A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Neil, I was insanely sorry — I was paralytic with it.’

‘I mean, sorry for me. You were sorry for her and for yourself. Very sorry, sure. And for Ruby. Jesus. Did you ever think, how was I supposed to feel, all that guilt pouring out of you, when all the time I was the one who…’

‘You already knew she was… You already knew that. You said it was nothing.’

‘Yeah, well, I changed my mind. It isn’t nothing, okay? You win. I regret it, Adam, okay? If I could undo it, I would. If there was anything I could do, I would.’

‘But whenever I —’

‘I said, I’m sorry about it. I’m fucking sorry, I’m ashamed. Understand?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me you felt like this?’

‘I just… I couldn’t, Adam. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘What do you… I was scared, Neil. All right? I was scared.’

They were quiet again. A man in sunglasses, jacket slung over his shoulder, walked past Adam’s car, talking on his phone. Adam had composed messages to the girl, revising and perfecting them, but he hadn’t sent one, at least, not yet.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ he continued. ‘That’s why you’ve done this? All of a sudden you regret what happened fifteen years ago, and to make amends you try it on with Claire?’

‘I didn’t… Look, you asked me and I’m trying to explain, that’s all. It was mostly the booze, we got carried away.’

Rape , Adam thought. He said, ‘Maybe we should have said goodbye at the airport. I’ve often wondered about that. That could have been the end of it.’

‘Yeah,’ Neil countered, ‘well, I sometimes think, if that old man hadn’t been at home, the guy with the car… Or if you hadn’t asked me that night on the beach… We could have left it in San Diego, couldn’t we? Nice little one-night stand. We would never have met her.’

Strangers were laughing in the background at Neil’s end. The renunciations hung on the line between them.

‘Look,’ Neil finally went on, ‘can we get together tomorrow to talk about this properly? After work?’

‘Sorry to have distracted you.’

‘No, I just mean it would be better to talk in person.’

‘No,’ Adam said. ‘Not tomorrow.’ And then he said, ‘I don’t think I ever want to see you again.’

Adam looked out through the windscreen. There ought to be witnesses or an audience for this. But there was only, on the opposite pavement, a woman in a burqa pushing a buggy. She’s trying to get it to sleep, Adam thought reflexively.

‘Don’t be silly. Don’t say that. Ad?’

Even to Adam the threat seemed safely theatrical, free, an ultimatum he would never be called upon to enact. More a rhetorical flourish than an irrevocable event. Somebody will say something, he thought. Somebody will do something to stop this.

‘Goodbye, Neil,’ his voice said.

‘What? Ad —’

He heard Neil say something else as he lowered the phone from his ear, but the words were too quiet to decipher. He pressed the button and looked at the screen. The call’s duration was 6:23 . He held the phone in both hands, expecting it to ring again. But it didn’t.

He reopened his electronic address book and scrolled down to Neil. Are you sure you want to delete this number?

Was he sure? To purge Neil like this might be tantamount to killing him, in Adam’s life anyway. To kill Neil would be a kind of self-mutilation or partial suicide. So much of his last decade and a half were stored in Neil, shameful times and halcyon. Without his friend as his repository and witness, part of Adam’s past — part of him — would perish, too.

He pressed Yes I want to delete Neil . He felt a queer kind of lightness or liberation. I will never see Neil again, he thought. Neil is dying, even though he is still alive. He will be dead and alive at the same time.

Adam stepped out of the car, closed the door gently and locked it with his key.

Neil took another glass of wine from a waistcoated attendant and drank half of it in one unprofessional gulp. He didn’t believe this. Not that Claire had told Adam, nor that Adam was livid: he believed all that. They had been busted by his drunk-texting, but she might anyway have felt guilty enough to confess. Splashing his face in the bathroom in his cavernous flat, he had thought, You idiot, Neil. You cunt. You could have left — twice — easily. How could you even have thought about her that way, let alone… He came out again to this deathly reception, networking and tax relief dressed up as benevolence, to avoid confronting his sinful self any further.

He didn’t believe Adam’s goodbye. They had a tacit but firm agreement, Neil thought, to be always in each other’s lives; it was much too late for either of them to rescind it.

With his free hand Neil retrieved the BlackBerry from his inside pocket to phone back. He dialled, but aborted the call almost instantly — before it rang, and, he hoped, before his number had flashed up on Adam’s screen. Better not to. Not today. One of them might say something worse. It was bad enough that he had counterattacked when he should have stuck to plain apology ( Damn right you’re sorry ). And that absurd Hail Mary joke about Wedding Crashers . Better to email.

He rolled and clicked with his thumb until the email template appeared (scientists of the future, Neil had thought, biologists or whatever, would wonder at the dramatic leap in thumb musculature made by Western man in the early twenty-first century). Dear Adam … Dear Ads … Adam … Mate … Ants … Adam, I’m sorry … Adam, I’m so sorry …

‘Who are you hiding from?’ Tony McGough called to him. ‘There’s gold in them thar hills.’

Tony put a heavy arm around Neil’s shoulders and rotated him to face the convocation of suits, shape-shifting yet cohesive like penguins huddling against the cold, individuals sometimes peeling off and scuttling along the group’s perimeter before burrowing back into the mass.

‘One of the Kumars is here,’ Tony said. ‘And a Levene, I think, or a capo from their office, anyway. Go get ’em, kimosabe.’

‘Just a second,’ Neil said, extending a finger upwards from the hand that held the BlackBerry. ‘Just give me a second.’

Tony was a workaholic. He and his two partners had left jobs in insurance and private equity to start their firm (none of them was called Rutland, they just thought the name sounded trustworthy). They had gathered their clients — including Farid, which was how Neil came to know them — in a remorseless, marriage-destroying campaign of insinuation and sycophancy at events like this one.

Still, as City bosses went, Tony was relatively humane. You could see it in his giveaway eyes, tender and melancholy, out of place somehow in his flabby, particoloured face, itself perched on a rectangular bouncer’s body.

‘Okay,’ Tony said, removing his arm. ‘See you in a minute, hotshot.’

‘Of course.’

Funny thing: growing up, Neil had always thought that whatever he managed to do or achieve, he would have to do and achieve on his own, not counting on favours or connections and never enjoying any. Yet he had been helped, by Bimal and Farid and now by Tony, each propelling him upwards through London postcodes and income-tax brackets, before passing him on to his next benefactor. (Neil hadn’t expected a goodbye, but on his penultimate day in Hanover Square he turned round at his desk and Farid was standing there; he raised an arm and caressed Neil’s cheek with his knuckles, up and down once, as if tracing the line of a scar.)

Neil crouched to put his glass on the carpet and turned towards the wall to type. Adam, I’m sorry for what happened… I’m truly sorry for what nearly happened… It was my fault, not Claire’s… I didn’t mean what I said.