The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

  Adam had been hired by Hardy and feared Laurel. As a team the two of them were like the improbable couples you sometimes saw at weddings, the type with no obvious compatibility or resemblance, who nevertheless synchronised perfectly on the dancefloor. They fit. Adam struggled to decipher where the power lay between them.

  The private sector, a realm so denigrated and envied by his Civil Service colleagues, turned out to be essentially the same. The same needs, grudges and laziness, distributed in roughly the same proportions across the office, interacting according to what was probably a scientifically predictable algorithm. The same atavistic subtexts to every disagreement in meetings. Only the vocabulary was different. In consultancy you sought alignment before a meeting by syndicating your findings to your team. Faced with scepticism or incomprehension, you would walk them through the deck. You talked about value and performance and delivery, and, as often as possible, strategy. The key phrase, the trump phrase, the term that dominated their spreadsheets and appraisals and reveries, was billable days.

  It was known in the office that one of the investors had sponsored Adam, and to begin with his colleagues had cold-shouldered him, as if he were part intern (unlikely to stay long enough to be worth schmoozing), part informer; he ate his lunch at his desk, pretending to be busy. He had thought to be respected for his decade of public service, to leap across to this new ladder halfway up, the higher rungs immediately in prospect. He was mistaken. Most of his peers had joined from mainstream consultancies, with the odd, exotic accountant sprinkled among them. The minority who, like Adam, had defected from the public sector, came from the big-ticket, contract-rich departments, health and local government and welfare. Adam had irrelevant expertise, unremunerative contacts.

  ‘Going forward,’ Hardy advised him, Adam struggling to repress the image of him leathered and strapped into the orgy cage, ‘you’ll need some expert leverage,’ meaning research assistants who knew what they were doing.

  They were certain to fire him, he warned Claire. It was only a matter of time. Even with the smaller mortgage, they would be screwed. He regretted his rash, greedy career switch. He dwelled on the cost of the children’s sports camp. The shame.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him in their bed in High Wycombe, dawn breaking outside the dormer window. She applied for part-time jobs and took one as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery.

  He worried.

  He brought in a smallish contract to find savings at a private prison, and he proved to be a good picker-upper, adept at knowing precisely enough to seem plausible. Half the time, Adam quickly saw, it wasn’t substantive expertise that the clients were buying. The arrangement reminded him of that song of a decade before, in which the lyrics deny the singer is the man his girlfriend has caught in flagrante. It wasn’t me – who decided you should be fired. It was Adam Tayler. It wasn’t me – who recommended that you be privatised. It was Mr Tayler.

  His true expertise was in taking the blame.

  It wasn’t me.

  It isn’t what you think.

  It was a misunderstanding.

  Adam often worked alone, sleeping in deathly identikit hotels while he terrorised some unfortunate regional hospital or council. He would take a book to dinner, less to read than as a prop to ward off garrulous travellers – a precaution he adopted after an evening in Hartlepool with a packaging salesman, a man with the hairiest ears he had ever seen, who, when Adam’s interest lagged, had pleaded, ‘It’s not just paper, it’s corrugated cardboard too!’ Occasionally he thought of Neil, driving round and round the M25, Neil before he flew out to America, with only the radio and his shampoo samples and his ruthless customers for company. He became a connoisseur of the spoiling techniques deployed by doctors and bureaucrats. Outright rudeness and noncooperation were easier to handle, he learned, than oily hypocrisy. ‘Wonderful idea’ and ‘fascinating insight’ generally translated, in Adam’s experience, as ‘You cunt’ and ‘I will crush you’.

  He went back to the Home Office to pitch for a contract at Croydon. Chatting awkwardly to old comrades, he wasn’t sure whether to think of them as victors or as inmates: whether, in careers as in a battle, the people who survived were the strongest and the bravest or, on the contrary, the most cowardly. Whether he had escaped or failed. He saw Heidi in the lift, but other people crowded around them. She blushed, fixedly watched the numbers ticking down to G, and strode off when the doors opened, with only a curt, eye-contact-less ‘Bye’.

  After a year he was summoned to Hardy’s office, and when he arrived found Laurel in there too. He glanced rapidly between them, looking for the driving-examiner smile.

  ‘This is perfectly normal —’ Laurel said.

  ‘This is absolutely routine,’ Hardy cut in, Laurel switching on a Zen grin to smooth over the interruption. They explained that Adam’s temporary contract would be rolled over for another year. The same thing happened the following year. In his more sanguine moments he would still glance up the ladder, at job titles with the prefix Senior or even Director of, but at others he peered downwards to the abyss, and was grateful to have his lowly rung to cling to.

  They had lunch at the café by the lake, cold meats that the children wouldn’t eat and Coke they weren’t supposed to drink. Afterwards they played babyfoot, like a family in an advert, Adam’s eyes meeting Claire’s as they registered the idyllic tableau. This is us. He whispered to Harry to let Ruby win, as he wished he had let Harriet win, once or twice, at table tennis or Risk. His son tried to comply, for a goal or two, but in the end he couldn’t manage the self-effacement.

  After the game Harry announced that he wasn’t tired and fell asleep in the shade. Claire sat on a lounger to brush Ruby’s beautiful hair.

  Adam put on his Crocs, and the sunglasses that were the marker of sexual self-respect among young parents, and absconded for a walk along the shore. He hummed to himself, then sang aloud: ‘Well I’m runnin’ down the road tryin’ to loosen my load / I’ve got seven women on my mind.⁠’ His happiness anthem. Away from the road and the café the lakeshore became wilder, rockier, unkempt, bottles and plastic bags and a lone flip-flop nestling in the crevices. But further along the rock gave way to a flat, curated stretch of sand, possibly attached to a hotel, though Adam couldn’t see one among the trees.

  Two young boys were playing bat and ball. An elderly couple dozed under a parasol like effigies of themselves. A young woman in a white bikini, sunbathing alone on a towel, sat up to remove her top. She was a pretty brunette, painted toenails, firm, catwalk breasts. Nineteen, Adam estimated, or thereabouts. The fidgeting of her hands behind her back drew his eyes but he forced them away.

  Adam watched as two men walked towards her, whispering. She was lying on her back, topless, and didn’t see them approaching. One produced a camera from a pouch around his neck; the other arced around the girl, using that studiedly casual, faintly comic, half-jog, half-stride gait that some people employ if the lights change while they are crossing a road.

  The second man stood next to the girl, grinning. The first man raised his camera.

  ‘Hey,’ Adam shouted. ‘Non.’ He shooed them away with the back of his hands, as you might a wasp or a stray dog.

  The girl sat up and saw the three of them. She tried to shield her breasts with a forearm as she rushed into a T-shirt, gathered her belongings and stalked up the beach towards the trees, one foot stumbling in the sand as she passed the second stranger. Adam wanted to shout after her that he was trying to help, but his schoolboy French deserted him, she was gone too quickly, tripping again on the root of a pine tree but keeping going, escaping, this time, into the shadows.

  The two men drew together and conferred, hands cupped to their mouths like conspiring tennis partners. They were younger than him, with the pointlessly bulbous muscles of gym enthusiasts, the wirier of the two, the man with the camera, somehow the more concerning.

  Adam stood his ground, bluffing, wondering whether he had been rash to in
tervene. The comatose pensioners and the bat-and-ball boys would be no help. He thought of the wasteful casualties of nightclub altercations and road rage incidents that he occasionally read about. He was grateful for his sunglasses, which masked the fear that must be glowing in his eyes. He held the wiry man’s gaze.

  They couldn’t read him, or they were bluffing themselves. They scowled, the wiry one spat on the sand, and they walked slowly away in the other direction.

  Adam exhaled. He looked towards the old people for acknowledgement or approbation but they hadn’t stirred.

  He turned to rejoin his family, scrambling back across the rocks, thinking of Ruby yelling ‘Higher!’, of she and Harry swimming back to Claire on the shore. He thought of the girl on the beach in Tenerife, struggling with her towel beneath the yellow parasols, he and the cameraman watching through the viewfinder. He thought of the girl by the lake in Yosemite, her head buried in the water as she swam, how she slicked back her hair and grinned. Two men were watching her, and one of them was him.

  They were eating ice creams at the café when he got back. The wind had picked up; Claire was wearing a sarong. She gestured that it was time to go, thumb pointing back over her shoulder towards the car park, as in an old disco move.

  They packed up their things and made for the hire car. Adam drove them out through the forest and across the farmland beyond. They passed war memorials, a sacked castle, a place where, so Claire’s guide book informed them, heretics had once been burned at the stake. They were safaris of pain, these holidays in gory old Europe. So much cleaned-up blood and forgotten loss.

  Adam still wondered about her. Not every day, nor even each week, but she would reappear at intervals, reliably incessant, and he was almost glad, sometimes, when she did. The memory of her had become a proof of who he was, a continuity between his forty-year-old incarnation and his younger self. Or, rather, she was a memory of a memory, since Adam understood that, after this much time, a person could only be an idea, as perhaps she always had been. He thought of her father, too, sometimes. You do your best, Eric had lamented, you think you’re doing right, and Adam saw that he, at least, had tried to.

  Of course he wished it hadn’t happened. He wished he had blown the whistle that night (My girl. You believe it?), that there had been no reason to excoriate him in the morning. Not speaking up was the most reprehensible action, or inaction, of his life. All the same, the obsession had eased. The whole episode was regrettable, horrible even, but also ancient and, like those medieval atrocities, almost impersonal, another Adam as well as a bygone Rose. He couldn’t have known then what he understood now, about daughters and about permanence.

  The guilt he still felt had a new focus. In the end, Adam reminded himself as he drove from the lake to the restaurant, It wasn’t me. It wasn’t him who had taken the girl into the tent that night. That fact was a partial mitigation, but also, now that he finally came to accept it, a kind of reproach.

  It wasn’t Adam. It wasn’t Rose. It was Neil.

  More than once, in the months immediately after their quarrel, Adam had considered contacting Neil, to let him know he had been right after all: his text had been prescient, no harm had been done, not to Adam and Claire at any rate. His email would be impersonal, caustic. If Neil replied, Adam would delete the message without reading it.

  When, a year later, abstruse catastrophe beckoned – when everything the experts guaranteed would never happen, bankruptcies and bail-outs and nationalisations, happened the next day; when Adam’s securocrat acquaintances were whispering about plans to impose martial law if the cash machines ran dry – he thought of Neil anew. Dodgily spliced investments, runaway derivatives, Farid’s ramshackle property deals: Neil was implicated in everything that had caused the debacle. Neil and his money.

  Adam called up the Rutland Partners website, hoping to find that the firm had gone to the wall, or at least was somersaulting towards the brickwork, a fate that would be adumbrated in some apologetic, lawyerly holding statement. Instead he read a screed of gobbledegook about how the fund had diversified its assets to minimise downside risk. He’s got away with it, Adam thought. He’s got away with it again. When his job at the consultancy faltered he blamed Neil for instigating the move. Neil had never understood the public-service ethos, never even tried. Perhaps he had known that Adam would come unstuck.

  But he couldn’t keep it up, and before long he found himself regretting his anathemas. He had been the man with the luck, Adam knew. Neil wasn’t one of those congenital banking types whom he had met at university and sometimes ran into now, the type who wore those City-boy felt-collared overcoats, who had been destined for riches since their perfunctory conception in some stockbroker-belt bedroom. Adam had the drive, too, or so it had seemed in the beginning. Neil had been powered by a kind of indifference, which the world had rewarded as some men covet aloof women. He had done it all himself.

  Later Adam would look again at the Rutland Partners website, but for clues to Neil’s progress rather than evidence of his downfall; now and again he would Google him. For the most part he was able to prevent himself searching for anyone else. He fought off the impulse to contact Rose until it almost abated.

  Adam still thought of Neil as dead. But after a couple of years he was no longer the shameful dead, an executed traitor or bubonic corpse, but dead in the manner of a rash, lamented duellist. That was one of the dead’s advantages, Adam saw: you could choose which version of them to remember, as an obituarist was free to choose a photo from his subject’s youth. Neil dragging him out of the ocean in San Diego. Neil with Harry’s green shit on his coat.

  As for the Claire thing, their nothing: his sense of scale had changed. His world was smaller, what was closest to him mattered most, and who, and so, in a way, they were quits. Rose was a contest and an idea, but Neil was his friend, had already been his friend that night in Yosemite. It made no difference that they had only known each other a few weeks. That wasn’t how you measured obligation. Adam already owed Neil that night, and he had defaulted. Joining him in the encirclement at the tent the next morning had been a bluff, Adam acknowledged to himself: he had asserted his innocence by exposing himself to judgement, self-interest and loyalty jumbled up.

  If Neil were to be resurrected – if he were to get in touch – Adam might consider forgiving him. They would have to discuss it, he and Claire. But he would definitely consider it. That is, if Neil would consider it, too.

  He wouldn’t, Adam was certain. They had left it too long. The job was his memento of Neil, a debt that at first had rankled but was now more poignant than galling. He wasn’t even sure whether Neil knew he had accepted it.

  They stopped for an early dinner. Claire was still wearing her sunglasses, but he could tell that she was watching him, checking the temperature of his thoughts, while the children threw a ball for a stranger’s dog in the square. Adam smiled to indicate that he was with her. Against her half-hearted objections he bought them preposterous baseball caps with 3-D wild boars, the emblems of the region, lolling on the visors.

  On the way home the four of them sang a round, Ruby struggling with her cues but laughing at herself with the rest of them, Adam watching her, almost surreptitiously, in the rearview mirror. These were their headline memories, Adam realised, the memories his children would one day share with lovers and spouses, the moments that would come back to them, arbitrarily, as adults, in a meeting or on a train, their equivalents of his boyhood’s fishpond and ice-cream catastrophes. The weight of that struck him afresh as he drove them back.

  In bed he told Claire about the topless girl by the lake. She said, ‘My hero,’ and kissed him on the shoulder.

  There was a pond behind the cottage, so pretty that, on the afternoon they arrived, Claire said the view belonged in a film, but overrun with lascivious frogs. That night Adam feared their croaking would keep him awake, but his wife put her arm around him and he fell asleep.

  2011

  W
/>   ith his back to the kitchen Dan couldn’t tell that Neil was watching him as he made the coffee. He was sitting at the bamboo bar, standing up, sitting down again, standing, scratching, apparently unsure how formal his visit was, how comfortable or uncomfortable he felt, to what extent he enjoyed the status of a brother and how far he came as a stranger.

  As Neil approached with the tray Dan raised one buttock from his bar stool and let out a rolling fart. He looked around, saw Neil, and grinned, pretending the salutation had been intentional.

  ‘Old time’s sake,’ he said. Neil forced a smile.

  Their accents had diverged with their lives. Both started from a clipped north London classlessness, but Neil’s voice had migrated moneywards, assimilating the rounded, self-indulgent vowels of his ritzier acquaintances. He was half-ashamed of his vocal suggestibility. Dan seemed to have more or less given up on consonants (‘’ol ’imes ’ake’).

  Neil put the tray on the bar and sat down.

  ‘What hospital is he in?’

  ‘Hampshire… You know, North Hampshire.’

  ‘Listen, ask the doctor where’s best for his… for what he’s got. Actually, tell me his name, could you? I’ll ask him, if that’s okay.’