The Faithful Couple Page 12

  Worst of all, almost, he recalled how, the next day, he had trivialised the whole thing, preferring not to see the gravity and the shame, which ought to have been plain as daybreak. He saw how the grubby self-preservation instinct had kicked in, the pukka voice that said, Get yourself off, whatever you have done, deny, abscond, deflect, get away with it. After that, later, regret it if you have to. Little white lie.

  Adam barely slept that night. He couldn’t unremember. Rose and Eric stayed with him as he brought Harry to the hospital the next day; they were with him, the day after that, as he drove Claire and the baby home, at the tortoise speed employed only by new fathers, octogenarians and middle-aged drunks pretending to be sober. He took a week’s paternity leave (not that many people would miss him), and they tagged along as he escorted Harry on their chilly we-still-love-you outings. At the aquarium, on Ealing Common, it became urgently important that Adam remember precisely what he had said and done. He derived a masochistic, almost narcotic satisfaction from the details he recovered: the play of light around the campfire, the smile on Rose’s face as she entered the tent, the hunch of Eric’s shoulders the following morning, as if he might make himself small enough to disappear. He found himself polishing and refining these keepsakes, sharpening their outlines and improving their texture, the better to admonish himself with them. He felt sure he could visualise his own gestures, the leer that Eric must have registered at the lake and Rose seen beside the fire, as if he had borrowed their memories. This, he knew, was always the most coveted perspective – What did I do? Why did I? Who was I? – and the one that was never truly available.

  He could hear her sob as he and Neil walked away, or thought he could, the sound long and low like an animal’s. Over and over he saw her father turning back to berate him beside the burned-out campfire. One day you’ll have your own.

  Now he did. His guilt and the fear fed on each other. The more he dwelled on Rose, the worse his pre-emptive anxiety for Ruby; the more he feared for Ruby, the fiercer his guilt over Rose, what she and her father must have been through. Worst of all was the hybrid guilt for what might ever happen to his daughter – because of him, or men like him, at least, which, morally, amounted to the same thing. The monkey-grip soles of Ruby’s pink feet, the frail, ineluctable clasp of her fingers on his, those grey eyes. The everything of her.

  I hope you find out how this feels.

  ‘Do that one more time, Sammy, and we’re going back inside.’

  Sam re-reached for the gear stick.

  ‘I’m serious, Sam. It’s automatic anyway, I told you.’

  The boy laughed. He shifted his skin-and-bone buttocks in the triangle of leather available to him between Neil’s thighs, brushing irrelevantly against his penis.

  ‘Can we take the roof down?’

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘It’s going to rain.’

  ‘If it rains we’ll put it back. Go on.’

  Neil smiled. He was an amateur; he was there for the taking. He pushed the button on the dash and the canvass retracted into the compartment behind the jump seat, a feat of puppetry that always seemed to him at once flash and already old-fashioned, retro-decadent.

  ‘Wave at Granddad,’ Neil said.

  Brian was facing out between the net curtains, leaning forward from his armchair, his head balanced on his walking stick and cushioned by his hands, his medicines out of sight on the nest of tables in the corner. When he saw Sam waving he briefly raised an arm.

  ‘Okay, Sammy, both hands on the wheel. No, higher, like this. Ten and two, remember. Right. Now, don’t overdo it. Just the pedals and the steering wheel.’

  ‘Got it. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Right. Off we go.’

  Neil surrendered the wheel and the pedals and put the car into gear. For want of anything better to do with his right arm he wrapped it around Sam’s waist. ‘Okay,’ he said, and they were off.

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘Bit more… Just a bit, that’s enough. You’re a natural.’

  The hair on top of Sam’s head was a shade or two darker than usual, one slanting patch matted greasily like a mechanic’s. It was Saturday afternoon but Sam was wearing his school trousers and a once-white shirt.

  ‘Right,’ Neil said, ‘I’ll help with the corner. Just around the block and then we’re going back. No, we agreed. Someone might see us.’

  ‘Okay, thanks,’ Sam said. ‘Thank you.’

  An eccentric kind of triumphal progress, this ride. Neil had never been very interested in cars (no cars, no football, two key indifferences he shared with Adam). The finish and the colour of the Audi, the upholstery and the stereo, were down to Jess. Sam would have made a better guess at the vehicle’s horsepower than Neil was able to. All the same he loved the car for what it represented. It was their first joint splurge, not counting their rent and the holidays and the gym membership at the boutique place in Islington. More than that, it was the first five-figure purchase he had ever made, made with his own money, the serious money, several grand after tax, which was amassing in his bank account with a wondrous monthly regularity – thanks to Farid, the second chance he gave Neil, and the deranged London property market.

  If he was ever going to have a pomp to be in, Neil guessed, he was in it now.

  ‘I said both hands. Christ.’ He grasped the wheel where Sam had let it go to wipe his nose.

  ‘Okay, sorry. There. Sorry.’

  They puttered past Bimal’s old house; no lights were on inside. Bimal had two kids of his own now, Neil knew, though he hadn’t yet met the second. These days they rarely saw each other, though they were on good terms, no hard feelings, like members of an amicably disbanded rock band.

  ‘How’s your dad?’

  ‘Okay I s’pose. Said I’ll have to get the bus back, though.’

  Brian had shown Neil the contents of an envelope Dan had left with his son the previous evening: a tenner plus change, and a note that said Bed by 9. Go easy on the TV. He was trying.

  ‘I could take you if you’d rather.’

  ‘Nah, I’ll be fine, honest. Are they – what do you call it again? – quadraphonic? The speakers.’

  ‘Dunno, Sammy. Sorry.’

  ‘What should I do about that bump? That okay?’

  Sam relaxed into Neil’s torso as he became used to the wheel, warming a patch of his uncle from the belly to the sternum. Almost four years, and Jess had never mentioned children: too proud, too committed to the performance of herself as spikily independent. Neil was allowing himself to believe that her silence meant she had no definite expectations or preferences. Perhaps this car would be their limit.

  ‘Into the chicane,’ Sam said. ‘He’s the youngest driver in the competition.’

  ‘The crowd’s gone wild,’ Neil said. Sam smiled up at him.

  ‘Sammy, the road.’ He gestured at the asphalt with his eyes.

  An afternoon at the Tower of London, out on the M1 together to a safari park, soppy admiration for the boy’s routine cognitive leaps: Sam had laid claim to what little parental instinct Neil harboured. Sam plus Adam’s kids, Harry and the wizened newborn girl, little avatars of his friend he could cradle and spoil.

  ‘I told you it would rain. Bollocks.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Only spitting,’ Sam said. ‘Anyway, we’re nearly back.’

  Neil left the roof down so Brian would be able to see them as they pulled up. ‘Let me…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Sam said. ‘I can do it. I can.’

  They rounded the final bend. Neil thought he could remember Brian indulging them in this way, he and Dan impatiently taking turns, in the beaten-up red Triumph with its indelible smell of travel-sickness puke and no seatbelts in the back. But he wasn’t sure that he trusted the memory, that it truly was one.

  ‘So is he looking after you all right? Granddad.’

  ‘S’pose so. Yeah. He’s
shit hot on his maths, isn’t he? And he’s got a roll of old brown paper from his shop, covers all my books with it. School books. Loves it.’

  ‘Does he fry you chips?’ Brian had covered his books, too. Neil had forgotten about that. Probably he had never said thank you.

  ‘Pizza,’ Sam said. ‘We order it, don’t we?’ Earlier, before lunch, Brian had made Sam wash his hands in the kitchen sink. In the clasping and rubbing of the boy’s palms, Neil recognised the motion of his father’s hands beneath the tap, and his brother’s hands, and, he realised with a jolt, his own.

  For his part he didn’t want to teach his nephew anything, besides steering: his job, Neil considered, was to help the child know less. There was something gratifyingly discretionary in his feelings for Sam, as if he were poised between the hard duty of family and the free choice of friendship. The stake in HappyFamilies had come to nothing, but Neil was nevertheless becoming a somebody, a man of substance. He would help Sam out, up and out, when the time came.

  Sam scuffed the front wheel into the kerb as they arrived. Neil winced, but the tyre was fine. Sam stood up to wave again, arching his body over the steering wheel, but Brian had already turned away from the window. Through the net curtains Neil made out his father’s back, hunched over the walking stick.

  He closed the roof. He kissed Sam’s greasy head.

  ‘Woz that for?’ Sam said, ruffling the kiss out of his hair and opening the car door.

  At this rate Neil would soon be able to do whatever he chose. He could take one of those Caribbean cruises he used to admire in the brochures at the travel agent in Wembley, though he knew that Jess wouldn’t let him. Naff, she would say, I’d rather go to Blackpool.

  He was in his pomp.

  Always a small shock when the train came out of the tunnel (not long to go now), natural light suddenly dispelling the artificial kind, escape from a constriction that Adam almost hadn’t noticed. The carriage had filled up. A woman was strap-hanging in the crush in front of him, sixty-five-ish, he estimated, half-moon glasses and duffel coat, old enough to be entitled to his seat and unlikely to be affronted if he relinquished it. His reflexes were dimmed: by the time she had burrowed through his preoccupation, a man with loud headphones and needless shades, who Adam wouldn’t have taken for a gentleman, had already stood up for her.

  Ordinarily he cherished this commute. One Tube line all the way, from Ealing to St James’s, almost always a seat, the beginning of the ride above ground, running alongside the common and then Chiswick Park, the trees letting him feel like a country squire coming up to town. Plus the views through the upper-storey windows, the enticement of which never faded. Once he had seen a woman in a bra slapping a man in the face. The train passed grander and humbler homes the deeper into London it dug, with their richer and poorer occupants, the winners and the clingers-on. Adam’s first day back at the department after his paternity leave, and in the sidings he saw sinister wreaths of cables he had never noticed before.

  He minded the gap. He bought his cappuccino from the American coffee shop, carefully carrying the scalding cup to the ministry as if it were a votive offering. If he behaved absolutely normally, if he stuck to the agreed routine, perhaps no one would notice that he was now only a shell, a fancy-dress costume of Adam, through the eye holes of which a shrunken, imposter creature now peered out.

  He negotiated the revamped security at the entrance to the building (all these scans and metal detectors, the new diurnal indignity that had to be got through, a twenty-first-century equivalent of bygone inconveniences like horse manure or outside plumbing). He made it to the lift, nabbing the prime, safe spot in the corner. He excuse-me-ed his way out when the electric ticker above the doors indicated his floor, keeping his head down as he scurried across the open-plan wilderness, the walk that always felt like a gauntlet. Not in early enough. Not working hard enough.

  Not a 7. Still not a 7.

  Asshole.

  Two or three people called out ‘Congratulations’. Adam waved limply in their directions. He made it to his half-concealed cubicle, with the waist-high partition that was his token privilege as Deputy Head of Returns. He logged on, maximised his email, the automated morning ritual. He was too tired.

  On that first day back there was another Lessons Learned debrief. Adam, Sheila (the Head of Returns to his Deputy), some officials up from Croydon. This time the lessons were derived from a Kurdish asylum-seeker’s much-publicised leap, with his six-year-old son, from the roof of a Glasgow high-rise. Adam saw the disparity in scale, life and death and desperation versus his eccentric self-indulgence. He wanted to concentrate. He tried, but he couldn’t help himself. Looking back on the years between now and California – the years between history ending and it shudderingly starting up again – they seemed to him an obtuse, wilfully extended adolescence. Adam had walked around as if nothing untoward had happened, nothing worth mentioning. He thought of his recently past self as a patsy in a slapstick film, a clot who hasn’t noticed the piano hurtling towards him from the sky.

  On his second day there was a briefing on the migration fallout of the coming war. Immigration was an unglamorous directorate, Adam knew, tarnished by its associations with xenophobia and failure and with Croydon, the giant applicant clearing-house on the edge of London, a place of mythic dysfunction, banishment to which was his and his colleagues’ deepest, incessant fear. When he was transferred to immigration from crime, at the end of his initial placement, he had consoled himself that he was playing against type. Everyone expected the floppy-haired brigade to gravitate to cushier berths, in private offices or at the Treasury or the Foreign Office, not to the sweat and tears of immigration policy. He could use it as a bridge to somewhere else, Adam reasoned. In any case, he had the mortgage, and the children, and this was where he was.

  Sheila was a 7. Head of Returns was a 7. Deputy was not. Neil was called ‘Executive Assistant’, which to Adam sounded like a glorified secretary, but in Neil’s world connoted ‘lieutenant’ or ‘henchman’. And money. Neil swanked about in his tailored suits, drove his lurid convertible, and never gave California a thought. His heedlessness was another kind of victory.

  There was a big-shot spook at the briefing (impeccably dressed, poshest man in the room), someone from the Ministry of Defence, a Home Office statistician. The big meeting room on the third floor. This wasn’t like him, Adam told himself as, fiddling with his cufflinks, the spook introduced himself. His immune system wasn’t ready for it. He worried that he might be unable to shake off the funk, like some Amazonian tribesman undone by the flu.

  In the Tayler household, when Adam was growing up, his family had slept soundly, taken no Prozac and seen no therapists. They had a breezy English pride in their sturdily mechanical brains. An argument or a grief was like a scratch or a broken limb. It was treated; it healed. Only Harriet seemed to have lows – tantrums, their father always called them – but they were as much a source of drollery as of concern. The Taylers touched wood, joshingly tapping each other’s crania, but otherwise their native empiricism precluded superstition: no one was the subject of a curse, nor would have credited it if they were. At boarding school, when one of the other pupils was morose or reclusive, some stranded son of a diplomat, say, the boys would hum the theme tune from Close Encounters or The Omen, joking about how the loner was defecting to the dark side. To moon over a girl was gay. To worry about exams was nerdy. Everyone was supposed permanently to be on good form, as if they were all well-conditioned, moodless racehorses. Then and into his adult life, Adam had thought of angst and depression as other people’s problems, as acne had been in his teens. Neil, for instance, with his tendency to analyse and mourn a moment when he ought to have been living it. Several times, Adam remembered, when they had shared rooms and tents in America, he had woken during the night to find Neil sitting up, perpendicular, his eyes open, thinking.

  They were all or nothing people, Adam realised, his family, his breed. Their only game plan w
as to get all the way through, right to the end, thinking as little as possible, in the hope that they could outrun it – whatever it was that they were frantically eschewing, the neglect or abuse or adultery. The failure, or the guilt. If it outran you, if it caught you, you were fucked.

  ‘… national security implications in the broadest sense,’ the spook concluded. It would have been better if Eric had punched him.

  On the third day Sheila’s boss, the deputy head of the directorate, declared herself ‘surprised’ – virtually an expletive in the desiccated language of their trade – at the widening gap between arrivals and returns.

  ‘The minister’s alarmed,’ she told Sheila in Adam’s hearing. ‘I’m alarmed, frankly.’