Conrad & Eleanor by Jane Rogers Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    Everything is tarnished now. He wonders how other people deal with this. The shame. The shamefulness of the past, the expeditiousness of it, the complacent ignorance in which one lived it, the continual and self-perpetuated delusions. He is ashamed of it all, from start to finish; of his pathetic protective male act, of his stoic refusal to react to injury and insult, of his conviction that he was necessary to the children. All the old clichés are there; no one is indispensable. El has always been honestly selfish. Which has left him the role of dishonestly selfless; the martyr, the victim. Until, with the stubborn perversity of flowing water, which must find a way through, he has come to find his satisfaction in her cruelty, in self-abasement.
    Is this true? It is true that he has negated himself, all but rubbed himself out. He has no desires. He cannot think of a single thing he wants to do. Contemptible. No wonder El can’t stand him. He can’t stand himself. Only sit here, passively, awaiting transformation. Death will come. What other change might possibly arise? That El might suddenly fling her arms around him and apologise for everything she did and was, and devote her days to cherishing and amusing him?
    Not only is it unimaginable, it is absolutely horrible. It would entail the removal of El’s personality.
    His limbs ache. He wants to shift position but won’t let himself. If he keeps staring at it. If he keeps boring at it, even though it’s solid rock – eventually he must come through to something, surely? This is of course a ridiculous thought. He will sit with his face pressed to a rock wall, and then being mortal he will die, and the rock, immovable and unmarked, will remain. He is pitting himself against something that cannot be altered.
    Stupid. The smell persists. Are they peeling more? A bag full – he visualises the circles of peel, the sticky little penknife, the row of sucked pips. Revolting. If this is a battle between him and a smell, the smell wins if he stays. If he goes away, the smell loses, it ceases to exist in his nostrils.
    He sees himself. His posture, his defeated shoulders, his empty hands. A monkey hunched at the back of its cage, staring balefully out of its prison. This is the problem. Not the anthropomorphism of animals, not the personification of cuddly kittens with diamante collars and little coats; the problem is the animal-ness of humans. The monkey is not like him, he is like the monkey. The monkey exists. The conditions of its existence (imprisoned, at the mercy of others whose priorities do not include the happiness of the monkey) are painful. And so by extrapolation…
    It is doubtful if the monkey would venture out, if you left the cage door open. It has become what it is, a bundle of miserable defeated resentment. Like him.
    By a monstrous effort of will he forces himself to his feet; drags his