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By Root 1075 0

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 tookhis 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 backon 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.’

‘Yes, you are.’

That’s better. Put him on the back foot. Claw back some ground.

‘Ah. Our drinks.’

Gerard was returning with two tall glasses of vodka and tonic, balanced on a chrome tray. The moment was lost.

‘Thanks,’ he said, taking a mouthful straight away.

‘Have they made it strong enough?’

‘It’s fine, thankyou, fine.’

‘I never thinkus Brits put enough booze in. Tend to hold back on the vodka, don’t you think?’

‘Really, it’s OK.’

The restaurant’s decor was a time warp of imperial England: more wood panelling, lamps with hexagonal shades bolted to the walls, even slices of Melba toast like dried skin racked on a plate at the table.

‘This a place where you eat a lot?’ Ben asked.

Why hadn’t he at least let the silence