Conrad & Eleanor (29 page)

‘I know I'm annoying,' she says. ‘But you don't understand what's happened to me. I don't think you do, anyway. I was just – incapable. And it makes me want to put solid things in place, so it never happens again.'

‘It's funny,' he says. ‘We don't talk about love.'

‘Love? No, not really. I mean, I don't know how we'd define love. But if it means you don't really exist unless the other person is there, then aren't we talking about it?'

Somewhere along the way they have dropped hands and he reaches for hers again now. It's cold. ‘Where are your gloves?'

‘Bologna?' She grins. ‘You can warm that one, the other's in my pocket.'

‘I think we should go home and go back to bed,' he says, squeezing her cold fingers. ‘And see what happens.'

El wakes, as usual, earlier than Con. Monday. She will have to go to work. She will have to be sensible and efficient, and affectionately wry about Con's escapade. She will have to be graceful and grateful with those colleagues who have covered for her. Perhaps take in some cakes? Some wine? She will have to tear like a whirlwind through the queries and tasks that have piled up in her absence, and prioritise the urgent ones. She must make sure she arrives home before 7. She will have to be pleasant with Louis so there's no silly atmosphere for other people to pick up on.

But they're all bound to know, she realises. Is it really likely that she and Louis have been talking and laughing together in the department, working late together or leaving together after work, and no rumours have attached to them? Of course people will have linked their names. Did she imagine it was all a secret just because she wanted it to be one? Shame rises like a tide, momentarily flooding her calculating brain. The flotsam that floats on the tide is a question: was I only not ashamed before because I thought it was a secret? She wonders if she finds it shameful now simply because she realises it is public knowledge. She wonders if she has any morals at all.

Con stirs and turns over so his back is to her. She turns to face the same way and bends her neck to rest her forehead against his shoulder blade, a supplicant. With her nose tucked under the duvet like this she breathes in the hot, strong scent of their bed; their sweat, their sex, their sleep. It's how their bed used to smell. It's how it should smell.

She is about to leave for work when Con calls her name. She turns back in the hall, car keys in hand, impatient. ‘Con?'

‘In my office.'

He is wearing the multicoloured dressing gown, sitting in front of her laptop which she's lent him for the day. ‘What is it?'

He points. His email programme is up, the message on the screen reads:
Welcome home.
You can run but you can't hide. Looking forward to meeting your lovely wife.

El stares. She knows without asking that the sender is Mad. She has the same sensation as when she first discovered the MAD emails: a lurch in her stomach, a physical spasm of fear and disbelief. ‘How does she know you're back?'

Con shrugs. ‘It was just there when I opened my emails.' He peers at the screen. ‘Sent at 6.47 this morning.'

They stare at the email in silence. When Con told her the Maddy saga yesterday morning, El deliberately held back. She found parts of it frankly implausible, and she suspected that he was giving her an edited version. He must have been attracted to Maddy, he almost certainly slept with her; how else account for the vengeful malice of the woman's tone? How else had Maddy got her hooks so deeply into him? A more detailed story would emerge, but at breakfast on his first morning home was not the time. El was conscious of sounds upstairs, Megan taking a shower; soon the kitchen would fill with the children. And it was clear to her that Con was still not fully recovered. His memory was probably unreliable, there were things he must surely have hallucinated when he was running a temperature in Bologna.

She boxed the Maddy story as something to be unpicked at a later date. But now here it is, shoving itself in their faces as they try to go about their daily lives.

‘We should call the police.'

Con sighs. ‘What can they do? It's not even a threat. You could read it as humorous.'

‘There's the one about ripping your heart out.'

‘But if she claims I seduced her – she's got photos of me in her hotel room – it's no more than anyone spurned in love might say. It's a reference to the monkeys, anyway.'

El realises he is speaking the truth. The story he's told her is true. ‘But Con, she could come to the house anytime.'

‘Yes.'

‘She could throw a brick through the window.'

‘Yes.'

There's a silence. El is suddenly aware of the car keys dangling from her fingers. ‘OK. I have to go to work.'

Con pushes back his chair and stands. He folds his arms around her and kisses her forehead. For a moment she allows herself to slump against him and be comforted.

‘Are you going to reply?'

‘I shouldn't think so.'

‘Be careful today – if anyone comes to the door.'

‘I'll be careful. Now go.' He pats her on the rump and she goes.

She rings him at lunchtime to check he's OK and to remind him to make a doctor's appointment.

‘I'm all right,' he says. ‘You don't need to fuss.'

‘Any more emails?'

‘El, if we spend our day worrying about what she's going to do, she's won.'

‘I know.' In fact, El has not spent the morning worrying, but rather rushing from one overdue task to the next, and it was only when she stopped to grab a sandwich that she guiltily remembered Con in his dressing gown of many colours, staring glumly at the laptop. ‘I know,' she repeats. ‘I've been busy. What are you doing?'

‘I'm composing my letter of resignation.'

‘Good.'

It is good. Very good, that he is taking such immediate action over work. But there will be problems thrown up by that too. What on earth is he going to do all day, every day? She wonders if he's thought about it. And catches herself again being rather dislikeable. Why is she patronising him? Why is she presuming he won't have thought about it? In the crisis he has been through it has almost certainly presented itself more luridly to him than it has just done to her.

Is this, perhaps, one of the after-effects that she must learn to live with? The presence of a little nagging voice which undermines her swift certainties, which casts doubt on her assumptions, which suggests that other people may understand more than she has given them credit for? She reaches for a name for the little voice. Self-doubt? Uncertainty? Humility? She's not sure and there's no time now. She notes it for future scrutiny and ploughs on through her day.

By the end of it she's done everything except behave in a pleasant and natural manner with Louis. When she saw him coming down the corridor she ducked into the Ladies and hid there like a schoolgirl until she knew he'd gone. She realises she will have to email him to explain what's happened and why the relationship is over. All she's given him so far is a tantrum and a request not to contact her. As if it's his fault. Driving home, she picks at that and understands that she does blame him for not being kinder or more understanding, and that it is entirely unfair of her to blame him, because both of them have always known full well that neither of their marriages were or would be threatened, and that therefore neither of them would ever make too heavy a claim upon the other. If Louis' wife had run away or died, El would have been equally wary. Of course. Because the last thing she would have wanted to do was to give Louis a false impression of how important he really was to her. Ugly but true. So how on earth can she blame him? She must send an email tonight apologising and being quite clear that it is over.

Conrad has made a smoked salmon quiche. ‘I made it earlier. We can have it whenever you're ready.'

She knows he's done that because he expected her to be late. She's not late. They are both glad that neither mentions it. They linger at table after they've finished, with the premonition of a depressing conversation about Mad hovering over them. El wants to compose her email to Louis first, but she doesn't want Con to think she's doing something work-­related in preference to talking to him. And it's not just Mad they need to discuss, she remembers. There is unfinished business from their previous conversation.

‘Yesterday,' she says, pouring them both more wine.

‘Yes?'

‘When we were talking. You said it always
is
a competition with us. Over work, the kids, and caring about each other.'

‘Yes.'

‘We dealt with work and the kids. We didn't talk about caring about each other.'

He laughs and puts his hand over hers on the table. ‘Do we need to?'

Making love has set a warm current running between them. When she looks at him he is bigger, stronger, more solid than he used to be. As if she'd been living with the ghost of Con before he went away. ‘But I mean it,' she persists. ‘I think we should talk about it. It
is
a competition, isn't it? You've always thought I cared more about work than about you. And you've always thought that
you
cared more about
me
than I did about you.'

‘And what do you think?'

‘I think you care more about the kids than you do about me.'

‘So what's to discuss?' He is surprisingly sharp.

‘While you were away, I thought you would get in touch with them if not with me.'

‘It's a different relationship, isn't it. The kids used to be completely dependent on us. Cara still is in many ways. And you are an independent adult.'

‘Of course. I'm not saying any of these things is bad. I'm just wanting to, I don't know, acknowledge —'

‘What?'

‘Sometimes I feel I have to prove something to you.'

‘No one likes being taken for granted.'

‘Of course not. But we both
know
, don't we? We both know we're here for the duration, it's not going to be hearts and flowers every day.'

‘Hearts and flowers once a year would be nice!' This is a reference to Valentine's Day. He has always given her roses and she has always teased him for the cliché of it. She has seldom remembered to reciprocate.

‘Touché.'

They sit in silence for a while but El can't let it go. ‘I shouldn't need to prove it to you because you know, you are the bedrock.'

‘Not a tremendously rewarding role, being a rock.'

‘Well, what do you want? When I rang to ask how you were today you told me not to fuss.'

‘True. Leave it. Some things don't have answers. Will you look at my letter for me?'

El reads Con's letter of resignation. He's sending it to Cor­astra and copying it to Gus. It is measured but truthful, citing his concern about conditions in the CBL animal house alongside his fear that the research may prove to be a dead end, as the reasons for his leaving. It doesn't blame Gus, but it doesn't let him off the hook on the subject of the animal house. She circles a couple of redundant commas and passes it back to him. ‘Good. Well done. Will you go back at all?'

‘I'll have to. I've got three monkeys still in trials, I'll have to see them through and write an interim report at the very least. But I've got a sick note for a week so there's a breathing space.'

‘Very good. What will you do now?'

‘El, there's something I have to tell you.'

Her heart flips. She knew. From the minute she arrived home she knew there was something. He's made her a nice meal, he's talked, he's listened, but something – there's been something in his manner, a seriousness, a distance, a – she doesn't know what it is but she's afraid it will be awful. He's made up his mind to tell her the truth about Maddy. Is he going to leave her after all?

‘El? Cara came round this afternoon.'

Cara? Cara! But what's wrong with Cara?

‘Please don't take this the wrong way. She said she wanted to tell you but she didn't know how to. I'm sure, if it hadn't been for all this —' he waves a hand ‘ —drama, she would have told us both before now.'

‘Told us what?'

‘She's pregnant.'

Con's not leaving. Cara's not ill. Briefly, El rejoices, before landing squarely on the problem. ‘She can't have it.'

‘Slow down.'

Yes. That's why Cara didn't tell me. She knew I'd say that. How many times today is El going to slam into her own knee-jerk responses? Suddenly she has a vision of Megan as a toddler, teaching herself to get over the back doorstep. Clutching the door jamb, lowering one leg over the sill and then tumbling as her weight lurched forward onto it and she lost her balance. Not crying. Patiently clambering up and trying again. She must have done it a dozen times. El remembers standing unnoticed in the kitchen watching with fascination and thinking,
this is how children learn
.
They just keep on practising until they master something.

Maybe I will learn now, El tells herself. Not to think I am always right.

In the same flash of thought she understands what Con is worrying over; that despite Con's absence, Cara couldn't tell Eleanor and had to wait for her father's return. Indeed, she had to go to Germany hunting for him, before there was a parent sympathetic enough to spill her troubles to. Con is afraid El will be offended. And naturally it hurts. But she has no right to the hurt. It's always been known that Cara is Daddy's girl. And has not El herself played the greatest part in making this happen? If anyone needed it, it is evidence of the success of her insistence that Con is Cara's father and the most important person in her life.

El raises her face to Con. He's leaning forward watching her. ‘Sorry. Yes,' she says. ‘Tell me.'