The hidden man

2

‘Don’t move. Hold it right there.’

The girl stopped immediately, her hand on the nape of her neck.

‘Now look up at me.’

Her eyes met his.

‘Without twisting your head.’

She moved her chin back towards the mattress.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Is that comfortable?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re warm enough?’

‘Yes, Ben, yes.’

He leaned forward, out of sight now. She heard the itch and whisper of the brush as it moved across the canvas. He said, ‘Sorry, Jenny, I interrupted you.’

‘That’s OK.’ She coughed and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘You said you were six when it happened? When your father walked out?’

Ben took a long drag on his cigarette and said, ‘Six, yes.’

‘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 quick temper. ‘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.’