by Jane Rogers
‘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.’
‘You all right?’
‘I am.’
‘OK. She’s already four months along.’
‘Four months? But she’s like a piece of string!’
‘I know. I know. She says food makes her feel sick. She hasn’t told him because she’s convinced he’ll try to make her have an abortion, and she says she wants to have it.’
‘She can’t even look after herself.’
‘That’s true. But there’s an argument which says that if she has someone else to look after, someone totally dependent on her… Maybe it will nudge her into being a bit more responsible.’
‘Like it has done so far.’
‘Look, El, I don’t know the answer.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I said she must do what she thinks best. I said we’d give her all the help we can.’
Cara won’t have any money. She won’t have anywhere to live. Con’s point about being responsible for a child is a good one, but not if Cara comes and lives here. Because the care of the child will simply fall on Con and Cara will continue to behave like a child herself. El restrains herself from saying this. There’s time enough, and Con will see the sense of it. Better for them to pay Cara’s rent on a place of her own.
‘Has she been to the doctor?’
‘Yes. And I’ve told her to make another appointment this week to get some dietary advice.’
‘And she’s been living with that lout all this time? She’s going to have to tell him.’
Con shakes his head. ‘She’s staying at her friend Jenny’s. She’s been there since New Year apparently. She tells me – I don’t know how true it is – she tells me that she’s split up with him for good.’
‘Well. It would simplify matters, if it was true.’
‘Yes.’
They look at each other and El smiles wryly. Con grins back at her.
‘So. Grandparents, eh? When d’you reckon to start knitting?’
Chapter 16
It is five years later.
Conrad is looking after Cara’s children, which he does two days a week: four-year-old Tilly and the baby, Lucas. After a fretful morning Lucas has fallen deeply asleep, and Tilly is happily lining up all her small farm animals, Playmobil figures and dinosaurs in ranks across the kitchen floor. The arrangement never reaches its end, because she continues to move different creatures from the back to the front, and to set others in pairs, instructing them in a half-whispered, sing-song voice as she does so; sometimes making a shift in direction, so that they must all be aligned facing the window, or the door; sometimes creating a carefully selected breakaway group, which is then rejoined by the entire contingent. She can be happy playing like this for hours. Con has tried listening in to her story but all he can glean are fragments: ‘You can come with me.’ ‘No no, we’re going this way.’ ‘The cockadoo is being very naughty, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm.’ She doesn’t like it if he sits and listens, so he gets on with cooking. El has said she’ll be back to eat tonight, but she’ll probably be late. He wants to feed Cara when she comes to collect the kids; he guesses that by the time she gets them home and into bed she’s too tired to bother cooking for herself.
There has been talk for quite a while of Cara and the kids moving in with him and El, and he’s hopeful it will happen. Less driving around for all of them, built-in babysitting and company for Cara, and the opportunity for him to exercise more control over what they all eat. Cara has ballooned and shrunk repeatedly since first getting pregnant, and at the moment she is nothing but skin and bones. There is part of his thinking which still classes plentiful eating with freedom from anxiety; it was hard not to think of Cara as more contented when she was plump: placid, maternal. Illogical, though, if she was comfort-eating. The plumpness was as much a sign of distress as is the skinniness. As he grates the parmesan he ponders the power of physical appearance to suggest personality and mood. And he thinks again of shape-shif
ting Maddy.
In the days after they returned home from Bologna, it became apparent to him that he would need to see Maddy, for precisely the same reason that a child needs to look under the bed where he thinks a wolf is hiding. He needed to stop her from being his nightmare. He let the idea gather force while he ticked off the other things he needed to do. Like giving in his notice at work. And, after he had actually left, and after long discussions with El, writing a letter to Carrington Bio-Life, copied to Corastra, saying that as a scientist whose animals had been kept at CBL, he had damning evidence of conditions in their monkey house. He listed the problems and requested a meeting to discuss changes they should implement. He indicated that if they did not reply within two weeks he would go to the inspectorate with an official complaint. El agreed that the anonymous release of his photos may not have had much effect, but with his name and his research experience behind it, and with a real rather than a vague threat, they might find him difficult to ignore. Their reply, with a meeting date, came within the week.
And at the meeting, the director of the animal facility greeted him with smooth assurance. There had been a change of regime; he was new in post, he had been appointed to ensure that Carrington Bio-Life’s spotless record on animal welfare was maintained at all costs. He took Conrad’s points extremely seriously, and he was very pleased to be able to tell him that all the deficiencies noted by Conrad had been remedied. Would Conrad like to accompany him on a tour of the facility?
Grimly, Con agreed, and naturally all was as the director said. Given that the animals were there as subjects of research, conditions were acceptable. Con was sickened by the sight of them but there were no obviously moribund animals being kept alive. The cages were clean, they all had water, their charts were scrupulously detailed and up to date. The director thanked him warmly for his interest and invited him to return whenever he liked. Con was shaking by the time he left, but it was over. He had done his best, and now he could try to forget it.
In all this time Maddy, the threat of Maddy, lurked in his and El’s minds. She had sent two further emails since his return, from a MAD2 email address: the first, Nice try, Houdini, had badly unnerved him because he wasn’t aware of having escaped anything. What trap had he blindly side-stepped? He reviewed his recent movements, imagining her watching from the shadows. The second read: I know what you’re going to do before you even think of it. Don’t imagine I’ve forgotten you. He guessed she had found out that he had left his job. El still thought he should go to the police. She called Mad a stalker.
One morning he emailed her simply requesting a meeting, stating a safe time and place: a Costa coffee shop in the centre of Manchester at 2pm on a Tuesday. He and El deliberated whether El should be there too, sitting discreetly at another table, keeping an eye on things. But in a public place, it seemed like overkill. Maddy emailed back succinctly: OK.
In the café, Conrad spotted her before she saw him. She was wearing jeans and a black T shirt, with a scuffed leather bomber jacket. She looked hard and lean and dangerous, the very opposite of that mousy librarian he had met at first. Every time he saw her she seemed to adopt a different style. She pulled out the chair and slumped down opposite him without giving any sign of recognition. ‘You haven’t got a drink,’ he said, despising himself for the thought that he might go and buy her one.
‘That’s because I don’t want a drink.’
‘OK. I’m here to tell you this has to stop.’
‘What?’
‘You. Following me. Threatening me.’
She laughed. ‘You did an ace disappearing act in Munich. Like a secret agent.’
‘I knew you were in Munich.’
‘I might have been.’
‘Look, Maddy, I am doing what you want, OK? I have resigned my job, I am no longer working with animals, and I am advising CBL on how to improve conditions in their research facility.’
She shook her head. ‘You give an inch and pretend it’s a mile. You need to talk to all the other scientists whose animals are there, you need to persuade them all that their work is cruel and evil, and you need to get the place closed down.’
Conrad took a mouthful of coffee. It was good and strong and he realised he was enjoying it. He was back in a world where the taste of coffee could be enjoyed. She was not part of that world. ‘That won’t happen,’ he told her. ‘Animal research is vital. I am prepared to work for better conditions for the animals but nothing else. There’s no way that place will close down.’
Maddy suddenly leant forward over the table, bringing her face close to his. ‘I went to prison because of you. I went to prison because you’re such a wishy-washy, two-faced bastard. Have you ever been to prison? D’you know how shit it is? When they take away your clothes, and put you in a stinking little cage and shove disgusting slop at you three times a day – like they do to your animals in their lock-up?’ Her voice was low but piercing. Con was aware of glances from other tables. He forced himself to keep his own voice light and conversational.
‘You’re mistaken, Maddy. I had nothing to do with that.’
‘Oh yes you did. You wouldn’t do what needed doing, you wouldn’t denounce CBL, you wouldn’t identify yourself, so I was forced into reprisals against your fellow torturers. I had to take the fight to them.’
‘Forced? Who forced you?’
‘If you care about something – hah, you don’t even know what that means. If you cared about the animals, you would do everything in your power to save them. You would plot, you would fight, you would risk your own safety, you would do anything.’
‘Paint slogans on cars, and put sanitary towels through letterboxes?’
‘Anything. Anything for the cause.’
‘I don’t see how that helps your cause.’
‘That’s because you’ve got no fucking imagination. Don’t you think those little men might be scared? Don’t you think they might be worrying, oh dear today it’s my car but tomorrow it might be me? Maybe I should change my job? Don’t I know that the only reason you’re conceding anything at all is because I finally got you good and frightened?’
For a moment Con quailed, feeling the power of her logic. No, he told himself. Don’t let her do this again. ‘You don’t know anything about me. I’m not frightened of you because there’s nothing you can do to harm me. I’ve told my wife all about you. After I left Munich I went missing for a few days and the police were involved in finding me. They are still expecting a full account of what happened, and if you threaten me again – if you so much as look at me again – I shall give them your name.’
‘Hah!’ she snorted contemptuously.
‘And your aliases, and your criminal record, and I will press charges.’
‘What charges?’
‘Stalking. Threatening behaviour. I’ve got all your emails.’
‘You’re a dick.’
Conrad took a mouthful of coffee and set the cup carefully down. She watched him for a while then leant over deliberately and grabbed his half-full cup from its saucer. She raised it to her lips and he thought she was going to drink, but she spat into the cup.
‘You won’t know what’s hit you,’ she said.
‘Maybe not, but you will be prime suspect. As I said, my wife has all the details.’ The skin on her fingers, clenched around his cup, was rough and chapped. He imagined her scrubbing herself, trying to get rid of the red paint she had used to daub the cars. Suddenly she seemed to him like an angry kid – defiant, hostile, knowing she was cornered. ‘You have to promise never to contact me again. Not to email me or threaten me or follow me. You have to leave me alone.’
‘Or what?’ she jeered. ‘Or Mr Plod will lock me up again?’
‘Yes,’ he said simply. There was a brief silence. ‘And you know you don’t like it,’ he added.
‘You are a pathetic wanker,’ she said, setting down his cu
p.
‘Fine. Just promise.’
‘Promise? You think I’ll keep a promise, scout’s honour?’
‘Promise.’
She was defeated. He knew that. It seemed to him he had known it from the moment she threw herself into the chair opposite him. What did she have? Nothing. All the power was with him. She pushed back her chair abruptly.
‘You need to promise, Maddy, or I’m talking to the police.’
‘Oh mister wank-face, yes sir, I pwomise!’ She sang it out loudly enough for all the heads in the café to turn, and then she was gone, slamming out of the place at full speed. A few people caught Con’s eye and shook their heads or raised their eyebrows, indicating sympathy. He nodded at them and went to get himself a fresh cup of coffee. Which he would enjoy from start to finish.
And Maddy had never contacted him again after that; her name never cropped up, she disappeared from view. It seemed as if El continued to worry about her long after she had receded from Con’s thoughts – sometimes he would be surprised by El wondering what had happened to her or who she was tormenting now. With distance Con could see that Maddy had done him no physical harm. She had committed no real crime.
And now – with Cara’s two kids to deal with, and the allotment he shares with Paul, and films to watch with Dan, and the usual shopping and cooking and cleaning at home – that whole crisis of five years ago seems both distant and unreal, as if it happened to someone else, some other, febrile, neurotic Conrad. His flight and El’s pursuit of him were enough to shock both of them into temporary good behaviour; into a period of talking, of honesty, of consideration, of nostalgic love. But this phase did not last long. How could it? he reasons with himself. Their lives are too similar to what they were before. El is still following her career, her department is having astonishing success with stem cells, they are attracting major funding, they are in the news. She is sought after, as a conference speaker, as a Ph.D. supervisor, as a research partner, and to sit on policy, prize-giving and funding bodies. If she agreed to all the requests, she would spend half the year overseas. There is no reason for her to give it up; she loves it and she thrives on it. So of course Con is house-husband; of course he eats at home, alone, while she attends glittering dinners; of course he deals with the crises in the lives of their offspring; of course the novelty of his bid for escape wears off. They are what they are, living the life they have always lived together – why should his running away for a few days have any lasting effect on that?
