The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  But that night, at dinner, she had found herself sitting next to Leo: meals were served at long benches, to encourage the mingling of the course leaders and their students, but the tutors still tended to huddle together at one end. This was where Eva was sitting – next to Joan Dawlins, a crime writer with whom she had once appeared on a television review show, and opposite the playwright David Sloane, a dark, lugubrious type who had said not a word to either of them – when Leo approached, carrying a glass of wine.

  ‘May I?’ he said, indicating the empty chair next to Eva. Joan had simpered, ‘Of course, Leo.’ Sloane still said nothing. But Leo did not sit; he hovered behind the chair, as if awaiting Eva’s permission. ‘Eva?’

  She had looked up from her casserole, registering his presence for the first time. ‘The chair’s empty, isn’t it?’

  As soon as she had spoken, she realised she had sounded rude. Unbecoming red patches had appeared at Joan’s throat. (Eva remembered them, suddenly, from the television programme: the make-up artist’s frantic dabbing of pan-stick under the bright studio lights.) Sloane was actually smiling – Eva would learn, by the end of the week, that he was the sort of man who thrived on others’ discomfort. And so she had turned to Leo, ready to apologise, but he didn’t look in the least perturbed.

  ‘I was so glad to see you were teaching this week too,’ he said sunnily, sitting down. ‘I really do love your books. I missed Tube stops reading Pressed. And the TV adaptation was great. They did a good job.’

  Carefully, Eva laid her knife and fork across her empty plate. She couldn’t quite decide whether he was sincere: she has a hatred of false flattery – of which she has seen quite a lot, since her ‘success’. Indeed, she doesn’t really think of herself as ‘successful’ – she fears that if she did, she might never write another word again – but she enjoys the praise, the reviews, the interviews. Deep down, though, she is aware that none of that matters as much as the writing itself: as sitting down in the mornings at her word processor, Jennifer and Daniel at school, Juliane moving around in the kitchen downstairs, and allowing herself the luxury of time spent entirely alone. It is more than many women are permitted, after all.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Eva must have sounded doubtful, because he turned to her – she noticed that his eyes were a shining, gunmetal grey, and that boyish dimples appeared when he smiled – and said, ‘You think I’m a fake. But I’m not, you know. It’s just my face. Nobody ever takes me seriously.’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

  ‘Well.’ Leo sipped his wine, still looking at her. ‘Perhaps you’ll be the exception, then.’

  He was flirting with her, of course, quite shamelessly, and continued to do so for the rest of the week. Perhaps the women she’d overheard had judged him accurately: Leo certainly seemed to know what he was doing. He paid Eva just enough attention at mealtimes and during the evening gatherings to make her feel singled out, but not so much that anyone would notice. Eva observed his courtship – if she could give it that quaint term – with amusement. She did nothing to encourage him (he knew she was married, as was he; surely he was only playing), but neither did she tell him to stop. Later, she would see that she could easily have done so, had she really wanted to; which must have meant that what she really wanted was for the flirtation to continue.

  And anyway, Eva has grown used, since her mother’s death, to this odd feeling of detachment, to the sense that nothing that is happening to her is fully real. It is as if she has been split into two, even three versions of herself – living, breathing simulacra – and lost sight of the original. She tried to express this to Penelope, and it just came out sounding like science fiction. She could feel her friend watching her cautiously, as if unsure how to respond. ‘Grief, darling,’ Penelope said eventually. ‘Grief does the strangest things. Don’t fight it. You just have to let it play out.’

  Was it grief, then, that encouraged Eva to play this game with Leo Tait; to nod when he offered her, and only her, a drink; to enjoy the warmth of his leg pressing against hers, safely out of sight beneath the dinner table? Perhaps at first, but on the fourth night – the Tuesday – his hand had slipped down onto her knee, and Eva had felt a lightning jolt that made her catch her breath; yet she had not brushed his hand away. After that, the game intensified: on a group outing to Haworth – Lucas, the foundation’s director, was a Brontë obsessive – they had somehow found themselves alone for a moment in an upstairs passageway. Leo had caught her at the waist, said fiercely into her ear, ‘I have to kiss you, Eva. I have to.’ She had shaken her head, slipped away to rejoin the group. For the rest of the day, she had kept her distance, guilt already creeping over her, though she had done nothing, not even let him kiss her; but that night, in bed, she realised that her guilt was pre-emptive. She wanted Leo. Her decision was already made; and as she lay there sleepless in her room, she thought about Jim, and whether, with Greta, he had felt the same way.

  And so, tonight: Friday. As is the foundation’s custom, the end of the course has been marked by a series of readings: two students from each course – novelists, playwrights, poets, crime writers – tactfully selected by their tutors; and then the tutors themselves. Leo was the last to read. Everyone was rather the worse for wear, and the women didn’t bother to hide their anticipation as he stood up, holding the latest slim volume of his poetry. ‘He can read to me anytime he likes,’ one woman, sitting just behind Eva, said in a stage whisper.

  Eva was looking too, of course; admiring Leo’s fine, tuneful baritone as it rolled out across the room. She had never read his poetry (though she had not admitted as much to him), and was unprepared for its effect: for the words’ soft ebb and flow, their unexpected delicacy. She had imagined muscular rhythms, all ‘sod’ and ‘hoe’ – not this wavelike form, pushing and pulling, building to a crescendo that left the room silent for one beat, then two, before the clapping began.

  Now, Leo is returning with the whiskies: their third, or their fourth? It is almost three a.m., and everyone else has gone to bed: even Lucas retired a few minutes ago, several sheets to the wind; they heard him stumble on the landing. Every moment Eva spends here, alone with Leo, is dangerous, but she makes no move to leave.

  When he reaches their table, he doesn’t sit down. ‘Perhaps we could take these up to my room?’

  They are silent on the stairs. His room is on the third floor, at the front of the house: the high bay windows, now framing the black night, overlook the car park, the road. Her own room is larger, with a view over the gardens, and the knowledge of this gives her a hot, shaming sense of pride.

  Eva stands by the closed door, holding her whisky glass, as he moves around the room, closing the curtains, turning on the bedside lamp. There is still time, she thinks. I could reach for the door-handle, go back out onto the landing. But she does not: she lets Leo come over to her, take the glass from her hand, match the length of his body to her own.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he says, and she nods, draws his face to hers. And then she is lost to pure sensation, to the charting of this new, undiscovered stretch of skin, and there is no room for thought at all.

  She wakes in his bed. It is early – she can hardly have slept – and the room is cast in a cool, purplish light. Leo is still sleeping, breathing softly through his half-open mouth. In repose, his face seems absurdly young, though he is a good few years older than she. Eva dresses quietly, careful not to wake him; she barely makes a sound as she closes the door, walks as quickly as she can to her own room. She sees no one, but realises that she would not care if she did: the shame that she has carried through the week has, curiously, evaporated.

  In the shower, soaping the body he has touched, Eva feels a sudden rush of exhilaration. She will not see Leo again, except by chance, at parties, on other such courses: they made no promises they couldn’t keep. Tonight, she will be home with Jim and the children; she will step back into her other life, pick up its familiar refrain. What h
appened here, in Yorkshire, will be something she will keep for herself. Something to carry with her silently, like a pebble slipped into the pocket of an old coat: tucked away, and then mostly forgotten.

  VERSION TWO

  Gingerbread

  Cornwall, December 1977

  Christmas Eve: the sky is a pale, iced blue, the sea polished and still. In the harbour, a fine layer of frost is melting on the swept decks of the boats.

  Holly wreaths hang in the front windows of the Old Neptune, and a sprig of mistletoe dangles from the front porch, brushing the heads of the fishermen as they duck in for a pint, leaving their wives to the plucked turkey and gift-wrap. Each time the heavy oak door is opened, a tinny blast of music rolls out across the quayside. ‘When a Child Is Born’; ‘Mull of Kintyre’; ‘Merry Christmas, Everybody.’

  In their cottage on Fish Street – how they all laughed at the name, the first time they saw it – Helena, Jim and Dylan are making gingerbread. Helena tips the sugar into the bowl, stirs the mixture with a wooden spoon. Her face is flushed with the effort, and a lock of hair, loosened from her low ponytail, is damp against her cheek. Jim would like to lean across the countertop, brush her hair back behind her ear, and feel the warmth of her skin under his hand. But he does not.

  ‘Can I have a go, Mum?’ Dylan is eight: tall for his age, with his mother’s clear china skin and light brown hair. Mousy, Helena calls it: she has taken to dying hers with henna, leaving the bathroom smelling unpleasantly of bitter herbs. Dylan’s eyes, though, are Jim’s – that startling blue – and so are the freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose. Sometimes, looking at his son, Jim has the unsettling feeling that his own reflection is staring back at him. They are alike in so many other ways, too: in Dylan’s talent for drawing (his set of HB pencils, bought by Jim for his last birthday, is among his most treasured possessions); in the boy’s sensitivity, the way he looks to Helena and Jim as the twin weathervanes of his own moods.

  ‘Thought you’d never ask.’ Above Dylan’s head, Helena catches his eye, and smiles. She seems relaxed today, playful, and he can feel the tension between them easing: it is a perceptible shift, like the sun coming out from behind a bank of cloud. There have been times, recently, after Helena has left the room, that Jim has noticed he was holding his breath.

  ‘Here.’ Helena draws her apron over Dylan’s head, fastens it loosely. He isn’t quite tall enough to reach the counter comfortably, so Helena sets him on a stool. ‘Keep stirring.’ To Jim, she adds, ‘Smoke?’

  They stand shivering by the back door, watching their breath writhe in the cold air. Helena’s herbs are huddled inside the makeshift greenhouse she has built from pallet boxes and a couple of discarded windowpanes, only a little cracked, that she found in a skip. She is good like that – practical, much more so than he. But the smoking outdoors is a new thing: Iris’s suggestion – no, instruction. At the thought of Iris, Jim tastes the familiar, bitter tang of dislike.

  ‘Iris still coming round, is she?’ He tries to keep his voice light.

  Helena glances over. ‘Yes. In a minute.’ She draws deeply on her roll-up. ‘Did Sinclair say what time they’d be here?’

  ‘Teatime.’

  ‘Fiveish, then.’ He watches her profile: her full, arched eyebrows, the wide slopes and furrows of her lips. When they had met in Bristol – that warehouse exhibition; dingy rooms filled with bad art and worse wine – he had been overwhelmed by her vitality, by the way she seemed to carry the sea air in the pores of her skin. It had not been entirely fanciful: at Trelawney House, after a heavy night, Helena would still rise early for one of her walks on the beach, her face carrying no sign of the night’s excesses. He remembers her as always sunny then – had painted her as such. Helena with Lady’s Bedstraw: her beauty bare, simple, captured with a few brushstrokes. He can’t quite decide when the tension between them appeared, unbidden, a hairline fracture webbing across a sheet of glass. But he has a name for it: Iris.

  He is upstairs when Iris arrives, pulling on a jumper before heading out to the studio: it is an old whitewashed outhouse, and always draughty, though Jim goes out early each morning to switch on the electric heater. Instinctively, he stiffens, picturing that woman in his hallway, greeting Helena, leaning down to kiss his son.

  Iris is short, thickset, with a large, square face and bobbed hair dyed an unflattering shade of orange. She makes fat, bulbous pottery she calls ‘sculpture’; he and Helena have bits of it squatting hideously all around the cottage. She has a stall at the Saturday craft market where holidaymakers, to Jim’s great surprise, sometimes part with their money for a bowl or a mug, but it is by no means a thriving concern: Iris lives, as far as he can tell, on a generous legacy provided by a great-aunt. This allows Iris to adopt the hippy’s professed indifference to material things, with which Jim suspects she disguises her envy of his own modest commercial success. Art is for the people, not for sale. Property is theft. I work on a higher spiritual plane.

  Sometimes, when Iris talks like this, Jim is gripped by the wild desire to punch her: he has never, in all his life, disliked anyone with such vehemence; and it’s a feeling he can’t quite explain. Helena, of course, can sense this, and her response is to dig in her heels. She certainly appears, these days, to reserve the larger part of her good humour for Iris rather than for him.

  In the hallway, Jim greets Iris, one Judas kiss on each cheek. Her skin is unpleasantly clammy, and smells of patchouli. She squints at him. ‘I hear you’ve been making gingerbread, Jim. Didn’t have you down as a baker. Women’s work, isn’t it?’ Iris half smiles at him, her head on one side. Always she goads him like this, with her gloopy, masticated feminism, as if Jim were some kind of woman-hater, when really, the only woman in the world he hates is her.

  ‘Dylan’s helping too,’ he says, ‘so does that make him a woman?’

  Without waiting for Iris’s reply, he turns to Helena. ‘Heading out for a bit. Let me know when they get here, won’t you?’

  In the studio, the heater is breathing out its bitter smell of burning dust, and Marcel is sprawled on the old rag-rug, belly up. ‘Hello, boy.’ Jim leans down, tickles him under the chin, and the cat preens, shifts. ‘We’ll have some music, shall we?’

  He slides Blood on the Tracks into the cassette player (his gift, last Christmas, from Sinclair and his mother), presses play. He tugs the sheet from his easel – an old habit, never broken, though Helena rarely comes in here any more – reaches into his pocket for his rolling tobacco, papers. Early one morning, the sun was shining, I was laying in bed … He sings along, pinching the tobacco, laying it along the shaft of the paper, narrowing his eyes at the canvas. Wondering if she’s changed at all, if her hair was still red …

  The woman’s hair is not red; it’s a deep, dark brown, with a conker’s lustre. She is turning away, looking towards the man who sits behind her, on their living-room sofa; he is facing her, and the viewer, with an expression that Jim wishes to be unreadable. At the moment, his main fear is that the man – who is both him and not him, just as the woman is both Helena and Eva Katz, and any of the women he has ever met – looks too miserable.

  This is the third panel of the triptych. The other two, standing sheet-wrapped against the studio wall, are almost the same, but for minor variations: in the first, it is the woman seated on the sofa, and the man standing; in the second, they are both sitting. Jim has changed small details about the room, too: the position of the clock on the wall behind the sofa; the cards and photographs on the mantelpiece; the colour of the cat stretched out on the armchair. (Only one is black and white, in homage to Marcel.)

  ‘Like a spot the difference,’ Helena had said when he first outlined the idea: she was joking, but he felt the sting. His aspirations for the triptych are much grander. The painting is about the many roads not taken, the many lives not lived. He has called it The Versions of Us.

  Jim has only just started working on the man’s face – dabbing lightly at the sha
dows around his mouth, trying to lift its corners – when Helena puts her head round the door. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the music. ‘They’re here.’

  He nods at her, turns reluctantly from the canvas, dips his brush in the jar of turps. He stoops for Marcel, and turns off the heater; it will be days before he can come out here again.

  Jim has never liked Christmas – the endless hours of eating and drinking, the enforced good cheer. The Christmas after his father’s death, Vivian was only just out of hospital, and she hadn’t even bothered to get up. There was nothing in the larder to eat but a jar of Marmite and a box of stale water biscuits, which he had finished by the time Mrs Dawes next door, with her unerring ability to sense his distress, had rung the bell and insisted he come over for his dinner.

  Now, Jim holds the cat’s warm, writhing body, presses his chin to the top of Marcel’s head. ‘Come on, boy. Let’s get you inside.’

  In the kitchen, there is the smell of cooling gingerbread, the low chorus of carols on the radio. (Helena is surprisingly traditional about Christmas: when Howard and Jim had tried to ban any mention of it one year at Trelawney House, she and Cath had very nearly packed their bags and left.)

  Vivian is talking very loudly to Dylan. ‘You mustn’t peek at your presents, darling. You simply mustn’t peek.’ She is wearing a green jumper with a reindeer motif clumsily hand-knitted through the front, a pink woolly hat and a pair of earrings in the shape of holly leaves. She turns to kiss him, and he sees that she has scrawled two thick blue lines of kohl unevenly around her eyes, and that her pink lipstick has bled into the deep wrinkles on either side of her mouth.