The Versions of Us (5 page)

Jim has booked a table for lunch at the University Arms. Vivian prefers to eat in college – ‘so I can really feel what it’s like to be you, Jim’ – but the last time he took her to the buttery, she had approached the dons’ table and engaged the startled master in conversation. It had taken him – a distinguished brigadier – almost half an hour to extricate himself. For Jim, it was just like being at school again – catching sight of Vivian waving at him from the gates in a red hat, a green coat: bright stabs of colour among the other mothers’ muted plumage. The boys around him staring, nudging, whispering.

After lunch, they walk through town to Clare, cross the bridge with its great boulders of honey-coloured stone, and take a turn about the gardens. It has stopped raining, but the sky is still leaden. Her mood, too, is growing heavier. By the ornamental pond, she pauses, turns to him, and says, ‘You will be home soon, won’t you? It’s so terribly lonely in that flat, all by myself.’

He swallows. Even the mention of the place feels like a weight around his neck. ‘I’ll be home in two weeks, Mother. It’s almost the end of term. Don’t you remember?’

‘Ah, yes. Of course.’ She nods, presses her lips together. She reapplied her lipstick – red, presumably to match the flowers on her hat, though it clashes terribly with her scarf – after lunch, but badly, in a smudged scrawl. ‘My son the lawyer. The clever, clever lawyer. You’re nothing like your father. You have
no
idea what a relief that is to me, my darling.’

The weight is growing heavier. Jim feels a sudden, overwhelming need to shout – to tell his mother he can’t stand it here, that he’s leaving. To ask her why she insisted he apply to Cambridge instead of going to art school: surely she knows that painting is the only thing that has ever truly made him happy. But he doesn’t shout. He says quietly, ‘Actually, Mother, I’ve been thinking about not coming back next year. I really don’t think I …’

Vivian has covered her face with her hands, but he knows that she is crying. In a whisper she says, ‘Don’t, Jim. Please don’t. I can’t bear it.’

He says nothing more. He takes her to his room in Memorial Court so that she can splash her face, reapply her make-up. Her earlier ebullience has gone: she is falling back down to the trough of the wave, and he feels the old, familiar blend of frustration and helplessness, the desire to help tempered by the knowledge that there is no way for him to reach her.

This time, Jim insists on a taxi. He hands Vivian into a compartment on the five-o’clock train, lingers at the window, wondering whether he ought to get on board, go with her to his aunt’s, make sure she gets there safely. Once, last year, in a state not dissimilar to this, she fell asleep in an empty compartment just past Potters Bar, and was only found by a guard long after the train had discharged its passengers and pulled into a siding at Finsbury Park.

But he does not go. He stays on the platform, waving uselessly at his mother’s face – eyes closed, head tipped back against the antimacassar – until the train has receded into the distance, and there is nothing for him to do but retrieve his bicycle, and cycle back into town.

On the last Saturday of term, they wake early in Jim’s college rooms, slip out unnoticed through the gap in the hedge, and take a bus to Ely.

The fens are lit by a thin, watery sun, so low in the sky that it seems to be almost touching the horizon. The wind is in from the east. It was there in town – they have felt it for weeks, drawn their scarves tighter around their necks, woken to see their breath form clouds of vapour in the freezing air – but out here, there are no buildings to break its passage, just acres of hard mud and low, twisted trees.

‘When will you pack?’ he says. They are leaving tomorrow: Jim on the midday train – he’ll break the journey with a night at his aunt Frances’s house in Crouch End; Eva after lunch, in her parents’ Morris Minor, her brother Anton tired and testy beside her on the back seat.

‘In the morning, I suppose. Shouldn’t need more than an hour or two. You?’

‘The same.’ He takes her hand. His is cold, rough, his forefinger calloused by the hard wood of his paintbrushes, his fingernails framed by half-moons of dried paint. Last night, he had finally showed her the portrait; he removed the sheet with a magician’s flourish, though she could see that he was nervous. Eva didn’t admit that she had already taken a look a few days before, while he was down the hall in the bathroom; had stared at her likeness. There she was, rendered in layers of paint, in his brushstrokes’ swift, swallow shapes: both utterly herself and somehow elevated, other. It was a week since she had seen the doctor. She couldn’t stand to look at the painting, to see such a tribute, and say nothing. And yet what was there to say?

She is silent again now, watching the great rolling blankness of the fens. At the front of the bus, a baby is crying, the sound low and guttural, as its mother tries to soothe it.

‘Well over two months gone,’ the doctor had said, fixing her with a pointed stare. ‘Three, even. You’ll need to start making arrangements, Miss Edelstein. You and your …’

He had let the ellipsis hang, and Eva had not filled it. She was thinking only of Jim, and the fact that she had known him for six short weeks.

If he notices her silence, Jim says nothing. He is quiet too, and pale, his eyes smudged with tiredness. Eva knows he isn’t looking forward to leaving, to going back to the Bristol flat he doesn’t think of as home – just the rented rooms that his mother, Vivian, occupies. Home, he has told her, is the Sussex house where he was born: rough grey flint and a front garden filled with roses. His father painting in the attic; his mother sitting for him, or mixing paints, swilling out jars with turps in the old pantry downstairs. That’s where Vivian was, Jim said, when his father had stood clutching at his chest at the top of the stairs, and fell: she had come running from the pantry to find him broken and twisted on the bottom step. Jim was at school. His aunt Patsy had collected him, brought him back to a house that was no longer a home: a house filled with policemen, and neighbours making cups of tea, and his mother screaming, screaming, until the doctors came and everything was quiet.

In Ely, the bus lurches to a halt beside a post office. ‘Everybody off,’ the conductor calls, and they line up, still holding hands, behind the other passengers: the woman with the baby, sleeping now; an elderly couple, the man dour and flat-capped, the woman plump, her expression kind. She catches Eva’s eye as they climb down the steps. ‘Young love, eh?’ she says. ‘You both have a lovely day, now.’

Eva thanks her, draws closer to Jim. The cold bites their faces.

‘We’ll have a look at the cathedral, shall we?’ he says. ‘I saw a Law Society concert here last year, and took a tour. It’s a beautiful place.’

She nods: anything Jim wants, anything to be close to him, to stave off the inevitable moment when she must tell him what she is, and what she has to do.

They start walking, huddled down into their scarves, towards the looming spires: two of them, square like castle keeps, their walls scarred, pockmarked, catching the winter light. Suddenly Jim stops, turns to her, his face reddening. ‘You don’t mind, do you? Going in? I didn’t even think.’

She smiles. ‘Of course I don’t mind. As long as God doesn’t.’

It’s the space that strikes Eva first: the great pillars reaching up through the vastness to the distant, vaulted roof. Beneath their feet is a mosaic of polished tiles – ‘A labyrinth,’ Jim says, ‘with God at the centre’ – and ahead, under huge panes of coloured glass, is a golden screen, beneath which the altar sits, covered with a fine white cloth. They walk slowly along the nave, pausing to gaze up at another extraordinary ceiling, its ribbed panels painted red, green and gold. At its centre is a pointed star that reminds Eva of the one embroidered into her mother’s Shabbat tablecloth – though that has six arms, and this (she counts them silently) has eight.

‘The octagon.’ Jim is almost whispering. Eva watches the quick, animated movements of his face, and loves him; is filled with a love for him so overwhelming she can hardly breathe.
How
, she thinks,
am I to leave him?
And yet she must; sleepless in her college room, the building creaking and whispering in the night, she has allowed herself hope: imagined telling him, watching his expression change, and then resolve itself.
It doesn’t matter
, he says – this imaginary Jim – and holds her close.
Nothing matters, Eva, as long as we’re together.
It is a waking dream, but she knows it could become real, that this Jim standing here before her, staring up at the distant reaches of the roof (how she would love to reach out and cup his chin with her hand, tilt his face down to meet her lips) could really say it. And that is why – as morning creeps over the city, and the college begins to stir into life – she has resolved over and over again not to give him the opportunity, not to permit the man she loves, with his talent, his grand plans – the man already bearing the weight of his mother’s illness – to be trapped by a situation that is not of his making. Father to another man’s child: Jim would say he could do it, and he would do it well; but she will not allow him to make that sacrifice.

A few nights ago, Eva had sat on her bed in Newnham with Penelope, her head resting on her shoulder; and even her dearest friend hadn’t tried to make her change her mind.

‘And what if David refuses?’ Pen had asked. ‘What will we do then?’

How grateful Eva had been for that ‘we’. ‘He won’t refuse, Pen. And if he does – well. I’ll find a way.’

‘
We’ll
find a way,’ Penelope had corrected her, and Eva had allowed the promise to stand, though she knew the burden was hers – hers and David’s – and no one could carry it for her. Not Penelope, not her parents. She believed Miriam and Jakob would understand – how could they not, given their own history? – and yet she couldn’t bear the idea of returning to her old room in Highgate, her studies abandoned, pregnant and alone.

In her notebook, she wrote,
I chose Jim, and I can’t bear to leave him. But the choice is no longer only mine to make.

Now, in the cathedral, Jim is still speaking. ‘The monks built it after the original nave pillars collapsed one night. They thought there’d been an earthquake. It must have been their way of proving that the disaster hadn’t defeated them.’

Eva nods. She doesn’t know how to reply, how to convey the feeling welling inside her: love, yes, but with it sadness – not just for the pain of parting, but for the people they have lost. His father, splayed and broken on the bottom step. Her Oma and Opa, on both sides, and all her aunts and uncles and cousins, herded onto trains, thirsty and blinking, knowing nothing of where they were going – only suspecting, fearing, but still carrying hope. There must have been hope, surely, right until the very last moment, when they knew that there was nothing to be done.

As if sensing what she is thinking, Jim squeezes her hand. ‘Let’s light a candle.’

There is a stand beside the West Door: a dozen tapers glowing in the darkness. Others are stacked underneath, below a slot for coins. Eva takes a fistful of pennies from her purse and drops them in, picks a candle for each Oma, each Opa, and then lights them, fitting one after another firmly into a metal base. Jim chooses only one, for his father, Lewis, and then they stand and watch the wicks take light, his rough painter’s hand in hers. She would like to cry, but tears are inadequate to express all that this means: to be here with him, remembering, hoping, when tomorrow she will be gone.

They eat thin vegetable soup in the refectory, then walk slowly back across town. The sun is fading, the wind whipping their hair; the warmth of the bus is a relief. Inside, Eva removes her shoes, thaws her freezing feet over the radiator underneath her seat. She isn’t intending to fall asleep, but her head quickly lolls back against the headrest, and Jim lets the weight of it fall against his shoulder. In Cambridge, he wakes her gently. ‘We’re here, Eva. You slept all the way.’

It is only then, as they get off the bus, that Eva tells Jim she is sorry: she can’t spend the evening with him; there is something she has to do. Jim protests: after tomorrow, he says, they won’t see each other for four whole weeks. Eva says she knows. She really is sorry. Then she leans forward, kisses him, and turns and hurries away, though Jim is calling her, and it is all she can do to lift her heavy feet.

She doesn’t stop until she reaches King’s Parade. The tall towers of King’s gatehouse are throwing their long, angular shadows across the cobblestones. Eva steadies herself against a lamppost, ignoring the curious stares of the men now stepping briskly past her in their black gowns. It is almost time for hall. She will be missing her own dinner at Newnham, but she doesn’t care. She can’t imagine being hungry for anything ever again.

Inside, the porter doesn’t bother to hide his disapproval. ‘It’s dinner time, miss. Mr Katz will be going in.’