Free The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

mostly university-educated, with soft hands and precision-parted hair: young men already beginning to resemble their fathers. At their desks, they trade jokes from
Beyond Our Ken
, or school-dormitory smut – but outside, confronted by other, more vigorous working men, their easy bonhomie seems to wither. There is only one – Peter Hartford: not a graduate, but the son of a stevedore, putting himself through his five-year articles by working Saturdays as a postman – whom Jim would tentatively call a friend.
    He finds Peter inside, at the bar. Louise is leaning towards him, her large breasts splayed over the bar-top, her frosted-pink mouth curved into a smile. Seeing Jim, she snaps sharply back, readopts her customary
froideur
. Peter turns, smiles at him. ‘What can I get you?’
    They take their pints out onto the terrace, find a table at a discreet distance from the other clerks.
    ‘Here’s to another week at the coalface.’ Peter lifts his glass to meet Jim’s. He is short, stocky, with reddish hair and a broad, guileless face, the first in five generations not to follow his father onto the docks.
Cleverer than any of us
, Jim thinks, and he feels a rush of affection for him, decides anew not to confide too honestly, not to admit how deeply he despises the profession that Peter has worked so hard to enter, while he, Jim, has sleepwalked into it, pushed by … What? Fear, he supposes: fear and the centrifugal force of his mother’s illness.
    After graduation, he had hitchhiked to France with Sweeting, spent a happy fortnight pottering around villages and vineyards, painting watercolours – bare-legged girls drinking
citron pressé
at a pavement café; a cornfield, yellow-tipped, shimmering – with an energy he hadn’t felt in years. He had returned resolved to inform his mother that he’d be applying to art school – to the Slade – but he had arrived in Bristol to discover that she was back in hospital. Her doctor would release her only on the condition that someone at home take charge of her day-to-day care. ‘She mustn’t be left alone, Mr Taylor,’ the doctor had said. ‘Not until we can be sure she’s more stable, at any rate. Will you be living with her?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ Jim replied, watching his plans slip away into the distance, like a foreign landscape receding through the window of a train.
    But then there was the matter of what he would
do
. In her more lucid moments, Vivian was insistent that he shouldn’t abandon the law, and Jim himself could think of no other career that might keep him at home; but he still had his part-two exams to take, and there was no law school in Bristol. In the end, his aunt Patsy had come to the rescue: she’d move in with Vivian, leaving his uncle John to fend for himself in Budleigh Salterton, while Jim went off to Guildford to take his exams; then go home when Jim returned for the holidays. In a few weeks, it had all been arranged. Arndale & Thompson – the first firm of Bristol solicitors Jim found listed in the phone book – accepted him for his articles. After six months in Guildford – he was billeted with a widower named Sid Stanley, a rather sad, lonely figure, with whom Jim spent most of his evenings watching television sitcoms – he was back in Bristol, a fully fledged articled clerk, living with his mother.
    It is not how Jim ever thought things would turn out – even when he allowed Vivian to persuade him to apply to Cambridge to study law. (He’d wanted to put down history of art, but there’d been a row, and he’d changed to law in a fit of pique, hardly thinking he’d get in; but it had turned out that, despite himself, he had an aptitude for the law’s quiet logic, for the measured apportioning of right and wrong.) Perhaps, he thinks, his life would look quite different now if he’d met a woman at university – someone with whom he wished to start a life of his own. And there have been some, since Veronica – in his final