The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  For all these reasons, Eva had told herself to turn away from the window of the agenzia immobiliare – she and Penelope were on a week’s holiday in Rome, ‘exorcising demons’, as Penelope put it. They’d hired a car, taken a day trip out to Bracciano. But she had not turned away: she had gone in, asked to view the house in the hills south of the town, with the small swimming pool, and the lemon trees standing sentry in pots on the sun terrace. Later that day, they had stood beside those lemon trees, smelling the resiny sweetness of the pines that screened the house from its neighbour.

  ‘You’ve got to do it,’ Penelope said. A few days later, Eva had.

  Now, she drives north, through the scrubby outskirts of Rome: past billboards from which slender women in bikinis pout and pose; past run-down casali, old farm machinery rusting in front yards; past walls daubed with obscure political graffiti: Berlusconi boia!, Onore al Duce. It is Eva’s favourite time of day: the threshold of evening, when the sun is dissolving into shadow, and the light is soft, the sky streaked with pink and orange. They have wound down all the windows, and the breeze is warm on their faces, the air carrying heat and diesel fumes and the honking of horns.

  Sarah is stretching out in the passenger seat, arching her back like a cat. ‘God, it’s good to be here.’

  ‘Busy week?’

  She closes her eyes. ‘Busy year, Mum.’

  ‘Still tough at the council?’

  ‘You have no idea.’ After a moment, she reaches across, touches Eva lightly on the arm: an apology. ‘Didn’t mean to sound snappy. I’ll tell you all about it later. Just let me close my eyes for a minute.’

  ‘Of course. We have all week, don’t we?’

  They are silent for the rest of the journey: Sarah dozing lightly in the front, Pierre plugged back into his music, the minutes elapsing to his own private soundtrack. When they reach the house, it is almost dark. Eva goes in ahead, switching on lights, while Sarah and Pierre stand out on the terrace, yawning, taking it in.

  ‘Wow, Oma.’ Pierre has removed the headphones; he is staring at the swimming pool, open-mouthed. ‘You didn’t tell me you had a pool.’

  ‘Didn’t I? I hope you packed your trunks.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Sarah taps her son playfully on the shoulder. ‘Clever old Mum packed them for you.’

  For supper, Eva fills plates with cheese, bread, tomatoes, thin slices of prosciutto. She shopped carefully at the market in Bracciano that morning, enjoying her good-natured discussions with the stall-holders about quality and price; thinking about the market in Trastevere, and about the kindly signora she had encountered in the waiting-room at the pronto soccorso hospital, bossily informing her that she ought to do her shopping elsewhere.

  There is sadness everywhere, of course – sadness and memory, the echo of Ted’s voice in her head, the remembered pressure of his hand in hers. But there is also joy: the sense – though really Eva suspects such a feeling to be overly sentimental – that she is closer to Ted here in Italy, somehow, than in the London house where he had faltered, grown ill; where she had watched him slowly fade away. He would have loved it here. Sometimes – though she has told no one this – she even thinks she sees him, caught fleetingly out of the corner of her eye: the quick dark blur of him, walking across the terrace; the bright flash of his white shirt. Eva will stop what she is doing then, and stay quite still, as if the slightest movement might frighten him away. But she can never quite resist the temptation to turn and look; and of course, when she does, there is never anybody there.

  They drink wine as they eat – rough local stuff, watered down for Pierre – and talk of Sarah’s latest case. (She is a social worker in Tower Hamlets; moved to London to train after everything went to pot in Paris with the band, and Julien.) The wine loosens Pierre’s tongue: he describes his plans for the summer – a drum course, a weekend at a music festival with friends. Sarah asks how the new book is going, and Eva tells her, ‘Slowly.’

  Later, when it is fully dark, Pierre slinks off to bed, and Eva lights the candles she has placed all round the terrace in terracotta pots.

  ‘It’s beautiful here, Mum. I can see why you fell in love with it.’

  ‘Yes. I did, rather. I know you thought I was barmy.’

  Sarah regards her mother over the rim of her wine glass. ‘No. Not barmy. I was worried you’d be lonely. Are you?’

  Eva takes a moment to answer. ‘Sometimes. But no more than I’d be anywhere. It’s difficult, of course. Without him.’

  ‘Of course. I miss him too.’ Another short silence. Then, ‘Dad called the other day.’

  ‘Did he?’ Thinking of David, Eva finds herself smiling. After all these years, her feelings towards him have grown kindly; she can see David, now, for what he always was – selfish, impossibly vain, but talented, too, and driven by his need to be true to that talent. There had been good times; the fact that their marriage had not stuck had surely, Eva will now admit, been as much her fault as his. They had each simply met, and then married, the wrong person. If the years have taught Eva anything, it is that this is hardly an unfamiliar tale.

  ‘He’s bored,’ Sarah says. ‘Nobody’s sending him scripts any more, he says. He’s feeling sorry for himself. “I’m a lonely old man, Sarah.” I told him to try living alone on ten quid a week, not seeing a soul from morning till night, and then tell me he was lonely. That shut him up.’

  ‘I bet it did.’ Eva sips her wine. She is familiar with the gentle battles that persist between Sarah and her father: much gentler now than during Sarah’s tricky Paris years, when she had refused to see David, had insisted that her only true father was Ted. ‘He mentioned Lear, the last time we spoke. Said Harry was trying to persuade the National.’

  ‘Yes. He’s hoping they might give it the go-ahead for next year.’

  ‘Well, that’ll keep him busy for a bit, then, won’t it? He won’t be calling for Meals on Wheels quite yet.’

  Sarah gives a dry laugh. ‘I suppose not.’

  A few minutes of quiet: the play and flicker of candlelight, the whirr and plash of the pool’s filters. From somewhere beyond the pines comes the cry of a child, and its mother’s answering call. ‘Anything else you want to tell me about, darling?’

  Sarah glances at her mother: sharply at first, then softening. ‘Mum, you’re completely transparent.’

  ‘Am I?’ Eva opens her eyes wide. ‘And I thought I was discretion itself.’

  ‘All right. There is someone.’

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The haircut.’

  Sarah smiles. ‘That has nothing to do with him. But he does like it.’

  ‘Has Pierre met him?’

  ‘Not yet. It’s still pretty new. But it’s good. His name’s Stuart. He’s from Edinburgh, originally. Lives in Stoke Newington. Works for Age Concern.’

  Eva spears a sliver of prosciutto with her fork, buying time. Her mouthful finished, she says, ‘Married?’

  ‘Divorced. Two kids, younger than Pierre. So we need to move slowly.’

  ‘Very sensible.’

  Sarah nods. ‘I promise you’ll meet him when we’re ready. Though that would mean coming back to London.’

  ‘I’ll be back. October, probably. Winters out here can be fairly grim.’

  ‘Not as grim as London, surely?’ Sarah lifts the wine bottle, refills both their glasses. Then, sitting back in her chair, she says, ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘No flickers of romance? Long lingering glances across the piazza?’

  Eva laughs. ‘Romance? You make me sound like some awful hormonal divorcee.’

  Sarah doesn’t laugh. She is straight-faced, serious: looking at her, Eva remembers the nights she and Ted had spent on the telephone – Rome to Paris; their bill, of course – while Sarah cried and cried at the other end of the line. The worst night of all, when Sarah had told them she was leaving Julien, taking Pierre, and they had both got straight int
o the car and driven north through the night. The autostrade empty, endless. The Alps glowing white in the pale dawn.

  ‘Come on, Mum. You did everything for Ted. You don’t have to be alone for ever.’

  ‘I know.’ Eva picks up her napkin, dabs at a faint spatter of wine that has settled on the collar of her shirt. ‘But I’m not looking for anyone, Sarah. I think that part of my life is over.’

  Eva is aware of her daughter’s eyes resting on her for a moment longer, but Sarah says no more. They are quiet again, feeling the thickening of the Italian night, drinking their wine until the bottle is finished, and it is time to go to bed.

  Later, unable to sleep, Eva lies watching the shadows on the ceiling, wondering whether what she said to her daughter was true; wondering why it is that here, in Italy, she has found a particular face returning so often to her thoughts. A narrow, pale face, scattered with freckles. Eyes a vivid, violet blue.

  In the last few months, she has been having a recurring dream: a high-ceilinged room, light flooding through dusty windows. A man before an easel, painting. He has his back to her; he doesn’t turn when she calls out, or even as she approaches him, drawn by the desire to see what he is working on. Each time, she has the strongest feeling that he is painting her own image. But when she is standing behind him – so close that she might reach out and touch him, though she does not – she sees that there is nothing on the canvas but white space.

  In the dream, the artist never turns, never shows his face. But each morning, when Eva wakes, she knows exactly who he is, and the knowledge of it leaves her with a faint, peculiar sense of longing: peculiar because it is for a man, a life, that she has never known, and surely never will.

  VERSION THREE

  Beach

  Cornwall, October 2008

  For Jim’s seventieth birthday, Penelope and Gerald host a picnic on the beach beside their house.

  It is more than a picnic: a feast, ordered from the deli in St Ives. Four wicker baskets filled with potted crab, pork pies, pasties; fat Greek olives and crumbling hunks of feta; a great whorl of festering cheese Gerald names as ‘Stinking Bishop’, and which makes the younger children screw up their faces in disgust. White wine in ice buckets. Cushions and blankets layered over pebbles; a table and chairs carried down from the house. Gerald’s iPod playing softly from a small battery-operated speaker: Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones. It is unseasonably warm – an Indian summer; the sky is bright and unclouded, a thin, diluted blue.

  Three o’clock, and Jim is sitting on a folding chair, talking to Howard. He is approaching a delicious state of drunkenness: had been quite unable to believe, when Howard appeared, ghostlike, at his shoulder, that here before him was his old friend and nemesis. He was much thinner now, and walking with the aid of a cane; but there were the same large, loose-knit features, the same black eyes beneath thick white brows.

  Jim had, at first, found himself unable to speak. After a few seconds, he’d managed only, ‘How?’

  ‘Eva,’ Howard had said. Across his shoulder, Jim had seen Eva watching them. He had smiled at her, to show that she had done the right thing – a beautiful, unexpected thing. Then he had clasped Howard to him, felt the bulk of the man, still strong, sinewy; breathed in his smell of rolling tobacco and old wool. With that came a hundred other smells: the cloying sweetness of marijuana, the sharp tang of cold sea air, the deep woody scent of the shared studio, laid with stacks of freshly sawn timber.

  Holding his old friend at a distance, Jim said, ‘Cath?’

  Howard shook his head. ‘Lost her five years ago. Cancer.’

  Now, they are sketching out the contours of the last three decades. The gradual failure of Trelawney House (Jim and Helena had heard something of this from Josie), the scattering of its residents. Howard and Cath’s removal to a terraced cottage in St Agnes. Jim’s leaving Helena for Eva: for the great sense of freedom he has found with her. His vigorous, productive years – the exhibitions, the newspaper articles, the money – petering out, a fire dwindling to embers.

  ‘I was working with sculpture, for a while,’ Jim says. ‘Found myself thinking of you, Howard. What was it you used to say? That you weren’t creating something new, you were just chipping away at what was already there.’

  Howard laughs. ‘Did I really say that? Bet I didn’t admit that Michelangelo said it first.’

  ‘No.’ Jim smiles. Over Howard’s shoulder, he can see his granddaughter, Alice, splashing in the water. She is approaching the waves cautiously, with a crab’s sidelong gait; her older cousins, Alona and Miriam, are taking her hand, guiding her, playing at adulthood. ‘You had to rule the place, didn’t you, Howard? Always had to show us you knew best.’

  The old man’s thick eyebrows twitch. ‘Never saw it like that. I just wanted us to make good work. Something we could all believe in.’ After a moment, he adds, ‘That interview. Making out that we were wastrels and derelicts. Showing her the bedrooms, for goodness’ sake. What were you thinking?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I was thinking.’ Howard’s face the morning the interview was published. The paper spread out across the kitchen table; Cath crying softly in a corner of the kitchen. Sophie wailing, inconsolable. Helena grim-faced and silent in the car. ‘She twisted everything I said. You know how these things go. You must know that by now.’

  Howard, watching the horizon, slowly nods. ‘Yes, I know. It was all a very long time ago.’

  Jim would like to tell him how much he had always admired him; how he had always felt, deep down, that Howard was the better artist. But he can’t quite seem to shape the words. ‘Are you still working?’

  ‘Oh no. Not for years.’ A smile creases Howard’s lips. ‘Burned the lot, didn’t I? Got mad at Cath one night, drank a bottle of whisky, and set light to it all. Cath called the fire brigade. Very nearly torched the whole street.’

  ‘God, Howard.’ Jim is laughing, though the image in his mind – drawn from the newspaper story he read about it, and no doubt sensationalised by memory – is a terrible one. Smoke rising above a row of cottages. Howard standing bare-foot on the patio, watching his life’s work go up in flames. ‘I saw the story. I should have written. I should have asked how you were.’

  ‘Oh, it was small fry, really. Nothing to bother a proper art-world type like you.’

  ‘Howard—’ Jim begins, but he is prevented from saying more by Alice, now turning from the water’s edge, calling for him, the breakers nipping at her toes.

  ‘Go,’ Howard says. ‘I’ll find Eva. Thank her again for dragging me out of my cave.’

  Jim gets to his feet, grasps the other man’s hand. ‘I’m glad you came. It’s good to see you. And I’m sorry. About Cath. I loved her, you know. We all did.’

  ‘I know.’ Howard nods. ‘Happy birthday, Jim. You’ve a lovely family. Never mind the bumps along the way.’

  In the shallows, Jim sets a steadying hand on each of Alice’s shoulders. She is a small, quivering thing, crying out again at the sudden shock of cool water on her skin. Alice is more precious to him – though he would never admit it to anyone – than Alona and Miriam, not only for the blood that connects them (odd that this should make any difference, when of course the woman he loves most in all the world is not of his blood), but for the fact that she was lost to him for so long.

  Alice was two years old when Jim finally met her: Sophie had simply appeared on their doorstep one afternoon, grey-faced and shivering. A man they didn’t know was waiting in a car on the drive; later, they’d remember that he hadn’t even extinguished the engine. ‘Take her for a bit, will you?’ Sophie had said. And then she was gone, running, slamming the passenger door shut before they could reply.

  The small child hadn’t cried as her mother left. She had watched the car turn, spit gravel, and then disappear. Then Alice had reached for Jim’s hand, and said, quite calmly, ‘Hungry.’

  Over the next few years, they had Alice to stay many times, their despair for Sophie st
ill colouring each day. And then, just before Alice was due to start school – they had found a place for her in the village primary, assuming that Sophie would not have made the necessary arrangements in Hastings – she had reappeared just as suddenly to take her daughter home. ‘It’s over, Dad,’ Sophie had said. ‘Really over this time. I promise you.’

  And Sophie has, as far as Jim and Eva know, remained true to her word: she has found work as a teaching assistant at Alice’s school, is attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings four times a week. It was there that she met Pete. He is here now: a mild, unremarkable-looking man, not one you would ever pinpoint as an addict, but if there is anything Jim has learned, it is never to put too much trust in appearances. He has always felt the potential for addiction in himself: an inchoate longing to loosen his grip. Had things turned out differently, Jim thinks, he might easily have allowed that longing to overwhelm him.

  He is grateful to Pete, too, for the calming influence he appears to exert over Sophie’s life. And Alice adores him: she is struggling free from Jim’s grasp now, scrambling back up the beach, calling out his name. ‘Pete! Me and Grandpa went in the sea! It bit us …’

  Jim follows Alice at a more sedate pace, the pebbles hard and smooth under his deck shoes. He rejoins the group around the table – Penelope and Gerald, Anton and Thea, Toby; Eva, topping up everyone’s wine. Seeing him approach, Eva smiles, hands him a fresh glass. ‘Having a good time?’

  ‘The best.’

  He sits in an empty chair, next to Penelope. ‘Thanks so much for this, Pen. I couldn’t have asked for a better celebration.’

  Penelope – draped in a blue kaftan, a white silk scarf knotted at her throat – shakes her head. ‘It’s all Eva’s doing, I promise. All we did was sit back and let things happen.’