The Versions of Us (15 page)

Now, in the pub garden, it is still warm, the night velvety, smelling of beer and cut grass. The teachers are a little drunk, bursts of laughter punctuating their horror stories about pupils they have known and loathed. Ada, the oldest of the group, recounts her memory of the time a notorious fifth-former sent a series of obscene notes to Alan’s secretary, purporting to be from Alan himself. The poor woman, she says, was frequently seen crying at her desk until the deception was finally discovered. ‘I’ve never seen Alan so furious,’ Ada concludes with an approving nod. ‘It was like a scene from – what is that film with the angry gorilla?
King Kong
.’

Jim is quiet, holding Eva’s hand under the table. She thinks of his paintings, arranged neatly on the white walls: the cut and swipe of them, their vivid swirls and streaks, caught inside trim black frames. On their return from New York, he had seemed galvanised, excited once more by the possibilities of paint. Out in his studio at the bottom of the garden, he had begun working furiously – in the evenings, and at weekends, after starting at the school; the private boys’ school in Dulwich, whose headmaster, Alan, seemed delighted to have Jim on the staff. Now, two years on, Jim is painting with less intensity – on Sundays, on the odd evening, when he isn’t too tired – and the work he is producing is moving deeper and deeper into abstraction. But where, with other painters, that abstraction becomes its own language, in Jim’s work the meaning remains knotted, indistinct. Really, Eva believes he should return to his earlier, figurative style: he is wonderful at portraits and landscapes; many of his early paintings, including two of her, line the walls of their house.

She tried saying this to him once, as tactfully as she could, but he turned on her, snarled. ‘Nobody wants to see
technique
any more, Eva. For God’s sake – can’t you see that stuff’s way out of date now? The world’s moved on.’ Eva knew perfectly well what he meant by ‘that stuff’ – his father’s paintings. She had rarely seen Jim so riled, and she did not press him further.

At closing time, they walk home: their car is parked at the school, but they are both too drunk to drive, and it’s not a long walk, though it is mainly uphill. Halfway, they pause to catch their breath. The suburban street is dark, silent, the lights of the city spread out below.

‘It went well, I think,’ Jim says. ‘Maybe I’ll get Adam Browning to come and have a look.’

Adam Browning is Ewan’s gallerist: Ewan has kindly told him about Jim, and Browning has written him a note, offering to come and see Jim’s next exhibition.

‘Good idea,’ Eva says. She leans forward to kiss him. Jim loops his arm around her shoulders, and they walk on, uphill, towards home.

The exhibition is in an old warehouse, down by the docks. The building has no name, and Jim wonders how he will ever find it: the flyer – rough, hand-drawn, the letters curling around the image of a woman, hair thick and flowing as a pre-Raphaelite muse – says only ‘Warehouse 59’.

But as he nears the river – still, glassy, mirroring the tall, lumbering bulks of ships and abandoned grain-stores – he sees he needn’t have worried: there is a chain of people leading the way across the cobblestones. They are around his age, the women in long skirts, their hair loose, much like the picture on the flyer; the men in jeans, bearded, their shirts louchely unbuttoned. ‘Hippies’, they are calling them in San Francisco – and even in Bristol, now. They are shouting to one another, and laughing: loud, peacock-bright. Jim falls into step with them, wishing he’d had time to change out of his suit.

‘Hey, man,’ somebody says. ‘Going to the show?’

The man is nodding at him, eyes half closed, his mouth carrying a slow, private smile. Stoned, of course – or something. Jim nods back, and the man says, ‘Groovy. Should be a blast.’

As they skirt the dockside, passing piles of pallet boxes, container stacks, the rusting hulls of old passenger ferries, Jim can feel his mood lifting: he is sloughing off the working week, the dust and grime of it, the hours spent poring over statutes, reading title deeds, sitting in airless rooms with fat-necked businessmen. He likes the law no more than he ever did, and yet it seems to like him: he is good at his job, more than he cares to be; and the less he cares for it, the more he seems to succeed.

Perhaps he would like his work better were he not navigating his days at Arndale & Thompson from inside the dreamlike fog of the chronically sleep-deprived. For months, his nights have been broken by his mother’s unpredictable wanderings. One day a few weeks ago, he woke at four. The flat was unnaturally silent: he rose, saw Vivian’s room empty, dressed, rushed out onto the dark Clifton streets, and found her walking up and down Whiteladies Road in her nightdress, sobbing, shivering. He wrapped her in his jacket, walked her home, and put her to bed like a tired child.

In that moment, Jim felt something shift in him: he resolved to care a little less. Whether his mother has noticed the change, he can’t say – and yet things have started to improve. Her doctor has prescribed a new medication: the high dosage leaves Vivian puffy-eyed and lethargic, but it seems to be evening out her extremes, and she has begun to sleep through the night. And anything is better, surely, than hospital, than ECT. (Jim can remember, quite vividly, going to visit her that first time, after his father’s death. The cool white corridors. The kindly nurse who had poured his orange squash into a plastic cup. The terrible, uncomprehending blankness of his mother’s face.)

His sleeplessness is not aided by the fact that he has begun painting again: late at night, usually; Bob Dylan or Duke Ellington on the record player, turned down low. His time in New York seems to have reinvigorated him. The other lawyers there were fast-talking, obsessed with money, cars, drink. Jim had nothing in common with them; he had spent most of his time at MoMA – the British sculptor Richard Salles, whose work Jim had seen before in Bristol, had a retrospective there; he went along, intrigued, and returned twice more, drinking in the swoop and thrust of bronze, granite, poured concrete. Or he wandered the streets of the Village, peering into gallery windows, walking through open doorways and finding himself part of some spontaneous ‘happening’. Once, in a basement gallery on Christopher Street, he stood among a small, solemn crowd as a young woman removed her clothes and began, slowly and reverently, to cover herself in liquid clay.

At first, painting in his room in the Bristol flat (how he hates the place, longs to get away; but while her night-time escapades continue, Jim knows how dangerous it would be for Vivian to be left alone), he feared his mother’s reaction; he remembered, too well, the times he’d come home from the office to find his canvases spoiled, his oil paints ruined. But she has not reacted with the vitriol he was expecting. Last weekend, she even came into his room, sat on his bed and watched him working, her legs curled under her like a girl’s. He let her stay, though he hates an audience. After a while, she said, ‘You’re good, you know, darling. You’ll never be as good as your father. But you’re really not bad at all.’

Warehouse 59 is easy to spot: someone has painted flowers over the rough brick, sent them spilling from the window frames, over the chipped pediments. Inside is a large open space, divided by an iron staircase. The walls are lined with paintings, the stone floor crowded with sculptures and installations: to Jim’s right is an old supermarket trolley, twisted and soldered into an animalistic skeleton; to his left, a mound of rubble on a plinth.

Jim sees right away that most of the art is second-rate – though as soon as the thought has formed, his confidence deserts him: who is he to judge, after all? A solicitor, a Sunday painter. The son of a great artist, but a man too fearful, too tied to the ebb and flow of his mother’s illness, to lay any claim to the word ‘artist’ himself.

He takes a beer from a trestle table at one end of the room, in exchange for a few coins, and begins a slow circuit of the room, aware that he recognises no one: he had seen the flyer in the White Lion, left Peter and the others finishing their first round. He asked Peter to come, but Sheila was expecting him for dinner, and it wasn’t quite his thing.

Jim can’t deny that he is jealous, sometimes, of his friend’s marriage: of their easy intimacy; of the instinctive protectiveness, the love, that he senses in Peter every time his wife’s name is mentioned. There have been women, of course – in New York, a secretary named Chiara, Italian-American, with a wide, generous body; Diane, a student actress, pale-haired, thin; several others in Bristol, including, most recently, a primary-school teacher named Annie. They have spent several months circling each other, neither quite ready to show their hand, though Jim knows, with what is surely insufferable arrogance but also nothing less than the truth, that Annie is falling for him, and that he doesn’t, won’t ever, feel the same. Sometimes, when he looks at her, it is as if he is looking at someone else: a woman with a small, intelligent face, dark eyes, skin lightly tanned, as if spun under a glaze.

Eva. Eva Katz – or should that be Curtis now? Married to the man they’re calling the next great British actor, heir to Olivier. Jim had spoken to her at the Algonquin for what, half an hour, before she rushed away? He had asked someone – that pretty girl in the white dress – where Eva was going; looking at him curiously, she had told him that Eva’s daughter was unwell. At the mention of the child, Jim had felt shame wash over him – what kind of man was he to sit exchanging intimacies with another man’s wife, some poor sick child’s mother? And yet he had done so, and her face has stayed with him; and her words.
Are you still painting? … No … Well, Jim Taylor, Lewis Taylor’s son, I’d say you’d better get back to it.

One painting holds his attention more than the rest. It is that most unfashionable of things, a seascape – the canvas layered in shades of blue and grey; the merging wash of sky and sea. Jim stands in front of it, trying to place the view: there is a crop of rock in the foreground, sprigged with coarse, bleached grass.
Cornwall
, he thinks, and a voice behind him says, as if in response, ‘St Ives.’

He turns. The woman is tall – her eyes are almost level with his own – with clear, pale skin. Her long brown hair is parted neatly at the centre. She is wearing a loose white top that reminds him of his father’s old painting smocks. Blue jeans and brown suede boots, fringed like a cowboy’s.

‘Helena,’ she says, as if he’d asked her name. ‘That one’s mine.’

‘Is it? It’s very good.’ He gives his own name, extends his hand. She doesn’t take it, just smiles. ‘What are you – a banker?’

He feels his cheeks colour. ‘A solicitor. But don’t worry. Dullness isn’t contagious. At least, I don’t think it is.’

‘No. Maybe not.’ She regards him for a moment. She has blue eyes, a wide, sensual mouth; a kind of freshness seems to come from her: the scent of clean linen, sea air. ‘Are you hungry? There’s food upstairs.’

They eat cross-legged on the floor, in an upstairs room hung with cheap Indian tapestries and dyed cotton sheets. One corner of the room is equipped with a small kitchenette; in another stands a record player, balanced on a stack of bricks. Someone has put on music, turned it up: Jim can hardly hear what Helena is saying, but he enjoys watching her lips move, and the way she eats, neat and efficient, not a mouthful going to waste.

Later, they move outside, where the music dulls, and the quayside is dark, the empty boats casting long shadows across the water. Helena has a joint in her bag, ready-rolled. She lights it, offers it to Jim, and they sit down on the cobblestones, backs against the warehouse brick, smoking. She lives in Cornwall, she says; not in St Ives itself, but just outside – they have a community there, an artists’ colony. The old one in St Ives is dying, killed off by in-fighting and old age. Theirs is a new way, free of ego, just artists living together, sharing thoughts, ideas, techniques. No art-world cronies telling them what to paint, how to think, how to sell their work: just a crumbling old house, a vegetable garden to tend, the limitless freedom of sea and sky.

Jim says it sounds wonderful, idyllic – a world away from painting at an easel in the spare room of his mother’s flat. And Helena looks at him and says that it is wonderful – that he should come, stay for a while: visitors are always welcome.

He says he might just do that, though he’s not sure he means it. Not yet.

When he kisses her, she tastes of garlic, tobacco and the sweet, cloying undertow of marijuana – and, yes, he is sure of it, though later he will admit it was fanciful, there is also the soft, salty tang of the sea.