A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

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.’