The Versions of Us (7 page)

At the Savoy, there are drinks and dancing, and a great deal of rich food. Anton Edelstein and his schoolfriend Ian Liebnitz drink too much rum punch, and are discreetly sick in an ornamental urn. After the speeches, Miriam Edelstein sings a Schubert lied, accompanied by Jakob on piano. Privately, Judith Katz considers this a little
de trop
; but she smiles and claps politely, and is careful to hide any trace of disapproval as the wedding party takes to the dance floor for the hora, and Eva and David are lifted high on silver chairs, each clinging to the end of a white silk handkerchief.

And then, too soon, it is time for the bride and groom to retire. They are to spend their wedding night upstairs, in one of the hotel’s grandest suites (another gift from Judith and Abraham Katz, along with the honeymoon: first thing tomorrow, Eva and David will board a BOAC flight for New York, spend a few days with his grandparents on the Upper East Side, and then take a train bound for Los Angeles). There are kisses, embraces; tears from the aunts and the two bridesmaids: the bride’s best friend, Penelope (flushed and uncomfortable inside her tight satin bodice), and the groom’s cousin Deborah (dark, rather haughtily beautiful, and noted, by keener observers, to have yawned twice while standing beside the chuppah). And then there is nothing but the upholstered silence of the lift, two hands intertwined, the bride’s new ring a plain, shining band beneath her engagement diamonds.

The suite, too, is silent. The couple stands for a moment in the doorway, the bellboy hovering uncertainly behind them. ‘Can I get you anything, sir, madam? There’s champagne in your room, with our compliments.’

‘How kind,’ David says. ‘Thank you, but you can go.’ The boy obeys, after offering more congratulations, and a coy little half-smile that Eva chooses to ignore.

There is a gramophone in the suite, a stack of records. ‘Shall we play some music, Mrs Katz?’

Eva nods, and David chooses an Everly Brothers album, flushes away the silence. He takes her in his arms, moves her around the soft blue carpet. There is, as so often, something self-consciously performative in his manner – Eva has sometimes caught herself feeling more like his audience than his fiancée – but tonight she doesn’t mind, because he is so handsome, and they are married, and David is the only man she has ever loved.

Or thinks she loves. There was a morning, soon after he asked her to marry him, when Eva woke filled with a kind of panic: a deep, nagging feeling that she did not love David, not as she should; or perhaps that she simply didn’t know
how
to love. In the library, while she was meant to be finishing her essay on
Hamlet
, Eva took out her notebook and wrote – bending low over her desk, so that none of the girls nearby might see –
David is so clever, so brilliant, so charming. He makes me feel that with him, I could do anything, go anywhere. I do love him, I know I do. And yet this horrid, stubborn little part of me insists that what we have together isn’t
real
, somehow – that it’s some kind of shallow imitation of love. I’ve been thinking about Plato’s cave, about that terrible idea that most of us spend our lives with our backs to the light, watching shadows on the wall. What if my life with David is just that? Suppose it’s simply not the real thing?

Eva had quickly dismissed the idea as absurd – she was surely complicating what should be utterly simple. But later, on her way to lectures, she asked Penelope, ‘How do you know, Pen – I mean,
really
know – that you love Gerald?’

‘Darling, I just know. It’s instinctive.’ She took Eva’s arm in hers. ‘But if you’re worrying about David, don’t. Doubts are natural too, you know. You must remember what I was like when I said yes to Gerald: a rabbit in headlights, desperate to know I was doing the right thing. “Anyone can see you’re right for each other, Pen,” you said: remember? Well, let me say that back to you. David Katz is a brilliant man, and he loves you, and I know you’ll make each other happy.’

Eva had allowed herself to be reassured. She did believe that David loved her: he had taken, each Friday, to buying her a bouquet of red roses, which filled her room with their heady perfume. When he proposed (he’d booked a table at the University Arms: went down on one knee – it was a performance, of course, and the couple at the next table had started to clap) – he said he’d known, from the moment he first saw her, that he would one day make her his wife. ‘You’re not like other girls, Eva – you have your own ambitions, your own plans. I like that. I respect it. And my family loves you too, you know.’

The whole restaurant seemed to be watching as he slid the ring onto her finger. ‘Even your mother?’ she said.

David laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry about her, darling. In a few months,
you’ll
be the only Mrs Katz who matters.’

Mrs Eva Katz
: she had written it down in her notebook, as if trying it on for size. With David, she was beautiful, weightless, free. Was this love? Eva had no reason, really, to believe it wasn’t – and so she dismissed her doubts, putting them down to inexperience, to the lack of a yardstick with which to measure her feelings.

Now, in their hotel room, David pours two glasses of champagne. They move to the huge bed with its massed cushions and quilts, and make love a little clumsily – they’ve both had too much to drink. Then they lie together, sweat-sheened, silent; David falls asleep almost at once, but Eva is wide awake. She puts on her new nightgown and robe – one of the few things Miriam was permitted to buy her, amidst the trunkfuls of gifts issued by Judith Katz – finds her cigarettes in the front pocket of her suitcase, neatly packed for tomorrow’s journey, and steps out onto the balcony.

Night is only just falling, and the air still carries the day’s heat: there are couples walking along the Embankment, arm in arm, as the streetlights come on; lightermen drawing their boats across the darkening river. Bizarre to think that tomorrow they will be in the air, flying away from London, high above the unfathomable stretches of the Atlantic.

Eva lights a cigarette. She thinks of Jakob, of how, last night, before she went up to sleep in her old bedroom for the final time, he had taken her aside and said, in German, ‘Are you absolutely sure,
Liebling
, about marrying this man?’

He had led her into the music room, sat her down beside the grand piano, the orchestra scores, the violins. It was not a room for inconsequential conversation; this, and the fact Jakob was speaking in German, had made Eva’s stomach twist and leap.

‘Why?’ she shot back in English. ‘Don’t you like David? Don’t you think you might have said something before?’

Jakob watched her steadily, his eyes dark brown, infinitely kind. Miriam always said those eyes were what first drew her to him on the train from Vienna: that, and the way Jakob had lifted up her suitcase without asking, carried it off into his compartment as if accepting without question the sudden intersection of their lives.

‘It’s not that I don’t like him,’ Jakob said. ‘He is easy to like, and I can see that he cares for you. But I’m afraid for you, Eva. I’m afraid he will never love you quite as much as he loves himself.’

Eva had been too angry to speak: angry because Jakob had waited so long to tell her what he really felt, and angry because he was, in some way, giving voice to the fears she had already worked so hard to dismiss. Over the last few months, as their future plans came into focus, she’d had the unsettling feeling that they were all angled towards David’s convenience rather than her own. In a month’s time, he would be starting at RADA, and they’d be moving to his parents’ house in Hampstead: Eva had suggested they take the empty flat in her parents’ house, but David’s mother had simply overruled her. ‘He’ll be working very hard, Eva,’ Judith had said. ‘Surely it’s better if we’re both there to look after him?’

Eva had waited a moment before answering, and then calmly pointed out that she, for one, had no intention of devoting herself to David’s care. She’d applied for a job at the
Daily Courier
(just dogsbodying on the women’s page, nothing glamorous), but the role had gone to someone else; her intention, now, was to read scripts for income – David had promised to pull some strings at the Royal Court – and start a novel. But in Hampstead, they would be confined to David’s old room: a shrine to his schoolboy achievements, filled with his old cricket bats and drama-society trophies. Yes, there was a desk at which Eva would, in theory, be able to write, but she suspected that the time and space to do so would, if Judith had anything to do with it, be in short supply.

But there, in her parents’ music room, Eva would not allow Jakob to revive her old anxieties; it was too late. She ran upstairs; in her bedroom, she lay awake for hours. It was almost dawn before she finally fell into a thin, fitful sleep.

Now, she smokes, watching the river, the lights, the bruise-purple sky. Then Eva goes back into the room, and slips into bed beside her sleeping husband.

Mid-morning, a Saturday: Eva is woken by the doorbell. At first, she doesn’t recognise the sound. She is swimming up through layers of sleep, still semi-immersed in a disturbing dream: she and Rebecca, alone on a tiny island with the tide coming in; the blast of a foghorn echoing out from the empty harbour, and the child screaming and screaming, impossible to comfort.

Opening her eyes, she feels the waves recede: the island is the old chaise longue in their bedroom, the foghorn the trill of the doorbell, ringing at regular intervals.

‘Anton!’ Eva calls out, as Rebecca stirs and gargles in the crook of her arm. But there is no reply – too late, she remembers that her brother is at cricket practice. Her mother is giving her Saturday-morning singing lessons at the Guildhall; her father is away with the orchestra. And David – well, David is out, too. They are quite alone.

She lifts Rebecca to a standing position, balances her on her knees. Rebecca’s eyes open sleepily, dark brown, all-knowing, and she stares frankly at her mother. She seems to consider whether to make a fuss – she has, after all, been roused unceremoniously from her morning nap – but decides against it, her tiny mouth cracking into a toothless smile. Eva smiles back, holds her daughter at arm’s length as she stands, places her gently on the floor. ‘Just let Mummy get dressed, and then we’ll go downstairs and see who’s making all that racket.’

It is Penelope. She’s standing on the top step, her face flushed above her black houndstooth jacket, holding a posy of yellow roses wrapped in brown paper. She stares at Eva for the shortest of moments, then moves quickly towards her; as they kiss, once on each cheek, Eva catches her friend’s familiar scents of lipstick and lily of the valley.

‘Honestly, darling. Did you forget I was coming?’

Eva is about to reply, but Penelope is already bending towards Rebecca, heavy in Eva’s arms. ‘Oh goodness, Eva, I’ve only been away three weeks and it’s like she’s all grown up!’ She places a hand on Rebecca’s head, ruffles her baby hair; it is too long – Eva has been meaning to cut it for days – and sticking up at odd angles, giving the child the look of an oversized cockatoo. ‘Aren’t you a beauty, Becca? Will you give your aunty Penelope a smile?’

Rebecca obliges: Eva suspects her daughter of having inherited some of her father’s willingness to rise to the expectations of an audience. She has his appetite for attention, too: she still wakes often in the night, wailing at some new, invisible affront. Eva and her mother have worn a threadbare track in the landing carpet from their pacing up and down, rubbing Rebecca’s hot, twisting back, Miriam softly singing the old Yiddish lullabies.

In the kitchen, she hands Rebecca to Penelope. Then Eva sets about making tea, finding a vase for the flowers, a plate for the shortbread biscuits her friend has produced from the depths of her crocodile-skin handbag.

‘Bad night, was it?’

‘You could say that.’ Filling the kettle, reaching into the depths of a cupboard for her mother’s cut-crystal vase. ‘David came home late – went to the pub with everyone after class. Of course, then he decided he wanted to see his daughter, so he woke her up. Rebecca got all excited, and then guess who had to spend the rest of the night getting her back to sleep?’

‘Ah.’ Eva senses that Penelope would like to say more, but she does not. She has stepped over to the sink, out of Eva’s way; Rebecca, seizing her chance, now grasps a wooden spoon from the drainer, and taps it experimentally on the side of Penelope’s head. ‘Don’t do that, Becca darling,’ Penelope says mildly.

Eva winces. ‘Sorry. Let me take her.’

‘Why don’t you both go and sit down? I’ll make the tea.’

Eva is too tired to argue. She settles her daughter on the drawing-room floor, in front of the French windows, with her favourite doll, and a good view of next door’s cat. She thinks of David as he had been last night, unsteady on his feet, reeking of beer and cigarettes. He had woken her coming in: woken the whole house, probably. Leaning over the bed, breathing out that stale pub smell, he’d said, ‘Where’s my favourite girl?’