Whenever she mentioned being an only child to us in those next few years, it was never as a question, more as a statement of fact. Did you notice that, Frank? That tone when she said, “I don’t have a brother or sister,” emphasis on the “I,” as if to suggest this set her apart from her friends, even from us, in some mysterious way. To me, it looked like it had worked out for the best. There was never any doubt back then that Eleanor was secure in her position as captain and mainstay of our hearts. And what greater achievement is there as a parent, really, than to know your child feels utterly assured of your love?
That’s not to say we took it for granted. There are a lot of things I can accuse myself of these days, but that is certainly not one of them. Every day we worked to secure that anchor, and each suppertime would be its own Eleanor-focused show-and-tell, you asking the questions in your best impression of a news presenter, Eleanor the interviewee reeling out the details of her day to an enrapt audience of two.
And what of it, for us? Well, we learned a lot, that’s for sure. By the time she was eight, we could name and profile every kid in her class; we knew all about the annoying way Josh put his hand up, how Anna could only write with a pencil with a special grip from Japan. By the time she was nine, we’d covered the Tudors, the Egyptians, and the Greeks and could have sailed through Eleanor’s pop quizzes on all of them. When she was ten, we heard every point in a yearlong playground argument between Heidi and Jess, two of the most popular girls in her class. We lived and breathed Eleanor and did everything we could to further her sense of stability at home.
More than that, I felt like we learned so much about Eleanor from her delivery of it all. She was so funny, so entertaining. She definitely got that from you. When she was ten, she had that French art teacher and we had a year of it—Eleanor had her accent down to a T, along with that peculiar way her whole upper body rolled side to side while she talked as if she were stuck on a particularly choppy Channel crossing. Some evenings I wouldn’t get halfway through my plate because we would be laughing and laughing and suddenly the food had gone cold. I can still see her now, clinging to my hand the minute I got in the door and dragging me through to the kitchen where she would embark on the latest story. There was nothing like it to make me feel needed, irreplaceable.
I loved that she wanted to talk to us. At the time, I never looked further than that. Why would I? Now, though, when I comb through those suppers with as much precision as my mind can manage, it seems so telling that while she was happy discussing her friends, her lessons, the outward trappings of her life, Eleanor never really wanted to talk about herself.
Did you notice that too, Frank? We saw it after Portugal when she refused to admit she was shaken. She was that bit more reserved for a few weeks afterward, on edge, staying close. But things went back to normal and we could have declared it just one bad experience, for Eleanor, for us both.
Only it wasn’t the one-off we might have hoped, was it?
They never did go back to Portugal after that holiday when Eleanor was seven. Maggie was very superstitious, and it seemed a small sacrifice not to go back there if it would help put the trauma of the night on the beach behind them all. Or at least as much as possible. Even now, the mere mention of that trip is enough to make Frank shiver, despite the stuffiness of the living room. For so many years that was his worst memory—the empty table and Eleanor gone. The roar of the sea and his own panic screaming in his ears.
These past few months, there is little doubt that Frank has shouldered worse. It has always seemed strange to him how, as a species, humans are so fixated on comparing their misery. The trials and tribulations of now versus then; our suffering versus that of our friends. In the silence, Frank has spent plenty of time mulling which is worse—a seven-year-old Eleanor lost on a foreign shore or the lost girl she became nearly twenty years later. The short, sharp panic of the former or the long, drawn-out decline of the latter? No parent should have to choose.
And in both instances, Maggie is right about Eleanor being so stoic. She never did want to speak about herself. Neither of them could work out why. They provided a happy home, the open environment to talk about whatever was troubling her. It reminded Frank of a phrase his own mother was fond of: You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. He imagines a hidden door inside Eleanor, all her feelings pressed up behind it. They could knock and knock and knock, but only she could let them in.
No—it wasn’t a one-off, not by any means. Frank can think of a handful of examples where Eleanor deflected the limelight away from her own issues and shone it right back on him and Maggie both.
He smooths down the next page to see which one it will be.
Three days to go
I remember the parents’ evening in her last year at primary school, when we sat, bewildered, as we were praised for how well Eleanor had handled one of the boys in her class picking on her after she collected first prize in a county-wide maths competition. The next day, when I asked about it, Eleanor insisted it was nothing. Do you know what she said when I asked why she hadn’t told us? Can you guess, Frank? Go on, try.
I didn’t want you and Dad to worry.
When she moved to secondary school not long after, I was increasingly vigilant for signs that she was holding her problems back from us. That was when a sibling would have been useful. In the absence of one, I found myself craving the same role I imagined one would play in her life. I wanted Eleanor to see me not just as her mother but as a friend. I knew what teenage girls were like, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Eleanor trying to navigate the knowing looks and the snide comments without someone to confide in.
I went out of my way to make that happen, organizing trips and activities for the two of us. Always outside the house, in some new environment that I hoped would make her feel mature and give her the nudge she needed to open up and confide in me all at once. And you were so supportive. I never got the sense that you felt left out, but maybe you just appreciated the peace that came with me being out of the house and you being out of earshot.
The Easter after Eleanor’s twelfth birthday, we took a trip up to Edinburgh, just us girls. We walked through the Old Town arm in arm, playing fantasy house-hunting with the big, beautiful Georgian homes. We bought matching tartan scarves and wore them with inordinate pride around the castle. When we sat out the rain in a pub on the corner of the Royal Mile, I let Eleanor try a sip of my whisky, and her response was one of such dramatic disgust—“It’s like something died in there, Mum”—that I thought we were about to get carted out by the management. On the last day, she managed to get me up Arthur’s Seat, huffing and puffing, through the force of her extraordinary good humor alone. When we got to the top, she draped her arm over my shoulders. Not a bead of sweat on her.
“We’re on top of the world!” she said, her eyes fixed on the city sprawling below.
“Where you belong.” I wrapped my arm around her waist and squeezed her hip. “All I ever want is for you to soar.”
It was such a success that we ended up going away annually, the two of us. We did Berlin the next year, Dublin when she was fourteen. I remember getting up the courage to ask her about boys then (better safe than sorry) and was met with such a look of horror that I concluded we were safe on that front. I loved those trips, Frank. I loved how they brought us closer and the way I felt we were forming the sort of mother-daughter relationship I had always wanted with my own mother. I could see us doing this when Eleanor was twenty, thirty, forty. Maybe she would bring her own daughter one day.
We ended up canceling our weekend away the next year, when she was fifteen. She blamed it on exams. I couldn’t see how two or three days would hurt, but I wasn’t going to push her either. That was the whole joy of those trips—Eleanor wanting to be there. You knew how hurt I was, didn’t you? I tried to hide it, to get behind Eleanor’s drive for studying at the expense of everything else. She was focused and ambitious—we ought to be proud. That much s
eemed obvious, and it was, until things started to unravel in earnest.
In reality, it was much harder to get behind Eleanor’s drive. We were both on edge, tiptoeing around the house, no radio in the kitchen, no noise whatsoever. I tried to coax her out of her room to give her a break, but all I was met with was her steadfast refusal to so much as glance up from her folders to look me in the eye. When I went to tell her to keep things in perspective, that she would do brilliantly with just a fraction of this work, she would snap. I didn’t understand.
I flat out denied that at the time. Now, though, when I pick back over those days, hungry for clues to what was to come, I realize she was spot on about that. I didn’t understand, Frank, not one bit. How had we managed to raise a child who would crumble under this sort of pressure? Maybe my mother was right when she claimed we were overprotective. We had spent the best part of sixteen years shoring her up, being the scaffolding surrounding the fragile growth of her personality. Wasn’t that what it meant, to parent? She was about to turn sixteen, adulthood just around the corner, the passage of life dictating that our metal supports were soon to be whipped away. I hate to say it, Frank, but I didn’t trust that she had the resilience not to falter.
We could console ourselves with the fact that the exam ordeal was time-bound. The end was in sight, and with it, we hoped, the old Eleanor, brimming with the lightness and the laughter that had always balanced her out. There wasn’t another parent in the world as desperate as me to see their child finally kick back. And when she did? I wasn’t naive about her being out, drinking probably. I just wished she could have called or texted, whatever was less mortifying in a public situation where the participants were under eighteen. That way we could have had some rest. I was never able to nod off until I knew she was safely through the door at night. It explains a lot about the frequency with which I have to pick up my prescriptions for sleeping pills nowadays.
That summer of her sixteenth birthday, I think it’s fair to say that I was more relaxed than you. Not horizontal. It was far too hot for that, and I’ve always been a pacer. Just take a look at the carpet under the window. Practically threadbare. No, what I mean is that, at first, I thought it was natural. I saw it as the first step toward getting Eleanor back on track, realigning her energy, her being young and as carefree as she ever could be. I could reconcile myself to the late nights and the half-empty bottles in the alcohol cabinet if it meant she was finding her way back to the girl I knew.
I imagine you are reading this, choking on the depths of my delusion. Wishful thinking sounds better, but in light of what came next, it sounds so painfully airy. Everything changed the night of the dinner party. I wonder if you sensed it then, over the wine and the gossip and the piles of dirty plates? While we were playing the consummate charming hosts, something happened that night that robbed us of our little girl forever. It was the moment I began to grieve Eleanor while she was still right before my eyes.
Do you know what happened that night, Frank? Did you ever find out what caused such an almighty change? I did. And it broke me. It broke me that Eleanor asked me not to share it, and it broke me that I kept her trust on that. I never got to test the logic of a problem shared. Even if it hadn’t been halved, even if I had borne ninety percent of the load, wouldn’t that still have been better?
What, though, Maggie? What? I can see you in my mind’s eye, all frustrated, flicking your Biro against your teeth in a bid to get me to spit it out. But now, just before I do, can you take a minute? Please, Frank. For me. Take a minute and just try to hold on to the image of our happy trio for as long as you can. Close your eyes, imagine it.
I don’t want what I tell you next to change how you see our Eleanor.
Chapter 6
Frank isn’t clicking his Biro, but that was a good guess on Maggie’s part. Instead he fiddles with the pages of the planner, concertinaing the edges with his index finger and thumb and then letting the paper spring back against his palm. So, she knew. He is not entirely surprised. There was always that bond between Maggie and Eleanor, that unspoken and unspeakable tie that ran between them and sometimes left him feeling like the piggy in the middle. Had it started in the womb? Or in the early years when it was just the two of them, all day, while he sweated it out on a stuffy minibus somewhere down the M40, en route to yet another conference?
He is restless, desperate to find out what it was that had drawn Eleanor further away from them and further into herself. It was something she didn’t want him to know, clearly. Every time he goes to turn the page, that is what holds him back. In his frustration, he returns to the study. Old habits die hard, and this is his safe kingdom, or rather it was, before the fire alarm and the paramedics and Maggie taken away to the shriek of the sirens.
The computer screen has gone back to sleep, the northern lights swirling in great jade waves across the monitor. Frank jiggles the mouse, and the photos spring back to life. He meant to scroll forward, like Maggie wanted him to, so he could savor their happy trio for a few minutes more: the lazy weekends spent building duvet forts, the camping excursion to Brittany when the tent flooded, the pictures of the three of them in Battleships deadlock. Only with the tiredness, the subtle tremor in his hands that started the moment he found Maggie and will not end until she is back, he has gone the wrong way. The photo reel zooms to the most recent photo.
It was taken by Edie a few Christmases ago, not a comfortable holiday by any standards. It was clear Eleanor didn’t want to be there; there was that vacancy in her eyes that showed she was elsewhere, or dreaming of it. At least she had turned up. Frank and Maggie had redoubled their festive cheer in a bid to compensate for her deficit in that department, and both wore gaudy festive jumpers. The lights on Frank’s have flashed at just the wrong moment, setting the lighting of the whole shot off, so that their faces are blazingly bright and the backdrop looks like a cellar.
Frank zooms in on Eleanor, scrolling in closer and closer until her face fills the screen and he is looking square at her. What was it? Why couldn’t you tell me too? He examines the flecks in her irises, the tiny bloodshot veins. Can he find the truth in there? It takes him back to the last time he saw her, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut for just a beat or two to calm the rush in his mind.
Our happy trio. Frank has thought of little else these past six months. He knows that whatever comes next will change his perception of that, Maggie has made that much obvious. It is enough to make him want to throw in the towel, to shove the planner in the bin or on the bonfire. What’s to stop him? His own guilty conscience. Perhaps the fact that he has shown enough cowardice already. He said it to Eleanor on their patio nights, and he still stands by it now—it’s never too late to change the story.
Frank inhales as deeply as his tight chest allows, and this time he manages to turn the page.
Two days to go
Did you do it? I hope so. There is so much good to think about, although, understandably, that is not what we dwell on. Not now, after everything. Another mistake, I’d say, but it is not too late to go some way to correcting it.
So, Eleanor. What happened? We were both so desperate to know, weren’t we? But she wouldn’t open up, no matter how hard we tried in the days that followed the dinner party. You didn’t have any luck, and mine wasn’t much better. She was avoiding me, Frank, plain and simple. I didn’t realize until then how perfectly possible that was, even under the same roof. Eye contact cut off, all conversation too; the very moment I walked into the room she walked straight out again. She lay in bed and spent whole days there. A week later, Katie came to the house to pick her up for something, but Eleanor wouldn’t come to the door and instead insisted I tell Katie that she wasn’t feeling well, that she couldn’t go out after all. I felt awful sending her away.
When Katie had gone, I crept back upstairs. If she was sick, then the illness was a mystery to me. The door wasn’t quite shut, and there was a gap that I could see through, a diagonal onto the bed. Eleanor had
pulled the curtains and was just lying there, on her back, looking up at the ceiling. I was all geared up to go in, but I got to the threshold of her room and there was something biting in my chest that stopped me. Maybe it was the blank stare. I couldn’t stand to have that directed at me. What if I got turned away as well? I told myself it was fatigue, burnout, whatever you want to call it. It was best not to push her any further. I would give her a month to get back to her old self. I hoped she would speak of her own accord.
Nothing. Clearly her reticence came from your side of the gene pool. With a month nearly up, opportunity presented itself to me. Eleanor’s phone gave up the ghost and she needed it fixed. Urgently, she said, as if the thing breathed for her too. She had an induction day for sixth form, so it was left to me, the bill payer, to get it working again. I told her that I’d use my morning off to sort it and was met with the warmest look she’d given me in weeks.
The teen behind the counter in the phone shop took great delight in telling me that it was kaput. I would need to replace the handset, but they could transfer the SIM card and any data on it. Numbers, messages, contacts. So long as it was backed up. It seemed likely enough, and I cashed out for a replacement. He got it all set up for me, finally asking which generic orchid I would like as my background with that slight look of pity that tech assistants seem to reserve for women of a certain age.
“It’s for my daughter, actually,” I said as he flicked through the options.
“Let’s keep the default, then. Everything else is sorted. Tell her she’ll need to reset her passcode.” He added, “I’ll leave it unlocked for now.”
I know you won’t believe it, Frank, but part of me wasn’t going to look. Isn’t there a word for that? Evidence procured by such dirty means that even the police reject it? All those years trying to earn my way into Eleanor’s trust, and here I was about to break it. I wouldn’t have done it had things not been so bad, were we not so desperate to find out what had happened that night to make her retreat right into herself. I got into the car and went into her messages before I had the chance to think better of it.
The Silent Treatment Page 20