The Faithful Couple

2008–10

Another thud from above, a few seconds after the first — the percussion, Neil figured, of something falling, then turning over or overbalancing. There was a scuffle of feet and the scrape of an object too big to carry being dragged across the floorboards.

‘Sam?’ Neil called up. ‘Sammy, you okay?’

No reply.

Neil came out of his parents’ room and took hold of the stepladder; its antique metal rungs wobbled as he climbed. He tried to remember the last time he had been in his father’s loft (the house and bedroom would always be Neil’s parents’, plural, but in his internal designation the loft was eternally and exclusively Brian’s, his mother’s closest approach to it, so far as he remembered, being to stand at the bottom of these steps and call down whomever was up there for lunch, peering up into the murk with an expression of adamant distrust). He trod carefully on the narrow steps, trying to weigh as little as possible. The madeleine aromas of damp paper and mouldy rubber assailed and stopped him halfway through the hatch.

Sam was kneeling in the beige glow of a single, unshaded low-watt bulb, his shirt smeared with a rich, well-matured dust. He was appraising an old black-and-white television — deeper than it was wide, three knobs, only ever three channels — which, Neil remembered, had been retired to the loft from service in his parents’ bedroom, but which before the purchase of their colour set had been the screen on which they watched the Cup Final in the lounge, he and Dan alternately fiddling with the aerial when the zigzagging interference got too much; the screen on which they watched the Grand National, Brian having closed the shop early and visited the bookies’ three doors down, placing a single pre-selected one-pound wager per family member, the boys clutching the betting slips as if they were enchanted parchments.

‘You can take it home if you want,’ Neil said. ‘Might still work. Take it, Sammy.’

‘Nah,’ Sam said, squinting at the alien bulk like an archaeologist at a sarcophagus. ‘No room. Stacy wouldn’t have it, would she? Look at it. Shame, though. All these old things. It’s like your own museum. Yours and Dad’s.’

‘Take something else, then,’ Neil told him. ‘Take anything you want. House clearers are coming next week. Never know, might be worth something.’

Neil’s turn to reckon his family’s life in things had come. A couple of archaic wooden tennis rackets, pressed between rectangular frames; an antediluvian computer, unrecognisable as a computer to Sam, and now, almost, to Neil, over which he and Dan had fought, viciously, no quarter asked or given, for seventy-two hours after it arrived one Thatcher-era Christmas, quickly forsaking its binary games for muddier diversions; a pair of binoculars in a scratched leather case; a deflated yellow dinghy, unused since it was launched on a frigid beach in Suffolk in the mid-eighties. In one corner were a pair of promising-looking trunks, which upon inspection contained only several decades’ worth of accounts for Collins & Sons… Sam didn’t have much that was truly his, but there was nothing among this junk that he could want. For reasons he couldn’t identify, Neil needed him to have something.

He watched Sam stoop to rifle a suitcase. The boy was only a couple of inches shorter than him, with an adolescent incongruity in his proportions (bulbous head, outsized feet) that suggested he hadn’t yet topped out; a trio of creases at the hems of his trousers charted their and Sam’s extensions like the rings of a tree trunk. When you looked at him from behind, or in silhouette, minus the pointillist skin and affected glower, he seemed much older.

In the end he took a yo-yo, though only, Neil knew, because he wanted to be kind. Sam creaked down the metal steps. Earlier, when Neil turned the light on, it had blinked into action as if from hibernation. This time — the last time — when he followed and flicked the switch, the bulb went off immediately.

The end. He closed the hatch.

In the bedroom, in the wardrobe, Neil found his father’s clothes, and on the adjacent shelves his mother’s clothes, more or less untouched, so far as he could see. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure Sam wasn’t there, pressed his nose into the fabric and inhaled.

Moth balls.

Do you cry when you think about it?

In the kitchen, beneath the sink, he found six dusty bottles of water, relics of an emergency supply that Brian had laid in, muttering about trade unionists, when a waterworks strike seemed imminent at the fag-end of the seventies. He put a paperweight, two vases and a few photos into a plastic crate. He could hear Sam moving around in Dan’s room, opening and closing the drawers, ransacking his father’s childhood. Dan had already pillaged the cutlery, plus a watercolour of a French harbour that Brian once hinted might be valuable, though Neil doubted it. In his father’s paperwork he discovered that the house had been remortgaged, five years before, around the time of Brian’s first stroke, in what the cheque stubs suggested was an eleventh-hour bid to keep Dan out of the gutter. Once he might have been aggrieved at the favouritism, but now he smiled at the secret, gruff kindness. Your brother knew from the beginning.

The doorbell rang.

‘Mr Hinds told me,’ Bimal’s father began. Neil tried to place Mr Hinds and failed. ‘I saw your car, you see. You don’t mind… I… He was a gentleman. That’s all, that’s what I… That’s all.’

Bimal’s father was wearing a suit, possibly the same, trademark garment he wore during their childhood. The skin above the bridge of his glasses was flaking, Neil noticed, white flecks on brown. He gawped around Neil as if he might be invited in, or be able to glimpse the corpse. Irritation rose up Neil’s throat — busybody, ghoul, vulture — but he suppressed it before it reached his lips. Behind his visitor, above the unchanged sequence of houses on the opposite side of the road, the sky was too blue, inconsiderately perfect.

‘Thanks,’ Neil said. ‘Appreciate it. Really.’

He asked after Bimal.

‘Yes, very well, very well, thank you,’ his father said. ‘California agrees with him, as you know. And the children, they are getting their American accents.’

Neil hadn’t known that Bimal had moved to America. He nodded in assent but said nothing.

‘He was very proud of you,’ Bimal’s father said at last. ‘Very proud. Always showing me the stock prices in the paper, you see. All your comings and goings. Very proud indeed. But you know that.’

He held out a hand for Neil to shake, somehow bony and soft at once, like the carcass of a battery chicken, and after that it seemed too late to ask for details.

‘A real gentleman,’ he repeated. He turned and walked away, erect but slow, with a mechanical, arthritic gait. He seemed smaller than Neil remembered him.

Neil stood at the open front door. ‘Come on,’ he called up to Sam. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get on with it.’

Neil put the rattly crate into the boot of his car, along with the two urns. Sam sat in the front, playing with the windows and reclining his seat at its expensively glacial pace.

‘Are you, like, ’kay?’ Sam asked.

‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘Course.’

He glanced over at Sam and saw that he was wiping his nose with his finger. At the end of every horizontal slash his hand circled up to wipe his eyes, too, finger for one eye, thumb around the other.

‘You?’

‘Course,’ Sam said.

Neil switched on the radio. Told y’all I was gonna bump like this. Sam turned it off.

He drove up through Stanmore, past the location of the golf course on which he and Dan had played pitch-and-putt as boys, Neil surreptitiously kicking his ball a few metres towards the hole whenever Dan, mighty Dan, turned his back. The land where the course had been was now a live-the-dream housing complex that had evidently missed its time. There was an advert on the fence, facing the dual carriageway. One corner of the plastic sheet had become unstuck and blown across the lettering: Still Six Units Remai

You were supposed to feel radically alone when the second one went, Neil knew. Finally orphaned; ultimately adult. That was what everyone said. No one left to forgive your mistakes, no generational buffer between you and your own death. No longer loved in that particular, enfolding way.

That wasn’t how Neil felt, as he and Sam drove over the edge of London, and he saw no point in pretending. He was no lonelier than he had been two weeks before; if anything he felt younger, lighter, childishly unburdened. You were supposed to feel a futile, belated regret for everything you hadn’t asked, everything you had been too timid or inhibited to bring up. That was another thing people said. There were indeed facts and episodes Neil found he would like to clarify, but it was gossip, really, that he coveted, not heirloom wisdom or five-to-midnight honesty. Not Do you love me? Or Are you scared? But How did you lose your virginity? Did you ever have an affair? Have you ever committed a crime? Smashed bottles and Don’t shit on your own doorstep and the phantom girlfriend in Maida Vale whom Brian had mentioned to Adam that afternoon in the nineties. Too late now.

Neil looked across at Sam. He was craning his head out of the window to catch the wind in his hair, as road-trippers did on television. They had the rest of the day together. Neil smiled.

He pulled off the dual carriageway into a narrow country lane. After a few minutes he parked beside a pond at the beginning of a village. Neil remembered the four of them coming to this place for picnics, although it was possible that they had only come once, one luminous recollection that his memory had amplified or wished into a habit. He retrieved the urns from the boot and strode towards a field where (he was almost sure) his mother had called On your marks, get set for fraternal races that Neil invariably lost.

‘Come on,’ he called back to Sam. ‘Sammy, come on.’

Sam loitered by the car, respectfully fastening the upper buttons of his shirt. Of the two of them, Sam had lost more, Neil saw. More of the less that he had.

Neil climbed over a stile and marched up the ramblers’ path at the side of the field. Glancing back he saw Sam attempt to vault the fence and fail. He turned around quickly so the boy wouldn’t know he had been seen. The field wasn’t as he expected and wanted it to be (cows and grass where Neil remembered wheat), and he realised, as he walked, that he didn’t know what he was looking for or where he ought to stop. Sam had fallen behind; Neil paused to let him catch up, sitting on the trunk of an old tree.

Dan had made it to the crematorium but vanished immediately afterwards, not troubling with excuses or goodbyes or bittersweet reminiscences or even a drink, leaving Neil in sole charge of both Sam and the ashes that had recently been Brian. Neil’s first instinct was surreptitiously to leave the urn behind, but one of the attendants had scampered after him, presuming the dereliction was an oversight, and he had been obliged to take it. Putting the thing in the bin felt like too much, even for Neil. Sam suggested the stretch of pavement outside the shop, which was after all the place Brian had spent more of his waking life than any other, a fourteen-year-old’s crazy and possibly illegal scheme that Neil had fleetingly entertained as reasonable.

Then he thought of the picnic place. The memory of it seemed to belong to someone else, inherited by the almost-forty Neil from some ancestor self, a figure who resembled and related to him as Neanderthals did to modern humans in biology-textbook sketches of the ascent of man. His childhood was a story about a person he only distantly knew; at the same time it contained incidents he could recall with an almost shocking clarity. The odour of damp at the back of the armchair when he hid behind it to filch a fresh-minted one-pound coin from his mother’s handbag, the leathery smell of her bag as he persuaded himself that she wouldn’t notice, or, if she did, that she would blame Dan. His reasoning and remorse on that day seemed nearer to Neil, as he sat on the tree trunk, than did the motives for more recent wrongs.

Sam caught up, perched alongside him and panted. Neil put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. When he regained his breath Sam stood up and in front of Neil, fidgeting — digging his hands into his trouser pockets, taking them out, entwining his fingers behind his back, replacing them in his pockets — from which Neil inferred that Sam thought this was the moment. It might as well be.

He stood and unscrewed the lid of his father’s urn, trying to think of something to say. In the end he settled on ‘Goodbye, Brian’, the valediction doubling as a petty revolt, since he had never called his father Brian while he was alive.

‘Amen,’ Sam said, and swallowed.

Neil rotated the lid. He meant to do it slowly, a picturesque hour-glass trickling, but he misjudged the angle and the consistency of the ash, and it landed in a clump at his feet. It seemed sacrilegious just to leave the stuff there — he had a premonition of a cow ambling over and lapping it up — so he and Sam found sticks and spread out the flakes until they resembled a burned-out campfire. Sam dug his stick into the ash and the ground below it to mark the spot. ‘Goodbye, Brian,’ he repeated.

Neil decided to keep hold of his mother until he thought of something more decorous to do with her. Walking back to the car he dredged or conjured up a picture of her sitting in an alcove of wheat in a summer skirt, her legs curled under her, her shoes kicked off. He might have distilled a picture of his father, but halfway back Sam found a chewed-up tennis ball, hemispherically bald where a dog had mauled it. He kicked the ball at Neil; Neil inexpertly returned it. They stained the knees of their trousers on the overlong grass at the verge of the field. Sam ran out of breath after a few minutes.

‘You okay?’ Neil asked him.

‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘No problem.’

‘Right. Come on.’

Neil drove them to a pub he knew further up the lane, now accoutred with a kiddies’ playground and a conservatory that he didn’t remember. He left his mother in the boot. He ordered a gin and tonic for himself and half a pint of lager shandy for his nephew.

‘So how’s Stacy, then?’

‘A’righ, s’pose,’ Sam said, drawling like an American television gangster, at least when he remembered to. He took a swig of shandy but didn’t seem to like it. ‘She’s a’righ most of the time. She’s there a lot, you know, with me. More than him.’

What sort of woman, Neil had asked himself when Sam first mentioned Stacy, would take on his brother in his twenty-first-century guise? Dan was no longer sinking, exactly — he had stretches of work, weeks or months at building sites or warehouses — but equally he seemed to have given up hope of rising: he subsisted in a hand-to-mouth state of precariously deferred crisis. Stacy was the answer. Whether she constituted a net benefit to Sam, or was simply an extra embarrassment, Neil wasn’t sure.

‘Didn’t want to come up?’

‘Don’t think he asked her. Not speaking much at the moment. You know, one of those.’ Sam raised his eyebrows, a worldly gesture on the craterous man-boy’s brow.

‘What about Basingstoke? School and everything.’

‘A’righ.’ Sam’s leg was twitching. He wiped his nose. He swallowed nervously, though he hadn’t taken a drink. ‘It’s true, what he said. The old man. The Indian bloke. I heard him from up the stairs. He was mad proud of you, your dad. Brian. Always on about you. He got me to show him your website, you know, on the computer. Your company or whatever. We went to that internet place on the high street.’

‘When I wasn’t there,’ Neil said, like some touchy adolescent. ‘Only when I wasn’t there.’

‘Yeah, but anyway. Still counts. And he was grateful, you know, the way you were always coming up here. He told me. He was thankful. Even if you and him, you never said much.’

‘You only get one,’ Neil said. ‘Dad, I mean. Might as well do your bit.’

‘Huh,’ Sam grunted, as if to say, Don’t I know it? What he actually said was, ‘He loved you, innit.’

Neil took a slug of G&T. ‘He was proud of you too, Sammy.’

‘Yeah…’

‘He was.’

‘Right.’

He noticed a cut at the corner of Sam’s mouth where he had attempted to shave for the occasion; between that, his grimy shirt and stained trousers, Sam might have stumbled out of a fire or a collapsed building. A few months before, during the death-watch in Harrow, Neil had broached the idea of his nephew moving in with him — casually, he intended, presenting it as an all-round win. It was a mistake, he saw afterwards, to specify that Dan could see his son whenever he liked, as if that were in doubt. Dan had growled at Sam to get his stuff together, shouted a goodbye at Brian, and manhandled the boy away. Three or four more years — as soon as Sam could be comprehensively detached from Dan, and from Stacy, if she were still around — and Neil would redeem him. Money and somewhere of his own to live and a job, even: he was the sort of man who could pull that off now.

They drove back into London. Neil bought potatoes and cooking oil and made them chips for dinner, cutting the potatoes very finely while Sam watched.

He wasn’t lonely. Neil told himself he wasn’t lonely. He had friends, or quasi-friends, functional friends, people with whom his life overlapped, people with whom he shared common interests, mostly in the utilitarian sense rather than the recreational one. He had gym friends, friends at work, though with them, Neil found, all the gamesmanship and rivalry that crept in under the back door of civilian friendships were there in the hallway from the start. Simulacra of friends. After he put Sam on his bus, the morning after the ashes, he had an urge to phone Adam. Not because he was traumatised or bereft: he just felt Adam should know, as if the act of telling him and Adam’s witness were a missing part of the event.

Neil’s feelings had hardened in the weeks after what, at first, he thought of as ‘the argument’. Every ungenerous thought he had ever harboured about Adam, from San Diego to Ealing, was collated in his defence, exaggerated and repeated with no kinder reflections admitted:

Smug bastard. Patronising bastard. Jealous bastard.

Fauntleroy. Failure.

Accomplice. Liar. Pimp.

He forgot that a friend’s faults were among his consolations — that some of Adam’s faults were virtues. They became only faults, worse and worse. He forgot his own culpabilities.

The blindness lasted over a year, until a few months after Neil’s father died. When, that autumn, the banks collapsed, gravity was reinvented, and it emerged that, contrary to long-held London belief, economics wasn’t only something that happened in faraway countries — Latin American basket cases and rabid Asian tigers — Neil felt sure Adam would be glorying in the blow-up. The image of Adam vengefully celebrating his comeuppance hardened into a certainty in Neil’s mind: chancer, spiv, wasn’t that what Adam had always thought of him, those only-in-England terms of disparagement, the commercial equivalents of the other English classic, Too clever by half? It sometimes seemed to Neil that there were only two or three socially acceptable careers in his hypocritical country.

Fuck you, then.

What are you really going to do?

That was the final swell of his anger, and at the end of the same year, after eighteen months apart, the bitterness lifted, slowly then suddenly, like a migraine or a grief. Now Neil floundered when he tried to recapture the logic that, on Adam’s sofa, had seemed to link his grievance with this redress. His reasoning became so vague and inarticulable that it was astonishing to him, almost funny, that he had lost his best friend, his only whole friend, for ever over this.

He should have known that night in California, Neil finally acknowledged to himself. He hadn’t needed Adam to tell him. Not just her nerves, nor the way her knees knocked together as she dried herself by the lake. He should have known in the tent.

Neil was in a post-crisis strategy meeting with Tony and the other partners when it struck him that in fact he had known, had only been pretending not to, hadn’t asked because he knew what the answer would be; that therefore, in a way, Adam had nothing to do with it, there had been nothing for Neil to revenge, and he must bear all the responsibility himself, both for Rose and for Claire. He blushed violently, not just blushing but sweating, suddenly and feverously as if he had food poisoning, his hands shaking like an alcoholic’s when he tried to take a note. He excused himself and rushed to the gents, hoping that Tony and the others hadn’t noticed his disarray, holding on to the edges of the sink and bowing his head so as not to look himself in his bloodshot eyes. By that evening his certainty had dissipated, and he was no longer sure what he had known or when.

When he first kissed her she had closed her eyes and puckered her lips as if she were in an old movie.

Who cared what Adam had or hadn’t said that night? He felt ridiculous and ashamed. That Christmas he considered texting. The number was still listed among the contacts in Neil’s phone, and now and then he would open Adam’s details and look at the meaningless digits and the handsome thumbnail as he was scrolling his way to someone else, privately embarrassed by this indulgence, the SIM-card necromancy. It was my fault, all of it, I’m sorry. But he didn’t text, or call.

He had texted Jess about Brian, telling himself that she would want to know. Sorry 2 hear that, she replied.

He hadn’t got his comeuppance. ‘It’s like that golf joke,’ Tony said to Neil early in the New Year.

‘What golf —’

‘Two golfers, they’re on the fairway, they see a bear. One starts to run, the other says, what are you doing, you can’t outrun a bear, and the first guy says, I don’t have to, I only have to outrun you. We’ve just got to be less fucked than the other fuckers.’

Neil laughed, aloud and inauthentically.

‘Don’t share that one with the clients, kimosabe.’

Tony had swapped a slab of stocks for gold, Swiss francs and American bonds. There was a bond-rush and a gold-rush, and six months on they were miraculously in profit, coming out of the crash with their reputation enhanced in the garrulous HNWI family. In hard times, Neil saw, the rich were the best business to be in. The rich were always with us, ever anxious to be relieved of the awful burden of their cash.

He was learning to be picky about who he ran money for. He could smell the psychotics who would sue if you missed their pie-in-the sky targets, and the foreign tycoons who would laugh, then have you escorted from the building, when you proffered your humble but kosher ten per cent return. He could spot the neurotics whose money could only be extracted gently, reassuringly — the right-place, right-time mega-salariat of the eighties and nineties, whose share options had turned into one-way golden tickets, and who were petrified of losing their barely dreamed of windfalls. On the other hand there were the risk junkies, proud of their own daring, a pride you had to flatter and nurture.

During the spring after the crash he went to Miami, a nine-hour flight for a fifteen-minute pitch, though by now Neil tended to know within thirty seconds how the conversation would end. Through the retracted security gates and into the antiseptically pristine home (always over-housekept, these palaces, the life scoured and disinfected out of them like covered-up murder scenes).

The client was at his desk. He didn’t look up. Neil said, ‘How do you feel about losing money?’

They wired the investment to Rutland half an hour later. In London they would think Neil had reeled him in with some patented, supernumerate spiel. It was simpler than that: Sell the customer what he wants to buy.

That evening he flew to New York, and in the morning had two meetings on the Upper East Side. In the afternoon he saw a woman he thought he knew, something about the shape of her head, her hair, the elastic rhythm of her stride. He tried to put her out of his mind. Later, on Park Avenue, he saw the same woman again, or thought he did, and although he knew the familiarity might be psychosomatic, he ran. I am not the sort of man who runs after a woman in the street, he wanted to tell the Americans he passed.

She was gone. She made him think of times in his childhood when he had needed to prove, in some insoluble dispute with Dan, that the tennis ball was in, really it was, or, later, that he had been the first of them to ask their father for Saturday morning off — occasions when he wanted urgently to appeal to some celestial umpire for a categorical ruling. Just tell me! Possibly she was fine, but there was no one to ask, and you had to live with that, Neil realised, never knowing what your own actions meant.

Two years after ‘the argument’, drinking alone at his bamboo bar, Neil thought about killing himself. Not out of despair or anguish; not for any particular reason at all, in fact, but rather because of the absence of a clinching reason to carry on living. He had changed his mind about suicide. It had come to seem less an arrogance than a practicality, an efficiency saving. Sure, his work had its consolations. It was fixed, unsurprising, and success and failure, blame and virtue, were reassuringly clear, the therapeutic superficiality limiting the scope of disappointment. But work wasn’t a sufficient incentive, and nor was money. For some of the others, money was less a commodity than a war, which they would always be losing so long as someone at the fund on the other side of Piccadilly was getting more. Neil knew he had enough. He was PAYEd more in a month than his father had earned most years.

He could leave it all to Sam. He could leave something to Adam, too, though Adam might be offended. He would write an apology into his will.

Instead of killing himself he became a partner. He took Sam to Paris for a weekend on the Eurostar. They went to a circus, a proper, old-fashioned circus that featured abused tigers and sequined show girls for the dads. Later in the summer Neil took Sam to Lake Garda, putting them up for a few days at a hotel recommended by Tony. They shared a room, Sam hunting for porn on the satellite channels and Neil scouring the grounds for a BlackBerry signal with roughly equal alacrity. Sam wanted to go to a nightclub, and he looked old enough to pass, but Neil put his foot down. He had some blotchy bruises on his forearms; Neil tried to examine them but Sam squirmed away. He kept his T-shirt on when he swam.

Neil met Roxanna at a recession-proof restaurant in Soho (pan-Oriental menu, sub-industrial decor, the lighting regimen tenebrous in some places and glaring in others, like a secret-police interrogation chamber with multiple stations). Tony and one of the other partners were there, several analysts and a few secretaries, plus assorted other-halves and hangers-on. They sat at an awkward long table, everyone arriving in the wrong order and wishing they were next to someone else, or wishing that they weren’t there at all, the room anyway too loud to hear what the person opposite was saying, as in most London restaurants, the diners barking at each other in an escalating aural brawl.

She was sitting between Neil and his colleague Dominic, a thirty-ish, obviously handsome stock analyst, not as posh as he would like to be, perhaps, but working on it. At first Neil assumed the two of them were attached, but during the starters she shot him an unmistakable get-me-out-of-here look. She was Iranian (not, apparently, a bar to boozing). She organised conferences, she was a friend of one of the secretaries, Tiffany, he thought she said, who had brought her in lieu of a date. She had ebony hair, matching eyes and endearingly irregular teeth. Neil tried not to be distracted by the acquaintances in his peripheral vision.

By the time the Look! No notepad! waitress brought the ironic fortune cookies, Neil was tired and anyway doubtful of his chances. Roxanna’s cookie advised her that, To give, you must first receive.

Neil cracked his cookie, looked down at the slip of paper and up at Roxanna. ‘It says here,’ he said, boredom and loneliness welling up as audacity, ‘that tonight I’m going to have sex with a stranger.’

Her eyes widened, she fixed them on the napkin across her knees. For a moment Neil thought she was going to leave, or to slap him.

She said, ‘Come with me for a cigarette?’

She didn’t smoke. On the way to the exit she steered him into one of the trendily unisex washrooms, pinning him between the rectangular marble sink and the door as it closed behind them. Neil felt at once decadent, worldly, like a desperado in a war zone, and embarrassingly teenaged. He had grown accustomed to the idea that some women might find him attractive: his weight was stable, ditto his hairline, as if protracted negotiations between him and it had established an agreed frontier. Money’s gloss invisibly burnished his pale skin. But this woman, here, hitching up her skirt in a toilet stall?

The circumstances didn’t inhibit her as to volume. She pushed a knuckle into his anus as he thrusted.

Dominic smirked at Neil when they returned to the table. Tony pretended he hadn’t seen them. It was only the second time in his life that he had been so reckless. There was suicidal indifference in the recklessness, and also something like the opposite, a roulette spin for a richer life.

Understanding that this beginning could drive them apart they never mentioned it. She emailed; they went out for dinner without colleagues or sex, at the restaurant or afterwards, as if Roxanna were an ancient goddess who might magically have her virginity restored. Her parents had fled Tehran for England during the revolution, she told him. They moved to America while she was at university, separating not long afterwards, but she had stayed in London. She was thirty-five: one careful owner, like him, Neil concluded from oblique references to her romantic past.

He went to Zurich, on to Singapore, and didn’t see her for two weeks. The third time, at a restaurant in Notting Hill, she announced that she had something to tell him. That’s it, Neil thought.

‘Neil, I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant, Neil.’ Once-in-a-lifetime news, but no other way than just to say it.

You used something, right?

I’ll take care of it.

He managed not to ask either Is it mine? or Are you going to keep it?, a double feat of self-restraint for which he was afterwards grateful. Her grin suggested that the second question would in any case have been redundant. His stomach sank, but he sensed another part of him levitating, taking off.

You could have a kid out there, you know.

They agreed that they would wait before she moved in but they didn’t. After all he was alone in that overwhelming apartment, with Sam for the odd weekend. She could always move out again, they told each other. For New Year’s Eve they went to Bilbao, dancing to a street band in the alleys of the old town. The first time the doll-sized knee or elbow poked at him through her belly, Neil felt as if he could fly; her new anatomy became so familiar to him, swelled so incrementally, that it came to seem this bloated form was the end-point, her finished state, rather than a beginning. He turned forty shortly before the baby was due, feeling that a lot of his life was behind him, and that little of that life was his.

They called her Leila. Neil was fascinated by her skin tone, which was neither Roxanna’s nor his but a golden hybrid of her own. He convinced himself that he could glimpse his mother in her brow and around her eyes. He tried to imagine his mother as a grandparent, but he knew the speculation was a lie, that he couldn’t ever know how she would have been. They enlisted a night nurse, a Ukrainian named Olesya, whom Tony had recommended. Olesya was pretty, defeatedly overweight, discreetly religious (Orthodox crucifix, mumbled imprecations, homeland pain written into the creases on her forehead and at the corners of her mouth).

Roxanna was in bed. Leila was asleep on his chest, her four limbs bent under her like a frog’s. Olesya lifted the weightless body off him and ushered Neil out of the flat, shooing him away with a wise smile and a broken-English instruction to ‘Go your friends.’

To begin with he didn’t quite admit where he was heading. He pretended to himself that he was only driving. It was a cold grey night with a starless London sky. He drove across town, to the back of the pub in Southwark where he had first met Claire, after that to the end of Westminster Bridge that abutted the bowling arcade and the still-spinning wheel. He drove along the Strand, looking for the doorway they had shared with those Australian girls, he couldn’t remember their names, his and Adam’s alternate secret, which hadn’t been enough. On his homeward loop he trawled the road at the back of Paddington Station to find the café in which he and Adam had sat, sussing out where they stood, whether the other was real, at their first meeting in England. Adam had worn his ridiculous cap.

The locations didn’t tally with Neil’s memories. Thinking about the nineties, the images came back to him washed-out and grimy: brown food and miserabilist films, boxy cars and chewing gum on the pavement, the streets in the centre of town streamed in filth, the rubbish bins removed lest terrorists stash bombs in them. In Neil’s mind the contrast between that time and neon now replayed Dorothy’s transition from dowdy Kansas to Technicolor Munchkinland. Scanning the unfamiliar shopfronts, Neil reckoned that the café had become an oyster bar. The airline office was now a high-concept fast-fooderie, he thought.

So inconsiderate, these changes. How were you ever supposed to find your way back, recover your old you, when the city was so different, as different, almost, as you were? You needed your own private London, preserved in formaldehyde, an archipelago museum of your imperishable moments. Instead your places were bulldozed and replaced with someone else’s memories.

I’m going crazy, Neil thought, as he sat in his car, half mounted on the pavement, being hooted by taxi drivers, stalking a bar that had once been a café in which, a long time before, he had talked with a man who used to be his friend. A friend he hadn’t seen for three years.

‘I’m going crazy,’ he said out loud. ‘Sorry,’ he said to no one, and to Adam, and to Rose, and drove himself back to Bayswater.

***

There was the usual rigmarole of pretending he might go back to sleep without relieving himself. Perhaps if he lay on his other side, or curled up, like this… Finally Adam levered himself out of bed, as quietly as he could, his senses muted as if he were underwater, eyes outraged at being called upon to open, and, when they did, reporting an unfamiliar room, doors and windows bafflingly transposed, so that for a moment he wondered whether he was dreaming. The croaking of frogs outside the window tipped him off. His brain cranked up, and he padded to the cork-floored bathroom between their room and the children’s. The door snapped shut, too loudly. Adam swore, counterproductively, but no one seemed to wake.

He had a challenging nocturnal erection. Sighing, he throttled his penis with his right hand, gripped the towel rail with his left, preparing to double over, as if he were executing a dive with pike — a fraught manoeuvre, but the surest way, when he was engorged, to avoid spraying urine across the seat and onto the floor, which would result in either an icky clean-up now or, if he neglected that courtesy, a bollocking from Claire in the morning. He bent his dick through another ten degrees, the organ bucking and resisting, and swore again.

The latch clicked as the bathroom door reopened. Adam straightened up and turned round, still clutching the angry penis, the look on his face on the cusp between ecstasy and excruciation.

‘Oh,’ Claire said. ‘Oh, Adam.’

He followed her gaze to his genitals. So far it hadn’t caused him much trouble, this penis. Less than he might have expected. Less grief than Neil’s had caused them.

‘It isn’t what you think,’ Adam said, releasing his grip. ‘Clezzy, really. It’s… I’m just trying to piss.’

Claire hesitated for a moment before acquiescing with a sleepy smile. She squeezed past him to the toilet, naked, yawning as she peed, wiping herself robotically. The trust that they had almost lost had come back to them.

‘Well,’ she said, standing up. ‘We’re awake now.’

She took hold of the penis with one hand, made a shush sign with the other, and led him silently back to bed.

Three years before, as open-mindedly as he could, Adam had considered the possibility that he found the thought of Claire and Neil arousing. Briefly he wondered whether he might be on the high road to a life of orgies in south London warehouses (like the ones that, so one of the secretaries told him on his second day in the office, Hardy liked to attend), where he would be locked in a cage to watch while strangers fucked his wife. That wasn’t it, he soon decided; he was as vanilla in his lusts as in his other tastes. Her brush with Neil had been a jolt rather than a turn-on, more medical than erotic, mild electrotherapy administered to a struggling heart. Or perhaps it was simply a coincidence when, a few weeks later — weeks of him ruminating on car journeys, his jaw grinding ominously, Claire glancing at him in silence as Harry and Ruby garrotted each other in the back — their sex life came back to them, too, like a rediscovered hobby. That summer they were anyway emerging from the tunnel of the children’s infancy: the phase of repurposed bodies and burgled privacy, of holidays that were marathons of arse-wiping and miscalculated discipline, their sexual punctuation being, if Adam were lucky, one perfunctory, grisly hand-job. The mutual neglect that began as a necessity and developed into a stand-off. They blinkingly began to see each other again.

Claire had crow’s feet around her eyes and her flesh was — not flabbier, but somehow more yielding than it once had been. Adam’s fingers sunk into her rather than stopping at her surface. She was still a beautiful woman, more beautiful, to him, because of what he had seen her body do. That same summer, after a decade of ordering grown-up drinks, or drinking nothing, she reverted to the alcosyrups she had preferred when they met, ginger wine and pina coladas and fuck-it Malibu and pineapples. The time poverty of parenthood had made her more decisive and demanding — in restaurants, in negotiations with telephone salespeople, in bed, where she directed his hands briskly or deployed her own.

Adam had kept his hair and, more or less, his looks. The sagging jowls had reconsidered and tightened back, the skin of his face coming to seem stretched and weather-beaten. When he looked in the mirror he had begun to see his father peering back at him, like an actor through his make-up.

The revived desire that his wife stirred felt like its own kind of transgression. Adam was freshly grateful to the him who had met and kept hold of her, and the him who had forgiven her for that nothing.

Afterwards he spooned her, clasping both of her breasts in one of his palms. ‘Love you,’ he said.

‘Go back to sleep,’ Claire said.

The trust had come back, but he hadn’t told her about Yosemite. That would always be just between them.

‘Up you get,’ Ruby said, hurdling onto their bed. ‘Beach time, lazyboneses.’

‘I already told her, it’s the castle today,’ Harry said from the doorway. ‘The one with the tree house, you know. It’s definitely my turn, she chose yesterday.’

‘Me too,’ Ruby said. ‘But it’s the beach first. Please, Daddy.’

Adam hesitated. ‘Tell you what,’ Claire ruled, her toenails digging into his calf beneath the bed covers, ‘we’ll go to the beach, but’ — she raised her voice above their son’s objection — ‘we’ll go to that place you like for dinner, where the man gave you the sparklers.’

‘I suppose,’ Harry said.

Adam drew his daughter to him. Ruby submitted, but passively, only half present in the embrace. Seven already: the years in which she needed to be as close to them as she could as often as she could, to be piggybacked and tickled and enfolded, her marsupial years, were drawing to an end. Adam felt a pang of unbereaved mourning.

They dressed and drove to the lake. The sand was greyish, the water was silty and cold, the rocks where the sand and water met encased in slimy, emerald weeds that were unpleasant and hazardous to walk on. With a seven-year-old’s talent for suspending disbelief, Ruby was in her swimsuit, across the beach and into the water before her parents had slipped off their shoes. She buried her face as she front-crawled, as her instructor had taught her.

‘You haven’t got any sun cream on!’ Adam called after her.

‘Daddy,’ Ruby called back. ‘Stop worrying.’

Adam splashed in. He threw Ruby into the air, never quite relinquishing control of the slippery limbs as her compact body rose and fell. ‘Higher,’ Ruby shrieked.

Harry joined them, shouting, ‘Do it to me!’ He and Adam raced, caressed underwater by shadowy tendrils, Ruby clinging to her father’s throat. Adam stood her in the shallows and waded back to demonstrate his butterfly stroke, splashing around like a demented walrus to small locomotive but great comic effect — the move a straight lift from his father’s summer playbook, which was itself, he had inferred, a daguerreotype of his father’s father’s, and so on and on, back and back, probably, to some exhibitionist Tudor moat swimmer, the parenting tactics encoded and passed on like eye colour or high blood pressure.

Playing in the water with his children, Adam’s mind went back to their peace lunch at the Chelsea fish restaurant several months before, the last time he had seen his father. It wasn’t the adult thing to do, he knew, it was gauche and unsophisticated, but he had mentioned his mother once, twice, how she was staying with her sister, how she worried about Harriet, in her squat with her punky German boyfriend, somewhere in east London.

Jeremy Tayler had pressed his fingers to his temples, eyes fixed on the menu, silent. ‘Asparagus,’ he finally said, looking up. ‘Then sole meunière. No, bonne femme.’

Anger had welled up in Adam, for his mother and also for himself, a kind of buyer’s remorse. All that happiness, that enervating, debilitating happiness, which had turned out to be a lie. That had been another kind of bereavement, for the life he thought they had all shared. Later Adam noticed his father appraise the waitress’s arse, as she bent to sweep the tablecloth with an accessory like a cut-throat razor.

‘Daddy?’ Ruby said.

She was kneeling in the shallows, recycling the murky water that lapped into her mouth, accustomed to going about her business while the adult worked through his or her distraction, emails, text messages.

‘Sorry,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t drink it, sweetheart.’

He pictured his mother’s pursed mouth as she applied the sun cream to him and Harriet, her firm, methodical strokes, only now intuiting the contest of devotion and boredom, and the other, veiled resentments that must have engraved her concentrating frown. Harriet had submitted herself obediently, he recalled, but he had always wriggled away ungratefully, desperate to show their father a dive, or how long he could hold his breath.

Fathers.

‘Again the buttercup,’ Ruby said.

‘All right,’ Adam said. ‘Just once.’

He splashed the children as he launched himself into his stroke; they splashed him back. In the end the three of them slipped back across the rocks. Claire distributed towels for the children to dry themselves.

Along the beach three old men were playing dominoes underneath a sun umbrella. A thin man and fat woman were holding hands. Snatches of music drifted over from the open-air café. Adam remembered reading an interview in the paper with some septuagenarian film director, a Spanish or Italian man, describing how, one morning in old age, lust had left him, and how light he felt without it, as if he had been tethered to a goat for sixty years and suddenly cut loose. Adam was beginning to feel like that, but about ambition rather than his libido. This wasn’t quite the life he expected, but what right, really, did he ever have to his hopes? They made enough money, just about. You never knew, they told each other, the business Claire was starting might take off, stranger things, the usual. Claire, the children, the nineteenth-century history books that he read on the commuter train from High Wycombe, a train on which, almost every day, he got a seat.

Hardy was the secretaries’ nickname for Alan, the shorter and fatter of his two bosses. Alan/Hardy had a Humpty Dumpty belly that he attempted to corset in a self-mortifying belt. He dyed his hair a rusty orange and signed his name with an overcompensating flourish, his insecurities so flagrant that they were hard to resent. Laurel (Craig) was taller, an inexpert shaver who wore ill-fitting clothes, as if he were dressed by a hard-up mother who was keeping him in hand-me-downs until he finished growing. He had an absent, scholarly air that, so the secretaries whispered, concealed an actuarial coldness when it came to cutting people loose. ‘P45 you as soon as look at you,’ one of them said.

Adam had been hired by Hardy and feared Laurel. As a team the two of them were like the improbable couples you sometimes saw at weddings, the type with no obvious compatibility or resemblance, who nevertheless synchronised perfectly on the dancefloor. They fit. Adam struggled to decipher where the power lay between them.

The private sector, a realm so denigrated and envied by his Civil Service colleagues, turned out to be essentially the same. The same needs, grudges and laziness, distributed in roughly the same proportions across the office, interacting according to what was probably a scientifically predictable algorithm. The same atavistic subtexts to every disagreement in meetings. Only the vocabulary was different. In consultancy you sought alignment before a meeting by syndicating your findings to your team. Faced with scepticism or incomprehension, you would walk them through the deck. You talked about value and performance and delivery, and, as often as possible, strategy. The key phrase, the trump phrase, the term that dominated their spreadsheets and appraisals and reveries, was billable days.

It was known in the office that one of the investors had sponsored Adam, and to begin with his colleagues had cold-shouldered him, as if he were part intern (unlikely to stay long enough to be worth schmoozing), part informer; he ate his lunch at his desk, pretending to be busy. He had thought to be respected for his decade of public service, to leap across to this new ladder halfway up, the higher rungs immediately in prospect. He was mistaken. Most of his peers had joined from mainstream consultancies, with the odd, exotic accountant sprinkled among them. The minority who, like Adam, had defected from the public sector, came from the big-ticket, contract-rich departments, health and local government and welfare. Adam had irrelevant expertise, unremunerative contacts.

‘Going forward,’ Hardy advised him, Adam struggling to repress the image of him leathered and strapped into the orgy cage, ‘you’ll need some expert leverage,’ meaning research assistants who knew what they were doing.

They were certain to fire him, he warned Claire. It was only a matter of time. Even with the smaller mortgage, they would be screwed. He regretted his rash, greedy career switch. He dwelled on the cost of the children’s sports camp. The shame.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him in their bed in High Wycombe, dawn breaking outside the dormer window. She applied for part-time jobs and took one as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery.

He worried.

He brought in a smallish contract to find savings at a private prison, and he proved to be a good picker-upper, adept at knowing precisely enough to seem plausible. Half the time, Adam quickly saw, it wasn’t substantive expertise that the clients were buying. The arrangement reminded him of that song of a decade before, in which the lyrics deny the singer is the man his girlfriend has caught in flagrante. It wasn’t me — who decided you should be fired. It was Adam Tayler. It wasn’t me — who recommended that you be privatised. It was Mr Tayler.

His true expertise was in taking the blame.

It wasn’t me.

It isn’t what you think.

It was a misunderstanding.

Adam often worked alone, sleeping in deathly identikit hotels while he terrorised some unfortunate regional hospital or council. He would take a book to dinner, less to read than as a prop to ward off garrulous travellers — a precaution he adopted after an evening in Hartlepool with a packaging salesman, a man with the hairiest ears he had ever seen, who, when Adam’s interest lagged, had pleaded, ‘It’s not just paper, it’s corrugated cardboard too!’ Occasionally he thought of Neil, driving round and round the M25, Neil before he flew out to America, with only the radio and his shampoo samples and his ruthless customers for company. He became a connoisseur of the spoiling techniques deployed by doctors and bureaucrats. Outright rudeness and noncooperation were easier to handle, he learned, than oily hypocrisy. ‘Wonderful idea’ and ‘fascinating insight’ generally translated, in Adam’s experience, as ‘You cunt’ and ‘I will crush you’.

He went back to the Home Office to pitch for a contract at Croydon. Chatting awkwardly to old comrades, he wasn’t sure whether to think of them as victors or as inmates: whether, in careers as in a battle, the people who survived were the strongest and the bravest or, on the contrary, the most cowardly. Whether he had escaped or failed. He saw Heidi in the lift, but other people crowded around them. She blushed, fixedly watched the numbers ticking down to G, and strode off when the doors opened, with only a curt, eye-contact-less ‘Bye’.

After a year he was summoned to Hardy’s office, and when he arrived found Laurel in there too. He glanced rapidly between them, looking for the driving-examiner smile.

‘This is perfectly normal —’ Laurel said.

‘This is absolutely routine,’ Hardy cut in, Laurel switching on a Zen grin to smooth over the interruption. They explained that Adam’s temporary contract would be rolled over for another year. The same thing happened the following year. In his more sanguine moments he would still glance up the ladder, at job titles with the prefix Senior or even Director of, but at others he peered downwards to the abyss, and was grateful to have his lowly rung to cling to.

They had lunch at the café by the lake, cold meats that the children wouldn’t eat and Coke they weren’t supposed to drink. Afterwards they played babyfoot, like a family in an advert, Adam’s eyes meeting Claire’s as they registered the idyllic tableau. This is us. He whispered to Harry to let Ruby win, as he wished he had let Harriet win, once or twice, at table tennis or Risk. His son tried to comply, for a goal or two, but in the end he couldn’t manage the self-effacement.

After the game Harry announced that he wasn’t tired and fell asleep in the shade. Claire sat on a lounger to brush Ruby’s beautiful hair.

Adam put on his Crocs, and the sunglasses that were the marker of sexual self-respect among young parents, and absconded for a walk along the shore. He hummed to himself, then sang aloud: ‘Well I’m runnin’ down the road tryin’ to loosen my load / I’ve got seven women on my mind.⁠’ His happiness anthem. Away from the road and the café the lakeshore became wilder, rockier, unkempt, bottles and plastic bags and a lone flip-flop nestling in the crevices. But further along the rock gave way to a flat, curated stretch of sand, possibly attached to a hotel, though Adam couldn’t see one among the trees.

Two young boys were playing bat and ball. An elderly couple dozed under a parasol like effigies of themselves. A young woman in a white bikini, sunbathing alone on a towel, sat up to remove her top. She was a pretty brunette, painted toenails, firm, catwalk breasts. Nineteen, Adam estimated, or thereabouts. The fidgeting of her hands behind her back drew his eyes but he forced them away.

Adam watched as two men walked towards her, whispering. She was lying on her back, topless, and didn’t see them approaching. One produced a camera from a pouch around his neck; the other arced around the girl, using that studiedly casual, faintly comic, half-jog, half-stride gait that some people employ if the lights change while they are crossing a road.

The second man stood next to the girl, grinning. The first man raised his camera.

‘Hey,’ Adam shouted. ‘Non.’ He shooed them away with the back of his hands, as you might a wasp or a stray dog.

The girl sat up and saw the three of them. She tried to shield her breasts with a forearm as she rushed into a T-shirt, gathered her belongings and stalked up the beach towards the trees, one foot stumbling in the sand as she passed the second stranger. Adam wanted to shout after her that he was trying to help, but his schoolboy French deserted him, she was gone too quickly, tripping again on the root of a pine tree but keeping going, escaping, this time, into the shadows.

The two men drew together and conferred, hands cupped to their mouths like conspiring tennis partners. They were younger than him, with the pointlessly bulbous muscles of gym enthusiasts, the wirier of the two, the man with the camera, somehow the more concerning.

Adam stood his ground, bluffing, wondering whether he had been rash to intervene. The comatose pensioners and the bat-and-ball boys would be no help. He thought of the wasteful casualties of nightclub altercations and road rage incidents that he occasionally read about. He was grateful for his sunglasses, which masked the fear that must be glowing in his eyes. He held the wiry man’s gaze.

They couldn’t read him, or they were bluffing themselves. They scowled, the wiry one spat on the sand, and they walked slowly away in the other direction.

Adam exhaled. He looked towards the old people for acknowledgement or approbation but they hadn’t stirred.

He turned to rejoin his family, scrambling back across the rocks, thinking of Ruby yelling ‘Higher!’, of she and Harry swimming back to Claire on the shore. He thought of the girl on the beach in Tenerife, struggling with her towel beneath the yellow parasols, he and the cameraman watching through the viewfinder. He thought of the girl by the lake in Yosemite, her head buried in the water as she swam, how she slicked back her hair and grinned. Two men were watching her, and one of them was him.

They were eating ice creams at the café when he got back. The wind had picked up; Claire was wearing a sarong. She gestured that it was time to go, thumb pointing back over her shoulder towards the car park, as in an old disco move.

They packed up their things and made for the hire car. Adam drove them out through the forest and across the farmland beyond. They passed war memorials, a sacked castle, a place where, so Claire’s guide book informed them, heretics had once been burned at the stake. They were safaris of pain, these holidays in gory old Europe. So much cleaned-up blood and forgotten loss.

Adam still wondered about her. Not every day, nor even each week, but she would reappear at intervals, reliably incessant, and he was almost glad, sometimes, when she did. The memory of her had become a proof of who he was, a continuity between his forty-year-old incarnation and his younger self. Or, rather, she was a memory of a memory, since Adam understood that, after this much time, a person could only be an idea, as perhaps she always had been. He thought of her father, too, sometimes. You do your best, Eric had lamented, you think you’re doing right, and Adam saw that he, at least, had tried to.

Of course he wished it hadn’t happened. He wished he had blown the whistle that night (My girl. You believe it?), that there had been no reason to excoriate him in the morning. Not speaking up was the most reprehensible action, or inaction, of his life. All the same, the obsession had eased. The whole episode was regrettable, horrible even, but also ancient and, like those medieval atrocities, almost impersonal, another Adam as well as a bygone Rose. He couldn’t have known then what he understood now, about daughters and about permanence.

The guilt he still felt had a new focus. In the end, Adam reminded himself as he drove from the lake to the restaurant, It wasn’t me. It wasn’t him who had taken the girl into the tent that night. That fact was a partial mitigation, but also, now that he finally came to accept it, a kind of reproach.

It wasn’t Adam. It wasn’t Rose. It was Neil.

More than once, in the months immediately after their quarrel, Adam had considered contacting Neil, to let him know he had been right after all: his text had been prescient, no harm had been done, not to Adam and Claire at any rate. His email would be impersonal, caustic. If Neil replied, Adam would delete the message without reading it.

When, a year later, abstruse catastrophe beckoned — when everything the experts guaranteed would never happen, bankruptcies and bail-outs and nationalisations, happened the next day; when Adam’s securocrat acquaintances were whispering about plans to impose martial law if the cash machines ran dry — he thought of Neil anew. Dodgily spliced investments, runaway derivatives, Farid’s ramshackle property deals: Neil was implicated in everything that had caused the debacle. Neil and his money.

Adam called up the Rutland Partners website, hoping to find that the firm had gone to the wall, or at least was somersaulting towards the brickwork, a fate that would be adumbrated in some apologetic, lawyerly holding statement. Instead he read a screed of gobbledegook about how the fund had diversified its assets to minimise downside risk. He’s got away with it, Adam thought. He’s got away with it again. When his job at the consultancy faltered he blamed Neil for instigating the move. Neil had never understood the public-service ethos, never even tried. Perhaps he had known that Adam would come unstuck.

But he couldn’t keep it up, and before long he found himself regretting his anathemas. He had been the man with the luck, Adam knew. Neil wasn’t one of those congenital banking types whom he had met at university and sometimes ran into now, the type who wore those City-boy felt-collared overcoats, who had been destined for riches since their perfunctory conception in some stockbroker-belt bedroom. Adam had the drive, too, or so it had seemed in the beginning. Neil had been powered by a kind of indifference, which the world had rewarded as some men covet aloof women. He had done it all himself.

Later Adam would look again at the Rutland Partners website, but for clues to Neil’s progress rather than evidence of his downfall; now and again he would Google him. For the most part he was able to prevent himself searching for anyone else. He fought off the impulse to contact Rose until it almost abated.

Adam still thought of Neil as dead. But after a couple of years he was no longer the shameful dead, an executed traitor or bubonic corpse, but dead in the manner of a rash, lamented duellist. That was one of the dead’s advantages, Adam saw: you could choose which version of them to remember, as an obituarist was free to choose a photo from his subject’s youth. Neil dragging him out of the ocean in San Diego. Neil with Harry’s green shit on his coat.

As for the Claire thing, their nothing: his sense of scale had changed. His world was smaller, what was closest to him mattered most, and who, and so, in a way, they were quits. Rose was a contest and an idea, but Neil was his friend, had already been his friend that night in Yosemite. It made no difference that they had only known each other a few weeks. That wasn’t how you measured obligation. Adam already owed Neil that night, and he had defaulted. Joining him in the encirclement at the tent the next morning had been a bluff, Adam acknowledged to himself: he had asserted his innocence by exposing himself to judgement, self-interest and loyalty jumbled up.

If Neil were to be resurrected — if he were to get in touch — Adam might consider forgiving him. They would have to discuss it, he and Claire. But he would definitely consider it. That is, if Neil would consider it, too.

He wouldn’t, Adam was certain. They had left it too long. The job was his memento of Neil, a debt that at first had rankled but was now more poignant than galling. He wasn’t even sure whether Neil knew he had accepted it.

They stopped for an early dinner. Claire was still wearing her sunglasses, but he could tell that she was watching him, checking the temperature of his thoughts, while the children threw a ball for a stranger’s dog in the square. Adam smiled to indicate that he was with her. Against her half-hearted objections he bought them preposterous baseball caps with 3-D wild boars, the emblems of the region, lolling on the visors.

On the way home the four of them sang a round, Ruby struggling with her cues but laughing at herself with the rest of them, Adam watching her, almost surreptitiously, in the rearview mirror. These were their headline memories, Adam realised, the memories his children would one day share with lovers and spouses, the moments that would come back to them, arbitrarily, as adults, in a meeting or on a train, their equivalents of his boyhood’s fishpond and ice-cream catastrophes. The weight of that struck him afresh as he drove them back.

In bed he told Claire about the topless girl by the lake. She said, ‘My hero,’ and kissed him on the shoulder.

There was a pond behind the cottage, so pretty that, on the afternoon they arrived, Claire said the view belonged in a film, but overrun with lascivious frogs. That night Adam feared their croaking would keep him awake, but his wife put her arm around him and he fell asleep.