C.J. Cooke - I Know My Name

‘Will you be all right getting Max and Cressida their breakfast?’ I say calmly. ‘Cressie’s bottles have to be sterilised, and I think there are a couple of cartons of formula in the fridge. Max takes Weetabix and milk heated in the microwave for thirty seconds.’

‘You’re leaving?’ Gerda says, following me across the room. ‘Where on earth are you going?’

I grab my keys from the kitchen island. ‘Work, I’m afraid.’

‘ Work ?’

Gerda’s got a face like a bad ham. Good. I stride towards the front door, jump into my car and drive off as fast as I can.

Eloïse and I met eight years ago at a charity event in Mayfair to which I’d begrudgingly gone to wave the company flag. I’d already been to one too many of those sort of things, and although I’ve spent much of my life in London there’s enough Weegie in me yet to find the whole canapés and air-kissing malarkey worse than sticking needles in my eyes. Not only that, but I’d been informed that my ex-girlfriend Lauren was going to be there and I desperately wanted an out.

But then this beautiful woman got up on the platform. She was unassuming and sweet, a hand drawn across her waist to clasp the elbow of the other arm. She spoke quietly into the mic, introduced herself: Eloïse Bachmann. She was starting a crowdfunded project for refugee children who had wound up in the UK. The more she talked about the causes behind this project, the more she seemed to come alive. Her voice grew louder, her posture changed, and suddenly people were paying attention. When she finished, everyone applauded. Even in the bright spotlight I could see that she was overwhelmed.

It’s not that Eloïse isn’t beautiful – she’s slim, blonde and gorgeous – but back then, she wasn’t my type. She’s sensible and quietly confident, probably the smartest person I know. Back then I tended to be drawn to theatrical, insecure women who embarrassed me in the company of friends; the type that tended to slash my tyres after an argument. My relationships were like social experiments. I’d become cynical about love, saying it didn’t exist, that I didn’t even want it, when really I was a blithering idiot with an addiction to sociopaths. And then I found myself two feet away from the girl who had captivated a roomful of millionaires with her earnest passion, and I felt like I’d come home.

She took persuading. None of my old tactics worked. Eloïse wasn’t into fruit baskets or restaurants with dress codes. Neither am I, but I’d been moving in certain circles for so long that I’d assumed these things would woo her. In desperation I cornered a colleague who was friendly with Eloïse and asked her what I should do. ‘Take her to Skybright,’ she said simply. I had no idea what Skybright was. Turned out to be a café run by volunteers, where people could pay what they wanted for the food, enabling the homeless to eat there. I invited Eloïse and she accepted. Three months later, I proposed. She very sweetly said no. A month later, I tried again, on both knees. I knew that I had never, ever felt about another human being what I felt for her, and I wasn’t giving up. Luckily, this time she said yes.

We had two weddings – a real one, attended by the two of us, the priest and a couple of friends in one of Magnus’ properties, and one for our families back in England a couple of weeks later. We spent the next few years backpacking and sailing around the world. El’s a fantastic sailor. Magnus taught her – it was the thing that kept them close, much closer than El and Gerda. We lived in a little beach hut in Goa for months, waking up to the sunrise and swimming in the warm ocean before breakfast. Making love under the stars. We travelled down the Amazon, spotting anacondas and tribes washing in the river. We hiked along the Great Wall of China, then made our way to Australia, where we spent a month sailing around the Whitsunday Islands. I thought I’d struggle, coming home from all of that, but I was so much more in love with Eloïse after that time spent together that I’d have been happy anywhere, doing anything.

I must stress that I adore my children. I really do. I know that I’m a lucky man. But.

The life that we’d lived before Max came along drew to a screeching halt the morning he came into the world. Our spontaneous weekend breaks in New York or Venice: gone. A full night’s sleep: gone. Mental faculties: vamoosed . Whereas El and I had spent the previous four years of our relationship in a state of contented, loved-up bliss, now we only ever seemed to see each other at our worst. I learned that there was actually a spectrum of exhaustion, and I always seemed to have fallen off the far end. We started having fights about things like housework and money. We had more fights during Max’s first year than we’d had in our entire relationship.

I remember about six months into parenthood, both of us demented from sleep deprivation, I was standing in the kitchen making up a bottle and I said to Eloïse, ‘How does any couple stay together after having kids?’

It must have been about two in the morning. Eloïse had crazy bedhead hair and was wearing an old black T-shirt of mine stained with baby sick. It felt like all we did in those days was mop up – or occasionally, catch – bodily fluids, sometimes with our bare hands. ‘I don’t know how anyone stays sane after having kids,’ she said.

Of course, this was all par for the course. We had a group of friends over for dinner one night not long after and shared this story with them, and it turned out that it was a conversation every single one of them had had. Matt reached across the table, took Eloïse’s hand, and said: ‘ Every woman thinks about leaving the father of her children. All it takes is for him to stay asleep while you deal with a screaming baby at three in the morning a few times and – boom! Divorce courts.’

I park in one of the staff spaces at the back of the building – it’s so early and yet there’s only a few spaces left. Some of my colleagues work literally a hundred hours a week, every week. They’ll take a fortnight off when it’s quiet and rent a yacht in the Caribbean. Few of them have young families, or if they do, they’re concealing the fact. I know two female colleagues are married but leave their wedding bands at home. Family is seen as a distraction in corporate finance.

The Smyth & Wyatt building on the Victoria Embankment is like something from Star Trek – Dean Wyatt spent ten million on revamping the place a couple of years ago so that the whole place would be made of glass and titanium, with leather couches imported from Italy and commissioned sculptures in the corridors. I get Dean’s ethos: if you spend every day here, from six in the morning until midnight, the place has to be pretty damn nice, and nice it is.

I race upstairs and unlock my office. I can hear someone calling my name, but I ignore it and log on to my computer. The thing loads up as fast as a tortoise on weed.

‘Lockie, boy,’ a voice calls. It’s Paddy Smyth. Paddy’s a Weegie, like me, though my accent has softened considerably: I’ve worked hard to graduate from Billy Connolly to Ewan McGregor. The London clients like it better.

‘You coming out for drinks, later?’ he asks.

‘Can’t, sorry. Got a bit of a crisis on my hands.’

He stuffs his hands in his pockets and ambles into my office, looking over the photos of my children on the cabinet opposite. ‘Yeah, I heard about the Dubai thing. I thought Raj was dealing with that?’

By ‘crisis’, I mean the fact that my wife is missing, but I don’t say anything more. ‘No, I’m not involved in the Dubai thing. I’ve got to sign off this paperwork for the Husain account ASAP.’