The Versions of Us (2 page)

‘Damn,’ Eva says. She presses down on the pedals, but her front tyre is jittering like a nervous horse. She brakes, dismounts, kneels to make her diagnosis. The little dog hovers penitently at a distance, barks as if in apology, then scuttles off after its owner – who is, by now, a good deal ahead, a departing figure in a beige trench coat.

There is the nail, lodged above a jagged rip, at least two inches long. Eva presses the lips of the tear and air emerges in a hoarse wheeze. The tyre’s already almost flat: she’ll have to walk the bicycle back to college, and she’s already late for supervision. Professor Farley will assume she hasn’t done her essay on the
Four Quartets
, when actually it has kept her up for two full nights – it’s in her satchel now, neatly copied, five pages long, excluding footnotes. She is rather proud of it, was looking forward to reading it aloud, watching old Farley from the corner of her eye as he leaned forward, twitching his eyebrows in the way he does when something really interests him.

‘
Scheiße
,’ Eva says: in a situation of this gravity, only German seems to do.

‘Are you all right there?’

She is still kneeling, the bicycle weighing heavily against her side. She examines the nail, wonders whether it would do more harm than good to take it out. She doesn’t look up.

‘Fine, thanks. It’s just a puncture.’

The passer-by, whoever he is, is silent. She assumes he has walked on, but then his shadow – the silhouette of a man, hatless, reaching into his jacket pocket – begins to shift across the grass towards her. ‘Do let me help. I have a kit here.’

She looks up now. The sun is dipping behind a row of trees – just a few weeks into Michaelmas term and already the days are shortening – and the light is behind him, darkening his face. His shadow, now attached to feet in scuffed brown brogues, appears grossly tall, though the man seems of average height. Pale brown hair, in need of a cut; a Penguin paperback in his free hand. Eva can just make out the title on the spine,
Brave New World
, and she remembers, quite suddenly, an afternoon – a wintry Sunday; her mother making
Vanillekipferl
in the kitchen, the sound of her father’s violin drifting up from the music room – when she had lost herself completely in Huxley’s strange, frightening vision of the future.

She lays the bicycle down carefully on its side, gets to her feet. ‘That’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid I’ve no idea how to use one. The porter’s boy always fixes mine.’

‘I’m sure.’ His tone is light, but he’s frowning, searching the other pocket. ‘I may have spoken too soon, I’m afraid. I’ve no idea where it is. So sorry. I usually have it with me.’

‘Even when you’re not cycling?’

‘Yes.’ He’s more a boy than a man: about her own age, and a student; he has a college scarf – a bee’s black and yellow stripes – looped loosely round his neck. The town boys don’t sound like him, and they surely don’t carry copies of
Brave New World
. ‘Be prepared and all that. And I usually do. Cycle, I mean.’

He smiles, and Eva 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; she is finding it difficult to meet his gaze.

‘Are you German, then?’

‘No.’ She speaks too sharply; he looks away, embarrassed.

‘Oh. Sorry. Heard you swear.
Scheiße
.’

‘You speak German?’

‘Not really. But I can say “shit” in ten languages.’

Eva laughs: she shouldn’t have snapped. ‘My parents are Austrian.’

‘
Ach so.
’

‘You
do
speak German!’

‘
Nein, mein Liebling.
Only a little.’

His eyes catch hers and Eva is gripped by the curious sensation that they have met before, though his name is a blank. ‘Are you reading English? Who’s got you on to Huxley? I didn’t think they let any of us read anything more modern than
Tom Jones
.’

He looks down at the paperback, shakes his head. ‘Oh no – Huxley’s just for fun. I’m reading law. But we are still
allowed
to read novels, you know.’

She smiles. ‘Of course.’ She can’t, then, have seen him around the English faculty; perhaps they were introduced at a party once. David knows so many people – what was the name of that friend of his Penelope danced with at the Caius May Ball, before she took up with Gerald? He had bright blue eyes, but surely not quite like these. ‘You do look familiar. Have we met?’

The man regards her again, his head on one side. He’s pale, very English-looking, a smattering of freckles littering his nose. She bets they gather and thicken at the first glance of sun, and that he hates it, curses his fragile northern skin.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I feel as if we have, but I’m sure I’d remember your name.’

‘It’s Eva. Edelstein.’

‘Well.’ He smiles again. ‘I’d definitely remember that. I’m Jim Taylor. Second year, Clare. You at Newnham?’

She nods. ‘Second year. And I’m about to get in serious trouble for missing a supervision, just because some idiot left a nail lying around.’

‘I’m meant to be in a supervision too. But to be honest, I was thinking of not going.’

Eva eyes him appraisingly; she has little time for those students – men, mostly, and the most expensively educated men at that – who regard their degrees with lazy, self-satisfied contempt. She hadn’t taken him for one of them. ‘Is that something you make a habit of?’

He shrugs. ‘Not really. I wasn’t feeling well. But I’m suddenly feeling a good deal better.’

They are silent for a moment, each feeling they ought to make a move to leave, but not quite wanting to. On the path, a girl in a navy duffel coat hurries past, throws them a quick glance. Then, recognising Eva, she looks again. It’s that Girton girl, the one who played Emilia to David’s Iago at the ADC. She’d had her sights set on David: any fool could see it. But Eva doesn’t want to think about David now.

‘Well,’ Eva says. ‘I suppose I’d better be getting back. See if the porter’s boy can fix my bike.’

‘Or you could let me fix it for you. We’re much closer to Clare than Newnham. I’ll find the kit, fix your puncture, and then you can let me take you for a drink.’

She watches his face, and it strikes Eva, with a certainty that she can’t possibly explain – she wouldn’t even want to try – that this is the moment: the moment after which nothing will ever be quite the same again. She could –
should
– say no, turn away, wheel her bicycle through the late-afternoon streets to the college gates, let the porter’s boy come blushing to her aid, offer him a four-bob tip. But that is not what she does. Instead, she turns her bicycle in the opposite direction and walks beside this boy, this Jim, their twin shadows nipping at their heels, merging and overlapping on the long grass.

In the dressing-room, she says to David, ‘I almost ran over a dog with my bike.’

David squints at her in the mirror; he is applying a thick layer of white pan-stick to his face. ‘When?’

‘On my way to Farley’s.’ Odd that she should have remembered it now. It was alarming: the little white dog at the edge of the path hadn’t moved away as she approached, but skittered towards her, wagging its stump of a tail. She’d prepared to swerve, but at the very last moment – barely inches from her front wheel – the dog had suddenly bounded away with a frightened yelp.

Eva had stopped, shaken; someone called out, ‘I say – look where you’re going, won’t you?’ She turned, saw a man in a beige trench coat a few feet away, glaring at her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, though what she meant to say was,
You should really keep your damn dog on a lead
.

‘Are you all right there?’ Another man was approaching from the opposite direction: a boy, really, about her age, a college scarf looped loosely over his tweed jacket.

‘Quite all right, thank you,’ she said primly. Their eyes met briefly as she remounted – his an uncommonly dark blue, framed by long, girlish lashes – and for a second she was sure she knew him, so sure that she opened her mouth to frame a greeting. But then, just as quickly, she doubted herself, said nothing, and pedalled on. As soon as she arrived at Professor Farley’s rooms and began to read out her essay on the
Four Quartets
, the whole thing slipped from her mind.

‘Oh, Eva,’ David says now. ‘You do get yourself into the most absurd situations.’

‘Do I?’ She frowns, feeling the distance between his version of her – disorganised, endearingly scatty – and her own. ‘It wasn’t my fault. The stupid dog ran right at me.’

But he isn’t listening: he’s staring hard at his reflection, blending the make-up down onto his neck. The effect is both clownish and melancholy, like one of those French Pierrots.

‘Here,’ she says, ‘you’ve missed a bit.’ She leans forward, rubs at his chin with her hand.

‘Don’t,’ he says sharply, and she moves her hand away.

‘Katz.’ Gerald Smith is at the door, dressed, like David, in a long white robe, his face unevenly smeared with white. ‘Cast warm-up. Oh, hello, Eva. You wouldn’t go and find Pen, would you? She’s hanging around out front.’

She nods at him. To David, she says, ‘I’ll see you afterwards, then. Break a leg.’

He grips her arm as she turns to go, draws her closer. ‘Sorry,’ he whispers. ‘Just nerves.’

‘I know. Don’t be nervous. You’ll be great.’

He
is
great, as always, Eva thinks with relief half an hour later. She is sitting in the house seats, holding her friend Penelope’s hand. For the first few scenes, they are tense, barely able to watch the stage: they look instead at the audience, gauging their reactions, running over the lines they’ve rehearsed so many times.

David, as Oedipus, has a long speech about fifteen minutes in that it took him an age to learn. Last night, after the dress, Eva sat with him until midnight in the empty dressing-room, drilling him over and over, though her essay was only half finished, and she’d have to stay up all night to get it done. Tonight, she can hardly bear to listen, but David’s voice is clear, unfaltering. She watches two men in the row in front lean forward, rapt.

Afterwards, they gather in the bar, drinking warm white wine. Eva and Penelope – tall, scarlet-lipped, shapely; her first words to Eva, whispered across the polished table at matriculation dinner, were, ‘I don’t know about you, but I would
kill
for a smoke’ – stand with Susan Fletcher, whom the director, Harry Janus, has recently thrown over for an older actress he met at a London show.

‘She’s
twenty-five
,’ Susan says. She’s brittle and a little teary, watching Harry through narrowed eyes. ‘I looked up her picture in
Spotlight
– they have a copy in the library, you know. She’s absolutely
gorgeous
. How am I meant to compete?’

Eva and Penelope exchange a discreet glance; their loyalties ought, of course, to lie with Susan, but they can’t help feeling she’s the sort of girl who thrives on such dramas.

‘Just don’t compete,’ Eva says. ‘Retire from the game. Find someone else.’

Susan blinks at her. ‘Easy for you to say. David’s besotted.’

Eva follows Susan’s gaze across the room, to where David is talking to an older man in a waistcoat and hat – not a student, and he hasn’t the dusty air of a don: a London agent, perhaps. He is looking at David like a man who expected to find a penny and has found a crisp pound note. And why not? David is back in civvies now, the collar of his sports jacket arranged just so, his face wiped clean: tall, shining, magnificent.

All through Eva’s first year, the name ‘David Katz’ had travelled the corridors and common rooms of Newnham, usually uttered in an excitable whisper.
He’s at King’s, you know. He’s the spitting image of Rock Hudson. He took Helen Johnson for cocktails
. When they finally met – Eva was Hermia to his Lysander, in an early brush with the stage that confirmed her suspicion that she would never make an actress – she had known he was watching her, waiting for the usual blushes, the coquettish laughter. But she had not laughed; she had found him foppish, self-regarding. And yet David hadn’t seemed to notice; in the Eagle pub after the read-through, he’d asked about her family, her life, with a degree of interest that she began to think might be genuine. ‘You want to be a writer?’ he’d said. ‘What a perfectly wonderful thing.’ He’d quoted whole scenes from
Hancock’s Half Hour
at her with uncanny accuracy, until she couldn’t help but laugh. A few days later, after rehearsals, he’d suggested she let him take her out for a drink, and Eva, with a sudden rush of excitement, had agreed.

That was six months ago now, in Easter term. She hadn’t been sure the relationship would survive the summer – David’s month with his family in Los Angeles (his father was American, had some rather glamorous connection to Hollywood), her fortnight scrabbling around on an archaeological dig near Harrogate (deathly dull, but there’d been time to write in the long twilit hours between dinner and bed). But he wrote often from America, even telephoned; then, when he was back, he came to Highgate for tea, charmed her parents over
Lebkuchen
, took her swimming in the Ponds.