Conrad & Eleanor (10 page)

‘But I like to see him in new things, things that haven't been washed a thousand times.'

‘New for a month. Till he grows out of them.'

‘We can keep them for the next one.'

She laughed and teased him at that, and mostly he gave in. But just as for himself he has always loved the feel of a crisp new cotton shirt, so for Paul he coveted Mothercare's bright stretchy babygrows, and would from time to time sneak one into the house.

Con remembers there were evenings when he would be stirring the frozen lumps of stew in the saucepan, with Paul crawling round underfoot, and both of them stopping and turning with big grins at the sound of El's bicycle nudging down the ginnel. Everything they did was purposeful, every moment of their lives was precious, the care of the child passed back and forth between them like a blazing torch.

Trying to linger now, trying to be fair, trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, ha ha, Con watches the young couple and their baby leave, with a surge of grief. The fine balance that they had, the working, childcaring, giving-to-each-other balance, was it really El who smashed it?

Yes. He feels his shoulders sag; he doesn't know how to stop blaming her. He wants to reclaim his own life, at least some of it, from her; he wants her not to have been the one who made everything happen.

It isn't right, it isn't plausible, it isn't even possible, he knows; he must have played as much of a part as her in the fiasco that has turned out to be their life. But where… how… when? He's stumbling about like some blundering old fool, and all he can make out is the harm she has done him. But does his own life only exist where it's touched hers? He wonders if she thinks of him as parasitic upon her energy. Maybe that would make him deserve what he has got, if he has been leeching upon her all their married life? If she has acted and he has only reacted. If his darkness has swallowed her light. Still he can't avoid what's coming. Still he can't excuse her.

When Paul was ill he stayed off work. More often than her, longer than her. He had thought there was a satisfaction in it that they shared; a tacit agreement that her work was more important, and so a pleasure in the role reversal. He did it for Paul and for El and for himself, all three of them could gain.

And when they made the decision to have another child, when Paul was two, it seems to Con they both recognised that Con was doing the lion's share – without complaint, since he knew El wouldn't have agreed to a second if it had threatened more disruption to her work. With the decisive and happy calm which had characterised their life together thus far, El became pregnant with and delivered Megan.

And two months after Megan was born, El dropped a bombshell.

‘We need to get an au pair.'

‘Why?'

‘To look after the children. To keep things going at home while we're at work.'

‘What's wrong with Kelly?'

‘Nothing. She's been great. But it's getting too complicated, Con.' An au pair could take Paul to nursery, which was due to start in September, pushing Megan in the pram. Then she could come home, tidy up, collect Paul, give the children their lunch, take them to the park, do a bit of shopping, make their tea.

‘What will Kelly say? She needs the money.'

‘She'll get two other kids to mind, you ninny. And she could have them a couple of afternoons a week while the au pair goes to her language classes – it'll work out heaps better.'

‘But —'

‘Imagine just coming straight home from work, and the kids not needing to be bundled from pillar to post; no bags of nappies and changes of clothing, no dashing away from unfinished work because it's pick-up time —'

‘You never have to dash away from unfinished work. I pick them up in the afternoon.'

‘Well,
you
won't have to dash away from work. And I won't have to feel guilty about you doing it.'

‘There's no need for you to feel guilty. I enjoy it.'

‘There is need because you bring it up in conversations like this. It's clearly unfair. You do more childcare than me.'

‘I do it because I want to.'

‘That's not the point, is it.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘If you do more than me, it's not fair. And if I spend more time at work – and if my career inches ahead of yours —' It wasn't inching. They both knew that. It was striding. It was leaping and bounding ahead of his. ‘Then one day you're going to resent it.'

‘El, you don't
want
to spend more time with the kids. And because I do, that liberates you to work all the hours God sends. Which is fine. But you don't like that because you feel you might owe me something. You don't want to think anyone else might have had to make any kind of sacrifice, for Eleanor Evanson to be a name in IVF; so you'd prefer to farm out your kids to some unknown exploited foreigner, and say it's all for my sake —'

‘You're twisting —'

‘You've never even consulted me. Maybe I prefer cooking my children's food to leaving them to eat shit.'

‘That's ridiculous. We can control what they eat whether we're there or not.'

‘Fine. But you're saying I'm not allowed to choose being with the kids.'

‘You want to be doing Hill's tedious research for the rest of your life?'

‘An au pair is not a compromise. It's your wish. A compromise would be you deciding to come home early two nights a week. Or – better – you employing an au pair two nights a week.'

‘I
can't
promise to be here early two nights a week. It's not possible. Not while we're working with newly harvested eggs. It doesn't work to a timetable, you know we can't freeze them.'

‘You could agree a timetable with Simon. As you know perfectly well. You could take it in turns.'

‘The kids don't
need
their parents twenty-four hours a day. They need to be loved and fed but they don't need
us
all the time. In fact they'll be better socialised without us. It's pure emotional blackmail, what you're doing.'

‘Because you don't want to come home early, you want to stop me from doing it too.'

‘You can still come home early every bloody day if you want. But at least it will be a choice.'

‘That makes rather a mockery of paying someone.'

‘I'll pay. My guilt, my money.' She was already earning more than him. She had him cornered and they both knew it.

An au pair came from an agency. Con wouldn't have anything to do with it so El interviewed her and took her on. She was a stolid Austrian, wretchedly shy with him, answering his attempts at conversation monosyllabically. The kids seemed to like her. She was thorough. The house was cleaner than it had ever been, the children's clothes neater. When he came in in the evening (having forced himself to stay till 4.30, till 5, till almost half past) they had already had their tea and she was cuddling Megan and reading to Paul, or, if Megan was asleep, playing endless games of Continuo, coloured squares spread across the floor and the eighteen-year-old crawling around them alongside the three-year-old. She was embarrassed by Con's presence and the kids were happy with her. So, more often than not, he'd end up pretending to read the paper in the kitchen, listening to their chatter through the crack in the door.

‘I'll give them their bath,' he told her, and she went immediately to her room. She was silent in there and never went out. It was impossible to banish her to such solitude every evening, but when he asked her to watch TV or stay in the kitchen and eat with him, her embarrassed presence was a strain. El went into action and found the girl an au pairs' social group to go to on Thursday nights, and an English class for a Tuesday. She recommended her to colleagues as a babysitter. Gradually Con reclaimed some evenings at home. But he never stopped resenting it. She stayed with them for two years.

When Gresl left, the children cried. But then the next au pair was Hélène, whom everybody loved. It was different with Hélène; she was happy to sit in the kitchen chatting to him all evening if she wasn't going out. She took it for granted he would want to relieve her of the kids when he came in, and while he bathed them and read stories she would put on the radio and clear up the mess in the kitchen. She rarely ate, claiming she had eaten with the kids, but if she wasn't going out and El was late home, Hélène would sit companionably with Con while he ate, regaling him with the minutiae of the children's day and lurid tales of the other au pairs in her language class. Some were expected to work terrible hours, 6am till midnight, one even had to get up to bottle-feed a new baby in the night. Some had no days off. (Hélène had all weekend.) Some children were so spoilt you would not believe, screaming and pinching their au pairs, threatening to tell their parents bad things if they weren't given sweets or privileges. And the fathers – dreadful, predatory men. Two girls had already left their placements after being cornered by the men of the house; one even came into her friend Natalie's bedroom at night while his wife was sleeping.

She delighted in these scandals and Con knew perfectly well that he was being tested. She was nineteen and devastatingly pretty; he was twenty-nine with a wife who never came home. ‘I see more of Hélène than I do of you,' he said, once.

‘Lucky you!' laughed Eleanor. Hélène had no particular boyfriend Con could identify, but calls from her friends both male and female monopolised the phone, and her weekends were full of outings and parties. Gradually Con noticed, though, that she rarely went out on a Wednesday or Thursday, always El's later nights at the hospital. On those nights she was almost always in with an evening to spare, helping him down a bottle of wine at the kitchen table. She wanted to be an English teacher when she went back to Marseille, and she was constantly asking him for explanations of different phrases and colloquialisms. There came the inevitable evening when they got on to the subject of sex.

‘Natalie says you have more words than us for
baiser
.'

‘Kissing?'

‘Fucking.'

‘I thought it meant to kiss.'

‘Both. It means both.'

‘Doesn't that get confusing?'

She began to laugh, it was infectious. ‘Usually you know – which one you are doing.'

‘But can't one thing lead to another?'

It did, after they had drawn up, without the aid of a dictionary, a list of more than thirty euphemisms which all needed explanation and amplification. Shag. Bonk. Bang. Screw. A spot of how's-your-father. (This made her howl with joy.) The old in-out (plus discussion of
Clockwork Orange
, which she had just read). Knee trembler. To know in the Biblical sense. Fornicate. Intercourse. Have relations with. Come together (necessitating a playing of the Beatles song of that title). Lewd act (discounted, after discussion of the range of behaviours to which it could be applied). Give one to. Have it away with. Sleep with. Make the beast with two backs. Mate. Jiggy jiggy. Do the horizontal tango. (She swore he'd made this up. Con couldn't remember where he'd got it from.) Lie with. Give a good seeing to. A quickie. A ride. A little death. To get your oats. To spend the night with. To go all the way with. To tumble in the hay. To make it with. To poke. To pork. In the sack.

When at last he said, ‘It's bedtime,' she giggled and pushed her chair back. He determined to sit, nursing his erection, until she had left the room but she came around the table to him and put her hand on his shoulder, and it was impossible not to reach up to her. All the time he was kissing her and running his hands over her warm body he was calculating. Not in the kitchen, one of the kids might wake up. Not in his and El's room, that would be too… It would have to be Hélène's little bed. He pulled away from her.

‘Hélène. I don't want to be one of those men – you know, pawing the au pair.'

‘
Non
.
Non
. Please —' Her fingers had found his zip.

‘OK, OK. Let's go to your room.' Hastily he locked the front door, leaving the key in the lock in case of a surprise return by El; followed Hélène into her room and wedged a chair against the door. He had no condom and wouldn't risk not using one; after years of married sex it was like being a sixth-former again, frenziedly doing everything but.

In the pounding silence afterwards he felt his heart sink like a stone. She was curling up for sleep: he kissed her lips, nose, eyes, gathered his clothes and went to his own room, where he lay awake all night cursing himself and vowing it wouldn't happen again.

In the morning he busily behaved as if nothing had happened; in the evening rang from work to say goodnight to the kids and that he'd be late home. Then, blessedly, the weekend. He had caught her reproachful glance a couple of times; knew he was behaving like a shit. On Monday night when the kids were in bed and Hélène was silent in her room, he knocked on her door.

‘
Oui? Entre
.'

‘No, I won't, Hélène. You come out to the kitchen, would you? We need to talk.' It embarrassed him to offer his explanations; her age, his position as her employer, the betrayal of El's trust on both their parts, etc., because she simply smiled.

‘It's OK. I know all that. It's just a bit of fun, no? I don't think you exploit me. I don't think you'll leave your wife. But it feels good. You don't think so?'

‘It feels wonderful. But it will lead to trouble, Hélène. Better not.'

‘OK.' She raised her hands in an ‘I will leave it alone' gesture. ‘OK. Don't worry about it. Now I must finish getting ready, I am going out for a drink.'

He brooded for a week before buying some condoms just in case. They used them fairly quickly. But all the while he was enjoying it, he was worried sick. Despising himself for a coward, he determined to get El to ask Hélène to leave, dropping just enough of the truth into the conversation to make it plausible – Hélène was flirting with him, he said, she was making him uncomfortable. He was afraid El would laugh it off, but she agreed with surprising ease. Then it turned out she had news of her own.