Conrad & Eleanor (25 page)

‘Thanks. Thought I'd take advantage of you dealing with the kids. I gave Greta the evening off – I'm assuming that's what you wanted?'

He nodded, feeling he had failed some kind of test. El turned back to the screen. ‘I'll be done by 9.30. Just want to finish this chapter.'

From then on, it seemed, they could hardly get in step. There were repeated moments of crackling incomprehension and distance, which had to be deliberately smashed by touch or laughter. It was as if they were angry with each other for not knowing about each other, and having to tell, to talk and explain, was cause for further irritation, because of the assumption that they did know already. They had been apart for too long to just pick it up again. It was the sort of irritation you might feel with a deaf person who has deliberately turned off his hearing aid. Each knew the other could understand, would easily understand, just didn't seem to be trying. And as time went on, and Con began to unearth various problems with the kids that El had not dealt with as thoroughly as (he believed) she should have done, the cycle of misunderstanding and blame between them became steadily more entrenched. He found out from Cara's teacher that she was best friends with a girl who had been caught stealing from other kids; and sure enough, the thefts Catherine the au pair had been charged with were down to Cara's friend – as Cara admitted when he talked to her. Dan would not play with other kids at nursery, or indeed at home. He barely communicated with anyone. A new battery of tests was instigated by Con. Paul was away from the house far too much; only ten-year-old Megan seemed on an even keel.

The trip to America was a mistake; it opened a fault line between them. He knew it at the time, and he knows it still.

At some point he must have drifted into sleep, because the next thing he knows is Alberto banging the front door and hurrying into his room.

‘This number. This number was wrong. I am sorry but the bank, they keep your card.'

Alberto has typed in the wrong PIN – most likely Con has given him the wrong PIN. He has done it three times and the machine has swallowed Con's card, and there is no way for Alberto to retrieve it.

‘You must ring your bank. I think they can post you a new card. But it will take time.'

Blearily, Con tries to focus on the problem. He has no money and no way of getting any. But he can't just lie here, helpless in a stranger's house. Obeying Alberto's instructions he switches on his mobile, which bleeps its ‘battery low' warning and dies. He knows how it feels. He shakes his aching head at Alberto and mouths the word ‘Sorry'.

Alberto leaves the room and Con closes his eyes. The bank will try to contact him at home, with news of a card misused in Bologna. The game is up.

C
ara is heroic
in her resistance to food. El is struggling miserably to remember how Con coaxed her out of her last anorexic bout. Tempting morsels are not having any success, neither are begging and pleading. It is inconceivable that Con can be knowingly doing this to Cara. A year ago, maybe – when he found out. But despite the shock waves that rocked them both then, his behaviour towards Cara never changed a jot.

It was idiotic bad luck that he did find out. Maybe that's the cause of it after all. Maybe he's simply had a very delayed reaction.

It started innocently enough, one of Cara's altruistic impulses. She decided to become a blood donor. Both El and Con agreed privately that she was probably too thin. ‘But let the nurse tell her that,' argued El. ‘Otherwise it's just us moaning on.' Their hope was that if she was rejected because of her weight, maybe she would become interested in eating enough to build herself up. She said she was nervous of going on her own and Con said he would take her and be a hand to hold. To his surprise, the nurse simply noted Cara's weight along with her other details, and began to collect the blood.

And it just happened, it so happened, as the nurse was dealing with Cara, and Con was standing benignly by, admiring his daughter's courage – it so happened that Cara asked what blood type she had. To which the nurse replied, type A. Con, overhearing, stepped forward helpfully to say, ‘That's not possible.' It was not possible. Con and El were both type B. Their children could only be B or O. Never A. He got as far as opening his mouth to tell the nurse, and then he closed it as the truth dawned. It was possible. It was entirely possible, if Con was not Cara's father.

That evening he waited till El was alone in the kitchen then asked her, ‘Who's Cara's father?'

‘You, you fool.'

‘She's blood group A. B plus B does not equal A.'

‘She's yours. You were there when she was born, you've raised her, you've looked after her, you've loved her – she's yours.'

‘But I wasn't there when she was conceived.'

‘Con. This was nineteen years ago.'

‘I'm curious.'

‘It wasn't important. Look, I didn't even know she wasn't yours until I saw her. I mean, she could have been yours.'

Silence.

‘I'm sorry, Con. I didn't know what to do. The affair ended long before she was born and it was never —'

‘Does he know?'

‘What?'

‘Her father.'

‘Of course not. No one knows and that's the way it should stay. It's irrelevant, she's nothing to do with him.'

‘You must have thought I was thick. The hair. The eyes. The eczema.' He makes a noise like laughter but he isn't laughing. ‘The low IQ.'

‘Stop it.'

‘All the others managed university. They
are
mine, I take it?'

‘For fuck's sake stop it, Con. She's yours.'

‘You must have found it ironic, the trouble she's given me.'

‘I didn't find it anything. She's yours, she's like what she's like, she's herself. I never even thought about it, after the first few weeks. She's our child, yours and mine, she loves you and I love you and the fact of her conception was simply random.'

‘Of course. Sorry I mentioned it. Bit crass of me to notice, really.'

‘Please, Con. I know it's a shock. I know it was wrong. But I agonised about it and there was nothing to be gained by telling you. Look how you love her now. Look how she loves you.'

‘Blue eyes, recessive gene, with brown-eyed parents.'

‘That's possible —'

‘I trusted you.'

‘I'm sorry. Look, it was a long time ago.'

‘So who was the stud? The blond blue-eyed Viking daddy?'

‘You didn't know him. I don't know him any more, it's in the past.'

‘Which makes it all right.'

‘No. No. But —'

‘Have you
ever
been faithful to me?'

He went upstairs, El remembers, without waiting for a reply. He was upstairs, quiet, she didn't know what to do. She wanted to beg him never to tell Cara, not that she thought he would, but she wanted the reassurance, and she knew that in his current state he would not reassure her about anything. When she went up to bed he was not there and she realised he had gone to Paul's old room. There was nothing to be gained by pursuing him at that time of night.

She left before he was up in the morning, and then it was there, between them, when she came home at night. He would not return her greeting when she came into the kitchen. Then he said, ‘There's nothing left. Not a vestige of decency in twenty-six years of marriage.'

‘You know that's not true. You know we were happy. After Cara was born was the happiest year of our lives.'

‘Because you lied to me and got away with it,' Con replied.

‘Because we loved each other and our children. Think of the things we did then – the holidays, the games we used to play, the parties. Don't you remember that weekend we went away for your birthday?'

‘Don't I remember how you manipulated me, how you used your great charm and cleverness to create the illusion of love, which like a sad fool I imagined to be real? Don't I remember how it was our best time, the time you were busy hoodwinking me? Don't I remember how you've made a fraud of everything that matters?'

‘Don't trash everything just because you're angry.'

‘It's not me that's doing the trashing. You're the one that trashed it by fucking someone else and bearing his child and lying about it, lie after lie after lie.'

‘I am not lying now. It was the happiest time of my life.'

‘Knowing you had betrayed me and got away with it was the happiest time of your life. Yes.'

‘No. I was happy because I loved you.'

‘Guilt.'

‘Love.'

‘Guilt. And then we both got paid back with the birth of Dan.'

‘Don't say that.'

‘Why not? Aren't we in the throes of Greek tragedy here? The wife pollutes the bloodline and the foolish cuckolded husband loves her all the more for it and she luxuriates in her moral squalor. Until the gods bring punishment in their own good time: the next child born to this blind, arrogant and mendacious couple is solitary and friendless, afflicted by the gods for his parents' wrongdoings.'

‘Con, don't say things which can never be put right. Don't destroy everything.'

‘Why not? You did.'

‘You're mad if you don't know when we were happy.'

‘Cuckolded. Unsuccessful. Mad. Have you finished?'

How could she talk to him? There was nothing she could say. And neither of them could sustain that level of hostility. After a while Con stopped sleeping in Paul's bed; he came back to bed with El, and neither of them said anything about it. It was an untouchable subject – like Louis, who Con also knew about. There were chasms in their marriage, which they skirted without comment. Was it to keep up appearances? For the sake of the children? For self-protection, because to do anything else would be too traumatic? But Con has chosen to leave now, after all those months of going through the motions of a normal married life.

Lying in his bed in Bologna, Conrad has no real sense of time. Alberto brings him drinks and food with regularity, and sometimes switches on the little bedside light. But Con is not sure if he has been ill for hours or days. He is sweaty and light-headed but his memory continues to unspool, and he can focus on that, and forget all about the clammy sickbed in the blue motor-­racing bedroom.

The saga with Maddy continues, of course. A few days after the distressing scene in the Indian restaurant, she sends him a very long and sane-sounding email. She apologises for her behaviour and reveals that she suffers from chronic insomnia, which sometimes reduces her to ‘a really pathetic state'. She knows she was rude and silly, and she is sorry she spoke so disparagingly about her fellow PECA members, who should be respected for the years of selfless work they have devoted to the cause of animal liberation. She is mortified to think that she insulted him. She can't live with herself until she knows that he has forgiven her. She doesn't want anything from him but forgiveness. Please please please can he reply, just to let her know he doesn't despise her? And so she can pay him back for the lunch she wasted.

Of course he replies, telling her that he knows what it is like to feel as if the world is against you. And that his daughter Cara has suffered with insomnia. Maddy replies with gratitude, and reveals that PECA's internal strife is resolved and that the website is up and running again. ‘You will find your statement here,' she writes, and the link is pasted in. Con clicks on it and finds his list laid out in a rather indigestible slab of yellow type against a turquoise background. On the plus side, it is all there, no one has tampered with his words. But he has to wonder how many people have troubled to read it. The PECA web man's design skills are clearly limited. And it is obvious that the addition of photos would improve the page considerably.

It does not surprise Con when Maddy raises this in her next email. Could they just meet to talk about the photos again? She doesn't want to pressurise him but he must recognise that nothing has changed for those poor monkeys since he first visited CBL in March. Words alone are never enough to persuade people. It is photos that make all the difference. Please, can they meet; she will come to Manchester, he doesn't need to travel anywhere, she will come to a hotel in Manchester and meet with him, and he doesn't need to worry about the way she was last time because she's got some marvellous new sleeping tablets and she's feeling on top of the world. Con wonders if he should advise her that her sleeping tablets were almost certainly tested on animals. But it would be petty, and is beside the point. He fobs her off for a while, but when she sends him an email with a date and the suggestion that they meet after he's finished work, in the bar at Malmaison, he agrees. It is not as if he is doing anything else to try to change things at CBL; Malmaison is new and he quite fancies a look inside; and if she is flaky, well, so is he, and half the rest of the world. Before he goes to meet her he deletes their entire email correspondence.

Malmaison is an odd choice of venue for her, he thinks, but maybe she has chosen it for proximity to the station. He finds himself rather excited by the thought of seeing her again. And her appearance justifies his excitement. She has clearly made an effort. She is wearing a silky black top with a scoop neckline that reveals the swell of her breasts. Her hair is glossy, and her walk more swaying – he realises it is the first time he has seen her in heels. ‘You look so well,' he says. ‘Are you here for work?'

‘Yes. Meetings. You know, clients.' She leans forward, exposing more cleavage. ‘Conrad, we really need those photos.'

‘Maddy, I've explained —'

‘You've brought them, haven't you. Can I just have a look?' She knows he has. But he feels unwilling to concede so quickly. He will let her look, and then they can discuss it. He passes her the envelope. While she shuffles slowly through them he orders drinks, keeping an eye on her face, afraid of her distress. When she's done she puts them face down on the table and rests her head in her hands.

‘Maddy?'

‘They're vile.'

‘Yes.'

‘How can you think it's all right to keep this quiet?' When she raises her face, a deep flush has spread up from her throat.

‘That's why I didn't want you to look before.'

‘We need to pick half a dozen to go online. Now, without wasting any more time.'

‘But —'

She is rising to her feet. ‘I've got a scanner in my room. We can blow them up on screen.' She is on the move, her wine glass held aloft, her flushed cheeks and glittering eyes blazing a way through the milling drinkers, and he is following her like a child towards the lifts where she walks in without hesitation, pressing the button so swiftly that the doors almost slam on him.

In her room, which is oppressively swathed in black and red, she sits at the desk at her open laptop. She feeds the photos one by one into the scanner, which is alongside. Con perches awkwardly on the vast bed. It is strewn with her clothes; he has to shift a bra and tights to make a space. She is copying all of them. He hasn't even agreed… he seems to be in a trance of indecision. He stares blankly at the deep red wall, while she taps busily on the keyboard, ignoring him. It is taking a long time. Then she unplugs something and brings her laptop to the bed and sits beside him. ‘This is the best, lying on his side, because you can see the hopelessness in his face. The vomit one, obviously. This one, clawing at the neck? I know it's not totally clear, but if we use the next one too…'

He has not looked at the photos since he showed Gus. He knows what they are, he has seen the real thing. But now his stomach churns as he sees them with her eyes and understands that it is beyond the pale to keep them secret. On the computer the pictures are bigger, brighter, more detailed. If it means losing his job, so be it.

When she has made the selection she returns to her seat at the desk and he watches mutely as she works at the computer for another few minutes, saving material and firing off an email. She closes the laptop and turns to face him. ‘Well,' she says. ‘That's that.'

Suddenly she is beside him on the bed with her hand on his thigh and her face very close. ‘Thank you,' she says. She leans in and kisses him on the lips.

It is a shock and not a shock. Her hand slides up his thigh, her breast presses against his chest, her body is glowing with heat. He responds automatically but the images of the monkeys are still in his head. After a moment he leans back and takes her hands in his.

‘Maddy, listen. You don't have to thank me. I mean, you don't have to thank me like this. It's not a transaction.'