A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

As Adam spoke Neil cast down his eyes at the wooden table, at the Venn diagram imprinted by glasses and bottles. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Tell me the rest of it, then.’

To Adam this felt like a dream, after all this time, surreal and inebriating. ‘It was earlier, when we were by the fire, do you remember that? He was sitting next to me, her father was, and he told me she was… He told me she was in high school.’

‘That’s all?’

Adam swallowed again. ‘He told me and I meant to tell you, I did, but somehow I… You were so… determined. Do you remember how we were about it? Later I didn’t think you would — that you and she… I should have told you. There’s nothing else I can say. And then in the morning, he…’

Neil held up his palms — Don’t shoot! — and pinched the bridge of his nose. The epiphany in a film when the hero realises his ally has been a villain all along. Or maybe it wasn’t, Neil thought at almost the same instant, perhaps this didn’t matter at all, an oversight from a decade ago, heat of the battle, few beers, so much since and closer that counted for more between them. It wasn’t as if… no one got hurt. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to stand, let the potman open the door for him and walk out, no goodbyes. He didn’t know what the rules were for this. How was he supposed to know?

He stalled. ‘Why have you waited… Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘Actually, I thought about it. I tried, once or twice, you won’t remember, you probably didn’t notice. I suppose it never felt… urgent. But now, with Ruby… You’re the only one I can talk to about it, don’t you see? I had to talk to someone.’

Neil raised his hand to his brow, covering his eyes. There was some anger, he found. ‘You know what could have happened? Her father, in the morning, he was about to… It looked as if…’

‘I know, Philly. I’m sorry about that. But he didn’t, did he?’

Again Neil sighed. ‘When you came and stood next to me — do you remember? — in front of the tent, they were all surrounding me, and I was alone, and you — you didn’t have to, we’d only known each other a couple of weeks, you could have disowned me, and I thought, it’s silly, I know, but I thought it was, you know, the nicest… But it wasn’t, was it? It was just…’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘And afterwards, all these years… Ten years. I thought we were more than that.’

‘We are.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I had to tell you, let me finish and you’ll see. In the morning, the father — Eric — he said to me, it was like a curse or something, he said he hoped… He said one day, I’d have a daughter, and he hoped… Well, I do, don’t you see? And now I look at Ruby and it’s as if — I know it sounds crazy — it’s as if it was her. Or that if it was, if it ever was, it would somehow be, I don’t know, fair.’

‘It isn’t like that — life — it’s nothing to do with fair.’

‘It’s as if I wouldn’t be able to complain. Like I’d be disqualified.’

Neil’s sympathy and patience had run dry. The whole conversation was the wrong way round.

‘That’s what this is about?’

‘What?’

‘I could have gone to prison in California, what was it he said I’d get, the guide? Two years. You heard him. Probably I would never have come out. And you expect me to… What the fuck do you expect?’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘For yourself.’

The ker-ching of the till, the slam of the door, a woman laughing, a glass smashing. Adam said, ‘Maybe there always are things like this. I mean things you don’t tell each other. Things you’ve done or said or, you know, thought about each other. Even to you.’

‘If you say so, Adam,’ Neil said. ‘But not things like this.’ He snatched a vicious glance at his watch.

‘You know,’ Adam counterattacked, ‘you could have been the one to suffer for this, just as easily.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ Neil said. ‘I’m not suffering. Not about her.’

They sat resentfully, like strangers obliged to share a table. When they finished their beers the potman swooped for their bottles with greater alacrity than he looked capable of. This time Neil looked up at him, momentarily distracted by the effort to determine his age. He could have been anywhere between forty and seventy.

‘Have you told Jess?’

‘Told her what?’

‘Don’t, Neil.’

‘Okay, no. But I don’t see why I should tell her. Tell her what? I haven’t told her about the girl I shagged in freshers’ week. There are lots of things I haven’t told her. I haven’t told her about us running away from that bar in Vegas without paying. It was a mistake, Adam. It isn’t relevant. An accident.’

‘That’s what I’m saying, it wasn’t an accident.’

‘Have you told Claire? What you’ve just told me.’

‘No,’ Adam said. ‘I can’t now, no way. If anything ever happened… This is between us. You’re the only one who could understand. Just us.’

From the turn in the stairs, halfway down, Adam could see through the archway to the end of the living room where Neil was sitting with Claire. Neil’s hair was swept back from his brow in the manner of a bullfighter or a tango dancer. He was talking too softly for Adam to hear, Claire interjecting the odd ‘Really?’ and ‘That’s wonderful’. She was already expert at letting men talk about themselves, allowing them to feel fascinating, a skill she had honed at work-related London dinner parties that, to Adam, always felt like botched auditions. She never expected her interlocutors to reciprocate her interest and, he suspected, experienced only a very mild affront, almost a satisfying vindication, when they didn’t.

Her eyes had asked him the question after they came in together. They were back earlier than she expected, Adam looking meaninglessly at the bookshelves like a visitor while Neil asked her how the newborn was sleeping, seconds later distractedly repeating himself. Something had happened. Adam had shaken his head, almost imperceptibly — Nothing. Don’t ask. Not in front of him — and gone to check on Harry.

‘You don’t have to,’ Adam had said outside the Bear. ‘I’ll say you were tired.’

‘I should,’ Neil had insisted, not yet certain what he should do, what he should feel, carrying on while the jury was out. They had walked back to the maisonette in silence.

Adam descended the last few stairs and paused in the doorway. Claire’s feet were curled under her buttocks, her skin on the sallow side of pale, one hand over her deflating abdomen, still cradling the foetus that had become the infant asleep on her shoulder. Now she was giggling, the hand holding her Caesarean scar as if she might burst, and Neil was laughing too, his silent laugh that looked like a grimace, his arms out straight and motionless on the armrests.

Neil looked up at him but his expression was blank. Adam had missed the punchline. They could have been talking about anything.

Like a lifer with no possibility of parole and nothing left to lose, Harry burst down the stairs and past him. He seized and tried to ransom Neil’s phone, this miniature god that the adults seemed to worship. He launched himself at his mother and sister; Claire deflected him with a forearm and Adam extracted him, Harry cycling his legs in the air in the obligatory show of resistance.

‘No, bedtime, lollipop,’ Adam said, the endearment and the rhythm of it direct inheritances from his father — lollipop, beetle-bug, darling , they welled up and came out of him involuntarily, as if written into some deep, time-delayed hard drive. In his bedroom Harry denied all wrongdoing, then began to cry, protest followed by contrition, guilt’s familiar one-two. He extorted a story from his father, exercising his power to be certain it was real, as tyrants must. His body clock was out, all of theirs were, the family living in that blurry newborn time zone in which night and day elide. Adam kept it short: boy, elephant, ride, squirt. The End.