A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

So inconsiderate, these changes. How were you ever supposed to find your way back, recover your old you, when the city was so different, as different, almost, as you were? You needed your own private London, preserved in formaldehyde, an archipelago museum of your imperishable moments. Instead your places were bulldozed and replaced with someone else’s memories.

I’m going crazy, Neil thought, as he sat in his car, half mounted on the pavement, being hooted by taxi drivers, stalking a bar that had once been a café in which, a long time before, he had talked with a man who used to be his friend. A friend he hadn’t seen for three years.

‘I’m going crazy,’ he said out loud. ‘Sorry,’ he said to no one, and to Adam, and to Rose, and drove himself back to Bayswater.

***

There was the usual rigmarole of pretending he might go back to sleep without relieving himself. Perhaps if he lay on his other side, or curled up, like this… Finally Adam levered himself out of bed, as quietly as he could, his senses muted as if he were underwater, eyes outraged at being called upon to open, and, when they did, reporting an unfamiliar room, doors and windows bafflingly transposed, so that for a moment he wondered whether he was dreaming. The croaking of frogs outside the window tipped him off. His brain cranked up, and he padded to the cork-floored bathroom between their room and the children’s. The door snapped shut, too loudly. Adam swore, counterproductively, but no one seemed to wake.

He had a challenging nocturnal erection. Sighing, he throttled his penis with his right hand, gripped the towel rail with his left, preparing to double over, as if he were executing a dive with pike — a fraught manoeuvre, but the surest way, when he was engorged, to avoid spraying urine across the seat and onto the floor, which would result in either an icky clean-up now or, if he neglected that courtesy, a bollocking from Claire in the morning. He bent his dick through another ten degrees, the organ bucking and resisting, and swore again.

The latch clicked as the bathroom door reopened. Adam straightened up and turned round, still clutching the angry penis, the look on his face on the cusp between ecstasy and excruciation.

‘Oh,’ Claire said. ‘Oh, Adam.’

He followed her gaze to his genitals. So far it hadn’t caused him much trouble, this penis. Less than he might have expected. Less grief than Neil’s had caused them.

‘It isn’t what you think,’ Adam said, releasing his grip. ‘Clezzy, really. It’s… I’m just trying to piss.’

Claire hesitated for a moment before acquiescing with a sleepy smile. She squeezed past him to the toilet, naked, yawning as she peed, wiping herself robotically. The trust that they had almost lost had come back to them.

‘Well,’ she said, standing up. ‘We’re awake now.’

She took hold of the penis with one hand, made a shush sign with the other, and led him silently back to bed.

Three years before, as open-mindedly as he could, Adam had considered the possibility that he found the thought of Claire and Neil arousing. Briefly he wondered whether he might be on the high road to a life of orgies in south London warehouses (like the ones that, so one of the secretaries told him on his second day in the office, Hardy liked to attend), where he would be locked in a cage to watch while strangers fucked his wife. That wasn’t it, he soon decided; he was as vanilla in his lusts as in his other tastes. Her brush with Neil had been a jolt rather than a turn-on, more medical than erotic, mild electrotherapy administered to a struggling heart. Or perhaps it was simply a coincidence when, a few weeks later — weeks of him ruminating on car journeys, his jaw grinding ominously, Claire glancing at him in silence as Harry and Ruby garrotted each other in the back — their sex life came back to them, too, like a rediscovered hobby. That summer they were anyway emerging from the tunnel of the children’s infancy: the phase of repurposed bodies and burgled privacy, of holidays that were marathons of arse-wiping and miscalculated discipline, their sexual punctuation being, if Adam were lucky, one perfunctory, grisly hand-job. The mutual neglect that began as a necessity and developed into a stand-off. They blinkingly began to see each other again.

Claire had crow’s feet around her eyes and her flesh was — not flabbier, but somehow more yielding than it once had been. Adam’s fingers sunk into her rather than stopping at her surface. She was still a beautiful woman, more beautiful, to him, because of what he had seen her body do. That same summer, after a decade of ordering grown-up drinks, or drinking nothing, she reverted to the alcosyrups she had preferred when they met, ginger wine and pina coladas and fuck-it Malibu and pineapples. The time poverty of parenthood had made her more decisive and demanding — in restaurants, in negotiations with telephone salespeople, in bed, where she directed his hands briskly or deployed her own.

Adam had kept his hair and, more or less, his looks. The sagging jowls had reconsidered and tightened back, the skin of his face coming to seem stretched and weather-beaten. When he looked in the mirror he had begun to see his father peering back at him, like an actor through his make-up.

The revived desire that his wife stirred felt like its own kind of transgression. Adam was freshly grateful to the him who had met and kept hold of her, and the him who had forgiven her for that nothing.

Afterwards he spooned her, clasping both of her breasts in one of his palms. ‘Love you,’ he said.

‘Go back to sleep,’ Claire said.

The trust had come back, but he hadn’t told her about Yosemite. That would always be just between them.

‘Up you get,’ Ruby said, hurdling onto their bed. ‘Beach time, lazyboneses.’

‘I already told her, it’s the castle today,’ Harry said from the doorway. ‘The one with the tree house, you know. It’s definitely my turn, she chose yesterday.’

‘Me too,’ Ruby said. ‘But it’s the beach first. Please, Daddy.’

Adam hesitated. ‘Tell you what,’ Claire ruled, her toenails digging into his calf beneath the bed covers, ‘we’ll go to the beach, but’ — she raised her voice above their son’s objection — ‘we’ll go to that place you like for dinner, where the man gave you the sparklers.’

‘I suppose,’ Harry said.

Adam drew his daughter to him. Ruby submitted, but passively, only half present in the embrace. Seven already: the years in which she needed to be as close to them as she could as often as she could, to be piggybacked and tickled and enfolded, her marsupial years, were drawing to an end. Adam felt a pang of unbereaved mourning.

They dressed and drove to the lake. The sand was greyish, the water was silty and cold, the rocks where the sand and water met encased in slimy, emerald weeds that were unpleasant and hazardous to walk on. With a seven-year-old’s talent for suspending disbelief, Ruby was in her swimsuit, across the beach and into the water before her parents had slipped off their shoes. She buried her face as she front-crawled, as her instructor had taught her.

‘You haven’t got any sun cream on!’ Adam called after her.

‘Daddy,’ Ruby called back. ‘Stop worrying.’

Adam splashed in. He threw Ruby into the air, never quite relinquishing control of the slippery limbs as her compact body rose and fell. ‘Higher,’ Ruby shrieked.

Harry joined them, shouting, ‘Do it to me!’ He and Adam raced, caressed underwater by shadowy tendrils, Ruby clinging to her father’s throat. Adam stood her in the shallows and waded back to demonstrate his butterfly stroke, splashing around like a demented walrus to small locomotive but great comic effect — the move a straight lift from his father’s summer playbook, which was itself, he had inferred, a daguerreotype of his father’s father’s, and so on and on, back and back, probably, to some exhibitionist Tudor moat swimmer, the parenting tactics encoded and passed on like eye colour or high blood pressure.