The Hidden Man. Charles Cumming

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 hardship 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 back and watch the visitors unravel. He’d wanted to have a shower before kick-off, to cook up a curry and sink a 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 branch 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 stark white 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, drunk on 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 weak cups 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