A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘No,’ Claire shouted up. ‘Now get to bed.’

‘Bedtime,’ Adam said. ‘I love you, beetle-bugs.’

‘I need a poo,’ Harry said.

They’ll kill me in the end, Adam thought.

When they were down he closed the front door quietly and got into their key-scratched car, sweeping the accumulated parking vouchers, empty smoothie containers and maps printed off the internet from the dashboard into the well of the passenger seat. Adam had a weekly arrangement with a moped driver from the Bengal Express. The driver, Suleiman, met him at the perimeter of the restaurant’s delivery zone, by the side of Ealing Common, to exchange a lamb biryani and pilau rice for his eight pounds forty-five, a university penchant that Adam had re-embraced in fatherhood. Claire said there were bound to be acceptable takeaways that would deliver to their door and spare him the bother, but the Bengal Express was a dependable pleasure, and Adam relied on it.

Suleiman was standing in the designated spot, near a streetwise London oak, texting with his free hand and smelling of cigarette smoke. If someone had put Suleiman in a police-style line-up, a pageant of wiry men in their twenties all silhouetted or facing away, a plastic bag in one hand and a phone in the other, Adam would have picked him out every time. Something about his posture and demeanour.

‘Hi, Suleiman,’ Adam said.

‘Hi,’ Suleiman said, and smiled.

‘How you doing?’ Adam asked. They weren’t well-acquainted but they weren’t quite strangers, either. Perhaps it was only ever a question of degree.

‘Good,’ Suleiman said. ‘Good.’

‘Look after yourself.’

‘See you next week,’ Suleiman said. ‘Be safe.’

Listening to the Eagles on the drive home, the thought entered Adam’s head that he could be one of those men you sometimes read about who nip out on an errand, shouting ‘Five minutes, darling’, and take off, disappear. He couldn’t, of course. Of course not. The children.

He ate his food in the kitchen, mechanically, while Claire munched a salad and watched a vote-me-out-of-here television show, discharging the new civic duty of celebrity democracy: vote for the one you love, or the one you hate, only vote now and often. She shoved her used tissue between the cushion of the sofa and the arm, the umpteenth time, umpteen squared, but he decided not to mention it this evening.

Adam climbed the stairs to their bedroom and plugged in his laptop on the dressing table. He closed the door as the computer booted up, awaiting the insipidly welcoming melody.

He hadn’t meant to find her, honestly he hadn’t. At least, that hadn’t been Adam’s main or his first intention when he minimised his policy document, opened his browser and began that afternoon’s allotted Googling. His own internet footprint was still pathetically shallow: he scored a glancing reference in the write-up of an immigration conference at the University of Nottingham, plus a couple of mentions in online reports of school and university reunions. He searched for Chaz, Archie, Chloe, the university ex who was supposed to come to California, but hadn’t, leaving him to Neil, the pick-up, the Faithful Couple. Chloe was married and living in Dubai… A personalised zombie show, the phantoms parading before him on a whim and a click. The past was back, miraculously navigable like a new-old continent, peopled by the resurrected dead. History was no longer finished, even if you wanted it to be. You could unearth it, and vice versa.

From Chloe, to Neil. He rated several mentions in property magazines, mostly in conjunction with Farid, plus one or two in the business pages of bona fide newspapers, offering mollifying quotes on Farid’s behalf. Also the contacts section of the discreet website for Farid’s company. There were some internet-ancient mentions in Neil’s HappyFamilies capacity, in schadenfreude -heavy analyses of the dotcom bust. He was much more prolific than Adam.

From Neil, that afternoon, to Yosemite. He found Trey easily, almost instantly, the distinctive first name making him conspicuous if you knew how to look. Trey was still working as a guide in northern California, but for a different outfit. This new operator’s website included a photo of him (filled-out, greyer) dangling a salmon from a fishing rod, an amiable grin in place of the snarl Adam envisaged ( What the fuck, you guys? ). Next he found the gay couple from the camping trip. Their first names, Mike and Patrick, unexpectedly returned to him, along with the excavated details that they lived in Reno, and that one of them (both, he soon established) ran a landscape gardening firm.

It was only after that — after Chaz, Archie, Chloe, Neil; Trey, Mike and Patrick — that Adam came to Rose.

In the past two years, every few weeks, he had tried ‘Rose AND Eric AND Boulder’, but it was useless without her full name. All he remembered was that she had one of those only-in-America, ethnically oxymoronic portmanteau surnames: O’Malley-Rodriguez, Romario-Johansson, Esquivel-Schlezinger, something like that. He had seen the double-barrel on the slip of paper she gave to Neil when she marched to their tent to say goodbye, trying to be steadfast. The two of them had looked at the name and address, printed carefully in unjoined letters, a wonky xxx appended at the bottom, when they were sitting next to each other on the bus to San Francisco. He remembered that she had drawn a little heart in place of the dot over an i… at least one i. He had never seen that scrap of paper again and had no idea what Neil had done with it. Probably he had thrown it away, or left it in his jeans when they went into the wash.

In his cubicle, Adam concentrated. He closed his eyes. Irish-Mexican. Cuban-Swedish. Italian-German. Definitely German, he realised, but it felt like German should come first. German-Balkan. German-Hispanic. German… Celtic! Schneider. Koestler. Five minutes later, he thought he had it: Schmidt!

Schmidt-Davies. Schmidt-Evans. Schmidt-McNeil.

He eliminated several dozen other permutations. He had given up and moved on to his father (something about his consultancy work, a letter he had written to a newspaper about the green belt) when, of its own accord, it came to him: Ferguson. Schmidt-Ferguson! Schmidt-Ferguson. Rose Schmidt-Ferguson.

Rose Schmidt-Ferguson.

He was almost sure and giddy and terrified but there wasn’t much on her, either. He really ought to get back to his document, prepare for his meeting with Nick. She cropped up in a list of students at a college in Arizona that Adam had never heard of. Class of ’00, that sounded about right, they numbered by the year of graduation, didn’t they? High school’s what I mean.

Had to be her. But there was nothing else.

MySpace was his last gambit of the day. He already had a ghost profile though he had hardly ever used it.

She was there. There she was.

He searched for her, her name came up, he clicked through to her profile page, and she was on his screen quicker than he was expecting — too quickly, he wasn’t altogether ready for her. He glanced sharply away from the screen and towards the padded partition between his cubicle and the outside world. Be smiling, Adam thought, as he trained his eyes on the list of internal telephone numbers and fire-escape instructions that were pinned to the partition. Please be smiling — untraumatised, unvictimised, too well balanced to be a cause of retribution. At the same time he knew that her smile would prove nothing. Of course she would be smiling. Nobody posted a photo of themself frowning. It was childish superstition to think the image would express her essence and fate, Google-age voodoo.

Smile, Rose. Please.

She wasn’t smiling. But neither was she weeping or grimacing or wearing a wimple. The photo was too posed and affected to infer a mood. She sat in profile, a curtain of hair obscuring her cheek, her visible eye wide and staring. Her hair… She was a brunette in the photo, but Adam had an image of Rose as a fairer girl, almost blond, a blonde wearing a sarong… He might be mistaken. She might have dyed it. She might have changed beyond his recognition. He had changed. Why expect her to be the same, faithful to his half-invented memory, conveniently imperishable, eternally fifteen years old? ( Fifteen! ) Why should the decay that his mirror averred each morning — the crow’s feet around his eyes, the body hair that, having vanquished his shoulders, was mystifyingly colonising his upper arms — be surprising or disappointing in her? Of course it was her.