The Faithful Couple Read online

  ‘Las Vegas,’ Adam said.

  Not Las Vegas… Neil caught his eye and Adam turned away. Look at her and we can keep it going.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Adam continued. ‘There was this croupier, Neil got talking to her. What was her name again? Daisy? She took that photo in our room.’

  ‘Or was it her friend?’ Neil said.

  ‘No, I’ve got it now, it was that bounty-hunter guy, you remember?’

  ‘You boys,’ Claire said. ‘You boys.’

  Adam didn’t tell Neil about Gavin’s disappearance or his mishap with the consent form. That wasn’t his role in their double act, he reflected in bed that night, Claire flushed and clammy beside him, gangsta rap and sporadic laughter emanating from the sitting room. He couldn’t. Nor had he mentioned another event in Tenerife that, in a way, had distressed him more. It was a small thing, and he couldn’t explain quite why it was so preoccupying. No one else in the team was likely to remember it, Adam suspected, or not for long. These things happened, they would think, you had a laugh and a joke about them and then you forgot them. No big deal. No harm done.

  He and a cameraman had gone to the beach to film some general views, pictures that would be spread across the series, helping to segue between storylines. The cameraman had panned across the black, volcanic sand, scouting for volleyball games and cavorting beauties, and doubletaked back again. He locked onto something in the middle distance that Adam couldn’t decipher without magnification, under or near a clump of yellow sun umbrellas.

  ‘Take a look,’ the cameraman said to him, grinning. When Adam bent his eye to the viewfinder he saw a couple locked together beneath a beach towel, unmistakably fucking.

  They carried on filming, even though they knew the footage would never be used. At least, it couldn’t be broadcast. It could be used, and it was used that evening, before they went out for their night’s work, to entertain the team at the villa. You could see the two bodies much more clearly on the villa’s television; everyone gathered round to score the performances for style, stamina, physique. The producer of the week, a Scot named Alex, supplied a deadpan commentary, as if this were a horse race or a boxing match (‘… and they’re into the final furlong…’). The girl was mostly covered by the man’s torso and the towel, apart from her legs, which stuck up and out like a crab’s. Every thirty seconds or so she seemed to have a dim access of shame, trying with one hand to wrap the towel around her legs, the palm of her other hand flat on the man’s back, but the material wouldn’t stretch. On the screen her face was well-defined, but still it was hard to tell whether her slack-jawed expression implied pleasure, pain or simply far-gone inebriation.

  What you could see for certain was that she was young, most likely in her late teens. After a while Adam couldn’t watch. He looked down at the terracotta tiles on the villa’s floor. He scratched his left forearm with the nails of his right hand.

  Adam wanted to discuss that girl with Neil, but somehow he never found the right moment. Claire had been there that evening and he didn’t want his girlfriend to know about her, not yet, and after all there was no harm done, and probably he had left it too long. Neil might not want to be reminded of her, and anyway they were never going to see her again. Adam considered that to be important, then, actions and their invisible consequences not altogether counting, he assumed, nor liable to rebound, if the counterparties were out of sight, finished and lost for ever.

  It was less than a lie, he told himself. It was an omission, a nothing about nothing, the square root of nothing.

  Major? High school’s what I mean.

  1999

  L

  ater Neil liked to think he had sensed Farid would be a force in his life, as he was sure he knew in the hostel yard that Adam was to be. In truth his first reaction to the man was disappointment. He came out of the sarcophagal lift – cramped, slow and clad in distressingly frank mirrors, which emphasised his vampiric hairline – expecting to find a twitchy entourage, a wall of blinking data screens, the electric aura of redemptive wealth. Balding, diminutive, only modestly overweight, Farid was sitting alone at a fake-mahogany dining table, bare besides his coffee. No water, no biscuits. The venue was a rented apartment: Neil spotted a kitchen counter through one of the internal doors before Strahan quietly closed it. Farid gestured for the three of them to sit opposite him, the glare from the window at his back and in their eyes. Strahan watched from an armchair set back against the wall.

  Bimal introduced Neil as an award-winning salesman (that weekend in Brighton with his dad), Jess as a designer who had worked on projects across the country (her A-levels in Hull). The executive team was supported, he said, by a panel of advisers boasting decades of experience in retail (Neil’s father) and utilities (Bimal’s).

  In his head Neil ran through the pitching guidelines he had refined during his eight months with HappyFamilies. Sit, don’t stand. Keep your hands together so they don’t shake, or under the table and out of sight. Address the investor only, never speak to your colleagues, which would imply that you need back-up, and so are either weak or lying.

  Look at him and we can keep it going.

  After Bimal handed over, Neil raced through the requisite jargon (digital disruption, value chains), the plucked-from-thin-air projections (conversion rates, average spends), before framing the main proposal:

  ‘We’re a small company right now. We know that. You know that. But we are confident that we will soon be an extremely profitable company. And you – at this exciting pre-revenue stage, you can acquire thirty per cent of our company for less than a million pounds.’

  Neil tried to convey urgency without desperation. HappyFamilies was seeking only the right kind of investor; they wanted Farid as much for his experience as for his money, though in fact they had no idea where Farid’s experience lay and preferred not to. When Neil finished, after a sod’s-law struggle to power up her laptop, Jess displayed a dummy version of their homepage and their hypothetical products, the families emblazoned on them immortally healthy and beautiful.

  Ecstatic young mothers and their pukeless infants. A beaming middle-aged father with his teenaged daughter.

  Farid sipped his coffee and regarded the table top. He wrote something down on a very small notepad, afterwards appearing to cross the jotting out. He gazed out of the window. For an infinite minute there was silence, except for the lawnmower buzz of traffic on the Edgware Road.

  Bimal was about to speak but Neil cast out an arm to stop him. Submission was part of the exchange, he knew. You had to let the customer inconvenience or insult you if they felt like it. That much he had learned during his involuntary years in the shop.

  In the pause Neil noticed a trio of family photos on an otherwise empty bookshelf. Wife, he presumed, though perhaps he shouldn’t; a younger and (surprisingly) fatter Farid crowded with children, two pretty girls and a younger boy; a pair of impeccably kempt toddlers who might be grandchildren.

  Farid looked up. ‘Don’t sell me your company,’ he said. ‘Not one customer is buying your company, Happy whatever it is. Sell me your products. Why should I buy these trinkets?’

  The accent seemed not to belong in nature, Arabic with a trace of Levantine French, coarsened by what sounded like a Slavic rasp. Beneath the paunch and his distraction Farid gave out the occasional hint of what must have made him rich in the first place, a fecund compound of rashness and caution, enthusiasm and cynicism. You glimpsed it for a second before the mask came down again.

  Sell the customer what he wants to buy. Neil harvested saliva from his cheeks to lubricate his tongue. He swallowed. ‘We are selling,’ he gambled, ‘new ways to tell your family that you love them. And to tell yourself that you love them. Everybody wants to think that about themselves, don’t they? That they love their family as much as they can.’

  Farid looked away.

  Bimal handled the other questions, of which there were few. Farid smiled thinly, rose and walked out, not saying goo
dbye or shaking hands. The kitchen door swung shut behind him. Strahan ushered the three of them into the lift.

  ‘He gets it,’ Jess said as the coffin descended.

  ‘Don’t think so, to be honest,’ Neil said. ‘He didn’t give us much.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Bimal said. ‘Guys, I’m sorry.’

  They were melancholically drinking cheap wine in a chain bar on Oxford Street, the Something & Something, when Bimal took the call. It wasn’t Farid, it was Strahan. His first words, Bimal told them afterwards, mimicking the pukka drawl, were, ‘I’ll need your bank details.’

  Jess was at the bar, blowing some of Farid’s investment on champagne, before Bimal could recount the rest. ‘I’ll need your bank details!’ Bimal said by way of a toast.

  ‘HappyFamilies!’ Neil said.

  ‘To HappyFamilies!’ Jess repeated.

  That night, when Bimal left, she taught him how to drink flaming sambucas, the expert way, a procedure she had learned in Prague, apparently, which involved two glasses, a lighter, a napkin and a straw. Other people in the bar watched them, men especially, covetous attention that Neil, to his surprise, found he enjoyed. They were shimmering that evening, radiating luck and strength, like the aura he and Adam had projected during the karaoke in San Diego. Neil inhaled the liquoricey gas and laughed his grimacing laugh.

  On the pavement outside Jess fell behind, as if considering, then strode wordlessly towards him, inclined her face and, finally, kissed his mouth. He was momentarily thrown by her approach, that determined, déjà-vu stride, so that his lips took a few seconds to respond to hers.

  It’s happening, Neil thought as Jess opened the door to her flat. My real life is happening.

  He was catching up with Adam. He called Adam in the morning.

  Somewhere outside, in the garden of the basement flat or in the street, foxes were mating or killing each other in a coloratura frenzy. Adam opened his eyes and rolled onto his back; a strand of Claire’s hair adhered to his lips. She had slept through the yowling. Clean conscience, that was what people said, wasn’t it?

  The bedside clock said six forty-four. He caressed her shoulder, her upper arm. She might be awake, Adam told himself, or almost. From her arm to her hip and then her thigh, one finger tracing an expanding arc that soon took in a buttock. She straightened her legs. He reached across her torso and gently squeezed both breasts in his palm, an encompassment that she had once told him she enjoyed. In Adam’s mental diagram of his wife this consoling micro-fetish was linked, via a dotted line, to the timing and violence of her parents’ divorce.

  They were awake now, anyway. His penis grazed her thigh – accidentally, the first time. Claire curled up and pulled the coverlet over her.

  The fox sounds were disconcertingly human, long hyperventilating shrieks, like a passer-by stumbling upon a corpse.

  Six fifty-two.

  Adam got out of bed and slouched to the bathroom. He met himself in the mirror and breathed in. His was a nice little gut, nothing vulgar or conspicuous when clothed, but flabby enough, on exposure, to undercut his once-automatic confidence in his metabolism and physique, a faith as blithe as his ingrained assumption that he would one day inherit the Earth. The hairs encamped on his chest had dispatched reconnaissance agents to his shoulders. He was twenty-eight.

  Shit shower shave aftershave deodorant teeth blast of hairdryer that woke Claire up.

  Eleven minutes past seven. Adam went into the kitchen. There was a mouse in there somewhere; he had heard its scuttle, the eccentric rhythm of something alive. He should tell the landlady. He listened to the answerphone message while the kettle boiled – an invitation from Chaz, boozing with him and Archie and two or three others, always strength in numbers these days, body count replacing intimacy, a group absconsion from adulthood. Together they had passed some unmarked inflection point, Adam sensed, at which longevity began to diminish closeness rather than enhance it. They were evanescing, his student cronies, without ill-will or grudges, as old friends evidently could when there was nothing left to say.

  Claire came into the kitchen in her towelling dressing gown.

  ‘Anything special today?’

  ‘Lessons Learned at three, God knows how long this one’ll go on for. You?’

  ‘Catalogue day.’

  ‘There’s a mouse in here somewhere.’

  ‘Risotto for dinner?’

  ‘I’m out tonight, remember.’

  ‘Where are you meeting him again?’

  ‘That new place by the river, you know, with the bowling.’

  Not a word about the penis. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed; or possibly, for her, all that male insistence had long since become unremarkable, a familiarity Adam preferred not to contemplate. He could make out a breast inside the towelling, its convex perfection.

  His coffee, her tea. Two pieces of toast. Just the one penis: a necessary quota, obviously, but also a chasm and, in a way, a sadness, that she would never get it, the urgency and then the shame.

  ‘Did you take out the recycling?’

  Seven thirty-seven. She sipped.

  Adam had observed this social attrition in older men, men of his father’s generation, how they wound up glumly fraternising at their wives’ engagements, as if the chromosomal match with other husbands were a sufficient bond. He knew his recent, second-hand male acquaintances as single traits, like supporting characters in a bad film: James, Libby’s boyfriend, always toting his dry cleaning; Paul, comes with Cherry, asks for his steak to be ‘cremated’. Poppy from the gallery and John the effete cinéaste.

  ‘Did you finish the mortgage form?’

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said.

  ‘You prom —’

  ‘I know, I’ll do it. I said I’ll do it.’

  Neil was the exception in this cast of has-beens and monochrome newcomers. Neil gave more and demanded more, and Adam owed him more.

  He swept the crumbs into his palm and brushed them into the sink. The rubbish truck was in the street, someone was shouting.

  ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your Lessons.’

  ‘Knife crime. The spike in the summer, you remember, that silly moral panic, lasted a fortnight.’

  They would miss that evening’s chronicle of the day’s granular irks and half-imagined insults – his from the jittery open floors of the department, hers at the subterranean print gallery just off Piccadilly, the coveted art job that had turned out to involve more hard-selling than Claire had reckoned on, and many more hours standing in a basement showroom, rocking on her heels and watching dust motes spiral in the half-light from the pavement-level windows. The Dinky duet: a reciprocal compassion, like oral sex but more frequent.

  D-I-N-K-Y: Dual Income, No Kids Yet. Even now, though, Adam didn’t share and show her everything. During their honeymoon, on their bed in the cabana, he had asked, ‘Is there anything I could do, or, you know, that I might have done in the past, that would make you not love me?’

  Claire said, ‘Of course there is, don’t be silly. What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Adam had backtracked. Even murderers told in the end, he had reflected – on their deathbeds, sometimes earlier, you read about them showing up at police stations, a decade on, turning themselves in. The next day, in the morning, the man – the father – could have given him away, easily, and that would have been the end of them, him and Neil, right there at the campsite.

  We thought they were such nice boys.

  Seven forty-three. The leaves on the tree outside their front window were still thick and green. It was the tallest tree in the street, its trunk reaching to the eaves of the subdivided house, the shade cast into their kitchen. Adam had imagined its strong branches saving him as he leaped from the window to escape a fire or when cornered by a burglar. He had dreamed of a burglar climbing up it, too, his face obscured by the foliage. Someone was screaming, not Adam, someone else, a woman. A woman or a g
irl.

  ‘What about the life insurance?’

  He had dreamed that dream three or four times, here in the rented flat in Shepherd’s Bush, with their spider plant, and the yucca plant, and the ugly, square dining table that they had bought in an auction house instead of one from Ikea, and the sofa that was from Ikea, Harriet’s sofa, sometimes, and, in the gaps between his bedsits, Neil’s. The Greeks ought to have a complex for this syndrome, Adam thought – the impulse not to usurp his parents, or to fuck them, but to be them. The headlong fast-forward to the age of dinner parties and being someone, practised little bickerings and wordless attunement, his too-real too-fast life.

  He put his plate in the dishwasher. He put his book in his bag. He hung his security tag around his neck, a pre-emptive adornment that he had regarded as defeatedly gauche when he first observed it on his departmental colleagues, but had fairly soon adopted.