A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘So what is there to forget?’

‘What?’

‘What did Neil want you to forget?’

She pulled away and leaned into the opposite arm rest. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘What have you already forgotten? Claire.’

Her eyes widened. The urgent ratiocination was legible in the microspasms of her cheek muscles and the darts of her pupils. She braced a foot against the floor, as if she were preparing to flee. Didn’t I delete it? , he thought he saw her think . I meant to delete it. Fuck! Next, he interpreted, she was considering a counterattack: What are you doing, looking at my phone? What the fuck do you think you’re doing? He almost felt sorry for her, so little time to come up with something, and she was bound to be exhausted, she always was. In the end he guessed she was contemplating an outright lie. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Adam, you always do. He meant no harm to his car, he reversed into the lamppost . Or, No harm done to his suit, after Harry jumped on him with muddy feet.

She must have rejected that option. Too undignified.

‘Nothing happened, Adam,’ she finally said. Her hand crept along the apron of the sofa. ‘We had a drink, a couple of drinks. You were late.’ She paused but he didn’t interject. ‘This funny old lady came to look at the flat. She was going on about her cats, and the loo, and…’

‘What’s she got to do with it?’

‘She thought Neil and me were married. It’s too hard to explain, Ad. We were trying not to laugh, and it felt like we were… a team. You know how that is, don’t you? I don’t think it would have happened without the old lady.’

‘What wouldn’t have happened?’

‘Nothing. We were laughing, it was a bit… I don’t know, flirty. That’s all. You were late.’

‘Don’t.’

‘We were sitting here, waiting for you, and… honestly, Adam, it was nothing.’

Everything was always nothing, Adam thought. He looked down at the patch of fabric between his legs. This is where they had been.

‘What nearly happened, then? Claire. What did you want to happen?’

‘Nothing, I’ve told you.’ He could see her deciding how honest to be. ‘He put his arm around my shoulder. We… sort of snuggled. That’s all.’

‘You don’t even like Neil.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

‘No harm done,’ he said.

‘That’s right. Adam?’

He stood, left the room, climbed the stairs to their bedroom and closed the door. The linen appeared to be unruffled. He sat on the edge of the mattress, elbows on knees, his face in his palms.

Adam wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. The situation wasn’t like any other he had experienced. It was an escalatingly adult moment, akin to the first time someone in the hospital had asked, ‘Who’s the father?’, and he had looked around, like a screwball comedian, before understanding it was him. Or the first time he had slapped four passports down at airport immigration and felt a decade older in an instant. Yes, you, this is happening to you. It wasn’t even very like itself, at least not the straightforward version of the scenario that was familiar from TV.

He believed his wife that nothing had happened, at least in the technical, secretional sense. A cuddle. A cuddle plus, maybe. He had always trusted her in that way, squeamish as he had occasionally felt about her sexual history. Truth be told, he had rarely thought about her in that way, not since the children. In any case, how much anger did he deserve? He hadn’t sat on their own sofa with Heidi, back in those cosy days before her promotion when she had been his proxy office spouse. But several times he had looked tipsily into her eyes in a way that he intended to seem meaningful. In St James’s Park one summer he brushed a fluff of pollen from her hair, and she stiffened and looked up at him as if he might kiss her. Once they held hands in the back of a taxi, gazing away from each other and out of their opposite windows in bittersweet silence.

He had never told Claire about any of that. He hadn’t told her about those women on the Strand (another nothing, a genuine nothing). He hadn’t felt any inclination or obligation to tell Claire. These things happened in a marriage, didn’t they? They were part of a marriage. Fidelity, Adam considered, was like the speed restriction on motorways. The official limit had a built-in margin that you were tacitly permitted to exploit, so long as you went no further. He thought of how, the last time they flew out of Heathrow, he had doubletaked one of the unobtainable Asian sales girls in Duty Free, how Claire had seen him and let it go.

She said they hadn’t, and he believed her. But even if Claire hadn’t broken the rules, Neil had. Marriage had a margin, but friendship had tighter parameters.

This was a punishment, Adam sensed. For what he knew about Neil — for what he had on Neil — and for what they had done together. What Adam had done. It was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You started it. That was what Neil had said on the morning after, long before he knew the whole story.

I hope you find out how this feels.

Adam pounced down the stairs and went back into the living room for his car keys.

‘What are you doing?’

He could hear the fear in her voice.

‘Adam?’

He found the keys. It was a warm dry night, not yet dark. He left his jacket behind.

‘Adam, where are you going?’

He slammed the door behind him.

Adam had turned the key in the ignition before he realised that he didn’t know Neil’s address. His seatbelt was pulled halfway across his torso, his father’s standard driving posture for several years after belts became mandatory (his mind went back to his father, even now, with an irksome canine loyalty). He had a pain in his back (sedentary work, carrying the kids, the same overconfidence regarding his chassis as he had always harboured about his weight). The sensation ran across his shoulder to his neck, then to the middle of his spine, but hurt differently in different places: sharp and neural in his neck, duller and achier lower down, as if the pain had matured or learned something along the way.

‘Fuck,’ Adam said, letting the seatbelt snap back.

He knew approximately where the building was. Neil lived in a red-brick mansion block in Bayswater, near a hotel, Adam recalled, with an elegant stairwell and an old-fashioned, sliding-grille lift. His was an internally plush but externally nondescript building, of a type Adam associated with foreign kleptocrats on the lam and their overindulged offspring or mistresses. Neil had only just moved in when Adam had visited; there was almost nothing in the flat besides an inherited bamboo bar and accompanying leather stools, screwed to the floor in the living room, fixtures that incited ribald speculation about the key parties the previous occupants might have hosted. Adam didn’t like the place much (even discounting for his instant, envious calculation of how much his friend must have paid for it, he had been fairly certain that he didn’t like it). High-ceilinged rooms, but boxy and over-regular, set off a faintly ominous corridor: the apartment felt more like a medical consulting suite than a residence, the kind of architecture that seemed designed to prevent anyone experiencing the place as home. But it was Neil’s, and Jess had left him, and Adam had discharged friendship’s duty of compassionate dishonesty, the kind lies you mixed with the dependable truths, and told him it was lovely.

He hadn’t been there since. Neil had never asked him again, let alone invited Claire and the kids, a failure that Adam inwardly resented but never mentioned. He might be able to find the building, just. But third floor? Fourth? Sitting in the car, he had a bathetic vision of himself patrolling the pavement, waiting to accost Neil as he arrived or left, or hurrying through the doors when another visitor was buzzed in — like the fare-dodgers who sometimes squeezed through the ticket barriers with you on the Tube — then pacing the corridors and madly banging on strangers’ doors. He could hardly ask Neil for the address: Dear Neil, you are a cunt, please could I have your address so I can come round and throttle you?