The Versions of Us (36 page)

But the lead paramedic shook his head. ‘
Signore
, we must take you in now, even if we have to strap you to this stretcher.’

In the ambulance, and since – waiting here on this hard chair, while the doctors run their endless tests – Eva has tried not to allow the fears circling in her mind to gain purchase. As soon as he could move again, Ted was dismissive, even angry: she shouldn’t have called an ambulance; he had a piece to file by two o’clock. But Eva, in her turn, was firm. She had telephoned Chris Powers herself; insisted that, at the very least, Ted must allow the doctors to establish what had happened.

No one said the word ‘stroke’ aloud, but she could hear its echo in the air. It was there, too, in the paramedics’ exchange of glances as Ted described the sensations that had overcome him; and in the face of the kindly, handsome doctor who had ushered Ted through those implacable double doors – ‘
Prego
,
signore
’ – and urged Eva to wait outside. She had wanted to go in with him, of course, but apparently that was not how things worked. ‘Better the family waits here,’ the doctor had said, letting the doors swing shut behind him.

Now, in the waiting-room, the matronly
signora
sitting opposite Eva leans forward, offers her a foil-wrapped parcel. ‘
Mangia
,’ she commands, as if Eva were another of her children. There are two here with her: a girl, about six years old, her hair tugged into tight plaits; the boy a little older, fidgeting on his chair. A third, Eva assumes, must be beyond the closed doors to the ward.

Eva opens her mouth to refuse, but she doesn’t wish to offend; and besides, it’s hours since breakfast, and she has had no lunch. ‘
Grazie mille
,’ she says.

The
panino
is delicious: salami and mortadella. The
signora
watches her as she eats. ‘
Grazie
,’ Eva says again. ‘
È molto buono
.’ The
signora
, taking this as an invitation, issues a detailed set of instructions as to where to acquire the best produce: the Trastevere Market, apparently, does not pass muster. Eva is considering how to politely disagree when she sees Ted emerging from the double doors.

‘Darling.’ He looks tired but calm: if there had been bad news, surely the doctor would have called her through? ‘What did they say? Aren’t they keeping you in?’

He shakes his head. ‘They don’t know much yet. They want me to see a neurologist.’ Noting her expression, he adds, ‘They don’t think it was a stroke, Eva. So that’s something.’

‘Yes. That’s something.’ She takes his hand. ‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Shattered.’ He offers a thin smile. ‘Home, please.’

They take a taxi, unable to face the long flight of steps. At home, Ted settles heavily on the living-room sofa, Umberto curling into a tight circle on his lap. Eva puts on a cassette – Mozart, to lighten the mood – and sets a saucepan to boil for pasta. She thinks about calling Sarah in Paris, and decides against it – it is almost nine o’clock; she’ll be busy getting ready for the gig, and Eva doesn’t want to worry her. And she
would
worry. Even now, she turns to Ted with her problems as often as she does to Eva, and there are many: Sarah’s life in Paris is chaotic, her band’s career as fraught and stuttering as her relationship with its guitarist, Julien.

Ted has been there for Sarah, solid and reassuring, all these years – and for Eva, too, of course.
I can’t believe it took me so long to find you
, he had said to her one night years ago, when it was all just beginning.
I’m afraid that if I make one false move, you’ll disappear.

Now, taking the packet of fettuccine down from the cupboard, Eva tries again to dispel the image that has been spooling through her mind since she called Ted’s name, and heard only silence in response. An open road ribboning endlessly across flat desert lands: the blank, featureless landscape of life without him.

‘Well? How was it?’

Sophie, settling on the back seat, waits a few seconds before replying. ‘Fine.’

Jim catches Eva’s eye. ‘And your mother?’

Another brief silence. Then, ‘Yeah. She’s fine.’

He sets the car into reverse, edges it out. It’s Saturday, and the airport is busy. Jim and Eva arrived early to meet Sophie; they sat in the arrivals hall, drinking bad coffee, watching a family – two parents and three children, each scalded a raw, uncomfortable shade of pink – navigate the concourse with a trolley piled high with luggage, duty-free bags and a stuffed donkey wearing a sombrero. Behind them came three men in vests and shorts, sipping on cans of Stella.

‘Christ,’ Jim said to Eva, his voice low. ‘I hope they weren’t on Sophie’s plane.’

‘Don’t worry. The Alicante flight hasn’t landed yet.’

Alicante: a city of dust and heat and unfinished skyscrapers. This, at least, is how Jim imagines it: he has received only one postcard from Helena, sent soon after she moved to Spain. A tall, mud-coloured hotel of brutal ugliness; on the back, she had written,
For Jim – because even the most hideous building here is lovelier than the home I shared with you. H.

Jim had been furious – not so much with the sentiment (that he could understand), but with the fact that Helena had put it on a postcard, where their daughter could see her mother’s hatred plainly inscribed. He’d composed an angry letter back, but Eva, reading it over at his request, had suggested he wait before posting it. ‘Helena has every right to be angry,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in alienating her even further, is there?’

And so he had waited, and after a few days, had consigned the letter to the bin. But Helena must have felt she had made her point. Since then, she has written only to Sophie – enclosed photographs of her small whitewashed house in a village in the mountains; of old women dressed in black, their faces a contour map of wrinkles; of skinny goats framed against rocky, grassless land. And then, two years ago, of a dark, narrow-faced man, his skin a deep brown, his eyes narrowed against the light. ‘Juan,’ Sophie said when she showed him the photograph, her expression giving nothing away. ‘Mum’s new boyfriend.’

Helena, of course, is free to do as she likes; Jim’s only real concern, then, was for Sophie – for this new shift in the unstable ground of her young life. He tried to ask her how she felt about Juan – this was two years ago; she had just turned sixteen – but she would not be drawn. Sophie turned her slow, heavy-lidded eyes on him and said, with an indifference that seemed absolute, ‘Why should I care what she does?’

‘Indifferent’ is the word Jim reaches for most often, now, to describe his daughter. She is morose and apathetic, barely speaking other than when spoken to, and even then in the curtest of monosyllables. She has put on weight: her face – that simulacrum of her mother’s – has filled out, and she hides her broadening hips under loose T-shirts. But what alarms Jim most is her lack of passion for anything, for anyone: she is average at school, and has few friends; she’s at home most weekends, watching television in her bedroom on the small portable set. Had Sophie even set herself squarely against Eva – made her stepmother the object of vivid teenage tantrums – Jim might have had a clearer idea of what they were dealing with; but she addresses Eva with the same robotic brevity that she accords the rest of the family. Only Sam, now studying geology in London, seems able to reach her; on the weekends when he comes home to Sussex with his textbooks and dirty washing, Sophie is transformed: smiling, almost animated, trotting puppy-like after her adored stepbrother, who responds in kind with a genial, amused affection.

At first, he and Eva were careful not to press Sophie too hard: to consider the impact that their move to Sussex must have had on her. (They had finally sold the Regent’s Park flat in 1984, bought a dilapidated farmhouse not far from the village in which Jim grew up.) ‘Don’t you remember how hard it was, starting a new school?’ Eva had said. ‘And she’s had to move around so many times. I think we should give her a little time.’

And they had given her time – let her settle into the new house; waited out the first term at the new school. But that’s exactly what Sophie seemed to be doing: waiting; marking time. She brought no friends home, nor was invited out. (Years later, Jim would think of this with an uncomfortable stab of irony.) Eva and Jim began to worry. ‘What’s it like at school, Sophie?’ they would ask, at regular intervals; or, ‘If you really hate it here in Sussex, you know we don’t have to stay. We can talk about going back to London.’ But Sophie gave only bland non-answers – ‘It’s fine’; ‘I’m fine’ – until Sam – still living at home then, finishing his A levels – warned them to stop asking. ‘She thinks you’re always getting at her,’ he told Jim. ‘She feels like nothing she can do is good enough for you and Mum.’

And so they had tried hard to take a step back; to give her the space to work through whatever it was she was working through. ‘She’s a teenager,’ Eva said, remembering her own tricky phases with Rebecca. ‘It will pass.’ But it didn’t; the years rolled on, and Sophie became more and more remote. Through her final months of A levels she displayed no interest in applying to university, or taking alternative steps to find a job. Jim and Eva abandoned their tactic of cautious distance, and tried, again, to take her in hand. ‘You can’t just bury your head in the sand about this, darling,’ Jim said. They were sitting at the dining-room table one Sunday afternoon, the roast lunch cleared away, their pudding bowls empty in front of them. ‘You really need to have some kind of plan.’

Eva, at his side, nodded. ‘Can we help you, Sophie? Can we try to work out together what you’d like to do next?’

That had reached her: Sophie had turned to her stepmother, and said, her voice clear and calm, ‘Is that what you did? Did you sit down with my dad and
work out
how he was going to leave my mum?’

It hurt, of course – later, in bed, Jim had held Eva as she cried – but they continued, undeterred. Did Sophie want to go to university? Would she rather get a job? But her exams came and went, and still Sophie had made no decisions. Even this trip to Spain came about only because Helena and Juan sent the plane tickets as an eighteenth birthday present. Jim could not imagine his daughter taking the initiative herself, even if he and Eva had offered her the money. (They had done so more than once, and she had flatly refused to take it.)

Now, joining the queue of cars waiting nose to tail at the exit, Jim can’t stop himself from saying, his grip closing on the steering-wheel, ‘Well, Sophie. Is that really all you’ve got to say about two weeks in Spain? That it was “fine”?’

In the rear-view mirror, he sees his daughter roll her eyes. ‘What else do you want to know?’

Eva places a hand on his knee: a warning. ‘I’m sure you’re tired, aren’t you, love? Why don’t you close your eyes for a bit? Maybe you can tell us more about your trip over dinner.’

They are quiet then. On the motorway, Jim concentrates on the shifting brake-lights of the cars in front. It is a warm day, softened by a stiff breeze from the sea: as they turn off, following the road home, he opens the window, breathes in deeply. The road narrows, hunkering down further into the countryside; the tall trees on either side, heavy with sap, bow to meet in the middle in places, forming a tunnel through which the greenish light dimly filters.

Jim loves this place, loves it with a deep, unquestioning certainty that he has never felt for London, or even Cornwall. His being here feels in some way the natural extension of his love for Eva, but also – and this he had not expected, when Eva first mooted the idea of moving to Sussex – for his mother. The initial, shaming relief he had felt after Vivian’s death – the sudden lightness in his shoulders, as if a heavy burden had been removed – had given way, very quickly, to guilt. For months, he was unable to paint, had spent his days moving listlessly about the Regent’s Park flat, until Eva – working on a manuscript in Rebecca’s old bedroom – could stand it no longer. She had asked Penelope for the number of a therapist, a distant mutual acquaintance from Cambridge. He had gone to see the woman in her flat in Muswell Hill – shadowy, book-lined, calm – and found, after some initial resistance, that there he was able not to dispel the guilt, exactly (guilt not just for what he had done, or not done, for his mother, but to Helena and Sophie, too), but to turn down its volume so that on good days it was barely audible. And, more importantly, after six months of therapy, he had begun to paint again.

Years later, as the situation with Sophie worsened, Jim had suggested to Eva that Sophie might also like to talk to someone; even asked whether, God forbid, they should confront the fact that she might be developing the early signs of his mother’s illness. ‘Yes,’ Eva said. ‘It has to be worth a try.’ But when he raised the possibility with Sophie – this was just before Christmas last year – she had eyed him with withering disdain. ‘So what you’re saying, Dad,’ she said, ‘is that you think I’m some kind of nutter, like Grandma Vivian?’