‘It’s Adam. And Claire’s already told me.’
‘What has she told you?’
Adam resisted saying, She’s told me everything. Instead he said, ‘She told me about… the sofa.’
Silence. Odd to be sitting in his car with his phone pressed to his ear, neither speaking nor spoken to. Embarrassing, somehow.
‘Christ, Ad, nothing happened. Ad? Nothing happened.’
‘Adam.’
‘Fine, Adam.’
‘No harm done?’
Another silence. To his own ear Adam’s voice sounded caustic and distorted, the timbre more synthetic than human. He waited for the apology.
Neil said, ‘We were rehearsing. We’re doing a skit for your birthday. Casino Royale. No, Wedding Crashers. We’re doing a scene from Wedding Crashers and we were rehearsing. Artistic licence. Adam?’
Adam smiled. He liked the lie. He had always enjoyed their lies, all the way back to San Diego. We’re hairdressers. We’re masseurs. He’s a set-designer. The two of them versus. This was a classy gambit, he gave Neil that. A lie about coming on to his wife that was also, in their private code, an expression of loyalty.
A fly buzzed against the window. Adam reached over, turned the key in the ignition, and opened the window to let it out.
‘Adam?’
The nicknames and the nostalgic humour: they were like the practised advances an old lover might make when she tries to re-seduce you, ingratiating with their echoes of everything you and the lover once had together, and once were.
‘Don’t, Neil. This isn’t… just don’t.’
‘Look, it was just a silly moment, really. Three glasses of wine in a hurry. I’m sorry, okay?’
Damn right you’re sorry.
Neil should have opened with that, Adam thought. He said, ‘No, it isn’t okay. I mean, what have I… I’ve always been… there for you, haven’t I? Haven’t I? I’ve always… encouraged you. Haven’t I? I’ve never… I’ve never… I can’t understand how you could do this to me,’ he lied.
‘You’ve never what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What, Adam? What have you never? Looked down on me because I hadn’t heard of Dante, is that it? Judged me for my horrid money-grubbing job? Yeah,’ Neil said, ‘you’ve always been very charitable, milord, I’m ever so grateful.’
‘Is that it, then? Is that why?’
‘No,’ Neil said. ‘No. Fuck’s sake.’
‘What then?’
‘Look… never mind.’
One of them had to say it: ‘California?’
Adam heard Neil’s exhalation, long and sad.
‘You said that was nothing.’
‘It isn’t like that — it doesn’t go in a straight line. You know why it happened, I’m sure you do. I don’t even mean what her dad told you about her that night. It wasn’t only that. Even apart from that it happened because of us. And then you couldn’t drop it, could you? I mean, you had to keep bringing it up. Finding her again, going on about contacting her, all that bollocks about what he said to you in the morning. What did you want me to do, kill myself? Turn myself in?’
Rape, thought Adam. He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘And then when you told me — to be honest, I wouldn’t say you were sorry, not as sorry as you should have been.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Neil, I was insanely sorry — I was paralytic with it.’
‘I mean, sorry for me. You were sorry for her and for yourself. Very sorry, sure. And for Ruby. Jesus. Did you ever think, how was I supposed to feel, all that guilt pouring out of you, when all the time I was the one who…’
‘You already knew she was… You already knew that. You said it was nothing.’
‘Yeah, well, I changed my mind. It isn’t nothing, okay? You win. I regret it, Adam, okay? If I could undo it, I would. If there was anything I could do, I would.’
‘But whenever I —’
‘I said, I’m sorry about it. I’m fucking sorry, I’m ashamed. Understand?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you felt like this?’
‘I just… I couldn’t, Adam. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What do you… I was scared, Neil. All right? I was scared.’
They were quiet again. A man in sunglasses, jacket slung over his shoulder, walked past Adam’s car, talking on his phone. Adam had composed messages to the girl, revising and perfecting them, but he hadn’t sent one, at least, not yet.
‘So that’s it, is it?’ he continued. ‘That’s why you’ve done this? All of a sudden you regret what happened fifteen years ago, and to make amends you try it on with Claire?’
‘I didn’t… Look, you asked me and I’m trying to explain, that’s all. It was mostly the booze, we got carried away.’
Rape, Adam thought. He said, ‘Maybe we should have said goodbye at the airport. I’ve often wondered about that. That could have been the end of it.’
‘Yeah,’ Neil countered, ‘well, I sometimes think, if that old man hadn’t been at home, the guy with the car… Or if you hadn’t asked me that night on the beach… We could have left it in San Diego, couldn’t we? Nice little one-night stand. We would never have met her.’
Strangers were laughing in the background at Neil’s end. The renunciations hung on the line between them.
‘Look,’ Neil finally went on, ‘can we get together tomorrow to talk about this properly? After work?’
‘Sorry to have distracted you.’
‘No, I just mean it would be better to talk in person.’
‘No,’ Adam said. ‘Not tomorrow.’ And then he said, ‘I don’t think I ever want to see you again.’
Adam looked out through the windscreen. There ought to be witnesses or an audience for this. But there was only, on the opposite pavement, a woman in a burqa pushing a buggy. She’s trying to get it to sleep, Adam thought reflexively.
‘Don’t be silly. Don’t say that. Ad?’
Even to Adam the threat seemed safely theatrical, free, an ultimatum he would never be called upon to enact. More a rhetorical flourish than an irrevocable event. Somebody will say something, he thought. Somebody will do something to stop this.
‘Goodbye, Neil,’ his voice said.
‘What? Ad —’
He heard Neil say something else as he lowered the phone from his ear, but the words were too quiet to decipher. He pressed the button and looked at the screen. The call’s duration was 6:23. He held the phone in both hands, expecting it to ring again. But it didn’t.
He reopened his electronic address book and scrolled down to Neil. Are you sure you want to delete this number?
Was he sure? To purge Neil like this might be tantamount to killing him, in Adam’s life anyway. To kill Neil would be a kind of self-mutilation or partial suicide. So much of his last decade and a half were stored in Neil, shameful times and halcyon. Without his friend as his repository and witness, part of Adam’s past — part of him — would perish, too.
He pressed Yes I want to delete Neil. He felt a queer kind of lightness or liberation. I will never see Neil again, he thought. Neil is dying, even though he is still alive. He will be dead and alive at the same time.
Adam stepped out of the car, closed the door gently and locked it with his key.
Neil took another glass of wine from a waistcoated attendant and drank half of it in one unprofessional gulp. He didn’t believe this. Not that Claire had told Adam, nor that Adam was livid: he believed all that. They had been busted by his drunk-texting, but she might anyway have felt guilty enough to confess. Splashing his face in the bathroom in his cavernous flat, he had thought, You idiot, Neil. You cunt. You could have left — twice — easily. How could you even have thought about her that way, let alone… He came out again to this deathly reception, networking and tax relief dressed up as benevolence, to avoid confronting his sinful self any further.