The Faithful Couple Read online

‘They happen, these spikes,’ Sheila tried. ‘There’s a cycle to them, the sending —’

  ‘The press are sniffing around this again, Sheila. You might think they had other things to worry about but it seems they don’t.’ She was a slight woman in ascetic pumps, with a greying helmet of hair, but Adam saw how she cowed Sheila, physically as well as institutionally, despite Sheila’s six-inch and fifteen-year advantages, her broad-hipped solidity. ‘I don’t want to hear about “sending-country factors”. We can’t have this many FASs running around, we can’t justify it.’

  ‘I’ll get on to Croydon,’ Sheila said.

  F-A-S: Failed Asylum Seeker, the hygienic, shrinkwrapped acronym for the human beings they repatriated, or were supposed to. To begin with Adam had felt squeamish about the vocab and the role. But he took solace in the fact that these were never his policies. His job was merely to orchestrate the process as humanely and efficiently as possible, from the immigration tribunals to the detention centres to the planes. Better him than some hang-’em-and-flog-’em hatchet man (I am a nice boy. I am). The politicians who did make the policies might be amateurs but they weren’t monsters, not in this rainy little democracy. Nor were the uniforms who applied them. Adam had spent three days with an enforcement team from Croydon. Five men in a van, two of them unpleasant, three of them not, three of them lazy, two of them not. One borderline racist, so far as he could tell. The usual loathing for Whitehall toffs, him included.

  There was a meeting that afternoon to discuss their response. Adam and Sheila needed to confect some top-notch, bullet-point braggadocio about the money that had left the Home Office and the rejected asylum-seekers who had left the country. By now he knew the form: four points on spending (always up), four on outcomes (up or down, depending).

  Deputy Head of Returns. Sitting in his cubicle, Adam’s failings bled together in his head. He was scared. He was sorry. Telling would be a penance, and, in any case, if he didn’t admit everything, Neil wouldn’t understand his dread. He might go berserk – at Adam’s silence then, his silence since, or for his breaking the silence now. On the other hand, Adam tried to reassure himself, friends were always disappointing or betraying each other. Forgotten birthdays, unpaid debts, missed appointments, convenient lies, people changing wrongly as they aged, not being who you wanted them to be… Only a friend could betray you. Betrayal, he told himself, was what friends did.

  He sent the text before the meeting: Come round this weekend? Drink? Something I need to say

  A chalkboard menu had ousted the dartboard. A tonne of house-clearance encyclopedias lined the wall where a quiz machine had stood. The puke- and history-saturated carpet had been discarded, the floorboards underneath whitewashed: the standard-issue makeover in neighbourhoods like Adam’s and Claire’s. Pubs were the millennial gentrifiers’ first targets, like television stations during a coup. The only relic of the boozer’s past was the potman (two wings of hair on a bald crown, the skin between them marbled with liver spots, stains around his flies). He clung on, scavenging empty glasses in exchange for drink, tolerated by the new management out of kindness or indifference.

  Four women were at the bar in their high heels and night-out skirts, their twenty-five-ish prime. Neil watched Adam watching them. His friend seemed to have undergone a marginally slower, domestic version of the fast-forward ageing that presidents and prime ministers went through live on television. Cartoon-dog bags beneath his eyes, a smudge of silvery grey in the hair above one ear, the regular hallmarks of parental decrepitude. Yet he was still chiselled and presentable, still emanating a cavalier glamour. Those women might not mind too much if they caught Adam admiring them.

  ‘What shall we be this evening?’ Neil joked. ‘Firemen? Lion tamers?’

  Adam thought he recognised one of the women, but he couldn’t work out why. Perhaps it was only from a few minutes before, when he and Neil walked in, an instant memory that to his overloaded mind felt like something deeper. He knew he shouldn’t stare. You saw it on the Tube sometimes, this rash scrutiny of strangers, agog middle-aged men tracking svelte legs along the platforms and up the escalators.

  They talked. Yes, she was a lovely girl, Adam allowed, utterly lovely, though he hadn’t spent all that much time with her, truth be told, his job mostly being to placate Harry while Claire nursed the baby. Also, he said, ‘she’s had this strange effect on me, I know it’s going to sound crazy, maybe it’s because she’s so wonderful, I look at her and… I haven’t told Claire about this, I can’t, but… This is what I wanted to talk about, in fact…’

  ‘What is?’

  The potman came for their empty bottles, offering them a gappy grin that seemed to Adam both hopeless and defiant. They said ‘thanks’ and turned away, out of some joint, reflexive consideration for the man’s presumed shame.

  ‘Hold that thought,’ Neil said, and went to the bar for drinks. He glanced only once at the women while he waited, a rapid, practised up-and-down, but twice at his phone, Adam noticed. The barman crouched to retrieve the bottles from a fridge, dipping comically out of view.

  The potman had saved him, if Adam wanted to be saved. Actually the malady seemed to be waning, burning itself out like a spiked fever. The performance of normality might soon evolve into the real thing. Even as he had been itemising his charge sheets Adam had known, some of the time – moments when he saw himself from the outside, like a patient looking down from the operating theatre’s ceiling – that Yosemite might not be able to bear the weight of all his masochistic remembrance. She might very well be fine. Almost certainly, they were fine.

  Not telling his friend might be more a kindness than a lie. In a practical sense, Adam advised himself, the betrayal would only be actuated if Neil found out. He could live without knowing this; he was living perfectly happily. He was living so happily.

  Neil brought the drinks and talked blithely about his work. ‘Net operating income… loan-to-value ratio… vacant possession value’ – his new, econometric vocabulary, the jagged poetry of money. Increasingly he reminded Adam of the cigar-smoking men he had met when, as a teenager, he had once or twice taken the train to London to have lunch with his father and a few of his associates: restless, distracted, with a pharaonic way of talking about their transactions that seemed at once showy and awesomely casual. These days Neil sometimes said ‘two’ for two million pounds, or ‘three-five’ for three and a half, dispensing with the tiresome zeros since millions were the only noteworthy denomination. Adam felt a dim, throwback duty to disapprove of Neil’s choices (going in with Farid, putting money first). Or rather, he felt an obligation to project disapproval, a moral condescension containing an implicit boast that he, Adam, could do and earn what Neil was doing and earning, if only he dropped his scruples and chose to. What he actually felt was pride – pride in himself, mostly, the gambler’s satisfaction at a bet that has come off.

  Enough about money. Today Adam surely had the conversational prerogative, the day-release patient’s right to choose their pastime.

  ‘Neil,’ he said. ‘Philly. Listen, I need to ask you. Do you ever think about it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened in America. After we had that photo taken, you know, the Faithful Couple. With her. With… that girl. The girl and her father.’

  Neil had raised his bottle to his mouth as Adam began speaking. He kept it there when the question had been formulated, his lips locked on the glass but not drinking, buying himself a few seconds. He tilted the bottle upward to finish his swig, closing his eyes as he swallowed. He was doubly surprised: by the out-of-the-blue allusion, and at the same time, he registered, that this had taken so long.

  Adam was in some deep, abstruse distress, like a man on the parapet of a bridge. This time it was common charity to respond. In any case, Neil wasn’t ashamed. He was as sure as ever – surer – that he had nothing to be ashamed of.

  ‘No,’ he lied. He set his bottle on the table. ‘Not really, Ants. Do you?’
r />   ‘Sometimes,’ Adam said. He looked down at the reconditioned floorboards. ‘I have been. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. For some reason, I can’t stop myself, not since Ruby was born. I know it sounds ridiculous.’

  ‘It is ridiculous,’ Neil said quietly. ‘It’s nuts.’

  ‘Is it?’

  The quartet of women clip-clopped past their table to the exit. One must have cracked a joke because two of them were laughing. The potman held the door open, bowing his head as if the women were minor royalty. There are many ways to get fucked up by this world, Neil thought, glancing at the potman and back to Adam, or to fuck yourself, and some of them you only notice after it’s too late.

  ‘They’re meeting us later,’ he tried. ‘I spoke to them at the bar. At that place in Waterloo, you know. I told them you were an extra in Footballers’ Wives.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Adam said.

  ‘Kit man.’

  ‘I said, don’t.’ The two-foot diameter of the table was planetary between them.

  ‘Listen,’ Neil said after a few seconds, in the tone he used when Sam was being obstreperous, or his father had neglected to take his blood-thinning medicine, ‘you’ve just had a baby. You probably haven’t slept for a week.’ You had to humour parents, he had learned that from Bimal: you had to ask about the children and commiserate with their exhaustion and tolerate the pious snobbery about their random biological accomplishment. ‘I bet you haven’t had sex for months’ – another gesture towards a joke that he quickly saw was unhelpful. ‘What has she got to do with anything?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Adam said, that eternally true and eternally pointless statement of fact. ‘It’s because of Ruby that I’ve been going over it. Her father…’ He sounded both nervous and resolved, as if he had been preparing. ‘Or maybe, you know, it’s been with us all along, waiting till our resistance was down, but we pretended it wasn’t.’

  ‘I haven’t pretended anything.’

  ‘Fine, Philly. Of course. But there’s something – I’d just like to talk about it. Is that all right?’

  Neil’s phone rang, the insipid up-and-down-the-scale default tone that he hadn’t yet got around to changing. His hand advanced towards the noise. Adam glared at the hand; it froze and remained still until the ringing stopped. That fucking phone. If Yosemite happened now, Adam thought, or if the cellular age had dawned a few years earlier, her father would have called the police immediately, no chance to reconsider.

  ‘You could have a kid out there too, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You could have a kid. With her. That morning, you said you didn’t…’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  I’ll take care of it. Neil could still hear her saying those words, in that indelible American accent. Are you sure? Yes, I got it. He hadn’t known exactly what she meant by that; probably neither had she. He hadn’t let that stop him.

  ‘I asked you, you probably don’t remember, but I remember, I asked…’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Adam.’ Neil sat up straight. He gripped the edge of the table. ‘This is it, is it? What you wanted to say to me?’

  ‘No. That isn’t what I meant. What I wanted, it’s…’ He had gone in too hard, made the whole thing sound too much like blame when it was meant to be an appeal. ‘What I mean is… We didn’t think. Why didn’t we?’

  Neil sighed. He counted to ten in his head. ‘Look,’ he said, softening. ‘Everyone does something they regret.’

  ‘So you regret it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘But you do.’

  ‘Adam,’ Neil said, ‘it was a long time ago. We were young.’

  ‘We weren’t that young. Let’s not kid ourselves. If you think about it, that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s why we’re still here. I mean, you and me. If we’d been fifteen too we would have lost each other by now. Like with Chaz and Archie and those boys you smoked that spliff with – they’re all crazy stories and sepia cricket photos, nostalgia for stuff that never happened in the first place. There’s nothing else left.’ Adam had hardly seen his older friends since his wedding, which, in retrospect, had been a festive wake for his youth. ‘You and me,’ he said, ‘we were adults.’

  ‘Fine,’ Neil said. ‘We were adults. So what?’

  ‘So we can’t just laugh it off, you know, boys will be boys or whatever. I can’t just forget about it, even if I wanted to. Especially now. Even though, in the last ten years, Claire and Jess, and the children and your, you know, your money, we nearly have.’

  ‘Ad, you keep saying “we”…’

  ‘Because it was both of us. I remember what you said about that and you were right. I’m not blaming everything on you, really I’m not, that’s what I’m trying to say, that’s what this is about. We were both there, and we both wanted her, and that was why it happened. I mean, the things we said – the jokes and the rest – and, you know, later, what I should have said.’

  ‘What do you mean, what you —’

  ‘The other day, I had Harry in the trolley, we’re at the supermarket, nappy aisle, and we bang into someone else’s trolley, another father, except the daughter is her age, you know, the girl’s. And yesterday there was this teenager in the street, she was telling off her boyfriend or something, and she shouted, “No!” Do you remember that?’

  ‘This isn’t what you thought then. Come to think of it, on that morning I remember you saying…’

  I guess the skiing’s off.

  ‘That makes it worse,’ Adam said, raising his voice and then lowering it again. ‘I remember what I said. That makes it worse.’

  ‘Adam,’ Neil said, more kindly. ‘Ad, you’ve got this out of proportion.’

  ‘What would you say if Sam did something like that?’

  ‘Sam’s nine.’

  ‘But in a few years. What would you say to him?’

  ‘What the fuck has Sammy got to do with it? Leave him out of it, will you? Christ, Adam, it’s enough to make me think —’

  ‘Okay, Philly. I’m sorry.’ Sam had been another mistake. ‘It’s just… We didn’t think, did we? I didn’t.’

  They were silent for a moment before Neil said, ‘Tell you what I think, since you bring it up. I think this is all arrogance. I mean, it’s a kind of arrogance. You want to be perfect, you think you can be perfect, it’s what you’ve always thought. I don’t blame you, it’s how you were brought up, you were probably pretty close to it, once. Maybe you expect it now more than ever, because of the kids and the rest. But you can’t be perfect because nobody can. I’m not perfect either,’ Neil said, unconsciously reaching for the mole on his neck, ‘but I never thought I was. All this guilt is just a way of feeling sorry for yourself. It’s, you know, a kind of narcissism or something.’

  ‘Possibly, Neil, but —’

  ‘It was nothing, Adam. Practically nothing, ten years ago. Happens all the time.’

  It was thrilling, this honesty, Neil thought. In the end he and Adam were as much about looking as liking: looking down through very deep but translucent water, down and down to the bottom, occasionally feeling vertiginous, sometimes spotting ugly shadows belly-crawling on the floor.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying… There’s something else.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘About that night,’ Adam said. ‘And the morning. There’s something else. When we were…’ Adam swallowed. ‘I knew, Neil. I knew about her.’

  ‘What did you —’

  ‘I knew she was… younger. I knew she was too young. I mean before he… Not just in the morning, when her father caught you. I knew that night.’

  As Adam spoke Neil cast down his eyes at the wooden table, at the Venn diagram imprinted by glasses and bottles. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Tell me the rest of it, then.’

  To Adam this felt like a dream, after all this time, surreal and inebriating. ‘It was earlier, when we were by the fire, do you remember that? He was sitting next to m
e, her father was, and he told me she was… He told me she was in high school.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  Adam swallowed again. ‘He told me and I meant to tell you, I did, but somehow I… You were so… determined. Do you remember how we were about it? Later I didn’t think you would – that you and she… I should have told you. There’s nothing else I can say. And then in the morning, he…’

  Neil held up his palms – Don’t shoot! – and pinched the bridge of his nose. The epiphany in a film when the hero realises his ally has been a villain all along. Or maybe it wasn’t, Neil thought at almost the same instant, perhaps this didn’t matter at all, an oversight from a decade ago, heat of the battle, few beers, so much since and closer that counted for more between them. It wasn’t as if… no one got hurt. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to stand, let the potman open the door for him and walk out, no goodbyes. He didn’t know what the rules were for this. How was he supposed to know?