Conrad & Eleanor (4 page)

The vanishing point he imagined earlier now induces giddiness. He's hungry, that's the thing. He counts the money in his wallet: 112 euros. He makes his way to the buffet car, glancing through the passengers as he goes, but there are too many of them, and of those who are facing the wrong way, several have brown hair the same length as hers, so it is impossible and he can only keep going mechanically putting one foot in front of the other, propelling himself forward. He pays for coffee and a ­mozzarella and tomato panini which needs heating so he has to wait, exposed, leaning against the bar, while the barman serves other customers. He is bewildered by their confidence, by their questions and comments about the food, and the way the barman responds, smiling or shaking his head.

Con stays in the buffet car to eat, staring out towards the flat winter countryside. There is an air of normality here – conjured perhaps by the barman, whose engagement with his work suggests that it is real, that the difference between a cappuccino and an Americano matters to him. As Con chews the comfortingly tasteless cheese, the starchy dough of the bread, he is momentarily oblivious to all other concerns.

None of this is new. Apart from Maddy, the threat of Maddy. None of the rest is new, and what seems at this precise moment to be the central thing – the key, though it will shift again, he's well aware of that – is Eleanor. His marriage, which has already transformed so many times that no one could see it straight. Hasn't he gone from loving her to hating her and back again so many times that the path between them is worn out? There is no love. There is no hate. There is only exhausted and exhausting familiarity, stalemate, they ignore and do not know each other because they have known each other too well for too long, invested too much, watched each other become incomprehensibly different and still the same, dealt each other the most deadly wounds, they have flayed each other alive and who cares about the rest, who cares what happens next? All that could conceivably remain might be kindness, a form of respect. But that's gone too, of course.

The present does not erase the past. The present does not erase the past. The mantra aligns itself with some rhythmic sound in the train's motion – he can almost empty his head. The present does not erase the past. Cara.

No, try not to think of Cara. But why should he not think of Cara? Of Paul, Megan, Cara, Daniel? Why shouldn't a man think of his children, his own flesh and blood? Of Cara. Of Cara's blood.

Not of her blood. Of Cara. Cara in the snow. How many times over she is his. Oh the comfort of family myth; the time Cara got lost in the snow.

He can see her chubby baby face. The fine golden down on her head, still not quite hair, an ethereal promise of hair, transparent, translucent; her ecstatic smile. Now she wears the purple snowsuit that used to be Megan's, with the hood pulled tight over her naked head, and she toddles through the snow in her wellies like a spaceman in different gravity, tottering, tilting, tumbling, laughing in amazement at the cold. She is flickering with life.

He's leaving her with El for the day – leaving them all, fourth day of the group holiday, leaving the women and children together while he goes off for a day's serious skiing with the men. He doesn't want to, but Ian's booked their holiday and he'll be offended if Con doesn't come on one of his macho expeditions. Con doesn't want to leave the kids, he doesn't want to leave El. She's twelve weeks pregnant with Dan and she's tired and not quite herself; her timing's a fraction slow, her focus isn't sharp. All his protective urges, his big-hearted territorial instincts. (Don't – don't sneer at this. Do not destroy the innocent past.) His instincts tell him to stay and protect his family. Which is ridiculous, because what harm can they come to, in the company of two other mothers with their children, in a cosy farmhouse surrounded by a splendour of snowy Swedish countryside? The low sun gilds the slopes, the sky is violet blue, Ian and Morris are calling him. He goes.

But after a couple of hours his arms are aching, his knees are locking, and he seems to have wrenched an ankle in one of his falls. The other two are better than him, he's never done cross-country before – all he's done is downhill skiing holidays with school. Ian wants to press on along a firebreak through woods, to a village with a hotel that serves food. It's 11.30 and Con has given it his best shot.

‘I'm heading back, I think I've twisted my ankle.'

They tease him for not being able to take the pace, but he senses the lightness they feel at streaming away from him. He has been slowing them down.

And he heads back slowly, enjoying it. Pausing to watch a single lingering yellow birch leaf twirl inexplicably on a twig end; to photograph a tracery of black branches against the grey cloud which is trundling across the sky like a stage set; to take off his skis and enjoy stamping his feet through the snow crust and feeling stable again. On a holiday like this you're never alone. And now the white land is unrolled all around him and he's at the centre of it. He remembers making tracks in the snow when he was a kid, making the footprints of a creature that would puzzle scientists, the prints of a three-toed dinosaur, by carefully laying one footprint over another. He's smiling and trudging up the last slope before the farm comes into view, when it hits him.

Something's wrong. He has to get back. Skis under one arm, poles in the other hand, he tries to run up the hillside, pushing himself to speed, his heart hammering. Danger. Danger.

From the crest of the hill he sees the farm lying tranquil in the valley under the low grey sky. Little figures are milling around on the opposite slope, they are out with the sledges. There's a good shallow run on the other side, they've taken the kids out on it every day. Nothing is untoward. But his thumping heart tells him different and he's pitching down the hillside like a drunken giant, too rushed and stupid to put on the skis which would have flown him there, striding and gasping and falling and dragging himself up again, keep going keep going keep going. Snow starts to fall as he careers down, big soft heavy flakes that blot the distance, now he can't see them on the hill opposite, now all he can see is the flakes up against his face, huge on his lashes, cold in his eyes.

Suddenly there are dark figures, a large and a small, El and Paul. He realises they are on the farmhouse track. She looks up astonished to see him.

‘Con! Where are the others? Are you all right?'

‘Yes —' He's breathless. ‘I couldn't keep up.'

‘Paul needs a poo, I'm taking him back. The others are with Marie.'

‘I'll – OK.' It's not here. He needs to get up that hill. He's dumped his skis and poles on the track, he's plunging away from them, El's surprised voice curving after him – ‘Con?' – but already they're behind him and he's penetrating the whiteness ahead, it's closing in, the sky is snowing down to meet the ground and he's charging up the hill with his freed and flailing arms for balance, he's powering up to the top. Where one of the other mothers appears dragging her twins on the big sledge. She gives the sledge a shove that sends it flying down towards the farm, the two boys squealing with joy.

‘They're coming up now —' She waves her hand at the hillside behind, and plunges after her boys.

And then Con sees Marie with her Charlotte, and Megan, halfway down the hill. Where's Cara? He's galumphing down towards them and Megan's crying and he's snagged by that but Cara, where's Cara? And Marie is shouting, ‘Megan fell off but Cara —' and he's galloping and slithering down the hill and there's the sledge below him but Cara's not on it. His mind can see and scan and calculate it all in a still glassy moment while his ungainly heavy body stumbles and heaves and falls impossibly slowly towards where he needs to be like the powerless body of his nightmares. The sledge is a funny shape, it's half buried in snow – no, it's broken, the front has snapped off. He's staring through the dizzying snow – the sledge has hit something, a rock or a post, it has snapped, it's ricocheted back. Cara will be up ahead, she's light enough, surely, to have sailed over – he plunges on he plunges on there's no knowing which direction but he plunges on in this one noticing that the snow is deeper down here, harder to walk in, there's no crust it must be sheltered by the next slope. If he doesn't find her soon — He's going to find her he's going to find her. There's a dark thing there a kind of – what is it? Her feet! Her feet sticking out of the snow and he grabs her wellies her little ankles inside them he tightens his grip and pulls her out. She's flown into the snow bank head first, she's been posted into the snow by her momentum, and there's no blood no damage. As he wipes the snow from her face she stares at him, amazed, and he waits for her to cry, but she focuses and a grin spreads across her face. ‘Dadda!'

She is unharmed. They work out later that she can only have been in the snow for a minute; Megan had just tumbled off when he saw her. Marie was waiting to catch them halfway down but she missed and Cara sailed on. But if he had not been there – how quickly could the falling snow have hidden her? Would she have been able to make herself heard, buried head first in the snow? Could she have dragged herself out? How quickly could anyone else have been down there to look for her? The new snow fell relentlessly all afternoon. Did he pull her from her grave?

The present does not erase the past. The present does not erase the past. He is surfacing. Eleanor shouldn't have left her, she knew it, Eleanor was irresponsible. He saved Cara. He was honoured for it by El, then and after. She called it his sixth sense. There's irony with affection and irony without. Back then, when she called it his sixth sense, it was all right. They smiled together. Only later has she made it into an insult.

Something's changed and his eyes snap open. The bass chatter of the headset on the boy beside him. It's stopped; the boy is looking at him, wanting to get out. Con rises and steps into the aisle; the boy brushes past leaving his coat nested into his seat. Con checks himself in a stretch and glances furtively at his watch. Five more hours to go. People seem to be… he glances around. They are looking at him. As he meets a man's eyes the fellow looks away, but his wife is staring, and the woman behind is staring – what is it, what has he done? Is there something behind him? He turns – nothing. Heads tilt, eyes are averted. He must be attracting their attention by his movements. They're looking at him because he's looking at them. He slots himself into the seat and makes himself small. All these people. The solidity of their flesh and purposes, the way they look. They look at him as if he is up to no good. They look at him with certainty, as if his lack of certainty is a disorderliness which offends them. They know where they are going and why. They eat sandwiches they have prepared earlier and wrapped in cling film; from plastic bags they extricate crisps and chocolate. They unscrew their bottles of water and flasks of coffee. They peel fruit.

The smell when he identifies it makes sweat prickle in his armpits. Someone is eating an orange.

His stomach convulses and he tastes the acidity at the back of his throat. Orange. It is the reek of the monkey house, of every monkey house he's known, that sharp bitter brassy tang with undertones of piss and shit, it dries his tongue and constricts his throat. He crouches low in his seat, nose half an inch from the fabric of the seat in front, taking little shallow breaths. It is possible to ignore a smell. You get used to it. When he used to visit his nan in the home, the old woman stale pissy used up air would slug him, but after ten minutes he'd forgotten it. It is possible to ignore anything. He sits, head bowed, wrists resting inert on his thighs, holding himself very still. This is your response, he chides himself. To El. To everything. Keep very still, withhold yourself. He has spent months now, waiting, as if hiding, like a stupid creature who imagines it is camouflaged. Waiting for the danger to pass.

Instead of getting up and dealing with it.

Has he been imagining that there is some virtue in stoicism? That his patient endurance might move or soften her? He sees clearly now that it never would; it maddens her. How must it be for her, coming home from work, from her day of lectures and meetings and cram-packed appointments, making the effort (the sacrifice) to come home rather than going for a drink with Louis; how must it be to find him, Conrad, sitting there in the dark in the corner of the kitchen with the day's dishes in the sink and no food prepared, staring into space? A giant reproach. A lump of self-pity. Yet – a tendril of orange stink creeps around the seat back and he jerks his head aside – yet he was not self-pitying, when he sat like that. He was simply blank. There was nothing for him to do. But she would only have been able to interpret it from her own point of view: him sitting there, offering nothing, like a plug hole, a drain into which energy and affection must be poured.

She has never poured energy and affection into him.

But that's not true either. He wouldn't have known how to deal with it if she did. He didn't
want
that. The boy returns to his seat, Con rises and sits again automatically. It's not true. The strangeness of the dynamic… the strangeness of the dynamic surely is that he imagined he would look after El. Her brightness, her cleverness, her speediness: he would protect and insulate her, with careful thoroughness, from all the dangers she was too hot and hasty to espy in advance. That was the team they had laughingly characterised themselves as – the tortoise and the hare. But the tortoise is supposed to win, not to stop halfway, frozen, pretending to be a stone. While the hare careers off, past the end post, into trackless freedom.

He wanted to look after her. Knowing from the start it would be impossible, since she was quicker and more competent. It was in the impossibility of the role that its attraction lay. That's why the time after Cara… that's why the time after Cara's birth was the best. Because El was vulnerable, softened, uncertain. It was possible to look after her.