The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

  ‘I don’t remember doing that,’ Neil said. ‘In our house it was always Dan who was going to do it, the big thing, whatever it was. He was going to work on a ranch in Argentina, or once, after he dropped out of college, he had this plan to go to Australia, something about being a policeman in the Outback. When I picture it – the future – I’m trailing along, you know, watching.’

  ‘Watching who? Your brother?’

  ‘I’m not sure any more,’ Neil said. ‘You, maybe.’

  Adam laughed.

  Neil had never considered himself underprivileged. Compared with most of his peers at school, his family had been comfortable, and resenting everyone who had retained both parents would have been too exhausting. Adam’s better fortune grated mostly when he strained to be sensitive about it: his tact constituted an extra layer of superiority that was one too many for Neil.

  As it proved when, in a bar at the Riviera, they talked about his father’s shop. Neil had worked there as a teenager, and was resigned to helping out again when he flew home, just for a few weeks, while he looked for something better and while, as would be unavoidable, he was still living with his dad. Adam planned to move in with two friends from university, Chaz and Archie, somewhere in west London, they hoped.

  ‘It should be useful, shouldn’t it?’ Adam offered, out of his depth but meaning to be considerate. ‘You know, dealing with the customers and all that. I mean, for whatever you do afterwards. Your business career.’

  ‘Not really,’ Neil said, thinking of the zoned-out, insincere retail patience that he would have to recultivate, and of his teenage runs to the bank with the takings, convinced every villain in Wembley knew by his gait that he was couriering an inch of tenners. ‘It’s a dead end, that shop. He should have closed it years ago.’

  ‘I’m sure it can’t be all that hopeless,’ Adam said. ‘In any case it’s a kind of anthropology, isn’t it, that sort of work?’

  The waiter brought their drinks. A few seconds later, Neil felt provoked. Behind Adam’s questions and in his tone he sensed another enquiry: what do you really want to do? The tyranny of vocation among well-bred graduates. It was a form of arrogance, Neil thought, this notion that everyone ought to be a nun or a sculptor, have some urgent calling, as if they all mattered so much that there must be something in it for them beyond money. The idealism that someone else was always paying for.

  Teaching in India. Anthropology!

  ‘You know what, yes, it is useful, in a way. Because, whatever you do, everyone’s selling something to someone in the end. Even you.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yeah, Adam, you are. You will be.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Adam said, laughing, his awkwardness emerging as condescension. To him the actual making of money was something someone else took care of, out of sight, like butchery or coal-mining.

  Beyond the bar the slot machines kept up their perky jingles and machine-gun payouts; the ignored piano player went on playing. An illusionless discomfort, rather than plain silence, descended on them. Neil fingered the mole on his neck, a nervous tic that Adam began to notice that evening.

  ‘Let’s do a bunk,’ Adam said.

  ‘What do you —’

  ‘You know, leg it.’ He mouthed ‘without paying’, returning to normal volume for, ‘Haven’t you ever done that before?’

  ‘Sure,’ Neil said. In Sheffield, when they were skint students, he and two friends had run away from an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant. Once, when they were teenagers, he and Dan had bolted from a snooker club in Cricklewood without paying for their Cokes. Even by his parsimonious standards, the Californian road trip had been cheap: free refills, supersized fries, the bounteous quantity of America. Their shared rooms. He could afford the beer. But he saw how Adam’s ruse would reposition the two of them against the world, like their lying game, only more so, as if they were daredevil children.

  ‘You get up to go to the loo,’ Adam instructed, ‘but instead of coming back you wait for me by the slot machines. Got it?’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘Synchronise watches.’

  They drained their beers and clinked their empty glasses.

  It didn’t go smoothly. The toilets were in the wrong direction and to reach the entrance to the bar Neil had to double back past the low table at which Adam was sitting, which might have looked suspicious had anyone been watching. Adam stood up after a couple of minutes, pretending to yawn and stretch, then followed, eyes fixed on the floor. He picked up pace as he marched past Neil and was running before he reached the main doors, with Neil in pursuit. They ran for much longer than they needed to, racing each other as much as fleeing anyone who in theory might have been chasing them. The race was the point. To begin with Adam was faster, as he had been on the beach, and Neil experienced a fleeting, weird panic that he might have lost him, lost him for ever, an anxiety that was more acute than his receding fear of being caught. But Neil had better stamina, more grit, and overtook outside a Venetian palazzo. They came to a halt when Adam got a stitch, sat on a wall and panted, taking in the meaningless neon spectacle, the warm Vegas atmosphere that was both childish and corrupt.

  They left the city early the next morning. Obeying their preconceptions, the road in Death Valley dissolved limpidly in front of them. Adam took a photo of the two of them sitting on the sizzling bonnet of the pick-up. As they drove through Fresno, resolving to do better, he asked about Neil’s mother.

  ‘You were – how old were you?’ He kept his eyes on the road.

  ‘Fourteen,’ Neil said. ‘Just fourteen. They only told us at the end, or almost, me and Dan, that was just before my birthday.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said. ‘That must have been… I can’t really imagine how that must have been.’

  ‘We were in the lounge,’ Neil said. ‘She told us and then she went straight into the kitchen to chop something. Chop chop chop, you know. Like she was beheading someone. Dad went up into the loft. Me and Dan went up to the park, and he threw me down this slope – I remember, it was a wet day, I got covered in mud, but I didn’t mind, because it was Dan, you know, and in those days anything to do with Dan…’

  Adam said, ‘I don’t know what… I’m really sorry.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ Neil said. ‘I’ve never, before today, I’ve hardly ever… I don’t talk about it much, to be honest.’

  At an outlet mall on the way into San Francisco Neil bought suede boots that were similar to Adam’s, somehow manly and fey at the same time. In the evening he experimented with wearing a sweater slung over his shoulders, as Adam sometimes wore his. At Adam’s urging they drove over and back across the Golden Gate Bridge three times. When they arrived at the hostel they had booked in San Francisco, they looked almost like brothers.

  Rose introduced herself as they were milling around the parking lot, waiting for the minibus that would take them out to Yosemite. Adam had nudged Neil with his elbow when she arrived with her father. She was wearing tight velour shorts; her dark hair was in a ponytail; she had long, elastic legs and high breasts, and, for them, was unquestionably the group’s main attraction. Otherwise it was an eclectic yet disappointing bunch: a meek, greying couple from Yorkshire, a haughtily athletic American who always wore singlets, three sober Germans, two sixty-something hippies from New Mexico and a middle-aged gay couple from Reno, both ‘in landscape gardening’. Plus their guide, a bearded tree-hugger named Trey, who strove to project an air of primitive wisdom and harangued them all about litter. Trey would do the cooking and put up the tents they were to sleep in for three nights. Adam and Neil would arrive a day or two late in Portland because of the tour, but they figured the driveaway client was unlikely to sue. They parked the pick-up in the tour operator’s lot.

  She mooched over to speak to them, distractingly bending one leg behind her as the three of them talked, leaning on their car for balance, heel pulled into her buttock as if she were limbering up for a run. Rose; from Colorado; sh
e had come up to San Francisco with her father. She asked where else they had been in America and how long they were staying, looking them in the eyes and grinning. Her T-shirt said ‘Colorado State’. She was pleased they were there, she said, rolling her eyes in the direction of the others in a hammily exasperated gesture.

  Her father came over and offered his hand. He was a large man – not tall, and not fat, exactly, but with a rectangular, troglodytic torso and powerful, tree-trunk legs. Forty to forty-five, Adam guessed, youngish for a man with a grown daughter, and with the ingratiating manner and untucked, sophomoric dress sense of a person who was keen to seem so. He had a crushing handshake but a surprisingly high voice, and a hair-trigger giggle that he tried endearingly if vainly to suppress. His name was Eric and he was a real-estate salesman. He and Rose had left his wife and son in Boulder to take this California trip together. The two of them, father and daughter, seemed gracefully at ease with each other, mutually respectful and natural in front of outsiders.

  Trey rattled them out to the park in the minibus, then gave them an introductory ride around Yosemite Valley (the ground was dry as dust in the summer heat, the plants and trees magically lush); in the early evening the group meandered through a grove of sequoia trees. Neil gazed upwards, knowing that the trees were supposed to make him feel something, some ecstasy or epiphany that the others seemed to be experiencing, and sensing approximately what the feeling was – awed, inconsequential, humbly serene – but not quite managing it. When he lowered his eyes he found Rose standing next to him, holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the setting sun. Down the sleeve of her bent arm Neil made out the stubble in her armpit. She said, ‘Wow’, smiled and walked away, towards her father.

  Adam’s favourites trees were two monster sequoias, the deep-grooved trunks of which were fused together at the bottom: only by craning your neck could you see that, a long way up, they divided. They had been competing for space and sunlight for ever, Trey said, yet depended on each other’s succour to survive. They only existed together, in their rivalrous embrace. The plaque at their joint base said Faithful Couple.

  ‘Shall we have one of us lads?’ Adam asked Neil, holding up his camera.

  They roped in the greying Yorkshireman to take the photo, arranging themselves beside the Faithful Couple sign. For the picture they pretended to bicker like old spouses, Neil making a fist and Adam turning up a palm as if he were remonstrating. But their other arms were around each other’s shoulders. They and the Faithful Couple were chequered in shadow from the other trees.

  Adam retrieved the camera and thanked the Yorkshireman. ‘It probably won’t come out,’ the Yorkshireman said. ‘Rotten light.’ But it did.

  They were in the high meadows when Rose snatched Adam’s hat. The campsite was just outside the entrance to the park; in the morning they left their tents standing and Trey drove them up a steep trail, putting them out to walk the final stretch when the path became impassable for the minibus. Adam and Neil amused the others with bravado about tracking and wrestling bears, irking the hippies and the gay couple when they kept up their wisecracks for too long. The meadows at the top were surrounded by grey-white granite hills, the horizon finished by a postcard blue sky and a few stranded clouds.

  There was a meltwater lake, ringed by pine trees, which looked inviting after their uphill hike. At first only Neil and Adam braved the water, stripping down to their underwear and sprinting in, yelling, swimming in circles for warmth and ribbing each other about their retreating genitals. Once they had acclimatised to the temperature they began to harry and dunk each other, out in the middle of the lake.

  Something made a splash, and a body made its way towards them in a determined front crawl, the face alternately buried in water and obscured by spray as it breathed, so that they couldn’t make out who was approaching, except, from the shape and the swimming costume, that it was a woman. For the last few metres before she reached them the swimmer submerged entirely, popping up to splash Adam from close range.

  It was Rose. She was wearing a discreet but flattering purple one-piece that she must have carried in her day bag. She coughed out some water and grinned.

  Adam splashed her back; Rose splashed Neil; he and Adam went for her together, pincer-style and mercilessly. ‘You guys,’ she protested, her eyes screwed closed as they converged to point-blank distance. She screamed cartoonishly as Adam dunked her – in the circumstances, reaching out to pressure the top of her head felt uncontroversial. He was alarmed when she didn’t resurface after he lifted his hand, but she came up a few seconds later and a couple of metres away, rubbing her eyes, spluttering, and sweeping back her long hair with an attention-seeking jerk of the neck and slick of her palm.

  ‘You guys,’ she said again, laughing. ‘You’re such bullies.’ She pushed away a final, mock-petulant splash and backstroked to the shallows. On the shore Eric extended a towel to wrap her in.

  Adam had a two-tone trucker’s tan, his face and forearms browning but the rest of him less bronzed. Neil was white all over and beginning to worry about the sun. They swam back to their clothes and their matching, lined-up boots. With his back turned Adam didn’t see Rose darting across the rock to grab the baseball cap he had replaced after their swim, racing away with the trophy in her wet bathing suit and bare feet. She squealed and dropped the cap when Adam almost had her, then jogged back to her father.

  ‘She’s up for it,’ Adam said to Neil, panting.

  ‘That hat is ridiculous.’

  ‘She is, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Ad,’ Neil said. ‘We… do we need her?’

  ‘What are you talking about? We’re in. One of us is, anyway.’

  They examined her, not very covertly, as she dried her back with the towel. Her nipples were conspicuous inside her swimsuit; a sprig of pubic hair had escaped from the crotch. She was womanly from the thigh up, and she walked like an adult, confident and unexaggerated. But there was something vulnerable and admonishing about the pigeonish angle of her standing feet, and the way her knees knocked together with the rhythm of her towelling. Adam’s gaze met Eric’s; the older man raised his chin and gave a corners-of-the-mouth smile.

  ‘Bit young, maybe,’ Neil said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘If there’s grass on the pitch…’ Adam joked, a second-hand vulgarity that he had heard but never himself uttered before.

  ‘In any case,’ Neil said, ‘what about her old man?’

  ‘Aw, he’s a sweetie,’ Adam said. ‘Look at them – not now, you idiot, he’s watching us – they’re a right-on family. Stop making excuses.’

  ‘Okay, Ads, okay,’ Neil said, capitulating as he had over the singing and the dip in the Pacific. ‘Let’s play.’

  Eric held up the towel to shield Rose, averting his eyes as she slipped back into her clothes.

  He let her have a beer that evening. At least, Rose appeared to be drinking a beer – Neil saw her gulp from the bottle and wipe her mouth with the back of her hand – though it was possible, he later realised, that she had taken one swig and passed it back to Eric. Father and daughter were sitting next to each other by the campfire that Trey had built after he served dinner. It was a warm dry night and they didn’t need the heat, but a fire was expected, and they used the flames to toast marshmallows. They could see each other sporadically in the flickering light.

  Next to Rose sat one of the Germans, a woman in her late thirties with short blond hair and ropy English. Next to her were the couple from Yorkshire, and beside them were Adam and Neil. Those two were drinking – they and some of the others had bought beer in San Francisco – but they weren’t drunk that night, not really. The other Germans and the gay couple were on the far side of the fire; the elderly hippies and the solitary athlete had already retired. No one had done anything difficult or brave, no perilous climbs or punishing hikes, but there was nevertheless an air of outdoor camaraderie, a communal will to make this be or seem the frontier trip of their imaginings.
/>
  They talked about what they had seen in the meadows that day and what they were hoping to see on the next, flora and fauna and soaring rock, peering meditatively into the flames when there seemed to be nothing left to say. Rose pulled her baggy sweater down over her legs and hugged them to her body. Eric and the Yorkshireman began to discuss computers. Eric put his faith in them; the Yorkshireman used an old-fashioned word processor.

  ‘You wait,’ Eric said. ‘In ten years, I’m telling you, there’ll be a computer in every village in Africa. One hundred per cent easier – everything. School, business – you wait. And be sure and remember me when it happens!’

  ‘They can’t eat computers,’ a German man said from the other side of the fire.

  ‘Guess not,’ said Eric, laughing and taking no offence.

  He stirred the cinders. Neil used Adam’s penknife to open two more beers.

  ‘Hey,’ Eric said, rallying. ‘You guys ski?’ He was looking at them.

  ‘Of course,’ said Adam.