Conrad & Eleanor Read Online Free PDF Page A

about a dozen times. He crashes to the floor.
    El rips off her boots and trousers and holds a tea towel under the cold tap then wraps it round her scalded thigh. Pressing her legs together to hold it in place, she runs a bowl of tepid water and puts the pale grey trousers in to soak. They are probably ruined.
    When she turns back to Con he is lying blocking the doorway. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ She picks her barefoot way across the shards of mug and crouches beside his head. He’s bleeding where the mug hit him but it isn’t deep. He’s out cold, though. She staunches the wound with her tea towel and scrapes away the broken china so she can pull him out to full length. His head lolls to the other side. Now she can see. The injury to the other temple is serious. It’s deep and white and livid. The tissue around it is already swollen. How has he —?
    She looks up in panic. The old iron shoe-scraper which they use as a doorstop when the kitchen door needs holding open – the old iron doorstop lies, toppled on its side underneath the bookshelf. It has an edge like a cleaver. She snatches a clean tea towel, runs more cold water, presses it to the swelling. His body twitches convulsively and his bowels open. His eyes roll up in his head.
    â€˜Con! Con! Conrad, listen to me.’ She leans into his face, searching for breath – grabs his wrist and fumbles the stupid multi-coloured sleeve out of the way. She can’t feel a pulse.
    Is this what Paul imagines? Or worse, that she attacked him with intent to kill him, with a knife or a brick? What is she supposed to have done with the body? Con is six foot four. Does Paul imagine her sawing his father into chunks on the kitchen floor, then secreting them round the garden? Or dragging his weight into the boot of the car (she wouldn’t have the strength, though, so again she’d have to dissect him first) and unloading him at some conveniently isolated landfill site, or popping him in a sack with stones and dropping him in a river?
    Eleanor is sweating. She opens her eyes. It seems entirely plausible; if she were Paul she would probably think it too. But I didn’t do that, she reminds herself. I didn’t do it. It could have happened but it didn’t.
    There is not much comfort in the thought. She wonders if Conrad too has imagined such a scene. No wonder he has left her. No wonder.

Chapter 2
    C onrad has not been murdered by Eleanor. He has gone to the conference in Munich. Where he has been greeted with friendliness by colleagues from universities around the world, and where he has slipped into his work persona as easily and comfortably as a man sliding his feet into a well-worn pair of slippers.
    It is a short walk from the conference centre in Munich to ­Conrad’s hotel. His Korean colleague, Park, is staying with friends a tram ride away. After the Sunday night dinner, Con walks with him to the tram stop then turns the corner towards his own hotel, away from the brightly lit main thoroughfare.
    This is a quiet residential street; on the corner there’s a building site enclosed by hoardings, then well-to-do houses, with brass nameplates of dentists and lawyers, shuttered windows, small coiffured shrubs in planters. The streetlamps are heritage, resembling gas lamps and giving as little light. As he moves towards the end of the empty street Conrad hears a lighter step behind him. He glances back. There’s a squat tree between him and the nearest streetlamp, and the shadows of the branches reach across the street. A woman is coming towards him through the shadows. Her.
    He’s running before he knows it. Running for the corner, running past the dark shopfronts, running up the steps, through the open door, into the lobby of his hotel. He slows to a walk, and nods to the receptionist while moving quickly towards the stairs. Once out of the receptionist’s view he’s running again. Up the stairs,