The Versions of Us (45 page)

A gunshot wakes him.

Jim lies still, listening to the loud thrumming of his heart. He’d been standing in an underground car park, thick with shadow; someone was chasing him – a faceless figure in a black hooded top, the twin barrels of a shotgun glinting in the gloom …

More shots: two of them, in quick succession. A voice. ‘Dad.
Dad
. It’s Daniel. Open up.’

He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. Jim stays where he is, breathing, letting his pulse slow. The drawn blind is casting wide slats of light and shade across the living-room floor. He wonders why he isn’t in his bedroom. He wonders why his son is banging on the door. If he has lost his key, why doesn’t Eva let him in?

‘
Dad
.’ The voice is louder now: Daniel must have come round to the living-room window. ‘Are you there? Let me in, please.’

Consciousness is returning slowly to Jim, in patches, like a child’s drawing sloppily coloured in. He is aware of the rough fabric of the sofa, then of a small patch of drool that appears to have gathered stickily on the arm, beside his open mouth. Then of the regiment of bottles assembled around the sofa, shaded prettily in the half-light like a still-life, pencil-sketched. Then of the fact that this is not his house.

‘Dad. Come on. I’m worried about you.’

But this must be his house: why else would he be here? So where, in that case, is Eva?

‘Dad. This is serious. Open up.’

This
is
his house, but not Eva’s. It is the house he shares with Bella and Robyn. So where are they?

‘
Dad
.’ A dull thud: someone is banging on the window. ‘Please. You’ve got to let me in.’

Bella isn’t here. Neither is Robyn. Jim is quite alone.

‘I’m serious, Dad. If you don’t let me in, I’m going to come back with the police, and make them break down the door.’

‘
All right
.’ Jim’s voice emerges in a low croak. The voice of an old man. The voice of a man he doesn’t know. ‘I’m
coming
.’

From beyond the window, he hears Daniel sigh. ‘Dad, you’re there. For God’s sake.’

Getting up from the sofa, Jim becomes aware of the pain: the deafening clash of it. He sits for a moment, concentrating on remaining upright. His breathing is shallow, ragged, and he seems to be naked except for a pair of underpants and his dressing-gown, on whose right sleeve a large, brownish stain appears to have bloomed. When he gets to his feet, his head spins woozily, and his pain redoubles its infernal rhythm.

He staggers across the living-room to the hall, opens the door. There, on the front step, is his son: jeans, brown leather jacket, his dark hair artfully styled. Beyond him, a bright wintry Hackney morning. Sun thinly glancing off flaking stucco. The front path inches deep with mulching leaves.

‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’

Jim squints at his son, but the light hurts his eyes, and he finds he can’t quite look at him.

‘Come on. Let me make you a coffee, or something.’

He can feel the effort Daniel is making to say only this. He moves aside to let him in, follows him back down the hallway.

The kitchen is not as bad as Jim had feared. Unwashed plates stacked beside the sink, the remains of the Indian he ordered last night – or was it the night before? – congealing in plastic containers. Bottles lined up along the windowsill. This confuses Jim: he quite clearly remembers throwing bottle after bottle into the recycling bin, wincing as they crashed and splintered. Odd how the bottles always seem to reappear.

Daniel hands Jim a mug of black coffee – of course there’s no milk – and a packet of Nurofen, then sits down opposite him at the table. Jim takes two tablets with the coffee. The crashing inside his skull is quieting a little, and the colours are slowly bleeding back into the day. With them come snatches of memory. The blank look on Bella’s face the morning she left, as if she were looking at a man she barely knew. Robyn fiddling with her hair (Jim took her out for pizza some days ago) while he asked about school, her friends, her dance classes, struggling to find the right words with which to reach his own daughter. He’d been reminded, painfully, of that awful pub lunch he’d shared with Daniel all those years before, after leaving Eva, leaving Gipsy Hill: dry roast chicken, rugby on the television, and his teenage son quietly uncomprehending.
Mum’s in pieces
,
Dad.
But Bella wasn’t, was she? She was A-OK; he was the one falling to pieces. He’d driven Robyn home – ‘home’: the glossy Islington mews house she and Bella were sharing with that man – and then gone back to Hackney. There, Jim had heard the siren call of the bottles neatly shelved in the newsagent’s on the corner. The sweet righting of the world, its shifting back into balance, that had come with the first sip.

‘Dad, you look awful.’

‘Do I?’ It is a while since Jim last looked in a mirror. He has been having trouble, lately, with his own reflection: an unnerving sense that he doesn’t recognise himself. ‘I suppose I must.’

‘When did you last have a wash?’

What a thing for a son to ask his father.
A lump forms in Jim’s throat. ‘Come on, Daniel. It’s not as bad as all that.’

He can feel his son watching him. Daniel has Eva’s eyes, her direct, uncompromising gaze. What does he have of Jim’s? Nothing, Jim hopes, for the boy’s sake.

‘Hattie and I would like you to come and stay with us for a bit. We don’t think it’s good for you to be on your own.’

Hattie: that lovely, sweet-faced girl with the wide smile, the easy laugh. How can Jim take this ugly face of his into her home, let the blackness that surrounds him flow out over that light, beautiful flat, with its white walls and sanded floors and dried flowers in jars?

He shakes his head. ‘No. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m fine where I am.’

‘You’re not, though, Dad, are you? You’re not fine at all.’

Jim says nothing. Through the back window, he watches a sparrow settle on a branch.

Bella and Robyn had left after breakfast one day, while he was out buying a newspaper. She must have had their bags ready in the spare room; how, Jim wondered for weeks afterwards, could he not have noticed? Her note was on the kitchen table, scrawled hurriedly – her writing was almost illegible – on the back of a used envelope; later, it occurred to him to wonder whether she had been planning to leave a note at all.
We both know it’s over. I suspect we should really never have started it. But we did, and it was good while it lasted. We’re moving in with Andrew. You can see Robyn whenever you like.

‘Andrew’ meant Andrew Sullivan, of course. Jim knew about him: he’d been collecting Bella’s work for years, and she’d been perfectly open with Jim about the fact that she was sleeping with him. When she’d told him, she was stretched out, catlike, on their bed; Jim was standing up, folding clean washing, feeling somehow at a disadvantage. She’d been sleeping with Andrew for months, she said. But he knew that, didn’t he?

He didn’t.

‘Oh.’ Bella had seemed genuinely perplexed. ‘I’m sure I never made you any false promises, Jim. We promised to make each other happy, didn’t we? Well, this makes me happy.’

‘Come on, Dad,’ Daniel says now. ‘It’s no good, you being stuck in the house on your own.’ He doesn’t need to add,
surrounded by memories of that woman
. He and Jennifer made their feelings about Bella perfectly clear: Jennifer overtly (she and Henry had planned their infrequent visits carefully, choosing times when Bella was unlikely to be at home), Daniel with a little more tact. They had even had a good dinner together – he, Bella, Robyn; Daniel, Hattie – for Jim’s last birthday. But that had been in an Italian restaurant in Soho; thinking about it now, Jim can’t remember the last time his son was in this house.

‘Have a shower. Let me put a few things in a bag for you.’

‘Daniel.’ Jim looks directly at his son for the first time. Daniel’s open, unlined face – his compassion, his youthfulness, his sheer bloody
optimism
– makes Jim want to weep. ‘I know what you’re doing, and I am grateful. But honestly, I don’t think I should come. Look at me. I’m a mess. I can’t bring this crap into your house. It’s not fair on Hattie.’

‘Actually, it was Hattie’s idea. Hers, and Mum’s.’

Perhaps it is the mention of Eva that changes Jim’s mind: that, or simple exhaustion. A letting go. Either way, he allows Daniel to take him up to the bathroom, to leave him showering while his son sorts a few of his things into a bag. And then they are in Daniel’s old Fiat, the heaters giving out their stale, biscuity warmth while the dark-windowed boozers and fried-chicken shops of east London give way to the looming glass and concrete of the City; the wide silver river to south London’s twisting roundabouts and high, blank-faced estates.

Hattie and Daniel live on the ground floor of a neat terraced Edwardian house in Southfields. The plasterwork is recently painted, the garden hedge trimmed. Hattie, waiting in the hallway, smells of face cream and fabric conditioner, so clean and fresh that Jim feels he oughtn’t to touch her. But she draws him to her. ‘Glad you’re here. We’ve been so worried.’

It is then that Jim starts to cry, while Daniel carries Jim’s bag in from the car, and his son’s girlfriend holds him in her arms.

‘I’ve made such a mess, Hattie,’ Jim says quietly. ‘Such a mess of everything. I miss her so much.’

‘Of course you do,’ she says. ‘Of course you miss Bella.’

No
, he would like to say, crediting the truth that he is only just beginning to acknowledge to himself.
Not Bella. Eva
.

But he does not say these words aloud. Instead he thanks Hattie, and he steps away, dries his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper. ‘Sorry, Hattie. I’m not sure what came over me.’

Daniel, coming back through from the kitchen, places a hand on his father’s arm. ‘Come on, Dad. Let’s get the kettle on.’

‘Are you hungry?’ Eva says after she has embraced Sarah, then held her at arm’s length for a moment, noted the shape and colour of her. Her daughter has a new haircut – short, rather elegant; in the sixties, the term would have been ‘gamine’. She has lost weight, too: in Eva’s arms, she felt less substantial than usual, and Eva found herself remembering, with some pain, her daughter’s precarious years in Paris, when she’d had to watch Sarah grow skeletal, living on coffee and cigarettes and who knew what. She and Ted had telephoned from Rome as often as they’d permit themselves, asking if they could send money; whether Sarah – and, later, Pierre – were eating enough. It is this old habit that has prompted her to ask this question now.

Sarah, knowing this, offers her mother a wry smile. ‘I’m fine, Mum. We ate on the plane. I could murder a coffee, though. Pierre?’

Eva’s grandson is standing a little apart: he is fifteen, all skinny legs and sharp angles, two white wires dangling from his ears. He removes one of the wires to answer his mother’s moving mouth. ‘What?’

‘Take the headphones out, please, and say hello to Oma properly.’

Pierre rolls his eyes, makes a pantomime of stuffing the wires into his pocket. But when Eva holds him close, he is a boy again, wide-eyed and grinning, chasing the ginger cat around the tiny fifth-floor apartment in Belleville where he was born.

‘Hello, Oma,’ he says into her ear.

‘Hello, darling. Welcome to Rome.’

They stop for coffee at the airport bar: three espressos in heavy white china cups, the barman eyeing Sarah with lazy interest. Sarah admires the fluency with which Eva places their order, asks after the man’s day.

‘Not too rusty, then?’

‘It seems to have come back. Like your French, no? When you’ve lived somewhere, I don’t think the language ever really goes away.’

Eva had been afraid, at first, that it would have: that not only her Italian, which she had not had cause to use for many years, might have deserted her, but also her love of Italy, the ease with which she and Ted had navigated the complex paths and channels of Roman life. And, more than that, she’d feared that she would simply not be able to face navigating them without Ted.