The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

  The thing is that Sammy is ill. I mean very ill. He might be okay but we don’t know yet. Ive always felt responsible for him and now I feel that more than ever. I don’t know why exactly but I needed to tell Adam about it. I think he will understand.

  Its a funny thing, isn’t it, that you start off wanting nothing from each other and that is almost the whole point, the freedom that we had, and then you do want things and youre happy to give them, time and all the rest. And then you find there are some things that its too much to give or sometimes to take.

  Please tell him that he doesn’t have to do anything or answer this message if he doesnt want to. But I would love it if he did. Tell him I know we can’t put everything right but we can still do this. Tell him I’m pleased the American man was at home that day.

  Sending love to you all

  Neil

  She didn’t reply. Not that day, nor the next, nor the day after that. Two days was a decade in this instantaneous age. You got twitchy if clients didn’t respond within an hour, knowing that they, like you, were bound to their lesser lives by the beeps and permanent-emergency throbs of their supposedly liberating gadgets. After two days, Neil began to abandon hope.

  The apparition was joltingly surreal: two human faces frowning at the glass, thirteen floors and a couple of hundred feet up. It always took Adam a moment to remember the man-bucket, the cords and the sponges. Then the dilemma over whether to acknowledge them – with some tough-guy nod, blokeish cock of the head or ingratiating smile – a sharp example of the moral discomfort routinely inflicted by London, a place in which you were always rubbing up against less fortunate neighbours, importunate strangers. If he nodded or smiled at the men through the window, he and they would lock eyes in the shared knowledge that he was sitting in an ergonomic chair on the cushy side of the glass, while, a metre away and on the other, they were dangling from the roof. If he didn’t, he would imply that they had no human claim on his attention.

  The trying etiquette of inequality. The whole routine, Adam knew, must be wearyingly familiar to the less equal. He went for a pursed smile and raised-eyebrow combination. One of the window-cleaners, the older of the two, gaunt and wearing a hoodie although it was a warm, clear morning, whispered something to the other; Adam thought he saw the younger man smirk as they heaved themselves out of view.

  He shook his head at his own involutions. This would never be his city.

  Laurel materialised beside his desk. ‘Leisure Services?’

  ‘Yup. Twenty minutes,’ Adam said. ‘Just need to spell-check it.’

  ‘I need to syndicate,’ Laurel said. ‘Adam, I really do.’

  Laurel’s mis-shaven cheeks were marbled in a scraped yellow and pastel red. He was strangely gauche for a person of his seniority, Adam had noticed, for someone with a solid career at one of the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms behind him. It was as if all the resources bestowed on him by evolution had gone into the substance of his work, the time-and-motion equations, leaving nothing over for social or cosmetic fripperies. In the past couple of years Laurel had grown slightly stooped, as if his height had become embarrassing to him; Adam found him intangibly camp – something in the stretch of his vowels and tight cross of his arms – though Laurel didn’t seem to be aware of the effect. He had a wife, two or three kids, but in three and a half years Adam had never heard him speak of them.

  ‘Twenty minutes max.’

  ‘Clients this afternoon.’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  ‘Okay. See you at the meeting?’ – a statement intoned as a question. Laurel smiled and loped away. He had the power, Adam had concluded, most of it, anyway, which was why he didn’t mind when Hardy interrupted him. He had the long-haul confidence to be eclipsed.

  Neither Alan/Hardy nor Craig/Laurel was his friend. The pair of them were yoked and segregated by an invisible barrier that everyone else could see, those two on the inside, the rest of the staff peripheral. They weren’t his friends, but Adam trusted them. He trusted them when they implied that he was safe.

  Since the new government came in, slashing and burning, public-sector consultants had been reviled. Not so much as bankers or journalists or the politicians themselves, but up there, in the league table of infamy, with estate agents or squeegee merchants. They were indolent and dispensable, a luxury of the incontinent boom. They were parasites. They were fucked.

  The work had slowed, and Adam had worried again. They all worried. They were right to worry. He received a string of emails inviting him to leaving drinks for people he hadn’t previously known existed. Sometimes the fall guy would follow up with his or her own valediction, rashly Replying All – some tragic, adrenalin-driven gush about how he would miss everyone and hoped they stayed in touch, or the snarky observation that she had enjoyed the job, most of the time. The various, equally pointless bearings of the tumbrel.

  Yet Hardy had winkingly implied, one afternoon when they had shared a lift, that he was safe. He asked after Adam’s family and Adam made a nervy crack about how expensive they were. Hardy mumbled something about a permanent contract just as the doors opened and they were released. Afterwards, when he was recounting the conversation to Claire, and he tried to conjure the precise phrases, the actual formulation, which had created the impression of security, Adam couldn’t grasp them. But he had been pretty sure that he was safe. He had his harness; he was strapped in.

  He tried and failed to log on to the shared Leisure Services file. He felt the bile rising, in a way that only tailgaters and malfunctioning computers could induce. Password incorrect: he had distractedly input the one he used for his credit card and Amazon accounts. Bank accounts, shopping accounts, email accounts, newspaper subscriptions, multiple computers – Adam sometimes felt he had become the sum of his passwords, that his lazily disguised pet names, phone numbers and ‘meaningful dates’, the odd extra digit or letter affixed as required, were his new DNA, the double helix of the touch-screen age. If they got scrambled, you were lost.

  Finally his fingers remembered the necessary sequence: ruby, followed by the six digits of her birthday (no space). He called up the document, ran the promised spell-check, passed an eye over the formatting. He emboldened the sub-headings and introduced some bullet points in the executive summary (‘… service optimisation… customer footfall… DCMS strategy…’). He added his name to the unobtrusive middle of the list of authors.

  He saved and closed the document and emailed it to Laurel, cc-ing Hardy. Outside his window the cords attached to the bucket were twitching, as if, somewhere below, condemned men were hanging and choking at the end of them.

  He had sworn off MySpace. He had vowed never to look her up again, had weakened once or twice and finally, the previous winter, when he was setting up a new computer, found that he had forgotten his log-in details. He had guessed and guessed, but on that occasion he couldn’t remember them, which, for once, was more a riddance than a loss. The need to re-register had been enough to dissuade him, one of those tiny online impositions that had become demoralising obstacles, in this case turning the pursuit of Rose from casual hobby to blatant obsession. He had resisted Facebook and almost forsaken Googling, though he permitted himself Chaz and Archie. Also, every few months, Neil.

  These days Adam could tolerate mentions of California, California was always everywhere, but Colorado still made him shiver. Once he switched off the television when a report about the poor little girl in Boulder came on; Claire had glanced across at him, but let it be. At the end of term, on prize day, as he watched Ruby climbing the stairs and crossing the stage, he thought of her striding across the campsite, alone in front of everybody.

  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 sh
e 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.

  He would have to cross the river to Embankment for the District Line. He strode along the passageway at the side of the Royal Festival Hall and up the steps to the pedestrian walkway. The wheel rose behind the railway bridge – toweringly close, but the base occluded – looking, from Adam’s angle, as if it might spin free and crush him. A newsstand sold papers in a dozen languages. The tarpaulins of the restaurants stretched along the riverfront; the overpriced tourist boats glided on the grey water. A tide of money had washed across London since Adam worked at the television company a short hop along the Thames. The tide was going out but the city was still soaking in it.

  Just below the bridge, on the small riparian beach (plastic plates and broken bricks and washed-up electrical wires among the pebbles), someone was shouting. He looked down to see a child, a girl – four or five, he estimated – standing alone at the water’s edge. The shout came again, and a man ran from the bottom of the steps that
led to the beach and snatched the girl up, reprimanding her lovingly.

  Adam took out his BlackBerry and dialled as he made his way onto the bridge. Two rings and she picked up.

  ‘No,’ Claire said. ‘Not on the mantelpiece… Yes. Adam.’

  ‘Just, hi, to say I won’t be home for dinner.’

  ‘Absolutely not… What? It’s our takeaway night. I thought we’d have Japanese.’

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘Can’t help it, you know.’

  ‘That’s it – both of you. I said, that’s it… Sorry. Adam.’

  He had always been faintly afraid of this bridge, ever since he saw a news item about two posses of muggers who, late at night, had trapped their hopeless victim in the middle. But this evening it was beautiful, festive, the discreet power of the ministries on one side of the river, the carousel and promenaders on the other.

  ‘Anything new today? Orders, I mean.’

  ‘Three from the Cotswolds,’ Claire said. ‘Two from Brighton. One from Dartmoor. Oh and that man from Habitat called again.’