The Faithful Couple Read online

  ‘Is what, what? What, Jess?’

  He came round to her side of the counter, cornering her. Her face, from where he was standing, jutted into an outsized photograph of serried candy that hung on the wall behind her. She had bought it at the Museum of Modern Art, on a trip to New York for a meeting about a new Arab soft drink. Damage limitation: shut this down, get out alive.

  ‘Come off it, Neil.’

  ‘Jess,’ Neil began, torn between wanting to talk her down and take her on, compromising on a soft, almost passive disagreement that vaguely implied she was unstable, and might have been expressly designed to infuriate her. ‘Come on. We’ve hardly ever talked about it.’

  ‘I suppose Adam’s brats are enough for you.’

  True: them and Sam, who was almost his, Neil was coming to believe, as much his, in a way, as he was his father’s. Neil never wanted or expected to have babies of his own. He didn’t feel equipped or trained for them, as if he were an animal that had been abandoned too early to know the proper procedure.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, grow up, Neil. Fucking grow up. You can’t be fifteen for ever, or however old you were when she died. Did you really think we’d go on like this indefinitely? Fuck, fuck, weekend break, fuck, fuck, conversation, new TV. Sex and holidays and buying cool appliances together.’

  ‘Let’s discuss it, then. Please.’ Crying doesn’t make you right, he thought.

  She pushed past Neil, leaning into him more than she strictly needed to when their shoulders collided, Neil yielding less than he might have done. She retreated to the bathroom and closed the door. Neil picked up the mozzarella packet, meaning to put it in the bin, but some of the amniotic fluid was still sloshing inside the plastic, and he spilled it over the black and white floor. He swore and kneeled to wipe up the mess with a tea towel.

  Jess came back while he was crouching, walking at speed and purposefully, her heels crackling on the tiles. ‘You’ve done it again,’ she said, in a voice that sounded angrier for being quiet. Her knee seemed to jerk in the direction of his forehead, and he momentarily feared she would injure him. The hand that wasn’t holding the tea towel reached to fend her off. ‘Your hair,’ she said. ‘Your fucking hair.’

  Neil’s hand moved to the crown of his head, pausing to finger the mole on his neck as it passed upwards.

  ‘In the sink. Your fucking stubble. How many times?’

  She slammed the front door on her way out. Neil stood up.

  He hadn’t told her that Adam had known about Rose. He lied to her about Adam’s lie.

  ‘Are you getting divorced?’

  Neil tickled Sam under his armpits.

  ‘Stop it,’ Sam said, kicking out. Neil moved out of range of the flailing legs. ‘Stop it, Neil,’ Sam repeated.

  He fell, muddying his knees on the furrowed ground beneath the zip wire; he tried to brush his trousers with his hands, dirtied his palms, and rubbed them on his backside. He wiped his nose with a grimy index finger.

  ‘Are you?’ Sam asked again, not letting him off. Usually Jess came on their outings, but, since their quarrel three days before, she had been working to rule. She was businesslike, efficient in the discharge of her cohabitee’s duties (tumble dryer, message from Brian, milk), but remote. She didn’t feel for Sam what Neil did, she wasn’t even close. She couldn’t face the acting.

  ‘We’re not married,’ Neil said. ‘So we can’t get divorced.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Sam said, impatient with the grown-up quibbling.

  At eleven his face was leaner and his hair darker than they had once been. Physically he could still have passed for nine, but there was something worldly in his grey-green eyes and the shadows around them, a precocious intuition that life was not on his side, as you might expect in a child who spent too much time with his taciturn and immobile grandfather, and had seen his father wet himself. ‘Fallen off the wagon,’ Brian had whispered, though the last time Neil had seen Dan, his clammy skin and dull eyes, he worried that drink might not be the half of it. Dan had quit his plumbing course after a month.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Neil said. ‘Jess and me, we haven’t decided. Don’t think so.’

  ‘Do you, you know, love her and all that?’

  ‘To be honest, Sammy, I don’t know.’

  The following month, on the day of the bombs, the day people spoke to strangers and called their relatives – ranking them as they dialled, the instant, city-wide census of emotional priorities – Neil phoned Adam before he called Jess. He was furious with Adam but he called him first.

  ‘Huh,’ Sam said, racing away across the playground, his proto-adult interests supplanted by puerile ones, the twin identities overlapping and ironising each other. Beyond the playground fence and the scarred park trees, two giant yellow cranes supervised north-west London, ominously arrogant, the Triffids of the boom.

  Sam climbed the frame and suspended himself from the monkey bars by the backs of his muddied knees. ‘No hands! I can!’ He began to cross the bars, his arms showily dangling.

  Brian raised a palm from his thigh and indicated the danger with a wave, the weak swish of a superannuated pontiff. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Tell him.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Neil said. ‘Leave him.’

  Halfway across Sam’s foot hit a bar instead of rising over it; he tried again, was blocked again by the bar. He reached up with his arms but his stomach muscles wouldn’t support him. Gravity took its chance, and for a moment Sam’s free leg cycled in the air, the concrete awaited, and Neil thought the worst was happening, was truly and actually happening, in nauseating slow motion and on his watch.

  Who’s sorry now? His mother’s voice rushed back to him, its crackly timbre as she crooned the old song she would launch into when he had improvidently ignored her advice.

  Sam’s errant leg regained the bar, and with the extra purchase he managed to swing his arms up. He dropped feet-first and harmlessly into a perfect landing.

  The all-or-nothing moment passed, and it turned out to have been nothing. Neil glanced at Brian but he hadn’t stirred (head on walking stick, face in grimace). He had experienced the same, transfixed powerlessness in California, when those strangers surrounded him, the police en route, Neil sensing that his life was taking a drastic turn but unable to correct it. He had thought of his mother then, too, wanting her to be there, a craving he hadn’t felt for years, at the same time pleased that she could never know.

  Sam was fine. Still, Neil felt as if some internal organ of his own had been bruised. His breathing was laboured. The child’s balls hadn’t dropped, for Christ’s sake. He hadn’t done anything yet. Travel, friendships. Sex.

  Fifteen. Did you know that, you asshole?

  ‘If you get divorced,’ Sam said, ‘can I come and live with you?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Sammy. It wouldn’t be allowed.’

  No harm done. Almost certainly no harm done.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘You’d be too far away from your school.’

  ‘I could go to a different school.’

  Practicality had been a mistaken argument. Neil looked at Sam and saw that he was joking, though in fact the thought had crossed his mind: some sort of guardianship, he wasn’t sure of the small print, he would have to find a lawyer.

  She was fine. Almost certainly, she was fine.

  Sam’s weekends in Harrow had become long and frequent enough for his teacher to have written a series of escalating warnings to Dan, and perhaps, Neil feared, preliminary letters to social services. If he had his way, these getaways would end: he thought Brian should sell the house and move into something smaller. He could use the difference to help pay the saintly Filipinos who cared for him on an increasingly full-time basis, an entourage that, for the moment, Neil was quietly subsidising. He had driven up to discuss this plan, but Brian wouldn’t consider it. His father wanted to die in that house, Neil could see, die there with his dead wife
on the mantelpiece, and he seemed stoically indifferent as to when this consummation came to pass.

  Neil had changed tack – Fuck it, I’ll give it a whirl – and told him that the house had been a fine place to grow up. That his had been a happy childhood, until the cancer. That he was grateful. His heart raced as he said those things. Brian said, ‘I think I might have left the deeds in the safe.’ The safe in the shop, he meant, which was someone else’s shop now, an ‘American’ nail bar, Neil thought.

  Sam wanted fish and chips. ‘Or Chinese, if you fancy it. But, you know, fish and chips, if we can.’

  ‘You two can,’ Brian said.

  ‘X-Factor in an hour,’ Sam said.

  The moment on the climbing frame could have gone another way, as every moment could. The damage might have been real. If it were, and even if it were inflicted by someone else, or by nobody, and you were only a bystander, but all the same you let it happen, what would that mean? Neil’s mind returned to their first meeting with Farid. ‘Everybody wants to think that, don’t they? That they love their family as much as they can.’ That was what Neil had said, more or less, though Christ knew he had been bluffing.

  Her sob had sounded ventriloquised, as if it came from another, older person or a different species. The Charlie Brown T-shirt.

  ‘God almighty,’ Brian said, ‘they sound like cats being strangled, the idiots on that programme. Why does everyone want to make bloody idiots of themselves these days?’

  Jess didn’t get it. Neither, for twelve years, had Neil. He had dodged and downplayed their behaviour, and lied to himself, and later, when Adam confessed, fixed on what the cost might have been for him. Adam alone had got it, and in the end, with his pitiless Googling, he had made Neil understand, he and Sam between them. Neil saw California anew that afternoon, saw it in the round, including the pain that would have followed later.

  The guilt ebbed his way, towing his anger back. Only now, Neil thought in the playground, did he begin to appreciate what Adam had made him do.

  And your mother!

  ‘Right,’ Neil said to Sam. ‘Let’s go. Help your granddad.’

  2007

  N

  eil squeezed the key fob, his recessed headlights blinked at him, and he walked around the corner to Adam’s road. These days he tended to park out of sight when he visited the Taylers, whether or not there was space nearby. Too much, somehow, for his car (a two-seater BMW, silvery grey, his choice, this time) to be visible through Adam’s window, squatting extravagantly in the street like a visiting potentate’s carriage. Likewise it would be uncouth to insist that Adam come to his new flat in Bayswater (Neil’s place, all his, not rented and not shared, almost no mortgage). He meant this deficit of hospitality as a kindness, as he hoped his friend could see. Admittedly a kindness that might look like coldness, and in truth could gratify Neil as either. Though in point of fact he was hardly ever in his flat himself, between his meetings with clients in New York and Monaco, Abu Dhabi and Geneva, his client dinners in the stratum of London restaurants where only the host’s menu lists the prices, and his weekend summonses to clients’ mansions and estates. There was rarely anything in the fridge for him, or anyone else, to consume, besides half-drunk bottles of wine, fungal milk and Sam’s pizza leftovers.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Neil said.

  A woman was obstructing Adam’s gateway; from where Neil stood she was framed by the white pointing that arced around the suburban front door. Elderly, grey-white hair in a bun, wearing an off-beige mackintosh even though the evening was warm. She was texting, leaning backwards to compensate for her long-sightedness, one bony, fastidious finger poking the keypad in regular, intrepid jabs.

  ‘Not at all, dear,’ she said, pressing her back to the gatepost as he passed.

  The woman looked up at the building as if she were casing it. Neil considered challenging her until he remembered the For Sale board that was affixed to the fence. He skipped up the steps and rang the bell.

  Claire’s meet-and-greet smile flattened when she saw him. She peered around his shoulder as if she were expecting someone else.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, a few seconds slower than she should have. ‘’Fraid he’s not back yet. Something about illegal immigrants, the usual.’ Compensating, she added, ‘Drink? Don’t think he’ll be long.’

  They had known each other for twelve years, but Neil couldn’t say that he and Claire were friends. Colleagues, in a way: mutually tolerant and intermittently cooperative, but dimly rivalrous and not entirely trusting. From the beginning he had wanted to like her, for convenience’s sake, and he had tried to like her, but at the same time there had always been a tempting, grubbily competitive satisfaction to be had in not liking her. They had rarely been alone together, awkward intervals when Adam fetched a drink or scolded or consoled a child, and never for very long.

  ‘Kids not here?’

  ‘With my mum. There’s a fairground on the common. I’m showing the flat today – can’t really do it when they’re rampaging.’ She gave a jokeless, strained laugh.

  Neil thought about making his excuses. A client’s pet charity was throwing a reception in Park Lane, clean water for India, he ought really to be there, making a donation on Rutland’s behalf, pretending to socialise while discreetly foisting his business cards on the high-rolling do-gooders. He was missing it only because he had already postponed this evening twice: dinner for Adam’s birthday, the only birthday, besides Sam’s, that Neil reliably remembered and marked. His treat; he would be permitted that minor generosity, at least. He had been looking forward to the largesse.

  The doorbell sounded before he managed to decide. Neil was closest; he pivoted and opened the door. The texting old woman bustled through it and past him. He closed the door behind her. That had been his first chance to leave, he saw afterwards.

  ‘I thought it must be you,’ the woman said. ‘Patricia.’ She extended a hand and Neil shook it. ‘Is this it? Of course it is, what am I saying? And this is your wife?’ Claire tried to correct her but Patricia wouldn’t be diverted. ‘The estate agent couldn’t make it, his message said to come anyway, I hope you don’t mind. Start at the top?’

  She helped herself to the stairs.

  ‘Viewing,’ Claire stage-whispered to Neil. ‘Sorry.’

  She turned and followed. Neil weighed his options. If he left now, or stayed where he was, Patricia might be offended. He went upstairs to join them.

  ‘Children’s bedroom?’ Patricia asked. ‘How old are they?’

  ‘Six and four,’ Claire said.

  ‘And such a pretty garden. Not yours, though. Never mind.’

  Adam and Claire were selling up, cashing out. They couldn’t muster the surpluses that London had demanded, not the steeplechaser stamina nor the virtuoso chutzpah nor the money. London was spitting them out, north or east, to Essex or Cambridgeshire or Buckinghamshire, somewhere in the commuter belt, they hadn’t quite decided.

  ‘Nice clean bath,’ Patricia said. ‘I insist on a clean bath. Do these open?’ She pushed feebly at a sash window; it was paint-stuck and wouldn’t give. ‘They’ll need to get out, you see.’

  ‘Who?’ Neil asked, heaving up the panel for her.

  ‘Aesop. Aesop and Tallulah. They’re quite safe if they have a ledge or a parapet.’ She poked her head out of the window and peered down towards the front door and along the street. ‘All those sleeping policemen, they’re a plague. Still, nice light for the throne.’

  Neil caught Claire’s glance before they realised that eye contact would be calamitous. She tried to swallow her laughter, disguising it as a warbled question. ‘Shall we see the other bedroom?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she whispered to Neil. ‘Please.’

  Funny thing about the absurd: you could survive or ignore it on your own, but two made that impossible. Two made an audience, a confederacy, a secret.

  ‘Now, dear, this is much more like it,’ Patricia said. ‘They can shimmy down that roof and do th
eir business in the garden there. Neighbours won’t mind, will they?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Neil said, straightening his face. ‘They’re very reasonable.’ Claire looked at the floor.

  ‘What do you do, dear?’

  ‘Wealth management. It’s a kind of fin —’

  ‘Yes, I thought so. He’s something in the City, that’s what I thought when I saw you outside. You’ll be moving somewhere bigger, I expect.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Neil said.

  ‘May I?’ Patricia said, gesturing towards the wardrobes. ‘Lovely. Lots of storage. Oodles. Will you have any more? If you don’t mind my asking.’