The Faithful Couple Read online

‘Knock it off, Jess,’ Neil said, turning away from her. ‘Me and him – you don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t sulk,’ she said. ‘I was just… I’m sorry.’

  After Adam and the wedding came the ritual introductions to their families. The first, Jess’s mother, was unplanned. Neil asked where she was going, whether he could go too, and she said, ‘Believe me, you don’t want to.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Your funeral.’

  They were halfway to Hull before he clocked it. Contrary to all the self-parodic jokes she had made, her childhood home, a shoebox miner’s terrace, had inside plumbing and no coal scuttle. Her mother was immobilised by arthritis and older-looking than Brian, despite being five years younger.

  ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he said as they stepped out of their taxi.

  ‘Likewise,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’ She carried a cane that she mostly forgot to use. ‘You could have warned me, Jessica. Nowt in the house.’

  The front room was a 3D album of Jess photos, though none of them was very recent. Jess in school uniform. A teenaged Jess glammed up for a night on the tiles. Jess wearing a mortar board at an ironic angle.

  ‘She’s a one,’ her mother said to Neil, when Jess went to smoke on the front step. ‘Give you much trouble?’

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Jess’s mother said, rasping out a laugh.

  She poured more tea and sat in silence with him until her daughter came back. Jess showed him no mercy, not interpreting or elaborating on the local names and legendary incidents that populated the intermittent conversation.

  Harrow was the final milestone, the last museum of their prior lives. They drove out in Jess’s car at the end of the summer.

  ‘Are you Neil’s wife?’ Sam asked, disobediently opening the front door alone.

  ‘No,’ Jess said, keeping her distance. She offered the boy her hand but he ran back into the house.

  Brian shuffled up. ‘Come inside,’ he said, turning away.

  Tea and a plate of digestives were pre-arrayed on top of the television. Sam mounted the armchair; as Brian came in he was preparing to hurl himself onto Neil’s back.

  ‘Careful,’ Brian said, pointlessly.

  Sam jumped. He slid down Neil’s spine, catching his hand in his uncle’s as he landed. Neil looked down at the spiral of hair on top of the child’s head, only recently thickened up from babyish thatch. The trace of a birthmark patterned his temple.

  Sam wiped his nose with his finger, though it wasn’t running. ‘Are you his wife?’ he asked Jess, indicating Brian with his eyes.

  ‘No!’ she exclaimed, too loudly for the room.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Tea?’ Brian asked.

  ‘My friend, Sammy,’ Neil said. ‘She’s my friend.’

  ‘Okay,’ Sam said. ‘Now we’re playing hide and seek.’

  ‘Are we?’ said Jess.

  ‘Milk and sugar?’

  ‘I’ll hide, and you count. Ready?’ Sam set off for the door. Brian pressed himself against the wall to let the boy pass.

  ‘One,’ said Neil.

  ‘Not yet!’ Sam shouted, laughing and looking back from the threshold. ‘Close your eyes!’

  ‘Just be careful,’ Brian repeated, resting a forearm on the corner of the mantelpiece. There was a shy tenderness buried somewhere in his father’s voice, Neil thought. Perhaps Sam picked it up more clearly than he was able to, as young ears could reputedly detect certain frequencies that adults miss.

  ‘Two,’ Neil said.

  Jess ran her hands down her thighs, straightening her skirt. Sam’s footsteps skipped across the hallway and echoed up the stairs, the pat of feet alternating with the soft slap of hands and pad of knees, the not-yet-outgrown technique of infancy. Hurry with a hint of dance.

  ‘Careful,’ Brian murmured, much too softly for Sam to hear. ‘Left him here yesterday. She dumped him on Dan, apparently, he’s got something on in Poole, hotel site, he said.’

  ‘This is Jess.’

  ‘Gave me a toy giraffe and a pair of pyjamas and left him. What was I supposed to do?’

  Brian had received a health warning from his doctor a few weeks before. He looked slightly awry in scale – all the right and recognisable features, but somehow smaller than life-size. His flannel trousers ballooned clownishly around his thighs.

  ‘Ten!’ Sam shouted down.

  ‘Jessica,’ Brian said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You go,’ Jess said.

  ‘Com… ing,’ Neil sing-songed, creaking up the stairs.

  He saw Sam’s feet at the bottom of the armchair in Dan’s old room, the point of an elbow jutting out horizontally at five-year-old height, the thin arm rotating as Sam picked his nose. Neil mimed an investigation of Dan’s wardrobe, empty besides some discarded cowboy-check shirts, and, at the bottom, a pile of hoarded school exercise books defaced with obscene sketches. The giraffe lay on the bed.

  ‘Saa… aam, where are you?’

  ‘I’m here,’ Sam said, unable to wait any longer. ‘Here.’

  Neil lifted Sam in the air and turned him upside down, squeezing him against his chest with one hand and tickling him with the other. You didn’t have to act with a five-year-old: that was one of Sam’s attractions. The mask could come off.

  ‘Stop,’ Sam laughed, not meaning it, sighing when the laughter ran out.

  ‘Sam,’ Brian called from the foot of the stairs. ‘Sam, come down. I’m making you a sandwich.’

  Jess was sitting in the kitchen. She had a cup and saucer in front of her, an unbitten digestive biscuit (no chocolate) wedged between them. Brian was at the counter, his back turned, spreading. A tableau came back to Neil: his father frying chips, the only thing he had ever cooked for his sons, and only ever when his wife was away, or hospitalised, or otherwise prevented from dispensing the regulation beans on toast, fish finger sandwiches or pasta with supermarket sauce. The potatoes were always cut string-thin, Neil remembered, and he and Dan would sit at the table, watching, as if their preparation were an alchemic rite.

  ‘There you go,’ Brian said, laying the sandwich on the table.

  ‘Yuck,’ Sam said.

  Later Neil and Jess went up together to check on him. He was splayed on Dan’s bed, one arm dangling over the side, another above his head, that hand clutching the giraffe, legs akimbo, as if he had struggled to the end, like those flailing corpses exhumed from the lava of Pompeii.

  ‘They’re all cute at that age, aren’t they, though?’ Jess whispered. ‘They peak at three or four, then they turn into fuck-ups and mediocrities like the rest of us.’

  ‘Shhh,’ Neil said. ‘Don’t.’

  She invited or instructed him to move in with her while they were downstairs watching television. Brian was washing up; the urn supervised from the mantel. Neil could activate the break clause in his lease later that autumn, she said. Pointless to waste more money on a separate pad.

  ‘Jess,’ he said. ‘You know I’ve never… I’m not sure I can.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, ‘I won’t marry you.’

  His life was happening.

  Adam was only twenty-five when Jim let him go. His tank was still full. He spanked the Civil Service exams, struck the requisite balance between showmanship and modesty at the final-round assessment centre. When he first arrived in Whitehall the atmosphere had been eerie, millenarian. The old ministers were waiting sullenly to be evicted, the bureaucrats openly anticipating new masters; grimy mesh bomb curtains, relics of the Cold War, still shrouded many of the windows. After the general election the organism of state exhaled, and Adam quickly found he liked the private lingo, the security passes and vetting, the sense of being among an elect. He and some of the other fast-streamers spent long, contented evenings in Whitehall pubs, plotting their routes to Grade 7, a rank that would confer higher pay immediately and, they knew, adumbrate future glory, Adam never seriously doubting that he would soon a
chieve it.

  ‘If I may?’ he interjected at five minutes past three, shortly after the meeting convened. ‘Might we consider reviving the amnesty?’

  Nick said, ‘I’m sure we’ll get —’

  ‘The amnesty scheme the previous government operated? The evidence now suggests it was quite effective in reducing knife crime where we rolled it out.’

  ‘Thank you – it’s Adam, isn’t it? Thanks.’

  Five past three: a slight violation of protocol, Adam knew. You were supposed to wait until the senior grades had their say, but he had already learned that particular lesson. Ditch the well-bred reticence in meetings. Sequester your credit from predators. Simulate teamwork but make sure you get noticed. These were the principles that his apprenticeship in television had inculcated, tenets of employment that had been as unannounced as most of adulthood’s rules and burdens (taxes, commuting, the many varieties of insurance that, in their household, Adam had somehow become responsible for procuring).

  There was a pause before someone from policing, already a 7, said, ‘Stop and search…’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Nick said, beginning to scribble on his notepad. Two of the other men were smoking, tapping their cigarettes into shallow metallic ashtrays that appeared to have been lifted from McDonald’s.

  ‘Under the new guidelines…’ the 7 continued.

  Actually Adam could use the extra money, the 7 money. The parental subsidies had dried up. ‘Short-term cashflow issues,’ his father had explained. He and Claire were still okay, financially, they were fine for the time being. He must remember that mortgage form.

  They were three-quarters of an hour into stop-and-search, it was almost four o’clock, when the 7 said, ‘… the girlfriends too. The girls. I mean, the young women. They often carry weapons for the men. It’s easier for them at clubs and what have you – no pat downs, sometimes they let them bypass the metal detectors. Sixteen, seventeen. Fifteen, some of them.’

  Fifteen again. Bad luck. You’re such bullies.

  Adam remembered his father teasingly saying to him (he must have been eight or nine), ‘Lollipop, whatever you do, try not to think about pink rabbits digging for treasure at midnight.’ Of course the stricture only made the thinking inevitable. His right hand put down his pen and moved of its own accord to scratch his left forearm.

  After stop-and-search Nick delineated the ‘systemic issues’ that had arisen in their external response to the summertime spike in knifings. Nick’s office personality consisted in his blue postman shirts and his martyrly hours, a regime he observed despite the moral claims made by the children in the photos pinned to the partition behind his work station. Or presumably they made such claims. Once, when Adam visited his desk late in the evening, he found Nick playing Space Invaders on his computer.

  ‘… roll out best practice,’ Nick was saying.

  A quarter past four. People were fidgeting and twitching, turning over pages on their notepads and listlessly flicking them back again. They discussed half a dozen policies that no one thought for a microsecond would be implemented. Towards the end someone else, a woman who outranked Adam, revived his knife amnesty idea.

  ‘One to consider,’ Nick said, and wrote something down. ‘Thanks, Pamela.’

  But… Adam opened his mouth but restrained himself. Two weeks before he had been sent up to Manchester for an event at a community centre. He had checked the backdrop for images or slogans that might be embarrassing if cropped by some unscrupulous photo editor; he was helping to marshal the local worthies, party ringers and bored journalists in the audience. The minister was standing nearby, and Adam, proud of his tradecraft and of his vocation, wished him a collegial ‘Good afternoon’. The minister said, ‘Good to see you’, a formula in which Adam had strained to hear a personal recognition, rather than a bet-hedging, not-sure-if-I’m-supposed-to-know-you fob-off.

  It was past five when they left the meeting room, as smoked-through as after a night in a pub. Adam returned to his desk and opened the document he was writing on youth justice. He could sense his less ambitious colleagues eyeing each other across the open-plan expanse, the clockwatchers’ stand-off, bags and umbrellas poised for the exit.

  ‘Tea, coffee?’ Colin said. ‘Last orders. Adam?’

  Two hours later, six weeks after Neil took Jess to Harrow, he and Adam were leaning against the booth at the back of their allotted lane, while the people before them finished their game. They were talking about the serial-killing doctor, talking fast, since there was always more to say than their time together allowed, even when it had just begun.

  ‘Expect he’ll top himself,’ Neil said.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Neil raised his voice against the techno, the fusillades of the shoot-em-ups, the gunned engine of the life-sized sports car. ‘I said, if you’d done that – all those people, I mean even if you hadn’t been caught – wouldn’t you top yourself?’

  ‘I suppose so. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it?’

  To both of them this subterranean playground felt dimly illicit. Not just the adults wielding children’s toys, pint glasses in one hand, air-hockey pucks in the other. The whole place was somehow unBritish in its high-spec levity.

  ‘Haven’t you ever thought about it? Suicide, I mean.’

  Adam laughed above the music. ‘No. Never. It would be, you know, giving up. It would mean you’d lost. Why, have you?’

  ‘Once or twice, maybe,’ Neil said. ‘Yeah. When I was younger, not seriously or anything. In the end it always seemed to me sort of arrogant. Ostentatious, do you know what I mean? I don’t think I’m really worth killing.’ The mass-murdering doctor made him think of his mother – the nagging fear that someone had somehow been to blame, that someone could have done something differently, a fear that was also, he knew, a kind of disguised hope, an abashed fantasy of redress or resurrection.

  ‘Of course you’re worth it,’ Adam said.

  ‘I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

  ‘But if anyone’s going to kill you,’ Adam said, ‘I think it should be me.’

  The group bowling before them – two men in replica football shirts and a younger, better-dressed woman – came out of the booth, laughing. Someone had spilled a drink; Neil wiped the low, screwed-down table with a serviette and laid his mobile phone on top of it. They took off their jackets.

  ‘Shall I?’ Adam said.

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Adam selected a purple bowling ball, the heaviest in the chute, and unleashed it in a swift picturesque motion that knocked down all the pins. He raised his fists above his head in celebration, the fluorescent lights illuminating his teeth and the whites of his eyes.

  ‘Beginner’s luck,’ Neil said.

  ‘Do you play this game for money?’

  Neil threw from an ungainly, erect posture. His ball dribbled to the end, knocking out a single pin. Adam whooped.

  ‘I’ll give you the early rounds,’ Neil said. As the contraption righted itself, he asked, ‘So the Millennium bug – is it going to be, you know, a meltdown? I think we should wait till afterwards – the launch, I’m talking about – but Bimal wants to go ahead in December.’

  ‘They’re working on it,’ Adam said.

  ‘But is it real? Is it, you know, dangerous?’

  ‘I could tell you,’ Adam said, ‘but you know what I’d have to do next.’

  ‘I’m serious, what do they think?’

  ‘I… I suppose I don’t know.’

  ‘Right. Okay. I just thought… Never mind.’

  Adam sat in the booth while Neil bowled again. That mobile phone… Sometimes, when he went out for the afternoon, with a minister or on a visit, he borrowed a phone from the depository, a weighty black slab with a government serial number and the phone’s own telephone number stencilled on the back. This one was sleek and metallic, and Adam was confident Neil wouldn’t have to return it in the morning.

 
; There was still a puddle of beer at the table’s lip. It occurred to Adam that he could slide the phone into it. Ridiculous!

  With his second go Neil knocked over two more pins. His face shone ghoulishly in the overhead lights.

  ‘He’s a ballsy fucker,’ Neil said. ‘Bimal. You wouldn’t have thought it. We haven’t earned a penny yet and he’s talking about floating. Serious Nasdaq cowboy.’

  Adam’s friend Archie was loaded, properly loaded, or his family was, a house in Miami and trust funds all round. Adam remembered another boy, from his boarding school, Philip, whose father had owned and then sold a company that manufactured plastic chairs; the sale price, eighteen million pounds, had been disclosed in a business round-up in The Times. Two or three days of jokes and everyone had forgotten about it. Inherited money was relatively harmless, Adam had always felt. You might resent it, but only as you might resent your friend’s superior height, or his better looks, or some other accidental advantage that he blamelessly held. Self-made wealth, the kind that Neil seemed poised to come into, might be trickier. Your friend’s inheritance was merely an injustice; Neil’s earned wealth might feel like a defeat.