The Faithful Couple Read online

  ‘Of course,’ Azim said.

  ‘No problem,’ Elin said.

  ‘Just a second,’ Neil said to Adam.

  He strode into the courtyard but found it crowded with diners, waiters, a half-hearted belly-dancer. He hurried out of the restaurant, bearing the phone like a fizzing hand grenade, and down the steps that led to the seafront. He ignored the carpet salesmen (‘Is not shop, is museum!’), crossed the road and found himself on the almost deserted boardwalk that stretched along the shore of the Caspian. No waves, just dead black water.

  ‘Hi, Adam,’ he said, rewinding, giving his friend a chance to begin again. To begin differently.

  ‘Philly, I’ve found her.’

  ‘Who?’ Neil asked, although he already knew. A nauseating aroma of oil wafted off the sea. In the distance, beyond the boardwalk and the trees, he made out the silhouette of an offshore platform, a lone orange beacon flashing at its apex in the Caucasian night.

  ‘Rose, of course. I’ve found her, Neil. I’ve found Rose.’

  Panic surged up Neil’s throat. Here they came – the shame, the recrimination, the policemen whom Eric was going to call but, for some blessed reason, hadn’t. He fought it down.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I said I’ve —’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The internet,’ Adam said. ‘MySpace. I registered and I searched for her and now I’ve found her. She’s… hair… at least…’

  The signal cracked up; Neil caught one word in three. He walked up the boardwalk, towards the oil platform. Adam was still there, patchy and scrambled but still with him. Neil raised the handset above his head and waved it in the warm air, hoping to reignite the signal-strength bars in the corner of the miniature screen. Around thirty metres ahead of him, beneath a tree that canopied the boardwalk, another man was brandishing his phone in the air, conjuring the same ethereal magic. To anyone watching it would have looked as if they were semaphoring each other in a strange, short-range code.

  Neil turned away from the man and walked back along the boardwalk, towards the restaurant. He regained his signal.

  ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Yes, I’m here. Just lost each other for a second.’

  ‘What time is it there? Aren’t you at work?’ – as if he might disqualify his friend’s intelligence on a technicality.

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said, ‘I’m in the office. I’m looking at her now. I suppose it’s her. I’m looking at her picture.’

  ‘What do you mean, you suppose?’

  There was a pause at the London end, that air of vacancy and distraction that descends when an interlocutor is doing something else, typically involving a computer, sometimes a television with the sound turned down. The ghostly hiatus of the multi-gadget era, in which everyone is always half-elsewhere.

  ‘She’s got a photo on her profile page, it’s a funny kind of photo. I was saying – Neil, when I lost you – I was saying that I think it’s her. Can’t be completely sure but it looks like it’s her. I’ll send you the link.’

  ‘Don’t, Ads,’ Neil said. ‘Anyway, how the hell would you know what she looks like now?’

  ‘You might need to register.’

  ‘Just don’t.’

  ‘You don’t understand, she might be okay, she might be fine. Maybe she’s forgiven us, or, you know, she would forgive us, if…’

  Neil sensed the panic coursing back. ‘Have you contacted her? Sent her a message or whatever?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Adam, don’t. Don’t contact her. Listen to me. Just don’t.’

  He turned around. The semaphoring man had finished his phone call; two other men, whom Neil hadn’t previously noticed, and whose outnumbering presence might have troubled him if he had, rose like ghosts from a bench in the shadows beneath the tree to join him. All three walked away from him and up the boardwalk, towards the oil platform; its orange light pulsed through the tree’s upper branches. Neil found himself mindlessly waving farewell with his free hand, though the man could no longer see him and he and Neil were strangers.

  Adam said, ‘What colour was her hair?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In Yosemite. Come on! What colour was her hair?’

  ‘Sorry, can’t remember,’ Neil lied.

  ‘Yes, you can. You can, Neil. She’s a brunette in the photo but for some reason I thought she was fairer.’

  ‘What else does it say?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Neil said, backtracking on his curiosity. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’m at a dinner. Local partners, total shysters. You should go too, Adam. Work on whatever it is you’re putting into the little box today.’

  ‘I’ll send you the link.’

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘It says she lives in Taos. In New Mexico. You know, Georgia O’Keeffe.’

  ‘I said I’m not interested. I’m hanging up now, Adam.’

  ‘It says she has a brother.’

  ‘Adam,’ Neil snapped, ‘what the fuck is this about? I thought we were finished with this, I thought you were over this crap. I’ve tried, I have, but… What are you trying to do to me? It’s enough to —’

  ‘She had a brother, didn’t she?’

  Neil breathed deeply. ‘Just don’t contact her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m hanging up,’ Neil repeated, and he did, pressing the Disconnect button hard, hoping that Adam wouldn’t send him the link, since if he did, Neil might have to click through and look at the picture. Look at Rose, out there in New Mexico with Georgia Whoeverthefuck.

  The traffic on the road between the boardwalk and the old city had picked up, rickety taxis alternating with late-model Mercs. Neil weaved through the vehicles, eager, suddenly, to be back in the private room with Azim and Elin. Since that night in the rain a year ago he had been sure that he and Adam could carry on, just somewhat differently, slightly recalibrated, maybe even for the better. Perhaps, after all, forgiveness could be provisional, a probation rather than an acquittal. He climbed the steps to the restaurant.

  The bodyguards stood motionless against the wall. Elin was asleep in his chair, chin on chest. His sheath of family photos had fallen from his lap onto the floor; the laminated face of a small girl, eyes wide, was lying beside her father’s Italian shoe. Azim was eating kumquats. He smiled at Neil with his full mouth as he sat down.

  Elin woke up when the maître d’ came in with the bill. Neil reached for his wallet to contribute. Azim half-wagged, half-pointed a finger at him. ‘Your money,’ he said, ‘is no good in my country.’

  He and Elin laughed. Neil saw the joke, and laughed too, though it was Farid’s money, not his, that they were celebrating. Not even Farid’s, in fact, though they didn’t need to know that. He gave them nothing.

  Adam wasn’t sure that Neil had rung off until he lowered the phone from his ear and saw the word Disconnected on the screen, below it the call’s duration, 7:47. He wasn’t annoyed by his friend’s brusqueness; he wasn’t distressed by the photo. On the contrary, he felt vindicated, almost elated. The girl was real, and, since she was real, she might be able, somehow, to release him.

  The immigration minister bustled through the office, accompanied by his condescending adviser, en route to somewhere more enclosed. Adam scarcely looked up from Rose’s profile. The warmest acknowledgement he could hope for was another ‘Good to see you’.

  Heidi appeared at the entrance to his cubicle. He closed his browser and enlarged the briefing paper he was writing on the relative efficacy of state and private deportation squads. These documents were the extent of his discourse with the powerful. Adam knew that half the time they were destined to languish, unread, at the bottom of the minister’s overstuffed red box.

  ‘Coffee?’ Heidi said. ‘Last call.’

  ‘Can’t now,’ Adam said. ‘But later?’

  ‘How much later?’

  ‘Do you mean,
what time do I get off?’

  ‘No, I mean, should I just ask someone else?’

  Adam frequently coffeed with Heidi, up in the deathly canteen (his preference) or down in one of the overpriced chains (hers). Sometimes, in the summer, they would scrimmage through the tourists photographing the squirrels to eat their sandwiches together on the lawn in St James’s Park. Occasionally they went for an after-work drink at the ye olde pub in the alley near the ministry. Their boozing male colleagues loosened their ties, stuffed their non-drinking hands into their pockets and thrust out their hips; the women crossed one arm beneath their busts and sipped their gin and tonics; all of them shot prurient glances at Adam and Heidi, who were widely assumed to be having an affair – an impression that arose because they spoke to each other in the office, actual words, physical mouths and ears, and human-to-human contact had come to seem intrusive, verboten, a borderline molestation in the high email age.

  ‘Twisted my arm,’ Adam said. ‘But, look, I’ve got a meeting with Nick five minutes ago. After that, okay? If I haven’t strangled him.’

  Nick walked past the cubicle in one of his trademark postman shirts, averting his gaze.

  Adam did a rapid overheard-office-insult calculation: insultee’s walking pace multiplied by interval between insult and his appearance on the scene, divided by volume of insulter’s voice. Nick probably hadn’t heard. It was probably just their adultery that he was ignoring.

  ‘Close,’ Heidi said. ‘Careful.’

  ‘Always,’ Adam said, and smiled.

  Too much. Heidi blushed, a picturesque Anglo-Chinese burnish. Adam looked meaninglessly at his screensaver: him and Neil at the Faithful Couple, scanned, uploaded and immortal.

  Okay, they flirted. They flirted just enough to salve the blow to his ego from the loosenings and sags, the ambushing jowls. But nothing happened, nothing ever had, less even than with those two women on the Strand, and that had been nothing, too. It was mostly jokes, him and Heidi, wisecracks and one-liners, like him and Neil, you could say, plus an implicit mutual acknowledgement, the understanding that he needed to share with at least one person in the ministry: We are still two human beings, even here in the machine.

  These days, when he tried to have sex with Claire, she generally kissed him back, kissed him off, the way his grandmother might have done if he had kissed her on the lips by accident – mouth closed and pursed, unyielding, on the appalled side of polite – and Adam rolled away and lay on his back, no part of their bodies touching, offended and ashamed. These days Claire’s idea of seduction, when she was sure the children were asleep and felt she ought to, was to reach under the duvet, hitch up her nightie and say, ‘We can fuck if you want.’

  He couldn’t make her want him. When he trimmed the old-man hairs in his nostrils and ears, it was Heidi’s notice he was anticipating. She pirouetted and returned to her desk, only her slender top half visible, like some graceful aquatic bird, as she weaved between the serried desks and computer screens.

  Adam turned back to his screensaver. Over the years he had wavered about whose arm was interrupting the picture’s edge. It might be hers. Very likely it was hers. He had given less attention to the tree itself, the deep grooves in the bark and the hollowed-out crevice that, now he came to focus on it, looked as if it might swallow them.

  The question was straightforward, Nick insisted in the meeting room. Thirty thousand asylum-seekers, give or take, arrived in the country each year. How many of them departed? The minister needed to know. The higher the figure, the better, obviously, but at a minimum they needed a number.

  Nick sucked the end of his pen. When he withdrew it from his mouth the lid lingered between his lips; he picked it out with his other hand. Like Adam he had transferred from crime to immigration, but more recently and importantly. Extended acquaintance hadn’t made them friends. On the contrary, theirs was one of those office relationships in which longevity instils a firm, empirical assurance that they never would be, a certainty that was itself a kind of comfort. Nick was out of his depth but shrewd enough to realise.

  Unfortunately not, Adam explained. The statisticians could rustle up a combined, annual figure for forcible removals and the voluntary departures that were reported to the authorities. But that wouldn’t correspond to the number of arrivals for the year and couldn’t safely be compared with it.

  ‘Why not? Of course it can.’

  Nick bent the pen between his thumbs as if he meant to break it. A noose of pimples ringed his neck above his shirt collar; he had lost much of his hair since their days together in crime and shorn the horseshoe that remained.

  They had said something about a brother, one of them had, Adam was sure of it. Taos, New Mexico.

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘Because they aren’t processed quickly enough,’ Adam said. ‘The figures don’t tally, you see. The ones we remove this year arrived last year, or the year before, or even the year before that.’

  There was a jug of misty water on the table but no glasses.

  ‘Three years ago?’

  Why shouldn’t he contact her? He could do it tactfully, respectfully, enquiring about her welfare. Hers and her father’s.

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Have you seen the files in Croydon? It’s ridiculous. They’re stacked three feet thick. Though some of them, when it takes that long, end up being allowed to stay on compassionate grounds even if their claim has been refused. And of course quite a lot of them sort of vanish in between.’

  Sheila, the Head of Returns, was on long-term sick, but Adam was still her deputy for purposes of pay and rank. Adam Tayler, Deputy Head of Returns. He could no longer tell himself that he was playing against type. This was his type.

  Nick looked at Adam and then at the far, unoccupied end of the table. ‘The permanent secretary would like an answer,’ he said in a menacingly calm tone. ‘The minister wants to know, presumably so he can tell Parliament. He doesn’t want to hear, “We don’t know”. He doesn’t want to say it.’

  Nick left it there.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said eventually. ‘I’m not sure what we can do.’

  Or he could be casual, jaunty: Hi!!!! Remember me?? As if there were nothing in the world to be ashamed or sensitive about.

  Nick blew out his cheeks. ‘Okay, take a previous year. Take 2002. Tell me how many asylum-seekers who lodged claims in 2002 have gone. We will extrapolate that into an annual proportion.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Adam said. ‘Removals aren’t tabulated by date of arrival. The stats people are fixing that, in fact – you know, cohort tracking. From this year, I think. But for what you want, somebody would have to go through the paperwork on every decision. Sorry.’

  There must have been a time, Adam had concluded, there must have been a moment when he was supposed to have made his move, like a middle-distance runner taking off around a bend. He should have seen a bill through Parliament, owned a crisis, God knew there were enough of them to go round. Half of it – success or stagnation, becoming a 7 or not – was dumb luck, but the other half was taking your chances when they came. There was a slow stream in the Civil Service, less formal but just as tractive as the fast one, and he had stumbled onto it. If he wasn’t careful by the end of his thirties he would find himself sitting it out, buckling up for the long, lengthening wait for the pension. Adam saw people doing that, dull behind the eyes after they had given up. That would mean twenty-five years to refine one of the functions available to the bypassed in departmental ecology: to be an avuncular throwback (he would wear braces, hum his school song), or, worse, a ‘character’ (he would wear odd socks and assault the photocopier). Worst of all, he might be exiled to some acronymous quango, which twice a year would lodge harmless reports on border queues or prison diets in the library of the House of Commons.

  Nick scowled, put the pen back in his mouth and bent over his papers. After a minute Adam understood that he was supposed to leave. He stood and returned to his desk.

  The eveni
ng before he had seen Will – Will from his job in television, Will from Tenerife – being interviewed outside a broadcasting awards ceremony on a reddish carpet. Will from television – on television. He looked slimmer than he had been a decade before, and taller, somehow, though of course he couldn’t have been. Cuban heels, possibly. He was controller of one of the BBC’s new cable channels; something that he had commissioned had won a gong. Will had smiled and pushed his glasses up his nose as he accepted the interviewer’s congratulations.

  Adam emailed Heidi: Survived. Your place or mine?

  He would look again that evening, after the children were in bed. There were only a few hours to get through first.