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 tables looked out over the Thames. A group of waiters, many with grey hair, had gathered near what appeared to be a lectern at the entrance to the restaurant. The oldest of them, whom Ben took to be the manager, broke away to greet him.
‘Can I help at all, sir?’ he asked in a thick East End accent. The man was almost entirely bald, with a dry, ridged complexion like the surface of a golf ball.
‘I’m having dinner with my father,’ Ben told him. ‘He should be here.’
‘The name, sir?’
‘His name is Keen. Christopher Keen. It was for eight fifteen.’
The waiter turned to consult his reservations book. Ben was almost too afraid to scan the tables beyond the glass in case he should catch sight of his father.
‘We don’t seem to have a booking for that name, sir.’
The waiter’s tone suggested that Ben had wasted his time.
‘Are you sure?’
He felt tricked, gripped by the sure thought that his father had bottled out.
‘Quite sure, sir. Of course, it’s possible that you’re dining with us in the Grill Room.’
‘The Grill Room?’
‘Our other restaurant, sir. You would have passed it on the way in. Just go backto the main door. You’ll find it on the right of reception, top of the stairs.’
Muttering an embarrassed thank you, Ben turned and walked back towards the foyer. He felt rushed now, no longer in control. A slim French woman introduced herself at the entrance to The Grill and took his name with a smile. He was surely on the brink of it now, his father only seconds away. She was conferring with one of her colleagues, pointing out into the room, and when Ben looked up to take in the quiet formality of his surroundings he saw his father at the far end of the restaurant, seated at a table backed up against the wall. Their eyes met and Keen nodded, rising to his feet, a man of sixty who seemed never to have aged. A very broad, effortful smile and that steady, unreadable gaze that Ben remembered even as a child. His breathing doubled back on itself as he moved towards the table. Ben tried to set his face but the effort was hopeless.
‘Benjamin.’
‘Hello.’
A firm handshake, a contact of skin, examining his father’s face for the bits that looked like him.
‘It’s so wonderful to see you. So wonderful. Do come and sit down.’
Some men of Keen’s generation had faces weakened by experience, eyes and mouths rendered timid by the failures of age. But his father looked capable, renewed, not someone whom a younger man might profitably challenge. Ben was amazed by the preservation of his good looks; his father had the vigour and apparent fitness of a man half his age. He was, against all expectation, impressed by him.
‘Will you have a glass of something?’ he asked, and Ben nodded at the waiter, dryly requesting water as he sat down.
‘Nothing a little stronger?’
The question, quite unintentionally, came off sounding like a test of Ben’s masculinity. He felt automatically obliged to order a vodka and tonic. Already, so soon, he had been undermined by something like the force of his father’s personality.
‘I’ll have one too, Gerard,’ Keen said to the waiter, who deposited two menus and a wine list on the table. He even knows the waiter’s name. Sweat collected across the upper part of Ben’s back, the shoulders of his suit jacket now tropically dense and hot.
‘And some water as well,’ Keen added, fixing blue eyes on his son. ‘Gas or no gas?’
It was another question to which he must find a quick answer. Ben wanted to say that he didn’t care, but muttered: ‘Without gas, please,’ in a low voice. Then the waiter moved off.
Before he was out of earshot Keen said, ‘I wanted to thankyou right away for agreeing to meet me.’
‘Not at all,’ Ben replied, responding with a smile, and he was immediately frustrated with himself for adhering to decorum. He had badly wanted to make things difficult at this early stage, to find some dark expression of his contempt, but instead was playing the genial, even-tempered son.
‘I went the wrong way when I came in,’ he said, just to fill the silence. ‘Didn’t realize they had two restaurants.’
‘No,’ his father replied, and he might almost have been bored. Why had Ben expected it to be one-way traffic? Why had he thought that the evening would see Keen on bended knee, uttering a grovelling apology? There was no sign of that at all.
‘So why did you want to see me?’ he asked, and it was the first question he had set which carried any kind of weight. Keen leaned forward as if to draw the sting out of it, to envelop Ben in goodwill.
‘Well, it’s been too long,’ he said. ‘Too much time has gone by and I am responsible for that.’