The Versions of Us

by Laura Barnett

  After the service, the mourners linger in the courtyard, walk slowly among the floral tributes. Jim reads the card attached to a bouquet of white roses. To a dear colleague and friend. You are much missed. Carl Friedlander.

  ‘Jim Taylor.’

  He looks up. She is damp-eyed, trying to smile.

  ‘Eva. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She moves closer, places a hand on his arm. She smells of face-powder and some sweet perfume. Why has he so often dreamed of her, this woman he barely knows, sketched out her image with his pencil, mixed in oil paint the precise colour of her skin, her hair, her eyes? He has never quite been able to answer this. Now he sees that the fact of her presence is the only answer.

  ‘It was good of you to come.’ He is intensely aware of the light pressure of her hand on his sleeve. ‘I’ve followed your career over the years. You’ve achieved so much.’

  ‘Have I?’ Jim can’t help himself – defensiveness is the weapon he reaches for most often these days. But she looks wrong-footed, and so he pedals back. ‘Thank you. It’s kind of you to say. And you … Well. I’ve read all your books.’

  ‘Really?’ That half-smile plays again on her lips. ‘You must be something of a glutton for punishment.’

  He would like to reply, but Eva is looking over his shoulder.

  ‘David,’ she says to the man behind him: David Katz, Jim sees as he turns. An old man now, with a head of white hair, an expensive-looking black coat.

  Eva is moving away from Jim. ‘You’ll come back to the house, won’t you? Twenty-five Lupus Street. Do come.’

  He was not planning to attend the wake, but he does, standing a little self-consciously with Toby, collecting a glass of red wine from a waiter’s tray. It is a handsome house: Georgian, pillared, its interiors a muted seascape of white, grey and blue. Jim thinks, with a sudden deep yearning that surprises him, of the House: his beloved Cornish home of concrete and glass, with the wide picture window framing rock, sea, sky.

  The house, of course, will go to Dylan, along with everything else: Jim has already informed his solicitor, asked him to check over his will. He is having dinner with Stephen tonight. He will tell his old friend then, begin to make the arrangements for his legacy (a word that lends his life’s work more import than Jim suspects it truly deserves). Then, tomorrow, he will make the journey north, to Dylan, Maya and Jessica. The thought of Dylan’s face as he tells him the news tugs a blankness across Jim’s vision, like falling snow.

  An hour or so later – it is mid-afternoon, and night is already drawing in – Eva makes her way over to him. She has removed her coat: her black wool dress is neat, well cut. Jim has been watching her as she moved among the guests, thanking them for coming, her tone light, solicitous; were it not for the tightness around her eyes, she might have been any hostess running an ordinary party. He feels a rush of admiration for her – for the sacrifices she has made, for the years she must have lost in looking after Ted. But perhaps Eva didn’t see it that way; perhaps she is one of those to whom selflessness comes easily. He knows himself well enough to admit that it has never come easily to him.

  ‘Sorry I’ve not had more time to talk,’ she says. They are alone, by the garden window: beyond the darkening patio are the dimming outlines of trees. ‘Odd how funerals require you to be sociable, when of course it’s the last thing you want to be.’

  He looks down at his feet, thinking perhaps that she means him: that the presence of someone like him – a mere acquaintance – is exactly the burden he had feared it would be.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean you,’ she adds quickly, as if he had spoken aloud. ‘I’m delighted you’re here. I’ve always …’ Eva hesitates, and he watches the set of her chin. Below, in the soft dip of her collarbone, is a silver heart. ‘Felt I knew you better than I really did, I suppose. It’s a funny thing. I did get your postcard, you know. I kept it for years. The Hepworth.’

  ‘Oval No. 2.’ How Jim had cursed himself after writing it: waited weeks for a reply, though he knew perfectly well that he had composed it precisely so as not to invite a response.

  ‘That was it. Oval No. 2. I kept looking at it, trying to work out if it contained some kind of coded message.’

  It had. Leave him. Come back to England. Love me. He had hidden it too well.

  ‘None other than to wish you well.’ He meets her gaze, hoping she will understand his true meaning.

  ‘Yes. That’s what I decided, in the end.’ A short, charged silence. Then, ‘I actually wrote you a card too.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes, when I heard about your mother’s death. But I didn’t post it. I decided there was nothing I could say that someone else wouldn’t already have said.’

  He can’t help smiling a little. ‘Do you know – I did exactly the same thing.’

  Looking at him. Her eyes night-dark, inquisitive. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I wrote to you again, after your husband died. Ted. I’d read your book, and I’d heard you on the radio. I felt like I knew a great deal about you both – but after I wrote the letter, I realised I didn’t, really. So I tore it up.’

  ‘Gosh.’ A woman Jim doesn’t recognise is at Eva’s elbow: tall, with a kindly, large-boned face. Eva turns to her. ‘Daphne. Thank you so much for coming.’ The woman embraces her, then moves away. Eva’s attention is his once more, and Jim is struck, with a violence he had not expected, by how profoundly he desires that attention.

  ‘Opportunities lost, I suppose,’ she says.

  ‘Yes. Opportunities lost.’

  Eva looks away, towards the garden. He senses the slow calibration of a decision.

  ‘This isn’t the time or the place to talk,’ she says. ‘Talk properly, I mean. But could we do that, perhaps? Meet another time?’ Then, a little anxiously, ‘Only if you’d like to, of course. I know you still live in Cornwall. And I’m in Italy a great deal. But I’ll be in London for the next few months. Perhaps, if you’re ever in town …’

  It is Jim’s turn to look away. He has an odd vision of the passage of both their lives as two separate tracks, now suddenly, unexpectedly, veering closer. He ought to say no. It is only coffee she is proposing – or tea, somewhere safe, unthreatening: the Wallace Collection, perhaps, or the Royal Academy café. And yet surely it is also more than that. He knows it. He knew it when they met at the Algonquin; he knew it at Anton’s party, and when she stood beside him on the steps of Stephen’s gallery. Then, like now, she had lingered on the brink of a decision, and had not found in his favour. Now, perhaps, she has.

  He should not say yes. Eva has lost Ted: she should not have to face losing anyone again. And yet he cannot refuse her. He is simply not strong enough. Or perhaps he is simply too selfish: later, he will be unable to decide which it is. But then there will be excitement, too – the prospect of their next meeting planing the edges from his fear as he travels north to Dylan, to the conversation he has rehearsed so many times, but for whose impact he cannot truly prepare.

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ he says.

  VERSION THREE

  Kaddish

  London, January 2012

  ‘All right?’ she says.

  He turns to look at her. She senses a stiffening in him, a drawing-in of breath. ‘Yes. All right.’

  She moves closer, takes his hand. Before them, the flowers: white chrysanthemums, bright orange marigolds, a cascade of lilies and irises. ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’

  Jim says nothing. Across the courtyard, the other mourners are beginning to disperse, making their way towards their parked cars.

  ‘We can go home now,’ Eva says. ‘We don’t have to go on to the house.’

  ‘No.’ His grip on her hand tightens. ‘No, we must go. Today is about Anton. And Thea and Hanna. We mustn’t make it about me.’

  In the family car, Eva sits on the back seat, beside Hanna, as she had on the journey to the crematorium. Jim is in front, beside the driver, the rigid set of his bac
k admitting nothing. He has been this way for a week – silent, remote; since the day they sat in the doctor’s office in the hospital.

  Eva had known from the moment the doctor requested – no, demanded – a biopsy that the results would not be good. But she had still found it difficult to absorb her words; had found herself imagining that she was listening not from a hard plastic chair, placed at right angles to the doctor’s desk, but from a great distance. Please, she had said silently, without knowing to whom she was speaking. Her mother, perhaps, or Jakob, with his kind, wise face. I have just lost my brother. Don’t let me lose my husband, too.

  The doctor’s voice had receded to a faint echo. But Jim had been listening attentively, leaning forward, making careful notes on the pad Eva had suggested he bring with him. Afterwards, she went over those notes, filling in the gaps in her own understanding. With chemotherapy, he had written, 12–18 months. Without, 6–8 months. He had underlined 6–8 three times.

  They have decided not to tell the family until after Anton’s funeral. ‘We can’t possibly put anything more on them all now,’ Jim had said. ‘And I need some time to take it in.’ Eva agreed: she couldn’t, in any case, imagine the words with which to frame such information. And so, for now, it is between the two of them, and the kindly Macmillan nurse who drove out to the house from Brighton two days ago, who sat on their sofa, drank their tea, showed them a leaflet printed in cheerful primary colours. ‘The chemo,’ the nurse said, ‘will give you some time, Mr Taylor. It’s worth having, isn’t it?’

  Eva had waited for Jim to agree that it was, but he did not reply.

  He has not cried yet; has remained dry-eyed, even, through Anton’s service, which went exactly as she and Thea had planned it. Ian Liebnitz said Kaddish. The celebrant spoke the eulogy Eva had helped Thea to write. Hanna – brave Hanna – read the Dylan Thomas poem. Jakob’s recording of the Kreutzer Sonata filled the room as the velvet curtains glided shut. Eva did cry then; her shoulders shook, her breath came in short gasps. Thea placed an arm around Eva’s back, and she felt ashamed: she should, she thought, have been comforting her sister-in-law, for already she was understanding what it must be like to lose a husband. With great effort, Eva forced herself to think of Anton as he would no doubt prefer her to remember him – happy, comfortable, smiling – and of Jim as he is now, sitting beside her, rather than as he might soon be.

  Thea has employed caterers for the wake. They have laid out platters of food in the dining-room – roast chicken and potato salad, Norwegian meatballs, a baked salmon. Waiters are moving soundlessly from room to room, offering glasses of wine on silver trays.

  Returning from the downstairs bathroom, Eva stands alone for a moment in the living-room doorway, taking stock. In one corner, Penelope and Gerald are talking to David and Jacquetta, tall and striking in a long black velvet coat. Rebecca and Garth are standing with Ian and Angela Liebnitz, Jim’s cousin Toby, and Anton’s business partner, Carl Friedlander. Sophie and Pete are by the French windows. Beyond, in the failing light of the afternoon – the day has been cold, damp, unremittingly grey – Alice is playing in the garden with Alona and Miriam; Hanna is upstairs with Thea, taking a moment’s rest. Behind her, Sam and Kate are coming through from the kitchen. She doesn’t know where Jim has gone.

  ‘Mum.’ Sam places a hand on her arm. ‘You OK?’

  She turns, offers him a small smile. ‘Yes, darling. As OK as I can be. How about you?’

  ‘Holding up. Come and have something to eat.’

  Eva fills a plate she knows she will not be able to finish. She has eaten little since New Year’s Eve, when the call came from Thea. They’d been at a party when Anton had the heart attack; Eva, Jim, Hanna and Jeremy had spent the rest of the night in A&E. Eva has eaten even less in the four days since Jim’s own appointment at the hospital.

  ‘Granny Eva.’ This is Alice, her face serious, as if she has news to deliver of some import. ‘Grandpa wants you to come and talk to him outside.’

  Eva looks up: there, on the patio, is Jim, his back turned, a faint smoke-trail rising above his head.

  ‘Thank you, Alice darling. Here, will you take this plate through to the kitchen for me?’

  The cold is a shock after the clotted warmth of indoors. She should have put on her coat; she draws her cardigan tighter as she approaches. ‘There you are.’

  He nods. His cigarette is almost finished. (He had given up; started again during their long, wakeful night in the hospital.) He stubs it out with his toe. ‘I’m going to have the chemo,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice steady, not betraying her relief.

  He turns his blue eyes to her. ‘It seemed pointless. Eighteen months rather than eight: what’s the difference?’

  She moves over to him, stands close, their arms not quite touching. There is a stirring in the bushes at the far end of the garden: Anton and Thea’s ancient cat, Mephistopheles, out on the chase. ‘A big difference,’ she says.

  ‘Yes. I know that now.’ Jim places an arm around her, draws her in. ‘We’ll tell them together, shall we? Not this week. Next Sunday, perhaps. We could make a sort of party of it. Well, not a party, exactly. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, darling, I do.’

  In the silence, they hear the kitchen door opening: a young man and woman Eva doesn’t know – Hanna’s colleagues from the hospital, she supposes – are coming out, clutching cigarette packets, their voices loud, bright, confident.

  Seeing the elderly couple standing together on the patio, their arms around each other, the young woman hesitates. ‘Oh. Sorry to disturb you.’

  Eva shakes her head. ‘You’re not disturbing us.’

  The young couple moves off deeper into the garden, where Mephistopheles is now sniffing the air, his tail curled neatly round his front paws.

  ‘You,’ Jim says in a low whisper, his breath warm on Eva’s ear, ‘have made me happier than I ever thought was possible.’

  ‘You incorrigible old romantic,’ she says lightly, because the alternative is to break down, lose herself. Then, quietly, after a moment, ‘What would my life have been without you?’

  He does not answer, because there is no answer to give: none but to stand together, each feeling the other’s warmth; looking out to where the shadows are gathering, and the night is coming on.

  2014

  This is how it ends.

  A woman stands in the upstairs bedroom of a house in Hackney, sorting clothes into black plastic sacks. She can hear her daughter moving around downstairs; every so often, Jennifer’s voice floats up through the empty rooms. ‘Mum, I’m not sure what to do with this. Come and tell me what you think.’ Or, ‘Shall we break for a cup of tea?’

  This is not Eva’s house, and yet she moves around it with easy familiarity; knows where to find the teaspoons, the mugs. She and Jennifer bought the milk that morning, together with a small packet of digestive biscuits. Clearing the house might, perhaps, have fallen to Bella, or to Robyn, but they live far away now, in New York. And anyway, Eva would not have allowed anyone else to do the job.

  Shirts, suits, jeans: all go into the plastic sacks. Lone socks, a moth-eaten brown jumper, a pair of paint-spattered overalls. Holding these, Eva pauses. Here is the house on Gipsy Hill: pink stucco, bare floorboards, the filthy glass roof of the dilapidated artist’s studio. Here is Jim, brush in hand, turning as Eva, home from the office, steps into a freshly painted living-room. ‘What do you think, Eva? Do you like it?’ Here are his arms around her, flecks of white paint in his hair. Here is her answer, as she leans in to offer him a kiss. ‘I like it, Jim. I like it a lot.’

  Eva folds the overalls slowly, carefully, running her hand over the deep creases in the navy twill, and then sets them aside. She has so few objects with which to remember Jim: a few pieces of furniture (the antique armchair he bought for her fortieth birthday, reupholstered in dove-grey velvet; the scrubbed pine kitchen table they found in Greenwich market). A box of family photographs.
His ancient copy of Brave New World, the pages yellowing, some of them splitting from the spine.

  Jim had given her the book the last time Eva was here with him, in his house. It was July, and warm: they sat outside in the garden – blowsy now with weeds; later, Eva would call Daniel, ask him to spend an afternoon tackling the mess – eating the lunch Eva had prepared. Cold chicken, tomatoes, a pasta salad. Jim ate little that day: he was already weak, his clothes hung loosely, and as she helped him outside, settled him gently in a garden chair, he kept his eyes tightly closed, as if afraid to look at her, and see her pity.

  They ate; they talked. She made coffee, and then Jim asked her to go back inside, bring out the book she’d find on the table beside his armchair. ‘You might recognise it,’ he had called through the French windows, and she did: a Penguin paperback, bordered by two thick red stripes. Brave New World: A Novel.

  She had carried it out to the garden.

  ‘I found it when I was clearing out some things,’ he said. ‘You know, preparing.’

  He didn’t need to say what for. She had watched his dear, familiar face, and felt so filled with love for him that it was, for a moment, impossible for her to speak. Then, gathering herself, she said, ‘I was so impressed that you were reading Huxley.’

  ‘Were you?’ He had smiled, and Eva shifted her gaze to the book in her lap; smiling, Jim was so much his younger self – the boy she fell in love with; the husband with whom she had built a life. Not a perfect life, but a life that was theirs, and theirs alone, for as long as it could last. ‘I must have thought that carrying it around with me made me look deep. A way to show the world there was more to me than a degree in law.’