Richard was woken up at five by Eleanor getting out of bed. At first, he was irritable; he’d slept badly after Rosie’s nightmare. He heard Eleanor retching in the bathroom and felt a familiar kind of despair. She appeared in the bedroom, white and puffy, damp and weak, and lay down next to him. He pretended to be asleep. Then he heard her crying.
He turned over and took her hand. Immediately, he knew that this was different. She said she had a headache again, but this time it was so intense, it hurt to move her head or speak. He tried to stroke her head – she pushed his hand away and cried. He went to get her tablets and water – she sat up shakily and swallowed them, then jerked up and ran to the bathroom. He heard her vomit. She came back and lay down again, tears on her face.
Later, he couldn’t think exactly how he knew it was serious. Serious enough that he rang his office to tell them that he couldn’t come in. He took Isobel and Rosie to nursery, agitated by the thought of Eleanor at home alone. Rosie caught his mood and wet herself in the street.
At home, Eleanor was vomiting compulsively. Eventually, there was nothing left and her body could only perform a kind of simulation, arching as if possessed and then collapsing on her side. He panicked about dehydration and made her drink water, but she threw it up again immediately: thin contaminated liquid shooting out of her like she’d burst an artery. All the useless resources he marshalled – cups of hot water, more paracetamol, anti-nausea tablets – ended up expunged from her body. He worried she would have to go on a drip. She started bringing up bile, then blood.
Richard sat at the end of the bed, enmeshed in indecision. He wanted to take her to hospital, then thought he was overreacting and then wanted to go again. He didn’t know what he would do about the children. He typed things into search engines and questioned her intently about her vision or rashes. The day passed quickly and slowly: a drawn-out, endless round of vomiting, sleeping and crying. He kept thinking that things would get better and then he realized that another hour was slipping out of his grasp and nothing had changed. He had to collect Isobel and Rosie and he still didn’t know what to do – he was afraid of leaving Eleanor to go and get them, afraid of not being able to look after them properly at the same time as looking after Eleanor, afraid of their distress at seeing her like this. He asked Eleanor what she wanted but she could barely speak. He tried to think of people he could ask for help: his parents were too far away, his sister would be at work. Eventually, he did the one thing he had been trying to avoid: he rang Eleanor’s mother.
*
Richard remembered lying on his back on the grass by the river in Cambridge, Eleanor’s head on his stomach. They’d said they were going to work and Eleanor was reading and writing in pencil in the margins. She was focused and self-contained; he was envious. He’d brought a book too, but he could only read if he held it at an uncomfortable angle to block out the sun, and he couldn’t concentrate anyway: all he could think about was the colour of the sky and Eleanor’s hair. His pen lolled on his chest, next to her face. He was trying to fight the urge to distract her, when Eleanor shut her book and said, ‘By the way, I ought to warn you: my mum’s a bit unusual.’
They were heading to London that weekend; he was going to meet her mother for the first time.
‘Unusual how?’
‘She’s just not like a mum. She does weird stuff.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘She pisses in the garden.’
‘What? Why?’
‘She’s sort of a hippy. She says it’s more natural, but I think it’s just that she’s lazy – when she’s in the kitchen, she can’t be bothered to go upstairs to use the bathroom. And she’s an attention seeker.’
‘So you don’t get on with her?’
‘We get on OK. She’s just always disappointed in me – she wants me to be more gregarious or daring than I actually am. She’s got a much more colourful life than I have. I think she’d rather it was the other way round.’
When he met Carolyn, he understood: she was flamboyant, garrulous and beautiful – proper, deep beauty that never diminished, even as the tiny vertical lines set in around her mouth, her hair got coarser and wilder, and the veins on her hands stood prouder. She was kind, but flirted with him insistently and he hadn’t known what to do – he knew that he was expected to flirt back, but he just wasn’t that sort of person. He couldn’t flirt with his girlfriend’s mother. He became stiffer and more awkward in response and she tried harder. Eleanor affected a kind of detached superiority that he’d never seen before, which irritated Carolyn and made Eleanor seem immature. The whole evening was mortifying.
Over time, Carolyn began to see him as a product of Eleanor’s dreadful banality and enthusiastically disapproved of his job and his wealthy parents. He thought she was irritating and hard work, and not half as charismatic as she thought she was. Eventually, all conversations returned to her. She refused to hear about the wedding – ‘if you try to talk to me about marquees and button-holes, darling, I will literally go insane. I do not want to hear those words in this house.’ When Eleanor told her she was pregnant with Rosie, she shrieked, ‘Oh God! I can’t be a grandmother! Not yet.’ She was tiresomely neurotic about food, trying to find excuses to skip meals, always following a new regime. ‘I’m only eating citrus fruits this week,’ she said as Eleanor put a shepherd’s pie on the table. Richard often found himself losing patience, but Eleanor was more accepting and tolerated Carolyn with grace and stoicism. It made Richard love her even more.
They got on better after Rosie and Isobel were born. She refused to be called ‘Grandma’ or to babysit – ‘I won’t be left alone with them, Richard. I don’t have a maternal bone in my body; you ask Ellie’ – and she enjoyed saying things like ‘Children are such absolute shits, aren’t they.’ But she softened when she saw them, and would get totally absorbed in their company. She clearly loved them – there was just an unspoken agreement that they would never draw attention to it.
*
Richard was floundering when he spoke to her, but Carolyn was calm and practical. For the first time, he appreciated her forcefulness: she insisted that he drive Eleanor to her house and then go to nursery to ‘pick up the monsters’. He poured Eleanor into the back seat of the car, putting seatbelts and blankets around her horizontal body. When they arrived, Carolyn drew Eleanor to her with an affection she normally reserved for Isobel and Rosie. The next morning she called her doctor out – Richard could only imagine the mixture of flirtation and stubbornness that had got him out on an emergency home visit, to see a patient who wasn’t even registered, and he couldn’t help but be grateful for it. The doctor told them it was probably a virus and that she would get better. Richard was relieved that Eleanor wasn’t going to die but angry that there was no concrete word to describe what they’d been going through. He wanted a diagnosis and a cure – something potent that would ensure it never happened again. At least some acknowledgement that his fear was justified. But Eleanor was slowly recovering – the pain in her head was still intense, but she was vomiting less and it was clear she wasn’t in any danger. The crisis had passed.