The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  She is still thinking of Miriam at five fifteen, when she arrives at the school. Ted is standing by the main doors, his shoulders hunched against the cold.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says when she reaches him, exhausted. ‘They haven’t started yet. Thank God for French timing, eh?’

  Eva kisses him, loving him for always remaining calm. Ted is impossible to argue with: he listens, considers, never raises his voice. She has seen him really angry only a handful of times, and even then it was perceptible only in the deepening colour of his cheeks, the emphatic slowing of his speech. He is such an easy man to love, she thinks, and she takes his arm, walks with him down the corridor to the main hall. And he is easy for Sarah to love too, reserving for her a relaxed, unstudied affection. Seeing them together makes Eva fleetingly regret, sometimes, that he was unable to have children of his own. Ted told her this on one of the very first nights they had spent together at his flat in St John’s Wood, in a dull, broken tone that seemed to speak of a fear of losing her, losing what they were, so carefully, tentatively, embarking upon. But Eva had drawn him to her, said with a certainty that she would only later truly come to feel, ‘I have a daughter, Ted. Be a father to her. Let’s just be grateful for what we have.’

  Sarah is one of the last students to perform. Eva can hardly breathe as she watches her emerge from the wings and sit down on the stool in the centre of the stage, settling her guitar on her knee. She is so like David – his height, his loose elegance and sculpted features – and yet she has so little of her father’s unshakeable confidence. Why would she, Eva thinks, when she has barely seen him more than twice a year since she was five?

  Eva wonders, sometimes, whether her daughter’s shyness – it took her music teacher weeks to persuade Sarah to take part in the concert – has developed as some kind of reaction to David’s fame. Here at the international school, among the children of writers and diplomats and businessmen, Sarah’s parentage is barely noted. But it had not been so in London: there was bullying, nudges and whispers, name-calling. Eva had drawn information from Sarah slowly, stealthily. Think you’re it, don’t you, just because your dad’s on the telly? Eva had wanted nothing more than to run straight to the school – to take the headmistress by the scruff of the neck, and make her end her daughter’s suffering at once. But she’d resisted, for Sarah’s sake. They’d waited it out. Not long afterwards, Ted had asked her to marry him, raised the possibility of their moving to Paris; and here they are.

  Now, Sarah sits motionless on stage, staring down at the floor. For ten seconds, maybe twenty, silence rolls out across the room. Eva is gripped by the fear that her daughter will simply get up and leave; she grasps Ted’s hand so tightly that later he will show her the red welts she raised on his palm. But then, after a few long moments, Sarah begins to play. And she is good, as Eva knew she would be, with a certainty that was surely beyond a mother’s natural pride. Sarah has her Oma’s natural aptitude for music; as she plays, there is a perceptible shift among the other parents: a collective drawing-in of breath. And later, there is applause, for which Sarah stands red-faced, blinking, as if she had quite forgotten that she was being watched.

  As promised, they take Sarah out to dinner, with her best friend Hayley, and Hayley’s parents, Kevin and Diane. Kevin and Ted discuss real estate – Kevin is a broker from Chicago, specialising in acquiring ‘high-spec’ apartments for fellow expats. Hayley and Sarah share secrets at their end of the table, their faces half hidden by curtains of hair. Diane – a tiny, skeletal woman with the precise manners of a Southern belle – leans in to Eva, her Hermès scarf trailing her Chanel scent. ‘Can you believe how grown-up they are?’

  ‘I can’t.’ In Eva’s mind, her daughter is still the plump-cheeked toddler crawling across the living-room carpet, or the five-year-old thrusting out her fat little legs on the Regent’s Park swings. Sometimes, when Sarah walks into the room, Eva has to blink a few times to erase the memory of the girl she once was.

  She has forgotten, now, about the postcard she wrote to Jim Taylor a few hours earlier, still lying unposted in the pocket of her coat: a coat that, when they get back to the apartment, Eva will hang on the hall stand, and not wear again for almost a week. She will not reach her gloved hand into her pocket until the very end of that day. Then, taking out the card, she will read it over, and wonder what on earth possessed her to write such a thing. What use could Jim Taylor possibly have, she will think, for empty platitudes from a woman he barely knows? And so she will place the postcard in the wastepaper basket beneath her desk, and not think of it again for many years.

  VERSION THREE

  Ground

  Bristol, February 1979

  ‘What can I do?’ Eva says.

  It is the first time either of them has spoken in some time. He heard her approach – her shoes crunched crisply on the gravel – but she did not come to him at once. She stood behind him, at a slight distance, but he could feel her there as surely as if she had spoken: there was that same narcotic rush of joy, potent as always. At once, he was ashamed: to stand alone at his mother’s graveside, while the other mourners were filing slowly away, and to feel joy?

  ‘Just be here.’

  Eva’s gloved fingers curl around his, black suede against thick grey wool. She bought him both the gloves and a new coat, handed them to him in a smart striped bag. Jim had tried to say it was too much, but she shook her head. ‘Just take them, darling. Please just let me do this for you.’

  He is glad of the coat now: the air is icy, snatching at his face, his neck. He hardly knows how long he has been standing here, how much time has passed since the last scattering of earth, the vicar’s sober summing-up. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our frail bodies that they may be conformed to his glorious body. Ten minutes? Half an hour? The vicar – a gentle, soft-faced man – had closed his book and moved away. The undertaker’s boys had stepped back in smart unison. There was a low murmuring among the guests: Sinclair, beside him, had turned to Jim expectantly, as if awaiting his cue. Sophie began to tug at his hand. ‘Dad, I’m cold.’

  Jim didn’t move. He had stood silently until everyone was gone: even Eva, who hadn’t been standing next to him, where he’d have liked her, but towards the back, holding Jakob’s arm. (He’d had a fall a few weeks before, and was still walking with a cane.) On her other side was Sam, quiet and grey-faced in his undersized black suit. Rebecca stood behind, her dark hair dramatically coiled and pinned, her fingernails painted an ugly brownish red. She hadn’t wanted to come – her RADA year group was deep into rehearsals for The Winter’s Tale – but Eva had insisted. Jim heard their whispered discussion in the dark: the Regent’s Park flat isn’t really large enough for four people – certainly not five, now that Sophie has come to live with them. Resentments simmer in the small rooms: sometimes, on opening the front door, Jim can feel it thickening the air like trapped smoke.

  Arguments erupt with exhausting frequency, but only between certain adversaries: Rebecca and Eva; Sophie and Jim. Between the rest of them, the dynamic is too fragile, too uncertain, to permit the open airing of grievances. With Eva, Sophie is shy, monosyllabic, unresponsive to her stepmother’s gentle overtures (a day out shopping for school shoes, endured in stony silence; a cinema trip; a concert by Jakob’s orchestra). He and Eva are both patient with her, suspecting that Sophie’s decision to move to London – to give up her school, her friends, her whole life in Cornwall – was prompted less by her forgiveness of Jim than by the fraying of her relationship with her mother. Helena is now immersed, Jim knows from Sophie and from the vitriolic letters Helena still writes to him, in a series of affairs with younger men. The latest is Rebecca’s age – an electrician named Danny, whom she met, Sophie says, when he repaired some faulty wiring in the cottage. ‘It’s disgusting,’ Sophie told Jim, with a bruised dignity that touched his heart. ‘I don’t want to see her ever again.’

  Meanwhile, Rebecca – furious that Eva has insisted she li
ve at home through her RADA course, rather than throw money away on an expensive flat – appears to have decided, for the most part, to act as if Jim simply isn’t there. And Sophie seems rather afraid of Rebecca, with her glamour and her insouciance and her habit of declaiming her audition speeches, loudly, in front of the bathroom mirror. Sam is the only one who seems relatively unperturbed by the changes in the household – he is sweet-natured, studious, preoccupied with football, space travel, engineering: enthusiasms that Jim doesn’t share, but in which he does his best to show an interest. So no, the flat will not do: Jim and Eva have agreed that they will have to find their own place – somewhere fresh and light. Somewhere to start again.

  Standing alone at the graveside – all these thoughts, and others (Vivian, mixing paints in the pantry of the Sussex cottage; Vivian, thin and glassy-eyed, unseeing, in the hospital), shifting through his mind – Jim was dimly aware that he was making a spectacle of himself. He could almost see his own image, caught in long shot: the grief-stricken son standing sentry by his mother’s grave. But as he stood there beside the freshly dug hole, with its lining of bright green baize, he was aware not so much of grief as of a curious emptiness. Exhaustion. Relief. The stillness that falls when a long-expected event finally comes to pass.

  ‘The car is waiting,’ Eva says softly now.

  Jim nods: he has forgotten all about the black car, about the driver in his peaked cap. Eva squeezes his hand, and they turn to go. The church car park is almost empty now: just Eva’s little Citroën (there wasn’t space for all of them in the family car), and that black saloon, where dimly, through the rear passenger window, he can see a woman’s face pressed against the glass. Pale skin, wide-set blue eyes. There is a quickening in his gut: Helena. He blinks a few times, looks again. The woman’s features rearrange themselves into those of a girl. Sophie.

  When Jim told Helena he was leaving her, her face had crumpled and twisted as if he had landed her a physical blow. He had wanted to feel pity, and yet Helena had seemed so ugly, her grief so vengeful and uncontrolled – a woman scorned – that it was all he could do not to simply walk out the door and close it behind him. And in the end, that was more or less what he had done: closed the kitchen door on her tears, on the shattered crockery littering the flagstones. (Helena had thrown plates at him; later, in his studio, she would take a knife to several of his canvases.)

  Jim had looked up the stairs, to the open door of Sophie’s room – she was at school – then picked up his suitcase and left. Earlier, he had placed a letter on her pillow, setting out, as best he could, his reasons for leaving; telling her that she would always be welcome to stay with him and Eva. Much later, he would realise what an error he had made in not talking to his daughter face to face. He hadn’t known then that it would be three months before he saw Sophie again, or that six months after that, Helena would call to tell him, her voice low and venomous, that Sophie wanted to leave Cornwall, and come to him. ‘She’s chosen you,’ she said. ‘So that’s it, Jim. You’ve taken everything I have. I hope you’re happy now.’

  The awful truth was that Jim was happy: not in some bland, superficial way – fixed Kodak smiles under the bluest of skies – but in his deepest self. This kind of happiness was less a state, he realised, than a form of honesty: a sense of essential rightness. He had known it when he was with Eva in Cambridge, and had looked for it again with Helena: he had found something real with her, something true, but not that. And then, all those years later, Jim had found that happiness again with Eva – or at least a version of it, however muddied, complicated.

  All that complexity had fallen away, though, on 8th January, 1978. The precise date was etched on his mind. Eva was just back from Los Angeles, and they had reserved a whole night for each other at their Dorset hotel. He knew at once that something had changed – feared that she had finally resolved to leave him. But the opposite was true: she was leaving Katz.

  ‘It’s you, Jim,’ she had said. ‘It’s always been you.’ And there it had been: that honesty, that slippage of two discrete objects into congruence. Jim had driven back to Cornwall the next day, and packed his bags.

  Now, he walks Eva to her Citroën, where Jakob, Sam and Rebecca – her family, now his – are waiting. ‘See you there,’ he says, and kisses her. Then he slides onto the back seat of the family car.

  ‘Home, sir?’

  Jim wants to tell the driver, ‘That house was never my home.’ But instead he says, ‘Yes, please. Sorry to keep you waiting.’

  Vivian and Sinclair’s house isn’t far from the church; they might have walked, in fact, but the undertakers were quite insistent on the cars. This is the farthest edge of Bristol, where ring roads and new-builds bleed into overgrown culverts and scrubby fields. Through the car window, a short parade of shops – a Chinese restaurant, a launderette – gives way to a school’s sprawling estate, disembodied shouts coming from an unseen playground. It is half past twelve: lunchtime.

  ‘Hungry, darling?’ Sophie is sitting very straight and still beside him, her cheeks still mottled from crying. She shakes her head, and Jim wants to reach for her, as he would have done, unthinkingly, just a few years ago.

  It was only when Jim drove to Cornwall to collect her that he’d begun to understand the full extent of Sophie’s anger. He’d loaded the boot and back seat with her cases, her schoolbooks, her collection of hideous troll dolls, with their wizened plastic faces and fluorescent shocks of hair. In the hallway of the cottage – Helena, to Jim’s relief, was out – he’d held his daughter to him, felt her rigid and unresponsive in his arms. ‘I’m so glad you’re coming,’ he had whispered into Sophie’s hair. ‘We both are. Eva and I.’

  ‘I’m only coming,’ Sophie had replied stonily, ‘because Mum makes me sick.’

  Vivian, too, had been angry, to an extent that took Jim by surprise. She and Helena had never, he thought, been particularly close; but when she learned of what she called Jim’s ‘desertion’, Vivian had made an ugly telephone call to Eva’s flat. (‘You beast,’ she’d hissed at him; he could hear Sinclair in the background, his voice calmly soothing. ‘Now, Vivian, come along, there’s no need for this.’) She had also written letters – sheet after sheet lined with her oversized, looped handwriting. You are no better than your father. Selfish, both of you. Heads full of nothing but yourselves and your bloody paintings. Finally, she had come to see them in person. Eva had opened the door; Vivian had pushed past, imperious, her mouth an uneven pink line beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

  ‘What,’ she’d said, ‘have you done with my son?’

  Had Vivian been a different kind of woman – her illness a different kind of illness – the scene might almost have been comical: a skit from the pen of Oscar Wilde. A handbag? But nobody was laughing.

  ‘You have ruined your daughter’s life,’ Vivian said to Jim, while Eva made tea, watching her with cautious concern. Then, drinking the tea, Vivian added, ‘You have ruined my life. Both of you.’

  Jim had known then, as he’d suspected all along, that it was really his father Vivian was angry with: his father and herself. He’d driven his mother back to Bristol that evening – she’d left the house while Sinclair was taking a bath, without telling him where she was going. Vivian had fallen asleep in the car almost at once, the lights of the motorway flashing orange on her face as the miles passed. Jim had spent the night in the spare room, woken to find his mother’s equanimity restored – for the moment, at least. Before he left, Sinclair had taken Jim aside. ‘I don’t think she’s taking her medication,’ he’d said, ‘but the doctors won’t do anything unless she tries to harm herself. I’m at my wits’ end.’

  All Jim had been able to do was tell Sinclair not to worry: that she would surely even out, over time, with or without her medication, as she had always done before. But almost a year later, Vivian had slipped a sleeping tablet into Sinclair’s night-time drink, and stolen from the house in the small hours. A driver had found her the next morning at the bas
e of a nearby road bridge. She had not left a note.

  At the house, Jim’s aunts are handing round plates of sandwiches and sausage rolls. Eva, having arrived a few minutes before, is slicing a Victoria sponge. The house is not full: there are perhaps twenty people, standing in small, hushed groups. Stephen and Prue are here, and Josie and Simon from Cornwall. Even Howard and Cath have sent their condolences, in the form of one of Cath’s intricate pencil drawings – a milk bottle, a clutch of tulips, We’re sorry sketched underneath with a fine-nibbed pen.

  Jim stands with Stephen in a corner of the living-room, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘It was a good service, Jim.’ Stephen’s voice is low, serious; he is wearing a sober charcoal-grey suit. Jim thinks of all the many nights he has sat with Stephen – too many to count – speaking of his love for Eva; his indecision; his feelings about his mother, his father. Stephen, it occurs to Jim now, is the only person who really knows every part of him – even with Eva, he must edit himself, expunge those facts that might cause her pain (the erotic content of Helena’s angry letters; the fact that Jakob had taken Jim aside, the first time they met, and warned him – politely, discreetly, but a warning all the same – never to do to Eva and her children what Jim had done to his other partner and child). Stephen knows all of this – knows everything – and he is still here. Still standing next to him. Jim feels a rush of affection for his friend. Touching his arm, he says, ‘Thanks for coming. I mean it.’

  Stephen clears his throat. ‘You don’t need to thank me. Least I could do.’