The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

‘Darling,’ she says.

  Sinclair, coming through from the hallway with the suitcases, catches Jim’s eye and mouths silently, ‘Not good.’

  It is Dylan who carries them through the evening: he adores his grandmother, and insists on producing his favourite toys – his Etch A Sketch; his Slinky; his Luke Skywalker action figure – for her inspection. Helena serves plates of ham, cheese, salad; they eat the cooled gingerbread with mugs of tea, and play a game of charades that disintegrates when it is Vivian’s turn, and she tells them the name of the film before she has acted it out. ‘Oh dear,’ she says, realising her mistake. Her eyes fill with tears. ‘Stupid, stupid me.’

  Jim – remembering a disastrous childhood game of twenty questions that had left his mother sobbing in the front room – creates a distraction by offering everyone a drink. After her second sherry, Vivian falls asleep on the sofa, gently snoring.

  Later, when Vivian has been persuaded to go to bed, Dylan is asleep, and Helena has turned in, too, Jim and Sinclair sit in the kitchen, sharing the last of a bottle of single malt.

  ‘How long has she been like this?’

  Sinclair shrugs. Jim has seen his stepfather’s expression before, on his own face, back in the years he spent with his mother in that miserable Bristol flat. ‘Three weeks, maybe. Four. The medication was working wonders – you know it was – but I think she’s stopped taking it. She says it makes her feel like she’s inside a bubble, that she just wants to feel again.’

  ‘You haven’t found the tablets?’

  ‘No. You know how clever she is. She’s emptying the bottle. I think she must be flushing them away.’

  The kitchen clock ticks on; in the old armchair in the corner, Marcel yawns, then settles back into sleep. ‘We’ll have to call Dr Harris in the new year,’ Jim says. ‘She’ll crash soon. It’s too much for you.’

  ‘Too much for all of us.’ Sinclair drains his glass. ‘She keeps calling for your father at night, you know. First time she’s ever done that. When I try to comfort her, she hits out.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jim says, because he is, and because there is nothing else to say. Then they go upstairs to bed – Jim to climb in with Helena, seeking the warmth of her body; Sinclair to the room where Vivian is sleeping quietly, at least for now.

  In the night – or perhaps it is the early morning – Jim is woken by the sound of a woman crying. He lies still for a few seconds, suddenly alert; but Helena sleeps on, and he does not hear the sound again.

  VERSION THREE

  Afterglow

  Los Angeles, December 1977

  On New Year’s Eve, David and Eva attend a party at the Hancock Park home of David’s agent, Harvey Blumenfeld.

  The house is large – of course – and half-timbered, in a turreted, faux-Florentine style that reminds Eva, incongruously, of a school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon: Anne Hathaway’s cottage, thatched, fat plaster belted by dark timber beams. Enormous palm trees surround the pool, which is flanked by a low building of pretty red stone, with an open wood-fired oven on which Harvey himself – a man of immense appetite, especially for dramatic gestures – has been known, at his more intimate summer gatherings, to bake pizza for his guests.

  Eva wears a long blush-pink gown with bell-sleeves and a plunging drawstring neckline. It seemed perfect in London – she had found it in a tiny boutique off Carnaby Street – but is not, she realises as soon as they arrive, at all right for Los Angeles.

  The other women are in pantsuits or fifty-dollar peasant blouses. Their hair is expertly blow-dried; their bare arms and décolletages are, for the most part, the warm, even colour of milky coffee. To say they are beautiful feels inadequate, and not, in all cases, strictly accurate: theirs is something beyond beauty. They are gilded, luminous; it is as if, Eva thinks, looking round at the guests – there is Faye Dunaway, gazelle-limbed in white bellbottoms; there is Carrie Fisher by the pool, blinking at Warren Beatty – they have somehow ingested the heat of the studio lamps through their skin. David, too, has always had this quality, and both women and men are drawn by it, moth-like. There he is now, across the room, talking animatedly to a rail-thin actress in a low-cut white blouse, her eyes not wavering from David’s face.

  Eva stands alone, drinking champagne, looking down at her hateful pink dress. She has an uncomfortable vision, suddenly, of her entire relationship with David as an unspooling sequence of these moments: a shifting film-strip of inappropriate dresses, worn to parties at which she knows no one.

  Well, not quite no one: there’s Harvey, of course, who treats Eva with an exaggerated courtesy that she fancies he considers European. (‘The beautiful Frau Curtis! How are you, loveliest of ladies?’) Harry is here, though not Rose; they parted three years ago, after she caught Harry in bed with his latest young actress. And Eva has, over the years, met enough of David’s people to be able to make her way around the room, drifting from group to group. She knows they do not really consider her one of them – how could she be, the little woman back home in England, bringing up two children – but they are, for the most part, gracious with her. Once, at an Oscars party, a young actress named Anna Capozzi – effortlessly elegant in a backless black gown – had come up, taken Eva by the arm, and whispered into her ear, ‘It’s absurd, what they’re saying about David. None of us believe a word.’ She must have known that it was true – that David was, is in love with Juliet Franks – but it was, Eva felt, kind of her to deny it.

  At least Juliet isn’t here: she has gone home to London for the holidays – a tactful absence for which Eva is grateful, but not fooled. She knows that Juliet is all but living with David. She has found expensive lotions and perfume in David’s en suite, and Rebecca – callously frank, as if she wants to goad her mother into reacting – has told Eva that Juliet is often there in the mornings, making them breakfast. Stacks of blueberry pancakes, freshly blended juices. Once, the thought of that woman making breakfast for her daughter would have made Eva want to scream out loud. Now, she is aware only of the essential rightness of the scene: of Juliet as the true wife, while she is the other woman, the interloper.

  It was Eva’s idea to spend Christmas and New Year in Los Angeles. She would have no proofreading to do, and it would, she thought, be a chance for Sam to spend some time with his father (David has not been back to London for more than a weekend, squeezed between castings, since Miriam’s funeral), and for both of them to spend time with Rebecca, who is currently living with her father. She is eighteen now, taller than Eva, with David’s dark eyes and wide, insouciant lips. She has already done some modelling in London, and David has been touting her around his Hollywood friends like a … well, ‘like a pimp’ was how Eva put it during their last argument, by telephone. David was righteously indignant, as only a father who has observed his children’s lives from the safe distance of five thousand miles can be. ‘If you try to stop her doing what she wants, Eva,’ he said, ‘you’ll only drive her away.’

  She didn’t want to admit it, but Eva knew that he was right. Rebecca’s teenage years have been punctuated by tears, door-slamming, threats of running away to Los Angeles. Their worst argument came when Rebecca was just fourteen: David had not flown home as promised for her birthday. The usual apologetic phone call had followed – ‘So sorry, darling, but Harvey has set up a meeting with George Lucas’; then an oversized bottle of Chanel No. 5, his usual peace offering, had arrived in the mail. Eva, by way of recompense, had organised an elaborate dinner party for Rebecca and four of her friends: prawn cocktail, chicken chasseur, baked Alaska. But, on the night, Rebecca and her friends had not materialised; and only one of the friends – a sweet, nervous girl named Abigail – had had the decency to telephone. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Katz,’ Abigail had said. ‘Rebecca’s gone out to a club with the others. She’ll be so angry that I told you, but I felt bad.’

  Slowly, carefully, Eva had wrapped the uneaten food in cling film, returned it to the fridge; disassembled the place settings; removed Aladdin Sane
(her birthday present to Rebecca) from the record player. Sam had helped – he was five at the time; still in awe of his beloved elder sister, but precociously sensitive to his mother’s moods – and then Eva had put him to bed, and sat up smoking, waiting. It was almost two a.m. when Rebecca arrived home; when she saw her mother, she had pursed her lips – painted a lurid, glittering pink – and said, ‘I wish I lived with Dad instead of you.’ And Eva – with a candour she would later regret – had replied, ‘Well, if that’s how you feel, why don’t you just bloody well fly over there?’

  Rebecca’s eyes had turned to slits. ‘Maybe I will. And then you’ll be sorry, won’t you?’

  But Eva had never thought that Rebecca would make good on the threat – until four years later, her A levels dutifully completed, Rebecca did. She had packed all her things – her jean-shorts and fringed suede waistcoats; her Bowie cassettes; Gunther, her ancient, fraying teddy bear – and set off for Heathrow one Saturday morning with the plane tickets David had, apparently, airmailed to her.

  It was lucky Eva had caught her: she’d been out taking Sam to football practice. Opening the door, she saw her daughter heaving a backpack down the stairs, and caught her by the arm. ‘Where on earth do you think you’re going?’

  ‘Los Angeles.’ Rebecca had stared at her mother – challenging her – and Eva had seen David’s resolve, David’s confidence, in those black-brown eyes, in the firm set of her daughter’s chin. She was so like her father; she was eighteen; perhaps she should go and spend some time with him. And so Eva decided not to fight. Loosening her grip on Rebecca’s arm, she said, ‘What on earth possessed you to leave without saying anything?’

  Rebecca had softened a little, then. ‘Sorry. I thought you’d try to stop me.’

  Eva, sighing, had reached forward, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear. ‘Come on, I’ll drive you to Heathrow. Not that you deserve it. And as for your bloody father …’

  At the car, Eva had stowed the backpack in the boot. Rebecca had climbed into the passenger seat, her bare legs brown, unblemished, and said, quite matter-of-factly, ‘You do understand that I need to get away, don’t you, Mum? You smother me, you see. You smother me with your love.’

  Eva had turned away, pretended to check her wing mirror as she blinked away her tears. They were silent as Bowie accompanied them up the M4. (How romantic that unlovely stretch of road still seemed, for the fact that it led to Cornwall, to Jim.) At the terminal, Rebecca was contrite – ‘I really am sorry, Mum’ – and Eva, not wanting anger to sour their parting, had bought her a few gifts for the trip: a Christian Dior compact; a pair of Ray-Bans. Rebecca had even cried a little as they said goodbye. And then she was gone: a tiny figure in shorts and boots, stooping under the weight of her enormous rucksack.

  All the way home, to Sam and an empty flat, her daughter’s words had played over and over in Eva’s mind. You smother me. It struck Eva then that she had made her choice, not once, but twice: invested not in Jim, in the chance of their finding happiness together, but in her children, in her certainty that their happiness must lie with a mother whose primary loyalty – at least on paper – was to their father. Oh, she had considered divorcing David, and bringing her love for Jim into the bright, clean light of day; but each time she did so, she saw her children – the way Rebecca glowed each time she saw her father; the way Sam treasured each of David’s film posters and theatre programmes, his autographed ten-by-eights. She had thought about bringing Jim into their lives – about building a home; threading together the disparate wefts of their broken families – and felt a rush of pure fear.

  She was putting her children first – they both were: Jim his daughter, Sophie, too – and that fact, Eva thought now, had made her over-protective. She remembered the time, just back from one of her rare nights away with Jim, that she’d insisted Rebecca stay at home for the whole weekend rather than go out with her friends; she’d wanted her daughter’s presence, in some way, to make up for how deeply, how painfully, she was missing Jim. She also remembered the afternoons when, returning from a snatched hour or two in Regent’s Park, she had forbidden Sam from going to a friend’s house after school. Guilt had made her draw the children too closely to her. As she drove back down the M4, it had occurred to Eva that she need do so no longer. That perhaps the best mother was not one who tried, against all odds, to protect her children; but one who was honest, happy, true to herself and to her own desires.

  In Los Angeles, the party rolls on with champagne, and a band, and fireworks at midnight. At one o’clock, the spent Catherine wheels are still smouldering, and the guests are beginning to disperse: those who wish to continue the party will do so at the Chateau Marmont, or in motel rooms scattered along the freeway. Eva and David will not be among them: Sam and Rebecca are at home (if Rebecca stayed home – Eva suspects she will have slipped away in the too-fast car David bought her for her eighteenth birthday). And so they make their way to David’s red Aston Martin, the Californian night cool and damp, and smelling of oleander and gasoline and the fireworks’ bitter afterglow.

  David has left the top down; Eva draws her wrap closer around her shoulders as he eases the car out onto the drive, the gravel loud beneath the tyres.

  ‘Cold?’ he says, glancing over.

  ‘No. I’m fine. It’s refreshing.’

  From the road, they can see the lights of downtown LA, blinking like the tail-spots of distant planes. Eva thinks of Jim, of course, as she always does: of the solid, safe shape of him; the way that every time she sees him, it’s as if the rest of the world has faded to a blur.

  She thinks of that day and night in the hotel in Broadway, the day after her mother’s funeral: how Jim had come back in after his walk, stretched out next to her, and asked her to come away with him, and she’d pretended she hadn’t heard. She’d loved him for asking – of course she had – but she had just lost her Mama, the children their beloved Oma, and the idea of forcing upon them another loss, another sudden shift in circumstance, had simply been too awful to contemplate.

  She thinks of what Jim might be doing right now; of whether he is lying next to Helena, thinking of the last time they – he and Eva – made love.

  She thinks of how it felt to write him that letter, all those years ago, to bicycle with it down King’s Parade as the street-lights blinked on, and to feel that her heart was breaking – not in some metaphorical sense, but with a pain that was physical: a tearing in two.

  She thinks of Jim standing outside the New York Public Library, his cold hands sheathed in his pockets, waiting for her, scanning the crowds for a face that would not appear.

  She thinks, It has been too long.

  She thinks, Now.

  ‘It’s time to stop this, David.’ Eva’s voice seems unnaturally loud, floating out to him across the silent road. ‘I can’t do this any more. I’m not even sure what it is we’re doing.’

  David watches the road unspool. His profile is almost as familiar to her as her own – she will be forty this year; she has known him for more than half her life – and yet she is struck, now, by how little she really knows the man he has become. His is the face on the movie poster, his eyes expressionless, unfathomable.

  ‘You’re right,’ he says. He speaks carefully, as if choosing words in a language he doesn’t fully command. ‘We’ve let things lie for too long.’

  ‘I love someone.’ She wasn’t expecting to say this now.

  ‘I know. And Jim deserves you, Eva. I mean it. He’s loved you all this time.’

  Eva runs a hand over the smooth pink fabric of her dress. A scrap of poetry – T.S. Eliot; how devoted she had been to him at Cambridge – drifts into her mind: Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take. All the efforts they have made, all the secrecy, those tissue-thin layers of lies and half-truths. All of it gone – just swept away.

  ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘I think I always knew.’

  She
swallows. They pass a motel missing half its sign, the neon letters TEL floating ghostlike in the darkness. ‘Does Rebecca know?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She hasn’t said anything.’ Eva breathes a little easier – she will tell her daughter, and Sam too, but in her own time. ‘We haven’t been honest with them, have we?’

  ‘We haven’t been honest with each other.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ David reaches into the dashboard for his cigarettes. He lights one, passes it to her. ‘We both did what we thought was right, Eva. And it wasn’t just out of some dusty old idea of duty – I did love you, you know. I probably still do. We just don’t fit, do we?’

  They are silent as they smoke. He is a decent man, underneath it all, Eva thinks. He really did the best he could. Another open-top car passes, blaring its horn: four teenagers are hanging out, Deep Purple thrumming from the stereo. Eva scans their faces for Rebecca’s, but her daughter isn’t among them. She leans back against the headrest, smoking the cigarette down to its last sour gasp, thinking of how suddenly everything can change; thinking of what Jim will say when she tells him what she has done.

  Outside David’s house – that modernist box of steel and concrete and glass; it has always been David’s place, not hers – the car purrs gently to a halt. They sit for a moment, neither of them quite ready to go inside.

  ‘Be happy with him, Eva,’ David says. ‘I really want you to be happy.’

  She reaches out, touches his face with her hand. It is the first time she has touched him in months – years, even – and the feel of David’s cool skin beneath her palm sends a shiver through her: fear, regret and the sweet remembered pleasure of loving him, or believing she did. Believing she had to.

  ‘I think we will be, David. I really think we will.’

  VERSION ONE

  Ground