, Reading) would be the centrepiece of Jim’s exhibition, but Helena hadn’t allowed herself to think about that; yesterday, as she helped him sort through his canvases, she had seen it again, propped against the studio wall, and grew suddenly upset. Later, in bed, when she was calmer, she said, ‘I’m
sorry, Jim. I know I’m being ridiculous. But I can’t help feeling that she haunts us, somehow. I know you still think about her. I can tell.’

  He denied it, of course, held her close, whispered soothing words into her ear. And yet he knew that she was right, and he was angry with himself, and with Eva above all.

  Two hours he had stood there, outside the New York Public Library: one hundred and twenty minutes ticking by with extravagant slowness while the city traffic clotted and flowed, and disappointment settled on him like a weight. Walking back to his apartment, he’d promised himself that he would finally leave Eva, and everything that might have been, behind. He would, again, stand by the decision she had made.

  He has remained true to his word – and yet now here she is, in the painting, soon to be wrapped and coddled and driven the two hundred miles to Bristol. He places his empty mug in the sink and looks over at Howard, who is leaning back against the wall, his eyes half closed. ‘Still coming to, Jim, my man. That dope was strong stuff.’

  ‘It was.’ Jim didn’t smoke much: he had left them to it and gone upstairs to Helena, who had not joined the party. ‘I’m going out.’

  Howard nods. ‘Won’t be long myself. Turn the heater on, will you? It’ll be freezing.’