Eleanor picked an upended water glass out of the dirty linen basket. Her clothes were damp; she supposed it didn’t matter, since they were dirty anyway. It was just that she had no idea how the glass had got there.
She’d found an earplug in a tea cup; a glove in a mixing bowl; a pair of tweezers in the egg drawer of the fridge. She didn’t tell Richard about it any more. His rational explanations were impossible to refute: Rosie being naughty, Zoe using their things, Eleanor being absent-minded. She just didn’t believe any of them.
She put the glass back on their bedside table and abandoned the washing. She was supposed to be resting anyway. She lay on her back on their bed, feeling her headache enlarge and recede, paying attention to its textures, as it moved around her skull. There was a moment of stillness and she thought, maybe this is it, maybe it’s over before it crested again worse than before. She tried not to think about the fact that their bedroom was under Emily’s room, but she could never quite get the thought out of her head. She sometimes wondered if she could feel the energy being transmitted through the ceiling, in some subtle, accumulative way, the walls of the room gently vibrating.
Rest was the only thing she and Richard could agree on. Richard insisted it would make her better; she didn’t think it would, but after a day of pretending not to be ill, it was luxurious to give in to it.
They were starting to separate earlier and earlier now. The meals she prepared got simpler: things she’d never have considered before, like pasta sauce out of a jar, beans on toast or the fish fingers she’d bought for the children. She stopped caring about vegetables or wholegrains or using up leftovers; she started buying ready meals for the first time in her life. As soon as they’d eaten, she went upstairs to bed and Richard went to his study. She knew it wasn’t right; she would start trying again, soon. She was just so tired.
Sometimes, lying on the bed, she had conversations with him in her head, trying to make him understand about the house, wondering if there was a way she could make him see. Even in her imagination, she was left crying with frustration, at his stubbornness, his dismissiveness. She used to look back and marvel at the ways they’d grown up. Now, even more so after that conversation with Amy, she’d started inhabiting the queer false starts of their relationship. Lately, she wondered if they hadn’t changed that much after all.
*
After they graduated, she and Richard retreated home for a peculiar, anxious summer. She felt lucky that home was in London, while he had to be in Oxfordshire, though she had to endure Carolyn’s disappointment and the unappealing options she flung at her: ‘Take off! Go backpacking! Go to art school in Paris! God, when I was your age, I couldn’t leave home quick enough. I was living in a squat off the King’s Road.’ Yes, for four months before you married a lawyer, Eleanor thought. She had no idea what to do: the options were both too wide and too narrow. She could do anything she wanted, but in the short term, she was desperate to leave home, and she needed to have something to say when people asked what she was up to.
In the end, she was offered her first job in September – an internship at a publishing company. It was badly paid and the work was menial, but it was easy: she created a spreadsheet or made a cup of tea and everyone was delighted. More importantly, when people asked her what she did, she felt like she had the right answer. Working in publishing suited her; it summed her up. It was creative, but not in an unstable, unsettling way: she wasn’t going to threaten to jump out of a window or smear menstrual blood on her lips. It was badly paid enough to feel self-righteous, but the editors she worked for could afford expensive tights. Amy knew people who were moving out of a three-bedroom flat in Stepney Green and they moved in together with another friend from Cambridge. She left home, commuted, paid council tax, went to housewarming parties and the Tate Modern at the weekend, quietly marvelling at how well things had worked out. She’d got far, far more than she’d ever expected.
Richard had got far less. He wanted to study more, but couldn’t get funding, and his parents refused to help him with something they saw as frivolous. He applied for competitive scholarships and wasn’t accepted, each rejection plunging him into a gloom so dramatic and self-absorbed that Eleanor found herself disagreeably unsympathetic. He told her he wanted to be a writer and through his parents’ connections, he managed to take on bits and pieces of journalism, but it was never close to an income. He said he was writing a play, but got defensive when Eleanor asked him about it. He became sulky, depressed; the mechanics of their relationship became stiff and uneasy.
She’d go and see him in Oxfordshire every other weekend, resenting the fare and the time away from London. She was afraid that her new life would disappear if she didn’t tend to it and felt jealous when Amy went to parties without her. Richard couldn’t afford to come to London and although she complained about that, she didn’t know if she wanted him to. She was enjoying Amy’s company much more than his these days.
Richard’s family home was large and austere and full of things that were unfamiliar to her: family silver, nineteenth-century oil paintings, a utility room and parents who were still married. He’d complained about his parents at Cambridge, in a way she thought was needlessly self-pitying; she was more sympathetic after she’d met them. Hugh was dominating and full of ‘jokes’ at her expense, usually about the Guardian or the public sector or people who worked in the arts. He was quick to inform her of the many things he disagreed with Mr Blair about. She hated the way he assumed the family would operate around him; she never saw him clear the table or make a cup of tea or even say thank you when Richard’s mother did.
But it was even less easy to be fond of Lorna, who constantly delivered little challenges in an easy, pugnacious tone. ‘And your job doesn’t feel like rather a waste of a Cambridge degree?’ she asked Eleanor, as graciously as if she’d asked her if she wanted more soup. Amy suggested that she thought Eleanor wasn’t good enough, but in fact, nothing was good enough: Richard, Hugh, their house, the town, the University of Cambridge, Mr Blair, the quality of supermarket smoked salmon. It was all inherently disappointing. Everything was ghastly or horrid or common, even things that Eleanor had previously thought were innocuous: microwaves, Santa, red front doors.
Once, she came down to the kitchen by herself and overheard Lorna on the phone. ‘We have Richard’s “girlfriend” staying . . .’ Eleanor could hear the inverted commas, as though Richard were a six-year-old. ‘Oh, she’s fine, I mean, perfectly all right. She’s a fellow English student. Not particularly pretty.’ Eleanor turned away, mortified, not really surprised that Lorna thought that, only that it had been communicated so directly.
She and Richard fought every weekend, worse than they ever had before. They were raw, undulating rows that quickly lost their borders or sense of meaning. They were cruel to each other. She abandoned him in a cafe, crying in frustration; he told her he missed being surrounded by people as intelligent as him. Even now, thirty-seven years old and untangling his socks from their daughter’s babygrow, remembering that remark made her furious.
The relationship was slowly being ground into the earth. She fully expected to find one day that there was nothing left, just an imprint where it had been. She would mourn it, but she didn’t feel especially sad about it, because there was so little to lose. She carried on: shuttling back and forth between Oxford and London, enduring Hugh and Lorna, feeling her spirits sink when she saw Richard’s number on the phone every night. She told Amy that she would do something about it, but she was so sure it would run its course, there was no impetus to act. All she had to do was wait, calmly, patiently, for the end.
*
The February after they left university, Richard decided to give up on writing and academia: he applied for a law conversion course and was accepted, his parents agreed to pay the fees and he made plans to move to London in September. It ought to have been good news – there was hope for them at least – but Eleanor didn’t think they would last another six months.
But they did. They began to argue less – they mellowed deliberately: bit tongues, withdrew, put a patina over things. Richard put a huge amount of energy into his course and the internships his father secured for him. It was the first time Eleanor had seen him happy for months, and some of the energy transferred to her. Two years later, Eleanor had a permanent job in publishing and a boyfriend who was a trainee solicitor in a mid-tier London law firm. She didn’t recognize herself in that description. ‘I live with my partner in Islington,’ she told herself. She felt like she was playing a part in a film about career girls. It felt adult and exciting, just not quite true.
Even though they lived together, Richard’s life still felt very separate from hers. She tried: she went for drinks with his colleagues and was polite, although she always felt like she’d got it wrong somehow. Her clothes were too scruffy or when she remembered to make an effort, they were smart in the wrong way. She often found herself zoning out, letting the conversations wash over her: ‘I’ve been totally beasted this week’, ‘I said, come on guys, it’s time to put your cock on the block now’, ‘I told him: I am not going to Kuala Lumpur for forty-eight hours.’
Richard was aggressively generous with his new income, buying her lavish gifts she didn’t particularly want – Eleanor sometimes wondered if he knew her at all when she opened a shoebox to find something shiny, high and taupe. She found the opulence of the law firm unnerving and vaguely distasteful. But she also liked their Zone 1 flat, which Richard paid more than half the rent on, and taxis on expenses. She refused a credit card and access to his account, but occasionally, if she saw something she liked and it was towards the end of the month, she would tell him about it and the money would appear in her account the next day. It was always slightly more than she’d mentioned. ‘Oh, I just got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Buy me a drink or something.’ But she never did and he never underpaid. She would collect parcels from the sorting office – sandals, underwear, bedsheets – feeling like she’d cheated, ashamed and thrilled.
Even from the beginning, Richard had doubts. ‘I don’t know if I’ll do it forever’ turned into ‘I’m not going to do this forever.’ The doubts intensified, and for two years, he was twitchy, on edge, looking for a concrete answer to an open question. He looked into teaching, VSO, becoming a psychoanalyst. After he hurt his knee running, he wanted to train as a physiotherapist. He grew a beard. He bought a flamboyant coat. He developed his own yeast for making sourdough bread and it sat in the fridge, a mushy brain. He had the idea of buying a disused mill in Cumbria and starting an organic flour business. He wrote out a business plan for a stationery shop in Victoria Park village, cut out an advert for a bookshop for sale in the south of France. Nothing changed.
When they talked about Richard’s future, dissecting his life and mining it for potential, Eleanor couldn’t help noticing that they never talked about hers. It simply seemed to matter less. It was true, she was happier in her job than he was and she sometimes found it satisfying, but she cared about it less than she had at the beginning. Sometimes Richard found her lack of enthusiasm convenient, because then he could give her a role: milling the flour, bringing up their children, doing the accounts in the stationery shop.
Sometimes, she wanted to tell him that she wanted more too. She was now an assistant editor, but she often felt that her job was simply to placate middle-aged men. She sat with authors (mostly older, mostly male) and listened patiently, advising on creative insecurity, footnotes, marital disputes, chapter breaks, health problems, plate sections, plot, structure, punctuation, the nature of love. And it was fine for the most part and she was good at it, but sometimes she wanted someone to help her, to listen to her problems and reorder her footnotes. When a colleague, younger and more senior, had come in to ask for Eleanor’s help with a piece of software and declared, ‘I’m just so shit at all this,’ Eleanor knew what she really meant was: I don’t want to do it and I think it’s beneath me. It was said in the same way Richard claimed to be terrible at housework. I don’t want to be good at this either, she wanted to say. It’s just that I have to be. But it didn’t torment her in the way it did Richard, and she was often glad she’d never expected to be exceptional. She was basically OK; it was just that sometimes she’d catch herself standing by the photocopier in a patch of sunlight, staring out of the window. The copies spun out behind her, sleek as silk, and she would long for a paper jam.
Then, suddenly, Richard told her that he’d applied for a job ‘in house’, at a commercial property developer. Much better hours. There was less chance of advancement: he would have to give up the idea of a heady rise to the top, of being made partner, of wealth and prestige. It was a step back; his parents would be disappointed. But they could still lead a relatively secure life and he would have more space to decide what he really wanted to do. There was even the option of going part-time eventually.
‘I’ll also have time for us. I want us to be together properly. I want to make proper meals and watch box sets with you. I don’t want you to keep going to parties on your own. I want us to think about starting a family.’
Eleanor was struck by a kind of dread, a fear that she might not really want those things too. But there was no way to consent, only to opt out, and then, all at once, it was happening.
*
When Eleanor turned twenty-nine, she noticed something had shifted. The hunger she’d had for a career in her early twenties now seemed outdated, slightly embarrassing. She and her friends had other considerations: houses and partners. She watched the twenty-four-year-olds in the office, eager and lively, and felt like she lived in another country. Her job was boring her – she seemed stuck at assistant editor level – but she couldn’t see a way out. In the end, she took a position as a managing editor, with more money, less contact with authors. It was not as interesting, but it was different and it made more sense, particularly since Richard had started talking about applying for a Master’s. They would need the money.
She’d outgrown the role of a career girl, but another role was emerging and she embraced it slowly. The older she got and the longer she and Richard were together, the more responsibilities presented themselves. She had always done more household tasks than Richard, because he worked longer hours and earned more, so it seemed fair. Their homes grew and the work became more demanding. She planned thrifty, nutritious meals for them both and learnt to cook elaborate, expensive meals for when they had people over, which she arranged with the partners of his male friends. She knew exactly what they had in the cupboard and how much, of chickpeas, oven cleaner, toothpaste, mouthwash. She defrosted the freezer, descaled the kettle and scrubbed mould off the bathroom tiles. She sent birthday, Christmas and thank-you cards from both of them, lit scented candles in the guest room for his parents, and corresponded with Richard’s godmother on Facebook. She researched places to stay on holiday, makes of vacuum cleaner and the best method of contraception.
She knew all these things were trivial, but they were also time-consuming and necessary. She didn’t hate doing any of it. And if she ever did feel resentful, she remembered that neglecting it would cause collateral damage: it would not just affect Richard, but their family and friends. In the end, it would reflect badly on her, and she didn’t want to upset anyone.
There was a sharp increase in the number of duties involving craft: she cut bunting triangles for people’s weddings, made mobile ornaments out of felt for baby showers and cakes for family birthdays. Eleanor had never thought of herself as artistic, and at first she was daunted, but then she realized it was fine, as long as you put some time and effort in and then disowned it by telling everyone how awful it was, in a giggly and apologetic way. It was sort of the opposite of being an artist: no talent or ego had to be involved.
Her female friends started talking about how they could make their careers fit around motherhood, and she joined in. They were conversations with no resolution. Sometimes, someone would point out that men never had these conversations, but in an amused, rueful way, and it always struck Eleanor as a pointless observation. What could she do about it? It seemed more practical to prepare for lives they were actually leading, than talk about how things ought to be.
She would never say that she thought men’s careers were more important than women’s or that childcare was a woman’s job; but Richard was the main breadwinner and she was the one who remembered to Rinse Aid the dishwasher. It was just the way their relationship – and that of every other woman she knew – had evolved, but you could only spend so much time sorting the hundred, tiny individual reasons from any broader implications. Her job was dissatisfying, but there didn’t seem much point in pushing her career when this potential disruption loomed. It had been cultivating in her for years: this sense that her time, money and freedom were limited. One day, she would have to give all this up. She was unconsciously preparing for motherhood.
*
Through the haze of her headache, she saw that it was half past nine – it was acceptable to start getting ready for bed. She hauled herself up and as she opened the door, she felt a tiny, metallic discomfort under her bare feet. She bent down and found the necklace Richard had given her for her thirtieth birthday stretched out in a line just inside their bedroom door. It made her feel sick. She put it back in her jewellery box and brushed her teeth, all at once horribly alert.