‘Since when, my darling Pen,’ Gerald says mildly, ‘have you ever just let things happen?’
Eva comes up behind Jim, places a hand on the back of his neck. ‘How was it with Howard?’
‘Good. Great.’ He twists round to look at her. ‘How on earth did you find him?’
She smiles. ‘Helena, would you believe? I emailed her. She said he and Cath had moved to St Agnes – then it was a simple Google search. Howard’s the president of the St Agnes Residents’ Association.’
‘Is he really? Well, he has gone straight in his old age …’
‘Hey,’ says Toby. ‘Less of the old. Not all of us are seventy yet.’
‘All right. Less of the old.’
Seventy: an age that once seemed inconceivable to Jim, that of a stooped, shuffling ancient, waiting for his moment to step quietly from the room. But Jim is neither stooped nor shuffling: a little soft around the middle, perhaps, his face pouched and lined – but still alert and vigorous, alive to the inconceivable preciousness of each moment as it passes.
He reaches back, over his shoulder, for Eva’s hand; grasps it tightly, as if the pressure of his hand on hers can convey his gratitude. And perhaps it can: Eva squeezes back, holding on; both of them looking to the horizon, to where the great waves are breaking, drawing with them the deep, unanswered loneliness of the open sea.
VERSION ONE
Kaddish
London, January 2012
A colourless London winter’s day: damp, windblown, the pavements slick with intermittent rain. At the entrance to the crematorium, the mourners huddle, the older women clutching at their billowing skirts. A gaggle of smokers stands a little apart, cupping their lighters with their hands.
Eva watches from the passenger window of the family car. She is holding Thea’s hand tightly, and thinking of other funerals – Vivian’s, in Bristol, frost clinging to the grass beside the grave; Miriam’s, on a fresh Thursday in spring, daffodils in glass bowls around the synagogue; Jakob’s, spare and simple, as he had wanted it. Anything not to think of the hearse, now slowing to a halt in front of them; of the flowers – calla lilies and irises, Anton’s favourite, Thea had said, with a certainty Eva hadn’t dared to question – arranged around the coffin. Plain oak with brass handles. They’d agreed that Anton would not have wanted anything fancier than that.
Her brother had made no arrangements for a funeral. A will, yes – they’d drawn those up shortly after they married, Thea said, during one of the blurred, wakeful nights the sisters-in-law spent at the kitchen table in the days after his death, waiting for the dawn to bleed into the next interminable day. But he’d been superstitious about funerals: hadn’t wanted to think about his own, for fear of tempting fate. Eva – raw, exhausted, finishing her sixth mug of coffee – had found it difficult to reconcile this information with the man Anton had become: a grandfather, a shipbroker, a man of substance. It was, she decided, in some way comforting to think that the boy he once was – chaotic, full of mischief – had lived on in this childish reluctance to acknowledge the administrative processes of death.
Without instructions, then, Thea and Eva had put their plans into place. A cremation: non-denominational, Thea insisted, and Eva – though thinking privately of the soothing ritual motions of their parents’ Jewish ceremonies – did not disagree. Thea, alert to Eva’s feelings, suggested that somebody (Ian Liebnitz, perhaps?) could say Kaddish. In the first hours after Anton’s heart attack – he and Thea had been at a New Year’s Eve party; in A&E, the family had been surrounded by bedraggled revellers in party clothes – the sisters-in-law had found their long-established affection deepening to something wordless, the terrible intimacy of grief. They would, they had decided, write the eulogy together, to be delivered by the celebrant: neither woman felt she would be strong enough to stand up and speak herself. Hanna would read some Dylan Thomas. Jakob’s recording of the Kreutzer Sonata would be played as the velvet curtains slid shut.
There was a certain satisfaction in the making of these arrangements: a tick-list efficiently completed. But none of it quite prepared Eva for how it would feel to sit in the car following her brother’s body, or to step out under the crematorium’s covered entrance, feeling Thea shrink and buckle beside her.
Hanna, emerging from the back seat with her husband, Jeremy, comes forward to take Thea’s arm. Eva presses her niece’s shoulder gratefully, and then moves among the gathered mourners, thanking them; accepting embraces, condolences, tears. Jennifer falls into step beside her; Susannah (a late baby, conceived after many fruitless rounds of IVF, and now a quiet, watchful four-year-old) is standing with her father, Henry. Beside them are Daniel and Hattie, the latter wearing a vintage fur muffler, a dark blue dress cradling the swell of her pregnancy. Next to Hattie, Jim: a slight, white-haired figure in a black coat. He has lost weight since giving up drinking; seems somehow diminished, though nobody considers this a change for the worse.
‘Eva.’ Jim steps forward, places a gloved hand on each of her arms. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She nods. ‘I know. Thank you for coming.’
The celebrant is politely ushering them inside; at the door, Eva feels a hand slip into hers. Carl. He has driven himself to the crematorium; hung back as Eva made her greetings, allowed her the air she needed, as is his way. But she is grateful for him now, for the reassuring pressure of his hand, for the tall form of him, slim and solid as a sail-ship.
‘Glad you’re here,’ she whispers.
‘Me too.’
It is, everyone will agree later, a particularly beautiful service. The florist has placed three large displays of lilies and irises around the central plinth. Ian Liebnitz says Kaddish in a fine, strong baritone. The eulogy is both informal and dignified, with a respectful smattering of jokes, and the celebrant makes no mistakes. Hanna chokes a little over the poem, but manages, after a few seconds, to gather herself, and carry on. The sound of Jakob’s violin – swooping, plangent, as if mining a deep, atavistic seam of sadness – fills the room as the curtains slowly close.
The wake is held at the house in Pimlico, where the caterers have laid out roast chicken and potato salad, Norwegian meatballs, a baked salmon. Waiters move soundlessly from room to room, offering drinks. Eva, accepting a glass of white wine, thinks of the countless times she has raised such a glass to toast her brother’s health; of his sixtieth birthday party, more than a decade ago, when he and Thea had so astutely seated her next to Carl Friedlander.
Carl had – quietly, unobtrusively – slipped into Eva’s life with a speed and ease that had taken both of them by surprise. They had started with coffee, then a concert, then a Saturday-afternoon visit to Tate Modern that had turned into drinks and dinner; a few days later, a supper at Eva’s house in Wimbledon had become an invitation to stay the night. He had taken her sailing for the weekend, out of Cowes. She had asked him to come for Christmas; he’d invited her to spend his birthday in Guildford with his daughter, Diana – a friendly, plain-speaking woman, to whom Eva had immediately warmed – and granddaughter, Holly. The following year, Carl had presented her, early in December, with an unexpected gift: flights to Vienna, three nights in a good hotel. They hid from the cold inside wood-panelled cafés, eating Sachertorte (delicious, but not a patch on Miriam’s) and drinking milky coffee. They saw Die Fledermaus. They found the apartment where Miriam was born – a tall, unremarkable building, its ground floor now occupied by a shoe shop – and stood on the station concourse where she had said goodbye to her mother and brother, not knowing that she would never see them again. Eva had cried, then, and Carl had held her, without self-consciousness, until she had no tears left.
He is a deeply intelligent, considerate man, and essentially light of heart: the grief Eva sensed at their first meeting has eased with time, and with this new possibility of love. Eva can’t help contrasting Carl with Jim: with the restlessness that always resided at Jim’s core. She had loved it, once, as she had loved every part of him; had s
een it as the natural undertow of his need to draw, to paint, to shape the world into a form he could understand. And perhaps it was: perhaps, had life not carried them down the path it did, that unease would simply have led him towards becoming a better artist, as it had his father.
She had taken no satisfaction in the fact that Jim’s leaving her for Bella had rebounded on him, that it had not afforded him the new burst of energy (for art, for love, for life) he must have believed it would. Eva’s anger had long since faded. Jim was a part of her: he always would be. She had remembered, in considering this, a Paul Simon song that she had played over and over for months in the early eighties, as if it might contain the answer to a question she hadn’t yet formed. You take two bodies and you twirl them into one. Their hearts and their bones. And they won’t come undone.
Eva had felt the truth of the lyric then, and she still does, though she and Jim are now nothing more to each other than former lovers, parents, grandparents; survivors berthed in the calmer waters of old age. Though the boy he was all those years ago in Cambridge, stopping to help her on the path, has become a pale, thinning man, almost elderly. And though the girl Eva once was is now hidden deep inside herself, under loosening skin, greying hair; beneath all the accumulated detritus of time.
Sometime in the afternoon, Eva steps out into the back garden for a cigarette. (Her inability to quit is the one subject on which she and Carl disagree.) It is there that Jim finds her.
‘Not given up yet, then?’
She shakes her head, offers him the packet. ‘I know you haven’t.’
‘Got to be allowed some vices.’ Jim takes a cigarette, accepts her proffered lighter. ‘Cut down, though. Five a day.’
‘I thought that was meant for vegetables.’
He smiles. It is the same smile as always, though the skin around his mouth has pouched and puckered, as has her own. How many times have they stood together, smoking, talking, making plans? Too many to remember. Too many to count. ‘Yes, well. Doing what I can on that front, too.’
They are silent for a while, contemplating the cool, damp grass, the naked trees. Above them, the clouds are massing, darkening; the day has barely bothered to bring light, and the evening will be falling again soon.
‘It doesn’t seem right, a world without Anton,’ Jim says. ‘He was always so vivid, somehow. Larger than life. Remember his thirtieth? That disgusting punch he made, and everyone passing out from too much grass.’
She closes her eyes. She can see the old Kennington house: the white furniture, the walled garden, the lights strung from the trees. With the clarity afforded by time, Eva can see that things were starting to founder even then; can remember Jim holding her in his arms as they danced; can remember willing things to take a turn for the better. And they had, for a while. They really had.
‘Of course I remember. God, thirty seemed so old then, didn’t it? We just had no idea.’
‘Eva …’ She opens her eyes, sees Jim regarding her with a new intensity. She swallows. ‘No, Jim, please don’t. Not now.’
He blinks. ‘No. I’m not … I don’t want to ask for forgiveness. Not today. Not again. I know you’re happy with Carl. He’s a good man.’
‘He is.’ She takes a deep drag on her cigarette. Next to her, Jim is shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. A knot of fear forms in the deepest part of her. ‘Jim? What is it?’
He takes a moment, sends a small cloud of smoke billowing from his mouth. Then he says, ‘I can’t tell you today. Not on Anton’s day. Come and see me, will you? Next week, maybe? We’ll talk.’
Eva has finished her cigarette. She drops the stub, crushes it with her foot. ‘This sounds serious.’
He looks at her again, holds her gaze this time. ‘It is, Eva. But not today. Come and see me. Please.’
The knot of fear has risen up in her body; loosened itself, snaked up into her chest, her throat. Jim does not need to say more. She will go to him: she will hear what the doctors have said, how much time he has. She will help him to make his plans; soothe him, if she can. Hearts and bones. A young woman with a broken bicycle. The man she might, so easily, have missed: cycling past, not stopping, carrying with him a whole life, a life that might never have been hers to share.
‘Of course I’ll come,’ she says.
VERSION TWO
Kaddish
London, January 2012
‘Smoke?’ Toby says. ‘I reckon there’s time.’
Jim shakes his head. ‘Given up.’
‘You never have.’ Toby stares at him, impressed. ‘Well, old man, I’ll be damned.’
He stands with Toby while his cousin lights his cigarette, draws in his first grateful puff. There are a few other smokers, standing a little apart, acknowledging each other with an expression that is not quite a smile. It is not a day for smiling, though that is how Jim remembers Anton Edelstein, will always remember him: vigorous, expansive, grinning.
It is many years since Jim last saw Anton, but he has, in recent months, come across photographs of him on Facebook: Toby, Anton and their friend Ian Liebnitz on a whisky tour of Speyside; Anton on holiday in Greece with his wife, Thea. Dylan had set Jim up with a Facebook account on his last visit to Edinburgh. ‘Good for keeping in touch with the old crowd, no?’ he had said, and Jim had nodded at his son, not wanting to betray his reluctance: the fact that the larger part of him can’t understand how and when the world decided to knock down the walls that had once discreetly shielded private lives from view.
Jim’s only online ‘friends’ remain Dylan, Maya, Toby and Helena. (She is given to posting phoney motivational messages on his wall, knowing that they irritate him beyond reason. Every time you find some humour in a difficult situation, you win. Don’t let yesterday’s disappointments overshadow tomorrow’s dreams.) He had demurred from requesting Anton Edelstein as a friend, still ruled by the no doubt anachronistic sense that a virtual friendship ought to spring from more than a distant, if cordial, acquaintance. He had, however, found himself lingering over Anton’s photographs, looking for a particular face.
It had not taken him long to find Eva. She was sitting at a table on some sunny terrace; behind her rose the distant plumes of pine trees, and a swathe of glistening water – a swimming pool – was visible just beyond her left arm. The changes time had brought in her had, for a moment, shocked him. (He had the same feeling, often, on seeing his own reflection in the mirror.) But fundamentally, she was unchanged: still slim, narrow-featured; still fully, wholeheartedly, alive. Her grief had not, he saw, destroyed her, and for that Jim had felt a kind of gratitude.
The funeral cortège is approaching; the black hearse edging respectfully to a halt. The smokers stir, shuffle, as if caught in an illicit act. Jim, turning, sees the doors of the family car open, Eva stepping out, holding tightly to her sister-in-law’s hand. She seems smaller than in the photograph, than in the many images of her he has retained in his mind. Her feet, in their smart black shoes, seem tiny; her body, neatly belted inside a coat of dark-grey wool, is trim as a bird’s. She doesn’t notice him: her attention is focused on the covered entranceway, where the other mourners are gathering. Beside her, Thea Edelstein is a pale ghost of a woman, her eyes red-rimmed; it feels intrusive even to look at her. The daughter, Hanna, is emerging from the back seat, with a handsome, blond-haired man Jim presumes to be her husband.
He is suddenly certain that he shouldn’t have come. He is finding it difficult to breathe: to Toby he says, through short gasps, that he will wait behind for a few minutes, follow him inside. Toby stares at him. ‘You all right?’
‘Yes. Just need some air.’
Jim stands alone until all the other mourners have gone in, the red-brick wall rough beneath his hand. It is the worst of London winter days – monochrome, cheerless, spurts of rain carried on an icy wind – but he doesn’t feel the cold. He is thinking of the doctor’s office in the hospital. Not even an office, really, just a windowless room. A desk, a computer,
a bed covered with a thin paper sheet. As the doctor spoke, Jim was reading a notice on the wall. Have you washed your hands? Everyone can do their bit to halt the spread of MRSA.
For days afterwards, it was that notice Jim held in his mind, not what the doctor had said, though the words were there too, of course. Biding their time. Waiting, like mines, to explode the casual certainty that his life would simply roll on as it always had.
‘You going in, sir?’ The undertaker, extravagantly sombre in his hat and three-piece suit. ‘I’m about to gather the pall-bearers.’
Jim nods. ‘I’m going in.’
Inside, three large displays of blue and white flowers are arranged around the central plinth. Ian Liebnitz recites the Kaddish, which Jim knows only at second hand, through Allen Ginsberg’s poem: he is not prepared for its bare, unvarnished sorrow. The celebrant gives the eulogy – written, she says, by Anton’s widow and sister. (In the front row, Jim sees Eva bow her head.) Hanna Edelstein reads the Dylan Thomas poem, familiar from many funerals, made unique by her strong, determined voice, which wavers only in the final lines. The curtains close slowly to the sound of a solo violin. Later, Jim will place the music as the first movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata.
He thinks, of course, of his mother’s funeral: of the iced Bristol ground, the high wooden rafters of the church; of his anger, still jagged then. He was angry for such a long time: angry with Vivian, for making him carry the burden of her illness, and then for allowing it to overwhelm her. Angry with his father, for not showing him how to love one woman, and her alone – and for being, Jim knows, the better artist. Angry with himself for not allowing anyone – not Helena, certainly not Caitlin – to truly know him. He was able, for many years, to channel this anger into his work – but anger, Jim knows now, is a young man’s game. He is no longer angry; could find no anger, even, with his doctor, or with the stark facts he’d laid out for Jim’s inspection. Facts with which it was impossible to argue.
The Versions of Us Page 34
