A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘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.’