The Versions of Us (8 page)

Waking, Eva had been confused – had reached for him, thinking David meant her to take him in his arms; but he had pulled away. ‘
Rebecca
, I mean. Hasn’t she got a cuddle for her daddy?’

At least, Eva thinks now, she can’t accuse David of taking no interest in their daughter – if only when it suits him. And he is still sweet with Eva, too, sometimes. There was that day trip to Brighton last month, just the three of them, escaping the clammy, boxed heat of the city: fish and chips, and ice creams, Rebecca crying out with delight as David lowered her toes gently into the smallest breakers. Eva had watched them, her husband and her daughter, feeling the tension seep out of her. She had closed her eyes for a moment; later, she’d felt the soft press of David’s lips on her cheek. ‘
How now, my love!
’ he had whispered into her ear. ‘
Why is your cheek so pale? How chance the roses there do fade so fast?
’ And she had smiled: they were Hermia and Lysander; there was the dust caught on shards of afternoon sunlight in the rehearsal room; there was David slipping his hand into hers in the courtyard garden of the Eagle. Back then – before Jim, before all the rest – they had been happy; and David had promised, that night almost two years ago when they had laid their plans, to try to make her so again. Surely it is too much to believe that he could have stopped trying so soon?

Penelope brings through the tea things, sits down next to Eva. ‘I take it David’s settling in all right at RADA?’

‘Oh, he seems to be having a whale of a time.’ Eva is trying hard to keep her voice bright. ‘He’s changed his name, you know. He’s David Curtis now, professionally. The head tutor says he’ll get more work that way.’

Penelope, halfway through a shortbread biscuit, widens her eyes. ‘Why Curtis?’

‘David
says
it’s because his aunt in America married a man called Curtis, so the name is in the family. But I think it’s because of Tony Curtis. You know, so that directors might think they’re related.’

‘I see. Well, good luck to him. We wouldn’t want anything to stand between David and world domination, now would we?’ Her tone is gently teasing; their eyes meet. Penelope laughs first, and then Eva does, and suddenly the morning seems sunny again.

‘It’s so good to see you,’ Eva says, reaching for her friend’s hand. ‘Tell me all about the honeymoon. I want to hear everything.’

They went first to Paris, Penelope says: stayed in the loveliest little hotel in Montmartre, with a view of Sacré-Coeur. For a couple of days, they hardly left their room – this with a blush – except to wander down to the bistro on the corner, which was straight out of a Jean-Luc Godard film: gingham tablecloths, candles in old wine bottles, moules marinière and steak frites. (‘Though not,’ Penelope adds with a smile, ‘any beautiful married couples loafing around looking thoroughly miserable, thank God.’) Gerald bought her an antique bracelet in a flea market, they spent hours in the Louvre, and one night they stumbled across a basement jazz club, and danced under a cloud of Gauloises. ‘They were all terribly serious,’ Penelope says. ‘While the band took a break, a man got up and read some dreadful poetry. I mean, really bad. I got the giggles. You should have seen the looks they gave us.’

From Paris, they drove out into the countryside, and found a cottage in the grounds of a crumbling old gîte. They stayed there for two weeks, swimming in the owners’ pool and getting fat on salami and cheese – here, Penelope pats her belly. She has never been slender, and has indeed gained weight since her wedding, but Eva thinks it rather suits her. ‘And now it’s back to reality. Gerald started at the Foreign Office last week. I think he’s rather in his element: using his Russian and all that. He doesn’t seem to miss acting in the least.’

‘I’m so glad, Pen.’ Eva is watching Rebecca carefully: she has tired of her doll, struggled clumsily to her feet, and is now staring eagerly at next door’s cat as it stretches out on the terrace, methodically washing its face. She thinks of Gerald, with his corduroy jackets and elbow patches and soft, boyish face; his utter, unashamed devotion to Penelope. She thinks of her own honeymoon: a week in Edinburgh, at the Scotsman Hotel, courtesy of Mr and Mrs Katz.
Tosca
at the Royal Lyceum, the streets wet and shadowed, and David’s extravagant consideration of Eva’s condition – still, thankfully, not too visible beneath a generous coat – fading to an impatience that wasn’t quite so easy to conceal.

I will
not
be jealous of my dearest friend
, Eva thinks. Aloud, she says, ‘And you’re starting at Penguin on Monday.’

Penelope nods. ‘Rather exciting, really. Though they’ll probably just have me doing all sorts of boring things to begin with.’

There is a charged silence, during which Rebecca decides to take a step towards the cat, without registering the obstacle of the French windows. She begins to wail, and Eva rushes over to soothe her. When Rebecca is quiet again, happy to sit back on the floor and play with her doll, Eva returns to the sofa.

Penelope says, ‘What about you? What will you do?’

She knows exactly what Penelope means, and yet an odd obstinacy grips Eva: how easy a question it is to ask, and how difficult to answer truthfully. ‘About what, Pen?’

‘Well. About work. Have you been doing any writing?’

‘What do you think? I’m hardly sitting around twiddling my thumbs.’ Eva is snappier than she meant to be; Penelope looks away, her face reddening again – she has always worn her emotions close to the surface. But neither is she easily deterred. ‘You had a baby, Eva. It’s not a prison sentence. You have your mother here – Jakob, Anton, David, when he’s around. David’s parents. You could easily take on some work. Or find time to write. After all, I’ll know exactly who to show your novel to soon, won’t I?’

They are silent again. Eva, through her tiredness, knows that Penelope is right. She should be writing: she has half a novel upstairs, in notebooks, hidden away under their bed, not to mention her stuttering, lifeless attempts at short stories. But Eva’s desire to write – the need to shape the world into a form she can understand, an impulse that had always seemed as natural as breathing – seems to have almost entirely deserted her since that terrible night when they had returned from Ely – she and Jim – and she had allowed him no explanation but that letter; had left it at his porters’ lodge like the coward she was.

Jim hadn’t tried to find her. Eva reminded herself that this was what she’d planned – that she’d presented him with a
fait accompli
because she hadn’t wanted Jim to try to change her mind – but still, in the deepest part of her, she’d carried some small flicker of hope.

She had withdrawn from Newnham immediately. Eva was still unable to shift from her mind the expression her director of studies had worn as they talked – sympathy tempered by discomfort and the faint trace of distaste – as she delivered the college’s official decision of rustication. Professor Jean McMaster was a brisk, plain woman, of the sort who would once have been called a bluestocking – and perhaps, in some quarters of the university, still was. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you, Eva,’ she had said. ‘I can only hope that the rules will one day come into line with life as it is actually lived, not as men wish women to live it – but I know that is of no comfort to you now.’

The wedding took place a few weeks later, in a back room at St Pancras Town Hall. It was a small, hushed affair, though Jakob and Miriam did their best to lighten the mood, making determined conversation with Abraham and Judith Katz: the former reciprocally jovial, the latter thin-lipped, clasping her new daughter-in-law in only the briefest of embraces.

Then, in January, Eva and David had moved back to Cambridge, into the married accommodation provided by King’s: a damp, sour-smelling flat on Mill Road, which Eva did her best to make comfortable – sewing cushion covers, filling the rooms with books – but which remained resolutely dark, musty and cold.

Through much of that endless Fenland winter, Eva had stayed indoors, as her stomach swelled, and David came home later and later in the evenings – there was always a play, a reading, a party. She couldn’t find a job. Soon after their return to the city, she walked into a bookshop, a café, asking for casual shifts, but each time the owner had looked her over, and then given her the same answer: ‘Not in your condition.’

And so she tried to write. She lacked the energy to return to the novel she had started over the summer – her notebooks remained where she had put them, under the bed – but she began a short story, then another, only to find that she couldn’t seem to get past the third or fourth paragraph. The characters Eva had grown so used to observing in her mind – shaping their thoughts, their physical appearance, their turns of phrase until she quite often struggled to remind herself that they weren’t actually flesh and blood – no longer felt real to her; they had become fleeting, insubstantial. After a few weeks, Eva had given up trying to chase after them; and then there was nothing for her to do but read, listen to the wireless, work through the recipes in the Elizabeth David book her mother had given her (the mutton carbonade was a success; the dauphinoise potatoes, less so), and wait for the coming of her child.

No, she had not looked for Jim, and she worked as hard as she could not to think of him; and then one day, there he was. It was March, a few days before her twentieth birthday; she was six months pregnant. The sun was out for the first time in what seemed like years: Eva had wanted to get out, to feel its warmth on her face. She had walked into town, forcing herself to pass along King’s Parade, past the Senate House, from which she would never graduate, admiring the play of light on stone. At Heffers bookshop on Petty Cury, Eva paused – she was desperate for something new to read – and then she saw him, pushing open the door, carrying two books in a paper bag, wearing that same tweed jacket, that same college scarf. Eva hardly dared breathe. She stood still, hoping he wouldn’t notice her; but hoping also that he wouldn’t walk away without looking back.

He did look back. Eva’s heart slipped into her mouth, and she had watched a curious expression cross his face: it was as if he were about to smile, but then remembered, and thought better of it. Jim had turned away, then, and she had watched his back as he walked the short distance to Sidney Street, and disappeared.

She saw him a few more times, after that – passing the flat on his bicycle one day; on Market Square in June the following year, on David’s graduation day, as she stood beside her in-laws with Rebecca in her arms. And then David and Eva had packed their things into boxes and driven to London, to her parents’ empty flat (she had drawn the line at moving in with the Katzes, insisting that she would need her mother’s help with the baby) and that had been that: no chance of seeing Jim again, no chance at all.

The next day, unpacking, Eva had again placed her notebooks under their bed; and that is where they have stayed ever since.

‘I did have a thought,’ Penelope says. Eva recognises that voice: it is the one Penelope uses on Gerald when suggesting something she suspects he might not want to do.

Eva leans forward, pours the last of the tea. ‘What was that?’

‘Well. Publishers always need readers, don’t they? People to tell them which manuscripts to take on, and which to reject.’

Eva hands her a cup.

‘Thank you.’ Penelope takes another biscuit from the plate. ‘So perhaps I could put in a good word for you at Penguin. Tell them how brilliant you are, how nobody knows more about books than you.’

Eva is touched, despite herself: it seems a long time, suddenly, since she has thought of herself as brilliant at anything other than quieting her daughter, reading her moods, mashing last night’s leftovers into something resembling a meal. ‘Nobody other than
you
, you mean.’

Penelope smiles, relieved. ‘Shall I, then? Mention you?’

At the window, Rebecca is whispering soft sounds into her doll’s ear. Eva thinks of her mother, of their own whispered confidences, exchanged on this sofa a few weeks ago, when they had finally rocked Rebecca back to sleep.

‘You really must find something to do with your time besides being her mother, darling,’ Miriam had said. ‘Motherhood is wonderful – important – but if you simply draw down the shutters on your creative life, you’ll end up resenting her.’

Eva – delirious with lack of sleep – had looked down at her daughter, her eyes closed, her expression now absolutely serene. ‘Is that how you felt when you fell pregnant? When you had to leave the conservatoire?’

Miriam had been silent for a moment. ‘Perhaps at first, a little. But then, when he left me – when we understood what was really happening in Vienna – it was all about getting out, getting away. And once I had you – and Anton, of course – you were both the centre of my life. But still, when I could, I returned to singing.’

Eva had lain back, closed her eyes; she could see Judith Katz, presiding over the table at the last Friday-night meal (they had arrived late: Rebecca had been fussing as Eva put her to bed), and reminding her son and daughter-in-law that as it was
their
money – hers and Abraham’s – that was facilitating their very comfortable life, the least Eva and David might do was show them the respect of arriving for Shabbat dinner on time.

Yes
, Eva thinks now,
a little money of my own would make all the difference.

She reaches across to Penelope, takes her hand. ‘Thanks, Pen. It would be wonderful if you could.’