The Versions of Us (12 page)

After the show, the producers throw a first-night party at the Algonquin.

It is, by British standards, a swanky affair: liveried waiters, a jazz trio, an apparently endless flow of champagne. The Oak Room’s wood-panelled walls lend the occasion an intimate, faintly medieval air; a series of heavy iron chandeliers punctuates the thickly plastered ceiling, their dim, guttering bulbs offering the guests the flattery of semi-darkness.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward stand together in one corner; in another, Rex Harrison bends his head towards Burt Lancaster, his crisp, theatrical baritone faintly audible beneath the general hubbub. At the centre of it all are Harry, David and Juliet, the play’s young director and stars. David’s hand is light in the dip of Juliet’s bare back as they make a slow, beaming circuit of the room.

Eva stands a little apart, holding a glass of champagne. Her shoes are rubbing – she bought them yesterday at Bloomingdale’s, along with her floor-length gown. She had left Sarah with David’s grandparents on the Upper East Side. It was the first time she’d been away from her daughter for more than half an hour, and she could barely concentrate for worrying, so she chose the first dress she tried on. Now, catching her reflection in the bar’s mirrored siding, Eva wonders whether she made a bad decision: the green silk has gathered in unflattering ridges across her stomach, still soft from her pregnancy. She stands a little straighter.

‘It went really well, didn’t it?’ Rose is at Eva’s elbow, bridelike in a draped white dress; it occurs to Eva that she may be trying to drop Harry a hint. But that is unkind: she likes Rose, is glad that her relationship with Harry seems to have stuck. Over the last month, marooned with Sarah in the tiny walk-up the show’s American producers rented for them – David refused to stay with his grandparents, insisted he needed his own space, though their disappointment was palpable – Rose has become a friend, perhaps Eva’s only friend in this maddening, beautiful city, with its neon gaudiness and sidewalk awnings and shuffling, unheeded beggars. On the long walks Eva has begun to take, pushing Sarah in what the Americans so charmingly call a ‘stroller’, the beggars are the only people who seem to have the time to stop and talk. A few weeks ago, while watching the pigeons with Sarah in Washington Square, Eva had been accosted by a tiny, wizened old woman wearing blue plastic bags for shoes. ‘Watch yourself, missy,’ the woman had hissed as Eva pushed Sarah briskly away. ‘I might
bite
.’ Eva has been unable to quite shift the woman’s face from her mind ever since.

‘Yes, I don’t think it could have gone any better,’ she says now. ‘Though I did worry John might miss his cue – you know when he asks David for a light, just before the curtain? He was a few seconds late.’

Rose stares at her, impressed. ‘I didn’t notice. You know the script better than they do.’ She sips her champagne. ‘But of course, that’s your job. To read carefully, I mean. To notice things.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Or it was.’

Since having Sarah just over ten months ago, Eva has given up her script reading: the Royal Court announced, soon after Sarah was born, that they were taking someone on full-time, and she has not made enquiries at other theatres. She has been happy to lose herself completely in motherhood: in its daily routine, minutely attuned to her daughter’s needs. And yet a part of her still wonders – especially in the sleepless hours of the night, when David buries his head beneath the pillow, and she must walk up and down the apartment’s tiny living-room, quieting Sarah as best she can – whether it will be enough. It is certainly not how she had imagined her future with David: she had seen them rising in tandem, his success as an actor complementing hers as a writer. And yet now, her free moments are so few, and when she does sit down to write, her mind feels loose, ragged, full of holes, and she is filled with the conviction that nothing she has to say is worth committing to paper. When she tries to raise the subject – to seek anew the warmth of David’s all-encompassing confidence – his answer is usually, ‘Well, darling – you have Sarah to think about now, don’t you? I’m sure you’ll find time to go back to writing when she’s older.’

Eva, has, in a weak, exhausted moment, confessed her frustration to Rose – who says now, as if reading her mind, ‘You could leave Sarah with David’s grandparents again, you know. Give you some time to get on with your writing.’

Eva looks over at David, now reaching out to shake Lancaster’s hand. Juliet is still standing close to him. Eva watches Lancaster’s eyes slide from the perfect oval of her face to the low V-shape of her neckline.

‘Or couldn’t David mind her sometimes? He’ll be free in the daytime now, won’t he? They all will. You could leave Sarah with David, go off to the library.’

Eva considers this: leaving her daughter in David’s care; tripping off down Fifth Avenue to the public library, a whole day stretching out in front of her; coming home to a clean apartment, a happy, rested baby, dinner bubbling away on the stove (or at least a couple of boxes of Chinese takeaway). It is unimaginable; David loves his daughter, there’s no doubting that, but he’s about as capable of changing her nappy as flying to the moon.

They are interrupted by Harry, approaching with a man Eva doesn’t recognise. His hair is neatly slicked, his suit charcoal-grey, loose-fitting, a little square. Not an actor, then – a money-man. But as they come closer, Eva reconsiders; there is something oddly familiar about the cast of his face.

‘Darlings.’ Harry is exuberant, high on his success. He slips an arm around Rose’s waist. ‘Here’s someone I’d like you both to meet. Jim Taylor. Jim, this is my darling English Rose – and this is Eva, David’s wife.’

Jim offers his hand to Rose, a little formally; stifling a giggle, she leans towards him and kisses him once on each cheek. ‘Much better than a boring old handshake, isn’t it?’

His cheeks colouring, he turns to Eva. As she also leans in to kiss him, she notices that his eyes are a very deep blue, almost violet, and framed by lashes longer than her own. In a woman, the effect would be called beautiful. In a man, it is a little unsettling.

Harry’s attention is already wandering; his duty done, he steps back, seeking more useful company. ‘You’ll look after Jim for me, won’t you, darlings?’ He turns away without waiting for a reply.

There is a brief, rather awkward silence. Then Jim says to Eva, ‘David was great tonight. It’s a brilliant play.’

The man, Jim, has a very straight gaze, made even more intense by the uncommon colour of his eyes. ‘Yes, he
is
good in it, isn’t he?’ Another short pause. ‘And what about you – how do you know Harry? Are you an actor?’

‘Oh no, nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid. I’m a solicitor.’ He lifts his palms, as if in apology. ‘Harry and I were at school together – and Cambridge, though I didn’t see so much of him there.’

‘Which college? I was at Newnham.’

‘Clare.’ Jim looks at Eva again, more closely, this time. ‘Do you know, I have the strangest feeling that we’ve met.’

Rose gives an exaggerated sigh. ‘
Please
don’t start one of those Cambridge conversations. I can’t bear it. I get enough of it with Harry.’

Eva laughs. ‘Sorry. You’re right. It’s tedious.’

For a few minutes, they talk of other things – Rose’s modelling; Sarah; what Jim is doing in New York (a two-month exchange programme, he says, organised to ‘further Anglo-American relations’). Then Rose, catching sight of Harry as he edges closer to a young woman in a tight black cocktail dress, slips away. ‘Nice to have met you, Jim.’

A passing waiter stops to fill their glasses. When he has moved on, Jim says, ‘I wish I could work out where I’ve seen you before.’

‘I know. It’s so odd, isn’t it? I can’t work it out either.’ Now that they are alone, Eva suddenly feels a little shy.

They are silent for a moment, and then he says, ‘Would you like to sit down?’

‘God, yes. These shoes are killing me.’

‘I thought so. You’ve been shifting from foot to foot ever since I came over.’

‘Have I?’ She watches him, alert to the possibility of ridicule, but he is smiling again. ‘How embarrassing.’

‘Not at all.’

They choose a corner booth. Discreetly, Eva kicks off her shoes. There is another silence – a little charged, now that they have chosen to separate themselves from the rest of the room. Jim breaks it. ‘How long have you known David? Did you meet at Cambridge?’

‘Yes. We were in a play at the ADC:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. I was Hermia; he was Lysander.’

‘So you were set on acting too?’

‘No, not really. My friend Penelope was auditioning, so I went along for the ride. It was good fun.’ The dry, chalky smell of the old store room in King’s, where they had rehearsed; drinking warm shandy in the Eagle courtyard afterwards; David taller, brighter, somehow
more
than any man Eva had ever seen. ‘I thought he was insufferably arrogant at first.’

‘But he won you round.’

‘He did.’ Eva falters, cautious of disloyalty. Carefully, she says, ‘What about you? Are you married?’

‘No. I’m rather … Things have been difficult. My mother, she’s …’ Jim is looking at her again, with that disconcerting, unwavering stare, as if he’s weighing up how much to tell. ‘She’s not well. The last time she was discharged from hospital, the doctors said she shouldn’t be living alone. My father died, you see.’ He pauses, and she senses how much it costs him to go on. ‘My aunt went to stay while I finished my law training in Guildford, but then it was down to me. So I moved back to Bristol to live with her.’

‘I see.’ On the other side of the room, the jazz trio has started up again, the saxophone rising mournfully above the soft shimmer of hi-hat and bass. ‘And how is she now?’

‘Not good.’ Jim’s expression shifts, and Eva regrets having asked. ‘Not good at all. She’s back in hospital. I wouldn’t have come all this way, but … Actually, her doctor said I should come. He thought it would be a tonic. For me, anyway.’

‘And has it been?’

‘Yes. Yes, I think it has. To be honest, I’m feeling better than I have in a good while.’

They move on to New York: the city’s unstoppable pace; the dizzying height of the buildings; the eeriness of the steam-plumes rising ghostlike from the pavements. (‘The first time I saw it,’ Eva says, ‘I was sure the subway must be on fire.’) Jim is impressed by the fact that Eva and David are staying in Greenwich Village – his own apartment is in Midtown, boxy and nondescript, a few blocks from the law firm. But he has, he says, spent most of his free time in the Village, drinking it all in. ‘There are some amazing galleries – in basements, shopfronts, old garages. All kinds of work, too – sculpture, installations, performance art. Even dance, over at the Judson church on Washington Square. There’s a real vibe.’

‘Perhaps that’s where I saw you, then. In the Village.’

He nods. ‘Yes. Perhaps that’s where it was.’

From there, they sidestep to Jim’s father – Eva saw his last retrospective at the Royal Academy – and to Jim himself: his own love of painting, the fact that he had always wanted to go to art school rather than Cambridge, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. ‘My father died when I was ten – well, perhaps you knew that, if you know his work. After that, she got a lot worse. She sold the house in Sussex, almost all of his paintings. She couldn’t bear to think that I’d turn out like him.’

A waiter is hovering by their table; they are silent while he tops up their glasses. Then Jim says, ‘There was a woman, you see. Sonia.’ His finger traces the stem of his glass. ‘In fact, there’d been a lot of women.’

As they talk, Eva has the sense that she is drifting further and further from the room, into a borderless place where time fractures, loosens, and there is only this man, this conversation, this inexplicable sense of profound connection. There is no other way she can describe it, though she is not yet trying to describe it to herself – she is simply here, intensely aware of the moment (the nearness of him, the soft rise and fall of his voice) as the rest of the world drops away.

She tells him about her writing, about her faltering attempt to finish a book: describes the plot, the characters, the setting. ‘It’s about working women, I suppose,’ she says. ‘Four women who meet at Cambridge, and then take a house together in London. Careers, friendship, big dreams.’ She pauses, offers him a smile. ‘And love, of course.’

He returns her smile. ‘Sounds fascinating. Do you have a title yet?’

Eva shakes her head, and tells him that she is worried she will never finish it, that she is too busy with Sarah; but that, if she is truly honest, she thinks she is afraid to finish and then find it isn’t good enough.

At this, Jim leans closer, his uncommon blue eyes fierce. His hand meets the tabletop with a dull thud. ‘Good enough for whom, Eva? Surely it only ever needs to be good enough for you.’

It is, in its glorious simplicity, possibly the most interesting thing anyone has ever said to her. Eva sits back against the leather banquette, fighting the desire to reach out and touch him, to take his hand in hers.

‘And you?’ she says with a new urgency. ‘Are you still painting?’

‘No.’ She can see how much it pains him to tell her the truth. ‘Not really. I’m just …’ He sighs. ‘I really have no excuse.’

‘Well, Jim Taylor, Lewis Taylor’s son,’ Eva says quietly, ‘I’d say you’d better get back to it too.’

‘What
are
you doing, darling, hiding out over here?’ David, looming tall over their booth, extends his hand to Jim. ‘I’m not sure we’ve met. David Curtis. I see you’ve been taking care of my wife.’

Jim gets to his feet, shakes David’s hand. He is a little shorter, and his grey suit looks decidedly shabby next to David’s slim-cut Savile Row, but he has no trouble meeting David’s eye. ‘Jim Taylor. I’d say that she was taking care of me. I don’t know anyone here other than Harry.’

David does not remove his gaze from Jim’s face. ‘Harry, eh? How do you know my old mucker?’