Conrad & Eleanor

by Jane Rogers

  ‘But you will help.’

  ‘I don’t see how I —’

  ‘Oh, you can. Take my camera. I’ll wait for you here.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘No. I know you can help, I knew it the moment I saw you.’

  ‘I don’t know when I’ll finish, and then I have a long drive home, I have to get back for my children —’ Yes, he even told her he had children.

  ‘But just pop in,’ she says. ‘You have to drive back through town. A quick cup of tea. I promise I won’t keep you longer than that.’

  He can’t imagine how he will feel after he has been back in there. He’ll tell them they’re breaking the law, he’ll have to threaten them with inspectors – whatever he has to do, a cup of tea with her afterwards will be easy in comparison. ‘OK.’ He pockets the camera reluctantly.

  This is the second pause. Why, after he has braced himself and been admitted to the wretched prison again, and waited in vain for anyone in a position of responsibility to appear, and walked about the place like a tourist of sadism, snapping pictures of the worst cases and finally realised that no one is coming and that anyway a carefully worded email from his desk would be more efficient and less liable to end in physical confrontation – why, after all this, does he return to the café? Why doesn’t he just put his foot down and head for home? Because he has already committed himself by taking the camera.

  Because she is what he deserves.

  When he opens the café door she is there with a pot of tea and two cups. ‘It’s just fresh,’ she says. ‘I must be telepathic.’

  He is shaking with pent-up anger and frustration, with all the unsaid things he has rehearsed for the animal house managers. It doesn’t take much of her candid questioning for him to spill the beans, and for him to admit he took photos, though he draws the line at her seeing them. He winds the film on to its end, extracts it from the camera and pockets it. ‘I can’t let you use any of this now. I have to try to get change within the animal labs first; I need to retain the threat of making the pictures public as a second line of attack.’ He hands her back her camera.

  She understands. She clasps his hand in gratitude and he finds himself strangely moved by the contact. Her skin is cool and dry, contained, like her quietly confident face. He finds himself thinking, she does not often touch other people. This is an important day for her. Balm to his own distress.

  By the time he is ready to leave they have exchanged names (Maddy) and email addresses and he has promised to keep her informed about how he gets on. She in turn promises to keep what he has told her a secret. When they stand to leave he almost hugs her. It is only on the drive home that he has doubts, and wonders why he has told her quite so much.

  If he is honest, it was always bad going into an animal house. Even when he was dealing with his own animals at the university. Treating the monkeys was always bad. He remembers steeling himself against their pretty faces, resolutely not giving them names. Occasionally in extreme grogginess they would submit to his syringe almost willingly, allowing him to feel for a tender self-deceiving moment that he could minister to them, help them, heal them. Instead of making them more sick. Sitting up and folding his knees up to his chest, Con rocks on the bed. There was a reason. Good in bad. Bad in good. It runs through all things. The best time was the worst. Think of it. The year after Cara’s birth. Its random-seeming contentment. Its surprising satisfactions. Its joy. Were because of the bad. Would not have existed without the bad. And what is he to make of that?

  There was something very strange about the year after Cara was born. There was more time. How could there be more time, when they had three children instead of two, and no au pair to help out? There was more time, Con supposes, because Eleanor was at home. She took a full six months’ maternity leave. She was reading and working at home, of course, she never stopped thinking and working, but she was there – there when he left in the morning, there when he came in at night. They were a team, functioning perfectly together. She would pass Cara to him when he came in, and Cara’s round wondering face would slowly fix on him and blossom into a smile. He’d run the tepid bath and swoosh her in it so she gasped with delighted laughter, Paul and Megan leaning over either side of him to brandish bath toys at her, a hippo that spouted water, a fish-shaped sponge, and Cara like a plump pink starfish herself beaming up at the three of them, waving her arms and legs. When Cara was done they poured in their own bubble bath and hot water and shrieked and giggled and piled each other’s heads with froth while he dried and powdered Cara, and El cooked. After they’d eaten, El gave Cara her evening feed while Con cleared up. And all the time, they talked. He loved having no au pair, having the whole house to themselves; would have been happy never to go out. He was dismayed when her sister asked to come and stay that autumn.

  El’s younger sister Minnie had been living in Italy for six years; Con hardly knew her. Now she was in crisis – her boyfriend had broken her heart, she wanted to move back to England, and she had no base, no job, no friends.

  ‘Why does she have to come to us? Why can’t she go home to your mum?’

  ‘Because my mum would drive her nuts, you know that. It’ll be nice for the kids anyway, an aunty.’

  ‘It’ll be as bad as having another au pair cluttering the place up.’

  ‘Con, we’ve got two spare bedrooms. And anyway, she’s looking for a job. She’ll go out – she’ll do stuff – it’ll be OK.’

  Minnie arrived pale and tragic, and monopolised El for two days of low, urgent confidences. Con’s worst fears were being realised; after he’d put the children to bed he sat grimly in front of the TV while the sisters’ continuous murmur ran on in the kitchen, with only the most random and infrequent accompaniment of chopping or stirring to indicate that dinner might ever arrive. When he cracked and went in to join them and open a bottle of wine, he was hurt to see they were already halfway through one and El had not even thought to offer him a glass.

  But after a few days, alliances shifted. Coming to bed early for the first time since Min’s arrival, El rolled her eyes at Con and shook her head. ‘She’s slurping up sympathy like a great sheet of blotting paper.’

  ‘She’s slurping up wine like a great sheet of blotting paper.’ They cackled, together.

  ‘But she has had a horrid time.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Oh, he’s been seeing someone else for months and stringing her along with stuff about it being a brief passion he needs to get out of his system, ’cos he loves her really.’

  ‘He’s told her?’

  ‘Asked her permission. He’s been bringing this female back to where they live.’

  ‘So has he got it out of his system?’

  ‘Well, the other woman’s pregnant.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He’s a foul old thing anyway, he’s about forty, and there’s a first wife somewhere in the background too. Min’s better off without him. But she’s really upset about the sex —’

  ‘Upset about it?’

  El bounced gleefully on the edge of the bed. ‘She thinks she’ll never find anyone to have such good sex with again.’

  ‘Blimey. What does he do?’

  ‘I shouldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Oh yes you should. You get in bed, I’ll nip down and fetch up the rest of the wine.’

  ‘What rest of the wine?’

  ‘You’re joking! Has she found the whisky?’ Con crept down to the dining room and took Grouse and glasses from the sideboard. A crack of light still showed under the kitchen door; there was the sound of running water, and of Min singing softly to herself. ‘Alas my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously…’ When he got back to the bedroom El took one look at him and shrieked with laughter.

  ‘Hush! Hush!’

  ‘Your face! What is it?’

  ‘She�
�s in the kitchen, singing “Greensleeves”.’ Neither of them could stop giggling.

  ‘Ssh!’

  He poured them each a slug. ‘Tell me about the sex.’

  ‘It’s just all so – elaborate. Apparently he’s got this thing about doing it outside.’

  ‘All Italians do.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘Stick around, honey. I know some things.’

  ‘Right. Well, they both go out with nothing on under their coats —’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Not a stitch. Just shoes. And then they go to a restaurant where the waiter offers to hang up their coats so they dither and say they’ll keep them just for now, thanks.’ El choked on her whisky and had to be thumped on the back. ‘We’re making so much noise!’

  ‘She’s downstairs, she won’t hear.’

  ‘And while they eat they’re exposing themselves through the buttons, or sticking their feet up each other’s coats —’

  ‘With shoes on?’

  ‘You’re ruining it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And drinking delicious wine, and pouring the odd dribble down the inside of their coats to lick off later —’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘When they’ve finished their meal in a nice, slow, decorous fashion, they leave the restaurant and find the nearest dark alley, open up the coats and have a good long fuck against the wall.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful.’

  ‘Or climb over the fence and do it in the park.’

  ‘Climb over the fence?’

  ‘Apparently. So they can sit on the edge of a bench. That’s her favourite —’

  ‘Sitting on a bench?’

  ‘Well, you know, sitting on him on a bench —’

  Con imagined large pale lugubrious Min wobbling on a park bench on top of her elderly lover, who would be a rather frail, skinny gent. ‘Stop it, I can’t breathe!’

  El’s face was pink with laughter. ‘Oh God, I shouldn’t tell you this!’

  ‘What did you tell her about us?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘What would you like me to have told her?’

  ‘Well, I just hope you made it exotic enough.’

  ‘Nothing true, then?’

  ‘Baggage!’ They rolled and rocked together on the bed.

  Min, whose mental age, Con suggested to El, was very close to Paul’s, encouraged Paul and Megan in elaborate games of dressing up, making extravagant headgear out of cereal boxes, tinfoil, feathers and plastic bottles. She took them out to the Oxfam shop to buy long skirts for robes and trains. Paul’s incipient hostility to the new baby (‘I would of liked it if it was a boy’) was totally deflected. Con and El found themselves with delicious giggly afternoons alone with Cara, who learned to crawl backwards at great speed before discovering the other direction. When Min was tipsy (most nights) she was lugubriously funny, relating the woeful tales of her attempts to find a job. She didn’t get one in a bookshop because they asked her maths questions about how much change she’d give, and she was thinking in lira and said three thousand instead of three pounds. She didn’t get one in a travel agent’s because the woman who ran it wanted to know if she was married, and when she said she wasn’t, told her she didn’t think she was suitable, because some of the men who came in made difficult requests.

  ‘Sounds right up your street!’ laughed El.

  ‘Are you sure it was a travel agent’s?’ Con wanted to know.

  ‘I haven’t told you the filing one yet. You know that one you found in the local paper, El? Filing and light reception duties?’

  ‘Yup, it’s really near —’

  ‘Builders’ merchants. It’s in a kind of garage, no heating. The entire place is plastered with pornographic posters, and there are these cardboard boxes – I kid you not – a pile of about fifteen cardboard boxes completely full of damp scraps of paper – ­letters, bills, receipts, final demands, old fag packets, snotty tissues and chip wrappers —’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘I am not. And this monster-man with a beer gut the size of your fridge goes, “All you gotta do is transfer that lot into the new filing cabinet, darling.” And there isn’t even a desk —’ Her dramatic arm swing sent a new bottle of wine flying. El’s glance at Con as she mopped up reduced him to silent hysteria.

  ‘Sorry. As for the reception bit, well, the only furniture in the entire place was a camp bed. I suppose I was meant to receive callers on that.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to the tech, or ring up the WEA? See if you can teach some Italian?’

  ‘But I don’t teach Italian, I teach English.’

  ‘I know, dimwit, but you could do conversation, couldn’t you? You could do basic Italian.’

  ‘But I want to get away from all that, I want to put it behind me —’

  ‘Min, you can’t start anything without money.’

  ‘No need to think about it again till Monday now. We’re going to cook you a fantastic tea tomorrow. Me and Paul and Megan, we’re making a five-course feast, starting with quails’ eggs and ending with chocolate mousse, with mead to drink, and everyone has to dress up like kings and queens…’

  Her room became a treasure trove of jumbled bargains, chocolate biscuits, dirty towels, rejection letters, half-empty glasses, and all the household scissors, pens and Sellotape. Paul and Megan foraged through it in amazed delight. El and Con discussed Min as they walked around the reservoir next afternoon, with sleeping Cara strapped to Con’s chest.

  ‘Has she always been like this?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘She’s a complete fantasist.’

  ‘You like her, don’t you?’

  ‘I think she’s great. But she needs to sort herself out.’

  ‘I know. There must be a job that’ll suit her, if only we could think —’

  ‘She doesn’t seem to feel any urgency about it.’

  ‘D’you think we should ask her for food money?’

  ‘It would focus her on the need to earn. How’s she financing the quails’ eggs and mead?’

  ‘Well —’

  ‘El, you’re not giving her money.’

  ‘Think what we’re saving on an au pair.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not helping her, is it? She’s twenty-six, she needs to be a bit more responsible.’

  ‘You don’t think we could employ her as an au pair for a bit?’

  ‘It would be mad. For a start she creates chaos wherever she goes. Also she needs to learn to stand on her own two feet.’

  ‘You’re right. Well, I’m going to find out which of the local schools offer Italian.’

  Min made them co-conspirators: plotting to find her a suitable job; managing her shameless requests for loans. She was the perfect foil to the whole family; even Megan would burst out joyously, ‘Look what silly Minnie done!’ pointing out the latest outrage of burnt cake, coffee-stained carpet, or disastrous use of hair dye. (She escaped a whole week of job hunting after dyeing her light-brown hair deep red, with a corresponding immovable stain across her forehead, ears and neck, so she looked as if she’d been dipped head first in red wine.)

  ‘It’s like having another child!’ El confided to Con, and it was, making them amused and exasperated allies. But she also gave them time together to enjoy it. Leaving the kids with Min was much simpler than leaving them with an au pair, since the kids loved it, and it was a way for Min to pay them back. They spent a couple of evenings a week in the pub, relishing each ­other’s company, and once attempting, with some hilarity, to enact Min’s favourite sexual fantasy. Mostly they just talked, making plans for the kids and for Min, and arguing over the chapter headings for El’s IVF book, which
at that stage they seriously thought they might co-write. And through that whole laughing giddy time, Cara grew sweet and round and golden-haired, everybody’s darling, the sun that warmed the whole family.

  He must have drifted off to sleep because he wakes with a memory of that sun, and with a chill of dread upon him. It’s gone. All gone. Now the dark is stretching its fingers towards him, and warmth and laughter are as unrecoverable – as unattain­able – as sweet midsummer sunshine in the midst of winter’s frost.

  He gets up quickly and reaches for his shoes. The late afternoon daylight is already failing. When he turns on the light, outside the window becomes dark blue. The memory of his previous night spent huddled beneath the window, and of his hunger, comes back to him. He will go out and buy supplies of food, and a bottle of wine, to see him through the night. He will prepare himself against the dread which already seems to be taking him by the throat… How stupid to have slept in daylight, wasted the day in sleep. When darkness is the thing he wants to blot out. When darkness is what he really fears…

  In the dark street Con doesn’t know which way. The cold mist that has hovered all day is low again, blurring and haloing streetlights, making an icy wetness that trails against his face like thick cold cobwebs, muffling sound so that passing vehicles loom, blare, then suddenly fade. Footsteps come from nowhere, volume distorts.

  End of the road and a sudden stream of traffic, he jiggles from foot to foot trying not to glance behind, keep moving, keep moving, steps into a gap in the traffic and is wrong-footed by a dark shape that scuttles after him and cuts in front – almost loses his balance. Close behind him a man shouts and there’s a streak of pressure against his calf. He blunders on to the opposite pavement and the scuttling dog is waiting, its lead stretched taut past his leg to its owner somewhere behind Con. In the light of a shop window Con sees the little dog’s ratty trails of hair and nasty bat-face snarling up at him. He stumbles on.

  The shops are still open, despite the dark; here in the awful cold a florist’s shop brims with garish colour; scarlet and yellow roses in tight buds that will never open, dyed blue daisy-like flowers, unnaturally turquoise. He hurries on, blinking the clashing colours from his eyes. A lit hairdresser’s clear as a goldfish bowl; an oblivious young man with sandy-golden hair, tawny lion hair, is being trimmed. Fair hair like Cara’s. Cara hair.