The second man stood next to the girl, grinning. The first man raised his camera.
‘Hey,’ Adam shouted. ‘Non.’ He shooed them away with the back of his hands, as you might a wasp or a stray dog.
The girl sat up and saw the three of them. She tried to shield her breasts with a forearm as she rushed into a T-shirt, gathered her belongings and stalked up the beach towards the trees, one foot stumbling in the sand as she passed the second stranger. Adam wanted to shout after her that he was trying to help, but his schoolboy French deserted him, she was gone too quickly, tripping again on the root of a pine tree but keeping going, escaping, this time, into the shadows.
The two men drew together and conferred, hands cupped to their mouths like conspiring tennis partners. They were younger than him, with the pointlessly bulbous muscles of gym enthusiasts, the wirier of the two, the man with the camera, somehow the more concerning.
Adam stood his ground, bluffing, wondering whether he had been rash to intervene. The comatose pensioners and the bat-and-ball boys would be no help. He thought of the wasteful casualties of nightclub altercations and road rage incidents that he occasionally read about. He was grateful for his sunglasses, which masked the fear that must be glowing in his eyes. He held the wiry man’s gaze.
They couldn’t read him, or they were bluffing themselves. They scowled, the wiry one spat on the sand, and they walked slowly away in the other direction.
Adam exhaled. He looked towards the old people for acknowledgement or approbation but they hadn’t stirred.
He turned to rejoin his family, scrambling back across the rocks, thinking of Ruby yelling ‘Higher!’, of she and Harry swimming back to Claire on the shore. He thought of the girl on the beach in Tenerife, struggling with her towel beneath the yellow parasols, he and the cameraman watching through the viewfinder. He thought of the girl by the lake in Yosemite, her head buried in the water as she swam, how she slicked back her hair and grinned. Two men were watching her, and one of them was him.
They were eating ice creams at the café when he got back. The wind had picked up; Claire was wearing a sarong. She gestured that it was time to go, thumb pointing back over her shoulder towards the car park, as in an old disco move.
They packed up their things and made for the hire car. Adam drove them out through the forest and across the farmland beyond. They passed war memorials, a sacked castle, a place where, so Claire’s guide book informed them, heretics had once been burned at the stake. They were safaris of pain, these holidays in gory old Europe. So much cleaned-up blood and forgotten loss.
Adam still wondered about her. Not every day, nor even each week, but she would reappear at intervals, reliably incessant, and he was almost glad, sometimes, when she did. The memory of her had become a proof of who he was, a continuity between his forty-year-old incarnation and his younger self. Or, rather, she was a memory of a memory, since Adam understood that, after this much time, a person could only be an idea, as perhaps she always had been. He thought of her father, too, sometimes. You do your best, Eric had lamented, you think you’re doing right, and Adam saw that he, at least, had tried to.
Of course he wished it hadn’t happened. He wished he had blown the whistle that night (My girl. You believe it?), that there had been no reason to excoriate him in the morning. Not speaking up was the most reprehensible action, or inaction, of his life. All the same, the obsession had eased. The whole episode was regrettable, horrible even, but also ancient and, like those medieval atrocities, almost impersonal, another Adam as well as a bygone Rose. He couldn’t have known then what he understood now, about daughters and about permanence.
The guilt he still felt had a new focus. In the end, Adam reminded himself as he drove from the lake to the restaurant, It wasn’t me. It wasn’t him who had taken the girl into the tent that night. That fact was a partial mitigation, but also, now that he finally came to accept it, a kind of reproach.
It wasn’t Adam. It wasn’t Rose. It was Neil.
More than once, in the months immediately after their quarrel, Adam had considered contacting Neil, to let him know he had been right after alclass="underline" his text had been prescient, no harm had been done, not to Adam and Claire at any rate. His email would be impersonal, caustic. If Neil replied, Adam would delete the message without reading it.
When, a year later, abstruse catastrophe beckoned — when everything the experts guaranteed would never happen, bankruptcies and bail-outs and nationalisations, happened the next day; when Adam’s securocrat acquaintances were whispering about plans to impose martial law if the cash machines ran dry — he thought of Neil anew. Dodgily spliced investments, runaway derivatives, Farid’s ramshackle property deals: Neil was implicated in everything that had caused the debacle. Neil and his money.
Adam called up the Rutland Partners website, hoping to find that the firm had gone to the wall, or at least was somersaulting towards the brickwork, a fate that would be adumbrated in some apologetic, lawyerly holding statement. Instead he read a screed of gobbledegook about how the fund had diversified its assets to minimise downside risk. He’s got away with it, Adam thought. He’s got away with it again. When his job at the consultancy faltered he blamed Neil for instigating the move. Neil had never understood the public-service ethos, never even tried. Perhaps he had known that Adam would come unstuck.
But he couldn’t keep it up, and before long he found himself regretting his anathemas. He had been the man with the luck, Adam knew. Neil wasn’t one of those congenital banking types whom he had met at university and sometimes ran into now, the type who wore those City-boy felt-collared overcoats, who had been destined for riches since their perfunctory conception in some stockbroker-belt bedroom. Adam had the drive, too, or so it had seemed in the beginning. Neil had been powered by a kind of indifference, which the world had rewarded as some men covet aloof women. He had done it all himself.
Later Adam would look again at the Rutland Partners website, but for clues to Neil’s progress rather than evidence of his downfall; now and again he would Google him. For the most part he was able to prevent himself searching for anyone else. He fought off the impulse to contact Rose until it almost abated.
Adam still thought of Neil as dead. But after a couple of years he was no longer the shameful dead, an executed traitor or bubonic corpse, but dead in the manner of a rash, lamented duellist. That was one of the dead’s advantages, Adam saw: you could choose which version of them to remember, as an obituarist was free to choose a photo from his subject’s youth. Neil dragging him out of the ocean in San Diego. Neil with Harry’s green shit on his coat.
As for the Claire thing, their nothing: his sense of scale had changed. His world was smaller, what was closest to him mattered most, and who, and so, in a way, they were quits. Rose was a contest and an idea, but Neil was his friend, had already been his friend that night in Yosemite. It made no difference that they had only known each other a few weeks. That wasn’t how you measured obligation. Adam already owed Neil that night, and he had defaulted. Joining him in the encirclement at the tent the next morning had been a bluff, Adam acknowledged to himself: he had asserted his innocence by exposing himself to judgement, self-interest and loyalty jumbled up.
If Neil were to be resurrected — if he were to get in touch — Adam might consider forgiving him. They would have to discuss it, he and Claire. But he would definitely consider it. That is, if Neil would consider it, too.