The Versions of Us (16 page)

For Miriam’s birthday, Eva treats her to a weekend in Suffolk.

Penelope and Gerald have recently spent their anniversary in Southwold, in a smart seafront hotel. They returned with the telephone number of a local woman who had an old fishermen’s cottage to let right on the coast – ‘The loveliest little place you ever saw, Eva, really – Rebecca would love it.’ It is a long time, Eva realises, since she and Rebecca have had a holiday – even longer for her mother. With Jakob so often away on tour, her parents seldom travel; they prefer to spend their rare weekends together pottering, gardening, nodding silently in twin armchairs to their beloved stack of opera LPs.

This birthday, it will be just the three of them – Eva, Miriam and Rebecca. Jakob is in Hamburg with the orchestra. Anton is on a work trip to Glasgow. (He has, much to the bemusement of his family, settled on shipbroking for a career.) And David – well, David is also away, of course, filming: when, these days, is David not away?

They drive up on Friday, after school, in Eva’s new Citroën (a present from David, bought with his pay-cheque from the last film; much as she is grateful for the car, she can’t help thinking of it as the symptom of an uneasy conscience). Rebecca is breathless, excited – she insists that Oma sit with her on the back seat, look at the drawing she did that afternoon. The teacher, Rebecca explains at length, asked each child to imagine their perfect weekend. She has drawn herself, her mother and her grandmother as stick figures on a beach, against a strip of sky; each wave a pencilled curlicue, the sun an orange ball, rays fanning out like wheel-spokes.

‘You see, Oma, this is what I’ll
actually
be doing this weekend. Miss Ellis said I was a very lucky girl.’

Miriam, laughing, says she does see. She asks after a fourth figure: taller, placed some distance away from the others. ‘That’s Daddy, silly,’ the child replies scornfully. ‘In my imagination, he will be there too.’

‘Don’t call Oma “silly”, Rebecca.’ Eva speaks firmly from the driving-seat. ‘That’s not nice.’ Rebecca bites her bottom lip, a gesture that always threatens tears. In the rear-view mirror, Eva catches her mother’s eye.

‘I know a song about going on an adventure,’ says Miriam. ‘Do you want to hear it?’

It is dark when they arrive at the cottage. Eva edges the Citroën down the narrow path between the terraces and into the cottage’s tiny courtyard, which is barely wider than the car.

‘I don’t fancy doing that again,’ Eva says when she has brought the car to a shuddering halt.

Miriam nods. ‘We shan’t need to drive much. Now, shall we wake Rebecca, or carry her in?’

Eva looks over at her daughter, curled on the seat, her face perfectly composed. She is small for a seven-year-old – she takes after Eva and Miriam in that respect, though her features are more like David’s: she has his persuasive black eyes and wide, expressive lips. It seems a shame to wake her.

‘I’ll carry her. Can you manage the bags?’

The cottage is flat-fronted, boxy, with a scrubby front garden stretching down to the seawall. Inside, it is freezing, the cold undercut by the strong, vegetable smell of damp. For a moment, standing exhausted in the doorway with Rebecca in her arms – she had two manuscripts to finish for Penguin before lunchtime, and their bags to pack – the prospect of making it habitable seems too much for Eva to bear. Thank heaven, then, for Miriam, striding in with the bags, issuing instructions. ‘Make up a bed for Rebecca,
Schatzi
. Open all the windows for ten minutes – just keep your coat on – and then I’ll light a fire. We’ll have the place
gemütlich
in no time.’

Quickly, deftly, Miriam sweeps out the grate and lines it with crushed newspaper and kindling, while the open windows flood the rooms with the fresh chill of the sea. Upstairs, in the small back bedroom – she has insisted Miriam take the larger room at the front – Eva smoothes sheets and blankets across the double mattress, and lays her sleeping daughter down.

Then she sits awhile with her mother before the fire, sharing a bottle of Riesling. The smell of damp has been overlaid by the deep, peaty scent of firewood, and the room is dark but for the fire’s orange flare and the greenish light of the table lamp. They talk of family matters – Jakob’s last concert; Anton’s latest girlfriend, a brittle blonde secretary named Susan whom both Eva and Miriam are struggling to like; Miriam’s health – she has suffered for years, uncomplainingly, with the drawn-out after-effects of a chest infection caught in her thirties, during a lengthy recital tour.

They do not talk of David, though he is there, lurking at the fringes of their conversation. Eva last saw him the night before he left for the shoot. It was late – Rebecca had been asleep for hours – and David was just back from some party to which Eva had not been invited. She had sat on the corner of their bed, smoking, watching him pack.

David had loved her once – he had told her so, that night in the Eagle pub. (How long ago it seemed now; how spent and deflated all that panic, that urgent making of plans.) He had never hesitated, never taken advantage of the balance of power now tipped decisively in his favour, in which he might – many men had done it before him – have refused to acknowledge her, or their child.

And Eva had believed, then, that she could love him too: this beautiful, clever, charming man, with his absolute belief in his own talent. She has come to love David, in her way, as he has her; and yet Eva feels now – she has considered the matter in her mind, examined it from every angle as if it were an object under glass – that he has never truly allowed her to know him, to slip beneath the various masks he presents to the world.

That night six weeks ago, as David moved silently around their room, she’d found herself wondering whether it was all simply a role he was playing: a part he’d once liked the look of – dutiful husband and father – and of which he’d grown tired. Or perhaps, more likely, the fault was hers; how could she be a proper wife to him, form a proper family, when he knew – he must know – that she had left her heart with another? And yet she had tried – oh, how she had tried; and she couldn’t forgive David easily for simply stepping away, absenting himself with the easy excuse of work. And of course it wasn’t only for work that he was absenting himself; of that she was fully aware.

The next morning, Miriam’s birthday, Eva wakes to wintry sun, the smell of woodsmoke, voices carrying faintly from downstairs. There is a space in the bed where Rebecca should be. Eva brushes her hair, pulls on clothes. She finds her mother and daughter in the kitchen preparing breakfast, a fresh fire already burning in the grate.

‘Happy birthday, Mama. What time is it? I should be making breakfast for you.’

Miriam, at the stove, waves a hand. ‘Don’t worry, darling, I don’t need waiting on. It’s ten o’clock. I thought you could use some sleep. Anyway, Rebecca and I have been having a fine old time.’

Rebecca tugs at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Come and sit here, Mummy. I set a place for you.’

They breakfast on fried eggs and milky instant coffee, thoughtfully left for them in the larder. From her suitcase, Eva produces her mother’s gifts. A silk Liberty scarf from herself and David. A pair of woollen gloves from Rebecca, bought with the carefully hoarded contents of her piggy-bank. A bottle of Fleurs de Rocaille perfume from Jakob. The 1964 Joan Sutherland recording of Bellini’s
Norma
from Anton, acting on his father’s advice.

‘What riches,’ Miriam says, and she fastens the scarf around her neck, sprays the perfume and slips on the gloves, so that Rebecca cries out, outraged at such a breach of protocol, ‘Oma, you
can’t
wear your gloves indoors!’

Later, they walk down to the beach. The tide is out, the sea a distant glimmer; the coarse sand is wet, littered with the discarded cases of sandworms. Rebecca runs ahead, towards the waterline, her arms flung wide. Eva calls her back, afraid of quicksand or other unknown dangers, but Miriam places a restraining hand on her arm. ‘Don’t worry so much,
Schatzi
. Let her play.’

Eva takes her mother’s hand, links her arm through hers. An image slips into her mind: her mother and Jakob, walking arm in arm along another eastern seafront, another beach. The tale of their arrival in England – and Eva’s own arrival a few months later – is as worn and familiar to her as an old photograph carried in a wallet. Docking in Dover; boarding a train for Margate, the address of Jakob’s cousin’s boarding-house written on a slip of paper. The cousin had found jobs for them both – Miriam cleaning, Jakob washing dishes. Two young musicians with a new baby, tidying up after an assortment of oddballs in a dilapidated dosshouse at the very edge of the world.

And yet they had been happy, Miriam always said; even later, in the camp on the Isle of Man, where they had organised evening concerts, and Miriam had taught rudimentary English to those who spoke only German, Polish, Hungarian, Czech. Then, they had still believed, despite the gathering weight of reports from across the Channel, that their families would eventually be able to join them in England: Miriam’s brother, Anton, and their elderly mother, Josefa, whose poor health had prevented them from leaving with Miriam; Jakob’s parents, Anna and Franz; his sisters, Fanny and Marianne; and all their cousins, uncles, aunts.

There was pain later, of course, a pain that never left them, only softened its edges with time. But Eva has always envied her mother’s ability to be happy: a facility for making do, for making better, that must surely spring from having had to leave everything behind.

‘Does this remind you of Margate?’ Eva says aloud. ‘Of how England looked when you first saw it?’

‘A little.’ Miriam is quiet for a moment. ‘The sky, perhaps – how huge it is, how pale, like a watercolour. A Turner. Your father would like it here.’

‘He would,’ Eva says, knowing she means Jakob, not that other father, his face shadowy, unknown. Just the idea of a father, really.

They walk on in silence, their shoes slapping faintly against the sand. Eva thinks of David, wherever he may be: in Spain, somewhere south of Madrid. He is due home in a fortnight. It is a long, complex shoot – a version of
Don Quixote
, directed by David Lean, with Oliver Reed in the title role. David has telephoned twice, spent most of each short conversation talking to Rebecca; told Eva only that Lean is working them hard, but he is enjoying himself – he and Reed stayed up till dawn the previous night, drinking rough local liquor. David did not mention Juliet Franks, though her name loomed large between them: she has a small part in the film, and was due to arrive halfway through the shoot. They both know who put her forward for the part, and why.

Seven years into her marriage, an uncomfortable awareness has settled over Eva: that it should never have happened. At this distance, she can hardly account for her own fervent belief, shared by David, Abraham and Judith (how clearly she recalled her mother-in-law’s air of martyred resignation), that her pregnancy meant they should marry at once. Her own parents certainly never pressured her. (‘Just be sure,
Schatzi
,’ Miriam had said. ‘Please just be absolutely sure.’) How could they, when Jakob had married Miriam knowing that he would be the father to another man’s child: believing that, as he loved her, it was the right, indeed the only, thing to do? Eva had known that Jim would make the same decision, if she had only given him the chance. She had believed that not allowing him that chance – not permitting his grand plans to buckle, lose their shape, under the weight of fatherhood – was an act of love. And yet, in New York, she had seen Jim’s face, and known at once that their parting had hurt him much more deeply than she had ever imagined.

At the thought of Jim, Eva feels a vertiginous sickness, as if she is standing at the very edge of a cliff. That nausea is there at night, too, sometimes, when she wakes in the early hours. (Last night, in the cottage, she slept better than she has in months.) To run after him at the Algonquin, hand him that note, and then not to go – the cruelty of it appals her; she would never have thought herself capable of such a thing. And yet she was. That New York morning had dawned bright and uncompromising, and Eva’s fear had been such that she could not go. She could not conceive of a version of that day in which she would leave Rebecca with her great-grandparents and stroll off in the autumn sunshine to the public library, and into – who knew what? An affair: a new beginning. The taking apart of everything in favour of an uncertain future.

That fear still shames her – though she wonders, too, whether Jim even went to the library. She has not heard from him. He does not have their London address, but it would be easy enough to find: he need only ask Harry, or even his cousin Toby, still part of her brother’s extended circle of friends. So perhaps – and Eva isn’t sure whether the thought makes her feel less wretched or more so – Jim didn’t go. Perhaps her very presumption disgusted him. Perhaps he tore her note into small pieces, and threw them away.

‘You are unhappy,
Schatzi
,’ Miriam says suddenly, as if Eva had spoken aloud. ‘You are unhappy in your marriage.’

Eva opens her mouth to protest. She has never discussed her true feelings about David with her mother – but of course Miriam must have some knowledge of them; she is too intuitive to be deceived. She and Jakob have always said they liked David – that they find him dynamic, charming. But Eva is aware that they are becoming increasingly frustrated with the long absences that are, in effect, leaving Eva to bring Rebecca up on her own, with all the difficulties and frustrations that this entails – the constant parrying of Rebecca’s questions about David’s return; the soothing of Rebecca’s tears, late in the night, when she comes running into her parents’ bedroom, looking for her father, and finds her mother alone.

She works so hard to protect her daughter: tells Rebecca how much David works; how greatly he is in demand. Each postcard from him is pored over; each long-distance phone call a cause for celebration. And in the meantime, she, Eva, is just the workaday parent, the constant presence – loved, yes, but so familiar as to hold little interest; certainly not the glamorous, remote figure swanning back into Rebecca’s life with gifts and kisses, whenever he so desires. And as for Eva’s own career – her writing, so much more important to her than her hack-work for Penguin – there is simply no time. She might, of course, give up her job – David is making good money now – but she refuses, on principle, to be entirely dependent on handouts from her husband, just as her mother has never been on Jakob, however much she has relied on him in other ways.