The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

It is: the cold hits Jim as he crosses the yard, and he draws in its freshness, the morning smells of sea and damp earth. He will never tire of the view down to the sea: the cove’s gentle shelving of rock, the mosaic of pebbles, and the water, restless, changeable, this morning a dark, inky blue, the sky lightening at the horizon. He stands for a moment before opening the studio door, looking down at the beach, flooded with a disorientating happiness; and he savours it, drinks it in, because he is old enough now to know happiness for what it is: brief and fleeting, not a state to strive for, to seek to live in, but to catch when it comes, and to hold on to for as long as you can.

  VERSION ONE

  Thirty

  London, July 1971

  They are almost two hours late for Anton’s party.

  First the babysitter – Anna, the rather petulant teenage daughter of a neighbour – arrived half an hour after they had asked her to come, without explanation. Then Jim, already several sheets to the wind (he poured them each a gin and tonic as they dressed, and downed another two while they waited for Anna) suddenly announced that he didn’t like what Eva was wearing.

  ‘You look like an oversized baby in a romper-suit,’ he said, while she, stung, looked down at the black jumpsuit that had seemed so elegant last week in the shop, paired with her new rope-soled wedge shoes. How could Jim not know how cruel he was being? He was smiling as he spoke; seemed surprised, affronted even, when she clattered back upstairs to change: ‘I was only joking, Eva – where’s your sense of humour?’ And yet as she changed – found the long dress she’d worn to the school leavers’ barbecue last weekend; he’d seen nothing to complain about in that – she found that she was crying a little.

  ‘Let it go,’ she told herself in the bathroom mirror as she swept a fresh layer of blusher over her cheeks, reapplied her kohl. And yet she couldn’t deny that she was wounded by this new sharpness in Jim; where once he couldn’t compliment her enough (how many times, in their early days, had he told her she was beautiful?), he was becoming barbed, critical; especially when he’d had a drink or two. And he couldn’t seem to see it: she’d tried to confront him a few weeks ago, asked why she seemed to irritate him so. He’d stared at her, eyes innocently wide (she’d chosen her moment poorly: they were just back from a drinks reception at the Courier, and neither of them was sober), and told her that he had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Surely I’m the one who irritates you,’ he’d said. ‘Your husband, the artist that never was. Not exactly something to boast about, is it?’

  As she repaired her face in the bathroom, Jennifer had come waddling in on her sturdy little legs – ‘Mummy go party’ – with Anna following sulkily behind. So Eva bent to kiss her daughter, and then went back downstairs to tell Jim they had better get going, or there’d be no point in going at all.

  ‘You’ve changed.’ He sounded resentful. ‘I didn’t say you needed to change.’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘Just let’s go.’

  They took a taxi to Anton’s house: a narrow Georgian terrace on a leafy square in Kennington. He and his wife, Thea – an angular, strikingly blonde Norwegian barrister – bought the house as soon as they returned from their wedding in Oslo. Thea immediately set about knocking through walls, ripping up the tattered linoleum, planing away imperfections, so that every corner of the house was soon modern, luxurious and understated – rather, Eva thinks, like Thea herself.

  Eva finds her sister-in-law in the garden, where coloured lights are hanging from the trees, and a trestle table is laid with the remains of a feast: platters of cold meats and cheese; herring in dill sauce; potato salad and Coronation chicken; a huge Sachertorte, baked by Miriam.

  ‘Have we missed the food?’ Eva says, kissing Thea lightly on each cheek. ‘I’m so sorry we’re late.’

  Thea dismisses her apology with a manicured hand. ‘Please. Don’t worry. We’re only getting started.’

  Anton is in the kitchen, dispensing rum punch from a metal tureen. ‘Meine Schwester! Have some punch. Your husband’s had a head-start.’ He nods in the direction of the hallway, where Jim is talking animatedly to Gerald – where, in that case, is Penelope?

  Eva accepts a glass from Anton, leans in to kiss him. ‘Happy birthday. Thirty? How does it feel?’

  He shrugs, ladles out another dose of punch, hands it to a passing guest. She watches his face – his dark eyes, much like her own in colour and shape, framed by thick, heavy brows (Jakob’s), his wiry, untameable crop of hair – and sees her brother as a boy, two years younger and always wanting what she had, to be just like her. Once, aged three, Anton had borrowed Eva’s favourite doll and carried it around for the rest of the day, insisting she was his, until Miriam intervened. He laughs when reminded about this now.

  ‘I’m not sure yet, sis. Much the same. How does it look from the other side?’

  Eva is prevented from replying by a sudden influx of new guests: Anton’s friends from work, men with loud voices and flushed, beery faces. The professional world Anton inhabits – a world of regattas, mooring rights, the gleaming hulls of newly launched yachts – is as unfamiliar to Eva as hers must be to him. Smiling politely at the men, mouthing, ‘Hello,’ she moves away, Anton’s question still loud in her ears. How does it look from the other side?

  She is thirty-two; married to the man she loves; mother to his child; writing for a living. She is halfway through a novel, and she hopes – believes – that it is good. She is asked, with increasing regularity, to appear on television talk shows, discussing anything from nuclear disarmament to the rights of working mothers. As her appearances on screen have become more regular, Eva has grown accustomed to being noticed, to having the eyes of strangers trail after her, visibly puzzled as to where they might have seen her before. The first time it happened – she was wheeling Jennifer to the park on her tricycle – she found it disconcerting, and still professes to find it so; but in a deep, private part of her, Eva is aware that she finds it rather gratifying.

  But what, then, of the most vital thing, the foundation on which all else rests – her marriage? The facts are becoming starker: Jim is unhappy, she fears desperately so, and she is unable to reach him. She has tried – of course she has – but he bats away every attempt. Last Sunday, for instance, when she left him at work in the studio and took Jennifer to lunch at Penelope’s, she had returned to find him slumped in his chair, an empty whisky bottle upended at his feet.

  ‘Daddy sleeping,’ Jennifer had said. Quickly, Eva picked her daughter up, took her inside, set her down to play with her toys in the living-room, where Eva could still keep an eye on her through the patio doors. Back in the studio, she shook Jim awake. Roused, he stared at her, his expression so nakedly bleak that Eva was suddenly afraid.

  ‘What is it, darling?’ she said. ‘What can I do?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  She had moved closer to him, placed her hand on the back of his neck, stroked his down-soft hair. ‘My love. Don’t do this. Why are you punishing yourself? You have your work; you have time to paint; we have Jennifer; we have each other. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say, Eva.’ He spoke softly, without venom, and yet she felt the weight of every word. ‘You have everything you’ve ever wanted. How can you possibly know how I feel?’

  ‘Eva.’ Here is Penelope, in a paisley-patterned dress; she has gained more weight since having Adam and Charlotte, and it gives her a rather fetching, queenly air. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

  Eva smiles, grateful for the interruption to her thoughts. She has made her way out to the garden again; the night has come on, and Thea has lit candles, placed them all round the perimeter flower-beds in glass jars, a second string of lights beneath the coloured bulbs. ‘Babysitter was late.’

  ‘Not that sulky girl from down the road?’

  Eva nods. ‘She’s not so bad, really.’

  ‘So you think. Do you know, when Gerald was off sick last week – some
kind of stomach bug; poor thing couldn’t move for two days – Luisa actually went into our room in a bikini top and shorts, and asked if there was anything she could do for him?’

  ‘Perhaps she was concerned …’

  ‘Not likely.’ The topic of Luisa, Penelope’s Spanish au pair, is a familiar one: Penelope suspects her of nymphomania. Eva cannot imagine loyal Gerald – who is also starting to turn plump, while his hair grows thinner – succumbing to temptation or, indeed, of a lissom twenty-year-old with eyes like molten chocolate choosing to tempt him. But she supposes that you never know. Eva would never have thought it possible of Jim, either.

  ‘That woman’s a menace,’ Penelope adds.

  ‘Now, now, Pen. That’s not very sisterly.’

  ‘She doesn’t make me feel very sisterly.’ Penelope sips her drink; she has rejected the punch in favour of white wine. Eva, already starting to feel a little drunk, begins to wish she had done the same. ‘But no, you’re right. I shouldn’t go on about her. She’s a godsend, really. Have you thought any more about getting someone in?’

  ‘An au pair?’ Eva has thought about it often: with both she and Jim out at work, arranging care for Jennifer is a haphazard, piecemeal affair, and she knows that she depends rather too heavily on Miriam. Jakob said as much, tactfully, last Sunday: he mentioned Juliane, the granddaughter of some old friends from Vienna, who was planning to come to London to study. ‘She’s worked with children before. It could work out well, Liebling.’

  Eva had nodded, said it could, though she still feels the same reluctance to bring a young stranger into their home. It is a nasty, private thing that she can’t bring herself to say aloud. She had found a letter once, with a German postmark, when she was cleaning his studio; it was from Greta, the recently departed language assistant at his school. Her English was stilted, Germanic: I am wondering when my body you will touch again. My heart calls at you. Eva had felt sick; she had actually run inside, to the bathroom, and bent low over the toilet bowl. But she had not been sick; instead, she had sat at the kitchen table, working her way steadily through a packet of cigarettes. By the time she’d smoked the last stub, she’d resolved to put the letter back where she’d found it, and say nothing: she could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t bring a response she couldn’t stand to hear. To imagine that Jim had loved that girl – that his decision to stay with Eva and Jennifer, rather than leave with Greta, had sprung from duty rather than desire – was impossible enough; but to have that fact in any way confirmed would, Eva felt, be too much to bear.

  ‘Papa says there’s a girl coming over in September from Vienna,’ she says now. ‘Juliane. The granddaughter of some friends of theirs – remember the Dührers? I might meet her. See what she’s like.’

  ‘Good idea. Now let’s get another drink.’

  They do so – Eva deciding, against her better judgement, to stick with the punch. As she drains her second glass, she is suffused with a giddy, infectious warmth. Anton ladles her out another, and then leads her back to the garden to dance. Everyone is there: Anton’s old schoolfriends (there, dancing close together, are Ian Liebnitz and his new wife, Angela); his shipbroker colleagues; Thea and her barrister friends; Penelope and Gerald; Jim’s cousin Toby and his friends from the BBC – and Jim, coming up behind her, taking her in his arms so that they are dancing together to the Rolling Stones – ‘Wild Horses’ – her back against his chest. She turns to face him. He is drunk, of course, but so is she, and they are smiling, moving in time with the music.

  He draws her face close to his, so that his features are huge, magnified: his blue eyes, so startling when she first saw them, are snatches of sky, and she can feel the rough texture of his beard against her cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says into her ear. ‘I love you. Always have, always will.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Eva says, because she does, despite her doubts, despite her nagging fears. And because really, if she can’t believe in that, then what is there left to believe in?

  VERSION TWO

  Thirty

  London, July 1971

  He meets his cousin Toby, as arranged, in a pub off Regent Street.

  Toby is with friends at a table in the small courtyard garden – relaxed in short sleeves, laughing over a pint of beer. He gets up as Jim approaches, and the men shake hands, their touch warm but a little uncertain: it is some years since they last saw each other, and the thought of contacting his cousin, of arranging to meet him, had only occurred to Jim quite late the previous day.

  His aunt Frances had telephoned a few weeks before to congratulate him on his first London exhibition: she’d seen the article in the Daily Courier. ‘We’ll all come,’ she said. ‘Do call Toby, won’t you, when you’re up? I know he’d love to see you.’ And so, last night, just before Helena drove him to St Ives to board the sleeper, that is what Jim had done. He had not been angling for a place to stay – Stephen had offered to book him into a hotel – but Toby had insisted: Jim should come out with his friends; a bunch of them were meeting in a pub, then going on to someone’s thirtieth birthday party. ‘It’ll make a nice change,’ Toby had said drily, ‘from all those sheep.’

  Jim had resisted the urge to correct him, to explain that there were no sheep at Trelawney House: just fields, and cliffs, and an indolent black-and-white cat named Marcel who had appeared at the kitchen door one day, skinny and threadbare, and refused to leave. But Toby was right about London being a change: just how much of a change, Jim hadn’t quite imagined. The train lurched into Paddington at six a.m. Blinking sleep from his eyes, Jim opened the curtain of his compartment window to the city, its grime and bustle, its crowds already surging and parting under the high vaulted roof. Back at home, in Cornwall, everyone would still be sleeping; Dylan would be curled like a comma against the bracket of his mother’s warm body.

  It was years since he’d last been to London, and Jim found that he was not prepared. After stepping from the train, he stood on the platform awhile, taking it all in. Out on the Bishop’s Bridge Road, he found a café, sat drinking coffee and eating a greasy bacon sandwich while the traffic ebbed and flowed, and strangers strode resolutely by in suits and high-heeled shoes. Why, he wondered, are they all in such a hurry?

  Toby’s friends, he discovers now, are mainly colleagues from the BBC: a TV producer, a script editor, a news presenter named Martin Saunders. They are incredulous when they hear that Jim doesn’t even own a television, hasn’t watched it in years, but they listen with growing interest to his description of Trelawney House: the shared studio, the vegetable garden, the strict division of duties.

  ‘A commune,’ one of them says; Jim can’t recall his name.

  Jim shifts uncomfortably on his seat. He knows what ‘commune’ means to most people. ‘We prefer “colony”. An artists’ colony.’

  The man is nodding at him, but Jim can see he’s not really listening. ‘A colony. Right. So how did you end up there?’

  That Bristol warehouse: the still shadows of the boats, the black water, the wonderful freshness of Helena’s lips on his. Later, she had taken him to bed – she was staying at a friend’s house in Redland; a crowd of people waved at them from the living-room through a cloud of dope. Helena’s skin was pale and warm to the touch; the feel of her body, moving with him, was something entirely new, something wonderful. Afterwards, they lay awake, and she said, ‘Why don’t you come to Cornwall with me, Jim? Today?’ He’d opened his mouth to say no, of course he couldn’t, and instead he’d heard himself saying, ‘Yes, all right, why not? Just for the weekend.’

  On Monday, he’d called Arndale & Thompson from St Ives to say that he was sick, and would return the following day. And he had; but a week later, he’d handed in his notice, and the month after that, he’d packed his things into his car and left Bristol for good. There had been none of his mother’s histrionics – his aunt Patsy had made sure of it by coming to stay – and even Vivian’s doctor had wished him well. ‘You’ve done muc
h more for her,’ he’d told Jim, ‘than many sons would have done.’

  Now, to this man whose name has quite slipped Jim’s mind, he says only, ‘Oh, I met a woman, of course. Followed her there. How else?’

  The man grins, raises his glass. ‘Well, I’ll drink to that. And you’ve got an exhibition opening soon, on Cork Street?’

  ‘Yes. The private view’s on Monday.’

  ‘Great. Do you know, Jim, I’d really like to talk to my editor about you. See about getting a crew down there. Could be great for our culture slot.’

  ‘I’m not sure …’ Jim can just imagine Howard and Cath’s reaction: Howard’s fleshy face colouring, his fist slamming down on the tabletop, with its topography of ancient scars. Absolutely not. How can you even suggest such a thing? ‘I don’t think that’s quite our style.’

  ‘Well, let’s see, eh? Why don’t I come to the show on Monday anyway, take a look?’

  Jim lifts his beer, says untruthfully, ‘You’ll be very welcome.’

  When their pints are finished, Toby tells them it’s time to go. ‘Whose birthday is it again?’ Martin asks.

  ‘Anton Edelstein’s,’ says Toby. ‘My friend from school – you remember, you met him at my Christmas party. The shipbroker.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Martin nods vigorously. ‘Eva Katz’s brother. Or should that be Eva Edelstein now?’

  Jim’s heart seems to lodge in his mouth. Slowly, carefully, he chances saying her name aloud. ‘Eva Katz?’

  Martin turns to look at him. ‘Yes, Eva Katz, the writer. David Katz’s wife – or ex-wife, I should say. He watches Jim, his grey eyes shrewd. ‘Why – do you know her?’

  He shrugs. ‘Not really. We met once, in New York. I went to see The Bohemians on Broadway.’

  Martin gives a slow nod. ‘Lovely woman. Thought I might have had a chance with her, once. But I hear she’s hooked up with Ted Simpson from the Daily Courier. Good on him, I say. He’s at least fifty if he’s a day.’