The Versions of Us (19 page)

There is the sound of footfall on the stairs. The kitchen door swings open: here is Howard, bear-like in his woollen dressing-gown, his eyes still gummed with sleep. He is an extraordinary-looking man: six foot two in his bare feet, bald, his features huge, fleshy, and ill suited, as if woven together from three different faces. And yet there is something about him – charisma, Jim supposes, though the word seems inadequate to describe the raw, silent power that Howard commands, especially over women. Jim suspects that Howard and Helena were once lovers, though he has never asked, aware that he mightn’t like the answer. If they were, it would have been kept very quiet: Howard and Cath have been together for years. And anyway, it is not
that
kind of place – Howard had made that very clear when they first discussed his moving in.

‘This is not,’ he told Jim, his eyes burning holes in his face, ‘the sort of set-up you read about in the papers. We do not pool our money, and we do
not
–’ this said with the emphatic thump of a fist on the kitchen table ‘– pool our lovers. We are artists here. We work, we garden, we cook together. If that sounds like the way you’d like to live, then you are welcome to join us.’

‘Pour me a mug, would you?’ Howard says now, landing heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. Jim does as he asks. ‘Good man.’

‘There was a frost last night,’ Jim says. ‘The first.’

Howard sips his coffee, closes his eyes. ‘Yes. I covered the lettuces. Firewood’ll need drying out, though. You on wood today?’

‘I think so.’ There is a duties rota pinned to the cork-board by the door, written in Cath’s small, neat hand. ‘Helena’s cooking tonight. She said something about cassoulet.’

Howard nods slowly, his eyes still shut. With his bald head and cowl-like robe, he has the look of a monk at prayer. ‘And Stephen’s coming at twelve, I believe.’

‘So he said.’ Jim has spent the last week in preparation: finishing the last of the canvases, sorting through the others, though Stephen said he would make the final selection himself – and Jim wasn’t to worry about packing them; he would bring a man with him to do that. Privately, Jim fears that it can’t really be happening, that Stephen Hargreaves can’t possibly be arriving today to load a clutch of his paintings into a van, and drive off with them back to Bristol, back to his gallery. But he knows such fears for what they are: night-terrors, irrational. For the exhibition is all arranged, the posters printed, one of them pinned proudly by Helena onto the cork-board:
Jim Taylor – Paintings
,
1966–69
. The private view is in three days’ time – they will all be going up, all eight of them, Josie and Simon and Finn and Delia too, in Howard’s shuddering old van. Jim’s aunt Patsy and uncle John are coming, and even his mother, with Sinclair. Jim can’t quite bring himself to call Sinclair her ‘boyfriend’; he could not have been more surprised when Patsy gave him the news, by telephone, a few months after he left for Cornwall. ‘Your mother has met someone. I haven’t seen her this happy – this
calm
, Jim – since she met your father.’

‘Did you and Helena work things out?’ Howard sips his coffee. ‘About the picture, I mean.’

Jim’s mug is empty. He lifts the coffee jug, hoping to pour another, but it is empty, too. ‘Yes. At least, I think so. She says she’s all right about it now.’

It was their first proper argument, a painful, drawn-out one that began six months ago, when he started work on a new painting, the largest he had ever done. A portrait, painted from memory, though he asked Helena to sit for the hands and feet (perhaps there lay his error): a woman, curled on a window seat, reading, the light falling in pale shafts across her face. The woman was small, her hair dark and shining, a half-smile playing on her lips as she read: Eva, of course it was Eva; he knew it would be her before he began.

It hadn’t occurred to him that Helena would be jealous – she is an artist, too; surely she would understand that some ideas emerge fully formed, beyond conscious control. But she
was
jealous. For days Helena would barely speak to him, wouldn’t allow herself to be comforted – though what comfort, really, could he give her? He had been honest with her from the first; she knew how much he had loved Eva, and how deeply she had wounded him.

He should never, he supposed during that uncomfortable time, have started the painting – though it was the best portrait he had done; he knew it and Helena knew it. When they mounted their exhibition in St Ives, it had dominated the room, drawn most of the visitors to it as if by some imperceptible magnetic force. One man had stood in front of it for almost a quarter of an hour; this was Stephen Hargreaves, an old friend of Howard’s from the Royal College. His Clifton gallery was, as it turned out, just a few streets away from Vivian’s flat; Jim had walked past it many times. ‘There’s some very good work here, Jim,’ Stephen had said, shaking his hand. ‘We really must think about giving you a show.’

Of course the Eva portrait (as he called it privately; its official title was
Woman, Reading
) would be the centrepiece of Jim’s exhibition, but Helena hadn’t allowed herself to think about that; yesterday, as she helped him sort through his canvases, she had seen it again, propped against the studio wall, and grew suddenly upset. Later, in bed, when she was calmer, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Jim. I know I’m being ridiculous. But I can’t help feeling that she haunts us, somehow. I know you still think about her. I can tell.’

He denied it, of course, held her close, whispered soothing words into her ear. And yet he knew that she was right, and he was angry with himself, and with Eva above all.

Two hours he had stood there, outside the New York Public Library: one hundred and twenty minutes ticking by with extravagant slowness while the city traffic clotted and flowed, and disappointment settled on him like a weight. Walking back to his apartment, he’d promised himself that he would finally leave Eva, and everything that might have been, behind. He would, again, stand by the decision she had made.

He has remained true to his word – and yet now here she is, in the painting, soon to be wrapped and coddled and driven the two hundred miles to Bristol. He places his empty mug in the sink and looks over at Howard, who is leaning back against the wall, his eyes half closed. ‘Still coming to, Jim, my man. That dope was strong stuff.’

‘It was.’ Jim didn’t smoke much: he had left them to it and gone upstairs to Helena, who had not joined the party. ‘I’m going out.’

Howard nods. ‘Won’t be long myself. Turn the heater on, will you? It’ll be freezing.’

It is: the cold hits Jim as he crosses the yard, and he draws in its freshness, the morning smells of sea and damp earth. He will never tire of the view down to the sea: the cove’s gentle shelving of rock, the mosaic of pebbles, and the water, restless, changeable, this morning a dark, inky blue, the sky lightening at the horizon. He stands for a moment before opening the studio door, looking down at the beach, flooded with a disorientating happiness; and he savours it, drinks it in, because he is old enough now to know happiness for what it is: brief and fleeting, not a state to strive for, to seek to live in, but to catch when it comes, and to hold on to for as long as you can.

They are almost two hours late for Anton’s party.

First the babysitter – Anna, the rather petulant teenage daughter of a neighbour – arrived half an hour after they had asked her to come, without explanation. Then Jim, already several sheets to the wind (he poured them each a gin and tonic as they dressed, and downed another two while they waited for Anna) suddenly announced that he didn’t like what Eva was wearing.

‘You look like an oversized baby in a romper-suit,’ he said, while she, stung, looked down at the black jumpsuit that had seemed so elegant last week in the shop, paired with her new rope-soled wedge shoes. How could Jim not know how cruel he was being? He was smiling as he spoke; seemed surprised, affronted even, when she clattered back upstairs to change: ‘I was only joking, Eva – where’s your sense of humour?’ And yet as she changed – found the long dress she’d worn to the school leavers’ barbecue last weekend; he’d seen nothing to complain about in
that
– she found that she was crying a little.

‘Let it go,’ she told herself in the bathroom mirror as she swept a fresh layer of blusher over her cheeks, reapplied her kohl. And yet she couldn’t deny that she was wounded by this new sharpness in Jim; where once he couldn’t compliment her enough (how many times, in their early days, had he told her she was beautiful?), he was becoming barbed, critical; especially when he’d had a drink or two. And he couldn’t seem to see it: she’d tried to confront him a few weeks ago, asked why she seemed to irritate him so. He’d stared at her, eyes innocently wide (she’d chosen her moment poorly: they were just back from a drinks reception at the
Courier
, and neither of them was sober), and told her that he had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Surely I’m the one who irritates you,’ he’d said. ‘Your husband, the artist that never was. Not exactly something to boast about, is it?’

As she repaired her face in the bathroom, Jennifer had come waddling in on her sturdy little legs – ‘Mummy go party’ – with Anna following sulkily behind. So Eva bent to kiss her daughter, and then went back downstairs to tell Jim they had better get going, or there’d be no point in going at all.

‘You’ve changed.’ He sounded resentful. ‘I didn’t say you needed to change.’

She drew a deep breath. ‘Just let’s
go
.’

They took a taxi to Anton’s house: a narrow Georgian terrace on a leafy square in Kennington. He and his wife, Thea – an angular, strikingly blonde Norwegian barrister – bought the house as soon as they returned from their wedding in Oslo. Thea immediately set about knocking through walls, ripping up the tattered linoleum, planing away imperfections, so that every corner of the house was soon modern, luxurious and understated – rather, Eva thinks, like Thea herself.

Eva finds her sister-in-law in the garden, where coloured lights are hanging from the trees, and a trestle table is laid with the remains of a feast: platters of cold meats and cheese; herring in dill sauce; potato salad and Coronation chicken; a huge Sachertorte, baked by Miriam.

‘Have we missed the food?’ Eva says, kissing Thea lightly on each cheek. ‘I’m so sorry we’re late.’

Thea dismisses her apology with a manicured hand. ‘Please. Don’t worry. We’re only getting started.’

Anton is in the kitchen, dispensing rum punch from a metal tureen. ‘
Meine Schwester!
Have some punch. Your husband’s had a head-start.’ He nods in the direction of the hallway, where Jim is talking animatedly to Gerald – where, in that case, is Penelope?

Eva accepts a glass from Anton, leans in to kiss him. ‘Happy birthday.
Thirty?
How does it feel?’

He shrugs, ladles out another dose of punch, hands it to a passing guest. She watches his face – his dark eyes, much like her own in colour and shape, framed by thick, heavy brows (Jakob’s), his wiry, untameable crop of hair – and sees her brother as a boy, two years younger and always wanting what
she
had, to be just like her. Once, aged three, Anton had borrowed Eva’s favourite doll and carried it around for the rest of the day, insisting she was
his
, until Miriam intervened. He laughs when reminded about this now.

‘I’m not sure yet, sis. Much the same. How does it look from the other side?’

Eva is prevented from replying by a sudden influx of new guests: Anton’s friends from work, men with loud voices and flushed, beery faces. The professional world Anton inhabits – a world of regattas, mooring rights, the gleaming hulls of newly launched yachts – is as unfamiliar to Eva as hers must be to him. Smiling politely at the men, mouthing, ‘Hello,’ she moves away, Anton’s question still loud in her ears.
How does it look from the other side?

She is thirty-two; married to the man she loves; mother to his child; writing for a living. She is halfway through a novel, and she hopes – believes – that it is good. She is asked, with increasing regularity, to appear on television talk shows, discussing anything from nuclear disarmament to the rights of working mothers. As her appearances on screen have become more regular, Eva has grown accustomed to being noticed, to having the eyes of strangers trail after her, visibly puzzled as to where they might have seen her before. The first time it happened – she was wheeling Jennifer to the park on her tricycle – she found it disconcerting, and still professes to find it so; but in a deep, private part of her, Eva is aware that she finds it rather gratifying.

But what, then, of the most vital thing, the foundation on which all else rests – her marriage? The facts are becoming starker: Jim is unhappy, she fears desperately so, and she is unable to reach him. She has tried – of course she has – but he bats away every attempt. Last Sunday, for instance, when she left him at work in the studio and took Jennifer to lunch at Penelope’s, she had returned to find him slumped in his chair, an empty whisky bottle upended at his feet.