A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Almost certainly, she was fine, Adam reminded himself at his desk, preparing himself for that evening. She might have her own children by now (he imagined Eric cradling them in his thick, hairy arms). Perhaps her life had been better than was her destiny before Yosemite, she being more studious or warier, less headlong in her rebellions, than she would otherwise have been. In which case, no harm had been done by either of them.

Adam would never know and nor, come to that, would Rose. He felt, that afternoon, as clear of her as he would ever be.

She might not be fine, of course.

In the conference room he took a chair set back from the table, against the wall. He rarely said anything in these meetings. He didn’t think that he was supposed to say anything; he suspected he was only invited out of courtesy. He slotted his chin between his thumb and his forefinger, stroking his stubble, a pose he valued for its contemplative appearance, but more for the micro-pleasure of the stubble’s rough, synthetic feel, its diurnal reliability.

Laurel came in with a photocopier-hot set of Leisure Services reports. He fanned and distributed the copies as Hardy arranged his jacket on the back of the chair at the head of the table. Laurel sat at his partner’s right hand. He crossed his arms and smiled.

‘Okay,’ Hardy said. ‘Let me walk you all through the deck.’

He was safe but stuck. After the early prisons contract Adam had struggled to bring in further work, and when, after the election, the commissions became scarce, it made no sense to send him out to a hospital or council when other, more proficient associates were available. The bill of his billable days was shrivelling. To the colleagues who had begun to invite him for after-work drinks, or for lunchtime sandwiches by the river, thinking that he might be a permanent someone, he was again an uninvitable no one. He was leprous, precarious. He was dangling from a rooftop by a thread.

He was rescued. Hardy had noticed, and Laurel agreed, or said he agreed, that Adam had a valuable, marketable skill, namely his familiarity with the English language. They called him back to Hardy’s office (he had installed a tub of moisturiser on the desk) and told him that, henceforth, his job would be to edit the product: to beautify the unreadable reports that outlined their scorched-earth or asset-stripping advice to clients, or at least to remove the most painful of the excrescences that crowded his colleagues’ mogul-run prose. ‘The Civil Service gift for story-telling,’ Laurel called it, and smiled.

Adam became a ghostwriter. He was the consultants’ wing man; he was the other guy.

At the beginning, at the television company, he had wanted and expected to be a star, a virtuoso, to awe his peers and astound his bosses. When he first joined the Civil Service, and he and the other fast-streamers gathered in their Whitehall pubs to gauge each other’s progress, they would debate how much good they were doing in the world, in their hearts never countenancing their rhetorical doubts. Now, like some meek but well-coached hostage, Adam wanted only to be the grey man, inoffensive and set fair to be overlooked when the violence began.

After Leisure Services he went back to his desk. For want of a better way to seem occupied he scrolled through his spam filter. Did he want to chat with a Russian woman? Did he want to satisfy his wife tonight? Did he want to buy a replica Rolex?

A stray message from Harriet (he promoted her to Approved Sender ). The subject was Stefan walking!!!! There was a video attachment: Stefan wasn’t walking, he was hauling himself along the side of a coffee table. The video lurched and ended when the child banged his head on the table’s edge. Harriet was happier in Munich. She had been happier since the truth about their father came out, once the shock wore off, at least: it took away his entitlement to judge. She had visited with Stefan a few months before, and over dinner she and Adam had sung their number from Lady and the Tramp . Harry and Ruby sat and watched, agape at this glimpse of their daddy’s childhood.

He frowned at the screen in ersatz contemplation as Laurel passed his desk again. This time he wasn’t looking at Adam, or didn’t seem to be. Laurel crossed the floor to Hardy’s office, opened the door without knocking and closed it quietly behind him.

The contracts had started to trickle in again. The government had discovered that you needed to spend money to save money: somebody had to work out whom to sack and whom to keep. ‘Creative destruction,’ Hardy called it. ‘Friction costs,’ according to Laurel. They still needed to say — more than ever, they had to be able to say — It wasn’t me. Only trouble was, they were being screwed on price. In the end they would get what they paid for, Hardy was muttering.

They had rolled over Adam’s contract for one more year. Between his salary and what Claire and Poppy had begun to pay themselves, they were okay. He eschewed his old ambitions and his universal rivalry, left them behind him like a naive summer romance. They could have dropped their struggle by now, he and Neil — though, on the other hand, the struggle had started at the very beginning, in California, in the hostel yard. So perhaps the struggle was the point.

He was strapped in. He was safe.

The bucket sailed past him, going down again, fast. The men had turned away, looking out towards the sky. This time Adam couldn’t see their faces, but their hands, he noticed, were almost touching on the outer rail.

Wind chimes. Frosted glass in the beginning, delicately jagged rose-coloured shards and cobalt icicles, and later bamboo pipes and miniature Japanese bells. Claire and Poppy pinged their design sketches between High Wycombe and Colchester.

Manners and goodwill had kept them in touch since they overlapped in the gallery. They weren’t close enough to count as friends, not really, but nor were they indifferent or ruthless enough to drop each other entirely: an email or two a year, later a couple of chaotic outings with their kids to London museums. As a student Poppy had designed jewellery; as the children careened around the Turbine Hall, Claire suggested that she scale up to ornaments. The wind chimes were manufactured in a workshop in Dorset and sold through garden centres, craft and furniture shops and the rudimentary website made for them by Poppy’s husband (he was more than the single trait Adam had ascribed to him in their lazily competitive twenties).

You never knew, Claire and Adam said to each other. You never knew what might come of your past, who might shimmy out of it to catch up with you. They were hopeful of cracking the accessories list of one of the department stores. They were thinking about wind spinners and babies’ mobiles.

By late afternoon Adam couldn’t concentrate. He left his computer on, a half-drunk cup of tea on his desk, his jacket draped tactically on the back of his chair. He ducked through the emergency exit and skipped down a flight of stairs, lest the bosses spot him waiting for the lift. The elevator doors opened several times on his way to the lobby, admitting other heliotropic skivers and early-doors drinkers. Adam enjoyed these fractional, five-second glimpses of alien floors, strange companies, unknown lives, currency traders and oil traders and the vendors of medical insurance. He had visions of the doors retracting one day to reveal an illicit poker game, or an elephant rearing on its hind legs, or a masked orgy.

Adam was early — much too early, no way he would be going home this early — but it was as if, having decided, he had to get on with it. Bizarre, having decided, to do anything further that afternoon. Adam wanted to ambush himself, too, to minimise his opportunities to change his mind.