Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine(79)

During the course of these chats, Raymond asked again about Mummy—why I hadn’t told her I’d been unwell, why she never visited me, or I her, until finally I gave in and provided him with a potted biography. He already knew about the fire, of course, and that I’d been brought up in care afterward. That, I told him, was because it wasn’t possible for me to live with Mummy afterward, not where she was. It was, I’d hoped, enough to keep him quiet, but no.

“Where is she, then? Hospital, nursing home?” he guessed. I shook my head.

“It’s a bad place, for bad people,” I said. He thought for a moment.

“Not prison?” He looked shocked. I held his gaze but said nothing. After another short pause he asked, not unreasonably, what crime she had committed.

“I can’t remember,” I said.

He stared at me, then snorted.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Come on, Eleanor. You can tell me. It won’t change anything between us, I promise. It’s not like you did it, whatever it was.”

I felt a hot flush streak right up the front of my body and then down my back, a sensation I can only liken to being given a sedative prior to a general anesthetic. My pulse was pounding.

“It’s true,” I said. “I honestly don’t know. I think I must have been told at the time, but I can’t remember. I was only ten. Everyone was really careful never to mention it around me . . .”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “She must have done something really terrible to . . . I mean, what about at school? Kids can be little shits about stuff like that. What about when people hear your name? Although, come to think of it, I don’t think I remember reading anything about a crime involving an Oliphant . . . ?”

“Yes, I suppose you would have remembered an Oliphant in the room,” I said.

He didn’t laugh. It wasn’t a very good joke, on reflection. I cleared my throat.

“Oliphant isn’t my real name,” I said. I liked it, always had, and was extremely grateful to whoever had selected it for me. You didn’t come across many Oliphants, that was for sure. Special.

He stared at me, like he was watching a film.

“They gave me a new identity afterward, moved me up here . . . it was meant to stop people recognizing me, protect me. Which is ironic.”

“Why?” he said. I sighed.

“Being in care wasn’t always much fun. I mean, it was completely fine, I had everything I needed, but it wasn’t all picnics and pillow fights.”

He raised his eyebrows, nodded. I stirred my coffee.

“The terminology’s different now, I think,” I said. “They call young people in care ‘looked after.’ But every child should be ‘looked after’ . . . it really ought to be the default.”

I heard myself sounding angry and sad. No one likes hearing themselves sound like that. If someone said, Please could you describe yourself in two words, and you said, “Erm . . . let me see . . . Angry and Sad?” then that really wouldn’t be good.

Raymond had reached out then and, very gently, he squeezed my shoulder. It was superficially ineffectual, but, in fact, felt surprisingly pleasant.

“Do you want me to find out what she did?” he said. “I bet I could, quite easily. The magic of the Interweb, hey?”

“No thank you,” I said curtly. “I’m more than capable of finding out myself, should I ever wish to. You’re not the only person who knows how to use a computer, you know,” I said. His face went very pink. “And in any case,” I went on, “as you so thoughtfully pointed out, it must have been something fairly horrendous. Don’t forget, I still have to talk to her once a week—it’s hard enough as it is. It will be completely impossible if I know that she’s done . . . whatever it is that she’s done.”

Raymond nodded. To his credit, he looked slightly ashamed, and only a tiny bit disappointed.

He really isn’t prurient, unlike most other people. After this chat, he still asked questions, but they were normal questions that anyone would ask about their friend’s mother (friend! I’ve got a friend!)—how she was, whether we’d spoken recently. I asked him the same questions back. It was normal. I didn’t tell him most of what Mummy said during our chats, of course—it was too painful to repeat, embarrassing and humiliating. I was sure Raymond was already acutely aware of my many physical and character defects, and so there was no need to remind him of them by relating Mummy’s bon mots.

Sometimes, he made me stop and think. We’d been talking about holidays, about how he planned to go traveling when he retired, so that he would have enough money to do it in style.

“Mummy’s seen so much of the world, lived in so many different places,” I said. I reeled a few off. Raymond, surprisingly, looked distinctly unimpressed.

“How old is your mum?” he said. I was taken aback. How old was she? I started to work it out.

“So . . . I’m thirty, and I think she must have had me when she was very young—nineteen, twenty? So she’ll be . . . I’d guess she’d be in her early fifties now, something like that?”

Raymond nodded.

“Right,” he said. “So . . . I’m wondering . . . I mean, I don’t have kids, so what would I know—but I imagine it can’t be easy, lodging in an opium den in Tangier if you’ve got a toddler with you? Or . . . what was the other thing? Working as a blackjack dealer in Macao?” He spoke very gently, as though he were afraid to upset me.