The Faithful Couple Page 17

  Who was Neil to say he shouldn’t contact her?

  Home for the companionable violence of bath-time, the silent and dependable teamwork with Claire, in the miniature factory the maisonette had become: food in, recycling, excrement, and reasonably clean and well-nourished children out. After the bath came the borderline anarchy of the interlude before bed, Adam poised on the landing outside the kids’ bedroom like a referee in a bout of all-in wrestling (almost everything is allowed).

  ‘Cartoons tonight,’ Harry said, fiddling with his penis. ‘One more?’

  ‘Not tonight, lollipop.’

  ‘Me too,’ Ruby said. She had Claire’s features but hers were finer, almost gaunt. In the bath, with her hair slicked back, and sometimes when she was crying, Adam could just make out the baby in her face, the new-born physiognomy that he knew she would soon lose. She had fallen in the park that day and scraped her little knees.

  ‘Mummy,’ Harry shouted down the stairs, ‘it’s cartoons tonight, isn’t it?’ – the divide and rule instinct kicking in, as primal, Adam had noticed, as the dancing instinct, the storytelling instinct and the nostalgia instinct.

  ‘No,’ Claire shouted up. ‘Now get to bed.’

  ‘Bedtime,’ Adam said. ‘I love you, beetle-bugs.’

  ‘I need a poo,’ Harry said.

  They’ll kill me in the end, Adam thought.

  When they were down he closed the front door quietly and got into their key-scratched car, sweeping the accumulated parking vouchers, empty smoothie containers and maps printed off the internet from the dashboard into the well of the passenger seat. Adam had a weekly arrangement with a moped driver from the Bengal Express. The driver, Suleiman, met him at the perimeter of the restaurant’s delivery zone, by the side of Ealing Common, to exchange a lamb biryani and pilau rice for his eight pounds forty-five, a university penchant that Adam had re-embraced in fatherhood. Claire said there were bound to be acceptable takeaways that would deliver to their door and spare him the bother, but the Bengal Express was a dependable pleasure, and Adam relied on it.

  Suleiman was standing in the designated spot, near a streetwise London oak, texting with his free hand and smelling of cigarette smoke. If someone had put Suleiman in a police-style line-up, a pageant of wiry men in their twenties all silhouetted or facing away, a plastic bag in one hand and a phone in the other, Adam would have picked him out every time. Something about his posture and demeanour.

  ‘Hi, Suleiman,’ Adam said.

  ‘Hi,’ Suleiman said, and smiled.

  ‘How you doing?’ Adam asked. They weren’t well-acquainted but they weren’t quite strangers, either. Perhaps it was only ever a question of degree.

  ‘Good,’ Suleiman said. ‘Good.’

  ‘Look after yourself.’

  ‘See you next week,’ Suleiman said. ‘Be safe.’

  Listening to the Eagles on the drive home, the thought entered Adam’s head that he could be one of those men you sometimes read about who nip out on an errand, shouting ‘Five minutes, darling’, and take off, disappear. He couldn’t, of course. Of course not. The children.

  He ate his food in the kitchen, mechanically, while Claire munched a salad and watched a vote-me-out-of-here television show, discharging the new civic duty of celebrity democracy: vote for the one you love, or the one you hate, only vote now and often. She shoved her used tissue between the cushion of the sofa and the arm, the umpteenth time, umpteen squared, but he decided not to mention it this evening.

  Adam climbed the stairs to their bedroom and plugged in his laptop on the dressing table. He closed the door as the computer booted up, awaiting the insipidly welcoming melody.

  He hadn’t meant to find her, honestly he hadn’t. At least, that hadn’t been Adam’s main or his first intention when he minimised his policy document, opened his browser and began that afternoon’s allotted Googling. His own internet footprint was still pathetically shallow: he scored a glancing reference in the write-up of an immigration conference at the University of Nottingham, plus a couple of mentions in online reports of school and university reunions. He searched for Chaz, Archie, Chloe, the university ex who was supposed to come to California, but hadn’t, leaving him to Neil, the pick-up, the Faithful Couple. Chloe was married and living in Dubai… A personalised zombie show, the phantoms parading before him on a whim and a click. The past was back, miraculously navigable like a new-old continent, peopled by the resurrected dead. History was no longer finished, even if you wanted it to be. You could unearth it, and vice versa.

  From Chloe, to Neil. He rated several mentions in property magazines, mostly in conjunction with Farid, plus one or two in the business pages of bona fide newspapers, offering mollifying quotes on Farid’s behalf. Also the contacts section of the discreet website for Farid’s company. There were some internet-ancient mentions in Neil’s HappyFamilies capacity, in schadenfreude-heavy analyses of the dotcom bust. He was much more prolific than Adam.

  From Neil, that afternoon, to Yosemite. He found Trey easily, almost instantly, the distinctive first name making him conspicuous if you knew how to look. Trey was still working as a guide in northern California, but for a different outfit. This new operator’s website included a photo of him (filled-out, greyer) dangling a salmon from a fishing rod, an amiable grin in place of the snarl Adam envisaged (What the fuck, you guys?). Next he found the gay couple from the camping trip. Their first names, Mike and Patrick, unexpectedly returned to him, along with the excavated details that they lived in Reno, and that one of them (both, he soon established) ran a landscape gardening firm.

  It was only after that – after Chaz, Archie, Chloe, Neil; Trey, Mike and Patrick – that Adam came to Rose.

  In the past two years, every few weeks, he had tried ‘Rose AND Eric AND Boulder’, but it was useless without her full name. All he remembered was that she had one of those only-in-America, ethnically oxymoronic portmanteau surnames: O’Malley-Rodriguez, Romario-Johansson, Esquivel-Schlezinger, something like that. He had seen the double-barrel on the slip of paper she gave to Neil when she marched to their tent to say goodbye, trying to be steadfast. The two of them had looked at the name and address, printed carefully in unjoined letters, a wonky xxx appended at the bottom, when they were sitting next to each other on the bus to San Francisco. He remembered that she had drawn a little heart in place of the dot over an i… at least one i. He had never seen that scrap of paper again and had no idea what Neil had done with it. Probably he had thrown it away, or left it in his jeans when they went into the wash.

  In his cubicle, Adam concentrated. He closed his eyes. Irish-Mexican. Cuban-Swedish. Italian-German. Definitely German, he realised, but it felt like German should come first. German-Balkan. German-Hispanic. German… Celtic! Schneider. Koestler. Five minutes later, he thought he had it: Schmidt!

  Schmidt-Davies. Schmidt-Evans. Schmidt-McNeil.

  He eliminated several dozen other permutations. He had given up and moved on to his father (something about his consultancy work, a letter he had written to a newspaper about the green belt) when, of its own accord, it came to him: Ferguson. Schmidt-Ferguson! Schmidt-Ferguson. Rose Schmidt-Ferguson.

  Rose Schmidt-Ferguson.

  He was almost sure and giddy and terrified but there wasn’t much on her, either. He really ought to get back to his document, prepare for his meeting with Nick. She cropped up in a list of students at a college in Arizona that Adam had never heard of. Class of ’00, that sounded about right, they numbered by the year of graduation, didn’t they? High school’s what I mean.

  Had to be her. But there was nothing else.

  MySpace was his last gambit of the day. He already had a ghost profile though he had hardly ever used it.

  She was there. There she was.

  He searched for her, her name came up, he clicked through to her profile page, and she was on his screen quicker than he was expecting – too quickly, he wasn’t altogether ready for her. He glanced sharply away from the scr
een and towards the padded partition between his cubicle and the outside world. Be smiling, Adam thought, as he trained his eyes on the list of internal telephone numbers and fire-escape instructions that were pinned to the partition. Please be smiling – untraumatised, unvictimised, too well balanced to be a cause of retribution. At the same time he knew that her smile would prove nothing. Of course she would be smiling. Nobody posted a photo of themself frowning. It was childish superstition to think the image would express her essence and fate, Google-age voodoo.

  Smile, Rose. Please.

  She wasn’t smiling. But neither was she weeping or grimacing or wearing a wimple. The photo was too posed and affected to infer a mood. She sat in profile, a curtain of hair obscuring her cheek, her visible eye wide and staring. Her hair… She was a brunette in the photo, but Adam had an image of Rose as a fairer girl, almost blond, a blonde wearing a sarong… He might be mistaken. She might have dyed it. She might have changed beyond his recognition. He had changed. Why expect her to be the same, faithful to his half-invented memory, conveniently imperishable, eternally fifteen years old? (Fifteen!) Why should the decay that his mirror averred each morning – the crow’s feet around his eyes, the body hair that, having vanquished his shoulders, was mystifyingly colonising his upper arms – be surprising or disappointing in her? Of course it was her.

  Adam had scratched his knee. He had called Neil. Probably he would have sent his friend the link he didn’t want, if Heidi hadn’t materialised in his cubicle. He might have written to her then and there.

  Five minutes of top-up exegesis at the most, Adam told himself at Claire’s dressing table, the computer screen emitting its lunar glow but the bedroom otherwise dark. Or ten. Ten minutes at the outside. There might be something he had missed.

  This time he retrieved her profile instantly. Her entry was almost as scant and poorly maintained as his own, as if, like him, she had registered and then lost interest (though for his part Adam wasn’t tech-savvy enough for much elaboration). Besides Rose’s move to New Mexico, he gleaned the names of two friends, Rio and Todd, and of her brother, George. She had uploaded no further photos, specified no interests and published no blog posts.

  Adam wondered how she thought of them now. At first, he speculated at the dressing table, she might have been proud of what had happened, bragged about it, even. She might have become a minor celebrity in her high school on account of her escapade. At first; and that could have been how she depicted that night for a few years. But that, Adam knew, was as much as he could legitimately hope for, and possibly too much. Instead she might have been humiliated by that farewell tableau, too ashamed to forgive her father for witnessing it, her resentment and his incomprehension later curdling into estrangement. (Once, when his parents visited him at university, Adam’s mother had stumbled upon the condoms in his bedroom, their eyes had met, and they hadn’t spoken for a month.) She might have regretted the liaison instantly, been sobbing for the fact of Neil that morning rather than over his departure. Later, at that college in Arizona, what did she say to people – boyfriends, for example – about the pale Englishman who had seduced her in California, and the overconfident friend who encouraged him and would have seduced her if he could?

  He caught his breath as it occurred to him she might be able to see that Adam Tayler, London, England had searched for and found her. Unlikely, he reassured himself. In any case, his name wouldn’t mean much to her. It wouldn’t be his name that she remembered.

  In the children’s bedroom, Ruby cried out. Adam froze, listening, but the yelp came only once. Bad dream, probably. Rats or bats or witches. He was grateful to the children now, in a way; or, he and they were quits over this. Ruby had induced the fierce remorse, and the fear, both of which Adam knew he might never shake off entirely, might have to live with for ever, dull and tolerable but persistent like a burned-out infatuation. At the same time everything before his children now seemed part of a different innings or account, the two of them forming a human statute of limitations.

  He shouldn’t have done that to you, Adam might write to her. We shouldn’t have done that to you. We’re sorry. I’m sorry. Some breathless declaration along those lines. Or, I don’t know whether your father told you, but I knew… So you see, it was me too, in a way. Me as much as him. Only after the apology would he write, The thing is, in the morning, your father… I know it’s selfish of me but if you could just…

  Possibly Neil was right about contacting her. She couldn’t have forgotten – nobody forgets that – but she might have relegated them to the back of the closet of her memory, only occasionally uncovering them when she was sifting through the clutter of her childhood. Possibly she thought about it every day. Either way she might not be pleased to hear from him, however urgently he repented. I just need to know that you’re okay. Tell me.

  At the same time, studying Rose’s photo in his bedroom, Adam was furious with her. Not for being younger than they first thought (had they thought?), nor for swimming and splashing them. Not for anything at all that she had done, in fact. He blamed her only for existing. Had she not existed, if she hadn’t been there, it couldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t be crouched masochistically over his computer screen; he would worry about his daughter only in the ordinary way, without this superfluous, gnawing superstition. Their friendship, his and Neil’s, wouldn’t have been contaminated from the start. If she ceased to exist now, there would be no victim, and so, from a certain, twistedly legalistic point of view, no offence to speak of or to pay for. Looking at the screen (Warning: Battery Low!), Adam oscillated between an impulse to atone and an urge to obliterate her.

  He heard a footfall on the stairs. Or a spontaneous creak. Probably a creak. These old houses.

  Or, if not her, could he at least obliterate those few days of his life? If he were allowed to rewind and delete any three of the days he had lived, he would choose the three in Yosemite. His life could be three days shorter: that would be a fair exchange and settlement, surely. Or let him erase that one evening, just those few hours. To be able to go back and cancel a few hours in a whole life – was that really so unreasonable a request? Everybody should be entitled to that, he thought. At least to that.

  He looked at the screen; the nails of his right hand scratched his left forearm. His heart sped up. Perhaps without those few hours, Adam considered, there would have been no him and Neil at all. Maybe they had stayed together as might two old lags determined to keep an eye on each other, united by their misdemeanour rather than in spite of it. Turn a betrayal inside out and you found its opposite, a secret and a bond. Perhaps that was what friendship came down to: trusting each other with the very worst things – because you had to, didn’t you? You had to trust and tell someone – the shaming weaknesses, the lowest abasements, the flaws and offences that would always be there between you, even if you never spoke of them. A lifelong, affectionate mutual blackmail.

  Friendship was keeping an eye on each other. Their bond was Rose.

  ‘What are you doing?’ She switched on the light.

  ‘Nothing,’ Adam said. He swivelled round to face Claire, reaching behind him to snap the screen as he turned, missing on the first swipe and knocking over a tube of body lotion.

  ‘What is it, Adam?’ She was focusing on the flattened computer, or rather on the shallow reflection of the computer in the dressing table mirror. ‘Tell me. What are you looking at?’

  Curiosity to indignation to rage inside a dozen words. She dipped her head forward expectantly, minus the smile that usually finished the gesture.

  ‘Nothing, Clezzy,’ he repeated. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Oh, Adam,’ she said. She gripped her hips as she did when reprimanding their children. ‘For God’s sake.’

  It’s funny how trust goes, Adam thought. Part of him wouldn’t have minded, might have quite liked, a chance to say, like a philanderer in a farce, It isn’t what you think. Some in flagrante gotcha featuring a willing blonde or two and a
comically timed entrance by his wife. But not this. This wasn’t even the low-risk, high-bandwidth version of that moment that Claire apparently thought it was, in which she would catch him with his dick in one hand and the fingers of the other typing misspelled, all-capitalised instructions to a virtual friend in Latvia or Manila.

  This was the opposite of pornography: it was expiation. It really wasn’t what she thought. But what was he supposed to say?

  ‘It isn’t what you think,’ he said.

  Claire laughed, caustically and unamused. ‘What do I think?’ she asked, her voice like a ticking bomb.

  He couldn’t say to her, In California, Neil… Or, Me and Neil… Thing is, her father… And then when Ruby was born… Today, at work… Come and take a look. It wouldn’t make sense to her. He confided fears and embarrassments to Claire that no one else could see, not even Neil, vanities and midnight doubts and, recently, his haemorrhoids. His grief at still not being a 7. But not this. It was too late, and Rose was theirs, not hers.

  ‘Ballroom-dancing lessons,’ he said. ‘For your birthday, there’s a place in Bloomsbury. You’ve spoiled it now, Claire. Christ.’