The Versions of Us (30 page)

‘Can I have a go, Mum?’ Dylan is eight: tall for his age, with his mother’s clear china skin and light brown hair.
Mousy
, Helena calls it: she has taken to dying hers with henna, leaving the bathroom smelling unpleasantly of bitter herbs. Dylan’s eyes, though, are Jim’s – that startling blue – and so are the freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose. Sometimes, looking at his son, Jim has the unsettling feeling that his own reflection is staring back at him. They are alike in so many other ways, too: in Dylan’s talent for drawing (his set of HB pencils, bought by Jim for his last birthday, is among his most treasured possessions); in the boy’s sensitivity, the way he looks to Helena and Jim as the twin weathervanes of his own moods.

‘Thought you’d never ask.’ Above Dylan’s head, Helena catches his eye, and smiles. She seems relaxed today, playful, and he can feel the tension between them easing: it is a perceptible shift, like the sun coming out from behind a bank of cloud. There have been times, recently, after Helena has left the room, that Jim has noticed he was holding his breath.

‘Here.’ Helena draws her apron over Dylan’s head, fastens it loosely. He isn’t quite tall enough to reach the counter comfortably, so Helena sets him on a stool. ‘Keep stirring.’ To Jim, she adds, ‘Smoke?’

They stand shivering by the back door, watching their breath writhe in the cold air. Helena’s herbs are huddled inside the makeshift greenhouse she has built from pallet boxes and a couple of discarded windowpanes, only a little cracked, that she found in a skip. She is good like that – practical, much more so than he. But the smoking outdoors is a new thing: Iris’s suggestion – no,
instruction
. At the thought of Iris, Jim tastes the familiar, bitter tang of dislike.

‘Iris still coming round, is she?’ He tries to keep his voice light.

Helena glances over. ‘Yes. In a minute.’ She draws deeply on her roll-up. ‘Did Sinclair say what time they’d be here?’

‘Teatime.’

‘Fiveish, then.’ He watches her profile: her full, arched eyebrows, the wide slopes and furrows of her lips. When they had met in Bristol – that warehouse exhibition; dingy rooms filled with bad art and worse wine – he had been overwhelmed by her vitality, by the way she seemed to carry the sea air in the pores of her skin. It had not been entirely fanciful: at Trelawney House, after a heavy night, Helena would still rise early for one of her walks on the beach, her face carrying no sign of the night’s excesses. He remembers her as always sunny then – had painted her as such.
Helena with Lady’s Bedstraw
: her beauty bare, simple, captured with a few brushstrokes. He can’t quite decide when the tension between them appeared, unbidden, a hairline fracture webbing across a sheet of glass. But he has a name for it:
Iris.

He is upstairs when Iris arrives, pulling on a jumper before heading out to the studio: it is an old whitewashed outhouse, and always draughty, though Jim goes out early each morning to switch on the electric heater. Instinctively, he stiffens, picturing that woman in his hallway, greeting Helena, leaning down to kiss his son.

Iris is short, thickset, with a large, square face and bobbed hair dyed an unflattering shade of orange. She makes fat, bulbous pottery she calls ‘sculpture’; he and Helena have bits of it squatting hideously all around the cottage. She has a stall at the Saturday craft market where holidaymakers, to Jim’s great surprise, sometimes part with their money for a bowl or a mug, but it is by no means a thriving concern: Iris lives, as far as he can tell, on a generous legacy provided by a great-aunt. This allows Iris to adopt the hippy’s professed indifference to material things, with which Jim suspects she disguises her envy of his own modest commercial success.
Art is for the people, not for sale. Property is theft. I work on a higher spiritual plane.

Sometimes, when Iris talks like this, Jim is gripped by the wild desire to punch her: he has never, in all his life, disliked anyone with such vehemence; and it’s a feeling he can’t quite explain. Helena, of course, can sense this, and her response is to dig in her heels. She certainly appears, these days, to reserve the larger part of her good humour for Iris rather than for him.

In the hallway, Jim greets Iris, one Judas kiss on each cheek. Her skin is unpleasantly clammy, and smells of patchouli. She squints at him. ‘I hear you’ve been making gingerbread, Jim. Didn’t have you down as a baker. Women’s work, isn’t it?’ Iris half smiles at him, her head on one side. Always she goads him like this, with her gloopy, masticated feminism, as if Jim were some kind of woman-hater, when really, the only woman in the world he hates is
her
.

‘Dylan’s helping too,’ he says, ‘so does that make
him
a woman?’

Without waiting for Iris’s reply, he turns to Helena. ‘Heading out for a bit. Let me know when they get here, won’t you?’

In the studio, the heater is breathing out its bitter smell of burning dust, and Marcel is sprawled on the old rag-rug, belly up. ‘Hello, boy.’ Jim leans down, tickles him under the chin, and the cat preens, shifts. ‘We’ll have some music, shall we?’

He slides
Blood on the Tracks
into the cassette player (his gift, last Christmas, from Sinclair and his mother), presses play. He tugs the sheet from his easel – an old habit, never broken, though Helena rarely comes in here any more – reaches into his pocket for his rolling tobacco, papers.
Early one morning, the sun was shining, I was laying in bed …
He sings along, pinching the tobacco, laying it along the shaft of the paper, narrowing his eyes at the canvas.
Wondering if she’s changed at all, if her hair was still red …

The woman’s hair is not red; it’s a deep, dark brown, with a conker’s lustre. She is turning away, looking towards the man who sits behind her, on their living-room sofa; he is facing her, and the viewer, with an expression that Jim wishes to be unreadable. At the moment, his main fear is that the man – who is both him and not him, just as the woman is both Helena and Eva Katz, and any of the women he has ever met – looks too miserable.

This is the third panel of the triptych. The other two, standing sheet-wrapped against the studio wall, are almost the same, but for minor variations: in the first, it is the woman seated on the sofa, and the man standing; in the second, they are both sitting. Jim has changed small details about the room, too: the position of the clock on the wall behind the sofa; the cards and photographs on the mantelpiece; the colour of the cat stretched out on the armchair. (Only one is black and white, in homage to Marcel.)

‘Like a spot the difference,’ Helena had said when he first outlined the idea: she was joking, but he felt the sting. His aspirations for the triptych are much grander. The painting is about the many roads not taken, the many lives not lived. He has called it
The Versions of Us.

Jim has only just started working on the man’s face – dabbing lightly at the shadows around his mouth, trying to lift its corners – when Helena puts her head round the door. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the music. ‘They’re here.’

He nods at her, turns reluctantly from the canvas, dips his brush in the jar of turps. He stoops for Marcel, and turns off the heater; it will be days before he can come out here again.

Jim has never liked Christmas – the endless hours of eating and drinking, the enforced good cheer. The Christmas after his father’s death, Vivian was only just out of hospital, and she hadn’t even bothered to get up. There was nothing in the larder to eat but a jar of Marmite and a box of stale water biscuits, which he had finished by the time Mrs Dawes next door, with her unerring ability to sense his distress, had rung the bell and insisted he come over for his dinner.

Now, Jim holds the cat’s warm, writhing body, presses his chin to the top of Marcel’s head. ‘Come on, boy. Let’s get you inside.’

In the kitchen, there is the smell of cooling gingerbread, the low chorus of carols on the radio. (Helena is surprisingly traditional about Christmas: when Howard and Jim had tried to ban any mention of it one year at Trelawney House, she and Cath had very nearly packed their bags and left.)

Vivian is talking very loudly to Dylan. ‘You mustn’t peek at your presents, darling. You simply mustn’t peek.’ She is wearing a green jumper with a reindeer motif clumsily hand-knitted through the front, a pink woolly hat and a pair of earrings in the shape of holly leaves. She turns to kiss him, and he sees that she has scrawled two thick blue lines of kohl unevenly around her eyes, and that her pink lipstick has bled into the deep wrinkles on either side of her mouth.

‘Darling,’ she says.

Sinclair, coming through from the hallway with the suitcases, catches Jim’s eye and mouths silently, ‘Not good.’

It is Dylan who carries them through the evening: he adores his grandmother, and insists on producing his favourite toys – his Etch A Sketch; his Slinky; his Luke Skywalker action figure – for her inspection. Helena serves plates of ham, cheese, salad; they eat the cooled gingerbread with mugs of tea, and play a game of charades that disintegrates when it is Vivian’s turn, and she tells them the name of the film before she has acted it out. ‘Oh dear,’ she says, realising her mistake. Her eyes fill with tears. ‘Stupid, stupid me.’

Jim – remembering a disastrous childhood game of twenty questions that had left his mother sobbing in the front room – creates a distraction by offering everyone a drink. After her second sherry, Vivian falls asleep on the sofa, gently snoring.

Later, when Vivian has been persuaded to go to bed, Dylan is asleep, and Helena has turned in, too, Jim and Sinclair sit in the kitchen, sharing the last of a bottle of single malt.

‘How long has she been like this?’

Sinclair shrugs. Jim has seen his stepfather’s expression before, on his own face, back in the years he spent with his mother in that miserable Bristol flat. ‘Three weeks, maybe. Four. The medication was working wonders – you know it was – but I think she’s stopped taking it. She says it makes her feel like she’s inside a bubble, that she just wants to
feel
again.’

‘You haven’t found the tablets?’

‘No. You know how clever she is. She’s emptying the bottle. I think she must be flushing them away.’

The kitchen clock ticks on; in the old armchair in the corner, Marcel yawns, then settles back into sleep. ‘We’ll have to call Dr Harris in the new year,’ Jim says. ‘She’ll crash soon. It’s too much for you.’

‘Too much for all of us.’ Sinclair drains his glass. ‘She keeps calling for your father at night, you know. First time she’s ever done that. When I try to comfort her, she hits out.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jim says, because he is, and because there is nothing else to say. Then they go upstairs to bed – Jim to climb in with Helena, seeking the warmth of her body; Sinclair to the room where Vivian is sleeping quietly, at least for now.

In the night – or perhaps it is the early morning – Jim is woken by the sound of a woman crying. He lies still for a few seconds, suddenly alert; but Helena sleeps on, and he does not hear the sound again.

On New Year’s Eve, David and Eva attend a party at the Hancock Park home of David’s agent, Harvey Blumenfeld.

The house is large – of course – and half-timbered, in a turreted, faux-Florentine style that reminds Eva, incongruously, of a school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon: Anne Hathaway’s cottage, thatched, fat plaster belted by dark timber beams. Enormous palm trees surround the pool, which is flanked by a low building of pretty red stone, with an open wood-fired oven on which Harvey himself – a man of immense appetite, especially for dramatic gestures – has been known, at his more intimate summer gatherings, to bake pizza for his guests.

Eva wears a long blush-pink gown with bell-sleeves and a plunging drawstring neckline. It seemed perfect in London – she had found it in a tiny boutique off Carnaby Street – but is not, she realises as soon as they arrive, at all right for Los Angeles.

The other women are in pantsuits or fifty-dollar peasant blouses. Their hair is expertly blow-dried; their bare arms and décolletages are, for the most part, the warm, even colour of milky coffee. To say they are beautiful feels inadequate, and not, in all cases, strictly accurate: theirs is something beyond beauty. They are gilded, luminous; it is as if, Eva thinks, looking round at the guests – there is Faye Dunaway, gazelle-limbed in white bellbottoms; there is Carrie Fisher by the pool, blinking at Warren Beatty – they have somehow ingested the heat of the studio lamps through their skin. David, too, has always had this quality, and both women and men are drawn by it, moth-like. There he is now, across the room, talking animatedly to a rail-thin actress in a low-cut white blouse, her eyes not wavering from David’s face.

Eva stands alone, drinking champagne, looking down at her hateful pink dress. She has an uncomfortable vision, suddenly, of her entire relationship with David as an unspooling sequence of these moments: a shifting film-strip of inappropriate dresses, worn to parties at which she knows no one.