Conrad & Eleanor (18 page)

‘This house?'

He nods.

El is conscious of Paul's eyes on her. ‘Of course. Where d'you want to start?'

‘I'll start in his study. It'll take me a while, you can get on with whatever you were doing.'

She will leave the bank statements till he's gone. She feels a strong need to keep whatever investigations she herself may make separate from his. It feels as if he is looking for something different from what she is seeking. He's looking for evidence of a crime – committed by Con, or her – even murder, committed by her. He's looking for big obvious things and would therefore misuse or misinterpret such hints and whispers as she might find.

‘Mum?' Paul has been upstairs for something and now has his coat on.

‘You're going?'

‘Are you all right with him here? D'you want me to stay?' He seems embarrassed.

‘No, no, it's fine, you go.'

‘It's just, I haven't really got anything to do here, and there's a mountain of work —'

She laughs. ‘There isn't anything to do here, you're exactly right. Go!'

‘I'm picking Cara up at 8, I'll bring her straight back here.'

Cara. Of course. ‘Right. I'll make us some food.'

‘Good idea. See you, Mum.' And he is gone. Belatedly she feels herself stir, start to raise herself from her chair, as if to offer him a kiss. They don't really kiss much, only at times like New Year. But it should be possible, surely, in these straits, to show a little affection? The front door bangs shut. It occurs to El that she ought to talk to Paul. It's up to her, after all, to take the initiative. Of course he's awkward with her, he knows she's holding back.

She must talk to both of them, Paul and Cara, when they come back tonight. The policeman enters the kitchen, gives her a quick nod, and begins opening the cupboards, crouching to peer into each one. What on earth does he imagine finding inside them? Parts of Con's dismembered body? When he looks in the freezer she realises that that is indeed what he is looking for. She is a suspect. She imagines the case against herself. Eleanor Evanson in cold blood plotted with her lover of three years' standing to murder and dispose of the body of her husband Conrad. She wished to claim that he had vanished in order to benefit financially from his disappearance, and to free herself to indulge more fully in this adulterous affair.

Does she stand to benefit financially? Only if Con is proved to be dead, surely? An insurance company isn't going to pay out for someone who might turn up any day. Anyway, she earns twice as much as him and is not short of cash.

She hears the policeman moving lightly up the stairs. He's doing their bedroom next, she guesses, and wonders dispassionately if he will check the sheets for evidence of harmonious marital relations. She might have been expected to change the sheets, though. Maybe if he found such evidence he would take it as proof of more recent (illicit) sexual activity. Can they date it? she wonders. Anyway, there are no stains in the bed. There has been no sexual activity in that bed for quite a while.

The key to this, the clues to this, will be in her own head. In her memory. She needs to dismiss the whole idea of this Mad person. She needs to approach the problem more rigorously. If Con has deliberately gone – or done something stupid that means he can't return – the most likely reason for it is her.
Done something stupid
flickers in her mind for a moment. Would he? Not unless he was much much more depressed and unbalanced than she realised. He would never put the kids through that. Knowing the fragility of the younger two, especially his beloved Cara – he would never inflict so much harm on them.

But… the dwindling thought kindles to brief life again… if he made it look like an accident? A slip, a fall, a drowning?

This is nonsense. Cara has visited the hospitals and morgue. Con is not dead.

No. Con has gone somewhere else, because of her. Yesterday she thought it was because of attrition. Because of knowing about her and Louis, because she'd finally worn away the last threadbare rags of his love and the past that had tied him to her – but today that seems too simple and too sentimental an analysis. Eleanor has never much liked thinking about the past. Firstly it is a terrible waste of present time, in which there is always something better to be done. Secondly it leads people into nostalgia and even outright grief. But Con is gone. It is as simple and absolute as a child's reading book. Janet sees John. Con is gone. She has lived her life as if people were responsible for their actions, so now she must make sense of this.

In the beginning they had Paul. Well, before that they were going out together, but she could have been going out with almost anybody. It was from that accidental pregnancy that the individual identity of their life as a couple sprang. It seems to El that she had hardly noticed Con till then. She had talked with him, made love with him, danced, walked, eaten, drunk, slept, argued, laughed, sat in companionable silence with him, but he had not really struck her, nothing about him had made a lasting impression or singled him out from the other three men with whom she had also done all these things, or the seven with whom she had done some of them. Until she told him she was pregnant. On her way, more or less, to the abortion clinic.

But Conrad had wanted the child. Against all sense and reason; she about to head north to start her house job at Oldham Royal hospital, he doing poorly paid research in the Cambridge lab and casting about for a career path. She was so bright and shiny then, she had hardly thought about telling him. Mentioned it in passing as they grabbed a lunchtime sandwich at that pub near the bridge.

‘By the way, I'm pregnant.' In her head it was already taken care of.

It seems to her now that was the first time she really saw him, saw Con; standing looking awkwardly away from her into the canal, slightly flushed, letting the words drop like stones: ‘Why don't you have it?'

He walked behind her along the towpath as they talked about it and she felt the solid weight of him at her back. It mattered to him. Suddenly she felt flimsy, lightweight, and as she cycled away, was so ashamed that she couldn't face her lecture and cycled straight to the student clinic and sat in a queue of grim-faced girls until it was her turn to be sighed over by the doctor and told she would regret it forever if she abandoned her career now. El was astonished. It had never occurred to her to abandon her career. That night she and Con talked properly. He had become more sure of himself and less embarrassed; he wanted them to get married. The career/motherhood conflict had not entered his head either. They would manage childcare between them. He would apply for jobs in the Manchester area, he would get work near her.

His quiet certainty was irresistible. As if the light had been switched on, El saw the beautiful biological simplicity of accepting what had happened, the elegance of there already being a baby inside her, which could grow and be born and be theirs; which she could welcome, not rip out and destroy. There was a great pleasure in knowing everybody else was wrong. None of them could believe how such an intelligent girl, etc. etc., and she and Con knew it would be perfectly all right, and she was filled with boundless energy which enabled her not only to sail through her finals and start at Oldham hospital, but also to redecorate with Con the little terraced house they'd found with views of the distant moors.

Everything went as they had planned – they led a charmed life. Baby Paul was not only perfect and beautiful but also slept long regular hours; within three months she was back at the hospital, and Con had adjusted his lab hours so that he finished at 4 every day and could pick Paul up then, in exchange for working Saturday mornings. No one's work suffered. Everyone gained. Con had been right and she honoured him for it.

She remembers cycling home from the hospital, her breasts heavy and prickling with milk for Paul. Sitting in the soggy old kitchen armchair with Paul on her tit, chatting to Con as he sliced onions, peeled potatoes. At the hospital Mr Steptoe had had some success in fertilising eggs in vitro; this was the run-up to the birth of Louise Brown, the first test tube baby. The suspense and tension at the hospital, the heightened vitality, was echoed in their life at home. Everywhere, life was taking a new shape, being
re
shaped by people.

She remembers the heady pleasure of knowing she would never be like her mother, she would always have her work. She and Con were conspirators and their lives a revolution; soon everyone would wake up and realise what they were missing, that it was possible to have everything, everything at once without anyone making any kind of sacrifice at all, and without exploiting anybody.

El becomes aware that her face is stiff; that she is holding her lips in an unnatural grimace. She doesn't want to cry. There is no need to think about those times, really. They were simple, nothing lurked in the corners. She can scroll through them, just keeping an eye out for the first broken thread, the moment when it all began to unravel…

But if she's going to cook tonight, some things will need defrosting. She goes out to the garage to look in the big freezer. And here's a shock – the freezer is virtually empty. All there is is a stack of horrible ready meals for one: lamb tikka, moussaka, fish pie. Who eats these? It can only be Con, he's in charge of shopping and cooking. But where are all his frozen veg from the garden? Every year he grows three different kinds of beans, peas, spinach, carrots – he grows them and freezes the surplus in neatly labelled bags, for winter use. He freezes raspberries, black­currants and gooseberries. He has a big well-tended kitchen garden, behind the honeysuckle trellis. Over the years all the kids have helped him with it. She remembers him kitting himself up in waterproofs and wellies on wet Sundays, going out to dig. ‘You can take the boy out of the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy,' he would say to her and grin. Have they already eaten everything this year? Surely not. She runs out into the sodden garden, across the overgrown lawn and past the trellis. The veg garden is bleak indeed; a few gone-to-seed cabbages, some tilting bamboo canes with dead brown tendrils clinging to them, yellowing weeds, and leafless, spiky-looking bushes. Of course there's nothing here, it's winter. But does it always look like this? So desolate, so abandoned? She makes her way back to the house and changes her soaking shoes. He has not grown any veg this year, he can't have done. But it is unknown in their history. The year he went to America he fussed endlessly over choosing the right person to take over the garden, from several willing neighbours. It is part of the ritual of his life, ordering seeds, the planting out, the weeding, the harvesting. The sight of the freezer with its shop-bought pap which she knows he doesn't like – which she can't even imagine him buying, let alone eating – makes her feel weak. How is it she has not looked in the freezer, or the garden, for so long?

C
onrad sleeps, wakes,
sleeps, losing track of days and nights. He traces and retraces the streets of Bologna, lost in a maze of memories. Time has gone haywire. How many days has he been here? Looking up from his trudging, he notices that he's outside a restaurant. A couple in the window are tucking into full plates. He stops. Just for a while, he could stop being such an idiot. He could have a proper meal. Why not? He knows that why not is because he's trying to conserve his cash, but he'll have to get some from a cashpoint soon anyway, and besides, who the hell cares where he is? He probably hasn't even been missed yet. He opens the heavy door and is met by good smells. He hasn't had a proper meal since the conference, for God's sake. A waiter seats him and he studies the menu, relishing the warmth, the comfort of the seat, the prospect of food – the sudden transition from being a freezing and aimless vagrant, to being a purposeful diner. The clarity of his role here is as satisfying as being an audience member in a theatre – what he has to do is simple and straightforward. Which makes him question, again, the complicated mess he has got himself into. Is he really on the run from Maddy? Is she the real reason he is rattling about alone in Bologna? Surely not. Didn't he make up his mind, definitively, to leave Eleanor three weeks ago, just as he has made up his mind to leave her, repeatedly, in the more distant past? It has just taken Maddy to push him over the edge.

Three weeks ago he went to see Megan in
The Winter's Tale
. It was a promenade performance in a warehouse space in Camden. Con arranged to go to see it on a Saturday night so they could have some time for an exhibition or walk on the Sunday. The only way to see Megan was on her own territory; she rarely came home, and was restless when she did. He was reminded of Eleanor with
her
mother; the duty visit, the impatience.

There is no time to see Meg before curtain-up; he collects his ticket and is shepherded into a holding area. The voluminous space is empty of décor and his heart sinks at the cheese-paring which deprives them of a proper set. But then there is music and a sharp brilliant pool of light in the darkness up ahead, suddenly illuminating the tableau of Leontes' court. As the audience are ushered forward into a circle around them, he sees how intimacy and voyeurism might work for the play. The frozen actors are grouped like a waxworks display and it is not until they come to life – clockwork figures moving to a tinkly, music-box tune – that he realises Megan is among them. He's assumed she was playing Perdita. But here she is, in regal crimson, supple and willowy now she is released from immobility, her face glowing with a tender smile for Polixenes. She is Queen Hermione, flirtatious, mature, poised. She is so like El that it is uncanny; a reincarnation of the El he first met. Mesmerised by her face and rapid, graceful movements, it is a while before Con tunes into the play.

‘Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a fork'd one!

Go, play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I

Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue

Will hiss me to my grave.'

The jealous king. The all-consuming, never-ending inventiveness of jealousy, colouring everything; transforming happiness to grief, contaminating the world. The remorseless logic of Leontes' words are a rallying call. This is how a betrayed man behaves. As if things mattered. As if something of value has been lost.

‘This jealousy

Is for a precious creature: as she's rare,

Must it be great.'

Something of value
has
been lost, but Con has never allowed himself to play that part: to rage, to destroy. Watching the distilled purity of Leontes' jealousy, Con is shamed. He has not even been jealous, though he has all the factual grounds Leontes lacks. Hasn't El taken up with Louis – continued with Louis – because Con has connived? Given up on her, not cared enough to be jealous? As beautiful, defiant, innocent Hermione/Eleanor/Megan defends herself to Leontes' jumped-up court, Con's lips move with Leontes'.

‘My life stands in the level of your dreams.'

‘Your actions are my dreams:

You had a bastard by Polixenes,

And I but dream't it.'

Banish the babe, kill the queen, slaughter all who would defend her: let black rage smash the world. In swallowing his own rage, he has made El's behaviour excusable. If he doesn't care enough to break with her, then he doesn't care enough to deserve her. What has he done? Compromised, prevaricated; thought of the children, thought of the disruption. Tried to pay her back by
not caring
. Death in life: she was right to despise him. Of course she despised him. Of course she betrayed him. He's invited it.

In the interval he paces the street outside, compelled by the desire to make a change in his situation. His emotions have been so plastered over and papered up that they have lost all meaning: he has duped himself into the life of a vegetable.

The warehouse is transformed for the second half. ­Blossom-laden branches hanging from the roof make a pink canopy, with dappled sunlight filtering through. The freshly green-­carpeted ground is confetti-strewn with petals; daffodils and tulips spill from overflowing tubs. Shepherds and shepherdesses dance among the audience. There is birdsong, spring and innocence, and Perdita and Florizel's love turns the world anew.

In the shameless sentiment and prettiness of the staging, and Autolycus' and the clown's foolishness, Con rediscovers his composure. It is only a play, after all. The decisions not to rage, not to leave, not to pull the house down around her ears, were painfully made and made for good reasons. Unfortunately he can see now that they were not the right decisions. Because as long as a thing is patched up, it will continue to limp along. Destruction is what's needed for life to spring anew. The freezing obliteration of winter, annihilation by ice of all that tangled growth. It is a cycle old as the seasons; a time of growth and plenty will be succeeded by darkness and death. Out of darkness and death, new life rises. His way of living has been as unnatural as his work, eking out the life of an ailing thing, instead of embracing destruction and trusting spring to come.

By the time the play reaches its sweetly cyclical ending, Con is at peace. It is rare to feel such clarity. He must end this. Walk away. Walk into the freezing darkness and out the other side. He will be able to do it now.

He takes Megan for a late dinner. She is still wrapped in the glamour of the part, still an uncanny double for El. She has a film audition in the offing, plus a term's work with a Theatre in Education company if she wants it. After eighteen months surviving on call centre work, chorus in a panto and crowd scenes in adverts, her career is taking shape and they can both drink to that.

‘Will Mum come to see it?'

‘I'll tell her she ought to. But you know how busy she is.'

‘She didn't see
The Dream Play
either.' Accusingly.

‘Not my fault.'

‘Why didn't you ask her to come with you?'

‘She's more likely to come if you remind her yourself.'

‘I've invited her once. If she doesn't want to see me it's up to her. Other people's mothers —'

‘Other people's mothers don't have such important careers.'

‘Pah!' said Megan, exactly as El might have done. ‘I don't know why she bothered having so many children.'

‘Why, how many do you propose to have?'

‘One, max. So I can look after her properly.'

‘You weren't looked after properly?'

‘OK, we were, but not by Mum. More by the au pairs than Mum. More by you than anyone.'

‘Am I such an inferior option?'

‘Oh the poor old thing!' She gave him a wonderfully theatrical kiss. ‘Don't be so touchy!'

‘Your husband could also look after your children.'

‘I'm not having a husband, thank you. Much easier living alone.' She glanced up at the stream of people coming through the restaurant door, to see if anybody recognised her. He remembers thinking calmly that it would not hurt her, or affect her in any way, when he left El.

His Italian is virtually non-existent but still he can tell there is a lot of meat on this menu (
Braciole di maiale
,
Saltimbocca alla Romana
,
Brasato al Barolo
are the three main choices on the board). He doesn't object to meat of itself, but he tends to cook and eat vegetarian to honour Paul and Megan's demands. And right now, there is something quite repulsive about the idea of meat. He settles for tomato and mozzarella, followed by pasta marinara.

It is because of him they are vegetarian, of course. He made a bad mistake with Paul when Paul was nine. It happened just after Dan's birth, in July. Dan was a week early, and Con had to go back to work for a couple of days before taking off his three weeks for the Spanish holiday that they had planned. El was exhausted after a long and difficult labour – Daniel was breech – and while Megan and Cara were happy in the care of Lisa, the latest au pair, Paul was fractious and difficult. Con offered him the option of going into the lab, provided he could read quietly while Con was busy, and Paul leapt at the suggestion. He was pleased to be singled out.

Conrad had a project meeting at 9 then needed to check a colleague's changes to an MRC funding application. In the late morning he became aware of Paul industriously drawing at the other end of the bench and offered to take the boy down to the animal house. Here the rodents and primates being used in departmental research lived in wire cages, in a brightly ­fluorescent-lit, windowless, breeze-block construction. Con was so used to it he didn't stop to think how it would strike Paul, and to begin with the boy didn't ask any questions. He pored over the cages of rats and mice, marvelling at their pink eyes and bald, squirming litters. He dabbed his finger end at their water bottles to make drips fall, and speculated on how those with shaven patches and wound dressings had hurt themselves.

Then one of the monkeys at the other end began to scream.

‘Dad? What is it, Dad?'

‘Just a monkey. They can be noisy, can't they?'

‘Can we see them?'

‘Sure.' They walked on past the rabbits to the monkey cages at the far end; at their approach the monkeys began to hurl themselves frantically round their cages; only one sat still on the floor of his cage, staring balefully at Paul and picking at a wound scab on his abdomen.

‘Are they frightened, Dad? Are they frightened of us?'

‘Well, they don't get many visitors. They get excited.'

‘Is it like a zoo?'

‘No. Not really.'

‘Is it a hospital? Are you making them better?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘What then?'

‘They help us with the experiments. We need them to help us work out how to make ill people better.' The monkeys were calming down, they came to rest on their perches or the floors of their cages, grimacing and staring tensely at Con and Paul, a couple of them chattering angrily to themselves.

‘What do they eat?'

‘Special monkey food. And oranges. They have fruit for a treat sometimes.'

‘But can't they ever come out?'

‘No.'

‘Do they have names?'

‘Not really.'

Paul took a couple of steps closer to the cages.

‘Don't go too near, Paul. They bite and scratch. They can be very bad tempered.'

‘They look sad.'

Con saw how stupid he had been to bring Paul here. The monkeys all looked fine. Those that had been operated on recently were behind locked doors in the sterile lab; you certainly wouldn't take a visitor in there. ‘Shall we go?'

‘Why do you have to keep them here?' As Paul turned towards him Con realised that the child was close to tears.

‘It's not that bad. They're safe here. They're warm and dry and fed —'

‘But they're not free. They can't go swinging through the trees or play —' Paul swiped angrily at the tears on his cheeks.

‘Pauly, Pauly, come on —' Con gave him his handkerchief. They passed in silence through the ranks of rabbits, rats, mice, to the outer door.

‘Why can't you let them go? Why can't you?'

It was a relief to breathe fresh air again. Con led them towards the canteen. ‘I told you, we need them to help us work out how to make ill people better.'

‘How?'

‘Well, sometimes things go wrong with bits of people's bodies and doctors can't cure them because they don't understand what's happening. Or because they need a new kind of medicine.'

‘Are all the monkeys ill?'

‘Things can be tested on them. To see if they would work on humans. New cures we've never tried before. When we go back to my lab I'll show you down the microscope, the little cells I'm battling with.'

‘You make the monkeys ill, to test the cures?'

‘Well, I don't, I work with rats. But some of the scientists have to work with monkeys.' They had reached the canteen. There was silence between them as they selected cutlery and slid their trays along the rail.

‘Can I have sausage and chips?'

‘If you like. D'you want a pudding?'

Paul chose a white iced bun and Con led them to a corner table.

‘What do you do with them afterwards?'

‘What?'

‘The monkeys. When the experiment is over?'

‘Nothing.' As far as Con knew they either died or were euthanised.

‘You should let them go.'

‘Most of them were bred here, Paul. They couldn't fend for themselves in the wild.'

‘Send them to a zoo then, where they can go outside.'

‘That's a good idea. Maybe we should.'

After lunch Con switched on the electron-microscope and showed Paul some slides of antibodies swarming round a pathogen. Explained, in simple terms, the battle the body wages against an intruder; explained why sometimes the body's defences need inhibiting, to manipulate a cure. ‘Your immune system is what protects you against diseases, or bad things from outside – wounds, infections, viruses. But sometimes we have to try and turn the immune system off, so we can help the body in other ways; help it to accept treatment for cancer, or a transplant, like a new heart. And that's my job. Trying to stop all these little swarming soldiers running wild and filling the bloodstream…'