The Faithful Couple Read online

  ‘Love you,’ Claire called from the sink, not turning round.

  At ten to eight Adam trotted down the stairs, past two other Dinky abodes, three piles of unclaimed post. The front door boasted geometric, stained-glass panels, relics of an Edwardian household wholeness. He stepped out onto the begrimed pavement.

  Farid, Bimal, Jess: later they came to be bound up together in Neil’s internal accounting, memory shaping one of its false contiguities for his convenience. In fact he had known Bimal for ever, in the ordinary way of knowing, and in the end he concluded that he never knew Farid, not really. Of the three he was only close to Jess, and yet, looked at in a practical way, she left the shallowest indentation on his life, her mark on him swiftly filling out and disappearing, like a fingerprint on rubber.

  For all Bimal’s pursuit of Neil, the two of them hadn’t been especially tight at school. Both had been marooned in the unsatisfactory netherworld between the tough, cool kids and the bullyable pariahs, an intermediate caste whose members ought to have formed mutual-defence alliances, but didn’t. Bimal’s family lived a couple of streets from Neil’s in a near-identical semi; as a child, whenever Neil ran into Bimal’s father, he was invariably wearing a suit, because of which Neil had assumed he must be an accountant or a doctor. He learned only as an adult that the man had worked for the gas board for thirty years. Neil’s default image of Bimal was glimpsed from behind his own mother’s back, when they had both been twelve, or thereabouts: Bimal standing on the doorstep, smiling goofily as he tried to sell some tomato plants he had grown in his father’s greenhouse, his father standing in the driveway in his suit. His mother had bought one of the plants, Neil remembered, and kept it on the kitchen windowsill. Bimal had grown up tall and plausible, and wore contact lenses instead of his thick-rimmed spectacles, though he retained his throwback bowl haircut as if it were a mascot.

  It was less affection that had kept them in touch than some half-acknowledged intuition that they might prove useful to each other one day – as now, at HappyFamilies, they were. The idea had come to him, Bimal confided, while he was working at a computer-software firm. A colleague had returned from a long weekend in St Petersburg with a bespoke set of matrioshka dolls, each figurine hand-painted with the image of one of his own relatives. The likenesses were creditable, and the dolls had been absurdly cheap, knocked up overnight, the colleague said, by an artist he met in a street market. People would pay proper money for these, Bimal had reflected. He had begun to think of other ways in which punters might be helped to celebrate themselves, to feel immortal and resplendent, which was how everybody wanted to feel these days. Tea towels silk-screened with family photos, snow-shakers that used the photos as a backdrop, classic film posters – Vertigo, The Italian Job – with a loved-one’s visage substituted for Jimmy Stewart’s or Michael Caine’s.

  After a long courtship Neil was persuaded by the World Wide Web. In Bimal’s revised business plan, the customers would browse the products online, order online, upload their photos online, pay online. Virtually no overheads. No gravity: magic.

  ‘That’s less than I’m earning now,’ Neil told Bimal when they discussed terms. ‘And that’s saying something.’

  ‘Plus your four per cent,’ Bimal said. Bimal wanted him, Neil suspected, as much to redeem his own teenage loneliness as for his putative sales acumen.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Five and a half.’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Done.’

  Neil’s business card said Marketing Director, but his most valuable skill lay in what quickly became their main preoccupation. Angel investors, small-time venture capitalists, the directors of greeting-card and novelty firms: Neil proved to be good at soliciting money. Where Bimal was rambly, overenthusiastic, Neil was more focused (Don’t waste the customer’s time), less sentimental. He was learning to read the rich, their vanities and contradictions; how they tended to resist that label, referring chippily to other, slightly wealthier people whom they instead placed in that bracket, yet at the same time seemed dimly baffled that you were not already rich yourself. Six per cent of HappyFamilies was Neil’s forward-dated ticket out of subterranean bedsits; his chance to one day do something for his nephew – a tutor, maybe the odd holiday – since, heaven knew, the boy’s father never would.

  He met Jess when she and her boss pitched for a contract to design their logo. At first sight he would have guessed New York rather than Hull. She was working for one of the voodoo marketing agencies that were infesting London, developing their minutely nuanced offerings in a warp-speed, boom-time corporate evolution – ‘brand’ and ‘image’ combined with ‘management’, ‘strategist’ and ‘consultancy’ in increasingly exotic combinations. She had interestingly short hair, a fancy, clingy suit, a dirty laugh and a twenty-a-day smoking habit.

  When their eyes locked during that meeting Neil thought the ocular come-on was a negotiating technique. You’ll have to try harder than that, he thought. In his self-image he remained the pasty and narrow-shouldered also-ran of his adolescence, his perception fixed at the harshest moment, like a clock stopped during an earthquake, the moles on his cheek and neck still the visual magnets they had been in the bathroom in Harrow. His hair had begun to recede at the temples, giving him (he thought) an unwholesome widow’s peak, like something out of The Munsters. By his own reckoning he was still a proposition that no grown woman was likely to prefer to, say, Adam.

  On the pavement afterwards Jess held onto him for longer than their handshake required.

  ‘You’ll hear from us.’

  ‘Will I?’ She laughed aloud at the pregnancy of their farewell, nervous and brassy at the same time. He like the unapologetic, male way she smoked, and, later, the taste of smoke in her mouth.

  ‘Fuck it, let’s hire her,’ Bimal said. ‘We need a designer anyway.’ Bimal frequently wanted to hire people, and almost as frequently to fire them, which for a time resulted in a gruesome attrition rate.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Neil said. ‘Not sure we can afford her.’

  Don’t shit on your own doorstep.

  Bimal insisted, and Jess – on the lookout, like half of London, for her jackpot move, her dotcom apotheosis – accepted. She moved into their ramshackle single room above a shop in Camden, where there were more phone lines than employees, and more employees (six, including her) than desks. She and Neil sat opposite one another, separated by a metre and a half of table top and two fat, humming computers, emailing each other in suggestive exchanges that he found deliriously flattering, and which were much less covert than they imagined.

  ‘More than four thousand,’ Adam said, three hours after he closed the stained-glass front door in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Probably. No, definitely.’

  ‘How many more?’

  ‘Hard to say. Depends on the Youth Justice Boards. I suppose you could say “at least four thousand”.’

  ‘Okay, “at least”. Christ.’

  The spin doctor made the change on screen and printed out the speech again. He sighed and mumbled inaudibly as he headed for the photocopier, honing the offhand charmlessness that was evidently considered essential in his trade. He returned with three copies of the speech in the sacrosanct double-spaced, single-sided, non-stapled format.

  ‘Chuck that one away,’ Adam said.

  ‘I have,’ the spin doctor said. ‘I will.’ This man was only a couple of years older than Adam, but he spoke to the minister every day, the Home Secretary every week.

  ‘Don’t mix them up.’

  ‘Okay. Christ.’

  ‘Tea, coffee?’ Colin asked. He was making the rounds in his office slippers, two empty mugs castaneting between his fingers, both of them his. Colin drew the line at washing up: the previous week he had fixed a hand-scrawled sign above the cluttered sink that said What did your last slave die of? ‘Adam, anything?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll page you with anything else,’ he said to the spin doctor. ‘Page and line number, all right?’<
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  Version control was an infamous nightmare. Adam had heard horror stories of career-ending oversights in which officials sent their minister to a podium with the wrong iteration of a speech: mangled statistics, unmeetable promises that ought to have been excised.

  ‘Four o’clock kick-off,’ the spin doctor said. ‘Some further education place in Bermondsey. Principal is onto me about her capital budget!’

  He gave a mean little chuckle. You could already see in his mottled cheeks and tinted nose that he drank too much.

  A-S-B-O: Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Or rather, son of ASBO, that was the crime directorate’s current focus, and therefore Adam’s. Quicker and harsher sentencing for the degenerates, community punishment for entry-level villains, plus some extra cash for after-school clubs and mentoring schemes: the standard carrot and stick one-two. These days wayward kids were the government’s main enemy, Rat Boy, Blip Boy and Spider Boy the new, pre-pubescent Most Wanted.

  They were fourteen and fifteen, these kids. Thirteen, some of them. Returning to his desk Adam remembered how, when he was fifteen, he had drunk two-thirds of a bottle of cider in the cadets’ hut and thrown up outside the fives courts. One of the housemasters was investigating the mess, interviewing the boys one-on-one in his study, promises of immunity for informers, the works. Half-resolved to confess, Adam had phoned home for his father’s endorsement.

  ‘Little white lie,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘But —’

  ‘Just this once.’ That had been his introduction to the prime genteel commandment: First, get yourself off.

  When Harriet was fifteen their mother had found, in the pocket of her coat, a note she had written about a boy (not to the boy, even, but about him), and had kept her in for half the Christmas holidays, enlisting Adam to disturb her weepy internal exile for meal deliveries and health checks.

  Fifteen: sometimes, in the past few years, that number, that age, had seemed to Adam to be stalking him.

  At twenty to one he went out to his preferred Italian deli in the narrow lane opposite the crenellated ministry. Standing in front of the glass display, watching the disembodied hands make his lunch, Adam thought they were short-changing him on chicken. He ground his jaw in disapproval; one of his fingers twitched towards the glass. The sandwich-maker (Indian or Pakistani, he guessed, tired-looking, striped apron) glanced up with an expression of abhorred pity. Adam turned sharply away from the man’s eyes and the sandwich and towards the streaked parquet beneath his feet.

  Three years in the Civil Service, eighteen months in the Home Office, two or three of these cherished sandwiches a week. Adam ought to be grateful to Jim, he supposed: Jim the executive producer, with his balding crew cut and mockney accent, the man who had inadvertently landed him in Whitehall. Three and a half years before, Jim had sent his secretary to extract Adam from the open-plan grid and deliver him to the corner office. He had offered Adam a pursed, funereal smile, like the smile of the examiner who failed him at his first driving test, virtually Adam’s only other substantial failure until this one. When Jim looked out of the window as he began to speak, towards the skyscrapers across the river in the City, Adam immediately understood.

  ‘First of all I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for us.’ Us and you. There was an ornamental chilli plant on the windowsill.

  Jim was mercifully brief, but throughout the few, tormenting minutes Adam worried that he might be sick. Everyone outside the goldfish-bowl cubicle would soon know why he was sitting there, he had realised. Or perhaps everyone knew already, Will already knew, and he was the last to find out. He half-turned his head to see if Will was watching.

  ‘I would keep you if I could, you know that, we could keep everyone…’

  Adam’s mind flew back to Tenerife, to Gavin the chimerical bar manager – fucking Gavin! – and slid from him to the girl on the beach.

  That poor girl. And the two of them. Amazing, the things you caught yourself thinking about, and when. That was the moment it struck: afterwards he thought he could trace his fifteen-o-phobia to Jim’s cubicle, one crisis summoning and eliding with another.

  No, Adam told Jim, there was nothing he wanted to ask. He heard himself say ‘Thank you’ as he rose to leave, like a condemned aristocrat tipping his executioner, the indiscriminate euphoria of something happening.

  The following evening, in Soho, he had indeed been sick, Neil holding his hair back from his face as if they were teenage girls. Adam pinballed between the tables on his dash to the toilets, spilling several drinks. Two of the spillees stood up – rugby types, play-acting toughs – and Neil interposed himself, his hands raised in his Don’t shoot! pose. ‘Just leave it, mate,’ Neil said to the larger man, his voice descending the social register to imply an acquaintance with violence.

  Sitting on the kerb, toeing the broken glass in the gutter, Adam had tried to explain how he felt. How, for him, life was like one of those childhood line-ups in which everyone stands against a wall to be measured and ranked, except for Adam the comparison wasn’t biannual but always, and the comparators were everyone, the rankings vertical as well as horizontal, featuring all the people he had ever been to school or worked with, and his father and his grandfathers and his great-grandfather the judge, all of them eternally jostling in the eyes of some super-arbiter, his stature suddenly the lowliest.

  ‘I know,’ Neil said. ‘I understand. But it isn’t like that, Ants. It’s just a job. You’ll get another job, I know you will. It’s not, you know, all of you. It’s not a vital organ or something. It’s what you do for money, that’s all.’

  His other, evanescing friends were useless, as if there were an asterisk in their contracts that excused them at unhilarious moments. And this was the least of it, Adam knew, the divorces and nervous breakdowns and dying parents and heartbreaking children were still to come. For the first time he could remember, his father let him down. ‘Every life needs a twist and a turn,’ Jeremy said on the phone, mysteriously affecting a Scottish brogue, as if he were quoting a song from some old Highlands musical that didn’t actually exist. Adam had expected more from him: sharper anger, sturdier protection. Claire kept her distance, treating him like a ticking bomb in an action movie, wary of pulling the wrong wire.

  That night he had almost told Neil the truth about California. Adam was incontinently grateful for his sympathy, and the secret felt like a burden too many. Neil seemed so close, there was nothing they couldn’t share, Adam would tell him and be forgiven in an instant, and then that episode would open up to them. He managed not to, cowardice or tact that afterwards he half-regretted.

  ‘Seriously, Neil, I don’t know what you see in him. I mean, what did you do in America, rob a bank together?’

  Neil flinched. They were in her bed, two months after they met Farid, Sunday morning fornication. Jess was exploiting the post-coital amnesty, the very temporary truce.

  ‘The way he took the mike and walked around like that. All that “my wife” crap. And making his father his best man… What a tosser.’

  Jess had lived in London for five or six years, more than enough to count as a local, but Yorkshire hung on in her vowels, an accent that to Neil’s southern ear made her jokes sound funnier and her judgements harsher. She was immune to Adam’s charm, their personalities somehow failing to intersect. On the three occasions they had met, the latest being Adam’s wedding, she had laughed when he wasn’t making a joke and missed the punchlines he intended.

  ‘Don’t,’ Neil said, rearranging his leg so that his thigh was no longer touching hers. ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘You know what, Philly old boy, in my experience, when people say things are complicated, they never are.’

  He knew Jess was onto something. For all Adam’s seigneurial confidence he thought in straight, obedient lines, was content to be defined by the government’s consoling acronyms. The wedding had obeyed its type: the adequately pretty English church, the vicar keeping the hypocritical God content
to a harmless minimum, the lawn parade of tepid canapés and novelty cummerbunds, the inevitable marquee. But that wasn’t him… That was all irrelevant… The money Adam had lent him for his first deposit, the nights Neil had spent on their sofa, when he was between bedsits and couldn’t face his father’s – he and Adam staying up, giggling like imbeciles, until Claire came to shush them, hands on hips, some primitive affinity of gender trumping his friend’s allegiance to her. A week, then five days… Those favours weren’t what mattered either, they were the currency and not the feeling. The way he had felt, six years earlier, when they met on the concourse at Paddington Station, beamed back together in London, or felt when, a week before that, he took Adam’s first phone call:

  It’s me, Neil. It’s Adam.

  Adam? Hi – Adam! I’ve got it, Dad, I said I’ve got it…

  ‘What is it, a class thing?’ Jess went on. ‘Sort of, you know, a yeoman and master type arrangement? Does he get to fuck me, too?’