A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

He could leave it all to Sam. He could leave something to Adam, too, though Adam might be offended. He would write an apology into his will.

Instead of killing himself he became a partner. He took Sam to Paris for a weekend on the Eurostar. They went to a circus, a proper, old-fashioned circus that featured abused tigers and sequined show girls for the dads. Later in the summer Neil took Sam to Lake Garda, putting them up for a few days at a hotel recommended by Tony. They shared a room, Sam hunting for porn on the satellite channels and Neil scouring the grounds for a BlackBerry signal with roughly equal alacrity. Sam wanted to go to a nightclub, and he looked old enough to pass, but Neil put his foot down. He had some blotchy bruises on his forearms; Neil tried to examine them but Sam squirmed away. He kept his T-shirt on when he swam.

Neil met Roxanna at a recession-proof restaurant in Soho (pan-Oriental menu, sub-industrial decor, the lighting regimen tenebrous in some places and glaring in others, like a secret-police interrogation chamber with multiple stations). Tony and one of the other partners were there, several analysts and a few secretaries, plus assorted other-halves and hangers-on. They sat at an awkward long table, everyone arriving in the wrong order and wishing they were next to someone else, or wishing that they weren’t there at all, the room anyway too loud to hear what the person opposite was saying, as in most London restaurants, the diners barking at each other in an escalating aural brawl.

She was sitting between Neil and his colleague Dominic, a thirty-ish, obviously handsome stock analyst, not as posh as he would like to be, perhaps, but working on it. At first Neil assumed the two of them were attached, but during the starters she shot him an unmistakable get-me-out-of-here look. She was Iranian (not, apparently, a bar to boozing). She organised conferences, she was a friend of one of the secretaries, Tiffany, he thought she said, who had brought her in lieu of a date. She had ebony hair, matching eyes and endearingly irregular teeth. Neil tried not to be distracted by the acquaintances in his peripheral vision.

By the time the Look! No notepad! waitress brought the ironic fortune cookies, Neil was tired and anyway doubtful of his chances. Roxanna’s cookie advised her that, To give, you must first receive .

Neil cracked his cookie, looked down at the slip of paper and up at Roxanna. ‘It says here,’ he said, boredom and loneliness welling up as audacity, ‘that tonight I’m going to have sex with a stranger.’

Her eyes widened, she fixed them on the napkin across her knees. For a moment Neil thought she was going to leave, or to slap him.

She said, ‘Come with me for a cigarette?’

She didn’t smoke. On the way to the exit she steered him into one of the trendily unisex washrooms, pinning him between the rectangular marble sink and the door as it closed behind them. Neil felt at once decadent, worldly, like a desperado in a war zone, and embarrassingly teenaged. He had grown accustomed to the idea that some women might find him attractive: his weight was stable, ditto his hairline, as if protracted negotiations between him and it had established an agreed frontier. Money’s gloss invisibly burnished his pale skin. But this woman, here, hitching up her skirt in a toilet stall?

The circumstances didn’t inhibit her as to volume. She pushed a knuckle into his anus as he thrusted.

Dominic smirked at Neil when they returned to the table. Tony pretended he hadn’t seen them. It was only the second time in his life that he had been so reckless. There was suicidal indifference in the recklessness, and also something like the opposite, a roulette spin for a richer life.

Understanding that this beginning could drive them apart they never mentioned it. She emailed; they went out for dinner without colleagues or sex, at the restaurant or afterwards, as if Roxanna were an ancient goddess who might magically have her virginity restored. Her parents had fled Tehran for England during the revolution, she told him. They moved to America while she was at university, separating not long afterwards, but she had stayed in London. She was thirty-five: one careful owner, like him, Neil concluded from oblique references to her romantic past.

He went to Zurich, on to Singapore, and didn’t see her for two weeks. The third time, at a restaurant in Notting Hill, she announced that she had something to tell him. That’s it, Neil thought.

‘Neil, I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant, Neil.’ Once-in-a-lifetime news, but no other way than just to say it.

You used something, right?

I’ll take care of it.

He managed not to ask either Is it mine? or Are you going to keep it? , a double feat of self-restraint for which he was afterwards grateful. Her grin suggested that the second question would in any case have been redundant. His stomach sank, but he sensed another part of him levitating, taking off.

You could have a kid out there, you know.

They agreed that they would wait before she moved in but they didn’t. After all he was alone in that overwhelming apartment, with Sam for the odd weekend. She could always move out again, they told each other. For New Year’s Eve they went to Bilbao, dancing to a street band in the alleys of the old town. The first time the doll-sized knee or elbow poked at him through her belly, Neil felt as if he could fly; her new anatomy became so familiar to him, swelled so incrementally, that it came to seem this bloated form was the end-point, her finished state, rather than a beginning. He turned forty shortly before the baby was due, feeling that a lot of his life was behind him, and that little of that life was his.

They called her Leila. Neil was fascinated by her skin tone, which was neither Roxanna’s nor his but a golden hybrid of her own. He convinced himself that he could glimpse his mother in her brow and around her eyes. He tried to imagine his mother as a grandparent, but he knew the speculation was a lie, that he couldn’t ever know how she would have been. They enlisted a night nurse, a Ukrainian named Olesya, whom Tony had recommended. Olesya was pretty, defeatedly overweight, discreetly religious (Orthodox crucifix, mumbled imprecations, homeland pain written into the creases on her forehead and at the corners of her mouth).

Roxanna was in bed. Leila was asleep on his chest, her four limbs bent under her like a frog’s. Olesya lifted the weightless body off him and ushered Neil out of the flat, shooing him away with a wise smile and a broken-English instruction to ‘Go your friends.’

To begin with he didn’t quite admit where he was heading. He pretended to himself that he was only driving. It was a cold grey night with a starless London sky. He drove across town, to the back of the pub in Southwark where he had first met Claire, after that to the end of Westminster Bridge that abutted the bowling arcade and the still-spinning wheel. He drove along the Strand, looking for the doorway they had shared with those Australian girls, he couldn’t remember their names, his and Adam’s alternate secret, which hadn’t been enough. On his homeward loop he trawled the road at the back of Paddington Station to find the café in which he and Adam had sat, sussing out where they stood, whether the other was real, at their first meeting in England. Adam had worn his ridiculous cap.

The locations didn’t tally with Neil’s memories. Thinking about the nineties, the images came back to him washed-out and grimy: brown food and miserabilist films, boxy cars and chewing gum on the pavement, the streets in the centre of town streamed in filth, the rubbish bins removed lest terrorists stash bombs in them. In Neil’s mind the contrast between that time and neon now replayed Dorothy’s transition from dowdy Kansas to Technicolor Munchkinland. Scanning the unfamiliar shopfronts, Neil reckoned that the café had become an oyster bar. The airline office was now a high-concept fast-fooderie, he thought.