The Faithful Couple Read online

  He stalled. ‘Why have you waited… Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘Actually, I thought about it. I tried, once or twice, you won’t remember, you probably didn’t notice. I suppose it never felt… urgent. But now, with Ruby… You’re the only one I can talk to about it, don’t you see? I had to talk to someone.’

  Neil raised his hand to his brow, covering his eyes. There was some anger, he found. ‘You know what could have happened? Her father, in the morning, he was about to… It looked as if…’

  ‘I know, Philly. I’m sorry about that. But he didn’t, did he?’

  Again Neil sighed. ‘When you came and stood next to me – do you remember? – in front of the tent, they were all surrounding me, and I was alone, and you – you didn’t have to, we’d only known each other a couple of weeks, you could have disowned me, and I thought, it’s silly, I know, but I thought it was, you know, the nicest… But it wasn’t, was it? It was just…’

  ‘I said I was sorry.’

  ‘And afterwards, all these years… Ten years. I thought we were more than that.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I had to tell you, let me finish and you’ll see. In the morning, the father – Eric – he said to me, it was like a curse or something, he said he hoped… He said one day, I’d have a daughter, and he hoped… Well, I do, don’t you see? And now I look at Ruby and it’s as if – I know it sounds crazy – it’s as if it was her. Or that if it was, if it ever was, it would somehow be, I don’t know, fair.’

  ‘It isn’t like that – life – it’s nothing to do with fair.’

  ‘It’s as if I wouldn’t be able to complain. Like I’d be disqualified.’

  Neil’s sympathy and patience had run dry. The whole conversation was the wrong way round.

  ‘That’s what this is about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I could have gone to prison in California, what was it he said I’d get, the guide? Two years. You heard him. Probably I would never have come out. And you expect me to… What the fuck do you expect?’

  ‘I said I was sorry.’

  ‘For yourself.’

  The ker-ching of the till, the slam of the door, a woman laughing, a glass smashing. Adam said, ‘Maybe there always are things like this. I mean things you don’t tell each other. Things you’ve done or said or, you know, thought about each other. Even to you.’

  ‘If you say so, Adam,’ Neil said. ‘But not things like this.’ He snatched a vicious glance at his watch.

  ‘You know,’ Adam counterattacked, ‘you could have been the one to suffer for this, just as easily.’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Neil said. ‘I’m not suffering. Not about her.’

  They sat resentfully, like strangers obliged to share a table. When they finished their beers the potman swooped for their bottles with greater alacrity than he looked capable of. This time Neil looked up at him, momentarily distracted by the effort to determine his age. He could have been anywhere between forty and seventy.

  ‘Have you told Jess?’

  ‘Told her what?’

  ‘Don’t, Neil.’

  ‘Okay, no. But I don’t see why I should tell her. Tell her what? I haven’t told her about the girl I shagged in freshers’ week. There are lots of things I haven’t told her. I haven’t told her about us running away from that bar in Vegas without paying. It was a mistake, Adam. It isn’t relevant. An accident.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying, it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Have you told Claire? What you’ve just told me.’

  ‘No,’ Adam said. ‘I can’t now, no way. If anything ever happened… This is between us. You’re the only one who could understand. Just us.’

  From the turn in the stairs, halfway down, Adam could see through the archway to the end of the living room where Neil was sitting with Claire. Neil’s hair was swept back from his brow in the manner of a bullfighter or a tango dancer. He was talking too softly for Adam to hear, Claire interjecting the odd ‘Really?’ and ‘That’s wonderful’. She was already expert at letting men talk about themselves, allowing them to feel fascinating, a skill she had honed at work-related London dinner parties that, to Adam, always felt like botched auditions. She never expected her interlocutors to reciprocate her interest and, he suspected, experienced only a very mild affront, almost a satisfying vindication, when they didn’t.

  Her eyes had asked him the question after they came in together. They were back earlier than she expected, Adam looking meaninglessly at the bookshelves like a visitor while Neil asked her how the newborn was sleeping, seconds later distractedly repeating himself. Something had happened. Adam had shaken his head, almost imperceptibly – Nothing. Don’t ask. Not in front of him – and gone to check on Harry.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Adam had said outside the Bear. ‘I’ll say you were tired.’

  ‘I should,’ Neil had insisted, not yet certain what he should do, what he should feel, carrying on while the jury was out. They had walked back to the maisonette in silence.

  Adam descended the last few stairs and paused in the doorway. Claire’s feet were curled under her buttocks, her skin on the sallow side of pale, one hand over her deflating abdomen, still cradling the foetus that had become the infant asleep on her shoulder. Now she was giggling, the hand holding her Caesarean scar as if she might burst, and Neil was laughing too, his silent laugh that looked like a grimace, his arms out straight and motionless on the armrests.

  Neil looked up at him but his expression was blank. Adam had missed the punchline. They could have been talking about anything.

  Like a lifer with no possibility of parole and nothing left to lose, Harry burst down the stairs and past him. He seized and tried to ransom Neil’s phone, this miniature god that the adults seemed to worship. He launched himself at his mother and sister; Claire deflected him with a forearm and Adam extracted him, Harry cycling his legs in the air in the obligatory show of resistance.

  ‘No, bedtime, lollipop,’ Adam said, the endearment and the rhythm of it direct inheritances from his father – lollipop, beetle-bug, darling, they welled up and came out of him involuntarily, as if written into some deep, time-delayed hard drive. In his bedroom Harry denied all wrongdoing, then began to cry, protest followed by contrition, guilt’s familiar one-two. He extorted a story from his father, exercising his power to be certain it was real, as tyrants must. His body clock was out, all of theirs were, the family living in that blurry newborn time zone in which night and day elide. Adam kept it short: boy, elephant, ride, squirt. The End.

  ‘One more,’ Harry said. His hair and complexion were all Claire, but there was something of Adam in his eyes and mouth.

  ‘Love you.’

  ‘In morning,’ Harry said, rolling over. He would be starting at his nursery soon, embarking on his life apart.

  Adam hurried down the stairs again, anxious about leaving them alone, past the picture window on the maisonette’s half-landing, beyond it the patchwork of skinny, London gardens squeezed between their road and the next, tiny manicured lawns and outsized trees, none belonging to them. In the sitting room Ruby opened her eyes, tried to focus, and saw something she didn’t like, a colour or a shape or a shade; she wrenched her gummy mouth into the embouchure of a scream, a silent scream that never came out. She began mouthing the air for milk, like a dog optimistically humping a leg, as if willpower alone might conform the world to her desire.

  Adam’s eyes asked Claire this time. He might have said, Do you realise what sort of a man you are married to? Or, I thought you might be interested to know… It was so long ago, before they met, but it might matter to her now, as it did to him. Her eyes were the same.

  Ruby hit the roof when the breast came out, always negotiating hardest when she was closing the deal. Claire angled an engorged tit into her mouth; Neil lost his nerve, cast his eyes around the room for something else to scrutinise and settled on his phone.


  ‘I should go,’ he said. ‘Jess…’

  ‘Of course,’ Adam said. ‘You go.’

  Claire prised the baby from her breast so Neil could kiss the bumfluffed head, smiling her queenly, disappointed smile. No handshake for the men, no shoulder biffs or backslapping hugs.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked Adam. ‘You two… okay?’

  She was wiser than he sometimes gave her credit for. Remember that, Adam told himself. Don’t lose sight of her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Much better.’

  Neil belted up and joined the evening traffic, heading west to east with the others, from the Nappylands of the suburbs to Dinkyville. He turned on the radio – It’s driving me mad, Going out of my – and snapped it off again.

  Neil was furious. He was dazed. He had known. He spat out a laugh. All this time.

  He didn’t want to think about California, he mustn’t, not immediately. Basic rule of business: don’t be railroaded into anything. Shake hands, do the sums when you get home. If Farid were there he would have smiled, said Very interesting and nothing more, pulverising Adam with his silence.

  Neil shouldn’t have gone back to the house. That was already a concession. He didn’t want to think about it, because if he did, he would have to decide. He was supposed to be in his pomp.

  At the end of Adam’s road a church was being converted into flats. Only One Unit Remaining! – even though the skeletal building was roofless. Churches turning into flats, cinemas transforming into gyms, old boozers mutating into restaurants: the abracadabra of money, magicking everything into something else, a shape-shifting spell that was evidently too strong for megaterrorism or the imminent war to disrupt. Neil Collins from Harrow – Neil Collins of Collins & Sons – metamorphosing into this Neil Collins, the him who was driving his new-model convertible, on his way home to Jess and their chrome and Corian pad.

  You could have a kid out there too.

  I knew she was too young.

  At least, Neil tried to console himself, they had avoided the familiar deaf arguments over Iraq, the argument itself akin to trench warfare, no positions ever altered and no minds changed, Adam against, Neil for, partly, he knew, because Adam was against.

  She was too young.

  Neil wasn’t going to think about them. He didn’t want to forgive Adam in a rush, lazily, and he was terrified of not forgiving him. Adam and his preposterous curse.

  This car, their flat, his suits: he owed it all to Farid. When HappyFamilies went bust, Bimal and the others had emerged from the rubble as eminently marketable commodities. Old, panicking analogue companies were recruiting digerati in a hurry, and even a belly-up dotcom history was enough to impress them. Bimal had straight away been hired to run the online operation for a luxury goods firm; Jess was snapped up by another design agency, with a grander title and improved salary. They were veterans before they were thirty, like specialists in a new kind of combat. They had learned important lessons while squandering Farid’s cash. Don’t count on Russian export licences, for one. The Millennium bug, that pantomime Armageddon, didn’t strike, but there was a swarm of other bugs, and the website was much too slow, just as customers were coming to appreciate how vital, how urgent, were the extra microseconds it took to log on, boot up and download. Those flickering waits had become an unbearable imposition.

  The main lesson had been about wiring, human wiring rather than the electronic kind. Bimal moved them to new offices off Carnaby Street, Neil developed a new product line (key rings, place mats, fridge magnets), Jess organised a slap-up launch in a disused fire station, all on the unexamined presumption that consumers had been rewired: that because they could do something, such as buy a bespoke silk-screened tea towel for £14.99 plus p+p, they would. Of course they would. They must. Program it, and they will point and click. But they wouldn’t, not in the numbers needed to keep HappyFamilies afloat when Farid’s money ran out. Business was still business, a Stone Age equation of revenue and costs. People were still recalcitrant, inconveniently autonomous people.

  If he had told me that night, Neil thought as he drove, I wouldn’t have done it. Of course not. If he had told me the following day, while I waited for the police and the handcuffs, I would have repudiated him on the spot. I might have.

  He turned into a long, straight, speed-trap street, grand Victorian houses on one side, council estates on the other, the road a no man’s land between the two camps. Segments of melon grinned in Technicolor rows beneath the awning of a Levantine grocer’s.

  Farid had abandoned them. He must have paid the shyster lawyer who negotiated his stake almost as much as he invested – he had sunk over a million all told – but he declined to double down. In the office people were whispering that he had only ever wanted to give his cash a nice dotcom sheen. Bimal filed for insolvency, people were yanking computers, scanners and coffeemakers out of the wall, in a spontaneous and oddly festive bout of auto-looting, when Strahan called Neil. Farid wanted to see him. He found the designated restaurant in Mayfair.

  It didn’t matter that he knew nothing about property, which, Farid explained, was these days his main concern. No, it was nothing to do with the internet, though they probably ought to have a place-filler website for the sake of appearances. Neil could sell, Farid said, or rather, he could squeeze investors for money, as he himself could testify, which was essentially the same talent. Farid had Strahan, with his picturesque cynicism, for schmoozing and introductions, but he needed a negotiator. Neil was a good fit, he implied, a useful median between the toffs and the cosmopolitan hustlers he dealt with. Farid smiled once, told Neil that Strahan would fix the details, basic plus bonuses, and turned back to his salad.

  Fucker wasn’t even sorry, Neil thought as he indicated to turn right. Not really. Sorry for her, sure, and for himself, his hocus-pocus evil eye, but not for me. If he had told me after we flew home, that summer… It was too long ago, he couldn’t know what he would have done. He might have laughed about it; he might not have cared.

  Carousers huddled outside a pub. Two of them, men in suits but with their shirts hanging out, seemed to Neil to be squaring up. The taller one threw a punch, but stopped his fist short. They laughed, the smaller man laughing hardest, doubling up at the only simulated violence.

  Neil rarely saw Farid, even now. He made infrequent appearances at their small but fancily addressed office in Hanover Square, and only brief ones at the parties they threw for investors. Still, he could be intimidatingly present when he chose to be. Neil once saw him eviscerate a straight-guy selling agent who had asked him to document his funds for a project in the City –

  Who the fuck you think you are? Ten years I do business with you, you want see my credit card statement? I phone your boss, you fucking cunt, you never my letting agent no more

  – and so on, Farid hamming up his broken English in a beautifully menacing cameo. His method was to borrow more than he needed for a purchase, top-skim the loan for his ‘personal overheads’, and use the change as bait for investors in his next, grander project. The next was always grander. The bankers didn’t seem to mind loaning the supernumerary sums: so long as the market kept rising, everyone would get their money back in the end, Farid said.

  Neil thought of Farid as a kind of godfather, mostly in the fairy sense, only occasionally in the villainous one. Buying this car with Jess had been the first time he experienced his money as a real, transformative force; felt it to be his money, and that he had hurdled the boundary between struggle and success, a frontier that had seemed Himalayan until Farid opened a path across it.

  He stopped at a red light. A child was loitering on the pavement in front of a supermarket, out too late. An old man was crossing the road, his spine so curled that his face was parallel with the road. The old man didn’t offer the standard wave of acknowledgement, nor even check that the oncoming car had stopped. He was shaking his head at the world.

  The light flashed amber. Some imbecile behind Neil hooted.

/>   Adam had been perfect after the stroke, Neil had to give him that. Like a brother, better than a brother, though even Dan had pulled himself together that week. Dan had come to the hospital, flirting with the nurses, depositing Sam to watch football on the television in another patient’s room. He was talking about taking a course (plumbing, he said, or roofing). He had some work on; he was straightening himself out.

  ‘Is he going to die?’ Sam asked Neil. ‘Granddad.’

  ‘I don’t know, Sammy. No.’

  ‘Dad got me a Scalextric,’ Sam said. ‘Did you know that? Second hand, but.’

  Sitting with his father on the ward, without the carapace of work that had protected them in the shop, Neil had been ambushed by discordant feelings. Fear (that Brian was about to die). Some fear, at least. Horror (the tubes, the fluids, the caricature of mortality). Awkwardness (the tubes, the fluids). A consciousness of the falsity of the situation: Neil knew, and Brian must have known, that the closeness was a charade. Regret, that it was only a charade, and that it was too late for them to be otherwise, for him to have a better reason to be there, a better way of accounting for his presence to himself than this abstract yet lumpen duty.