The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

‘Oh, any fool could see there was more to you than that.’ Eva spoke lightly, but he reached across the table for her hand.

  ‘No, not any fool, Eva. Just you. Only you.’

  Jim’s hand in hers was light, cool; the skin thin and papery, almost translucent in places. In that hand was everything she had once loved, everything she had believed in. Eva held it, and there was no anger, no pain, no forgiveness: just a woman holding a man’s hand, offering him whatever comfort it was hers to give.

  ‘I’m afraid, Eva.’ His tone was matter-of-fact; he was looking down at his coffee mug. ‘I’m so afraid.’

  ‘I know you are.’ Her grip on his hand tightened. ‘We’ll all be there with you, Jim. All of us.’

  He met her gaze. ‘There are no words to thank you, really.’

  ‘We don’t need words,’ she said. And she had sat quietly, holding his hand, until he grew sleepy, his eyes twitching shut; and then carefully, tenderly, she had helped him back upstairs to bed.

  Three days later, Jim was admitted to hospital. Strip-lighting, linoleum; Jim sleeping mostly, his closed face grey against the pillow. His oncologist gathered them in the family room – Eva, Carl, Jennifer, Daniel; Robyn and Bella were standing by to fly back from America – to deliver his news with a compassion, even a tenderness, for which they were all, in some small way, grateful.

  The hospice. Red brick, fountains; an enormous horse chestnut tree shedding conkers onto the lawn outside Jim’s room. His body seeming to grow lighter by the day, until, at the end, it was almost weightless, barely denting the mattress on which he lay.

  The crematorium. A beautiful October day – pale sunshine, leaves lying in drifts beside the gravel path, stained glass throwing panes of coloured light across the polished floor. Bella, her dark curls glossy, tamed; her coat dark purple, expensive. Robyn, tall, blue-eyed: the image of her father. In the chapel, Bella had paused at the front pew. Eva turned, gave her a small nod, and Bella returned it, slid down onto the bench. And there they had sat – Robyn between them; Daniel, Hattie and Carl to Eva’s left; Jennifer, Henry and Susannah in the row behind. As the celebrant took her place at the lectern, Eva felt a sense of peace draw over her: one born of sadness, yes, but also of gratitude, joy, memory. I loved you, she told Jim silently. And look how much we made of that love.

  Now this: Jim’s bedroom. Jim’s house. The clearing-away of his belongings, of all the ephemera with which he had, for a time, secured his place in this life.

  Eva has left the top drawer of the chest until last. Here, beneath piles of underwear and vests, she finds a scroll of good, thick drawing paper, tightly furled. On top of it, a note, secured with an elastic band. For Eva. With love, always. Jim x.

  She spreads the paper out on the chest of drawers, and sees herself. Soft pencil lines. A book in her lap. Her hair half covering her face; behind her, the mullion panes of the college window. It is her, and it is not her. A version of her. His version, or the version she once offered him.

  Eva stands quietly, looking at the drawing, until she hears Jennifer’s voice call out again, and then she goes downstairs to find her.

  It also ends here.

  A woman stands before the wide picture window of a house in Cornwall, looking out. Wide swathe of roiling sea. The sky huge, limitless, hung with pale grey cloud.

  ‘So you first met in New York in 1963,’ the reporter says. Her name is Amy Stanhope (she handed Eva a card when she arrived) and she is young – no more than thirty; sitting on the sofa, cradling the cup of tea Eva has just made. ‘You were –’ she consults her notebook ‘– twenty-four then, but you didn’t get together until you were in your seventies?’

  Eva turns her attention, reluctantly, back to the room. ‘Please don’t put “get together”. You make us sound like teenagers.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Amy is a little cowed before this thin, rather formal woman, her white hair drawn severely back from her head, her brown eyes sharp, searching. She has read only one of Eva Edelstein’s books – Handle With Care, her memoir about caring for her second husband, Ted Simpson. From this – and the fact that Eva Edelstein chose to become a carer for a second time, to a man with whom she fell in love so late in life – Amy has pictured someone softer. A kindly old lady, self-effacing, possibly something of a martyr. ‘But that was when you … became close, wasn’t it? Eighteen months ago, just after his diagnosis?’

  Eva nods. She had known, somehow, from the moment she saw Jim again at Anton’s funeral. She’d seen him wrestle with himself; she’d wanted to say, Don’t do the right thing. Surely you see this means we must act quickly, before this last opportunity is lost? Instead, she’d simply asked if he would like to meet. And they had, just a few days later: Jim was stopping off in London on his way home from Edinburgh. He’d suggested tea at the Wallace Collection café. Eva was nervous – had spent a good deal of time deciding what to wear; settled on a dark green dress she’d bought in Rome the previous winter. But when she saw Jim Taylor, sitting there in the gallery’s courtyard in his long black coat, those nerves had evaporated. He looked up as she approached, and she felt her heart leap to her throat.

  They had stayed together for the rest of the afternoon; met again the following day for lunch, before Jim caught his train back to St Ives. Eva went with Jim to Paddington; there, on the concourse, he had told her what he’d told his son. He’d understand if she didn’t want to see him again, he said – if it was simply too much to take on. Amid the clamour and din, the commuter bustle, the high-pitched shrieks of a small child, Eva had reached out and touched his face. ‘It’s not too much, Jim. It’s not too much.’

  Back in the living-room of the Cornwall house, Amy is speaking. ‘And you moved in here just a few months after that?’

  ‘Yes. Six weeks after we met again.’

  Amy smiles. ‘So romantic.’

  ‘Some would call it foolhardy. But it didn’t seem so to us.’ Her first visit to St Ives. On seeing him again, waiting for her at the platform’s end, Eva’s excitement was so pure, so revitalising, that she felt she might be twenty again. The drive had taken them past shingled cottages, past snowdrops bowing their heads beside the road; it was February, and the landscape was an Impressionist painting of shimmering whites and blues. Jim rolled down the windows at Eva’s request, and the cool breeze on her face tasted of the sea. Approaching the house, he said, ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re here. You’ll stay awhile, won’t you? You’ll stay as long as you like?’

  She had stayed; insisted Sarah and Stuart take the London house, rented out the villa in Italy. (She’d wanted to take Jim there, to rest for a time under the sun, but he was weakening, wanted nothing more than to stay at home in his beloved Cornwall.) Eva had spent hours writing, or in the garden; on good days, Jim would take himself out to the studio to paint. ‘If Matisse could lie in bed cutting masterpieces out of paper,’ he said, ‘then I can at least try to pick up a paintbrush.’

  On bad days, she had sat with him on the living-room sofa, listening to the radio, watching old films. Often, sleep would overcome him – Jim was tired so often – and he’d slump against her shoulder. Once, he woke midway through one of David’s films – it was years since Eva had seen it, and she was watching her ex-husband with fascination, as if examining footage of her own past – and said, ‘Isn’t that David Katz?’ Eva said it was, and Jim had made a sound that was somewhere between a cough and a sigh. ‘I hated him, you know, when we met. I hated that he’d found you first. But this is our time, now, isn’t it? I just wish we had more of it.’

  The journalist, Amy Stanhope, is sitting on that same sofa now. We had so little time, Eva thinks, and a lump forms in her throat. By way of distraction, she offers Amy another cup of tea, and Amy says she would love one, though the mug she is holding is still half full.

  In the kitchen, Eva can see Jim everywhere: stirring bolognese sauce on the stove; pouring coffee; encircling her with his arms as she stood at the counter, chopping vegetabl
es for soup. Ours was a good love, Eva tells him in her mind. Not the giddy love of teenagers, or that of a married couple in middle age, frayed by work, home, children, by the hue and cry of the everyday; but its own, pure thing, true to itself, answerable to no one, to nothing. If the children had wondered at it (and they had), well, they’d simply had to accept it for what it was. Jim and Eva had agreed that this new love would not erase those that had come before; nor would they fall prey to imagining what might have been.

  Last Easter, Sarah had come to stay, with Stuart and Pierre, and they had all sat out on the terrace beyond the kitchen, sharing a meal, watching the sun lowering over St Ives Bay. Jim had just finished his latest course of chemotherapy; he was gaunt and sick, but seemed happy, at ease, asking Stuart and Sarah about their work in London, Pierre about his music. Washing up at the sink where Eva is standing now, filling the kettle for tea, Sarah had slipped her arm around her mother, drawn her close, and said in a low voice, ‘I can see it, Mum. I can see why you love him. I’m so sorry I made a fuss.’ And Eva, leaning gratefully into her daughter’s embrace, had replied, ‘Darling, you’ve nothing to be sorry for.’

  A few months later – it was July, and warm, the sea a deep turquoise, the cliffs splashed yellow with lady’s bedstraw – Jim was admitted to hospital in Truro, and Eva had telephoned Dylan in Edinburgh, advising him to come as soon as he could. By September, Jim was slipping away to a place Eva couldn’t reach. The hospice was so much like the place in which she’d lived out her last few weeks with Ted that Eva, standing in the doorway on the day he was admitted, felt her legs give way; a nurse had had to help her to her feet. I’m afraid it will be too much for you, Jim had said that day at Paddington. And it was true: it was too much. She’d known it would be, and yet she had made her choice; and as she stood, weeks later, at the crematorium, remembering his life, remembering all that he was to his family, and to her, Eva knew that if she had the chance, she would make that choice again.

  And I still would, Jim, she thinks now, pouring milk into Amy’s tea.

  Eva carries the mug through to the living-room. ‘Shall we finish our talk in the studio?’

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ Amy replies, and they walk out into the garden – the air icy, the border plants squat and shrunken, waiting for spring. At the studio door, Eva pauses. ‘How well do you know Jim’s work?’

  ‘Well, I think. Like most people, The Versions of Us is probably the work I know best. It’s so powerful, so resonant. And I read about his show at the Tate, the one that brought Lewis Taylor and Jim together. It was amazing to see the continuity between them – and the differences, of course.’

  Eva smiles: perhaps she has underestimated Amy. ‘Then you may know that we have The Versions of Us here now. It was in a private collection, but Jim bought it back last year.’

  The paintings are hanging on the back wall of the studio: three hinged panels, turned slightly in on themselves. Eva opens the two outer leaves, and Amy stands before them, her eyes travelling across each board. A woman with dark brown hair, looking away from the viewer, towards the man who sits behind her, his expression blank, inscrutable. This is the third panel of the triptych. The other two are almost the same, but for minor variations: in the first, the woman is seated, and the man standing; in the second, they are both sitting. Minute details about the room vary, too: the position of the wall-clock; the cards and photographs on the mantelpiece; the colour of the cat stretched out on the armchair.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Amy says. ‘Those colours … He painted it in the mid-seventies, didn’t he?’

  Eva nods. ‘Yes, in 1977, while he was living in St Ives with Helena Robins. His then partner.’

  ‘It’s strange looking at it here, now, with you. The woman in the paintings – she looks just like you.’

  The triptych was a present: a surprise. Jim had arranged it all with Stephen Hargreaves; he took Eva out to the studio on the morning of her birthday – he was still walking then, without his stick, and had insisted she keep her eyes closed until they were inside. Opening them, she had looked, and seen herself. Seen them both. ‘Now do you understand,’ he said, ‘you were there with me all along?’ And then he had kissed her, and she thought of all the years that had led up to this – all those seconds and minutes and hours, spent elsewhere, with others, doing other things; none of them wasted, or regretted, but none more precious to her than this moment now.

  ‘Yes, she does, doesn’t she?’ Eva speaks so softly that the journalist has to strain to hear.

  They are silent, then. In front of them, the triptych. Slicks of oil paint on canvas. Three couples. Three lives. Three possible versions.

  It ends here, too.

  A woman stands on the Cambridge Backs. A wide strip of earth and tufted grass, rutted by the heavy passage of bicycles. Behind her, the steady crescendo of passing traffic. In front, a row of trees, through which she can just make out the spire of King’s College Chapel.

  ‘It was here, I think,’ Eva says. ‘Hard to remember exactly where, but this seems about right.’

  Penelope, beside her, links her arm through Eva’s. ‘It hasn’t changed at all, has it? I mean, looking across at King’s, we could be right back there, in the thick of it. Everything ahead of us.’

  Eva nods. A girl approaching on a bicycle – dark hair flying out behind her, black satchel slung across her shoulder – rings her bell, and they step aside to let her pass. Eva hears the girl tut loudly as she cycles on, and wonders for a moment what they must look like to her: two elderly women, dawdling on the footpath. Spectators to the flow, the urgency, of younger lives.

  ‘It’s not our place any more, though, is it?’

  Penelope squeezes Eva’s arm. ‘It’ll always be your place, Eva. Yours and Jim’s.’

  They had planned to come here together. She’d organised a weekend – reserved a room in a good hotel, a table at a restaurant. But on the morning they were to leave, Jim had woken pale and exhausted. He’d slept poorly, as he often did: Eva had heard him in the night, turning in their bed, stumbling against the door-jamb on his way to the bathroom. She had looked at him and said, ‘We’ll leave Cambridge for now, shall we, darling? Rest up at home. The city’s not going anywhere, is it?’

  They had swallowed their disappointment; they both knew it was unlikely they’d make it back. The chemotherapy was working – Jim was still here, after all; still with her – but at a cost: aside from the exhaustion and the sleeplessness, there was the nausea, the loss of interest in food, in wine, in all the things in which he’d once taken such great pleasure. His hair had thinned, and he was losing weight: it seemed to Eva that he was shrinking before her eyes. ‘Heroin chic,’ Jim had said: he would retain his sense of humour to the last.

  At home in Sussex. Days spent reading, and listening to the radio, and on good days, taking the car down to Brighton. The sea steely, implacable; the beach impassable now, the stones too precarious for Jim’s unsteady gait, and so they had walked slowly along the pier, sat in a café and drunk tea, watched passers-by flirt and kiss and argue. They spoke less and less: not because they had nothing to say, but because they enjoyed the companionability of silence; and because so much of what lay between them was unspoken, unspeakable. There was pain, and fear, and sadness; and yet on those afternoons, in Brighton, they were not unhappy. They had each other. They had their respective children, and their grandchildren, and the endlessly shifting patterns of their lives. They had their joy that Sophie had come back to them. They had their relief that they had found a way back to each other.

  At the end, the hospice. There was a huge horse chestnut tree in the garden, framed by Jim’s bedroom window; he liked to lie in bed, watching the way the sun caught the conkers as they fell. He used to gather them on his way to school, he said; leave them in his pocket and retrieve them months later, their shine dulled. Alice – she was sitting by his bed, staring at her grandfather, at the wires, the machines, the metal bed frame – had
grown excited then, and said, ‘I do that too, Grandpa. I do that too.’

  Eva was there every day, and most nights; she knew each of the nurses by name. They were kind, most of them, in a way that far exceeded the merely professional: one nurse, a cheerful Nigerian woman named Adeola, took a particular shine to Jim, and he began, jokingly, to call her his ‘wife number two’.

  ‘Mr Taylor,’ Adeola would say with a wink when Eva appeared at the door, ‘your wife number one is here. Shall I ask her to come back later?’ And Jim, when he was able, would smile (how the sight clawed at Eva’s heart) and tell her that perhaps Adeola should let Eva in, or she might become suspicious.

  Those four walls. The chair on which Eva sat for hours; the bed on which she spent her nights, under a hospital blanket, her sleep punctuated by the low beeps and murmurs of Jim’s machines. When the moment finally came, it was the middle of the night, but she was already awake: she had woken a few minutes before, knowing that this was his time. His eyes were closed, his mouth open; she placed a hand before his lips, felt the minute pressure of his breath. It was coming in gasps now, the sound strange, frightening; but she would not allow herself to be afraid. She took his hand. It wasn’t long before he was gone; and then she sat there with him, stroking his hand, until Adeola came.

  Now, on the Backs, Penelope says, ‘Let’s look at the drawing again.’

  Eva reaches into her handbag; here, tucked beneath the flyleaf of her hardback diary, is a sheet of paper. She found it just a week ago, while going through the mass of correspondence in Jim’s studio. It was torn from an A5 pad: a pencil sketch, the bare outline of a woman, sleeping on her side, her hands pressed together, as if in prayer. A note on the back, in Jim’s scribbled hand, read, E, sleeping – Broadway, Cotswolds, 1976. He had never shown it to her, had tucked it away in a folder filled with bills. She wondered whether he had even remembered it was there.

  Eva stares at the drawing, then hands it to Penelope. After a few moments of silence, Penelope hands it back. ‘Are you done, darling?’