A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

As he was paying through the window of the taxi, his pocket beeped. He gave the driver a twenty, told him to keep the change, and read her message: Forget what?xx

Not just undocumented immigrants working illegally. That would hardly be news to anyone in London who had renovated a home in the last few years or cash-in-handed a cleaning lady. Nor merely illegal immigrants working as security guards. Illegal immigrants working as security guards in the Home Office. And Parliament. And, very likely, Number 10 and MI6. It would be funny if… okay, it was funny, but you could only laugh in the right company, Adam was streetwise enough to know that. One of the Downing Street enforcers had been in, demanding to know what could be done, when and how much it would cost (the prospect of front-page ignominy always conjured money from the ether). Everyone knew that two or three heads would have to be stuck on pikes in Whitehall. There were dark mutterings about a stash of discarded paperwork that had been discovered in a Croydon housekeeping cupboard.

Croydon: the eternal scapegoat, the illegal immigrants of the Home Office. Thank God for Croydon.

His would almost certainly not be among the impaled heads, Adam reflected as he walked home from the Tube. He was too lowly an official to be a useful sacrifice. All the same, it seemed providential that Neil had put him in touch with that consultancy. If that oleaginous interviewer wanted him, perhaps he should find a way to accept his friend’s charity. He and Neil sometimes did a sort of skit when they saw each other, a pastiche of their former selves — Adam telling most of the jokes, Neil residually gauche, or acting it, for history’s sake, or for Adam’s. This was one of the reasons Adam needed him: Neil carried a trace memory or reflection of Adam at the height of his possibilities, his maximal plumage, fresh from university, thoughtless of failure, absolutely ignorant of what awaited him. An image of him at his happiest and his freest, as well as at his most… regrettable. Underneath, Adam knew, the power had already swung away from him, following the money, rather as, in old age, it ebbs to the spouse who stays healthier for longer, a basic animal hierarchy.

That was already their dispensation, whether or not he took this nepotistic job. He already owed Neil. In any case, Adam wasn’t changing the world at the department. He wasn’t changing anything. He wasn’t even a 7.

Adam turned into his street and mounted the steps to the maisonette. He heard the familiar front-door serenade of play and conflict, sibling love and rivalry too entwined to be distinguished. He found Ruby perched on the kitchen table in her nightie; Harry was performing little standing leaps in his pyjamas, his upstretched hand reaching for the phone she was dangling above him.

‘Careful,’ Adam said; then, shouting, ‘Claire!’ It was much too late for this.

‘Coming,’ she called down.

‘Get down from there! Clezz!’

‘No,’ Ruby said, squatting defensively in the corner. ‘Naughty Daddy!’ She flipped and clicked between the gadget’s applications, with a native dexterity that made Adam feel both proud and old.

‘Give it to me.’

‘Mine,’ Ruby said. She drew the prize into her torso.

‘Give it to Daddy,’ Harry said, confiscation representing, to him, a respectable draw.

‘It’s bedtime, lollipop,’ Adam said. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

‘I know how to spell shit ,’ Harry said.

‘Me too,’ Ruby said.

‘Give it to me,’ Adam repeated. He yanked the phone from his daughter’s grasp with more force than she was expecting. After the shock, she began to wail.

‘ Suh ,’ Harry said, counting off the phonetic letters with his fingers.

Adam glanced at the miniature screen. The roulette of Ruby’s clicks had landed on Claire’s inbox. A message from Adam himself; one from Claire’s mother; Adam again; the mother of one of Harry’s friends; Neil; Adam.

‘ Huh ,’ Harry said, extending another elfin finger.

Adam placed the phone on the kitchen counter. Ruby was crying. He hated upsetting her, even when her behaviour and his self-respect obliged him to. He hated anyone upsetting her, but it was worse when he was responsible.

‘I want a new daddy,’ she said. ‘I do.’ She wriggled out of his embrace.

‘Ruby-loo,’ he said. ‘Come back here.’

Why Neil? He and Adam had been in touch directly to cancel. Neil and Claire never texted each other, so far as Adam knew. He picked up the phone again and opened the message with a hasty, unthinking depression of his forefinger.

No harm done. Let’s forget it

‘ ii ,’ Harry said.

‘I’ll ask Father Christmas for him,’ Ruby said.

Forget it… In theory, Adam could choose to attend to his daughter, rebuke his son, his wife would appear, the vertiginous moment would pass. In practice, only one course of action was available. He fumbled his way to Claire’s outbox. Her reply was the last message she had sent.

Forget what?xx

Forget what? And those xx, so harmless when she sprayed them over saccharine messages to her friends, so incriminating in this one.

‘ Tuh ,’ Harry said. He grinned.

‘Dadda?’ Ruby said. She had stopped crying.

Adam helped her down from the table. The children bickered away and up the stairs.

His first sensation was a light-headed, instant nostalgia for the prelapsarian era that had just ended, the era of automatic trust that Adam felt he was only now appreciating, as a nobleman might recognise his privileges only after they are expropriated. A moment later he was dizzy with grubby surmises, hypothetical scenarios, a frantic scan of his memory for clues or tells. He gently laid the phone down again and looked at the floor. He ground his jaw.

His mother had known about his father’s affairs, or so she had told Harriet. She knew, and she hadn’t minded, at least not enough to divorce him. She had left him for a different reason. She was bored, she told Harriet. Just bored.

This was his biggest failing and worst mistake, Adam reflected in the kitchen: the wrongful imputation of harmlessness. Will from television, pole-climbers in the Home Office. His father. Neil. He was hopeless at spotting where the harm was coming from.

Neil?

People could live with these things, if they chose to.

Claire’s cheeks were flushed when she came in. He thought he saw her glance at the phone. She told him about the viewings and asked about the office, and the minister, but he only grunted at her until the children were comprehensively in bed.

He turned on the satellite news. More about the missing girl and her broken parents; in Parliament, the new prime minister, the latest face of the age of war, lamented that week’s glorious dead. Nothing, yet, about the illegal immigrants. They would sniff it out tomorrow, someone would leak it to damage someone else.

She sat next to him on the sofa. He could smell the booze on her, and something else, a lozenge or toothpaste that she had used to disguise it.

‘How long did he stay?’ Adam asked her. His voice came out blank and deadpan. ‘Neil.’

‘Not long. Till you said you weren’t going to make it.’

He turned off the television. She carried on staring at the charcoal rectangle as if the picture were still there.

‘Was he still here when the kids got back?’

‘I can’t… Yes, maybe he was.’ She would have lied if she were sure she could get away with it, Adam thought.

‘What happened?’

‘What?’

‘With Neil.’

‘Nothing,’ she said. She put a hand on his arm. He saw her swallowing anxiously. This was it, Adam thought. This might be it for them.