The Faithful Couple Page 5

  ‘You think this is funny?’ Eric said. ‘Big joke for you guys, isn’t it? My little girl… What did you do, make a bet or something?’

  ‘He said he was sorry,’ Adam managed. ‘We’re both very sorry.’

  ‘I want you to remember this,’ Eric said. ‘One day, you’ll have your own… You do your best, you think you’re doing right. I hope for your sake you never know how this feels.’

  Eric half-turned to go, and Adam thought it was over, but he reconsidered and turned back. Briefly Adam feared Eric might punch or throttle him. ‘You know what,’ he said instead, ‘scratch that. I hope you find out exactly how this feels. I told you, you asshole. I fucking told you. I should never have let her stay up… I hope you do, and when that day comes you better remember me.’

  At last he walked off, which at the time felt to Adam like a mercy, Eric’s one day being too remote and hypothetical to seem troubling.

  Adam stuffed his kit into his rucksack, silently and fast, and they were almost out. At the very end, as they were heaving their bags onto their backs, Rose marched up to Neil, holding out a torn piece of paper on which she had scribbled her name and her parents’ address and phone number. She had changed into a T-shirt with a Charlie Brown motif; she inclined her face for him to kiss, her eyes red but no longer crying, chest heaving despite her visible efforts to pacify it.

  Eric watched, now squatting on a tree trunk with his palms on his temples. He seemed somehow shrunken, like a terracotta statue of himself. He balled his hands into fists and let them hang beside his calves. Much later, Adam wondered whether, along with all the other emotions he must have experienced, Eric might have been proud of his daughter at that moment, as she strode across the campsite. Adam saw him avert his eyes as Neil raised a finger to Rose’s chin, gently tilted her face forward and kissed the crown of her head, like a blessing.

  She controlled herself until he and Adam hurried away. As they left the campsite they heard a single sob, deeper and longer than her rollercoaster squeals at the lake. Turning back, inadvisably, as they went, Adam saw Rose sitting on her father’s knee, her face buried in his chest, his in her hair.

  The odd thing was, or so it came to seem, that for all the blame they were to apportion, all the secrecy and forgiveness and revenge, they didn’t feel so very much at the time. Or perhaps it wasn’t odd, given how remorse can sometimes accumulate, the intimate sort especially; how events can take on a different complexion or valency the further they recede, or the more they seem to have happened to someone else; the more entangled they become, as Rose would, with other memories and resentments. They talked about the drama as they took that shuttle, they talked about her on the bus to San Francisco, Neil briefly studying her note in his lap, but scarcely at all as they delivered the pick-up to Portland (a long straight drive with no detours), where the grateful recipient, the man from San Diego’s older and calmer brother, took them out for a burger to thank them. This glossing-over was partly tact, and involved at least some shame, but also, that summer, a giddy, distracted sense of scale. They didn’t register the pivot in their lives, as you might notice a scratch without anticipating the infection.

  They were both due to fly home from Los Angeles, and both with the same airline, but on different dates, so Neil called and changed his ticket. On the Greyhound to LA they made unwisely loud jokes about the consequences they might suffer if they ventured into the badlands at the rear of the bus. On the plane Neil fell asleep in the aisle seat with his head on Adam’s shoulder. Adam leaned across, reached into the luggage compartment for a blanket, and draped it over him.

  Adam’s family was meeting him at the airport. He and Neil patted each other on the shoulder, and, after a moment, embraced. Even the hug felt easier and less compromising than what they wanted to say.

  ‘I’m sad,’ Adam finally managed.

  ‘So am I.’

  Walking away through the terminal, Neil turned to see Adam being enfolded by a man with greying hair and posh-pink trousers, and a girl he presumed was Adam’s sister. He watched them for a few seconds before heading down into the Tube.

  1995

  ‘T

  hey should be in this afternoon.’ Neil leaned across the scratched countertop. ‘Can you come back for them? I don’t know – four-ish?’

  ‘Sorry,’ the young woman said. ‘Afternoon off today. Monday any good?’

  ‘Hope you’re doing something nice with it.’

  The telephone rang in the back office. One rotary double-shriek, a second, and Brian’s muffled voice answered.

  ‘Such a lovely day,’ the woman said. ‘I might go up the reservoir.’

  She leaned against the cash register, crossing her left leg over the standing right. Her cotton jacket rumpled open, disclosing a flash of shoulder and smooth armpit between the fabric and her sleeveless dress.

  ‘Neil!’ Brian called from the office.

  ‘All right for some,’ Neil said. ‘I won’t be here Monday, I’m afraid. Last day tomorrow.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I could run them up to you, if you like. Might be heavy.’

  The woman was a secretary at the chartered surveyors’ practice above the hi-fi shop, a business that in the past two years had been among Collins & Sons’ best customers.

  ‘Would you?’ She twisted a lock of hair around a finger.

  ‘Neil!’ Brian shouted. ‘For you!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Neil said. ‘Just a second, okay?’ He offered her a rueful, raised-eyebrow smile. ‘Who is it?’ he asked Brian as they crossed at the internal doorway.

  ‘No idea,’ Brian said, shaking his head. ‘Like a bunch of teenagers.’

  Neil sat at the back office desk. A stationery supplier’s marketing calendar, illustrated with photos of envelopes in bundles and in-trays, or half-tucked into pockets, hung on the wall in front of him. Wrong month, wrong year.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘This is the Metropolitan Police,’ the familiar voice said. ‘We’ve had a report of disorderly conduct at a pub in the Waterloo area. We would like to speak to you and an extremely handsome blond man.’

  Leave the police out of it, Neil thought. But quickly he felt the reliable surge of adrenalin, the instant recharge: something to do with laughter – the muscle memory of old jokes and the anticipation of new ones – and an inchoate appreciation that this friendship was itself a kind of joke, a random jackpot.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he said. ‘You almost had me.’

  ‘Don’t take that tone with me, young man,’ Adam said. ‘This is serious.’

  Jokes and beaches and freedom, beamed instantaneously into the back office.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, it’s just, you know, the only blond man I know doesn’t really fit your description. He’s sort of a runt, to be honest, posh as hell, you know, thinks he’s Lord Byron or something…’

  ‘That’ll do, Philly. I’m just checking, still on for Sunday, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yeah, great. I mean, if that’s still okay with you.’

  ‘Of course. I’m all yours, Claire’s finishing her dissertation.’

  Towers of old catalogues sagged under and on top of the desk. The musty odour of decomposing paper mingled with the whiff of imperfect drainage from the water closet (chain-pull flush, grime-grooved soap). The desk, the filing cabinets and the museum-piece safe were smothered in luxuriant, Rembrandtesque dust; the entire room seemed not to have been cleaned since Neil revised for his exams there.

  ‘Great. After lunch?’

  ‘About three?’

  ‘Done. And, you know, thanks.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’

  ‘No, I mean, you know, the cheque.’

  ‘Forget it, Philly. It’s nothing.’

  ‘I’ve got most of it already, it’s just, I need to get a few things, and if I use the whole lot on the deposit I’ll —’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got a team meeting in a minute. I’ll see you Sunday, I’ve got the a
ddress.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  Jokes and beaches and discretionary kindness. And trust. Neil hurried back into the shop, smiling privately.

  Brian was sitting behind the counter, shoulders hunched, hands in his lap, thumbs twiddling. Alone.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘But she —’

  ‘They’re sending someone up before closing. Not her, not the woman. Office junior, she said.’

  ‘Right, but I was going —’

  ‘Neil,’ Brian said, still facing away. ‘Neil. I know you’re slinging your hook, but – don’t shit on your own doorstep.’

  No one was watching him but Neil blushed anyway, cross and embarrassed at once. Sitting down at the other end of the counter he remembered how, when he was fifteen, he and an almost-forgotten friend had been chased off a bus by a posse of troublemakers, making it back to Neil’s house breathless and scared. ‘You should have smashed a bottle, you two should,’ Brian told them as they fumbled with the door chain. ‘You should have smashed it, held it up and said, “Who’s first?”’ The friend made screw-loose signs behind Brian’s back.

  Don’t shit on your own doorstep: another glimpse of his father’s foreign prehistory, an obscure past that Neil knew he would never reconnoitre. He had certainly had his chance, two long years’ worth of chances, but the moment had never seemed right, he hadn’t known how to begin, and he had wasted them. They both had.

  A customer came in, a man in an unseasonal mackintosh and old-timer’s Trilby. He scanned the printer inks, wrote something on a notepad and left without uttering a word, the bell on the door tinkling him in and out.

  ‘Time-waster,’ Brian said. ‘Price-checking, that’s all.’

  Two years, give or take the few, scattered months of the short-term contracts Neil had managed to land elsewhere: telesales (insurance), market-research questionnaires (refrigerators). After a year he had written to the pharmaceutical company to ask for his pre-California job back, but his former boss had moved on and his successor said there were no vacancies. Finally Neil was leaving, to a media company near Tower Bridge and, with Adam’s help, to a rented bedsit in Burnt Oak.

  ‘And the parking charges,’ Brian added. ‘What the hell do they think they’re playing at?’

  Neil and Dan had spent their school holidays stacking these shelves, taking apart and reconstructing stationery displays, their private, outsized Rubik’s cubes. They scribbled rude jokes about the customers; they slunk out to play the slot machine in the café two doors away. There was painful hilarity with bulldog clips. Their mother would make jam sandwiches for their lunch; afterwards they went up to the Wimpy for cardboard chips and synthetic milkshakes. One blissful morning they found a stash of pornographic magazines in a second-hand filing cabinet.

  Neither Brian nor Neil ever expected him to be back. Collins & Sons, the shopfront read, but Brian hadn’t fathered any sons when the glass was etched, and, after they were born, he never anticipated that either of them would join him behind the counter when they grew up. He had been paying Neil fifty quid a week, which Neil knew he hadn’t earned, and moreover knew they couldn’t really afford on what the shop was taking.

  They sat. Brian’s chair was caught in the rhombus of sunlight refracted by the shopfront. He dozed off in the warmth, chin on chest. He was fifty-nine, and in reasonable physical condition, apart from some routine spreading, some greying and thinning on top, and a neglectful attitude to ear and nasal hair. But he napped like an older man: a worn-out man, deep-down finished, obliterating his afternoons in miniature, reversible suicides.

  The bell startled him awake. A man in shiny grey trousers and a blue shirt asked, ‘Fax paper?’ Neil began to rise, but Brian sat him down with an air-pat of his hand, creaking to his feet to show the customer to the shelf.

  Almost two years – his two flatlining years since California – and, if Neil were honest with himself, nothing at all to show for them, not counting his friendship with Adam. Say what you like about Dan, down in Southampton with his child, its errant mother and his booze, at least he had escaped Collins & Sons. He hadn’t made it to Argentina or Australia but he had at least managed that.

  ‘Thanking you,’ Brian said, handing the customer his change. The man counted the coins and left.

  In the beginning Neil had tried to persuade his father to rejig their displays. He wanted to put the biggest sellers near the door, with impulse buys, such as they were (staplers, hole punches, Sellotape dispensers), beside the cash till. Sell the customer what he wants to buy; don’t waste the customer’s time: he knew that much from the pharmaceuticals job. He would move the stock and the fittings himself, Neil had offered, he would see to it one evening after closing. All he needed was his father’s say-so. Brian didn’t see the point. The megastores had taken over, was his mantra, the high streets were just as screwed as manufacturing, but retail lacked the grandeur and the romance of industry, it missed the angry unions and the picturesque strikes, so you never saw it on the news.

  A day and a half to go, Neil’s final shifts before his real life began, and still he glanced at the door every half a minute: in hope (of a break in the boredom, the joint loneliness), and pre-emptive distaste (the self-effacement that some customers expected, the impression of his own invisibility, and of his father’s, which they conveyed), and, since the robbery the previous autumn (the knife held to Brian’s ribs before he could reach the panic button), a cold undertow of fear. An hour before closing Brian took the cash and the cheques from the safe and totted them up on his antique calculator. He strangled the bills into hundred-pound bundles with grubby rubber bands, put the bundles and a deposit slip into a brown envelope and gave it to Neil to run up to the bank for the last time. Neil crammed the envelope into a trouser pocket and bolted for the door, the pavement, the sunshine.

  At half-past five that afternoon Neil turned the sign on the door to Closed, stepped outside and pulled the grille halfway down the shopfront. The slot in the tessellated metal for their mail was temporarily suspended at eye level, looking to Neil like the peephole of a prison cell.

  ‘Just going to say hello to Bimal,’ he called out.

  ‘Right,’ Brian replied from the back office.

  ‘See you at home.’

  ‘Righto.’

  Neil paused for a few seconds, Brian’s last ever chance to object. Nothing. The bell on the door rung him out.

  Bimal was one of the very few local boys Neil had kept up with: hellos in the street when they were back from university, since then a few brisk drinks, at the most recent of which Bimal tried to recruit him to his pie-in-the-sky merchandising start-up. A plausible engagement, but in fact they weren’t meeting that evening. Instead Neil went to the video store, where he shuffled the cases in the New Releases rack and tried not to eye the Adult section too conspicuously. Next, the travel agent, where he flicked through brochures for cruises and Caribbean resorts that he confidently expected never to visit (Time-waster! the shopkeeper in his head reproached). Finally, after dawdling for long enough to evade his father, he crossed the road to the bus stop.

  He couldn’t face the car journey. Somehow those fifteen extra minutes at the end of the day had become too much, obeying an alternative, decelerated timescale. In the shop they had designated roles, they were functional and blessedly interrupted. The silence in the car was heavier. Two or three times a week Neil would make his excuses and either walk or catch a bus. Nipping out to see Bimal. This needs to go in the last post. Got to see a man about a dog. If Brian saw through them, Neil hoped he would likewise see the whiteness of the lies.

  Two years.

  The bus from Wembley to Harrow was almost full. He found a place in the middle of the upstairs deck, next to a statuesque woman in a sari. She rotated her knees to usher him into the window seat. As the bus pulled away Neil bet himself that he could close his eyes for a minute and know precisely where he was on this overfamiliar route. He t
ried and failed.

  Five schoolgirls clattered up the stairs, one of them shrieking when she was thrown against the plastic stairwell as the bus moved off, laughing as she recovered. The girls stood in the aisle, holding onto the upright railings and the backs of seats, a few rows in front of Neil’s.

  Two black, two white, one Asian. Three of them had bunched and knotted their shirts around their midriffs, exposing the skin above their short skirts. They were taking turns to listen to a slug of pop on somebody’s Walkman, two at a time, a headphone apiece.

  Sixteen, Neil estimated. They probably didn’t see him at all. He felt rebuked by their uniforms and looked out of the window, into the upper floors of the pebbledash suburban houses, at the branches and defaced trunks of the city trees. Blossom ran past his window in intermittent blizzards. Something about the girls had jarred, or chimed, one of them in particular, the nearest, standing with her back towards him. Her ponytail, or – no – the way she had raised a hand to balance on her friend’s shoulder, the other hand reaching behind her to bend her heel into a buttock. She jiggled on her standing leg, the unselfconscious gestures undermining her studiedly grown-up imprecations. The shape of her as she executed that stretch unsettled Neil. His eyes closed again.