The Faithful Couple Read online

  Adam retrieved his purple ball from midway along the chute, and hurled it fast and dramatically into the gutter a couple of feet short of the pins.

  ‘Listen,’ Neil said as they crossed between the lane and the table, ‘you should join us. Seriously. After the launch, we’ll be hiring – copywriters, business-development people, I’m sure there’s something you could do.’

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ Adam said.

  Neil had been dutifully enthusiastic when Adam first mentioned the Civil Service, even though he hadn’t known what Fast Stream meant. He had envisaged Adam and his leonine hair behind the defensive plastic screen of a benefits office. In his heart he was sceptical about these grass-is-greener switches, these poor-me-I’m-bored lurches from law to teaching, or teaching to law, manoeuvres that, as he saw it, only substituted one whim for another.

  ‘I know, and I know you’re doing fine where you are, the government. Brilliantly. I’m just saying, think about it. I could speak to Bimal.’

  Instead of answering, Adam held up his hands, palms out, as if he were a celebrity at an awards ceremony, or a politician at a rally, false-modestly shushing applause. He considered for a moment and decided not to say what he was thinking.

  Neil’s phone beeped. He pushed some buttons and frowned. ‘Bimal,’ he said. ‘Workaholic.’

  The memory forced its way out. ‘It’s like what’s-his-name predicted,’ Adam said, his tone aiming for guilelessness, though he could perfectly well recall the name he had omitted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, the American guy.’

  ‘What American guy?’

  ‘Eric. That’s right.’

  Party like it’s 1999 boomed out, an anthem that seemed to be playing on a loop across the Western world.

  ‘Eric who?’ Neil asked, instantly knowing who his friend was referring to. The promiscuous giggle and the balled fists. He reached for the mole on his neck.

  ‘You know, Neil. Come on. You remember. Eric from California.’

  On the stereo Prince announced that the party was over.

  ‘He wasn’t from California,’ Neil said. ‘They were from Colorado. So what’s he got to do with anything?’

  ‘You remember, he went on about how computers were going to take over our lives and none of us believed him. Every village in India would have one, he said. We were around the campfire, it was that evening, you know… You have to.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Neil said, ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘You must, it was the same night, before you —’

  ‘No.’

  Eric had said, Remember me when it happens… It would be too much to say that she insisted, at that moment when she became serious and resolute and the games had ended. But Neil hadn’t needed to press or convince her, either. ‘Sure,’ she had said. ‘I want it to be you.’ At first, Adam forced him to recall, Neil had thought she meant, or wanted her to mean, I want it to be you tonight, Neil: I want it to be you and not Adam. But a few minutes later he realised that her ‘it’ had meant something else entirely, an event specific to her and nothing to do with him and Adam.

  They were out of time, Prince declared.

  Neil stood at the top of the bowling lane, his fingers in the furtive niches but the ball suspended by his side. Somehow, in his head, while he had grown older, advancing from the extreme edge of adolescence to the brink of his thirties, she was frozen in her Yosemite incarnation, so that when he thought about the two of them together now, the age gap yawned even more accusingly than it had done at the time. Once or twice, on the television news, he had seen melodramatic stories about teachers running off with pupils, or teenage girls eloping with Mediterranean waiters, and quickly told himself that they bore no resemblance to him. That wasn’t him at all.

  Two years in San Quentin. Her Charlie Brown T-shirt. The details had been seared into his memory, saved from the routine auto-erase, by the fuss in the morning.

  They bowled again. Neil’s balls dawdled to the pins, reliably taking out three or four or six. Adam urged his arm to remember its original technique, but the harder he tried, the more immediately he found the gutter. Neil’s face looked leprously white in the spotlights.

  They fell back on polite enquiries, the basic mnemonic responsibility of friendship, the minimum talent that it required. Neil asked about Claire’s job, Adam’s parents, Harriet. He had danced with Harriet at the wedding, as far as possible leaving the actual movement to her, struggling to hold on to her like a boxer on the ropes; the more she had drunk that evening, the more ingenuous she seemed, and Neil remembered something Adam had told him about their childhood – how their father had wanted another boy, and when Harriet was a toddler had insisted she be dressed in a little boy’s sailor suit.

  ‘She’s okay,’ Adam said. ‘She’s back at home, job didn’t work out. Bit weepy, you know. How’s your old man?’

  ‘The same. Not opening the shop on Saturdays any more. Asked after you the other day.’

  Neil mentioned Sam, and Adam said, ‘You’ve got this different tone in your voice when you talk about him, did you know that?’

  ‘Do I sound the same for Jess?’

  ‘No.’

  They discussed their preliminary plans for millennium eve, the river of fire into which the Thames would supposedly be transfigured at midnight, an object of London’s revelrous self-deprecation even before the feat was attempted. They were both trying, paddling away from the edges of the whirlpool. They had two goes left when Neil gave in to it.

  ‘What did you bring him up for?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t, Adam. I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like you’re trying… just when I… I mean, why did you mention him?’

  ‘Take it easy. You’re being ridiculous. It’s just, I think it’s because, I was at this meeting this afternoon – knife crime – they were talking about the girlfriends, for some reason it —’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Take it easy, I’m sorry. You just reminded me of him – the Millennium bug and his computers…’

  ‘I mean, I haven’t thought about her for years, we’ve never even talked about it… It was just a mistake, you know that.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just, like you say, we’ve never… I mean, I’ve never… Nothing.’

  A man in a baseball cap from the neighbouring lane pinched Adam’s bowling ball. A familiar eighties rock song struck up, but somehow, in their heads, the music had been turned down, screened out.

  ‘Christ,’ Neil said. ‘You make me think…’

  ‘What? What do I make you think?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Go on, say what I make you think.’

  ‘I said, forget it. Fuck’s sake, Adam, why do we have to talk about this?’

  ‘Okay. Jesus.’

  Neil picked up a ball but didn’t bowl. ‘That’s enough,’ he said.

  ‘But you’ve got another go.’

  He dropped the ball into the gutter.

  ‘But you’re winning, Philly…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Neil said. ‘You can have this one.’

  Neil raised his chin to indicate to the tourists waiting behind the partition that he and Adam were leaving. They crowded into the booth; he retrieved his phone.

  Outside the giant Ferris wheel angled across the water, halfway to its upright terminus, leaning out towards Parliament as if for a crackpot siege. In the other direction, downstream, was the porcupine Dome. London at the end of history: neophile, frivolous, renovated in splotches, like the make-up on a careless old woman.

  ‘Looks like it might fall,’ Adam said. ‘It can’t, can it?’

  Neil didn’t reply. He turned his eyes towards the wheel but didn’t appear to see it. The project’s floodlights blazed along the riverbank.

  If this friendship were a proposition that crossed Adam’s desk, and he
were coldly weighing the costs and benefits, he might deem himself irrational for spending so much time on it. No money, no sex; no tangible pay-off of any kind. Friendship was a luxury in any utilitarian calculus, and yet without it, without Neil, his life would be thin. ‘Maybe it can fall,’ he muttered. ‘Unbelievable.’

  They shook hands and then, sensing that the formality was absurd and dangerous, managed a one-armed hug, so that they ended up standing alongside one another, facing out across the water.

  2003

  A

  fter the arraignments he would muster his excuses. He tried to be objective, scrupulous, as if the inside of his head were a court, and he were the prosecutor and the defence attorney, as well as the judge and the accused, or the co-accused. He considered but discounted the weaker extenuations, such as their youth (they hadn’t been that young) and the drinking (they weren’t all that drunk, not that evening). He admitted the quicksand ambiguity of her appearance and of her demeanour: she had seemed alternately aware and oblivious of her body’s power, playfulness eliding with flirtation on a slippery adolescent continuum. He acknowledged the hypnotic momentum of the holiday, for most of which the two of them had scarcely noticed women, being too preoccupied with each other, until finally they had turned their energy outwards, looking for a mediator and a prize, and found her. Found Rose.

  In the private hearings he conducted, many each day in the first, hallucinatory week – with several more each night, when he was up and jiggling the baby, or in bed, wasting his chance of sleep – he would leave the obvious argument till last. It had been Neil, he would eventually remind himself, it was Neil, and not him, who had taken the girl into the tent and fucked her. It was Neil who had actually done that, even if Adam had wanted and intended to fuck her himself.

  Yet somehow that most material fact felt more like a technicality than a true exoneration. Adam was implicated, he knew that, as a man could be had up for murder though someone else wielded the knife. You wanted it too. You started it. He would have been implicated even if he hadn’t known about her age, because he was there and because of what he said about her. But he had known. I fucking told you. If there was room for a beneficial doubt before her father corrected him, there hadn’t been afterwards. Every time, always, as in some rerun disaster film that you vainly hope might turn out differently, Adam found himself guilty. He deserved the morning-after curse that at the time he barely heeded:

  One day you’ll have your own. I hope you find out how this feels.

  ‘She’s asleep,’ Claire would whisper to him during that week. ‘She’s asleep already, Adam. Put her in the basket and come to bed. Ad, come on.’

  When he tried to recall the reasons he hadn’t spoken up, either by the campfire or (his second chance) when Neil evicted him from the tent, the only motives Adam could salvage were sordid and inadequate, pique and revenge that made his conduct seem worse.

  My little girl. What kind of people are you?

  Or, kneeing him in the coccyx as he lay beside her, four in the morning outrage, Claire would say, ‘Adam, she’s crying. It’s your turn. Fuck’s sake, she’s going to wake him. What is it, Adam?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s nothing, Clezz. Give her to me.’

  It was the baby’s fault, of course. The baby had aggravated Yosemite from an occasional nag to a disorder. Not just the sleeplessness but the fact of the baby. She recast Adam’s memory, as if she were a belated witness who brought vital new information, newly terrifying consequences.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’

  ‘She’s fine, she’s just hungry. Go to sleep.’

  ‘No, I mean, when she’s older. Will she be all right, Clezz?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’

  They had passed the girl to him in the operating theatre, a foot of squiddy cord still attached, the limbs slathered in the white birth cream that they all come out in, the elastic mouth emitting a cry at once mechanical and undulating, like the rise and fall of an air-raid siren. The body looked much too big, way too enormous, to have been living inside Claire until a few moments before. ‘Adam?’ Claire said, because she hadn’t seen the child yet, besides a blur when they waved her above the screen. ‘Is she…?’ Adam glimpsed the gash in her abdomen when he took the bundle from the midwife, saw the layers of Claire’s fat and muscle retracted by the harsh clamps. The wound seemed much too grave for anyone to hope seriously to survive, as if a mid-sized cannonball had punched a hole in her.

  ‘How do you do?’ Adam said to the bundle, which was wrinkling its nose and grimacing, as if it were about to sneeze. Because what, really, were you supposed to say? Oh I see, it’s you, I get it, of all the genetic possibilities, you’re the one. All the love and worry will be for you. The grey eyes opened, horrified, closing quickly to shrink the world away.

  ‘Adam? How is she? Is she…?’

  Claire was woozy from the anaesthetics they were dripping into her spinal cord. They had rushed her under the knife when the child became distressed, all of it happening with the momentum of an action movie so that Adam barely had time for fear. Put on the gown, put on the mask. Hold her hand. ‘She’s fine,’ Adam told her. ‘She’s wonderful.’ He gave the child to his wife to clasp while they laboriously stitched her up. His eyes met hers, the private, romantic, gulping moment that all just-delivered parents share. Wow and I love you and Oh fuck.

  Second time round, he knew the script. Two years before, when Harry was born, he hadn’t been sure what to do or say, what or how to feel. They had been to the happy-clappy baby classes but nobody could tell you that part. He had gingerly walked the squawking bundle around the ward, humming ‘American Pie’, ‘The Boxer’, ‘Take it Easy’. Neil had come immediately that afternoon, he remembered, too soon, really, they had still been disoriented. Neil was pleased to be early, Adam had seen, pleased to get there before their families. A nurse mistook him for the father and showed him how to feed Harry with a pipette. Neil got Harry’s neonatal kryptonite shit on his coat.

  This time Adam’s parents arrived first, performing themselves in an oddly chafing way. ‘Out through the sun roof,’ Jeremy Tayler joked, the inveterate jollity that was beginning to seem a form of evasion. They and Claire’s mother cooed all the necessary compliments and made the standard quips – She’s got a good pair of lungs on her! She’s got you wrapped round her little finger already! – there never seeming to be anything personal to say about a baby, a baby being the most particular yet most generic thing on Earth, just as there was never anything but platitudes to offer at funerals.

  Neil came just before chucking-out time. He brought extravagant flowers that the Chinese nurse swiftly confiscated; he held Ruby at arm’s length from his bespoke suit, as if she might be booby-trapped.

  ‘She won’t bite,’ Adam said.

  ‘It isn’t biting I’m worried about, Ants.’ He handed the bundle back. ‘The good news is, she looks like Claire.’

  ‘At least, you know, she doesn’t look like you.’

  ‘Boys,’ said Claire, tubed-up and aching. ‘You boys.’ She laid the baby on her chest and closed her eyes.

  ‘Wet the baby’s head?’ Neil suggested.

  But Adam had to go home to Harry. He sent the ritual email, specifying the girl’s weight and the satisfactory state of the mother’s health, as the mysterious formula required, attaching a photo he downloaded from the camera in which Ruby, purple and wrinkled, looked both a day and a hundred years old. He went to bed, and in bed Yosemite had come back to him. He closed his eyes and they were there: not his own daughter or his sewn-up wife but another father and a different child. It was as if he were watching one of those primitive, flip-through cartoons, jumpy images that nevertheless told a clear story. The jokes, the chase, the conquest. The curse.

  The jokes. The whole thing began with the swim, Adam saw on the night Ruby was born, with him reaching out to submerge her head in the lake, her father watching from the shore. The feel of her skull seemed to c
ome back to him, thick with hair (one of his fingers briefly catching in it), but cold from the water like a corpse’s. He remembered his sharp momentary panic that she had gone under for ever and he had done something terrible. He remembered the dirty words he heard himself say afterwards, the macho challenge he issued to Neil, as if the girl were a hill to race up or a fence to hurdle. Stop making excuses. Then the evening and the campfire, and what he hadn’t said, and the scratchy night. He shouldn’t have touched her in the water.