Conrad & Eleanor (21 page)

‘Go on.'

‘You think sacking is the worst they'd do to a person who threatened their research programme?'

‘You're being melodramatic.'

‘OK. Then why doesn't this alleged mole, whoever they are, why doesn't he or she go public, instead of this cloak and dagger stuff ? Why doesn't he go properly to the papers instead of to a bunch of anti-vivisectionist nutters?'

‘You think a mole has to hide behind the animal libbers?'

‘I think it's all a load of shite.'

‘But Con – just look at it and see what you think?'

He left the room without replying, and she didn't raise it again until the following weekend, lying in bed with the Sunday papers, where an in-depth piece about ‘Who are the real Animal Liberationists?' was touted in the magazine. ‘Did you look?'

‘At what?' He was pretending to read the sport.

‘The website.'

‘I glanced at it.'

‘Well?'

‘There's a lot of unsupported claims. It's easy to make an animal research lab look bad.'

‘You don't think it's authentic?'

‘Not for a moment.'

And that was the end of it. The press dropped the story after a couple of days; there was no indication that the claims were being pursued either by police or funding bodies; the issue seemed closed.

But Con's indifference to the claims struck El unpleasantly. At some level, she thought, he had given up; had become so firmly chained to his job and his pension that even if the work was dehumanising and going nowhere, he would stay with it, because it required more energy and imagination than he could muster to get out. She began to feel a degree of contempt for him.

Then came the flare-up before Christmas. They were supposed to be going shopping. El had had a run of evening lectures and work-related social events which Con had boycotted, declining the role of what he termed ‘celebrity spouse'. She was uncomfortably conscious of the number of evenings he must have spent home alone. She found an empty Thursday evening in her diary and suggested meeting in town for late-night shopping and a meal.

When the kids were little Con had been an inspired Christmas shopper, hunting down wonderful toys for each of them, and going to great lengths, as they got older, to find the latest album Paul wanted, a particular brand of make-up favoured by Megan, a jacket patterned with parrots which Cara wore till it was rags, computer games even Dan had not yet tracked down. El remembers how good he used to be at buying her clothes: he had bought her the green silk skirt she still wears from time to time for dinners; he chose her blue wool jacket, and the little black top with sequins at the neck. But no more. As if he is a firm being modernised, retrenching, cutting back on services, he has stopped shopping; now offers money or a token instead.

So the impulse to take him shopping was, she knew, contaminated: he would read it as her attempt to jolly him along, to rekindle some dying ember of past pleasure, and he would be as recalcitrant as a sulky kid. But if she just left him at home to rot, how would that help either of them? She had to do
something
. If they started where he could find something pretty for Cara and Megan – Monsoon or Kookaï – then he might get into a better mood and…

Forlorn hope. El herself was late to meet him, thanks to a Ph.D. student who responded to criticism by bursting into tears and revealing that her partner had cancer. Con received her excuse in silence and walked out of Kookaï after two minutes complaining that the music was too loud and the clothes overpriced. El found an embroidered bag for Megan in Accessorize, but Con barely glanced at it, took no notice of the beads and earrings that might have been good for Cara, and requested that they stop and eat before progressing to the bookshop.

It was in the buzzing gloom of La Tasca that the argument flared. The place was full of late-night shoppers and service was slow; El realised the shops would be closing by the time they were done. But there was no point in shopping with him anyway, in this mood; she would do her own shopping in half the time, and if he wanted to behave like an old person, that was his lookout.

Intolerable, though, to sit in silence, with raucous Christmas drinking parties and excitedly chattering shoppers all around them. So she unthinkingly asked him how he'd got on at work today. His tone was light and unpleasantly ironic. ‘Oh, the usual, you know. The last two animals from the November round were euthanised this week so I'm analysing data from the post-­mortems. Then I'll write up the report explaining why our success rate is no higher than it was last July.'

‘I can't understand why you're still doing this, Con.'

‘It's my job, dear, they pay me on a monthly basis, rather well.'

‘You don't have to do it for the money.'

‘Really? Let's see, what else could I do? How can I choose between the army of employers beating a path to my door, all eager for the services of a fifty-year-old man with highly specific and increasingly redundant research experience?'

‘It's not redundant.'

‘It is. You know that as well as I do. You know it better than me, you little hypocrite.'

‘Con, I don't see why —'

‘Let's get to the bottom of this, shall we? For once and for all. In case you hadn't noticed, you earn twice as much as me.'

‘Yes, but that doesn't matter —'

‘To me unfortunately it does. Which is one reason why I'm unwilling to give up work which is at least half-decently paid, in order to return to being some tin-pot researcher's lab boy.'

‘Money's never been an issue.'

‘No, indeed, but when all else fails there is at least a kind of dignity in earning.'

‘You don't need to do this.'

‘What do you know about what I need to do?'

‘To be working at something that's going nowhere, day in day out, it's enough to depress anyone.'

‘It's how most people spend their working lives.'

‘But —'

‘You think the majority of the population find their work rewarding and fulfilling? Processing peas, assembling car parts, digging holes in the road, checking tax returns?'

‘There's some point at least to most jobs, something useful's being produced.'

‘Well, you know, Eleanor, there was some point to my work – many would say, a quite significant and valuable point, certainly not a harmful one – making more hearts available for transplant is not a harmful one: but my dear, in research as in the rest of nature, the fit survive and the weaker specimens go to the wall.'

‘Are you trying to blame me?'

‘Not personally. We both had choices. I chose a blind alley, and you have followed your clever little nose to success. And the irony will not have escaped you that now your success helps ensure our failure. Because the obvious way, thanks to you lot, to develop transplant organs is via stem cell growth. Why would anyone continue to fund a Neanderthal pig-to-human transplant programme when the shiny prospect of own-cell grown human hearts is being dangled like a carrot?'

‘You think
I'm
making your work invalid?'

‘Not personally. It's just the luck of the draw. Your research is the main channel. Mine was a promising-looking backwater. The history of science is littered with the corpses of good research ideas. Who's to know whether it might not have worked, in the end? We've been nearly there for a long time. A bit more enthusiasm, a bit more funding, a bit more fucking luck and we might have broken through. But it's too late now, stem cells have all the good press, they're the obvious way to go. And we're dinosaurs.'

‘I haven't been working on stem cells out of malice, to do you down!'

‘Of course not. You just lead a charmed life.'

‘There's no point in saying things like that. But if you're agreeing that the transgenic research has no future, surely you can agree to leave?'

‘Why should I? Kneiper are still putting money into the programme – there may well be other applications for these drugs. And if they decide to pull the plug they'll have to pay decent redundancy money. Given that there's nothing else I'm fit to do, it would be idiotic to leave.'

‘You're
fifty
. You've got years of working and thinking ahead of you. You could even retrain, do something completely different – I can support you. What good will there be in clinging to the wreck as it goes down?'

‘
You
can support me? Given that a shred of dignity is just about all I have left, wouldn't you say I ought to hang on to it?'

The waiter brought their order and they ate in silence. So that was the way he saw it. Her success ensured his failure. As if there wasn't enough shit between them, her work must destroy his.

But Con hasn't gone because of this – has he? It's old news. It's sad, it's bitter, but they're not work rivals. She's always worked harder than him, they both know that, and his lack of ambition has allowed him to do other things. There is always a knowledge which contradicts observed fact. He was jealous and contemptuous when comparing his career with hers; damaging words were said. Nevertheless she knows it was not the most important thing. It was not even, necessarily, a very important thing at all. He doesn't take work as seriously as her. Which has made all sorts of things possible: his chief-carer role with the children; easiness over money, with neither of them caring who earned or spent the most; a generosity in recognising and honouring each other's differences. The work rage is not a root cause of anything. More, a manifestation of unease, a symptom of some other, deeper wrong.

She is drawn back again to Cara's birth. That time of happiness. Back again to the golden centre; follow the thread from there, to find out the heart of the rot.

El remembers being seduced by Con's sweetness after she told him she was pregnant. Once Hélène had left he seemed to take over the entire running of the house. He brought her breakfast in bed and shielded her from the children's tantrums, he made love to her with renewed intensity and frequency.

‘You only like me when I'm pregnant,' she joked.

‘I like that you're different. Your body forces you to slow down.'

‘You like me handicapped with a big fat weight.'

‘Maybe. Yes. I like the fact that you can't just put it down. I like how primitive it is. Pregnant women are different from men.'

‘Unlike nasty, everyday, non-pregnant women, who're out there pretending to be men.'

‘Absolutely. Fecundity rules, OK.'

The birth of Cara was a bridge which they crossed to find one another, to find the two golden years that led to Daniel's birth. If it was guilt that made her love him – well: it didn't make the love any less real. Nor the love with which he responded. If ever good can come from bad, then surely that was it.

El tells herself it is necessary to be clear about that time. Not to mythologise. Because of what happened afterwards. She must know she is not deluding herself. OK, one of the effects of Cara's birth was to bring Con into focus. She had accepted him before as a fact in her life. Husband. Father of her children. And yet, as she had said to him in an early spat, ‘You could marry anyone, within reason.' He chose to take that as a slight, but what she had meant simply was that the creation of a long-term partnership and environment for raising children was not dependent on infatuation or lust: as the half-population of the world who live in arranged marriages could attest.

‘How romantic,' he said wryly.

‘I think it's probably good to be unromantic. I haven't got unrealistic expectations.'

‘It wouldn't make any difference to you if you were married to someone else?'

‘He would have to have similar educational and probably class background, similar aspirations. Which an arranged marriage would take care of anyway.'

‘And the marriage would not be any different?'

‘Of course it would be
different
, because he'd be a different person. It might be worse or better. But it wouldn't be impossible.' Her sense of it was that she had learned to love Con as a husband firstly because she had been physically attracted to him and then because of his persistence, because he seemed to know
he
loved
her
; and then because of qualities like tolerance and open-mindedness and an interest in ideas; because he was, in many ways, like her. And the ways in which he was not like her were more or less complimentary. ‘I'm not insulting you!' she scolded him. ‘It's real, it's based on usage and knowledge, it's not some fantasist's
true love
that will last about a week.'

He made a mocking bow. ‘Next time round I'll marry a poet.'

Her sense of the marriage was that although she loved him (of course, it went without saying) he hardly impinged on her: he was there in her life, a major figure, like the children – but he could also be not there. Her identity was still single.

After Cara, that changed. Because guilt and emotional anxiety made her more susceptible? Because the marriage anyway would have developed into a new and deeper phase? Or simply because of logistics; in the year after Cara's birth they spent more time together? The last was the most plausible answer. But it could have been a mixture of all three.

What happened was that she became more aware of him. Of his physical presence; the way he handled the baby, the way he silently anticipated what El needed and where she was going, lifting/shifting/opening/closing/mediating the world of objects around her so that what she needed was always to hand and her movements around the house, from house to car, from car to clinic or wherever she went, were eased and lightened. She noticed the space and quiet order he created for her to be in; it was as if he gave her a special world. But she also remembered how this had irritated her when Paul and Megan were born: his careful thoughtfulness and manoeuvring had filled her with impatience, so that she had snapped, ‘I'm not ill, you know, I'm perfectly capable of opening the door for myself!'