A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Two police officers, one of each sex, walked past his car, their hands clasped meditatively behind their backs, looking quaintly approachable, stab vests notwithstanding. Adam raised his buttocks from the seat to fish his phone from his trouser pocket. He would text:

Neil, Claire told me what happened today. I can’t believe you would do that to me

Or: You scumbag. You total scumbag

Or: Rape, Neil. It’s called rape. Statutory rape, but still rape. You are a rapist

Neither of them had ever applied that word aloud to what happened in California, though it had often resounded in Adam’s head when they were together, as, he expected, it had in Neil’s — the legalistic modifier mitigating the noun to a greater or lesser extent according to his mood. A seventeen-year-old boy with a fifteen-year-old girl: that was more a technical than a moral offence, towards which the law and common sense were inclined to indulgence. But Neil’s twenty-three to her fifteen were at the wrong end of the moral continuum. Neil had been a man. They both had.

So: Rape, Neil.

Or perhaps, he thought, just Goodbye

He navigated to Neil’s number in his address book. Dear Neil .

Not Dear . Just Neil. Or N .

He abandoned his message. Texting would be uncivilised. Adolescent. He would call.

It occurred to Adam that he would be less encumbered in the passenger seat; he opened the door and walked around the bonnet to the other side of the car. A supermarket delivery van had pulled up outside a house along the street, blocking the road while its driver unloaded, hazard lights flashing in the dusk. From the other direction he heard the wail of an ambulance. Two men jogged past his car, the squatter of the two straining to keep up.

Do it . His hand shook, the phone quaking in his palm as he aimed his thumb at the keys. The connection was slow — Neil might be out of range, or out of juice — but then the number was ringing. This wasn’t what he had expected. He had intended something dramatic, yes, and distressing, but less sudden, something he would have more time to think about and rehearse.

He grew stronger as he neared the safety of voicemail. ‘You’ve reached Neil’ — something gratingly American in that formulation, as if modernity required a transatlantic accent — ‘please…’

Adam hung up. Voicemail would be as undignified as texting. Hi Neil, this is Adam, you are a terrible bastard, don’t bother to call back

He caught himself untensing in relief. He dialled again.

Neil answered on the third ring.

‘Hello?’

That tone… Neil would have seen on his screen that it was Adam — everyone was pre-announced these days, like guests at a courtly reception — and yet the disingenuous innocence, that nonchalance.

Adam opened his mouth to speak, but it was dry and nothing came out, as if the nightmares he periodically suffered of muteness at a viva exam, or some uncanny capital trial, were being realised. He could feel his heart thrashing in his chest. He could hear it.

‘Hello? Ants?’

‘Neil, I… I need to talk to you.’

‘Just a second.’ The hand over the mouthpiece, Adam’s last chance to reconsider or reformulate. ‘Yup. Ads?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Charity thing at the Dorchester. You weren’t there and… It was free booze or channel-surfing, you know.’

‘Haven’t you had enough to drink?’

‘What?’

‘You had a few earlier, didn’t you? With Claire.’

‘Look, Adam, let’s talk tomorrow, all right? I’m supposed to be schmoozing. Tony’s here. I’ll give you a call in the morning, okay?’

‘I don’t give a shit about your schmoozing. Or about Tony. Fuck Tony. Christ. I want to know what the fuck you think you were doing with Claire.’

Better: he was entitled to this.

‘Hang on,’ Neil said. Again the muffle, other blurred, male conversations, once or twice a bump of the phone against Neil’s leg — Neil presumably leaving whatever banqueting suite he was stuck in, understanding that this was serious.

‘Okay. Ants. What were you saying?’

Here we go, Adam thought, the same shenanigans as with Claire: the stonewalling and lies that had to be got through, before the only-half-lies and reluctant confession. He felt like a detective, or a torturer. Onto the second prisoner, who can never be sure what his accomplice has admitted. How bored they must get of this routine.

‘It’s Adam. And Claire’s already told me.’

‘What has she told you?’

Adam resisted saying, She’s told me everything . Instead he said, ‘She told me about… the sofa.’

Silence. Odd to be sitting in his car with his phone pressed to his ear, neither speaking nor spoken to. Embarrassing, somehow.

‘Christ, Ad, nothing happened. Ad? Nothing happened.’

‘Adam.’

‘Fine, Adam.’

‘No harm done?’

Another silence. To his own ear Adam’s voice sounded caustic and distorted, the timbre more synthetic than human. He waited for the apology.

Neil said, ‘We were rehearsing. We’re doing a skit for your birthday. Casino Royale . No, Wedding Crashers . We’re doing a scene from Wedding Crashers and we were rehearsing. Artistic licence. Adam?’

Adam smiled. He liked the lie. He had always enjoyed their lies, all the way back to San Diego. We’re hairdressers. We’re masseurs. He’s a set-designer. The two of them versus. This was a classy gambit, he gave Neil that. A lie about coming on to his wife that was also, in their private code, an expression of loyalty.

A fly buzzed against the window. Adam reached over, turned the key in the ignition, and opened the window to let it out.

‘Adam?’

The nicknames and the nostalgic humour: they were like the practised advances an old lover might make when she tries to re-seduce you, ingratiating with their echoes of everything you and the lover once had together, and once were.

‘Don’t, Neil. This isn’t… just don’t.’

‘Look, it was just a silly moment, really. Three glasses of wine in a hurry. I’m sorry, okay?’

Damn right you’re sorry.

Neil should have opened with that, Adam thought. He said, ‘No, it isn’t okay. I mean, what have I… I’ve always been… there for you, haven’t I? Haven’t I? I’ve always… encouraged you. Haven’t I? I’ve never… I’ve never… I can’t understand how you could do this to me,’ he lied.

‘You’ve never what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What, Adam? What have you never? Looked down on me because I hadn’t heard of Dante, is that it? Judged me for my horrid money-grubbing job? Yeah,’ Neil said, ‘you’ve always been very charitable, milord, I’m ever so grateful.’

‘Is that it, then? Is that why?’

‘No,’ Neil said. ‘No. Fuck’s sake.’

‘What then?’

‘Look… never mind.’

One of them had to say it: ‘California?’

Adam heard Neil’s exhalation, long and sad.

‘You said that was nothing.’

‘It isn’t like that — it doesn’t go in a straight line. You know why it happened, I’m sure you do. I don’t even mean what her dad told you about her that night. It wasn’t only that. Even apart from that it happened because of us. And then you couldn’t drop it, could you? I mean, you had to keep bringing it up. Finding her again, going on about contacting her, all that bollocks about what he said to you in the morning. What did you want me to do, kill myself? Turn myself in?’

Rape , thought Adam. He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘And then when you told me — to be honest, I wouldn’t say you were sorry, not as sorry as you should have been.’