The Versions of Us (21 page)

She is taller than he remembers, wearing a black jumpsuit and high wedge shoes. Her dark hair is piled up, exposing her neck; he had forgotten the even, ceramic hue of her skin. Perhaps sensing that she is being watched, she looks round; she catches his eye and stares back, but doesn’t quite smile. Jim looks away, reddening. Clearly, she doesn’t remember him.

‘Hello.’ Eva’s voice, coming from somewhere near his shoulder; he looks round, and there she is. She’s smiling now, but tentatively, as if not quite sure of his reaction. ‘It’s Jim Taylor, isn’t it? We met in New York once, at the Algonquin. You probably don’t remember. I’m Eva Katz.’

The pleasure of being recognised, known, floods through him. Jim opens his mouth to tell her that he does remember her, of course he does, but he is interrupted.

‘Eva.’ Martin is lowering his plate in order to step forward, kiss her on the cheek. ‘You’re looking lovely.’

‘Thanks, Martin. It’s good to see you.’

For a few minutes, Eva is lost to Jim: the group shifts and re-forms around her, and she swaps stories with the BBC men about people they know, names that pass over him, diffuse and meaningless. In listening, however, he learns several interesting things: that Eva has just published a novel (how could he not have noticed this? He must talk to Howard about getting the papers delivered); that before that, she was working on the
Daily Courier
’s books pages; and that she is here, at the party, with a man named Ted Simpson, who is some kind of star reporter.

‘Where
is
Ted?’ Martin asks, looking around. Eva smiles – Jim notices that she has done so at each mention of Ted’s name – and says vaguely, ‘Oh, somewhere. Inside, I think.’

After a while, she turns to Jim, noting his silence. She asks what he is doing these days: he’s a solicitor, isn’t he? As he begins to explain about leaving the law, about moving to Trelawney House, he senses Toby’s friends’ attention wandering. Gradually, they all drift away, until just he and Eva are left, and she is nodding as he tells her about the Cork Street show. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she says. ‘Living down there must be doing you a power of good.’

‘Yes.’ He holds her gaze. He remembers now this very direct stare of hers: level, penetrating, as if it could cut through any amount of bluster and untruth. He wonders what that idiot Katz did to lose her.
If she were mine
, he thinks,
I’d never let her go
. And then he catches himself in the thought, and his conscience wounds him. And so he says, ‘My partner lives there, too. Our son, Dylan, loves it.’

She rewards him with a mother’s high-watt beam. ‘You have a son! How wonderful. I have a daughter, Sarah. How old is Dylan?’

He tells her, produces the photograph from his wallet. It is a Polaroid, taken by Josie, hazed by sunshine, a deep crease etched across the lower half of the frame. Dylan at nine months, fat and curly-haired, waddling across the back lawn towards Helena’s outstretched arms.

‘He’s lovely,’ Eva says. ‘They both are.’

‘Thanks. How old is yours?’

‘Eight. Here, I’ll show you.’ She reaches for the small purse hanging from her wrist. As she opens it, he admires the smooth curve of her neck; the plain silver pendant – a heart – resting against the swathe of bare skin that stretches enticingly from her chin to the low neckline of her suit. The pendant is discreet, probably expensive, and yet Jim feels instinctively that it was not her choice – a gift, he supposes, from this man. Ted.

‘Oh.’ She looks up, and he shifts his gaze to her face. ‘Of course – it’s in my other bag. What a shame. I so wanted you to see Sarah.’

‘I can picture her. If she’s anything like you, she must be beautiful.’ He has spoken without thinking. Jim has grown used, in Cornwall, to not censoring himself – it is one of the policies of the house, this candour; Howard has no time for what he terms ‘petty bourgeois niceties’. Now, sensing her unease, Jim regrets the compliment. Eva is looking down at her empty glass, and he is filled with the fear that she will turn to go, and be lost to him once more.

But instead she says, in a low voice, ‘You said something to me, that time we met, in New York – something that stuck with me.’ She looks back at him, and a new seriousness in her expression prevents him from reaching instinctively for a joke:
Oh dear – that bad, was it?
‘I was telling you about my writing – about how badly it was going, how I couldn’t finish a book – and you said, “Surely it only ever needs to be good enough for you.”’

He remembers now, of course he remembers – he’d winced about it afterwards, cursed himself for sounding insufferably pompous.

‘I never did finish that book,’ she says. ‘I just couldn’t make it work, for myself or anybody else. But when I started writing this one – the last one – I wrote those words on a card, in black marker pen, and pinned it to the wall above my desk. I kept the card there the whole way through.’

‘I’m sure you’re giving me far too much credit. But I remembered what you said to me, too. The way you told me I should just get on with my painting, stop making excuses. I remembered it for a very long time.’

Their eyes lock for a few seconds, and then Eva looks away, at the patio, where people are gathering, dancing to the Rolling Stones. Jim has forgotten them, forgotten everyone but her; he is seized by the desire to place his hand on the soft nape of her neck, to draw her to him. But she has seen someone: a man, waving from the patio, beckoning her to join him. He is older (Martin’s fifty was an exaggeration: late forties might be more accurate), and his hair is silvering, but Jim can see he’s still handsome, his face animated, expressive, lit with the confidence of a man who has secured his place in the world, but is still ready to be surprised by it.

‘Ted,’ Eva says, though Jim already knows who he must be. ‘I’d better go and … We’ll talk later, all right? It’s wonderful to meet you again, Jim.’

She presses his hand, briefly, with hers, and then is gone. He’s left alone in the garden, under the flickering lights – in the time they’ve been talking, someone has lit candles, placed them in glass holders all around the perimeter fence, under the coloured bulbs already hanging from the trees. Jim takes his cigarette papers from his pocket, his tobacco, the tiny nugget of grass he brought with him for the weekend. He rolls himself a joint, tries not to look at her, there on the patio, now moving close to Ted, his arms around her waist, their faces inches apart.

He makes a great effort not to look, and yet Eva is there each time Jim lifts his head, as if the other guests are all in tones of sepia, bleached out. And even when he closes his eyes – which he does, taking the first sweet drag, letting it linger in his mouth – he can see her, spinning and twirling, dozens of tiny candle flames glancing off the shine of her hair.

Eva sees him before he sees her.

He has only just arrived, and is standing a little uncertainly in the hallway with a group of men, his cousin Toby among them. His hair is longer now, brushing his shoulders, and he is wearing bellbottom jeans. He removes his jacket, revealing a tight brown T-shirt with a low, scooped neck.

Jim never used to look like such a hippy, but of course he moved to Cornwall several years ago, joined some sort of commune. Eva heard the news from Harry: he had brought it up casually one evening, over dinner at the flat, before David left for Los Angeles; not calculatedly, she thought, but with his customary indifference to other people’s feelings.

‘Remember Jim Taylor,’ he’d said, ‘that guy from Clare you went out with for a while?’ Eva had said nothing, just stared at him, as if it were possible for Jim to have slipped from her mind. ‘He’s only shacked up with some artist bird and joined a hippy commune. Free love and all that. Lucky
bugger
, if you ask me.’

Now, before Jim can look up and see her, Eva turns, runs back up the stairs. She stands at the bathroom mirror, gripping the basin; her heart is beating too fast; her mouth is dry. She meets her eyes in the glass; the colour has drained from her face, and her eyelids – she has copied a smoky effect she saw in a magazine, layered grey shadow over lashings of mascara and kohl – are smudged and stark.

It hadn’t occurred to her that Jim would be at the party, and she realises now that it should have done. He has an exhibition opening soon – quite a big solo show; they ran a piece on it in the
Daily Courier
– and of course he could easily have looked up his cousin Toby while he was in London. Yet surely he should have refused an invitation to her brother’s birthday party.
Unless
– Eva grips the basin harder at the thought –
he wants to see me. Unless he has come here for me
.

Immediately, she dismisses the idea as absurdly self-regarding: Jim has a girlfriend now, possibly even children. She is sure that the thought of her, Eva, never even crosses his mind. And she has her own ties: not that she will allow herself to think of Rebecca and Sam as such, even on her darkest days.

Eva splashes her face with cold water, then takes her compact from her bag, dusts her cheeks with blusher. She thinks of Sam as he was when she left: putting on his pyjamas, his hair still damp from his bath. ‘Come back soon, Mummy,’ he said fiercely, clinging to her as she leaned in to kiss him. She said she would, of course; told him that Emma, the babysitter, would be up in a minute to read him a story.

Rebecca was in her room, painting her toenails an arresting shade of purple. Eva thought they made her feet look gangrenous, but she said, ‘That’s an amazing colour, darling. I’m off now.’

Her daughter looked up, her expression softening – already, at twelve, she is concerned with her appearance (
Like father like daughter
, Eva thinks), and spends hours on the telephone with her friends after school, whispering boys’ names. ‘You look pretty, Mum. I love that dress.’ Eva had thanked her, gone over to kiss her goodbye, to breathe in Rebecca’s sweet, mingled scents of Silvikrin shampoo and Chanel No. 5. (David had bought her a bottle, duty-free, on his last trip home. It is far too mature a perfume for a twelve-year-old, but Rebecca insists on wearing it every day, even to school.)

Back out on the landing, Eva looks down at the hall: more people are arriving, laughing and talking, carrying bottles of wine, but Jim is no longer among them. She readies herself, lifts her skirt to avoid tripping as she goes downstairs. She smiles at the newcomers, though she doesn’t recognise them – friends of Thea’s, she supposes; they have her sister-in-law’s loose, elegant air. In the kitchen, she ladles out another glass of punch.

Her brother: thirty years old. She can hardly believe it – sometimes, when she thinks of Anton, she still sees the small, determined child who wanted everything she had. But of course that boy is gone, as are the earlier versions of herself. The girl with plaits and a brief, fierce passion for horses. The teenager writing feverish screeds in her notebooks, and terrible poetry that would later make her wince. The young student falling from her bicycle, sensing the shadow of a man pass over her. Looking up, not knowing who he would be.

‘Hello,’ Jim says, and for a moment Eva is confused: she is still on the Backs, looking at a boy wearing a tweed jacket and a bee-striped college scarf, wondering whether to accept his offer of help. But that boy disappears, resolves himself into the man standing before her, in the open door that leads out into the garden, under the coloured lights Thea has woven through the trees.

‘Hello,’ she says.

A couple Eva doesn’t know edge past Jim, holding hands. ‘Sorry.’ The girl is young, bare-footed, her hair a white-blonde sheet. ‘Just after some more punch.’

Jim steps back into the garden. ‘I’ll get out of the way.’ To Eva, he adds, ‘Come outside?’

She nods wordlessly, follows him. It is not a large garden, but most of the guests have congregated on the patio: someone has turned up the music, and people are dancing; Penelope and Gerald are whooping and twirling among them. But it isn’t difficult to find a quieter, darker corner, beside a pair of bay trees in white pots. They can almost imagine they are alone here, and she remembers the last time they were, in the Algonquin, at that godforsaken party.
Nothing’s quite right
, he had said, and she had known exactly what he meant, but couldn’t find the words to tell him so.

‘I didn’t mean to come.’

Eva looks at Jim properly for the first time: at his skin, pale as always, with its scattering of freckles; at the faint laughter lines creeping across his forehead. His expression is not friendly, and she hears her own voice hardening. ‘Why did you, then?’

‘Toby brought me. He said we were going to a birthday party. He didn’t say it was Anton’s. By the time he did, we were already on our way.’

But you could have turned back
, she thinks. Aloud, she says, ‘You never did meet Anton, did you?’

‘No. I never did.’

They are silent for what seems a long time. Eva can hear her blood pulsing in her ears. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t come.’