The Faithful Couple

2011

With his back to the kitchen Dan couldn’t tell that Neil was watching him as he made the coffee. He was sitting at the bamboo bar, standing up, sitting down again, standing, scratching, apparently unsure how formal his visit was, how comfortable or uncomfortable he felt, to what extent he enjoyed the status of a brother and how far he came as a stranger.

As Neil approached with the tray Dan raised one buttock from his bar stool and let out a rolling fart. He looked around, saw Neil, and grinned, pretending the salutation had been intentional.

‘Old time’s sake,’ he said. Neil forced a smile.

Their accents had diverged with their lives. Both started from a clipped north London classlessness, but Neil’s voice had migrated moneywards, assimilating the rounded, self-indulgent vowels of his ritzier acquaintances. He was half-ashamed of his vocal suggestibility. Dan seemed to have more or less given up on consonants (‘’ol ’imes ’ake’).

Neil put the tray on the bar and sat down.

‘What hospital is he in?’

‘Hampshire… You know, North Hampshire.’

‘Listen, ask the doctor where’s best for his… for what he’s got. Actually, tell me his name, could you? I’ll ask him, if that’s okay.’

‘All right, Neil, but…’

‘I’ll pay for it. Forget it, Dan. Don’t worry about it. What else did he say? The doc.’

‘He said — what was it again? — he said there was “grounds for optimism”, that’s what he called it, but that, you know, we had to be realistic.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

‘I don’t know, Neil. I don’t.’

Dan peered into his coffee but didn’t drink any. His skin seemed jaundiced; his eyes were Bassett-hound ringed; his teeth were so discoloured as to be indistinguishable from the gums, so that earlier, when Neil was letting him in, he had doubletaked to confirm that they were there. But Dan was still good-looking, Neil thought, in a dissolute, half-ruined way. Better looking than Neil. He used his left arm sparingly, most of the time letting it hang by his side. Building accident, he had said, winking, at once disguising and intending to advertise some more rakish explanation, though Neil couldn’t imagine what it might be.

When Dan told him, Neil had been furious beyond words. Probably his rage was unjust; the trouble was, Dan was the only sublunary party available for his blame. Except for Neil himself: Sam’s bruises and the breathlessness and his squirming.

‘Did he say — did the doctor say — if you had — if we had…’

‘He says in the — what do you call it? — the chronic — right — the chronic period, it’s hard to spot. Always is, he says, the symptoms are so, like, normal. Specially when it’s so slow. All right?’

Dan’s face reddened and his eyes popped, as if he were holding his breath, or straining to take a dump. After a few seconds his colour and features settled again. He opened his mouth to say something else but closed it without speaking. When it came down to it, Dan was Sam’s father, and he loved the boy after his fashion. He had his anger, too.

‘All right. Is Stacy with him?’

‘You know Stacy,’ Dan said.

Neil tried to smile an assent, although in fact he didn’t know Stacy, had never met her, not counting one occasion on which he had waved at a woman whom he presumed was Stacy through the window of a car that he likewise (perhaps naively) assumed was Dan’s, the time they had come to pick up Sam in London the previous year. Neil had no interest in knowing Stacy. He let it go. ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ he said.

Dan picked up his cooling coffee and put it down again with a noisy clack. Neil wanted him to leave now. He glanced at his watch, then regretted it.

‘This euro thing,’ Dan said. ‘It hurting you?’

Neil wasn’t sure where to begin and didn’t much want to. But he saw that Dan was trying. He had a momentary, compassionate intuition of how hard this must be for him, all of it.

‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Depends which way you bet. It’s been bad for some people but okay for us. The money’s got to go somewhere, you just have to make sure you get there first.’

‘Yeah,’ Dan said. ‘Right.’ He looked down at the bar. ‘This antique, then?’ He rapped his knuckles on the Formica surface.

The front door opened. Roxanna wheeled the buggy in, closing the door fastidiously, hoping Leila might sleep for another half an hour. Neil could hear her being quiet — the effortful, tiptoeing footfalls and delicate clinks as keys and bags were shed.

She saw Dan first, straight away looking behind her at the closed door as if assessing her flight chances. Then she saw Neil.

‘Just gone off,’ she stage-whispered.

‘This her?’ Dan said. ‘This must be her.’

He sank off the stool and headed for the buggy. Neil experienced a stab of limbic horror at the prospect of Dan touching his child, his rough hands on her flawless skin, the contamination. One of his arms twitched in Dan’s direction but he reined it back.

‘She’s just gone —’

‘Let him,’ Neil said, in a tone so unfamiliar that Roxanna acquiesced and stared, mouth half-open.

Dan unbuckled the girl using his better arm, wincing slightly as he lifted her out of the buggy with both. She was asleep when he nestled her head in the crook of his elbow but opened her eyes when he stroked her cheek. She peered up at his unfamiliar, ragged face, but didn’t cry.

‘Da-da,’ she said.

Neil grimaced.

‘Beautiful girl,’ Dan said. ‘Beautiful.’

‘I should change her,’ Roxanna said.

Dan began a high-pitched, whiny hum, lullaby with a hint of love song. It failed to cohere into a tune and trailed off after a dozen notes. ‘Beautiful like her mum,’ he added.

He offered Roxanna a yellow smile, a tiny, self-parodic flashback to flirty, alpha, mighty Dan. Dan slurping water from the tap. Dan letting Tezza hide in the closet (or perhaps it was the other way around, Neil was no longer certain). Roxanna looked at the floor.

‘More,’ said Leila.

‘This is Roxanna,’ Neil said. ‘Dan.’

Neil wanted to be generous. He knew what a niece or nephew could mean: the salvaging of someone from the mess, an outlet for affections that bottomless grudges had stifled, a chance for atonement. More than that, he owed Dan, he finally understood, because Dan had known about their mother from the beginning, back when they were teenagers themselves. He had lived with the secret for months, Neil’s own, personal human shield, and for all Neil knew everything that had happened to Dan since began with that.

He let his brother handle his child, let him jiggle her and arch his body above her, holding her hands as she took a few precarious, drunkard’s steps. They talked about the possibility of bringing Sam to a hospital in London. No, neither of them had been back to Harrow, a Romanian family had taken the house, Neil said.

‘Dad,’ said Dan, ‘before he died… You probably worked this out, I know you sorted the lawyer and that, the will. He tried to help me… I was having a rough patch, you remember, and — the house — he…’

‘Forget it, Danny,’ Neil said. ‘It’s fine, forget it. Really.’

Dan traced snail trails and mouse runs on the inside of Leila’s arms while Roxanna unloaded her shopping. After a few more minutes, Neil said to his brother, ‘Give her to me now, Dan. Now.’

Sam gave a thumbs up when Neil passed him the iPad, and another when he made a puerile remark about the departed nurse’s arse. Neil regretted the joke immediately: better not to encourage that. Before she left the nurse had put an oxygen mask on Sam’s face, and after that he couldn’t say anything, at least not intelligibly. After a few minutes he closed his eyes. The iPad slid from his hand.

Neil had seen this gear before, on Brian, after his stroke. The ominous tubes, like extruded plastic intestines; the multiple drips; the monitors that made him feel like a cameo turn in the pre-credit sequence of a hospital drama, the heaving chords and contextual sirens of the theme set to cut in at any moment. The whole get-up looked wrong on Sam, outsized and fancy-dress.

He couldn’t make out whether the boy was asleep. Probably he was in and out. Talk: he should talk. ‘Hope you’re comfortable, Sammy. Food okay? Guess you haven’t eaten much. Roxanna sends her love. Leila would send hers too, but she can’t speak yet, unfortunately. So.’

The gossip and niceties ran out pretty quickly. Then what? Depressing to talk about the illness, absurd to ignore it.

‘Doctors seem nice, Sam. They say you’re doing well.’ Or so Dan reported: apart from making sure he scrubbed up on his way in, none of the hospital people said much to Neil at all, even though he was footing the bills, since he wasn’t the primary relative.

‘Does anything hurt?’ He thought he saw Sam grimace. ‘We can get more painkillers if it hurts. Shall I get her back?’

That nurse (Greek, Neil thought, possibly Spanish) ought to do something about the pain. Where the hell was she? Or the flinch might just have been wind, Neil supposed, like the neonatal creases of Leila’s lips that he had optimistically interpreted as smiles. Or Sam might be wholly asleep and dreaming — fighting off muggers, tonguing Lara Croft, failing to revise for his exams, flying down the stairs, whatever the fuck it was that teenagers dreamed about these days. He might be listening to Neil and agreeing, or listening and disagreeing. Or his twitches might be gestures of protest against the cosmic injustice that had landed on him.

‘I’ve seen your father. He seems okay.’ He waited for a flinch but none materialised. ‘Between us we’ll see to everything, Sammy. And Stacy, of course. Whoever the hell Stacy is. Don’t worry about your exams, I’ll find someone to take them for you. I could get someone to take care of Stacy too, if you like.’

No flinch; no smile. Ridiculous, in a way, to ramble on when it was unlikely that Sam was listening. But these hospital-ward monologues were a bit like cooing over your child in public. You didn’t feel embarrassed, you just had to do it. You had to talk, partly because it was the only thing you could do, and partly because of the strange, irrational apprehension that if you didn’t keep talking, that might be the end.

What else? Reminiscences: ‘… that time you came to stay with me and Jess, you ate that knickerbocker glory, remember? You puked in a plant in the restaurant foyer, all over it… That waitress… The time we went out to that old airfield, you remember, I let you drive the car — how old were you? — and I had to grab the wheel back…’

Reminiscences might be ill-advised, Neil saw, contrasting as they did the whackily eventful past and uncertain future. He trailed off.

Once, as a teenager, Neil had witnessed two men beating up a third outside a Tube station, their shoes thudding dully into his midriff and skull. He had run over, a reflex rather than premeditated valour, but the men had done enough and ambled away. To his surprise the victim sat up, coughed, spat and walked off. Up close, even routine violence was the worst thing in the world.

Sam’s illness was like violence. It wasn’t like violence, it was violence. The worst thing in the world.

The news, maybe: ‘… kicking off in Libya and everywhere else down there… They’ve tweeted the News of the World to death… Kicking off in Greece. Portugal next, they reckon, or the Micks, maybe…’

Again the euro crisis: Sam wouldn’t give a toss about the bloody euro crisis. Neil didn’t give a toss about it, either, come to that.

Leila had been ten days old when Sam came to meet her. For a second, while Neil was changing the baby’s nappy, he caught Sam’s face in a mirror: open mouth, crestfallen eyes, which he righted when he saw that he was being watched. He had come to stay with them only a few times since.

Neil hadn’t done what he wanted to do for Sam. He felt remiss, and, worse, he felt irrationally implicated. Here you go, the American girl had said when she gave him her address that morning, as if he had asked for it, which he hadn’t, or might use it, which he never did. Perhaps it would have been better if they had called the police, and Neil had taken his chances in — he groped for the prison’s name — San Somewhere.

Hocus-pocus. Ridiculous.

What was left? Song lyrics: the last refuge of the bedside desperado. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, When I first met you… In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight… Well I’m runnin’ down the road tryin’ to loosen my load.

Sam flinched.

A flinch as in, It’s okay, I know you’re trying? Or, on the contrary, a Knock it off, will you, for fuck’s sake? sort of flinch? Because, when you stopped to think about it, what was Neil really saying in all his talk? You are ill… You are very very ill… You are ill and I am scared. Nobody wanted to listen to that. Probably his chatter made only one of them feel better.

He shut up. He noticed a little crescent of zits above the corner of Sam’s mouth, an adolescent affliction that seemed touchingly banal in the circumstances. When he was Sam’s age, Neil had salacious, anarchistic thoughts about what he would do in this situation. Fuck hookers, punch policemen, egg the Queen. It wasn’t like that at all.

The tempo of beeps from the monitors picked up; he looked around for a white coat but no one rushed in. Just as he was about to leave, Sam opened his eyes again and seemed to blink an acknowledgement. Neil felt the unwonted tears coming and fought them back. He reconsidered, tried to force them out, and felt something glide down his cheek.

You didn’t get to choose when calamity struck. At a minimum, Neil caught himself thinking during the taxi ride from Harley Street, you should get a say in that. All this would be easier if it had come at a different time: easier in the practicalities, at least, if not the emotions. If the disease had held off until Leila was older. If it had developed before his split with Adam. That was a disreputable, egocentric thought, Neil realised; he was ashamed of it.

Sometimes, when he remembered Adam, he would feel a pain in the region of his liver, a sharp ache like the cramp he sometimes got if he drank too much coffee.

He let Roxanna know he was on the way. Theirs was a queer kind of closeness, he thought as he texted. He had seen her with her legs in the stirrups, wailing in her own shit and blood. He had licked her clitoris and tasted her breast milk (sweeter than he anticipated, with a hint of caramel). They were into the mature phase now, the time when the childishness started, struggling for dominion, picking fights, gaming each other, banking favours and concessions as he and Jess once had. Yet for all the proximity he hadn’t yet assimilated basic Roxanna facts — the temperature at which she liked her bath, her allergies, her preferred orders in restaurant chains and coffee shops.

They were obscenely intimate strangers. On rare occasions when Neil’s birth family came up in conversation she would ask polite but desultory questions, as if they were discussing characters from history. Who shot Franz Ferdinand? Who was Henry VIII’s third wife? What colour was Neil’s mother’s hair? To her, his family was dead and buried, and she, Leila and Neil comprised a pristine new reality. She was kind about Sam, but she didn’t see how, for Neil, he was the lone survivor, whom he had plucked for himself from the wreckage. She didn’t know Adam, knew nothing of what had happened with Adam, neither what happened between Neil and Adam and Claire nor between Neil and Adam and Rose. Once, rummaging in the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen, she had stumbled on the photo of the two of them beneath the Faithful Couple. ‘An old friend,’ Neil had told her, and they had both left it at that.

He would love her properly in the end, Neil thought, as he ducked out of the taxi at the corner of his street. He was almost there. He stepped out distractedly to cross the road; a blue, by-the-hour bicycle swerved to avoid him (between the bikes and the susurrating electric cars, aural intuition no longer sufficed for London pedestrians). When he reached his building he raised his hand to punch in the entry code, but paused. He stood alone on the pavement for a few minutes before he went upstairs.

Roxanna was watching a box set, all charismatic psychopaths and impenetrable accents. When he bent to kiss her she ruffled his hair, asked if he was all right and was there anything she could do? Leila was in her cot, asleep. He ought to be anxious for her by association, but the two universes felt too disconnected — the unjust Sam universe and Leila’s prelapsarian version — for Sam to be a warning for Leila or Leila a consolation for Sam.

He went into the under-used room they affectedly called the study. Outside, on the pavement, he had decided to go through Claire: a risk, obviously, since he couldn’t be sure that she would cooperate, nor how Adam would respond to her mediation. Still, Claire might know whether Adam was amenable; whether the timing was bad; whether Neil had been forgiven, or could be. He didn’t have an email address for her but the internet soon furnished one, from the contact page of what was evidently her new company: Claire@windinyourhair.com.

Good for you, Neil thought, with a small admixture of regret. One of them had been an entrepreneur after all.

He logged onto his email. He tried to keep it short (Don’t waste the customer’s time), deciding not to mention his father, or Leila and Roxanna, but to explain only about Sam. He wrote in a hurry and pressed Send before he had a chance to reconsider. No xxx below the sign-off this time:

Claire

To be honest I can still hardly believe that I’m writing this. I mean, not that I am writing to you now but what happened in the first place. I know its probably too late but I wanted to say again to you and Adam that I am sorry. Please tell Adam this if you think that would be appropriate.

I’ve tried too many times to figure out that evening and all I can think of is that somehow you end up with grudges against the people you care about most. You end up not being able to tell them apart, your failures and the witnesses to them, your friends and why you need them. Anyway I take all the blame on myself. All of it. Please tell Ad that. Tell him it was always my fault and I should have seen that earlier.

Obviously I don’t know how things are with you and the kids although I would love to. I dont even know where youre living. I can see that you’re in business now and I hope that it is prospering. I am getting in touch because I wanted Adam to know about something thats happened. I am sure that he remembers Sam, my nephew, I expect that you remember him too. He and Harry played together once or twice. Seventeen now, amazing.

The thing is that Sammy is ill. I mean very ill. He might be okay but we don’t know yet. Ive always felt responsible for him and now I feel that more than ever. I don’t know why exactly but I needed to tell Adam about it. I think he will understand.

Its a funny thing, isn’t it, that you start off wanting nothing from each other and that is almost the whole point, the freedom that we had, and then you do want things and youre happy to give them, time and all the rest. And then you find there are some things that its too much to give or sometimes to take.

Please tell him that he doesn’t have to do anything or answer this message if he doesnt want to. But I would love it if he did. Tell him I know we can’t put everything right but we can still do this. Tell him I’m pleased the American man was at home that day.

Sending love to you all

Neil

She didn’t reply. Not that day, nor the next, nor the day after that. Two days was a decade in this instantaneous age. You got twitchy if clients didn’t respond within an hour, knowing that they, like you, were bound to their lesser lives by the beeps and permanent-emergency throbs of their supposedly liberating gadgets. After two days, Neil began to abandon hope.

The apparition was joltingly surreal: two human faces frowning at the glass, thirteen floors and a couple of hundred feet up. It always took Adam a moment to remember the man-bucket, the cords and the sponges. Then the dilemma over whether to acknowledge them — with some tough-guy nod, blokeish cock of the head or ingratiating smile — a sharp example of the moral discomfort routinely inflicted by London, a place in which you were always rubbing up against less fortunate neighbours, importunate strangers. If he nodded or smiled at the men through the window, he and they would lock eyes in the shared knowledge that he was sitting in an ergonomic chair on the cushy side of the glass, while, a metre away and on the other, they were dangling from the roof. If he didn’t, he would imply that they had no human claim on his attention.

The trying etiquette of inequality. The whole routine, Adam knew, must be wearyingly familiar to the less equal. He went for a pursed smile and raised-eyebrow combination. One of the window-cleaners, the older of the two, gaunt and wearing a hoodie although it was a warm, clear morning, whispered something to the other; Adam thought he saw the younger man smirk as they heaved themselves out of view.

He shook his head at his own involutions. This would never be his city.

Laurel materialised beside his desk. ‘Leisure Services?’

‘Yup. Twenty minutes,’ Adam said. ‘Just need to spell-check it.’

‘I need to syndicate,’ Laurel said. ‘Adam, I really do.’

Laurel’s mis-shaven cheeks were marbled in a scraped yellow and pastel red. He was strangely gauche for a person of his seniority, Adam had noticed, for someone with a solid career at one of the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms behind him. It was as if all the resources bestowed on him by evolution had gone into the substance of his work, the time-and-motion equations, leaving nothing over for social or cosmetic fripperies. In the past couple of years Laurel had grown slightly stooped, as if his height had become embarrassing to him; Adam found him intangibly camp — something in the stretch of his vowels and tight cross of his arms — though Laurel didn’t seem to be aware of the effect. He had a wife, two or three kids, but in three and a half years Adam had never heard him speak of them.

‘Twenty minutes max.’

‘Clients this afternoon.’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Okay. See you at the meeting?’ — a statement intoned as a question. Laurel smiled and loped away. He had the power, Adam had concluded, most of it, anyway, which was why he didn’t mind when Hardy interrupted him. He had the long-haul confidence to be eclipsed.

Neither Alan/Hardy nor Craig/Laurel was his friend. The pair of them were yoked and segregated by an invisible barrier that everyone else could see, those two on the inside, the rest of the staff peripheral. They weren’t his friends, but Adam trusted them. He trusted them when they implied that he was safe.

Since the new government came in, slashing and burning, public-sector consultants had been reviled. Not so much as bankers or journalists or the politicians themselves, but up there, in the league table of infamy, with estate agents or squeegee merchants. They were indolent and dispensable, a luxury of the incontinent boom. They were parasites. They were fucked.

The work had slowed, and Adam had worried again. They all worried. They were right to worry. He received a string of emails inviting him to leaving drinks for people he hadn’t previously known existed. Sometimes the fall guy would follow up with his or her own valediction, rashly Replying All — some tragic, adrenalin-driven gush about how he would miss everyone and hoped they stayed in touch, or the snarky observation that she had enjoyed the job, most of the time. The various, equally pointless bearings of the tumbrel.

Yet Hardy had winkingly implied, one afternoon when they had shared a lift, that he was safe. He asked after Adam’s family and Adam made a nervy crack about how expensive they were. Hardy mumbled something about a permanent contract just as the doors opened and they were released. Afterwards, when he was recounting the conversation to Claire, and he tried to conjure the precise phrases, the actual formulation, which had created the impression of security, Adam couldn’t grasp them. But he had been pretty sure that he was safe. He had his harness; he was strapped in.

He tried and failed to log on to the shared Leisure Services file. He felt the bile rising, in a way that only tailgaters and malfunctioning computers could induce. Password incorrect: he had distractedly input the one he used for his credit card and Amazon accounts. Bank accounts, shopping accounts, email accounts, newspaper subscriptions, multiple computers — Adam sometimes felt he had become the sum of his passwords, that his lazily disguised pet names, phone numbers and ‘meaningful dates’, the odd extra digit or letter affixed as required, were his new DNA, the double helix of the touch-screen age. If they got scrambled, you were lost.

Finally his fingers remembered the necessary sequence: ruby, followed by the six digits of her birthday (no space). He called up the document, ran the promised spell-check, passed an eye over the formatting. He emboldened the sub-headings and introduced some bullet points in the executive summary (‘… service optimisation… customer footfall… DCMS strategy…’). He added his name to the unobtrusive middle of the list of authors.

He saved and closed the document and emailed it to Laurel, cc-ing Hardy. Outside his window the cords attached to the bucket were twitching, as if, somewhere below, condemned men were hanging and choking at the end of them.

He had sworn off MySpace. He had vowed never to look her up again, had weakened once or twice and finally, the previous winter, when he was setting up a new computer, found that he had forgotten his log-in details. He had guessed and guessed, but on that occasion he couldn’t remember them, which, for once, was more a riddance than a loss. The need to re-register had been enough to dissuade him, one of those tiny online impositions that had become demoralising obstacles, in this case turning the pursuit of Rose from casual hobby to blatant obsession. He had resisted Facebook and almost forsaken Googling, though he permitted himself Chaz and Archie. Also, every few months, Neil.

These days Adam could tolerate mentions of California, California was always everywhere, but Colorado still made him shiver. Once he switched off the television when a report about the poor little girl in Boulder came on; Claire had glanced across at him, but let it be. At the end of term, on prize day, as he watched Ruby climbing the stairs and crossing the stage, he thought of her striding across the campsite, alone in front of everybody.

Almost certainly, she was fine, Adam reminded himself at his desk, preparing himself for that evening. She might have her own children by now (he imagined Eric cradling them in his thick, hairy arms). Perhaps her life had been better than was her destiny before Yosemite, she being more studious or warier, less headlong in her rebellions, than she would otherwise have been. In which case, no harm had been done by either of them.

Adam would never know and nor, come to that, would Rose. He felt, that afternoon, as clear of her as he would ever be.

She might not be fine, of course.

In the conference room he took a chair set back from the table, against the wall. He rarely said anything in these meetings. He didn’t think that he was supposed to say anything; he suspected he was only invited out of courtesy. He slotted his chin between his thumb and his forefinger, stroking his stubble, a pose he valued for its contemplative appearance, but more for the micro-pleasure of the stubble’s rough, synthetic feel, its diurnal reliability.

Laurel came in with a photocopier-hot set of Leisure Services reports. He fanned and distributed the copies as Hardy arranged his jacket on the back of the chair at the head of the table. Laurel sat at his partner’s right hand. He crossed his arms and smiled.

‘Okay,’ Hardy said. ‘Let me walk you all through the deck.’

He was safe but stuck. After the early prisons contract Adam had struggled to bring in further work, and when, after the election, the commissions became scarce, it made no sense to send him out to a hospital or council when other, more proficient associates were available. The bill of his billable days was shrivelling. To the colleagues who had begun to invite him for after-work drinks, or for lunchtime sandwiches by the river, thinking that he might be a permanent someone, he was again an uninvitable no one. He was leprous, precarious. He was dangling from a rooftop by a thread.

He was rescued. Hardy had noticed, and Laurel agreed, or said he agreed, that Adam had a valuable, marketable skill, namely his familiarity with the English language. They called him back to Hardy’s office (he had installed a tub of moisturiser on the desk) and told him that, henceforth, his job would be to edit the product: to beautify the unreadable reports that outlined their scorched-earth or asset-stripping advice to clients, or at least to remove the most painful of the excrescences that crowded his colleagues’ mogul-run prose. ‘The Civil Service gift for story-telling,’ Laurel called it, and smiled.

Adam became a ghostwriter. He was the consultants’ wing man; he was the other guy.

At the beginning, at the television company, he had wanted and expected to be a star, a virtuoso, to awe his peers and astound his bosses. When he first joined the Civil Service, and he and the other fast-streamers gathered in their Whitehall pubs to gauge each other’s progress, they would debate how much good they were doing in the world, in their hearts never countenancing their rhetorical doubts. Now, like some meek but well-coached hostage, Adam wanted only to be the grey man, inoffensive and set fair to be overlooked when the violence began.

After Leisure Services he went back to his desk. For want of a better way to seem occupied he scrolled through his spam filter. Did he want to chat with a Russian woman? Did he want to satisfy his wife tonight? Did he want to buy a replica Rolex?

A stray message from Harriet (he promoted her to Approved Sender). The subject was Stefan walking!!!! There was a video attachment: Stefan wasn’t walking, he was hauling himself along the side of a coffee table. The video lurched and ended when the child banged his head on the table’s edge. Harriet was happier in Munich. She had been happier since the truth about their father came out, once the shock wore off, at least: it took away his entitlement to judge. She had visited with Stefan a few months before, and over dinner she and Adam had sung their number from Lady and the Tramp. Harry and Ruby sat and watched, agape at this glimpse of their daddy’s childhood.

He frowned at the screen in ersatz contemplation as Laurel passed his desk again. This time he wasn’t looking at Adam, or didn’t seem to be. Laurel crossed the floor to Hardy’s office, opened the door without knocking and closed it quietly behind him.

The contracts had started to trickle in again. The government had discovered that you needed to spend money to save money: somebody had to work out whom to sack and whom to keep. ‘Creative destruction,’ Hardy called it. ‘Friction costs,’ according to Laurel. They still needed to say — more than ever, they had to be able to say — It wasn’t me. Only trouble was, they were being screwed on price. In the end they would get what they paid for, Hardy was muttering.

They had rolled over Adam’s contract for one more year. Between his salary and what Claire and Poppy had begun to pay themselves, they were okay. He eschewed his old ambitions and his universal rivalry, left them behind him like a naive summer romance. They could have dropped their struggle by now, he and Neil — though, on the other hand, the struggle had started at the very beginning, in California, in the hostel yard. So perhaps the struggle was the point.

He was strapped in. He was safe.

The bucket sailed past him, going down again, fast. The men had turned away, looking out towards the sky. This time Adam couldn’t see their faces, but their hands, he noticed, were almost touching on the outer rail.

Wind chimes. Frosted glass in the beginning, delicately jagged rose-coloured shards and cobalt icicles, and later bamboo pipes and miniature Japanese bells. Claire and Poppy pinged their design sketches between High Wycombe and Colchester.

Manners and goodwill had kept them in touch since they overlapped in the gallery. They weren’t close enough to count as friends, not really, but nor were they indifferent or ruthless enough to drop each other entirely: an email or two a year, later a couple of chaotic outings with their kids to London museums. As a student Poppy had designed jewellery; as the children careened around the Turbine Hall, Claire suggested that she scale up to ornaments. The wind chimes were manufactured in a workshop in Dorset and sold through garden centres, craft and furniture shops and the rudimentary website made for them by Poppy’s husband (he was more than the single trait Adam had ascribed to him in their lazily competitive twenties).

You never knew, Claire and Adam said to each other. You never knew what might come of your past, who might shimmy out of it to catch up with you. They were hopeful of cracking the accessories list of one of the department stores. They were thinking about wind spinners and babies’ mobiles.

By late afternoon Adam couldn’t concentrate. He left his computer on, a half-drunk cup of tea on his desk, his jacket draped tactically on the back of his chair. He ducked through the emergency exit and skipped down a flight of stairs, lest the bosses spot him waiting for the lift. The elevator doors opened several times on his way to the lobby, admitting other heliotropic skivers and early-doors drinkers. Adam enjoyed these fractional, five-second glimpses of alien floors, strange companies, unknown lives, currency traders and oil traders and the vendors of medical insurance. He had visions of the doors retracting one day to reveal an illicit poker game, or an elephant rearing on its hind legs, or a masked orgy.

Adam was early — much too early, no way he would be going home this early — but it was as if, having decided, he had to get on with it. Bizarre, having decided, to do anything further that afternoon. Adam wanted to ambush himself, too, to minimise his opportunities to change his mind.

He would have to cross the river to Embankment for the District Line. He strode along the passageway at the side of the Royal Festival Hall and up the steps to the pedestrian walkway. The wheel rose behind the railway bridge — toweringly close, but the base occluded — looking, from Adam’s angle, as if it might spin free and crush him. A newsstand sold papers in a dozen languages. The tarpaulins of the restaurants stretched along the riverfront; the overpriced tourist boats glided on the grey water. A tide of money had washed across London since Adam worked at the television company a short hop along the Thames. The tide was going out but the city was still soaking in it.

Just below the bridge, on the small riparian beach (plastic plates and broken bricks and washed-up electrical wires among the pebbles), someone was shouting. He looked down to see a child, a girl — four or five, he estimated — standing alone at the water’s edge. The shout came again, and a man ran from the bottom of the steps that led to the beach and snatched the girl up, reprimanding her lovingly.

Adam took out his BlackBerry and dialled as he made his way onto the bridge. Two rings and she picked up.

‘No,’ Claire said. ‘Not on the mantelpiece… Yes. Adam.’

‘Just, hi, to say I won’t be home for dinner.’

‘Absolutely not… What? It’s our takeaway night. I thought we’d have Japanese.’

‘Sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘Can’t help it, you know.’

‘That’s it — both of you. I said, that’s it… Sorry. Adam.’

He had always been faintly afraid of this bridge, ever since he saw a news item about two posses of muggers who, late at night, had trapped their hopeless victim in the middle. But this evening it was beautiful, festive, the discreet power of the ministries on one side of the river, the carousel and promenaders on the other.

‘Anything new today? Orders, I mean.’

‘Three from the Cotswolds,’ Claire said. ‘Two from Brighton. One from Dartmoor. Oh and that man from Habitat called again.’

‘That’s great, Clezzy.’

‘It’s just an enquiry.’

‘That’s wonderful.’

‘Harry wants you.’

Her palm over the receiver, then Harry’s, muffling it differently, then his son’s quick breath.

‘How many did you score today?’

‘Only two, but one was a header.’

‘That’s great, Harry. Wonderful.’

‘A header!’

‘Wonderful, Harry. What did Miss Franks say about —’

‘Bye, Daddy.’

‘Your mother called,’ Claire said. ‘She wants to come round with Godfrey. Sunday, she said.’

His mother was okay, too.

‘Sorry,’ Adam said.

‘It’s all right. I’ll do fish pie.’

A beggar was squatting halfway across the bridge, disturbing the pedestrian flow. He was wrapped up much too warmly for the temperature in his coat and his blanket and his sleeping bag and, probably, everything else that he owned. Adam turned back towards the beach. The girl and the man were gone.

‘She there?’ he asked. ‘Put her on.’

‘Just a sec… Ruu-beee…’

The rustle of ear on phone.

‘Go on then, lollipop.’

‘The sloth bear is the only bear that carries its young on its back.’

‘I like that one. That’s a great one. Any others today?’

‘When are you coming home?’

‘Who’s my favourite girl?’

‘I know, Daddy.’

‘Love you.’

‘I know.’

‘Is it Laurel?’ Claire said.

‘What?’

‘Me too,’ Ruby said in the background.

‘Is it Leisure Services, then? Why you’re late today.’

When Claire told him, Adam had got her to show him the email immediately. He had felt a constriction in his throat, and tears that would have needed only a little encouragement. He hadn’t forewarned her that it would be tonight: he didn’t want to jinx it.

‘Office karaoke,’ Adam said. ‘Three-line whip, unfortunately. Thought I told you. Sorry, Clezz.’

Adam smiled at his lie. Fleetingly he had a vision of himself as one of those Japanese men you sometimes heard about, who get dressed in the morning, go out as if to work, and sit on a park bench all day, their calls forwarded to fake clearing-house secretaries.

‘Don’t overdo it,’ she said. He heard their doorbell ring. ‘Shopping’s here.’

‘Love you,’ Adam said.

‘No, you won’t answer it…’

He descended into the claustrophobic, white-tiled maze of the station. On the platform he picked up an evening paper from a cubby-hole shop, like a child’s model of a shop, and scanned the front page without taking in the words. Electric adverts in the underpasses, electric music in people’s ears: boredom had become a dread threat that had perpetually to be resisted, as if all of life were an American basketball game, all its gaps and pauses filled with diversions and analgesics. Adam got off the train and emerged into the bonus evening sunshine.

People who wanted him to help save the tiger. People who wanted him to save Darfur. A person urging him to take out a gym membership on a soon-to-expire special offer. A bearded man wearing boots without laces who wanted twenty pence for a cup of tea; a better-dressed, more ambitious woman who wanted a quid for her bus fare (Inflation!, Neil thought). People in suits and miniskirts and veils, lots of them talking on mobile phones, in English and Arabic and Russian and other languages that Neil couldn’t identify, meandering and gesticulating and obliviously halting to the rhythm of their conversations. Shops that invited you to call home, fly home, change money from home and send it there, eat like you do at home, read newspapers from home, tan or cover up as you do at home. Walking down a London street had become a financial and moral obstacle course. You could feel virtuous, callous, conned and xenophobic in the space of a hundred metres.

Neil had left his taxi and its catastrophist driver (Trafalgar Square: nightmare! The Olympics: meganightmare! West Ham United: what a nightmare!) on Bayswater Road and walked up Queensway. He and the doorman outside the hotel nodded at each other, a consoling evening ritual that had somehow evolved between them, though they had never actually spoken. It was a hot, blue evening, the kind that, every now and then, lets London feel Mediterranean, or Californian. Neil took off his jacket and swung it over his shoulder. He cut off the main road and turned into his street.

He saw the legs first, emerging from the doorway onto the pavement: the ankle-booted feet and besuited calves; the inflection at the knees, a pair of hands resting on them; the downslope of the thighs, descending to an unseen waist in the recess. One of the legs jiggled nervily at the ankle. Shit: he was supposed to pick up some milk and… something else.

He took out his phone to reread Roxanna’s message. Milk and wet wipes. He would be coming out again later to meet Dan at the hospital. He would do the shopping then.

When he looked up from the screen, the torso in the doorway had leaned forward into view. Also, in profile, the head: dirty blond hair, the handsome face bisected by the tortoiseshell arm of the sunglasses, the visage familiar but receding into obscurity again as the body rotated back.

Neil froze. He crossed to the other side of the street for a squarer view. Another five paces and he would be sure.

He thought he might be hallucinating; that the figure in the doorway might be an urban mirage. He screwed his eyes closed, and when he opened them again the view was blocked by a stationary van. Instead of what he thought and hoped might be Adam (and, mixed in with the hope, feared, because of the momentousness and the delicacy), he found himself staring at a man with a crew cut and a cigarette behind his ear, who was incongruously mouthing the words to a love song on the radio. I hate that I let you down… I guess karma comes back around.

Neil stood still until the van moved. The driver glanced at him as he pulled away, and Neil half-expected a finger or an insult, but the man only smiled.

It was him.

The thought occurred to Neil that he could run off. Adam hadn’t seen him; he was wearing his sunglasses but seemed to be looking down at his shoes. Neil chased the thought away. This apparition was what he had hoped for the previous week, though not with much faith, when he sent Claire his long-shot email.

Neil smiled — a freakish, Blairish sort of grin, it must have been — but Adam still hadn’t looked up. Should he thank him? Make a joke, tell one of their lies, ask after Claire? Maybe he shouldn’t mention Claire. She had evidently passed on his message, but he didn’t know how things stood between them. Their kids: Adam might have another one by now, for all Neil knew. He had a child — he, Neil, was a father, a fact of which, astoundingly, Adam was still ignorant. He worried whether he should repeat his apology, or, on the contrary, should never mention that day and the sofa again.

They had been apart for four years. It was eighteen years since Yosemite. After she gave him her scrap of paper that morning Neil had said ‘Thanks’, as if she were a sales assistant handing him his change. That was all.

He had to pause in the middle of the road, perched on a white dividing dash like a shipwrecked sailor on flotsam, while high-spec four-by-fours eddied behind and in front of him. It was while he was crossing the second lane, when he was no more than ten metres from the doorway, that Adam looked up and saw him.

Adam had stood for the first half-hour. Standing was better for his back, and it had seemed to him more fitting to be upright when or if Neil arrived. To be eye to eye (or nearly). When he came to look for it he had found the building easily. There was a row of them, richly anonymous Edwardian mansion blocks, red-brick with white detailing, bay-windowed, blinds drawn, all of them called Something Court. But only this one had black-and-white chequered tiling in the entrance, and filigreed ironwork around the ground-floor windows, both of which Adam recognised. For a few minutes he patrolled the pavement outside, in a little circuit that took him twenty metres past the door in both directions. Then he worried there was a chance, a small chance, that Neil’s entry or exit might coincide with one of his turns, like a POW blindsiding a guard in an old war film. He squatted on the marble step, trying to smile harmlessly at residents who left or arrived, exactly as he had imagined he might do on that night four years before, now with the opposite purpose.

Harry had nudged him into it that morning. The children overheard them discussing Neil’s email over breakfast; Harry remembered him, and asked, and they explained what had happened in drastically periphrastic terms. An argument; adults had them too; very sad.

Harry had shrugged and said, ‘I get it, you defriended him.’ Adam had realised that he hadn’t, and wouldn’t, even if he never saw Neil again, despite what they had done to each other and together. That wasn’t how he was wired.

He knew he had to come in person. No more desiccated electronic messages, nor the eerie semi-presence of the phone, both of which conveyed only words and left out half of what mattered. No more screens or handsets or intermediaries. He would open with Sam. Anything else would be bad manners. Everything else would wait.

Adam doubted the location first. He was confident that he had the correct building, but realised, belatedly, that he had no idea whether Neil still lived there. By now he might have moved to Kensington, or Primrose Hill, or New York, or Zug. Or he might be visiting one of his plutocratic clients on a yacht or at their schloss. Or he might indeed be living here, and in London this evening, but be preoccupied with some trans-time zone arbitrage gambit or wining-and-dining marathon. Adam might end up waiting there all night.

He wouldn’t wait all night. He would give it till seven-thirty, seven forty-five at the outside, then head for Marylebone Station and home. Neil had another hour, Adam decided. An hour or that was it.

Only after the practical questions did his mind reach the emotional risks and pitfalls. He walked himself through it. Assume he was in the right place; Neil came; they spoke, perhaps embraced; Neil invited him in; they were both sorry and glad. But equally it could go a frostier way, all unprocessed bitterness and hoarded recrimination, or, worse (a possibility Adam nauseously considered only too late), it might be sullen, awkward, nothing to say and silently obvious that there could be no going back, therefore no way they could go on, and at the end they would trade a few terminal niceties, like schoolmates who bump into each other in the street and are obliged to pretend that they were once close. They would say goodbye and never see each other again, which might afterwards be more painful, less meaningful and memorable, than if he hadn’t come at all.

Adam remembered a family pet, an old half-blind spaniel named Ajax, whom his mother had resolved to put down but kept alive, for a few extra days, until Adam came home from boarding school at Easter. He was fourteen or fifteen, keen to affect a macho indifference but not feeling it. Ajax had been Adam’s dog, mainly, before he went away, and on the ride from the station he envisaged a heartrending, slobbery farewell. But when he came into the house and went to the basket, called the dog’s name and patted him, inhaling the faecal aroma of canine decay, Ajax hadn’t known him.

That could happen. That could easily happen.

Adam looked out into the parade of legs that were scissoring past him. Trousered legs, naked legs, bow, obese and arthritic legs. It was a child’s perspective, the world below the waist, and he felt like a child, out of his depth and alone, boredom and excitement alternating as at a zoo or a funfair. Two or three times he thought the legs were Neil’s — long and lean, the shape of the knee cap and fibula visible in the stride — and he looked up, and they weren’t. Strangers.

With half an hour to go, primitive superstition advised him to stop looking, to focus on the floor instead, or else, like Father Christmas, Neil would never come. He remembered the sunglasses in his pocket and put them on, for luck.

His ankle continued to jiggle but his mind strayed. The spelling primers he was meant to order; the broadband prices he had undertaken to compare; the appointments with the dentist he was supposed to book: the multiplying duties of online fatherhood. A pair of brogues and plausible legs intruded into the upper periphery of his vision, standing in the road in front of him. He raised his eyes, more wearily than in hope, and it was Neil.

Adam didn’t manage to get up in time. The traffic parted and Neil was eight, then five metres away. By the time he remembered what he had intended to say, Neil was hovering in front of him, his crotch at Adam’s eye level. He opened his mouth to deliver his lines — I’m so sorry about Sam, Neil, we’re both so sorry — but closed it again before anything came out.

Neil looked down at the top of Adam’s head: the swirl of his hair was still thick, still lush, now with a weft of grey amid the gold. He took in the companionable body on which, alarmingly yet consolingly, he could read his own ageing. The familiar, irrelevant shell of his friend. The notion entered his head that if he lifted a knee sharply, he would break Adam’s nose. He shooed the renegade thought away.

He was about to speak — Thank you, Adam. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry — when the door of his building opened and an old woman edged through it. Neil recognised her: fourth floor, Russian. ‘Evening,’ he said, so nervous of swallowing his voice that it sounded too loud, almost deranged. The babushka pushed between them and left them alone.

Neil sat on the step. His eyes met Adam’s sunglasses as he manoeuvred himself into position, but once he was down they both looked outwards at the street again, as if the two of them were waiting for someone else to join them.

They both knew it had to be Adam.

‘Hello, Neil,’ he said.

‘Evening, Ants. I’m sorry.’

‘So am I.’

Neil slowly raised his right arm and levered it around Adam, as you might tentatively put an arm around a teenage girlfriend, until his hand rested on his friend’s shoulder.

Adam took off his sunglasses.