A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

His other, evanescing friends were useless, as if there were an asterisk in their contracts that excused them at unhilarious moments. And this was the least of it, Adam knew, the divorces and nervous breakdowns and dying parents and heartbreaking children were still to come. For the first time he could remember, his father let him down. ‘Every life needs a twist and a turn,’ Jeremy said on the phone, mysteriously affecting a Scottish brogue, as if he were quoting a song from some old Highlands musical that didn’t actually exist. Adam had expected more from him: sharper anger, sturdier protection. Claire kept her distance, treating him like a ticking bomb in an action movie, wary of pulling the wrong wire.

That night he had almost told Neil the truth about California. Adam was incontinently grateful for his sympathy, and the secret felt like a burden too many. Neil seemed so close, there was nothing they couldn’t share, Adam would tell him and be forgiven in an instant, and then that episode would open up to them. He managed not to, cowardice or tact that afterwards he half-regretted.

‘Seriously, Neil, I don’t know what you see in him. I mean, what did you do in America, rob a bank together?’

Neil flinched. They were in her bed, two months after they met Farid, Sunday morning fornication. Jess was exploiting the post-coital amnesty, the very temporary truce.

‘The way he took the mike and walked around like that. All that “my wife” crap. And making his father his best man… What a tosser.’

Jess had lived in London for five or six years, more than enough to count as a local, but Yorkshire hung on in her vowels, an accent that to Neil’s southern ear made her jokes sound funnier and her judgements harsher. She was immune to Adam’s charm, their personalities somehow failing to intersect. On the three occasions they had met, the latest being Adam’s wedding, she had laughed when he wasn’t making a joke and missed the punchlines he intended.

‘Don’t,’ Neil said, rearranging his leg so that his thigh was no longer touching hers. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘You know what, Philly old boy, in my experience, when people say things are complicated, they never are.’

He knew Jess was onto something. For all Adam’s seigneurial confidence he thought in straight, obedient lines, was content to be defined by the government’s consoling acronyms. The wedding had obeyed its type: the adequately pretty English church, the vicar keeping the hypocritical God content to a harmless minimum, the lawn parade of tepid canapés and novelty cummerbunds, the inevitable marquee. But that wasn’t him… That was all irrelevant… The money Adam had lent him for his first deposit, the nights Neil had spent on their sofa, when he was between bedsits and couldn’t face his father’s — he and Adam staying up, giggling like imbeciles, until Claire came to shush them, hands on hips, some primitive affinity of gender trumping his friend’s allegiance to her. A week, then five days… Those favours weren’t what mattered either, they were the currency and not the feeling. The way he had felt, six years earlier, when they met on the concourse at Paddington Station, beamed back together in London, or felt when, a week before that, he took Adam’s first phone call:

It’s me, Neil. It’s Adam.

Adam? Hi — Adam! I’ve got it, Dad, I said I’ve got it…

‘What is it, a class thing?’ Jess went on. ‘Sort of, you know, a yeoman and master type arrangement? Does he get to fuck me, too?’

‘Knock it off, Jess,’ Neil said, turning away from her. ‘Me and him — you don’t understand.’

‘Don’t sulk,’ she said. ‘I was just… I’m sorry.’

After Adam and the wedding came the ritual introductions to their families. The first, Jess’s mother, was unplanned. Neil asked where she was going, whether he could go too, and she said, ‘Believe me, you don’t want to.’

‘Don’t I?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Your funeral.’

They were halfway to Hull before he clocked it. Contrary to all the self-parodic jokes she had made, her childhood home, a shoebox miner’s terrace, had inside plumbing and no coal scuttle. Her mother was immobilised by arthritis and older-looking than Brian, despite being five years younger.

‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he said as they stepped out of their taxi.

‘Likewise,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’ She carried a cane that she mostly forgot to use. ‘You could have warned me, Jessica. Nowt in the house.’

The front room was a 3D album of Jess photos, though none of them was very recent. Jess in school uniform. A teenaged Jess glammed up for a night on the tiles. Jess wearing a mortar board at an ironic angle.

‘She’s a one,’ her mother said to Neil, when Jess went to smoke on the front step. ‘Give you much trouble?’

‘No. You?’

‘Oh yes,’ Jess’s mother said, rasping out a laugh.

She poured more tea and sat in silence with him until her daughter came back. Jess showed him no mercy, not interpreting or elaborating on the local names and legendary incidents that populated the intermittent conversation.

Harrow was the final milestone, the last museum of their prior lives. They drove out in Jess’s car at the end of the summer.

‘Are you Neil’s wife?’ Sam asked, disobediently opening the front door alone.

‘No,’ Jess said, keeping her distance. She offered the boy her hand but he ran back into the house.

Brian shuffled up. ‘Come inside,’ he said, turning away.

Tea and a plate of digestives were pre-arrayed on top of the television. Sam mounted the armchair; as Brian came in he was preparing to hurl himself onto Neil’s back.

‘Careful,’ Brian said, pointlessly.

Sam jumped. He slid down Neil’s spine, catching his hand in his uncle’s as he landed. Neil looked down at the spiral of hair on top of the child’s head, only recently thickened up from babyish thatch. The trace of a birthmark patterned his temple.

Sam wiped his nose with his finger, though it wasn’t running. ‘Are you his wife?’ he asked Jess, indicating Brian with his eyes.

‘No!’ she exclaimed, too loudly for the room.

‘Who are you?’

‘Tea?’ Brian asked.

‘My friend, Sammy,’ Neil said. ‘She’s my friend.’

‘Okay,’ Sam said. ‘Now we’re playing hide and seek.’

‘Are we?’ said Jess.

‘Milk and sugar?’

‘I’ll hide, and you count. Ready?’ Sam set off for the door. Brian pressed himself against the wall to let the boy pass.

‘One,’ said Neil.

‘Not yet!’ Sam shouted, laughing and looking back from the threshold. ‘Close your eyes!’

‘Just be careful,’ Brian repeated, resting a forearm on the corner of the mantelpiece. There was a shy tenderness buried somewhere in his father’s voice, Neil thought. Perhaps Sam picked it up more clearly than he was able to, as young ears could reputedly detect certain frequencies that adults miss.

‘Two,’ Neil said.

Jess ran her hands down her thighs, straightening her skirt. Sam’s footsteps skipped across the hallway and echoed up the stairs, the pat of feet alternating with the soft slap of hands and pad of knees, the not-yet-outgrown technique of infancy. Hurry with a hint of dance.

‘Careful,’ Brian murmured, much too softly for Sam to hear. ‘Left him here yesterday. She dumped him on Dan, apparently, he’s got something on in Poole, hotel site, he said.’

‘This is Jess.’

‘Gave me a toy giraffe and a pair of pyjamas and left him. What was I supposed to do?’

Brian had received a health warning from his doctor a few weeks before. He looked slightly awry in scale — all the right and recognisable features, but somehow smaller than life-size. His flannel trousers ballooned clownishly around his thighs.