At last, the car pulled smoothly onto the rough gravel parking area beside Sarah and Mark’s ancient Citroën.
‘Hello, hello!’ Sarah came running out, her wild curls bouncing, like an eager spaniel. She hugged Eleanor tight. ‘I won’t ask how your journey was because it must have been hellish at this hour. Forget about it and come in. The wine is open, the roast chicken is done or even overdone, but please, please will you do the gravy because mine is always crap.’
Mark ambled out and greeted them.
Sarah and Mark were very different from each other. Sarah was like some extraordinary bundle of energy and passion that had been condensed and contained in her compact frame, while Mark was tall and stooping and as laid-back as it was possible to be without actually being in a coma. Still, Eleanor thought they were a very good fit; there was something about the way their different temperaments dovetailed together that made the two of them cohere. Mark was like a perfectly calm, reflective lake, and Sarah a manic duck constantly zig-zagging and flapping around him. He soothed her; she enlivened him.
Roger started to unpack the car. Eleanor started to help but he pressed the two bottles of wine into her hands and waved her inside, telling her to go on in and get warm.
‘Are you OK?’ Sarah peered up at Eleanor’s face as if trying to decipher exceptionally small print.
Eleanor raised her eyebrows a fraction.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Hmm. Fine, fine? Or Eleanor-fine?’
11
Happy Families I
1965–1972
‘Do you mind about its not being a boy?’ Marcia’s voice sounds grey and cracked. She looks exhausted after the long labour and, in the end, a forceps delivery.
‘No, of course not. Why would I?’ Conrad moves to sit by his wife’s bed and pats her hand. ‘She’s healthy, she has all her limbs – what else matters?’ He dislikes misogyny, not because he believes he ought to support the feminist cause but because it’s simply illogical. Women are physically weaker, clearly, but there is no evidence for their being lesser beings in any other regard as far as he can see. Looking down on women just because they are women is a perfect example of lazy thinking and, therefore, he has no truck with it. Ergo, why would the arrival of a female child be a cause for disappointment?
‘Daddy’s desperate for a grandson, you know.’
Marcia’s two older sisters have produced only girls and seem to have called a halt to breeding.
‘Well, let him adopt one then, if he wants one!’ Conrad laughs.
‘Oh, don’t be so silly, darling!’ Marcia has a tendency to be very literal at times, especially when she is tired. ‘Still, we can always try for another, can’t we?’
‘Let’s not worry about what to have for pudding when we’ve yet to take a bite of our hors d’oeuvres, yes?’
‘What?’ She closes her eyes.
She is tired, he knows, and perhaps now is really not the time for one of his foolish quips.
‘No rush, I mean.’ He reaches out and pats her hand again. ‘One chapter at a time, dear thing, yes?’
Marcia is a more efficient mother than he had expected, capable of attending to the infant’s needs without undue fuss. The baby, Eleanor, is a placid little thing, who gurgles with delight when Conrad dangles his jangly keys for her to clutch at. As a rule, Conrad does not find babies of any great interest, as they can neither converse nor read, but still, when he holds his finger out and his little daughter clings onto it like a lifebelt, he notes an indefinable feeling in his chest that is hard to label. He detests inarticulacy so it is most frustrating not to be able to name this strange stirring in the core of him. He laughs at himself and supposes it is simply part of the biological imperative, the necessity of feeling protective towards one’s offspring, to preserve one’s genetic line. Entirely selfish therefore. Nothing to crow about.
Less than two years later, they are back in the same hospital. This time, it is a boy – sing Allelujah! – and Marcia insists on calling the child Benedict – ‘Blessed one’, although Conrad had favoured Leo as being short and unpretentious and impossible to reduce to an undesirable diminutive. Still, there are times when one can see that the victory would not be worth the battle, so he gives way. At the news of the baby’s arrival, Marcia’s parents hotfoot it down from Harrogate as fast as they can, rather than, as had been the case with Eleanor, after two days due to ‘previous engagements’. They bring expensive presents for the baby: a silver rattle, an engraved napkin ring, a white cashmere cardigan. Standing in the doorway of his wife’s private hospital room (paid for by Daddy, of course), witnessing the family scene, Conrad is struck by the resemblance to the Adoration of the Magi – serene Madonna, blessed infant, acolytes worshipping and bearing costly yet useless gifts. All it needs is a donkey in the corner…
Marcia has bought black cherry yoghurt for the children to try, still a rather exotic treat in the early 1970s in England. Conrad, musing on his forthcoming trip to accompany another exhibition to Florence, wanders into the kitchen to see if there is any coffee going. He watches his daughter peel back the foil lid of her yoghurt and just look into the pot. Most children would probably either dig their spoon in at once or refuse it altogether, but Eleanor likes to take her time over things. Benedict is struggling to open his yoghurt and immediately starts to get into a strop about it instead of asking for assistance.
Marcia, ironing on the far side of the room, sighs, ‘Oh, do help him, Eleanor. Don’t just let him sit and suffer.’
‘I will in a minute,’ Eleanor is already halfway across the room en route to the Welsh dresser. ‘I want to have my special spoon.’
Conrad pats the side of the coffee pot and, finding it still warm, tops up his mug, then goes to the fridge for milk.
Eleanor takes her time, standing by the drawer and slowly clinking through the spoons, presumably trying to find her favourite one with the rosebud on the handle. She closes the drawer quietly, then returns to her seat.
Benedict hits her on the arm and shouts, ‘Open it now!’
‘Say please, Benedict.’
‘Oh, Eleanor, just do it for him, will you?’ Marcia has her hands full, folding and turning a large tablecloth to press it.
‘All right, but I always have to say please.’ She opens the yoghurt, and plonks it in front of him.
Benedict picks up the yoghurt then reaches up and tips it upside-down over his sister’s head. She lets out a yell and shoves him, and he roars with rage.
Oh God, not more of this, for crying out loud. Conrad takes his coffee and backs out of the room to the hallway.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Conrad hears Marcia thunk down the iron and march across the room. ‘That’s very naughty, Benedict. You’re not to do that.’
Conrad frowns. It is odd, hearing his wife’s voice without seeing her face. The words are an admonition, true, and yet the tone does not fit somehow. Why is that? She sounds… hmm, not cross, not really… she sounds as if she is reading something from an instruction manual, as if she knows that is what a parent is supposed to say.
‘You provoked him!’ Now she does sound cross. Oh dear, poor Eleanor seems to be bearing the brunt of her mother’s displeasure. ‘Why did you make him wait? Honestly, Eleanor, you’ve only yourself to blame.’
‘It’s not fair!’ Eleanor is crying now. ‘You always take his side.’
‘Don’t be silly. Go and get cleaned up. Take off your blouse and bring it straight back to me to wash.’
Conrad sits halfway up the stairs, waiting for her.
‘It’s not fair,’ she repeats, snivelling. Her hair and face are smeary and clown-like with the yoghurt, her white blouse blotched with purplish-pink gunk.
‘Ah. Life’s not fair, little thing.’ He digs out his cloth handkerchief and dabs at her face and hair. ‘He’s just a tot who doesn’t know any better – you know that. Go up and wash it off and you’ll feel better.’
‘Can’t you help me?�
��
‘You’re a big girl – you can manage. Daddy’s got to work. Trot along now.’
Back downstairs, he pokes his head round the kitchen door. Marcia has Benedict cuddled on her lap and is singing to him: ‘Dapples and greys… pintos and bays… all the pretty little ponies…’ He has his thumb in his mouth and is curled into her; he looks like a cherub, all soft and sweet and golden.
‘I think Eleanor might need a hand in the bathroom getting that stuff off,’ he says.
‘Can’t you help her, for once?’
‘I have a lot of work to get through.’
‘Well, she’ll just have to manage, then.’ Marcia rests her chin on top of her son’s head. ‘He’s very upset.’
Conrad nods but says nothing further, then turns and leaves the room.
He stands, undecided, in the hallway for a minute. Checks his watch. Sighs. Then bounds up the stairs two at a time and knocks on the bathroom door.
‘You all right, little thing?’
There is no response so he opens the door. Eleanor is standing at the basin in her vest and skirt, face scrubbed, hair still clogged with yoghurt. She does not speak but he meets her eyes in the mirror. Her mouth is clamped tight shut and he can see that she is doing her damnedest not to cry, and it is this, more than anything else, he finds hard to bear.
‘Come on,’ he says, fitting the shower attachment to the bath taps to wash her hair. ‘Let’s get it off. Crikey, what a horrid mess. Let’s not use that stuff as shampoo ever again, eh?’
12
The Weekend in Suffolk
Eleanor loved this cottage. It was not that it was decorated or furnished exactly as she would have done it herself. Sarah’s taste tended towards the ethnic and the rough-hewn, so there were more fringed hangings and lumpen coffee mugs than Eleanor would have chosen, but it was very cosy and welcoming, and she would not have changed the cold flagstones for fitted carpet. She liked the unevenness of them, the way their dips and hollows were a map of so many footsteps over the last two hundred years.
The guest room was small, with a standard double bed, which felt cramped compared with the superking-sized one Eleanor and Roger had at home. The sloping ceiling of the eaves made it impossible for an adult to stand upright on the far side by the window. Roger deposited his bag on the side nearer the door, saying, ‘I know you like to have the window side.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Aren’t you going to unpack?’ Roger swapped the pillow on his side of the bed for the one they had brought from home, as Eleanor turned to go straight out again.
‘I said I’d help Sarah in the kitchen.’
‘Honestly, she shouldn’t make you do all the work. You’re a guest.’
‘It’s only the gravy. And I’m not a proper guest, more like family.’
Roger snorted but turned back to his unpacking, tutting at the jangling of the wire hangers as he hung up his trousers and shirts.
Back down in the kitchen, Sarah poured Eleanor a huge glass of wine.
‘Good grief. I was only wanting to drink it, not swim in it.’
‘You looked as if you might be in need.’
Eleanor nodded without comment and rolled up her sleeves.
‘Now, gravy. And tell me what you’ve been up to.’
As she stirred the gravy, Eleanor could hear the rumble of male voices in the sitting room; she wasn’t sure what Roger and Mark might talk about on their own but Mark seemed equally happy talking about business or gardening or sport or the cryptic crossword as he was discussing people and books and films and politics, or indeed anything at all.
‘And how did the seasonal sex go?’ Sarah asked, handing her a jug.
‘Sssh! It’s not seasonal… will you please sssh?’
‘I am shushing, I promise, but I know it’s pretty much bang on every three months because you told me. You can’t deny it now.’
‘I’m not but it’s not seasonal. Ah, the Spring Equinox, time to get my knickers off…’ Eleanor took a deep swig of her wine. ‘It’s just gradually settled into that sort of pattern, that’s all: his birthday, our anniversary, my birthday, and either Christmas or New Year. Nothing odd about that.’
‘No, not at all odd. “Darling! It’s October the fourth – I must ravish you!”’
Eleanor laughed in spite of herself.
‘You’re very cruel. Come on, let’s get the food on the table. You know how Roger gets when he’s hungry.’
Later, up in their room, Eleanor changed into her nightdress while Roger was in the bathroom.
‘Did you leave your slippers in the car?’ he said, looking down at her bare feet as he came in. ‘I can fetch them for you.’
‘Don’t worry, I can get them in the morning.’
‘I don’t mind. I’ll get them now.’
She knew he wanted to go outside anyway. Roger often liked to smoke a cigar last thing at night.
Eleanor went over to the window. The moon was almost full – just a whisper off it, a near perfect disc of silver light against a black sky. It was so much darker here than in London. She could see hundreds, thousands of stars; at home, all you could see in the night sky were the blinking lights of aeroplanes. She turned off the bedroom lights and opened the window to see better. The darkness was exquisite, scattered with stars, as if a child had spilled glitter over black velvet. She leaned against the sill and drank in the night and the moon and the stars, trembling a little in the cold and the vastness of it all.
Below, the front door opened and Roger emerged. He paused briefly on the step to light his cigar, then moved onto the front path. She thought he would look up at the moon, wondered if he would notice – as surely he must – how much clearer the sky was here. But instead, he took out his mobile and looked down at it, scrolling through his emails. Now she could see his expanding bald spot gleaming in the moonlight. She suddenly had the mischievous thought that she could drop something onto his head, just for fun: a flowerhead plucked from the sweet little posy of flowers Sarah had placed in their room? She turned round to look. The heavy brass candlestick on the chest of drawers caught her eye. An image of herself letting go of it directly above Roger’s head came to her. She imagined it thunking into that target zone of his shiny patch of scalp, his collapsing without a sound, blood pooling across the path into the roses by the front door. God, she really was losing the plot. Honestly – she shook the thought away, then shut the window as quietly as she could and went to brush her teeth.
Whenever they were away from home, Eleanor read non-fiction, usually a biography or travel memoir or a collection of letters. She rarely read novels any more unless Roger was away for work. Over the years, she had tried various strategies to address ‘the problem’; she tried not to think about it at all, but when it came slinking into her head unbidden, she kept it framed by crisp quotation marks as if it were simply a bothersome practical difficulty she had to deal with. An e-reader seemed the obvious answer, but she found it an unsatisfactory experience. For Eleanor, holding a book, the feel of it in her hand, turning the pages, the ink, the paper, the smell of it, even the turning back a page or two to check something – these small pleasures, which might sound foolish if she were to try to describe them, were part of the deep, quiet enrichment that sinking into a book provided.
As always, there was rarely anything to be gained by confronting Roger over areas of disagreement. One had either to accept his way or find a path to circumvent him without his having even the slightest suspicion that you were defying him. Or fume silently, of course.
Roger came in and handed her the slippers.
‘Thank you.’ Eleanor smiled. ‘It looks like a beautiful night out there.’
‘What? Oh, yes. Nippy, though. Winter’s just around the corner, you can tell.’
‘Mmm, I suppose so.’
‘Good book?’ He nodded at her paperback and started to undress.
‘Yes, I think so. It’s a collection of poems by—’
‘P
oetry!’ He snorted. ‘Well, whatever turns you on, darling. So long as you don’t expect me to read them!’
‘Of course not.’ She looked away. ‘Did you bring a book?’
‘Plenty on my tablet. Plus some work, inevitably.’ He reached for his pyjamas, then stood looking in the mirror for a minute or two, examining his gums.
‘You work so hard.’ She smiled at his reflection. ‘I hoped this weekend might give you a bit of a break.’
He turned to face her. ‘I’d rather crack on than have a backlog to clear on Monday a.m.’
‘You’re right.’
‘Still…’ He transferred his tablet from the bed to the bedside table and turned towards her. ‘Perhaps we could…? After all, we didn’t on your birthday as usual, did we?’
If necessary, they deferred their seasonal sex for a few days. Eleanor was just at the end of her period on her birthday, so it had not taken place, and midweek sex had never been on the agenda as Roger always had to get up so early for work.
‘But these walls are awfully thin.’ Eleanor patted the wall next to her. She dropped her voice to a whisper, ‘They’re right next door…’ She herself was almost completely silent when they had intercourse; Roger’s grunts were, by contrast, really quite loud.
‘Well, perhaps you’re right.’ He leaned over and planted a kiss on her face somewhere between her mouth and her cheek. ‘Sunday evening then, once we’re home.’
‘Mm. Think I’ll turn my light off now. Good night.’ Eleanor put down her book, took a minute to insert her earplugs with care – Roger couldn’t help snoring, but it was always wise to get a head start otherwise the sound drilled into her head – then snuggled down beneath the quilt.
Growing Up for Beginners Page 8
