The Versions of Us (26 page)

‘Maybe.’ Sarah shrugs, and in her studied nonchalance Eva has a sudden vision of the adult Sarah will one day be, and the child she herself once was. She wraps her arm around her daughter’s shoulders.

‘What’s that for?’ Sarah says, though she is still young enough to lean in, to rest her head in the dip of her mother’s collarbone.

‘Just because,’ Eva says, and they watch the rushing cityscape, framed by the car window: the white apartment buildings, the bright flashes of shopfronts, and the gleaming domes of Sacré-Coeur, standing sentinel on the hill.

The interviewer is not quite what Jim was expecting.

She is a sensible-looking, solid woman in late middle age, dressed in navy slacks and a pale yellow twinset. Her hair is cropped short, and as she steps from her car – she has just pulled up in the drive; Jim is watching from the front-room window – she looks around with a curiosity she doesn’t bother to disguise.

Jim goes out to meet her, shakes her hand. Her small blue eyes are unblinking beneath untamed, greying brows. ‘Ann Hewitt. You thought I’d be younger, didn’t you?’

Wrong-footed, he smiles. ‘Perhaps. But I’m sure you thought I’d be better-looking.’

Ann Hewitt cocks her head and waits a few seconds, as if deciding whether to allow herself to be amused. ‘Perhaps I did.’

He takes her through to the kitchen, fills the kettle for tea. Helena has left a plate of biscuits on the table, a vase of flowers on the dresser. ‘She’s not an estate agent, Hel,’ Jim said to her before she left; she had been moving around the house since early morning, cleaning, tidying, making good. ‘We don’t have to impress her.’

Helena had looked up at him then, incredulous. ‘Oh, we
do
, Jim,’ she said. ‘And you’re a fool if you think otherwise.’

‘Is nobody home, then?’ Ann Hewitt is standing in front of the housework rota. The names are fewer now – Finn and Delia left last year, after Howard accused Delia of stealing money from the housekeeping for grass – but the duties are as neatly delineated as ever, spooling out in an unending cycle that Jim is beginning to find depressing. In fact, if he is truthful, he has found it depressing for quite a while.

‘Afraid not. It’s market day in St Ives. We have a stall.’ He pours water into two mugs, finds the milk. ‘Do you take sugar?’

‘No.’ From her handbag, the interviewer produces a pencil and a small black notebook. She flips to the first page, and he watches the quick march of her pencil; places a mug on the counter next to her, thinking of how the kitchen must look through her eyes. The ancient stove, so unreliable that they are often reduced to eating cold food for days, even when frost is starching the ground outside. The curtains that Josie tie-dyed and hand-stitched, now badly in need of a clean. The regiment of empty wine bottles on the dresser, hoarded by Simon, who fashions sculptures from fragments of glass (when he can be bothered to rouse himself from his bed). Jim is suddenly grateful to Helena, guilty for chiding her when she was only thinking of him, of all of them. But guilt is so often his overriding feeling towards her, these days, that he is able to suppress the impulse almost as quickly as it appears.

He sips his tea. ‘Shall we go out to the studio?’

‘I wonder …’ Ann Hewitt offers him a thin-lipped smile. ‘Would you give me a little tour of the house, perhaps, while the others are out?’

Jim hesitates. Stephen Hargreaves had insisted he do the interview at home – ‘They’re just keen to see where you work, Jim – nothing salacious.’ But Howard had been furious – had forbidden Jim from doing it, until Jim had quietly reminded Howard that he was
not
his father, and couldn’t forbid him from doing anything; and that Trelawney House was his home, too, and had been for the last five years. ‘Bloody right I’m not your father,’ Howard had thundered back. ‘But if he were here, I’m sure he’d say the same bloody thing – you’re an
artist
, not a celebrity. You seem to be having trouble remembering the distinction.’

They had not spoken for days – though that was not so unusual, now. It was Howard who eventually broke the silence. ‘If you’re set on having this woman in our home, for God’s sake keep her to the kitchen and the studio. Don’t let her wander round, taking it all in, judging us. And get her here on market day. I’m bloody well not going to sit here making small-talk.’

Damn Howard
, Jim thinks now
. Damn his self-importance. Damn his petty bloody rules.

‘Yes, all right,’ he says aloud. ‘I suppose you’ll get a good feel for the place.’

Later, Jim will wonder what on earth he was thinking, showing Ann Hewitt from room to room – as if
he
were a bloody estate agent – answering her questions, so politely, so innocently phrased: ‘So whose bedroom is this?’; ‘Your daughter, Sophie – where does she sleep?’ He had even opened the door to Josie and Simon’s room: they had not pinned back the gaudy, batiked sheet they hung as a curtain, and the room was in semi-darkness, the smell of weed still sweetening the air.

His only excuse, later, will be the one he can’t share with any of them – that he was thinking of Eva. Jim’s mind was full of her, as it is always now – and was especially that morning, when only a few hours stood between him and the moment she would step out from his mind and become real once more.

And so now, Jim barely notices as Ann Hewitt scribbles away in her notebook, is hardly aware of what he is saying as he leads her to the studio. This, at least, is tidy, everything scrubbed and put away: Howard even allowed Cath to sweep up his wood-shavings, to neatly arrange his tools.

As they talk, time seems to warp and bend: when a knock comes at the door, he feels that hours, even days, might have passed. Jim is suddenly alert: this is his cue – pre-arranged, at Howard’s insistence – to ask the interviewer to leave. And it means that Jim will be leaving shortly, too.

He accompanies Ann Hewitt back to her car, where she shakes his hand again, thanks him for his time. ‘You have a very interesting place here,’ she says as she climbs into the driver’s seat. ‘Our readers will be fascinated, I’m sure.’

He waves her off, thinking nothing of her parting words. He will think nothing more of Ann Hewitt at all until weeks later, when the article is spread across the kitchen table, sending its shockwaves out across the room.

Josie has prepared a Spanish omelette for lunch. Jim sits, eats, dismisses their curiosity about the interviewer with a vague, ‘Oh, it was fine, I think.’ Sophie climbs onto his knee, and he feeds her forkfuls of omelette, though he can feel Helena’s irritation: she prefers Sophie to feed herself, but he loves to sit like this, carrying his daughter’s small weight, pressing his nose to her head, inhaling the sweet baby-smell of her hair.

With Sophie, Jim’s feelings of guilt are stronger than they are with Helena, more difficult to ignore. Guilt about raising her here, at the colony – a place that had once seemed so liberating, but is now beginning to seem like a dreadful place to raise a child. At two and a half, Sophie is becoming needy, difficult: at night, she often climbs from her cot, walks wailing from room to room until Jim – or, more usually, Helena – staggers sleepily from their bed to find her, then settles her under the covers between them. And there are so many lurking dangers: knives left out in the kitchen overnight; the terrible drop of the cliff-edge, and the sharp, unforgiving rocks below.

Until recently, Sophie was allowed to wander in and out of the studio at will; but one day in January, she dipped her hand in Jim’s oil paints, and stamped multicoloured prints all over one of Howard’s driftwood sculptures. Jim had found it hilarious, but Howard most definitely hadn’t. ‘Can’t
someone
,’ he thundered, his fleshy cheeks turning a dangerous shade of puce, ‘keep an eye on that bloody child? She runs around here like a barefoot Indian.’

But if Sophie isn’t to be admitted to the studio, then one of them – he or Helena, usually, though Cath and Josie pitch in when they can – must watch her; and that duty falls most often to Helena, who has all but stopped painting since having Sophie. All of this weighs upon Jim’s conscience – not to mention the fact that, for almost two years now, he has been able, over and over again, to hold his daughter close, to love her with everything he is – and then to set her down, leave her, drive off to the woman he also loves. The woman who is not her mother.

Today, Jim leaves as soon as he can without arousing suspicion. Sophie waddles out to watch him, and Helena holds her back, away from the car wheels. ‘You’ll be home tomorrow, then? In time for dinner?’

‘Yes, in time for dinner.’ He kisses her, then leans down to kiss his daughter, whose face is already crumpling, preparing for tears. He watches their reflection in the mirror as he reverses, swings the car round, edges it out onto the drive. Sophie is crying now, beating her tiny fists against her mother’s legs; for a moment, Jim considers turning back. But he does not. He drives on, watching their twin figures grow smaller and smaller, and then disappear.

In Bristol, he spends an hour or so with his mother and Sinclair. He tells them what he told Helena: that he is driving on to London, to spend the evening with Stephen and discuss next month’s exhibition. He dares not think how many times he has used that excuse – Stephen, of course, knows everything – but neither Vivian nor Sinclair seems particularly interested. His mother is distracted, her eyes darting around the room as they talk; in a brief moment alone with Jim, Sinclair confides that he is worried about her, that the extremities of her moods seem to have returned.

‘We must get her back to the doctor, then. Soon.’ Jim speaks with concern, but he is ashamed, privately, by how unaffected he is by the news. He is thinking only of how quickly he can get away.

It is seven o’clock when he arrives at the hotel – their hotel, as he has started to call it in his mind, though they have only met here a couple of times. An entire night away together is a luxury they can rarely afford.

He finds her in the bar, looking out at the grey reaches of the sea, a gin and tonic on the table in front of her.

Eva turns, hearing him approach, and Jim feels something burst inside him: the euphoria of seeing her for the first time in too long. The narcotic rush of looking at her face and knowing that, for one night at least, and one blur of a morning, it belongs to him.

On the boat from Athens, they sit on the upper deck, at the back, just as they did that first time. The bright Nikon colours are exactly as they have lived on in Jim’s memory: the deep blue expanse of sea; the bleached yellows of the retreating land; the cerulean splash of sky.

He closes his eyes, feeling the sun on his face. The thrum of the engine is like the purr of some great, benign creature, blotting out the chatter of the other travellers – an American woman, close by, is reading aloud from Dr Seuss to a small child; a Greek family on his other side is sharing
spanakopita
and crumbling hunks of feta cheese. He reaches for Eva’s hand, remembering how, on that first visit – their honeymoon; everything so new, everything still possible – she wore a blue and white checked dress, and her feet were bare and brown in her white sandals.

‘Do you still have that dress?’ he says, not opening his eyes.

‘Which one?’

‘The one you wore on honeymoon. Blue and white checks. I haven’t seen it for years.’

‘No.’ She lets go of his hand. He can hear her reaching for her handbag, rummaging through its crowded depths. ‘I gave it to Jennifer’s school jumble sale, Jim. It must have been twenty years old.’

As the ferry approaches the island, they move with the other passengers to the prow of the boat: still that childish rush of excitement at the first sight of land. There is the crumbling watchtower at the mouth of the harbour; there are the scrubby hills rising above the town, so unexpectedly green after the parched streets of Athens. (An Athenian they met on the ferry, the last time, had made a joke in impressively scatological English: ‘They say that when God made Athens, he opened his bowels, and shat out concrete.’) There is the town itself – if you could call it that, this small collection of houses, rising in tiers like an amphitheatre around the harbour; the dome of the church; the bar and taverna at the dockside, where old men grumbled over backgammon in the late afternoon.