Conrad & Eleanor (5 page)

Everything is tarnished now. He wonders how other people deal with this. The shame. The shamefulness of the past, the expeditiousness of it, the complacent ignorance in which one lived it, the continual and self-perpetuated delusions. He is ashamed of it all, from start to finish; of his pathetic protective male act, of his stoic refusal to react to injury and insult, of his conviction that he was necessary to the children. All the old clichés are there; no one is indispensable. El has always been honestly selfish. Which has left him the role of dishonestly selfless; the martyr, the victim. Until, with the stubborn perversity of flowing water, which must find a way through, he has come to find his satisfaction in her cruelty, in self-abasement.

Is this true? It is true that he has negated himself, all but rubbed himself out. He has no desires. He cannot think of a single thing he wants to do. Contemptible. No wonder El can't stand him. He can't stand himself. Only sit here, passively, awaiting transformation. Death will come. What other change might possibly arise? That El might suddenly fling her arms around him and apologise for everything she did and was, and devote her days to cherishing and amusing him?

Not only is it unimaginable, it is absolutely horrible. It would entail the removal of El's personality.

His limbs ache. He wants to shift position but won't let himself. If he keeps staring at it. If he keeps boring at it, even though it's solid rock – eventually he must come through to something, surely? This is of course a ridiculous thought. He will sit with his face pressed to a rock wall, and then being mortal he will die, and the rock, immovable and unmarked, will remain. He is pitting himself against something that cannot be altered.

Stupid. The smell persists. Are they peeling more? A bag full – he visualises the circles of peel, the sticky little penknife, the row of sucked pips. Revolting. If this is a battle between him and a smell, the smell wins if he stays. If he goes away, the smell loses, it ceases to exist in his nostrils.

He sees himself. His posture, his defeated shoulders, his empty hands. A monkey hunched at the back of its cage, staring balefully out of its prison. This is the problem. Not the anthropomorphism of animals, not the personification of cuddly kittens with diamante collars and little coats; the problem is the animal-ness of humans. The monkey is not like him,
he
is like the monkey. The monkey exists. The conditions of its existence (imprisoned, at the mercy of others whose priorities do not include the happiness of the monkey) are painful. And so by extrapolation…

It is doubtful if the monkey would venture out, if you left the cage door open. It has become what it is, a bundle of miserable defeated resentment. Like him.

By a monstrous effort of will he forces himself to his feet; drags his coat from the seat, makes one foot move in front of the other step step step along the foetid carriage way, past the faces and the eyes, through the intensifying stink to the sliding door at the end. He pushes the handle, watches it open, steps through into cleaner air. He leans against the partition facing outwards, watching the sodden countryside streaming past. He has left his case in the luggage rack at the other end. But it can stay there till he gets off. It would be good to wait here, instead of ploughing through another carriage-full of upturned, inquisitive faces. Instead of helpfully walking towards her, wherever she is sitting, waiting with the sinister knowledge that he will be unable to prevent himself from offering himself up to her.

There is no seat here and he will attract attention if he sits on the floor. The carriage door shushes and thunks open, someone passes behind his back. That's the problem: if she walks through the train, he is easier to find here than tucked away in a seat.

Nevertheless he stays; there is something compelling in the rain that streams diagonally across the window, in the authenticity of the dull grey light outside. There is a normality to daylight which restores sense at the most basic level, he thinks. Paul's incredulous rage: ‘The monkeys never even see daylight in their whole lives!' Why couldn't he listen to Paul earlier? He did listen, but what he heard was a betrayed child, who has discovered that his parent is imperfect. Not a serious argument for the monkeys. Maddy is punishment for that. But Paul. Might Paul even be connected? A new thought, paranoid but plausible. Paul is politically active, he is capable of joining a group campaigning against the use of animals in research. In fact he is highly likely to. And to set someone like Maddy onto his father? Con is unsure if this is plausible or not. Everything is fluid, things which were unlikely even a day ago are now developing, and Con's own previous view of Paul as distant, contemptuous, absorbed in the intricacies of his own life shifts now into a view of Paul as potentially aggressive; determined to make a stand against the old man. Paul is committed to his principles; why shouldn't he try to make Con denounce the cruelties inflicted by his own research? Suddenly Con sees that it is crazy not to have told Paul about Maddy. Either he is a moving force behind her action, in which case Con can work out with him precisely how to do the right thing about the animal house, and ask him to call off Maddy's reign of terror. Or, if he's not involved, Con can at least ask his advice. Paul will understand.

Con has no sooner articulated this thought than he dismisses it. Understanding necessarily entails a desire to do so. Why should Paul desire to understand his father? His biological need, as older son, is to reject and replace his father. This is what is happening, thinks Con. All I need to do is let nature take its course. Which it will do anyway, with or without my permission.

He presses his forehead against the cold window and watches it mist up with his breath. Is this an agreement to allow himself to play the victim? Is he back to square one? He can twist, he can turn, but there's nothing to be done.

When his back starts to ache he moves into the next carriage in search of a seat. But the few empty seats are beside people who are now properly entrenched in their journey, with bags and books and chattels wedged around them. His arrival in search of a seat when the train has not stopped to admit new passengers will reveal him as a malcontent, a seat-swapper. He pauses again at a carriage end, looking at the same view of diagonally teeming rain. He could go back to the buffet car. He could wait until the train stops and then look for a seat as if he is a new passenger. But the train never stops. Does it? Is it non-stop to Rome? Non-stop for nine hours? Surely not. That would make it a travelling prison, intolerable. He presses close to the window again, and sees the wavering semi-molten shapes of grey industrial units, decomposing and reforming in the streaming tears of rain.

He's being stupid. Flights last longer – twelve hours, sometimes more – why get wound up about a non-stop train? But he needs to get off. He needs to get off, to walk, to be in the daylight, in the rain, in a street, in charge of his own speed and direction. He must get off the train.

When the shapes of warehouses and factories are transformed into houses and blocks of flats; when the train slows its pace, to pass through what is clearly the centre of a city, when there is a tower like Pisa and red stone arches, then he is tight against the door, willing it to stop. It's too soon for Rome. His geography of Italy is scrambled. Milan? Modena? Somewhere in northern Italy, but will it stop? There's a rattle of Italian over the PA system, his brain sifts the words for meaning. Stazione Bologna Centrale. Bologna. Thank God.

Con is on the platform, sucking in lungfuls of cold wet air, checking the signs for
Uscita
, when he remembers his case. Doors are slamming. He makes a start back for the carriage but it's too late. With a silent glide before the noise of motion kicks in, the train is off, at walking pace, slow enough to stop, but unstoppable. The train's next stop is Rome.

He checks his pockets. Passport, wallet, glasses, phone. OK. What's in the case? Laptop, papers, clothes, toilet bag. They can send it back from Rome. He can go to the ticket office now and ask.

He walks through the station, empty-handed and light. The case is not important. Better without it. Newborn. Which is garbage, not least for the cost of replacing stuff; where is money going to come from? How long is he going to last like this? It would be the ultimate defeat to go crawling back to El because he's run out of money. How much is in his account? He doesn't even know. His salary comes in on the 20th, so there's that. But for how long will they continue to pay him, if he doesn't supply a sick note or explanation? How long does a missing person stay on a payroll?

It's been one day. He is not exactly missing. Part of his mind, a treacherous part of his mind, sees himself back at home and at work next week. Sees this as a shameful episode known only to himself – and indeed who else is likely to notice? El? She probably doesn't know when he is due home. The kids? Ditto. People at work might wonder, since George and the others will be there. But a few days' absence, that's nothing unusual. He could stay a couple of nights, do the sights of Bologna and pretend he's a free man, then go back as if nothing ever was. Dip his toe in the water then run away up the beach.

There is a faulty switch somewhere in his circuitry. There is something wrong with the wanting and intending circuit. It flickers. He does not know what he wants or what he will do. I am a feather for each wind that blows, he thinks, and the well-wrought, well-thought words comfort him.

The case will go into Lost Property. They'll keep it there a few weeks at least. Maybe he'll go to Rome next week anyway, and pick it up in person. He walks out of the station empty-handed, into a gentle drizzle. Already it seems the mid-­afternoon winter darkness is closing in. Lights shine in the windows of Bologna.

E
l catches her
alarm on the first beep at 6am. She has not really slept, but she must have dozed, because once she is showered and dressed she feels clear-headed. The helpless fear of the night has vanished. She clears the kitchen table – Paul has drained the brandy, naturally – and sits cradling a mug of tea and making a list. She needs to phone Con's sister Ailsa. Not that Ailsa will have any idea where he is, but it would be very poor family politics not to have told her, if he really is missing. Also, El wants an ally in not telling Con and Ailsa's mother. She can't see any point in telling the old lady; Con only visits her a couple of times a year, it will be quite a while before she misses him. Anyway, he'll be back. El adds phoning Dan and Megan to her list; she must be sure they are both up to speed on what is happening, now Cara is going to Munich. All four children are hypersensitive to being left out of any information known to their siblings. El thinks about Dan, in his nasty little box of a room in student accommodation. Not that Dan seems to mind a nasty little box. He has his bed, his desk and his computer; Con reported him isolated but perfectly content, last time he visited.

Dan has been extremely calm over Con's disappearance so far – is that likely to change? El hasn't seen him really upset for a long time; he's grown out of the inconsolable rages he suffered as a child. Those rages were about frustration, El was sure – about not being able to do or have something he'd set his heart on. Now he's seventeen he's got more control, and a better grasp of what is possible; also he's good at something. He's applying his mind to computer programming, with excellent results, and excelling is always good for the spirits. El knows she has always been right about Dan. It is Con who has been wrong, demanding tests and visits to specialists, bandying words like autism and Asperger's, looking for nameless psychological woes. El has always maintained that Dan is fine, and so he is; look at him now, flourishing in his first year at university despite his youth. If it was down to Con he'd have been languishing in some special school, rather than finding his own path through the jungle of the comprehensive, leaping ahead a year and learning how to protect himself from bullies and idiots. Yes, Dan is different. Yes, he's a loner. But there is nothing at all wrong with his brain; he's the brightest of the four. So far he has reacted to Con's absence with his usual blankness. Hopefully that will continue, but if he seems upset she will have to tell him to come home. She wonders whether Paul has talked to him. If so, she really must ring him, because Paul will have wound him up. She underlines Dan on her list. Megan, on the other hand, will be easy. How much better it would be if Megan could come home. El imagines her efficient thoughtfulness;
she
would not have left the table littered with dirty glasses and biscuit crumbs,
she
would not be treating her mother as prime suspect. She would probably be coming up with very sensible avenues of search to pursue. But Megan is on stage in London every night this week. She keeps more or less nocturnal hours, El can't phone her before lunchtime. El has a pang for her older daughter's level-headedness; how much more practical than Cara's weepy hysteria and Paul's hateful anger.

Abruptly she refocuses on work, and lists the most vital things she needs to do today; pours herself a bowl of muesli and chops an apple into it, and consumes her breakfast rapidly. Conrad's driving glasses are on the table. She stares at the navy blue case for a while before checking its contents. If you were leaving for good, you would certainly take your driving glasses. Those glasses have been there for a long time, she thinks. For days, maybe weeks. Has he got a new pair? Come to think of it, has he actually been driving? His car is always in the garage with the door shut when she gets home from work, and there's nothing unusual in that because she leaves before he does and gets home after him. But the little heap of car keys, garage keys and glasses that always used to irritate her on the dusty ­flower stand in the hall hasn't been there for a long time. She rises quickly to check – no, not there.

He must have been going to work by train. Has he even been going to work? Would she know if he didn't? Yes, of course, George-n-ita would have said something. And there was the Ph.D. student. Of course he's been going to work.

Though it might be better if he hadn't. The work is bad for him, she's sure of that – despite the fact that it was her prompting that led him into it. Oh, it was innocent then, it was hopeful, it was still possible for them to talk; it was before this awful shutter had come down between them.

They had a holiday in Ireland, the summer after Dan's first birthday. Rented an old farmhouse in West Cork, she can still smell the smoky, peaty dampness of the place. There were niggles between them; she had got them a new au pair and gone back to work when Dan was three months, and Con was putting in more time with the kids than he should have been doing. He was already fretting about Dan, who was late to smile, late to sit up, late to crawl. He was on three years' funding looking at immunosuppressants and the treatment of tumours in rats; it was slow, predictable work. El believed he was sublimating his own stasis onto Dan. And both of them were tired – four children were turning out to be significantly more work than three.

But the Irish farm was a good place, and they fell back into their old easy way of getting on that went back to before Dan was born, sitting outside in the overgrown garden in the long summer evenings, while Paul and Megan played hide and seek under the rhododendron bushes. Once Dan was settled and three-year-old Cara in bed, they could leave the older two to play until they dropped. They sat in dilapidated deckchairs with a bottle of wine on a wobbly cane table between them, watching as the sky slowly deepened and bats began to carve the air.

‘Tell me something you'd really like,' she said to him.

‘First star.' He pointed high above the farmhouse roof. In the bushes all around them the little birds were twittering and fluttering and falling away.

‘Tell me.'

‘I'd like to never see the inside of that bloody lab again.'

‘Well, Con – you must leave.'

‘And do what? It's secure, there's funding – I'm working for a megalomaniac and the research is like watching paint dry, but so what?'

‘So
that
. It's soul-destroying. Listen, I had an idea. It was just a conversation I barged in on, one lunchtime – they were talking about transplants.'

‘Transplants?'

‘Heart, kidney, lung, whatever. Saul and Brock have got money for a slab of research on monkeys.'

‘I'm not interested in butchery.'

‘Of course. But apart from the surgery, what's the main thing that's all about?'

‘Rejection.'

‘Precisely. Finding ways to stop rejection. Immunosuppressants.'

‘I don't know anything about monkeys.'

‘Duh. No. But you know a hell of a lot about immune systems. About how they break down. About ways of blocking them.'

‘In rats, and humans.'

‘Wouldn't there be cross over?'

‘El, there are people who've been working on monkeys for years. Saul and Brock for a start.'

‘But work on immune markers in cancer might well be relevant for damping down rejection in transplanted organs – they're all parts of the same system.'

There was a silence, and they listened to Megan's clear shrill voice calling out, ‘Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one
hundred
. Coming, ready or not.'

‘There must be people who already know about this.'

‘I'm not sure there are. Why don't you give Saul a ring?'

‘Give him a ring and say what?'

‘Oh Con! Say you've heard he's got money to work on transplants, and where's he up to on immunosuppressants. Say —'

‘All right, all right. Listen.'

An owl was calling from the stand of beech trees the other side of the lane; into the silence that followed its call came an answering ‘tu-whit, tu-whoo' from Paul, and giggles.

‘We ought to chivvy those two to bed.'

‘I'll make their cocoa. You drag them in.'

They said no more about it that night, but Con himself raised it the next evening. The fine weather had turned to drizzle, and they'd attempted their first peat fire in the wide sooty kitchen fireplace. It was making a wonderful smell and plenty of smoke but not much in the way of heat. El knelt beside it feeding it dry twigs, trying to conjure a blaze.

‘That research must have already been done, El, it must have been. Christian Barnard and the heart transplants, the drugs they used must have been tested on animals before people —'

‘If they have money to research with monkeys there must be a reason.'

‘But they've already moved on to drugs they're prepared to try on people – why go backwards?'

‘I don't know. Maybe there's some other factor?'

‘OK. If we're both speaking from equal positions of ignorance, then I shall speculate. And I think you should leave that fire to smoulder, that's what peat does.'

‘But it's not warm.'

‘Come and sit on my knee. I'll keep you warm.'

She remembers the quiet pleasure of that moment, both mental – he was interested, she'd got him hooked, he was starting to chip at the idea – and physical, his long limbs folding her in, warming and holding her, taking charge of her, which was a rare thing now for him to do. She loved it when he was expansive; since Dan, it seemed all energy and initiative must come from her. But now here at last was Con again, chewing on an idea that engaged him, ordering her around, lifting the responsibility of the pair of them off her shoulders.

‘Here, move round a bit. I never met a woman with such a sharp pointy bum.'

‘You'd prefer me fat?'

‘Can't have too much of a good thing. Now look. The biggest problem the transplant people have is not even rejection, is it?'

‘Shortage of donors.'

‘Exactly. How can they build any kind of success rate, how can they hope to sort out what works from what doesn't when they're reliant for their supply of organs on accidents? You never know what's coming in, what blood group, age, size.'

‘OK. So?' She could already see where he was going.

‘So are Saul and Brock actually looking at monkey hearts for humans?'

‘I don't know. Could it work?'

‘It could work in the sense that you could breed them specifically for that; you could prepare the recipient, take the organ from the donor at the most opportune moment – but whether you could make a match I have no idea. Chimps are closest, aren't they, but I have no idea even how big their hearts are. And I've a feeling they're an endangered species.'

‘If humans reject other human hearts, a monkey heart is even more alien.'

‘Yes, but like I said, you could prepare it; breed it specifically for that purpose. I don't know anything about monkeys but you could treat the donor heart in advance with drugs that would make its less antigenic to the new host.'

Eleanor suddenly remembers the funny clicking noise that interrupted him. A tap followed by a rattling click, coming from upstairs. She uncurled from his lap and they both crept up the steep creaky staircase. The door to Paul and Megan's room, left open when they'd gone to bed, was closed. In the feeble glare of the forty-watt bulb that hung from the landing ceiling, they could see the latch on the door wobbling up and down, clicking, as if manipulated by invisible fingers. When Con opened the door there was an exclamation and a clatter. And there was little Megan in her pyjamas, with the cricket bat she had been using to try to push up the latch. They took her downstairs for a cuddle. All the doors had those old iron latches that need lifting with a finger, so high up the doors that only Paul could reach them; Megan and Cara were trapped if a door was closed on them. She remembers Con praising Megan for trying the bat rather than waking Paul. ‘Good lateral thinking, little lass.' And how then, with a drowsy Megan curled between them on the battered sofa, and the sounds of her desperate thumb-­sucking gradually relaxing into nothing more than gentle breathing, he had quietly returned to his speculations about transplanting monkey hearts to humans.

They kicked the ideas back and forth between them for the rest of the holiday, and the optimism which reanimated Con is linked in El's mind with the physical attributes of that creaky old house, its stubborn functionality: the big cold stone slabs on the kitchen floor that could be swept or sluiced down when farm muck got trodden in; the booby trap of a door sill on the back door to the yard that each of the children tripped over repeatedly, put there, she assumes, to keep flooding mud out of the kitchen; the noisy, uncarpeted wooden stairs, black and slippery with use, that they had to keep Cara away from, but that they all managed to avoid falling down. That old unyielding house sheltered them and imbued their holiday with its character; regrounded them in a physical setting that demanded their attention and was so old it did not need excuses; making them aware every time they clanked open a door or set a bare foot on the cold kitchen floor or drew in a breath of peat-smoky air, aware of being alive and able and in motion, aware of their own lightness and warmth and mutability.

Would Con have generated the enthusiasm to contact Saul, if these conversations had happened at home? El doubts it. That strange old house brought out the best in him – in them – and ­fostered a new kind of energy.

The sound of Cara in the shower brings El back to this kitchen. Cara will not eat anything El offers her for breakfast, so better not to be in the kitchen when she comes down. She may just pick at something she fancies, if left to her own devices. El takes a new mug of tea and her list into her office. She can polish off some work emails before it's time for Cara to leave.