it, Mark. If he could do it to Mum when they were married, if he could to it to us when we were kids, what’s to stop him doing it now?’
‘Thanks,’ Mark said, his face tightening. ‘You think I’m that much of a mug?’
Ben didn’t answer. He started walking towards the metal fence that ran along the western edge of the square. He had to move between parked cars.
‘You’ve got him all wrong,’ Mark said, following behind. ‘He’s not some puppet-master pulling the strings. Don’t you think people change? Don’t you think it’s possible that he might want to say sorry?’
Ben stopped and turned.
‘Has he said sorry to you?’
Mark could not give the answer he needed to without lying.
‘That’s not his style,’ he said, fudging it. They were now standing together on the pavement. ‘Dad just wants to make his peace. It’s that simple.’
‘Well, maybe he does,’ Ben conceded. ‘Maybe he does. And he can make it somewhere else.’
There were lights on in several of the houses on Edwardes Square, oil paintings and chintz and Peter Sissons reading the news. Ben saw a man enter a yellow-wallpapered drawing room wearing bottle-green corduroy trousers and a bright red sweater. The man was carrying a tray of food and talking to someone in another room.
‘You don’t believe that,’ Mark said.
‘Don’t I?’ Ben stared hard into his eyes. ‘He’s doing what I always thought he’d do. Crawling back, mid-life crisis, wanting us both to pat him on the head and tell him everything’s OK. Well, it’s not OK. He doesn’t meet me, he doesn’t meet Alice. End of story.’
‘Is that how she feels?’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Ben turned again. ‘You two seem to be very close.’
‘I don’t need to ask her.’ Mark was angry now. He couldn’t keep it in. ‘She knows what I know. She knows what you should know if you weren’t so fucking pig-headed. She knows that you’re fascinated by Dad. She knows that you can’t wait to meet him.’
Until that moment, Ben had thought that he was in control, bending Mark to his will. But this last remark caught him off guard. He ran through every one of his recent conversations with Alice, every argument, every lie, every quiet chat in the house, but he could not recall even hinting at what Mark had just suggested.
‘Is that what she told you?’ he asked.
‘She doesn’t need to tell me.’
Ben frowned.
‘Look,’ Mark said. ‘Don’t you even want to know what he looks like? How his character is different from yours? Don’t you want to know if he’s boring or vain or funny or rich? Doesn’t any of that interest you? Don’t you wonder what sort of a person he is, the hidden man?’
‘We have nothing in common,’ Ben said, but the statement lacked conviction. He blew a column of smoke at the railings. ‘Anyway, I’m not interested in any of that at all.’
But Mark was on to him.
‘I don’t buy it. You have nothing but interest in that. Listen, if you turn around now and agree to meet him, Alice is not going to think badly of you. Your friends won’t think you’ve sold out. I won’t think you’ve sold out.’ Mark touched his chest. ‘Is that all that’s stopping you? What other people might think?’
Ben was stunned by how well they both knew him. He thought that he had concealed his feelings, maintained a privacy, but his thoughts had been preempted. It was as if he was listening to his entire personality being pulled inside-out. He managed to say ‘No’, but the word was meaningless. Mark was whispering.
‘And it’s not disloyal to Mum. I know that’s always been on your conscience, but she wanted us to be happy.’
‘Does Alice think I’m stubborn?’ It was a question to which Ben already knew the answer. Somebody walked past them, but he did not look up. ‘Does Alice think I’m too proud to face facts, that I’m stuck in the past?’
‘No.’
‘And what about you?’
‘Ben, it doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. If you feel the way you feel, then it sounds like we’re all wasting our time. It sounds like there’s nothing more to be said.’
Ben waited. He was ready now. It was the right moment. He knew that Mark was being shrewd and not forcing the issue.
‘Nobody should make you do something that you don’t want to do,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day, just because I’ve started seeing Dad doesn’t mean that you should too.’
‘I know that…’
‘But I think it would do you good to meet him. I think it’s something that you need to do. Even if it’s just to let off steam, to have it out with him. That’s why we set this thing up tonight, this disastrous fucking drinkin this disastrous fucking boozer.’ Mark nodded his head in the direction of the pub. ‘But to know that he’s here in London and not do anything about that is just going to eat away at you. It’s bad for you, it’s bad for me and it’s bad for your marriage.’
And, finally, he had said enough. For a moment Ben allowed the silence of the square to envelop them, then he extinguished his cigarette on the black painted spike of a gate.
‘I’m right, you know,’ Mark said.
‘I know you are.’
‘So you’ll do it?’
Ben stared, taking his time.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
14
There was something almost mundane about the hour that preceded their reunion. Ben simply showered, put on a clean shirt and a suit, placed a tie in one of the pockets of his jacket and drank a single gulp of vodka from a bottle of Stolichnaya he kept in the fridge. The spirit burned in his throat, spreading like linctus across his chest. Then he walked outside on to Elgin Crescent and began looking around for a cab.
It was a quarter to eight on a Thursday night. Alice was still at work, Mark already back in Moscow having acted as the intermediary in setting up the reunion. Ben found a taxi on Ladbroke Grove and settled into the backseat, wearily informed by the driver that pre-Christmas traffic had jammed up throughout London and that it might take as much as an hour to reach the Savoy. Ben was already late and wondered how long his father would wait before giving up and going home. Twenty minutes? Half an hour? What would be an appropriate span of time for a man who had not seen his son in twenty-five years? At eight thirty, still five hundred metres short on the Strand, Ben decided to walk and paid off the driver with a twenty-pound note. He resented the cost of the journey.
A small group of European tourists wearing brand-new Burberry raincoats were clustered in the art deco forecourt of the Savoy: tanned men with immaculately coiffed hair, their wives balanced precariously on high-heeled shoes. A doorman dressed in full morning suit scoped Ben briefly, saw that he looked respectable, and stepped aside to allow him through the revolving doors.
Polished wood panelling. Squares of black and white stone set into the floor like a chessboard. The lobby resembled the set of some pre-war costume drama. Sheer nervous momentum carried Ben through the lobby, past whispering guests on sofas and a pretty receptionist who caught his eye. He found himself heading towards the source of some music, piano notes played lightly on the black keys, coming through a wide drawing-room area packed with tables and chairs. Everything to Ben’s eyes looked green and peach: the flecked, avocado-coloured carpet, the Doric-order columns finished in tangerine marble. More men in morning coats were moving soundlessly around the room, collecting trays of empty cups and spreading linen cloths reverently across tables. The white-tied pianist was playing on a raised platform at the centre of the room. Ben thought that he recognized ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’, but the melody was lost, chopped up into shapeless bursts of modern jazz.
Ahead of him, behind a glass partition, he could see people seated for dinner in the restaurant. Some of the
