Conrad & Eleanor (17 page)

Lacerating incidents from that year. The belated celebration they had nearly a year after Cara's birth, a summer party in the garden on a cloudless June day; they had been in the new house two years and he had battled with the garden. There was a bank of delphiniums and smoke-blue lupins. On that afternoon there must have been sixty of their friends and relatives eating and drinking and laughing in the sunshine, and Eleanor and Cara running like a gold thread through the shifting groups and conversations; even as it unfolded the afternoon was in his mind a still moment of perfection, a richly woven tapestry, with jewel-bright daisies and buttercups underfoot, Eleanor in her long blue dress with the gold-haloed child in her arms, the children's echoing laughter as they played hide and seek in the bushes, a wisp of sound like smoke lingering in the air and mingling with the scent of the heavy old-fashioned chalk-pink roses that dropped their soft petals across the path. His picture, he had composed it; the figures and the background were his. His picture of happiness. He never noticed the death's head in the corner.

He remembers comforting Eleanor over Cara's skin; the eruptions of eczema that plagued her soon after her first birthday. He remembers telling her, every child is different, and the other two are probably prone to some illness that Cara will escape. He remembers Eleanor's grateful smile and nod.

He remembers the night after El's six-week check-up, her sitting in bed grinning at him as he undressed, and him grinning back, knowing what she meant. Knowing and acting upon that knowledge. But what had that grin really meant? She'd got away with it.

There are photos of Con and Cara. More than of him with any of the others. More than of him at any time, for that matter. El takes up the camera only occasionally, almost absent-­mindedly, fires off a few shots. But there are lots of him and baby Cara; him bathing her, dressing her, feeding her, playing with her on the floor. El must have done that deliberately; pictures of her husband bonding with Cara. To reassure herself. Or him.

And why did she invite Min? She and Min weren't close; they hardly ever saw her after she moved out. Her stay was a lovely, silly, isolated incident. Why invite her when there was a new baby and so much to do and El already knew what a ­chaotic creature Minnie was? She can't have known how well it would all work out. To convince herself, by contrast with poor Min, that the life she had with Con and the kids was worth hanging on to? Was Min a confidante? Is that the information El bartered, in exchange for Min's outlandish tales? Was Min there so that El could save herself from temptation to phone the man? She's told Con she broke it off before the birth, that the real father never knew she was pregnant. She must have found that hard. Enough to be afraid she couldn't sustain it? He doesn't know. It's not in his experience of Eleanor. The Eleanor he knows is not afraid of herself, is not anxious, is not impulsive, or guilty, or at the mercy of her emotions. Another man knew that Eleanor; he only knew the Eleanor his own limitations allowed him to observe. A four-square Eleanor, an ambitious, decisive, efficient woman, with no mysteries or hidden depths. As the eye, so the object; among the many distresses he feels this is perhaps the greatest, that he has created for himself (of her) so dislikeable a woman. What help can there be for either of them?

W
hen
E
leanor gets
home from the police station Dan tells her Cara has rung and will ring again later.

‘What did she say?' asks El.

‘Nothing.'

‘Well, was she OK?'

Dan stares at her in the way that he does.

‘Oh never mind,' says El, but he has formatted his reply.

‘She didn't say if she was OK.'

‘Thank you, Dan. Thanks for the message.' She spends a couple of hours finishing off her grant application; then she looks for some food and finds that they are out of bread and milk and cheese, and goes to the corner shop for bits and pieces because she can't face the supermarket. She does have a better conversation with Dan over food, which is good. He seems mercifully unperturbed by his father's absence, and agrees to being given his train fare to go back to his room at college and get on with his work, because there is nothing useful that he can do here.

She
can
talk to the children, she reassures herself, she can. It's just that Con is around at home more so he's the one they naturally go to. But it's easy for him and the kids to write her out of the domestic history. She and Con shared looking after the kids, for heaven's sake, and she had them on her own while Con was in America. She remembers enjoying the rare occasions when she was able to spend time alone with one of them – which seems to happen less and less, bizarrely, now they are all grown up. She thinks about Megan, who has flown the nest most successfully; immersed in her theatrical world, concerned about Con, yes, but not pestering, not emoting all over the place. El ought to make time to go and see her latest play; Con said she was very good in it. What was it?

But Megan won't mind if she goes or not; Megan understands the imperatives of a busy life. She rarely comes home, she has inherited El's driven genes. She doesn't demand attention from her parents in the ways that Paul and Cara do.

El suddenly remembers how easy it is to talk to Megan, and wishes that she were here. It is a long time since she has had her to herself. In fact the last time she can remember clearly is back when she took Megan to London for her RADA audition. El had arranged a meeting with a research partner from Cambridge, and she and Megan rendezvoused in the late afternoon at Wood Green tube, near the home of El's friend who they were staying with. It was a bright spring day and they decided to wander through Alexandra Park, following the curving paths up to the old Broadcasting House as they talked, watching the view of London unroll before them. There was a dusty, scruffy air to the park, and scaffolding on Alexandra Palace – it had all seen better days, El thought, but she could see that Megan was enchanted with everything to do with London. Her audition had gone well, she was confident they would take her (correctly, as it turned out) and bubbling with excitement at the prospect of life in London.

After El had quizzed her about the other applicants, and the staff she had met, and the first year students who had shown them round, and after Megan had described the photos and reviews from the previous year's shows, and the three theatres and rehearsal rooms she had seen, and they had found a bench to perch on to discuss the merits of hall of residence versus room in a shared house, Megan suddenly asked El about
her
day. El's meeting had been to review adjustments to the medium they were testing for lines of primate embryonic stem cells. She sketched out the research rather tentatively to Megan; none of the kids were interested in her work, and why should they be? But Megan suddenly said, ‘Is that how they made Dolly the sheep? She's a clone, right? Did they grow her from a bunch of stem cells?'

El laughed. ‘Not exactly.'

‘But it's the same kind of thing, isn't it? Are you going to grow an animal?'

‘No. We're interested in perfecting the
medium
the cells are kept in, so they can go on growing and we can go on splitting them and keeping them in their primordial state.'

‘But why? What's the point?'

‘OK, the point is to get this right so that we can go on to establish the best medium for
human
embryonic stem cell lines, which will be fantastically useful for research.'

‘How?'

‘Because they'll be able to test drugs on them. It'll be possible to see precisely how new drugs affect the health of the cells; and it'll also be possible to use them for tissue repair, say for someone with terrible burns. Maybe even one day, to repair or replace diseased organs. And there are particular illnesses, Parkinson's and diabetes are two, where healthy stem cells should be able to help slow or even reverse the disease.'

‘That's pretty amazing.'

‘Yes, I think so.'

‘So Dolly the sheep is nothing to do with this?'

‘Well, no, she
is
to do with it, because she was grown from a somatic cell and that shows that we could, in theory, grow tissue for an adult patient from that patient's somatic cells. Which would resolve the problem of rejection.'

‘Somatic?'

‘Normal body cell. Dolly was grown from an empty egg, that's an egg which they had removed the nucleus from, and the nucleus of a cell from the udder of a six-year-old sheep. You know why she's called Dolly, don't you?'

‘Pass.'

‘Dolly Parton.'

Megan began to giggle. ‘Is it a boobs reference?'

‘Correct.'

‘Will you be able to do it soon?'

‘What?'

‘Cure Parkinson's, repair burns —'

‘I don't know. You can never tell how long something's going to take, in science. Could be months, could be years.'

Megan smiled. ‘I can see why you like it.'

‘Good. I do like it. I love it!'

It is the only time El can recall talking to any of them ser­iously about her work, and now she hugs it to herself – she knows Megan is like her, hungry, ambitious – but at least Megan doesn't hold her in the contempt in which, she remembers now with vivid shame, she used to hold her own mother.

At 6.30 she cleans her teeth and puts on some make-up and heads off to meet Louis. There are four cars in the car park at the Golden Hind, none of them his. She has just settled herself in a corner with a tomato juice when he arrives. He waves and goes to the bar, and she watches him buy his drink. A small wiry man in a well-fitting suit, there is something about the tension in him, the coiled-ness of him, that draws the eye; has always drawn Eleanor's eye. His right foot is pedalling the bar footrest; his fingers drumming a rhythm on the bar. He is only still when he sleeps. As he turns to walk towards her their eyes meet and he smiles, deepening the creases that run from the sides of his nose to the corners of his wide mouth. His smile has always had a whiff of shared secrets and complicity; it is impossible not to smile back at him.

He kisses her lightly. ‘No news?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Heard from Cara?'

‘Dan has. She's going to hospitals. If she finds anything I'm sure she'll —'

Louis nods and sips his drink. Eleanor finds his urbanity distasteful. He sits here, smart and dapper, on his way home, untouched.

‘How did it go with Michael? Is he jet-lagged?' she asks.

‘Fine. He's full of beans. We did the MRC meeting then lunch with the great and the good, and he's been talking to Kirsty and co this afternoon while I was teaching. I've invited him to dinner tonight.'

‘Oh Louis, that's kind. I'm sorry to dump him on you.'

‘Don't be ridiculous.'

‘The stupid thing is, I could have him to dinner. I mean, I'm not doing anything, just hiding. It's like I'm in purdah.'

‘You don't need the strain of making polite conversation.'

‘You mean people don't need the strain of seeing someone who might be upset.'

‘I don't think people…'

‘Is everyone talking about Con?'

He shrugs. ‘A bit. Of course.'

‘I don't know what to do.'

‘There's not much you can do, is there. If you don't have any idea —'

‘You know I don't have any idea. What idea could I have? He's never done anything like this before.'

‘That's what I was saying.'

‘No you weren't. You said it as if – as if I
should
have some idea. Or even as if you thought I was having an idea but keeping it secret —'

‘Eleanor, stop it.'

‘Don't tell me to stop.' To El's horror, she has to swallow a choking sob. Tears have leapt to her eyes.

‘Is there anything I can do?' Louis says kindly.

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know. That's why I'm asking.'

‘Well, what would you suggest?'

‘For God's sake, El, I haven't made him disappear.'

‘Maybe we did. Maybe he just got fed up of this and thought sod it, why should I live with a woman who's seeing someone else, why should I —'

‘Eleanor, if he was going to run off because of you screwing someone else, he would have done it a long time ago.'

A part of Eleanor's brain observes that this is a very unpleasant thing for Louis to say, and that it reveals a level of contempt for her that she can do without. Putting that to one side for a moment, she analyses the content. Though superficially true, it is also wrong.

No one gives their definitive reaction on a first offence. No. Surely it is the cumulative weight of numerous offences, a build-up of insults, a continual, cynical battering, which finally triggers a reaction. El knows this – and feels for the first time a piercing certainty that this is what has happened. That Con has left for precisely this reason. Attrition. He can no longer imagine or make himself believe that things might get better. He has given up on her.

And now she can't suppress the tears. Picking up her bag she runs out of the pub and has locked herself in the car before Louis can get to her. He tries the door as she starts the engine.

‘Eleanor. Stop it. Stop! Don't be —'

His words are lost as she reverses wildly, swings round and out onto the mercifully empty road. She can hear her own throat roaring for air between sobs, she can see the road in bursts between gouts of tears, like driving through a thunderstorm. Con has gone because of her. She has finally driven Con away. Of its own volition, it seems, the car drifts towards the kerb and stops moving. The engine stalls. El leans her head on the steering wheel and cries.

Cara rings soon after Eleanor gets in. ‘Mum? Have you heard any —?'

‘No.'

‘I've been to all the hospitals. And the police – a woman told me all the places they've checked. He's not anywhere public.'

‘Well, come home, Cara. Get the first flight in the morning.'

‘I've just – I've been walking. You know, round the streets near his hotel, just looking at the people. There are so many people in the streets. I just keep thinking I'll see him if I keep doing it, I'm going to see him, he's going to be one of these people coming down the street —'

‘It doesn't make sense. If he was there, and all right, he wouldn't just be walking down the street, would he. He'd be on a plane coming home.'

‘What about amnesia? He might have had a bump on the head and —'

‘Then he'd be in hospital.'

‘But he might be all right. Not realise. Just be walking about —'

‘He'd have to be staying somewhere, using money, showing his ID…'

The line crackles over their silence. ‘Come home, Cara. When's your return flight?'

‘Tomorrow night.'

It suddenly seems to El that getting Cara home quickly is more important than anything. ‘Change your ticket. I'll pay. Get the morning flight.'

‘I'll see.'

‘Please, Cara.'

‘Bye, Mum.'

Louis calls a couple of times and she switches off her mobile. The second time he leaves a message. ‘Ring me, Eleanor. This is silly.' She is not going to ring him.

Paul returns, hears that the police have not rung back about the computer, and goes down to the station himself the following morning. As a result of his efforts a tall, diffident detective sergeant materialises on the doorstep in the late afternoon. He accepts El's offer of tea and the three of them sit at the kitchen table talking through the case. It is immediately obvious that very little is being done. Someone is going through Con's computer today and it will be returned tomorrow. They are willing to liaise with police in Munich but if he has left Munich he could be anywhere – anywhere in the world.

‘He could have come back to England,' Paul says suddenly.

‘Of course. By some other flight. Or Eurostar. He could be anywhere.'

‘And is there no mechanism for —'

‘For what? Finding one person, who may be deliberately concealing his identity, in the whole world? I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but it's true, there's no way we could find him. His bank account hasn't been touched since the Saturday of the conference; he withdrew 250 euros that morning, from the cashpoint opposite his hotel. If he uses the card again the bank will tell us, but so far…' He shrugged.

‘If he's not withdrawing money, he's not spending it.' Paul's voice is light and reasonable.

‘Correct.'

‘The only way you don't spend money is if someone else is looking after you. Or if you're dead.'

‘Or if you've already transferred some to a different account, perhaps under another name. We'll be checking back with his bank for movement of funds in the recent past.'

El knows she can do that immediately. His statements are in the blue ring-binder on the bottom bookshelf in his room. It is refreshing that the detective offers neither reassurance nor sympathy; he is simply going through the facts. El appreciates his business-like attitude. Nevertheless she is taken aback when he drains his tea and says, ‘Now I'd like to search the house, if I may.'