The Versions of Us (11 page)

‘It was bad for the first three months,’ she says aloud. ‘Not so bad any more. I’m due next month.’

‘How very exciting.’ As Eva turns awkwardly, carrying the heavy plate, the woman seems to remember her manners. ‘Won’t you let me do that for you? My name’s Rose, by the way.’

‘Thank you, Rose, that’s kind. I’m Eva.’

‘I know.’ Rose takes the plate as Harry lingers uncertainly by the door, unused to relinquishing the centre of attention. ‘I love your flat, by the way. It’s just gorgeous. So stylish.’

‘Thanks.’ Through the serving-hatch, Eva watches the guests milling and circling. A few of them are dancing, framed against the wide plate-glass windows, now black, but by day flooded with wintry light, offering up a landscape of leafless trees and frosted grass. The flat’s proximity to Regent’s Park was what had sold it to her. It had been David’s choice, really – which meant his mother’s. Eva would have preferred something more homely, less uncompromisingly modern; and she felt she had the right to make her own decision, not least because a portion of the money they were putting up for the flat was Eva’s own, courtesy of her godmother’s legacy. But Judith Katz was not easily disobeyed. She had simply walked into Eva and David’s room without knocking – it was mid-morning; David and Abraham were out, and Eva was trying to concentrate on a tricky debut play by a young writer from Manchester – and said, ‘Eva, you simply
will
tell me what on earth you have against that lovely flat. It’s just perfect. I can’t understand why you always have to pitch yourself against me.’

Eva – not quite three months pregnant, and still suffering from a nausea that, far from remaining confined to the mornings, seemed to last well into the afternoons – had opened her mouth to argue, and found that she simply didn’t have the strength. All right: they would take the flat. And it would be wonderful, Eva had to admit (though she did not give Judith the pleasure of doing so aloud), to be just a few yards from the park once the baby was born, and the blossom was back on the trees.

The baby. Though Eva has not spoken, the baby seems to hear her: she feels a sharp responsive kick, as if something at her very core is struggling for release.

‘Eva, why are you hiding out here? Come and mingle, won’t you?’ David is at the kitchen door; she turns to him, puts a finger to her lips, beckons him over. ‘What is it?’

She lifts his hand, places it on her stomach. He feels it then, taut and quivering beneath his hand, and his face creases into a smile. ‘God, Eva, sometimes I still can’t believe he’s really in there. Our son. Our little boy.’

He leans forward to kiss her. So unexpected is the gesture – David has barely kissed her for weeks, and certainly hasn’t attempted anything more intimate – that Eva resists pointing out that they have no idea whether it
is
a boy. In fact, with an inexplicable certainty that she has shared only with her mother and Penelope, she knows the baby to be a girl.

They had waited a good while before trying for a baby – ‘I’d like to get myself established first, Eva,’ David had said, ‘and you’re busy enough with your script-editing, aren’t you?’ Eva was busy – too busy, some weeks – and there was the fast-flowing slipstream of David’s work: the auditions, the read-throughs, the first-night parties. His was a world of people, of socialising, of collective endeavour, while hers was shrinking to fit inside four walls. She collected a fresh stack of play scripts from the Royal Court once a fortnight or so, delivered them again a few weeks later, and was otherwise rarely required to leave the house. Once, unable to stand another moment alone in the house with Judith, she had decided to drop in on David at rehearsals, unannounced; the director had barked at her to leave at once, and David had sulked for days afterwards. The world that had once seemed to her so glamorous, so mysterious – the magnificent conjuring trick of the theatre; the audience and actors co-operating in a glorious spotlit illusion – was already, through familiarity, losing its allure.

Meanwhile, her own writing was, as Eva had feared, coming to nothing: she had started a novel, but it had come undone halfway through. She showed what she had written to Penelope, who was kind – ‘There’s real potential here, Eva, but it’s not quite coming to life yet, is it?’ – and went over and over the pages, searching for the thread that might weave her words into a cohesive whole. But she couldn’t find it; in the back of her mind, a voice said,
You’ll never be a real writer, Eva. You’re just not good enough.

As the months went on, she began to reach less and less for her notebooks, and to think more and more about how much she would like a baby; this was one of the few subjects on which she and her mother-in-law concurred. ‘I can’t think why you’re waiting so long to get pregnant, Eva,’ Judith Katz had said one Shabbat dinner. ‘You’re rattling around the house with absolutely nothing to do.’

‘Hardly, Judith,’ Eva had replied tartly. ‘I am working, you know.’

‘Motherhood is a woman’s only real work,’ Judith had said – a familiar refrain, uttered with all the mustered hauteur of a Victorian dowager. Cousin Deborah had rolled her eyes at Eva, and Abraham had reached out and touched his wife’s arm.

‘Now, Judith – I’m sure David and Eva will work it all out in their own time. David does have his career to think of.’

When it did eventually happen – when a week of constant sickness was, to Eva’s joy, confirmed as a symptom of pregnancy – David was every bit as delighted as Eva. Within a few days, Eva had already secretly chosen a name – Sarah, after her godmother Sarah Joyce, whom she had loved, and whose last gesture had been so unexpectedly generous. This would be one point on which Eva would brook no argument from Judith Katz, or anyone else.

‘Come on, darling. You’re missing the party.’

David takes her hand, leads her back out to the living-room. Someone has changed the record, put on the album Eva bought specially for tonight: Ella Fitzgerald singing the old Christmas songs. (Never mind the fact that at least half the guests celebrate Hanukkah.) The first piano chords skitter across the room, syncopated, feather-light; Ella sings of snow and fields and open sleighs, and more people join the dancers at the window. Someone – Penelope – takes Eva’s other hand, and then she is half shuffling, half twisting around the floor, the baby kicking and spinning to a rhythm only she can feel.

At first, Eva doesn’t notice Juliet, across the room, standing a little apart. But when she staggers to a halt – dizzy, flushed, catching her breath, Sarah’s kicks coming faster now, like a second, juddering heartbeat – Eva becomes aware of Juliet’s gaze: not smiling, not frowning, but watching her unblinkingly, as if challenging her to be the first to look away.

The first thing Jim notices about her are her feet: her toes are long, sinuous, slightly simian; her ankles are starkly pale against her black leotard. He watches her body too, of course: the broad curve of her hips; her tapering waist; her breasts pressed tight against her chest. But it is her feet that hold his attention as she dances, tracing skittish patterns across the floor, her rhythm unsettled, unpredictable, obeying an inner metronome that only she can hear.

Other dancers cross the stage – a man with a pouched, lugubrious face; a thin woman with red hair, the cleft of each rib visible through her costume – but he sees only these two feet. In his slightly inebriated state – it was another wasted day: a morning in the apartment, failing to paint; an afternoon drinking bourbon in the bar on Charles and Washington – he thinks they might well be the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

Afterwards, the audience seems reluctant to leave. A small crowd gathers on the steps of the church, as if after a service, though the wind is blowing cold, sending the last of the fallen leaves tumbling across Washington Square. A girl in a blue mackintosh, her eyes carrying an unnatural, burnished sheen –
Stoned out of her tree
, Jim thinks – turns to him. In a small, high voice, she says, ‘Wasn’t that just the
best
thing you’ve ever seen? Don’t they just change your life?’

Jim hesitates. He enjoyed the performance, found something liberating, hypnotic, in the way the dancers moved and twisted around the floor. He was reminded of the Matisse paper cut-outs with which he had, at the Slade, become briefly obsessed: their kinetic lines, their giddy, infectious energy. But he doesn’t quite know how to explain this to a stranger. ‘It was great, yes.’

The stranger beams at him. ‘You’re British!’ This said triumphantly, as if he might have forgotten.

He smiles back, without warmth, and thrusts his hands deeper into his pockets – he has left his gloves in the apartment, overlooked the face-aching chill of the New York City winter. ‘I am indeed.’

The girl in the blue mackintosh – her name is Deana – is still talking when the dancers emerge: tall, shapeless figures, thickly wrapped in coats and mufflers. That dancer’s long, pale feet are now encased in leather boots, but he recognises her face; he can’t help smiling at her, though of course she doesn’t know him. She doesn’t smile back; why should she? The male dancer with the long face greets Deana with a kiss, throws an arm around her shoulders. Deana raises an eyebrow at Jim, as if in apology, but he barely notices. He is still looking at the woman in the leather boots.

They are all going on to a bar on Cornelia Street. Jim falls into step with them: it’s only ten o’clock, and Eva won’t be home from the theatre for a few hours yet – there’s a party afterwards at the Algonquin. At the thought of her standing with David Katz, his old rival – talking, laughing, sharing memories of old times – a tightness draws across Jim’s chest. Perhaps he should have gone to the play with her; he can see now that not going was a rather childish decision on his part. And yet when Eva said that Katz had been in touch, that Harry’s play had transferred to Broadway, Jim’s refusal to go had been instinctive: self-preservation, he supposes, or just plain old jealousy. It is five years now since Katz had any claim on Eva – five years in which she has become Jim’s
wife
, for goodness’ sake, has bought a house with him, become the bedrock of his life. But still there is a nasty, snarling chorus in the back of his head that he can’t quite ignore.
Katz is a star now – what have
you
done? Who are
you
? You’re just a kept husband, wafting around New York while your wife goes out to work. You’re not an artist. You haven’t sold a painting since you left the Slade. You can’t
give
your paintings away. You’re nothing.
It is only in the bar on Charles and Washington that he has been able to silence that chorus: there, he sits with a bourbon as morning slips into afternoon.

The bar on Cornelia is a basement dive, black walls and sticky floors; a small platform with a chair, where a man with a guitar may or may not appear. The Judson dancers occupy a booth. Jim is late joining them, returning from the gents’ – he can’t quite believe his luck when the only remaining seat is next to her. She is looking at him now.

‘Pamela,’ she says, as he slides onto the bench.

He will not remember much about the night: just the sooty semi-darkness of the room; the red wine that arrives in fat, raffia-covered bottles; the deep, rough-edged voice of the musician who at some point takes to the stage singing Woody Guthrie. Pamela he will recall mostly in still frames: a lock of black curls, pushed behind her ear; a glass lifted to her lips; the bright whiteness of her naked body, slatted with shadow. And her feet, of course: the cool length of them, pressing against his legs when she comes.

He will not remember leaving her apartment, or getting home, though he must have done somehow: the next day he wakes late, in their bed – his and Eva’s – the sound of the telephone cutting painfully across what may well be the worst hangover he has ever had. He stumbles across the bedroom to the landing, fumbles for the phone. It is Eva, ringing from work – she has a cubicle in the
New York Times
offices; files her new column, ‘An Englishwoman in New York’, to the
Courier
from there, along with reports on news, fashion, culture – to tell him that the president has been shot dead. A motorcade shuffling through a Dallas square. Three shots. Blood seeping across Mrs Kennedy’s neat pink suit.

Beneath the shock, there is a heady, shaming sense of relief: this is the story now. This is all anybody will be talking about for days, weeks, months. Eva will be busy filing to London: too busy to wonder where her husband was last night; why he came in sometime before dawn, showered, and then slid into bed beside her, his mind still jumbled with images of another woman. Later, there will be guilt, of course – but not yet. Not now.