A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Claire asked, ‘How are things with you?’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Can’t complain.’

Neil didn’t know what he had meant by that dismal evasion. He should have said, I’m rich, Claire. Amazing, isn’t it? I’m becoming rich. But she knew that already.

‘Still travelling all the time?’

‘Calms down a bit over the summer. Switzerland, maybe. And Cayman in September.’

Neil worked client side , peddling a discreetly asterisked vision of minimal risks, outwitted taxes and soaring returns, and sharing in the fat management fees that the HNWIs were reluctant but willing to pay for the dream of anti-gravitational prosperity. He had swung from the evanescing ether of Bimal’s website to Farid’s semi-solid buildings, then back to abstraction, this time in the guise of almost pure money. Money spawning money. The basics, he considered, had been constant since his peripatetic days in the pharmaceuticals trade, and his interminable summers and post-California stint in his father’s shop . Sell the customer what he wants to buy.

‘How is, you know, the market?’ She gave another nervous laugh.

‘Fine,’ Neil said. ‘You know, wolf from the door.’

They drank their wine, Claire taking tiny, feline but frequent sips. Neil looked at his watch.

‘How’s your father?’ she asked.

‘The same.’ He made a quick slashing gesture with his left hand — flat palm, sharp rotation at the wrist — conveying both a dim estimation of Brian’s life expectancy and a preference not to discuss it. Claire refilled their glasses.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Her phone rang and she retreated to the kitchen to answer. Neil only half-deciphered the conversation: ‘Why?… Fuck’s sake, Adam… Okay.’

She stood in the aperture between the two rooms and said, ‘He’s late. I mean, he’s even later. Christ. Doesn’t know when he’ll be back, minister on the warpath, apparently.’ Neil began to stand. ‘You’re welcome to stay for another.’

Her cheeks had a sauvignon glow. Neil had never overcome his impression, formed instantaneously in the smoky pub where Adam had introduced them, that Claire looked down on him. His money, he had latterly suspected, had made looking down on him all the more urgent. The market : the way she said it, and still judged him, her and Adam both. Or perhaps he was being unfair. Her T-shirt had bunched and ridden up above the elastic of her velour trousers.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

They had never been friends, but neither could Neil say that he knew her, or had ever really seen her, unrefracted by her husband, separate from her assigned role.

Claire fetched the second bottle. Neil took a couple of quick, noiseless paces and sat on the sofa. Between it and the wall he noticed a graveyard of mangled toys — a digger missing a wheel, a doll minus an arm, cherished objects that devotion had not kept from violence.

Classical music wafted from the kitchen, intricate, fine-boned, a piano without accompaniment. Concerto? Minuet? The nomenclature escaped him. Claire returned with the bottle and a corkscrew and sat beside him on the sofa. She opened and poured. Bored, Neil thought. Bored and lonely. And tired. She curled her feet up and under her buttocks and balanced a glass on her knee.

‘Do you miss her?’ Claire said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Not much, to be honest,’ Neil said. ‘Is that terrible? She feels — it’s hard to explain it — she’s like a film that ended, or a holiday. Or a job. It was supposed to end, I think.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. No reason.’

Even now he couldn’t say for certain why Jess had gone. Something to do with her age, a mid-thirties, stick-or-twist moment at which he had seen other women bolt, too; something to do with her mother’s death, and also, she had intimated, something to do with his mother’s death. She hadn’t helped him to rank these motives. She had already done her grieving in her head, as you might for the victim of a long, terminal illness, so that, for Jess, the final, literal end was more a technicality than a crisis. She had no interest in his money.

For a moment Neil thought Claire was going to admit to never having liked her, that amateurish barbed condolence, but instead she said, ‘She was sweet.’

Adam had come round with a bottle of whisky that evening but Neil had felt as much relief as anguish. They drank most of the whisky anyway. Even three or four doubles to the wind, Neil did not find his thumb poised to dial her number on his mobile. He slept better without her.

‘Sweet’s not the word I would have chosen.’

They both laughed, and Claire reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Neil glanced at the hand and across at her face; she withdrew the hand and smiled. Lonely and bored, Neil thought, and maybe also a harmless desire to feel desirable again. He remembered that moment in the pub when they first met, the ghost of flirtation he had glimpsed in the space between two blinks. He remembered how assiduous she had always been in laughing at his jokes. That had been fun, mean cruel fun, the interlude with the poor old lady.

They drank another glass of wine, sinking deeper into the sofa until they were almost horizontal. Claire began criticising Adam, gently, as an exasperated mother might, in low-key solidarity with Neil’s break-up. There was something contagious about romantic discord, just as there could be in marriage and child-bearing, Neil believed, if you weren’t careful. She said she wanted to shake Adam sometimes — of course he should take the consulting job if they wanted him, they really were very grateful. Sometimes Adam seemed so… absent. He was wonderful with the children but they got the best of him. She sometimes felt that there was nothing left for her.

Did Neil know what she meant? He said he did, assenting to this tactful, joint demolition, her resentments of her husband rising up to meet his, all those years of Adam cutting the bread too thick, or whatever his domestic foibles were, a call-and-response ritual that, now, was less an inverted contest in intimacy than a mutual commiseration.

Neil could say to her, There is something else you should know about your husband, It was before you met him but I think you should know anyway… Adam had been so adamant that she mustn’t find out.

She rotated her body and the back of her head came to rest against his shoulder. He could smell her, the unmistakable whiff of posh-girl cosmetics, Chanel and high-end moisturiser. He could still distinguish the individual fragrances from his time in the business, the olfactory memories coming back to him like old song lyrics. He reached an arm around her to pat her on the far shoulder, and left it there, innocuously.

More than once, in the past two years, he had thought of telling Claire about Yosemite, anticipating the nice symmetry of the comeuppance. Yet now that the chance arrived, snitching seemed petty and obvious. Instead they talked about weekend plans, summer holidays, some stuff about the children. That had helped, Neil thought afterwards, the camouflage and double bluffs of their prattle. He spared her the details of the commodity prices, currencies and bonds that preoccupied much of his waking life.

His knuckles brushed against her exposed bicep. With their other hands, they drank.

The trouble with forgiveness was that it was hard to retract. Overtly, at least: not in his heart.

He asked about their house sale (top of the market, Neil reckoned, though it was a fool’s game to try to call it). He moved his knuckles up and down her skin, very slowly, very slightly, a couple of inches at a time, the caress delicate enough for him to sense the microscopic down on her arm, and her tiny, involuntary jolts.