The Faithful Couple

2005

Neil wanted a drink, a proper drink, but he wasn’t sure if that was allowed. He hadn’t seen the menu — Azim had ordered for all of them, shashlik and sturgeon and a delicate Caucasian calzone — and he didn’t know whether alcohol was included. Finally, halfway through the meal, sweating into his suit and doubting that he could endure the internecine bonhomie without lubrication, Neil meekly asked whether beer was available.

Azim laughed, rocking his head back, mouth open, lips and moustache stretching thin. Elin flicked a finger, once, beckoning an assistant-cum-bodyguard and dispatching him into the courtyard for the drinks.

‘This isn’t Tora Bora,’ Azim said, still laughing.

Standing upright against the wall of the private room, their other flunky didn’t move or smile. The world, Neil reflected, was approximately divided into the proprietors of violence — big-shots with assets to protect, hoodlums with nothing to lose, like the muggers who had roughed up Jess at the entrance to their building — and the herds of harmless people in the middle, peering at the carnivores above and below.

‘You like the fish?’ Elin asked. He had a round, pockmarked, simpleton’s face, which seemed designed by nature to appear misleadingly ingenuous.

‘Lovely,’ Neil lied. They were avoiding business talk, though Neil suspected Azim and Elin were discussing dates and numbers in their private exchanges.

‘Super fresh,’ Azim said. ‘House speciality.’

A muezzin sang out through a loudspeaker, somewhere above the restaurant in the old city. A cat’s tail twitched under the empty chair between Azim’s and Neil’s. He saw Azim notice the tail and for a moment thought the cat might be in jeopardy. Azim pinched some white fish-flesh between his fingers, fed it to the stray and smiled. The cat caressed his legs.

The best analogy Neil could offer himself was with how he felt in that motel room in Los Angeles twelve years before. I am Neil Collins from Harrow, Neil Collins of Collins & Sons. What the fuck am I doing here?

To be honest, he knew the answer, which was as straightforward now as it had been in California. There the answer was Adam. In Baku, it was Farid.

Farid had given him a temporary, functional entrée to the plutocracy. Its members, Neil had noticed, observed their own rituals and rules, in traffic jams, at airports, in all their dealings with officialdom. There was a kind of telepathy between them, a family resemblance in manner and sheen that seemed always to be mutually visible beneath the local idiosyncrasies. They were charming sociopaths, for the most part, enraptured by their wealth but able to be ironic about it, to see the joke and the luck of it. Young women were usually in tow and frequently on offer, like digestifs, though Farid had warned Neil, right at the beginning, always to decline, lest he end up featuring in some blackmailable amateur pornography. Don’t shit on your own doorstep.

Farid was supplying half the funds for a gaudy, multi-purpose tower on the site of a soon-to-be flattened, Soviet-era housing estate. ‘Give them nothing,’ he had urged as he left the Hilton that morning, condemning Neil to endure their new partners’ hospitality alone. By which he had meant, nothing personal, nothing they could use against him later. Farid himself had given Neil nothing all along: those photos of somebody’s grandchildren he had glimpsed at their first meeting, with Bimal and Jess in the rented flat near Marble Arch, were as close an approach as Neil ever made to him. Neil felt indebted to Farid, filial almost, but also, sometimes, ashamed.

The beer arrived. Azim became garrulous. Was Blair as strong as Thatcher? Something about a local and much-lamented war that Neil had never heard of. Elin broke in with the personal questions. Did Neil have children? Was he married?

Elin was married. From his inside pocket he produced a laminated, folding set of pictures, a boy and two girls at what might have been Disney World. A pretty woman in lipstick and Western clothes. He watched Neil looking at them. ‘My wife,’ he said, and smiled. ‘My children.’ Always the children.

Neil gave them nothing. Not yet. Maybe one day. We’ll see.

‘Next time you come,’ Azim said, putting on the full oriental show, ‘you stay in my house. We kill a sheep. You meet my daughter.’ Elin said something to Azim and they both laughed.

Neil wasn’t sure what the joke was, whether it was on him. ‘That would be wonderful,’ he ventured.

‘Not for the sheep,’ Elin said, and they laughed again.

Insincerity wasn’t quite the word for these exchanges. They were both false and true at the same time, authentic human contact shot through with cynicism. The blandishments were almost genuine at the moment they were uttered, Neil felt. The same as business everywhere, only more exuberant — the same as life everywhere, come to that, intimacy mixed with exploitation, the mission always to insulate something, some moment or bond, from the contest.

Azim and Elin lapsed into Azeri. Neil had begun wondering whether it would be impolite to look at his phone when, as if obediently, it rang. A twin fire-station shriek, the old rotary theme that was already kitsch history.

For the first two rings he ignored it, smiling inanely as if the noise were emanating from somewhere else. It was unlikely to be Jess: she was in Buenos Aires, seven hours behind him, research for a new Latin American biscuit product, he thought she had said. It might be Sam. Neil had given him a phone for his birthday, with instructions to call should Brian deteriorate, or should Dan. Sam texted him emoticon-studded jokes, mordant synopses of Dan’s proliferating benders, occasionally his homework scores; Neil amplified his responses with lavish exclamation marks, as the mobile argot required.

After three rings he took out the phone and looked at the screen. The caller-ID photo told him it was Adam. Handsome bugger.

Azim coughed, then grinned.

Neil’s rancour over California had passed, rinsing out of him during the thunderstorm the previous summer, the two of them and those two women. This evening he felt the old warmth — because Adam was in the world, still in Neil’s world, in spite of everything, comfortingly persistent — and a more recent, entwined irritation. Of late there often seemed to be something more pressing to do when Adam rang: it wasn’t the right time, Neil would call his friend back later, he usually resolved, definitely he would.

‘You may answer,’ Elin said. ‘Please.’

On the sixth ring Neil cupped the screen beneath the table. Pressing the reject button would be too brutal: Neil himself could tell when someone offed him like that, and he always received it as a tiny act of violence. He generally let Adam ring through to voicemail, the lazy medium between the investment of talking and harshness of termination.

Not today. Neil raised and jiggled the phone in his hand, mouthing ‘sorry’ as he stood. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a curt tone intended to sound executive. Not just the organ-grinder’s monkey.

‘I’ve found her,’ Adam said.

‘Excuse me,’ Neil said to his hosts, putting his hand over the mouthpiece as you were supposed to. ‘I have to take this.’

‘Of course,’ Azim said.

‘No problem,’ Elin said.

‘Just a second,’ Neil said to Adam.

He strode into the courtyard but found it crowded with diners, waiters, a half-hearted belly-dancer. He hurried out of the restaurant, bearing the phone like a fizzing hand grenade, and down the steps that led to the seafront. He ignored the carpet salesmen (‘Is not shop, is museum!’), crossed the road and found himself on the almost deserted boardwalk that stretched along the shore of the Caspian. No waves, just dead black water.

‘Hi, Adam,’ he said, rewinding, giving his friend a chance to begin again. To begin differently.

‘Philly, I’ve found her.’

‘Who?’ Neil asked, although he already knew. A nauseating aroma of oil wafted off the sea. In the distance, beyond the boardwalk and the trees, he made out the silhouette of an offshore platform, a lone orange beacon flashing at its apex in the Caucasian night.

‘Rose, of course. I’ve found her, Neil. I’ve found Rose.’

Panic surged up Neil’s throat. Here they came — the shame, the recrimination, the policemen whom Eric was going to call but, for some blessed reason, hadn’t. He fought it down.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I said I’ve —’

‘Where?’

‘The internet,’ Adam said. ‘MySpace. I registered and I searched for her and now I’ve found her. She’s… hair… at least…’

The signal cracked up; Neil caught one word in three. He walked up the boardwalk, towards the oil platform. Adam was still there, patchy and scrambled but still with him. Neil raised the handset above his head and waved it in the warm air, hoping to reignite the signal-strength bars in the corner of the miniature screen. Around thirty metres ahead of him, beneath a tree that canopied the boardwalk, another man was brandishing his phone in the air, conjuring the same ethereal magic. To anyone watching it would have looked as if they were semaphoring each other in a strange, short-range code.

Neil turned away from the man and walked back along the boardwalk, towards the restaurant. He regained his signal.

‘You still there?’

‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Yes, I’m here. Just lost each other for a second.’

‘What time is it there? Aren’t you at work?’ — as if he might disqualify his friend’s intelligence on a technicality.

‘Yes,’ Adam said, ‘I’m in the office. I’m looking at her now. I suppose it’s her. I’m looking at her picture.’

‘What do you mean, you suppose?’

There was a pause at the London end, that air of vacancy and distraction that descends when an interlocutor is doing something else, typically involving a computer, sometimes a television with the sound turned down. The ghostly hiatus of the multi-gadget era, in which everyone is always half-elsewhere.

‘She’s got a photo on her profile page, it’s a funny kind of photo. I was saying — Neil, when I lost you — I was saying that I think it’s her. Can’t be completely sure but it looks like it’s her. I’ll send you the link.’

‘Don’t, Ads,’ Neil said. ‘Anyway, how the hell would you know what she looks like now?’

‘You might need to register.’

‘Just don’t.’

‘You don’t understand, she might be okay, she might be fine. Maybe she’s forgiven us, or, you know, she would forgive us, if…’

Neil sensed the panic coursing back. ‘Have you contacted her? Sent her a message or whatever?’

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Adam, don’t. Don’t contact her. Listen to me. Just don’t.’

He turned around. The semaphoring man had finished his phone call; two other men, whom Neil hadn’t previously noticed, and whose outnumbering presence might have troubled him if he had, rose like ghosts from a bench in the shadows beneath the tree to join him. All three walked away from him and up the boardwalk, towards the oil platform; its orange light pulsed through the tree’s upper branches. Neil found himself mindlessly waving farewell with his free hand, though the man could no longer see him and he and Neil were strangers.

Adam said, ‘What colour was her hair?’

‘What?’

‘In Yosemite. Come on! What colour was her hair?’

‘Sorry, can’t remember,’ Neil lied.

‘Yes, you can. You can, Neil. She’s a brunette in the photo but for some reason I thought she was fairer.’

‘What else does it say?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Neil said, backtracking on his curiosity. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’m at a dinner. Local partners, total shysters. You should go too, Adam. Work on whatever it is you’re putting into the little box today.’

‘I’ll send you the link.’

‘I’m not interested.’

‘It says she lives in Taos. In New Mexico. You know, Georgia O’Keeffe.’

‘I said I’m not interested. I’m hanging up now, Adam.’

‘It says she has a brother.’

‘Adam,’ Neil snapped, ‘what the fuck is this about? I thought we were finished with this, I thought you were over this crap. I’ve tried, I have, but… What are you trying to do to me? It’s enough to —’

‘She had a brother, didn’t she?’

Neil breathed deeply. ‘Just don’t contact her.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m hanging up,’ Neil repeated, and he did, pressing the Disconnect button hard, hoping that Adam wouldn’t send him the link, since if he did, Neil might have to click through and look at the picture. Look at Rose, out there in New Mexico with Georgia Whoeverthefuck.

The traffic on the road between the boardwalk and the old city had picked up, rickety taxis alternating with late-model Mercs. Neil weaved through the vehicles, eager, suddenly, to be back in the private room with Azim and Elin. Since that night in the rain a year ago he had been sure that he and Adam could carry on, just somewhat differently, slightly recalibrated, maybe even for the better. Perhaps, after all, forgiveness could be provisional, a probation rather than an acquittal. He climbed the steps to the restaurant.

The bodyguards stood motionless against the wall. Elin was asleep in his chair, chin on chest. His sheath of family photos had fallen from his lap onto the floor; the laminated face of a small girl, eyes wide, was lying beside her father’s Italian shoe. Azim was eating kumquats. He smiled at Neil with his full mouth as he sat down.

Elin woke up when the maître d’ came in with the bill. Neil reached for his wallet to contribute. Azim half-wagged, half-pointed a finger at him. ‘Your money,’ he said, ‘is no good in my country.’

He and Elin laughed. Neil saw the joke, and laughed too, though it was Farid’s money, not his, that they were celebrating. Not even Farid’s, in fact, though they didn’t need to know that. He gave them nothing.

Adam wasn’t sure that Neil had rung off until he lowered the phone from his ear and saw the word Disconnected on the screen, below it the call’s duration, 7:47. He wasn’t annoyed by his friend’s brusqueness; he wasn’t distressed by the photo. On the contrary, he felt vindicated, almost elated. The girl was real, and, since she was real, she might be able, somehow, to release him.

The immigration minister bustled through the office, accompanied by his condescending adviser, en route to somewhere more enclosed. Adam scarcely looked up from Rose’s profile. The warmest acknowledgement he could hope for was another ‘Good to see you’.

Heidi appeared at the entrance to his cubicle. He closed his browser and enlarged the briefing paper he was writing on the relative efficacy of state and private deportation squads. These documents were the extent of his discourse with the powerful. Adam knew that half the time they were destined to languish, unread, at the bottom of the minister’s overstuffed red box.

‘Coffee?’ Heidi said. ‘Last call.’

‘Can’t now,’ Adam said. ‘But later?’

‘How much later?’

‘Do you mean, what time do I get off?’

‘No, I mean, should I just ask someone else?’

Adam frequently coffeed with Heidi, up in the deathly canteen (his preference) or down in one of the overpriced chains (hers). Sometimes, in the summer, they would scrimmage through the tourists photographing the squirrels to eat their sandwiches together on the lawn in St James’s Park. Occasionally they went for an after-work drink at the ye olde pub in the alley near the ministry. Their boozing male colleagues loosened their ties, stuffed their non-drinking hands into their pockets and thrust out their hips; the women crossed one arm beneath their busts and sipped their gin and tonics; all of them shot prurient glances at Adam and Heidi, who were widely assumed to be having an affair — an impression that arose because they spoke to each other in the office, actual words, physical mouths and ears, and human-to-human contact had come to seem intrusive, verboten, a borderline molestation in the high email age.

‘Twisted my arm,’ Adam said. ‘But, look, I’ve got a meeting with Nick five minutes ago. After that, okay? If I haven’t strangled him.’

Nick walked past the cubicle in one of his trademark postman shirts, averting his gaze.

Adam did a rapid overheard-office-insult calculation: insultee’s walking pace multiplied by interval between insult and his appearance on the scene, divided by volume of insulter’s voice. Nick probably hadn’t heard. It was probably just their adultery that he was ignoring.

‘Close,’ Heidi said. ‘Careful.’

‘Always,’ Adam said, and smiled.

Too much. Heidi blushed, a picturesque Anglo-Chinese burnish. Adam looked meaninglessly at his screensaver: him and Neil at the Faithful Couple, scanned, uploaded and immortal.

Okay, they flirted. They flirted just enough to salve the blow to his ego from the loosenings and sags, the ambushing jowls. But nothing happened, nothing ever had, less even than with those two women on the Strand, and that had been nothing, too. It was mostly jokes, him and Heidi, wisecracks and one-liners, like him and Neil, you could say, plus an implicit mutual acknowledgement, the understanding that he needed to share with at least one person in the ministry: We are still two human beings, even here in the machine.

These days, when he tried to have sex with Claire, she generally kissed him back, kissed him off, the way his grandmother might have done if he had kissed her on the lips by accident — mouth closed and pursed, unyielding, on the appalled side of polite — and Adam rolled away and lay on his back, no part of their bodies touching, offended and ashamed. These days Claire’s idea of seduction, when she was sure the children were asleep and felt she ought to, was to reach under the duvet, hitch up her nightie and say, ‘We can fuck if you want.’

He couldn’t make her want him. When he trimmed the old-man hairs in his nostrils and ears, it was Heidi’s notice he was anticipating. She pirouetted and returned to her desk, only her slender top half visible, like some graceful aquatic bird, as she weaved between the serried desks and computer screens.

Adam turned back to his screensaver. Over the years he had wavered about whose arm was interrupting the picture’s edge. It might be hers. Very likely it was hers. He had given less attention to the tree itself, the deep grooves in the bark and the hollowed-out crevice that, now he came to focus on it, looked as if it might swallow them.

The question was straightforward, Nick insisted in the meeting room. Thirty thousand asylum-seekers, give or take, arrived in the country each year. How many of them departed? The minister needed to know. The higher the figure, the better, obviously, but at a minimum they needed a number.

Nick sucked the end of his pen. When he withdrew it from his mouth the lid lingered between his lips; he picked it out with his other hand. Like Adam he had transferred from crime to immigration, but more recently and importantly. Extended acquaintance hadn’t made them friends. On the contrary, theirs was one of those office relationships in which longevity instils a firm, empirical assurance that they never would be, a certainty that was itself a kind of comfort. Nick was out of his depth but shrewd enough to realise.

Unfortunately not, Adam explained. The statisticians could rustle up a combined, annual figure for forcible removals and the voluntary departures that were reported to the authorities. But that wouldn’t correspond to the number of arrivals for the year and couldn’t safely be compared with it.

‘Why not? Of course it can.’

Nick bent the pen between his thumbs as if he meant to break it. A noose of pimples ringed his neck above his shirt collar; he had lost much of his hair since their days together in crime and shorn the horseshoe that remained.

They had said something about a brother, one of them had, Adam was sure of it. Taos, New Mexico.

‘Adam?’

‘Because they aren’t processed quickly enough,’ Adam said. ‘The figures don’t tally, you see. The ones we remove this year arrived last year, or the year before, or even the year before that.’

There was a jug of misty water on the table but no glasses.

‘Three years ago?’

Why shouldn’t he contact her? He could do it tactfully, respectfully, enquiring about her welfare. Hers and her father’s.

‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Have you seen the files in Croydon? It’s ridiculous. They’re stacked three feet thick. Though some of them, when it takes that long, end up being allowed to stay on compassionate grounds even if their claim has been refused. And of course quite a lot of them sort of vanish in between.’

Sheila, the Head of Returns, was on long-term sick, but Adam was still her deputy for purposes of pay and rank. Adam Tayler, Deputy Head of Returns. He could no longer tell himself that he was playing against type. This was his type.

Nick looked at Adam and then at the far, unoccupied end of the table. ‘The permanent secretary would like an answer,’ he said in a menacingly calm tone. ‘The minister wants to know, presumably so he can tell Parliament. He doesn’t want to hear, “We don’t know”. He doesn’t want to say it.’

Nick left it there.

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said eventually. ‘I’m not sure what we can do.’

Or he could be casual, jaunty: Hi!!!! Remember me?? As if there were nothing in the world to be ashamed or sensitive about.

Nick blew out his cheeks. ‘Okay, take a previous year. Take 2002. Tell me how many asylum-seekers who lodged claims in 2002 have gone. We will extrapolate that into an annual proportion.’

‘Sorry,’ Adam said. ‘Removals aren’t tabulated by date of arrival. The stats people are fixing that, in fact — you know, cohort tracking. From this year, I think. But for what you want, somebody would have to go through the paperwork on every decision. Sorry.’

There must have been a time, Adam had concluded, there must have been a moment when he was supposed to have made his move, like a middle-distance runner taking off around a bend. He should have seen a bill through Parliament, owned a crisis, God knew there were enough of them to go round. Half of it — success or stagnation, becoming a 7 or not — was dumb luck, but the other half was taking your chances when they came. There was a slow stream in the Civil Service, less formal but just as tractive as the fast one, and he had stumbled onto it. If he wasn’t careful by the end of his thirties he would find himself sitting it out, buckling up for the long, lengthening wait for the pension. Adam saw people doing that, dull behind the eyes after they had given up. That would mean twenty-five years to refine one of the functions available to the bypassed in departmental ecology: to be an avuncular throwback (he would wear braces, hum his school song), or, worse, a ‘character’ (he would wear odd socks and assault the photocopier). Worst of all, he might be exiled to some acronymous quango, which twice a year would lodge harmless reports on border queues or prison diets in the library of the House of Commons.

Nick scowled, put the pen back in his mouth and bent over his papers. After a minute Adam understood that he was supposed to leave. He stood and returned to his desk.

The evening before he had seen Will — Will from his job in television, Will from Tenerife — being interviewed outside a broadcasting awards ceremony on a reddish carpet. Will from television — on television. He looked slimmer than he had been a decade before, and taller, somehow, though of course he couldn’t have been. Cuban heels, possibly. He was controller of one of the BBC’s new cable channels; something that he had commissioned had won a gong. Will had smiled and pushed his glasses up his nose as he accepted the interviewer’s congratulations.

Adam emailed Heidi: Survived. Your place or mine?

He would look again that evening, after the children were in bed. There were only a few hours to get through first.

Who was Neil to say he shouldn’t contact her?

Home for the companionable violence of bath-time, the silent and dependable teamwork with Claire, in the miniature factory the maisonette had become: food in, recycling, excrement, and reasonably clean and well-nourished children out. After the bath came the borderline anarchy of the interlude before bed, Adam poised on the landing outside the kids’ bedroom like a referee in a bout of all-in wrestling (almost everything is allowed).

‘Cartoons tonight,’ Harry said, fiddling with his penis. ‘One more?’

‘Not tonight, lollipop.’

‘Me too,’ Ruby said. She had Claire’s features but hers were finer, almost gaunt. In the bath, with her hair slicked back, and sometimes when she was crying, Adam could just make out the baby in her face, the new-born physiognomy that he knew she would soon lose. She had fallen in the park that day and scraped her little knees.

‘Mummy,’ Harry shouted down the stairs, ‘it’s cartoons tonight, isn’t it?’ — the divide and rule instinct kicking in, as primal, Adam had noticed, as the dancing instinct, the storytelling instinct and the nostalgia instinct.

‘No,’ Claire shouted up. ‘Now get to bed.’

‘Bedtime,’ Adam said. ‘I love you, beetle-bugs.’

‘I need a poo,’ Harry said.

They’ll kill me in the end, Adam thought.

When they were down he closed the front door quietly and got into their key-scratched car, sweeping the accumulated parking vouchers, empty smoothie containers and maps printed off the internet from the dashboard into the well of the passenger seat. Adam had a weekly arrangement with a moped driver from the Bengal Express. The driver, Suleiman, met him at the perimeter of the restaurant’s delivery zone, by the side of Ealing Common, to exchange a lamb biryani and pilau rice for his eight pounds forty-five, a university penchant that Adam had re-embraced in fatherhood. Claire said there were bound to be acceptable takeaways that would deliver to their door and spare him the bother, but the Bengal Express was a dependable pleasure, and Adam relied on it.

Suleiman was standing in the designated spot, near a streetwise London oak, texting with his free hand and smelling of cigarette smoke. If someone had put Suleiman in a police-style line-up, a pageant of wiry men in their twenties all silhouetted or facing away, a plastic bag in one hand and a phone in the other, Adam would have picked him out every time. Something about his posture and demeanour.

‘Hi, Suleiman,’ Adam said.

‘Hi,’ Suleiman said, and smiled.

‘How you doing?’ Adam asked. They weren’t well-acquainted but they weren’t quite strangers, either. Perhaps it was only ever a question of degree.

‘Good,’ Suleiman said. ‘Good.’

‘Look after yourself.’

‘See you next week,’ Suleiman said. ‘Be safe.’

Listening to the Eagles on the drive home, the thought entered Adam’s head that he could be one of those men you sometimes read about who nip out on an errand, shouting ‘Five minutes, darling’, and take off, disappear. He couldn’t, of course. Of course not. The children.

He ate his food in the kitchen, mechanically, while Claire munched a salad and watched a vote-me-out-of-here television show, discharging the new civic duty of celebrity democracy: vote for the one you love, or the one you hate, only vote now and often. She shoved her used tissue between the cushion of the sofa and the arm, the umpteenth time, umpteen squared, but he decided not to mention it this evening.

Adam climbed the stairs to their bedroom and plugged in his laptop on the dressing table. He closed the door as the computer booted up, awaiting the insipidly welcoming melody.

He hadn’t meant to find her, honestly he hadn’t. At least, that hadn’t been Adam’s main or his first intention when he minimised his policy document, opened his browser and began that afternoon’s allotted Googling. His own internet footprint was still pathetically shallow: he scored a glancing reference in the write-up of an immigration conference at the University of Nottingham, plus a couple of mentions in online reports of school and university reunions. He searched for Chaz, Archie, Chloe, the university ex who was supposed to come to California, but hadn’t, leaving him to Neil, the pick-up, the Faithful Couple. Chloe was married and living in Dubai… A personalised zombie show, the phantoms parading before him on a whim and a click. The past was back, miraculously navigable like a new-old continent, peopled by the resurrected dead. History was no longer finished, even if you wanted it to be. You could unearth it, and vice versa.

From Chloe, to Neil. He rated several mentions in property magazines, mostly in conjunction with Farid, plus one or two in the business pages of bona fide newspapers, offering mollifying quotes on Farid’s behalf. Also the contacts section of the discreet website for Farid’s company. There were some internet-ancient mentions in Neil’s HappyFamilies capacity, in schadenfreude-heavy analyses of the dotcom bust. He was much more prolific than Adam.

From Neil, that afternoon, to Yosemite. He found Trey easily, almost instantly, the distinctive first name making him conspicuous if you knew how to look. Trey was still working as a guide in northern California, but for a different outfit. This new operator’s website included a photo of him (filled-out, greyer) dangling a salmon from a fishing rod, an amiable grin in place of the snarl Adam envisaged (What the fuck, you guys?). Next he found the gay couple from the camping trip. Their first names, Mike and Patrick, unexpectedly returned to him, along with the excavated details that they lived in Reno, and that one of them (both, he soon established) ran a landscape gardening firm.

It was only after that — after Chaz, Archie, Chloe, Neil; Trey, Mike and Patrick — that Adam came to Rose.

In the past two years, every few weeks, he had tried ‘Rose AND Eric AND Boulder’, but it was useless without her full name. All he remembered was that she had one of those only-in-America, ethnically oxymoronic portmanteau surnames: O’Malley-Rodriguez, Romario-Johansson, Esquivel-Schlezinger, something like that. He had seen the double-barrel on the slip of paper she gave to Neil when she marched to their tent to say goodbye, trying to be steadfast. The two of them had looked at the name and address, printed carefully in unjoined letters, a wonky xxx appended at the bottom, when they were sitting next to each other on the bus to San Francisco. He remembered that she had drawn a little heart in place of the dot over an i… at least one i. He had never seen that scrap of paper again and had no idea what Neil had done with it. Probably he had thrown it away, or left it in his jeans when they went into the wash.

In his cubicle, Adam concentrated. He closed his eyes. Irish-Mexican. Cuban-Swedish. Italian-German. Definitely German, he realised, but it felt like German should come first. German-Balkan. German-Hispanic. German… Celtic! Schneider. Koestler. Five minutes later, he thought he had it: Schmidt!

Schmidt-Davies. Schmidt-Evans. Schmidt-McNeil.

He eliminated several dozen other permutations. He had given up and moved on to his father (something about his consultancy work, a letter he had written to a newspaper about the green belt) when, of its own accord, it came to him: Ferguson. Schmidt-Ferguson! Schmidt-Ferguson. Rose Schmidt-Ferguson.

Rose Schmidt-Ferguson.

He was almost sure and giddy and terrified but there wasn’t much on her, either. He really ought to get back to his document, prepare for his meeting with Nick. She cropped up in a list of students at a college in Arizona that Adam had never heard of. Class of ’00, that sounded about right, they numbered by the year of graduation, didn’t they? High school’s what I mean.

Had to be her. But there was nothing else.

MySpace was his last gambit of the day. He already had a ghost profile though he had hardly ever used it.

She was there. There she was.

He searched for her, her name came up, he clicked through to her profile page, and she was on his screen quicker than he was expecting — too quickly, he wasn’t altogether ready for her. He glanced sharply away from the screen and towards the padded partition between his cubicle and the outside world. Be smiling, Adam thought, as he trained his eyes on the list of internal telephone numbers and fire-escape instructions that were pinned to the partition. Please be smiling — untraumatised, unvictimised, too well balanced to be a cause of retribution. At the same time he knew that her smile would prove nothing. Of course she would be smiling. Nobody posted a photo of themself frowning. It was childish superstition to think the image would express her essence and fate, Google-age voodoo.

Smile, Rose. Please.

She wasn’t smiling. But neither was she weeping or grimacing or wearing a wimple. The photo was too posed and affected to infer a mood. She sat in profile, a curtain of hair obscuring her cheek, her visible eye wide and staring. Her hair… She was a brunette in the photo, but Adam had an image of Rose as a fairer girl, almost blond, a blonde wearing a sarong… He might be mistaken. She might have dyed it. She might have changed beyond his recognition. He had changed. Why expect her to be the same, faithful to his half-invented memory, conveniently imperishable, eternally fifteen years old? (Fifteen!) Why should the decay that his mirror averred each morning — the crow’s feet around his eyes, the body hair that, having vanquished his shoulders, was mystifyingly colonising his upper arms — be surprising or disappointing in her? Of course it was her.

Adam had scratched his knee. He had called Neil. Probably he would have sent his friend the link he didn’t want, if Heidi hadn’t materialised in his cubicle. He might have written to her then and there.

Five minutes of top-up exegesis at the most, Adam told himself at Claire’s dressing table, the computer screen emitting its lunar glow but the bedroom otherwise dark. Or ten. Ten minutes at the outside. There might be something he had missed.

This time he retrieved her profile instantly. Her entry was almost as scant and poorly maintained as his own, as if, like him, she had registered and then lost interest (though for his part Adam wasn’t tech-savvy enough for much elaboration). Besides Rose’s move to New Mexico, he gleaned the names of two friends, Rio and Todd, and of her brother, George. She had uploaded no further photos, specified no interests and published no blog posts.

Adam wondered how she thought of them now. At first, he speculated at the dressing table, she might have been proud of what had happened, bragged about it, even. She might have become a minor celebrity in her high school on account of her escapade. At first; and that could have been how she depicted that night for a few years. But that, Adam knew, was as much as he could legitimately hope for, and possibly too much. Instead she might have been humiliated by that farewell tableau, too ashamed to forgive her father for witnessing it, her resentment and his incomprehension later curdling into estrangement. (Once, when his parents visited him at university, Adam’s mother had stumbled upon the condoms in his bedroom, their eyes had met, and they hadn’t spoken for a month.) She might have regretted the liaison instantly, been sobbing for the fact of Neil that morning rather than over his departure. Later, at that college in Arizona, what did she say to people — boyfriends, for example — about the pale Englishman who had seduced her in California, and the overconfident friend who encouraged him and would have seduced her if he could?

He caught his breath as it occurred to him she might be able to see that Adam Tayler, London, England had searched for and found her. Unlikely, he reassured himself. In any case, his name wouldn’t mean much to her. It wouldn’t be his name that she remembered.

In the children’s bedroom, Ruby cried out. Adam froze, listening, but the yelp came only once. Bad dream, probably. Rats or bats or witches. He was grateful to the children now, in a way; or, he and they were quits over this. Ruby had induced the fierce remorse, and the fear, both of which Adam knew he might never shake off entirely, might have to live with for ever, dull and tolerable but persistent like a burned-out infatuation. At the same time everything before his children now seemed part of a different innings or account, the two of them forming a human statute of limitations.

He shouldn’t have done that to you, Adam might write to her. We shouldn’t have done that to you. We’re sorry. I’m sorry. Some breathless declaration along those lines. Or, I don’t know whether your father told you, but I knew… So you see, it was me too, in a way. Me as much as him. Only after the apology would he write, The thing is, in the morning, your father… I know it’s selfish of me but if you could just…

Possibly Neil was right about contacting her. She couldn’t have forgotten — nobody forgets that — but she might have relegated them to the back of the closet of her memory, only occasionally uncovering them when she was sifting through the clutter of her childhood. Possibly she thought about it every day. Either way she might not be pleased to hear from him, however urgently he repented. I just need to know that you’re okay. Tell me.

At the same time, studying Rose’s photo in his bedroom, Adam was furious with her. Not for being younger than they first thought (had they thought?), nor for swimming and splashing them. Not for anything at all that she had done, in fact. He blamed her only for existing. Had she not existed, if she hadn’t been there, it couldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t be crouched masochistically over his computer screen; he would worry about his daughter only in the ordinary way, without this superfluous, gnawing superstition. Their friendship, his and Neil’s, wouldn’t have been contaminated from the start. If she ceased to exist now, there would be no victim, and so, from a certain, twistedly legalistic point of view, no offence to speak of or to pay for. Looking at the screen (Warning: Battery Low!), Adam oscillated between an impulse to atone and an urge to obliterate her.

He heard a footfall on the stairs. Or a spontaneous creak. Probably a creak. These old houses.

Or, if not her, could he at least obliterate those few days of his life? If he were allowed to rewind and delete any three of the days he had lived, he would choose the three in Yosemite. His life could be three days shorter: that would be a fair exchange and settlement, surely. Or let him erase that one evening, just those few hours. To be able to go back and cancel a few hours in a whole life — was that really so unreasonable a request? Everybody should be entitled to that, he thought. At least to that.

He looked at the screen; the nails of his right hand scratched his left forearm. His heart sped up. Perhaps without those few hours, Adam considered, there would have been no him and Neil at all. Maybe they had stayed together as might two old lags determined to keep an eye on each other, united by their misdemeanour rather than in spite of it. Turn a betrayal inside out and you found its opposite, a secret and a bond. Perhaps that was what friendship came down to: trusting each other with the very worst things — because you had to, didn’t you? You had to trust and tell someone — the shaming weaknesses, the lowest abasements, the flaws and offences that would always be there between you, even if you never spoke of them. A lifelong, affectionate mutual blackmail.

Friendship was keeping an eye on each other. Their bond was Rose.

‘What are you doing?’ She switched on the light.

‘Nothing,’ Adam said. He swivelled round to face Claire, reaching behind him to snap the screen as he turned, missing on the first swipe and knocking over a tube of body lotion.

‘What is it, Adam?’ She was focusing on the flattened computer, or rather on the shallow reflection of the computer in the dressing table mirror. ‘Tell me. What are you looking at?’

Curiosity to indignation to rage inside a dozen words. She dipped her head forward expectantly, minus the smile that usually finished the gesture.

‘Nothing, Clezzy,’ he repeated. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Oh, Adam,’ she said. She gripped her hips as she did when reprimanding their children. ‘For God’s sake.’

It’s funny how trust goes, Adam thought. Part of him wouldn’t have minded, might have quite liked, a chance to say, like a philanderer in a farce, It isn’t what you think. Some in flagrante gotcha featuring a willing blonde or two and a comically timed entrance by his wife. But not this. This wasn’t even the low-risk, high-bandwidth version of that moment that Claire apparently thought it was, in which she would catch him with his dick in one hand and the fingers of the other typing misspelled, all-capitalised instructions to a virtual friend in Latvia or Manila.

This was the opposite of pornography: it was expiation. It really wasn’t what she thought. But what was he supposed to say?

‘It isn’t what you think,’ he said.

Claire laughed, caustically and unamused. ‘What do I think?’ she asked, her voice like a ticking bomb.

He couldn’t say to her, In California, Neil… Or, Me and Neil… Thing is, her father… And then when Ruby was born… Today, at work… Come and take a look. It wouldn’t make sense to her. He confided fears and embarrassments to Claire that no one else could see, not even Neil, vanities and midnight doubts and, recently, his haemorrhoids. His grief at still not being a 7. But not this. It was too late, and Rose was theirs, not hers.

‘Ballroom-dancing lessons,’ he said. ‘For your birthday, there’s a place in Bloomsbury. You’ve spoiled it now, Claire. Christ.’

Adam stretched his legs in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. He folded his arms over his chest. He was fond of his lie. Neil should have been there to appreciate it.

He could see her not believing him. She was staring past him into the mirror — the huddle of cosmetics in the foreground, the computer nestling among them, then the back of Adam’s chair, his neck, the resilient fullness of his hair, and Claire herself, shrunken and open-mouthed in the middle distance. He could see her wanting to rush over, flip up the screen, demand or remember or guess his password and ascertain what or who was in his browser. But she couldn’t. The manoeuvre would be too loud an intimation of divorce. And she was too tired.

She said, ‘I’m going to bed,’ not repudiating his explanation but not accepting it, either.

‘Me too,’ Adam agreed, not wanting to leave her alone with the computer.

She sat on the edge of the bed to undress, rotating her torso so her breasts were shielded from him when she took off her bra (Ridiculous!). She reached under her pillow for the extra-large T-shirt that she liked to sleep in; she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and anoint her face (the same brand of moisturiser since they met, its aroma part of the smell of her, a scent Adam had thought he would always recognise and love). He hurried out of his clothes, draping them over the chair and the computer, and lay on his back under the duvet, straight and still like a corpse in a coffin on The Sopranos. His foot met a stray piece of train set; he kicked it onto the carpet, stubbing a toe.

She turned out the light and joined him, lying on her side, facing away.

‘Who did you vote for?’

‘You know who I voted for… Oh, that. No one,’ Claire said. ‘They’re all as bad as each other.’

Nursery-rhyme sing-songs in church halls… accidental shits in swimming pools… perpetual laundry. The immurement. If Claire had stayed at the gallery she might have been running the place by now. But the salary/childcare sums had made no sense, even with her mother helping them one day a week, rising to two when she lost the second man, the bloke with the zany cummerbund from the wedding.

‘That knee looks sore, doesn’t it? Did she fall off her scooter again?’

Claire grunted.

They had got money all wrong, Adam now saw, held it in insufficient respect. He hadn’t foreseen how the gap would grow, their line on the money graph rising slightly, then flatlining, while the Neils of the world — while Neil’s — shot up faster and for longer, until you would need a squiggly break in the graph’s vertical axis to compare their incomes. At the beginning, when it had seemed like a windfall, he had tried to regard Neil’s wealth as harmless, amusing, but when it lasted, became a structural fact in their lives, they had experienced money’s cleavage, its powerful negative magnetism.

‘Nick gave me a going over today. Asylum stats. Imbecile.’

Nothing.

She never said so — you couldn’t say it because of the children, the children were supposed to be enough — but he knew Claire had expected more. Not salary or square-footage but a different kind of more. A general rather than a particular, material more. Sometimes, when he contemplated his life, Adam saw himself driving round and round an underground car park with a voucher in his mouth.

She sighed, plumped her pillow, sighed again. Under the duvet she pulled her T-shirt down towards her knees. He raised his head, anticipating a last-ditch conversation — Let’s not go to bed on an argument, Claire always said — but she was silent. The Dinky duet was sung out.

In bed, ostracised, Adam remembered how, when they were very young, he and Harriet had seen his parents dancing together (in his memory they were dressed to the nines: a wedding, maybe) and had thought them as beautiful as a fairy tale, the most beautiful and enamoured couple in the world. It was their fault, all that happiness, or what had felt like happiness to children, leaving him with too little to prove. When he spoke to them now they complained about each other in icy, ominous periphrases (Please tell your father…). He was noticing a new tightness around his mother’s mouth, and a new, defensive habit of introducing her remarks with I’m sorry, but… as if the world were perpetually countermanding her (I’m sorry, but she’s beautiful). At family meals his father constantly refilled Adam’s wine glass, and Claire’s, to reduce the supply to his wife. Adam had begun to wonder about the bank account and — who knew? — bedroom indiscretions that his parents might be concealing, must always have been.

The known unknowns of other people’s marriages, even theirs. Even his: Heidi, and that smooch on the Strand, and Rose.

Claire loved him, he thought. Her anger told him that. He loved her, too. He still loved her, even if, most of the time, the love didn’t seem especially helpful or relevant. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, except maybe the children, adept as they were at finding the cracks and prising them apart.

‘Love you,’ he said. He rolled onto his side to spoon her, and she let him, though she might already have been asleep.

You see, if you are okay, that would mean… Could you possibly ask your father to take it back?

Their names were Sian and Alida and they were from New Zealand. Alida was Neil’s and Sian was Adam’s, one of those spontaneous assortments determined instantly by looks, height and ebullience. At least, they said their names were Sian and Alida, who knew what they were really called. Adam had introduced himself as Henry and Neil as Kevin.

‘At the opera,’ he said, when Sian asked where they had been that evening. ‘You know, Covent Garden. Carmen. It was a blast.’

‘My friend here, Henry, he’s a set designer,’ Neil put in.

‘Papier mâché mostly,’ Adam clarified. ‘Collages, murals. Castles that they slide out of the wings.’

‘Slaves and elephants,’ Neil said.

‘No kidding,’ Sian said.

‘Choice,’ Alida said.

The two men had been out to dinner at a burger place behind the Strand. It was the summer after Adam told Neil the truth about California, the year before he exhumed Rose. They were ambling in the direction of Trafalgar Square when the rain began — a sudden, unEnglish monsoon, overrunning the drains and flooding along the gutters as if London’s subterranean rivers were erupting, one of those violent summer rains that make it seem the whole grey, nonporous city must drown. They were drenched within a minute and took shelter in an airline salesroom’s doorway. Sian and Alida had occupied the recess before them. The women were tipsier than Neil and Adam, a condition and opportunity that they clocked straight away, their decommissioned chat-up instincts still whirring.

‘We’re having a party,’ Sian said, after the sizings-up and jokes about swimming for it. ‘You should come.’

‘Who else is going?’ Adam said. The downpour felt like a carnival.

‘Just us,’ Sian said. She cocked her hips and pinched his lapel. The rainwater was trickling into the doorway.

‘Come,’ Alida said to Neil, casting down her eyes so as to turn them up again. Twenty-seven, Neil estimated. Twenty-eight. Knee-high suede boots, tight jeans, leopard-print accessories. Grown-up women: drunk, a long way from home and looking unfussily for a good time.

It was odd, in a way, that the two of them had never been through this rite together, not like this. The backing up and egging on and keeping pace. Adam glanced across at Neil — questions and permission and joint amazement that this could still be happening to them, in their mid-thirties, with their kids and careers and the rest, that they might be allowing it to. Neil nodded.

‘What sort of party is it?’ Adam said. The rain had slicked and darkened his hair.

‘Well, Henry, it’s this sort,’ Sian said, pushing onto her tiptoes to kiss him. As their lips met — just the lips, briefly — Adam’s eyes found Neil’s again.

Neil and Alida kissed, too, politely, understanding that they were supposed to. Her lips were cold like a mermaid’s, the back of her coat where he gripped her was wet and warm at once. He kept his eyes open and saw the scalp beneath her hair, the brown roots that betrayed the blond. The water penetrating their hide-out looked like urine. When she diffidently introduced her tongue he pulled away.

The rain eased off and the four of them walked up the Strand and into the Aldwych, notionally to find a taxi to the women’s digs near Euston. A bus splashed gutter water over Neil’s legs, and outside the cocoon of the doorway and without the transfiguration of the rain, he could see that this was impossible. A swivel of his eyes and a nod from Adam and they absconded, diving into an unlicensed cab that pulled up serendipitously at the kerb.

That was the night Neil’s grievance over California lifted, or seemed to. To begin with he hadn’t been certain that it would. The first time they had seen each other after Adam told him, a year earlier, had been strange, strangerish, as if they were beginning their relationship again. Jess and Claire were there, and that had helped, since they couldn’t talk about California in front of them and, though the women didn’t much like each other and rarely pretended to, their niceties filled the air time. The next time had been at a kiddie-friendly party at the Taylers’. Neil was in the kitchen, watching Adam’s father show the children, other people’s children, how to strike the piñata that was strung up in the living room. Adam came in for a glass of water. As he turned the tap, Neil said, ‘To be honest, Ad, I’m not sure what I’m doing… I mean, to tell me now, after — something like that — after ten years…’

Adam had shot a nervous look towards Claire and rasped, ‘You told me it was nothing.’

‘That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Her not finding out.’

‘Tell Grandpa my turn,’ Harry said, taking Adam’s hand and leaning forward to drag him away, like a miniature workman on a cable.

Adam left the tap running; Neil turned it off. Jeremy struck the piñata over-arm and viciously, as if he were playing tennis, and split it.

From the beginning Neil had wanted to forgive him: in the underpopulated scheme of his life, he hadn’t seen what other choice he had. But he only truly managed to that night in the rain. The point was, Adam would have gone through with it. He would have gone to Euston with Sian and Alida if Neil had required him to; if that had been his price. The kiss in the doorway was enough, the new secret and shared vulnerability that they needed. An equal secret, this time. Again the two of them against the world.

On the back seat of the taxi, steam rising from his rain-soaked trousers, agreeing never to mention this without either of them saying a word, their Balkan driver pining for Pristina, Neil’s resentment seemed to wash away, as if it had only ever been an act. That was the end of her, he had hoped that night.

Jess was furious when he told her. Neil flew in from Baku, Jess from Buenos Aires, both of them retaining the rumpled vigour of the business-class traveller. They had sex immediately, out of habit as much as appetite, the sense that they ought to desire each other, the ghost of desire, as much as the thing itself. The lights were out as always, very little said, the distance Neil needed in his intimacy.

They showered. He shaved. They plugged in their BlackBerries, which rubbed alongside each other on the kitchen counter like mating reptiles. Neil told her about Rose. She couldn’t remain a secret, or a risk, or a threat. He would bring her into the open, neutralise her, on his own terms.

Neil told her about the girl, the tent and the uproar in the morning, the competition the night before, how they had left her there, crying. ‘I know I should have asked her,’ he said. ‘I know I should have told you about this before. I don’t know, I’m sorry.’

Jess was furious, but not about Rose. Neil, the tent and Yosemite sounded quite humane, she considered, compared with, say, the concrete base of a war memorial, a winter night in Yorkshire, and a drunk, married man. Fifteen wasn’t even that young, was her verdict. Little cow only got what she wanted, she was probably on a dare, who’s to say she was a virgin, anyway?

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Neil said. ‘She wasn’t.’ He pictured her blushing and blushing when Adam flirted with her beside the campfire. Afterwards, in the tent, she had put her T-shirt back on, and her knickers, and she had propped her head on his chest and babbled about movies and friends and what the friends thought of those movies.

Her father should have known better, Jess said. (Don’t stay up late, honey.) Anyway it was more than a decade ago, she told him. It was nothing.

Adam had better not contact her.

‘That’s what I keep saying, I know.’

She was furious with him for having taken the trouble to keep it from her. Not for not telling her, exactly. Had she found out about Rose accidentally, pursuing some leading remark that Neil let slip, this scrape wouldn’t have mattered, Jess said. There were bound to be unmentioned details from their prior lives, half-forgotten summer jobs and abandoned hobbies, dead friendships and tipsy clinches too trivial to have brought up, which came as tiny yet salutary reminders of each other’s mystery. She understood that. As for her, Neil didn’t know the half of it, she told him. (Those men on the pedalo and her friend.)

The offence lay not in the trifling facts, nor in their concealment, but in the importance Neil himself had ascribed to them: in the secrecy and the conspiracy. A secret between him and Adam.

‘You fucking boys,’ Jess said. She picked up a corkscrew from the kitchen counter, registered that she was pointing it at Neil, and put it down. ‘I mean, I can just see you. Stewing. Should I tell her? When should I tell her? Oh, Adam, what do you think? When I never would have given a fuck.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘What else do you two keep to yourselves?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What is it, then? Card school? Hash cakes? Little boys?’

‘Jess, don’t.’

‘Christ, Neil… You’re nobody’s fool and nobody’s child. You’re your own you, that’s the point of you, can’t you see that? That’s why I… You’re all there. Except when you’re with him, and you become this sort of adolescent sidekick. Look at him, Neil, and look at you. Look where you both are.’

‘I said don’t.’

‘It’s like he’s your fucking father or something.’

‘No,’ Neil said. ‘Not any more.’

Actually it had bolstered Neil, Adam’s confession; it had tipped the scales in his favour. The yeoman and master routine was winding up. These days he saw Adam’s faults, but had come to regard the annoyances (that thing he did with his jaw) as a part of his appeal. Fellowship in weakness was one of friendship’s consolations.

‘Or your mother.’

‘What’s my mother got to do with it?’

‘Oh Neil,’ Jess said. She picked up a knife and slashed open a packet of mozzarella, as if an aggressive pretence of normalcy might save them. The cloudy suspension ran over her hands. ‘You’re done for.’

The two of them had gone up to Yorkshire for the funeral of Jess’s mother at the end of the previous year. A dozen mourners, plus a vicar who hadn’t known the dead woman, in a church so cold that no one had removed their coats. No music, because neither Jess nor her mother had chosen any. On a shelf in her mother’s bedroom closet, in a shoebox, Jess found: a yellowed local newspaper cutting about a rugby match in the twenties, in which her mother’s father had played wing three-quarter; a photo of her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a satin dress, her father wearing a baggy suit, a gallon of Brylcreem and the smile of a man who had something to look forward to (though what did Jess know about that — what did she really know?); a letter from another man, not her father, written a year after her parents were married and a year before Jess was born, which said nothing in particular, and at the same time, between the lines, something very particular (Ever yours, Ted); a very small brown envelope containing a lock of Jess’s baby hair (she hadn’t realised how fair she had been); a letter Jess had sent home from university during what, judging from the date, must have been the middle of her first term, which genuinely said nothing in particular, between the lines or on them, and which she had no recollection of writing; a retirement card from her mother’s colleagues at the primary school where, after she was widowed, she had worked as a dinner lady, as much for the company as for the money. More than the loss itself — which, truth be told, as Jess liked it to be, was sudden but less than devastating — what stung her, she said, was the sense of what her mother’s life had been. And the unspoken question that this observation prompted, about what her own life would add up to.

Mothers.

‘What do you —’

‘It’s only ever half of you, Neil. As if it’s a part-time job or something. It’s not only Adam, it’s like a bit of you’s missing.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Jess laid the knife on the chopping board and looked down at the sliced mozzarella. He could still be surprised by how short she was without heels.

She sighed, then looked up at him. ‘Is this it, then?’ She had stopped her automated cooking, but for a moment Neil thought she was talking about their dinner. He glanced at the hob. ‘I mean, for us, you twat.’

‘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.’