A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Playing in the water with his children, Adam’s mind went back to their peace lunch at the Chelsea fish restaurant several months before, the last time he had seen his father. It wasn’t the adult thing to do, he knew, it was gauche and unsophisticated, but he had mentioned his mother once, twice, how she was staying with her sister, how she worried about Harriet, in her squat with her punky German boyfriend, somewhere in east London.

Jeremy Tayler had pressed his fingers to his temples, eyes fixed on the menu, silent. ‘Asparagus,’ he finally said, looking up. ‘Then sole meunière . No, bonne femme .’

Anger had welled up in Adam, for his mother and also for himself, a kind of buyer’s remorse. All that happiness, that enervating, debilitating happiness, which had turned out to be a lie. That had been another kind of bereavement, for the life he thought they had all shared. Later Adam noticed his father appraise the waitress’s arse, as she bent to sweep the tablecloth with an accessory like a cut-throat razor.

‘Daddy?’ Ruby said.

She was kneeling in the shallows, recycling the murky water that lapped into her mouth, accustomed to going about her business while the adult worked through his or her distraction, emails, text messages.

‘Sorry,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t drink it, sweetheart.’

He pictured his mother’s pursed mouth as she applied the sun cream to him and Harriet, her firm, methodical strokes, only now intuiting the contest of devotion and boredom, and the other, veiled resentments that must have engraved her concentrating frown. Harriet had submitted herself obediently, he recalled, but he had always wriggled away ungratefully, desperate to show their father a dive, or how long he could hold his breath.

Fathers.

‘Again the buttercup,’ Ruby said.

‘All right,’ Adam said. ‘Just once.’

He splashed the children as he launched himself into his stroke; they splashed him back. In the end the three of them slipped back across the rocks. Claire distributed towels for the children to dry themselves.

Along the beach three old men were playing dominoes underneath a sun umbrella. A thin man and fat woman were holding hands. Snatches of music drifted over from the open-air café. Adam remembered reading an interview in the paper with some septuagenarian film director, a Spanish or Italian man, describing how, one morning in old age, lust had left him, and how light he felt without it, as if he had been tethered to a goat for sixty years and suddenly cut loose. Adam was beginning to feel like that, but about ambition rather than his libido. This wasn’t quite the life he expected, but what right, really, did he ever have to his hopes? They made enough money, just about. You never knew, they told each other, the business Claire was starting might take off, stranger things, the usual. Claire, the children, the nineteenth-century history books that he read on the commuter train from High Wycombe, a train on which, almost every day, he got a seat.

Hardy was the secretaries’ nickname for Alan, the shorter and fatter of his two bosses. Alan/Hardy had a Humpty Dumpty belly that he attempted to corset in a self-mortifying belt. He dyed his hair a rusty orange and signed his name with an overcompensating flourish, his insecurities so flagrant that they were hard to resent. Laurel (Craig) was taller, an inexpert shaver who wore ill-fitting clothes, as if he were dressed by a hard-up mother who was keeping him in hand-me-downs until he finished growing. He had an absent, scholarly air that, so the secretaries whispered, concealed an actuarial coldness when it came to cutting people loose. ‘P45 you as soon as look at you,’ one of them said.

Adam had been hired by Hardy and feared Laurel. As a team the two of them were like the improbable couples you sometimes saw at weddings, the type with no obvious compatibility or resemblance, who nevertheless synchronised perfectly on the dancefloor. They fit. Adam struggled to decipher where the power lay between them.

The private sector, a realm so denigrated and envied by his Civil Service colleagues, turned out to be essentially the same. The same needs, grudges and laziness, distributed in roughly the same proportions across the office, interacting according to what was probably a scientifically predictable algorithm. The same atavistic subtexts to every disagreement in meetings. Only the vocabulary was different. In consultancy you sought alignment before a meeting by syndicating your findings to your team. Faced with scepticism or incomprehension, you would walk them through the deck . You talked about value and performance and delivery , and, as often as possible, strategy . The key phrase, the trump phrase, the term that dominated their spreadsheets and appraisals and reveries, was billable days .

It was known in the office that one of the investors had sponsored Adam, and to begin with his colleagues had cold-shouldered him, as if he were part intern (unlikely to stay long enough to be worth schmoozing), part informer; he ate his lunch at his desk, pretending to be busy. He had thought to be respected for his decade of public service, to leap across to this new ladder halfway up, the higher rungs immediately in prospect. He was mistaken. Most of his peers had joined from mainstream consultancies, with the odd, exotic accountant sprinkled among them. The minority who, like Adam, had defected from the public sector, came from the big-ticket, contract-rich departments, health and local government and welfare. Adam had irrelevant expertise, unremunerative contacts.

‘Going forward,’ Hardy advised him, Adam struggling to repress the image of him leathered and strapped into the orgy cage, ‘you’ll need some expert leverage,’ meaning research assistants who knew what they were doing.

They were certain to fire him, he warned Claire. It was only a matter of time. Even with the smaller mortgage, they would be screwed. He regretted his rash, greedy career switch. He dwelled on the cost of the children’s sports camp. The shame.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him in their bed in High Wycombe, dawn breaking outside the dormer window. She applied for part-time jobs and took one as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery.

He worried.

He brought in a smallish contract to find savings at a private prison, and he proved to be a good picker-upper, adept at knowing precisely enough to seem plausible. Half the time, Adam quickly saw, it wasn’t substantive expertise that the clients were buying. The arrangement reminded him of that song of a decade before, in which the lyrics deny the singer is the man his girlfriend has caught in flagrante. It wasn’t me — who decided you should be fired. It was Adam Tayler. It wasn’t me — who recommended that you be privatised. It was Mr Tayler.

His true expertise was in taking the blame.

It wasn’t me.

It isn’t what you think.

It was a misunderstanding.

Adam often worked alone, sleeping in deathly identikit hotels while he terrorised some unfortunate regional hospital or council. He would take a book to dinner, less to read than as a prop to ward off garrulous travellers — a precaution he adopted after an evening in Hartlepool with a packaging salesman, a man with the hairiest ears he had ever seen, who, when Adam’s interest lagged, had pleaded, ‘It’s not just paper, it’s corrugated cardboard too!’ Occasionally he thought of Neil, driving round and round the M25, Neil before he flew out to America, with only the radio and his shampoo samples and his ruthless customers for company. He became a connoisseur of the spoiling techniques deployed by doctors and bureaucrats. Outright rudeness and noncooperation were easier to handle, he learned, than oily hypocrisy. ‘Wonderful idea’ and ‘fascinating insight’ generally translated, in Adam’s experience, as ‘You cunt’ and ‘I will crush you’.