The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  Ted has been there for Sarah, solid and reassuring, all these years – and for Eva, too, of course. I can’t believe it took me so long to find you, he had said to her one night years ago, when it was all just beginning. I’m afraid that if I make one false move, you’ll disappear.

  Now, taking the packet of fettuccine down from the cupboard, Eva tries again to dispel the image that has been spooling through her mind since she called Ted’s name, and heard only silence in response. An open road ribboning endlessly across flat desert lands: the blank, featureless landscape of life without him.

  VERSION THREE

  Landing

  Sussex, July 1988

  ‘Well? How was it?’

  Sophie, settling on the back seat, waits a few seconds before replying. ‘Fine.’

  Jim catches Eva’s eye. ‘And your mother?’

  Another brief silence. Then, ‘Yeah. She’s fine.’

  He sets the car into reverse, edges it out. It’s Saturday, and the airport is busy. Jim and Eva arrived early to meet Sophie; they sat in the arrivals hall, drinking bad coffee, watching a family – two parents and three children, each scalded a raw, uncomfortable shade of pink – navigate the concourse with a trolley piled high with luggage, duty-free bags and a stuffed donkey wearing a sombrero. Behind them came three men in vests and shorts, sipping on cans of Stella.

  ‘Christ,’ Jim said to Eva, his voice low. ‘I hope they weren’t on Sophie’s plane.’

  ‘Don’t worry. The Alicante flight hasn’t landed yet.’

  Alicante: a city of dust and heat and unfinished skyscrapers. This, at least, is how Jim imagines it: he has received only one postcard from Helena, sent soon after she moved to Spain. A tall, mud-coloured hotel of brutal ugliness; on the back, she had written, For Jim – because even the most hideous building here is lovelier than the home I shared with you. H.

  Jim had been furious – not so much with the sentiment (that he could understand), but with the fact that Helena had put it on a postcard, where their daughter could see her mother’s hatred plainly inscribed. He’d composed an angry letter back, but Eva, reading it over at his request, had suggested he wait before posting it. ‘Helena has every right to be angry,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in alienating her even further, is there?’

  And so he had waited, and after a few days, had consigned the letter to the bin. But Helena must have felt she had made her point. Since then, she has written only to Sophie – enclosed photographs of her small whitewashed house in a village in the mountains; of old women dressed in black, their faces a contour map of wrinkles; of skinny goats framed against rocky, grassless land. And then, two years ago, of a dark, narrow-faced man, his skin a deep brown, his eyes narrowed against the light. ‘Juan,’ Sophie said when she showed him the photograph, her expression giving nothing away. ‘Mum’s new boyfriend.’

  Helena, of course, is free to do as she likes; Jim’s only real concern, then, was for Sophie – for this new shift in the unstable ground of her young life. He tried to ask her how she felt about Juan – this was two years ago; she had just turned sixteen – but she would not be drawn. Sophie turned her slow, heavy-lidded eyes on him and said, with an indifference that seemed absolute, ‘Why should I care what she does?’

  ‘Indifferent’ is the word Jim reaches for most often, now, to describe his daughter. She is morose and apathetic, barely speaking other than when spoken to, and even then in the curtest of monosyllables. She has put on weight: her face – that simulacrum of her mother’s – has filled out, and she hides her broadening hips under loose T-shirts. But what alarms Jim most is her lack of passion for anything, for anyone: she is average at school, and has few friends; she’s at home most weekends, watching television in her bedroom on the small portable set. Had Sophie even set herself squarely against Eva – made her stepmother the object of vivid teenage tantrums – Jim might have had a clearer idea of what they were dealing with; but she addresses Eva with the same robotic brevity that she accords the rest of the family. Only Sam, now studying geology in London, seems able to reach her; on the weekends when he comes home to Sussex with his textbooks and dirty washing, Sophie is transformed: smiling, almost animated, trotting puppy-like after her adored stepbrother, who responds in kind with a genial, amused affection.

  At first, he and Eva were careful not to press Sophie too hard: to consider the impact that their move to Sussex must have had on her. (They had finally sold the Regent’s Park flat in 1984, bought a dilapidated farmhouse not far from the village in which Jim grew up.) ‘Don’t you remember how hard it was, starting a new school?’ Eva had said. ‘And she’s had to move around so many times. I think we should give her a little time.’

  And they had given her time – let her settle into the new house; waited out the first term at the new school. But that’s exactly what Sophie seemed to be doing: waiting; marking time. She brought no friends home, nor was invited out. (Years later, Jim would think of this with an uncomfortable stab of irony.) Eva and Jim began to worry. ‘What’s it like at school, Sophie?’ they would ask, at regular intervals; or, ‘If you really hate it here in Sussex, you know we don’t have to stay. We can talk about going back to London.’ But Sophie gave only bland non-answers – ‘It’s fine’; ‘I’m fine’ – until Sam – still living at home then, finishing his A levels – warned them to stop asking. ‘She thinks you’re always getting at her,’ he told Jim. ‘She feels like nothing she can do is good enough for you and Mum.’

  And so they had tried hard to take a step back; to give her the space to work through whatever it was she was working through. ‘She’s a teenager,’ Eva said, remembering her own tricky phases with Rebecca. ‘It will pass.’ But it didn’t; the years rolled on, and Sophie became more and more remote. Through her final months of A levels she displayed no interest in applying to university, or taking alternative steps to find a job. Jim and Eva abandoned their tactic of cautious distance, and tried, again, to take her in hand. ‘You can’t just bury your head in the sand about this, darling,’ Jim said. They were sitting at the dining-room table one Sunday afternoon, the roast lunch cleared away, their pudding bowls empty in front of them. ‘You really need to have some kind of plan.’

  Eva, at his side, nodded. ‘Can we help you, Sophie? Can we try to work out together what you’d like to do next?’

  That had reached her: Sophie had turned to her stepmother, and said, her voice clear and calm, ‘Is that what you did? Did you sit down with my dad and work out how he was going to leave my mum?’

  It hurt, of course – later, in bed, Jim had held Eva as she cried – but they continued, undeterred. Did Sophie want to go to university? Would she rather get a job? But her exams came and went, and still Sophie had made no decisions. Even this trip to Spain came about only because Helena and Juan sent the plane tickets as an eighteenth birthday present. Jim could not imagine his daughter taking the initiative herself, even if he and Eva had offered her the money. (They had done so more than once, and she had flatly refused to take it.)

  Now, joining the queue of cars waiting nose to tail at the exit, Jim can’t stop himself from saying, his grip closing on the steering-wheel, ‘Well, Sophie. Is that really all you’ve got to say about two weeks in Spain? That it was “fine”?’

  In the rear-view mirror, he sees his daughter roll her eyes. ‘What else do you want to know?’

  Eva places a hand on his knee: a warning. ‘I’m sure you’re tired, aren’t you, love? Why don’t you close your eyes for a bit? Maybe you can tell us more about your trip over dinner.’

  They are quiet then. On the motorway, Jim concentrates on the shifting brake-lights of the cars in front. It is a warm day, softened by a stiff breeze from the sea: as they turn off, following the road home, he opens the window, breathes in deeply. The road narrows, hunkering down further into the countryside; the tall trees on either side, heavy with sap, bow to meet in the middle in places, forming a tunnel through which the greenish light dimly filter
s.

  Jim loves this place, loves it with a deep, unquestioning certainty that he has never felt for London, or even Cornwall. His being here feels in some way the natural extension of his love for Eva, but also – and this he had not expected, when Eva first mooted the idea of moving to Sussex – for his mother. The initial, shaming relief he had felt after Vivian’s death – the sudden lightness in his shoulders, as if a heavy burden had been removed – had given way, very quickly, to guilt. For months, he was unable to paint, had spent his days moving listlessly about the Regent’s Park flat, until Eva – working on a manuscript in Rebecca’s old bedroom – could stand it no longer. She had asked Penelope for the number of a therapist, a distant mutual acquaintance from Cambridge. He had gone to see the woman in her flat in Muswell Hill – shadowy, book-lined, calm – and found, after some initial resistance, that there he was able not to dispel the guilt, exactly (guilt not just for what he had done, or not done, for his mother, but to Helena and Sophie, too), but to turn down its volume so that on good days it was barely audible. And, more importantly, after six months of therapy, he had begun to paint again.

  Years later, as the situation with Sophie worsened, Jim had suggested to Eva that Sophie might also like to talk to someone; even asked whether, God forbid, they should confront the fact that she might be developing the early signs of his mother’s illness. ‘Yes,’ Eva said. ‘It has to be worth a try.’ But when he raised the possibility with Sophie – this was just before Christmas last year – she had eyed him with withering disdain. ‘So what you’re saying, Dad,’ she said, ‘is that you think I’m some kind of nutter, like Grandma Vivian?’

  Jim couldn’t contain his anger then. ‘Don’t you ever use that word about your grandmother. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Sophie, fleeing through the kitchen door, paused then, looked back at him. ‘Well, neither do you, Dad. So why don’t you just leave me alone?’

  Now, home from the airport, Jim carries Sophie’s suitcase upstairs to her room, then asks if there’s anything he can do to help with dinner. Eva shakes her head. ‘I’m just heating up a lasagne.’

  ‘I’ll pop outside for a bit, then.’

  Eva nods. ‘I’ll knock when it’s ready.’

  His studio occupies the old barn that came with the house; it was this, together with the rambling grounds – an overgrown orchard, a meadow waist-high with grass – that had made them fall in love with it. The barn was in a terrible state – roof-tiles missing, timbers rotting, the carcass of an ancient John Deere quietly rusting under cobwebs. But they had set to work – he, Eva, Anton, Sam and a team of builders from the village. Slowly, painstakingly, they had turned the barn into a functional studio: punctuated the sloping roof with enormous sheets of glass; plumbed in a toilet; and even – such luxury – installed central heating. For the first few weeks after they had finished, Jim could hear Howard’s voice in his head, as it had once sounded on winter mornings, when they had moved about the freezing communal studio at Trelawney House. Bit of cold never did anyone any harm. Don’t go round grumbling, for God’s sake – put on another jumper …

  Almost as soon as he began working in the new studio, Jim found himself moving away from painting, and into sculpture: working with great hunks of limestone, then granite; turning them into tall, smooth-sided monoliths that carry, in his mind, the quiet power of ancient monuments. The critics have not been so kind: ‘A tedious exercise in priapic pointlessness’ was how one of them had described his last exhibition. Jim had laughed on reading the review; he remembered his father telling him, on one of those afternoons when Jim had sat silently watching him paint, that ‘The opinions of critics are fit only for lining a hamster’s cage.’ Stephen’s first reaction, however, had surprised him. ‘The sculptures are interesting,’ his old friend and gallerist had said, and Jim knew faint praise when he heard it. ‘But you’re a painter, really, Jim, at your core. Better, perhaps, to return to what you know?’

  Now, Jim stands before the piece he has been working on for three weeks: a narrow shard of black granite, planed and smoothed, its blank surface littered with tiny splinters of colour: grey, white, charcoal. He thinks about something else that Howard used to say at Trelawney House, over and over again, to whomever would listen. With sculpture, you’re not creating something out of nothing. You’re just chipping away at what’s already there.

  The words struck Jim, and stayed with him: he felt, when his hands first itched to move over solid stone, that they also expressed something about the way he feels for Eva. Jim wouldn’t allow himself to regret the years he’d had without her – his years with Helena; his daughter, Sophie – but in his mind, his new sculptures are monuments to the essential simplicity, the rightness, he feels in being with Eva; to the overwhelming gratitude he feels for this, their second chance. He only wishes there were some way he could have struck out for that chance – for his own happiness – without causing his daughter so much pain. That he could find some way, in short, to make it up to Sophie, other than by trying his best to show her, each day, each week, how much she means to him. But she does not seem to want to listen. Or, he thinks darkly, perhaps I’m just not trying hard enough.

  At half past seven, they gather in the kitchen to eat; Eva serves the lasagne, salad, pours white wine. Eva asks again about the holiday, and Sophie tells them a little more – about the black chickens Helena is keeping in the back garden; about Juan, whom she describes as ‘All right – a bit weird, but all right.’

  Jim watches his daughter, pale and awkward in her black T-shirt and leggings. He feels a rush of affection for her; reaches over to take her hand, tells her he is glad to have her home.

  Sophie regards him coolly, and then removes her hand.

  VERSION ONE

  Man Ray

  London, March 1989

  A few days before her fiftieth birthday, Eva invites Penelope over for lunch.

  ‘Don’t bring Gerald,’ she says. ‘Jim’s in Rome. School trip.’

  The next day – a Saturday – she bakes a quiche, prepares a salad, and sets a bottle of Chablis to cool. They eat. They drink. They discuss Gerald’s bad back; Jennifer’s wedding plans: she is engaged to Henry, a fellow trainee solicitor – polite, steady, his hair already thinning a little at the crown – but devoted to Jennifer, and she to him. Last month, while they were out shopping for bridal gowns, she had turned to Eva and said, ‘I love Henry so much, Mum, I’m almost afraid to marry him; afraid that marriage won’t match up to the idea I have in my head. Is that how it was with you and Dad?’

  Eva had looked at her daughter, standing there before the rack of dresses – so young, so lovely, so dear to her – and experienced a rush of feelings she couldn’t quite define: love, sadness, happiness and something else, a kind of nostalgia, the sense that she was winding back to the moment in her own past when she had stood beside Jim, and vowed to make their love last for a lifetime, and beyond. No, she had never been afraid. ‘Don’t worry so much, darling,’ she told Jennifer. ‘Marriage isn’t a thing to match up to some perfect image in your mind. It will be what you make it. And you and Henry will make it wonderful.’

  Too painful to think about that moment now. Eva pours herself and Penelope a fresh glass of wine, and then produces the postcard that she has tucked into the back pages of a proof copy of her latest book. (Non-fiction, this time: a survey of the ten best women writers of the twentieth century.) She lays it down on the table between them.

  It is a reproduction of a black-and-white photograph. A woman, shown in profile, her lips and eyebrows dark and full, her hair fashionably shingled. The whole image is a little blurred, unfocused, as if shaded with the softest pencil point.

  ‘Lee Miller, no?’ Penelope says. ‘Man Ray?’

  Eva nods, impressed. ‘Turn it over.’

  On the back of the card is written, in a sloping, familiar hand, For B – because I will always think of you in beautiful monochrome. Thank you for bringing m
e back to life. All my love, always, J.

  They are silent for a moment. Then Penelope says, ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘In the car. Yesterday. I was cleaning out the boot.’ Eva drains her glass, watches her friend across the table. She feels oddly calm, as she had been the previous afternoon, when the disparate cogs of her mind had finally seemed to slip into oiled synchronicity, and she’d climbed into the car, knowing at once where she had to go.

  ‘I won’t insult you by asking whether it’s definitely Jim’s writing.’

  ‘No.’

  Penelope sits back in her chair, runs a finger up the stem of her glass. ‘And do we know who this “B” could be?’

  ‘Bella Hurst.’

  ‘The girl with the studio?’

  ‘The very one.’

  She should have known, of course: any wife would say the same. And yet Eva is uncomfortably aware that she really should have known, that when she had begun to sense a change in Jim, through that autumn term – he seemed lighter; he drank less; he even cleared the shed, dug out his easel, and began, tentatively, to paint – there would be something, or someone, more behind it than the gradual fading of his grief for Vivian. She had known of the supply teacher, of course – he had mentioned her a few times at first; nonchalantly, she’d thought (‘Oh, she’s quite sweet – very young – lives in a ghastly squat in New Cross’), and then more regularly, with greater enthusiasm. Jim had begun, occasionally, to go to the pub with Bella Hurst; had visited her shared studio in Peckham; had met up with her, once or twice, after Gerry returned to work, and she was no longer at the school. Eva must, she supposes, now presume that there were also other meetings of which she was not informed.