The Versions of Us (34 page)

Meanwhile, Rebecca – furious that Eva has insisted she live at home through her RADA course, rather than throw money away on an expensive flat – appears to have decided, for the most part, to act as if Jim simply isn’t there. And Sophie seems rather afraid of Rebecca, with her glamour and her insouciance and her habit of declaiming her audition speeches, loudly, in front of the bathroom mirror. Sam is the only one who seems relatively unperturbed by the changes in the household – he is sweet-natured, studious, preoccupied with football, space travel, engineering: enthusiasms that Jim doesn’t share, but in which he does his best to show an interest. So no, the flat will not do: Jim and Eva have agreed that they will have to find their own place – somewhere fresh and light. Somewhere to start again.

Standing alone at the graveside – all these thoughts, and others (Vivian, mixing paints in the pantry of the Sussex cottage; Vivian, thin and glassy-eyed, unseeing, in the hospital), shifting through his mind – Jim was dimly aware that he was making a spectacle of himself. He could almost see his own image, caught in long shot: the grief-stricken son standing sentry by his mother’s grave. But as he stood there beside the freshly dug hole, with its lining of bright green baize, he was aware not so much of grief as of a curious emptiness. Exhaustion. Relief. The stillness that falls when a long-expected event finally comes to pass.

‘The car is waiting,’ Eva says softly now.

Jim nods: he has forgotten all about the black car, about the driver in his peaked cap. Eva squeezes his hand, and they turn to go. The church car park is almost empty now: just Eva’s little Citroën (there wasn’t space for all of them in the family car), and that black saloon, where dimly, through the rear passenger window, he can see a woman’s face pressed against the glass. Pale skin, wide-set blue eyes. There is a quickening in his gut: Helena. He blinks a few times, looks again. The woman’s features rearrange themselves into those of a girl. Sophie.

When Jim told Helena he was leaving her, her face had crumpled and twisted as if he had landed her a physical blow. He had wanted to feel pity, and yet Helena had seemed so ugly, her grief so vengeful and uncontrolled –
a woman scorned
– that it was all he could do not to simply walk out the door and close it behind him. And in the end, that was more or less what he had done: closed the kitchen door on her tears, on the shattered crockery littering the flagstones. (Helena had thrown plates at him; later, in his studio, she would take a knife to several of his canvases.)

Jim had looked up the stairs, to the open door of Sophie’s room – she was at school – then picked up his suitcase and left. Earlier, he had placed a letter on her pillow, setting out, as best he could, his reasons for leaving; telling her that she would always be welcome to stay with him and Eva. Much later, he would realise what an error he had made in not talking to his daughter face to face. He hadn’t known then that it would be three months before he saw Sophie again, or that six months after that, Helena would call to tell him, her voice low and venomous, that Sophie wanted to leave Cornwall, and come to him. ‘She’s chosen
you
,’ she said. ‘So that’s it, Jim. You’ve taken everything I have. I hope you’re happy now.’

The awful truth was that Jim
was
happy: not in some bland, superficial way – fixed Kodak smiles under the bluest of skies – but in his deepest self. This kind of happiness was less a state, he realised, than a form of honesty: a sense of essential rightness. He had known it when he was with Eva in Cambridge, and had looked for it again with Helena: he had found something real with her, something true, but not that. And then, all those years later, Jim had found that happiness again with Eva – or at least a version of it, however muddied, complicated.

All that complexity had fallen away, though, on 8th January, 1978. The precise date was etched on his mind. Eva was just back from Los Angeles, and they had reserved a whole night for each other at their Dorset hotel. He knew at once that something had changed – feared that she had finally resolved to leave him. But the opposite was true: she was leaving
Katz
.

‘It’s you, Jim,’ she had said. ‘It’s always been you.’ And there it had been: that honesty, that slippage of two discrete objects into congruence. Jim had driven back to Cornwall the next day, and packed his bags.

Now, he walks Eva to her Citroën, where Jakob, Sam and Rebecca – her family, now his – are waiting. ‘See you there,’ he says, and kisses her. Then he slides onto the back seat of the family car.

‘Home, sir?’

Jim wants to tell the driver, ‘That house was never my home.’ But instead he says, ‘Yes, please. Sorry to keep you waiting.’

Vivian and Sinclair’s house isn’t far from the church; they might have walked, in fact, but the undertakers were quite insistent on the cars. This is the farthest edge of Bristol, where ring roads and new-builds bleed into overgrown culverts and scrubby fields. Through the car window, a short parade of shops – a Chinese restaurant, a launderette – gives way to a school’s sprawling estate, disembodied shouts coming from an unseen playground. It is half past twelve: lunchtime.

‘Hungry, darling?’ Sophie is sitting very straight and still beside him, her cheeks still mottled from crying. She shakes her head, and Jim wants to reach for her, as he would have done, unthinkingly, just a few years ago.

It was only when Jim drove to Cornwall to collect her that he’d begun to understand the full extent of Sophie’s anger. He’d loaded the boot and back seat with her cases, her schoolbooks, her collection of hideous troll dolls, with their wizened plastic faces and fluorescent shocks of hair. In the hallway of the cottage – Helena, to Jim’s relief, was out – he’d held his daughter to him, felt her rigid and unresponsive in his arms. ‘I’m so glad you’re coming,’ he had whispered into Sophie’s hair. ‘We both are. Eva and I.’

‘I’m only coming,’ Sophie had replied stonily, ‘because Mum makes me
sick
.’

Vivian, too, had been angry, to an extent that took Jim by surprise. She and Helena had never, he thought, been particularly close; but when she learned of what she called Jim’s ‘desertion’, Vivian had made an ugly telephone call to Eva’s flat. (‘You
beast
,’ she’d hissed at him; he could hear Sinclair in the background, his voice calmly soothing. ‘Now, Vivian, come along, there’s no need for this.’) She had also written letters – sheet after sheet lined with her oversized, looped handwriting.
You are no better than your father. Selfish, both of you. Heads full of nothing but yourselves and your bloody paintings.
Finally, she had come to see them in person. Eva had opened the door; Vivian had pushed past, imperious, her mouth an uneven pink line beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

‘What,’ she’d said, ‘have you done with my son?’

Had Vivian been a different kind of woman – her illness a different kind of illness – the scene might almost have been comical: a skit from the pen of Oscar Wilde.
A handbag?
But nobody was laughing.

‘You have
ruined
your daughter’s life,’ Vivian said to Jim, while Eva made tea, watching her with cautious concern. Then, drinking the tea, Vivian added, ‘You have ruined my life. Both of you.’

Jim had known then, as he’d suspected all along, that it was really his father Vivian was angry with: his father and herself. He’d driven his mother back to Bristol that evening – she’d left the house while Sinclair was taking a bath, without telling him where she was going. Vivian had fallen asleep in the car almost at once, the lights of the motorway flashing orange on her face as the miles passed. Jim had spent the night in the spare room, woken to find his mother’s equanimity restored – for the moment, at least. Before he left, Sinclair had taken Jim aside. ‘I don’t think she’s taking her medication,’ he’d said, ‘but the doctors won’t do anything unless she tries to harm herself. I’m at my wits’ end.’

All Jim had been able to do was tell Sinclair not to worry: that she would surely even out, over time, with or without her medication, as she had always done before. But almost a year later, Vivian had slipped a sleeping tablet into Sinclair’s night-time drink, and stolen from the house in the small hours. A driver had found her the next morning at the base of a nearby road bridge. She had not left a note.

At the house, Jim’s aunts are handing round plates of sandwiches and sausage rolls. Eva, having arrived a few minutes before, is slicing a Victoria sponge. The house is not full: there are perhaps twenty people, standing in small, hushed groups. Stephen and Prue are here, and Josie and Simon from Cornwall. Even Howard and Cath have sent their condolences, in the form of one of Cath’s intricate pencil drawings – a milk bottle, a clutch of tulips,
We’re sorry
sketched underneath with a fine-nibbed pen.

Jim stands with Stephen in a corner of the living-room, smoking a cigarette.

‘It was a good service, Jim.’ Stephen’s voice is low, serious; he is wearing a sober charcoal-grey suit. Jim thinks of all the many nights he has sat with Stephen – too many to count – speaking of his love for Eva; his indecision; his feelings about his mother, his father. Stephen, it occurs to Jim now, is the only person who really knows every part of him – even with Eva, he must edit himself, expunge those facts that might cause her pain (the erotic content of Helena’s angry letters; the fact that Jakob had taken Jim aside, the first time they met, and warned him – politely, discreetly, but a warning all the same – never to do to Eva and her children what Jim had done to his other partner and child). Stephen knows all of this – knows everything – and he is still here. Still standing next to him. Jim feels a rush of affection for his friend. Touching his arm, he says, ‘Thanks for coming. I mean it.’

Stephen clears his throat. ‘You don’t need to thank me. Least I could do.’

Across the room, Jim’s aunt Patsy is asking the vicar if he would like tea; Jim, watching, catches her eye, nods. ‘Excuse me a minute, Stephen, won’t you?’

In the kitchen, Jim finds Sinclair filling the kettle.

‘Let me do that,’ he says, but his stepfather places a firm hand on his arm. ‘For God’s sake, Jim, I’m capable of making a bloody pot of tea.’

‘Of course you are. Sorry.’

Jim busies himself with the cups and saucers; someone – Patsy, Jim assumes – has laid them out on the counter in neat rows, beside a milk jug and sugar bowl. The bowl is part of a larger set, hand-painted with a pattern of small yellow flowers. Jim remembers this china from the Sussex house: Vivian would take down the cups from the dresser for guests. She smashed one of them, once; sent it flying across the kitchen towards his father’s head. She missed, of course, and the broken pieces had lain on the floor for days.

He’d thought of this as he drove away from Helena, that day a year ago – away from the plates she’d sent flying across the flagstones, from the scorched earth of their relationship, their love – and felt, then, the full weight of his decision settle over him. And yet, as London approached – London; Eva; their chance, at last, of a life together – Jim had felt his sorrow gradually fade.
Was that how my father felt when he left us, when he drove away with Sonia?
he thinks now.
And yet he returned, and I did not. Does that make him the better man?

‘I’m sorry, Jim. That was unfair of me.’

Jim has, for a moment, forgotten that Sinclair is in the room: he looks up, sees his stepfather watching him, contrite. Sinclair’s hands are shaking as he places the kettle on its stand. Jim has never heard him swear.

‘It doesn’t matter. What can I do?’

He has, unconsciously, echoed the words Eva spoke to him at the graveside. Jim looks back to the living-room, through the open serving-hatch, seeking out her face. She is always present in his mind, but this is a sharpening of focus, a small tug on the invisible thread that connects them – that has always connected them, from the very first moment he saw her in Cambridge. How lovely she was that day, with her watchful eyes and neat, ballerina’s poise.

He sees her now, handing a slice of cake to an elderly woman he doesn’t recognise. She has her back to him, but, sensing she is being watched – or perhaps feeling that same tug – she turns.

With you, I can face anything
, he tells her silently.
Stay with me.

Eva gives him a small smile – barely a twitch of the lips – as if to say, simply,
Yes.