He didn’t believe Adam’s goodbye. They had a tacit but firm agreement, Neil thought, to be always in each other’s lives; it was much too late for either of them to rescind it.
With his free hand Neil retrieved the BlackBerry from his inside pocket to phone back. He dialled, but aborted the call almost instantly — before it rang, and, he hoped, before his number had flashed up on Adam’s screen. Better not to. Not today. One of them might say something worse. It was bad enough that he had counterattacked when he should have stuck to plain apology (Damn right you’re sorry). And that absurd Hail Mary joke about Wedding Crashers. Better to email.
He rolled and clicked with his thumb until the email template appeared (scientists of the future, Neil had thought, biologists or whatever, would wonder at the dramatic leap in thumb musculature made by Western man in the early twenty-first century). Dear Adam… Dear Ads… Adam… Mate… Ants… Adam, I’m sorry… Adam, I’m so sorry…
‘Who are you hiding from?’ Tony McGough called to him. ‘There’s gold in them thar hills.’
Tony put a heavy arm around Neil’s shoulders and rotated him to face the convocation of suits, shape-shifting yet cohesive like penguins huddling against the cold, individuals sometimes peeling off and scuttling along the group’s perimeter before burrowing back into the mass.
‘One of the Kumars is here,’ Tony said. ‘And a Levene, I think, or a capo from their office, anyway. Go get ’em, kimosabe.’
‘Just a second,’ Neil said, extending a finger upwards from the hand that held the BlackBerry. ‘Just give me a second.’
Tony was a workaholic. He and his two partners had left jobs in insurance and private equity to start their firm (none of them was called Rutland, they just thought the name sounded trustworthy). They had gathered their clients — including Farid, which was how Neil came to know them — in a remorseless, marriage-destroying campaign of insinuation and sycophancy at events like this one.
Still, as City bosses went, Tony was relatively humane. You could see it in his giveaway eyes, tender and melancholy, out of place somehow in his flabby, particoloured face, itself perched on a rectangular bouncer’s body.
‘Okay,’ Tony said, removing his arm. ‘See you in a minute, hotshot.’
‘Of course.’
Funny thing: growing up, Neil had always thought that whatever he managed to do or achieve, he would have to do and achieve on his own, not counting on favours or connections and never enjoying any. Yet he had been helped, by Bimal and Farid and now by Tony, each propelling him upwards through London postcodes and income-tax brackets, before passing him on to his next benefactor. (Neil hadn’t expected a goodbye, but on his penultimate day in Hanover Square he turned round at his desk and Farid was standing there; he raised an arm and caressed Neil’s cheek with his knuckles, up and down once, as if tracing the line of a scar.)
Neil crouched to put his glass on the carpet and turned towards the wall to type. Adam, I’m sorry for what happened… I’m truly sorry for what nearly happened… It was my fault, not Claire’s… I didn’t mean what I said.
Or: I guess the dinner’s off.
Better not. Beware the perils of email, Neil urged himself: jokes that might be missed, brevity received as rudeness, possibly, in this case, an apology that would seem insufficiently contrite, or, conversely, to be admitting more than he intended to. All these new ways to communicate, digital guarantees against losing each other, which were mostly new opportunities for misunderstanding. Everyone was inescapable, these days, but in place of the old jeopardy you found yourself clutching at holograms.
Probably best just to write, Adam, I’ll call you tomorrow. Or, Let’s talk tomorrow. Although that might seem curt and non-consensual.
Neil accidentally kicked over the half-drunk wine glass at his feet. He turned back towards the suits and plucked another from a passing tray. Best of all, maybe, would be to say and write nothing for a few days. Let his friend cool off. Let him and Claire patch things up.
He blamed the old woman (Priscilla?), with her cats and her orange-powdered mole. If she hadn’t barged in, he might have left. If: If Eric hadn’t turned in early that night. If the man who owned the truck had been out. If the girl in the sarong (she was the blonde, wasn’t she?) hadn’t lingered in the hostel yard. Or if Adam hadn’t. All these random collisions, pinballing molecules. In the end you couldn’t say where anything started, which was the main action of your life and what the interference.
Neil sipped. He gulped.
In any case, was it really only he who ought to apologise? He was in the wrong, he acknowledged that. Doubly wrong: he shouldn’t have said the things he did. But some of what he said had been accurate, and not just about Adam’s deceit: his tone, the superciliousness that had grated from the beginning, right back to Las Vegas, the condescension that incited Neil in Yosemite, which he thought Adam had outgrown, but which in reality he had merely disguised. I have always encouraged you… I have never criticised you.
Who the fuck did he think he was? Neil didn’t owe Adam anything. Morally speaking, they were quits, he reckoned, taking into account what happened in California. Quits at the least. In any case, for years Adam had been a kind of succubus, taking out of Neil more than he put back. Neil could have managed everything he had done without Adam. He could manage the future without him, if he must or if he chose to.
So: We’re quits, Ants. Fuck you.
Tony was coming towards him with the Levene brothers’ man. Neil replaced the BlackBerry in his pocket, cocked his head back and sluiced the last of the wine down his throat. He stepped forward for the handshake. ‘Jonny,’ he said. ‘Good to see you.’
Neil, Tony and the man clinked glasses. ‘Bottoms up,’ Neil heard himself say.
When it was too late, or seemed to be, he reflected that his mood that evening — wrigglingly defensive, angrily ashamed — had been a hypocritical luxury. He had luxuriated in his pique because he didn’t think the estrangement was real. His confidence in the friendship obscured its demise. In the morning Neil sent a secretary from the office to collect his car.
Adam slammed the front door again. He didn’t care if he woke the kids; he didn’t think Claire would reproach him. As he started up the stairs, his phone rang. He expected Neil, but it was Nick, doubtless wanting to impart some new, baroque twist in the illegal-immigrant debacle — less than a day old, but already feeling prehistoric — or some fresh demand for unobtainable statistics, the wrong, inconsequential part of Adam’s life interrupting his private crisis.
He switched Nick off. He pounded up the stairs to the bedroom and turned on the light.
Claire was in bed but awake. Adam avoided her eyes and didn’t speak. He rolled the chair to the wardrobe and stood on it to reach the upper cupboard, surfing the swivels as he opened the doors. Forgotten objects fell or were thrown out as he rummaged. Maternity clothes; worn-out but hoarded shoes; a map of Barcelona from a pre-parenthood weekend break, sentimentally retained as if it might help them chart a path back in time; a university graduation certificate; the box for a digital camera. Why had they never sifted this stuff?