by A. D. Miller
‘I don’t think so,’ Neil said. ‘Actually she wants me to get the snip.’
Keep a straight face and we can keep it going.
Claire fixed her eyes on the dressing table.
‘I wouldn’t, if I were you. You might change your mind. People do. Kitchen?’
Neil tried to meet Claire’s eyes again but she turned and hurried out. She had lost the weight that she put on with Ruby, Neil noticed. Her hair was still resplendent.
Patricia ran her texting finger along the kitchen counter and inspected it for dust. ‘They’ll need somewhere to sit down, of course,’ she said.
‘The cats?’ Neil asked. Claire spread a palm across her face.
‘Of course not. Not the cats. My grandchildren. I thought I explained. Yes, my son-in-law’s in the money business like you, dear, he’s away a lot – New York mostly, and lately these emergent markets, I’m not sure I’d put up with it if I were her, and between you, me and the gatepost I’m not certain I really trust him. Anyway I’m moving down to help a bit more. You know, after school, weekends.’
‘How old are they?’ Claire asked.
‘Eight and ten, little bit older than yours. Nice children. Bit spoiled. Bit noisy sometimes.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ Neil said.
‘Oh, it’s all right. The children are the main thing now, you see. We’ve sold the cottage – I have, I suppose. Now, this is lovely!’ She moved into the living room. ‘On the small side but lovely. Are these the original shutters?’
‘Yes,’ Claire said. ‘South facing.’
Patricia had a large mole on her cheek that matched Neil’s, he noticed, though hers was covered and advertised by a smudge of orange face powder.
‘Yes, I can see them bouncing around in here. But it isn’t much for the money, is it? And such a nice bath. Good luck to you both.’ She ran a hand across her pale hair and smiled. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, letting herself out.
Claire leaned against the closed door, burying her face in the crook of her elbow. Neil sat on the stairs. She looked up and they let their eyes meet. They wanted to laugh but the hilarity had passed. Neil felt a flutter of guilt, less over the old woman than for the fact of the confederacy, the temporary partnership that was somehow misaligned.
‘Drink?’ Claire offered again. The smile that he had once considered superior seemed, this evening, ingenuously hospitable.
Neil glanced at his watch and hesitated. He could still make Park Lane if he hurried. But he was here now. Surely Adam couldn’t be much later. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long,’ Claire added.
‘Go on then,’ Neil said. ‘Twisted my arm.’ His second, best chance to leave, and he turned it down.
Neil went through to the sitting room and scanned the bookshelves while she poured. Art books, history books, political memoirs, Adam’s bid to maintain his student-age idea of his intellectual self. There were too few books on Neil’s expansive shelves in Bayswater: some Rough Guides (Provence, Copenhagen, Istanbul, the last their intended, now aborted destination for that summer); some Ian Fleming novels; a few textbooks on finance and investment that Tony McGough had foisted on him. It was a caste affectation, Neil had always thought, this three-dimensional wallpaper, less a record of reading (he wondered how many of these books Adam had ever opened) than a signalling device or membership requirement for the upper-middle classes.
Claire came through from the kitchen bearing two full wine glasses and an open bottle of white. She set the tray on the coffee table. Neil took a glass and sat in the armchair, his arms resting perpendicularly in front of him.
‘He saw your man,’ Claire said. ‘At the consultancy. Alan somebody?’
‘He’s not really my man,’ Neil said. ‘I just, you know, know one of the investors. I put a word in, that’s all, really. Did they hit it off?’
‘It went okay, I think. He hasn’t heard anything yet, though. It would mean more money.’
‘Fingers crossed. I’m sure he – what’s that thing he says? – he spanked it.’
Adam’s career reminded Neil of whichever medieval king it was in O-level history who won all his battles but lost every war. All his paper distinctions and mandarin respectability had left him naggingly unfulfilled and, he had managed to confide to Neil, unexpectedly impecunious. He had a chance, thanks to his friend, to escape the Home Office for a private consultancy, where the work would be more varied and somewhat better paid. Money-wise, Adam was on his own, Neil knew. His parents’ house had been sold during the divorce, and had anyway turned out to have been mortgaged to its fake-Tudor beams.
‘It’s funny, I think the fact that it came through you, it complicates it. Do you know what I mean? Crazy, really, you’re his closest friend, the others have all…’
‘I know,’ Neil said. ‘I understand.’ He was pleased to be able to dispense this favour to Adam.
‘You boys,’ Claire said.
By contrast Neil’s had been the sort of mish-mash career that in another era would have connoted failure, but in his implied the perpetual, shark-like motion of success. He had quit Farid at the start of the previous year. Farid wanted the tenants of a retail development that he owned to overstate their rents in his paperwork, thus inflating the value of the building so he could borrow more against it. He deputised Neil to lean on them. Nothing to worry about, Farid assured him, the genuine rents would catch up with the fictitious ones soon. Up, up and away… It was inducements, not threats or anything more sinister, which Neil was supposed to distribute. Farid’s bankers, distracted as they were by his World Cup and Grand Prix tickets, were unlikely to spot the ruse. Neil had baulked. He walked out and into Rutland Partners, an investment fund for HNWIs: High Net Worth Individuals. Tony McGough was his new boss.
Claire asked, ‘How are things with you?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Can’t complain.’
Neil didn’t know what he had meant by that dismal evasion. He should have said, I’m rich, Claire. Amazing, isn’t it? I’m becoming rich. But she knew that already.
‘Still travelling all the time?’
‘Calms down a bit over the summer. Switzerland, maybe. And Cayman in September.’
Neil worked client side, peddling a discreetly asterisked vision of minimal risks, outwitted taxes and soaring returns, and sharing in the fat management fees that the HNWIs were reluctant but willing to pay for the dream of anti-gravitational prosperity. He had swung from the evanescing ether of Bimal’s website to Farid’s semi-solid buildings, then back to abstraction, this time in the guise of almost pure money. Money spawning money. The basics, he considered, had been constant since his peripatetic days in the pharmaceuticals trade, and his interminable summers and post-California stint in his father’s shop. Sell the customer what he wants to buy.
‘How is, you know, the market?’ She gave another nervous laugh.
‘Fine,’ Neil said. ‘You know, wolf from the door.’
They drank their wine, Claire taking tiny, feline but frequent sips. Neil looked at his watch.
‘How’s your father?’ she asked.
‘The same.’ He made a quick slashing gesture with his left hand – flat palm, sharp rotation at the wrist – conveying both a dim estimation of Brian’s life expectancy and a preference not to discuss it. Claire refilled their glasses.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
Her phone rang and she retreated to the kitchen to answer. Neil only half-deciphered the conversation: ‘Why?… Fuck’s sake, Adam… Okay.’
She stood in the aperture between the two rooms and said, ‘He’s late. I mean, he’s even later. Christ. Doesn’t know when he’ll be back, minister on the warpath, apparently.’ Neil began to stand. ‘You’re welcome to stay for another.’
Her cheeks had a sauvignon glow. Neil had never overcome his impression, formed instantaneously in the smoky pub where Adam had introduced them, that Claire looked down on him. His money, he had latterly suspected, had made looking down on him all the more
urgent. The market: the way she said it, and still judged him, her and Adam both. Or perhaps he was being unfair. Her T-shirt had bunched and ridden up above the elastic of her velour trousers.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not?’
They had never been friends, but neither could Neil say that he knew her, or had ever really seen her, unrefracted by her husband, separate from her assigned role.
Claire fetched the second bottle. Neil took a couple of quick, noiseless paces and sat on the sofa. Between it and the wall he noticed a graveyard of mangled toys – a digger missing a wheel, a doll minus an arm, cherished objects that devotion had not kept from violence.
Classical music wafted from the kitchen, intricate, fine-boned, a piano without accompaniment. Concerto? Minuet? The nomenclature escaped him. Claire returned with the bottle and a corkscrew and sat beside him on the sofa. She opened and poured. Bored, Neil thought. Bored and lonely. And tired. She curled her feet up and under her buttocks and balanced a glass on her knee.
‘Do you miss her?’ Claire said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’
‘Not much, to be honest,’ Neil said. ‘Is that terrible? She feels – it’s hard to explain it – she’s like a film that ended, or a holiday. Or a job. It was supposed to end, I think.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. No reason.’
Even now he couldn’t say for certain why Jess had gone. Something to do with her age, a mid-thirties, stick-or-twist moment at which he had seen other women bolt, too; something to do with her mother’s death, and also, she had intimated, something to do with his mother’s death. She hadn’t helped him to rank these motives. She had already done her grieving in her head, as you might for the victim of a long, terminal illness, so that, for Jess, the final, literal end was more a technicality than a crisis. She had no interest in his money.
For a moment Neil thought Claire was going to admit to never having liked her, that amateurish barbed condolence, but instead she said, ‘She was sweet.’
Adam had come round with a bottle of whisky that evening but Neil had felt as much relief as anguish. They drank most of the whisky anyway. Even three or four doubles to the wind, Neil did not find his thumb poised to dial her number on his mobile. He slept better without her.
‘Sweet’s not the word I would have chosen.’
They both laughed, and Claire reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Neil glanced at the hand and across at her face; she withdrew the hand and smiled. Lonely and bored, Neil thought, and maybe also a harmless desire to feel desirable again. He remembered that moment in the pub when they first met, the ghost of flirtation he had glimpsed in the space between two blinks. He remembered how assiduous she had always been in laughing at his jokes. That had been fun, mean cruel fun, the interlude with the poor old lady.
They drank another glass of wine, sinking deeper into the sofa until they were almost horizontal. Claire began criticising Adam, gently, as an exasperated mother might, in low-key solidarity with Neil’s break-up. There was something contagious about romantic discord, just as there could be in marriage and child-bearing, Neil believed, if you weren’t careful. She said she wanted to shake Adam sometimes – of course he should take the consulting job if they wanted him, they really were very grateful. Sometimes Adam seemed so… absent. He was wonderful with the children but they got the best of him. She sometimes felt that there was nothing left for her.
Did Neil know what she meant? He said he did, assenting to this tactful, joint demolition, her resentments of her husband rising up to meet his, all those years of Adam cutting the bread too thick, or whatever his domestic foibles were, a call-and-response ritual that, now, was less an inverted contest in intimacy than a mutual commiseration.
Neil could say to her, There is something else you should know about your husband, It was before you met him but I think you should know anyway… Adam had been so adamant that she mustn’t find out.
She rotated her body and the back of her head came to rest against his shoulder. He could smell her, the unmistakable whiff of posh-girl cosmetics, Chanel and high-end moisturiser. He could still distinguish the individual fragrances from his time in the business, the olfactory memories coming back to him like old song lyrics. He reached an arm around her to pat her on the far shoulder, and left it there, innocuously.
More than once, in the past two years, he had thought of telling Claire about Yosemite, anticipating the nice symmetry of the comeuppance. Yet now that the chance arrived, snitching seemed petty and obvious. Instead they talked about weekend plans, summer holidays, some stuff about the children. That had helped, Neil thought afterwards, the camouflage and double bluffs of their prattle. He spared her the details of the commodity prices, currencies and bonds that preoccupied much of his waking life.
His knuckles brushed against her exposed bicep. With their other hands, they drank.
The trouble with forgiveness was that it was hard to retract. Overtly, at least: not in his heart.
He asked about their house sale (top of the market, Neil reckoned, though it was a fool’s game to try to call it). He moved his knuckles up and down her skin, very slowly, very slightly, a couple of inches at a time, the caress delicate enough for him to sense the microscopic down on her arm, and her tiny, involuntary jolts.
Still she didn’t move. They drank; she gulped. The booze and the music and the moment had their own logic.
What the fuck was he doing?
When Neil thought of the randomness of it, all the reasons it could have been extinguished, not just the primordial grievance but neglect or drift or routine jealousy, his friendship with Adam was like a whim of evolution, a platypus or an anteater, so precious and unlikely. Even now, even these last few years, there was no one he trusted or needed so much. Neil trusted Adam more, in a way, because of his frankness over California. Among his living family, only Sam came close, Sam who was a different kind of relative, a friend, almost. This ought to be as taboo as incest. He began to blush.
At the same time, considered in a certain light, wasn’t this what Adam wanted? To compete with Neil, and to incriminate him. What he had always wanted. In California Adam had ushered him into the wrong, urged, provoked and finally deceived him into it. In London he had assailed Neil with a remorse he hadn’t recognised, needling allusions that he had privately interpreted as sabotage. Finally Neil had seen and suffered the shame that Adam had insisted on, and resented his friend anew, for both the insistence and, belatedly, for his part in the event.
She’s up for it, mate. That was what Adam had said. Stop making excuses.
These past two years Neil had thought of her when he saw Sam. Sometimes he thought of her when he saw Adam with his daughter. Between the three of them – Neil, Adam and Rose – they had driven Jess away.
I knew she was younger.
Since Adam wanted Neil to be guilty, perhaps he should be. He could earn the guilt that had been foisted on him.
They babbled. Was Claire going back to work? Scarcely worth it – the costs of childcare. His mouth was dry; he drank. He curled his fingers inside her arm and around her ribcage. She sat up straight but didn’t withdraw. With his other hand he put his empty glass on the arm of the sofa and fingered the mole on his neck.
He wanted a refill – there was still an inch of wine in the bottle – but he was reluctant to move. He was sober enough to know that he had drunk too much (he would have to leave his car and send someone out from the office). Her breasts were contoured against her sweater. His palms were damp; he felt the twitch of an erection, a warning-shot harbinger of his instincts.
Neil expected to regret this for ever; never mind for ever, he regretted it already. At the same time he felt wonderfully serene. Her head and her hair were warm against his shirt but the skin of her arm felt cold. An image came to his mind, from some ancient TV programme, of men in an exotic country (Brazil? Mexico?) stunt-diving from a cliff into the fearfully shallow water a long way below, their
arms poised and cruciform as they tilted over the precipice. He felt as he imagined those divers must have felt: exhilarated, imperilled, yet tranquil in the inevitability of the fall.
‘Claire,’ he said. ‘Claire.’ He spoke so softly that she leaned still further into his chest to hear him.
He twirled a ringlet of her hair around a finger of his drinking hand. He could feel her breath against his neck. He had so wanted to match Adam, so admired his sophisticated charm, and envied it. He still did, despite everything that had happened since, what other people might construe as his success or Adam’s failure. And these things that his friend had now, Claire and the children, a life Neil had so persuaded himself he couldn’t emulate that he had resolved not even to want it.
He half-expected her to move or to stop him, but she didn’t.
How much? That much?