The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

  ‘All right, Neil, but…’

  ‘I’ll pay for it. Forget it, Dan. Don’t worry about it. What else did he say? The doc.’

  ‘He said – what was it again? – he said there was “grounds for optimism”, that’s what he called it, but that, you know, we had to be realistic.’

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, Neil. I don’t.’

  Dan peered into his coffee but didn’t drink any. His skin seemed jaundiced; his eyes were Bassett-hound ringed; his teeth were so discoloured as to be indistinguishable from the gums, so that earlier, when Neil was letting him in, he had doubletaked to confirm that they were there. But Dan was still good-looking, Neil thought, in a dissolute, half-ruined way. Better looking than Neil. He used his left arm sparingly, most of the time letting it hang by his side. Building accident, he had said, winking, at once disguising and intending to advertise some more rakish explanation, though Neil couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  When Dan told him, Neil had been furious beyond words. Probably his rage was unjust; the trouble was, Dan was the only sublunary party available for his blame. Except for Neil himself: Sam’s bruises and the breathlessness and his squirming.

  ‘Did he say – did the doctor say – if you had – if we had…’

  ‘He says in the – what do you call it? – the chronic – right – the chronic period, it’s hard to spot. Always is, he says, the symptoms are so, like, normal. Specially when it’s so slow. All right?’

  Dan’s face reddened and his eyes popped, as if he were holding his breath, or straining to take a dump. After a few seconds his colour and features settled again. He opened his mouth to say something else but closed it without speaking. When it came down to it, Dan was Sam’s father, and he loved the boy after his fashion. He had his anger, too.

  ‘All right. Is Stacy with him?’

  ‘You know Stacy,’ Dan said.

  Neil tried to smile an assent, although in fact he didn’t know Stacy, had never met her, not counting one occasion on which he had waved at a woman whom he presumed was Stacy through the window of a car that he likewise (perhaps naively) assumed was Dan’s, the time they had come to pick up Sam in London the previous year. Neil had no interest in knowing Stacy. He let it go. ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ he said.

  Dan picked up his cooling coffee and put it down again with a noisy clack. Neil wanted him to leave now. He glanced at his watch, then regretted it.

  ‘This euro thing,’ Dan said. ‘It hurting you?’

  Neil wasn’t sure where to begin and didn’t much want to. But he saw that Dan was trying. He had a momentary, compassionate intuition of how hard this must be for him, all of it.

  ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Depends which way you bet. It’s been bad for some people but okay for us. The money’s got to go somewhere, you just have to make sure you get there first.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan said. ‘Right.’ He looked down at the bar. ‘This antique, then?’ He rapped his knuckles on the Formica surface.

  The front door opened. Roxanna wheeled the buggy in, closing the door fastidiously, hoping Leila might sleep for another half an hour. Neil could hear her being quiet – the effortful, tiptoeing footfalls and delicate clinks as keys and bags were shed.

  She saw Dan first, straight away looking behind her at the closed door as if assessing her flight chances. Then she saw Neil.

  ‘Just gone off,’ she stage-whispered.

  ‘This her?’ Dan said. ‘This must be her.’

  He sank off the stool and headed for the buggy. Neil experienced a stab of limbic horror at the prospect of Dan touching his child, his rough hands on her flawless skin, the contamination. One of his arms twitched in Dan’s direction but he reined it back.

  ‘She’s just gone —’

  ‘Let him,’ Neil said, in a tone so unfamiliar that Roxanna acquiesced and stared, mouth half-open.

  Dan unbuckled the girl using his better arm, wincing slightly as he lifted her out of the buggy with both. She was asleep when he nestled her head in the crook of his elbow but opened her eyes when he stroked her cheek. She peered up at his unfamiliar, ragged face, but didn’t cry.

  ‘Da-da,’ she said.

  Neil grimaced.

  ‘Beautiful girl,’ Dan said. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘I should change her,’ Roxanna said.

  Dan began a high-pitched, whiny hum, lullaby with a hint of love song. It failed to cohere into a tune and trailed off after a dozen notes. ‘Beautiful like her mum,’ he added.

  He offered Roxanna a yellow smile, a tiny, self-parodic flashback to flirty, alpha, mighty Dan. Dan slurping water from the tap. Dan letting Tezza hide in the closet (or perhaps it was the other way around, Neil was no longer certain). Roxanna looked at the floor.

  ‘More,’ said Leila.

  ‘This is Roxanna,’ Neil said. ‘Dan.’

  Neil wanted to be generous. He knew what a niece or nephew could mean: the salvaging of someone from the mess, an outlet for affections that bottomless grudges had stifled, a chance for atonement. More than that, he owed Dan, he finally understood, because Dan had known about their mother from the beginning, back when they were teenagers themselves. He had lived with the secret for months, Neil’s own, personal human shield, and for all Neil knew everything that had happened to Dan since began with that.

  He let his brother handle his child, let him jiggle her and arch his body above her, holding her hands as she took a few precarious, drunkard’s steps. They talked about the possibility of bringing Sam to a hospital in London. No, neither of them had been back to Harrow, a Romanian family had taken the house, Neil said.

  ‘Dad,’ said Dan, ‘before he died… You probably worked this out, I know you sorted the lawyer and that, the will. He tried to help me… I was having a rough patch, you remember, and – the house – he…’

  ‘Forget it, Danny,’ Neil said. ‘It’s fine, forget it. Really.’

  Dan traced snail trails and mouse runs on the inside of Leila’s arms while Roxanna unloaded her shopping. After a few more minutes, Neil said to his brother, ‘Give her to me now, Dan. Now.’

  Sam gave a thumbs up when Neil passed him the iPad, and another when he made a puerile remark about the departed nurse’s arse. Neil regretted the joke immediately: better not to encourage that. Before she left the nurse had put an oxygen mask on Sam’s face, and after that he couldn’t say anything, at least not intelligibly. After a few minutes he closed his eyes. The iPad slid from his hand.

  Neil had seen this gear before, on Brian, after his stroke. The ominous tubes, like extruded plastic intestines; the multiple drips; the monitors that made him feel like a cameo turn in the pre-credit sequence of a hospital drama, the heaving chords and contextual sirens of the theme set to cut in at any moment. The whole get-up looked wrong on Sam, outsized and fancy-dress.

  He couldn’t make out whether the boy was asleep. Probably he was in and out. Talk: he should talk. ‘Hope you’re comfortable, Sammy. Food okay? Guess you haven’t eaten much. Roxanna sends her love. Leila would send hers too, but she can’t speak yet, unfortunately. So.’

  The gossip and niceties ran out pretty quickly. Then what? Depressing to talk about the illness, absurd to ignore it.

  ‘Doctors seem nice, Sam. They say you’re doing well.’ Or so Dan reported: apart from making sure he scrubbed up on his way in, none of the hospital people said much to Neil at all, even though he was footing the bills, since he wasn’t the primary relative.

  ‘Does anything hurt?’ He thought he saw Sam grimace. ‘We can get more painkillers if it hurts. Shall I get her back?’

  That nurse (Greek, Neil thought, possibly Spanish) ought to do something about the pain. Where the hell was she? Or the flinch might just have been wind, Neil supposed, like the neonatal creases of Leila’s lips that he had optimistically interpreted as smiles. Or Sam might be wholly asleep and dreaming – fighting off muggers, tonguing Lara Croft, failing to revise for hi
s exams, flying down the stairs, whatever the fuck it was that teenagers dreamed about these days. He might be listening to Neil and agreeing, or listening and disagreeing. Or his twitches might be gestures of protest against the cosmic injustice that had landed on him.

  ‘I’ve seen your father. He seems okay.’ He waited for a flinch but none materialised. ‘Between us we’ll see to everything, Sammy. And Stacy, of course. Whoever the hell Stacy is. Don’t worry about your exams, I’ll find someone to take them for you. I could get someone to take care of Stacy too, if you like.’

  No flinch; no smile. Ridiculous, in a way, to ramble on when it was unlikely that Sam was listening. But these hospital-ward monologues were a bit like cooing over your child in public. You didn’t feel embarrassed, you just had to do it. You had to talk, partly because it was the only thing you could do, and partly because of the strange, irrational apprehension that if you didn’t keep talking, that might be the end.

  What else? Reminiscences: ‘… that time you came to stay with me and Jess, you ate that knickerbocker glory, remember? You puked in a plant in the restaurant foyer, all over it… That waitress… The time we went out to that old airfield, you remember, I let you drive the car – how old were you? – and I had to grab the wheel back…’

  Reminiscences might be ill-advised, Neil saw, contrasting as they did the whackily eventful past and uncertain future. He trailed off.

  Once, as a teenager, Neil had witnessed two men beating up a third outside a Tube station, their shoes thudding dully into his midriff and skull. He had run over, a reflex rather than premeditated valour, but the men had done enough and ambled away. To his surprise the victim sat up, coughed, spat and walked off. Up close, even routine violence was the worst thing in the world.

  Sam’s illness was like violence. It wasn’t like violence, it was violence. The worst thing in the world.

  The news, maybe: ‘… kicking off in Libya and everywhere else down there… They’ve tweeted the News of the World to death… Kicking off in Greece. Portugal next, they reckon, or the Micks, maybe…’

  Again the euro crisis: Sam wouldn’t give a toss about the bloody euro crisis. Neil didn’t give a toss about it, either, come to that.

  Leila had been ten days old when Sam came to meet her. For a second, while Neil was changing the baby’s nappy, he caught Sam’s face in a mirror: open mouth, crestfallen eyes, which he righted when he saw that he was being watched. He had come to stay with them only a few times since.

  Neil hadn’t done what he wanted to do for Sam. He felt remiss, and, worse, he felt irrationally implicated. Here you go, the American girl had said when she gave him her address that morning, as if he had asked for it, which he hadn’t, or might use it, which he never did. Perhaps it would have been better if they had called the police, and Neil had taken his chances in – he groped for the prison’s name – San Somewhere.

  Hocus-pocus. Ridiculous.

  What was left? Song lyrics: the last refuge of the bedside desperado. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, When I first met you… In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight… Well I’m runnin’ down the road tryin’ to loosen my load.

  Sam flinched.

  A flinch as in, It’s okay, I know you’re trying? Or, on the contrary, a Knock it off, will you, for fuck’s sake? sort of flinch? Because, when you stopped to think about it, what was Neil really saying in all his talk? You are ill… You are very very ill… You are ill and I am scared. Nobody wanted to listen to that. Probably his chatter made only one of them feel better.

  He shut up. He noticed a little crescent of zits above the corner of Sam’s mouth, an adolescent affliction that seemed touchingly banal in the circumstances. When he was Sam’s age, Neil had salacious, anarchistic thoughts about what he would do in this situation. Fuck hookers, punch policemen, egg the Queen. It wasn’t like that at all.

  The tempo of beeps from the monitors picked up; he looked around for a white coat but no one rushed in. Just as he was about to leave, Sam opened his eyes again and seemed to blink an acknowledgement. Neil felt the unwonted tears coming and fought them back. He reconsidered, tried to force them out, and felt something glide down his cheek.

  You didn’t get to choose when calamity struck. At a minimum, Neil caught himself thinking during the taxi ride from Harley Street, you should get a say in that. All this would be easier if it had come at a different time: easier in the practicalities, at least, if not the emotions. If the disease had held off until Leila was older. If it had developed before his split with Adam. That was a disreputable, egocentric thought, Neil realised; he was ashamed of it.

  Sometimes, when he remembered Adam, he would feel a pain in the region of his liver, a sharp ache like the cramp he sometimes got if he drank too much coffee.

  He let Roxanna know he was on the way. Theirs was a queer kind of closeness, he thought as he texted. He had seen her with her legs in the stirrups, wailing in her own shit and blood. He had licked her clitoris and tasted her breast milk (sweeter than he anticipated, with a hint of caramel). They were into the mature phase now, the time when the childishness started, struggling for dominion, picking fights, gaming each other, banking favours and concessions as he and Jess once had. Yet for all the proximity he hadn’t yet assimilated basic Roxanna facts – the temperature at which she liked her bath, her allergies, her preferred orders in restaurant chains and coffee shops.

  They were obscenely intimate strangers. On rare occasions when Neil’s birth family came up in conversation she would ask polite but desultory questions, as if they were discussing characters from history. Who shot Franz Ferdinand? Who was Henry VIII’s third wife? What colour was Neil’s mother’s hair? To her, his family was dead and buried, and she, Leila and Neil comprised a pristine new reality. She was kind about Sam, but she didn’t see how, for Neil, he was the lone survivor, whom he had plucked for himself from the wreckage. She didn’t know Adam, knew nothing of what had happened with Adam, neither what happened between Neil and Adam and Claire nor between Neil and Adam and Rose. Once, rummaging in the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen, she had stumbled on the photo of the two of them beneath the Faithful Couple. ‘An old friend,’ Neil had told her, and they had both left it at that.

  He would love her properly in the end, Neil thought, as he ducked out of the taxi at the corner of his street. He was almost there. He stepped out distractedly to cross the road; a blue, by-the-hour bicycle swerved to avoid him (between the bikes and the susurrating electric cars, aural intuition no longer sufficed for London pedestrians). When he reached his building he raised his hand to punch in the entry code, but paused. He stood alone on the pavement for a few minutes before he went upstairs.

  Roxanna was watching a box set, all charismatic psychopaths and impenetrable accents. When he bent to kiss her she ruffled his hair, asked if he was all right and was there anything she could do? Leila was in her cot, asleep. He ought to be anxious for her by association, but the two universes felt too disconnected – the unjust Sam universe and Leila’s prelapsarian version – for Sam to be a warning for Leila or Leila a consolation for Sam.

  He went into the under-used room they affectedly called the study. Outside, on the pavement, he had decided to go through Claire: a risk, obviously, since he couldn’t be sure that she would cooperate, nor how Adam would respond to her mediation. Still, Claire might know whether Adam was amenable; whether the timing was bad; whether Neil had been forgiven, or could be. He didn’t have an email address for her but the internet soon furnished one, from the contact page of what was evidently her new company: Claire@windinyourhair.com.

  Good for you, Neil thought, with a small admixture of regret. One of them had been an entrepreneur after all.

  He logged onto his email. He tried to keep it short (Don’t waste the customer’s time), deciding not to mention his father, or Leila and Roxanna, but to explain only about Sam. He wrote in a hurry and pressed Send before he had a chance to reconsider. No
xxx below the sign-off this time:

  Claire

  To be honest I can still hardly believe that I’m writing this. I mean, not that I am writing to you now but what happened in the first place. I know its probably too late but I wanted to say again to you and Adam that I am sorry. Please tell Adam this if you think that would be appropriate.

  I’ve tried too many times to figure out that evening and all I can think of is that somehow you end up with grudges against the people you care about most. You end up not being able to tell them apart, your failures and the witnesses to them, your friends and why you need them. Anyway I take all the blame on myself. All of it. Please tell Ad that. Tell him it was always my fault and I should have seen that earlier.

  Obviously I don’t know how things are with you and the kids although I would love to. I dont even know where youre living. I can see that you’re in business now and I hope that it is prospering. I am getting in touch because I wanted Adam to know about something thats happened. I am sure that he remembers Sam, my nephew, I expect that you remember him too. He and Harry played together once or twice. Seventeen now, amazing.