The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

Bristol, February 1979

  They bury Vivian on a Friday morning: the coldest of February days, the sky grey and the air damp, moistening the skin, though no rain has fallen.

  The grass of the churchyard is frozen hard; it snaps beneath their feet as they walk from the church. All through that slow procession – Jim is at the front left-hand corner of the coffin, bearing his portion of its weight, allowing its sharp edges to press uncomfortably against his shoulder – he can think only of the diggers; of how long it must have taken them to break the ground, to cleave through the iced topsoil to the warm, crumbling earth below.

  He has never been to a burial before. Funerals, yes – Miriam’s was almost three years ago – but all of them cremations: brief services building to a theatrical denouement, the coffin disappearing behind a pair of curtains as if in a conjuror’s trick. Of his father’s funeral, Jim remembers only that slow dance of red velvet, the mechanical whirr as the casket moved off to places unknown. His mother still and silent on the pew beside him (the doctor had come to the house that morning, given her something ‘to keep her calm’); the dark-grey worsted of his shorts rough against his thighs.

  When the police telephoned with their news, Jim had assumed – when he was able to think anything at all – that his mother’s funeral would follow the same pattern. But it turned out that plans had been made, promises given. Vivian had been attending church for more than a year. Jim had not been surprised when she told him: his mother had often, in her high periods, developed sudden, unpredictable fanaticisms. There had been a particularly uncomfortable phase in his early teens when she’d flirted with Wicca, and he’d found strange little offerings around the house – plaited twigs, a nest of quail’s eggs, a heap of dried daisy-heads.

  And so Vivian had wanted, Sinclair said, to be buried at her new church: she had a horror of cremation, of being wheeled off to meet the flames while still alive, her cries going unheeded.

  Jim did not say, Well, if my mother wanted a Christian burial, perhaps she should have thought twice about throwing herself off a bridge.

  He is at pains to be solicitous of Sinclair, who feels responsible – though Jim does not hold him so, any more than he does himself; perhaps rather less. It was Vivian who had refused to take her tablets: they had found her stash hidden in a plastic bag inside the cistern of the downstairs toilet. It was Vivian who had wanted to be able to feel again. It was Vivian who had ground a sleeping tablet into powder, slipped it into Sinclair’s bedtime single malt, and then crept from the house at three a.m. to walk barefoot across cold black tarmac to the bridge.

  It was a plain footbridge, spanning an unremarkable stretch of A-road: goodness knows why she had chosen such a place. A driver, naturally, found her. He told the police he’d seen her fall – watched a woman drop, her nightdress luminous in the streetlight. ‘She was smiling,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she was. I’ll never forget it.’

  Jim knew this because he’d asked to see the driver’s statement. Reading it, he’d been reminded, suddenly, of a story he’d once heard in a Bristol pub: he was back from Cambridge for the holidays, had gone out alone one night to the White Lion for a beer. The man was tall, good-looking, about his age; sitting among a group of pasty-faced office boys in cheap suits. He was telling these boys, in his soft Bristol burr, about a factory girl, jilted by her lover, who had thrown herself from Clifton suspension bridge and floated gently down, her wide Victorian skirts forming a kind of parachute. She had, incredibly, survived. ‘Lived to eighty-five,’ the man had said. It was curious how vividly Jim could see the man’s face in his mind. ‘A legend in her own lifetime.’

  At the graveside, the undertaker’s boys step forward to lower the coffin into the ground. Someone – one of the diggers, Jim supposes – has lined the bare hole with baize: against the black earth, the green fabric seems cheap, artificial. Jim releases his share of his mother’s weight to the boys’ care – they are men really, muscles straining under their black suit jackets – and feels a hand slip into his. Eva. Sinclair is on his other side – a husk of a man, hollowed out, as if air is whistling through him. Jennifer and Daniel are behind them, each holding one of Jakob’s hands.

  ‘What is that man doing, Opa?’ Daniel whispers loudly to Jakob as the priest – a large, ungainly man with a soft, kind face; of course he must be kind, to have permitted Vivian a proper funeral – steps to the side of the grave.

  ‘Saying goodbye, Daniel,’ Jakob whispers back. ‘We’re all saying goodbye to your grandma.’

  Afterwards, the black cars take them back to Sinclair’s house – Jim has never quite grown used to thinking of it as his mother’s – where Eva and his aunts have prepared the buffet, set out wine, sherry, beer. He pours himself a whisky – the last of a bottle he gave Sinclair for Christmas, but has almost polished off himself over the last few wakeful nights – and watches Eva as she moves among the guests. She is still slender, compact; her dark hair – gathered now into a low bun – throws up the odd streak of grey, but really, she could still be taken for a girl.

  His girl. His wife. The woman he knows better than any other – better, certainly, than he ever knew his mother, with her fathomless reserves of sadness. She has come so far from the girl she once was, out there with her bicycle on the Cambridge Backs. Eva is now, in some way, public: a person known, recognised. A few weeks ago, a man of about Jim’s age had come up to them while they were out to dinner, and told Eva how much he admired her without so much as glancing in Jim’s direction. And he hadn’t minded – not as he might have, once. He’d put paid, on that wonderful holiday in Greece, to his unsightly bitterness. And he had come home feeling better, truly, than he had in years – closer to his beautiful, brilliant wife; filled with love for his children; finding satisfaction in his teaching, in the possibility of inspiring in others his own love for art, and all that it means to him.

  And yet still it has crept back, gradually: that old sense of failure, of ambition unfulfilled. A husband, a father, an art teacher: dull, plodding, reliable. Not a real artist; not like his old friend Ewan, with his exhibition at the Tate. Recently, at a party, Jim had overheard some new acquaintance of Eva’s – a TV producer, blue-suited, shiny – ask why her husband had never considered becoming a ‘proper painter, like his father’.

  ‘Oh, but Jim is a painter,’ Eva had replied. ‘And a very good one too.’

  Jim had been proud of his wife’s loyalty, of her deliberate, tender blindness. (He hasn’t painted anything in years.) And yet her words had also stung. For days he had wondered whether Eva truly believed what she had said – whether this was, in short, her version of the truth, and what that meant about the person she must still believe he was. For what claim, now, could Jim truly lay to being any kind of artist?

  The wake passes in a blur of faces. ‘At least she is at rest,’ someone says – a woman about his mother’s age, grey-haired, her small blue eyes pink-rimmed. Jim nods, unable to think of a response. Only his aunt Patsy seems to have anything meaningful to offer. ‘You did all you could for her, Jim. You were her darling boy – her everything – but in the end, even that wasn’t enough, was it? Nothing was ever enough.’

  She frowns as Jim pours another whisky: he brought a second bottle with him from London. ‘You’d better watch that. Drinking yourself into a stupor won’t make it hurt any less.’

  He knows his aunt is right: he is drinking too much. He can’t blame his mother for that, either – convenient as that would be. For months now, Jim has been uncomfortably aware of the relief that comes with the first drink – the sense that he is reconfiguring the world, making it comprehensible.

  After dinner is the best time (earlier, sometimes, at weekends). The day’s stresses passed, Daniel in bed, Jennifer sitting dutifully with her schoolbooks, Eva out somewhere – usually, Jim can’t remember where; maybe she asked him to come, maybe she didn’t – and the kitchen quiet, calmly lit. The second drink is good, too, and the third: then, the room’s colours gro
w warmer, and the evening is filled with possibilities. It is only with the fourth drink, the fifth, that those possibilities seem to recede, and the room’s shadows lengthen. It is then that he wonders where Eva is, where everyone is, why the house is so silent. It is then that Jim feels the great, deep loneliness creep over him, and with it the unnerving sense that it is not his father he takes after, but his mother. For surely this is how Vivian must have felt in those darkest times, on that moonless night when she closed the front door behind her and walked out in her bare feet. Jim thinks then that he really is his mother’s son, and the thought fills him with fear; and so he pours himself another drink.

  Sometime later – it is dark outside, and the kitchen windows are throwing pools of light out over the neat front lawn – Eva makes coffee. She places a mug in front of Jim – he is sitting at the kitchen table, as he has been for a long time. The other mourners must have left: he is aware only of his wife, and of Sinclair, and of the low chatter of the television from the living-room.

  ‘I failed her,’ Sinclair says. ‘I’m so sorry, Jim.’

  Jim looks at his stepfather, at his gentle, unremarkable, unmemorable face. ‘You don’t have to be sorry, Sinclair. There was nothing you could have done. Nothing anybody could have done.’

  He has said the same thing, or variations of it, over and over again, for weeks. He will keep saying it, but it will never be enough. He will never be able to make Sinclair understand, really understand, that the darkness lived inside Vivian, and that although she feared it, hated it, there were moments, too, when she wanted nothing more than to dive down into it, allow its waters to close up over her head. Jim understands, and that is why he reaches for the whisky bottle, pours a generous dose into his coffee mug.

  ‘Jim …’ Eva’s voice is soft, concerned, but he shakes his head. He gets up, takes the mug, goes out to the hallway, opens the back door.

  The cold is the slow, seeping kind: he doesn’t notice it at first, but his fingers shake as he takes out his rolling tobacco, his papers and filter tips. He is clumsy, fumbling; curses his hands, the cold, everything, until Eva comes, takes the tobacco from him, and rolls them both a cigarette. Silently, they smoke, looking out at the dark, frosted outlines of wintering shrubs. They smoke because there is nothing left to say. They smoke until their faces are aching with cold, and it is time to go back inside.

  VERSION TWO

  Breakfast

  Paris, February 1979

  It is Ted who finds the notice in the newspaper.

  They are having breakfast: coffee and brioche, the World Service turned down low, the papers spread across the dining-room table. Ted still prefers to read the papers at home, but Eva can join him only on Fridays, now – on other days, she is due at the university by nine o’clock. Often, she gets there earlier, for an hour of reading, preparation: the quiet gathering of her thoughts.

  Eva’s office is on the third floor of the English faculty: small but well lit, its windows framing the splayed upper branches of a plane tree, its walls lined with framed film posters and book-cover reproductions. The pleasure Eva takes in this little room, furnished exactly as she likes it, surprises her. She loves their apartment, with its miscellany of family life (Sarah’s guitar, propped against the sofa; Ted’s papers; the washing strung from the kitchen ceiling on the old-fashioned laundry rack), but none of it feels as fully hers, and hers alone, as this shabby faculty cubbyhole.

  Even now, as she scans an article about striking lorry drivers, Eva’s mind is already in that room: considering the pile of first-year short stories she has left on her desk, the reference she has agreed to write for a Harvard master’s application. And so she isn’t fully listening when Ted says, ‘Jim Taylor. Don’t you know him from Cambridge?’

  ‘Jim Taylor?’ Eva looks up, notes that her husband’s expression is serious. ‘What about him?’

  ‘His mother’s died. Killed herself, apparently. What an awful thing.’ He folds his copy of the Guardian neatly in half, passes it to her. Vivian Taylor, artist’s widow, dies at 65. It is not the lead obituary, but a down-page article, accompanied by a small black-and-white photograph of a slender woman in a patterned dress, the man beside her shorter, stockier. The coroner has ruled the cause of death to be suicide. She is survived by her son, Jim, a prominent painter in his own right, and by her sisters, Frances and Patricia.

  Eva looks again at the photograph. Vivian is not quite smiling, but the man with his arm around her – her husband, Lewis Taylor – is beaming. He isn’t handsome – he is short, blunt-featured: nothing like Jim – but he has a certain ragged, leonine power, tangible even in three inches of grainy newsprint. But Vivian: artist’s widow, artist’s mother. How dreadful, Eva thinks, that her life should be defined only in relation to the men she loved.

  Across the table, Ted is watching her face. ‘Did you know her at all?’

  ‘No.’ Eva lays the paper down. ‘I barely know Jim, really. We didn’t even meet in Cambridge – it was later, in New York.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’ He is moving on, already, to the French papers, taking up the morning’s edition of Libération. ‘My mistake.’

  Later, in her office – it is lunchtime: traffic lining the street below as the weekend exodus begins, students whooping and laughing in the corridors – Eva takes out the obituary, places it on top of the unfinished Harvard reference. There is Jim, surely, in Vivian’s expression, in the cast of her slender body. She is surprised they didn’t use a photograph of Jim, too – his is the more familiar face; Eva recently read an article stating that a painting of his had sold at auction for a staggering sum. Perhaps the editor thought it would be too painful for him, for his family. Strange, too, she thinks, that there should be no mention of Helena, or their son. What was his name? Dylan. A beautiful boy: dark hair and bright, curious eyes, dazzled by sunlight, reaching out for something beyond the frame.

  From her desk drawer, Eva takes a postcard printed with the address of the university. Too plain, she thinks. Too businesslike. Instead, she finds a card she picked up at the Rodin Museum: The Wave. Three women crouched beneath a frozen surge of greenish onyx. Not by Rodin, but Camille Claudel. Artist’s widow, artist’s mother: will Jim find the resonance significant? She decides to take the chance that he will not.

  Dear Jim, Eva writes. I was so sorry to read of your mother’s passing. She crosses out ‘passing’, stares for a moment at the spoiled card. She has no other card to send him; he will have to forgive the mistake. She writes ‘death’ instead: surely anything else is euphemism. I have no other words to offer: it’s at times like these, I think, that we see how inadequate language really is. Art says it all much better, doesn’t it? I hope you are still able to work. I think of you …

  Eva pauses here, taps her chin with the blunt end of her pen. ‘Often’ would be an exaggeration: she thinks of Jim Taylor only rarely, and fleetingly – while washing up, or closing her eyes for sleep; in those unguarded moments when she allows her mind to wander to what might have been. She will leave the statement as it is: truthful, but ambivalent. Then she adds, With all my sympathy and best wishes, Eva Simpson. The address of Jim’s Cork Street gallery on the right-hand side of the card, and it is done.

  She turns the card over, stares at it for a few seconds – she can’t quite read the expressions of the three bronze figures caught beneath that solid overhang of water – and then places it in her coat pocket to post later.

  The next few hours pass quietly. She is interrupted only by a student – Mary, a nervous freshman from Milwaukee, anxious to know what Eva thinks of her story ahead of Monday’s class; and by Audrey Mills, bearing coffee and pastries from the local patisserie. Audrey is a large, good-natured woman whose thick grey hair always hangs in a plait drawn across one shoulder. They talk of the usual things: students, midterms, the repairs Audrey’s husband is making to their country house south of Versailles; Ted’s book (he is halfway through a tongue-in-cheek Englishman’s guide to the French
character); Sarah. ‘It’s the half-term concert tonight, isn’t it?’ Audrey is finishing a mouthful of millefeuille.

  Eva nods. ‘Starts at five. I’d better get this reference done and head off. My life won’t be worth living if I’m late.’

  At four o’clock, Eva unspools the finished Harvard reference from her typewriter, folds it neatly, and places it inside a good cream envelope. Then she shrugs on her coat, checks her handbag for car keys, purse, compact. Outside, the corridor is empty, echoing; her heels click efficiently on the parquet as she makes her way downstairs, wishes the lone security guard, Alphonse, un bon weekend.

  The Friday afternoon traffic is still heavy: it takes her an age to manoeuvre her little Renault out onto the Avenue Bosquet, and the queue of cars slows to a halt on the Pont de l’Alma. It’s already half past four. Eva taps out an anxious rhythm on the steering-wheel, tries to remind herself that there are worse places to be stuck in traffic: it is a dull, colourless day, but the tall grey buildings along the Rive Droite are austerely beautiful, a study in monochrome.

  She watches a small boat plough the grimy waters of the Seine, and finds herself thinking about her mother – about a visit Miriam and Jakob made to Paris one summer, soon after she and Ted were married. They had taken a bateau-mouche from Notre-Dame to the Eiffel Tower. The heat on the unshaded boat was intense, and Sarah was being difficult, whimpering endlessly about ice cream. To mollify her, Miriam had produced a carton of orange juice from her handbag, which Sarah then – deliberately, Eva suspected – managed to spill across the front of her new white dress. Eva had snapped at her daughter, and then at Miriam; at the Tower, they had aborted their plans to take the lift to the top, and sought instead the cool interior of a nearby café.

  Eva can see her mother now: reaching into her bag for a handkerchief; looking pointedly at the tabletop while Ted and Jakob made tactful conversation, and Sarah busied herself with the ice-cream sundae Eva hadn’t had the heart to refuse her. She had suddenly felt thoroughly ashamed of herself; she’d reached across the table, taken Miriam’s hand, said in German, ‘I’m sorry, Mama. Forgive me.’ And Miriam had replied, ‘Don’t be so silly, Schatzi. What is there to forgive?’