The Faithful Couple Read online

  Above all, boredom.

  On the third day, when Brian was less groggy and tentatively mobile, Neil had tried, for the first and last time, to speak to him about his mother’s final weeks, which he remembered as a farce of whispering, increasingly absurd as she dwindled into frailness, followed by a series of over-choreographed hospital and hospice visits that, in his recollection, were always wrecked by vomiting or narcolepsy.

  ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘I wanted to ask you, why did you only tell us then? Right at the end.’

  ‘Your brother knew,’ Brian said, hoarse and unshaven. ‘Daniel knew. From the beginning. It was only you.’ He paused and closed his eyes, and Neil waited for the explanation. ‘Don’t forget,’ his father said instead, ‘to turn around the Open sign in the shop window.’

  Perhaps there had been a kind of wisdom in that refusal to elaborate, Neil thought, slowing down to pass a cyclist. Water under the bridge.

  A pizza delivery moped came the wrong way down a one-way street. Neil hooted. A group of men waited outside a minicab office, laughing at each other’s jokes. Adam was a liar, a decade’s worth of lies, but he had been kinder and more attentive than Jess, who had calibrated her response to what she knew of his and Brian’s relationship. She didn’t have much time for charades.

  ‘Anything I can do?’ Adam had said. ‘I’ll come over.’

  ‘You can bump off the guy in the bed opposite him. Stinks, the fucker. Screams all night, apparently.’

  ‘Roger that. Seriously, I hope things are… bearable.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll come over.’

  Adam called every day for a week. Neil suspected he was projecting his feelings for his own parents onto this emptier situation. He had come to admire Adam’s automatic love of his family without ever thinking he could emulate or quite understand it, as you might admire the practitioner of some recondite craft or art, a potter or a saxophonist.

  That was only a few months ago. They had talked about Brian that week. They often talked about Sam and Harry. These days they didn’t talk much about Claire and Jess, out of a combination, Neil supposed, of loyalty and tact. Pretty soon they wouldn’t be talking about money, even though having it or not having it, how much you got and how you got it, were becoming the main questions. How much your friends got, and how.

  A half-empty bus pulled away from its stop. A homeless man with an overstuffed shopping trolley sat on the narrow bench beneath the shelter, not waiting for anything. The man’s eyes met Neil’s before he could accelerate.

  Envy wasn’t quite the right word for Adam’s response to his wealth. It would be fairer to describe it as a kind of cognitive dissonance, incomprehension that the chips should have fallen this way. Neil forgave him that much. He had felt something similar about his money, too, as if someone, some pinstriped overseer, might tap him on the shoulder at any moment, explaining that there had been a misunderstanding, he would have to give it back. The previous year he had invited Adam and Claire to join them on a balloon ride, high-altitude champagne over Kent for Jess’s birthday, and Adam had accepted. He rang back a couple of days later to say no, sorry, some blather about the babysitter, but Neil was certain the real reason had been the cost. He would happily have paid, but he knew Adam wouldn’t countenance that. Whisky and comfort and time were permitted offerings, recognised currency. But money, no. It was different from before, when Adam had loaned him the deposit for his bedsit, because the disparity was permanent, and in Neil’s favour.

  Under a streetlight, two young men, one fat, one not, were eating chips out of a single paper cone. When he thought about their friendship now, Neil was put in mind of an image he must have seen on the television news a few years before they first met. It was a report about the Channel Tunnel, in which the two teams of diggers, one from England, one French, were breaking through to each other in the middle, beneath the sea. The clip showed two men groping for the other’s hand, clasping arms, clawing for each other through a wall of dirt.

  Baker Street, Euston, the alluringly illuminated, somehow anarchic avenues of Regent’s Park, the pavement operettas of King’s Cross. Neil drove back into the up-themselves zone, the laptop and latte territory north of the City that, strange to say, was where he now lived. Sunday-night revelry: always somebody with something to celebrate or a sorrow to drown. Three young women shivered in their miniskirts outside a bar.

  Whatever happened now – he didn’t know what would happen now – Neil never again wanted to talk to Adam about California. These days he could scarcely picture her face. He would forget her name eventually: he would make sure that he forgot it. He hadn’t known her age, even if Adam had, that was a fact and not an extemporised excuse. To begin with, he found himself recalling on the Farringdon Road, she had seemed educated, knowing, ready. I’ll take care of it. But after they started, or he started, she became still. Still and taut rather than still and relaxed, breathing regularly in his ear as if she were concentrating, or being brave, enduring a minor operation without anaesthetic. Then a deep exhalation when he rolled off, when he should have cradled and kissed her but hadn’t.

  He pulled over, outside a sushi restaurant, to let a wailing police car pass. Okay, he wasn’t proud of it. He certainly wouldn’t say that he was proud of it. Better that Adam had stopped it, or that he hadn’t started it at all. All the same, she consented; he apologised; it was an honest mistake. These days, in this godlessly promiscuous era, didn’t everyone over twenty have some version of this story in their past, some heat-of-the-moment coupling that might be regrettable and sordid, but was also finished and forgivable? In Harrow, when Neil was fifteen or sixteen, Dan let his friend Tezza hide in his wardrobe and watch while Dan had sex with his girlfriend. Tezza had dared him. In the kitchen, after she left, when they generously told him about their exploit, Neil was in awe: of the sex itself, obviously, but also of their gall and the macho priorities. The girlfriend never found out, so far as Neil remembered, though he couldn’t have said for certain.

  It wasn’t only boys or teenagers who accumulated these stories. Once, when she was drunk, Jess had confided something she had done when she was drunker – in Faliraki, he thought she had said – while she was at university. Her friend, two men they met in a nightclub, a pedalo… Regret, not a characteristic emotion for Jess, was the reason she brought it up, rather than bravado or some bid to titillate or make him jealous. He hadn’t known what to say, hadn’t said anything, wasn’t sure, in the morning, that she remembered telling him, and they had never talked about it again.

  What was the point in dwelling on stuff like this? No harm done. Almost certainly no harm done. It was funny how these incidents came back to you, though, even when they belonged to other people. The nightclub in Faliraki and that pedalo and her friend.

  Adam could have stopped him easily. Quick word, Neil? Jailbait, mate. No, I’m serious. He did. Some sixty-second exchange along those lines.

  Neil found a space in a resident’s parking bay; he flipped the car around to reverse in. He was too tight on the driver’s side and had to manoeuvre out and back again. Perhaps it wasn’t just his money that irked Adam but Jess, the flat, the whole package, so badly that he had resorted to this kamikaze raid on Neil’s happiness. That was what their conversation felt like, even if he could never articulate the suspicion. This was one of those things that you both know but you can’t say, not because you couldn’t prove it – you wouldn’t have to prove it – but because once you had said it, it couldn’t be unsaid.

  He punched in the code and climbed the stairs. There was no particular reason why he shouldn’t tell Jess about Yosemite. He would tell her tonight: him, Adam, the girl and her father, all of it. She would probably laugh at his solemnity, call him ‘sweet’, pinch his cheek, tell him to say a dozen Hail Marys and collect her dry cleaning for a month in penance.

  Jess was in bed. He switched on the television – real murder on one channel, imaginary murder on another. The flat w
as preternaturally tidy, in urgent need of desecration, but Neil didn’t feel entitled to disorder the shelves or skew the furniture. Almost a year after they moved in here he still felt like a guest. He performed his efficient evening ablutions (teeth, face scrub, glance at his hairline) and slid in beside her. He would tell her in the morning.

  He didn’t tell her in the morning. She was in a hurry, so was he, it wasn’t the right time. She asked after Adam’s brats – did the silver spoon require surgical removal? – kissed him on the forehead and left. Something about a strategy meeting. He would tell her later. Soon.

  He checked his phone as he was putting it into his jacket. Two overnight texts: one from Strahan, sent at six o’clock in the morning, which said Office, 8.15; the other, from Adam, sent at half-past three, said, Great to see you. I’m sorry. Neil envisioned his friend pacing around in the small hours, bearing his infant daughter and the memories she inflicted.

  As much as the lies, it was a matter of roles. Adam’s was always to be immaculate, intangibly superior. Neil’s was to be a kind of scrappy insurgent, amusing and testing but deferring to his friend. They had both seemed to understand that arrangement without it ever being articulated. Adam had been the one to phone the driveaway firms in San Diego; only he could have made the first phone call after they flew home. Yet neither of them were quite the things they had been a decade before. Perhaps Adam had never been what Neil wanted him to be in the first place. The question was whether after they stripped away the made-up stuff, all the mutual invention, after he subtracted these lies, there was anything left, anything true and real, which was worth keeping.

  Neil didn’t know what had happened that night ten years ago. Adam thought he knew, but he had only a distorted memory of a daze. He wanted to be able to forgive him. Halfway to the front door Neil took out the phone from his pocket and replied to Adam’s text.

  Ruby is adorable

  2005

  N

  eil wanted a drink, a proper drink, but he wasn’t sure if that was allowed. He hadn’t seen the menu – Azim had ordered for all of them, shashlik and sturgeon and a delicate Caucasian calzone – and he didn’t know whether alcohol was included. Finally, halfway through the meal, sweating into his suit and doubting that he could endure the internecine bonhomie without lubrication, Neil meekly asked whether beer was available.

  Azim laughed, rocking his head back, mouth open, lips and moustache stretching thin. Elin flicked a finger, once, beckoning an assistant-cum-bodyguard and dispatching him into the courtyard for the drinks.

  ‘This isn’t Tora Bora,’ Azim said, still laughing.

  Standing upright against the wall of the private room, their other flunky didn’t move or smile. The world, Neil reflected, was approximately divided into the proprietors of violence – big-shots with assets to protect, hoodlums with nothing to lose, like the muggers who had roughed up Jess at the entrance to their building – and the herds of harmless people in the middle, peering at the carnivores above and below.

  ‘You like the fish?’ Elin asked. He had a round, pockmarked, simpleton’s face, which seemed designed by nature to appear misleadingly ingenuous.

  ‘Lovely,’ Neil lied. They were avoiding business talk, though Neil suspected Azim and Elin were discussing dates and numbers in their private exchanges.

  ‘Super fresh,’ Azim said. ‘House speciality.’

  A muezzin sang out through a loudspeaker, somewhere above the restaurant in the old city. A cat’s tail twitched under the empty chair between Azim’s and Neil’s. He saw Azim notice the tail and for a moment thought the cat might be in jeopardy. Azim pinched some white fish-flesh between his fingers, fed it to the stray and smiled. The cat caressed his legs.

  The best analogy Neil could offer himself was with how he felt in that motel room in Los Angeles twelve years before. I am Neil Collins from Harrow, Neil Collins of Collins & Sons. What the fuck am I doing here?

  To be honest, he knew the answer, which was as straightforward now as it had been in California. There the answer was Adam. In Baku, it was Farid.

  Farid had given him a temporary, functional entrée to the plutocracy. Its members, Neil had noticed, observed their own rituals and rules, in traffic jams, at airports, in all their dealings with officialdom. There was a kind of telepathy between them, a family resemblance in manner and sheen that seemed always to be mutually visible beneath the local idiosyncrasies. They were charming sociopaths, for the most part, enraptured by their wealth but able to be ironic about it, to see the joke and the luck of it. Young women were usually in tow and frequently on offer, like digestifs, though Farid had warned Neil, right at the beginning, always to decline, lest he end up featuring in some blackmailable amateur pornography. Don’t shit on your own doorstep.

  Farid was supplying half the funds for a gaudy, multi-purpose tower on the site of a soon-to-be flattened, Soviet-era housing estate. ‘Give them nothing,’ he had urged as he left the Hilton that morning, condemning Neil to endure their new partners’ hospitality alone. By which he had meant, nothing personal, nothing they could use against him later. Farid himself had given Neil nothing all along: those photos of somebody’s grandchildren he had glimpsed at their first meeting, with Bimal and Jess in the rented flat near Marble Arch, were as close an approach as Neil ever made to him. Neil felt indebted to Farid, filial almost, but also, sometimes, ashamed.

  The beer arrived. Azim became garrulous. Was Blair as strong as Thatcher? Something about a local and much-lamented war that Neil had never heard of. Elin broke in with the personal questions. Did Neil have children? Was he married?

  Elin was married. From his inside pocket he produced a laminated, folding set of pictures, a boy and two girls at what might have been Disney World. A pretty woman in lipstick and Western clothes. He watched Neil looking at them. ‘My wife,’ he said, and smiled. ‘My children.’ Always the children.

  Neil gave them nothing. Not yet. Maybe one day. We’ll see.

  ‘Next time you come,’ Azim said, putting on the full oriental show, ‘you stay in my house. We kill a sheep. You meet my daughter.’ Elin said something to Azim and they both laughed.

  Neil wasn’t sure what the joke was, whether it was on him. ‘That would be wonderful,’ he ventured.

  ‘Not for the sheep,’ Elin said, and they laughed again.

  Insincerity wasn’t quite the word for these exchanges. They were both false and true at the same time, authentic human contact shot through with cynicism. The blandishments were almost genuine at the moment they were uttered, Neil felt. The same as business everywhere, only more exuberant – the same as life everywhere, come to that, intimacy mixed with exploitation, the mission always to insulate something, some moment or bond, from the contest.

  Azim and Elin lapsed into Azeri. Neil had begun wondering whether it would be impolite to look at his phone when, as if obediently, it rang. A twin fire-station shriek, the old rotary theme that was already kitsch history.

  For the first two rings he ignored it, smiling inanely as if the noise were emanating from somewhere else. It was unlikely to be Jess: she was in Buenos Aires, seven hours behind him, research for a new Latin American biscuit product, he thought she had said. It might be Sam. Neil had given him a phone for his birthday, with instructions to call should Brian deteriorate, or should Dan. Sam texted him emoticon-studded jokes, mordant synopses of Dan’s proliferating benders, occasionally his homework scores; Neil amplified his responses with lavish exclamation marks, as the mobile argot required.

  After three rings he took out the phone and looked at the screen. The caller-ID photo told him it was Adam. Handsome bugger.

  Azim coughed, then grinned.

  Neil’s rancour over California had passed, rinsing out of him during the thunderstorm the previous summer, the two of them and those two women. This evening he felt the old warmth – because Adam was in the world, still in Neil’s world, in spite of everything, comfortingly persistent – and a more recent, entwi
ned irritation. Of late there often seemed to be something more pressing to do when Adam rang: it wasn’t the right time, Neil would call his friend back later, he usually resolved, definitely he would.

  ‘You may answer,’ Elin said. ‘Please.’

  On the sixth ring Neil cupped the screen beneath the table. Pressing the reject button would be too brutal: Neil himself could tell when someone offed him like that, and he always received it as a tiny act of violence. He generally let Adam ring through to voicemail, the lazy medium between the investment of talking and harshness of termination.

  Not today. Neil raised and jiggled the phone in his hand, mouthing ‘sorry’ as he stood. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a curt tone intended to sound executive. Not just the organ-grinder’s monkey.

  ‘I’ve found her,’ Adam said.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Neil said to his hosts, putting his hand over the mouthpiece as you were supposed to. ‘I have to take this.’