Conrad & Eleanor (31 page)

And then of course she feels guilty. He needs Cara and the children in a way she doesn't. And the children need a father figure. She has other things: work, her students, her colleagues. Of course he needs to be loved by Tilly and Lucas, and to be Cara's main support. And how much better it would be for Cara if she moved back. Cara could confide in her dad, he could help her pull herself together. El knows that she cannot. She's tried, she has really tried; when the three of them came home from Bologna, when Cara was pregnant the first time. That Easter she took Cara off on an idyllic Tenerife holiday of sun and swimming and delicious restaurants. Cara was silent and tetchy, eating nothing due to (she claimed) feeling sick with her pregnancy, sleeping late and wasting the fresh sunny mornings. El could not break through to her. And if she is jealous because Cara and Con watch rubbish TV together and cackle with laughter, or spend hours discussing the quirks and fads of Cara's children – if she is jealous of those things, then she is an utter bitch. Cara must move in, and Eleanor will be glad. It is Con who has organised the conversion of the attic into Dan's self-contained lair, and that works brilliantly. Now Dan has a decent job in IT, he is even paying rent, and they have the security of knowing where he is, knowing he is safe.

She feels a dull, nagging unease whenever she thinks about the time Con went missing. It was terrible, and she discovered how much she needed him. But once he was back it was hard to remember the urgency of that. Each day, after all, comes down to a mundane domestic sequence of breakfast (eaten separately, El rising a good hour before Con), departure for work (a peck on the cheek), return from work (a peck on the cheek), dinner with maybe a few minutes' chat, clearing up and reading, and bed (a peck on the cheek). How could anyone invest that with the heightened emotion she felt when he disappeared? Of course they are simply furniture in one another's lives – what else could she expect? But it gives her a sense of failure and shame, and makes her even feel that she is recreating the conditions for him to depart again. She realises she doesn't know how to be married. She can't understand how other people do it, day in, day out, for years. And then one of the children comes round, or friends for dinner, and Con jokes and talks about ideas she has never heard him mention, and she is struck by how funny and interesting he is. Afterwards she tells herself he is only dull with her, just as she is only dull with him.

She takes her plate of moussaka into the sitting room and sets it on the coffee table. Cara is on the sofa with Lucas flat out beside her, thumb in mouth.

‘Wine for the worker?' Con offers, passing her a glass. Tilly comes and stands on the opposite side of the coffee table, staring intently at El's food.

‘Are you hungry, Till?' she asks.

‘When's she not?' from Cara.

‘Can I give her a bit?'

‘She won't like it, but feel free.'

‘I'll get you a little spoon, Tilly, and you can have a taste and see what you think.'

Conrad is on his feet before she can move, fetching the spoon. ‘She's eaten two dippy eggs, haven't you, Tilly lass? And more cucumber and carrot sticks than she can count.'

‘Three five four nine eleven!' retorts Tilly.

‘Exactly. Here's a spoon.'

Tilly attacks her side of El's plate, and El eats from her own side.

‘Don't spill it down you. We're going in a minute,' Cara threatens.

‘Cara and I were talking,' Con begins.

‘About a move-in date?'

‘Not quite yet. About Megan's old room and how I might reorganise it for Tilly and Lucas. D'you think Meg would mind if we boxed her stuff up?'

El laughs. ‘I think it would be entirely reasonable, given that she left home nearly a decade ago!'

‘I don't want her blaming me for turfing her out,' says Cara sullenly.

‘For God's sake —' starts El.

‘I'll ring her,' soothes Con. ‘I'll ring her and tell her I want to clear the room. We can fit some of her stuff in our wardrobe. She can come home for the weekend and sort out what she really wants to keep.'

‘I like this,' Tilly announces triumphantly, shovelling in another mouthful.

‘I can see you do, young lady. There'll be none left for me!'

‘Great, now this one's asleep. He'll howl when I try to put him in the car,' complains Cara. El's eyes meet Con's and she allows her eyebrows to rise a fraction of a fraction.
Cara is exasperating
. He smiles back at her without moving a muscle.
She is, but what can we do?
Suddenly El feels like laughing.

‘Tilly,' Con says. ‘You've eaten so much of your poor granny's tea that she'll be hungry all night. D'you want to come with me and find some more food for her?' Tilly nods seriously and trots into the kitchen after him.

‘Won't it be a bit shit for you if we come back?' Cara asks in the sudden silence. ‘You won't get much peace.'

‘We've never been much for peace,' El tells her. ‘Having kids around will be good for us.'

‘I know Dad wants us to come but it's different for you. You're busy at work all day, you want to flop when you get in.'

‘Am I not flopping?' El asks her. ‘Food cooked for me, wine poured for me, world-class entertainment provided? What more could I ask?'

Cara smiles one of her all-too-rare smiles, and Eleanor's heart soars. Con and Tilly come back from the kitchen bearing, respectively, a second helping of moussaka and a tiny lopsided cupcake smothered in hundreds and thousands. ‘I made this!' Tilly announces.

Con is grinning at El.
Thank you, yes, you see we can weather Cara and her kids, together.
She smiles back at him.
Yes.

Mostly El doesn't think about the marriage, because she is too busy, and busy with too many other interesting things. But when she does think about it, in a rational, objective way, she feels slightly resentful and defeated. It is not what she imagined it would be, and it seems likely that is more her fault than Conrad's. She blocks their holiday times into her new academic diary promptly every year. Planning holidays together – and indeed taking them – is an easy thing to do. They can share an interest in a new place, in its culture and history, in walking and in eating different kinds of food in different kinds of settings. They get on well together on holiday. But increasingly El studies their fellow travellers with a jaundiced eye. Most are old, similar to Con and El in age, or older. They sit in couples in companionable or hostile silence, they visit the sights, they take dips in the pool or the sea. We are just the same as them, El thinks, and she hates the thought. All their hope and imagination and love and cleverness – and what are they, at the end of the day? Just the same as everyone else, living the same clichés. She hates it, and she hates herself for having allowed herself to imagine that she was in some way different and should have been able to arrive at a better way of living. She hates the trick of it: you start off young, imagining you can do anything, that life is yours to shape as you will. And then you find yourself trammelled into exactly the same pattern as everyone else. There is the illusion of choice, but no real choice. Just a narrowing funnel.

And then something happens – the birth of Cara's children, for example, or Paul getting married, or Megan getting rave national reviews, or a breakthrough of some kind at work – and suddenly all her resentment is washed away and she realises how happy and blessed she is, and how her own individual life is, certainly, more vivid than anyone else's, and more distinctive and original and important. And she knows that the originality and importance is in no small part due to the exceptional nature of her marriage with Conrad.

Jane Rogers has written nine novels, including
Mr Wroe's Virgins
(which she dramatized as an award-winning BBC drama serial),
Her Living Image
(which won the Somerset Maugham Award),
Island
and
Promised Lands
(which won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Her most recent novel,
The Testament of Jessie Lamb
, was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, and won the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her short story collection,
Hitting
Trees with Sticks
, was shortlisted fort the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

Jane also writes radio drama and adaptations, and has taught writing to a wide range of students. She is a mentor for Gold Dust (a unique mentoring scheme for writers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

www.janerogers.info

also by jane rogers

Hitting Trees with Sticks

The Testament of Jessie Lamb

The Voyage Home

Island

Promised Lands

Mr Wroe's Virgins

The Ice is Singing

Her Living Image

Separate Tracks

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2016 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jane Rogers, 2016

The moral right of Jane Rogers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or
localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 9781782397922
E-book ISBN 9781782397946
Trade paperback ISBN 9781782398233

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