The Faithful Couple

2007

Neil squeezed the key fob, his recessed headlights blinked at him, and he walked around the corner to Adam’s road. These days he tended to park out of sight when he visited the Taylers, whether or not there was space nearby. Too much, somehow, for his car (a two-seater BMW, silvery grey, his choice, this time) to be visible through Adam’s window, squatting extravagantly in the street like a visiting potentate’s carriage. Likewise it would be uncouth to insist that Adam come to his new flat in Bayswater (Neil’s place, all his, not rented and not shared, almost no mortgage). He meant this deficit of hospitality as a kindness, as he hoped his friend could see. Admittedly a kindness that might look like coldness, and in truth could gratify Neil as either. Though in point of fact he was hardly ever in his flat himself, between his meetings with clients in New York and Monaco, Abu Dhabi and Geneva, his client dinners in the stratum of London restaurants where only the host’s menu lists the prices, and his weekend summonses to clients’ mansions and estates. There was rarely anything in the fridge for him, or anyone else, to consume, besides half-drunk bottles of wine, fungal milk and Sam’s pizza leftovers.

‘Excuse me,’ Neil said.

A woman was obstructing Adam’s gateway; from where Neil stood she was framed by the white pointing that arced around the suburban front door. Elderly, grey-white hair in a bun, wearing an off-beige mackintosh even though the evening was warm. She was texting, leaning backwards to compensate for her long-sightedness, one bony, fastidious finger poking the keypad in regular, intrepid jabs.

‘Not at all, dear,’ she said, pressing her back to the gatepost as he passed.

The woman looked up at the building as if she were casing it. Neil considered challenging her until he remembered the For Sale board that was affixed to the fence. He skipped up the steps and rang the bell.

Claire’s meet-and-greet smile flattened when she saw him. She peered around his shoulder as if she were expecting someone else.

‘Come in,’ she said, a few seconds slower than she should have. ‘’Fraid he’s not back yet. Something about illegal immigrants, the usual.’ Compensating, she added, ‘Drink? Don’t think he’ll be long.’

They had known each other for twelve years, but Neil couldn’t say that he and Claire were friends. Colleagues, in a way: mutually tolerant and intermittently cooperative, but dimly rivalrous and not entirely trusting. From the beginning he had wanted to like her, for convenience’s sake, and he had tried to like her, but at the same time there had always been a tempting, grubbily competitive satisfaction to be had in not liking her. They had rarely been alone together, awkward intervals when Adam fetched a drink or scolded or consoled a child, and never for very long.

‘Kids not here?’

‘With my mum. There’s a fairground on the common. I’m showing the flat today — can’t really do it when they’re rampaging.’ She gave a jokeless, strained laugh.

Neil thought about making his excuses. A client’s pet charity was throwing a reception in Park Lane, clean water for India, he ought really to be there, making a donation on Rutland’s behalf, pretending to socialise while discreetly foisting his business cards on the high-rolling do-gooders. He was missing it only because he had already postponed this evening twice: dinner for Adam’s birthday, the only birthday, besides Sam’s, that Neil reliably remembered and marked. His treat; he would be permitted that minor generosity, at least. He had been looking forward to the largesse.

The doorbell sounded before he managed to decide. Neil was closest; he pivoted and opened the door. The texting old woman bustled through it and past him. He closed the door behind her. That had been his first chance to leave, he saw afterwards.

‘I thought it must be you,’ the woman said. ‘Patricia.’ She extended a hand and Neil shook it. ‘Is this it? Of course it is, what am I saying? And this is your wife?’ Claire tried to correct her but Patricia wouldn’t be diverted. ‘The estate agent couldn’t make it, his message said to come anyway, I hope you don’t mind. Start at the top?’

She helped herself to the stairs.

‘Viewing,’ Claire stage-whispered to Neil. ‘Sorry.’

She turned and followed. Neil weighed his options. If he left now, or stayed where he was, Patricia might be offended. He went upstairs to join them.

‘Children’s bedroom?’ Patricia asked. ‘How old are they?’

‘Six and four,’ Claire said.

‘And such a pretty garden. Not yours, though. Never mind.’

Adam and Claire were selling up, cashing out. They couldn’t muster the surpluses that London had demanded, not the steeplechaser stamina nor the virtuoso chutzpah nor the money. London was spitting them out, north or east, to Essex or Cambridgeshire or Buckinghamshire, somewhere in the commuter belt, they hadn’t quite decided.

‘Nice clean bath,’ Patricia said. ‘I insist on a clean bath. Do these open?’ She pushed feebly at a sash window; it was paint-stuck and wouldn’t give. ‘They’ll need to get out, you see.’

‘Who?’ Neil asked, heaving up the panel for her.

‘Aesop. Aesop and Tallulah. They’re quite safe if they have a ledge or a parapet.’ She poked her head out of the window and peered down towards the front door and along the street. ‘All those sleeping policemen, they’re a plague. Still, nice light for the throne.’

Neil caught Claire’s glance before they realised that eye contact would be calamitous. She tried to swallow her laughter, disguising it as a warbled question. ‘Shall we see the other bedroom?’

‘Don’t,’ she whispered to Neil. ‘Please.’

Funny thing about the absurd: you could survive or ignore it on your own, but two made that impossible. Two made an audience, a confederacy, a secret.

‘Now, dear, this is much more like it,’ Patricia said. ‘They can shimmy down that roof and do their business in the garden there. Neighbours won’t mind, will they?’

‘Don’t think so,’ Neil said, straightening his face. ‘They’re very reasonable.’ Claire looked at the floor.

‘What do you do, dear?’

‘Wealth management. It’s a kind of fin —’

‘Yes, I thought so. He’s something in the City, that’s what I thought when I saw you outside. You’ll be moving somewhere bigger, I expect.’

‘Something like that,’ Neil said.

‘May I?’ Patricia said, gesturing towards the wardrobes. ‘Lovely. Lots of storage. Oodles. Will you have any more? If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Neil said. ‘Actually she wants me to get the snip.’

Keep a straight face and we can keep it going.

Claire fixed her eyes on the dressing table.

‘I wouldn’t, if I were you. You might change your mind. People do. Kitchen?’

Neil tried to meet Claire’s eyes again but she turned and hurried out. She had lost the weight that she put on with Ruby, Neil noticed. Her hair was still resplendent.

Patricia ran her texting finger along the kitchen counter and inspected it for dust. ‘They’ll need somewhere to sit down, of course,’ she said.

‘The cats?’ Neil asked. Claire spread a palm across her face.

‘Of course not. Not the cats. My grandchildren. I thought I explained. Yes, my son-in-law’s in the money business like you, dear, he’s away a lot — New York mostly, and lately these emergent markets, I’m not sure I’d put up with it if I were her, and between you, me and the gatepost I’m not certain I really trust him. Anyway I’m moving down to help a bit more. You know, after school, weekends.’

‘How old are they?’ Claire asked.

‘Eight and ten, little bit older than yours. Nice children. Bit spoiled. Bit noisy sometimes.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Neil said.

‘Oh, it’s all right. The children are the main thing now, you see. We’ve sold the cottage — I have, I suppose. Now, this is lovely!’ She moved into the living room. ‘On the small side but lovely. Are these the original shutters?’

‘Yes,’ Claire said. ‘South facing.’

Patricia had a large mole on her cheek that matched Neil’s, he noticed, though hers was covered and advertised by a smudge of orange face powder.

‘Yes, I can see them bouncing around in here. But it isn’t much for the money, is it? And such a nice bath. Good luck to you both.’ She ran a hand across her pale hair and smiled. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, letting herself out.

Claire leaned against the closed door, burying her face in the crook of her elbow. Neil sat on the stairs. She looked up and they let their eyes meet. They wanted to laugh but the hilarity had passed. Neil felt a flutter of guilt, less over the old woman than for the fact of the confederacy, the temporary partnership that was somehow misaligned.

‘Drink?’ Claire offered again. The smile that he had once considered superior seemed, this evening, ingenuously hospitable.

Neil glanced at his watch and hesitated. He could still make Park Lane if he hurried. But he was here now. Surely Adam couldn’t be much later. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long,’ Claire added.

‘Go on then,’ Neil said. ‘Twisted my arm.’ His second, best chance to leave, and he turned it down.

Neil went through to the sitting room and scanned the bookshelves while she poured. Art books, history books, political memoirs, Adam’s bid to maintain his student-age idea of his intellectual self. There were too few books on Neil’s expansive shelves in Bayswater: some Rough Guides (Provence, Copenhagen, Istanbul, the last their intended, now aborted destination for that summer); some Ian Fleming novels; a few textbooks on finance and investment that Tony McGough had foisted on him. It was a caste affectation, Neil had always thought, this three-dimensional wallpaper, less a record of reading (he wondered how many of these books Adam had ever opened) than a signalling device or membership requirement for the upper-middle classes.

Claire came through from the kitchen bearing two full wine glasses and an open bottle of white. She set the tray on the coffee table. Neil took a glass and sat in the armchair, his arms resting perpendicularly in front of him.

‘He saw your man,’ Claire said. ‘At the consultancy. Alan somebody?’

‘He’s not really my man,’ Neil said. ‘I just, you know, know one of the investors. I put a word in, that’s all, really. Did they hit it off?’

‘It went okay, I think. He hasn’t heard anything yet, though. It would mean more money.’

‘Fingers crossed. I’m sure he — what’s that thing he says? — he spanked it.’

Adam’s career reminded Neil of whichever medieval king it was in O-level history who won all his battles but lost every war. All his paper distinctions and mandarin respectability had left him naggingly unfulfilled and, he had managed to confide to Neil, unexpectedly impecunious. He had a chance, thanks to his friend, to escape the Home Office for a private consultancy, where the work would be more varied and somewhat better paid. Money-wise, Adam was on his own, Neil knew. His parents’ house had been sold during the divorce, and had anyway turned out to have been mortgaged to its fake-Tudor beams.

‘It’s funny, I think the fact that it came through you, it complicates it. Do you know what I mean? Crazy, really, you’re his closest friend, the others have all…’

‘I know,’ Neil said. ‘I understand.’ He was pleased to be able to dispense this favour to Adam.

‘You boys,’ Claire said.

By contrast Neil’s had been the sort of mish-mash career that in another era would have connoted failure, but in his implied the perpetual, shark-like motion of success. He had quit Farid at the start of the previous year. Farid wanted the tenants of a retail development that he owned to overstate their rents in his paperwork, thus inflating the value of the building so he could borrow more against it. He deputised Neil to lean on them. Nothing to worry about, Farid assured him, the genuine rents would catch up with the fictitious ones soon. Up, up and away… It was inducements, not threats or anything more sinister, which Neil was supposed to distribute. Farid’s bankers, distracted as they were by his World Cup and Grand Prix tickets, were unlikely to spot the ruse. Neil had baulked. He walked out and into Rutland Partners, an investment fund for HNWIs: High Net Worth Individuals. Tony McGough was his new boss.

Claire asked, ‘How are things with you?’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Can’t complain.’

Neil didn’t know what he had meant by that dismal evasion. He should have said, I’m rich, Claire. Amazing, isn’t it? I’m becoming rich. But she knew that already.

‘Still travelling all the time?’

‘Calms down a bit over the summer. Switzerland, maybe. And Cayman in September.’

Neil worked client side, peddling a discreetly asterisked vision of minimal risks, outwitted taxes and soaring returns, and sharing in the fat management fees that the HNWIs were reluctant but willing to pay for the dream of anti-gravitational prosperity. He had swung from the evanescing ether of Bimal’s website to Farid’s semi-solid buildings, then back to abstraction, this time in the guise of almost pure money. Money spawning money. The basics, he considered, had been constant since his peripatetic days in the pharmaceuticals trade, and his interminable summers and post-California stint in his father’s shop. Sell the customer what he wants to buy.

‘How is, you know, the market?’ She gave another nervous laugh.

‘Fine,’ Neil said. ‘You know, wolf from the door.’

They drank their wine, Claire taking tiny, feline but frequent sips. Neil looked at his watch.

‘How’s your father?’ she asked.

‘The same.’ He made a quick slashing gesture with his left hand — flat palm, sharp rotation at the wrist — conveying both a dim estimation of Brian’s life expectancy and a preference not to discuss it. Claire refilled their glasses.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Her phone rang and she retreated to the kitchen to answer. Neil only half-deciphered the conversation: ‘Why?… Fuck’s sake, Adam… Okay.’

She stood in the aperture between the two rooms and said, ‘He’s late. I mean, he’s even later. Christ. Doesn’t know when he’ll be back, minister on the warpath, apparently.’ Neil began to stand. ‘You’re welcome to stay for another.’

Her cheeks had a sauvignon glow. Neil had never overcome his impression, formed instantaneously in the smoky pub where Adam had introduced them, that Claire looked down on him. His money, he had latterly suspected, had made looking down on him all the more urgent. The market: the way she said it, and still judged him, her and Adam both. Or perhaps he was being unfair. Her T-shirt had bunched and ridden up above the elastic of her velour trousers.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

They had never been friends, but neither could Neil say that he knew her, or had ever really seen her, unrefracted by her husband, separate from her assigned role.

Claire fetched the second bottle. Neil took a couple of quick, noiseless paces and sat on the sofa. Between it and the wall he noticed a graveyard of mangled toys — a digger missing a wheel, a doll minus an arm, cherished objects that devotion had not kept from violence.

Classical music wafted from the kitchen, intricate, fine-boned, a piano without accompaniment. Concerto? Minuet? The nomenclature escaped him. Claire returned with the bottle and a corkscrew and sat beside him on the sofa. She opened and poured. Bored, Neil thought. Bored and lonely. And tired. She curled her feet up and under her buttocks and balanced a glass on her knee.

‘Do you miss her?’ Claire said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Not much, to be honest,’ Neil said. ‘Is that terrible? She feels — it’s hard to explain it — she’s like a film that ended, or a holiday. Or a job. It was supposed to end, I think.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. No reason.’

Even now he couldn’t say for certain why Jess had gone. Something to do with her age, a mid-thirties, stick-or-twist moment at which he had seen other women bolt, too; something to do with her mother’s death, and also, she had intimated, something to do with his mother’s death. She hadn’t helped him to rank these motives. She had already done her grieving in her head, as you might for the victim of a long, terminal illness, so that, for Jess, the final, literal end was more a technicality than a crisis. She had no interest in his money.

For a moment Neil thought Claire was going to admit to never having liked her, that amateurish barbed condolence, but instead she said, ‘She was sweet.’

Adam had come round with a bottle of whisky that evening but Neil had felt as much relief as anguish. They drank most of the whisky anyway. Even three or four doubles to the wind, Neil did not find his thumb poised to dial her number on his mobile. He slept better without her.

‘Sweet’s not the word I would have chosen.’

They both laughed, and Claire reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Neil glanced at the hand and across at her face; she withdrew the hand and smiled. Lonely and bored, Neil thought, and maybe also a harmless desire to feel desirable again. He remembered that moment in the pub when they first met, the ghost of flirtation he had glimpsed in the space between two blinks. He remembered how assiduous she had always been in laughing at his jokes. That had been fun, mean cruel fun, the interlude with the poor old lady.

They drank another glass of wine, sinking deeper into the sofa until they were almost horizontal. Claire began criticising Adam, gently, as an exasperated mother might, in low-key solidarity with Neil’s break-up. There was something contagious about romantic discord, just as there could be in marriage and child-bearing, Neil believed, if you weren’t careful. She said she wanted to shake Adam sometimes — of course he should take the consulting job if they wanted him, they really were very grateful. Sometimes Adam seemed so… absent. He was wonderful with the children but they got the best of him. She sometimes felt that there was nothing left for her.

Did Neil know what she meant? He said he did, assenting to this tactful, joint demolition, her resentments of her husband rising up to meet his, all those years of Adam cutting the bread too thick, or whatever his domestic foibles were, a call-and-response ritual that, now, was less an inverted contest in intimacy than a mutual commiseration.

Neil could say to her, There is something else you should know about your husband, It was before you met him but I think you should know anyway… Adam had been so adamant that she mustn’t find out.

She rotated her body and the back of her head came to rest against his shoulder. He could smell her, the unmistakable whiff of posh-girl cosmetics, Chanel and high-end moisturiser. He could still distinguish the individual fragrances from his time in the business, the olfactory memories coming back to him like old song lyrics. He reached an arm around her to pat her on the far shoulder, and left it there, innocuously.

More than once, in the past two years, he had thought of telling Claire about Yosemite, anticipating the nice symmetry of the comeuppance. Yet now that the chance arrived, snitching seemed petty and obvious. Instead they talked about weekend plans, summer holidays, some stuff about the children. That had helped, Neil thought afterwards, the camouflage and double bluffs of their prattle. He spared her the details of the commodity prices, currencies and bonds that preoccupied much of his waking life.

His knuckles brushed against her exposed bicep. With their other hands, they drank.

The trouble with forgiveness was that it was hard to retract. Overtly, at least: not in his heart.

He asked about their house sale (top of the market, Neil reckoned, though it was a fool’s game to try to call it). He moved his knuckles up and down her skin, very slowly, very slightly, a couple of inches at a time, the caress delicate enough for him to sense the microscopic down on her arm, and her tiny, involuntary jolts.

Still she didn’t move. They drank; she gulped. The booze and the music and the moment had their own logic.

What the fuck was he doing?

When Neil thought of the randomness of it, all the reasons it could have been extinguished, not just the primordial grievance but neglect or drift or routine jealousy, his friendship with Adam was like a whim of evolution, a platypus or an anteater, so precious and unlikely. Even now, even these last few years, there was no one he trusted or needed so much. Neil trusted Adam more, in a way, because of his frankness over California. Among his living family, only Sam came close, Sam who was a different kind of relative, a friend, almost. This ought to be as taboo as incest. He began to blush.

At the same time, considered in a certain light, wasn’t this what Adam wanted? To compete with Neil, and to incriminate him. What he had always wanted. In California Adam had ushered him into the wrong, urged, provoked and finally deceived him into it. In London he had assailed Neil with a remorse he hadn’t recognised, needling allusions that he had privately interpreted as sabotage. Finally Neil had seen and suffered the shame that Adam had insisted on, and resented his friend anew, for both the insistence and, belatedly, for his part in the event.

She’s up for it, mate. That was what Adam had said. Stop making excuses.

These past two years Neil had thought of her when he saw Sam. Sometimes he thought of her when he saw Adam with his daughter. Between the three of them — Neil, Adam and Rose — they had driven Jess away.

I knew she was younger.

Since Adam wanted Neil to be guilty, perhaps he should be. He could earn the guilt that had been foisted on him.

They babbled. Was Claire going back to work? Scarcely worth it — the costs of childcare. His mouth was dry; he drank. He curled his fingers inside her arm and around her ribcage. She sat up straight but didn’t withdraw. With his other hand he put his empty glass on the arm of the sofa and fingered the mole on his neck.

He wanted a refill — there was still an inch of wine in the bottle — but he was reluctant to move. He was sober enough to know that he had drunk too much (he would have to leave his car and send someone out from the office). Her breasts were contoured against her sweater. His palms were damp; he felt the twitch of an erection, a warning-shot harbinger of his instincts.

Neil expected to regret this for ever; never mind for ever, he regretted it already. At the same time he felt wonderfully serene. Her head and her hair were warm against his shirt but the skin of her arm felt cold. An image came to his mind, from some ancient TV programme, of men in an exotic country (Brazil? Mexico?) stunt-diving from a cliff into the fearfully shallow water a long way below, their arms poised and cruciform as they tilted over the precipice. He felt as he imagined those divers must have felt: exhilarated, imperilled, yet tranquil in the inevitability of the fall.

‘Claire,’ he said. ‘Claire.’ He spoke so softly that she leaned still further into his chest to hear him.

He twirled a ringlet of her hair around a finger of his drinking hand. He could feel her breath against his neck. He had so wanted to match Adam, so admired his sophisticated charm, and envied it. He still did, despite everything that had happened since, what other people might construe as his success or Adam’s failure. And these things that his friend had now, Claire and the children, a life Neil had so persuaded himself he couldn’t emulate that he had resolved not even to want it.

He half-expected her to move or to stop him, but she didn’t.

How much? That much?

She must be drunk, too. Drunk enough. A woman like her, who for much of Neil’s life wouldn’t have given him a second glance. If he had misread her, he might never see Adam again. He might never see him again if he hadn’t. And yet the weight of her against him, her scent, her warmth, were so perfect. His senses were at once blurred and sharpened by the wine, intense but somehow indistinguishable from each other. So natural, so inevitable. It seemed to Neil that he had always wanted this, even if he hadn’t known, a newly discovered pedigree for his desire that let the faithlessness feel less ignoble.

Claire let her hand rest on his leg. Neil caught his breath. He heard the blood drumming in his ears. In the kitchen the pianist was dallying in the upper scales, sentimental and manipulative. I want it to be you, Rose had said. During the night, in the tent, he had seen her features twitch and frown, the hieroglyphs of a dream, her lips synching the words or protests that her dream self must have been saying.

He tightened his grip on her ribs. He turned his face towards hers. This would be only fair.

It was the wine, maybe, or the nerves, but his timing was out. He leaned over too far, too fast, and kissed only her hair; several twisty strands clung to his lips when he withdrew.

That might have been all anyway, the spell broken for both of them, but Neil would never know for certain. The front door opened. She snatched her hand from his leg.

Neil stood up, checking that his trousers were respectable. Harry marched through the living room to the kitchen and opened the fridge. He turned off the music, scraping a stool across the parquet to the counter to eat whatever it was he had extracted.

‘Hello, Uncle Neil,’ he called out, in the ironic tone that kids seemed obliged to affect. He had reached the age when they could no longer count on a smile, their size, the sheer audacity and miracle of their diminutive yet capable bodies, to win the approbation and indulgence of adults. Harry had realised that, from now on, he would have to earn them, and he evidently wasn’t pleased.

‘Me too,’ Ruby yelled as she trailed after her brother. She changed her mind and jumped onto the sofa, thrusting an illuminated, hand-held windmill into Claire’s face. ‘Hello, darling,’ Claire said, hugging her daughter more tightly than their temporary separation called for.

Claire’s mother came in with the children’s kit. She was thinner and greyer than Neil remembered her from the novelty cummerbund days. Her spectacles dangled on a long, professorial cord. She glanced from him to the bottle to her daughter.

‘Hi,’ Neil said, striding towards her and taking her free hand between his. ‘Neil.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember.’

‘Good to see you again.’

‘Yes.’ She turned to Claire.

‘I was about to leave,’ Neil said. ‘Adam’s not here.’

‘Okay,’ she said.

Neil called out goodbyes to the children, and to Claire, without looking at her. ‘Me too,’ he heard Ruby say to somebody.

He plucked his jacket from the banister and swam for the door, slamming it behind him more violently than he intended. He abandoned his car and swayed towards the station to find a taxi.

When he was almost home he took out his CrackBerry. He wasn’t sure he would have Claire’s number — he had no recollection of ever calling her directly — but there it was. He could sense the boozy ripeness of his breath in the cocoon of the cab. An early-onset hangover gripped the back of his head, competing for attention with his instant remorse. The car bucked and jerked in the traffic; the driver was telling a story to someone on his speakerphone: ‘… and he’s only gone and got himself a man bag, the dickhead. I said, what you got that for? He said, it’s for holidays. You dickhead, I said…’

Neil opened a window. No harm done, he thumb-typed. Let’s forget it. He hesitated for a moment and then pressed Send.

I’ve bailed, he wrote to Adam. Next week, maybe? Happy birthday

As he was paying through the window of the taxi, his pocket beeped. He gave the driver a twenty, told him to keep the change, and read her message: Forget what?xx

Not just undocumented immigrants working illegally. That would hardly be news to anyone in London who had renovated a home in the last few years or cash-in-handed a cleaning lady. Nor merely illegal immigrants working as security guards. Illegal immigrants working as security guards in the Home Office. And Parliament. And, very likely, Number 10 and MI6. It would be funny if… okay, it was funny, but you could only laugh in the right company, Adam was streetwise enough to know that. One of the Downing Street enforcers had been in, demanding to know what could be done, when and how much it would cost (the prospect of front-page ignominy always conjured money from the ether). Everyone knew that two or three heads would have to be stuck on pikes in Whitehall. There were dark mutterings about a stash of discarded paperwork that had been discovered in a Croydon housekeeping cupboard.

Croydon: the eternal scapegoat, the illegal immigrants of the Home Office. Thank God for Croydon.

His would almost certainly not be among the impaled heads, Adam reflected as he walked home from the Tube. He was too lowly an official to be a useful sacrifice. All the same, it seemed providential that Neil had put him in touch with that consultancy. If that oleaginous interviewer wanted him, perhaps he should find a way to accept his friend’s charity. He and Neil sometimes did a sort of skit when they saw each other, a pastiche of their former selves — Adam telling most of the jokes, Neil residually gauche, or acting it, for history’s sake, or for Adam’s. This was one of the reasons Adam needed him: Neil carried a trace memory or reflection of Adam at the height of his possibilities, his maximal plumage, fresh from university, thoughtless of failure, absolutely ignorant of what awaited him. An image of him at his happiest and his freest, as well as at his most… regrettable. Underneath, Adam knew, the power had already swung away from him, following the money, rather as, in old age, it ebbs to the spouse who stays healthier for longer, a basic animal hierarchy.

That was already their dispensation, whether or not he took this nepotistic job. He already owed Neil. In any case, Adam wasn’t changing the world at the department. He wasn’t changing anything. He wasn’t even a 7.

Adam turned into his street and mounted the steps to the maisonette. He heard the familiar front-door serenade of play and conflict, sibling love and rivalry too entwined to be distinguished. He found Ruby perched on the kitchen table in her nightie; Harry was performing little standing leaps in his pyjamas, his upstretched hand reaching for the phone she was dangling above him.

‘Careful,’ Adam said; then, shouting, ‘Claire!’ It was much too late for this.

‘Coming,’ she called down.

‘Get down from there! Clezz!’

‘No,’ Ruby said, squatting defensively in the corner. ‘Naughty Daddy!’ She flipped and clicked between the gadget’s applications, with a native dexterity that made Adam feel both proud and old.

‘Give it to me.’

‘Mine,’ Ruby said. She drew the prize into her torso.

‘Give it to Daddy,’ Harry said, confiscation representing, to him, a respectable draw.

‘It’s bedtime, lollipop,’ Adam said. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

‘I know how to spell shit,’ Harry said.

‘Me too,’ Ruby said.

‘Give it to me,’ Adam repeated. He yanked the phone from his daughter’s grasp with more force than she was expecting. After the shock, she began to wail.

‘Suh,’ Harry said, counting off the phonetic letters with his fingers.

Adam glanced at the miniature screen. The roulette of Ruby’s clicks had landed on Claire’s inbox. A message from Adam himself; one from Claire’s mother; Adam again; the mother of one of Harry’s friends; Neil; Adam.

‘Huh,’ Harry said, extending another elfin finger.

Adam placed the phone on the kitchen counter. Ruby was crying. He hated upsetting her, even when her behaviour and his self-respect obliged him to. He hated anyone upsetting her, but it was worse when he was responsible.

‘I want a new daddy,’ she said. ‘I do.’ She wriggled out of his embrace.

‘Ruby-loo,’ he said. ‘Come back here.’

Why Neil? He and Adam had been in touch directly to cancel. Neil and Claire never texted each other, so far as Adam knew. He picked up the phone again and opened the message with a hasty, unthinking depression of his forefinger.

No harm done. Let’s forget it

‘ii,’ Harry said.

‘I’ll ask Father Christmas for him,’ Ruby said.

Forget it… In theory, Adam could choose to attend to his daughter, rebuke his son, his wife would appear, the vertiginous moment would pass. In practice, only one course of action was available. He fumbled his way to Claire’s outbox. Her reply was the last message she had sent.

Forget what?xx

Forget what? And those xx, so harmless when she sprayed them over saccharine messages to her friends, so incriminating in this one.

‘Tuh,’ Harry said. He grinned.

‘Dadda?’ Ruby said. She had stopped crying.

Adam helped her down from the table. The children bickered away and up the stairs.

His first sensation was a light-headed, instant nostalgia for the prelapsarian era that had just ended, the era of automatic trust that Adam felt he was only now appreciating, as a nobleman might recognise his privileges only after they are expropriated. A moment later he was dizzy with grubby surmises, hypothetical scenarios, a frantic scan of his memory for clues or tells. He gently laid the phone down again and looked at the floor. He ground his jaw.

His mother had known about his father’s affairs, or so she had told Harriet. She knew, and she hadn’t minded, at least not enough to divorce him. She had left him for a different reason. She was bored, she told Harriet. Just bored.

This was his biggest failing and worst mistake, Adam reflected in the kitchen: the wrongful imputation of harmlessness. Will from television, pole-climbers in the Home Office. His father. Neil. He was hopeless at spotting where the harm was coming from.

Neil?

People could live with these things, if they chose to.

Claire’s cheeks were flushed when she came in. He thought he saw her glance at the phone. She told him about the viewings and asked about the office, and the minister, but he only grunted at her until the children were comprehensively in bed.

He turned on the satellite news. More about the missing girl and her broken parents; in Parliament, the new prime minister, the latest face of the age of war, lamented that week’s glorious dead. Nothing, yet, about the illegal immigrants. They would sniff it out tomorrow, someone would leak it to damage someone else.

She sat next to him on the sofa. He could smell the booze on her, and something else, a lozenge or toothpaste that she had used to disguise it.

‘How long did he stay?’ Adam asked her. His voice came out blank and deadpan. ‘Neil.’

‘Not long. Till you said you weren’t going to make it.’

He turned off the television. She carried on staring at the charcoal rectangle as if the picture were still there.

‘Was he still here when the kids got back?’

‘I can’t… Yes, maybe he was.’ She would have lied if she were sure she could get away with it, Adam thought.

‘What happened?’

‘What?’

‘With Neil.’

‘Nothing,’ she said. She put a hand on his arm. He saw her swallowing anxiously. This was it, Adam thought. This might be it for them.

‘So what is there to forget?’

‘What?’

‘What did Neil want you to forget?’

She pulled away and leaned into the opposite arm rest. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘What have you already forgotten? Claire.’

Her eyes widened. The urgent ratiocination was legible in the microspasms of her cheek muscles and the darts of her pupils. She braced a foot against the floor, as if she were preparing to flee. Didn’t I delete it?, he thought he saw her think. I meant to delete it. Fuck! Next, he interpreted, she was considering a counterattack: What are you doing, looking at my phone? What the fuck do you think you’re doing? He almost felt sorry for her, so little time to come up with something, and she was bound to be exhausted, she always was. In the end he guessed she was contemplating an outright lie. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Adam, you always do. He meant no harm to his car, he reversed into the lamppost. Or, No harm done to his suit, after Harry jumped on him with muddy feet.

She must have rejected that option. Too undignified.

‘Nothing happened, Adam,’ she finally said. Her hand crept along the apron of the sofa. ‘We had a drink, a couple of drinks. You were late.’ She paused but he didn’t interject. ‘This funny old lady came to look at the flat. She was going on about her cats, and the loo, and…’

‘What’s she got to do with it?’

‘She thought Neil and me were married. It’s too hard to explain, Ad. We were trying not to laugh, and it felt like we were… a team. You know how that is, don’t you? I don’t think it would have happened without the old lady.’

‘What wouldn’t have happened?’

‘Nothing. We were laughing, it was a bit… I don’t know, flirty. That’s all. You were late.’

‘Don’t.’

‘We were sitting here, waiting for you, and… honestly, Adam, it was nothing.’

Everything was always nothing, Adam thought. He looked down at the patch of fabric between his legs. This is where they had been.

‘What nearly happened, then? Claire. What did you want to happen?’

‘Nothing, I’ve told you.’ He could see her deciding how honest to be. ‘He put his arm around my shoulder. We… sort of snuggled. That’s all.’

‘You don’t even like Neil.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

‘No harm done,’ he said.

‘That’s right. Adam?’

He stood, left the room, climbed the stairs to their bedroom and closed the door. The linen appeared to be unruffled. He sat on the edge of the mattress, elbows on knees, his face in his palms.

Adam wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. The situation wasn’t like any other he had experienced. It was an escalatingly adult moment, akin to the first time someone in the hospital had asked, ‘Who’s the father?’, and he had looked around, like a screwball comedian, before understanding it was him. Or the first time he had slapped four passports down at airport immigration and felt a decade older in an instant. Yes, you, this is happening to you. It wasn’t even very like itself, at least not the straightforward version of the scenario that was familiar from TV.

He believed his wife that nothing had happened, at least in the technical, secretional sense. A cuddle. A cuddle plus, maybe. He had always trusted her in that way, squeamish as he had occasionally felt about her sexual history. Truth be told, he had rarely thought about her in that way, not since the children. In any case, how much anger did he deserve? He hadn’t sat on their own sofa with Heidi, back in those cosy days before her promotion when she had been his proxy office spouse. But several times he had looked tipsily into her eyes in a way that he intended to seem meaningful. In St James’s Park one summer he brushed a fluff of pollen from her hair, and she stiffened and looked up at him as if he might kiss her. Once they held hands in the back of a taxi, gazing away from each other and out of their opposite windows in bittersweet silence.

He had never told Claire about any of that. He hadn’t told her about those women on the Strand (another nothing, a genuine nothing). He hadn’t felt any inclination or obligation to tell Claire. These things happened in a marriage, didn’t they? They were part of a marriage. Fidelity, Adam considered, was like the speed restriction on motorways. The official limit had a built-in margin that you were tacitly permitted to exploit, so long as you went no further. He thought of how, the last time they flew out of Heathrow, he had doubletaked one of the unobtainable Asian sales girls in Duty Free, how Claire had seen him and let it go.

She said they hadn’t, and he believed her. But even if Claire hadn’t broken the rules, Neil had. Marriage had a margin, but friendship had tighter parameters.

This was a punishment, Adam sensed. For what he knew about Neil — for what he had on Neil — and for what they had done together. What Adam had done. It was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You started it. That was what Neil had said on the morning after, long before he knew the whole story.

I hope you find out how this feels.

Adam pounced down the stairs and went back into the living room for his car keys.

‘What are you doing?’

He could hear the fear in her voice.

‘Adam?’

He found the keys. It was a warm dry night, not yet dark. He left his jacket behind.

‘Adam, where are you going?’

He slammed the door behind him.

Adam had turned the key in the ignition before he realised that he didn’t know Neil’s address. His seatbelt was pulled halfway across his torso, his father’s standard driving posture for several years after belts became mandatory (his mind went back to his father, even now, with an irksome canine loyalty). He had a pain in his back (sedentary work, carrying the kids, the same overconfidence regarding his chassis as he had always harboured about his weight). The sensation ran across his shoulder to his neck, then to the middle of his spine, but hurt differently in different places: sharp and neural in his neck, duller and achier lower down, as if the pain had matured or learned something along the way.

‘Fuck,’ Adam said, letting the seatbelt snap back.

He knew approximately where the building was. Neil lived in a red-brick mansion block in Bayswater, near a hotel, Adam recalled, with an elegant stairwell and an old-fashioned, sliding-grille lift. His was an internally plush but externally nondescript building, of a type Adam associated with foreign kleptocrats on the lam and their overindulged offspring or mistresses. Neil had only just moved in when Adam had visited; there was almost nothing in the flat besides an inherited bamboo bar and accompanying leather stools, screwed to the floor in the living room, fixtures that incited ribald speculation about the key parties the previous occupants might have hosted. Adam didn’t like the place much (even discounting for his instant, envious calculation of how much his friend must have paid for it, he had been fairly certain that he didn’t like it). High-ceilinged rooms, but boxy and over-regular, set off a faintly ominous corridor: the apartment felt more like a medical consulting suite than a residence, the kind of architecture that seemed designed to prevent anyone experiencing the place as home. But it was Neil’s, and Jess had left him, and Adam had discharged friendship’s duty of compassionate dishonesty, the kind lies you mixed with the dependable truths, and told him it was lovely.

He hadn’t been there since. Neil had never asked him again, let alone invited Claire and the kids, a failure that Adam inwardly resented but never mentioned. He might be able to find the building, just. But third floor? Fourth? Sitting in the car, he had a bathetic vision of himself patrolling the pavement, waiting to accost Neil as he arrived or left, or hurrying through the doors when another visitor was buzzed in — like the fare-dodgers who sometimes squeezed through the ticket barriers with you on the Tube — then pacing the corridors and madly banging on strangers’ doors. He could hardly ask Neil for the address: Dear Neil, you are a cunt, please could I have your address so I can come round and throttle you?

Two police officers, one of each sex, walked past his car, their hands clasped meditatively behind their backs, looking quaintly approachable, stab vests notwithstanding. Adam raised his buttocks from the seat to fish his phone from his trouser pocket. He would text:

Neil, Claire told me what happened today. I can’t believe you would do that to me

Or: You scumbag. You total scumbag

Or: Rape, Neil. It’s called rape. Statutory rape, but still rape. You are a rapist

Neither of them had ever applied that word aloud to what happened in California, though it had often resounded in Adam’s head when they were together, as, he expected, it had in Neil’s — the legalistic modifier mitigating the noun to a greater or lesser extent according to his mood. A seventeen-year-old boy with a fifteen-year-old girl: that was more a technical than a moral offence, towards which the law and common sense were inclined to indulgence. But Neil’s twenty-three to her fifteen were at the wrong end of the moral continuum. Neil had been a man. They both had.

So: Rape, Neil.

Or perhaps, he thought, just Goodbye

He navigated to Neil’s number in his address book. Dear Neil.

Not Dear. Just Neil. Or N.

He abandoned his message. Texting would be uncivilised. Adolescent. He would call.

It occurred to Adam that he would be less encumbered in the passenger seat; he opened the door and walked around the bonnet to the other side of the car. A supermarket delivery van had pulled up outside a house along the street, blocking the road while its driver unloaded, hazard lights flashing in the dusk. From the other direction he heard the wail of an ambulance. Two men jogged past his car, the squatter of the two straining to keep up.

Do it. His hand shook, the phone quaking in his palm as he aimed his thumb at the keys. The connection was slow — Neil might be out of range, or out of juice — but then the number was ringing. This wasn’t what he had expected. He had intended something dramatic, yes, and distressing, but less sudden, something he would have more time to think about and rehearse.

He grew stronger as he neared the safety of voicemail. ‘You’ve reached Neil’ — something gratingly American in that formulation, as if modernity required a transatlantic accent — ‘please…’

Adam hung up. Voicemail would be as undignified as texting. Hi Neil, this is Adam, you are a terrible bastard, don’t bother to call back

He caught himself untensing in relief. He dialled again.

Neil answered on the third ring.

‘Hello?’

That tone… Neil would have seen on his screen that it was Adam — everyone was pre-announced these days, like guests at a courtly reception — and yet the disingenuous innocence, that nonchalance.

Adam opened his mouth to speak, but it was dry and nothing came out, as if the nightmares he periodically suffered of muteness at a viva exam, or some uncanny capital trial, were being realised. He could feel his heart thrashing in his chest. He could hear it.

‘Hello? Ants?’

‘Neil, I… I need to talk to you.’

‘Just a second.’ The hand over the mouthpiece, Adam’s last chance to reconsider or reformulate. ‘Yup. Ads?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Charity thing at the Dorchester. You weren’t there and… It was free booze or channel-surfing, you know.’

‘Haven’t you had enough to drink?’

‘What?’

‘You had a few earlier, didn’t you? With Claire.’

‘Look, Adam, let’s talk tomorrow, all right? I’m supposed to be schmoozing. Tony’s here. I’ll give you a call in the morning, okay?’

‘I don’t give a shit about your schmoozing. Or about Tony. Fuck Tony. Christ. I want to know what the fuck you think you were doing with Claire.’

Better: he was entitled to this.

‘Hang on,’ Neil said. Again the muffle, other blurred, male conversations, once or twice a bump of the phone against Neil’s leg — Neil presumably leaving whatever banqueting suite he was stuck in, understanding that this was serious.

‘Okay. Ants. What were you saying?’

Here we go, Adam thought, the same shenanigans as with Claire: the stonewalling and lies that had to be got through, before the only-half-lies and reluctant confession. He felt like a detective, or a torturer. Onto the second prisoner, who can never be sure what his accomplice has admitted. How bored they must get of this routine.

‘It’s Adam. And Claire’s already told me.’

‘What has she told you?’

Adam resisted saying, She’s told me everything. Instead he said, ‘She told me about… the sofa.’

Silence. Odd to be sitting in his car with his phone pressed to his ear, neither speaking nor spoken to. Embarrassing, somehow.

‘Christ, Ad, nothing happened. Ad? Nothing happened.’

‘Adam.’

‘Fine, Adam.’

‘No harm done?’

Another silence. To his own ear Adam’s voice sounded caustic and distorted, the timbre more synthetic than human. He waited for the apology.

Neil said, ‘We were rehearsing. We’re doing a skit for your birthday. Casino Royale. No, Wedding Crashers. We’re doing a scene from Wedding Crashers and we were rehearsing. Artistic licence. Adam?’

Adam smiled. He liked the lie. He had always enjoyed their lies, all the way back to San Diego. We’re hairdressers. We’re masseurs. He’s a set-designer. The two of them versus. This was a classy gambit, he gave Neil that. A lie about coming on to his wife that was also, in their private code, an expression of loyalty.

A fly buzzed against the window. Adam reached over, turned the key in the ignition, and opened the window to let it out.

‘Adam?’

The nicknames and the nostalgic humour: they were like the practised advances an old lover might make when she tries to re-seduce you, ingratiating with their echoes of everything you and the lover once had together, and once were.

‘Don’t, Neil. This isn’t… just don’t.’

‘Look, it was just a silly moment, really. Three glasses of wine in a hurry. I’m sorry, okay?’

Damn right you’re sorry.

Neil should have opened with that, Adam thought. He said, ‘No, it isn’t okay. I mean, what have I… I’ve always been… there for you, haven’t I? Haven’t I? I’ve always… encouraged you. Haven’t I? I’ve never… I’ve never… I can’t understand how you could do this to me,’ he lied.

‘You’ve never what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What, Adam? What have you never? Looked down on me because I hadn’t heard of Dante, is that it? Judged me for my horrid money-grubbing job? Yeah,’ Neil said, ‘you’ve always been very charitable, milord, I’m ever so grateful.’

‘Is that it, then? Is that why?’

‘No,’ Neil said. ‘No. Fuck’s sake.’

‘What then?’

‘Look… never mind.’

One of them had to say it: ‘California?’

Adam heard Neil’s exhalation, long and sad.

‘You said that was nothing.’

‘It isn’t like that — it doesn’t go in a straight line. You know why it happened, I’m sure you do. I don’t even mean what her dad told you about her that night. It wasn’t only that. Even apart from that it happened because of us. And then you couldn’t drop it, could you? I mean, you had to keep bringing it up. Finding her again, going on about contacting her, all that bollocks about what he said to you in the morning. What did you want me to do, kill myself? Turn myself in?’

Rape, thought Adam. He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘And then when you told me — to be honest, I wouldn’t say you were sorry, not as sorry as you should have been.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Neil, I was insanely sorry — I was paralytic with it.’

‘I mean, sorry for me. You were sorry for her and for yourself. Very sorry, sure. And for Ruby. Jesus. Did you ever think, how was I supposed to feel, all that guilt pouring out of you, when all the time I was the one who…’

‘You already knew she was… You already knew that. You said it was nothing.’

‘Yeah, well, I changed my mind. It isn’t nothing, okay? You win. I regret it, Adam, okay? If I could undo it, I would. If there was anything I could do, I would.’

‘But whenever I —’

‘I said, I’m sorry about it. I’m fucking sorry, I’m ashamed. Understand?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me you felt like this?’

‘I just… I couldn’t, Adam. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘What do you… I was scared, Neil. All right? I was scared.’

They were quiet again. A man in sunglasses, jacket slung over his shoulder, walked past Adam’s car, talking on his phone. Adam had composed messages to the girl, revising and perfecting them, but he hadn’t sent one, at least, not yet.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ he continued. ‘That’s why you’ve done this? All of a sudden you regret what happened fifteen years ago, and to make amends you try it on with Claire?’

‘I didn’t… Look, you asked me and I’m trying to explain, that’s all. It was mostly the booze, we got carried away.’

Rape, Adam thought. He said, ‘Maybe we should have said goodbye at the airport. I’ve often wondered about that. That could have been the end of it.’

‘Yeah,’ Neil countered, ‘well, I sometimes think, if that old man hadn’t been at home, the guy with the car… Or if you hadn’t asked me that night on the beach… We could have left it in San Diego, couldn’t we? Nice little one-night stand. We would never have met her.’

Strangers were laughing in the background at Neil’s end. The renunciations hung on the line between them.

‘Look,’ Neil finally went on, ‘can we get together tomorrow to talk about this properly? After work?’

‘Sorry to have distracted you.’

‘No, I just mean it would be better to talk in person.’

‘No,’ Adam said. ‘Not tomorrow.’ And then he said, ‘I don’t think I ever want to see you again.’

Adam looked out through the windscreen. There ought to be witnesses or an audience for this. But there was only, on the opposite pavement, a woman in a burqa pushing a buggy. She’s trying to get it to sleep, Adam thought reflexively.

‘Don’t be silly. Don’t say that. Ad?’

Even to Adam the threat seemed safely theatrical, free, an ultimatum he would never be called upon to enact. More a rhetorical flourish than an irrevocable event. Somebody will say something, he thought. Somebody will do something to stop this.

‘Goodbye, Neil,’ his voice said.

‘What? Ad —’

He heard Neil say something else as he lowered the phone from his ear, but the words were too quiet to decipher. He pressed the button and looked at the screen. The call’s duration was 6:23. He held the phone in both hands, expecting it to ring again. But it didn’t.

He reopened his electronic address book and scrolled down to Neil. Are you sure you want to delete this number?

Was he sure? To purge Neil like this might be tantamount to killing him, in Adam’s life anyway. To kill Neil would be a kind of self-mutilation or partial suicide. So much of his last decade and a half were stored in Neil, shameful times and halcyon. Without his friend as his repository and witness, part of Adam’s past — part of him — would perish, too.

He pressed Yes I want to delete Neil. He felt a queer kind of lightness or liberation. I will never see Neil again, he thought. Neil is dying, even though he is still alive. He will be dead and alive at the same time.

Adam stepped out of the car, closed the door gently and locked it with his key.

Neil took another glass of wine from a waistcoated attendant and drank half of it in one unprofessional gulp. He didn’t believe this. Not that Claire had told Adam, nor that Adam was livid: he believed all that. They had been busted by his drunk-texting, but she might anyway have felt guilty enough to confess. Splashing his face in the bathroom in his cavernous flat, he had thought, You idiot, Neil. You cunt. You could have left — twice — easily. How could you even have thought about her that way, let alone… He came out again to this deathly reception, networking and tax relief dressed up as benevolence, to avoid confronting his sinful self any further.

He didn’t believe Adam’s goodbye. They had a tacit but firm agreement, Neil thought, to be always in each other’s lives; it was much too late for either of them to rescind it.

With his free hand Neil retrieved the BlackBerry from his inside pocket to phone back. He dialled, but aborted the call almost instantly — before it rang, and, he hoped, before his number had flashed up on Adam’s screen. Better not to. Not today. One of them might say something worse. It was bad enough that he had counterattacked when he should have stuck to plain apology (Damn right you’re sorry). And that absurd Hail Mary joke about Wedding Crashers. Better to email.

He rolled and clicked with his thumb until the email template appeared (scientists of the future, Neil had thought, biologists or whatever, would wonder at the dramatic leap in thumb musculature made by Western man in the early twenty-first century). Dear Adam… Dear Ads… Adam… Mate… Ants… Adam, I’m sorry… Adam, I’m so sorry…

‘Who are you hiding from?’ Tony McGough called to him. ‘There’s gold in them thar hills.’

Tony put a heavy arm around Neil’s shoulders and rotated him to face the convocation of suits, shape-shifting yet cohesive like penguins huddling against the cold, individuals sometimes peeling off and scuttling along the group’s perimeter before burrowing back into the mass.

‘One of the Kumars is here,’ Tony said. ‘And a Levene, I think, or a capo from their office, anyway. Go get ’em, kimosabe.’

‘Just a second,’ Neil said, extending a finger upwards from the hand that held the BlackBerry. ‘Just give me a second.’

Tony was a workaholic. He and his two partners had left jobs in insurance and private equity to start their firm (none of them was called Rutland, they just thought the name sounded trustworthy). They had gathered their clients — including Farid, which was how Neil came to know them — in a remorseless, marriage-destroying campaign of insinuation and sycophancy at events like this one.

Still, as City bosses went, Tony was relatively humane. You could see it in his giveaway eyes, tender and melancholy, out of place somehow in his flabby, particoloured face, itself perched on a rectangular bouncer’s body.

‘Okay,’ Tony said, removing his arm. ‘See you in a minute, hotshot.’

‘Of course.’

Funny thing: growing up, Neil had always thought that whatever he managed to do or achieve, he would have to do and achieve on his own, not counting on favours or connections and never enjoying any. Yet he had been helped, by Bimal and Farid and now by Tony, each propelling him upwards through London postcodes and income-tax brackets, before passing him on to his next benefactor. (Neil hadn’t expected a goodbye, but on his penultimate day in Hanover Square he turned round at his desk and Farid was standing there; he raised an arm and caressed Neil’s cheek with his knuckles, up and down once, as if tracing the line of a scar.)

Neil crouched to put his glass on the carpet and turned towards the wall to type. Adam, I’m sorry for what happened… I’m truly sorry for what nearly happened… It was my fault, not Claire’s… I didn’t mean what I said.

Or: I guess the dinner’s off.

Better not. Beware the perils of email, Neil urged himself: jokes that might be missed, brevity received as rudeness, possibly, in this case, an apology that would seem insufficiently contrite, or, conversely, to be admitting more than he intended to. All these new ways to communicate, digital guarantees against losing each other, which were mostly new opportunities for misunderstanding. Everyone was inescapable, these days, but in place of the old jeopardy you found yourself clutching at holograms.

Probably best just to write, Adam, I’ll call you tomorrow. Or, Let’s talk tomorrow. Although that might seem curt and non-consensual.

Neil accidentally kicked over the half-drunk wine glass at his feet. He turned back towards the suits and plucked another from a passing tray. Best of all, maybe, would be to say and write nothing for a few days. Let his friend cool off. Let him and Claire patch things up.

He blamed the old woman (Priscilla?), with her cats and her orange-powdered mole. If she hadn’t barged in, he might have left. If: If Eric hadn’t turned in early that night. If the man who owned the truck had been out. If the girl in the sarong (she was the blonde, wasn’t she?) hadn’t lingered in the hostel yard. Or if Adam hadn’t. All these random collisions, pinballing molecules. In the end you couldn’t say where anything started, which was the main action of your life and what the interference.

Neil sipped. He gulped.

In any case, was it really only he who ought to apologise? He was in the wrong, he acknowledged that. Doubly wrong: he shouldn’t have said the things he did. But some of what he said had been accurate, and not just about Adam’s deceit: his tone, the superciliousness that had grated from the beginning, right back to Las Vegas, the condescension that incited Neil in Yosemite, which he thought Adam had outgrown, but which in reality he had merely disguised. I have always encouraged you… I have never criticised you.

Who the fuck did he think he was? Neil didn’t owe Adam anything. Morally speaking, they were quits, he reckoned, taking into account what happened in California. Quits at the least. In any case, for years Adam had been a kind of succubus, taking out of Neil more than he put back. Neil could have managed everything he had done without Adam. He could manage the future without him, if he must or if he chose to.

So: We’re quits, Ants. Fuck you.

Tony was coming towards him with the Levene brothers’ man. Neil replaced the BlackBerry in his pocket, cocked his head back and sluiced the last of the wine down his throat. He stepped forward for the handshake. ‘Jonny,’ he said. ‘Good to see you.’

Neil, Tony and the man clinked glasses. ‘Bottoms up,’ Neil heard himself say.

When it was too late, or seemed to be, he reflected that his mood that evening — wrigglingly defensive, angrily ashamed — had been a hypocritical luxury. He had luxuriated in his pique because he didn’t think the estrangement was real. His confidence in the friendship obscured its demise. In the morning Neil sent a secretary from the office to collect his car.

Adam slammed the front door again. He didn’t care if he woke the kids; he didn’t think Claire would reproach him. As he started up the stairs, his phone rang. He expected Neil, but it was Nick, doubtless wanting to impart some new, baroque twist in the illegal-immigrant debacle — less than a day old, but already feeling prehistoric — or some fresh demand for unobtainable statistics, the wrong, inconsequential part of Adam’s life interrupting his private crisis.

He switched Nick off. He pounded up the stairs to the bedroom and turned on the light.

Claire was in bed but awake. Adam avoided her eyes and didn’t speak. He rolled the chair to the wardrobe and stood on it to reach the upper cupboard, surfing the swivels as he opened the doors. Forgotten objects fell or were thrown out as he rummaged. Maternity clothes; worn-out but hoarded shoes; a map of Barcelona from a pre-parenthood weekend break, sentimentally retained as if it might help them chart a path back in time; a university graduation certificate; the box for a digital camera. Why had they never sifted this stuff?

‘Adam?’ Then, more stridently, ‘Adam — what are you doing?’

He succeeded, finally, in extracting a red biscuit tin from the junk. He balanced the tin on the lip of the cupboard, prised open the lid. These were Adam’s special, once-important things: the letter that had offered him his first big-time job in television, some billets-doux from Chloe, tied up in a pretentious snip of lace, some old photographs. He found what he was looking for. He replaced the box, jumped from the chair and made for the door, leaving the detritus of his raid scattered on the floor.

‘Adam, what…’

Back down the stairs, the late, mauve summer dusk shading to grey outside the window, a view he had always enjoyed but would soon leave behind, past the contaminated sofa and into the kitchen. He turned the photo over.

Two young men, almost equally foreign to him now, their arms around each other, gesticulating for the camera. Two young men who, naturally, had no idea what the next decade and a half would do to them; who had little idea what the next thirty-six hours would do to them, or what they would do in them. Adam felt affectionate, protective, belatedly apprehensive. He wanted to break through time’s thick, soundproofed glass, sit between them, behind the sign that said Faithful Couple, put an arm around each of them and tell them not to do it. But they wouldn’t have known what he was talking about. They were happy. They were together.

He grasped the upper edge of the photo between his thumbs, preparing to rip. I sometimes think… After a minute he stood on another chair and tossed the picture into the dusty, dead-insect limbo on top of the kitchen cabinet.