Conrad & Eleanor (16 page)

‘Well, the other woman's pregnant.'

‘Ah.'

‘He's a foul old thing anyway, he's about forty, and there's a first wife somewhere in the background too. Min's better off without him. But she's really upset about the sex —'

‘Upset about it?'

El bounced gleefully on the edge of the bed. ‘She thinks she'll never find anyone to have such good sex with again.'

‘Blimey. What does he do?'

‘I shouldn't tell you.'

‘Oh yes you should. You get in bed, I'll nip down and fetch up the rest of the wine.'

‘What rest of the wine?'

‘You're joking! Has she found the whisky?' Con crept down to the dining room and took Grouse and glasses from the sideboard. A crack of light still showed under the kitchen door; there was the sound of running water, and of Min singing softly to herself. ‘Alas my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously…' When he got back to the bedroom El took one look at him and shrieked with laughter.

‘Hush! Hush!'

‘Your face! What is it?'

‘She's in the kitchen, singing “Greensleeves”.' Neither of them could stop giggling.

‘Ssh!'

He poured them each a slug. ‘Tell me about the sex.'

‘It's just all so – elaborate. Apparently he's got this thing about doing it outside.'

‘All Italians do.'

‘How d'you know that?'

‘Stick around, honey. I know some things.'

‘Right. Well, they both go out with nothing on under their coats —'

‘Nothing?'

‘Not a stitch. Just shoes. And then they go to a restaurant where the waiter offers to hang up their coats so they dither and say they'll keep them just for now, thanks.' El choked on her whisky and had to be thumped on the back. ‘We're making so much noise!'

‘She's downstairs, she won't hear.'

‘And while they eat they're exposing themselves through the buttons, or sticking their feet up each other's coats —'

‘With shoes on?'

‘You're ruining it.'

‘Sorry.'

‘And drinking delicious wine, and pouring the odd dribble down the inside of their coats to lick off later —'

‘Mmmm.'

‘When they've finished their meal in a nice, slow, decorous fashion, they leave the restaurant and find the nearest dark alley, open up the coats and have a good long fuck against the wall.'

‘Sounds wonderful.'

‘Or climb over the fence and do it in the park.'

‘Climb over the fence?'

‘Apparently. So they can sit on the edge of a bench. That's her favourite —'

‘Sitting on a bench?'

‘Well, you know, sitting on him on a bench —'

Con imagined large pale lugubrious Min wobbling on a park bench on top of her elderly lover, who would be a rather frail, skinny gent. ‘Stop it, I can't breathe!'

El's face was pink with laughter. ‘Oh God, I shouldn't tell you this!'

‘What did you tell
her
about us?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Liar.'

‘Nothing.'

‘Liar!'

‘What would you like me to have told her?'

‘Well, I just hope you made it exotic enough.'

‘Nothing true, then?'

‘Baggage!' They rolled and rocked together on the bed.

Min, whose mental age, Con suggested to El, was very close to Paul's, encouraged Paul and Megan in elaborate games of dressing up, making extravagant headgear out of cereal boxes, tinfoil, feathers and plastic bottles. She took them out to the Oxfam shop to buy long skirts for robes and trains. Paul's incipient hostility to the new baby (‘I would of liked it if it was a boy') was totally deflected. Con and El found themselves with delicious giggly afternoons alone with Cara, who learned to crawl backwards at great speed before discovering the other direction. When Min was tipsy (most nights) she was lugubriously funny, relating the woeful tales of her attempts to find a job. She didn't get one in a bookshop because they asked her maths questions about how much change she'd give, and she was thinking in lira and said three thousand instead of three pounds. She didn't get one in a travel agent's because the woman who ran it wanted to know if she was married, and when she said she wasn't, told her she didn't think she was suitable, because some of the men who came in made difficult requests.

‘Sounds right up your street!' laughed El.

‘Are you sure it was a travel agent's?' Con wanted to know.

‘I haven't told you the filing one yet. You know that one you found in the local paper, El? Filing and light reception duties?'

‘Yup, it's really near —'

‘Builders' merchants. It's in a kind of garage, no heating. The entire place is plastered with pornographic posters, and there are these cardboard boxes – I kid you not – a pile of about fifteen cardboard boxes completely full of damp scraps of paper – ­letters, bills, receipts, final demands, old fag packets, snotty tissues and chip wrappers —'

‘You're making it up.'

‘I am not. And this monster-man with a beer gut the size of your fridge goes, “All you gotta do is transfer that lot into the new filing cabinet, darling.” And there isn't even a
desk
—' Her dramatic arm swing sent a new bottle of wine flying. El's glance at Con as she mopped up reduced him to silent hysteria.

‘Sorry. As for the reception bit, well, the only furniture in the entire place was a camp bed. I suppose I was meant to
receive
callers on that.'

‘Why don't you go to the tech, or ring up the WEA? See if you can teach some Italian?'

‘But I don't teach Italian, I teach English.'

‘I know, dimwit, but you could do conversation, couldn't you? You could do
basic
Italian.'

‘But I want to get away from all that, I want to put it behind me —'

‘Min, you can't start anything without money.'

‘No need to think about it again till Monday now. We're going to cook you a fantastic tea tomorrow. Me and Paul and Megan, we're making a five-course feast, starting with quails' eggs and ending with chocolate mousse, with mead to drink, and everyone has to dress up like kings and queens…'

Her room became a treasure trove of jumbled bargains, chocolate biscuits, dirty towels, rejection letters, half-empty glasses, and all the household scissors, pens and Sellotape. Paul and Megan foraged through it in amazed delight. El and Con discussed Min as they walked around the reservoir next afternoon, with sleeping Cara strapped to Con's chest.

‘Has she always been like this?'

‘Pretty much.'

‘She's a complete fantasist.'

‘You like her, don't you?'

‘I think she's great. But she needs to sort herself out.'

‘I know. There must be a job that'll suit her, if only we could think —'

‘She doesn't seem to feel any urgency about it.'

‘D'you think we should ask her for food money?'

‘It would focus her on the need to earn. How's she financing the quails' eggs and mead?'

‘Well —'

‘El, you're not giving her money.'

‘Think what we're saving on an au pair.'

‘Yeah, but it's not helping her, is it? She's twenty-six, she needs to be a bit more responsible.'

‘You don't think we could employ her as an au pair for a bit?'

‘It would be mad. For a start she creates chaos wherever she goes. Also she needs to learn to stand on her own two feet.'

‘You're right. Well, I'm going to find out which of the local schools offer Italian.'

Min made them co-conspirators: plotting to find her a suitable job; managing her shameless requests for loans. She was the perfect foil to the whole family; even Megan would burst out joyously, ‘Look what silly Minnie done!' pointing out the latest outrage of burnt cake, coffee-stained carpet, or disastrous use of hair dye. (She escaped a whole week of job hunting after dyeing her light-brown hair deep red, with a corresponding immovable stain across her forehead, ears and neck, so she looked as if she'd been dipped head first in red wine.)

‘It's like having another child!' El confided to Con, and it was, making them amused and exasperated allies. But she also gave them time together to enjoy it. Leaving the kids with Min was much simpler than leaving them with an au pair, since the kids loved it, and it was a way for Min to pay them back. They spent a couple of evenings a week in the pub, relishing each ­other's company, and once attempting, with some hilarity, to enact Min's favourite sexual fantasy. Mostly they just talked, making plans for the kids and for Min, and arguing over the chapter headings for El's IVF book, which at that stage they seriously thought they might co-write. And through that whole laughing giddy time, Cara grew sweet and round and golden-haired, everybody's darling, the sun that warmed the whole family.

He must have drifted off to sleep because he wakes with a memory of that sun, and with a chill of dread upon him. It's gone. All gone. Now the dark is stretching its fingers towards him, and warmth and laughter are as unrecoverable – as unattain­able – as sweet midsummer sunshine in the midst of winter's frost.

He gets up quickly and reaches for his shoes. The late afternoon daylight is already failing. When he turns on the light, outside the window becomes dark blue. The memory of his previous night spent huddled beneath the window, and of his hunger, comes back to him. He will go out and buy supplies of food, and a bottle of wine, to see him through the night. He will prepare himself against the dread which already seems to be taking him by the throat… How stupid to have slept in daylight, wasted the day in sleep. When darkness is the thing he wants to blot out. When darkness is what he really fears…

In the dark street Con doesn't know which way. The cold mist that has hovered all day is low again, blurring and haloing streetlights, making an icy wetness that trails against his face like thick cold cobwebs, muffling sound so that passing vehicles loom, blare, then suddenly fade. Footsteps come from nowhere, volume distorts.

End of the road and a sudden stream of traffic, he jiggles from foot to foot trying not to glance behind, keep moving, keep moving, steps into a gap in the traffic and is wrong-footed by a dark shape that scuttles after him and cuts in front – almost loses his balance. Close behind him a man shouts and there's a streak of pressure against his calf. He blunders on to the opposite pavement and the scuttling dog is waiting, its lead stretched taut past his leg to its owner somewhere behind Con. In the light of a shop window Con sees the little dog's ratty trails of hair and nasty bat-face snarling up at him. He stumbles on.

The shops are still open, despite the dark; here in the awful cold a florist's shop brims with garish colour; scarlet and yellow roses in tight buds that will never open, dyed blue daisy-like flowers, unnaturally turquoise. He hurries on, blinking the clashing colours from his eyes. A lit hairdresser's clear as a goldfish bowl; an oblivious young man with sandy-golden hair, tawny lion hair, is being trimmed. Fair hair like Cara's. Cara hair.

They are a family of dark hair. Thick, glossy, choking black is Eleanor's, Paul's, Megan's, Dan's, and dark brown was Con's, before the grey. And tawny golden lion-haired Cara. ‘Must be the milkman's,' he had said. Joke.

He knows the slightly wiry texture of Cara's hair, he knows the shape and curl of it, how she has to keep it long so the weight of it makes waves – if it's too short it curls around itself like a lamb's thick fleece. He has been combing Cara's hair ever since there was enough of it to comb. From the first year of her life. Because he knows it better than his own there is a sense in which it belongs to him. Although, of course, it is nothing of his. Between a father and his adopted child form emotional bonds of closeness over years. Proximity and habit, the habit of love, turn strangers into family. For the adoptive father, it is all gain; he turns a random little girl into his very own.

But played the other way, all loss. Turning his blue-eyed daughter, his laughing infant, lasting product of the transient pleasure of numberless unions between Eleanor and himself, gold currency coined by the hammering of their flesh on flesh, astonishing reward for what they did together for their own delight – into a fraud. Counterfeit, an impostor. Turning his daughter into his not-daughter, and his pleasure, retrospectively, into another man's. Of course dogs chase him. The severed nerves and sinews of love that bound her to him trail behind him down the street like a string of intestines. He is gutted.

That the year of Cara's birth was the happiest of their marriage was Con's myth, in which Eleanor so skilfully conspired that he fully thought it a joint myth; enjoying, thanks to there being more than one believer, the status of objective truth. Instead of the defiant efficiency El displayed after the births of Paul and Megan – instead of rushing back to work, programming meetings, slotting breastfeeds into the tea breaks in her schedule – she hesitated. She waited. She failed to organise. She was gentler, softer, than her old self. Con was moved to see in her a more consuming maternal affection than she had displayed with either of the first two. She would change her mind and not go out, because Cara cried. He would find her sometimes standing over the cot watching the child sleeping – a habit he himself had had from the first. She had grown up, joined him, on an emotional plane which she had briskly discounted with their first two children. Sometimes, as she fed Cara, she was blinking back tears, which filled Con himself with a primitive desire to protect her. He remembers one afternoon when Min had taken the other two out, sitting on the arm of the chair and putting his arm around El, drawing her head in to rest against his chest. The vision of himself, stern with love, perched on the chair arm protectively embracing his damp-eyed wife and baby, revolts him. He is disgusted at the creature that he was, at his culpably innocent pomposity, at his assumption that he is understood, his pitiful desire to play the man. It is disgust and shame, as if he had found a picture of himself masturbating in public. Eleanor was weeping for her lover, her baby's father. And so blinding was Con's own arrogance that he welcomed her grief as a sign of dependence, and used it to bolster his own self-importance. Calling it all ‘love'.