In the immediate aftermath, we wanted to make it right again. To get us all back to normal. We caught our flight, we made it home. It was spaghetti Bolognese for supper. When Eleanor went back to school a day later, we were braced for reports of some upset. You even considered warning the school, mentioning that there had been an incident. In the end, I talked you down; we didn’t need another eyebrow arched in the direction of our parenting. Weeks went by and—surprisingly—nothing.
While, on the surface, we had narrowly avoided disaster, there was still a subtle shift in the delicate tectonic plates of family life that to this day I feel was so much more insidious. In the supermarket, Eleanor no longer wanted to go off and source items by herself. She had started an after-school art club, and if I was so much as five minutes late to pick her up, you could see she had been chewing the ragged nail at the side of her thumb until little pinpricks of red bubbled up from under the skin. When we went out, I felt her closer to my leg, her hand gripping mine just that bit tighter. Some days, I wondered if I was imagining it. You had talked to her about it on the way to school that first day, in the weeks after. Eleanor insisted there was nothing wrong.
No harm done, as my own mother used to be so fond of saying. Only it was never as simple as that with Eleanor. She was always so conscious of upsetting us, wasn’t she? Holding in her own pain so there was no risk of her inflicting even a drop of it on us. We had seen glimpses of it before: a grazed knee she neglected to mention, an upset at school that was raised, casually, by another parent. And after Portugal? When she had seen on the beach that she was our world? Anything that hurt her was bound to tip us both off our axes. That is some burden for any child to carry, let alone one as hypersensitive as Eleanor.
For once, it was nice to feel a holiday drifting into the distant moorings of memory. With every day that passed after Portugal, we moved ever closer toward solid ground. And things were still so good—it’s impossible to deny that. I loved seeing Eleanor grow. Physically, she shot up around her eighth birthday until she wasn’t that much shorter than you. I didn’t want her growing up to mean growing away. You two had always been so close. It was me I was worried about. It sounds tragic to say it, but I didn’t want to be shrugged off now that she was older, cast off as an embarrassment like any of the toys that had gone out of favor and were now clogging up the space at the back of her wardrobe. I resolved to do everything I could to keep that bond we had, father and daughter.
When she was nine, her class did a project on butterflies. Eleanor was captivated. Drawing them, reading up on them. She even had a pajama set with a print of tessellated wings. The school had planned a trip to a dedicated exhibition in the Botanic Garden, but when I suggested we go together first, the two of us, she took me up on my offer without so much as a moment’s pause.
“Ells, come look at this one.” It is as silent as a library inside, the windows papered with laminated quiet signs. There is something almost comical about the exaggerated tiptoeing Eleanor performs on her approach.
“What is it?”
“It’s a swallowtail.” I’ve seen one just once before, on a family holiday in the Norfolk Broads, back when I was Eleanor’s age. They were rare then, even more so now.
“It’s amazing.” Eleanor is so close that I can feel her breath warm against my arm.
“Here.” I pass her my camera. “Take a picture.”
There is such fixity in Eleanor’s gaze, her tongue creeping out of the corner of her mouth in concentration as she steadies the shot. In front of us the pale yellow wings twitch, their inky veins throbbing. I have made sure the flash is off, the shutter snap too. Eleanor manages to take her photos without a disturbance. It is only when she passes the camera back that she startles the butterfly by letting out an almighty sneeze. Half the greenhouse recoil in shock.
Eleanor looks up at me, eyes wide at the mere thought of a reprimand. Instead, I feel myself beginning to crack up. I take her hand and drag her through the fire doors to where we can laugh, freely, until our lungs are empty and our stomachs are sore.
I loved Eleanor’s focus, her drive. A project would finish and she would throw herself into the next thing at school, often to the point of obsession. She still had such levity with it, though. I could see it as we creased up on the bench outside the butterfly exhibition, other families wondering just what was so funny as they walked past. It was in a hundred perceptive asides at dinnertime or in the commentary she gave in front of the TV. It was in the way she could mimic the exact tone of your voice when you harangued me for leaving my wet towel on the bed again.
It’s a shame those skills don’t count for much at school, not formally anyway. When she moved to secondary school, we were on tenterhooks. It wasn’t as if we were expecting the same full-blown meltdown we had seen over reception, but there was the same sense of unease that we’d always had when it came to Eleanor going anywhere new, anywhere beyond our immediate reach. Saying it aloud makes it sound like we coddled her, which I’m not sure is entirely fair. We never wrapped her up in cotton wool, though I suppose we never went out of our way to expose her to the elements either. Does any parent? Maybe we just hoped she would develop a thicker skin with time.
As it was, she managed to make the transition well enough. Katie and the few other friends she had were all still in the same class, though I didn’t get the sense they had expanded their tribe much. Her first report made mention of the fact that she was quiet in class, shy in group projects, particularly with people she didn’t know. The final line was something about Eleanor needing to give herself a break every now and again, a little smiley face in the margin next to it. I remember you passing the sheet over to me with a wry smile. They were spot on about that.
Eleanor would stay up to all hours on her homework when there was something she couldn’t do. You could see her chewing down on the edge of her pen until the plastic snapped and her lips were tinged blue. There was no “Just ten minutes more,” no “I’ll just finish this page.” There was never any compromise with Eleanor. She was eleven, twelve. Saying that now, it seems mad we didn’t put our foot down. But then it was learning, and that was important, right? In all honesty, it was probably just because we were never very good at saying no to her.
I admired her tenacity, really I did, but where had that pressure come from, Mags? It certainly didn’t come from us, no matter what you might have thought these past few years. Perhaps it is just the nature of being an only child? All that focus honed in like a laser on her and her alone. That would be the easy explanation, though, and if there is one thing we both know about Eleanor, it’s that she always managed to eschew those. More often than not, I wonder if it was just a part of her, that drive, hooked up somewhere to a complete inability to deal with even the slightest failure. It was up to us to try to keep it in check.
It always struck me as amusing that, while other parents in Eleanor’s class were desperately coercing their children into doing homework, we spent our time desperately trying to coerce Eleanor outside. That bicycle we got her for her thirteenth birthday was a brilliant investment. Every weekend that summer, the three of us would go out together, up to the meadow, cycling side by side until one of the pretentious Lycra-clad types whizzed by from the opposite direction and we had to merge into single file.
At the pub, I’d get in a round of drinks. I can still see her, Mags, mid-story, jabbing her straw between the melting fragments of ice while she regaled us with some new tale from school, every bit as engaging and animated as you. She couldn’t have been further from the shy girl of her school report, that’s for sure. I often wondered if we had raised two separate Eleanors, one for home and one for the world outside.
Sometimes I’d watch you watching her and my mind would wind back to that day when you told me you were pregnant. I hadn’t wanted it to change us. I’d told myself it wouldn’t. And do you know what, Maggie? I’ve never been happier to find myself in the wrong. Under the table, you would run your
foot up and down my calf in time to the ebb and flow of her story. Having Eleanor had brought us closer, made us more compassionate with each other. There was no one and nothing that I would rather we had in common.
In the evenings, once you had gone to bed and I was marking scripts or drifting off under the patio heater, Eleanor would pad out to meet me in her slippers. Little fluffy things, moccasins you had selected for Christmas that collected dust like the particles were going out of fashion.
One night in particular is locked in my memory.
“Evening, Eleanor. Oh, thank you. That’s very kind.” She places a cup of tea on the battered garden table next to me. I nudge out the second lounger, its middle all loose and flabby, and take off my jacket so that it covers the loose spring. “Here, darling.”
It is dark enough that the first stars are visible. It’s on the tip of my tongue to start pointing them out, but something stops me. I take a sip of my tea—she always did make a good cup—and wait for her to speak.
“Do you ever wonder why we are how we are?”
I look over at her: she is fourteen, five foot ten, all arms and legs. She looks so young in a pair of pajamas that hasn’t caught up with yet another growth spurt, at that fragile age when you are so blatantly still a child but so utterly convinced that you are an adult. I am seized by a desire to grab her, to cuddle her up in my arms and let her fall asleep in my lap like she did when she was a toddler.
Instead I clear my throat. “It’s a good question. Maybe the best one of all. Although I would say that, I suppose.”
“How much is nature, how much is nurture, you know? How much is just luck?”
Eleanor is impatient for an answer. She always has been, ever since she was a toddler, but in that moment it is so obvious; she leans forward in her recliner, her torso twisting toward me. There are two purple crescents under her eyes, the skin there a wafer-thin sheet of tiny raised pores. The result of hormones or the relentless fizzing in her mind—I can’t tell which.
“It’s both,” I say, careful not to rush into an answer. “We inherit certain genes, though there will be those that are harder to trace. You can teach certain behaviors as well. And then, well, there’s luck. I’d never underestimate that, even if it’s not what I’m meant to say at work. I like to believe that there’s always an element of fate, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it.”
“Hm.” Eleanor nods and turns back in her chair, lifting the levers on the arms so she is tilting to look up at the sky. Something I said has obviously given her pause for thought. We sit in silence for what feels like an hour but which can’t in reality be more than ten minutes. “So, there is always a chance to change your own story?”
“Yeah, I’d say so.”
I am desperate to ask where all this has come from, but before I have the opportunity Eleanor stands up and bends down by my chair so I can kiss her on the forehead, the way I have always done before she goes to bed ever since she was a baby. They are always your baby, aren’t they, Mags? However much they catch up in height or intelligence or anything else besides.
I never worked out what Eleanor was getting at there—was it teen angst or something more? Now, after everything that has happened, I come back time and time again to that conversation, scanning every word and pause and gesture for a clue to what was to come. Hundreds of hours replaying that night and still I’m none the wiser. Even if I was, what difference would it make? If there is one conclusion I’ve come to in recent months, though, it’s that try as we might, there would always be some part of Eleanor that resided in the wilds outside our reach. I only wish we’d had a firmer grasp of this and equipped her with better tools to survive out there.
Things began to feel strained after her fifteenth birthday. She was going into a big year at school, what with exams, decisions about sixth-form colleges and subject choices, and the sort of big statements about “the future” from teachers that are bound to get anyone’s back up. On top of that, there was that falling-out with Katie and one of her other friends I heard about secondhand, from you, of course, most probably long after it had been patched up and laid to bed. By the time we reached the summer term, I was checking every phrase and sentence in my mind before I so much as opened my mouth around Eleanor. It didn’t take much to earn a look like thunder and that gut-wrenching sense of being locked out of her confidence.
We blamed the work—after all, she’d been at her desk six, seven hours a day for God knows how long. It was enough to make anyone snappy and irritable. We just needed to get through the exams and then we could crack the lid, let out some of that pressure. We could talk about better coping strategies for stress and anxiety, all of the subjects that were currently going down like a fleet of lead balloons. “Once you finish your exams, it’ll be the longest summer of your life,” you told her over supper, as she dissected her potato into ever smaller cubes. Little did we know it would end up being the longest of ours too.
We didn’t see much of Eleanor after that final exam. All those years encouraging her to kick back, and suddenly she was doing it of her own accord, albeit with little heed for anyone else. Careful what you wish for, as you always liked to say, eh, Mags? She told us she was out and at least that much was true. It was like squeezing blood from a stone, trying to prize any more information out of Eleanor—who she was with, where they were heading. She had always been so open with us about that sort of stuff, and suddenly we were scrambling around for whatever scraps of information she deigned to throw in our direction.
To start with, it was a few missed dinners, nothing terrible in the grand scheme of things, but within a week or two she was turning up well past midnight. It was a scorching-hot summer that year, and I remember the agitation the hosepipe ban brought to everyone—horticulturist or not. No one could sleep, least of all us, tangled atop a cotton sheet, attuned to every sound, our ears filtering every creak of the house for that subtle click that announced Eleanor’s keys in the lock and the end of our nightly ordeal. Our text exchanges were almost entirely one-sided.
When will you be home?
Call me when you get this.
Your mother is sick with worry.
In the morning, we were too exhausted to offer any sort of coherent punishment. We’d felt it then, being that bit older. When Eleanor was little, the fact that our friends were ten, fifteen years ahead in the parenting game meant it had been hard to find playdates, that Eleanor grew up in a home full of adults or near enough. Fast-forward to her teens and it was the sympathy we craved, the immediate solidarity of our support network struggling with the same surliness. It would have been nice to hear from just one of them dealing with the same inability to enforce a curfew.
We were too addled from fatigue to get even our own party line straight. When I went to tell her it was unacceptable, you counseled patience—it was the summer holidays; she was doing what all teens do. When you were out of your mind with anxiety, surrounding Eleanor with it like a cage—You have to tell us where you are. You have no idea what we go through—I told you to calm down and back off. We didn’t want to risk her pushing us away for good. Instead, every night as we tossed and turned, we passed our new mantra between us like an inhaler: “It’s just a phase.” In hindsight, I wonder if we should have spent more time figuring out at what point a phase ends and the real problem starts.
I couldn’t work out what the hell was going on—where was my Eleanor, the kind, sensitive girl we had raised? I found it impossible to wrap my head around the fact that this was the same girl who used to devote a whole day to the manufacture of my Father’s Day card, a masterpiece in macaroni shapes, now looking at me like an intruder in her life. If it was teen rebellion, it was so at odds with the girl we knew that, at first, I almost felt at a remove. This isn’t my life. That’s what I thought, Mags, when she stomped out the door without so much as a backward glance. This isn’t the daughter I have. She was never around to come and sit with me on the patio. I couldn’t find it in
me to put my feet up on the spare lounger.
Amid it all, life carried on as normal. When one of my papers was published in Nature that August, just before Eleanor’s sixteenth birthday, you hosted a dinner party in my honor, bringing chairs down from the attic so we could accommodate a cohort of collaborators and peer reviewers for the night. When the subject of children came up, we had our two-hander down to a T.
“So where is young Eleanor tonight?” Jeremy, the head of my department, nudges you as he leans across to help himself to more rice.
“Out. With friends. You know how it is.” The lights are low, but I can still see you flush as you look down at your empty plate, willing this discussion over.
“Ours were like that too, never a bloody clue where they were from one minute to the next.” Jeremy chuckles, long and low. “Isn’t that right, Anne? Almost a relief when they fled the nest!”
“I wouldn’t worry too much.” Anne extends her hand diagonally across the table, weaving between the tumblers and strewn serving spoons. “God, if I’d had a pound for every time I felt like giving up on the whole sodding parenting malarkey when the boys were in their teens, trust me, I wouldn’t still be working!”
The rest of the table have abandoned their separate conversations, presumably sensing something juicier afoot. The silence surrounding your response is deafening.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it is quite like that.” You retract your hand delicately, wiping it on your napkin. Your eyes flash up at me, screaming for help.
The Silent Treatment Page 9
