A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Adam had scratched his knee. He had called Neil. Probably he would have sent his friend the link he didn’t want, if Heidi hadn’t materialised in his cubicle. He might have written to her then and there.

Five minutes of top-up exegesis at the most, Adam told himself at Claire’s dressing table, the computer screen emitting its lunar glow but the bedroom otherwise dark. Or ten. Ten minutes at the outside. There might be something he had missed.

This time he retrieved her profile instantly. Her entry was almost as scant and poorly maintained as his own, as if, like him, she had registered and then lost interest (though for his part Adam wasn’t tech-savvy enough for much elaboration). Besides Rose’s move to New Mexico, he gleaned the names of two friends, Rio and Todd, and of her brother, George. She had uploaded no further photos, specified no interests and published no blog posts.

Adam wondered how she thought of them now. At first, he speculated at the dressing table, she might have been proud of what had happened, bragged about it, even. She might have become a minor celebrity in her high school on account of her escapade. At first; and that could have been how she depicted that night for a few years. But that, Adam knew, was as much as he could legitimately hope for, and possibly too much. Instead she might have been humiliated by that farewell tableau, too ashamed to forgive her father for witnessing it, her resentment and his incomprehension later curdling into estrangement. (Once, when his parents visited him at university, Adam’s mother had stumbled upon the condoms in his bedroom, their eyes had met, and they hadn’t spoken for a month.) She might have regretted the liaison instantly, been sobbing for the fact of Neil that morning rather than over his departure. Later, at that college in Arizona, what did she say to people — boyfriends, for example — about the pale Englishman who had seduced her in California, and the overconfident friend who encouraged him and would have seduced her if he could?

He caught his breath as it occurred to him she might be able to see that Adam Tayler, London, England had searched for and found her. Unlikely, he reassured himself. In any case, his name wouldn’t mean much to her. It wouldn’t be his name that she remembered.

In the children’s bedroom, Ruby cried out. Adam froze, listening, but the yelp came only once. Bad dream, probably. Rats or bats or witches. He was grateful to the children now, in a way; or, he and they were quits over this. Ruby had induced the fierce remorse, and the fear, both of which Adam knew he might never shake off entirely, might have to live with for ever, dull and tolerable but persistent like a burned-out infatuation. At the same time everything before his children now seemed part of a different innings or account, the two of them forming a human statute of limitations.

He shouldn’t have done that to you , Adam might write to her. We shouldn’t have done that to you. We’re sorry. I’m sorry. Some breathless declaration along those lines. Or, I don’t know whether your father told you, but I knew… So you see, it was me too, in a way. Me as much as him. Only after the apology would he write, The thing is, in the morning, your father… I know it’s selfish of me but if you could just…

Possibly Neil was right about contacting her. She couldn’t have forgotten — nobody forgets that — but she might have relegated them to the back of the closet of her memory, only occasionally uncovering them when she was sifting through the clutter of her childhood. Possibly she thought about it every day. Either way she might not be pleased to hear from him, however urgently he repented. I just need to know that you’re okay. Tell me.

At the same time, studying Rose’s photo in his bedroom, Adam was furious with her. Not for being younger than they first thought (had they thought?), nor for swimming and splashing them. Not for anything at all that she had done, in fact. He blamed her only for existing. Had she not existed, if she hadn’t been there, it couldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t be crouched masochistically over his computer screen; he would worry about his daughter only in the ordinary way, without this superfluous, gnawing superstition. Their friendship, his and Neil’s, wouldn’t have been contaminated from the start. If she ceased to exist now, there would be no victim, and so, from a certain, twistedly legalistic point of view, no offence to speak of or to pay for. Looking at the screen ( Warning: Battery Low! ), Adam oscillated between an impulse to atone and an urge to obliterate her.

He heard a footfall on the stairs. Or a spontaneous creak. Probably a creak. These old houses.

Or, if not her, could he at least obliterate those few days of his life? If he were allowed to rewind and delete any three of the days he had lived, he would choose the three in Yosemite. His life could be three days shorter: that would be a fair exchange and settlement, surely. Or let him erase that one evening, just those few hours. To be able to go back and cancel a few hours in a whole life — was that really so unreasonable a request? Everybody should be entitled to that, he thought. At least to that.

He looked at the screen; the nails of his right hand scratched his left forearm. His heart sped up. Perhaps without those few hours, Adam considered, there would have been no him and Neil at all. Maybe they had stayed together as might two old lags determined to keep an eye on each other, united by their misdemeanour rather than in spite of it. Turn a betrayal inside out and you found its opposite, a secret and a bond. Perhaps that was what friendship came down to: trusting each other with the very worst things — because you had to, didn’t you? You had to trust and tell someone — the shaming weaknesses, the lowest abasements, the flaws and offences that would always be there between you, even if you never spoke of them. A lifelong, affectionate mutual blackmail.

Friendship was keeping an eye on each other. Their bond was Rose.

‘What are you doing?’ She switched on the light.

‘Nothing,’ Adam said. He swivelled round to face Claire, reaching behind him to snap the screen as he turned, missing on the first swipe and knocking over a tube of body lotion.

‘What is it, Adam?’ She was focusing on the flattened computer, or rather on the shallow reflection of the computer in the dressing table mirror. ‘Tell me. What are you looking at?’

Curiosity to indignation to rage inside a dozen words. She dipped her head forward expectantly, minus the smile that usually finished the gesture.

‘Nothing, Clezzy,’ he repeated. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Oh, Adam,’ she said. She gripped her hips as she did when reprimanding their children. ‘For God’s sake.’

It’s funny how trust goes, Adam thought. Part of him wouldn’t have minded, might have quite liked, a chance to say, like a philanderer in a farce, It isn’t what you think . Some in flagrante gotcha featuring a willing blonde or two and a comically timed entrance by his wife. But not this. This wasn’t even the low-risk, high-bandwidth version of that moment that Claire apparently thought it was, in which she would catch him with his dick in one hand and the fingers of the other typing misspelled, all-capitalised instructions to a virtual friend in Latvia or Manila.

This was the opposite of pornography: it was expiation. It really wasn’t what she thought. But what was he supposed to say?

‘It isn’t what you think,’ he said.

Claire laughed, caustically and unamused. ‘What do I think?’ she asked, her voice like a ticking bomb.

He couldn’t say to her, In California, Neil … Or, Me and Neil … Thing is, her father … And then when Ruby was born … Today, at work … Come and take a look . It wouldn’t make sense to her. He confided fears and embarrassments to Claire that no one else could see, not even Neil, vanities and midnight doubts and, recently, his haemorrhoids. His grief at still not being a 7. But not this. It was too late, and Rose was theirs, not hers.