A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘You can take it home if you want,’ Neil said. ‘Might still work. Take it, Sammy.’

‘Nah,’ Sam said, squinting at the alien bulk like an archaeologist at a sarcophagus. ‘No room. Stacy wouldn’t have it, would she? Look at it. Shame, though. All these old things. It’s like your own museum. Yours and Dad’s.’

‘Take something else, then,’ Neil told him. ‘Take anything you want. House clearers are coming next week. Never know, might be worth something.’

Neil’s turn to reckon his family’s life in things had come. A couple of archaic wooden tennis rackets, pressed between rectangular frames; an antediluvian computer, unrecognisable as a computer to Sam, and now, almost, to Neil, over which he and Dan had fought, viciously, no quarter asked or given, for seventy-two hours after it arrived one Thatcher-era Christmas, quickly forsaking its binary games for muddier diversions; a pair of binoculars in a scratched leather case; a deflated yellow dinghy, unused since it was launched on a frigid beach in Suffolk in the mid-eighties. In one corner were a pair of promising-looking trunks, which upon inspection contained only several decades’ worth of accounts for Collins & Sons… Sam didn’t have much that was truly his, but there was nothing among this junk that he could want. For reasons he couldn’t identify, Neil needed him to have something.

He watched Sam stoop to rifle a suitcase. The boy was only a couple of inches shorter than him, with an adolescent incongruity in his proportions (bulbous head, outsized feet) that suggested he hadn’t yet topped out; a trio of creases at the hems of his trousers charted their and Sam’s extensions like the rings of a tree trunk. When you looked at him from behind, or in silhouette, minus the pointillist skin and affected glower, he seemed much older.

In the end he took a yo-yo, though only, Neil knew, because he wanted to be kind. Sam creaked down the metal steps. Earlier, when Neil turned the light on, it had blinked into action as if from hibernation. This time — the last time — when he followed and flicked the switch, the bulb went off immediately.

The end. He closed the hatch.

In the bedroom, in the wardrobe, Neil found his father’s clothes, and on the adjacent shelves his mother’s clothes, more or less untouched, so far as he could see. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure Sam wasn’t there, pressed his nose into the fabric and inhaled.

Moth balls.

Do you cry when you think about it?

In the kitchen, beneath the sink, he found six dusty bottles of water, relics of an emergency supply that Brian had laid in, muttering about trade unionists, when a waterworks strike seemed imminent at the fag-end of the seventies. He put a paperweight, two vases and a few photos into a plastic crate. He could hear Sam moving around in Dan’s room, opening and closing the drawers, ransacking his father’s childhood. Dan had already pillaged the cutlery, plus a watercolour of a French harbour that Brian once hinted might be valuable, though Neil doubted it. In his father’s paperwork he discovered that the house had been remortgaged, five years before, around the time of Brian’s first stroke, in what the cheque stubs suggested was an eleventh-hour bid to keep Dan out of the gutter. Once he might have been aggrieved at the favouritism, but now he smiled at the secret, gruff kindness. Your brother knew from the beginning.

The doorbell rang.

‘Mr Hinds told me,’ Bimal’s father began. Neil tried to place Mr Hinds and failed. ‘I saw your car, you see. You don’t mind… I… He was a gentleman. That’s all, that’s what I… That’s all.’

Bimal’s father was wearing a suit, possibly the same, trademark garment he wore during their childhood. The skin above the bridge of his glasses was flaking, Neil noticed, white flecks on brown. He gawped around Neil as if he might be invited in, or be able to glimpse the corpse. Irritation rose up Neil’s throat — busybody, ghoul, vulture — but he suppressed it before it reached his lips. Behind his visitor, above the unchanged sequence of houses on the opposite side of the road, the sky was too blue, inconsiderately perfect.

‘Thanks,’ Neil said. ‘Appreciate it. Really.’

He asked after Bimal.

‘Yes, very well, very well, thank you,’ his father said. ‘California agrees with him, as you know. And the children, they are getting their American accents.’

Neil hadn’t known that Bimal had moved to America. He nodded in assent but said nothing.

‘He was very proud of you,’ Bimal’s father said at last. ‘Very proud. Always showing me the stock prices in the paper, you see. All your comings and goings. Very proud indeed. But you know that.’

He held out a hand for Neil to shake, somehow bony and soft at once, like the carcass of a battery chicken, and after that it seemed too late to ask for details.

‘A real gentleman,’ he repeated. He turned and walked away, erect but slow, with a mechanical, arthritic gait. He seemed smaller than Neil remembered him.

Neil stood at the open front door. ‘Come on,’ he called up to Sam. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get on with it.’

Neil put the rattly crate into the boot of his car, along with the two urns. Sam sat in the front, playing with the windows and reclining his seat at its expensively glacial pace.

‘Are you, like, ’kay?’ Sam asked.

‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘Course.’

He glanced over at Sam and saw that he was wiping his nose with his finger. At the end of every horizontal slash his hand circled up to wipe his eyes, too, finger for one eye, thumb around the other.

‘You?’

‘Course,’ Sam said.

Neil switched on the radio. Told y’all I was gonna bump like this. Sam turned it off.

He drove up through Stanmore, past the location of the golf course on which he and Dan had played pitch-and-putt as boys, Neil surreptitiously kicking his ball a few metres towards the hole whenever Dan, mighty Dan, turned his back. The land where the course had been was now a live-the-dream housing complex that had evidently missed its time. There was an advert on the fence, facing the dual carriageway. One corner of the plastic sheet had become unstuck and blown across the lettering: Still Six Units Remai

You were supposed to feel radically alone when the second one went, Neil knew. Finally orphaned; ultimately adult. That was what everyone said. No one left to forgive your mistakes, no generational buffer between you and your own death. No longer loved in that particular, enfolding way.

That wasn’t how Neil felt, as he and Sam drove over the edge of London, and he saw no point in pretending. He was no lonelier than he had been two weeks before; if anything he felt younger, lighter, childishly unburdened. You were supposed to feel a futile, belated regret for everything you hadn’t asked, everything you had been too timid or inhibited to bring up. That was another thing people said. There were indeed facts and episodes Neil found he would like to clarify, but it was gossip, really, that he coveted, not heirloom wisdom or five-to-midnight honesty. Not Do you love me? Or Are you scared? But How did you lose your virginity? Did you ever have an affair? Have you ever committed a crime? Smashed bottles and Don’t shit on your own doorstep and the phantom girlfriend in Maida Vale whom Brian had mentioned to Adam that afternoon in the nineties. Too late now.

Neil looked across at Sam. He was craning his head out of the window to catch the wind in his hair, as road-trippers did on television. They had the rest of the day together. Neil smiled.

He pulled off the dual carriageway into a narrow country lane. After a few minutes he parked beside a pond at the beginning of a village. Neil remembered the four of them coming to this place for picnics, although it was possible that they had only come once, one luminous recollection that his memory had amplified or wished into a habit. He retrieved the urns from the boot and strode towards a field where (he was almost sure) his mother had called On your marks, get set for fraternal races that Neil invariably lost.