Ritual (10 page)

His most
arresting characteristic, however, was not what he wore, but his bearing. Like
the elaborate house behind him, he seemed almost to float a fraction of an inch
above the ground. It was something that Charlie found impossible to analyse,
and it was highly disturbing, as if the man were not quite real.

The man held
out his hand and Charlie shook it. The fingers were very cool and limp, like wilted
celery.

‘That’s your
son?’ he asked, nodding towards Martin.

‘Martin,’ said
Charlie. ‘And you must be M. Musette.’

‘Well, well,’
the man smiled. ‘My reputation has reached even the ears of M A RI A.’

Charlie looked
at him suspiciously. ‘You know who I am?’

‘I am in the
gastronomic business, Mr McLean. It is my business to know who you are.
Similarly, I know the inspectors from Michelin and Relais & Chateaux.
Forewarned, you see, is forearmed.’

‘Haxalt told
you,’ said Charlie.

‘You are being
unfair on Mr Haxalt,’ M. Musette replied. ‘Mr Haxalt would never betray
anybody’s trust.
Even yours.’

Charlie put his
hands on his hips and surveyed the black Gothic building. ‘The main reason I
came was to see whether your restaurant was worth putting into the guide.’

‘
Le Reposoir
?’ asked M. Musette, with
obvious amusement. ‘I fear not, Mr McLean. This is hardly a roadside hamburger
stand. It is a private dining association, open only to subscribing members. It
would be very unfair to your readers if you were to suggest that they could
obtain a casual meal here as they wandered through Connecticut looking at the
autumn leaves.
Or, selling their patent cleansers.’
That last remark was an undisguised dig at MAR I A’s strong associations with
travelling salesmen.

‘Men who sell
patent cleansers provide an honest service,’ Charlie replied, more sharply than
he had meant to. ‘Just like most restaurateurs.’

‘I’m afraid
that does not include me,’ said M. Musette. ‘I am hardly what you could call a restaurateur.
I am more of a social arbiter than a chef.’

At that moment,
the mahogany doors opened, their windows reflecting the dull silvery sky, and a
young woman appeared, pale-faced, in a black ankle-length cape. M. Musette
turned, and gave her a wave which meant that he wouldn’t be long, and that he
would be with her in just a moment.

‘Madame
Musette?’ asked Charlie.

‘It is probably
time for you to leave,’ said M. Musette, affably but adamantly.

‘There isn’t
any chance of eating here, then?’ asked Charlie.

‘I regret not.
We are a very exclusive society, and I am afraid that the presence of a
restaurant inspector would not be regarded by our membership with any
particular warmth.’

The young woman
who had been standing on the steps came closer, stepping on to the shingle
driveway and watching Charlie with solemnity. She was almost alarmingly
beautiful, with a fine oval face coloured by only the slightest tinge of
blusher, soulful blue eyes, and very short gamine-style hair, a blonde bleached
even blonder. She remained completely covered by her cape, and Charlie had the
unsettling fantasy that, underneath it, she was naked, except for black silk
stockings and stiletto shoes.

‘Aren’t you
going to introduce us?’ asked Charlie.

M. Musette
looked at Charlie in a way which Charlie had never been looked at before. His
eyes betrayed not malice but a total lack of interest in Charlie as a human
being; as if he were nothing more than one of twenty thousand blurred faces in
a baseball stadium crowd. ‘You should not come here again without a prior
appointment,’ he said, and this time his tone was completely dismissive.
‘Although it might appear that you can drive into the grounds unobserved, we
have very attentive security services.’

Charlie looked
around the grounds of
Le Reposoir
one
last time, and then shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Have it your way. I must
tell you,
though,
I could have done with a top quality
French meal. This leg of the trip is always a desert, gastronomically
speaking.’

‘I am sure you
will be able to find somewhere to satisfy your appetite,’ said M. Musette.
There was lightning flickering on the horizon, and a few heavy drops of rain
fell on to the shingle and the roof of Charlie’s car. He waited for one moment
more, and then climbed back into the driver’s seat, stretching over to fasten
his seatbelt. M. Musette came up and closed the door for him.

‘I’m sorry for
intruding,’ said Charlie, although he didn’t sound sorry and he didn’t
particularly mean to.

M. Musette said
nothing, but took two or three theatrical steps back. Charlie slowly swung the
car around in a wide circle, and headed back the way he had come. As he did so,
he glanced in his rear-view mirror at the young woman who might have been Mme
Musette. Now that the rain was falling more heavily, she reached with one hand
out of the darkness of her cloak to tug a large hood over her head.

The car was
moving; the rear-view mirror was joggling; the morning was dark with thunder.
All the same, Charlie was convinced that what he had seen was not an illusion,
and he stared at Martin in amazement and perplexity, and slowed the car down
for a moment. Then he turned around in his seat to stare at Mme Musette even
harder.

Martin said,
‘Dad? What are you looking at?’

‘That Mme
Musette, the woman in the cloak.’

‘What about
her?’

Charlie turned
back again, and steered the Oldsmobile at low speed all the way up the curving
driveway between the bushes. Martin repeated, ‘Dad?’ but Charlie wasn’t sure
whether he wanted to tell what he had seen or not, particularly since
Le Reposoir
had seemed to upset him so
much.

‘It’s nothing,’
he remarked, although he couldn’t help looking back in the rear-view mirror
just one more time, before Mme Musette disappeared into the house like a
shrinking shadow. What had alarmed him so much had been that hand – that hand
which had emerged from the blackness of her cloak.

That hand on
which there had been only one finger, a forefinger, to hook down the fabric of
her hood and keep away the rain.

B
y six that evening they were lying with their feet up on their
beds at the Windsor Hotel in West Hartford, watching what looked like a
Venusian version of Diffr’nt Strokes because even the black people had green
faces.

‘If you had to
judge racial harmony in America from nothing but what you saw on hotel
televisions, you’d think we were the most integrated nation on earth,’ said
Charlie, sipping Miller Lite out of the can. ‘The red people get on with the
purple
people,
the orange people get on with the blue
people. . .’

Martin didn’t
even smile. He had heard the same remark so many times that he scarcely heard
it.

It was just Dad
being Dad.

They watched
the end of the programme, and then Charlie swung his legs off the bed, and
pushed his hand through his hair, and said, ‘How about something to eat? The
restaurant here isn’t too bad.’

‘Do I have a
choice?’ asked Martin. A last chink of sunlight had penetrated beneath the
blinds, and gilded his eyelashes.

‘Sure you have
a choice. This may be work for me, but for you it’s a two-week vacation.’

‘Then do you
mind if I stay here and watch television? I couldn’t eat another meal, not
right now.’

Charlie
shrugged. ‘It’s all right by me if it’s all right by you. Are you sure you
won’t come along just to keep me company? You don’t have to eat anything.’

‘Dad,’ said
Martin, ‘we haven’t been getting along too well, have
we
?’

Charlie
straightened his narrow blue woven necktie. ‘It’s early days yet. We hardly
even know each other. I’m the father who was never at home, and you’re the kid
I never came home to.

We’ll get
along. Give it some time.’

Martin said,
‘Why?’

‘Why what?
Why give it some time?’

Martin shook
his head. ‘No – why didn’t you ever come home?’

‘There were
reasons. Well – there was one big reason and then there were lots of little
reasons. It isn’t too easy to explain, not at one sitting, anyway. Before you
go back to your mother, though, I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and
exactly what it was all about. People sometimes lead lives you wouldn’t even
guess at, do you know what I mean? That savings bank manager, that Haxalt, for
all we know he goes home at night and dresses up like Joan Crawford. And as for
that Musette dude... well, he’s some kind of weird character if ever I saw one.’

‘What are you
trying to tell me?’ Martin demanded.

Charlie looked
down at Martin’s young, sunlit face. God, how lucky he was! Only
fifteen,
and all his chances still ahead of him.
Old enough to be argumentative and arrogant, but not yet old enough
to understand that argument and arrogance never got anybody anywhere.
He
said, gently, ‘What I’m trying to tell you is that I had another life, apart
from the life you already know about; and that one life was always fighting
against the other life.’

‘And the other
life won?’

Charlie said,
‘You don’t resent me, do you? You don’t still feel bad about me?’

‘I don’t know,’
said Martin. ‘That’s what I came along on this trip to find out.’

Charlie was
silent. It hadn’t occurred to him that Martin was vetting him just as much as
he was vetting Martin. He rubbed his forehead, and turned around so that Martin
could see only his back, and then he said, ‘What happens if you decide that I’m
not the kind of father you want?’

‘Then I’ll go
back to Mom and that will be the end of it.’

Charlie picked
up his coat off the back of the chair. The hotel room was wallpapered in a
brown bamboo pattern, and there were two prints on the wall of Boston &
Maine railroad locomotives of the i88os. He had stayed in rooms like this so
often before that he had almost no sense of place, only of time. ‘You’re sure
you don’t want to eat?’ he asked Martin. ‘You could call room service and have
them
send you a hamburger or a sandwich or something. They
do good ribs here, as far as I recall.’

Martin said,
‘It’s okay. I’m not hungry.’

‘Well, I’m not
either,’ Charlie told him. ‘At least, not for the kind of food they serve up
here. But, that’s the way it goes. Some people work so that they can eat. I eat
so that I can work.’

He gave himself
a last unnecessary check in the mirror, and then he went to the door. ‘You can
join me any time you want to, if you change your mind. I’ll be glad of your
company.’ :

‘All right,
sir.’

‘Will you call
me Charlie, for Christ’s sake? My name is Charlie.’

‘Yessir,’ said Martin.
Then – almost without pausing – ‘Have you given up on
Le Reposoir
? I mean, are you content to go to your grave never
having eaten there even just once?’

Charlie
frowned. ‘What? There are millions of restaurants I’m never going to get to eat
in – tens of millions. I’ve never eaten at La Colombe d’Or in Houston. Why
should I be worried about
Le Reposoir
?’

‘Because it’s
special,’ said Martin; and then, with devastat-ingly cold observation, ‘And
most of all, because they won’t let you in.’

Charlie stood
by the door, his hand on the chain, with the feeling in his heart that if he
didn’t quickly take steps to make sure that Martin became his
friend,
he was going to finish up by being his very worst
enemy. A little unevenly, he said, ‘You know what Groucho Marx told that club
that refused his membership application?’

‘Yes, sir.
“I do not wish to belong to the kind of club that
accepts people like me as members.”‘

Martin paused,
and then he said, ‘You told me.’

‘Okay.’ Charlie
nodded. ‘I’ll catch you later.’

He walked along
the red-carpeted corridor until he reached the fire door that would take him
out of the Windsor’s annexe, across its so-called ornamental gardens (four
scrappy-looking flowerbeds and a tangle of bushes that should have been cleared
away years ago), and into its Olde Hartforde Suite and the main building. He
laid his hand on the fire door ready to push it open when he saw something
through the smudgy wired-glass window.
A white flicker in the
unkempt garden.
A small scurrying shape that could have been a dog or a
windblown sheet of newspaper or an optical illusion created by the evening
sunlight on the glass.

But he stood
where he was, feeling cold and uncertain, because he suspected that it wasn’t
any of those things. He suspected that it was the dwarfish figure that he had
seen in Mrs Kemp’s garden last night, talking to Martin through the distorting
kitchen window. And the figure was here, in West Hartford, in the same hotel,
which meant only one thing that Charlie could think of. Real or imaginary, it
was following them. Worse than following them, it was tracking them down.

For a moment,
Charlie hesitated. Maybe he should go back and warn Martin that the dwarf was
around. On the other hand, if Martin had been talking to it, maybe Martin knew
that it was around. Maybe Martin had even gone so far as to tell it where they
were going. Maybe it was nothing more than his own imagination, creating a
demon or a devil which could take the blame for his own failure to make friends
with the son he was supposed to have taken care of, and hadn’t. He felt
confused and uncertain, as if he had been drinking. But at last he pressed his
hand against the fire door, opened it, and stepped out.

There was no
sign of any creature.
Only the dry hunchbacked bushes and the
untidy flowerbeds.