Conrad & Eleanor (12 page)

Feeling this impatience connects her with her life again, with the surge which has propelled her ever since childhood. She visualises herself as a teenager, a blur of movement. Hurling herself past the marker posts, racing out of childhood towards life as fast as she could go, brushing off the irritating strands her mother tried to hold her with. Packing her rucksack the day after her last O level exam. Brilliant June sunshine falling in bright blocks through the windows, the whole world outside was glowing and throbbing with light, drumming her out of the nest as surely as the rhythm of the first contractions begins to squeeze the ripe foetus out of the dark womb. Her mother coming into her room.

‘You're going to London today?'

‘Yes, Mum.'

‘You're not even waiting till the end of the week?'

‘What for?'

‘Well, apart from anything else, you could have given me a hand painting Minnie's room. All the time you've been doing your exams you've not lifted a finger in the house —'

‘I had to revise.'

‘Fair enough, but I did think that afterwards there might be a bit of give after all that take take take.'

‘
Mum
.'

‘What?'

‘I'll help some other time. I just need to get away.'

‘To what? What's so special in London? That long-haired streak of pump water —'

‘His name's John.'

‘Why doesn't he come and see you here, if he's so keen on you? His term must have ended.'

‘He's got a summer job.' A lie.

‘Doing what?'

‘Swimming-pool attendant.' An inspired lie.

‘And where are you going to stay?'

‘In a spare room at his house. One of the guys he shares with has gone home for the summer.' Another lie.

‘And what are you going to do with yourself all day?'

‘I'll try and get a job.'

‘You could get a job here.'

‘Yes, but this isn't London.'

Somewhere in her mother's cluttered head a penny drops. ‘I know what you're going to do.' Her tone is outraged.

Eleanor doesn't reply.

‘I know what you're going to do,' her mother repeats aggressively.

Too right, Mother. Lose my virginity as fast as I possibly can. ‘What?'

‘And you're making a big mistake. You're going to end up in all sorts of mess. Girls always think it won't happen to them.'

‘What?'

‘Getting pregnant. Why d'you think you know better than —'

‘Mum, I'm not going to —'

‘I wasn't born yesterday, I'm not that stupid, I've seen girls your age throwing away their chances.'

‘I'm not going to mess up my life.' Eleanor wants her mother to leave the room, so she can have a last proper look round, and get her cigarettes from under her mattress. But her mother stands there, stubbornly belligerent, a dark lump blocking her path.

‘Mum, trust me. I can look after myself.'

‘How are you going to get there?'

‘I'll take the coach.'

‘I don't want you hitching. You never know what kind of person might stop.'

‘Right.'

Her mother knows as well as she does that she's going to hitch. But these rituals must all be observed, before she can step out into her freedom.

‘Well.'

It seems to El that her mother is obstinate stupidity incarnate. It will take a bulldozer to shift her bulk out of El's path.

‘Well?' she risks.

‘I said, well. I've got to sort the washing.' Grudgingly, she turns in the doorway and El can feel her heart and lungs expanding as the constricting presence is removed. Light and quick as a swallow, she slips the last few things in her bag, darts to the bathroom, grabs her toothbrush, swoops down the stairs, listens for the sudden hush as her mother lifts the lid of the washing machine, and timing it perfectly, sings out, ‘Bye, Mum! I'll give you a ring on Saturday!' before, in a single balletic movement, hoisting the rucksack onto one shoulder and twisting the Yale lock and swinging open the front door with the other hand, stepping out into the light, pulling it closed with a locking thud behind her.

The lane is a blaze of light. But nothing can harm Eleanor. And nothing ever has. She ticked off a whole list of experiences that summer: sex, getting drunk, bumming cigarettes (and twice, money) off total strangers, LSD, learning her way around central London, art (working her way systematically round the National Gallery, memorising names, styles, movements).

It seems to her, looking back, that she was efficient yet not mechanical. Her memory of that summer holds snapshots of happiness. Lying on John's dishevelled bed after sex, naked and light as a feather in the afternoon sunlight, his fingers tracing a tickling line around her breasts and down her belly. Catching his eye as his spaced-out housemate rambles on over tea, and choking on her laughter. Emerging out of Charing Cross tube and climbing up onto Hungerford Bridge, staring down the gleaming river to St Paul's and Tower Bridge and relishing both her own joy in being there, and the cliché of that. Maybe that was the note of the whole summer. Her discovery of a world of things the world already knows – common experience, old things all bursting with new juicy pleasures. Sitting in a smoke-filled room at 2am with a bunch of people whose names she'd forgotten but who all loved and understood one another better than anyone in the whole idiotic world outside – that was new, and to be gathered in and savoured, as much as the strange beauty of the Italian Renaissance section in the National. She stood before Piero della Francesca's
Nativity
with tears in her eyes. Yes, other people liked it and thought it good. But her own response was more real, more rich, more special, than anyone else's.

Going home after that summer made her giddy with im­patience. Her mother was a dull weight seeking to attach itself to her rising star and drag her down with leaden fears. Eleanor was working hard at her A levels and getting top grades. She was dumping John and moving on through a succession of boys who amused and interested and pleasured her without ever hurting her feelings or breaking her heart. She was encased in her own bright bubble of confidence, her own spell of innocence, as secure as a babe in the amniotic sac, or as a young sleeping beauty in her eleven fairy godmothers' spells, and there was never any sign of a puncturing needle. Launching herself on adult life, she did exactly what she wanted as fast as she possibly could, and always got away with it. Con loved that. She knew he loved it in her, which made her even shinier. It was part of their myth; Con thorough and deliberate, El brilliant and fast – a perfect partnership, each counterbalancing the other, the tortoise and the hare. Acknowledging that was one of the early pleasures of the relationship. El remembers an evening soon after Paul was born; she was sitting at the kitchen table making notes, and Con was reading the Sunday paper with Paul dozing off over his shoulder. Con began to scoff over some mention of ‘female intuition' which he found patronising.

‘Why is it patronising?' El put her pencil in her book. He looked across at her suspiciously.

‘You know perfectly well why it's patronising.'

‘No I don't,' she laughed. ‘Tell me.'

‘For heaven's sake, El. Instead of having rational minds like men, poor little women have to make do with “intuition”?'

‘Oh, I see. I've always thought it was a good thing.'

Con raised his eyebrows.

‘But I guess I didn't see it as
instead of
a rational mind. I think of intuition as the highest action of the rational mind.'

‘Go on.'

‘Well, for me it is. When I make a decision —'

‘What sort of decision? Should this woman have a caesarean? Or, should I scratch my bum?'

‘A serious decision.'

‘OK.'

‘I make it by intuition.'

‘That's ridiculous.'

‘No. It's how I make my best decisions.'

‘In an instant, on a whim?'

‘Fast yes, but not on a whim. Everything feeds into it, your mind speeds up; your mind scans all the options and alternatives, but quickly, almost in a blur, so you can hold them all together at once in your head; you don't go, if
a
then blah blah blah, on the other hand if
b
then blah blah blah – you have the whole problem, and all possible outcomes on view like – like —'

‘An aerial photograph?' Con offered.

‘OK. I was going to say like all-round vision, so much the same. And then with all that in your head you leap to the best possible conclusion.'

‘Right. This is where it's silly. You do all this rational stuff and then you “leap”. You jump to a conclusion. That's not rational.'

‘It's not rational, it's better than rational. Because it involves some other form of knowledge as well.'

‘
Some other form of knowledge?
Like what? Primitive instinct?'

‘There isn't a term for it. OK, I'll tell you what it is. It's the knowledge that a trapeze artist has in letting go of one rope in mid-air and flying to the next, or the knowledge a researcher has in looking at the first batch of results and leaping to a conclusion. It's the knowledge that a fighter pilot has in suddenly swooping out of range of an enemy he's scarcely glimpsed.'

‘What's the good of a researcher leaping to a conclusion? You've shot your own argument down in flames.'

After he had put Paul to bed, they spent the rest of the even­ing dissecting how each of them individually had come to the decision that this was the house they should buy – which El had decided after fifteen minutes (intuitively) and Con after four days (rationally).

‘So intuition beats rational thought?' he asked slyly.

‘You know I'm not saying that, I'm saying it
incorporates
­rational thought.'

‘And beats it. By three days, twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes.'

‘Oh rubbish.'

He smilingly kissed her forehead.

Later her speed became a stick to beat her with. He accused her of bulldozing people at work, of riding roughshod over Cara's depression, of never stopping to think. She wonders if being with Conrad, over the years of his appreciation of her speed, and later, his opposition to it, have combined to make her more speedy; firstly by encouraging it, and then by forcing her into defiance. She thinks of the impatience he now fills her with, a physical pressure. Not just Con, most people. People are so slow. She always has to make allowances, to wait for them to catch up.

Blearily the present surfaces through the past, the thick grey back of a whale humping out of the waves. The bad thing is now, El realises. Con's vanishing is the puncture wound which will let it all slip out, all her bright success, all her confidence and certainty. This is how her finger gets pricked, this is where the bubble bursts.

It is possible to wander round this notion and examine it from different angles: she is still anaesthetised by the glow of the past. Last night's painful anxiety has not yet returned although she senses now it will. There is a kind of superstition which is attached to speed and success and happiness. It is to do with never letting the bad things in. Energy and movement have been her protection, and have all her life kept her immune from psychological harm. Con slowed down, and so made himself susceptible. She has had this argument with him more than once. About his work, last year. ‘If it's not going anywhere, if it's stopped engaging you – for heaven's sake, Con, get out.'

‘Out and into what?'

‘There are other areas of research you could move into. Look at some of the cancer treatment work that's being done with immunosuppressants.'

‘I've spent half my career on the transplant programme.'

‘It's not so different – you know that as well as I do.'

‘There isn't anything.'

‘How do you know if you don't look?'

‘I know.'

‘The only thing that's stopping you getting out of the monkey house is your own depression. If you told yourself it was possible —'

‘Your mind has this wonderful ability, my dear, to sprinkle gold dust everywhere you tread, but —'

‘You don't even try. You're just completely negative.'

‘But for some of us, our minds sprinkle shit, and we see it coming and then we tread in it.' He let the bad thing in. It is like any other imbalance. Once a person starts eating too much, even if they diet later, they have destroyed their natural balance. Once fear and gloom and despair are allowed in, you are contaminated.

On cue the doorbell rings. She hurries to get it before they ring again and wake Dan. A policeman and woman ask to come in.

‘Have you found – have you got some news?'

But they haven't. They've come to take away Con's computer and personal papers.

‘People often leave clues on computers,' says the man, as if she were stupid. ‘They think they can delete things but we have ways —'

‘Yes, I know.' She has already decided not to tell them about the MAD emails; let's see how long they take to find them, she tells herself, and let's see what they do about them when they do find them. It probably won't be these two anyway, it will be a special computer nerd in a garret somewhere. If they find something she's missed – well, good.

Within minutes they are gone, the full drawers of Con's desk piled in the arms of the man, the woman clutching the computer tower, its lead dangling pathetically. El is left surveying the gaping absences in Con's room. Her eyes fill with tears. It is ridiculous to howl about his room when she hasn't cried for him. But she shouldn't have let them take his computer. God knows how long they'll be, and his work is on it. In Con's recent state of mind, how good is he likely to have been at backing things up? What if they accidentally wipe it? She should have made copies, she should have told them she needed copies.