Conrad & Eleanor (23 page)

How long did it take, that shift at work? That slow subterranean movement from optimism, conviction and discovery, via endless knock-backs and tiny inchings-forward, to the dull acceptance that this was it, nothing much was changing? The animal rights people gave them a year's grace by letting out the pigs. That put the whole programme back a year while they bred up a new batch of pigs, ironically instilling in Con a renewed sense of optimism and purpose. Maybe with the next batch of pigs there would be a breakthrough. And then when the new pigs were ready, nothing worked any better than it had before. Always this cycle of hope and of being slapped down.

He was naive; naive and gullible. Ditto with Maddy. Soon after their Birmingham meeting she asked to meet him in London, and he organised a visit to Megan's play that evening to make sense of the journey. Maddy was waiting for him at Euston and led him to a basic-looking Indian restaurant five minutes away, on Drummond Street. It was a sweltering August day.

‘I'm not sure I fancy Indian for lunch,' he tells her.

‘Oh, but it's vegetarian and the food is very good. Please give it a try. I always come here.'

It is on the tip of his tongue to suggest sandwiches in Regent's Park, or a pub with a beer garden, but she looks so distressed that he goes along with it. The food is spread out on a long table; following her, he helps himself to random spoonfuls until he has far more than he wants to eat. He has never been able to understand the point of eating hot food when you are hot. They settle at a table. ‘So how was my statement received?' He knows it has not appeared on the Prevent Experiments and Cruelty to Animals website, because he's been checking it regularly.

‘There are problems with the group,' she tells him. ‘Real problems, everything has been held up.'

‘What's gone wrong?'

She shakes her head. ‘Relationships. Turns out the man who does the website has been having an affair with Lindy, who is Tom's partner. Lindy and Tom are the founders of PECA. When it came out there was a huge flare-up and nothing has been done on the website since. He's got it all password protected, none of the rest of us can touch it.'

Con nods. They are cranks. The idea that anything will get done via Maddy is simply a waste of time.

‘I'm so angry with them all,' Maddy confides. ‘If you believe in a cause, a cause like this, the animals should come first – not petty things like family and relationships. All that has to be put aside. It's a crusade, we need to fight together.'

‘Did you show them my statement?'

‘Yes – yes. But they're carping. They're saying,
Where are the photos?
and
This is useless without his name on it
. They're so petty and negative and they gang up together…'

Con realises she is near to tears. ‘Don't be upset. And you were right, this dhal is excellent, so is the – the green curry.'

‘I will be upset. Of course I will. Just because they've all known each other for longer than me, because it's
their
group that
I've
joined, I'm like a kid they can order around.'

Con is really afraid she will cry. He is annoyed with himself for not realising, before this, how flaky she is. Now he comes to look at her properly, she is a mess. She's wearing a crumpled, off-white shirt and faded cords, on the hottest day of summer. Her hair is greasy and her skin grey. ‘You're not at work today?' he asks.

‘I'm on holiday.'

He thinks she has lost her job. ‘Listen, your people at PECA will sort it out. Of course they will. People are always selfish when they're upset. When the dust settles they'll update the website, don't you worry.'

‘Everything I do,' she says, ‘is for the cause. If I can't make a difference I might as well be dead.'

‘Come on now, Maddy, don't talk like this. If you've really fallen out with the PECA bunch, have you thought of starting a group of your own?'

‘Me and whose army?' she says bitterly. ‘Everyone's afraid. Will you give me those photos?'

‘Well, there's no point right now, is there? With the website not working.'

‘The point is then at least they'll see I mean business.'

‘But Maddy, I don't want… the photos can't be a pawn in an argument between you and your friends. I mean, I can't just —'

‘You can't just help me. No. Of course you can't. Why should I expect that?' Her voice is getting louder. She has not touched her food. ‘Why should I expect help from a scientist?' She pushes away her dishes and stands up. She is at full volume now. ‘Why should I expect help from someone who has everything he ever wanted handed to him on a plate?'

‘Maddy —'

‘My life is nothing but shit.' She turns and slams out of the restaurant. A waiter grins at Con. After a moment of embarrassment, he realises how relieved he is to be rid of her. He has made a stupid mistake, and he vows he will not make it again.

But then, of course, he does.

With what feels like a physical effort, he shifts his thoughts away from her. He doesn't have to go back. He never has to go back there, it is over. Sleep, like black water, closes over his head.

Alberto comes into Con's room bearing a tray of food. Soup, bread, a peeled and sliced apple. Con shuffles himself to sitting up again and takes a couple of spoonfuls of soup. The spoon is so heavy he can barely lift it.

‘Alberto, thank you.' His voice seems to have become a whisper. ‘But I can't – I'm sorry…'

Alberto nods. ‘Try the apple. You must have something. It will be three days now – you must eat.'

Conrad forces down a slice. His throat is sore and swollen and the shreds of apple are like splinters in it.

‘OK, I will call doctor.'

Maybe wise, thinks Con. This is an illness. Has he really been here three days? He is ill, in a stranger's house, he can't even shift himself back to the hotel. He must give Alberto some cash. He fumbles through his wallet but there doesn't seem to be any. He remembers paying with a 50-euro note at the restaurant – was that the last of his money? He hands Alberto his bank card, and laboriously writes his PIN on the back of an old receipt. Alberto tells him, with dignity, that he does not require money, but he will agree to fetch 250 euros for Conrad.

‘You will telephone your wife, perhaps?'

Con glances at his switched-off mobile on the bedside table. It lies in a forlorn heap with his hotel key and loose change; Alberto must have emptied his pockets when he put him to bed. ‘Yes, of course. Thank you.'

Alberto removes the tray and returns with another glass of water. As Con's heavy eyes close he hears Alberto moving around the kitchen and then the front door softly opening and shutting. Con squints at his phone. He could call El. Tell her he's ill. The whole episode could be put down to his illness and there would be no need to explain any of it.

No. He does not want El to rescue him, with her impatient efficiency. Is she always impatient now? The now Eleanor is a woman he does not really look at. He knows how she looks: the slightly stiff posture with the deliberately straight back; the defiantly jet-black hair which seems, when she is tired, too dark and vivid for her face. He suggested to her a year ago that she should stop dyeing it and she laughed incredulously. He thinks silver or grey or whatever combination are now threading their way through the black would soften it and be kinder to her pale fifty-three-year-old skin. But it's not so much the posture or the hair or even the clothes, which are smarter and more discreetly formal than he likes, which identify her as a certain type and class of woman; it is the closed-ness of her face. She is intent on other things; her work, her own busyness, her lover – intent on anything but Con.

But is that what his grievance boils down to – a plea for attention? Is this why he does not look at her? Because what he sees when he looks negates him?

No – there's another reason for not looking at her. Because he wants her to know he is angry. The withholding of eye contact is the withholding of himself. He's saying she's not worth looking at. He's negating
her
.

And does she look at him? When she does, he dislikes the way she does it. It is as if she knows in advance whatever he is going to say. She finds him both predictable and slightly disappointing. So he is not looking at her because he doesn't like what she projects back to him, a sense that he is slow and that she has more important concerns. She is not in the least interested in what of herself he reflects back to her. She doesn't care what he thinks, because his thoughts are irrelevant to her. This is why he doesn't look at her. Because she has negated him far more effectively than he has negated her.

But where are the other Eleanors, the ones before this one he cannot look at? He can only think of photos, as if his memories have been stolen by them, or distilled into static moments. Their wedding photo. The best one; the one that the kids used to pore over wonderingly, savouring the notion of ‘before we were born'. Eleanor is radiant. She doesn't look pregnant; she is smiling straight at the camera, her hair lifted slightly back from her face by the breeze outside the register office, and her lips are slightly parted as if she is meeting something, like a swimmer breasting a wave, she seems to be afloat upon the moment. Anyone who sees the photo knows her smile is about Con. It is connected to her fingers entwined with his, to their facing a future together.

The picture of her breastfeeding Paul. Con still carries this in his wallet; it is tattered with age. She is looking at the photog­rapher – Con. She is smiling a complex smile. A fraction of it is almost shamefaced. It says what a ridiculous cliché for you to take my picture feeding our baby – she is smiling at their cheesiness. But overcoming the hangdog look is a great beam of happiness that says, I'm glad you're looking at me and it doesn't matter ever what anyone else thinks because we both know this is wonderful. It is both public and secret, shamefaced and proud, again, it is Eleanor faring forward.

He tries to think when she stopped looking like that, when she stopped drawing him into complicity with her own reactions (or knowing he was already complicit). Might it have been that
he
stopped understanding
her
? Might that have been the beginning of her impatience?

But she stopped offering him things to understand. How could he understand if he didn't know? And in the history of all that, her affair with Louis is not, in fact, very important. It is symptomatic, not causal. Things were wrong a long time before.

It comes back to the America trip. That's where things started to go unstoppably wrong. When Dan was four, Con was invited to go to Cornell for six months. His old friend Max had a decent grant for further research into arresting the production of antibodies in lymphocytes; it was a good overlap with Con's work. Con told Eleanor in a moment of self-indulgence, pleased to have been asked.

‘Why don't you go?'

He instantly regretted telling her. ‘I don't think it would be a good idea while the children are so young, do you?'

‘Why not? I don't think it would be a problem at all.'

It would so obviously be a problem that he was defeated. If she was really oblivious to how much time he spent with the kids, to how much he did in the house…

‘I'll take some unpaid leave,' she said.

Con sat down.

‘I've been thinking about it anyway. I need some proper time to work on the book.'

Of course. The book.

‘You should go to Cornell. It's a good opportunity.'

He felt a strange despair, which he knew he must conceal from her, because it was composed of things he could never admit. Firstly he didn't want to go – but if she knew that she would know he'd told her about it for effect, which was humiliating. Home was the place he wanted most in the world to stay in, with the children, with her. He would make no sense, away from home. And even if she did take unpaid leave, she wouldn't look after the children properly, she wouldn't do all the things he did. But the received opinion between them was that he did more childcare than her because she put her work first, so if she was now generously offering to put
his
work first, he should embrace her offer with open arms. He was ashamed at his lack of enthusiasm. It should be good, working with Max; it should be exciting, being in America on his own. He would have to go and pretend to be pleased. And the lie would have to be maintained both here and there, before, during and after. ‘It is,' he said. ‘A good career move, probably. But won't you feel rather lumbered?'

‘Of course not. Home all day, and with an au pair to do the running round – luxury! I'll actually have time to think.'

She would have time, she would be home – and he wouldn't be here to share that. It was a thing he had dreamed of since the golden time with Cara, them being home together again, cooking for each other, having time to put the children to bed together or take them to the park on a summer evening. Little luxuries her work schedule never permitted, because on the rare occasions she was home early she insisted he make the most of it (by which she meant, work), and if he resisted, pointed out plaintively that she was surely entitled to an evening on her own with the children. She assumed being home was easy. Relegating all his time at home to the level of self-indulgence, something for which she had no need to feel respect or gratitude. She would find time to write a book. Proving her greater reserves of energy and efficiency. There was no escape.

Max met him at the airport. So little had Con been able to believe he would actually make the trip, that at the first sight of Max lounging against the pillar grinning from ear to ear, Con was shocked and wondered what coincidence had brought him here. It was impossible to look at Max and not smile. From the mirror glasses pushed up into his wiry black hair to his sardonic grin to the turquoise shirt covered in bronzed surfers to his elephantine, wrinkled grey jeans, Max was a piece of mockery and self-mockery. ‘O-Kay?'