A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Neil’s stop was approaching; he leaned across the woman in the sari and pressed the buzzer. But her voice, her pure middle-American accent, was still almost audible to him, as if she were talking to him as he disembarked the bus and turned the corner of his father’s street, only through a wall or from under water.

When the doorbell rang that Sunday Neil was standing on a chair in his bedroom, retrieving a photo album from the swamp of old comics and decomposing sticker collections on the top shelf.

‘Dad,’ he shouted, ‘the door!’

The bell sounded again, an effortful rusty wheeze. Neil heard indistinct voices in the hallway. He dropped off the chair and jogged down the stairs.

‘How do you do?’ Adam was saying.

‘Come in,’ Brian said. ‘Come through.’ He ushered Adam inside, flourishing his whole arm, almost bowing.

Neil caught up with them in the lounge, made to embrace his friend, but checked himself. Too intimate, somehow, in front of his father. ‘Hello,’ he said, more coldly than he meant to.

‘Hi, Neil,’ Adam said. He smiled. It’s okay, the smile seemed to Neil to say. Show me all of it. Adam had never been out to Harrow before; Neil had invited him once or twice, but half-heartedly. On Adam’s mental map this whole suburban ring, with its low-rise shopping arcades and identikit semis — the doughnut of London between the green belt and the costume-drama core — was still marked There Be Monsters.

‘This is Adam,’ Neil told Brian. ‘He’s —’

‘Yes, I know, I know, the chap from America,’ Brian said. Neil had never heard his father use the word ‘chap’ before.

They stood in the middle of the room. ‘Very nice house you have,’ Adam offered.

‘Have a seat,’ Brian said, indicating the armchair that faced the television. He retreated to the mantelpiece, resting his elbow in front of the urn.

‘Well, then,’ Brian said, looking out between the net curtains and into the driveway. ‘Come far?’

‘Maida Vale.’

‘Very nice,’ Brian said.

Twenty seconds, then Adam asked, ‘I’ve got the car, shall we…?’

‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘Come on. Come upstairs.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Brian said.

They escaped to Neil’s room. ‘Let’s do the big one first,’ Adam suggested. He bent to pick up the box.

‘I’ll take that end,’ Neil said. ‘I know where we’re going.’ The base bulged and threatened to split. ‘Put your hands underneath. No, both of them.’

‘Okay,’ Adam said. ‘Fuck, Philly, okay.’

Neil backed out of his room and reverse-pivoted to the stairs. ‘Watch it here, it’s slippery.’

The carpet was frayed almost to nothing on the lip of the top step, a few tenacious strands of fabric stretched across the rounded edge like a bald man’s comb-over. Theirs was a womanless house: cleanish but neglected, the decor untouched since before Mrs Thatcher got in, a place of prepackaged meals rather than ingredients, brown processed food that Neil and Brian heated in the microwave and ate in front of the television, all the talking in the room done on the screen.

‘Careful,’ Brian said from the bottom of the stairs, almost too softly for them to hear. He stood by the front door, a one-man honour guard, as they edged through and deposited the box on the crazy paving in the driveway. Adam opened the boot of the car, rearranged his parents’ wellies and his father’s golf umbrella, and they loaded the box in.

‘Tea?’

‘Very kind of you, Mr Collins…’

‘Dad, we’ve got to get on with it.’

In the bedroom Adam lifted a stereo speaker. ‘Load me up, will you?’ he said to Neil, rolling his eyes towards the speaker’s twin.

‘I’ll take that one, you’ll never manage both.’

‘How much do you want to bet? Million quid?’

Neil watched his friend descend the stairs, the solid physicality of him and the bone-deep confidence. He made it.

‘I had a lady friend down there once,’ Brian said as Adam negotiated the front door, catching his knuckles on the frame. ‘Maida Vale, you know. Not far from the canal, Harrow Road side. Long time ago now, that was.’

Brian had never mentioned this woman to Neil before. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to get on, okay? It’s two trips anyway.’

‘Righto,’ Brian said, flapping his hand in a surrendering farewell.

They laid the speakers, a suitcase and a cork pinboard across the seats and got in. Adam nudged the car out of the driveway and into the road. ‘You’ll have to direct me,’ he said.

‘Right,’ Neil said. ‘No, I mean left — left here, then left again. That’s it, up to the roundabout.’ They passed a launderette, a bookie, a chippy, an Indian takeaway. A hairdresser’s and an optician’s. ‘When are you off?’

‘Wednesday. We’re all flying out together, with the cameramen and the sound guys. I’ve got to help them lug the kit.’ This would be Adam’s first location shoot: holidaymakers in Tenerife.

‘So how are they? The reps and what have you. Your contacts. All lined up?’

‘They’re sorted, I think. There’s this one guy, Gavin, he runs a bar, he’s been very helpful. It’s kind of popular sociology, you know, the country seeing itself in the mirror. That’s what Jim says.’

‘Jim? Right at the lights.’

Adam spoke about his television career with a confidence that, to Neil, hinted at some plan or agreement for his advancement that he was sadly not at liberty to disclose. A confidence that was apparently justified: after a few purgatorial months at his first job, at an unglamorous firm that made training videos, he had moved to a cutting-edge production company. Adam seemed to Neil to be carried aloft by invisible hands, like a stage-diver conveyed to safety by a well-wishing crowd.

‘Jim the executive producer. Anyway — did I tell you? — Claire might come out for a few days, if the production manager lets us. Bit of a witch.’

‘Jesus, and you’re supposed to be her boyfriend.’

‘No, I meant the production man — Fuck off.’

‘Pull up on the right. I haven’t even met her yet.’

‘When I get back. You can be my character witness.’

‘Yeah, here, that’s fine. What’s my commission?’

‘You can have her sister.’

‘Does she have a sister?’

‘No.’

They drew in alongside a brown, grimly functional modern building. There was a convenience shop on the ground floor and cage-like fortifications on the upper windows, as if the inhabitants were expecting a siege. Neil’s immediate neighbours were a pawnbroker and a Bengali women’s association. He descended a set of switchback metal steps beneath the shopfront; Adam followed, at the bottom stepping over the newspapers, chip wrappers and Fanta cans that Neil had kicked into the well of the basement. Inside he had a single room, with a cupboard kitchen and a bathless bathroom. There was an acrid smell of damp. The furnishings comprised a penitentially narrow bed, a single plastic chair and a washing-up tub in the sink.

‘It’s great, Philly,’ Adam said.

‘It’s a shit-hole,’ Neil said. ‘And you know it.’

‘Come on, I think it’s terrific,’ Adam insisted. ‘You’ll never have to say “Your place or my dad’s?” to another girl.’

‘Oh fuck off,’ Neil said, gently punching his shoulder. He opened the only window. ‘Thanks again. I mean it.’

‘No problem,’ Adam said. ‘Really. I’ve got the car for a fortnight, they’re out in Perpignan.’

‘No, I mean the deposit. I’ll pay you back. With interest.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

There was no escape from money in London, they were discovering, from its double magnetism, which drew the well-off together and drove them and the struggling apart. In the flat Adam shared with Chaz and Archie there were double beds all round, a whirlpool bath and a sun-trap roof terrace; two of them, Adam and Archie, had moved in before their first pay-check. Neil had been out with them all, once, but the graft hadn’t taken.