The Versions of Us (39 page)

His father’s paintings formed the landscape of Jim’s childhood: their muted blues and greys, their warm-eyed women, their soft washes of English sky. But since his father’s death, he has seen them only in books and postcard reproductions: Vivian had sold them all, every single one. Now this David Jenson is going to find them and bring them together, like estranged relations to a family reunion. To place them alongside Jim’s own paintings. To ask people to stand and stare, to assess how much of the father has remained in the son.

Dressing, Jim thinks,
I am older now than my father was when he died.
Fifty-two years old: he celebrated his fiftieth in this house, with champagne and margaritas and a band strumming out Rolling Stones covers until four a.m. Single (more or less) for a decade. A lesbian ex-partner living in connubial pottery-making bliss on the isle of Skye. A twenty-one-year-old son studying printmaking in Edinburgh, and already a great deal more mature than either of his parents were at his age, or – Jim laughs to think of it – any time since.

Dylan had come down for Jim’s party; they’d stood together in the garden, drinking beer, and his son had said, ‘You know, Dad, I’ve been thinking about how you were after Mum and I left – how you never tried to poison me against her. You could have made things really difficult, and you didn’t. I think that’s kind of amazing. And I’ve had fun, coming down to see you in the holidays. I still do. Watching you in the studio, and stuff. It’s been great.’

Jim, looking back at his lovely, handsome son – he has Helena’s clear skin, and Jim’s blue eyes, and the combination, to Jim’s mind, makes Dylan much better-looking than his father has ever been – had felt so full of pride and love that for a moment he’d been unable to speak. And so he’d simply slung his arm around Dylan’s shoulders, thinking that he’d never expected things to turn out like this; but then he’d lived long enough to understand the futility of expecting anything at all.

Anything, or anyone. In the years since Helena left, Jim has found his imagination straying to one particular face. His cousin Toby had also come down for Jim’s birthday party; he’d stayed on at the House for a few days afterwards, with his elegant French wife, Marie. It had occurred to Jim, late one evening, to ask after Eva. He’d watched Marie and Toby exchange looks. ‘She’s having a hard time,’ Toby said. ‘Ted Simpson’s not well at all – Parkinson’s, I think. They’re back from Rome. He can’t work. She’s looking after him more or less full-time.’

Jim had found it difficult to articulate his feelings: sorrow for Eva, he supposed, overridden by a sense that it was not his sorrow to feel. What claim could he really make to knowing her? He sees her often in his mind, with her large, calm eyes, her intelligent smile; but he hasn’t painted her likeness for years – not since his triptych. Recently, he has wondered whether that painting was an exorcism of sorts: a conclusion put to the possibility of a relationship between them; one he had intuited, in meeting her, but that had withered before it had even had the slightest chance to take root. Eva Katz – Simpson – was the partner that might have been, against whom, existing as she did only in Jim’s imagination, no other woman could ever quite measure up. Helena had sensed it, he was sure. But Caitlin – well, Caitlin is different.

His studio assistant, his secretary, sometimes his model, and then quietly, unobtrusively, a little more. Thirty-eight years old; a more than decent painter in her own right; her body slim and supple. (She begins each morning with a run along Carbis Bay.) A brief early marriage behind her. No children, no demands.

Jim can hear Caitlin now, moving around downstairs: making more coffee, no doubt. She has her own key, but keeps office hours – unless they should, by mutual consent, wish her to stay a little longer. She has never spent the night. It is a delicate, tender arrangement, carefully calibrated to their respective needs.

‘Coffee?’ she calls redundantly up the stairs: she will already have made a pot.

‘Yes, please,’ he calls back. And then he follows his voice downstairs, to where Caitlin is waiting, and outside, in the studio, is an easel, a fresh canvas, a new working day.

David is standing at the bar, talking to Harry, wearing a checked cotton scarf knotted over a smart black coat.

For a moment, Eva has the odd sensation of watching the years roll backwards – almost four full decades – until she can see them quite clearly as they were in the ADC bar: young, puffed-up, full of grand plans. Then, just as quickly, those boys are gone, and here before her are two men in late middle-age: grey-haired, confident, satisfied. It strikes Eva now that neither man had ever shown the slightest doubt that his plans would come to pass exactly as he willed them.

‘Eva.’ David’s charm is undimmed by age: he leans forward to kiss her as if she were the one woman responsible for his happiness. Eva supposes, at one time, that she was, but she knows this ability of his now for what it really is: a reflex action, the product of his indefatigable urge to be adored. Many women have fallen for it – and she was among them. One Cambridge play; one summer; those dizzying afternoons in twisted sheets that would force them to become so much more to each other than they ought to have been. They had been happy then; and they had tried, for too long, to recapture that happiness. What was it he’d said in the car in Los Angeles, that night when they both gave up trying?
We just don’t quite fit, do we?
It is because of Jim, of course – her second chance – that Eva knows how true this is.

‘David.’ She offers her cheeks to be kissed. To Harry, she says, ‘Excited?’

He nods. ‘Nervous. Press night and all that. But Rebecca’s been a
darling
, of course, from start to finish.’

‘Of course.’ Eva throws him an assessing glance. Harry has put on weight, and his thin hair is standing up behind his ears, like an owl’s tufts. Rebecca said he had married again: a much younger woman, barely out of her teens. An actress, naturally. His last Ophelia. ‘Until he gets bored, of course,’ Eva had said, and Rebecca frowned. ‘Harry’s all right, Mum. I don’t know why you’ve always had it in for him.’

Now, Harry is shifting uncomfortably under Eva’s gaze. ‘Well. I’d better get back, rally the troops. See you at the party – and
enjoy
.’

David slaps his old friend firmly on the shoulder. ‘Go to it. Mind they all break a leg. And give my daughter a big hug from me.’ When Harry has gone, he says to Eva, ‘It’s only the half. I bought you a gin and tonic. Shall we sit?’

They find a table by the window. It is just beginning to grow dark: the sweep of concrete stretching down to the Thames is webbed with shadow, and the river path is busy with couples, their twin silhouettes shifting in the fading light. Inside, the foyer is filling up; Eva is aware of the looks, the conspicuous nudges. They have only just sat down when a woman in a scarlet jacket – about Eva’s age; smiling, red-lipsticked – approaches their table, brandishing a programme.

‘So sorry to bother you both.’ The woman blushes to match the jacket. ‘Would you mind awfully …?’

From her pocket she produces a pen. David beams at her – his professional smile. ‘Not at all. To whom should I make this out?’

Eva looks away. It is a long time since she was last out with David alone; she has forgotten the minor disturbances his presence so often causes. Once – this was in the mid-sixties, at the very height of David’s fame: Rebecca could only have been six or seven, and Eva wasn’t yet pregnant with Sam – a woman had followed the three of them home from Regent’s Park. She had planted herself on their doorstep and rung the doorbell over and over again, until they’d had no option but to call the police. David had laughed it off – ‘Just part of the job, Eva, stop fussing’ – but she could still remember the fear and confusion on her daughter’s face. Still, it doesn’t seem to have done Rebecca any harm: she’s gone on to choose the same kind of life for herself, after all. What was it Garth – Rebecca’s husband, a playwright, and the perfect, deadpan foil to his wife’s natural exuberance – said last year, when Rebecca’s agent telephoned to tell her that she now had her own official fan club? ‘Finally – a load more people to love her almost as much as she loves herself.’ Garth was laughing as he said it, of course. Rebecca had scowled at him, but then she had softened and smiled.

‘It’s good to see you,’ David says when the red-jacketed woman has turned reluctantly away. ‘You look well.’

‘Do I?’ Eva is in the last throes of a summer cold: pink-nosed, her eyes watering, no doubt loosening her make-up; she’ll have to reapply it before the party. But, wary of sounding ungracious, she adds, ‘Thank you. Nice coat.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ He runs a hand over one of the crisp lapels. ‘Burberry. Jacquetta chose it.’

‘How is Jacquetta?’

‘Good.’ He sips his gin and tonic. ‘Really good.’

‘And the girls?’

He smiles; a real smile, this time. ‘Perfect.’

It was Rebecca, again, who informed Eva that David and Juliet were to divorce. The wedding had been a very public affair – a poolside ceremony at the Chateau Marmont; an exclusive cover story in
People
magazine – and the divorce was to be no less so. Each painful thrust and parry was played out across the newspapers; David had slunk back from America, gone to ground at his parents’ house in Hampstead. Eva had felt so sorry for him, despite herself, that she had found herself inviting him to spend a weekend with them in Sussex.

It was not a success. David had drunk all their good wine; told Jim repeatedly that he should never have let Eva go (she found this part of the performance particularly unconvincing); and then spilled a mug of coffee across the new living-room carpet. Since then, Eva has restricted their meetings to family gatherings: the children’s weddings; the grandchildren’s blessings; the odd press night and film screening. To the last blessing – of Miriam, Sam’s youngest daughter; named after her own mother, in a gesture that had moved Eva deeply – David had brought a woman none of them had seen before. She was six foot tall, with a blonde lion’s mane of hair, and an incipient baby bump leavening the austere lines of her frame.

‘This is Jacquetta,’ David told the family, with some pride. ‘She’s having twins.’

Now, he says, ‘And Jim? All well back at the ranch?’

Eva nods. ‘All well.’

This isn’t strictly true, but she has no wish to discuss with David how disappointed Jim had been with his last sculpture exhibition. (No sales, and not a single national review.) Or their continued anxiety over Sophie, now twenty-five and scratching out a chaotic life in Brighton, changing jobs and partners with the same irredeemable lassitude they have for so long struggled to address. Or Eva’s own quietly prolonged grief for Jakob, whose death came two years ago, and whom she still misses, every hour of every day.

And anyway, how could Eva convey to David the fact that, difficult as they are, such problems do not seep beneath the foundations of what they have built together, she and Jim? The breakfasts shared in silent companionship, voices speaking softly on the radio. The mornings spent separately – he in his studio, she in her study, but each still acutely attuned to the other’s presence. The evenings of cooking, eating, watching television, seeing friends: all the minute permutations of their life together.

‘Rebecca tells me you’re working on something,’ David says. ‘A book?’

She nods. ‘Perhaps. They’re short stories, but I think they’ll hang together.’ She is unable to keep the excitement from her voice: to find her way back to writing after so long, and to enjoy her writing, to hope that it might even be good; it is almost more than she could have hoped for. And it was Jim, of course, who made it happen; Jim and his absolute intolerance for any of her weary excuses.
You’re a writer, Eva. You’ve always been a writer. So go upstairs and write.

David places a hand on her arm. ‘Eva, that’s wonderful. I always said you shouldn’t have given up your writing.’ She smiles – how like David that is. ‘Anything about me in there?’

She laughs. ‘Oh yes. I’d get your lawyer on the case as soon as possible.’

‘All right.’ He sits back, eyes shining with amusement. ‘I deserved that. But seriously – what are the stories about?’

‘Oh …’ How to answer that; how to reduce months of work, of thinking and worrying and refining, to one polished sentence? ‘Love, I suppose. One woman, and the men she has loved. Each story is about a particular moment, experienced with a particular man.’ Seeing his eyebrows lift, she adds, ‘Don’t look at me like that. There haven’t been a
lot
of men. Most of the stories are about the one man she loves most deeply.’

‘Her Jim, then.’ She holds David’s gaze, and then the three-minute bell rings out across the foyer. Around them begins the general bustling of the crowd. The atmosphere between them breaks, loses its charge.

‘We should go in,’ Eva says.