Conrad & Eleanor Read Online Free PDF Page B

station, quick!’ The bahnhof . All he needs to do is get on a train before she can get on. That’s all he needs to do, leave on the soonest train.
    He sees himself vanishing down the line, diminishing to a dot. He sees himself gone. He can’t make himself be in that dot, to know where he is. But he sees himself gone. It might work; it would at least be active rather than passive. Ever since the evening in Malmaison, she has been in control. At least if he vanishes, it is not playing the victim.
    The sludge of his responsibilities stirs and clouds up around him, muddying the view. If he disappears, how will it affect the children? Cara especially, on the point of splitting up with her pig of a boyfriend – who can she turn to? If he disappears, what will happen at work? If he disappears, who will take the car for its MOT next Tuesday, who will be there to let the plumber in? Who will know where he has put the key to the shed? If he disappears…
    If he disappears, where will he be? There is a click outside his door. He holds his breath. No further sound. He exhales. He remembers how he felt on the plane coming here; the lightening, the relief. Escape.
    He gets up at 6 and moves silently round his room, gathering his things into the case. When he looks out the street is still. She can’t have waited outside all night, it was freezing. But if she has, he will handle it. A kind of calmness has seeped into him. Something has been set in motion and now he can follow it. Or maybe it’s just the animal lifting of the spirits at the passing of the night. He splashes water on his face and cleans his teeth, though he still doesn’t turn on the light. He opens his door carefully and steps out, case in hand, into the silent corridor.
    His taxi takes him past the conference centre. Its front doors are closed, its interior dark. She will be expecting him to be there today. Maybe whatever she is planning will happen there today. The speed of the taxi through near-empty streets is like flying, winging his way above trouble. He has his case, his phone, his laptop, he is self-contained, extricating himself from the scene. What can she do when he’s gone?
    He knows, of course. She can target El and the children, and blackmail him with the threat of that. He should close his email account. Then her emails would bounce back, wouldn’t they? Close his phone and email contracts, render himself incommunicado. It would be part of vanishing. He cannot put himself out of the reach of the children, he thinks, but simultaneously knows that he can and will. They are adults, all they need of parents now is cash and Eleanor has plenty. They don’t need him. It’s over, he tells himself. It’s over. So what are the choices? To huddle in the shell of his own life, playing the victim, or to strike out into the distance. His fear, his concern for his own safety, is nothing. There are many other things which are more important and which should now direct his movements. The monkeys, the animal house – despite all this sound and fury he has done nothing yet, nothing has changed. His work, El, the children, the house, all still wrong, all unresolved, all in need of – in need of — a figure outside the station snags his attention, as the taxi slows and pulls in. The up-and-down gait, the forward angle of her head… but then the movement of the taxi allows him a glimpse of profile; of course it is not her, it’s a young girl. And how will he ever resolve El, the children, the house, work? This ludicrous crowd of impossible things, this unending list of his failures, of his ‘playing the victim’, of his being at the receiving end of undeserved random events which buffet him from one buffoon-like position of imbalance to the next, which knock him down like the wobbly man the children used to play with, bobbing back up idiotically ready for the next blow. Of course he must