‘That’s capitalism for you,’ Neil said. ‘Can’t mind its own business, can it?’
Straight away he wanted to take it back. At the same time he wanted to scream, I voted Conservative, I voted for Major. What are you really going to do?
Claire laughed nervously. Adam did a thing with his jaw, a kind of foodless, one-side-of-the-face grinding, which Neil had learned to recognise as a sign of irritation. The worst thing was that he was entirely himself with her.
Neil made an effort. ‘So how was the island?’
‘There were some lovely parts,’ Claire said. ‘Fishing villages, you know, mountains, volcanoes, when you got away from Playa. Have you ever been?’
‘No.’
She had a way of smiling — eyes widened, head slightly projected — that to Neil suggested some unmet expectation, a graceful disappointment, as if she had offered him a hint or cue that he had failed to take.
‘I didn’t see much of them myself,’ Adam said. ‘I was up all night most of the time — you know, filming in nightclubs, sometimes the hospital, you wouldn’t believe —’
‘All that sociology, I remember,’ Neil interrupted. ‘The country in the mirror and all that.’ Again the instant regret.
‘The next project should be more serious,’ Adam said. ‘They’re talking about Yugoslavia.’
Neil saw her squeeze Adam’s knee under the table. He wondered how his friend would have briefed her about him. He wondered what they would say about him later. He isn’t normally like that… No, he was sweet. The private lights-out communion. She would be in his life now, too.
He tried again, and for a while he kept it up. He talked to her about auction houses, the prospect of her working in one. Remote, Claire said. Near their table a group of patently underage boys were playing a quiz machine, one double the others’ size, like a bullock reared on superstrength hormones.
When she went to the ladies, Neil asked, ‘So what’s she like?’
‘What do you mean?’ Adam said. ‘You can see what she’s like.’
‘No, I mean… You know what I mean, Ads.’
‘Come on, Neil. Not here.’
‘Out of ten?’
‘Don’t. She’s coming back. She’ll be back any minute. I said, don’t.’
‘Fine, but we’ve always —’
‘Don’t.’
Adam felt betrayed. He wanted his friend to endorse his choice of Claire, but he also needed Neil to vindicate her choice of him. Neil was supposed to make him seem popular and dependable, and he was flunking. At the same time he had a vague sense that Neil was entitled to his sabotage, that he should submit himself to it.
Claire tussled Adam’s hair as she slid in next to him. ‘So how’s it going?’ Adam asked. ‘The job.’
‘Okay,’ Neil said. ‘Better than the shop, anyway.’
‘Claire, it’s — how would you describe it again?’
‘Media sales. Magazine publisher near Tower Bridge. Ad sales, you know. It’s a pretty cut-throat industry — the pay’s almost all commission, and the management keep raising the thresholds, you know, for the incentive scheme.’
Politely Claire asked, ‘What are your colleagues like?’
‘Well,’ Neil said, ‘to give you an idea, they’ve got this thing called the animal — it’s an ugly old cuddly toy, like a Muppet or something, totally filthy — and if you sell more space than anyone else that week you keep it on your desk till the Friday after. Everyone has to make gorilla noises when they pass you.’
Adam laughed. ‘What happened with that business thing, Philly? What was his name? Your friend.’
‘Bimal.’
‘Philly?’
‘Collins,’ Neil said, though it was a shame, almost, to let her in on it, the nickname bond, the quiddity of him and them, a pledge masquerading as humour.
‘Of course, Bimal. Have you decided?’
‘Turned him down,’ Neil said. ‘It’s a nice idea but I can’t see it working.’
Adam went to the bar. Just for a moment Neil thought there was a silent, eye-contact flicker between Claire and him, a fleeting sense of a bifurcating possibility, like those he thought he shared now and again with strangers coming down the escalators on the Tube as he rode up them. He noticed her belt, a wide leather strap with a fat metal buckle, an accessory that to him implied both chastity and availability. Valuable, locked — but look, here’s a way to open me. Probably he had imagined it, or it was a tease, part of some game with Adam or with herself in which he was only symbolically involved. They swapped mildly embarrassing anecdotes about Adam to fill the time — his lucklessness at the dog track in Walthamstow, his fondness for Dallas reruns — demonstrating their closeness to him by their licence to belittle him.
Adam distributed the drinks. ‘Did I tell you we’re going down for the weekend?’
‘What are we doing?’
‘What? No, not… I mean, Claire and me. To my parents’. I’m, you know, introducing them. Da na na naahhh’ — the cliffhanger opening of Beethoven’s fifth.
‘Congratulations,’ Neil said, turning towards the bar.
He had been to the house in Somerset, once, the previous summer. It was most of what he expected, a converted farmhouse with a dry stone wall, but the rest of the family had been away. The revered father in pink trousers whom he had glimpsed at the airport, the doting mother, the blond sister… Adam’s inaccessible past. Whenever Adam mentioned his childhood, his pets, his sister falling into fish ponds, their ice-cream calamities, sacrilegious outbursts at Midnight Mass — memories that, for him, seemed too abundant to cherish — Neil had an urge to tamper the records, doctor the photos, insert himself, somehow, into the Tayler mythology, a sort of reverse Stalinism, adding rather than subtracting.
‘Separate bedrooms,’ Claire said.
‘Naturally,’ Adam said. ‘Very proper.’
She had a slow, precious way of drinking, Neil noticed, tiny sips like a monarch wary of poisoning.
‘Harriet’s going to be down,’ Adam went on. ‘She’ll probably do her possessive act, you know, sitting on my lap, making me sing our special song from Lady and the Tramp.’ Neil had slept in Harriet’s room, under a quilt with her name stitched into it, her adolescent pin-ups still fixed to the pastel walls.
‘Don’t be such a bully,’ Claire said, slapping Adam’s forearm.
Their basic imbalance wasn’t money or jobs but people. Chaz and Archie and Claire and his eternal happy family: Adam had back-up. Neil had Brian, and Dan, who had visited only a handful of times since California. Once he came alone, went out for the evening with some mates who hadn’t left the neighbourhood, and rolled home late and drunk, rattling around the kitchen and slurping water straight from the tap as if he were seventeen again. Twice he brought his child with him (never its mother); on the first occasion Neil had cradled it, feeling more than he anticipated, the baby somehow seeming a time-travel charm through which they could all go back and try again. Then the child had shat, the force of the excretion blasting the helpless body off his lap, and he passed it back.