A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘Ballroom-dancing lessons,’ he said. ‘For your birthday, there’s a place in Bloomsbury. You’ve spoiled it now, Claire. Christ.’

Adam stretched his legs in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. He folded his arms over his chest. He was fond of his lie. Neil should have been there to appreciate it.

He could see her not believing him. She was staring past him into the mirror — the huddle of cosmetics in the foreground, the computer nestling among them, then the back of Adam’s chair, his neck, the resilient fullness of his hair, and Claire herself, shrunken and open-mouthed in the middle distance. He could see her wanting to rush over, flip up the screen, demand or remember or guess his password and ascertain what or who was in his browser. But she couldn’t. The manoeuvre would be too loud an intimation of divorce. And she was too tired.

She said, ‘I’m going to bed,’ not repudiating his explanation but not accepting it, either.

‘Me too,’ Adam agreed, not wanting to leave her alone with the computer.

She sat on the edge of the bed to undress, rotating her torso so her breasts were shielded from him when she took off her bra ( Ridiculous! ). She reached under her pillow for the extra-large T-shirt that she liked to sleep in; she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and anoint her face (the same brand of moisturiser since they met, its aroma part of the smell of her, a scent Adam had thought he would always recognise and love). He hurried out of his clothes, draping them over the chair and the computer, and lay on his back under the duvet, straight and still like a corpse in a coffin on The Sopranos . His foot met a stray piece of train set; he kicked it onto the carpet, stubbing a toe.

She turned out the light and joined him, lying on her side, facing away.

‘Who did you vote for?’

‘You know who I voted for… Oh, that. No one,’ Claire said. ‘They’re all as bad as each other.’

Nursery-rhyme sing-songs in church halls… accidental shits in swimming pools… perpetual laundry. The immurement. If Claire had stayed at the gallery she might have been running the place by now. But the salary/childcare sums had made no sense, even with her mother helping them one day a week, rising to two when she lost the second man, the bloke with the zany cummerbund from the wedding.

‘That knee looks sore, doesn’t it? Did she fall off her scooter again?’

Claire grunted.

They had got money all wrong, Adam now saw, held it in insufficient respect. He hadn’t foreseen how the gap would grow, their line on the money graph rising slightly, then flatlining, while the Neils of the world — while Neil’s — shot up faster and for longer, until you would need a squiggly break in the graph’s vertical axis to compare their incomes. At the beginning, when it had seemed like a windfall, he had tried to regard Neil’s wealth as harmless, amusing, but when it lasted, became a structural fact in their lives, they had experienced money’s cleavage, its powerful negative magnetism.

‘Nick gave me a going over today. Asylum stats. Imbecile.’

Nothing.

She never said so — you couldn’t say it because of the children, the children were supposed to be enough — but he knew Claire had expected more. Not salary or square-footage but a different kind of more. A general rather than a particular, material more. Sometimes, when he contemplated his life, Adam saw himself driving round and round an underground car park with a voucher in his mouth.

She sighed, plumped her pillow, sighed again. Under the duvet she pulled her T-shirt down towards her knees. He raised his head, anticipating a last-ditch conversation — Let’s not go to bed on an argument, Claire always said — but she was silent. The Dinky duet was sung out.

In bed, ostracised, Adam remembered how, when they were very young, he and Harriet had seen his parents dancing together (in his memory they were dressed to the nines: a wedding, maybe) and had thought them as beautiful as a fairy tale, the most beautiful and enamoured couple in the world. It was their fault, all that happiness, or what had felt like happiness to children, leaving him with too little to prove. When he spoke to them now they complained about each other in icy, ominous periphrases ( Please tell your father …). He was noticing a new tightness around his mother’s mouth, and a new, defensive habit of introducing her remarks with I’m sorry, but… as if the world were perpetually countermanding her ( I’m sorry, but she’s beautiful ). At family meals his father constantly refilled Adam’s wine glass, and Claire’s, to reduce the supply to his wife. Adam had begun to wonder about the bank account and — who knew? — bedroom indiscretions that his parents might be concealing, must always have been.

The known unknowns of other people’s marriages, even theirs. Even his: Heidi, and that smooch on the Strand, and Rose.

Claire loved him, he thought. Her anger told him that. He loved her, too. He still loved her, even if, most of the time, the love didn’t seem especially helpful or relevant. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, except maybe the children, adept as they were at finding the cracks and prising them apart.

‘Love you,’ he said. He rolled onto his side to spoon her, and she let him, though she might already have been asleep.

You see, if you are okay, that would mean… Could you possibly ask your father to take it back?

Their names were Sian and Alida and they were from New Zealand. Alida was Neil’s and Sian was Adam’s, one of those spontaneous assortments determined instantly by looks, height and ebullience. At least, they said their names were Sian and Alida, who knew what they were really called. Adam had introduced himself as Henry and Neil as Kevin.

‘At the opera,’ he said, when Sian asked where they had been that evening. ‘You know, Covent Garden. Carmen . It was a blast.’

‘My friend here, Henry, he’s a set designer,’ Neil put in.

‘Papier mâché mostly,’ Adam clarified. ‘Collages, murals. Castles that they slide out of the wings.’

‘Slaves and elephants,’ Neil said.

‘No kidding,’ Sian said.

‘Choice,’ Alida said.

The two men had been out to dinner at a burger place behind the Strand. It was the summer after Adam told Neil the truth about California, the year before he exhumed Rose. They were ambling in the direction of Trafalgar Square when the rain began — a sudden, unEnglish monsoon, overrunning the drains and flooding along the gutters as if London’s subterranean rivers were erupting, one of those violent summer rains that make it seem the whole grey, nonporous city must drown. They were drenched within a minute and took shelter in an airline salesroom’s doorway. Sian and Alida had occupied the recess before them. The women were tipsier than Neil and Adam, a condition and opportunity that they clocked straight away, their decommissioned chat-up instincts still whirring.

‘We’re having a party,’ Sian said, after the sizings-up and jokes about swimming for it. ‘You should come.’

‘Who else is going?’ Adam said. The downpour felt like a carnival.

‘Just us,’ Sian said. She cocked her hips and pinched his lapel. The rainwater was trickling into the doorway.

‘Come,’ Alida said to Neil, casting down her eyes so as to turn them up again. Twenty-seven, Neil estimated. Twenty-eight. Knee-high suede boots, tight jeans, leopard-print accessories. Grown-up women: drunk, a long way from home and looking unfussily for a good time.

It was odd, in a way, that the two of them had never been through this rite together, not like this. The backing up and egging on and keeping pace. Adam glanced across at Neil — questions and permission and joint amazement that this could still be happening to them, in their mid-thirties, with their kids and careers and the rest, that they might be allowing it to. Neil nodded.