The Faithful Couple

2003

After the arraignments he would muster his excuses. He tried to be objective, scrupulous, as if the inside of his head were a court, and he were the prosecutor and the defence attorney, as well as the judge and the accused, or the co-accused. He considered but discounted the weaker extenuations, such as their youth (they hadn’t been that young) and the drinking (they weren’t all that drunk, not that evening). He admitted the quicksand ambiguity of her appearance and of her demeanour: she had seemed alternately aware and oblivious of her body’s power, playfulness eliding with flirtation on a slippery adolescent continuum. He acknowledged the hypnotic momentum of the holiday, for most of which the two of them had scarcely noticed women, being too preoccupied with each other, until finally they had turned their energy outwards, looking for a mediator and a prize, and found her. Found Rose.

In the private hearings he conducted, many each day in the first, hallucinatory week — with several more each night, when he was up and jiggling the baby, or in bed, wasting his chance of sleep — he would leave the obvious argument till last. It had been Neil, he would eventually remind himself, it was Neil, and not him, who had taken the girl into the tent and fucked her. It was Neil who had actually done that, even if Adam had wanted and intended to fuck her himself.

Yet somehow that most material fact felt more like a technicality than a true exoneration. Adam was implicated, he knew that, as a man could be had up for murder though someone else wielded the knife. You wanted it too. You started it. He would have been implicated even if he hadn’t known about her age, because he was there and because of what he said about her. But he had known. I fucking told you. If there was room for a beneficial doubt before her father corrected him, there hadn’t been afterwards. Every time, always, as in some rerun disaster film that you vainly hope might turn out differently, Adam found himself guilty. He deserved the morning-after curse that at the time he barely heeded:

One day you’ll have your own. I hope you find out how this feels.

‘She’s asleep,’ Claire would whisper to him during that week. ‘She’s asleep already, Adam. Put her in the basket and come to bed. Ad, come on.’

When he tried to recall the reasons he hadn’t spoken up, either by the campfire or (his second chance) when Neil evicted him from the tent, the only motives Adam could salvage were sordid and inadequate, pique and revenge that made his conduct seem worse.

My little girl. What kind of people are you?

Or, kneeing him in the coccyx as he lay beside her, four in the morning outrage, Claire would say, ‘Adam, she’s crying. It’s your turn. Fuck’s sake, she’s going to wake him. What is it, Adam?’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing, Clezz. Give her to me.’

It was the baby’s fault, of course. The baby had aggravated Yosemite from an occasional nag to a disorder. Not just the sleeplessness but the fact of the baby. She recast Adam’s memory, as if she were a belated witness who brought vital new information, newly terrifying consequences.

‘Is she going to be all right?’

‘She’s fine, she’s just hungry. Go to sleep.’

‘No, I mean, when she’s older. Will she be all right, Clezz?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

They had passed the girl to him in the operating theatre, a foot of squiddy cord still attached, the limbs slathered in the white birth cream that they all come out in, the elastic mouth emitting a cry at once mechanical and undulating, like the rise and fall of an air-raid siren. The body looked much too big, way too enormous, to have been living inside Claire until a few moments before. ‘Adam?’ Claire said, because she hadn’t seen the child yet, besides a blur when they waved her above the screen. ‘Is she…?’ Adam glimpsed the gash in her abdomen when he took the bundle from the midwife, saw the layers of Claire’s fat and muscle retracted by the harsh clamps. The wound seemed much too grave for anyone to hope seriously to survive, as if a mid-sized cannonball had punched a hole in her.

‘How do you do?’ Adam said to the bundle, which was wrinkling its nose and grimacing, as if it were about to sneeze. Because what, really, were you supposed to say? Oh I see, it’s you, I get it, of all the genetic possibilities, you’re the one. All the love and worry will be for you. The grey eyes opened, horrified, closing quickly to shrink the world away.

‘Adam? How is she? Is she…?’

Claire was woozy from the anaesthetics they were dripping into her spinal cord. They had rushed her under the knife when the child became distressed, all of it happening with the momentum of an action movie so that Adam barely had time for fear. Put on the gown, put on the mask. Hold her hand. ‘She’s fine,’ Adam told her. ‘She’s wonderful.’ He gave the child to his wife to clasp while they laboriously stitched her up. His eyes met hers, the private, romantic, gulping moment that all just-delivered parents share. Wow and I love you and Oh fuck.

Second time round, he knew the script. Two years before, when Harry was born, he hadn’t been sure what to do or say, what or how to feel. They had been to the happy-clappy baby classes but nobody could tell you that part. He had gingerly walked the squawking bundle around the ward, humming ‘American Pie’, ‘The Boxer’, ‘Take it Easy’. Neil had come immediately that afternoon, he remembered, too soon, really, they had still been disoriented. Neil was pleased to be early, Adam had seen, pleased to get there before their families. A nurse mistook him for the father and showed him how to feed Harry with a pipette. Neil got Harry’s neonatal kryptonite shit on his coat.

This time Adam’s parents arrived first, performing themselves in an oddly chafing way. ‘Out through the sun roof,’ Jeremy Tayler joked, the inveterate jollity that was beginning to seem a form of evasion. They and Claire’s mother cooed all the necessary compliments and made the standard quips — She’s got a good pair of lungs on her! She’s got you wrapped round her little finger already! — there never seeming to be anything personal to say about a baby, a baby being the most particular yet most generic thing on Earth, just as there was never anything but platitudes to offer at funerals.

Neil came just before chucking-out time. He brought extravagant flowers that the Chinese nurse swiftly confiscated; he held Ruby at arm’s length from his bespoke suit, as if she might be booby-trapped.

‘She won’t bite,’ Adam said.

‘It isn’t biting I’m worried about, Ants.’ He handed the bundle back. ‘The good news is, she looks like Claire.’

‘At least, you know, she doesn’t look like you.’

‘Boys,’ said Claire, tubed-up and aching. ‘You boys.’ She laid the baby on her chest and closed her eyes.

‘Wet the baby’s head?’ Neil suggested.

But Adam had to go home to Harry. He sent the ritual email, specifying the girl’s weight and the satisfactory state of the mother’s health, as the mysterious formula required, attaching a photo he downloaded from the camera in which Ruby, purple and wrinkled, looked both a day and a hundred years old. He went to bed, and in bed Yosemite had come back to him. He closed his eyes and they were there: not his own daughter or his sewn-up wife but another father and a different child. It was as if he were watching one of those primitive, flip-through cartoons, jumpy images that nevertheless told a clear story. The jokes, the chase, the conquest. The curse.

The jokes. The whole thing began with the swim, Adam saw on the night Ruby was born, with him reaching out to submerge her head in the lake, her father watching from the shore. The feel of her skull seemed to come back to him, thick with hair (one of his fingers briefly catching in it), but cold from the water like a corpse’s. He remembered his sharp momentary panic that she had gone under for ever and he had done something terrible. He remembered the dirty words he heard himself say afterwards, the macho challenge he issued to Neil, as if the girl were a hill to race up or a fence to hurdle. Stop making excuses. Then the evening and the campfire, and what he hadn’t said, and the scratchy night. He shouldn’t have touched her in the water.

Worst of all, almost, he recalled how, the next day, he had trivialised the whole thing, preferring not to see the gravity and the shame, which ought to have been plain as daybreak. He saw how the grubby self-preservation instinct had kicked in, the pukka voice that said, Get yourself off, whatever you have done, deny, abscond, deflect, get away with it. After that, later, regret it if you have to. Little white lie.

Adam barely slept that night. He couldn’t unremember. Rose and Eric stayed with him as he brought Harry to the hospital the next day; they were with him, the day after that, as he drove Claire and the baby home, at the tortoise speed employed only by new fathers, octogenarians and middle-aged drunks pretending to be sober. He took a week’s paternity leave (not that many people would miss him), and they tagged along as he escorted Harry on their chilly we-still-love-you outings. At the aquarium, on Ealing Common, it became urgently important that Adam remember precisely what he had said and done. He derived a masochistic, almost narcotic satisfaction from the details he recovered: the play of light around the campfire, the smile on Rose’s face as she entered the tent, the hunch of Eric’s shoulders the following morning, as if he might make himself small enough to disappear. He found himself polishing and refining these keepsakes, sharpening their outlines and improving their texture, the better to admonish himself with them. He felt sure he could visualise his own gestures, the leer that Eric must have registered at the lake and Rose seen beside the fire, as if he had borrowed their memories. This, he knew, was always the most coveted perspective — What did I do? Why did I? Who was I? — and the one that was never truly available.

He could hear her sob as he and Neil walked away, or thought he could, the sound long and low like an animal’s. Over and over he saw her father turning back to berate him beside the burned-out campfire. One day you’ll have your own.

Now he did. His guilt and the fear fed on each other. The more he dwelled on Rose, the worse his pre-emptive anxiety for Ruby; the more he feared for Ruby, the fiercer his guilt over Rose, what she and her father must have been through. Worst of all was the hybrid guilt for what might ever happen to his daughter — because of him, or men like him, at least, which, morally, amounted to the same thing. The monkey-grip soles of Ruby’s pink feet, the frail, ineluctable clasp of her fingers on his, those grey eyes. The everything of her.

I hope you find out how this feels.

‘Do that one more time, Sammy, and we’re going back inside.’

Sam re-reached for the gear stick.

‘I’m serious, Sam. It’s automatic anyway, I told you.’

The boy laughed. He shifted his skin-and-bone buttocks in the triangle of leather available to him between Neil’s thighs, brushing irrelevantly against his penis.

‘Can we take the roof down?’

‘It’s raining.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘It’s going to rain.’

‘If it rains we’ll put it back. Go on.’

Neil smiled. He was an amateur; he was there for the taking. He pushed the button on the dash and the canvass retracted into the compartment behind the jump seat, a feat of puppetry that always seemed to him at once flash and already old-fashioned, retro-decadent.

‘Wave at Granddad,’ Neil said.

Brian was facing out between the net curtains, leaning forward from his armchair, his head balanced on his walking stick and cushioned by his hands, his medicines out of sight on the nest of tables in the corner. When he saw Sam waving he briefly raised an arm.

‘Okay, Sammy, both hands on the wheel. No, higher, like this. Ten and two, remember. Right. Now, don’t overdo it. Just the pedals and the steering wheel.’

‘Got it. Don’t worry.’

‘Right. Off we go.’

Neil surrendered the wheel and the pedals and put the car into gear. For want of anything better to do with his right arm he wrapped it around Sam’s waist. ‘Okay,’ he said, and they were off.

‘Like that?’

‘Bit more… Just a bit, that’s enough. You’re a natural.’

The hair on top of Sam’s head was a shade or two darker than usual, one slanting patch matted greasily like a mechanic’s. It was Saturday afternoon but Sam was wearing his school trousers and a once-white shirt.

‘Right,’ Neil said, ‘I’ll help with the corner. Just around the block and then we’re going back. No, we agreed. Someone might see us.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ Sam said. ‘Thank you.’

An eccentric kind of triumphal progress, this ride. Neil had never been very interested in cars (no cars, no football, two key indifferences he shared with Adam). The finish and the colour of the Audi, the upholstery and the stereo, were down to Jess. Sam would have made a better guess at the vehicle’s horsepower than Neil was able to. All the same he loved the car for what it represented. It was their first joint splurge, not counting their rent and the holidays and the gym membership at the boutique place in Islington. More than that, it was the first five-figure purchase he had ever made, made with his own money, the serious money, several grand after tax, which was amassing in his bank account with a wondrous monthly regularity — thanks to Farid, the second chance he gave Neil, and the deranged London property market.

If he was ever going to have a pomp to be in, Neil guessed, he was in it now.

‘I said both hands. Christ.’ He grasped the wheel where Sam had let it go to wipe his nose.

‘Okay, sorry. There. Sorry.’

They puttered past Bimal’s old house; no lights were on inside. Bimal had two kids of his own now, Neil knew, though he hadn’t yet met the second. These days they rarely saw each other, though they were on good terms, no hard feelings, like members of an amicably disbanded rock band.

‘How’s your dad?’

‘Okay I s’pose. Said I’ll have to get the bus back, though.’

Brian had shown Neil the contents of an envelope Dan had left with his son the previous evening: a tenner plus change, and a note that said Bed by 9. Go easy on the TV. He was trying.

‘I could take you if you’d rather.’

‘Nah, I’ll be fine, honest. Are they — what do you call it again? — quadraphonic? The speakers.’

‘Dunno, Sammy. Sorry.’

‘What should I do about that bump? That okay?’

Sam relaxed into Neil’s torso as he became used to the wheel, warming a patch of his uncle from the belly to the sternum. Almost four years, and Jess had never mentioned children: too proud, too committed to the performance of herself as spikily independent. Neil was allowing himself to believe that her silence meant she had no definite expectations or preferences. Perhaps this car would be their limit.

‘Into the chicane,’ Sam said. ‘He’s the youngest driver in the competition.’

‘The crowd’s gone wild,’ Neil said. Sam smiled up at him.

‘Sammy, the road.’ He gestured at the asphalt with his eyes.

An afternoon at the Tower of London, out on the M1 together to a safari park, soppy admiration for the boy’s routine cognitive leaps: Sam had laid claim to what little parental instinct Neil harboured. Sam plus Adam’s kids, Harry and the wizened newborn girl, little avatars of his friend he could cradle and spoil.

‘I told you it would rain. Bollocks.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘It is.’

‘Only spitting,’ Sam said. ‘Anyway, we’re nearly back.’

Neil left the roof down so Brian would be able to see them as they pulled up. ‘Let me…’

‘It’s okay,’ Sam said. ‘I can do it. I can.’

They rounded the final bend. Neil thought he could remember Brian indulging them in this way, he and Dan impatiently taking turns, in the beaten-up red Triumph with its indelible smell of travel-sickness puke and no seatbelts in the back. But he wasn’t sure that he trusted the memory, that it truly was one.

‘So is he looking after you all right? Granddad.’

‘S’pose so. Yeah. He’s shit hot on his maths, isn’t he? And he’s got a roll of old brown paper from his shop, covers all my books with it. School books. Loves it.’

‘Does he fry you chips?’ Brian had covered his books, too. Neil had forgotten about that. Probably he had never said thank you.

‘Pizza,’ Sam said. ‘We order it, don’t we?’ Earlier, before lunch, Brian had made Sam wash his hands in the kitchen sink. In the clasping and rubbing of the boy’s palms, Neil recognised the motion of his father’s hands beneath the tap, and his brother’s hands, and, he realised with a jolt, his own.

For his part he didn’t want to teach his nephew anything, besides steering: his job, Neil considered, was to help the child know less. There was something gratifyingly discretionary in his feelings for Sam, as if he were poised between the hard duty of family and the free choice of friendship. The stake in HappyFamilies had come to nothing, but Neil was nevertheless becoming a somebody, a man of substance. He would help Sam out, up and out, when the time came.

Sam scuffed the front wheel into the kerb as they arrived. Neil winced, but the tyre was fine. Sam stood up to wave again, arching his body over the steering wheel, but Brian had already turned away from the window. Through the net curtains Neil made out his father’s back, hunched over the walking stick.

He closed the roof. He kissed Sam’s greasy head.

‘Woz that for?’ Sam said, ruffling the kiss out of his hair and opening the car door.

At this rate Neil would soon be able to do whatever he chose. He could take one of those Caribbean cruises he used to admire in the brochures at the travel agent in Wembley, though he knew that Jess wouldn’t let him. Naff, she would say, I’d rather go to Blackpool.

He was in his pomp.

Always a small shock when the train came out of the tunnel (not long to go now), natural light suddenly dispelling the artificial kind, escape from a constriction that Adam almost hadn’t noticed. The carriage had filled up. A woman was strap-hanging in the crush in front of him, sixty-five-ish, he estimated, half-moon glasses and duffel coat, old enough to be entitled to his seat and unlikely to be affronted if he relinquished it. His reflexes were dimmed: by the time she had burrowed through his preoccupation, a man with loud headphones and needless shades, who Adam wouldn’t have taken for a gentleman, had already stood up for her.

Ordinarily he cherished this commute. One Tube line all the way, from Ealing to St James’s, almost always a seat, the beginning of the ride above ground, running alongside the common and then Chiswick Park, the trees letting him feel like a country squire coming up to town. Plus the views through the upper-storey windows, the enticement of which never faded. Once he had seen a woman in a bra slapping a man in the face. The train passed grander and humbler homes the deeper into London it dug, with their richer and poorer occupants, the winners and the clingers-on. Adam’s first day back at the department after his paternity leave, and in the sidings he saw sinister wreaths of cables he had never noticed before.

He minded the gap. He bought his cappuccino from the American coffee shop, carefully carrying the scalding cup to the ministry as if it were a votive offering. If he behaved absolutely normally, if he stuck to the agreed routine, perhaps no one would notice that he was now only a shell, a fancy-dress costume of Adam, through the eye holes of which a shrunken, imposter creature now peered out.

He negotiated the revamped security at the entrance to the building (all these scans and metal detectors, the new diurnal indignity that had to be got through, a twenty-first-century equivalent of bygone inconveniences like horse manure or outside plumbing). He made it to the lift, nabbing the prime, safe spot in the corner. He excuse-me-ed his way out when the electric ticker above the doors indicated his floor, keeping his head down as he scurried across the open-plan wilderness, the walk that always felt like a gauntlet. Not in early enough. Not working hard enough.

Not a 7. Still not a 7.

Asshole.

Two or three people called out ‘Congratulations’. Adam waved limply in their directions. He made it to his half-concealed cubicle, with the waist-high partition that was his token privilege as Deputy Head of Returns. He logged on, maximised his email, the automated morning ritual. He was too tired.

On that first day back there was another Lessons Learned debrief. Adam, Sheila (the Head of Returns to his Deputy), some officials up from Croydon. This time the lessons were derived from a Kurdish asylum-seeker’s much-publicised leap, with his six-year-old son, from the roof of a Glasgow high-rise. Adam saw the disparity in scale, life and death and desperation versus his eccentric self-indulgence. He wanted to concentrate. He tried, but he couldn’t help himself. Looking back on the years between now and California — the years between history ending and it shudderingly starting up again — they seemed to him an obtuse, wilfully extended adolescence. Adam had walked around as if nothing untoward had happened, nothing worth mentioning. He thought of his recently past self as a patsy in a slapstick film, a clot who hasn’t noticed the piano hurtling towards him from the sky.

On his second day there was a briefing on the migration fallout of the coming war. Immigration was an unglamorous directorate, Adam knew, tarnished by its associations with xenophobia and failure and with Croydon, the giant applicant clearing-house on the edge of London, a place of mythic dysfunction, banishment to which was his and his colleagues’ deepest, incessant fear. When he was transferred to immigration from crime, at the end of his initial placement, he had consoled himself that he was playing against type. Everyone expected the floppy-haired brigade to gravitate to cushier berths, in private offices or at the Treasury or the Foreign Office, not to the sweat and tears of immigration policy. He could use it as a bridge to somewhere else, Adam reasoned. In any case, he had the mortgage, and the children, and this was where he was.

Sheila was a 7. Head of Returns was a 7. Deputy was not. Neil was called ‘Executive Assistant’, which to Adam sounded like a glorified secretary, but in Neil’s world connoted ‘lieutenant’ or ‘henchman’. And money. Neil swanked about in his tailored suits, drove his lurid convertible, and never gave California a thought. His heedlessness was another kind of victory.

There was a big-shot spook at the briefing (impeccably dressed, poshest man in the room), someone from the Ministry of Defence, a Home Office statistician. The big meeting room on the third floor. This wasn’t like him, Adam told himself as, fiddling with his cufflinks, the spook introduced himself. His immune system wasn’t ready for it. He worried that he might be unable to shake off the funk, like some Amazonian tribesman undone by the flu.

In the Tayler household, when Adam was growing up, his family had slept soundly, taken no Prozac and seen no therapists. They had a breezy English pride in their sturdily mechanical brains. An argument or a grief was like a scratch or a broken limb. It was treated; it healed. Only Harriet seemed to have lows — tantrums, their father always called them — but they were as much a source of drollery as of concern. The Taylers touched wood, joshingly tapping each other’s crania, but otherwise their native empiricism precluded superstition: no one was the subject of a curse, nor would have credited it if they were. At boarding school, when one of the other pupils was morose or reclusive, some stranded son of a diplomat, say, the boys would hum the theme tune from Close Encounters or The Omen, joking about how the loner was defecting to the dark side. To moon over a girl was gay. To worry about exams was nerdy. Everyone was supposed permanently to be on good form, as if they were all well-conditioned, moodless racehorses. Then and into his adult life, Adam had thought of angst and depression as other people’s problems, as acne had been in his teens. Neil, for instance, with his tendency to analyse and mourn a moment when he ought to have been living it. Several times, Adam remembered, when they had shared rooms and tents in America, he had woken during the night to find Neil sitting up, perpendicular, his eyes open, thinking.

They were all or nothing people, Adam realised, his family, his breed. Their only game plan was to get all the way through, right to the end, thinking as little as possible, in the hope that they could outrun it — whatever it was that they were frantically eschewing, the neglect or abuse or adultery. The failure, or the guilt. If it outran you, if it caught you, you were fucked.

‘… national security implications in the broadest sense,’ the spook concluded. It would have been better if Eric had punched him.

On the third day Sheila’s boss, the deputy head of the directorate, declared herself ‘surprised’ — virtually an expletive in the desiccated language of their trade — at the widening gap between arrivals and returns.

‘The minister’s alarmed,’ she told Sheila in Adam’s hearing. ‘I’m alarmed, frankly.’

‘They happen, these spikes,’ Sheila tried. ‘There’s a cycle to them, the sending —’

‘The press are sniffing around this again, Sheila. You might think they had other things to worry about but it seems they don’t.’ She was a slight woman in ascetic pumps, with a greying helmet of hair, but Adam saw how she cowed Sheila, physically as well as institutionally, despite Sheila’s six-inch and fifteen-year advantages, her broad-hipped solidity. ‘I don’t want to hear about “sending-country factors”. We can’t have this many FASs running around, we can’t justify it.’

‘I’ll get on to Croydon,’ Sheila said.

F-A-S: Failed Asylum Seeker, the hygienic, shrinkwrapped acronym for the human beings they repatriated, or were supposed to. To begin with Adam had felt squeamish about the vocab and the role. But he took solace in the fact that these were never his policies. His job was merely to orchestrate the process as humanely and efficiently as possible, from the immigration tribunals to the detention centres to the planes. Better him than some hang-’em-and-flog-’em hatchet man (I am a nice boy. I am). The politicians who did make the policies might be amateurs but they weren’t monsters, not in this rainy little democracy. Nor were the uniforms who applied them. Adam had spent three days with an enforcement team from Croydon. Five men in a van, two of them unpleasant, three of them not, three of them lazy, two of them not. One borderline racist, so far as he could tell. The usual loathing for Whitehall toffs, him included.

There was a meeting that afternoon to discuss their response. Adam and Sheila needed to confect some top-notch, bullet-point braggadocio about the money that had left the Home Office and the rejected asylum-seekers who had left the country. By now he knew the form: four points on spending (always up), four on outcomes (up or down, depending).

Deputy Head of Returns. Sitting in his cubicle, Adam’s failings bled together in his head. He was scared. He was sorry. Telling would be a penance, and, in any case, if he didn’t admit everything, Neil wouldn’t understand his dread. He might go berserk — at Adam’s silence then, his silence since, or for his breaking the silence now. On the other hand, Adam tried to reassure himself, friends were always disappointing or betraying each other. Forgotten birthdays, unpaid debts, missed appointments, convenient lies, people changing wrongly as they aged, not being who you wanted them to be… Only a friend could betray you. Betrayal, he told himself, was what friends did.

He sent the text before the meeting: Come round this weekend? Drink? Something I need to say

A chalkboard menu had ousted the dartboard. A tonne of house-clearance encyclopedias lined the wall where a quiz machine had stood. The puke- and history-saturated carpet had been discarded, the floorboards underneath whitewashed: the standard-issue makeover in neighbourhoods like Adam’s and Claire’s. Pubs were the millennial gentrifiers’ first targets, like television stations during a coup. The only relic of the boozer’s past was the potman (two wings of hair on a bald crown, the skin between them marbled with liver spots, stains around his flies). He clung on, scavenging empty glasses in exchange for drink, tolerated by the new management out of kindness or indifference.

Four women were at the bar in their high heels and night-out skirts, their twenty-five-ish prime. Neil watched Adam watching them. His friend seemed to have undergone a marginally slower, domestic version of the fast-forward ageing that presidents and prime ministers went through live on television. Cartoon-dog bags beneath his eyes, a smudge of silvery grey in the hair above one ear, the regular hallmarks of parental decrepitude. Yet he was still chiselled and presentable, still emanating a cavalier glamour. Those women might not mind too much if they caught Adam admiring them.

‘What shall we be this evening?’ Neil joked. ‘Firemen? Lion tamers?’

Adam thought he recognised one of the women, but he couldn’t work out why. Perhaps it was only from a few minutes before, when he and Neil walked in, an instant memory that to his overloaded mind felt like something deeper. He knew he shouldn’t stare. You saw it on the Tube sometimes, this rash scrutiny of strangers, agog middle-aged men tracking svelte legs along the platforms and up the escalators.

They talked. Yes, she was a lovely girl, Adam allowed, utterly lovely, though he hadn’t spent all that much time with her, truth be told, his job mostly being to placate Harry while Claire nursed the baby. Also, he said, ‘she’s had this strange effect on me, I know it’s going to sound crazy, maybe it’s because she’s so wonderful, I look at her and… I haven’t told Claire about this, I can’t, but… This is what I wanted to talk about, in fact…’

‘What is?’

The potman came for their empty bottles, offering them a gappy grin that seemed to Adam both hopeless and defiant. They said ‘thanks’ and turned away, out of some joint, reflexive consideration for the man’s presumed shame.

‘Hold that thought,’ Neil said, and went to the bar for drinks. He glanced only once at the women while he waited, a rapid, practised up-and-down, but twice at his phone, Adam noticed. The barman crouched to retrieve the bottles from a fridge, dipping comically out of view.

The potman had saved him, if Adam wanted to be saved. Actually the malady seemed to be waning, burning itself out like a spiked fever. The performance of normality might soon evolve into the real thing. Even as he had been itemising his charge sheets Adam had known, some of the time — moments when he saw himself from the outside, like a patient looking down from the operating theatre’s ceiling — that Yosemite might not be able to bear the weight of all his masochistic remembrance. She might very well be fine. Almost certainly, they were fine.

Not telling his friend might be more a kindness than a lie. In a practical sense, Adam advised himself, the betrayal would only be actuated if Neil found out. He could live without knowing this; he was living perfectly happily. He was living so happily.

Neil brought the drinks and talked blithely about his work. ‘Net operating income… loan-to-value ratio… vacant possession value’ — his new, econometric vocabulary, the jagged poetry of money. Increasingly he reminded Adam of the cigar-smoking men he had met when, as a teenager, he had once or twice taken the train to London to have lunch with his father and a few of his associates: restless, distracted, with a pharaonic way of talking about their transactions that seemed at once showy and awesomely casual. These days Neil sometimes said ‘two’ for two million pounds, or ‘three-five’ for three and a half, dispensing with the tiresome zeros since millions were the only noteworthy denomination. Adam felt a dim, throwback duty to disapprove of Neil’s choices (going in with Farid, putting money first). Or rather, he felt an obligation to project disapproval, a moral condescension containing an implicit boast that he, Adam, could do and earn what Neil was doing and earning, if only he dropped his scruples and chose to. What he actually felt was pride — pride in himself, mostly, the gambler’s satisfaction at a bet that has come off.

Enough about money. Today Adam surely had the conversational prerogative, the day-release patient’s right to choose their pastime.

‘Neil,’ he said. ‘Philly. Listen, I need to ask you. Do you ever think about it?’

‘What?’

‘What happened in America. After we had that photo taken, you know, the Faithful Couple. With her. With… that girl. The girl and her father.’

Neil had raised his bottle to his mouth as Adam began speaking. He kept it there when the question had been formulated, his lips locked on the glass but not drinking, buying himself a few seconds. He tilted the bottle upward to finish his swig, closing his eyes as he swallowed. He was doubly surprised: by the out-of-the-blue allusion, and at the same time, he registered, that this had taken so long.

Adam was in some deep, abstruse distress, like a man on the parapet of a bridge. This time it was common charity to respond. In any case, Neil wasn’t ashamed. He was as sure as ever — surer — that he had nothing to be ashamed of.

‘No,’ he lied. He set his bottle on the table. ‘Not really, Ants. Do you?’

‘Sometimes,’ Adam said. He looked down at the reconditioned floorboards. ‘I have been. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. For some reason, I can’t stop myself, not since Ruby was born. I know it sounds ridiculous.’

‘It is ridiculous,’ Neil said quietly. ‘It’s nuts.’

‘Is it?’

The quartet of women clip-clopped past their table to the exit. One must have cracked a joke because two of them were laughing. The potman held the door open, bowing his head as if the women were minor royalty. There are many ways to get fucked up by this world, Neil thought, glancing at the potman and back to Adam, or to fuck yourself, and some of them you only notice after it’s too late.

‘They’re meeting us later,’ he tried. ‘I spoke to them at the bar. At that place in Waterloo, you know. I told them you were an extra in Footballers’ Wives.’

‘Don’t,’ Adam said.

‘Kit man.’

‘I said, don’t.’ The two-foot diameter of the table was planetary between them.

‘Listen,’ Neil said after a few seconds, in the tone he used when Sam was being obstreperous, or his father had neglected to take his blood-thinning medicine, ‘you’ve just had a baby. You probably haven’t slept for a week.’ You had to humour parents, he had learned that from Bimal: you had to ask about the children and commiserate with their exhaustion and tolerate the pious snobbery about their random biological accomplishment. ‘I bet you haven’t had sex for months’ — another gesture towards a joke that he quickly saw was unhelpful. ‘What has she got to do with anything?’

‘You don’t understand,’ Adam said, that eternally true and eternally pointless statement of fact. ‘It’s because of Ruby that I’ve been going over it. Her father…’ He sounded both nervous and resolved, as if he had been preparing. ‘Or maybe, you know, it’s been with us all along, waiting till our resistance was down, but we pretended it wasn’t.’

‘I haven’t pretended anything.’

‘Fine, Philly. Of course. But there’s something — I’d just like to talk about it. Is that all right?’

Neil’s phone rang, the insipid up-and-down-the-scale default tone that he hadn’t yet got around to changing. His hand advanced towards the noise. Adam glared at the hand; it froze and remained still until the ringing stopped. That fucking phone. If Yosemite happened now, Adam thought, or if the cellular age had dawned a few years earlier, her father would have called the police immediately, no chance to reconsider.

‘You could have a kid out there too, you know.’

‘What?’

‘You could have a kid. With her. That morning, you said you didn’t…’

‘I doubt it.’

I’ll take care of it. Neil could still hear her saying those words, in that indelible American accent. Are you sure? Yes, I got it. He hadn’t known exactly what she meant by that; probably neither had she. He hadn’t let that stop him.

‘I asked you, you probably don’t remember, but I remember, I asked…’

‘Fuck’s sake, Adam.’ Neil sat up straight. He gripped the edge of the table. ‘This is it, is it? What you wanted to say to me?’

‘No. That isn’t what I meant. What I wanted, it’s…’ He had gone in too hard, made the whole thing sound too much like blame when it was meant to be an appeal. ‘What I mean is… We didn’t think. Why didn’t we?’

Neil sighed. He counted to ten in his head. ‘Look,’ he said, softening. ‘Everyone does something they regret.’

‘So you regret it?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But you do.’

‘Adam,’ Neil said, ‘it was a long time ago. We were young.’

‘We weren’t that young. Let’s not kid ourselves. If you think about it, that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s why we’re still here. I mean, you and me. If we’d been fifteen too we would have lost each other by now. Like with Chaz and Archie and those boys you smoked that spliff with — they’re all crazy stories and sepia cricket photos, nostalgia for stuff that never happened in the first place. There’s nothing else left.’ Adam had hardly seen his older friends since his wedding, which, in retrospect, had been a festive wake for his youth. ‘You and me,’ he said, ‘we were adults.’

‘Fine,’ Neil said. ‘We were adults. So what?’

‘So we can’t just laugh it off, you know, boys will be boys or whatever. I can’t just forget about it, even if I wanted to. Especially now. Even though, in the last ten years, Claire and Jess, and the children and your, you know, your money, we nearly have.’

‘Ad, you keep saying “we”…’

‘Because it was both of us. I remember what you said about that and you were right. I’m not blaming everything on you, really I’m not, that’s what I’m trying to say, that’s what this is about. We were both there, and we both wanted her, and that was why it happened. I mean, the things we said — the jokes and the rest — and, you know, later, what I should have said.’

‘What do you mean, what you —’

‘The other day, I had Harry in the trolley, we’re at the supermarket, nappy aisle, and we bang into someone else’s trolley, another father, except the daughter is her age, you know, the girl’s. And yesterday there was this teenager in the street, she was telling off her boyfriend or something, and she shouted, “No!” Do you remember that?’

‘This isn’t what you thought then. Come to think of it, on that morning I remember you saying…’

I guess the skiing’s off.

‘That makes it worse,’ Adam said, raising his voice and then lowering it again. ‘I remember what I said. That makes it worse.’

‘Adam,’ Neil said, more kindly. ‘Ad, you’ve got this out of proportion.’

‘What would you say if Sam did something like that?’

‘Sam’s nine.’

‘But in a few years. What would you say to him?’

‘What the fuck has Sammy got to do with it? Leave him out of it, will you? Christ, Adam, it’s enough to make me think —’

‘Okay, Philly. I’m sorry.’ Sam had been another mistake. ‘It’s just… We didn’t think, did we? I didn’t.’

They were silent for a moment before Neil said, ‘Tell you what I think, since you bring it up. I think this is all arrogance. I mean, it’s a kind of arrogance. You want to be perfect, you think you can be perfect, it’s what you’ve always thought. I don’t blame you, it’s how you were brought up, you were probably pretty close to it, once. Maybe you expect it now more than ever, because of the kids and the rest. But you can’t be perfect because nobody can. I’m not perfect either,’ Neil said, unconsciously reaching for the mole on his neck, ‘but I never thought I was. All this guilt is just a way of feeling sorry for yourself. It’s, you know, a kind of narcissism or something.’

‘Possibly, Neil, but —’

‘It was nothing, Adam. Practically nothing, ten years ago. Happens all the time.’

It was thrilling, this honesty, Neil thought. In the end he and Adam were as much about looking as liking: looking down through very deep but translucent water, down and down to the bottom, occasionally feeling vertiginous, sometimes spotting ugly shadows belly-crawling on the floor.

‘That’s what I’m trying… There’s something else.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘About that night,’ Adam said. ‘And the morning. There’s something else. When we were…’ Adam swallowed. ‘I knew, Neil. I knew about her.’

‘What did you —’

‘I knew she was… younger. I knew she was too young. I mean before he… Not just in the morning, when her father caught you. I knew that night.’

As Adam spoke Neil cast down his eyes at the wooden table, at the Venn diagram imprinted by glasses and bottles. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Tell me the rest of it, then.’

To Adam this felt like a dream, after all this time, surreal and inebriating. ‘It was earlier, when we were by the fire, do you remember that? He was sitting next to me, her father was, and he told me she was… He told me she was in high school.’

‘That’s all?’

Adam swallowed again. ‘He told me and I meant to tell you, I did, but somehow I… You were so… determined. Do you remember how we were about it? Later I didn’t think you would — that you and she… I should have told you. There’s nothing else I can say. And then in the morning, he…’

Neil held up his palms — Don’t shoot! — and pinched the bridge of his nose. The epiphany in a film when the hero realises his ally has been a villain all along. Or maybe it wasn’t, Neil thought at almost the same instant, perhaps this didn’t matter at all, an oversight from a decade ago, heat of the battle, few beers, so much since and closer that counted for more between them. It wasn’t as if… no one got hurt. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to stand, let the potman open the door for him and walk out, no goodbyes. He didn’t know what the rules were for this. How was he supposed to know?

He stalled. ‘Why have you waited… Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘Actually, I thought about it. I tried, once or twice, you won’t remember, you probably didn’t notice. I suppose it never felt… urgent. But now, with Ruby… You’re the only one I can talk to about it, don’t you see? I had to talk to someone.’

Neil raised his hand to his brow, covering his eyes. There was some anger, he found. ‘You know what could have happened? Her father, in the morning, he was about to… It looked as if…’

‘I know, Philly. I’m sorry about that. But he didn’t, did he?’

Again Neil sighed. ‘When you came and stood next to me — do you remember? — in front of the tent, they were all surrounding me, and I was alone, and you — you didn’t have to, we’d only known each other a couple of weeks, you could have disowned me, and I thought, it’s silly, I know, but I thought it was, you know, the nicest… But it wasn’t, was it? It was just…’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘And afterwards, all these years… Ten years. I thought we were more than that.’

‘We are.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I had to tell you, let me finish and you’ll see. In the morning, the father — Eric — he said to me, it was like a curse or something, he said he hoped… He said one day, I’d have a daughter, and he hoped… Well, I do, don’t you see? And now I look at Ruby and it’s as if — I know it sounds crazy — it’s as if it was her. Or that if it was, if it ever was, it would somehow be, I don’t know, fair.’

‘It isn’t like that — life — it’s nothing to do with fair.’

‘It’s as if I wouldn’t be able to complain. Like I’d be disqualified.’

Neil’s sympathy and patience had run dry. The whole conversation was the wrong way round.

‘That’s what this is about?’

‘What?’

‘I could have gone to prison in California, what was it he said I’d get, the guide? Two years. You heard him. Probably I would never have come out. And you expect me to… What the fuck do you expect?’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘For yourself.’

The ker-ching of the till, the slam of the door, a woman laughing, a glass smashing. Adam said, ‘Maybe there always are things like this. I mean things you don’t tell each other. Things you’ve done or said or, you know, thought about each other. Even to you.’

‘If you say so, Adam,’ Neil said. ‘But not things like this.’ He snatched a vicious glance at his watch.

‘You know,’ Adam counterattacked, ‘you could have been the one to suffer for this, just as easily.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ Neil said. ‘I’m not suffering. Not about her.’

They sat resentfully, like strangers obliged to share a table. When they finished their beers the potman swooped for their bottles with greater alacrity than he looked capable of. This time Neil looked up at him, momentarily distracted by the effort to determine his age. He could have been anywhere between forty and seventy.

‘Have you told Jess?’

‘Told her what?’

‘Don’t, Neil.’

‘Okay, no. But I don’t see why I should tell her. Tell her what? I haven’t told her about the girl I shagged in freshers’ week. There are lots of things I haven’t told her. I haven’t told her about us running away from that bar in Vegas without paying. It was a mistake, Adam. It isn’t relevant. An accident.’

‘That’s what I’m saying, it wasn’t an accident.’

‘Have you told Claire? What you’ve just told me.’

‘No,’ Adam said. ‘I can’t now, no way. If anything ever happened… This is between us. You’re the only one who could understand. Just us.’

From the turn in the stairs, halfway down, Adam could see through the archway to the end of the living room where Neil was sitting with Claire. Neil’s hair was swept back from his brow in the manner of a bullfighter or a tango dancer. He was talking too softly for Adam to hear, Claire interjecting the odd ‘Really?’ and ‘That’s wonderful’. She was already expert at letting men talk about themselves, allowing them to feel fascinating, a skill she had honed at work-related London dinner parties that, to Adam, always felt like botched auditions. She never expected her interlocutors to reciprocate her interest and, he suspected, experienced only a very mild affront, almost a satisfying vindication, when they didn’t.

Her eyes had asked him the question after they came in together. They were back earlier than she expected, Adam looking meaninglessly at the bookshelves like a visitor while Neil asked her how the newborn was sleeping, seconds later distractedly repeating himself. Something had happened. Adam had shaken his head, almost imperceptibly — Nothing. Don’t ask. Not in front of him — and gone to check on Harry.

‘You don’t have to,’ Adam had said outside the Bear. ‘I’ll say you were tired.’

‘I should,’ Neil had insisted, not yet certain what he should do, what he should feel, carrying on while the jury was out. They had walked back to the maisonette in silence.

Adam descended the last few stairs and paused in the doorway. Claire’s feet were curled under her buttocks, her skin on the sallow side of pale, one hand over her deflating abdomen, still cradling the foetus that had become the infant asleep on her shoulder. Now she was giggling, the hand holding her Caesarean scar as if she might burst, and Neil was laughing too, his silent laugh that looked like a grimace, his arms out straight and motionless on the armrests.

Neil looked up at him but his expression was blank. Adam had missed the punchline. They could have been talking about anything.

Like a lifer with no possibility of parole and nothing left to lose, Harry burst down the stairs and past him. He seized and tried to ransom Neil’s phone, this miniature god that the adults seemed to worship. He launched himself at his mother and sister; Claire deflected him with a forearm and Adam extracted him, Harry cycling his legs in the air in the obligatory show of resistance.

‘No, bedtime, lollipop,’ Adam said, the endearment and the rhythm of it direct inheritances from his father — lollipop, beetle-bug, darling, they welled up and came out of him involuntarily, as if written into some deep, time-delayed hard drive. In his bedroom Harry denied all wrongdoing, then began to cry, protest followed by contrition, guilt’s familiar one-two. He extorted a story from his father, exercising his power to be certain it was real, as tyrants must. His body clock was out, all of theirs were, the family living in that blurry newborn time zone in which night and day elide. Adam kept it short: boy, elephant, ride, squirt. The End.

‘One more,’ Harry said. His hair and complexion were all Claire, but there was something of Adam in his eyes and mouth.

‘Love you.’

‘In morning,’ Harry said, rolling over. He would be starting at his nursery soon, embarking on his life apart.

Adam hurried down the stairs again, anxious about leaving them alone, past the picture window on the maisonette’s half-landing, beyond it the patchwork of skinny, London gardens squeezed between their road and the next, tiny manicured lawns and outsized trees, none belonging to them. In the sitting room Ruby opened her eyes, tried to focus, and saw something she didn’t like, a colour or a shape or a shade; she wrenched her gummy mouth into the embouchure of a scream, a silent scream that never came out. She began mouthing the air for milk, like a dog optimistically humping a leg, as if willpower alone might conform the world to her desire.

Adam’s eyes asked Claire this time. He might have said, Do you realise what sort of a man you are married to? Or, I thought you might be interested to know… It was so long ago, before they met, but it might matter to her now, as it did to him. Her eyes were the same.

Ruby hit the roof when the breast came out, always negotiating hardest when she was closing the deal. Claire angled an engorged tit into her mouth; Neil lost his nerve, cast his eyes around the room for something else to scrutinise and settled on his phone.

‘I should go,’ he said. ‘Jess…’

‘Of course,’ Adam said. ‘You go.’

Claire prised the baby from her breast so Neil could kiss the bumfluffed head, smiling her queenly, disappointed smile. No handshake for the men, no shoulder biffs or backslapping hugs.

‘You all right?’ she asked Adam. ‘You two… okay?’

She was wiser than he sometimes gave her credit for. Remember that, Adam told himself. Don’t lose sight of her.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Much better.’

Neil belted up and joined the evening traffic, heading west to east with the others, from the Nappylands of the suburbs to Dinkyville. He turned on the radio — It’s driving me mad, Going out of my — and snapped it off again.

Neil was furious. He was dazed. He had known. He spat out a laugh. All this time.

He didn’t want to think about California, he mustn’t, not immediately. Basic rule of business: don’t be railroaded into anything. Shake hands, do the sums when you get home. If Farid were there he would have smiled, said Very interesting and nothing more, pulverising Adam with his silence.

Neil shouldn’t have gone back to the house. That was already a concession. He didn’t want to think about it, because if he did, he would have to decide. He was supposed to be in his pomp.

At the end of Adam’s road a church was being converted into flats. Only One Unit Remaining! — even though the skeletal building was roofless. Churches turning into flats, cinemas transforming into gyms, old boozers mutating into restaurants: the abracadabra of money, magicking everything into something else, a shape-shifting spell that was evidently too strong for megaterrorism or the imminent war to disrupt. Neil Collins from Harrow — Neil Collins of Collins & Sons — metamorphosing into this Neil Collins, the him who was driving his new-model convertible, on his way home to Jess and their chrome and Corian pad.

You could have a kid out there too.

I knew she was too young.

At least, Neil tried to console himself, they had avoided the familiar deaf arguments over Iraq, the argument itself akin to trench warfare, no positions ever altered and no minds changed, Adam against, Neil for, partly, he knew, because Adam was against.

She was too young.

Neil wasn’t going to think about them. He didn’t want to forgive Adam in a rush, lazily, and he was terrified of not forgiving him. Adam and his preposterous curse.

This car, their flat, his suits: he owed it all to Farid. When HappyFamilies went bust, Bimal and the others had emerged from the rubble as eminently marketable commodities. Old, panicking analogue companies were recruiting digerati in a hurry, and even a belly-up dotcom history was enough to impress them. Bimal had straight away been hired to run the online operation for a luxury goods firm; Jess was snapped up by another design agency, with a grander title and improved salary. They were veterans before they were thirty, like specialists in a new kind of combat. They had learned important lessons while squandering Farid’s cash. Don’t count on Russian export licences, for one. The Millennium bug, that pantomime Armageddon, didn’t strike, but there was a swarm of other bugs, and the website was much too slow, just as customers were coming to appreciate how vital, how urgent, were the extra microseconds it took to log on, boot up and download. Those flickering waits had become an unbearable imposition.

The main lesson had been about wiring, human wiring rather than the electronic kind. Bimal moved them to new offices off Carnaby Street, Neil developed a new product line (key rings, place mats, fridge magnets), Jess organised a slap-up launch in a disused fire station, all on the unexamined presumption that consumers had been rewired: that because they could do something, such as buy a bespoke silk-screened tea towel for £14.99 plus p+p, they would. Of course they would. They must. Program it, and they will point and click. But they wouldn’t, not in the numbers needed to keep HappyFamilies afloat when Farid’s money ran out. Business was still business, a Stone Age equation of revenue and costs. People were still recalcitrant, inconveniently autonomous people.

If he had told me that night, Neil thought as he drove, I wouldn’t have done it. Of course not. If he had told me the following day, while I waited for the police and the handcuffs, I would have repudiated him on the spot. I might have.

He turned into a long, straight, speed-trap street, grand Victorian houses on one side, council estates on the other, the road a no man’s land between the two camps. Segments of melon grinned in Technicolor rows beneath the awning of a Levantine grocer’s.

Farid had abandoned them. He must have paid the shyster lawyer who negotiated his stake almost as much as he invested — he had sunk over a million all told — but he declined to double down. In the office people were whispering that he had only ever wanted to give his cash a nice dotcom sheen. Bimal filed for insolvency, people were yanking computers, scanners and coffeemakers out of the wall, in a spontaneous and oddly festive bout of auto-looting, when Strahan called Neil. Farid wanted to see him. He found the designated restaurant in Mayfair.

It didn’t matter that he knew nothing about property, which, Farid explained, was these days his main concern. No, it was nothing to do with the internet, though they probably ought to have a place-filler website for the sake of appearances. Neil could sell, Farid said, or rather, he could squeeze investors for money, as he himself could testify, which was essentially the same talent. Farid had Strahan, with his picturesque cynicism, for schmoozing and introductions, but he needed a negotiator. Neil was a good fit, he implied, a useful median between the toffs and the cosmopolitan hustlers he dealt with. Farid smiled once, told Neil that Strahan would fix the details, basic plus bonuses, and turned back to his salad.

Fucker wasn’t even sorry, Neil thought as he indicated to turn right. Not really. Sorry for her, sure, and for himself, his hocus-pocus evil eye, but not for me. If he had told me after we flew home, that summer… It was too long ago, he couldn’t know what he would have done. He might have laughed about it; he might not have cared.

Carousers huddled outside a pub. Two of them, men in suits but with their shirts hanging out, seemed to Neil to be squaring up. The taller one threw a punch, but stopped his fist short. They laughed, the smaller man laughing hardest, doubling up at the only simulated violence.

Neil rarely saw Farid, even now. He made infrequent appearances at their small but fancily addressed office in Hanover Square, and only brief ones at the parties they threw for investors. Still, he could be intimidatingly present when he chose to be. Neil once saw him eviscerate a straight-guy selling agent who had asked him to document his funds for a project in the City –

Who the fuck you think you are? Ten years I do business with you, you want see my credit card statement? I phone your boss, you fucking cunt, you never my letting agent no more

— and so on, Farid hamming up his broken English in a beautifully menacing cameo. His method was to borrow more than he needed for a purchase, top-skim the loan for his ‘personal overheads’, and use the change as bait for investors in his next, grander project. The next was always grander. The bankers didn’t seem to mind loaning the supernumerary sums: so long as the market kept rising, everyone would get their money back in the end, Farid said.

Neil thought of Farid as a kind of godfather, mostly in the fairy sense, only occasionally in the villainous one. Buying this car with Jess had been the first time he experienced his money as a real, transformative force; felt it to be his money, and that he had hurdled the boundary between struggle and success, a frontier that had seemed Himalayan until Farid opened a path across it.

He stopped at a red light. A child was loitering on the pavement in front of a supermarket, out too late. An old man was crossing the road, his spine so curled that his face was parallel with the road. The old man didn’t offer the standard wave of acknowledgement, nor even check that the oncoming car had stopped. He was shaking his head at the world.

The light flashed amber. Some imbecile behind Neil hooted.

Adam had been perfect after the stroke, Neil had to give him that. Like a brother, better than a brother, though even Dan had pulled himself together that week. Dan had come to the hospital, flirting with the nurses, depositing Sam to watch football on the television in another patient’s room. He was talking about taking a course (plumbing, he said, or roofing). He had some work on; he was straightening himself out.

‘Is he going to die?’ Sam asked Neil. ‘Granddad.’

‘I don’t know, Sammy. No.’

‘Dad got me a Scalextric,’ Sam said. ‘Did you know that? Second hand, but.’

Sitting with his father on the ward, without the carapace of work that had protected them in the shop, Neil had been ambushed by discordant feelings. Fear (that Brian was about to die). Some fear, at least. Horror (the tubes, the fluids, the caricature of mortality). Awkwardness (the tubes, the fluids). A consciousness of the falsity of the situation: Neil knew, and Brian must have known, that the closeness was a charade. Regret, that it was only a charade, and that it was too late for them to be otherwise, for him to have a better reason to be there, a better way of accounting for his presence to himself than this abstract yet lumpen duty.

Above all, boredom.

On the third day, when Brian was less groggy and tentatively mobile, Neil had tried, for the first and last time, to speak to him about his mother’s final weeks, which he remembered as a farce of whispering, increasingly absurd as she dwindled into frailness, followed by a series of over-choreographed hospital and hospice visits that, in his recollection, were always wrecked by vomiting or narcolepsy.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘I wanted to ask you, why did you only tell us then? Right at the end.’

‘Your brother knew,’ Brian said, hoarse and unshaven. ‘Daniel knew. From the beginning. It was only you.’ He paused and closed his eyes, and Neil waited for the explanation. ‘Don’t forget,’ his father said instead, ‘to turn around the Open sign in the shop window.’

Perhaps there had been a kind of wisdom in that refusal to elaborate, Neil thought, slowing down to pass a cyclist. Water under the bridge.

A pizza delivery moped came the wrong way down a one-way street. Neil hooted. A group of men waited outside a minicab office, laughing at each other’s jokes. Adam was a liar, a decade’s worth of lies, but he had been kinder and more attentive than Jess, who had calibrated her response to what she knew of his and Brian’s relationship. She didn’t have much time for charades.

‘Anything I can do?’ Adam had said. ‘I’ll come over.’

‘You can bump off the guy in the bed opposite him. Stinks, the fucker. Screams all night, apparently.’

‘Roger that. Seriously, I hope things are… bearable.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll come over.’

Adam called every day for a week. Neil suspected he was projecting his feelings for his own parents onto this emptier situation. He had come to admire Adam’s automatic love of his family without ever thinking he could emulate or quite understand it, as you might admire the practitioner of some recondite craft or art, a potter or a saxophonist.

That was only a few months ago. They had talked about Brian that week. They often talked about Sam and Harry. These days they didn’t talk much about Claire and Jess, out of a combination, Neil supposed, of loyalty and tact. Pretty soon they wouldn’t be talking about money, even though having it or not having it, how much you got and how you got it, were becoming the main questions. How much your friends got, and how.

A half-empty bus pulled away from its stop. A homeless man with an overstuffed shopping trolley sat on the narrow bench beneath the shelter, not waiting for anything. The man’s eyes met Neil’s before he could accelerate.

Envy wasn’t quite the right word for Adam’s response to his wealth. It would be fairer to describe it as a kind of cognitive dissonance, incomprehension that the chips should have fallen this way. Neil forgave him that much. He had felt something similar about his money, too, as if someone, some pinstriped overseer, might tap him on the shoulder at any moment, explaining that there had been a misunderstanding, he would have to give it back. The previous year he had invited Adam and Claire to join them on a balloon ride, high-altitude champagne over Kent for Jess’s birthday, and Adam had accepted. He rang back a couple of days later to say no, sorry, some blather about the babysitter, but Neil was certain the real reason had been the cost. He would happily have paid, but he knew Adam wouldn’t countenance that. Whisky and comfort and time were permitted offerings, recognised currency. But money, no. It was different from before, when Adam had loaned him the deposit for his bedsit, because the disparity was permanent, and in Neil’s favour.

Under a streetlight, two young men, one fat, one not, were eating chips out of a single paper cone. When he thought about their friendship now, Neil was put in mind of an image he must have seen on the television news a few years before they first met. It was a report about the Channel Tunnel, in which the two teams of diggers, one from England, one French, were breaking through to each other in the middle, beneath the sea. The clip showed two men groping for the other’s hand, clasping arms, clawing for each other through a wall of dirt.

Baker Street, Euston, the alluringly illuminated, somehow anarchic avenues of Regent’s Park, the pavement operettas of King’s Cross. Neil drove back into the up-themselves zone, the laptop and latte territory north of the City that, strange to say, was where he now lived. Sunday-night revelry: always somebody with something to celebrate or a sorrow to drown. Three young women shivered in their miniskirts outside a bar.

Whatever happened now — he didn’t know what would happen now — Neil never again wanted to talk to Adam about California. These days he could scarcely picture her face. He would forget her name eventually: he would make sure that he forgot it. He hadn’t known her age, even if Adam had, that was a fact and not an extemporised excuse. To begin with, he found himself recalling on the Farringdon Road, she had seemed educated, knowing, ready. I’ll take care of it. But after they started, or he started, she became still. Still and taut rather than still and relaxed, breathing regularly in his ear as if she were concentrating, or being brave, enduring a minor operation without anaesthetic. Then a deep exhalation when he rolled off, when he should have cradled and kissed her but hadn’t.

He pulled over, outside a sushi restaurant, to let a wailing police car pass. Okay, he wasn’t proud of it. He certainly wouldn’t say that he was proud of it. Better that Adam had stopped it, or that he hadn’t started it at all. All the same, she consented; he apologised; it was an honest mistake. These days, in this godlessly promiscuous era, didn’t everyone over twenty have some version of this story in their past, some heat-of-the-moment coupling that might be regrettable and sordid, but was also finished and forgivable? In Harrow, when Neil was fifteen or sixteen, Dan let his friend Tezza hide in his wardrobe and watch while Dan had sex with his girlfriend. Tezza had dared him. In the kitchen, after she left, when they generously told him about their exploit, Neil was in awe: of the sex itself, obviously, but also of their gall and the macho priorities. The girlfriend never found out, so far as Neil remembered, though he couldn’t have said for certain.

It wasn’t only boys or teenagers who accumulated these stories. Once, when she was drunk, Jess had confided something she had done when she was drunker — in Faliraki, he thought she had said — while she was at university. Her friend, two men they met in a nightclub, a pedalo… Regret, not a characteristic emotion for Jess, was the reason she brought it up, rather than bravado or some bid to titillate or make him jealous. He hadn’t known what to say, hadn’t said anything, wasn’t sure, in the morning, that she remembered telling him, and they had never talked about it again.

What was the point in dwelling on stuff like this? No harm done. Almost certainly no harm done. It was funny how these incidents came back to you, though, even when they belonged to other people. The nightclub in Faliraki and that pedalo and her friend.

Adam could have stopped him easily. Quick word, Neil? Jailbait, mate. No, I’m serious. He did. Some sixty-second exchange along those lines.

Neil found a space in a resident’s parking bay; he flipped the car around to reverse in. He was too tight on the driver’s side and had to manoeuvre out and back again. Perhaps it wasn’t just his money that irked Adam but Jess, the flat, the whole package, so badly that he had resorted to this kamikaze raid on Neil’s happiness. That was what their conversation felt like, even if he could never articulate the suspicion. This was one of those things that you both know but you can’t say, not because you couldn’t prove it — you wouldn’t have to prove it — but because once you had said it, it couldn’t be unsaid.

He punched in the code and climbed the stairs. There was no particular reason why he shouldn’t tell Jess about Yosemite. He would tell her tonight: him, Adam, the girl and her father, all of it. She would probably laugh at his solemnity, call him ‘sweet’, pinch his cheek, tell him to say a dozen Hail Marys and collect her dry cleaning for a month in penance.

Jess was in bed. He switched on the television — real murder on one channel, imaginary murder on another. The flat was preternaturally tidy, in urgent need of desecration, but Neil didn’t feel entitled to disorder the shelves or skew the furniture. Almost a year after they moved in here he still felt like a guest. He performed his efficient evening ablutions (teeth, face scrub, glance at his hairline) and slid in beside her. He would tell her in the morning.

He didn’t tell her in the morning. She was in a hurry, so was he, it wasn’t the right time. She asked after Adam’s brats — did the silver spoon require surgical removal? — kissed him on the forehead and left. Something about a strategy meeting. He would tell her later. Soon.

He checked his phone as he was putting it into his jacket. Two overnight texts: one from Strahan, sent at six o’clock in the morning, which said Office, 8.15; the other, from Adam, sent at half-past three, said, Great to see you. I’m sorry. Neil envisioned his friend pacing around in the small hours, bearing his infant daughter and the memories she inflicted.

As much as the lies, it was a matter of roles. Adam’s was always to be immaculate, intangibly superior. Neil’s was to be a kind of scrappy insurgent, amusing and testing but deferring to his friend. They had both seemed to understand that arrangement without it ever being articulated. Adam had been the one to phone the driveaway firms in San Diego; only he could have made the first phone call after they flew home. Yet neither of them were quite the things they had been a decade before. Perhaps Adam had never been what Neil wanted him to be in the first place. The question was whether after they stripped away the made-up stuff, all the mutual invention, after he subtracted these lies, there was anything left, anything true and real, which was worth keeping.

Neil didn’t know what had happened that night ten years ago. Adam thought he knew, but he had only a distorted memory of a daze. He wanted to be able to forgive him. Halfway to the front door Neil took out the phone from his pocket and replied to Adam’s text.

Ruby is adorable