Conrad & Eleanor (27 page)

Everything goes well. He takes the train to the airport, his flight is on time, his hotel room is on the third floor with a view of trees. He is able to perform the conference camaraderie and feels humbled by the commitment of his colleagues to their research. It is a long time since he has been able to imagine that what he is doing is important. On the Sunday evening, the mood after dinner is convivial. He sits with Park, a Korean who did his Ph.D. with Gus and worked in the cubicle next to Con's lab. Park fell in love with an Irish girl, of whom his family disapprove. The girl doesn't want to move to Korea, but Park's career there is really taking off, he's second in department, it would be crazy to leave now. They want to marry, but what sense does it make if they don't even live in the same country? As he and Park drain their wine Con listens and advises with keen interest. Afterwards, he realises he has actually forgotten about Maddy. He has spent the whole evening not thinking of her once. But then comes the walk back to his hotel.

It is a short walk from the conference centre in Munich to Conrad's hotel. Park is staying with friends a tram ride away. Con walks with him to the tram stop then turns the corner towards his own hotel, away from the brightly lit main thoroughfare.

This is a quiet residential street; on the corner there's a building site enclosed by hoardings, then well-to-do houses, with brass nameplates of dentists and lawyers, shuttered windows, small coiffured shrubs in planters. The streetlamps are heritage, resembling gas lamps and giving as little light. As he moves towards the end of the empty street Conrad hears a lighter step behind him. He glances back. There's a squat tree between him and the nearest streetlamp, and the shadows of the branches reach across the street. A woman is coming towards him through the shadows. Her.

E
leanor is lost.
If Con was delaying coming home to teach her a lesson, this is too long. If he is with another woman called Maddy, it is implausible that he has not contacted the kids. If he is kidnapped, there's no ransom. If he's ill or dead, someone must know. This silence, extending for days, stretches her nerves taut and keeps her awake all night, making her heart flip every time the phone rings. Her work is going to pot; Cara is keeping nocturnal hours and not eating; Paul comes and goes at random, so angry he barely speaks to her; Megan is on stage every night, and Dan is Dan. El has sent Louis an email asking him not to contact her, which he is respecting. She didn't imagine he would do anything else – what
could
he do? But still maybe she hoped. It makes her all the more solitary and unreal. She is a ghost. Her urgent vivid life has become a painted backdrop against which she sees herself standing immobile, with no lines and no direction. How will this end? How can she make it end? Sometimes people are missing for years. Then it would be up to her, by main force, to wrestle her life back into some kind of reality. But where will the cut-off point be and what will signal it? What will stop this grey succession of helpless, passive hours? How can she regain control?

She hates it when the phone rings. Some people are avoiding her but others want to offer their support and ask how things are going. She hates rehashing the same worn phrases; no, no news yet, the kids are being very good, thanks; no, there's nothing you can do but very kind of you to offer. Even the smallest task she sets herself, such as cooking something tempting for Cara, becomes overwhelming. She sits indecisively flicking through recipe books, then has to search cupboards for ingredients and make a shopping list, then worries about leaving Cara alone or missing a vital phone call. Yes, everyone has her mobile, but the home phone is the real one, the one Con would ring. Being in the house for when there is news is the only positive thing she can do, so then it's back to the recipe books to find something which can be made from ingredients already in the cupboards, or trying to decide whether to phone Paul and ask him to shop. And she is doing no good staying in with Cara because Cara hides in her room and when El knocks on the door with a drink or a snack, Cara thanks her mechanically but doesn't talk, answering only monosyllabically when El dredges up something to say to her. She can't communicate with Cara – not in this state – Con is the only one who can.

El cleans the house automatically. It is distressingly filthy, she has not cleaned it properly for months, and neither, despite the agreement that he should, has Con. Cleaning, washing the grime off the paintwork, polishing the soap residue off the shower cubicle, reaching down all the ceiling cobwebs with a broom, gives her the sense of accomplishing something. But she cannot bear to use the vacuum, because its noise may block out the sound of a phone call. She creeps backwards down the carpeted stairs with a brush and dustpan, brushing each step clean, raising small clouds of dust. She tests herself by trying to set a date when she will return to work, but the tide of matters she is already behind with feels so daunting that she wants to duck and avoid it. And beyond that, she can't see the point. What is the point of going to work? What is the point of all those things she was so busy busy busy with?

She is cleaning kitchen windows when the phone rings. She reaches it on the third ring. The police. Conrad's bank card has been used in Bologna, Italy.

‘So he's in Bologna?'

No, his bank card is. She is reminded that it may have been stolen. There may be difficult circumstances. The bank card was used with a wrong PIN, it may not have been used by Conrad. Eleanor is advised to contact the bank where it was used; she is given the number and the name of someone who speaks English.

Now there's a blur of activity, now everything shifts. The Italian man she speaks to, having requested Con's account number and other lengthy verification, tells her the person who used the card was Alberto Carpazo, who has left his name and address, and has explained to a bank clerk that the owner of the card, Conrad Evanson, is at his house and is too ill to use the card himself. Alberto's address is dictated to El.

‘Is there – did he leave a phone number?'

‘Madam, he did.'

When she has written everything down El hangs up the phone and sits staring at it. He is alive. In Italy. In a strange man's house. As far as she knows, Con doesn't speak Italian. Relief and fear are enough to paralyse her for a moment. He's found. But he's ill. And, since he hasn't phoned her, she has to assume he doesn't want to see her. Unless he is too ill to phone? What is he – what
was
he – up to? Her impulse to phone Alberto's number dies. She paces the house for twenty minutes then checks flights to Bologna. There's one late this afternoon from Manchester, seats are available.

She goes up to Cara's room and tells her, and suddenly Cara is focused and energised, though tears are running down her face.

‘We should phone him right now, Mum. The Italian.'

‘That was my first thought. But we don't really know what's going on. Maybe it would be better just to go there. If Con wanted us to know where he was, he would have phoned. His mobile's still off, I tried it. If he's too ill to phone then we can't talk to him anyway. And if this man – Alberto – was lying, then phoning will give him warning that we are coming, do you see?'

‘But he's
there
—'

‘Yes, and we can be there by this evening. There's a flight at 3.45.'

‘Would they have told him? That the bank has contacted the police?'

El shrugs. ‘There are too many unknowns. We don't know why he's there, we don't know what state he's in, we only have a stranger's word for it that he
is
there. If we go to the house unannounced – say we get there early evening – he won't be expecting us. We're more likely to find
something
out than if we ring and give him time to vanish.'

Cara is shaking her head. ‘But why would he want to vanish?'

‘Darling, it's what he's done. We don't know why. But if he started by doing that, we have to assume he still doesn't want us to know where he is.'

Eleanor books their flight. With phoning the other children, and packing, and downloading maps of Bologna and booking a hotel on a street close to Alberto's address, the morning is gone and they are on the plane before there's time to think again. Cara looks terrible, and though El tells herself she couldn't have left her alone at home, she knows she could have asked Paul to stay with her. El's notion that she is bringing Cara for Cara's own good is countered by the knowledge that she is bringing Cara for El's own good. Con will want to see Cara, whereas he might not want to see El. In that sense she is using Cara, and the girl looks on the point of collapse. El will make everything easy. They'll get a taxi from the airport, drop their things at the hotel then go straight on to Alberto's. Whatever happens there, she will get Cara back to the hotel for food and sleep before it is too late. El squashes down the bubble of hope which keeps trying to rise in her chest.

She turns over in her mind whether there might be danger. Whether she might be walking – and walking Cara – into a trap. If Alberto is a front, for kidnappers, say, and El and Cara deliver themselves to his door… But what is the point in kidnapping a whole family? And making no ransom demands? And El has left Alberto's address with the other kids; she has promised to ring them later tonight. Things will swing into action pretty quickly if she doesn't call them.

The problems begin before they even land. The time for their descent into Bologna airport has already passed when an announcement is made by their pilot. ‘Weather conditions on the ground are now unfavourable. There is a fog. We will follow a holding pattern and wait to see if conditions improve. On the advice of the control tower we will take time. Apologies for the delay to your journey.' From the babble of other passengers El deduces that this is not uncommon in Bologna and that if the fog persists the pilot will divert to Milan. Cara begins to cry. El puts her arm around the girl's skinny shoulders and tries not to cry herself. She is coming round to believing that this is some kind of punishment: that in every protracted detail since Con's non-return, she is being punished for her heedless selfishness, for her busy careless irresponsible life, for the happy El that she has been. Now she must submit to fate. She has no control.

And indeed there is no situation she can imagine where one has less control than in an aeroplane. Twice the pilot makes his descent, and glints of airport lights are briefly visible through the dense black cloud. But on each occasion he rears back up into the sky, the engines screaming, the passengers silent and white-faced. After the second attempt he announces that the tower reports the fog is lifting slightly and that he will make one final attempt before abandoning and diverting to Milan.

Cara is shaking. El is a seasoned air traveller, she knows they are unlikely to die – and yet that fear is so all-consuming that it has engulfed the entire planeload. They have been reminded that they are in a tin can thousands of feet above the earth and that only those screaming engines and the pilot's skill stand between them and a plummet to the ground. When a suicide attempt becomes real – when the tablets are in the mouth, or the feet balanced on the span of the bridge – how can anyone ever go through with it? El wonders. The will to live is so strong, so intense and unthinking, how can it be annulled? She wonders if Con thought of suicide before he took off. If running away (which is what she now guesses he has done) was a coward's suicide? She can't call him a coward, though. Since his absence has reduced her to an abject state. He was conscious of something that she was not prepared to admit. Their failure, their cruelty to one another, the wasting of their lives; she pretended to be oblivious, and Conrad, he acknowledged it. She is in no position to call him a coward.

The third attempt at landing seems to happen in slow motion, the descent taking place through complete blackness. El finds herself physically braced and desperate for the abort, the upward lurch – when the engine sound changes, and with a shocking jolt they are on the runway. The airport lights appear through shifting swathes of fog. They are taxiing along the runway, they are on the ground and heading for the light. As their shock disperses, the passengers begin, raggedly, to applaud.

Everything is slow. Freezing fog lingers in the narrow streets of Bologna. The taxi they have patiently queued for takes them as far as a traffic jam then sits there; the only thing moving is the meter. Glimpses of the streets in the foggy darkness reveal ancient buildings with barred windows, everything shut up and closed against them. At their hotel El decides Cara should go to bed immediately but Cara refuses, and so they are out into the icy blackness again. Their taxi driver, who insisted on payment when they arrived, has gone, and anyway Alberto's address is within walking distance. The hotel receptionist gives them a coloured tourist map of the city and draws in biro the line they should follow. El takes Cara's arm but Cara shakes her off, and so they move singly along the murky street. The streets are more like alleyways, and other dark figures materialise suddenly, their footsteps muffled by the fog. Lamps are visible as haloed blobs, illuminating a few inches of fog around them but shedding no light on the street. El can't see which way up to hold the map, never mind the biro line. The air is cold and heavy with moisture, El is gasping for breath, her lungs half-suffocated. She can think of nothing but danger now. Her own skin and hair are wet, which means Cara's will be too. She's an idiot, she should have waited till morning. Now they are heading uphill under covered arches. In the empty roadway the fog has lifted, but it still drifts under the arches, revealing and then closing off their route. She peers at numbers on the ancient doors; the place is silent and closed up as if all the inhabitants are sleeping or dead. El checks her watch, just after 8pm, it's not late – then remembers 8pm UK is 9pm Italian time. Well, too bad, they are here; they are wet and cold and bedraggled and perhaps asking for trouble, but she knocks hard on the door and stands, shoulders squared, between Cara and the door, waiting for it to open.

When Alberto ushers them into Con's room, Cara runs to hug him. When she has settled, curled on the bed beside him, her head nestled into Con's shoulder, he looks up to meet ­Eleanor's eyes. She waits in the doorway.

‘I'm sorry,' she says at last but Conrad is speaking too, at the same instant. ‘What? What did you say?' she asks.

‘I said I'm sorry.'

‘We're both —'

‘Yes,' he says.

Now she's able to move forward and kiss him and take in the unhealthy heat of his skin, his pallor, his red eyes. ‘You've got flu.'

‘Or something like it, yes. Alberto has been taking good care of me.'

She sinks to her knees on the opposite side of the bed to Cara, and Con reaches awkwardly to put his arm around her shoulders. She is suddenly embarrassed at the thought of Alberto watching this maudlin scene, but when she wipes her eyes and looks up, he is gone and the door is closed. She moves the lamp off the small bedside table and sits on the table, taking Con's warm hand between hers.

‘Have you got somewhere to stay?' he asks.

‘Hotel, it's quite near. Shall I come and fetch you in the morning?'

He nods.

El knows there is all the time in the world now to talk, but still she can't make herself wait. ‘Were you running away from me?'

Con takes a long time to answer and she wishes she hadn't asked, especially with Cara listening. ‘It's hard to say. I didn't start with the intention of running at all. No, I didn't start by running away from you.'