Conrad & Eleanor (20 page)

Con tells her he doesn't even know the guy's name and points out to her that it will be necessary to withhold his own name from his statement. He's written it the previous evening; a deliberately undramatic account itemising the ways in which the state of the animals contravenes the law.

She reads it in silence then glances up at him. ‘The photos?'

‘I'm not convinced the photos are necessary.'

‘I've been told that they are. A picture is worth a thousand words, you know. People join the protest when they see pictures, it's so much more immediate.'

He thinks about her nameless instructors and wonders if she sees herself performing for them, in her head. ‘Names, pictures, dates, don't let anything slip.' She reminds him of a little girl at school, with her notebook. ‘Well, I need to think a bit longer about the photos. They may well have CCTV footage of me taking them.'

‘You weren't breaking the law. They were.'

‘Yes, but they can ID me from the CCTV footage. Bang goes my anonymity.'

She nods doubtfully. ‘OK. Who are the people you've talked to so far?'

‘How d'you mean?'

‘The other researchers. Your boss, your colleagues.'

‘You don't need their names.'

‘Not to use in the public domain, of course not. But it really helps the cause if we can build up our information banks, like just knowing how many scientists are involved, their names and universities…'

There is no point in withholding names, seeing as she knows his and knows where he works. She could find out from the university website anyway.

When she has finished writing she thanks him and puts her little book away, his statement carefully folded inside. And then they just chat and eat. She wants to know about his family, his children, but when he asks her in return she shakes her head, wide eyed. ‘Oh no, I've never been married. I'm not in a relationship.' She asks about El's career, and what the children all do. He realises that he has drunk most of the wine and that he is talking a lot, but it is pleasant to sit in the glow of her attention and to hear her murmurs of admiration when he explains that he has looked after the children on a more regular basis than El, who has a more important career than he does. It is pleasant to paint an attractive picture of his life (and it is, after all, an attractive life, a privileged life, of secure income, loving family, interesting work). She seems to him almost a beggar at life's feast; an only child of working-class parents already dead – living alone, a wanderer who has taught English as a foreign language in half a dozen different cities, never settling, developing attachments to pets rather than people. ‘I had such a beautiful clever cat in Granada, it broke my heart to leave her. She used to tap on the window for me to let her in at night, and my room was on the third floor. That cat could have climbed the Eiffel Tower.'

He finds himself searching her words and face for clues to her solitariness. She's attractive enough – much more attractive, indeed, than she seemed at their first meeting. She's kind-hearted. Why has no man – or woman – snapped her up? When it is time to go for his train he pays and carries her bag as far as the lifts. ‘I'm sorry,' she puts her hand on his arm. ‘I need to go up the stairs. I have a stupid thing about lifts.'

He carries her bag up two flights of stairs and at the fire door at the head of the corridor he passes it back to her. ‘Thank you so much,' she whispers. ‘I've had a lovely time. And you will make such a difference.' To his surprise she stands on tiptoe and pecks him on the cheek, then turns with a smile that is de­cidedly flirtatious, and moves off down the corridor.

He has to run for his train. But her sudden hot breath on his face, and the knowing tilt of her smile, stay with him rather disturbingly. Poor girl. Woman. Poor, lonely woman. And yet there is more to her than that. He finds himself basking, rather, in a sense of his own attractiveness.

E
l ends up
rushing to the supermarket for food for Paul and Cara. But once she is in there she might as well stock up on stuff like toilet rolls and washing powder, because she can't remember how much they have left of anything and it would be stupid to run out. She decides a chicken will be easy and only remembers Paul is vegetarian when she is in the queue for the till. Then she ends up drifting aimlessly up and down the aisles unable to think of a single vegetarian meal apart from omelette. She tries to conjure the things Con makes for them, with beans, lentils, nuts, feta cheese. She can't make a Con-type meal, though, even if she could remember one. Pancakes? They would stick to the pan or tear. Soufflé? Too tricky. It needs to be something she can make in advance, not have to fiddle about with while they sit in the kitchen watching her critically.

Since when is she incapable of cooking for her own children? The division of labour has been very marked in recent times. Con cooks, El works late. But surely to God she can throw something together. She ends up buying eggs, green lentils, tins of kidney beans and chickpeas, and pine nuts. Plus salad stuff. She can look for a recipe at home. Here in the crowded brightness of the supermarket her brain is refusing to function at all. Why is it so busy? It is Saturday, she remembers. When she has loaded her food into the car she remembers fruit for dessert and has to go back again to buy overpriced and probably tasteless strawberries, the only soft fruit on offer.

Back at the house she checks phone and emails, nothing, and sits down with the Rose Elliot cookbook. The phone rings – Megan.

‘Mum, I could come home first thing tomorrow. But is there anything useful I can do?'

‘I wish there was. I don't know what to do myself. None of us do. Cara went to Munich but she's coming back empty-handed.'

‘Have the police —?'

‘No. Nothing.'

‘But have you tried
everyone
who knows him?'

‘Yes. Paul's been through his address book.'

‘Can't they trace mobile phones?'

‘Only if he uses it.'

There's a silence. El thinks she should ask Megan about her play, but she can't remember what it is. ‘To be honest, Megan, it's pretty pointless you coming home. Unless you want to.'

‘Well – OK. I'll ring you in the morning and see. Bye, Mum.'

When the line goes dead El sits staring at the grain of the kitchen table. She doesn't know what to cook. She doesn't know what play her daughter is performing in. She has not even opened her emails today, and she doesn't want to now. Sitting staring at the table is about as much as she can do. She thinks of her colleague Linda at work. Linda's husband died recently of something short and sharp. Peritonitis, maybe. And Linda was off work with compassionate leave. When she came back she sent an email round to everyone in the department, thanking them for their kindness and support, for the beautiful flowers and for the much-appreciated home-cooked meals and cakes people had brought round. El had not done that. She had contributed to the flowers, but she had not made cakes or meals; it seemed to her rather voyeuristic fussing, to go noseying in on Linda's grief, bearing food. She thought Linda would be better off keeping herself busy doing her own cooking; it would provide her with a distraction.

Now El sees that what she needs more than anything is a friend to come round with a home-cooked meal, and that she is such a cold and heartless woman that she never even made any attempt to understand Linda's distress – or indeed anyone else's, ever. Even Louis, who she thought was fond of her at the very least, cannot be bothered with her. No wonder Con has left her: she is a monster. She hasn't tried to understand how he feels, she hasn't put herself in his shoes, she hasn't done anything at all to deserve his love and loyalty. And now she is crying with self-pity, which is the most despicable emotion of all.

The phone rings; the police, wanting to ask about Con's computer. There are a few emails in a folder called MAD. Was Eleanor aware of them? Yes, she says, and no, she doesn't know who they are from. If there's nothing else, please can she have the computer back? They promise to return it shortly.

El spends two hours making a lentil dhal which turns out to be almost inedibly hot, rice, salad and hard-boiled eggs. When Paul and Cara arrive Cara refuses all food.

‘I just need to go to bed, I'm tired.'

‘But you must eat something, Cara – you must.'

‘I'll have a banana, OK?'

Bananas are, of course, what El has failed to buy. The two in the fruit bowl are almost black. ‘It's all right,' says Cara, ‘stop fussing.'

‘Did you – was there anything you —?'

‘No. It was completely hopeless. I've just been telling Paul, I can't face going over it all again. Ask him.' Cara stamps off upstairs as if El has offended her. And El and Paul sit awkwardly over the unappetising food.

‘She didn't tell me much more than that,' Paul concedes. ‘She talked to the people at his hotel and the conference centre, and no one had noticed anything. I think she spent a lot of time just pacing the streets. You know what she's like, she was expecting some kind of sixth sense to lead her to him.'

‘She looks terrible.'

Paul shrugs. ‘Oh, she went to the British embassy too, and they kept her waiting for hours and nobody did anything.'

‘Megan might come tomorrow,' El offers.

‘Police been back?'

‘They've searched the house, you know that. They rang and said they're bringing his computer back soon.' If the police find anything of interest about the MAD emails, that will be soon enough to tell him. She cannot cope with a rant from him about how badly she and Con behave. Paul toys with his food in silence. She wishes he could be kind to her, she is about to cry for lack of kindness.

‘I don't know what to do, Paul.'

He looks at her, and she feels his anger relax a notch. ‘There has to be something. If everything at home and in his room has been checked, then someone has to go through his work stuff. Have the police been there?'

‘I don't even know.'

‘Well, if I can get a key, I could go tomorrow. I'll see if I can go through his work desk and computer. Will you phone Gus to ask about access?'

‘Of course.'

‘What are you doing about work?' he suddenly asks.

‘What d'you mean?'

‘Shouldn't you get a sick note or something? You've hardly been in this week, have you.'

‘Well no, but —'

‘We can't keep on acting as if nothing's happened. There's no point in pretending you can carry on as normal – you can't.'

‘But there's nothing for me to do at home.'

‘Are you up for going into work?'

El hesitates. ‘No, I suppose not.'

‘Right then. Go to the doctor on Monday.'

El realises this is the closest her son can come to being kind to her. When he leaves she clears up the pointless meal and goes to knock softly on Cara's door, but there is no reply.

She remembers the question of money, raised by the policeman, and spends an hour going through Con's old bank statements. There is absolutely nothing untoward. He earns and spends the same amount each month, and every three months or so he shifts any surplus into his savings account with the bank. He has £27,000 in his savings account, and has not drawn anything out of it since they had the roof done five years ago.

This leads her to depressing thoughts about access to bank accounts, and wills, and she takes herself to bed, thinking that if she can't sleep she will read. But she is unable to find a single book which looks interesting.

She has a shower and lies in bed with the light off, knowing she will not sleep. OK, she won't sleep. She'll think, then. She permits herself to consider, again, where things went wrong. It is hard to find defining moments. Things shift slowly, imperceptibly, over years. Accretion, accretion, the slow accretion of tiny details of speech and action like specks of dust which gradually bury the partners in a marriage and make movement, change, impossible. At the point at which you notice change, it has already long ago occurred. Con's souring, his silting up, his loss of enthusiasm and energy, she had already known it for a while when she first
noticed
it. But she remembers when she noticed it most recently: it was when the animal libbers went to the press with a lot of allegations about the animal house used by his lab. That was a defining moment; a moment where she could measure the gap between his position and the position she might have expected him to have.

The first she knew of it was an item on the news as she drove to work. ‘Allegations of incompetence and negligence have been made against Carrington Bio-Life animal facility…'

‘What's going on? Did you know about it?' she asked him, that evening.

‘Yeah. It's nothing serious.'

‘Have they got evidence?'

He shrugged. ‘Probably made it all up.'

Taking her cue from Con, El dismissed it from her mind. But next morning the paper carried a grainy picture of a pitiful monkey with a pig's heart grafted to its neck. Cara shrieked in horror. ‘Dad? Is this what you do? Dad? Dad!'

‘You know what I do, Cara. I'm working on stopping one animal from rejecting another creature's heart, in the hopes of developing a better range of drugs to prevent organ rejection in human transplants.'

‘But on its
neck
!'

‘What do you want us to do? Carve its chest open and take out its own heart, to put the pig's in there? We can monitor the new heart's health, on the neck – we can see quickly when things go wrong —'

‘But it's vile!'

‘Shut up, Cara.'

It was rare for him to be harsh with Cara. The picture revolted El too, but she told herself she was being squeamish; this was necessary. Lives would be saved by it. ‘I don't understand where they've got the picture from,' she asked him. ‘Those swimmy lines on it – it looks like a still from a video.'

‘The press have got the pictures off the internet.' He put on his coat and went to work before she could say anything else. The story accompanying the picture provided all the details. The anti-vivisection group had been given info by a mole working in the animal house. Key facts were bullet pointed in the article on page 19:

• regulation monitoring procedures were not followed;
  
• entries on records of inspection of post-op animals were forged;
  
• clearly distressed moribund animals were not being euthanised.
  

This was not a random animal lib attack on wicked vivisectionists cutting up our furry friends. They argued that unacceptably high rejection rates of grafted organs were not being properly reported, in an attempt to prolong research which would otherwise be terminated. There was a whiff of authenticity to the whole thing. El recognised the information as being uncomfortably close to what she already knew: the pig/monkey heart transplant programme was posited on the notion of an imminent breakthrough in immunosuppressant drugs. Yet Con had been working on it – she calculated – nearly nine years. Were they any nearer a breakthrough now than when he started? He hadn't mentioned it, if they were.

At lunchtime she went to the PECA website and read the entire document. From the beginning of the story – the dodgy purchasing and importation arrangements for monkeys (in cages smaller than the minimum legal requirements; and after two, not six months' quarantine, meaning that they could be carrying the Aids-related virus or other viruses which might be equally dangerous to humans) to the unacceptably high death rate in surgery, to the failure to properly record and monitor post-op progress, to the total unrelieved failure rate – not one monkey survived with any quality of life – the catalogue of wretchedness seemed all too plausible. No wonder Con didn't talk much about work. No wonder he was depressed. Why on earth didn't he get out?

She raised it when she got in at 10 that night, after a long course-planning committee meeting that was followed by Louis and her needing to get something to eat together. ‘I don't know why you stay at the lab, Con. I mean, what's the point in doing something that's going nowhere?'

‘Because mostly we think it isn't going nowhere. We hope it's going somewhere. That's why we do the research, El.'

‘Don't be sniffy with me. If there have been no advances and this heralded breakthrough is still as elusive as —'

‘Who says there have been no advances?'

‘That website —'

‘Since when did you believe a bunch of rabid animal libbers?'

‘It seems an intelligently argued record, Con. Haven't you looked at it?'

‘What am I going to learn from some piece of hysteria?'

‘It feels convincing. Whoever wrote it either works there himself or is in very close communication with someone who does.'

‘I doubt that, my dear know-all, because it would be more than anyone's job is worth to release details of the work to the press; it's classified.'

‘Maybe someone doesn't care about their job – maybe they care more about the blatant abuses that are clearly —'

‘I'm glad you have such a high opinion of my work.'

‘Con, please, just look at the site and see what you think.'

‘The drug companies invest millions in this. How do you think they would deal with an employee stirring up bad publicity?'

‘Sack them, I suppose.'

‘You are an innocent, aren't you.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Whoever hits the immunosuppressant jackpot – and there has to be one, eventually, there has to be a cocktail of drugs which make the pig heart transplants possible – will become one of the richest companies on earth. Imagine. Every hospital in the world wants a supply.'