The weekend away had been gorgeous – just not in the way it was supposed to be. Eleanor didn’t care about the hotel or the birthday meal or that Richard’s parents had taken Rosie and Isobel for the night. All she could think about was wellness: the seductive feeling of being nourished, strengthened from the inside. She felt more alive than she had in weeks. Richard told her it was the proper night’s sleep and she pretended to agree. She wanted to believe that he was right, that it would last beyond the weekend, but when she got home and it began again, she wasn’t surprised. Within days, it was worse than before.
The Monday after they got back, Rosie threw pieces of Lego in her face and pinched Isobel. Eleanor tried to stay calm, not make a fuss, pretend it didn’t hurt, but the familiar panic throbbed inside her and she found herself close to tears. Rosie leapt on her back and sank her teeth into her shoulder. It was surprisingly difficult to get her off; she wondered if it would bruise. This is normal, a phase, she told herself, trying to suppress the feeling that it was something else.
Her private fear was that Rosie found the house as difficult as she did. At first, Eleanor had been relieved that Rosie loved her new nursery, but now, it felt ominous. Rosie would scream and cry when Eleanor came to pick her up or have a tantrum on Saturday mornings when Eleanor explained that there was no nursery today. Eleanor remembered the way Rosie used to run into her arms when they’d been apart, clutching her tight, as if they hadn’t seen each other for years. It had been wonderful and oppressive and cloying. She ached for it now.
By the end of the day, Eleanor was frayed and her shoulder was still sore. After the children had gone to bed, she decided to try and talk to Richard. ‘We need to talk about Rosie’s biting,’ she said and then laughed, an unnatural, high-pitched sound, at having to say such an unappealing thing.
‘OK, let’s talk then.’ He sat down at the table and something about the way he did it, the show of being magnanimous, made her furious. She stood opposite him, picking at the skin around her nails.
‘I just . . . I don’t know what to do any more. What if she does it at nursery?’
‘Have you asked them about it?’
‘They said she’s been fine. She’s not biting other children. Just me.’
‘Well, that’s OK, then.’
‘It really hurts, Richard!’ She pulled at the neck of her top to show him the mark on her shoulder. The red had faded now – it was just a few grey indentations, the skin barely punctured. Even she could see it didn’t look serious.
Richard paused. ‘Why don’t you ask work if you can go back full-time? They could go to nursery five days. To be honest, the extra cash would be pretty helpful right now.’
‘I can’t do that!’ she said, scalded. ‘I’d lose my one day with them.’
‘But if you’re not enjoying it.’
‘I am enjoying it!’ They stared at each other, and she wondered if either of them were going to acknowledge how untrue that was. ‘And anyway, it’s not about whether I enjoy it, it’s about . . . being there, I don’t know.’ She looked away.
Richard said gently, ‘Rosie does seem to be doing really well at nursery. Maybe she’d be happier . . .’
Eleanor couldn’t imagine how she would face people, having to go back to work because she couldn’t even manage one day a week on her own with her children. Because they couldn’t even manage one day with her. It was unthinkable. Besides, she was lucky to work part-time; she knew that. She was always careful to be grateful, because things were always worse for someone else and she didn’t want to upset or offend anyone by complaining. She was grateful to be able to go back to work, grateful to work part-time, grateful that she could leave at five every day. Grateful that her children were healthy; grateful that she could have children at all. Even when she remembered sitting in the hospital waiting room during labour thinking, This is the worst experience of my life, even when she felt sick catching sight of something the same blue as the midwives’ uniforms, she was still grateful that she had not had to have an emergency caesarean and that no one had died. She was grateful that her mother lived nearby, and that Richard helped. She knew that gratitude and counting your blessings were important for staying positive. It just made it impossible to ask for anything more.
The conversation had run aground. She went to the fridge, got out a head of broccoli, and wondered when they’d lost the knack of being honest with each other. When they’d got married, she’d decided to take Richard’s name, partly because if they had children, she wanted them to share a family name. ‘We can be Team Harding,’ Richard said. She had never felt less like they were a team. They were on opposing sides, constantly bargaining with each other, pitching for their share of the resources of their marriage: time, money, sense of identity. She was afraid of what she might lose if she tried to describe how confused and conflicted she was.
Richard got out his laptop; he said he was working on his essay, but when she looked over, she saw the little squares of paint chart colours on his screen. She chopped the broccoli and tried to think of something cheerful or interesting to say. She had so little energy left.
She knew about the importance of taking care of your marriage after you had children, and about quality time and date nights, and she also felt that it was her responsibility to provide these things. She would try and organize more nights out for the two of them, just as soon as she started to feel better. But truthfully, that wasn’t what she missed most. She missed moments when they’d suddenly be intrigued by each other, spooning out conversation like honey from a jar, happy and loquacious. Her head on his stomach, listening to the gentle mechanical noises. The things she used to tell him that now seemed too trivial: ‘I thought about cabbage but I got cauliflower instead’, ‘My feet got cold when I was waiting for the bus.’ They piled up, unused, as she listened to Richard click and scroll.
*
Eleanor had met Richard eighteen years ago, at Cambridge. It was the first week of term and she had been invited to a meeting to formalize their timetable. She was more disorientated than she’d ever been, cowed by the beauty, age and scale of everything, and horrified to discover she was the last to arrive. She sat down, her face hot, sneaking furtive glances at the other students. There were ten of them, but it might as well have been a hundred: she was only able to pick out a few faces. One or two she’d been introduced to: a girl with peroxide-blonde hair and a nose stud; a tall thin boy, cross-legged, hunched over, tapping his foot rapidly against the chair leg. She noticed his glasses were dirty.
The tutor initiated a ‘friendly little discussion’ about English Literature to ‘get to know each other’ – it was not a formal tutorial, but it was clear that they were being tested or testing each other in some way. There was a small awkward silence and Eleanor’s discomfort became almost hysterical, before one of the students she’d met before, a boy called Dominic, started talking, in a loud easy voice. Eleanor forced herself to speak, hating how her tongue had thickened and how weak and tentative she sounded. Then the boy with glasses spoke. He wasn’t rude to her exactly, but he was on the cusp of it, managing to be both challenging and dismissive at the same time. She loathed and admired him; he later admitted he could barely remember her being there. Dominic responded, calling him by name – Richard. They clearly knew each other and dominated the rest of the session with a style of passive-aggressive argument that would become very familiar to her. She didn’t speak again. Eventually, they were given the times for their term’s tutorials – their tutor called them supervisions – and put into pairs: she was with Richard, of course.
Eleanor had never given this decision much weight; she assumed they would have come together some other way. It was only later, as their marriage lengthened and deepened and their lives hardened, that she began to think about it again. If it hadn’t been for that initial pairing, perhaps nothing would ever have grown between them. Perhaps one of them would have met someone else before it had been able to. She didn’t like to think that nearly two decades of her life were due to a whim, a quirk of logistics. But sometimes, when she met someone’s eye, felt something in her stomach and thought she saw the ghost of another life rear up, she wondered if it really did all hang on that fine a thread, after all.
At first, the supervisions were her worst hour of the week. In front of the tutor, Richard would behave as if she wasn’t there, directing his conversation at Dr Franklin only. Eleanor could barely keep up with his trains of thought and floundered when she had to speak. She dreaded the end even more: they were twenty-five minutes away from college and had no choice but to walk back together. The walks were uncomfortable, interspersed with heavy silences. Richard would ask her opinion about their course, their tutors, the reading; she would start to stumble, inarticulate; he would interrupt and then tell her what he thought. She tried to initiate small talk, but he seemed immune to pleasantries. As soon as they reached the edge of town, she would invent an errand and escape.
It was halfway through term that things started to change. Eleanor had found Cambridge utterly overwhelming. She’d gone to a girls’ school and had got used to things being restricted – men, calories, ambitions. University seemed limitless by comparison. People were trying to display, rather than disguise, their intelligence. They talked brashly about politics and philosophy and had opinions about things that Eleanor didn’t know it was possible to have opinions on: Rwandan politicians or whether Shakespeare was overrated. It was nothing like the sixth-form common room and conversations about blow jobs and toast. It was far too much but at the same time, intoxicating.
She hadn’t known it was possible to transform so quickly. She made her first real friend: Amy, the girl with peroxide hair who Eleanor had originally thought was far too dynamic and self-confident to be interested in her. She discovered that although Amy knew a lot, about whisky and punk and Israeli foreign policy, she didn’t know how to cook. Eleanor tentatively started to teach her things: how to sweat onions, spinach reduces, bouillon is better than stock cubes. She took Amy to get her supermarket loyalty card and explained when it was worth spending more money and when the cheaper brands were OK. In this way, they became close: Eleanor softening mushrooms in a Woolworths pan, drinking wine from a mug and listening to Amy deride the other members of the English group, particularly Dominic and his right-wing chauvinistic view of the world.
Eleanor’s relief at being happy and somewhere approaching comfortable was so intense that she became chatty – gregarious even. She was playing a part and although she wasn’t sure it suited her, it was convincing everyone, sometimes even herself. ‘I can’t imagine you being shy,’ someone said to her, and she was amazed at how easy it was to fool people. She still felt out of her depth, but she was getting used to that feeling, managing it; even, sometimes, enjoying it. She had unfurled.
Most weeks, she ended up running into Richard on the way to supervisions, but she stopped finding the prospect of walking together horrifying. She wasn’t intimidated by him any more; she began to suspect that he was being deliberately opaque in order to sound more intelligent than he was. It wasn’t that she was too stupid to understand him; it was that he didn’t want to be understood. Even Dr Franklin seemed to have trouble following him sometimes. Eleanor interrupted if one of his monologues started alienating her and became more articulate if he asked her opinion. He became more considerate, more willing to engage. It felt like he was beginning to respect her.
Once they were in a seminar or tutorial, everything shifted. The softness and consideration were gone and Eleanor became subdued. She was still in awe of his confidence, while hating it at the same time, and still nervous around Dr Franklin, who made his preferences clear. He listened intently to Richard, and then seemed to mentally put his feet up when she opened her mouth. And when she bumped into Richard in the college bar, looking horribly uncomfortable, she would try out her chatty girl routine on him, to no effect. It was impossible to think they’d ever had a satisfying conversation.
But the walks to and from Dr Franklin’s were a hinterland – neither fully social or academic, it was a small space in which they were more truly themselves. Cautiously, they started to arrange to meet so they could walk together and Eleanor found herself looking forward to it. She began to garner personal details about Richard and lined them up in her mind like treasure, not sure yet of their particular value. She learnt he grew up in Oxfordshire, he went to boarding school and his house had a boot room. His parents were doctors and his sister was planning to go to medical school; he felt like a black sheep. He wanted to be a playwright and was trying to work up the courage to have one of his plays put on at Cambridge.
At one point, Richard started complaining about the standard of contributions in their seminar group – Dominic came under attack, and he didn’t think much of Angela. ‘Well, I do my best,’ Eleanor said jokily, and he said quickly: ‘No, you’re good. I mean – not brilliant. But good.’
She felt like he’d kissed her.