The Versions of Us (51 page)

‘Yes, she does, doesn’t she?’ Eva speaks so softly that the journalist has to strain to hear.

They are silent, then. In front of them, the triptych. Slicks of oil paint on canvas. Three couples. Three lives. Three possible versions.

It ends here, too.

A woman stands on the Cambridge Backs. A wide strip of earth and tufted grass, rutted by the heavy passage of bicycles. Behind her, the steady crescendo of passing traffic. In front, a row of trees, through which she can just make out the spire of King’s College Chapel.

‘It was here, I think,’ Eva says. ‘Hard to remember exactly where, but this seems about right.’

Penelope, beside her, links her arm through Eva’s. ‘It hasn’t changed at all, has it? I mean, looking across at King’s, we could be right back there, in the thick of it. Everything ahead of us.’

Eva nods. A girl approaching on a bicycle – dark hair flying out behind her, black satchel slung across her shoulder – rings her bell, and they step aside to let her pass. Eva hears the girl tut loudly as she cycles on, and wonders for a moment what they must look like to her: two elderly women, dawdling on the footpath. Spectators to the flow, the urgency, of younger lives.

‘It’s not our place any more, though, is it?’

Penelope squeezes Eva’s arm. ‘It’ll always be your place, Eva. Yours and Jim’s.’

They had planned to come here together. She’d organised a weekend – reserved a room in a good hotel, a table at a restaurant. But on the morning they were to leave, Jim had woken pale and exhausted. He’d slept poorly, as he often did: Eva had heard him in the night, turning in their bed, stumbling against the door-jamb on his way to the bathroom. She had looked at him and said, ‘We’ll leave Cambridge for now, shall we, darling? Rest up at home. The city’s not going anywhere, is it?’

They had swallowed their disappointment; they both knew it was unlikely they’d make it back. The chemotherapy was working – Jim was still here, after all; still with her – but at a cost: aside from the exhaustion and the sleeplessness, there was the nausea, the loss of interest in food, in wine, in all the things in which he’d once taken such great pleasure. His hair had thinned, and he was losing weight: it seemed to Eva that he was shrinking before her eyes. ‘Heroin chic,’ Jim had said: he would retain his sense of humour to the last.

At home in Sussex. Days spent reading, and listening to the radio, and on good days, taking the car down to Brighton. The sea steely, implacable; the beach impassable now, the stones too precarious for Jim’s unsteady gait, and so they had walked slowly along the pier, sat in a café and drunk tea, watched passers-by flirt and kiss and argue. They spoke less and less: not because they had nothing to say, but because they enjoyed the companionability of silence; and because so much of what lay between them was unspoken, unspeakable. There was pain, and fear, and sadness; and yet on those afternoons, in Brighton, they were not unhappy. They had each other. They had their respective children, and their grandchildren, and the endlessly shifting patterns of their lives. They had their joy that Sophie had come back to them. They had their relief that they had found a way back to each other.

At the end, the hospice. There was a huge horse chestnut tree in the garden, framed by Jim’s bedroom window; he liked to lie in bed, watching the way the sun caught the conkers as they fell. He used to gather them on his way to school, he said; leave them in his pocket and retrieve them months later, their shine dulled. Alice – she was sitting by his bed, staring at her grandfather, at the wires, the machines, the metal bed frame – had grown excited then, and said, ‘I do that
too
, Grandpa. I do that too.’

Eva was there every day, and most nights; she knew each of the nurses by name. They were kind, most of them, in a way that far exceeded the merely professional: one nurse, a cheerful Nigerian woman named Adeola, took a particular shine to Jim, and he began, jokingly, to call her his ‘wife number two’.

‘Mr Taylor,’ Adeola would say with a wink when Eva appeared at the door, ‘your wife number one is here. Shall I ask her to come back later?’ And Jim, when he was able, would smile (how the sight clawed at Eva’s heart) and tell her that perhaps Adeola should let Eva in, or she might become suspicious.

Those four walls. The chair on which Eva sat for hours; the bed on which she spent her nights, under a hospital blanket, her sleep punctuated by the low beeps and murmurs of Jim’s machines. When the moment finally came, it was the middle of the night, but she was already awake: she had woken a few minutes before, knowing that this was his time. His eyes were closed, his mouth open; she placed a hand before his lips, felt the minute pressure of his breath. It was coming in gasps now, the sound strange, frightening; but she would not allow herself to be afraid. She took his hand. It wasn’t long before he was gone; and then she sat there with him, stroking his hand, until Adeola came.

Now, on the Backs, Penelope says, ‘Let’s look at the drawing again.’

Eva reaches into her handbag; here, tucked beneath the flyleaf of her hardback diary, is a sheet of paper. She found it just a week ago, while going through the mass of correspondence in Jim’s studio. It was torn from an A5 pad: a pencil sketch, the bare outline of a woman, sleeping on her side, her hands pressed together, as if in prayer. A note on the back, in Jim’s scribbled hand, read,
E, sleeping – Broadway, Cotswolds, 1976
. He had never shown it to her, had tucked it away in a folder filled with bills. She wondered whether he had even remembered it was there.

Eva stares at the drawing, then hands it to Penelope. After a few moments of silence, Penelope hands it back. ‘Are you done, darling?’

‘Yes, Pen,’ Eva says. ‘I think I am.’

So many people have helped bring this book to life, or kept me sane while I was trying to do so.

Huge thanks to my eagle-eyed team of early readers, for their encouragement and advice: Jonathan Barnes; Fiona Mountford; Doreen Green; Simon Armson; Matthew Ross (I am still impressed by his familiarity with Ely Cathedral); and Sofia Buttarazzi (apologies for the late nights!). Thanks also to David Race, Ellie and Irene Bard, and Conrad Feather.

The research and archive team at the
Guardian
and the
Observer
, and Anne Thomson, archivist at Newnham College, Cambridge, both offered fascinating insights into the history of their respective institutions. Katharine Whitehorn kindly offered me some reflections on her time at Cambridge and on Fleet Street. Many thanks to all.

I am so grateful to Judith Murray for her invaluable wisdom, support and general fabulousness; and to Kate Rizzo, Eleanor Teasdale, Jamie Coleman and all at Greene & Heaton. Thanks also to Sally Wofford-Girand and everyone at Union Literary, and to the lovely Toby Moorcroft.

I am indebted to Kirsty Dunseath and Andrea Schulz for their belief, their consideration, and their astute, careful and sensitive editing. Thanks also to Rebecca Gray, Jessica Htay and the whole team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Orion; and to Lauren Wein and everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Thanks to Jan Bild, Peter Bild and Ian Barnett for their incalculable support and faith over the years. And thanks, above all, to my husband, Andrew Glen, for putting up with me – and, as he pointed out, tolerating the fact that a fair few of his
bon mots
have unwittingly made their way into these pages …

Finally, this novel is infused with the memory of Peter’s mother, my late step-grandmother, Anita Bild. Miriam Edelstein’s story is in large part inspired by Anita’s own: like Miriam, she made the journey to London from Vienna in the thirties; and the Edelsteins’ house in Highgate is modelled on Anita’s, where we often sat talking about music and literature. I wish I had been able to show Anita this book; I like to imagine that she’d have turned to me afterwards, told me (I hope!) that she’d enjoyed it, and then, kindly but firmly, corrected my use of German.

LB

Laura Barnett
is a writer, journalist and theatre critic. She has been on staff at the
Guardian
and the
Daily Telegraph
, and is now a freelance arts journalist and features writer, working for the
Guardian
, the
Observer
and
Time Out
, as well as several other national newspapers and magazines.

Laura was born in 1982 in south London, where she now lives with her husband. She studied Spanish and Italian at Cambridge University, and newspaper journalism at City University, London. Her first non-fiction book,
Advice from the Players
– a compendium of advice for actors – is published by Nick Hern Books. Laura has previously published short stories, for which she has won several awards.
The Versions of Us
is her first novel.

@laura_jbarnett
www.laura-barnett.co.uk

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A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

This ebook first published in 2015
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Copyright © Laura Barnett 2015

The right of Laura Barnett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from
Four Quartets
by T.S. Eliot. Used herewith by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from
The Amateur Marriage
reprinted by the permission of HSG Agency as agents for the author. Copyright © 2004 by Anne Tyler Modaressi.

Excerpt from ‘This Is Us’ reprinted with the kind permission of Mark Knopfler.

‘Tangled Up In Blue’ Words and Music by Bob Dylan © 1975. Reproduced by permission of Ram’s Horn Music/ Sony/ATV Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD

‘Hearts and Bones’. Words and Music by Paul Simon.
Copyright © 1983 Paul Simon (BMI). All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.