The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  The paint is dry; Jim draws an old sheet down over the canvas. It is a quarter past four. She’s three-quarters of an hour late now, and it’s still pouring, the rain an insistent drumming on the skylight. Fear grips him: perhaps she has slipped on the wet-slicked road; or a driver, blinded by the downpour, has caught the wheel of her bicycle, left her drenched and twisted on the pavement. Irrational, he knows, but this is how it is now – has been through the four weeks since each stepped into the other’s life with the ease of old friends picking up the thread of a familiar conversation. Elation underpinned by fear: the fear of losing her; the fear of not being enough.

  Eva had told Jim about her boyfriend, David Katz, on the night they’d met, after he’d fixed the puncture, fetched his own bike and then cycled out with her to a pub he knew on Grantchester Road. She’d met Katz six months earlier, when they were both performing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Katz was an actor, already carrying something of a reputation: Jim recognised the name.) Her heart wasn’t really in it, she’d said; the next day, she’d tell Katz it was over. She’d have done it right away, but this was the first night of his new play, Oedipus Rex. She’d missed the performance, and it seemed unkind to compound the hurt by telling him why.

  Jim and Eva had sat in a corner booth in the back room of the pub, while the landlord rang out for last orders. It had been precisely six hours since they’d met, and one hour and ten minutes since they’d first kissed. When she finished speaking, Jim had nodded and kissed her again. He didn’t say that he had worked out why Katz’s name was familiar: that he was a friend of an old classmate of Jim’s, Harry Janus, now studying English at John’s. Jim had met Katz once, at a party, and had taken an instant dislike to him for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate. But from that moment on – even when Katz’s professional success became such that his failure at anything would seem unimaginable – Jim would feel a certain compassion for his rival: a loose, winner’s generosity. Whatever Katz ended up with, after all, Jim would still have the greater prize.

  There, in the pub, Jim had admitted that there was also someone he’d need to let down gently. Eva hadn’t asked her name, and he knew that were she to ask, he would struggle to recall it. Poor Veronica: could she really have meant so little? And yet it was so: the following day, Jim had suggested they meet for coffee at a bar on Market Square, had told her it was over without even waiting for her to drain her mug. Veronica cried a little, silently – the tears loosened her make-up, sent a blackish trickle of kohl inching down her cheek. The depth of her emotion had surprised him – Jim was sure he hadn’t misled her, nor she him – and inspired in him nothing but a distant, polite embarrassment; he had passed her a tissue, wished her well, and taken his leave. Walking back to college, it had occurred to Jim to wonder how he could behave so unfeelingly. But his discomfort was quickly displaced by other, happier thoughts – Eva’s dark brown eyes, meeting his own; the pressure of her lips as they kissed. Jim would hardly ever think of Veronica again.

  Eva had finished with Katz a few days later. The following Friday, she’d gone alone to London for her mother’s birthday; she’d have liked Jim to come, but her parents had met Katz over the summer, and she didn’t want to surprise them too quickly with news of this new relationship. Later that day, feeling at a loose end, Jim had found himself walking past the ADC Theatre, and buying a ticket for that evening’s performance of Oedipus Rex.

  Even under layers of white stage make-up, David Katz seemed a formidable opponent: tall, charismatic, with an easy swagger even Jim could see must be attractive. And, like Eva, Katz was Jewish. Though he would never have admitted as much, Jim – a nominal Protestant, baptised only at his grandmother’s insistence, and with no sense of that common history, that loss – felt more than a little intimidated.

  Afterwards, he’d slipped from the theatre, gone back to college and paced around his room, obsessing over what Eva saw in him, what he could possibly offer her that Katz couldn’t trump. And then Sweeting had come, knocked on his door, and told him that a few of them were off to the JCR, so why didn’t he stop moping and come and get drunk?

  Now, the rain is pooling and sliding, and Jim’s thoughts are circling, picking up speed: Katz has been to see Eva; he has won her back; they’re lying together in her rooms, skin on skin. He reaches for his jacket, takes the stairs two at a time: he’ll check the gap in the hedge – their gap – in case she’s decided to avoid the porters’ lodge. (The day porter is beginning to raise an eyebrow at how often Eva passes through; unfairly, Jim feels, as she is certainly not the only Newnham girl to spend a good portion of her time out of college.) On the ground floor, he almost collides with Sweeting, coming in as he’s going out.

  ‘Watch it, Taylor,’ says Sweeting, but Jim doesn’t stop, doesn’t even notice the rain as it slicks his hair, slips beneath the loose collar of his shirt.

  At the hedge, he stops, whispers her name. Says it again, louder. This time he hears her reply. ‘I’m here.’

  She climbs through the gap, wet branches tugging at her face, her coat. He tries to part them, to ease her way, but the tough boughs snap back, scratch his hands. When she stands in front of him – soaked, dirt-smeared, catching her breath, saying sorry, she got stuck talking to someone after lectures, she just couldn’t get away – he could weep with relief. He swallows the urge, knowing it to be unmanly. But he can’t help saying, as he takes her in his arms, ‘Oh, darling, I thought you weren’t coming.’

  Eva slips from his grasp, wearing that same stern expression he is coming to love, rain dripping from her nose onto the ground. ‘Silly boy. Don’t be ridiculous. How could I ever want to be anywhere but here?’

  VERSION TWO

  Mother

  Cambridge, November 1958

  ‘Must you go?’ she says.

  Jim, dressing in the half-light of her room, turns to look at Veronica. She has shifted onto her side; the twin mounds of her breasts are pressed together, solid, pale as china beneath her violet slip. ‘I’m afraid I really must. I’m meeting the eleven-o’clock train.’

  ‘Your mother,’ she says flatly. She watches him as he pulls on his socks. ‘What is she like?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ he says, meaning I don’t want to tell you. And really, any association between Veronica and his mother must be avoided: there’s hardly ten years between them, a fact that, whenever he dwells on it, appals him, and must surely appal her even more.

  Sensing this, perhaps, she doesn’t press the matter, but follows him downstairs in her silk robe, offers to make him coffee. The morning is dull and overcast, threatening rain. In the blunt grey light, last night’s detritus – the wine glasses, hers still carrying a bloom of pink lipstick; the dirty plates left festering in the sink – strikes him as impossibly sordid. He refuses the coffee, kisses her quickly on the lips, ignores her when she asks when she will see him again.

  ‘Bill’s back next week, remember,’ she adds, her voice low, as he opens the door to leave. ‘We haven’t much time.’

  The door firmly closed behind him, Jim retrieves his bicycle from the passageway at the side of the house. Next door’s net curtains twitch as he wheels the bike out onto the road, but he doesn’t bother to look round. There is an odd sense of unreality to all this – as if it isn’t really him, stepping up onto the pedals, casting off onto the black tarmac of this unremarkable suburban street, leaving behind his lover (for want of a better word): a woman twelve years his senior, with a husband in the merchant navy. Surely, he tells himself as he turns onto Mill Road, skirts the steady flow of traffic filing from the city centre to the station, it was all her doing? Veronica had sought him out in one of the dustier corners of the University Library (she was doing an evening course in ancient cultures); Veronica had asked him if he would like to join her for a drink. She had done it before, of course, and she’ll do it again. That doesn’t make him an unwilling participant – far from it – but he is becoming keenly aware that he hardly k
nows her, and doesn’t really care to know her better; that what once seemed exciting and illicit now carries the deadening ring of cliché. It simply has to stop, he thinks. I’ll tell her so tomorrow.

  Thus resolved, Jim feels a little better as he draws up in front of the station, leans his bicycle against a spare portion of wall. The eleven-o’clock from King’s Cross is delayed. He sits in the cafeteria, drinking bad coffee and eating a Chelsea bun, until the train arrives with a great screeching of brakes. He is a little slow getting up, draining the last powdery dregs; from the ticket hall, he hears his mother calling. Her voice is brittle, over-loud. ‘James! James, darling! Mummy’s here! Where are you?’

  Vivian is on one of her highs: he’d known it when she telephoned the porters’ lodge two days before, saying she would be up to pay him a visit on Saturday, and wasn’t that a lovely surprise? No use in telling her that it was almost the end of term, that he’d be home in two weeks, and had a mountain of work to finish before then if Dr Dawson was even going to entertain the possibility of allowing him to return next year. That is, if Jim decides he wants to return.

  ‘Yes, that’s a lovely surprise, Mum,’ he’d told her dutifully. He tells her the same thing now, when he finds her out by the taxi rank, still calling his name. She is wearing a bright blue wool suit, a pink scarf, a hat entwined with red artificial roses. She feels tiny in his embrace: he fears she is tinier every time he sees her, as if, ever so slowly, she is evaporating before his eyes. That is how she had described the lows to him once – he was only little, nine or ten; this was before his father’s death – as he sat beside her on her bed, the curtains drawn. ‘It feels,’ she had said, ‘as if I’m disappearing, bit by bit, and I don’t even care.’

  He leaves his bike at the station, offers to pay for a taxi into town, but she won’t hear of it. ‘Let’s walk,’ she says. ‘It’s such a lovely day.’ It’s not lovely – they’re only halfway down Mill Road when the first drops of rain brush their shoulders – but she’s talking quickly. A stream of words. Her train ride up from Bristol yesterday – ‘I met the loveliest woman, Jim. I gave her our number. I really think we could become great friends.’ His aunt Frances, with whom she has spent the night in Crouch End – ‘She’d roasted a chicken, James, a whole chicken. All the children were there – such sweet little things – and there was trifle for afters, just because she knows it’s my favourite.’

  Jim has booked a table for lunch at the University Arms. Vivian prefers to eat in college – ‘so I can really feel what it’s like to be you, Jim’ – but the last time he took her to the buttery, she had approached the dons’ table and engaged the startled master in conversation. It had taken him – a distinguished brigadier – almost half an hour to extricate himself. For Jim, it was just like being at school again – catching sight of Vivian waving at him from the gates in a red hat, a green coat: bright stabs of colour among the other mothers’ muted plumage. The boys around him staring, nudging, whispering.

  After lunch, they walk through town to Clare, cross the bridge with its great boulders of honey-coloured stone, and take a turn about the gardens. It has stopped raining, but the sky is still leaden. Her mood, too, is growing heavier. By the ornamental pond, she pauses, turns to him, and says, ‘You will be home soon, won’t you? It’s so terribly lonely in that flat, all by myself.’

  He swallows. Even the mention of the place feels like a weight around his neck. ‘I’ll be home in two weeks, Mother. It’s almost the end of term. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Of course.’ She nods, presses her lips together. She reapplied her lipstick – red, presumably to match the flowers on her hat, though it clashes terribly with her scarf – after lunch, but badly, in a smudged scrawl. ‘My son the lawyer. The clever, clever lawyer. You’re nothing like your father. You have no idea what a relief that is to me, my darling.’

  The weight is growing heavier. Jim feels a sudden, overwhelming need to shout – to tell his mother he can’t stand it here, that he’s leaving. To ask her why she insisted he apply to Cambridge instead of going to art school: surely she knows that painting is the only thing that has ever truly made him happy. But he doesn’t shout. He says quietly, ‘Actually, Mother, I’ve been thinking about not coming back next year. I really don’t think I …’

  Vivian has covered her face with her hands, but he knows that she is crying. In a whisper she says, ‘Don’t, Jim. Please don’t. I can’t bear it.’

  He says nothing more. He takes her to his room in Memorial Court so that she can splash her face, reapply her make-up. Her earlier ebullience has gone: she is falling back down to the trough of the wave, and he feels the old, familiar blend of frustration and helplessness, the desire to help tempered by the knowledge that there is no way for him to reach her.

  This time, Jim insists on a taxi. He hands Vivian into a compartment on the five-o’clock train, lingers at the window, wondering whether he ought to get on board, go with her to his aunt’s, make sure she gets there safely. Once, last year, in a state not dissimilar to this, she fell asleep in an empty compartment just past Potters Bar, and was only found by a guard long after the train had discharged its passengers and pulled into a siding at Finsbury Park.

  But he does not go. He stays on the platform, waving uselessly at his mother’s face – eyes closed, head tipped back against the antimacassar – until the train has receded into the distance, and there is nothing for him to do but retrieve his bicycle, and cycle back into town.

  VERSION THREE

  Cathedral

  Cambridge & Ely, December 1958

  On the last Saturday of term, they wake early in Jim’s college rooms, slip out unnoticed through the gap in the hedge, and take a bus to Ely.

  The fens are lit by a thin, watery sun, so low in the sky that it seems to be almost touching the horizon. The wind is in from the east. It was there in town – they have felt it for weeks, drawn their scarves tighter around their necks, woken to see their breath form clouds of vapour in the freezing air – but out here, there are no buildings to break its passage, just acres of hard mud and low, twisted trees.

  ‘When will you pack?’ he says. They are leaving tomorrow: Jim on the midday train – he’ll break the journey with a night at his aunt Frances’s house in Crouch End; Eva after lunch, in her parents’ Morris Minor, her brother Anton tired and testy beside her on the back seat.

  ‘In the morning, I suppose. Shouldn’t need more than an hour or two. You?’

  ‘The same.’ He takes her hand. His is cold, rough, his forefinger calloused by the hard wood of his paintbrushes, his fingernails framed by half-moons of dried paint. Last night, he had finally showed her the portrait; he removed the sheet with a magician’s flourish, though she could see that he was nervous. Eva didn’t admit that she had already taken a look a few days before, while he was down the hall in the bathroom; had stared at her likeness. There she was, rendered in layers of paint, in his brushstrokes’ swift, swallow shapes: both utterly herself and somehow elevated, other. It was a week since she had seen the doctor. She couldn’t stand to look at the painting, to see such a tribute, and say nothing. And yet what was there to say?

  She is silent again now, watching the great rolling blankness of the fens. At the front of the bus, a baby is crying, the sound low and guttural, as its mother tries to soothe it.

  ‘Well over two months gone,’ the doctor had said, fixing her with a pointed stare. ‘Three, even. You’ll need to start making arrangements, Miss Edelstein. You and your …’

  He had let the ellipsis hang, and Eva had not filled it. She was thinking only of Jim, and the fact that she had known him for six short weeks.

  If he notices her silence, Jim says nothing. He is quiet too, and pale, his eyes smudged with tiredness. Eva knows he isn’t looking forward to leaving, to going back to the Bristol flat he doesn’t think of as home – just the rented rooms that his mother, Vivian, occupies. Home, he has told her, is the Sussex house where he was bo
rn: rough grey flint and a front garden filled with roses. His father painting in the attic; his mother sitting for him, or mixing paints, swilling out jars with turps in the old pantry downstairs. That’s where Vivian was, Jim said, when his father had stood clutching at his chest at the top of the stairs, and fell: she had come running from the pantry to find him broken and twisted on the bottom step. Jim was at school. His aunt Patsy had collected him, brought him back to a house that was no longer a home: a house filled with policemen, and neighbours making cups of tea, and his mother screaming, screaming, until the doctors came and everything was quiet.

  In Ely, the bus lurches to a halt beside a post office. ‘Everybody off,’ the conductor calls, and they line up, still holding hands, behind the other passengers: the woman with the baby, sleeping now; an elderly couple, the man dour and flat-capped, the woman plump, her expression kind. She catches Eva’s eye as they climb down the steps. ‘Young love, eh?’ she says. ‘You both have a lovely day, now.’

  Eva thanks her, draws closer to Jim. The cold bites their faces.

  ‘We’ll have a look at the cathedral, shall we?’ he says. ‘I saw a Law Society concert here last year, and took a tour. It’s a beautiful place.’

  She nods: anything Jim wants, anything to be close to him, to stave off the inevitable moment when she must tell him what she is, and what she has to do.