The Versions of Us (43 page)

Eva steps away, stung. ‘Oh, Thea, you haven’t …’

‘Don’t look at me like that. Just keep an open mind.’ Thea lifts the neat arc of an eyebrow. ‘Now it’s almost time for dinner. Will you come and help me round up the troops?’

The family is seated together at the top table, as at a wedding: Anton and Thea; Jennifer and Henry; Daniel and his new girlfriend, Hattie, a fashion student with a small lace hat of her own design balanced elegantly on her cornrowed hair. Thea’s mother, Bente – a retired neurosurgeon in her eighties, with her daughter’s excellent bone structure and formidable intelligence – has managed to make the journey from Oslo. She sits beside Eva’s niece, Hanna, now twenty-six and in the final year of medical training. On Bente’s other side are Anton’s old schoolfriend Ian Liebnitz and his wife, Angela, who have grown, like many long-married couples, faintly to resemble each other. Between Angela and Eva, an empty seat, and a name Eva recognises, etched in careful longhand.
Carl Friedlander.
Anton’s new partner in the firm, the man who, if Eva remembers correctly, lost his wife to cancer, not more than a year ago.

Across the table, she catches Anton looking meaningfully at Carl’s vacant chair. ‘Just you wait,’ she mouths at him, ‘until I do my speech.’ Eva is angrier than she’s letting on: angry that, rather than simply enjoying her own brother’s sixtieth birthday party, she’ll be forced to endure the agony of a set-up in plain view of her son and daughter, and just about every friend she and her brother have ever had (excepting Jim, of course. Jim has not been invited). But Anton smiles at her, shrugs. He is suddenly so like the little boy he used to be – chubby, red-cheeked, forever seeking out some new source of mischief – that Eva is unable to resist the urge to smile back.

Carl Friedlander arrives just as the starter is being served. He is extremely tall – more than six foot, Eva surmises, as he offers breathless apologies to the table: he was coming in from his daughter’s place in Guildford, and the train had simply sat outside Waterloo. A spare, fleshless face, almost gaunt; a crop of thick white hair. Shaking his hand, Eva is reminded of a photograph of Samuel Beckett that used to stare out across the
Daily Courier
office from above Bob Masters’s desk: a Cubist composition of monochrome planes, cross-hatched with blocks of shadow. But Carl Friedlander’s expression is not, she notes with relief, quite so severe.

Sitting down, he says, ‘Lovely to meet you.’ He settles himself on his chair, smoothes out a crease in his jacket. ‘I know of you, of course. I mean, I did before I met Anton. My wife read every single one of your books.’

He flinches, a little, at ‘wife’, and so, to spare his embarrassment, Eva says quickly, ‘How kind of you to say so. And did you read any of them yourself? Men are allowed to, you know.’

Carl looks at her, judging her tone. He gives a short, dry laugh. ‘Is that so? I wish I’d known. I hid
Pressed
under a copy of
Playboy
while I was reading it. In case anybody saw.’

It is Eva’s turn to laugh now. She can feel Jennifer, always finely attuned to the nuances of her mother’s moods, watching them from the other side of the table. ‘Well, now you know, you can reread it in public as often as you like.’

Between the starter and the main dish, Eva learns that Carl Friedlander was born and raised in Whitechapel, to German (he doesn’t need to say Jewish) parents. That he joined the merchant navy in 1956, and remained there for thirty years, until he left to run his own shipbroking firm. That when Anton’s company took over that firm two years ago, he’d thought he would retire, but Anton had twisted his arm to stay on. That he adores Wagner, despite knowing that he probably shouldn’t. That his granddaughter’s name is Holly, and she is the brightest, most precious thing in his life. And that he is profoundly, inexpressibly lonely.

This last, of course, is perceptible only to someone who can read the signs, who knows what it is to reach the latter portion of one’s life (morbid to think that way, but there it is) and find oneself suddenly, unexpectedly alone. Eva knows it is absurd, really, that this should come as such a shock: we are alone when we enter the world, and alone when we leave it. But marriage – a good marriage, at any rate – obscures that basic truth. And Eva’s marriage to Jim
had
been good: she can see that now, at a distance of more than ten years from its unceremonious finale.

In the months after Jim left, Eva had experienced what she might now grudgingly call a breakdown, though the term feels imprecise. It was less a breaking down than a cleaving in two: she’d had the surreal sense that the route of her life had bifurcated, and she had found herself stuck on the wrong path, with no means of tracing her way back. Easy to think of Dante – and she had, of the
via smarrita
, the right road lost. She had been unable to work (her publisher had been forced to put out her survey of women writers without a single interview); quite unable to function at all. It had taken the combined efforts of Penelope, Anton, Thea and an expensive psychotherapist to shake Eva out of it: to remind her that there were things to be done, decisions to be made. That, and her overriding need to be present for her children; not to mention her determination not to allow Jim to see that she was failing without him.

Eva would, she had decided, spare herself that last indignity. So she had roused herself, put the pink house they had loved so much on the market; bought a smaller place in Wimbledon, near the common, with a spare bedroom for Daniel, who was just off to university in York. She had even sent a card, when required, to Jim and Bella, to mark the birth of their baby daughter, Robyn.

For a year or so, Jim had kept his distance. Jennifer had even withdrawn his invitation to her wedding. But then, gradually, he had reappeared in their lives: at Daniel’s graduation (Bella was at home with Robyn), Jim had taken Eva’s hand during the ceremony, leaned over and whispered in her ear, ‘Thank you, Eva. Thank you for not making it any harder than it had to be.’

She had felt a rush of anger then, so powerful she’d wanted to shout out loud.
You walked into my life when I was nineteen years old. You were the only man I ever loved – the only man I ever hope to love. You took everything we did together, everything we were to each other, and scorched it to nothing: left it a cloud of ash
. But she had said none of this. She had simply squeezed Jim’s hand, and then let it go.

When the main course has been cleared, Thea gets to her feet, and silence falls across the room. She proposes a toast to Anton, and there is the high glockenspiel ring of glasses, a ragged chorus of cheers. Then Thea looks over at Eva. She stands in her turn, and all thoughts of Jim, of loneliness, of this stranger seated next to her – a fellow traveller on the wrong road – fall from her mind as she speaks of her brother: the boy, the man, the father, the son. And of their parents, much missed.

‘Great job,’ Carl says when Eva sits back down; as she spoke, his eyes never left her face.

Later, when the meal is over, the round tables have been cleared from the ballroom, and everyone is a little drunk, Carl will ask Eva to dance. He will hold her a little self-consciously at first, and then closer, moving fluidly, elegantly, in a way that Eva will find entirely unexpected.

Afterwards, she will break away, aware of the curious eyes of her son and daughter, her niece; and Carl will nod, disappear back into the crowd. She will feel his absence then, will scan the upper deck for a glimpse of him, even as she pretends she isn’t looking. As the party draws to a close – the guests spilling unsteadily back onto the embankment; the boat’s lights spreading washes of colour across the night-black surface of the water – Carl will come to say goodbye, will tell her that he would very much like to see her again.

Then, Eva will find herself saying,
Yes. Please. I’d like that too.

Early on the morning of Anton’s sixtieth birthday, as Jim is packing his overnight case for his trip to London, he receives a phone call from his son.

For a few moments after hanging up, Jim sits in silence, a slow smile creeping across his face. Then he dials his cousin Toby’s number.

‘So sorry,’ he says. ‘The baby’s come. Yes, a fortnight early. You’ll send my apologies to Anton and Thea, won’t you? Have a good time.’

At the station, he attempts to exchange his train ticket to London for one to Edinburgh, but the clerk purses her lips. ‘That’s an advance return, sir. Non-refundable, non-exchangeable. You’ll need to buy a new ticket. And there’s only the sleeper from Penzance now.’

‘Fine.’ In his excitement, Jim forgets to be irritated. ‘Just book me a return from London to Edinburgh, then, please. First class. I need to get there today. My son and daughter-in-law have just had a baby. Their first.’

The clerk’s expression softens a little. ‘Your first grandchild?’

Jim nods.

‘Well.’ She jabs at her keyboard, waits as the ticket printer whirrs and sputters. ‘You’ve got it all to come, then, sir, haven’t you?’

The next London train leaves in half an hour. Jim buys a newspaper at the kiosk, orders a large cappuccino with an extra shot. The morning is fine, bright, the promise of warmth leavened by the brisk Cornish breeze; standing on the platform with his overnight case, the coffee in his hand, Jim feels a tide of pure happiness rise up in him. His granddaughter, Jessica. (Dylan and Maya chose the name in the sixth month of pregnancy, after seeing a production of
The Merchant of Venice
.) He closes his eyes, feeling the wind on his face, breathing in the station smells of engine-grease, bacon and disinfectant. He thinks,
I will hold on to this moment and remember it. I will catch it before it disappears.

He has a table seat on the train: spacious, comfortable. He accepts fresh coffee from the waiter, though his cappuccino isn’t yet finished, and orders the full English. It is only then, as Jim sits back, unfolds his newspaper, watches the gorse and the slate cottages and the distant glittering sea, that he realises he hasn’t told Vanessa he’ll be away for longer than one night. He takes his new mobile phone (it was Vanessa who persuaded him to buy it; he is still rather wary of the thing, with its tiny keys and sudden inexplicable noises) from his overnight case. Slowly, painstakingly, he taps out a text message.
Jessica’s come two weeks early. I’m on my way to Edinburgh. Not sure when I’ll be back. You’ll hold the fort, won’t you? J.

Of course she will. Vanessa is bewilderingly efficient: she has quit her job, as PA to the head of a London investment bank, for Cornwall and ‘a more creative life’. Jim isn’t entirely sure how managing his studio – ordering materials, archiving paintings and correspondence, preventing the relentless surge of email and paperwork from engulfing him completely – constitutes a ‘creative life’, but Vanessa seems happy enough. She’s no Caitlin, who left abruptly two years ago, after announcing that she’d met someone who would be ‘hers, and hers alone’. Vanessa is married, for one thing – not that Jim would have chanced his luck even if she weren’t. But he enjoys her company, and is grateful for the uncanny way she manages to anticipate his needs.

Here she is now, popping up on the phone’s screen, asking whether he’d like her to send flowers to Anton Edelstein.
Great idea
, Jim types back.
Thanks, V. Speak soon.

Anton Edelstein: sixty years old today. Odd that Jim should find this so difficult to take in, when he passed the sixty-year mark two years ago. (Caitlin had only just left him; he was still licking his wounds, and had a doleful celebration in an Indian restaurant with Stephen Hargreaves.) In Jim’s mind, Anton is still a thirty-year-old in flared trousers and paisley shirt, doling out rum punch in his Kennington kitchen.

Jim has seen little of Anton in the intervening years – at a party or two at Toby’s; at the private view of Jim’s first solo show at the Tate. There, in the dim shadows of the gallery’s basement foyer, Jim had found himself asking after Eva.

The question had taken Anton by surprise. ‘I didn’t realise you knew my sister.’

‘Not very well,’ Jim said quickly. ‘We’ve met a few times over the years.’

‘Yes. I suppose you would have.’ Anton’s gaze had shifted uncomfortably to the ground. ‘Well, in that case, you’ll know that it’s all been very hard for her. Very hard indeed.’

Jim had nodded, though really he could hardly imagine how hard it was. He had first heard Eva on the radio two years before – he usually listened to Radio 4 while he was painting, and had switched on his set one morning to hear her voice, clear and eloquent and utterly unexpected. She was talking about a book she’d written: a book about caring for her husband, Ted Simpson, the former foreign correspondent, now severely disabled by the combined effects of Parkinson’s disease and several strokes.

Jim had stood quite still, forgetting to breathe, thinking of what Toby had said at his own fiftieth birthday party –
Ted Simpson’s not well at all.
Thinking of the man he’d seen take Eva in his arms at Anton’s thirtieth, all those years ago: grey-haired, stockily handsome, with a firmness about him, a solidity, that even Jim could see was attractive. The heart-shaped pendant he was sure Ted must have given her, lying coolly against Eva’s warm skin.