The Faithful Couple Page 6

  He had scarcely been able to see her in the tent, and the visual impressions he retained from inside it were static and disordered, chiaroscuro snapshots of poles and canvas folds and unerotic body parts: her knitted brow, a shoulder, her elevated knees as she pedalled back into her giveaway knickers. His strongest tactile memory of that evening was from earlier, around the campfire. After he moved to sit beside her, when Adam and some of the others were still up, he had slipped his index finger underneath her sweater, surreptitiously touching her skin above the elastic of her shorts. She bridled, just for a second, as if he had administered a mild electric shock, then tried to relax, letting his hand stay where it was. That was when Neil knew: that she had chosen him, he had won, that she might be his.

  He opened his eyes. The legs in the aisle began to recede; the girls swung themselves around the railing at the top of the stairs, practised and orderly as firemen, thudded down them and skipped off the bus. The doors emitted their steam-train hiss as they closed and the driver pulled away.

  Neil rarely thought about the American girl. There was no particular reason to think about her, let alone the morning-after tears, his ten-minute dread of the thunderbolt disaster. Speaking to Adam today, and the prospect of seeing him at the weekend, must have prompted this association, Neil figured, though in fact they had never talked about her in London. Not once. As an anecdote she lacked a useful classification: the episode was neither salacious nor amusing, neither wittily self-deprecating nor aggrandising. Neil had slept with three other women since, and while those English liaisons were transient and awkward in their own ways (two of them had wanted more, the other time he had), none involved any taint or shame. There was nothing to say about that night, and after all California was their golden time, their creation story. A misunderstanding. Regrettable, but accidental. No one had done anything wrong.

  Neil’s stop was approaching; he leaned across the woman in the sari and pressed the buzzer. But her voice, her pure middle-American accent, was still almost audible to him, as if she were talking to him as he disembarked the bus and turned the corner of his father’s street, only through a wall or from under water.

  When the doorbell rang that Sunday Neil was standing on a chair in his bedroom, retrieving a photo album from the swamp of old comics and decomposing sticker collections on the top shelf.

  ‘Dad,’ he shouted, ‘the door!’

  The bell sounded again, an effortful rusty wheeze. Neil heard indistinct voices in the hallway. He dropped off the chair and jogged down the stairs.

  ‘How do you do?’ Adam was saying.

  ‘Come in,’ Brian said. ‘Come through.’ He ushered Adam inside, flourishing his whole arm, almost bowing.

  Neil caught up with them in the lounge, made to embrace his friend, but checked himself. Too intimate, somehow, in front of his father. ‘Hello,’ he said, more coldly than he meant to.

  ‘Hi, Neil,’ Adam said. He smiled. It’s okay, the smile seemed to Neil to say. Show me all of it. Adam had never been out to Harrow before; Neil had invited him once or twice, but half-heartedly. On Adam’s mental map this whole suburban ring, with its low-rise shopping arcades and identikit semis – the doughnut of London between the green belt and the costume-drama core – was still marked There Be Monsters.

  ‘This is Adam,’ Neil told Brian. ‘He’s —’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know, the chap from America,’ Brian said. Neil had never heard his father use the word ‘chap’ before.

  They stood in the middle of the room. ‘Very nice house you have,’ Adam offered.

  ‘Have a seat,’ Brian said, indicating the armchair that faced the television. He retreated to the mantelpiece, resting his elbow in front of the urn.

  ‘Well, then,’ Brian said, looking out between the net curtains and into the driveway. ‘Come far?’

  ‘Maida Vale.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Brian said.

  Twenty seconds, then Adam asked, ‘I’ve got the car, shall we…?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘Come on. Come upstairs.’

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Brian said.

  They escaped to Neil’s room. ‘Let’s do the big one first,’ Adam suggested. He bent to pick up the box.

  ‘I’ll take that end,’ Neil said. ‘I know where we’re going.’ The base bulged and threatened to split. ‘Put your hands underneath. No, both of them.’

  ‘Okay,’ Adam said. ‘Fuck, Philly, okay.’

  Neil backed out of his room and reverse-pivoted to the stairs. ‘Watch it here, it’s slippery.’

  The carpet was frayed almost to nothing on the lip of the top step, a few tenacious strands of fabric stretched across the rounded edge like a bald man’s comb-over. Theirs was a womanless house: cleanish but neglected, the decor untouched since before Mrs Thatcher got in, a place of prepackaged meals rather than ingredients, brown processed food that Neil and Brian heated in the microwave and ate in front of the television, all the talking in the room done on the screen.

  ‘Careful,’ Brian said from the bottom of the stairs, almost too softly for them to hear. He stood by the front door, a one-man honour guard, as they edged through and deposited the box on the crazy paving in the driveway. Adam opened the boot of the car, rearranged his parents’ wellies and his father’s golf umbrella, and they loaded the box in.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Very kind of you, Mr Collins…’

  ‘Dad, we’ve got to get on with it.’

  In the bedroom Adam lifted a stereo speaker. ‘Load me up, will you?’ he said to Neil, rolling his eyes towards the speaker’s twin.

  ‘I’ll take that one, you’ll never manage both.’

  ‘How much do you want to bet? Million quid?’

  Neil watched his friend descend the stairs, the solid physicality of him and the bone-deep confidence. He made it.

  ‘I had a lady friend down there once,’ Brian said as Adam negotiated the front door, catching his knuckles on the frame. ‘Maida Vale, you know. Not far from the canal, Harrow Road side. Long time ago now, that was.’

  Brian had never mentioned this woman to Neil before. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to get on, okay? It’s two trips anyway.’

  ‘Righto,’ Brian said, flapping his hand in a surrendering farewell.

  They laid the speakers, a suitcase and a cork pinboard across the seats and got in. Adam nudged the car out of the driveway and into the road. ‘You’ll have to direct me,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ Neil said. ‘No, I mean left – left here, then left again. That’s it, up to the roundabout.’ They passed a launderette, a bookie, a chippy, an Indian takeaway. A hairdresser’s and an optician’s. ‘When are you off?’

  ‘Wednesday. We’re all flying out together, with the cameramen and the sound guys. I’ve got to help them lug the kit.’ This would be Adam’s first location shoot: holidaymakers in Tenerife.

  ‘So how are they? The reps and what have you. Your contacts. All lined up?’

  ‘They’re sorted, I think. There’s this one guy, Gavin, he runs a bar, he’s been very helpful. It’s kind of popular sociology, you know, the country seeing itself in the mirror. That’s what Jim says.’

  ‘Jim? Right at the lights.’

  Adam spoke about his television career with a confidence that, to Neil, hinted at some plan or agreement for his advancement that he was sadly not at liberty to disclose. A confidence that was apparently justified: after a few purgatorial months at his first job, at an unglamorous firm that made training videos, he had moved to a cutting-edge production company. Adam seemed to Neil to be carried aloft by invisible hands, like a stage-diver conveyed to safety by a well-wishing crowd.

  ‘Jim the executive producer. Anyway – did I tell you? – Claire might come out for a few days, if the production manager lets us. Bit of a witch.’

  ‘Jesus, and you’re supposed to be her boyfriend.’

  ‘No, I meant the production man — Fuck off.’

  ‘Pull up on the ri
ght. I haven’t even met her yet.’

  ‘When I get back. You can be my character witness.’

  ‘Yeah, here, that’s fine. What’s my commission?’

  ‘You can have her sister.’

  ‘Does she have a sister?’

  ‘No.’

  They drew in alongside a brown, grimly functional modern building. There was a convenience shop on the ground floor and cage-like fortifications on the upper windows, as if the inhabitants were expecting a siege. Neil’s immediate neighbours were a pawnbroker and a Bengali women’s association. He descended a set of switchback metal steps beneath the shopfront; Adam followed, at the bottom stepping over the newspapers, chip wrappers and Fanta cans that Neil had kicked into the well of the basement. Inside he had a single room, with a cupboard kitchen and a bathless bathroom. There was an acrid smell of damp. The furnishings comprised a penitentially narrow bed, a single plastic chair and a washing-up tub in the sink.

  ‘It’s great, Philly,’ Adam said.

  ‘It’s a shit-hole,’ Neil said. ‘And you know it.’

  ‘Come on, I think it’s terrific,’ Adam insisted. ‘You’ll never have to say “Your place or my dad’s?” to another girl.’

  ‘Oh fuck off,’ Neil said, gently punching his shoulder. He opened the only window. ‘Thanks again. I mean it.’

  ‘No problem,’ Adam said. ‘Really. I’ve got the car for a fortnight, they’re out in Perpignan.’

  ‘No, I mean the deposit. I’ll pay you back. With interest.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  There was no escape from money in London, they were discovering, from its double magnetism, which drew the well-off together and drove them and the struggling apart. In the flat Adam shared with Chaz and Archie there were double beds all round, a whirlpool bath and a sun-trap roof terrace; two of them, Adam and Archie, had moved in before their first pay-check. Neil had been out with them all, once, but the graft hadn’t taken.

  ‘I mean it, Ad. Few months and I’ll have it.’

  ‘Pay me back when you make your first million.’ They both laughed. ‘You start next week, right? Break a leg.’

  They carried the cargo down the stairs. Neil stood the pinboard, an improvised photo display, against the wall opposite the stair-obstructed window, in the basement’s lone oblong of natural light. Neil and Dan when they were teenagers, wearing shades and gurning. The two of them, younger, with their mother on a pebbly beach, Neil turning his face from the camera and up towards hers. A picture of Neil and Adam at the motel in Los Angeles, another of them fooling around beneath the Faithful Couple, the lip of a path running in front of the double trunk, a backdrop of lush foliage, their two conjoined figures at the base, someone else’s bare arm intruding at the frame’s left edge. Adam had made copies for Neil after they came home.

  For a moment they stood in the basement, looking at the photos together in silence. Then they bounded up the stairs, instinctively racing.

  ‘Well,’ Neil said on the pavement, ‘I’ll miss you while you’re over there.’

  ‘Stay alive,’ Adam said hammily. ‘I will find you.’

  There wasn’t much more to fetch: the fat body of the stereo and its black tendrils; half a dozen hangers’ worth of shirts; the tubular segments and disc-shaped base of a floor lamp; some linen; a box of plastic ornaments that Neil had collected as a child, his boyhood’s special things, some of them, Adam noticed, old promotional freebies from cereal packets.

  Adam loitered in the lounge while Neil gathered his kit. A couple of china figurines sat on the mantelpiece, above them a framed floral print that his mother would without question have described as ‘ghastly’. The urn. He tiptoed across to examine it.

  The previous autumn, after they had been to a film at Marble Arch, Adam had reminisced about going to the cinema with his mother when he was very young. About how, in the intermissions between the features, she would give him and Harriet money for popcorn or a lolly (never both), sending them up to the usherette to buy their treats, the two of them waving back at her from the queue, considering this the most thrillingly grown-up privilege in the world. Adam had begun an edited account of his mother’s life: her grandfather the judge, the much-mythologised spell in Tangiers before she married, her kooky taste in jewellery, how much he loved her cooking. Standing in front of the mantelpiece in Harrow, he remembered how he had stopped himself that afternoon, and clumsily apologised.

  Neil came back down the stairs. Adam said, ‘Don’t you want to…?’

  ‘He’s asleep. I’ll call him later.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Neil closed the front door, depressing the latch with his finger to minimise the click, leaving almost silently, as if from a dormitory, or a wake.

  At the second set of traffic lights a hunched old woman crossed the road in front of them, dragging a rectangular shopping trolley. Adam said, ‘At your house… at your dad’s place. You know, on your mantelpiece…?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘I don’t know what it is really. He can’t decide what to do with her, or can’t bring himself to, maybe. Wouldn’t happen if Mum was here!’

  He gave a short choke of a laugh, louder and fiercer than his silent, grimacing, true laugh. He told Adam about the night, after his A-levels, when he freaked out some friends by tipping ash from their spliff into the urn, stoned homage disguised as bravado. Even then they hadn’t asked about her, Neil said, just averted their eyes in silence.

  ‘Do you cry when you think about it?’

  ‘You mean, did I cry then?’

  ‘No, I mean do you cry when you think about it now?’

  Neil paused. ‘To be honest, I don’t. Cry, I mean.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I cried. When I nearly do, you know, when I feel like it, the ducts or whatever gearing up, it’s always for some silly reason, over nothing, that bloke who fell over at the Olympics or something. Why, do you?’

  ‘Cry? Sometimes. Not that I’ve… I’ve been lucky, you know.’

  They were quiet for a minute, but comfortably. The silence had a new timbre that they both heard, an ease that felt like an accomplishment.

  ‘Your father,’ Adam finally said. ‘Your dad. He isn’t… He wasn’t how I expected. You’re always so, I don’t know, down on him. He was really try —’

  ‘It was different,’ Neil said. ‘He was. You being there, it was easier.’

  ‘It’s just, the way you talk about them – your brother, too.’ Adam reflexively compared Neil’s father with his own, Jeremy, a man who always let him feel that all manner of things would be well – not just that they would be, in fact, but that they were already well, could never be otherwise, and that Adam’s role was simply to perpetuate and ramify the wellness he inherited. ‘It’s not what I’m used to, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t have to live with him.’

  ‘Neither do you.’

  ‘No!’ Neil exclaimed. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Take it easy, you can always move back.’

  ‘No, you idiot, we’ve gone the wrong way.’

  Adam turned into a driveway and began to reverse out again, but stopped. The shirts were hanging from a strap above the rear passenger-side window, blocking his view of the traffic. Neil leaned between the seats and tried to pin them behind the stereo, but they escaped. He thrust himself backwards, clasping a headrest with one hand and reaching for the shirts with the other.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘No, go on,’ Neil said. ‘I’ll call you out.’

  Looking sideways Adam saw the pale, hairy calf below the hem of Neil’s jeans, an obscurely improper glimpse of skin that was ordinarily concealed. He gently tugged the trousers towards his friend’s ankles. Little by little, Neil was uncovering: his father (Adam picked up a dim genetic echo between their gummy Collins smiles), his brother and his mother. Those photos of them on the pin
board, alongside Los Angeles, the Faithful Couple.

  ‘Adam?’

  He put the car into reverse.

  ‘Gavin?’

  ‘Que?’

  ‘Señor Gavin?’