The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

  She must be drunk, too. Drunk enough. A woman like her, who for much of Neil’s life wouldn’t have given him a second glance. If he had misread her, he might never see Adam again. He might never see him again if he hadn’t. And yet the weight of her against him, her scent, her warmth, were so perfect. His senses were at once blurred and sharpened by the wine, intense but somehow indistinguishable from each other. So natural, so inevitable. It seemed to Neil that he had always wanted this, even if he hadn’t known, a newly discovered pedigree for his desire that let the faithlessness feel less ignoble.

  Claire let her hand rest on his leg. Neil caught his breath. He heard the blood drumming in his ears. In the kitchen the pianist was dallying in the upper scales, sentimental and manipulative. I want it to be you, Rose had said. During the night, in the tent, he had seen her features twitch and frown, the hieroglyphs of a dream, her lips synching the words or protests that her dream self must have been saying.

  He tightened his grip on her ribs. He turned his face towards hers. This would be only fair.

  It was the wine, maybe, or the nerves, but his timing was out. He leaned over too far, too fast, and kissed only her hair; several twisty strands clung to his lips when he withdrew.

  That might have been all anyway, the spell broken for both of them, but Neil would never know for certain. The front door opened. She snatched her hand from his leg.

  Neil stood up, checking that his trousers were respectable. Harry marched through the living room to the kitchen and opened the fridge. He turned off the music, scraping a stool across the parquet to the counter to eat whatever it was he had extracted.

  ‘Hello, Uncle Neil,’ he called out, in the ironic tone that kids seemed obliged to affect. He had reached the age when they could no longer count on a smile, their size, the sheer audacity and miracle of their diminutive yet capable bodies, to win the approbation and indulgence of adults. Harry had realised that, from now on, he would have to earn them, and he evidently wasn’t pleased.

  ‘Me too,’ Ruby yelled as she trailed after her brother. She changed her mind and jumped onto the sofa, thrusting an illuminated, hand-held windmill into Claire’s face. ‘Hello, darling,’ Claire said, hugging her daughter more tightly than their temporary separation called for.

  Claire’s mother came in with the children’s kit. She was thinner and greyer than Neil remembered her from the novelty cummerbund days. Her spectacles dangled on a long, professorial cord. She glanced from him to the bottle to her daughter.

  ‘Hi,’ Neil said, striding towards her and taking her free hand between his. ‘Neil.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember.’

  ‘Good to see you again.’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned to Claire.

  ‘I was about to leave,’ Neil said. ‘Adam’s not here.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  Neil called out goodbyes to the children, and to Claire, without looking at her. ‘Me too,’ he heard Ruby say to somebody.

  He plucked his jacket from the banister and swam for the door, slamming it behind him more violently than he intended. He abandoned his car and swayed towards the station to find a taxi.

  When he was almost home he took out his CrackBerry. He wasn’t sure he would have Claire’s number – he had no recollection of ever calling her directly – but there it was. He could sense the boozy ripeness of his breath in the cocoon of the cab. An early-onset hangover gripped the back of his head, competing for attention with his instant remorse. The car bucked and jerked in the traffic; the driver was telling a story to someone on his speakerphone: ‘… and he’s only gone and got himself a man bag, the dickhead. I said, what you got that for? He said, it’s for holidays. You dickhead, I said…’

  Neil opened a window. No harm done, he thumb-typed. Let’s forget it. He hesitated for a moment and then pressed Send.

  I’ve bailed, he wrote to Adam. Next week, maybe? Happy birthday

  As he was paying through the window of the taxi, his pocket beeped. He gave the driver a twenty, told him to keep the change, and read her message: Forget what?xx

  Not just undocumented immigrants working illegally. That would hardly be news to anyone in London who had renovated a home in the last few years or cash-in-handed a cleaning lady. Nor merely illegal immigrants working as security guards. Illegal immigrants working as security guards in the Home Office. And Parliament. And, very likely, Number 10 and MI6. It would be funny if… okay, it was funny, but you could only laugh in the right company, Adam was streetwise enough to know that. One of the Downing Street enforcers had been in, demanding to know what could be done, when and how much it would cost (the prospect of front-page ignominy always conjured money from the ether). Everyone knew that two or three heads would have to be stuck on pikes in Whitehall. There were dark mutterings about a stash of discarded paperwork that had been discovered in a Croydon housekeeping cupboard.

  Croydon: the eternal scapegoat, the illegal immigrants of the Home Office. Thank God for Croydon.

  His would almost certainly not be among the impaled heads, Adam reflected as he walked home from the Tube. He was too lowly an official to be a useful sacrifice. All the same, it seemed providential that Neil had put him in touch with that consultancy. If that oleaginous interviewer wanted him, perhaps he should find a way to accept his friend’s charity. He and Neil sometimes did a sort of skit when they saw each other, a pastiche of their former selves – Adam telling most of the jokes, Neil residually gauche, or acting it, for history’s sake, or for Adam’s. This was one of the reasons Adam needed him: Neil carried a trace memory or reflection of Adam at the height of his possibilities, his maximal plumage, fresh from university, thoughtless of failure, absolutely ignorant of what awaited him. An image of him at his happiest and his freest, as well as at his most… regrettable. Underneath, Adam knew, the power had already swung away from him, following the money, rather as, in old age, it ebbs to the spouse who stays healthier for longer, a basic animal hierarchy.

  That was already their dispensation, whether or not he took this nepotistic job. He already owed Neil. In any case, Adam wasn’t changing the world at the department. He wasn’t changing anything. He wasn’t even a 7.

  Adam turned into his street and mounted the steps to the maisonette. He heard the familiar front-door serenade of play and conflict, sibling love and rivalry too entwined to be distinguished. He found Ruby perched on the kitchen table in her nightie; Harry was performing little standing leaps in his pyjamas, his upstretched hand reaching for the phone she was dangling above him.

  ‘Careful,’ Adam said; then, shouting, ‘Claire!’ It was much too late for this.

  ‘Coming,’ she called down.

  ‘Get down from there! Clezz!’

  ‘No,’ Ruby said, squatting defensively in the corner. ‘Naughty Daddy!’ She flipped and clicked between the gadget’s applications, with a native dexterity that made Adam feel both proud and old.

  ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘Mine,’ Ruby said. She drew the prize into her torso.

  ‘Give it to Daddy,’ Harry said, confiscation representing, to him, a respectable draw.

  ‘It’s bedtime, lollipop,’ Adam said. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘I know how to spell shit,’ Harry said.

  ‘Me too,’ Ruby said.

  ‘Give it to me,’ Adam repeated. He yanked the phone from his daughter’s grasp with more force than she was expecting. After the shock, she began to wail.

  ‘Suh,’ Harry said, counting off the phonetic letters with his fingers.

  Adam glanced at the miniature screen. The roulette of Ruby’s clicks had landed on Claire’s inbox. A message from Adam himself; one from Claire’s mother; Adam again; the mother of one of Harry’s friends; Neil; Adam.

  ‘Huh,’ Harry said, extending another elfin finger.

  Adam placed the phone on the kitchen counter. Ruby was crying. He hated upsetting her, even when her behaviour and his self-respect obliged him to. He hat
ed anyone upsetting her, but it was worse when he was responsible.

  ‘I want a new daddy,’ she said. ‘I do.’ She wriggled out of his embrace.

  ‘Ruby-loo,’ he said. ‘Come back here.’

  Why Neil? He and Adam had been in touch directly to cancel. Neil and Claire never texted each other, so far as Adam knew. He picked up the phone again and opened the message with a hasty, unthinking depression of his forefinger.

  No harm done. Let’s forget it

  ‘ii,’ Harry said.

  ‘I’ll ask Father Christmas for him,’ Ruby said.

  Forget it… In theory, Adam could choose to attend to his daughter, rebuke his son, his wife would appear, the vertiginous moment would pass. In practice, only one course of action was available. He fumbled his way to Claire’s outbox. Her reply was the last message she had sent.

  Forget what?xx

  Forget what? And those xx, so harmless when she sprayed them over saccharine messages to her friends, so incriminating in this one.

  ‘Tuh,’ Harry said. He grinned.

  ‘Dadda?’ Ruby said. She had stopped crying.

  Adam helped her down from the table. The children bickered away and up the stairs.

  His first sensation was a light-headed, instant nostalgia for the prelapsarian era that had just ended, the era of automatic trust that Adam felt he was only now appreciating, as a nobleman might recognise his privileges only after they are expropriated. A moment later he was dizzy with grubby surmises, hypothetical scenarios, a frantic scan of his memory for clues or tells. He gently laid the phone down again and looked at the floor. He ground his jaw.

  His mother had known about his father’s affairs, or so she had told Harriet. She knew, and she hadn’t minded, at least not enough to divorce him. She had left him for a different reason. She was bored, she told Harriet. Just bored.

  This was his biggest failing and worst mistake, Adam reflected in the kitchen: the wrongful imputation of harmlessness. Will from television, pole-climbers in the Home Office. His father. Neil. He was hopeless at spotting where the harm was coming from.

  Neil?

  People could live with these things, if they chose to.

  Claire’s cheeks were flushed when she came in. He thought he saw her glance at the phone. She told him about the viewings and asked about the office, and the minister, but he only grunted at her until the children were comprehensively in bed.

  He turned on the satellite news. More about the missing girl and her broken parents; in Parliament, the new prime minister, the latest face of the age of war, lamented that week’s glorious dead. Nothing, yet, about the illegal immigrants. They would sniff it out tomorrow, someone would leak it to damage someone else.

  She sat next to him on the sofa. He could smell the booze on her, and something else, a lozenge or toothpaste that she had used to disguise it.

  ‘How long did he stay?’ Adam asked her. His voice came out blank and deadpan. ‘Neil.’

  ‘Not long. Till you said you weren’t going to make it.’

  He turned off the television. She carried on staring at the charcoal rectangle as if the picture were still there.

  ‘Was he still here when the kids got back?’

  ‘I can’t… Yes, maybe he was.’ She would have lied if she were sure she could get away with it, Adam thought.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘With Neil.’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. She put a hand on his arm. He saw her swallowing anxiously. This was it, Adam thought. This might be it for them.

  ‘So what is there to forget?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did Neil want you to forget?’

  She pulled away and leaned into the opposite arm rest. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘What have you already forgotten? Claire.’

  Her eyes widened. The urgent ratiocination was legible in the microspasms of her cheek muscles and the darts of her pupils. She braced a foot against the floor, as if she were preparing to flee. Didn’t I delete it?, he thought he saw her think. I meant to delete it. Fuck! Next, he interpreted, she was considering a counterattack: What are you doing, looking at my phone? What the fuck do you think you’re doing? He almost felt sorry for her, so little time to come up with something, and she was bound to be exhausted, she always was. In the end he guessed she was contemplating an outright lie. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Adam, you always do. He meant no harm to his car, he reversed into the lamppost. Or, No harm done to his suit, after Harry jumped on him with muddy feet.

  She must have rejected that option. Too undignified.

  ‘Nothing happened, Adam,’ she finally said. Her hand crept along the apron of the sofa. ‘We had a drink, a couple of drinks. You were late.’ She paused but he didn’t interject. ‘This funny old lady came to look at the flat. She was going on about her cats, and the loo, and…’

  ‘What’s she got to do with it?’

  ‘She thought Neil and me were married. It’s too hard to explain, Ad. We were trying not to laugh, and it felt like we were… a team. You know how that is, don’t you? I don’t think it would have happened without the old lady.’

  ‘What wouldn’t have happened?’

  ‘Nothing. We were laughing, it was a bit… I don’t know, flirty. That’s all. You were late.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘We were sitting here, waiting for you, and… honestly, Adam, it was nothing.’

  Everything was always nothing, Adam thought. He looked down at the patch of fabric between his legs. This is where they had been.

  ‘What nearly happened, then? Claire. What did you want to happen?’

  ‘Nothing, I’ve told you.’ He could see her deciding how honest to be. ‘He put his arm around my shoulder. We… sort of snuggled. That’s all.’

  ‘You don’t even like Neil.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘No harm done,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. Adam?’

  He stood, left the room, climbed the stairs to their bedroom and closed the door. The linen appeared to be unruffled. He sat on the edge of the mattress, elbows on knees, his face in his palms.

  Adam wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. The situation wasn’t like any other he had experienced. It was an escalatingly adult moment, akin to the first time someone in the hospital had asked, ‘Who’s the father?’, and he had looked around, like a screwball comedian, before understanding it was him. Or the first time he had slapped four passports down at airport immigration and felt a decade older in an instant. Yes, you, this is happening to you. It wasn’t even very like itself, at least not the straightforward version of the scenario that was familiar from TV.

  He believed his wife that nothing had happened, at least in the technical, secretional sense. A cuddle. A cuddle plus, maybe. He had always trusted her in that way, squeamish as he had occasionally felt about her sexual history. Truth be told, he had rarely thought about her in that way, not since the children. In any case, how much anger did he deserve? He hadn’t sat on their own sofa with Heidi, back in those cosy days before her promotion when she had been his proxy office spouse. But several times he had looked tipsily into her eyes in a way that he intended to seem meaningful. In St James’s Park one summer he brushed a fluff of pollen from her hair, and she stiffened and looked up at him as if he might kiss her. Once they held hands in the back of a taxi, gazing away from each other and out of their opposite windows in bittersweet silence.

  He had never told Claire about any of that. He hadn’t told her about those women on the Strand (another nothing, a genuine nothing). He hadn’t felt any inclination or obligation to tell Claire. These things happened in a marriage, didn’t they? They were part of a marriage. Fidelity, Adam considered, was like the speed restriction on motorways. The official limit had a built-in margin that you were tacitly permitted to exploit, so long as you went no further. He thought of how, the
last time they flew out of Heathrow, he had doubletaked one of the unobtainable Asian sales girls in Duty Free, how Claire had seen him and let it go.

  She said they hadn’t, and he believed her. But even if Claire hadn’t broken the rules, Neil had. Marriage had a margin, but friendship had tighter parameters.

  This was a punishment, Adam sensed. For what he knew about Neil – for what he had on Neil – and for what they had done together. What Adam had done. It was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You started it. That was what Neil had said on the morning after, long before he knew the whole story.

  I hope you find out how this feels.

  Adam pounced down the stairs and went back into the living room for his car keys.