The Versions of Us (4 page)

Jim, at his easel, lays his palette down on the floor, moves quickly around the room, turning on lamps. But it’s no good: in the artificial light, the colours seem flat, uninspired; the paint is too thick in places, the brushstrokes too clearly visible. His father never painted by night: he rose early, went up to his attic studio to make the best of the morning. ‘Daylight never lies, son,’ he’d say. Sometimes, his mother would mutter back, her voice low, but still loud enough for Jim to catch, ‘Unlike
some
people around here.’

He puts the palette in the basin, wipes off his brushes on an old rag, places them in a jam jar filled with turps. Splashes of watery paint spatter the enamel: his bedder will complain again tomorrow. ‘Didn’t sign up to clean this sort of mess, now, did I?’ she’ll say, and roll her eyes. But she’s more tolerant than Mrs Harold, the woman he had last year. In the third week of his first term, she had marched off to the head porter to complain, and before long, Jim had been hauled up before his director of studies.

‘Have a bit of consideration, won’t you, Taylor?’ Dr Dawson had told him wearily. ‘This isn’t actually an art school.’ They both knew he’d got off lightly. Dawson’s wife is a painter, and when the second-year ballot awarded Jim these enormous top-floor rooms, with their sloping ceilings and wide, uncurtained skylight, he couldn’t help thinking that the old professor might well have made the necessary arrangements.

But when it comes to Jim’s academic work, Dawson’s tolerance is starting to wear thin: he’s been late handing in all his essays this term, and not one of them has come back higher than a 2:2. ‘We have to consider, Mr Taylor,’ the professor had said last week, having called him back to his rooms, ‘whether you really want to stay on here.’ Then, staring at Jim meaningfully over his black-rimmed glasses, he had added, ‘So do you?’

Of course I do
, Jim thinks now.
Just not for the same reasons you’d like me to. You and my mother both.

He runs a finger lightly over the canvas to see whether the fresh paint has dried: Eva will be here soon, and he must cover up the portrait before she comes. He says it’s because it isn’t ready, but in fact it very nearly is. Today, while he should have been reading about land trusts and co-ownership, he has been working on the blocks of shadow that define the contours of her face. He has painted her seated at his desk chair, reading (a trick to make the long periods of sitting mutually beneficial), her dark hair falling in loose coils across her shoulders. As soon as he had sketched the outline, he realised that he was bringing to life the vision he had of her when they first met on the Backs.

The paint is dry; Jim draws an old sheet down over the canvas. It is a quarter past four. She’s three-quarters of an hour late now, and it’s still pouring, the rain an insistent drumming on the skylight. Fear grips him: perhaps she has slipped on the wet-slicked road; or a driver, blinded by the downpour, has caught the wheel of her bicycle, left her drenched and twisted on the pavement. Irrational, he knows, but this is how it is now – has been through the four weeks since each stepped into the other’s life with the ease of old friends picking up the thread of a familiar conversation. Elation underpinned by fear: the fear of losing her; the fear of not being enough.

Eva had told Jim about her boyfriend, David Katz, on the night they’d met, after he’d fixed the puncture, fetched his own bike and then cycled out with her to a pub he knew on Grantchester Road. She’d met Katz six months earlier, when they were both performing in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. (Katz was an actor, already carrying something of a reputation: Jim recognised the name.) Her heart wasn’t really in it, she’d said; the next day, she’d tell Katz it was over. She’d have done it right away, but this was the first night of his new play,
Oedipus Rex
. She’d missed the performance, and it seemed unkind to compound the hurt by telling him why.

Jim and Eva had sat in a corner booth in the back room of the pub, while the landlord rang out for last orders. It had been precisely six hours since they’d met, and one hour and ten minutes since they’d first kissed. When she finished speaking, Jim had nodded and kissed her again. He didn’t say that he had worked out why Katz’s name was familiar: that he was a friend of an old classmate of Jim’s, Harry Janus, now studying English at John’s. Jim had met Katz once, at a party, and had taken an instant dislike to him for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate. But from that moment on – even when Katz’s professional success became such that his failure at anything would seem unimaginable – Jim would feel a certain compassion for his rival: a loose, winner’s generosity. Whatever Katz ended up with, after all, Jim would still have the greater prize.

There, in the pub, Jim had admitted that there was also someone he’d need to let down gently. Eva hadn’t asked her name, and he knew that were she to ask, he would struggle to recall it. Poor Veronica: could she really have meant so little? And yet it was so: the following day, Jim had suggested they meet for coffee at a bar on Market Square, had told her it was over without even waiting for her to drain her mug. Veronica cried a little, silently – the tears loosened her make-up, sent a blackish trickle of kohl inching down her cheek. The depth of her emotion had surprised him – Jim was sure he hadn’t misled her, nor she him – and inspired in him nothing but a distant, polite embarrassment; he had passed her a tissue, wished her well, and taken his leave. Walking back to college, it had occurred to Jim to wonder how he could behave so unfeelingly. But his discomfort was quickly displaced by other, happier thoughts – Eva’s dark brown eyes, meeting his own; the pressure of her lips as they kissed. Jim would hardly ever think of Veronica again.

Eva had finished with Katz a few days later. The following Friday, she’d gone alone to London for her mother’s birthday; she’d have liked Jim to come, but her parents had met Katz over the summer, and she didn’t want to surprise them too quickly with news of this new relationship. Later that day, feeling at a loose end, Jim had found himself walking past the ADC Theatre, and buying a ticket for that evening’s performance of
Oedipus Rex
.

Even under layers of white stage make-up, David Katz seemed a formidable opponent: tall, charismatic, with an easy swagger even Jim could see must be attractive. And, like Eva, Katz was Jewish. Though he would never have admitted as much, Jim – a nominal Protestant, baptised only at his grandmother’s insistence, and with no sense of that common history, that loss – felt more than a little intimidated.

Afterwards, he’d slipped from the theatre, gone back to college and paced around his room, obsessing over what Eva saw in him, what he could possibly offer her that Katz couldn’t trump. And then Sweeting had come, knocked on his door, and told him that a few of them were off to the JCR, so why didn’t he stop moping and come and get drunk?

Now, the rain is pooling and sliding, and Jim’s thoughts are circling, picking up speed: Katz has been to see Eva; he has won her back; they’re lying together in her rooms, skin on skin. He reaches for his jacket, takes the stairs two at a time: he’ll check the gap in the hedge –
their
gap – in case she’s decided to avoid the porters’ lodge. (The day porter is beginning to raise an eyebrow at how often Eva passes through; unfairly, Jim feels, as she is certainly not the only Newnham girl to spend a good portion of her time out of college.) On the ground floor, he almost collides with Sweeting, coming in as he’s going out.

‘Watch it, Taylor,’ says Sweeting, but Jim doesn’t stop, doesn’t even notice the rain as it slicks his hair, slips beneath the loose collar of his shirt.

At the hedge, he stops, whispers her name. Says it again, louder. This time he hears her reply. ‘I’m here.’

She climbs through the gap, wet branches tugging at her face, her coat. He tries to part them, to ease her way, but the tough boughs snap back, scratch his hands. When she stands in front of him – soaked, dirt-smeared, catching her breath, saying sorry, she got stuck talking to someone after lectures, she just couldn’t get away – he could weep with relief. He swallows the urge, knowing it to be unmanly. But he can’t help saying, as he takes her in his arms, ‘Oh, darling, I thought you weren’t coming.’

Eva slips from his grasp, wearing that same stern expression he is coming to love, rain dripping from her nose onto the ground. ‘Silly boy. Don’t be ridiculous. How could I ever want to be anywhere but here?’

‘Must you go?’ she says.

Jim, dressing in the half-light of her room, turns to look at Veronica. She has shifted onto her side; the twin mounds of her breasts are pressed together, solid, pale as china beneath her violet slip. ‘I’m afraid I really must. I’m meeting the eleven-o’clock train.’

‘Your mother,’ she says flatly. She watches him as he pulls on his socks. ‘What is she like?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ he says, meaning
I don’t want to tell you
. And really, any association between Veronica and his mother must be avoided: there’s hardly ten years between them, a fact that, whenever he dwells on it, appals him, and must surely appal her even more.

Sensing this, perhaps, she doesn’t press the matter, but follows him downstairs in her silk robe, offers to make him coffee. The morning is dull and overcast, threatening rain. In the blunt grey light, last night’s detritus – the wine glasses, hers still carrying a bloom of pink lipstick; the dirty plates left festering in the sink – strikes him as impossibly sordid. He refuses the coffee, kisses her quickly on the lips, ignores her when she asks when she will see him again.

‘Bill’s back next week, remember,’ she adds, her voice low, as he opens the door to leave. ‘We haven’t much time.’

The door firmly closed behind him, Jim retrieves his bicycle from the passageway at the side of the house. Next door’s net curtains twitch as he wheels the bike out onto the road, but he doesn’t bother to look round. There is an odd sense of unreality to all this – as if it isn’t really him, stepping up onto the pedals, casting off onto the black tarmac of this unremarkable suburban street, leaving behind his lover (for want of a better word): a woman twelve years his senior, with a husband in the merchant navy.
Surely
, he tells himself as he turns onto Mill Road, skirts the steady flow of traffic filing from the city centre to the station,
it was all her doing?
Veronica had sought him out in one of the dustier corners of the University Library (she was doing an evening course in ancient cultures); Veronica had asked him if he would like to join her for a drink. She had done it before, of course, and she’ll do it again. That doesn’t make him an unwilling participant – far from it – but he is becoming keenly aware that he hardly knows her, and doesn’t really care to know her better; that what once seemed exciting and illicit now carries the deadening ring of cliché.
It simply has to stop
, he thinks.
I’ll tell her so tomorrow.

Thus resolved, Jim feels a little better as he draws up in front of the station, leans his bicycle against a spare portion of wall. The eleven-o’clock from King’s Cross is delayed. He sits in the cafeteria, drinking bad coffee and eating a Chelsea bun, until the train arrives with a great screeching of brakes. He is a little slow getting up, draining the last powdery dregs; from the ticket hall, he hears his mother calling. Her voice is brittle, over-loud. ‘James! James, darling! Mummy’s here! Where are you?’

Vivian is on one of her highs: he’d known it when she telephoned the porters’ lodge two days before, saying she would be up to pay him a visit on Saturday, and wasn’t that a lovely surprise? No use in telling her that it was almost the end of term, that he’d be home in two weeks, and had a mountain of work to finish before then if Dr Dawson was even going to entertain the possibility of allowing him to return next year. That is, if Jim decides he wants to return.

‘Yes, that’s a lovely surprise, Mum,’ he’d told her dutifully. He tells her the same thing now, when he finds her out by the taxi rank, still calling his name. She is wearing a bright blue wool suit, a pink scarf, a hat entwined with red artificial roses. She feels tiny in his embrace: he fears she is tinier every time he sees her, as if, ever so slowly, she is evaporating before his eyes. That is how she had described the lows to him once – he was only little, nine or ten; this was before his father’s death – as he sat beside her on her bed, the curtains drawn. ‘It feels,’ she had said, ‘as if I’m disappearing, bit by bit, and I don’t even care.’

He leaves his bike at the station, offers to pay for a taxi into town, but she won’t hear of it. ‘Let’s walk,’ she says. ‘It’s such a lovely day.’ It’s not lovely – they’re only halfway down Mill Road when the first drops of rain brush their shoulders – but she’s talking quickly. A stream of words. Her train ride up from Bristol yesterday – ‘I met the
loveliest
woman, Jim. I gave her our number. I really think we could become great
friends
.’ His aunt Frances, with whom she has spent the night in Crouch End – ‘She’d roasted a
chicken
, James, a whole
chicken
. All the children were there – such sweet little things – and there was trifle for afters, just because she
knows
it’s my favourite.’