‘And your brother?’
‘Mark was eight.’
‘And you haven’t seen your father since?’
‘No.’
Outside on the street, three floors down, a distant child was imitating the sound of a diving aeroplane.
‘Why did he leave?’
When Ben did not answer immediately, Jenny thought that she might have offended him. That could happen sometimes, with sudden intimacy. When a model is lying naked in an artist’s studio with only a thin white sheet for company, conversation tends towards the candid.
‘My father was offered a position in the Foreign Office, in 1976,’ he said finally. The voice betrayed a controlled resentment, the glimpse, perhaps, of a quicktemper. ‘The idea of it went to his head. The work meant more to him than his family did. So he took off.’
Jenny managed a compassionate smile, although there was nothing in her own experience to compare with the concept of a parent abandoning his own child. The thought appalled her. Ben continued to paint, his face very still and concentrated.
‘That must have been awful,’ she said, just to fill the silence. The remark sounded like a platitude and she regretted it. ‘I mean, it’s difficult to recover from something like that. You must find it so hard to trust anyone.’
Ben looked up.
‘Well, you have to be careful with that one, don’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Blaming everything on the past, Jenny. We’re the therapy generation. An explanation for every antisocial act in our damaged adolescence. Make a mistake and you can always write it off against a shitty childhood.’
She smiled. She liked the way he said things like that, the smile that suddenly cracked across his face.
‘Is that what you believe?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. He was trying to capture the play of light on her body, the darkening hollows of skin. ‘It’s what my brother thinks.’
‘Mark?’
Ben nodded. ‘He’s a lot more forgiving than I am. Actually works with my father now. Doesn’t see it as a problem at all.’
‘He works with him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘Freak coincidence.’ Ben blew hard on the canvas to free it of dust. He didn’t feel much like opening up and telling Jenny all about big brother’s dream job; running a top London nightclub and flying business class around the world. She was a student, just twenty-one, and would only want to know if he could get her into Libra for free or source her some cheap CDs. ‘Mark and my dad go on business trips together,’ he said vaguely. ‘Have dinners, that kind of thing.’
‘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 of what he’s done. Because he’s nobody.’ The words were unconvincing, like something Ben had learned by heart many years before. ‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the day my father walked out on Mum was the day he ceased to exist.’
3
Ian Boyle stood in the vast, air-conditioned barn of Terminal One arrivals, waiting for the plane. He was cold and tired and wished he was on his way home. Arsenal were playing Champions League at Highbury against a team of third-rate Austrians: there’d be goals and a hatful of chances, one of those easy nights in Europe when you can just sit backand watch the visitors unravel. He’d wanted to have a shower before kick-off, to cookup a curry and sinka couple of pints down the pub. Now it would be a race to get home after the rush-hour M4 trudge, and no time to chat to his daughter or deal with the piles of post.
Two young boys - five and eight, Ian guessed - swarmed past him and ducked into a bran
ch of Sunglass Hut, shrieking with energy and excitement. A woman with a voice not dissimilar to his ex-wife’s made a prerecorded security announcement on the public address system, pointless and unheard in the din of the hall. Ian wondered if there were other spooks near by, angels from fifty services waiting for their man in the starkwhite light of Heathrow. His own people, working other assignments, would most probably have holed up in Immigration, getting a kick out of the two-way mirrors at Passport Control. But Ian had spent four years working Customs and Excise and was anxious to avoid spending time with old colleagues; a lot of them had grown smug and set in their ways, drunkon the secret power of strip search and eviction. He’d go through only when the plane had touched down, not a moment before, and watch Keen as he came into the hall. It was just that he couldn’t stand the looks they gave him, those fat grins over weakcups of tea, the suggestion of pity in their trained, expressionless eyes. When Ian had left for the Service in 1993, he could tell that a lot of his colleagues were pleased. They thought it was a step down; Ian was just about the only one who felt he was moving up.
Finding a seat opposite a branch of Body Shop, he looked up and checked the flickering arrivals screen for perhaps the ninth or tenth time. The BA flight from Moscow was still delayed by an hour and a half - no extension, thankChrist, but still another twenty-five minutes out of London. Fucking Moscow air traffic control. Every time they put him on Libra it was the same old story: ice on the runway at Sheremetjevo and the locals too pissed to fix it. He rang Graham outside in the car, told him the bad news, and settled backin his chair with a collapsing sigh. A family of Africans in some kind of traditional dress walked past him weeping, two of them pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes as they pushed trolleys piled six feet high with luggage and bags. Ian couldn’t tell if they were happy or sad. He lit a cigarette and opened the Standard.
4
Christopher Keen had taken the call personally in his private office. It was a routine enquiry, of the sort he handled every day, from a businessman calling himself Bob Randall with ‘a minor difficulty in the former Soviet Union’.
‘I’ve been informed,’ Randall explained, ‘that Russia is your area of expertise.’
Keen did not askwho had recommended him for the job. That was simply the way the business worked: by reputation, by word of mouth. Neither did he enquire about the nature of the problem. That was simply common sense when speaking on an open line. Instead, he said, ‘Yes. I worked in the eastern bloc for many years.’
‘Good.’ Randall’s voice was nasal and bureau-cratically flat. He suggested a meeting in forty-eight hours at a location on the Shepherd’s Bush Road.
‘It’s a Cafe Rouge, in the French-style. On the corner of Batoum Gardens.’ Randall spelt out ‘Batoum’ very slowly, saying ‘B for Bertie’ and ‘A for Apple’ in a way that tested Keen’s patience. ‘There are tables there which can’t be seen from the street. We’re not likely to be spotted. Would that be suitable for you, or do you have a specific procedure that you like to follow?’
Keen made a note of the date in his deskdiary and smiled: first-time buyers were often like this, jumpy and prone to melodrama, wanting codewords and gadgets and chalkmarks on walls.
‘There is no specific procedure,’ he said. ‘I can find the cafe’.
‘Good. But how will I recognize you?’
As he asked the question Bob Randall was sitting in Thames House staring at a JPEG of Keen taken in western Afghanistan in 1983, but it was necessary cover.
‘I’m tall,’ Keen said, switching the phone to his other ear. ‘I’ll be wearing a darkblue suit, most probably. My experience is that in circumstances such as these two people who have never met before very quickly come to recognize one another. Call it one of the riddles of the trade.’
‘Of course,’ Randall replied. ‘Of course. And when shall we say? Perhaps six o’clock?’
‘Fine,’ Keen said. He was already hanging up. ‘Six o’clock.’
Two days later, the businessman calling himself Bob Randall arrived at the cafe on Shepherd’s Bush Road half an hour early and picked out a secluded table, his backfacing the busy street. At 17.55 he tooka call from Ian Boyle, informing him in a jumble of code and double-speakthat the BA flight from Moscow had eventually landed some ninety-five minutes late. The subject had used a public telephone box - not a mobile - after clearing passport control, and was now picking up his luggage in the hall. The call had been made to a west London number that was already being traced.
‘Understood,’ he told him. ‘And was there any sign of Duchev?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well keep on it, please. And brief Paul Quinn. I’m going to be walking the dog for the next two hours. Contact me again at eight.’
And at that moment he saw Christopher Keen coming into the cafe, indeed wearing a darkblue suit, a striking man possessed of a languid self-confidence. Demonstrably public school, he thought, and felt the old prejudice kick in like a habit. The photograph at Thames House had not done justice to Keen’s well-preserved good looks, nor to his travelled, evidently disdainful manner. The two men made eye contact and Randall gave a thin smile, his moustache lifting slightly to reveal stained yellow teeth.
Keen sensed immediately that there was something unconvincing about his prospective client. The suit was off the peg, and the shirt, bought as white but now greyed by repeated launderings, looked cheap and untailored. This was not a businessman with ‘minor difficulties in the former Soviet Union’, far less someone who could afford to employ the services of Divisar Corporate Intelligence.
‘Mr Randall,’ he said, with a handshake that deliberately crushed his knuckles. Keen looked quickly at the ground and registered his shoes. Grey-possibly fake-patent leather, tasselled and scuffed. Further evidence. ‘How can I help?’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’ Randall was trying to release his hand. ‘Let me start by getting you a drink.’
‘That would be very kind, thank you.’
‘Did you find the cafe OK?’
‘Easily.’
Keen placed a blackPsion Organiser and a mobile telephone on the table in front of him and sat down. Freeing the trapped vents of his suit jacket, he looked out of the window and tried to ascertain if he was being watched. It was an instinct, no more than that, but something was out of place. A crowd of office workers had gathered at a table on the other side of the window and an elderly man with a limp was walking into the cafe alone. The traffic heading north towards Shepherd’s Bush Green had been slowed by a van double-parked outside a mini-supermarket. Its rear doors were flung open and two young Asian men were unloading boxes from the back.
‘It’s part of a chain, I believe,’ Randall said.
‘What’s that?’
‘The cafe. Part of a chain.’.
‘I know.’
A waitress came and tooktheir order for two beers. Keen wondered if he would have to stay long.
‘So, I very much appreciate your meeting me at such short notice.’ The businessman had a laboured, slightly self-satisfied way of strangling words, an accent located somewhere near Bracknell. ‘Had you far to come?’
‘Not at all. I had a meeting in Chelsea. Caught a fast black.’
Randall’s eyes dropped out of character, as if Keen had made a racist remark. ‘Excuse me?’
‘A fast black,’ he explained. ‘A taxi.’
‘Oh.’ In the uneasy silence that followed the waitress returned and poured lager into his glass.
‘So, how long have you worked in your particular field?’
‘About seven or eight years.’
‘And in Russia before that?’
‘Among other places, yes.’ Keen thanked the waitress with a patrician smile and picked up his glass. ‘I take it you’ve been there?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘And yet you told me on the telephone that you have a problem in the former Soviet Union. Tell me, Mr Randall, what is it that you
think I can do for you?’
Leaning backin his seat, Randall nodded and swallowed a mouthful of lager. He blinked repeatedly and a small amount of foam evaporated into his moustache. After a momentary pause he said, ‘Forgive me. It was necessary to employ a little subterfuge to prevent your employers becoming suspicious. My name is not Bob Randall, as perhaps you may have guessed. It is Stephen Taploe. I workacross the river from your former Friends.’
Keen folded his arms and muttered, ‘You don’t say,’ as Taploe pushed his tongue into the side of his cheek, his feet moving involuntarily under the table. ‘And you thinkthat I can help you with something…’
‘Well, it’s a good deal more complicated than that,’ he said. ‘To come straight to the point, Mr Keen, this has become something of a family matter.’
5
‘It’s possible, Jenny, that one day you’ll walkinto a public art gallery and lookat nothing at all. A total absence. Something with no texture, no shape, no solidity. No materials will have been used up in its construction, not even light or sound. Just a room full of nothing. That will be the exhibit, the gimmick, the thing you’re encouraged to lookat and talkabout over cranberry juice at Soho House. Emptiness. Actually the opposite of art.’
Jenny was glad that Ben wasn’t talking about his father any more. She preferred it when his mood was less anxious and abrasive. It was another side to him, more relaxed and quick-witted; she wondered if it was even flirtatious. But Ben looked like the faithful type: he was only thirty-two, after all, and there were pictures of his wife all over the studio walls, nudes and portraits of a quality that had persuaded her to sit for him in the first place.
‘Have you lived here long?’ she asked, and began gathering up her clothes. Ben was cleaning his brushes at the sink, wrapping the bristles in a rubber band and covering any exposed paint with small wraps of cling film.
‘Since we got engaged,’ he said. ‘About three years.’
‘It’s such a great house.’ Jenny’s stomach flattened out as she stretched into a thick woollen polo neck, her head disappearing in the struggle to find sleeves.
The Hidden Man (2003) Page 2
