The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [5]
‘And you don’t mind?’
Ben rubbed his neck.
‘Nothing to do with me.’
‘Come on.’ She rolled over and drew her knees up tight against her chest. A very faint tremor of cellulite appeared on her upper thigh. ‘Yesterday you told me you guys were close. Hasn’t it affected your relationship?’
Ben decided to kill the subject.
‘Are you bored, Jenny?’ he asked. ‘How come you’ve moved position?’
She sensed his annoyance, but pressed on, using her body as a decoy. With her legs in the air, cycling for balance as she leaned over the bed, she began looking for a cigarette.
‘I just need a break,’ she said. ‘Come on. Don’t be so mysterious. Tell me.’
He was looking at the naked base of her spine.
‘Tell you what?’
‘About your brother. About the way you feel about him.’
‘The way I feel about him.’ Ben repeated the phrase quietly under his breath.
‘Yes.’ She was sitting up again now, still without a cigarette. ‘Tell me how this thing between Mark and your father has affected you.’
‘This thing?’
He was picking at words, escaping her. She knew that he was being clever and shrugged her shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of mock surrender. ‘Just tell me if you’re still as close as you were before.’
‘Closer,’ he lied, and looked her right in the eye.
‘Good.’
Then he paused, adding, ‘I’m just angry with him.’
She seized on this like a piece of gossip.
‘Angry? About what?’
‘For forgiving our father so quickly. For welcoming him back into his life.’ Ben found that he was sweating and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. ‘Mark gives the appearance of being streetwise and cool, but the truth is he’s a diplomat, the guy who smooths things over. He hates confrontation or ill-feeling of any kind. So Dad comes back after an absence of twenty-five years and his attitude is conciliatory. Anything for a quiet life. For some reason Mark needs to keep everything on an even keel or he gets unsettled.’
‘Maybe that’s how he’s learned to deal with hard-ship in the past,’ Jenny suggested confidently, and Ben tried to remember if the girls he had known when he was twenty-one had been half as self-assured and insightful as she was.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘And you?’ she asked.
‘I’m just the opposite. I don’t want simple answers to complicated questions. I don’t want to welcome Dad back with open arms and say it didn’t matter that he ruined my mother’s life. Mark thinks this is stubborn, that I’m locked in the past. He thinks I should let bygones be bygones.’
‘Well, you have to deal with it in your own way.’
‘That’s what I keep telling him.’
Out on the road, the child was making the noise of a machine gun, a sound like a flooded engine swooping up and down the street. Ben’s eyes twitched in annoyance and he stood up to close the window. Jenny renewed her search for a cigarette, rummaging around in a handbag amongst old tissues and bottles of scent. When a pair of sunglasses spilled out on to the wooden floor, he said, ‘Have one of mine,’ and threw her a packet from his shirt pocket.
Ben was slightly annoyed, as if she was not seeing his point of view, and went through with an idea. Walking across the studio from the window, he withdrew a scrapbook from the drawer of a cupboard and handed it to her, flicking to the second page before returning to his easel.
‘What’s this?’ she asked.
‘Read the cutting.’
A wedding announcement from The Times had been pasted on the open page.
The marriage took place on 10 April between Mr Benjamin Graham Keen, youngest son of the late Mrs Carolyn Buchanan, and Alice Lucy McEwan, only daughter of Mr Michael McEwan of Halstead, Essex, and Mrs Susan Mitchell, of Hampstead, London. Mr Mark Keen was best man.
‘This is about you and your wife,’ Jenny said.
‘Yes, but you notice the omission?’ There was a small note of childish rebellion in Ben’s voice that surprised her. He didn’t seem like the type to hold a grudge.
‘No.’
‘There’s no mention of my father.’
‘You just left him out?’
‘We just left him out.’
‘Why?’
‘Because