The Versions of Us (9 page)

On Fridays, the clerks have a strict arrangement to meet in the pub after work.

Today, Jim is a little later leaving than the others: he has stayed behind to tie up one of the many loose ends that sometimes, in his bleaker moments, he imagines as hundreds of thick, coarse threads, vine-like, wrapping themselves around him.

These excursions to the pub, he thinks as he walks the short journey from the office, are just another example of his colleagues’ unwavering devotion to routine. Nine o’clock sharp – clerks arrive. Half past nine – clerks enter morning meeting. One o’clock – clerks exit to eat toasted cheese sandwiches at the corner café. Two o’clock – clerks return to desks. Five o’clock on Fridays – clerks repair to the White Lion to get tipsy on warm beer and try their luck with the barmaid, Louise.

Here they are now, bunched around an outside table. The week has been unseasonably warm, and the suspension bridge stands high and beautiful behind them, the lowering sun gilding the ironwork.
The lads
, their bosses call them, though there is nothing particularly laddish about these men, who are mostly university-educated, with soft hands and precision-parted hair: young men already beginning to resemble their fathers. At their desks, they trade jokes from
Beyond Our Ken
, or school-dormitory smut – but outside, confronted by other, more vigorous working men, their easy bonhomie seems to wither. There is only one – Peter Hartford: not a graduate, but the son of a stevedore, putting himself through his five-year articles by working Saturdays as a postman – whom Jim would tentatively call a friend.

He finds Peter inside, at the bar. Louise is leaning towards him, her large breasts splayed over the bar-top, her frosted-pink mouth curved into a smile. Seeing Jim, she snaps sharply back, readopts her customary
froideur
. Peter turns, smiles at him. ‘What can I get you?’

They take their pints out onto the terrace, find a table at a discreet distance from the other clerks.

‘Here’s to another week at the coalface.’ Peter lifts his glass to meet Jim’s. He is short, stocky, with reddish hair and a broad, guileless face, the first in five generations not to follow his father onto the docks.
Cleverer than any of us
, Jim thinks, and he feels a rush of affection for him, decides anew not to confide too honestly, not to admit how deeply he despises the profession that Peter has worked so hard to enter, while he, Jim, has sleepwalked into it, pushed by … What? Fear, he supposes: fear and the centrifugal force of his mother’s illness.

After graduation, he had hitchhiked to France with Sweeting, spent a happy fortnight pottering around villages and vineyards, painting watercolours – bare-legged girls drinking
citron pressé
at a pavement café; a cornfield, yellow-tipped, shimmering – with an energy he hadn’t felt in years. He had returned resolved to inform his mother that he’d be applying to art school – to the Slade – but he had arrived in Bristol to discover that she was back in hospital. Her doctor would release her only on the condition that someone at home take charge of her day-to-day care. ‘She mustn’t be left alone, Mr Taylor,’ the doctor had said. ‘Not until we can be sure she’s more stable, at any rate. Will you be living with her?’

‘I suppose so,’ Jim replied, watching his plans slip away into the distance, like a foreign landscape receding through the window of a train.

But then there was the matter of what he would
do
. In her more lucid moments, Vivian was insistent that he shouldn’t abandon the law, and Jim himself could think of no other career that might keep him at home; but he still had his part-two exams to take, and there was no law school in Bristol. In the end, his aunt Patsy had come to the rescue: she’d move in with Vivian, leaving his uncle John to fend for himself in Budleigh Salterton, while Jim went off to Guildford to take his exams; then go home when Jim returned for the holidays. In a few weeks, it had all been arranged. Arndale & Thompson – the first firm of Bristol solicitors Jim found listed in the phone book – accepted him for his articles. After six months in Guildford – he was billeted with a widower named Sid Stanley, a rather sad, lonely figure, with whom Jim spent most of his evenings watching television sitcoms – he was back in Bristol, a fully fledged articled clerk, living with his mother.

It is not how Jim ever thought things would turn out – even when he allowed Vivian to persuade him to apply to Cambridge to study law. (He’d wanted to put down history of art, but there’d been a row, and he’d changed to law in a fit of pique, hardly thinking he’d get in; but it had turned out that, despite himself, he had an aptitude for the law’s quiet logic, for the measured apportioning of right and wrong.) Perhaps, he thinks, his life would look quite different now if he’d met a woman at university – someone with whom he wished to start a life of his own. And there have been some, since Veronica – in his final term, he was briefly taken with an extremely pretty first-year history student named Angela Smith, but she’d broken it off, citing some old boyfriend from school – but no one about whom he has felt remotely serious.

‘It’s not such a bad place, really, is it?’ Jim says aloud. ‘Even old Croggan seems to be warming to me a bit.’

Peter nods. ‘I find it’s best to avoid him until early afternoon – he’s usually just back from lunch then, and half-cut on port.’

They exchange weak smiles, sip their pints. Jim, facing the bridge, admires its great struts and curves, the way it seems to thrust out organically from the thick green foliage on either bank. Peter, like most of Bristol’s natives, seems not even to notice it, but Jim is continually struck by the way Brunel’s great construction hangs above the Avon like a huge, still bird, its grey wings outstretched.

The first time they came to the White Lion, Peter had told him a story: a factory girl, jilted by her lover, had thrown herself from the parapet and floated gently down to safety, her wide Victorian skirts billowing into a parachute. ‘She lived to eighty-five,’ Peter said. ‘A legend in her own lifetime.’

Jim had shivered, thinking of the nights – how many had there been since he’d moved back to Bristol: three? four? – when he had run out onto the Clifton streets after his mother. Vivian was usually barefoot, her raincoat loosely belted over her nightdress. Once, she had already stepped out onto the parapet before he reached her. He had caught her by the collar like a cat, tried not to look down at the deep, silted darkness below.

Now, to dispel the memory, Jim asks Peter what plans he has for the weekend. ‘Not much. Working tomorrow, of course. I might take Sheila out on Sunday. Clevedon, maybe, if it’s still nice. Ice cream, stroll on the pier. All that jazz.’

Jim has met Sheila once, at Peter’s birthday party: she is wide-hipped, tall (taller than Peter, in fact, though neither of them seems to mind), with a tumble of blonde curls and a low, infectious cackle. They are newly married, with a little house in Bedminster, a few streets away from where they both grew up. ‘That’s right,’ Peter had said proudly when he introduced her to Jim, ‘I really did fall for the girl next door. How lucky was I that she fell for me too?’

‘What about you?’ Peter says now, eyeing Jim carefully over his pint glass. ‘Up to anything? How are … well, things?’

Jim has sketched out the bare framework of his situation for Peter: his mother’s illness; his decision – if Jim could call it that, for it had certainly not felt like one – to forget art school, forget London, and stay here with her.

‘All right,’ he says.

It’s true, in relative terms: Vivian is back on an upswing. Last night, she woke him at three a.m., playing Sinatra at full volume in the living-room. ‘
Dance
with me, Lewis,’ she said, her eyes unnaturally bright. And so Jim had danced with her, for a song or two, because he hadn’t the heart to tell her for the millionth time that he was not his father, that his father was long gone.

‘Find time to do some painting this weekend, will you?’

‘Maybe.’ Jim has set up his easel in a corner of his bedroom; the light isn’t good, and he often wakes with a headache from the turps, but at least he can turn the key when he goes out. A month or so ago, when he forgot to lock the room, he came back to find great sweeps of paint smeared across the blank canvas he had left there, and the half-empty tubes bleeding stickily onto the carpet. ‘Hope so.’

They are quiet then, enjoying the silence of men happy to leave the finer details of their feelings between parentheses. Soon their glasses are empty; another of the clerks, passing on his way to the bar, asks if they’d like another drink. Both say yes: Peter because he feels Jim could use the company, and Jim because it is a warm Friday evening, already carrying the sweet, resiny scents of autumn, and he wants to stay here, in the fading light, for as long as he can.

He sees her face on a Sunday afternoon.

He is out walking, carrying his sketchbook and pencils in his satchel: his aunt Patsy and uncle John have come up to see his mother, so he has the day entirely to himself. He is thinking of going down to the docks, sketching the lowered heads of the cranes, the still bulk of the William Sloan steamer, just in from Glasgow. Perhaps later he will see a film, or drive over to Richard and Hannah’s for dinner: he has an open invitation to eat with them in Long Ashton whenever he likes. There will be roast chicken, salad from the garden, the cat curled on Hannah’s lap. Richard will open a good bottle of wine, and they’ll play records, and talk about art, and, for a while, he’ll feel something akin to happiness: he’ll forget about his mother and her vast, insufferable neediness; about the void that still lies at the very heart of him. All this Jim is thinking, idly, pleasurably – and then he sees her. Eva.

She is walking up the hill, on the other side of the road. Her face is cast in the shadow of a building, but it is hers: the same narrow, pointed chin; the same dark eyes, framed by full, arched brows. She is wearing a light summer jacket, unbelted, over a green dress. Her hair is pinned up, exposing her slender neck, the exquisite shade of her skin.

Jim stops still, collides with a woman coming the other way. She scowls, tells him to look where he is going, but he doesn’t reply. On the other pavement, Eva is walking on, her stride brisk, purposeful. She has her back to him now. He runs out into the road, narrowly missing a passing car, whose driver shouts, sounds his horn. Jim doesn’t hear; he would like to call her name, but he can’t seem to form the word. He falls into step behind her, marvelling at the physical fact of her presence. He can hear the blood pulsing in his ears.

The last time he saw her, she was standing on Market Square. The baby was a small, wriggling thing in her arms – pretty, as babies go, with her mother’s dark hair and eyes. David Katz was beside her, in his fur-trimmed graduation hood. An older couple – the man glossy, foreign-looking; his wife hard-faced, unsmiling – stood at a slight distance, as if not quite sure whether to admit to being part of the group.

Katz’s parents
, he had thought:
they don’t like her
. And over the deep muscle-memory of his own pain – the pain Jim has carried with him since that night, when he found her letter in his pigeonhole in the porters’ lodge – he felt a rush of worry for her. It was the first time it had occurred to him to wonder what it was really like for
her
: until then, with the rampant egotism of the rejected, he had thought that the suffering must be entirely on his side. In fact, he had
wanted
her to suffer, had turned away when he saw her outside Heffers bookshop, her pregnant belly taut beneath her blouse. He had made sure she saw him looking, and then turned from her.

She is still walking, a few steps ahead. There is no child. Perhaps Katz has her, or perhaps – and Jim will feel a chill later, when he remembers how easily the thought came to him, how selfishly he had wished it were true – they have given her away.

He thinks wildly of what to say, of all the things he would like to tell her.
What are you doing in Bristol, Eva? How are you? Did you hear I quit my law course? I’m working as assistant to a sculptor now, Richard Salles. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He’s very good. I met him at an exhibition, and he’s become a friend, a mentor, even. And I’m
working
, Eva, really working – better than I have for years. Do you miss me? Why did you end it like that, with that letter? Why didn’t you give me a choice, for goodness’ sake? Don’t you know what my choice would have been?

So loud are the words inside his head that Jim is unable to believe he hasn’t spoken them aloud. He reaches out to tap her on the arm, and she swings round to face him, her eyes wide, furious. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing, following me? Go away at once, or I’ll
shout
.’