Ritual Read online

  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.

  6

  By 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 1880s. 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 devastatingly 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. Only the dark clouds rolling overhead as if they were hurrying on their way to some distant battle.

  The food at the Windsor Hotel was relentlessly dull. In an attempt to console himself for not having been able to eat at Le Reposoir, Charlie ordered the Grande Royale menu, which started off with steamers, followed by charcoal-broiled bluefish, carpetbag steak, and peach pie. In the hands of a competent chef, any one of these traditional American dishes could have been a masterpiece. In the Windsor Hotel, they were tough, dry, slimy, and canned, in that order. Charlie sat alone at an underlit table, facing a badly painted frieze of Windsor Castle in England, chewing his way through this unappetizing menu while a four-piece band played ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon’ and the six businessmen sitting next to him chain-smoked cigars throughout their meal.

  When he had finished, Charlie was approached by the maitre d’, who stood beside his table with his hands folded over his groin. ‘You didn’t care for the dinner, sir?’ the maitre d’ asked, with unconcealed annoyance.

  ‘The dinner was – acceptable,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Perhaps a small glass of brandy on the house?’ the maitre d’ suggested. His tone of voice was almost ferocious.

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  The maitre d’ bent forward. He had huge open pores in his nose and his breath smelled of Binaca. ‘It isn’t my fault this place is so bad.’

  Charlie stared at him without expression.

  The maitre d’ went on, ‘I do my best, I used to work at the Hyatt Pilgrim in Boston. But what can I do with a place like this? They won’t invest any money on it.’

  Charlie said, ‘What does this have to do with me?’

  ‘Come on, Mr Restaurant Inspector. You can’t kid me. I know a restaurant inspector when I see one.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I was expecting you. I knew what you were, the moment you walked into the room. All restaurant inspectors have that same look. Most men who are forced to eat alone will keep their eyes on their food, or on a book. But you – your eyes are never still. You are looking at the cutlery, at the glasses, at the table linen. You are timing the waiters, you are testing the food. After you have finished your coffee you will go to the men’s room to make sure it is clean. You may even try to dodge into the ladies’. I know your kind.’

  Charlie slowly shook his head. ‘You must be making some kind of mistake here, friend. I’m a salesman, dealing in hydraulic valves. You want to come out and look at what I’m carrying in the back of my car?’

  ‘You can’t kid me,’ the maitre d’ hissed at him, triumphant now. ‘I was told. I was expecting you. You don’t fool me for one moment.’

  ‘Bring me the bill,’ said Charlie.

  ‘No, sir, no charge,’ retorted the maitre d’.

  ‘I want the bill,’ Charlie insisted. ‘In fact, if you don’t bring me the bill right now I’m going to call for the manager.’

  ‘No charge,’ the maitre d’ challenged him.

  Charlie paused for a moment, and then stood up. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘No charge. I’m not going to get myself involved in an argument about it.’ He raised his eyes. ‘All the same, I’d like to know who told you to expect me.’

  The maitre d’ shrugged, and flapped at Charlie’s coat with a napkin to brush off the crumbs of peach-pie. ‘The restaurant business is a brotherhood, sir.’

  ‘Like the Cosa Nostra, you mean?’ said Charlie sarcastically.

  ‘No, sir. More like monks, or friars.’

  Charlie looked away. The maitre d’ was obviously drunk. Either drunk, or so disaffected with his job that he didn’t care what he said, or to whom he said it. Monks or friars, Christ Almighty. The only possible religious ingredient in the restaurant business was the prayers of forgiveness they said when they wrote ‘Fresh’ and ‘Home Cooked’ on the menus.

  The maitre d’ said, ‘How about that glass of brandy? Come on, friend. It’s on the house.’

  A little wearily, Charlie nodded. The maitre d’ clapped his hands and the wine waiter came over, a stocky, unsmiling type with a tight maroon coat and a tight maroon face to match. ‘Give the gentleman a glass of the Courvoisier, Arnold. You’d like it in the lounge, sir? In the lounge, Arnold. Next to the fireplace.’

  Charlie sat in a high leather-upholstered library chair nursing his brandy while two large logs smouldered in the olde colonial fireplace like the last remains of a derelict building. Across the lounge, sitting in profile to him, was a thirtyish woman with ash blonde hair and a tight sapphire-blue dress and a little more jewellery than was tasteful, especially for a country mausoleum like the Windsor. Charlie surmised that she was a woman of relatively easy virtue, if not an out-and-out hooker. She made a big play of lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke across the lounge. Charlie sipped his brandy and thought that she had a pretty impressive chest, even if her hips were on the wide side.

  After about ten minutes, the woman stood up and came across to the fireplace. She stared down at the logs, the elbow of her smoking arm cupped in the hand of her other arm, her chin slightly lifted.

  ‘I always think a real fire is so romantic, don’t you?’ she asked Charlie, without looking at him.

  ‘I don’t know about this one,’ said Charlie. ‘It looks half dead to me.’

  ‘Ashes to ashes,’ the woman remarked. Then, ‘Are you travelling alone?’

  ‘Not entirely. I have my son with me.’

  ‘Do you usually travel alone?’ For the first time she turned to catch him with a blue-eyed stare. She was good-looking, in a Hollywood kind of a way, short-nosed, broad-cheekboned, almost baby-faced; except of course that the crisscross lines were beginning to show in the corners of her eyes. A diamond brooch in the shape of a star reflected the light from one of the ceiling lamps. Charlie thought: Genuine. This woman has been places, and done things, and men have showed their approval in the time-honoured way.

  Charlie said, ‘I’m not looking for company, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You look unhappy,’ the woman told him. ‘I can’t bear to see anybody looking unhappy.’

  ‘I’m a little tired is all.’

  ‘Would you mind if I sat down beside you and talked to you?’

  Charlie nodded toward the chair next to his. ‘It’s a free country. I can’t guarantee that you’ll get any answers.’

  She sat down and crossed her legs. Her blue shiny dress rode higher on her thighs than it ought to have done. She smelled of Obsession by Calvin Klein. She blew smoke over him, but he wasn’t sure that he particularly minded. The top three buttons of her dress were unfastened and Charlie could see a very deep cleavage indeed. White breasts with a single beckoning mole between them.

  ‘I saw you arguing with Bits,’ she said.

  ‘You mean the maitre d’? Is that his name?’

  ‘It makes him sound like a gangster, doesn’t it? But his real name’s Arthur. They call him Bits because when he was younger he was always saying, ‘For two bits I’ll quit this job,’ or ‘For two bits I’ll make that damned sauce myself.’ Not that he was ever a violent man – oh no. Just a little temperamental. He says he was descended from the Borgias.’

  ‘That wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Charlie. He pointed towards the woman’s empty glass. ‘How about a nightcap? Was that frozen daiquiris you were drinking?’

  She smiled. ‘You know what they say about ladies who have a taste for frozen daiquiris?’

  ‘I can’t say that I do. I hope it’s polite.’

  ‘Polite?’ the woman laughed.

  Charlie ignored her mockery and held out his hand. ‘I’m Charlie McLean.’

  ‘Velma Farloe,’ the woman replied.

  ‘Nice to know you, Velma. Have you been here long?’

  ‘Here in this bar, or here in West Hartford?’

  Charlie said, ‘I never did feel at home in New England – Connecticut in particular. I always f
eel like I’m being looked at as some kind of outsider.’

  ‘Where do you feel at home?’ asked Velma.

  ‘Illinois, Indiana. I guess I’m a small-town mid-Westerner at heart. Mind you, I was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. My parents moved to Kokomo when I was ten, and then to Merrillsville.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘I don’t intend to sit here and tell you the story of my life.’

  Velma dropped her eyelids in the warm, coaxing way in which some women would have dropped a perfumed scarf. ‘I don’t mind if you do.’

  ‘I’m a salesman, that’s all. That’s the beginning and the end of it.’

  ‘Bits said you were one of those restaurant inspectors.’

  ‘Bits confides in you, huh?’

  ‘Come on, Charlie,’ said Velma. ‘You know who I am. I’m the friendly lady who sits in the corner of every restaurant lounge from here to eternity.’

  The stocky wine-waiter brought them two fresh drinks. When Charlie offered to pay, he said, ‘On the house,’ in a gruff falsetto that was as adamant as it was startling.

  ‘Bits is trying to butter you up, that’s all,’ Velma told Charlie. ‘He thinks if he gives you two or three glasses of brandy you’re going to recommend the Windsor and get him a pay hike.’

  ‘Some hope of that,’ said Charlie. ‘This is one of the worst restaurants between Mount Fissell and Wequetequock.’

  ‘Well,’ purred Velma. ‘You sure know your geography.’

  She shifted herself closer. She touched Charlie’s left temple with her fingertips. He could breathe her perfume, and also that other indescribable odour known as Woman On Heat. He sipped at his brandy feeling as prissy as a boy scout. He needed a woman desperately, but for some reason he always held himself back, as if it were the right and proper thing to do. Because of Marjorie? No, he couldn’t believe that. Because of everything that had happened in Milwaukee? No, he couldn’t believe that either. It was far more deeply rooted. It was a glimpse of his mother fastening her stockings. It was his father’s face intruding on his unconscious like a big pale blimp, roaring, ‘Women should be respected, Charlie. ‘Women are holy.’