by A. D. Miller
Sam loitered by the car, respectfully fastening the upper buttons of his shirt. Of the two of them, Sam had lost more, Neil saw. More of the less that he had.
Neil climbed over a stile and marched up the ramblers’ path at the side of the field. Glancing back he saw Sam attempt to vault the fence and fail. He turned around quickly so the boy wouldn’t know he had been seen. The field wasn’t as he expected and wanted it to be (cows and grass where Neil remembered wheat), and he realised, as he walked, that he didn’t know what he was looking for or where he ought to stop. Sam had fallen behind; Neil paused to let him catch up, sitting on the trunk of an old tree.
Dan had made it to the crematorium but vanished immediately afterwards, not troubling with excuses or goodbyes or bittersweet reminiscences or even a drink, leaving Neil in sole charge of both Sam and the ashes that had recently been Brian. Neil’s first instinct was surreptitiously to leave the urn behind, but one of the attendants had scampered after him, presuming the dereliction was an oversight, and he had been obliged to take it. Putting the thing in the bin felt like too much, even for Neil. Sam suggested the stretch of pavement outside the shop, which was after all the place Brian had spent more of his waking life than any other, a fourteen-year-old’s crazy and possibly illegal scheme that Neil had fleetingly entertained as reasonable.
Then he thought of the picnic place. The memory of it seemed to belong to someone else, inherited by the almost-forty Neil from some ancestor self, a figure who resembled and related to him as Neanderthals did to modern humans in biology-textbook sketches of the ascent of man. His childhood was a story about a person he only distantly knew; at the same time it contained incidents he could recall with an almost shocking clarity. The odour of damp at the back of the armchair when he hid behind it to filch a fresh-minted one-pound coin from his mother’s handbag, the leathery smell of her bag as he persuaded himself that she wouldn’t notice, or, if she did, that she would blame Dan. His reasoning and remorse on that day seemed nearer to Neil, as he sat on the tree trunk, than did the motives for more recent wrongs.
Sam caught up, perched alongside him and panted. Neil put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. When he regained his breath Sam stood up and in front of Neil, fidgeting – digging his hands into his trouser pockets, taking them out, entwining his fingers behind his back, replacing them in his pockets – from which Neil inferred that Sam thought this was the moment. It might as well be.
He stood and unscrewed the lid of his father’s urn, trying to think of something to say. In the end he settled on ‘Goodbye, Brian’, the valediction doubling as a petty revolt, since he had never called his father Brian while he was alive.
‘Amen,’ Sam said, and swallowed.
Neil rotated the lid. He meant to do it slowly, a picturesque hour-glass trickling, but he misjudged the angle and the consistency of the ash, and it landed in a clump at his feet. It seemed sacrilegious just to leave the stuff there – he had a premonition of a cow ambling over and lapping it up – so he and Sam found sticks and spread out the flakes until they resembled a burned-out campfire. Sam dug his stick into the ash and the ground below it to mark the spot. ‘Goodbye, Brian,’ he repeated.
Neil decided to keep hold of his mother until he thought of something more decorous to do with her. Walking back to the car he dredged or conjured up a picture of her sitting in an alcove of wheat in a summer skirt, her legs curled under her, her shoes kicked off. He might have distilled a picture of his father, but halfway back Sam found a chewed-up tennis ball, hemispherically bald where a dog had mauled it. He kicked the ball at Neil; Neil inexpertly returned it. They stained the knees of their trousers on the overlong grass at the verge of the field. Sam ran out of breath after a few minutes.
‘You okay?’ Neil asked him.
‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘No problem.’
‘Right. Come on.’
Neil drove them to a pub he knew further up the lane, now accoutred with a kiddies’ playground and a conservatory that he didn’t remember. He left his mother in the boot. He ordered a gin and tonic for himself and half a pint of lager shandy for his nephew.
‘So how’s Stacy, then?’
‘A’righ, s’pose,’ Sam said, drawling like an American television gangster, at least when he remembered to. He took a swig of shandy but didn’t seem to like it. ‘She’s a’righ most of the time. She’s there a lot, you know, with me. More than him.’
What sort of woman, Neil had asked himself when Sam first mentioned Stacy, would take on his brother in his twenty-first-century guise? Dan was no longer sinking, exactly – he had stretches of work, weeks or months at building sites or warehouses – but equally he seemed to have given up hope of rising: he subsisted in a hand-to-mouth state of precariously deferred crisis. Stacy was the answer. Whether she constituted a net benefit to Sam, or was simply an extra embarrassment, Neil wasn’t sure.
‘Didn’t want to come up?’
‘Don’t think he asked her. Not speaking much at the moment. You know, one of those.’ Sam raised his eyebrows, a worldly gesture on the craterous man-boy’s brow.
‘What about Basingstoke? School and everything.’
‘A’righ.’ Sam’s leg was twitching. He wiped his nose. He swallowed nervously, though he hadn’t taken a drink. ‘It’s true, what he said. The old man. The Indian bloke. I heard him from up the stairs. He was mad proud of you, your dad. Brian. Always on about you. He got me to show him your website, you know, on the computer. Your company or whatever. We went to that internet place on the high street.’
‘When I wasn’t there,’ Neil said, like some touchy adolescent. ‘Only when I wasn’t there.’
‘Yeah, but anyway. Still counts. And he was grateful, you know, the way you were always coming up here. He told me. He was thankful. Even if you and him, you never said much.’
‘You only get one,’ Neil said. ‘Dad, I mean. Might as well do your bit.’
‘Huh,’ Sam grunted, as if to say, Don’t I know it? What he actually said was, ‘He loved you, innit.’
Neil took a slug of G&T. ‘He was proud of you too, Sammy.’
‘Yeah…’
‘He was.’
‘Right.’
He noticed a cut at the corner of Sam’s mouth where he had attempted to shave for the occasion; between that, his grimy shirt and stained trousers, Sam might have stumbled out of a fire or a collapsed building. A few months before, during the death-watch in Harrow, Neil had broached the idea of his nephew moving in with him – casually, he intended, presenting it as an all-round win. It was a mistake, he saw afterwards, to specify that Dan could see his son whenever he liked, as if that were in doubt. Dan had growled at Sam to get his stuff together, shouted a goodbye at Brian, and manhandled the boy away. Three or four more years – as soon as Sam could be comprehensively detached from Dan, and from Stacy, if she were still around – and Neil would redeem him. Money and somewhere of his own to live and a job, even: he was the sort of man who could pull that off now.
They drove back into London. Neil bought potatoes and cooking oil and made them chips for dinner, cutting the potatoes very finely while Sam watched.
He wasn’t lonely. Neil told himself he wasn’t lonely. He had friends, or quasi-friends, functional friends, people with whom his life overlapped, people with whom he shared common interests, mostly in the utilitarian sense rather than the recreational one. He had gym friends, friends at work, though with them, Neil found, all the gamesmanship and rivalry that crept in under the back door of civilian friendships were there in the hallway from the start. Simulacra of friends. After he put Sam on his bus, the morning after the ashes, he had an urge to phone Adam. Not because he was traumatised or bereft: he just felt Adam should know, as if the act of telling him and Adam’s witness were a missing part of the event.
Neil’s feelings had hardened in the weeks after what, at first, he thought of as ‘the argument’. Every ungenerous thought he had ever harboured about Adam, from San Dieg
o to Ealing, was collated in his defence, exaggerated and repeated with no kinder reflections admitted:
Smug bastard. Patronising bastard. Jealous bastard.
Fauntleroy. Failure.
Accomplice. Liar. Pimp.
He forgot that a friend’s faults were among his consolations – that some of Adam’s faults were virtues. They became only faults, worse and worse. He forgot his own culpabilities.
The blindness lasted over a year, until a few months after Neil’s father died. When, that autumn, the banks collapsed, gravity was reinvented, and it emerged that, contrary to long-held London belief, economics wasn’t only something that happened in faraway countries – Latin American basket cases and rabid Asian tigers – Neil felt sure Adam would be glorying in the blow-up. The image of Adam vengefully celebrating his comeuppance hardened into a certainty in Neil’s mind: chancer, spiv, wasn’t that what Adam had always thought of him, those only-in-England terms of disparagement, the commercial equivalents of the other English classic, Too clever by half? It sometimes seemed to Neil that there were only two or three socially acceptable careers in his hypocritical country.
Fuck you, then.
What are you really going to do?
That was the final swell of his anger, and at the end of the same year, after eighteen months apart, the bitterness lifted, slowly then suddenly, like a migraine or a grief. Now Neil floundered when he tried to recapture the logic that, on Adam’s sofa, had seemed to link his grievance with this redress. His reasoning became so vague and inarticulable that it was astonishing to him, almost funny, that he had lost his best friend, his only whole friend, for ever over this.
He should have known that night in California, Neil finally acknowledged to himself. He hadn’t needed Adam to tell him. Not just her nerves, nor the way her knees knocked together as she dried herself by the lake. He should have known in the tent.
Neil was in a post-crisis strategy meeting with Tony and the other partners when it struck him that in fact he had known, had only been pretending not to, hadn’t asked because he knew what the answer would be; that therefore, in a way, Adam had nothing to do with it, there had been nothing for Neil to revenge, and he must bear all the responsibility himself, both for Rose and for Claire. He blushed violently, not just blushing but sweating, suddenly and feverously as if he had food poisoning, his hands shaking like an alcoholic’s when he tried to take a note. He excused himself and rushed to the gents, hoping that Tony and the others hadn’t noticed his disarray, holding on to the edges of the sink and bowing his head so as not to look himself in his bloodshot eyes. By that evening his certainty had dissipated, and he was no longer sure what he had known or when.
When he first kissed her she had closed her eyes and puckered her lips as if she were in an old movie.
Who cared what Adam had or hadn’t said that night? He felt ridiculous and ashamed. That Christmas he considered texting. The number was still listed among the contacts in Neil’s phone, and now and then he would open Adam’s details and look at the meaningless digits and the handsome thumbnail as he was scrolling his way to someone else, privately embarrassed by this indulgence, the SIM-card necromancy. It was my fault, all of it, I’m sorry. But he didn’t text, or call.
He had texted Jess about Brian, telling himself that she would want to know. Sorry 2 hear that, she replied.
He hadn’t got his comeuppance. ‘It’s like that golf joke,’ Tony said to Neil early in the New Year.
‘What golf —’
‘Two golfers, they’re on the fairway, they see a bear. One starts to run, the other says, what are you doing, you can’t outrun a bear, and the first guy says, I don’t have to, I only have to outrun you. We’ve just got to be less fucked than the other fuckers.’
Neil laughed, aloud and inauthentically.
‘Don’t share that one with the clients, kimosabe.’
Tony had swapped a slab of stocks for gold, Swiss francs and American bonds. There was a bond-rush and a gold-rush, and six months on they were miraculously in profit, coming out of the crash with their reputation enhanced in the garrulous HNWI family. In hard times, Neil saw, the rich were the best business to be in. The rich were always with us, ever anxious to be relieved of the awful burden of their cash.
He was learning to be picky about who he ran money for. He could smell the psychotics who would sue if you missed their pie-in-the sky targets, and the foreign tycoons who would laugh, then have you escorted from the building, when you proffered your humble but kosher ten per cent return. He could spot the neurotics whose money could only be extracted gently, reassuringly – the right-place, right-time mega-salariat of the eighties and nineties, whose share options had turned into one-way golden tickets, and who were petrified of losing their barely dreamed of windfalls. On the other hand there were the risk junkies, proud of their own daring, a pride you had to flatter and nurture.
During the spring after the crash he went to Miami, a nine-hour flight for a fifteen-minute pitch, though by now Neil tended to know within thirty seconds how the conversation would end. Through the retracted security gates and into the antiseptically pristine home (always over-housekept, these palaces, the life scoured and disinfected out of them like covered-up murder scenes).
The client was at his desk. He didn’t look up. Neil said, ‘How do you feel about losing money?’
They wired the investment to Rutland half an hour later. In London they would think Neil had reeled him in with some patented, supernumerate spiel. It was simpler than that: Sell the customer what he wants to buy.
That evening he flew to New York, and in the morning had two meetings on the Upper East Side. In the afternoon he saw a woman he thought he knew, something about the shape of her head, her hair, the elastic rhythm of her stride. He tried to put her out of his mind. Later, on Park Avenue, he saw the same woman again, or thought he did, and although he knew the familiarity might be psychosomatic, he ran. I am not the sort of man who runs after a woman in the street, he wanted to tell the Americans he passed.
She was gone. She made him think of times in his childhood when he had needed to prove, in some insoluble dispute with Dan, that the tennis ball was in, really it was, or, later, that he had been the first of them to ask their father for Saturday morning off – occasions when he wanted urgently to appeal to some celestial umpire for a categorical ruling. Just tell me! Possibly she was fine, but there was no one to ask, and you had to live with that, Neil realised, never knowing what your own actions meant.
Two years after ‘the argument’, drinking alone at his bamboo bar, Neil thought about killing himself. Not out of despair or anguish; not for any particular reason at all, in fact, but rather because of the absence of a clinching reason to carry on living. He had changed his mind about suicide. It had come to seem less an arrogance than a practicality, an efficiency saving. Sure, his work had its consolations. It was fixed, unsurprising, and success and failure, blame and virtue, were reassuringly clear, the therapeutic superficiality limiting the scope of disappointment. But work wasn’t a sufficient incentive, and nor was money. For some of the others, money was less a commodity than a war, which they would always be losing so long as someone at the fund on the other side of Piccadilly was getting more. Neil knew he had enough. He was PAYEd more in a month than his father had earned most years.
He could leave it all to Sam. He could leave something to Adam, too, though Adam might be offended. He would write an apology into his will.
Instead of killing himself he became a partner. He took Sam to Paris for a weekend on the Eurostar. They went to a circus, a proper, old-fashioned circus that featured abused tigers and sequined show girls for the dads. Later in the summer Neil took Sam to Lake Garda, putting them up for a few days at a hotel recommended by Tony. They shared a room, Sam hunting for porn on the satellite channels and Neil scouring the grounds for a BlackBerry signal with roughly equal alacrity. Sam wanted to go to a nightclub, and he looked old enough to pass, but
Neil put his foot down. He had some blotchy bruises on his forearms; Neil tried to examine them but Sam squirmed away. He kept his T-shirt on when he swam.
Neil met Roxanna at a recession-proof restaurant in Soho (pan-Oriental menu, sub-industrial decor, the lighting regimen tenebrous in some places and glaring in others, like a secret-police interrogation chamber with multiple stations). Tony and one of the other partners were there, several analysts and a few secretaries, plus assorted other-halves and hangers-on. They sat at an awkward long table, everyone arriving in the wrong order and wishing they were next to someone else, or wishing that they weren’t there at all, the room anyway too loud to hear what the person opposite was saying, as in most London restaurants, the diners barking at each other in an escalating aural brawl.
She was sitting between Neil and his colleague Dominic, a thirty-ish, obviously handsome stock analyst, not as posh as he would like to be, perhaps, but working on it. At first Neil assumed the two of them were attached, but during the starters she shot him an unmistakable get-me-out-of-here look. She was Iranian (not, apparently, a bar to boozing). She organised conferences, she was a friend of one of the secretaries, Tiffany, he thought she said, who had brought her in lieu of a date. She had ebony hair, matching eyes and endearingly irregular teeth. Neil tried not to be distracted by the acquaintances in his peripheral vision.
