The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  And so now, Jim barely notices as Ann Hewitt scribbles away in her notebook, is hardly aware of what he is saying as he leads her to the studio. This, at least, is tidy, everything scrubbed and put away: Howard even allowed Cath to sweep up his wood-shavings, to neatly arrange his tools.

  As they talk, time seems to warp and bend: when a knock comes at the door, he feels that hours, even days, might have passed. Jim is suddenly alert: this is his cue – pre-arranged, at Howard’s insistence – to ask the interviewer to leave. And it means that Jim will be leaving shortly, too.

  He accompanies Ann Hewitt back to her car, where she shakes his hand again, thanks him for his time. ‘You have a very interesting place here,’ she says as she climbs into the driver’s seat. ‘Our readers will be fascinated, I’m sure.’

  He waves her off, thinking nothing of her parting words. He will think nothing more of Ann Hewitt at all until weeks later, when the article is spread across the kitchen table, sending its shockwaves out across the room.

  Josie has prepared a Spanish omelette for lunch. Jim sits, eats, dismisses their curiosity about the interviewer with a vague, ‘Oh, it was fine, I think.’ Sophie climbs onto his knee, and he feeds her forkfuls of omelette, though he can feel Helena’s irritation: she prefers Sophie to feed herself, but he loves to sit like this, carrying his daughter’s small weight, pressing his nose to her head, inhaling the sweet baby-smell of her hair.

  With Sophie, Jim’s feelings of guilt are stronger than they are with Helena, more difficult to ignore. Guilt about raising her here, at the colony – a place that had once seemed so liberating, but is now beginning to seem like a dreadful place to raise a child. At two and a half, Sophie is becoming needy, difficult: at night, she often climbs from her cot, walks wailing from room to room until Jim – or, more usually, Helena – staggers sleepily from their bed to find her, then settles her under the covers between them. And there are so many lurking dangers: knives left out in the kitchen overnight; the terrible drop of the cliff-edge, and the sharp, unforgiving rocks below.

  Until recently, Sophie was allowed to wander in and out of the studio at will; but one day in January, she dipped her hand in Jim’s oil paints, and stamped multicoloured prints all over one of Howard’s driftwood sculptures. Jim had found it hilarious, but Howard most definitely hadn’t. ‘Can’t someone,’ he thundered, his fleshy cheeks turning a dangerous shade of puce, ‘keep an eye on that bloody child? She runs around here like a barefoot Indian.’

  But if Sophie isn’t to be admitted to the studio, then one of them – he or Helena, usually, though Cath and Josie pitch in when they can – must watch her; and that duty falls most often to Helena, who has all but stopped painting since having Sophie. All of this weighs upon Jim’s conscience – not to mention the fact that, for almost two years now, he has been able, over and over again, to hold his daughter close, to love her with everything he is – and then to set her down, leave her, drive off to the woman he also loves. The woman who is not her mother.

  Today, Jim leaves as soon as he can without arousing suspicion. Sophie waddles out to watch him, and Helena holds her back, away from the car wheels. ‘You’ll be home tomorrow, then? In time for dinner?’

  ‘Yes, in time for dinner.’ He kisses her, then leans down to kiss his daughter, whose face is already crumpling, preparing for tears. He watches their reflection in the mirror as he reverses, swings the car round, edges it out onto the drive. Sophie is crying now, beating her tiny fists against her mother’s legs; for a moment, Jim considers turning back. But he does not. He drives on, watching their twin figures grow smaller and smaller, and then disappear.

  In Bristol, he spends an hour or so with his mother and Sinclair. He tells them what he told Helena: that he is driving on to London, to spend the evening with Stephen and discuss next month’s exhibition. He dares not think how many times he has used that excuse – Stephen, of course, knows everything – but neither Vivian nor Sinclair seems particularly interested. His mother is distracted, her eyes darting around the room as they talk; in a brief moment alone with Jim, Sinclair confides that he is worried about her, that the extremities of her moods seem to have returned.

  ‘We must get her back to the doctor, then. Soon.’ Jim speaks with concern, but he is ashamed, privately, by how unaffected he is by the news. He is thinking only of how quickly he can get away.

  It is seven o’clock when he arrives at the hotel – their hotel, as he has started to call it in his mind, though they have only met here a couple of times. An entire night away together is a luxury they can rarely afford.

  He finds her in the bar, looking out at the grey reaches of the sea, a gin and tonic on the table in front of her.

  Eva turns, hearing him approach, and Jim feels something burst inside him: the euphoria of seeing her for the first time in too long. The narcotic rush of looking at her face and knowing that, for one night at least, and one blur of a morning, it belongs to him.

  VERSION ONE

  Island

  Greece, August 1975

  On the boat from Athens, they sit on the upper deck, at the back, just as they did that first time. The bright Nikon colours are exactly as they have lived on in Jim’s memory: the deep blue expanse of sea; the bleached yellows of the retreating land; the cerulean splash of sky.

  He closes his eyes, feeling the sun on his face. The thrum of the engine is like the purr of some great, benign creature, blotting out the chatter of the other travellers – an American woman, close by, is reading aloud from Dr Seuss to a small child; a Greek family on his other side is sharing spanakopita and crumbling hunks of feta cheese. He reaches for Eva’s hand, remembering how, on that first visit – their honeymoon; everything so new, everything still possible – she wore a blue and white checked dress, and her feet were bare and brown in her white sandals.

  ‘Do you still have that dress?’ he says, not opening his eyes.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one you wore on honeymoon. Blue and white checks. I haven’t seen it for years.’

  ‘No.’ She lets go of his hand. He can hear her reaching for her handbag, rummaging through its crowded depths. ‘I gave it to Jennifer’s school jumble sale, Jim. It must have been twenty years old.’

  As the ferry approaches the island, they move with the other passengers to the prow of the boat: still that childish rush of excitement at the first sight of land. There is the crumbling watchtower at the mouth of the harbour; there are the scrubby hills rising above the town, so unexpectedly green after the parched streets of Athens. (An Athenian they met on the ferry, the last time, had made a joke in impressively scatological English: ‘They say that when God made Athens, he opened his bowels, and shat out concrete.’) There is the town itself – if you could call it that, this small collection of houses, rising in tiers like an amphitheatre around the harbour; the dome of the church; the bar and taverna at the dockside, where old men grumbled over backgammon in the late afternoon.

  Jim remembers donkeys, too: rickety and fly-blown, left to stand in the midday sun; he had been quite upset, and Eva, surprising him, had said he mustn’t judge by his own standards. But he can see no donkeys now, and the town itself appears to have doubled in size: new houses – some still unfinished, metal struts rising up from bald concrete blocks – line the upper tiers, and the bars and tavernas have proliferated. A few feet back from the quay, a couple dressed entirely in white are sipping cocktails in the shade of a striped awning, to the sound of an Elton John record spilling from the bar’s open door.

  He has a sudden memory, bright and clear. He and Eva sitting by the harbour at sundown with their glasses of retsina. Petros the barman pouring out measures of ouzo to fishermen, their faces thick and pocked as tooled leather. But there is no sign of Petros now: the man emerging from the bar with a tray of glasses tipped by cocktail umbrellas and glacé cherries is young, muscled, seal-sleek. Petros’s grandson, perhaps. Or no relation at all.

  As they wait in lin
e at the gangplank with their suitcases, Jim turns to Eva. ‘God, it’s really changed, hasn’t it?’

  ‘We had to expect that, after all this time.’

  A boy is waiting for them, carrying their name, misspelled, on a white card. He loads their suitcases onto a trolley, sets off without a word. They follow behind, and Jim feels his spirits dip. It was his idea, and a good one, he felt, to spend their fifteenth wedding anniversary on the island they had loved so much: a week together, just the two of them. Eva had been unsure at first; Daniel wasn’t quite three – too little, she felt, to be left for a whole week. But slowly, Jim had convinced her: Daniel would be with Juliane. (The au pair, the Dührers’ granddaughter, had arrived from Vienna four years ago, and by now they couldn’t imagine life without her.) They would both be fine, he said. Eventually Eva had agreed, on the condition that they didn’t stay in the same hotel as before. ‘It would be too awful,’ she said, ‘if we found that it had changed beyond recognition.’

  It seemed that she was prepared for the changes worked by time in a way that he was not. He is, Jim knows, far more afflicted by nostalgia than his wife: it is he who captures each new episode in the children’s lives – birthdays, first steps, outings to the theatre – with his camera, who sends off each roll of film to be developed, pores endlessly over each clutch of photographs. It is, Jim supposes, the same urge that once drove him to paint – the need to capture a moment, whether real or imagined, before it disappears. And yet the attempt, it seems to him now, is always doomed to fail, whether in art (those meaningless abstract daubs on which he’d wasted so much time, and which now induce in him only a slight embarrassment, and, yes, a certain sadness) or in those family snapshots. There is always a slippage between the image in his memory – Eva brushing a lock of hair away from her face; Jennifer in her school uniform, so smart, so quietly grown-up; Daniel grinning messily from his high-chair – and the photographs he spreads out on the kitchen table.

  Now, as they walk up the steep cobbled street to their apartment – he had telephoned the island’s tourist office, asked for a place with a sea view, a terrace to breakfast on – a phrase slips into Jim’s mind. Some fortune-cookie aphorism: nothing is permanent except change. It plays on repeat, a stuck record, until they reach the apartment – admire its dazzling whitewash; the blessed coolness of the shuttered rooms; the terrace, bright with red bougainvillea; the sea below mirrored and glinting. And then a weight seems to fall from Jim’s shoulders, and he thinks, But surely change needn’t always be for the worse.

  When the boy has gone off with his tip, dragging the empty trolley, they fall gratefully into bed, exhausted from the long journey. Jim wakes first. It is still warm – to air the room, they opened the shutters, drew the lace curtains between the bedroom and the terrace – but the sun is lowering, a light breeze lifting the curtains. He lies for a while, halfway between sleep and dream. He had been dreaming of their garden at home: he was there with Jennifer and Daniel, playing hide and seek; his mother was there too, and Sinclair, and everyone was asking where Eva was, but he didn’t know. Jim moves onto his side, gripped by irrational anxiety; but she is there, of course, soundly sleeping, her right arm crooked above her head as if frozen in the act of waving.

  He would like to reach for her, draw her warm body to his. He would have done so, fifteen years ago, without thinking – or, if he thought of anything, it would only have been how lucky he was to have met her; how inconceivable it was to live his life alone. But now, he hesitates – Eva is so deeply asleep, and he knows how exhausted she is: two radio interviews this week, and all that toing and froing with the BBC about the screenplay for Pressed. As the date of their departure loomed, Daniel was fractious, troublesome: waking in the night, asking for Eva, consoled only by crawling into their bed, where he would shift and snuffle, robbing them both of sleep. So now, Jim does not reach for his wife. Instead, he gets up from the bed, finds his cigarettes, and goes out onto the terrace.

  It is a beautiful evening; the flagstones are warm beneath his feet, the light soft and diffuse. Snatches of sound travel up from the houses below – a mother calling her child, a girl laughing, the jaunty burble of a television cartoon. Jim watches a small speedboat round the harbour wall, carve its V-shaped path through the still water. His mind is also beautifully still, and he remembers now that this was the effect the island had – the ability to pause the maelstrom of thought, to focus the mind on this moment, this place.

  On their honeymoon, he had assumed that it was because he was so in love, so happy, drunk on visions of the future; and so he is surprised to find, now, that it still has a similar effect, everything falling away. All the silted build-up of the intervening decades: the years of teaching; the heavy disappointment of his failed ambitions; his infidelity, distant now (he has not taken anyone but his wife to bed since Greta); his jealousy of Eva’s effortless success (not effortless, surely – he, of all people, knows how hard she works – and yet, in his darker moments, he can’t help feeling how easy it has all been for her). All of it simply evaporates, leaving only these warm tiles, this indigo sky, this stretch of darkening sea.

  He could cry with relief, but does not. He goes back into the bedroom, moulds his body to the shape of Eva’s, rests his head against the dip of her collarbone until she wakes, turns to him sleepily, and he says, ‘I’m glad we came.’

  VERSION TWO

  Homecoming

  Paris & London, April 1976

  The call comes just after nine o’clock.

  It is lucky that Eva is at home to answer it. She has just dropped Sarah off at school, and would have gone straight to the university had her first tutorial not been cancelled – Ida, the faculty secretary, had telephoned earlier to tell Eva that two of her students were unwell, her slow Mississippi drawl conveying her contempt for their excuses. And so Eva had found herself with several spare hours: time, she resolved on the short walk back to the apartment – stopping at their favourite boulangerie for croissants and fresh rolls; admiring the cotton-bursts of blossom on the trees that line their street – that she would dedicate to tackling the new biography of Simone de Beauvoir that Bob has sent from London for review.

  But she has only just removed her jacket, laid her keys and shopping bag on the hall table, when the telephone rings.

  ‘Eva?’ It’s Anton. She knows immediately, from his tone, that something is wrong. ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been ringing for half an hour.’

  ‘I’m just back from taking Sarah to school, Anton.’ There is a chair beside the hall table: a beautiful, rickety old thing Eva picked up at Les Puces flea-market, with the intention of reupholstering its balding seat. She sits down, aware of a cold, gaping sensation at her core. ‘Didn’t you try the office? What is it? Is it Mama?’

  There is a pause, during which she hears her brother sigh. ‘She’s in hospital, Eva. The Whittington. Pneumonia. It’s not good. Can you come today?’

  Pneumonia: such a curious word. All through the making of arrangements – telephoning Ted, telephoning Ida, telephoning Highgate, because she wants to hear Jakob’s voice, and has forgotten that he won’t be at home – Eva sees the word projected in her mind, in chalk-white letters, imagines a bearded professor pointing at it with a stick. Observe the Greek ‘pn’ – strange to our ears. From ‘pneumon’, meaning ‘lung’. Miriam’s lungs: she has spent decades wheezing into bags, gasping on inhalers, shaking her head as she did so, as if it were no more than a minor inconvenience.

  Ted, back early from the office, holds Eva in his arms, strokes her hair. She pictures her mother’s twin lungs, disembodied, failing, like two limp, punctured balloons.

  They decide, after some discussion, that Eva will go to London alone. It is a Thursday: Ted has two pieces to file for the Saturday paper, and Sarah has a French test the next morning.

  ‘Come on Saturday,’ Eva says firmly as she shuts her case. ‘Just let me see how she is.’

  Ted, doubtful, frowns at her across
the bedroom. ‘Well … if you’re sure, darling. But I’d much rather we came with you now.’

  On the train to Calais, the de Beauvoir biography lying unopened on her lap, Eva wonders why she insisted they didn’t come. Ted might have held off his deadlines, or filed from London, and Sarah could surely have missed her test. But she had, for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, felt an instinctive need to go to her mother unaccompanied.

  She thinks of the last time she saw Miriam. Christmas – or ‘Hanumas’, as Ted has affectionately dubbed it; since his arrival in the family, along with Anton’s wife, Thea, the Edelsteins have incorporated into their celebrations turkey, fairy lights, even a tree. They had all crowded round the sagging dining-room table, eating by candlelight; Anton’s daughter, Hanna, was button-eyed and gurgling on Thea’s lap.

  Afterwards, as was their custom, they had gathered in the music room. Jakob played his violin – the sad old tunes that seemed to come from some deep well of collective memory – and Sarah stepped up to the piano, performed the Satie Gymnopédie with which she had recently earned distinction at grade six. Miriam had sat curled in her usual chair; she looked tired – Eva and Thea had insisted she let them cook – and seemed a little short of breath, but not unusually so. She had watched her granddaughter’s hands intently as they moved over the keys. Then she had closed her eyes and leaned her head back against a cushion, a small smile arching her lips.

  And yet, thinking back now, Eva remembers that her mother had gone to bed very early – and on Boxing Day, she had bowed out of their usual walk in Highgate Wood. ‘You go, darlings,’ she had said brightly over breakfast. ‘I’ll be fine right here with my new books.’ Jakob, Eva sees now, had been worried. ‘Your mother’s doing too much,’ he had said to her as they walked the short distance to the wood, arm in arm, the rest of the group striding out ahead. ‘Talk to her, Eva. Make her understand that she needs to rest.’ And Eva, patting Jakob’s arm, had agreed that she would; but the rest of the day had been lost to eating, clearing up, watching Sarah and Hanna play together, and her promise had slipped from her mind.