The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [30]
‘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 walkand 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 blackand 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 KickOut 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 tookto 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 thankyou, Ben turned and walked