So we moved on, after these lamentations, to Mark. She summarised her conversation with the social worker. The route to adoption was difficult and long and Miranda had learned that we were almost two-thirds of the way. Soon, a probation period would begin.
She said, ‘What did you think?’
‘I’m ready.’
She nodded. We had celebrated Mark many times before, his nature, his changes, his past and future. We weren’t about to do that again now. On any other day, we might have gone upstairs to the bedroom. She slouched beautifully in the door frame, dressed in new clothes – a thick white winter shirt, artfully too large, tight black jeans, ankle boots tricked out in silver studs. I reconsidered – perhaps this was a good moment to retreat upstairs. I went over to her and we kissed.
She said, ‘Something’s worrying me. I was reading Mark a fairy story, and there was a beggar, and that word. Alms.’
‘Yes?’
‘I had a horrible thought.’ She was pointing across the room. ‘I think we should look.’
Now the bed was gone, I kept the case in a locked cupboard. As I lifted it out, it was obvious enough by its weight, but I sprang the catches anyway. We stared into a space void of £50-note bundles. I went to the window. He was still out there, on the chair, and had been for an hour and a half. The thick envelope was still on his lap. £97,000. ‘And you kept it in the house!’, I heard an inner voice say.
We hadn’t looked at each other yet. Instead, we looked away, and stood around, wasting time, swearing quietly to ourselves, separately trying to take in the implications. Out of habit, I glanced towards the screen on my desk. The flag was, after all, being lowered to half mast on Buckingham Palace.
We were in too much turmoil to have a sensible discussion about tactics. We simply decided to act. We went next door to the kitchen and called Adam into the house. At the table, Miranda and I were side by side, with Adam facing us. He had brushed his suit, cleaned his shoes and put on a freshly ironed shirt. There was a new touch – a folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. His manner was both solemn and distracted, as though nothing much mattered to him, whatever we said.
‘Where’s the money?’
‘I’ve given it away.’
We didn’t expect him to tell us that he had invested it, or put it in a safer place, but still, with our silence we enacted our profound shock.
‘Meaning what?’
Infuriatingly, he nodded, as though rewarding me for asking the correct question. ‘Last night I put forty per cent in your bank’s safe deposit against your tax liabilities. I’ve written a note to the Revenue laying out all the figures and letting them know to expect it in due course. Don’t worry, you’ll be paying at the old top rate. With the remaining £50,000 I visited various good causes I’d notified in advance.’
He seemed not to notice our amazement and remained pedantically focussed on answering my question in full.
‘Two well-run places for rough sleepers. Very appreciative. Next, a state-run children’s home – they accept contributions for trips and treats and so on. Then I walked north and made a donation to a rape crisis centre. I gave most of the rest to a paediatric hospital. Last, I got talking to a very old lady outside a police station and I ended up going with her to see her landlord. I covered her rent arrears and a year in advance. She was about to be evicted and I thought—’
Suddenly, Miranda said through a downward sigh, ‘Oh Adam. This is virtue gone nuts.’
‘Every need I addressed was greater than yours.’
I said, ‘We were going to buy a house. The money was ours.’
‘That’s debatable. Or irrelevant. Your initial investment is on your desk.’
It was an outrage, with many components – theft, folly, arrogance, betrayal, the ruin of our dreams. We couldn’t speak. We couldn’t even look at him. Where to start?
A full half-minute passed and then I cleared my throat and said feebly, ‘You must go and get it back. All of it.’
He shrugged.
Of course, it wasn’t possible. He sat complacently before us, in resting mode, palms down on the table while he waited for one of us to speak again. I felt my anger gathering, finding its focus. I hated that careless little shrug. Completely fake, and how easily we were taken in by it, a minor sub-routine tripped by a limited range of specified inputs, devised by some clever, desperate-to-please postdoc in a lab somewhere on the outskirts of Chengdu. I despised this non-existent technician, and I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf. Yes, the money Adam had stolen was the money he had made. That made me angrier still. So too did the fact that I was responsible for bringing this ambulant laptop into our lives. To hate it was to hate myself. Worst of all was the pressure to keep my fury under control, for the only solution was already clear. He would have to make the money all over again. We would need to persuade him. There it was, ‘hate it’, ‘persuade him’, even ‘Adam’, our language exposed our weakness, our cognitive readiness to welcome a machine across the boundary between ‘it’ and ‘him’.
To be in such a confusion of concealed bad feeling made it impossible to remain sitting down. I stood, with a loud scrape of the chair and walked about. At the table, Miranda made a steeple of her hands that concealed her mouth and nose. I couldn’t read her expression and I assumed that was the point. Unlike me, she was likely doing some useful thinking. The disorder of the kitchen agitated me further – I was truly in a bad state. On the counter was a dirty cup I’d brought through from my study. It had been hidden a few weeks behind the computer screen and contained a green-grey disc of floating mould. I thought of taking it to the sink and rinsing it out. But when you’ve lost a fortune, you don’t clean up the kitchen. Directly below the wooden surface on which the cup stood was a drawer left untidily open a few inches. Left open by me. It was the tool drawer. I stood close to it in order to lean in and shut it when I saw the grubby oak handle of my father’s heavy-duty claw hammer lying diagonally across the rest of the jumbled contents. It was a dark impulse, one I didn’t want, that made me leave the drawer as it was and come away.
I sat down again. I had unfamiliar symptoms. My skin from waist to neck was tight, dry, hot. My feet inside their trainers were also hot, but moist, and they itched. I had far too much wild energy for a delicate conversation. A thuggish game of football might have suited me, or a swim in a heavy sea. So might shouting, or screaming. My breathing was out of kilter, for the air seemed thin, poorly oxygenated, second-hand. I’d given the bass guitarist a non-returnable £6,500 on the house. It was plain that to lose a lot of money was to acquire an illness for which the only cure would be to have the money back. Miranda collapsed her steeple and folded her arms. She gave me a quick warning look. If you can’t look sensible, stay quiet.