‘Yeah.’
‘It was just a present, a way of showing him…’
He heard Ben sigh deeply, then the noise of passengers going into the station.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Look, don’t worry. It’s not important. I just needed to talkto you. I think I would have walked out whatever.’
‘What happened?’ Mark asked again.
‘Nothing. Everything. He was confident, tricky. I never felt comfortable. So I got upset, started asking awkward questions, putting him on the spot. I don’t know why I did it, Mark. I never felt comfortable letting Mum down.’
‘Sure. Sure.’
‘It was like I was just looking for an excuse to lose my temper. You know how I can do that?’
‘I know how you can do that,’ Mark said softly.
‘I mean, I’m not looking for a fight, but sometimes…’
‘I know. I know.’
Ben stopped talking. He was dimly aware of the piss and grime of Charing Cross Station. He fed the last of his coins into the pay phone and said, ‘Look, I’m almost out of money. How’s Moscow?’
‘Don’t worry about Moscow.’ ‘Just go home. Is Alice there? We can talk from your house.’
‘No. In the morning.’ A woman walked past Ben with snow on the shoulders of her coat. ‘Call me when we both know what we’re saying. It sounds like you were asleep anyway. I didn’t mean to wake you up.’
Mark rolled his neck until it clicked.
‘You didn’t wake me up,’ he said. ‘I was just lying here. It’s been a long day. Look, I’m sorry it didn’t workout. Maybe we shouldn’t have forced you into it. It just seemed the best thing to do.’
‘It was the best thing to do, it was,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’
16
Christopher Keen emerged from the Savoy and squeezed a smile at the doorman as snow began twisting into the forecourt. A cab pulled up and he stepped inside, instructing the driver to take him to his flat in Paddington. It was not yet ten o’clock but he felt dejected and worn out.
The driver said, ‘Enjoyable evening, sir?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Dodgy meal, was it? I have heard, sir, that The Grill is not quite what it used to be. You know, in the old days.’
‘It wasn’t the food,’ Keen replied tersely.
‘I see.’
It took more than half an hour to reach Paddington, thirty minutes of regret and silent reflection. The snow began falling more heavily, coating the streets in a thin viscous film of grey slush. Keen was still surprised by how much of the basic geography of London he recalled: short cuts, obscure streets, the facade of a fondly remembered building. Nothing about England ever changes, he thought. There are just more cars on the roads, more people and litter in the streets. He considered stopping off at his club in St James’s, but his mood was too bleak and forlorn. When the driver reached the entrance to his apartment, Keen tipped him three pounds and grimaced at the freezing wind. Tightening his scarf, he walked up the steps to the foyer and rode the lift to the fourth floor.
Inside the flat he noted the packet of coffee that he had spilt in the kitchen that morning and decided to leave it for another day. He was still hungry from not eating and cut himself a slice of cheese, taking several cubes of ice from the freezer and dropping them into a tumbler of whisky. In the small sitting room next door, he sat down in his favourite armchair and rested the glass on a low antique table. There, on the wall, was the photograph of Ben’s wedding, and Keen thought for a moment about smashing it on the floor, a crude, adolescent gesture against everything that had gone wrong. Instead he would drink his whisky, perhaps watch television, and then try to get some sleep. Mark might even telephone from Moscow to find out how things had gone. Keen did not have the will to call him of his own volition, but the thought reminded him to contact Taploe. Going back into the kitchen he pulled a pad of Post-it notes from a drawer and scrawled Call Taploe re: M across the top copy. Then, having fixed it to the frame of the door, he returned to the sitting room and switched on the television news.
17
When the policewoman came to Ben’s house, six hours later, it was after four o’clockin the morning and yet he was still awake, sitting at the kitchen table reading an article Alice had written for that evening’s edition of the Standard.
She had been asleep since midnight or thereabouts, tired out by work and conversation. For a while Ben had laid beside her, trying to let the day slip past him, but his mind kept turning over events at the Savoy and after an hour he had given up, dressed again and come downstairs.
His insomnia was not infrequent. Ben and Alice kept different hours and he had begun to feel separated from her when they were in bed together. When the lights went out, all the cuddled intimacy of their first years had been somehow lost; to careers, to age, to some misplaced idea of how a marriage should be. And yet he liked the anonymity afforded by night; so much of his life was given over to the idea of making Alice happy that Ben was glad to have just a few hours to himself. Often he would read a book or watch a film on television, sometimes go for a drive or seek out a late-night bar. It balanced things out: those quiet hours when Alice was asleep belonged to him and to him alone. Ben had no office to go to in the morning, no responsibility to anyone but himself: he could wake up with a hangover at eleven in the morning and still put in a good day’s workin the studio.
He was nearing the end of the article when the doorbell rang, the sound of it shaking him out of an almost hypnotic concentration. Ben stood up and the newspaper fell to the floor. He assumed that it was one of his friends leaving drunk from a club, coked up to the eyeballs and coming round for a nightcap. As long as they didn’t ring the bell again, there was a chance that Alice would not wake up.
‘Who is it?’ he asked as he reached the door, keeping his voice deliberately low. It occurred to him that somebody might have simply pressed the bell as a prank and then run away.
‘The police, sir.’ It was a woman’s voice, measured and serious. ‘Could I come in?’
Ben’s first thought was that something had happened to Mark. A car accident in Moscow. A mugging. And, as he quickly unhooked the chain, he saw that the face of the woman on the other side of the door had prepared itself for delivering bad news. Her hair was tied up under a flat hat and her eyes seemed robbed of colour.
She said, ‘I’m sorry to come round so late, sir.’
‘Is everything all right?’
Please. Not Mark. Just tell me that Mark’s OK.
‘I have to ask, sir. Does a Mr Benjamin Keen live here?’
‘I’m Benjamin Keen,’ Ben said quickly. ‘Is it Mark? Has something happened to my brother?’
‘No. It’s not your brother, sir. We couldn’t find him.’
He felt a wave of relief that was short lived. Couldn’t find him? So was it a friend, somebody close to the family who had been hurt, even killed? Ben ran through a checklist of names: Alice’s parents; Joe or Natalie; his oldest friend, Alex, who was on holiday in Spain. At no point did it occur to him that something might have happened to his father.
The policewoman asked again if she could come in and they went inside to the kitchen. She was wearing a fluorescent waterproof jacket that rustled as she sat down. Away from the flared light of the doorstep her face looked darker, prettier, but no less disconcerted. Ben saw that she was younger than he was by at least four years and that whatever it was she had been asked to tell him, she had never had to do it before.
‘You said that you couldn’t find Mark.’
‘That’s right.’ Her voice was very quiet and she could barely lookat him.
