The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

  ‘Just a second,’ Neil said, extending a finger upwards from the hand that held the BlackBerry. ‘Just give me a second.’

  Tony was a workaholic. He and his two partners had left jobs in insurance and private equity to start their firm (none of them was called Rutland, they just thought the name sounded trustworthy). They had gathered their clients – including Farid, which was how Neil came to know them – in a remorseless, marriage-destroying campaign of insinuation and sycophancy at events like this one.

  Still, as City bosses went, Tony was relatively humane. You could see it in his giveaway eyes, tender and melancholy, out of place somehow in his flabby, particoloured face, itself perched on a rectangular bouncer’s body.

  ‘Okay,’ Tony said, removing his arm. ‘See you in a minute, hotshot.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Funny thing: growing up, Neil had always thought that whatever he managed to do or achieve, he would have to do and achieve on his own, not counting on favours or connections and never enjoying any. Yet he had been helped, by Bimal and Farid and now by Tony, each propelling him upwards through London postcodes and income-tax brackets, before passing him on to his next benefactor. (Neil hadn’t expected a goodbye, but on his penultimate day in Hanover Square he turned round at his desk and Farid was standing there; he raised an arm and caressed Neil’s cheek with his knuckles, up and down once, as if tracing the line of a scar.)

  Neil crouched to put his glass on the carpet and turned towards the wall to type. Adam, I’m sorry for what happened… I’m truly sorry for what nearly happened… It was my fault, not Claire’s… I didn’t mean what I said.

  Or: I guess the dinner’s off.

  Better not. Beware the perils of email, Neil urged himself: jokes that might be missed, brevity received as rudeness, possibly, in this case, an apology that would seem insufficiently contrite, or, conversely, to be admitting more than he intended to. All these new ways to communicate, digital guarantees against losing each other, which were mostly new opportunities for misunderstanding. Everyone was inescapable, these days, but in place of the old jeopardy you found yourself clutching at holograms.

  Probably best just to write, Adam, I’ll call you tomorrow. Or, Let’s talk tomorrow. Although that might seem curt and non-consensual.

  Neil accidentally kicked over the half-drunk wine glass at his feet. He turned back towards the suits and plucked another from a passing tray. Best of all, maybe, would be to say and write nothing for a few days. Let his friend cool off. Let him and Claire patch things up.

  He blamed the old woman (Priscilla?), with her cats and her orange-powdered mole. If she hadn’t barged in, he might have left. If: If Eric hadn’t turned in early that night. If the man who owned the truck had been out. If the girl in the sarong (she was the blonde, wasn’t she?) hadn’t lingered in the hostel yard. Or if Adam hadn’t. All these random collisions, pinballing molecules. In the end you couldn’t say where anything started, which was the main action of your life and what the interference.

  Neil sipped. He gulped.

  In any case, was it really only he who ought to apologise? He was in the wrong, he acknowledged that. Doubly wrong: he shouldn’t have said the things he did. But some of what he said had been accurate, and not just about Adam’s deceit: his tone, the superciliousness that had grated from the beginning, right back to Las Vegas, the condescension that incited Neil in Yosemite, which he thought Adam had outgrown, but which in reality he had merely disguised. I have always encouraged you… I have never criticised you.

  Who the fuck did he think he was? Neil didn’t owe Adam anything. Morally speaking, they were quits, he reckoned, taking into account what happened in California. Quits at the least. In any case, for years Adam had been a kind of succubus, taking out of Neil more than he put back. Neil could have managed everything he had done without Adam. He could manage the future without him, if he must or if he chose to.

  So: We’re quits, Ants. Fuck you.

  Tony was coming towards him with the Levene brothers’ man. Neil replaced the BlackBerry in his pocket, cocked his head back and sluiced the last of the wine down his throat. He stepped forward for the handshake. ‘Jonny,’ he said. ‘Good to see you.’

  Neil, Tony and the man clinked glasses. ‘Bottoms up,’ Neil heard himself say.

  When it was too late, or seemed to be, he reflected that his mood that evening – wrigglingly defensive, angrily ashamed – had been a hypocritical luxury. He had luxuriated in his pique because he didn’t think the estrangement was real. His confidence in the friendship obscured its demise. In the morning Neil sent a secretary from the office to collect his car.

  Adam slammed the front door again. He didn’t care if he woke the kids; he didn’t think Claire would reproach him. As he started up the stairs, his phone rang. He expected Neil, but it was Nick, doubtless wanting to impart some new, baroque twist in the illegal-immigrant debacle – less than a day old, but already feeling prehistoric – or some fresh demand for unobtainable statistics, the wrong, inconsequential part of Adam’s life interrupting his private crisis.

  He switched Nick off. He pounded up the stairs to the bedroom and turned on the light.

  Claire was in bed but awake. Adam avoided her eyes and didn’t speak. He rolled the chair to the wardrobe and stood on it to reach the upper cupboard, surfing the swivels as he opened the doors. Forgotten objects fell or were thrown out as he rummaged. Maternity clothes; worn-out but hoarded shoes; a map of Barcelona from a pre-parenthood weekend break, sentimentally retained as if it might help them chart a path back in time; a university graduation certificate; the box for a digital camera. Why had they never sifted this stuff?

  ‘Adam?’ Then, more stridently, ‘Adam – what are you doing?’

  He succeeded, finally, in extracting a red biscuit tin from the junk. He balanced the tin on the lip of the cupboard, prised open the lid. These were Adam’s special, once-important things: the letter that had offered him his first big-time job in television, some billets-doux from Chloe, tied up in a pretentious snip of lace, some old photographs. He found what he was looking for. He replaced the box, jumped from the chair and made for the door, leaving the detritus of his raid scattered on the floor.

  ‘Adam, what…’

  Back down the stairs, the late, mauve summer dusk shading to grey outside the window, a view he had always enjoyed but would soon leave behind, past the contaminated sofa and into the kitchen. He turned the photo over.

  Two young men, almost equally foreign to him now, their arms around each other, gesticulating for the camera. Two young men who, naturally, had no idea what the next decade and a half would do to them; who had little idea what the next thirty-six hours would do to them, or what they would do in them. Adam felt affectionate, protective, belatedly apprehensive. He wanted to break through time’s thick, soundproofed glass, sit between them, behind the sign that said Faithful Couple, put an arm around each of them and tell them not to do it. But they wouldn’t have known what he was talking about. They were happy. They were together.

  He grasped the upper edge of the photo between his thumbs, preparing to rip. I sometimes think… After a minute he stood on another chair and tossed the picture into the dusty, dead-insect limbo on top of the kitchen cabinet.

  2008–10

  A

  nother thud from above, a few seconds after the first – the percussion, Neil figured, of something falling, then turning over or overbalancing. There was a scuffle of feet and the scrape of an object too big to carry being dragged across the floorboards.

  ‘Sam?’ Neil called up. ‘Sammy, you okay?’

  No reply.

  Neil came out of his parents’ room and took hold of the stepladder; its antique metal rungs wobbled as he climbed. He tried to remember the last time he had been in his father’s loft (the house and bedroom would always be Neil’s parents’, plural, but in his internal designation the loft was eternally and exclusively Brian’s, his mother’s closest a
pproach to it, so far as he remembered, being to stand at the bottom of these steps and call down whomever was up there for lunch, peering up into the murk with an expression of adamant distrust). He trod carefully on the narrow steps, trying to weigh as little as possible. The madeleine aromas of damp paper and mouldy rubber assailed and stopped him halfway through the hatch.

  Sam was kneeling in the beige glow of a single, unshaded low-watt bulb, his shirt smeared with a rich, well-matured dust. He was appraising an old black-and-white television – deeper than it was wide, three knobs, only ever three channels – which, Neil remembered, had been retired to the loft from service in his parents’ bedroom, but which before the purchase of their colour set had been the screen on which they watched the Cup Final in the lounge, he and Dan alternately fiddling with the aerial when the zigzagging interference got too much; the screen on which they watched the Grand National, Brian having closed the shop early and visited the bookies’ three doors down, placing a single pre-selected one-pound wager per family member, the boys clutching the betting slips as if they were enchanted parchments.

  ‘You can take it home if you want,’ Neil said. ‘Might still work. Take it, Sammy.’

  ‘Nah,’ Sam said, squinting at the alien bulk like an archaeologist at a sarcophagus. ‘No room. Stacy wouldn’t have it, would she? Look at it. Shame, though. All these old things. It’s like your own museum. Yours and Dad’s.’

  ‘Take something else, then,’ Neil told him. ‘Take anything you want. House clearers are coming next week. Never know, might be worth something.’

  Neil’s turn to reckon his family’s life in things had come. A couple of archaic wooden tennis rackets, pressed between rectangular frames; an antediluvian computer, unrecognisable as a computer to Sam, and now, almost, to Neil, over which he and Dan had fought, viciously, no quarter asked or given, for seventy-two hours after it arrived one Thatcher-era Christmas, quickly forsaking its binary games for muddier diversions; a pair of binoculars in a scratched leather case; a deflated yellow dinghy, unused since it was launched on a frigid beach in Suffolk in the mid-eighties. In one corner were a pair of promising-looking trunks, which upon inspection contained only several decades’ worth of accounts for Collins & Sons… Sam didn’t have much that was truly his, but there was nothing among this junk that he could want. For reasons he couldn’t identify, Neil needed him to have something.

  He watched Sam stoop to rifle a suitcase. The boy was only a couple of inches shorter than him, with an adolescent incongruity in his proportions (bulbous head, outsized feet) that suggested he hadn’t yet topped out; a trio of creases at the hems of his trousers charted their and Sam’s extensions like the rings of a tree trunk. When you looked at him from behind, or in silhouette, minus the pointillist skin and affected glower, he seemed much older.

  In the end he took a yo-yo, though only, Neil knew, because he wanted to be kind. Sam creaked down the metal steps. Earlier, when Neil turned the light on, it had blinked into action as if from hibernation. This time – the last time – when he followed and flicked the switch, the bulb went off immediately.

  The end. He closed the hatch.

  In the bedroom, in the wardrobe, Neil found his father’s clothes, and on the adjacent shelves his mother’s clothes, more or less untouched, so far as he could see. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure Sam wasn’t there, pressed his nose into the fabric and inhaled.

  Moth balls.

  Do you cry when you think about it?

  In the kitchen, beneath the sink, he found six dusty bottles of water, relics of an emergency supply that Brian had laid in, muttering about trade unionists, when a waterworks strike seemed imminent at the fag-end of the seventies. He put a paperweight, two vases and a few photos into a plastic crate. He could hear Sam moving around in Dan’s room, opening and closing the drawers, ransacking his father’s childhood. Dan had already pillaged the cutlery, plus a watercolour of a French harbour that Brian once hinted might be valuable, though Neil doubted it. In his father’s paperwork he discovered that the house had been remortgaged, five years before, around the time of Brian’s first stroke, in what the cheque stubs suggested was an eleventh-hour bid to keep Dan out of the gutter. Once he might have been aggrieved at the favouritism, but now he smiled at the secret, gruff kindness. Your brother knew from the beginning.

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Mr Hinds told me,’ Bimal’s father began. Neil tried to place Mr Hinds and failed. ‘I saw your car, you see. You don’t mind… I… He was a gentleman. That’s all, that’s what I… That’s all.’

  Bimal’s father was wearing a suit, possibly the same, trademark garment he wore during their childhood. The skin above the bridge of his glasses was flaking, Neil noticed, white flecks on brown. He gawped around Neil as if he might be invited in, or be able to glimpse the corpse. Irritation rose up Neil’s throat – busybody, ghoul, vulture – but he suppressed it before it reached his lips. Behind his visitor, above the unchanged sequence of houses on the opposite side of the road, the sky was too blue, inconsiderately perfect.

  ‘Thanks,’ Neil said. ‘Appreciate it. Really.’

  He asked after Bimal.

  ‘Yes, very well, very well, thank you,’ his father said. ‘California agrees with him, as you know. And the children, they are getting their American accents.’

  Neil hadn’t known that Bimal had moved to America. He nodded in assent but said nothing.

  ‘He was very proud of you,’ Bimal’s father said at last. ‘Very proud. Always showing me the stock prices in the paper, you see. All your comings and goings. Very proud indeed. But you know that.’

  He held out a hand for Neil to shake, somehow bony and soft at once, like the carcass of a battery chicken, and after that it seemed too late to ask for details.

  ‘A real gentleman,’ he repeated. He turned and walked away, erect but slow, with a mechanical, arthritic gait. He seemed smaller than Neil remembered him.

  Neil stood at the open front door. ‘Come on,’ he called up to Sam. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get on with it.’

  Neil put the rattly crate into the boot of his car, along with the two urns. Sam sat in the front, playing with the windows and reclining his seat at its expensively glacial pace.

  ‘Are you, like, ’kay?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘Course.’

  He glanced over at Sam and saw that he was wiping his nose with his finger. At the end of every horizontal slash his hand circled up to wipe his eyes, too, finger for one eye, thumb around the other.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Course,’ Sam said.

  Neil switched on the radio. Told y’all I was gonna bump like this. Sam turned it off.

  He drove up through Stanmore, past the location of the golf course on which he and Dan had played pitch-and-putt as boys, Neil surreptitiously kicking his ball a few metres towards the hole whenever Dan, mighty Dan, turned his back. The land where the course had been was now a live-the-dream housing complex that had evidently missed its time. There was an advert on the fence, facing the dual carriageway. One corner of the plastic sheet had become unstuck and blown across the lettering: Still Six Units Remai

  You were supposed to feel radically alone when the second one went, Neil knew. Finally orphaned; ultimately adult. That was what everyone said. No one left to forgive your mistakes, no generational buffer between you and your own death. No longer loved in that particular, enfolding way.

  That wasn’t how Neil felt, as he and Sam drove over the edge of London, and he saw no point in pretending. He was no lonelier than he had been two weeks before; if anything he felt younger, lighter, childishly unburdened. You were supposed to feel a futile, belated regret for everything you hadn’t asked, everything you had been too timid or inhibited to bring up. That was another thing people said. There were indeed facts and episodes Neil found he would like to clarify, but it was gossip, really, that he coveted, not heirloom wisdom or five-to-midnight honesty. Not Do you love me
? Or Are you scared? But How did you lose your virginity? Did you ever have an affair? Have you ever committed a crime? Smashed bottles and Don’t shit on your own doorstep and the phantom girlfriend in Maida Vale whom Brian had mentioned to Adam that afternoon in the nineties. Too late now.

  Neil looked across at Sam. He was craning his head out of the window to catch the wind in his hair, as road-trippers did on television. They had the rest of the day together. Neil smiled.

  He pulled off the dual carriageway into a narrow country lane. After a few minutes he parked beside a pond at the beginning of a village. Neil remembered the four of them coming to this place for picnics, although it was possible that they had only come once, one luminous recollection that his memory had amplified or wished into a habit. He retrieved the urns from the boot and strode towards a field where (he was almost sure) his mother had called On your marks, get set for fraternal races that Neil invariably lost.

  ‘Come on,’ he called back to Sam. ‘Sammy, come on.’