Conrad & Eleanor

by Jane Rogers

  ‘That’s the negative way to put it. You could say, because I was happy in my work and I wanted you to feel the same.’

  ‘I could.’ His tone is doubtful and she glances at him.

  ‘Look, whatever you accuse me of, you’re almost certainly right. Sometimes I think all I want is for everyone – not just you, but everyone – to leave me alone to get on with my work. To make no more demands on me; to expect nothing.’

  ‘Yes. I felt that.’

  ‘But when you weren’t there…’ She trails off. They go down the steep steps, cross the road, under the railway bridge and down past the old mill to the canal path. The valley bottom is in shadow. El doesn’t speak again till they are by the canal. ‘This is the thing that’s hard to explain. When I didn’t know where you were, or whether you’d come back, I was useless.’

  ‘Well, I imagine it was a shock. And naturally – probably, naturally – you wouldn’t want me to be the victim of some nasty accident.’

  El shakes her head. ‘No. It’s hard for you to believe because it was hard for me to believe. I couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t help Cara. I couldn’t answer Paul. I couldn’t shop or cook. I couldn’t even think of a way to look for you.’

  ‘You were upset,’ he says uneasily. An El who is doing nothing is unimaginable.

  She shakes her head again. ‘It wasn’t about being upset. I wasn’t sobbing and tearing my hair. It was about being meaningless. Without you.’

  Con is stuck for a reply. He thinks about sitting on the train to Bologna with the bass beat of his neighbour’s music in his ears and the monkey house stench of orange in his nostrils: he thinks about the dark wet streets of the city with a lurking presence always at his back, and of the bar where he saw the young couple with their baby in a carrier: he thinks of squatting in the shadow underneath the window of his pensione at night, so that the revolving orange light in the street would not shine over his face. Was he meaningless? And if so, was it because of El’s absence?

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he says slowly. ‘It wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one thing. I mean, all the time I was away, it was for lots of reasons. You were one of them. And I was – lost, I suppose you could say – lost without you. Is that the same as meaningless?’

  El laughs. ‘It’s not a competition! You don’t have to have been just as meaningless as me.’

  ‘But it always is a competition with us, isn’t it?’ he finds himself saying. ‘Isn’t that the trouble? Over work, over the kids, over caring about each other.’

  ‘Is it a competition over work?’

  ‘Not any more, obviously. But I suppose it was at one point.’

  ‘OK. Let’s not fight old battles. Not a competition over work. It’s not a competition over the kids because you’ve put in the time with them and you’re their main person. Which I knew, but I understand it better now.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning I understand jealousy is not appropriate and that I should honour you for the things you can do better than me.’

  ‘It’s not a question of better, it’s just a question of having the time to pay attention.’

  ‘Conrad, for God’s sake, accept a compliment! You are a better father than I am a mother and thank heavens for it. They need you. They love you.’

  ‘They love you too,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Yes, so much that they think me capable of murder.’

  He laughs, and after a beat she joins in.

  ‘When we can talk like this,’ she says, ‘it’s impossible to believe how much we couldn’t talk.’

  ‘Things get furred up,’ he says. ‘Like limescale in pipes. Like cholesterol in arteries. Things get clogged up and then the – the system needs a – a —’

  ‘Good dose of vinegar,’ offers El. ‘For the limescale, anyway.’

  Con looks up and takes in the faint haze of green on the willows, the pinkish red of other twigs and branches. ‘When do the pussy willows come out?’

  El laughs. ‘You’re asking me, country boy?’

  ‘Early spring,’ he reflects. ‘It must be soon. D’you remember when Megan wanted to pick some and we argued?’

  ‘What did we argue about?’

  ‘You said she could and I said she couldn’t.’

  El pulls a face. ‘Conservationist.’

  ‘Not at all. They’re practically impossible to pick. You can bend the twigs double before they’ll break. And then you have to twist and twist it round to try and snap the strands of bark. It hurts your hands, it’s horrible.’

  ‘So who won?’

  ‘I told her I’d go for a walk later with the secateurs and cut some for her.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No idea. I probably forgot. But so did she.’

  ‘Right.’ She stops to watch as two drakes skid down onto the surface of the water behind a duck who is streaking away as fast as she can, neck outstretched. ‘All the things we’ve argued about. All the millions of things,’ she says.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Was that the problem? We more or less stopped arguing.’

  ‘Well, if you think back that’s not true. It had got to the point where we only argued. The arguments were few and far between, but that’s because we didn’t actually see each other very often.’

  ‘All right. Do we need to sit down with a pen and paper to do this or can we do it as we walk?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Draw up some rules. Some do’s and don’ts.’

  ‘You’re going to fix us with a list of rules?’ His voice is more sarcastic than he intends.

  ‘Look, Con. We’ve both admitted. Lots of things went wrong. It’s not going to just all come right again because we want it to.’

  ‘It’s not all going to come right again because you make a list of rules.’

  ‘No, but it might help. Anything that might help is worth considering. Number one, make a time to talk every week. One evening minimum. Say Friday. Starting no later than 7pm.’

  She is serious so he nods.

  ‘Your turn.’

  ‘God, El, I don’t know.’

  ‘Do something together every weekend. Walk, theatre, gallery, outing.’

  ‘Every weekend?’

  ‘Why not? Doesn’t have to be all weekend, it might just be Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘I feel like I’m being marriage guidance counselled.’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea either.’

  ‘NO.’

  ‘Not a bad idea at all!’

  He realises she is teasing him. ‘Make a list of rules if you want, and I’ll look at them. But I’m not convinced.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I will. And you know what my third one will be?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sex.’

  Conrad sighs. In Bologna there were twin beds in the hotel room and anyway he was sweaty and ill and Cara was popping in at all hours. Last night they curled up together for the first time in their own bed, and although he put his arm around her and she spooned her back into his belly, there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that this was enough for now. That after the flight home and the noisy meal, and with the children in the house, a chaste hug was the most appropriate end to the long day. Anyway he was exhausted. Also, Con thought, I am nervous. Maybe she is too. He couldn’t actually remember the last time they had made love.

  ‘Sex,’ persists El. ‘Because if we can’t talk about it – if we don’t communicate about it – it’s another, I don’t know, chasm, between us.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘D’you want to talk about it now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK.’

  They climb up to the old railway line in silence. The sun flashes in their eyes. The trees and bushes alongside the track are more forward than
those by the canal; higher up, Con supposes they get more light. There are several bearing pale catkins which do actually dance like lambs’ tails in the wind. He points them out to El.

  ‘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.’