The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [36]
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’clockbut 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 drinkhis 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 workand 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