The Versions of Us (48 page)

Eva had felt the truth of the lyric then, and she still does, though she and Jim are now nothing more to each other than former lovers, parents, grandparents; survivors berthed in the calmer waters of old age. Though the boy he was all those years ago in Cambridge, stopping to help her on the path, has become a pale, thinning man, almost elderly. And though the girl Eva once was is now hidden deep inside herself, under loosening skin, greying hair; beneath all the accumulated detritus of time.

Sometime in the afternoon, Eva steps out into the back garden for a cigarette. (Her inability to quit is the one subject on which she and Carl disagree.) It is there that Jim finds her.

‘Not given up yet, then?’

She shakes her head, offers him the packet. ‘I know
you
haven’t.’

‘Got to be allowed some vices.’ Jim takes a cigarette, accepts her proffered lighter. ‘Cut down, though. Five a day.’

‘I thought that was meant for vegetables.’

He smiles. It is the same smile as always, though the skin around his mouth has pouched and puckered, as has her own. How many times have they stood together, smoking, talking, making plans? Too many to remember. Too many to count. ‘Yes, well. Doing what I can on that front, too.’

They are silent for a while, contemplating the cool, damp grass, the naked trees. Above them, the clouds are massing, darkening; the day has barely bothered to bring light, and the evening will be falling again soon.

‘It doesn’t seem right, a world without Anton,’ Jim says. ‘He was always so vivid, somehow. Larger than life. Remember his thirtieth? That disgusting punch he made, and everyone passing out from too much grass.’

She closes her eyes. She can see the old Kennington house: the white furniture, the walled garden, the lights strung from the trees. With the clarity afforded by time, Eva can see that things were starting to founder even then; can remember Jim holding her in his arms as they danced; can remember willing things to take a turn for the better. And they had, for a while. They really had.

‘Of course I remember. God, thirty seemed so old then, didn’t it? We just had no idea.’

‘Eva …’ She opens her eyes, sees Jim regarding her with a new intensity. She swallows. ‘No, Jim, please don’t. Not now.’

He blinks. ‘No. I’m not … I don’t want to ask for forgiveness. Not today. Not again. I know you’re happy with Carl. He’s a good man.’

‘He is.’ She takes a deep drag on her cigarette. Next to her, Jim is shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. A knot of fear forms in the deepest part of her. ‘Jim? What is it?’

He takes a moment, sends a small cloud of smoke billowing from his mouth. Then he says, ‘I can’t tell you today. Not on Anton’s day. Come and see me, will you? Next week, maybe? We’ll talk.’

Eva has finished her cigarette. She drops the stub, crushes it with her foot. ‘This sounds serious.’

He looks at her again, holds her gaze this time. ‘It is, Eva. But not today. Come and see me. Please.’

The knot of fear has risen up in her body; loosened itself, snaked up into her chest, her throat. Jim does not need to say more. She will go to him: she will hear what the doctors have said, how much time he has. She will help him to make his plans; soothe him, if she can.
Hearts and bones
. A young woman with a broken bicycle. The man she might, so easily, have missed: cycling past, not stopping, carrying with him a whole life, a life that might never have been hers to share.

‘Of course I’ll come,’ she says.

‘Smoke?’ Toby says. ‘I reckon there’s time.’

Jim shakes his head. ‘Given up.’

‘You never have.’ Toby stares at him, impressed. ‘Well, old man, I’ll be damned.’

He stands with Toby while his cousin lights his cigarette, draws in his first grateful puff. There are a few other smokers, standing a little apart, acknowledging each other with an expression that is not quite a smile. It is not a day for smiling, though that is how Jim remembers Anton Edelstein, will always remember him: vigorous, expansive, grinning.

It is many years since Jim last saw Anton, but he has, in recent months, come across photographs of him on Facebook: Toby, Anton and their friend Ian Liebnitz on a whisky tour of Speyside; Anton on holiday in Greece with his wife, Thea. Dylan had set Jim up with a Facebook account on his last visit to Edinburgh. ‘Good for keeping in touch with the old crowd, no?’ he had said, and Jim had nodded at his son, not wanting to betray his reluctance: the fact that the larger part of him can’t understand how and when the world decided to knock down the walls that had once discreetly shielded private lives from view.

Jim’s only online ‘friends’ remain Dylan, Maya, Toby and Helena. (She is given to posting phoney motivational messages on his wall, knowing that they irritate him beyond reason.
Every time you find some humour in a difficult situation, you win. Don’t let yesterday’s disappointments overshadow tomorrow’s dreams.
) He had demurred from requesting Anton Edelstein as a friend, still ruled by the no doubt anachronistic sense that a virtual friendship ought to spring from more than a distant, if cordial, acquaintance. He had, however, found himself lingering over Anton’s photographs, looking for a particular face.

It had not taken him long to find Eva. She was sitting at a table on some sunny terrace; behind her rose the distant plumes of pine trees, and a swathe of glistening water – a swimming pool – was visible just beyond her left arm. The changes time had brought in her had, for a moment, shocked him. (He had the same feeling, often, on seeing his own reflection in the mirror.) But fundamentally, she was unchanged: still slim, narrow-featured; still fully, wholeheartedly, alive. Her grief had not, he saw, destroyed her, and for that Jim had felt a kind of gratitude.

The funeral cortège is approaching; the black hearse edging respectfully to a halt. The smokers stir, shuffle, as if caught in an illicit act. Jim, turning, sees the doors of the family car open, Eva stepping out, holding tightly to her sister-in-law’s hand. She seems smaller than in the photograph, than in the many images of her he has retained in his mind. Her feet, in their smart black shoes, seem tiny; her body, neatly belted inside a coat of dark-grey wool, is trim as a bird’s. She doesn’t notice him: her attention is focused on the covered entranceway, where the other mourners are gathering. Beside her, Thea Edelstein is a pale ghost of a woman, her eyes red-rimmed; it feels intrusive even to look at her. The daughter, Hanna, is emerging from the back seat, with a handsome, blond-haired man Jim presumes to be her husband.

He is suddenly certain that he shouldn’t have come. He is finding it difficult to breathe: to Toby he says, through short gasps, that he will wait behind for a few minutes, follow him inside. Toby stares at him. ‘You all right?’

‘Yes. Just need some air.’

Jim stands alone until all the other mourners have gone in, the red-brick wall rough beneath his hand. It is the worst of London winter days – monochrome, cheerless, spurts of rain carried on an icy wind – but he doesn’t feel the cold. He is thinking of the doctor’s office in the hospital. Not even an office, really, just a windowless room. A desk, a computer, a bed covered with a thin paper sheet. As the doctor spoke, Jim was reading a notice on the wall.
Have you washed your hands? Everyone can do their bit to halt the spread of MRSA
.

For days afterwards, it was that notice Jim held in his mind, not what the doctor had said, though the words were there too, of course. Biding their time. Waiting, like mines, to explode the casual certainty that his life would simply roll on as it always had.

‘You going in, sir?’ The undertaker, extravagantly sombre in his hat and three-piece suit. ‘I’m about to gather the pall-bearers.’

Jim nods. ‘I’m going in.’

Inside, three large displays of blue and white flowers are arranged around the central plinth. Ian Liebnitz recites the Kaddish, which Jim knows only at second hand, through Allen Ginsberg’s poem: he is not prepared for its bare, unvarnished sorrow. The celebrant gives the eulogy – written, she says, by Anton’s widow and sister. (In the front row, Jim sees Eva bow her head.) Hanna Edelstein reads the Dylan Thomas poem, familiar from many funerals, made unique by her strong, determined voice, which wavers only in the final lines. The curtains close slowly to the sound of a solo violin. Later, Jim will place the music as the first movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata.

He thinks, of course, of his mother’s funeral: of the iced Bristol ground, the high wooden rafters of the church; of his anger, still jagged then. He was angry for such a long time: angry with Vivian, for making him carry the burden of her illness, and then for allowing it to overwhelm her. Angry with his father, for not showing him how to love one woman, and her alone – and for being, Jim knows, the better artist. Angry with himself for not allowing anyone – not Helena, certainly not Caitlin – to truly know him. He was able, for many years, to channel this anger into his work – but anger, Jim knows now, is a young man’s game. He is no longer angry; could find no anger, even, with his doctor, or with the stark facts he’d laid out for Jim’s inspection. Facts with which it was impossible to argue.

After the service, the mourners linger in the courtyard, walk slowly among the floral tributes. Jim reads the card attached to a bouquet of white roses.
To a dear colleague and friend. You are much missed. Carl Friedlander
.

‘Jim Taylor.’

He looks up. She is damp-eyed, trying to smile.

‘Eva. I’m so sorry.’

‘Thank you.’ She moves closer, places a hand on his arm. She smells of face-powder and some sweet perfume. Why has he so often dreamed of her, this woman he barely knows, sketched out her image with his pencil, mixed in oil paint the precise colour of her skin, her hair, her eyes? He has never quite been able to answer this. Now he sees that the fact of her presence is the only answer.

‘It was good of you to come.’ He is intensely aware of the light pressure of her hand on his sleeve. ‘I’ve followed your career over the years. You’ve achieved so much.’

‘Have I?’ Jim can’t help himself – defensiveness is the weapon he reaches for most often these days. But she looks wrong-footed, and so he pedals back. ‘Thank you. It’s kind of you to say. And you … Well. I’ve read all your books.’

‘Really?’ That half-smile plays again on her lips. ‘You must be something of a glutton for punishment.’

He would like to reply, but Eva is looking over his shoulder.

‘David,’ she says to the man behind him: David Katz, Jim sees as he turns. An old man now, with a head of white hair, an expensive-looking black coat.

Eva is moving away from Jim. ‘You’ll come back to the house, won’t you? Twenty-five Lupus Street. Do come.’

He was not planning to attend the wake, but he does, standing a little self-consciously with Toby, collecting a glass of red wine from a waiter’s tray. It is a handsome house: Georgian, pillared, its interiors a muted seascape of white, grey and blue. Jim thinks, with a sudden deep yearning that surprises him, of the House: his beloved Cornish home of concrete and glass, with the wide picture window framing rock, sea, sky.

The house, of course, will go to Dylan, along with everything else: Jim has already informed his solicitor, asked him to check over his will. He is having dinner with Stephen tonight. He will tell his old friend then, begin to make the arrangements for his legacy (a word that lends his life’s work more import than Jim suspects it truly deserves). Then, tomorrow, he will make the journey north, to Dylan, Maya and Jessica. The thought of Dylan’s face as he tells him the news tugs a blankness across Jim’s vision, like falling snow.

An hour or so later – it is mid-afternoon, and night is already drawing in – Eva makes her way over to him. She has removed her coat: her black wool dress is neat, well cut. Jim has been watching her as she moved among the guests, thanking them for coming, her tone light, solicitous; were it not for the tightness around her eyes, she might have been any hostess running an ordinary party. He feels a rush of admiration for her – for the sacrifices she has made, for the years she must have lost in looking after Ted. But perhaps Eva didn’t see it that way; perhaps she is one of those to whom selflessness comes easily. He knows himself well enough to admit that it has never come easily to him.

‘Sorry I’ve not had more time to talk,’ she says. They are alone, by the garden window: beyond the darkening patio are the dimming outlines of trees. ‘Odd how funerals require you to be sociable, when of course it’s the last thing you want to be.’

He looks down at his feet, thinking perhaps that she means him: that the presence of someone like him – a mere acquaintance – is exactly the burden he had feared it would be.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean you,’ she adds quickly, as if he had spoken aloud. ‘I’m delighted you’re here. I’ve always …’ Eva hesitates, and he watches the set of her chin. Below, in the soft dip of her collarbone, is a silver heart. ‘Felt I knew you better than I really did, I suppose. It’s a funny thing. I did get your postcard, you know. I kept it for years. The Hepworth.’