The Versions of Us (41 page)

Impossible to explain to his sixteen-year-old son why Jim couldn’t come home; why – despite his regret at hurting Eva, at hurting his children – he was happier with Bella than he’d been in years. He had already left the school by then – he’d handed in his notice before the end of the spring term, and hadn’t been asked to return for the summer. Alan’s disapproval had been etched on his face as he accepted his resignation, and Jim had not found the courage to say any of the things he’d imagined. But then they had discovered that Bella was pregnant, and, all at once, their future had come into sharp focus. At the hospital for their first scan, Bella had held his hand tightly, watching the tiny image of their child appear on the screen. ‘I knew it, Jim,’ she’d said later. ‘From the first moment I saw you, I knew I wanted to have your baby. She – or he – is going to be so beautiful. Our very own work of art.’

After tea, playtime: Jim settles Robyn in her bedroom, surrounded by her dolls. On the landing, he pauses before the door to the spare room. It is here, among boxes and broken umbrellas and Robyn’s discarded playthings, that he has set up his easel, laid out his paints, his brushes, his turps-soaked rags.

It was a temporary arrangement at first: the new studio space they’d rented in Dalston was smaller than the one in Peckham, and Bella had started working on a larger scale – her last piece, a minute reconstruction of her childhood bedroom, had occupied the entire space. There wasn’t room for them to work side by side, and his working from home would leave Bella free to spend longer hours at the studio.

Jim felt dwarfed by her work: its scale, its swagger, threatened to overwhelm his quieter, more tentative efforts. The sculptures he had attempted in the Peckham studio, in the first flush of energy brought by falling in love with Bella, with all that he felt she represented, had not come to life, and he had, with an unspoken feeling of failure, returned to painting. But even here, at home, that sense of diminution has remained – his work just seems too small, somehow; an inaudible whisper next to Bella’s full-voiced shout. He is still painting, dutifully, on the days he is not supply teaching, or looking after Robyn, but he is aware of it as exactly that: a duty. To his long-held ambitions; to Bella; to the version of himself he has offered her: the artist thwarted by fatherhood, by marriage, by responsibility, looking for a chance to start again.

On the landing, he turns from the spare room, goes back downstairs. It is half past four: still hours until dinner, which he has promised to prepare (if Bella comes home at all: she has begun to spend several nights a week sleeping at the studio). In the kitchen, Jim makes himself a cup of tea, carries it through to the living-room, sits down. A great feeling of tiredness washes over him, and he suddenly feels that he couldn’t possibly get up. His eyes twitch shut, and he is aware of nothing, until a small hand is tugging at his sleeve, a small, shrill voice shouting, ‘Daddy, wake up! Why are you sleeping?’

Rising slowly from a dream, he says, ‘I’m coming, Jennifer. Daddy’s coming.’

When he opens his eyes, he is surprised not to see Jennifer there. He blinks at this tiny girl, her eyes a pure, clear blue beneath her mass of dark curls, and for a few seconds, he has no idea at all who she is.

She carries Ted’s lunch through on a tray: leek and potato soup, blended to a fine purée; a slice of buttered bread that she will break into small pieces and moisten with the soup.

‘Ready for lunch, darling?’ Eva places the tray down on the meal trolley beside Ted’s bed – wheeled, hospital-issue; ugly but functional. She does not expect a reply, but when she turns, she sees that he has fallen asleep.

She stands for a moment, watching the shuddering rise and fall of her husband’s chest. He has pressed the right side of his face against the pillow, so that only the left side – the good side – is visible. With his eyes closed, his mouth half open, he looks exactly as he always did: she is reminded of the first morning she woke beside him in his unfamiliar bed, traced the planes and contours of his face as he slept. When he woke, he had said, ‘Please tell me that you’re really here, Eva. That I’m not dreaming.’ She had smiled, drawn a finger lightly across the curve of his cheek. ‘I’m here, Ted. I’m not going anywhere.’

In the kitchen, she lays his tray back on the countertop: she’ll check on him again in half an hour, heat up the soup; or perhaps he’ll prefer it cold. It is a beautiful day, warm but not oppressively so: she has opened the kitchen windows, hung the washing – Ted’s sheets, laundered on endless rotation; his striped pyjamas; his support stockings – out to dry. Now, she takes her own bowl of soup out to the garden, lays the patio table with placemat, spoon, neatly folded napkin.

Eva made a point of mentioning this routine in the book.
You will mostly be eating alone, but don’t neglect those small rituals that make a meal feel special. You’d have done it when your husband, wife or parent was well, so why not do it for yourself now?
Daphne had worried that it sounded too prescriptive. ‘Will most carers really be fretting about folding napkins, Eva?’ she’d said on the telephone: they were working on edits to the second draft. ‘Aren’t you just putting them under even more pressure?’

But Eva had held firm. ‘It’s the small things like that, Daphne, that keep you from going mad. At least, that’s been my experience. And that’s what I’m writing about, isn’t it?’

Eva had sounded more certain than she truly felt: her deeper worry was about the fact that she was writing the book – working title,
Handle With Care
– at all. She had been caught completely off guard when Emma Harrison – a young woman who had taken over clients from Jasper, Eva’s former agent and friend – approached her with the idea. It had only been six months since Sarah had bought Eva the laptop computer and set her up with something called Outlook Express. (The name had made Eva laugh. ‘Sounds like a film by Sergio Leone,’ she had said.) Only a handful of people had Eva’s email address, but the enterprising Emma Harrison had managed to track it down. She had, she explained tactfully, joined the agency soon after Jasper’s death.
I do hope you don’t mind my contacting you out of the blue
, she wrote.
But I wondered whether you might like to have lunch one day soon? I have an idea that I’d like to put to you.

They met at Vasco & Piero’s in Soho, Jasper’s favourite haunt. (Eva had to hand it to the girl: she had done her research.) Emma had ordered an expensive Sancerre, and said that her idea was simple. ‘A book about caring. Part memoir, part practical guide. It must be
so
difficult, doing what you’re doing, Eva – and there are thousands of wives and husbands and children up and down the country doing the exact same thing. Quietly, nobly – for no money, mostly. This would be a chance to speak to them. To offer them support.’

Eva had drawn the line at ‘nobly’ – she was, she said rather primly, ‘no Florence Nightingale’ – but she had promised to think about it. That night, after Ted’s bath – Carole, the evening nurse, had come to help lift him in and out, and now Eva was rubbing E45 cream into his legs – she had said to him, ‘Darling, they’re asking me to write a book about you. About what looking after you is really like. I’m not sure it’s a good idea. What do you think?’

Ted had become quite agitated then: the voiceless sounds that had become his only mode of expression increased in volume. (She would start the book with this: the terrible fact that a man who had built his career on the ability to communicate had been left unable to speak.) His eyes had moved rapidly from side to side, in the blinking action she had come to associate with assent.

‘You think I should?’ she said. The blinking continued. ‘Well.’ She moved her hand up his body, began massaging the cream into his right arm. ‘We’ll see, then.’

Now, in the garden, she eats her soup. She has left the radio on, and the news travels softly through the kitchen window: three children killed in a petrol bomb attack in Northern Ireland; famine in Sudan; Brazil to meet France in the World Cup final. (
Stay interested in the world
, she had written in chapter three.
Listen to the radio, watch television, subscribe to a newspaper. The important thing is to remember that you and the person you care for aren’t the only people left in the world – and certainly not the only people in pain.
)

She thinks about those poor children in Ireland and Sudan; about Sarah’s Pierre, now a bright, bilingual seven-year-old; about the frightened woman who wrote to her a month ago, saying that her husband had returned to Pakistan with their two children, and she believed she might never see them again. Eva did not choose the letter for her column. Instead, in accordance with the policy she has developed with the
Daily Courier
’s lawyers, she wrote back to the mother, urging her to go to the police. The woman’s reply came yesterday.
Thank you for your advice, Mrs Simpson. I can’t tell you what it means to me. But it’s no good. He says he’ll kill them if I come after him. And I really think he could.

Advice. This is what Eva deals in now, though she feels, deep down, that she knows no more than anyone about anything; less, even, than she did when she was twenty, and everything seemed so plain and clear and simple. It was
Handle With Care
that did it, of course: the book’s success had exceeded even Emma Harrison’s expectations. The critics loved it (most of them, anyway); the readers adored it. Eva was invited to appear on television, and to join the boards of three charities. The ‘care issue’ was debated in Parliament. Even Judith Katz – now ninety years old, and measuring out her days in a rather chic sheltered housing development in Hampstead Garden Suburb – telephoned to offer her congratulations. And then the
Daily Courier
got in touch, in the shape of Jessamy Cooper, the thirty-four-year-old editor of the new Saturday magazine. (
When
, Eva couldn’t help wondering,
had the whole world grown so absurdly
young
?
)

Over another expensive lunch, Jessamy had said, ‘How would you feel about being our new advice columnist?’

Eva thought for a moment. ‘Agony aunt, you mean?’

‘If you like.’ Jessamy had smiled. ‘But “agony” sounds a bit gruesome, doesn’t it?’

The irony, Eva thinks, finishing her soup, is that the more time she spends issuing advice and talking about care, the less time she spends actually
caring
. They now employ Carole for three full days a week, and to help Eva give Ted his bath. When he is in a particularly bad phase – there was a bout of pneumonia just after Christmas – they book her for nights, too, and she stays in the spare room.

The book has made this possible – that, and Ted’s payout from the
Daily Courier
, which proved more than generous. Eva had been invited in to see the new editor, a recent import from the
Telegraph
whom Eva had never met; she had sat at a cautious distance from his desk, watching his small, rheumy eyes shifting uncomfortably around the room. ‘Great man, Ted Simpson. Much missed.’
But you never knew him
, Eva had resisted the temptation to say.
What do you know of how much he is missed?

It would seem, however, that even Ted prefers Eva to keep busy with her writing. He had told her, back when he was still able to speak, that his greatest fear was not for himself, but for the fact that she might be forced to devote herself to his care. There had been a terrible incident – Eva had related it in the book – a few weeks after they’d returned from Rome: they had taken a train to King’s Cross one morning, and he had lost control of his movements as they crossed the platform. She had known exactly what to do – grip his arm tightly as she helped him inch backwards across the concourse, find a place for him to sit; above all, try to keep him calm. But a businesswoman – Eva can still picture her now in her trim black suit, her sharp spiked heels – had tutted as she passed; said loudly, ‘Fancy being drunk at this time of day. It’s a disgrace.’

Ted had shrunk from the woman’s voice, as if from a physical blow. When they finally found somewhere to sit, he had placed his head in his hands, and said, ‘You should leave me, Eva. I’m no use to you. I’m ruining your life.’

Eva had taken his hands from his face; they were cold, bloodless, so she had warmed them with her own. ‘Ted. I told you I wasn’t going anywhere. And I’m not. You’re stuck with me, all right?’

And yet Eva could not pretend, in the deepest part of herself, that the thought of leaving him had not occurred to her. One afternoon a few weeks later, she had snatched a few hours for herself, made the slow climb uphill to Alexandra Palace. She had sat on a bench under a wide plane tree that made her think of Paris, looking down over the city.
I am too young for this
, she told herself.
I never asked for it. It isn’t fair
. And it wasn’t, of course – but then she made herself think of how much more unfair it was for Ted. She pictured herself leaving, handing his care over to a nurse of whom they could expect no more than a distant, anonymous kindness; leaving him in a hospital somewhere, reassuring herself with that terrible euphemism ‘home’. Ted was an only child – his parents dead, no children of his own – and she and Sarah were all he had; they would not desert him. And Eva loved him. That fact was beyond question.