He wouldn’t, Adam was certain. They had left it too long. The job was his memento of Neil, a debt that at first had rankled but was now more poignant than galling. He wasn’t even sure whether Neil knew he had accepted it.
They stopped for an early dinner. Claire was still wearing her sunglasses, but he could tell that she was watching him, checking the temperature of his thoughts, while the children threw a ball for a stranger’s dog in the square. Adam smiled to indicate that he was with her. Against her half-hearted objections he bought them preposterous baseball caps with 3-D wild boars, the emblems of the region, lolling on the visors.
On the way home the four of them sang a round, Ruby struggling with her cues but laughing at herself with the rest of them, Adam watching her, almost surreptitiously, in the rearview mirror. These were their headline memories, Adam realised, the memories his children would one day share with lovers and spouses, the moments that would come back to them, arbitrarily, as adults, in a meeting or on a train, their equivalents of his boyhood’s fishpond and ice-cream catastrophes. The weight of that struck him afresh as he drove them back.
In bed he told Claire about the topless girl by the lake. She said, ‘My hero,’ and kissed him on the shoulder.
There was a pond behind the cottage, so pretty that, on the afternoon they arrived, Claire said the view belonged in a film, but overrun with lascivious frogs. That night Adam feared their croaking would keep him awake, but his wife put her arm around him and he fell asleep.
2011
With his back to the kitchen Dan couldn’t tell that Neil was watching him as he made the coffee. He was sitting at the bamboo bar, standing up, sitting down again, standing, scratching, apparently unsure how formal his visit was, how comfortable or uncomfortable he felt, to what extent he enjoyed the status of a brother and how far he came as a stranger.
As Neil approached with the tray Dan raised one buttock from his bar stool and let out a rolling fart. He looked around, saw Neil, and grinned, pretending the salutation had been intentional.
‘Old time’s sake,’ he said. Neil forced a smile.
Their accents had diverged with their lives. Both started from a clipped north London classlessness, but Neil’s voice had migrated moneywards, assimilating the rounded, self-indulgent vowels of his ritzier acquaintances. He was half-ashamed of his vocal suggestibility. Dan seemed to have more or less given up on consonants (‘’ol ’imes ’ake’).
Neil put the tray on the bar and sat down.
‘What hospital is he in?’
‘Hampshire… You know, North Hampshire.’
‘Listen, ask the doctor where’s best for his… for what he’s got. Actually, tell me his name, could you? I’ll ask him, if that’s okay.’
‘All right, Neil, but…’
‘I’ll pay for it. Forget it, Dan. Don’t worry about it. What else did he say? The doc.’
‘He said — what was it again? — he said there was “grounds for optimism”, that’s what he called it, but that, you know, we had to be realistic.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘I don’t know, Neil. I don’t.’
Dan peered into his coffee but didn’t drink any. His skin seemed jaundiced; his eyes were Bassett-hound ringed; his teeth were so discoloured as to be indistinguishable from the gums, so that earlier, when Neil was letting him in, he had doubletaked to confirm that they were there. But Dan was still good-looking, Neil thought, in a dissolute, half-ruined way. Better looking than Neil. He used his left arm sparingly, most of the time letting it hang by his side. Building accident, he had said, winking, at once disguising and intending to advertise some more rakish explanation, though Neil couldn’t imagine what it might be.
When Dan told him, Neil had been furious beyond words. Probably his rage was unjust; the trouble was, Dan was the only sublunary party available for his blame. Except for Neil himself: Sam’s bruises and the breathlessness and his squirming.
‘Did he say — did the doctor say — if you had — if we had…’
‘He says in the — what do you call it? — the chronic — right — the chronic period, it’s hard to spot. Always is, he says, the symptoms are so, like, normal. Specially when it’s so slow. All right?’
Dan’s face reddened and his eyes popped, as if he were holding his breath, or straining to take a dump. After a few seconds his colour and features settled again. He opened his mouth to say something else but closed it without speaking. When it came down to it, Dan was Sam’s father, and he loved the boy after his fashion. He had his anger, too.
‘All right. Is Stacy with him?’
‘You know Stacy,’ Dan said.
Neil tried to smile an assent, although in fact he didn’t know Stacy, had never met her, not counting one occasion on which he had waved at a woman whom he presumed was Stacy through the window of a car that he likewise (perhaps naively) assumed was Dan’s, the time they had come to pick up Sam in London the previous year. Neil had no interest in knowing Stacy. He let it go. ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ he said.
Dan picked up his cooling coffee and put it down again with a noisy clack. Neil wanted him to leave now. He glanced at his watch, then regretted it.
‘This euro thing,’ Dan said. ‘It hurting you?’
Neil wasn’t sure where to begin and didn’t much want to. But he saw that Dan was trying. He had a momentary, compassionate intuition of how hard this must be for him, all of it.
‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Depends which way you bet. It’s been bad for some people but okay for us. The money’s got to go somewhere, you just have to make sure you get there first.’
‘Yeah,’ Dan said. ‘Right.’ He looked down at the bar. ‘This antique, then?’ He rapped his knuckles on the Formica surface.
The front door opened. Roxanna wheeled the buggy in, closing the door fastidiously, hoping Leila might sleep for another half an hour. Neil could hear her being quiet — the effortful, tiptoeing footfalls and delicate clinks as keys and bags were shed.
She saw Dan first, straight away looking behind her at the closed door as if assessing her flight chances. Then she saw Neil.
‘Just gone off,’ she stage-whispered.
‘This her?’ Dan said. ‘This must be her.’
He sank off the stool and headed for the buggy. Neil experienced a stab of limbic horror at the prospect of Dan touching his child, his rough hands on her flawless skin, the contamination. One of his arms twitched in Dan’s direction but he reined it back.
‘She’s just gone —’
‘Let him,’ Neil said, in a tone so unfamiliar that Roxanna acquiesced and stared, mouth half-open.
Dan unbuckled the girl using his better arm, wincing slightly as he lifted her out of the buggy with both. She was asleep when he nestled her head in the crook of his elbow but opened her eyes when he stroked her cheek. She peered up at his unfamiliar, ragged face, but didn’t cry.
‘Da-da,’ she said.
Neil grimaced.
‘Beautiful girl,’ Dan said. ‘Beautiful.’
‘I should change her,’ Roxanna said.
Dan began a high-pitched, whiny hum, lullaby with a hint of love song. It failed to cohere into a tune and trailed off after a dozen notes. ‘Beautiful like her mum,’ he added.
He offered Roxanna a yellow smile, a tiny, self-parodic flashback to flirty, alpha, mighty Dan. Dan slurping water from the tap. Dan letting Tezza hide in the closet (or perhaps it was the other way around, Neil was no longer certain). Roxanna looked at the floor.
‘More,’ said Leila.