The Versions of Us (37 page)

Jim couldn’t contain his anger then. ‘Don’t you
ever
use that word about your grandmother. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Sophie, fleeing through the kitchen door, paused then, looked back at him. ‘Well, neither do you, Dad. So why don’t you just leave me alone?’

Now, home from the airport, Jim carries Sophie’s suitcase upstairs to her room, then asks if there’s anything he can do to help with dinner. Eva shakes her head. ‘I’m just heating up a lasagne.’

‘I’ll pop outside for a bit, then.’

Eva nods. ‘I’ll knock when it’s ready.’

His studio occupies the old barn that came with the house; it was this, together with the rambling grounds – an overgrown orchard, a meadow waist-high with grass – that had made them fall in love with it. The barn was in a terrible state – roof-tiles missing, timbers rotting, the carcass of an ancient John Deere quietly rusting under cobwebs. But they had set to work – he, Eva, Anton, Sam and a team of builders from the village. Slowly, painstakingly, they had turned the barn into a functional studio: punctuated the sloping roof with enormous sheets of glass; plumbed in a toilet; and even – such luxury – installed central heating. For the first few weeks after they had finished, Jim could hear Howard’s voice in his head, as it had once sounded on winter mornings, when they had moved about the freezing communal studio at Trelawney House.
Bit of cold never did anyone any harm. Don’t go round grumbling, for God’s sake – put on another jumper …

Almost as soon as he began working in the new studio, Jim found himself moving away from painting, and into sculpture: working with great hunks of limestone, then granite; turning them into tall, smooth-sided monoliths that carry, in his mind, the quiet power of ancient monuments. The critics have not been so kind: ‘A tedious exercise in priapic pointlessness’ was how one of them had described his last exhibition. Jim had laughed on reading the review; he remembered his father telling him, on one of those afternoons when Jim had sat silently watching him paint, that ‘The opinions of critics are fit only for lining a hamster’s cage.’ Stephen’s first reaction, however, had surprised him. ‘The sculptures are interesting,’ his old friend and gallerist had said, and Jim knew faint praise when he heard it. ‘But you’re a painter, really, Jim, at your core. Better, perhaps, to return to what you know?’

Now, Jim stands before the piece he has been working on for three weeks: a narrow shard of black granite, planed and smoothed, its blank surface littered with tiny splinters of colour: grey, white, charcoal. He thinks about something else that Howard used to say at Trelawney House, over and over again, to whomever would listen.
With sculpture, you’re not creating something out of nothing. You’re just chipping away at what’s already there.

The words struck Jim, and stayed with him: he felt, when his hands first itched to move over solid stone, that they also expressed something about the way he feels for Eva. Jim wouldn’t allow himself to regret the years he’d had without her – his years with Helena; his daughter, Sophie – but in his mind, his new sculptures are monuments to the essential simplicity, the rightness, he feels in being with Eva; to the overwhelming gratitude he feels for this, their second chance. He only wishes there were some way he could have struck out for that chance – for his own happiness – without causing his daughter so much pain. That he could find some way, in short, to make it up to Sophie, other than by trying his best to show her, each day, each week, how much she means to him. But she does not seem to want to listen.
Or
, he thinks darkly,
perhaps I’m just not trying hard enough.

At half past seven, they gather in the kitchen to eat; Eva serves the lasagne, salad, pours white wine. Eva asks again about the holiday, and Sophie tells them a little more – about the black chickens Helena is keeping in the back garden; about Juan, whom she describes as ‘All right – a bit weird, but all right.’

Jim watches his daughter, pale and awkward in her black T-shirt and leggings. He feels a rush of affection for her; reaches over to take her hand, tells her he is glad to have her home.

Sophie regards him coolly, and then removes her hand.

A few days before her fiftieth birthday, Eva invites Penelope over for lunch.

‘Don’t bring Gerald,’ she says. ‘Jim’s in Rome. School trip.’

The next day – a Saturday – she bakes a quiche, prepares a salad, and sets a bottle of Chablis to cool. They eat. They drink. They discuss Gerald’s bad back; Jennifer’s wedding plans: she is engaged to Henry, a fellow trainee solicitor – polite, steady, his hair already thinning a little at the crown – but devoted to Jennifer, and she to him. Last month, while they were out shopping for bridal gowns, she had turned to Eva and said, ‘I love Henry so much, Mum, I’m almost afraid to marry him; afraid that marriage won’t match up to the idea I have in my head. Is that how it was with you and Dad?’

Eva had looked at her daughter, standing there before the rack of dresses – so young, so lovely, so dear to her – and experienced a rush of feelings she couldn’t quite define: love, sadness, happiness and something else, a kind of nostalgia, the sense that she was winding back to the moment in her own past when she had stood beside Jim, and vowed to make their love last for a lifetime, and beyond. No, she had never been afraid. ‘Don’t worry so much, darling,’ she told Jennifer. ‘Marriage isn’t a thing to match up to some perfect image in your mind. It will be what you make it. And you and Henry will make it
wonderful
.’

Too painful to think about that moment now. Eva pours herself and Penelope a fresh glass of wine, and then produces the postcard that she has tucked into the back pages of a proof copy of her latest book. (Non-fiction, this time: a survey of the ten best women writers of the twentieth century.) She lays it down on the table between them.

It is a reproduction of a black-and-white photograph. A woman, shown in profile, her lips and eyebrows dark and full, her hair fashionably shingled. The whole image is a little blurred, unfocused, as if shaded with the softest pencil point.

‘Lee Miller, no?’ Penelope says. ‘Man Ray?’

Eva nods, impressed. ‘Turn it over.’

On the back of the card is written, in a sloping, familiar hand,
For B – because I will always think of you in beautiful monochrome. Thank you for bringing me back to life. All my love, always, J
.

They are silent for a moment. Then Penelope says, ‘Where did you find it?’

‘In the car. Yesterday. I was cleaning out the boot.’ Eva drains her glass, watches her friend across the table. She feels oddly calm, as she had been the previous afternoon, when the disparate cogs of her mind had finally seemed to slip into oiled synchronicity, and she’d climbed into the car, knowing at once where she had to go.

‘I won’t insult you by asking whether it’s definitely Jim’s writing.’

‘No.’

Penelope sits back in her chair, runs a finger up the stem of her glass. ‘And do we know who this “B” could be?’

‘Bella Hurst.’

‘The girl with the studio?’

‘The very one.’

She should have known, of course: any wife would say the same. And yet Eva is uncomfortably aware that she really
should
have known, that when she had begun to sense a change in Jim, through that autumn term – he seemed lighter; he drank less; he even cleared the shed, dug out his easel, and began, tentatively, to paint – there would be something, or someone, more behind it than the gradual fading of his grief for Vivian. She had known of the supply teacher, of course – he had mentioned her a few times at first; nonchalantly, she’d thought (‘Oh, she’s quite sweet – very young – lives in a ghastly squat in New Cross’), and then more regularly, with greater enthusiasm. Jim had begun, occasionally, to go to the pub with Bella Hurst; had visited her shared studio in Peckham; had met up with her, once or twice, after Gerry returned to work, and she was no longer at the school. Eva must, she supposes, now presume that there were also other meetings of which she was not informed.

It was, Eva had believed, a friendship – perhaps this Bella Hurst (she thought of the girl always, for some reason, with her surname attached) was looking for a mentor. And Jim: well, she’d had no reason to doubt him since that long-ago dalliance, or whatever it had been, with Greta. And Jim had been quite open with her about Bella – had told her how much he enjoyed talking to her about art, that she had ideas he’d never really debated before – ideas about practice, deconstruction, about the dissolution of the old boundaries between high and low art. Privately, Eva had thought these ideas rather pretentious, but she had stopped short of saying so aloud.

Jim had even invited the girl to dinner: Bella Hurst had sat there, drinking their wine, eating the food Eva had prepared. She was impossibly young and tiny in her workman’s vest and loose dungarees; her eyes, beneath that unruly thatch of hair, were entrancingly mismatched, one blue, one black. Eva had felt a twinge of something then – even if it was only shameful envy of her youth, her freshness, something that she and Penelope might try to emulate with lotions and night-creams, but could never retrieve – but she had filed it neatly away at the back of her mind. She was just too
bu
s
y
to be bothered with suspicion: busy with research for the book, with newspaper articles, with radio series and discussion shows and the Booker. (She was a judge for the 1987 prize, and spent much of 1986 working through a teetering stack of novels.) Even when Jim had come to Eva last year, told her that a space had come up in Bella Hurst’s studio – that he wanted to rent it, go there on weekends, during holidays – even then, her reaction had only been one of delight that he was working again. ‘That’s a fantastic idea, Jim,’ she’d said. ‘Of course you must take it. Perhaps a fresh start, in a new space, will be just what you need.’

Eva can only think, now, that it had been a case of deliberate blindness on her part, and their hiding in plain sight. How stupid they must have thought her – if they had thought of her at all. Or perhaps Bella Hurst had considered their marriage a permissive one; perhaps Jim had even told her it was such. Could he have found out about Leo Tait, about their brief liaison in Yorkshire? Eva doesn’t think it likely – she has never mentioned that night to anyone, and can’t imagine that Leo would have done so. But now, anything seems possible. And had it been, with Bella, just a one-night thing – a physical urge that Jim couldn’t resist, as she herself had been unable to with Leo – then she might feel differently; but there is no way that Jim’s note can be attached to a casual affair.
Thank you for bringing me back to life.
Each word a bullet to Eva’s heart.

Yesterday, in Peckham, she had found Bella Hurst unruffled, implacable. Eva had rung the bell to the studio, told a bored-looking man in paint-spattered overalls whom she was there to see. He had left her standing at the open door – she had read the name on each pigeonhole in the hallway with its peeling paint, its greenish sproutings of mould, over and over again; watched the letters of her husband’s name rearrange themselves into an incomprehensible jumble.

She had felt light-headed; had put a hand to the wall to steady herself, wondering what she would do when she was face to face with Bella Hurst; wondering what she could possibly say that might lessen the weight of her pain. There was nothing, surely – this was the end of everything, the ripping apart of the life Eva and Jim had worked so hard, for so long, to build, and to maintain. The giddy joy of falling in love, of finding each other; their honeymoon; their months in New York; their beloved house in Gipsy Hill. Jennifer. Daniel. The loss of Vivian, of Miriam. Those terrible years in which Eva had feared they were drawing apart, and yet they’d found a way back to each other, hadn’t they? They’d pulled through. What could she possibly say that would make this girl – this
child
– understand what it meant to be shown a picture of your life as you know it – a picture of substance and beauty; the hours and weeks and years that make a shared life, a family – and then see it ripped unceremoniously from its frame?

When Bella had eventually appeared, she had done so smiling, her naked face serene above a loose white shirt, black leggings, a man’s tweed waistcoat (not Jim’s). Eva had showed her the postcard – told her, in a voice she couldn’t keep from trembling, that she had found something that she presumed belonged to her.

‘Well,’ Bella said, those blue-black eyes hard as marbles. ‘It’s useless to say I’m sorry, I’m afraid, because I’m not. But I hope it won’t be too hard on you.’

Telling all this to Penelope, Eva can feel herself wincing at the crass banality of it all: the middle-aged man, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, falling for a girl just a few years older than his daughter; the wife finding the lovers’ note, rushing to confront her rival. She pictures herself, standing there in that foul hallway in her oldest, least flattering jeans, her hair unbrushed – emptying the car boot had been the last stage of a spring clean, and she hadn’t thought to change. Jim has turned her into the oldest cliché there is – the wronged wife – and she hates him for it; hates herself for playing the role. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.