A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

These days, when he tried to have sex with Claire, she generally kissed him back, kissed him off, the way his grandmother might have done if he had kissed her on the lips by accident — mouth closed and pursed, unyielding, on the appalled side of polite — and Adam rolled away and lay on his back, no part of their bodies touching, offended and ashamed. These days Claire’s idea of seduction, when she was sure the children were asleep and felt she ought to, was to reach under the duvet, hitch up her nightie and say, ‘We can fuck if you want.’

He couldn’t make her want him. When he trimmed the old-man hairs in his nostrils and ears, it was Heidi’s notice he was anticipating. She pirouetted and returned to her desk, only her slender top half visible, like some graceful aquatic bird, as she weaved between the serried desks and computer screens.

Adam turned back to his screensaver. Over the years he had wavered about whose arm was interrupting the picture’s edge. It might be hers. Very likely it was hers. He had given less attention to the tree itself, the deep grooves in the bark and the hollowed-out crevice that, now he came to focus on it, looked as if it might swallow them.

The question was straightforward, Nick insisted in the meeting room. Thirty thousand asylum-seekers, give or take, arrived in the country each year. How many of them departed? The minister needed to know. The higher the figure, the better, obviously, but at a minimum they needed a number.

Nick sucked the end of his pen. When he withdrew it from his mouth the lid lingered between his lips; he picked it out with his other hand. Like Adam he had transferred from crime to immigration, but more recently and importantly. Extended acquaintance hadn’t made them friends. On the contrary, theirs was one of those office relationships in which longevity instils a firm, empirical assurance that they never would be, a certainty that was itself a kind of comfort. Nick was out of his depth but shrewd enough to realise.

Unfortunately not, Adam explained. The statisticians could rustle up a combined, annual figure for forcible removals and the voluntary departures that were reported to the authorities. But that wouldn’t correspond to the number of arrivals for the year and couldn’t safely be compared with it.

‘Why not? Of course it can.’

Nick bent the pen between his thumbs as if he meant to break it. A noose of pimples ringed his neck above his shirt collar; he had lost much of his hair since their days together in crime and shorn the horseshoe that remained.

They had said something about a brother, one of them had, Adam was sure of it. Taos, New Mexico.

‘Adam?’

‘Because they aren’t processed quickly enough,’ Adam said. ‘The figures don’t tally, you see. The ones we remove this year arrived last year, or the year before, or even the year before that.’

There was a jug of misty water on the table but no glasses.

‘Three years ago?’

Why shouldn’t he contact her? He could do it tactfully, respectfully, enquiring about her welfare. Hers and her father’s.

‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Have you seen the files in Croydon? It’s ridiculous. They’re stacked three feet thick. Though some of them, when it takes that long, end up being allowed to stay on compassionate grounds even if their claim has been refused. And of course quite a lot of them sort of vanish in between.’

Sheila, the Head of Returns, was on long-term sick, but Adam was still her deputy for purposes of pay and rank. Adam Tayler, Deputy Head of Returns. He could no longer tell himself that he was playing against type. This was his type.

Nick looked at Adam and then at the far, unoccupied end of the table. ‘The permanent secretary would like an answer,’ he said in a menacingly calm tone. ‘The minister wants to know, presumably so he can tell Parliament. He doesn’t want to hear, “We don’t know”. He doesn’t want to say it.’

Nick left it there.

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said eventually. ‘I’m not sure what we can do.’

Or he could be casual, jaunty: Hi!!!! Remember me?? As if there were nothing in the world to be ashamed or sensitive about.

Nick blew out his cheeks. ‘Okay, take a previous year. Take 2002. Tell me how many asylum-seekers who lodged claims in 2002 have gone. We will extrapolate that into an annual proportion.’

‘Sorry,’ Adam said. ‘Removals aren’t tabulated by date of arrival. The stats people are fixing that, in fact — you know, cohort tracking. From this year, I think. But for what you want, somebody would have to go through the paperwork on every decision. Sorry.’

There must have been a time, Adam had concluded, there must have been a moment when he was supposed to have made his move, like a middle-distance runner taking off around a bend. He should have seen a bill through Parliament, owned a crisis, God knew there were enough of them to go round. Half of it — success or stagnation, becoming a 7 or not — was dumb luck, but the other half was taking your chances when they came. There was a slow stream in the Civil Service, less formal but just as tractive as the fast one, and he had stumbled onto it. If he wasn’t careful by the end of his thirties he would find himself sitting it out, buckling up for the long, lengthening wait for the pension. Adam saw people doing that, dull behind the eyes after they had given up. That would mean twenty-five years to refine one of the functions available to the bypassed in departmental ecology: to be an avuncular throwback (he would wear braces, hum his school song), or, worse, a ‘character’ (he would wear odd socks and assault the photocopier). Worst of all, he might be exiled to some acronymous quango, which twice a year would lodge harmless reports on border queues or prison diets in the library of the House of Commons.

Nick scowled, put the pen back in his mouth and bent over his papers. After a minute Adam understood that he was supposed to leave. He stood and returned to his desk.

The evening before he had seen Will — Will from his job in television, Will from Tenerife — being interviewed outside a broadcasting awards ceremony on a reddish carpet. Will from television — on television. He looked slimmer than he had been a decade before, and taller, somehow, though of course he couldn’t have been. Cuban heels, possibly. He was controller of one of the BBC’s new cable channels; something that he had commissioned had won a gong. Will had smiled and pushed his glasses up his nose as he accepted the interviewer’s congratulations.

Adam emailed Heidi: Survived. Your place or mine?

He would look again that evening, after the children were in bed. There were only a few hours to get through first.

Who was Neil to say he shouldn’t contact her?

Home for the companionable violence of bath-time, the silent and dependable teamwork with Claire, in the miniature factory the maisonette had become: food in, recycling, excrement, and reasonably clean and well-nourished children out. After the bath came the borderline anarchy of the interlude before bed, Adam poised on the landing outside the kids’ bedroom like a referee in a bout of all-in wrestling ( almost everything is allowed).

‘Cartoons tonight,’ Harry said, fiddling with his penis. ‘One more?’

‘Not tonight, lollipop.’

‘Me too,’ Ruby said. She had Claire’s features but hers were finer, almost gaunt. In the bath, with her hair slicked back, and sometimes when she was crying, Adam could just make out the baby in her face, the new-born physiognomy that he knew she would soon lose. She had fallen in the park that day and scraped her little knees.

‘Mummy,’ Harry shouted down the stairs, ‘it’s cartoons tonight, isn’t it?’ — the divide and rule instinct kicking in, as primal, Adam had noticed, as the dancing instinct, the storytelling instinct and the nostalgia instinct.