by Jane Rogers
He sees himself in the kitchen at home. Trying to decide whether to peel one potato or two. Reaching into the cupboard for a plate, a cup. Checking the time although no one will come in, only El, late, after he’s gone to bed. Pulling down the blind in order not to see his lone reflection at table, sitting in his same old place as if the ghosts of the children occupy the others. He puts the radio on but it is too brash, and music is too loud at any volume. Music shouldn’t be used to fill silence. It should be listened to or not played at all. All he is doing is waiting. Anything else would be false: outings, music, TV, social arrangements. Waiting for the next step to become clear.
In routine, he has discovered, you can have less and less. You need hardly ever touch the sides. You can stay in the empty centre. Drive to work at 8; read the lab reports and mail; adjust drug regimes, whip through research reports, analyse statistics, check some results. Attend a departmental meeting, drive home. Heat something from the freezer. Sit in the empty kitchen letting the evening pass. Sometimes one of them would ring. Or there’d be an email among the junk. Sometimes El would be at home, uneasy and cheery in his presence, hastily trying to cook or make conversation, offering him wine. He was relieved when she went into her study after dinner, to do a couple more hours’ work. It was astonishing how little one could do and still get by. Time never stood still, there was no need to invent ways to pass it, it simply passed itself.
His mind turns to Cara. He had to go to Leeds to fetch her back. She had been ringing and crying for three weeks but when he knocked on the door of her room in the hall of residence, he wasn’t prepared for how she would look. Deathly pale, her hair lank and unwashed, her eyes brimming with tears. He hated the boy, the stupid callous thoughtless boy, the boy who wasn’t worth her grief. He saw that whatever reasoning or persuasion he had imagined offering to her would not be relevant. She was packed and ready; they carried her things in silence to the car.
She cried all the way home, weakly, inconsolably, while he made ineffectual attempts at comforting her, and noticed the stick-thinness of her fingers, hands and arms, and blamed himself and El for not realising sooner. But she was rescued, he reassures himself, swimming up from his doze. He did rescue her. He stayed off work, he made her soups and snacks and treats, he took her out for walks and swims as if she were a little girl again. And palely, sadly, brokenly she obeyed, ate and took exercise, listened and nodded to the mantras he offered: it’s all right, there’s no pressure, you don’t have to go back.
He and Eleanor argued. ‘You make her worse, you’re pandering to her, encouraging her to wallow —’
‘El, can you not see the girl is ill? She’s on the verge of breakdown, she’s lost over a stone —’
‘She’s got to learn to cope with life. What on earth has happened that’s so traumatic? Her boyfriend’s dumped her, OK, it happens every day to thousands of people. They don’t all fall apart at the seams.’
‘You really don’t see, do you —’
‘I see she’s getting behind with her essays. How much harder is it going to be to go back if she has a mountain of catching up to do?’
‘She doesn’t want to go back.’
‘She’s already got enough of a chip on her shoulder about Paul and Megan’s A levels. What good will it do her self-confidence to know she couldn’t hack university?’
Was El right? Was it right that he looked after Cara and honoured her distress, or should he have packed her off back to Leeds the following weekend? In that she has never returned to university, perhaps so. Con sees there was no right answer. All the questions have been trick questions, and here he has been, all his life, earnestly trying his best while something somewhere snorts with laughter at his attempts – at his naive and credulous life.
Dawn comes slowly, grudgingly. When he hauls himself up to the window there is thick white mist outside, cloud, there’s no sky to be seen. There’s nothing in the street, the flashing light has gone. In the half-light Con finds his shoes and puts them on. Cautiously opens the door. No one there; no one on the stairs; no one on the desk. He unlocks the heavy front door and slips out, pulling it to behind him. The air is thick and icy cold, like stepping into a freezer. When it hits his lungs he coughs, tugging the lapels of his coat together, turning up the collar. The pavement is dark grey and wet, coils of white mist linger in the street. There’s a noise approaching; materialising as a street-sweeping van, its rotating brushes scouring the gutter, its driver’s glazed eyes sliding as impersonally over Con as if he were a bin of grit.
Something to eat. He turns right then left, and there is a bright glass front of a café. Its golden window is filled with heaps of croissants and cakes; the aroma of fresh coffee zips across the cold street. People stand at the bar in their coats or sit on high stools along the walls, sipping coffee, absorbed in papers, an extraordinary vision of ordinariness. Con gets a latte and two croissants, finds a vacant stool, joins the ranks of the saved. The regular hiss of the espresso machine rhythmically drowns out the barman’s banter; Con is inside a warm sweet engine. When he has finished he orders the same again, relaxing into the slow contentment of being fuelled. There’s a long heavy mirror above the ledge where his coffee rests; the bevelled edges remind him of one they had at home, the first mirror they ever owned. El bought it in a junk shop. It stood in their bedroom and its edges caught the morning sun and scattered flakes of brilliant light across the walls and ceiling. He remembers how it used to fascinate Paul when he was toddling – he would reach up to try to grasp the specks of light from the wall. There was no other furniture in that bedroom, only the bed. At night, in the soft glow of the bedside lamp, the mirror reflected their pale bodies intricately and intimately combined.
Staring into the glass Con registers a young couple come in, with a baby. The infant is wrapped in a pouch strapped to the boy’s chest. As the girl orders their drinks, the boy smiles and nods at the child, who gazes up at him adoringly. Turning from the bar with a coffee in each hand, the girl leans in and blows a breath of air at the baby. She and the boy laugh.
They had a pouch like that for Paul. Faded blue corduroy, slightly padded, it came up to support his head at the back. They used it when he was very young. In the days of innocence.
Con remembers the feel of the warm weight of the child pressed against his chest. The secure binding of the corduroy straps around his back and over his shoulders. He remembers walking down the street like that, holding hands with El.
‘My turn to carry him for nine months now.’
‘OK. Just as long as I don’t have to carry him again for the nine months after that!’
‘I’m serious about looking after him as much as you.’
‘Con, it’s understood.’
He found her lightness slightly irritating. ‘You say it as if it’s not even worth discussing, but no couple I know have ever done this.’
‘But we agreed from the start! Things have changed – loads of fathers will be looking after their kids from now on.’
‘When I took him to baby clinic on Friday I was in a waiting room full of women.’
‘You don’t need me to praise you for this. You and I are equal; we both know what it means.’
‘I just want recognition. My father never changed a nappy. Never got up in the night. We’re reinventing the roles —’
‘OK! I recognise it. Our Experiment; the new model family.’
‘Thank you. That’s all I wanted. What he’ll do, of course,’ stroking Paul’s fluffy head, ‘is reject us for a pair of crazed ideologues and find a wife he can treat like a slave.’
Together, they laughed.
But the experiment was serious stuff. Since no one but El could feed Paul, Con did all the rest once he was home from work: bathing, nappy changing, long walks round and round the sitting room at night, gently rubbing the fretful baby’s back and waiting for him to burp and settle
. Con remembers it as a time of generosity between himself and El; she gave him the baby, in return he gave her time for her work. While she was on maternity leave they passed the child back and forth between them with the elegance of an old-fashioned dance; he remembers leaning in to lift Paul from her arms as she sat in the pool of light cast by the old anglepoise, watching her stretch and smile at him as she buttoned her shirt, watching her reach for her books on the table and pull them into her lap where the suckling child had just lain. He remembers the warm boy against his chest, his wife’s glossy head studiously bent in the lamplight.
Once she stopped breastfeeding and returned to work, he was able to take on more. El was finishing her house job at Oldham Royal, and her specialism was Obs and Gynae. Steptoe and Edwards were making history with their attempts at IVF, and like many others at the hospital, she was caught up in the drama of it. It was inevitable that she should end up working in the same field. It was Con who took Paul to Kelly the childminder in the morning, he who was regularly able to leave work earlier than El and pick him up in the afternoon. They made it equal between them then, that was why it was good. The only grounds for bitterness must be that it ended. They were agreed on the great benefits of breast over formula, and from the start, after feeding Paul, El always expressed milk and froze it. So when she returned to work there was a good supply stashed away for bottle-feeding. Though her own milk dwindled once she was on the wards again, she could still manage to feed him herself morning and night; bottle-fed by Con and the childminder with the frozen supplies, he didn’t need to go onto formula for a whole extra month. Utterly endearing, to Con, this typical El efficiency applied to her own milk production: cow, farmer and dairy rolled into one. She was decisive about all sorts of practical aspects of their life: they must always use disposable nappies, because of the savings in time and energy; it was more cost-effective to employ a cleaner than for her or Con to do it; cooking stews and soups at the weekend and freezing portions was the most convenient way for them to eat. They argued briefly about clothes, he remembers.
‘Con, it’s idiotic to dress a growing child in new clothes. The charity shops are full of really good stuff —’
‘But I like to see him in new things, things that haven’t been washed a thousand times.’
‘New for a month. Till he grows out of them.’
‘We can keep them for the next one.’
She laughed and teased him at that, and mostly he gave in. But just as for himself he has always loved the feel of a crisp new cotton shirt, so for Paul he coveted Mothercare’s bright stretchy babygrows, and would from time to time sneak one into the house.
Con remembers there were evenings when he would be stirring the frozen lumps of stew in the saucepan, with Paul crawling round underfoot, and both of them stopping and turning with big grins at the sound of El’s bicycle nudging down the ginnel. Everything they did was purposeful, every moment of their lives was precious, the care of the child passed back and forth between them like a blazing torch.
Trying to linger now, trying to be fair, trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, ha ha, Con watches the young couple and their baby leave, with a surge of grief. The fine balance that they had, the working, childcaring, giving-to-each-other balance, was it really El who smashed it?
Yes. He feels his shoulders sag; he doesn’t know how to stop blaming her. He wants to reclaim his own life, at least some of it, from her; he wants her not to have been the one who made everything happen.
It isn’t right, it isn’t plausible, it isn’t even possible, he knows; he must have played as much of a part as her in the fiasco that has turned out to be their life. But where… how… when? He’s stumbling about like some blundering old fool, and all he can make out is the harm she has done him. But does his own life only exist where it’s touched hers? He wonders if she thinks of him as parasitic upon her energy. Maybe that would make him deserve what he has got, if he has been leeching upon her all their married life? If she has acted and he has only reacted. If his darkness has swallowed her light. Still he can’t avoid what’s coming. Still he can’t excuse her.
When Paul was ill he stayed off work. More often than her, longer than her. He had thought there was a satisfaction in it that they shared; a tacit agreement that her work was more important, and so a pleasure in the role reversal. He did it for Paul and for El and for himself, all three of them could gain.
And when they made the decision to have another child, when Paul was two, it seems to Con they both recognised that Con was doing the lion’s share – without complaint, since he knew El wouldn’t have agreed to a second if it had threatened more disruption to her work. With the decisive and happy calm which had characterised their life together thus far, El became pregnant with and delivered Megan.
And two months after Megan was born, El dropped a bombshell.
‘We need to get an au pair.’
‘Why?’
‘To look after the children. To keep things going at home while we’re at work.’
‘What’s wrong with Kelly?’
‘Nothing. She’s been great. But it’s getting too complicated, Con.’ An au pair could take Paul to nursery, which was due to start in September, pushing Megan in the pram. Then she could come home, tidy up, collect Paul, give the children their lunch, take them to the park, do a bit of shopping, make their tea.
‘What will Kelly say? She needs the money.’
‘She’ll get two other kids to mind, you ninny. And she could have them a couple of afternoons a week while the au pair goes to her language classes – it’ll work out heaps better.’
‘But —’
‘Imagine just coming straight home from work, and the kids not needing to be bundled from pillar to post; no bags of nappies and changes of clothing, no dashing away from unfinished work because it’s pick-up time —’
‘You never have to dash away from unfinished work. I pick them up in the afternoon.’
‘Well, you won’t have to dash away from work. And I won’t have to feel guilty about you doing it.’
‘There’s no need for you to feel guilty. I enjoy it.’
‘There is need because you bring it up in conversations like this. It’s clearly unfair. You do more childcare than me.’
‘I do it because I want to.’
‘That’s not the point, is it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘If you do more than me, it’s not fair. And if I spend more time at work – and if my career inches ahead of yours —’ It wasn’t inching. They both knew that. It was striding. It was leaping and bounding ahead of his. ‘Then one day you’re going to resent it.’
‘El, you don’t want to spend more time with the kids. And because I do, that liberates you to work all the hours God sends. Which is fine. But you don’t like that because you feel you might owe me something. You don’t want to think anyone else might have had to make any kind of sacrifice, for Eleanor Evanson to be a name in IVF; so you’d prefer to farm out your kids to some unknown exploited foreigner, and say it’s all for my sake —’
‘You’re twisting —’
‘You’ve never even consulted me. Maybe I prefer cooking my children’s food to leaving them to eat shit.’
‘That’s ridiculous. We can control what they eat whether we’re there or not.’
‘Fine. But you’re saying I’m not allowed to choose being with the kids.’
‘You want to be doing Hill’s tedious research for the rest of your life?’
‘An au pair is not a compromise. It’s your wish. A compromise would be you deciding to come home early two nights a week. Or – better – you employing an au pair two nights a week.’
‘I can’t promise to be here early two nights a week. It’s not possible. Not while we’re working with newly harvested eggs. It doesn’t work to a timetable, you know we can�
��t freeze them.’
‘You could agree a timetable with Simon. As you know perfectly well. You could take it in turns.’
‘The kids don’t need their parents twenty-four hours a day. They need to be loved and fed but they don’t need us all the time. In fact they’ll be better socialised without us. It’s pure emotional blackmail, what you’re doing.’
‘Because you don’t want to come home early, you want to stop me from doing it too.’
‘You can still come home early every bloody day if you want. But at least it will be a choice.’
‘That makes rather a mockery of paying someone.’
‘I’ll pay. My guilt, my money.’ She was already earning more than him. She had him cornered and they both knew it.
An au pair came from an agency. Con wouldn’t have anything to do with it so El interviewed her and took her on. She was a stolid Austrian, wretchedly shy with him, answering his attempts at conversation monosyllabically. The kids seemed to like her. She was thorough. The house was cleaner than it had ever been, the children’s clothes neater. When he came in in the evening (having forced himself to stay till 4.30, till 5, till almost half past) they had already had their tea and she was cuddling Megan and reading to Paul, or, if Megan was asleep, playing endless games of Continuo, coloured squares spread across the floor and the eighteen-year-old crawling around them alongside the three-year-old. She was embarrassed by Con’s presence and the kids were happy with her. So, more often than not, he’d end up pretending to read the paper in the kitchen, listening to their chatter through the crack in the door.
‘I’ll give them their bath,’ he told her, and she went immediately to her room. She was silent in there and never went out. It was impossible to banish her to such solitude every evening, but when he asked her to watch TV or stay in the kitchen and eat with him, her embarrassed presence was a strain. El went into action and found the girl an au pairs’ social group to go to on Thursday nights, and an English class for a Tuesday. She recommended her to colleagues as a babysitter. Gradually Con reclaimed some evenings at home. But he never stopped resenting it. She stayed with them for two years.