The Faithful Couple Read online

  Adam stretched his legs in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. He folded his arms over his chest. He was fond of his lie. Neil should have been there to appreciate it.

  He could see her not believing him. She was staring past him into the mirror – the huddle of cosmetics in the foreground, the computer nestling among them, then the back of Adam’s chair, his neck, the resilient fullness of his hair, and Claire herself, shrunken and open-mouthed in the middle distance. He could see her wanting to rush over, flip up the screen, demand or remember or guess his password and ascertain what or who was in his browser. But she couldn’t. The manoeuvre would be too loud an intimation of divorce. And she was too tired.

  She said, ‘I’m going to bed,’ not repudiating his explanation but not accepting it, either.

  ‘Me too,’ Adam agreed, not wanting to leave her alone with the computer.

  She sat on the edge of the bed to undress, rotating her torso so her breasts were shielded from him when she took off her bra (Ridiculous!). She reached under her pillow for the extra-large T-shirt that she liked to sleep in; she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and anoint her face (the same brand of moisturiser since they met, its aroma part of the smell of her, a scent Adam had thought he would always recognise and love). He hurried out of his clothes, draping them over the chair and the computer, and lay on his back under the duvet, straight and still like a corpse in a coffin on The Sopranos. His foot met a stray piece of train set; he kicked it onto the carpet, stubbing a toe.

  She turned out the light and joined him, lying on her side, facing away.

  ‘Who did you vote for?’

  ‘You know who I voted for… Oh, that. No one,’ Claire said. ‘They’re all as bad as each other.’

  Nursery-rhyme sing-songs in church halls… accidental shits in swimming pools… perpetual laundry. The immurement. If Claire had stayed at the gallery she might have been running the place by now. But the salary/childcare sums had made no sense, even with her mother helping them one day a week, rising to two when she lost the second man, the bloke with the zany cummerbund from the wedding.

  ‘That knee looks sore, doesn’t it? Did she fall off her scooter again?’

  Claire grunted.

  They had got money all wrong, Adam now saw, held it in insufficient respect. He hadn’t foreseen how the gap would grow, their line on the money graph rising slightly, then flatlining, while the Neils of the world – while Neil’s – shot up faster and for longer, until you would need a squiggly break in the graph’s vertical axis to compare their incomes. At the beginning, when it had seemed like a windfall, he had tried to regard Neil’s wealth as harmless, amusing, but when it lasted, became a structural fact in their lives, they had experienced money’s cleavage, its powerful negative magnetism.

  ‘Nick gave me a going over today. Asylum stats. Imbecile.’

  Nothing.

  She never said so – you couldn’t say it because of the children, the children were supposed to be enough – but he knew Claire had expected more. Not salary or square-footage but a different kind of more. A general rather than a particular, material more. Sometimes, when he contemplated his life, Adam saw himself driving round and round an underground car park with a voucher in his mouth.

  She sighed, plumped her pillow, sighed again. Under the duvet she pulled her T-shirt down towards her knees. He raised his head, anticipating a last-ditch conversation – Let’s not go to bed on an argument, Claire always said – but she was silent. The Dinky duet was sung out.

  In bed, ostracised, Adam remembered how, when they were very young, he and Harriet had seen his parents dancing together (in his memory they were dressed to the nines: a wedding, maybe) and had thought them as beautiful as a fairy tale, the most beautiful and enamoured couple in the world. It was their fault, all that happiness, or what had felt like happiness to children, leaving him with too little to prove. When he spoke to them now they complained about each other in icy, ominous periphrases (Please tell your father… ). He was noticing a new tightness around his mother’s mouth, and a new, defensive habit of introducing her remarks with I’m sorry, but… as if the world were perpetually countermanding her (I’m sorry, but she’s beautiful). At family meals his father constantly refilled Adam’s wine glass, and Claire’s, to reduce the supply to his wife. Adam had begun to wonder about the bank account and – who knew? – bedroom indiscretions that his parents might be concealing, must always have been.

  The known unknowns of other people’s marriages, even theirs. Even his: Heidi, and that smooch on the Strand, and Rose.

  Claire loved him, he thought. Her anger told him that. He loved her, too. He still loved her, even if, most of the time, the love didn’t seem especially helpful or relevant. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, except maybe the children, adept as they were at finding the cracks and prising them apart.

  ‘Love you,’ he said. He rolled onto his side to spoon her, and she let him, though she might already have been asleep.

  You see, if you are okay, that would mean… Could you possibly ask your father to take it back?

  Their names were Sian and Alida and they were from New Zealand. Alida was Neil’s and Sian was Adam’s, one of those spontaneous assortments determined instantly by looks, height and ebullience. At least, they said their names were Sian and Alida, who knew what they were really called. Adam had introduced himself as Henry and Neil as Kevin.

  ‘At the opera,’ he said, when Sian asked where they had been that evening. ‘You know, Covent Garden. Carmen. It was a blast.’

  ‘My friend here, Henry, he’s a set designer,’ Neil put in.

  ‘Papier mâché mostly,’ Adam clarified. ‘Collages, murals. Castles that they slide out of the wings.’

  ‘Slaves and elephants,’ Neil said.

  ‘No kidding,’ Sian said.

  ‘Choice,’ Alida said.

  The two men had been out to dinner at a burger place behind the Strand. It was the summer after Adam told Neil the truth about California, the year before he exhumed Rose. They were ambling in the direction of Trafalgar Square when the rain began – a sudden, unEnglish monsoon, overrunning the drains and flooding along the gutters as if London’s subterranean rivers were erupting, one of those violent summer rains that make it seem the whole grey, nonporous city must drown. They were drenched within a minute and took shelter in an airline salesroom’s doorway. Sian and Alida had occupied the recess before them. The women were tipsier than Neil and Adam, a condition and opportunity that they clocked straight away, their decommissioned chat-up instincts still whirring.

  ‘We’re having a party,’ Sian said, after the sizings-up and jokes about swimming for it. ‘You should come.’

  ‘Who else is going?’ Adam said. The downpour felt like a carnival.

  ‘Just us,’ Sian said. She cocked her hips and pinched his lapel. The rainwater was trickling into the doorway.

  ‘Come,’ Alida said to Neil, casting down her eyes so as to turn them up again. Twenty-seven, Neil estimated. Twenty-eight. Knee-high suede boots, tight jeans, leopard-print accessories. Grown-up women: drunk, a long way from home and looking unfussily for a good time.

  It was odd, in a way, that the two of them had never been through this rite together, not like this. The backing up and egging on and keeping pace. Adam glanced across at Neil – questions and permission and joint amazement that this could still be happening to them, in their mid-thirties, with their kids and careers and the rest, that they might be allowing it to. Neil nodded.

  ‘What sort of party is it?’ Adam said. The rain had slicked and darkened his hair.

  ‘Well, Henry, it’s this sort,’ Sian said, pushing onto her tiptoes to kiss him. As their lips met – just the lips, briefly – Adam’s eyes found Neil’s again.

  Neil and Alida kissed, too, politely, understanding that they were supposed to. Her lips were cold like a mermaid’s, the back of her coat where he gripped her was wet and warm at once. He kept his eyes open an
d saw the scalp beneath her hair, the brown roots that betrayed the blond. The water penetrating their hide-out looked like urine. When she diffidently introduced her tongue he pulled away.

  The rain eased off and the four of them walked up the Strand and into the Aldwych, notionally to find a taxi to the women’s digs near Euston. A bus splashed gutter water over Neil’s legs, and outside the cocoon of the doorway and without the transfiguration of the rain, he could see that this was impossible. A swivel of his eyes and a nod from Adam and they absconded, diving into an unlicensed cab that pulled up serendipitously at the kerb.

  That was the night Neil’s grievance over California lifted, or seemed to. To begin with he hadn’t been certain that it would. The first time they had seen each other after Adam told him, a year earlier, had been strange, strangerish, as if they were beginning their relationship again. Jess and Claire were there, and that had helped, since they couldn’t talk about California in front of them and, though the women didn’t much like each other and rarely pretended to, their niceties filled the air time. The next time had been at a kiddie-friendly party at the Taylers’. Neil was in the kitchen, watching Adam’s father show the children, other people’s children, how to strike the piñata that was strung up in the living room. Adam came in for a glass of water. As he turned the tap, Neil said, ‘To be honest, Ad, I’m not sure what I’m doing… I mean, to tell me now, after – something like that – after ten years…’

  Adam had shot a nervous look towards Claire and rasped, ‘You told me it was nothing.’

  ‘That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Her not finding out.’

  ‘Tell Grandpa my turn,’ Harry said, taking Adam’s hand and leaning forward to drag him away, like a miniature workman on a cable.

  Adam left the tap running; Neil turned it off. Jeremy struck the piñata over-arm and viciously, as if he were playing tennis, and split it.

  From the beginning Neil had wanted to forgive him: in the underpopulated scheme of his life, he hadn’t seen what other choice he had. But he only truly managed to that night in the rain. The point was, Adam would have gone through with it. He would have gone to Euston with Sian and Alida if Neil had required him to; if that had been his price. The kiss in the doorway was enough, the new secret and shared vulnerability that they needed. An equal secret, this time. Again the two of them against the world.

  On the back seat of the taxi, steam rising from his rain-soaked trousers, agreeing never to mention this without either of them saying a word, their Balkan driver pining for Pristina, Neil’s resentment seemed to wash away, as if it had only ever been an act. That was the end of her, he had hoped that night.

  Jess was furious when he told her. Neil flew in from Baku, Jess from Buenos Aires, both of them retaining the rumpled vigour of the business-class traveller. They had sex immediately, out of habit as much as appetite, the sense that they ought to desire each other, the ghost of desire, as much as the thing itself. The lights were out as always, very little said, the distance Neil needed in his intimacy.

  They showered. He shaved. They plugged in their BlackBerries, which rubbed alongside each other on the kitchen counter like mating reptiles. Neil told her about Rose. She couldn’t remain a secret, or a risk, or a threat. He would bring her into the open, neutralise her, on his own terms.

  Neil told her about the girl, the tent and the uproar in the morning, the competition the night before, how they had left her there, crying. ‘I know I should have asked her,’ he said. ‘I know I should have told you about this before. I don’t know, I’m sorry.’

  Jess was furious, but not about Rose. Neil, the tent and Yosemite sounded quite humane, she considered, compared with, say, the concrete base of a war memorial, a winter night in Yorkshire, and a drunk, married man. Fifteen wasn’t even that young, was her verdict. Little cow only got what she wanted, she was probably on a dare, who’s to say she was a virgin, anyway?

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Neil said. ‘She wasn’t.’ He pictured her blushing and blushing when Adam flirted with her beside the campfire. Afterwards, in the tent, she had put her T-shirt back on, and her knickers, and she had propped her head on his chest and babbled about movies and friends and what the friends thought of those movies.

  Her father should have known better, Jess said. (Don’t stay up late, honey.) Anyway it was more than a decade ago, she told him. It was nothing.

  Adam had better not contact her.

  ‘That’s what I keep saying, I know.’

  She was furious with him for having taken the trouble to keep it from her. Not for not telling her, exactly. Had she found out about Rose accidentally, pursuing some leading remark that Neil let slip, this scrape wouldn’t have mattered, Jess said. There were bound to be unmentioned details from their prior lives, half-forgotten summer jobs and abandoned hobbies, dead friendships and tipsy clinches too trivial to have brought up, which came as tiny yet salutary reminders of each other’s mystery. She understood that. As for her, Neil didn’t know the half of it, she told him. (Those men on the pedalo and her friend.)

  The offence lay not in the trifling facts, nor in their concealment, but in the importance Neil himself had ascribed to them: in the secrecy and the conspiracy. A secret between him and Adam.

  ‘You fucking boys,’ Jess said. She picked up a corkscrew from the kitchen counter, registered that she was pointing it at Neil, and put it down. ‘I mean, I can just see you. Stewing. Should I tell her? When should I tell her? Oh, Adam, what do you think? When I never would have given a fuck.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘What else do you two keep to yourselves?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What is it, then? Card school? Hash cakes? Little boys?’

  ‘Jess, don’t.’

  ‘Christ, Neil… You’re nobody’s fool and nobody’s child. You’re your own you, that’s the point of you, can’t you see that? That’s why I… You’re all there. Except when you’re with him, and you become this sort of adolescent sidekick. Look at him, Neil, and look at you. Look where you both are.’

  ‘I said don’t.’

  ‘It’s like he’s your fucking father or something.’

  ‘No,’ Neil said. ‘Not any more.’

  Actually it had bolstered Neil, Adam’s confession; it had tipped the scales in his favour. The yeoman and master routine was winding up. These days he saw Adam’s faults, but had come to regard the annoyances (that thing he did with his jaw) as a part of his appeal. Fellowship in weakness was one of friendship’s consolations.

  ‘Or your mother.’

  ‘What’s my mother got to do with it?’

  ‘Oh Neil,’ Jess said. She picked up a knife and slashed open a packet of mozzarella, as if an aggressive pretence of normalcy might save them. The cloudy suspension ran over her hands. ‘You’re done for.’

  The two of them had gone up to Yorkshire for the funeral of Jess’s mother at the end of the previous year. A dozen mourners, plus a vicar who hadn’t known the dead woman, in a church so cold that no one had removed their coats. No music, because neither Jess nor her mother had chosen any. On a shelf in her mother’s bedroom closet, in a shoebox, Jess found: a yellowed local newspaper cutting about a rugby match in the twenties, in which her mother’s father had played wing three-quarter; a photo of her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a satin dress, her father wearing a baggy suit, a gallon of Brylcreem and the smile of a man who had something to look forward to (though what did Jess know about that – what did she really know?); a letter from another man, not her father, written a year after her parents were married and a year before Jess was born, which said nothing in particular, and at the same time, between the lines, something very particular (Ever yours, Ted); a very small brown envelope containing a lock of Jess’s baby hair (she hadn’t realised how fair she had been); a letter Jess had sent home from university during what, judging from the date, must have been the middle of her first term, which genuinely said nothi
ng in particular, between the lines or on them, and which she had no recollection of writing; a retirement card from her mother’s colleagues at the primary school where, after she was widowed, she had worked as a dinner lady, as much for the company as for the money. More than the loss itself – which, truth be told, as Jess liked it to be, was sudden but less than devastating – what stung her, she said, was the sense of what her mother’s life had been. And the unspoken question that this observation prompted, about what her own life would add up to.

  Mothers.

  ‘What do you —’

  ‘It’s only ever half of you, Neil. As if it’s a part-time job or something. It’s not only Adam, it’s like a bit of you’s missing.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Jess laid the knife on the chopping board and looked down at the sliced mozzarella. He could still be surprised by how short she was without heels.

  She sighed, then looked up at him. ‘Is this it, then?’ She had stopped her automated cooking, but for a moment Neil thought she was talking about their dinner. He glanced at the hob. ‘I mean, for us, you twat.’