The Versions of Us (10 page)

It is not her. Eva’s face has melted into another’s: broader, a little plumper, without her questioning, intelligent eyes. He has followed a stranger up the street, and terrified her half to death.

‘I’m so sorry. I thought you were someone else.’

The woman shakes her head, turns away, half runs up the hill towards Clifton. Jim stands, watching her go. And then he walks on, in the opposite direction, down to the docks, the water, the deep quietness of ships at rest.

It is a good house – not grand, but solid, foursquare: a pair of windows on either side of the white-painted porch with its twin colonnades; a large tree, heavy with russet leaves, almost obscuring one half of the facade.

It was this, together with the colour of the stucco – an unusual salmon-pink – that had made the agent reluctant to show it to them. The man – his name was Nicholls; he wore a rakish checked waistcoat and a thin moustache – told them, doubtfully, that the interiors hadn’t been touched since the twenties. ‘It’s going for a song,’ he said. ‘You’ll see why. He was an
artist
, don’t you know? Didn’t have a clue how to keep a place looking spick.’

That had been enough to make Jim put his foot down – they
would
see the house, thank you, that very afternoon. It might even have been enough to make them part with the money sight unseen (and such a reasonable price, in comparison with most of the other houses they’d been shown). They had the money in the bank, after all: left to Eva, in a gesture not anticipated by any of the Edelsteins, by her late godmother, Sarah Joyce – a soprano, and the first real friend Jakob and Miriam had made in London.

But the garden was what had really sealed the deal. It was not so much the plot itself, which tilted sharply, sliding down Gipsy Hill – the dusty, forgotten corner of south London with which Eva and Jim had, for reasons they couldn’t quite explain, fallen in love – but the building at the bottom: the deceased artist’s studio. It was just a shed, really, but the artist had removed the original felt roof, and replaced it with glass panels that could be drawn back in fine weather, letting in the sky. It would no doubt be freezing in winter, and sweltering in summer – and, since the old man’s death, it had fallen badly into disrepair. Weeds had sprung up between the floor-slats, and the glass roof was whitewashed with dried bird droppings. But Eva needed only to look at Jim to know that this was it: his place, her place; the place that they would make their own. They had told Nicholls they would have it there and then.

Now, as Eva stands at the kitchen window, peeling potatoes for fish pie, she can just make out her husband in his studio, over the grassy incline: the top of his head, the angle of his easel. Jim spent much of the summer working on the house, sanding down floors and cupboards, painting walls; Eva joined him most evenings, exchanging her office clothes for old shirts and paint-spattered slacks. She has hardly seen him since he finished preparing the studio. He is out there before she goes off to work, breaks to have dinner on her return, and then goes back out until the early hours, his old rule about only working in daylight forgotten. (His tutor at the Slade had quickly dismissed this as nonsense, and Jim had eventually come round to his way of thinking.)

The Slade has changed Jim’s work, too: gone, for the most part, are his figurative paintings, the rich, textured renderings of land and sea and Eva herself. In their place is something much more urgent, untethered, almost feverish. ‘Pure energy,’ was how one enthusiastic critic had put it at the MA show – though he had not, in the end, found space to mention Jim in his article, and she had felt his disappointment for him, seen the way Jim offered his friend Ewan – the main subject of the piece – his sincere congratulations. She had wished there was something, anything, that she could do other than tell him she believed in him, that success would come to him in its own time.

The peeling finished, Eva slices the potatoes, places them in a pan, covers them with water. The fish is already poached, lying in its thick, creamy sauce; the trifle is setting in the larder. Only an hour until their guests arrive. She fills the kettle for tea, leans back against the worktop while she waits for it to boil, looks with pleasure around the kitchen they have furnished – barely – with a scrubbed pine table picked up at Greenwich Market, a brightly coloured rag-rug her mother had forgotten about, found rolled up in a corner of the cellar. ‘No mod cons,’ Nicholls had warned them. ‘You’ll be much happier in that new block I showed you.’ They hadn’t bothered to set him straight: how to explain the delight of bare floorboards, plaster cornicing, chipped Victorian tiles, to one who prefers gas fires, carpets, fitted kitchens? He thought they were barmy. Perhaps they were. They didn’t care.

Eva carries a mug of tea down the garden to Jim. Before entering, she knocks twice and waits for his reply, as is their custom. He looks round, his eyes still glazed with concentration. She tries not to look at the canvas – he still prefers only to show her the finished work, though he no longer covers his easel with a sheet. She understands: she is the same about her writing; refuses to read him even a sentence before the story – or, these days, column – is complete. ‘It’s six o’clock, darling. They’re coming at seven, remember? Do you want a bath?’

He shakes his head. ‘No time. They’ll have to take me as they find me, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ll go, then.’ She moves towards him, hands him the tea, leans down to kiss him. She can taste the faint acrid tang of paint. ‘You’ll come in at seven, though, won’t you?’

Back upstairs, Eva runs her bath, lays fresh clothes out on their bed. They’ll be eight tonight – Penelope and Gerald; Frank, Eva’s editor at the
Daily Courier
, and his wife, Sophia; Ewan and his girlfriend, Caroline.
A motley group
, Eva thinks as she undresses, slips into the hot, scented water,
but they’ll rub along all right, won’t they?
She closes her eyes, leans her head back against the enamel. To think, their first proper dinner party in their new house: how absurdly grown-up it feels.

By half past seven, all but Ewan and Caroline are there. (Ewan is always late.) They sip dangerously strong gin martinis in the living-room: Jim has only recently taken to mixing cocktails, and hasn’t quite got to grips with the concept of measures. By eight o’clock, when Ewan and Caroline finally arrive and they can sit down to eat, they are all more than a little merry. Penelope tells a story about the first time she and Eva tried to cook spaghetti at Newnham, on their one-ring electric hob: ‘We went next door for cocktails – Linda Spencer had a bottle of gin – and forgot all about dinner. When we came back, all the water had boiled off, and the pasta was charred to a crisp. Then, of course, the fire alarm went off …’

Ewan, who has already finished his martini, makes Caroline blush by saying that she recently tried to serve him an uncooked egg, having forgotten to set the pan to boil. So then Sophia – a small-featured, rather dainty former debutante, with an unexpectedly rough-edged sense of humour – admits to the room that when Frank last offered to cook dinner ‘to give her a night off’, he presented her with a slab of raw mince, topped with an egg, and tried to persuade her it was steak tartare. ‘I might have been convinced,’ Sophia says, a forkful of fish pie hovering between her plate and her red-painted mouth, ‘had I not recognised the mince as the stuff I’d put out that morning for the dog. It was off – I mean, really
grey
– and oh, the smell …’

Soon, the fish pie is finished, the trifle bowls scraped clean, and six bottles of wine stand empty on the dining-room table. After coffee, Jim suggests that they play some records. He and Frank scrap good-naturedly about what to put on – before becoming the
Courier
’s women’s editor (a title that surely only a man as vivid and masculine as Frank could pull off), he was its arts editor, and still reserves a particular affection for jazz. Frank carries the day, and they all dance clumsily around the room to the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s slinking saxophone.

Later, Penelope and Eva, warm from the dancing, duck out to the garden for a cigarette. It is a cool, clear night, stars littering the sky above the city’s sodium glow.

‘Great party, Eva darling,’ Penelope says, balancing unsteadily on her heels. ‘I think I might be a bit drunk.’

‘Maybe just a bit, Pen. Me too.’

They lean back against the brickwork, watching the burning orange tips of their cigarettes. ‘Loved your column this week. Really
funny
, Eva. Funny and clever. Reckon they’ll keep on with it?’

Eva smiles; she still can’t quite believe her idea for a column has come good. She had pitched the idea to Frank just a few weeks before: ‘An A to Z of modern marriage,’ she said over a Friday-evening shandy in the Cheshire Cheese, ‘covering everything from “arguments” to “zygote”. We could call it “The Married Woman’s Alphabet”.’

Frank had spluttered into his beer. ‘It’s a great idea, Eva. I’ll broach it with the Man Upstairs, but I think you’d do a great job. Just promise me not to use “zygote”.’

Now, to Penelope, she says, ‘I don’t know. Hope so. Ask Frank.’

‘Maybe I will.’ Penelope beams, her teeth bright white in the darkness. ‘No, all right, maybe not tonight.’ She tilts her head, lays it on Eva’s shoulder. ‘Love this house. It’s perfect.
You’re
perfect.’

‘Nothing’s perfect,’ Eva says, but she is thinking,
Perhaps this is as close to perfect as things will ever come. Right here, right now
,
there is absolutely nothing that I would want to change
.

‘Of course we all adore David. He really is so marvellously talented, isn’t he?’

The actress – Eva is struggling to remember her name: Julia, perhaps, but she doesn’t want to chance saying it aloud – stares boldly at Eva, as if challenging her to disagree. Her eyes are an arresting shade of pale blue, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, ringed by a thick, upswept line of black kohl.

‘Oh yes,’ Eva says absently: her mind is on the kitchen, where she has forgotten a tray of sausage rolls; too much longer in the oven and they’ll be good only for the bin. ‘Marvellously talented. Will you excuse me?’

She makes her way across the crowded living-room, smiling at their guests – ‘Thank you so much for coming’ – as she goes. Her bump is impossible to disguise now, even beneath this great tent of a dress; it’s not that she wishes to hide it, but she’d like to feel less ungainly, less like an oversized obstacle around which groups of guests are forced to part and re-form. That actress – not Julia, Eva recalls too late, but
Juliet
: she played Jessica to David’s Lorenzo in
The Merchant of Venice
at the Old Vic – had actually wrinkled her nose at Eva, as if she were emitting an unpleasant smell.

‘Oh, goodness,
look
at you, so enormous!’ Juliet had said, without a trace of warmth. Eva had wanted to wrest the cocktail glass from that dainty little hand and tip its contents over her head; the effort of not doing so had exhausted her reserves of self-control.

In the kitchen, Harry Janus is placing his hand on the thigh of a very young girl Eva doesn’t recognise. He springs back as she enters, awards her one of his most charming smiles.

‘Our gracious hostess,’ he says. ‘In full bloom.’

Eva ignores him. She moves over to the oven, bends to remove the tray. The woman hovers behind her, not offering to help.

‘When are you due?’ she asks shyly. ‘Have you been very sick? My sister felt rotten the whole time with her first. It wasn’t enough to put her off having another, though.’

She seems sweet enough
, Eva thinks, as she transfers the hot rolls onto a serving-plate.
She’s not to know what Harry’s like. Not yet, anyway.