The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  Into the silence, Sinclair says, ‘I’m a little worried about Vivian. You’ll have seen how she is …’ Eva nods, but says nothing; he is not given to unexpected confidences. ‘It’s this blasted flu, I think. Takes it out of her too, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I can see it would.’

  ‘I’m thinking of speaking to her doctor again. In confidence. Just to see if he can throw any light on things.’

  Sinclair is looking down at the tabletop. Eva feels the sudden desire to reach out to him, and she does so, takes his hand in hers. He glances up at her, surprised. ‘It must be so very hard for you, all this.’

  He swallows, squeezes her hand lightly, then lets go. ‘Not so hard, really. That’s what marriage is, isn’t it? Taking the rough with the smooth. At least, that’s what it should be.’

  The cry comes then: a muffled ‘Mummy’ drifting down through the fitted carpet. ‘I’ll go up to her,’ Eva says.

  She holds Sinclair’s words in her mind as she climbs the stairs. Taking the rough with the smooth. They have been rough, these past years; there were moments when she forced herself to consider the fact that they might not make it. It wasn’t that Eva doubted their love, but she began to fear that it might simply not be enough to carry them through. And yet her fears have proved unfounded: that stormy, rudderless time is behind them, and Eva can now observe it with relief, from the safe berth of calmer waters.

  In Sinclair’s office, she finds that Jennifer – four years old, but acting younger; disconcerted, Eva suspects, by the imminent arrival of a little brother or sister – has thrown off her bedclothes, and is standing, red-faced and teary, behind the door.

  ‘Mummy,’ Jennifer cries, and her tone – wailing, disconsolate – reminds Eva, suddenly, of Vivian. ‘You didn’t come.’

  ‘I’m here now, darling.’ She keeps her voice low, soothing. ‘I was only downstairs.’

  Jennifer, uncomforted, watches her mother through narrowed eyes. ‘I don’t like it here. I want to go home.’

  Eva goes over to her, kisses the top of her head. ‘No you don’t, Jennifer. What you want is some breakfast. So why don’t you come downstairs and let Grandpa Sinclair make it for you?’

  She helps her daughter on with her dressing-gown and slippers – these, embroidered with a picture of Minnie Mouse on each toe, are a beloved present from Penelope and Gerald, and guaranteed to resolve any tantrum.

  ‘Does Grandpa Sinclair have Frosties?’ Jennifer asks hopefully.

  ‘I think he might,’ Eva says. She leads her daughter out onto the landing, where Jim is emerging from their bedroom, mussy-haired, yawning. ‘Morning,’ he says, offering them both a drowsy smile. ‘Where’s my kiss?’

  ‘Daddy!’ Jennifer launches herself at her father, throwing her arms around his legs; and as he lifts her up, presses his nose against hers – their special, private form of greeting – Eva watches them together, father and daughter, and thanks whomever there is to thank that she and Jim have planed out those rough edges of their marriage, leaving it – she hopes; no, she knows – smoother, better, stronger than it was before.

  VERSION TWO

  Montmartre

  Paris, November 1972

  Eva has taken to spending her mornings writing in a café on the Place du Tertre.

  She was self-conscious about it at first: it seemed ostentatious, somehow, to sit with her notebook and pen in a café where so many great writers had almost certainly sat drinking pastis half a century before. She could almost picture Ernest Hemingway tapping her on the shoulder, shaking his head, saying, ‘Think you can write one true sentence, do you, madame? Would you even know what one looked like if it bit you on the leg?’ But when she had confessed as much to Ted, he’d laughed out loud. ‘Eva, darling, why can’t you get your head round the fact that you have every right to call yourself a writer, too?’

  Eva had laughed with him, knowing that he was right: writing is her only work now, though the income from her first book is not quite what she would have hoped, and she has abandoned her work on the second. A few months later, she started on a third novel, about a woman in middle age who decides, quite suddenly, to abandon her safe, conventional marriage, and moves to Paris to start a new life alone.

  ‘Too autobiographical?’ she said to Ted one night over dinner, describing the plot.

  He was faintly hurt. ‘Surely not,’ he said. ‘You’re not moving to Paris alone, after all – unless there’s something you’d like me to know?’

  She began the new book in London, writing fluidly, in a burst of enthusiasm; but her work quickly ground to a halt. Her first excuses were sound: the wedding (a small, elegant affair, just family and close friends, at Chelsea Town Hall, followed by an excellent lunch at the Reform Club); the move to Paris, with all the attendant packing and unpacking. Settling Sarah into her new school; allowing herself and Ted time to adjust to life in an unfamiliar city. But her more recent reasoning – the redecorating of the Daily Courier apartment; Sarah’s struggle to make friends – rings hollow, even to Eva. The truth is that she is stuck, and the café, with its constant distractions – the whirr and screech of the coffee machine; the high ring of the bell above the door; the rise and fall of conversation, only half understood – is a good place to hide.

  This morning – a Friday – she sits at her usual table by the window. She drinks two bowls of café au lait and eats a croissant slowly, tearing it into sections, layering each one with butter and jam. Out on the square, the usual painters are sitting before their easels in coats and fingerless gloves, dashing off knock-offs of Picasso and Dalí and Matisse for passing tourists. At eleven, Eva watches an elderly lady inch past the window as she does at the same time each morning, swaddled in a rabbit-fur coat. At twelve, Eva gets up, returns her notebook to her satchel, draws on her coat, leaves the coins on the metal dish beside the bill, and steps out into the fresh Paris air.

  Three hours have passed since she arrived at the café, and she has written precisely two paragraphs. I am turning doing nothing into an art form, she thinks as she hurries towards the small supermarket on the corner of their street. And then she turns her thoughts to other, happier things – this afternoon, Penelope and Gerald are arriving at the Gare du Nord with the children. They will all have a splendid weekend, and she will know how lucky she is to have Sarah and Ted, to have Paris, to have the company of good friends.

  In the supermarket, Eva fills a basket with cheese, ham, yoghurt, a tub of olives, two bottles of red wine and those long, unwieldy baguettes that she has not yet learned to love more than a solid English loaf, or her parents’ favoured Austrian rye. Beside the vegetable rack, she almost collides with Josephine St John, whose husband, Mitch, is the correspondent for the Herald Tribune: he and Ted share an office in the foreign press house, and Josephine – a witty, warm Bostonian, who married Mitch straight out of Harvard, and has travelled with him ever since – has become a friend. They stand together, exchanging news, until it is almost one o’clock, and Eva says she must get back: she’s meeting Ted at home for lunch.

  Josephine lifts an eyebrow, then leans in to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘You must be newlyweds. I can’t get Mitch to come home for lunch for love nor money.’

  But as it turns out, Ted can’t come home. The telephone is ringing as Eva enters the apartment: he has a story to file for tomorrow’s paper – will she mind picking up Sarah alone, meeting Penelope et al., and bringing them home in a taxi? Of course she doesn’t mind – but Ted is apologetic, promises to treat them all to dinner at Maxim’s.

  Putting down the phone, Eva is struck again by the contrast between this marriage – the ease of it; Ted’s basic consideration of her needs, even when he has to put his work first – and the way things had been with David: his narcissism; the suffocating presence of his mother, always there, with her instructions about how things ought to be done. Though Judith Katz had surprised Eva completely by appearing at the door of the Regent’s Park flat a few days after David l
eft, when things were still raw and black and Sarah couldn’t stop asking when Daddy was coming home. She was carrying a stack of Tupperware boxes: chicken soup, Russian salad, shepherd’s pie.

  ‘I thought you could use these,’ Judith had said; and then she had pressed Eva to her, and the embrace – so utterly unexpected – had threatened the fresh onset of tears. ‘I want you to know, Eva dear, that I’m thoroughly ashamed of him. As for that woman – well, Abraham and I won’t be having anything to do with her.’

  Eva had reminded Judith that if David and Juliet were to marry, as it seemed they were, then none of them would really have much choice in the matter. Judith, sweeping into the kitchen with her Tupperware, nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ she said, and her expression was so nakedly sad that Eva had understood, at once, that Judith was also in need of reassurance. ‘You mustn’t worry about seeing Sarah, Judith. She adores you, adores you both. You and Abraham will see her as often as you like.’

  That isn’t quite so easy now, of course, Eva thinks, moving around her Paris kitchen, putting away the shopping, loading a plate with bread, ham, tomatoes. But Judith and Abraham had, to her surprise, raised no objection when she told them about Ted, about the move to Paris. ‘Oh, Paris – we’ll be over so often you’ll be sick of us,’ Abraham had said at once, in his good-natured way; and they have, in fact, already flown out for two weekends – stayed, by mutual consent, in a good hotel on the Île de la Cité; been polite, even friendly, with Ted. It had all gone a lot better than Eva could ever have anticipated; and she has been left with a residual gratitude towards Judith, her old adversary.

  The apartment is chilly, even with the gas heater on and the doors closed: she carries her lunch through to the living-room, wraps a shawl around her shoulders, and then opens the shutters, admitting the thin, wintry afternoon, the car horns and the distant cries of children out for their lunchtime break.

  Ted has left today’s papers in a pile on the table: he has them delivered to the apartment rather than the office. He likes to read them carefully, over breakfast: the French papers first, then the British ones, and finally the Wall Street Journal and the Herald Tribune. Eva tends to limit herself to the British papers, looking out for the bylines of the people they know – and for her own, on Saturdays: Bob Masters is still sending her two or three novels a month to review. Now, she takes the Daily Courier from the top of the pile, reads the main stories as she eats: the fallout of Richard Nixon’s victory; the deaths of six people in an IRA bomb. And then, on the first of the culture pages, she sees his name. ‘Jim Taylor: Breathing New Life Into the Art of Portraiture.’

  Eva’s hand stills on the page. She thinks of how Jim had looked when she refused his dinner invitation, left him on the steps of the Cork Street gallery. Younger, suddenly, and somehow lost. He’d written her a postcard, afterwards, care of the Courier: Thanks so much for coming to the exhibition. I wish you every happiness, which seems to me no more than you deserve – J.

  The photograph was of a Hepworth sculpture: an egg-like oval (its title, she saw, was Oval No. 2) bisected by two smooth holes, as if termites had eaten through it. Eva had stared at the image for some minutes, searching for a deeper meaning – other than the St Ives connection, of course – but none came. It was as if Jim had deliberately chosen an image with the least possible significance. And perhaps that was just as well, for Eva could not deny the excitement she had felt at receiving it, though she quickly placed the postcard in the bottom drawer of her desk – where it would stay, evoking only the faintest memory of their mutual attraction. She had already given Ted her answer. And Jim – well, he had his own family to think of. His own life.

  At two, Eva clears away the lunch things, then performs a quick tour of the apartment, plumping cushions, smoothing down the fresh bed linen in the guest room that will be Penelope and Gerald’s; she has set up twin camp-beds in Sarah’s room for Adam and Charlotte. Then she puts her coat back on, finds a scarf and gloves, and heads out onto the street.

  Sarah’s international school is a short walk away. Eva sees her daughter immediately, standing huddled in the playground with two other girls, their small heads bent close together, brown on blonde. She doesn’t want to disturb them – Sarah has only just started to make friends – but then her daughter looks up, sees Eva, begins her lengthy, girlish goodbyes.

  They take a taxi to the station: Penelope and Gerald’s train is due in at half past, and Sarah’s bag is heavy with the weekend’s homework.

  ‘Those girls look nice,’ Eva says when they are settled on the back seat. ‘Maybe you should invite them home for tea.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Sarah shrugs, and in her studied nonchalance Eva has a sudden vision of the adult Sarah will one day be, and the child she herself once was. She wraps her arm around her daughter’s shoulders.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Sarah says, though she is still young enough to lean in, to rest her head in the dip of her mother’s collarbone.

  ‘Just because,’ Eva says, and they watch the rushing cityscape, framed by the car window: the white apartment buildings, the bright flashes of shopfronts, and the gleaming domes of Sacré-Coeur, standing sentinel on the hill.

  VERSION THREE

  Interview

  Cornwall, February 1973

  The interviewer is not quite what Jim was expecting.

  She is a sensible-looking, solid woman in late middle age, dressed in navy slacks and a pale yellow twinset. Her hair is cropped short, and as she steps from her car – she has just pulled up in the drive; Jim is watching from the front-room window – she looks around with a curiosity she doesn’t bother to disguise.

  Jim goes out to meet her, shakes her hand. Her small blue eyes are unblinking beneath untamed, greying brows. ‘Ann Hewitt. You thought I’d be younger, didn’t you?’

  Wrong-footed, he smiles. ‘Perhaps. But I’m sure you thought I’d be better-looking.’

  Ann Hewitt cocks her head and waits a few seconds, as if deciding whether to allow herself to be amused. ‘Perhaps I did.’

  He takes her through to the kitchen, fills the kettle for tea. Helena has left a plate of biscuits on the table, a vase of flowers on the dresser. ‘She’s not an estate agent, Hel,’ Jim said to her before she left; she had been moving around the house since early morning, cleaning, tidying, making good. ‘We don’t have to impress her.’

  Helena had looked up at him then, incredulous. ‘Oh, we do, Jim,’ she said. ‘And you’re a fool if you think otherwise.’

  ‘Is nobody home, then?’ Ann Hewitt is standing in front of the housework rota. The names are fewer now – Finn and Delia left last year, after Howard accused Delia of stealing money from the housekeeping for grass – but the duties are as neatly delineated as ever, spooling out in an unending cycle that Jim is beginning to find depressing. In fact, if he is truthful, he has found it depressing for quite a while.

  ‘Afraid not. It’s market day in St Ives. We have a stall.’ He pours water into two mugs, finds the milk. ‘Do you take sugar?’

  ‘No.’ From her handbag, the interviewer produces a pencil and a small black notebook. She flips to the first page, and he watches the quick march of her pencil; places a mug on the counter next to her, thinking of how the kitchen must look through her eyes. The ancient stove, so unreliable that they are often reduced to eating cold food for days, even when frost is starching the ground outside. The curtains that Josie tie-dyed and hand-stitched, now badly in need of a clean. The regiment of empty wine bottles on the dresser, hoarded by Simon, who fashions sculptures from fragments of glass (when he can be bothered to rouse himself from his bed). Jim is suddenly grateful to Helena, guilty for chiding her when she was only thinking of him, of all of them. But guilt is so often his overriding feeling towards her, these days, that he is able to suppress the impulse almost as quickly as it appears.

  He sips his tea. ‘Shall we go out to the studio?’

  ‘I wonder …’ Ann Hewitt offers him a thin-lippe
d smile. ‘Would you give me a little tour of the house, perhaps, while the others are out?’

  Jim hesitates. Stephen Hargreaves had insisted he do the interview at home – ‘They’re just keen to see where you work, Jim – nothing salacious.’ But Howard had been furious – had forbidden Jim from doing it, until Jim had quietly reminded Howard that he was not his father, and couldn’t forbid him from doing anything; and that Trelawney House was his home, too, and had been for the last five years. ‘Bloody right I’m not your father,’ Howard had thundered back. ‘But if he were here, I’m sure he’d say the same bloody thing – you’re an artist, not a celebrity. You seem to be having trouble remembering the distinction.’

  They had not spoken for days – though that was not so unusual, now. It was Howard who eventually broke the silence. ‘If you’re set on having this woman in our home, for God’s sake keep her to the kitchen and the studio. Don’t let her wander round, taking it all in, judging us. And get her here on market day. I’m bloody well not going to sit here making small-talk.’

  Damn Howard, Jim thinks now. Damn his self-importance. Damn his petty bloody rules.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ he says aloud. ‘I suppose you’ll get a good feel for the place.’

  Later, Jim will wonder what on earth he was thinking, showing Ann Hewitt from room to room – as if he were a bloody estate agent – answering her questions, so politely, so innocently phrased: ‘So whose bedroom is this?’; ‘Your daughter, Sophie – where does she sleep?’ He had even opened the door to Josie and Simon’s room: they had not pinned back the gaudy, batiked sheet they hung as a curtain, and the room was in semi-darkness, the smell of weed still sweetening the air.

  His only excuse, later, will be the one he can’t share with any of them – that he was thinking of Eva. Jim’s mind was full of her, as it is always now – and was especially that morning, when only a few hours stood between him and the moment she would step out from his mind and become real once more.