The Versions of Us (33 page)

Across the table, Ted is watching her face. ‘Did you know her at all?’

‘No.’ Eva lays the paper down. ‘I barely know Jim, really. We didn’t even meet in Cambridge – it was later, in New York.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ He is moving on, already, to the French papers, taking up the morning’s edition of
Libération
. ‘My mistake.’

Later, in her office – it is lunchtime: traffic lining the street below as the weekend exodus begins, students whooping and laughing in the corridors – Eva takes out the obituary, places it on top of the unfinished Harvard reference. There is Jim, surely, in Vivian’s expression, in the cast of her slender body. She is surprised they didn’t use a photograph of Jim, too – his is the more familiar face; Eva recently read an article stating that a painting of his had sold at auction for a staggering sum. Perhaps the editor thought it would be too painful for him, for his family.
Strange, too
, she thinks,
that there should be no mention of Helena, or their son. What was his name? Dylan. A beautiful boy: dark hair and bright, curious eyes, dazzled by sunlight, reaching out for something beyond the frame.

From her desk drawer, Eva takes a postcard printed with the address of the university.
Too plain
, she thinks.
Too businesslike
. Instead, she finds a card she picked up at the Rodin Museum:
The Wave
. Three women crouched beneath a frozen surge of greenish onyx. Not by Rodin, but Camille Claudel.
Artist’s widow, artist’s mother
: will Jim find the resonance significant? She decides to take the chance that he will not.

Dear Jim
, Eva writes.
I was so sorry to read of your mother’s passing.
She crosses out ‘passing’, stares for a moment at the spoiled card. She has no other card to send him; he will have to forgive the mistake. She writes ‘death’ instead: surely anything else is euphemism
. I have no other words to offer: it’s at times like these, I think, that we see how inadequate language really is. Art says it all much better, doesn’t it? I hope you are still able to work. I think of you …

Eva pauses here, taps her chin with the blunt end of her pen. ‘Often’ would be an exaggeration: she thinks of Jim Taylor only rarely, and fleetingly – while washing up, or closing her eyes for sleep; in those unguarded moments when she allows her mind to wander to what might have been. She will leave the statement as it is: truthful, but ambivalent. Then she adds,
With all my sympathy and best wishes, Eva Simpson.
The address of Jim’s Cork Street gallery on the right-hand side of the card, and it is done.

She turns the card over, stares at it for a few seconds – she can’t quite read the expressions of the three bronze figures caught beneath that solid overhang of water – and then places it in her coat pocket to post later.

The next few hours pass quietly. She is interrupted only by a student – Mary, a nervous freshman from Milwaukee, anxious to know what Eva thinks of her story ahead of Monday’s class; and by Audrey Mills, bearing coffee and pastries from the local
patisserie.
Audrey is a large, good-natured woman whose thick grey hair always hangs in a plait drawn across one shoulder. They talk of the usual things: students, midterms, the repairs Audrey’s husband is making to their country house south of Versailles; Ted’s book (he is halfway through a tongue-in-cheek Englishman’s guide to the French character); Sarah. ‘It’s the half-term concert tonight, isn’t it?’ Audrey is finishing a mouthful of millefeuille.

Eva nods. ‘Starts at five. I’d better get this reference done and head off. My life won’t be worth living if I’m late.’

At four o’clock, Eva unspools the finished Harvard reference from her typewriter, folds it neatly, and places it inside a good cream envelope. Then she shrugs on her coat, checks her handbag for car keys, purse, compact. Outside, the corridor is empty, echoing; her heels click efficiently on the parquet as she makes her way downstairs, wishes the lone security guard, Alphonse,
un bon weekend.

The Friday afternoon traffic is still heavy: it takes her an age to manoeuvre her little Renault out onto the Avenue Bosquet, and the queue of cars slows to a halt on the Pont de l’Alma. It’s already half past four. Eva taps out an anxious rhythm on the steering-wheel, tries to remind herself that there are worse places to be stuck in traffic: it is a dull, colourless day, but the tall grey buildings along the Rive Droite are austerely beautiful, a study in monochrome.

She watches a small boat plough the grimy waters of the Seine, and finds herself thinking about her mother – about a visit Miriam and Jakob made to Paris one summer, soon after she and Ted were married. They had taken a bateau-mouche from Notre-Dame to the Eiffel Tower. The heat on the unshaded boat was intense, and Sarah was being difficult, whimpering endlessly about ice cream. To mollify her, Miriam had produced a carton of orange juice from her handbag, which Sarah then – deliberately, Eva suspected – managed to spill across the front of her new white dress. Eva had snapped at her daughter, and then at Miriam; at the Tower, they had aborted their plans to take the lift to the top, and sought instead the cool interior of a nearby café.

Eva can see her mother now: reaching into her bag for a handkerchief; looking pointedly at the tabletop while Ted and Jakob made tactful conversation, and Sarah busied herself with the ice-cream sundae Eva hadn’t had the heart to refuse her. She had suddenly felt thoroughly ashamed of herself; she’d reached across the table, taken Miriam’s hand, said in German, ‘I’m sorry, Mama. Forgive me.’ And Miriam had replied, ‘Don’t be so silly,
Schatzi
. What is there to forgive?’

She is still thinking of Miriam at five fifteen, when she arrives at the school. Ted is standing by the main doors, his shoulders hunched against the cold.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says when she reaches him, exhausted. ‘They haven’t started yet. Thank God for French timing, eh?’

Eva kisses him, loving him for always remaining calm. Ted is impossible to argue with: he listens, considers, never raises his voice. She has seen him really angry only a handful of times, and even then it was perceptible only in the deepening colour of his cheeks, the emphatic slowing of his speech.
He is such an easy man to love
, she thinks, and she takes his arm, walks with him down the corridor to the main hall. And he is easy for Sarah to love too, reserving for her a relaxed, unstudied affection. Seeing them together makes Eva fleetingly regret, sometimes, that he was unable to have children of his own. Ted told her this on one of the very first nights they had spent together at his flat in St John’s Wood, in a dull, broken tone that seemed to speak of a fear of losing her, losing what they were, so carefully, tentatively, embarking upon. But Eva had drawn him to her, said with a certainty that she would only later truly come to feel, ‘I have a daughter, Ted. Be a father to her. Let’s just be grateful for what we have.’

Sarah is one of the last students to perform. Eva can hardly breathe as she watches her emerge from the wings and sit down on the stool in the centre of the stage, settling her guitar on her knee. She is so like David – his height, his loose elegance and sculpted features – and yet she has so little of her father’s unshakeable confidence.
Why would she
, Eva thinks,
when she has barely seen him more than twice a year since she was five?

Eva wonders, sometimes, whether her daughter’s shyness – it took her music teacher weeks to persuade Sarah to take part in the concert – has developed as some kind of reaction to David’s fame. Here at the international school, among the children of writers and diplomats and businessmen, Sarah’s parentage is barely noted. But it had not been so in London: there was bullying, nudges and whispers, name-calling. Eva had drawn information from Sarah slowly, stealthily.
Think you’re it, don’t you, just because your dad’s on the telly?
Eva had wanted nothing more than to run straight to the school – to take the headmistress by the scruff of the neck, and make her end her daughter’s suffering at once. But she’d resisted, for Sarah’s sake. They’d waited it out. Not long afterwards, Ted had asked her to marry him, raised the possibility of their moving to Paris; and here they are.

Now, Sarah sits motionless on stage, staring down at the floor. For ten seconds, maybe twenty, silence rolls out across the room. Eva is gripped by the fear that her daughter will simply get up and leave; she grasps Ted’s hand so tightly that later he will show her the red welts she raised on his palm. But then, after a few long moments, Sarah begins to play. And she is good, as Eva knew she would be, with a certainty that was surely beyond a mother’s natural pride. Sarah has her Oma’s natural aptitude for music; as she plays, there is a perceptible shift among the other parents: a collective drawing-in of breath. And later, there is applause, for which Sarah stands red-faced, blinking, as if she had quite forgotten that she was being watched.

As promised, they take Sarah out to dinner, with her best friend Hayley, and Hayley’s parents, Kevin and Diane. Kevin and Ted discuss real estate – Kevin is a broker from Chicago, specialising in acquiring ‘high-spec’ apartments for fellow expats. Hayley and Sarah share secrets at their end of the table, their faces half hidden by curtains of hair. Diane – a tiny, skeletal woman with the precise manners of a Southern belle – leans in to Eva, her Hermès scarf trailing her Chanel scent. ‘Can you
believe
how grown-up they are?’

‘I can’t.’ In Eva’s mind, her daughter is still the plump-cheeked toddler crawling across the living-room carpet, or the five-year-old thrusting out her fat little legs on the Regent’s Park swings. Sometimes, when Sarah walks into the room, Eva has to blink a few times to erase the memory of the girl she once was.

She has forgotten, now, about the postcard she wrote to Jim Taylor a few hours earlier, still lying unposted in the pocket of her coat: a coat that, when they get back to the apartment, Eva will hang on the hall stand, and not wear again for almost a week. She will not reach her gloved hand into her pocket until the very end of that day. Then, taking out the card, she will read it over, and wonder what on earth possessed her to write such a thing.
What use could Jim Taylor possibly have
, she will think,
for empty platitudes from a woman he barely knows?
And so she will place the postcard in the wastepaper basket beneath her desk, and not think of it again for many years.

‘What can I do?’ Eva says.

It is the first time either of them has spoken in some time. He heard her approach – her shoes crunched crisply on the gravel – but she did not come to him at once. She stood behind him, at a slight distance, but he could feel her there as surely as if she had spoken: there was that same narcotic rush of joy, potent as always. At once, he was ashamed: to stand alone at his mother’s graveside, while the other mourners were filing slowly away, and to feel
joy
?

‘Just be here.’

Eva’s gloved fingers curl around his, black suede against thick grey wool. She bought him both the gloves and a new coat, handed them to him in a smart striped bag. Jim had tried to say it was too much, but she shook her head. ‘Just take them, darling. Please just let me do this for you.’

He is glad of the coat now: the air is icy, snatching at his face, his neck. He hardly knows how long he has been standing here, how much time has passed since the last scattering of earth, the vicar’s sober summing-up.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our frail bodies that they may be conformed to his glorious body.
Ten minutes? Half an hour? The vicar – a gentle, soft-faced man – had closed his book and moved away. The undertaker’s boys had stepped back in smart unison. There was a low murmuring among the guests: Sinclair, beside him, had turned to Jim expectantly, as if awaiting his cue. Sophie began to tug at his hand. ‘Dad, I’m
cold
.’

Jim didn’t move. He had stood silently until everyone was gone: even Eva, who hadn’t been standing next to him, where he’d have liked her, but towards the back, holding Jakob’s arm. (He’d had a fall a few weeks before, and was still walking with a cane.) On her other side was Sam, quiet and grey-faced in his undersized black suit. Rebecca stood behind, her dark hair dramatically coiled and pinned, her fingernails painted an ugly brownish red. She hadn’t wanted to come – her RADA year group was deep into rehearsals for
The Winter’s Tale
– but Eva had insisted. Jim heard their whispered discussion in the dark: the Regent’s Park flat isn’t really large enough for four people – certainly not five, now that Sophie has come to live with them. Resentments simmer in the small rooms: sometimes, on opening the front door, Jim can feel it thickening the air like trapped smoke.

Arguments erupt with exhausting frequency, but only between certain adversaries: Rebecca and Eva; Sophie and Jim. Between the rest of them, the dynamic is too fragile, too uncertain, to permit the open airing of grievances. With Eva, Sophie is shy, monosyllabic, unresponsive to her stepmother’s gentle overtures (a day out shopping for school shoes, endured in stony silence; a cinema trip; a concert by Jakob’s orchestra). He and Eva are both patient with her, suspecting that Sophie’s decision to move to London – to give up her school, her friends, her whole life in Cornwall – was prompted less by her forgiveness of Jim than by the fraying of her relationship with her mother. Helena is now immersed, Jim knows from Sophie and from the vitriolic letters Helena still writes to him, in a series of affairs with younger men. The latest is Rebecca’s age – an electrician named Danny, whom she met, Sophie says, when he repaired some faulty wiring in the cottage. ‘It’s
disgusting
,’ Sophie told Jim, with a bruised dignity that touched his heart. ‘I don’t want to see her ever
again
.’