Ritual (3 page)

‘I said I
apologized,’ Martin repeated.

The garden
outside was lit up by a hesitant flicker of lightning. Charlie turned towards
the window again. As he did so, he felt a sensation like somebody running a
hairbrush down his back. A white face was pressed against the window, so close
to the glass that its breath had formed an oval patch of fog. It was peering
into the restaurant with an expression that looked like a mixture of fear and
longing.

It could have
been a large-faced child. It was too short for an adult. Charlie was
frighteningly reminded of Dopey, in Snow White, with his vacant pale blue eyes
and his en-cephalitic head.

In spite of the
child’s obvious anguish, it was the most terrifying thing that Charlie had ever
seen. The lightning flickered one last time and then died; the garden was
darkened; the face was swallowed by shadow. Charlie sat staring at the window
with his hands flat on the table, rigid. Martin raised his head and looked at
him.

‘Dad?’ he
asked.
Then, more quietly, ‘Dad?’

Charlie didn’t
look at him. He kept his eyes on the blacked-out windowpane. ‘What did you see,
out there in the garden?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ said
Martin. ‘I told you.’

‘You said you
saw somebody.’ Charlie insisted. ‘Tell me what he looked like.’

‘I made a
mistake, that’s all. It was a bush, I don’t know.’

Charlie was
about to bark back at Martin when he saw something in the boy’s eyes that
stopped him. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t contempt. It was a kind of secrecy, a
deep unwillingness to discuss what he had seen. Charlie sat back in his chair
and watched Martin for a while. Then he raised his hand to attract the
attention of Harriet the waitress.

‘Don’t have the
coffee,’ Harriet told them, as she came across the restaurant.

‘I don’t intend
to. Just bring me a last glass of chardonnay, would you, and the bill?’

‘I’ll make sure
that Mrs Foss doesn’t charge you for the veal.’

‘Don’t worry about
it, please.’

Harriet was
just turning to go when Charlie lifted his hand again, and said, ‘Harriet, tell
me something. Does Mrs Foss have any children?’

Harriet
sniffed. ‘Three… but sometimes they seem like thousands. There’s Darren, who
takes care of the accounts. Then there’s Lloyd, who buys all the provisions.
And Henry… but the less said about Henry the better, believe me. Henry is
really peculiar?

‘I mean young
children.’

Martin glanced
up. His sudden interest didn’t escape Charlie’s notice. He had seen that figure
in the garden, Charlie was sure of it. What Charlie couldn’t understand was why
he didn’t want to admit it.

Harriet said,
‘Young children, no. You’re talking about kids, toddlers? She’s about two
hundred years too old for that.’

On the other
side of the restaurant, Mrs Foss’s antennae picked up Harriet’s slighting tone
of voice, and she lifted her head and searched for Harriet with narrowed eyes.
‘Harriet,’ she said, and there were a dozen Biblical warnings in that one word.

While Charlie
was paying the bill, he remarked to Martin,
‘ You
may
not have seen anything, but I did.’

Martin didn’t
answer. Charlie waited for a little while, but decided not to push him, not
yet.

There had to be
a reason why he didn’t want to talk about what he had seen, and maybe the
reason wasn’t any more complicated than the simple fact that he didn’t yet
trust Charlie enough to confide in him. And considering Charlie’s record as a
father, he could hardly be blamed for that.

‘Where are we
going to stay tonight?’ Martin asked.

‘The original
plan was to drive across to Hartford, and stay at the Welcome Inn.’

‘But now you
want to go to that French restaurant they were talking about?’

‘It had crossed
my mind,’ Charlie admitted.’ I always like trying new places. Besides, it’ll
give us time to spend the afternoon any way we want. Maybe we could go bowling,
or take in a movie or something. That’s what fathers and sons are supposed to
do together, isn’t it?’

‘I guess.’

‘Charlie
attempted a smile. ‘Come on, then. You go wait for me in the car. I just have
to wash my hands, as they say in polite circles.’

‘Oh, you mean
you have to go the inky-dinky ha-ha room.’ Charlie slapped his son on the back.

‘You’ve got it,
champ.’

The men’s
washroom was tiled and gloomy, with noisy cisterns and urinals that looked as
if they had been salvaged from the Lusitania. In the brown-measled mirror over
the sink, Charlie’s face had the appearance of having been painted by an
old
Dutch master. He scrutinized himself closely, and
thought that he was beginning to show signs of wear. It wasn’t true what they
said about life beginning at forty. They only said that to stop you going
straight to the bathroom and slicing your throat from ear to ear.
When you reached middle age, you started to disintegrate, your
dreams first and then your body.

He bent over
the sink and soaped his hands. A faint wash of watery sunlight strained through
the small window over to his right. He could see treetops through it, and grey
clouds unravelling.

Maybe it was
going to be a fine afternoon.

Outside the
washroom, in the Iron Kettle’s red-carpeted lobby, there was a cigarette
machine.

He hadn’t
smoked in eleven years, but suddenly he felt tempted to buy a pack. It was the
tension of having Martin around him all the time, he decided. He wasn’t used to
demonstrating his affection on a day-to-day basis. That was why he had so
rarely stayed home for very long. He had always been afraid that his love would
start wearing thin, like medieval fabric.

He was still
buttoning up his coat when Mrs Foss appeared, and stood watching him through
her upswept spectacles, her hands clasped in front of her.

‘I hope we’re
going to see you again’ she said. ‘I promise that we can do better for you next
time.’

‘The veal was
quite acceptable, thank you.’

Mrs Foss opened
the wired-glass door for him. ‘I hope I’ve managed to persuade you not to visit
Le Reposoir
.’

Charlie made a
dismissive face.

‘It wouldn’t be
wise, you know.
Especially not with that son of yours.’

Charlie looked
at her. ‘I’m not sure that I understand what you mean.’

‘If you don’t
go there, you won’t have to find out,’ said Mrs Foss.

She
straightened Charlie’s necktie with the unselfconscious expertise of a woman
who has been married for forty years and raised three sons.

Charlie didn’t
know what to say to that. He turned and looked out through the door across the
puddly asphalt parking lot, towards his light yellow Oldsmobile. A new car
every two years was the only perk that his publishers ever gave him; and
considering that he covered an average of 55,000 miles a year, which meant that
most of his cars were on the verge of collapse after eighteen months, it wasn’t
so much of a perk as a bare necessity.

He could see
Martin standing on the opposite side of the car with a copy of The Litchfield
Sentinel draped over his head to keep off the last few scattered drops of rain.
He frowned. The way Martin was waving his
hand,
he
looked almost as if he were talking to somebody. Yet, from where Charlie was
standing, there didn’t appear to be anybody around.

Charlie watched
Martin for a while, and then he turned back to Mrs Foss, and took hold of her
hand. Those jagged diamond rings again. ‘Thank you for your hospitality. I’ll
be sure to stop by here again, itinerary willing.’

‘Remember what
I told you,’ said Mrs Foss. ‘It’s not the kind of advice that anybody gives
lightly.’

‘Well, no,’
said Charlie. ‘I suppose it isn’t.’

He walked
across the parking lot under a gradually clearing sky. He didn’t call out to
Martin, but as he approached, Martin suddenly dragged the newspaper off the top
of his head, turned around, and skipped in front of the car, lunging and
swiping at the air as if he were d’Artagnan.

Now he’s
behaving just like a typical fifteen-year-old kid, thought Charlie. But why is
he making such a song and dance about it? What’s he trying to shorn me? Or,
more importantly, what’s he trying to hide?

‘You ready to
roll?’ he said. He glanced quickly around the parking lot, but there was nobody
in sight. Just the tousled grass slope of the
garden,
and the quietly dripping trees.
Just the sky, reflected in
the puddles, like glimpses of a hidden world.

‘Do you think I
could learn fencing?’ Martin asked him, parrying and riposting with imaginary
musketeers.

‘I guess you
could.’ Charlie told him. ‘Come on, it’s only three or four miles to Alien’s
Corners.’

He unlocked the
car door and eased himself behind the wheel. The windshield was beaded with
clear, shivering raindrops. Martin climbed in beside him and buckled himself
up. ‘They have fencing lessons at school. Danny DeMarto does it. It’s
fantastic.’

Charlie started
up the Oldsmobile’s engine and backed slowly out of his parking space. ‘Maybe
you should ask your mother.’

‘It’s only
twenty-five dollars a lesson.’

‘In that case,
you should definitely ask your mother. Besides – what do you want to learn to
fence for? You’d be better off learning how to play the stock market.’

‘I don’t know.
Maybe I could get myself a job in the movies, if I could fence.’

‘The movies?
I’m not sitting next to the reincarnation of
Errol Flynn, am I?’

Martin said,
quite seriously, ‘I thought about being a stunt-man, something like that.’

‘That’s kind of
a wacky career,’ Charlie ventured.

‘Well, I’m not
going to be a restaurant inspector,’ said Martin. There was no scorn in his
voice, and somehow that made his remark all the more painful. It was a plain
and simple fact.

Charlie steered
out of the parking lot and turned right on the road for Alien’s Corners. For
two or three minutes they drove in silence. On either side of them the woods
rose up like heaps of ashes at a mass cremation, smoking with mist.

As offhandedly
as he could, Charlie asked, ‘Who were you talking to just now?’

Martin looked
baffled. ‘What do you mean? I wasn’t talking to anybody.’

‘In the parking
lot, I saw you. You were waving your hands around as if you were talking to
somebody. Come on, Martin, I know when somebody’s talking to somebody.’

Martin turned
away from him, and stared out of the window at the woods.

Charlie said,
‘I’m not checking up on you or anything. I’m just trying to take care of you.
I’ve also got to admit that I’m curious to know who you can find to talk to, in
this Godforsaken locality.’

‘I was
singing,’ said Martin. ‘You know, like pretending to play the guitar.’ He
demonstrated by strumming an invisible Fender.

Charlie glanced
up at his own eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. He wanted to tell Martin
that the guitar-playing gestures he was making now were nothing at all
like
the gestures he had been making in the parking lot.
Those gestures had been flat-handed, chopping, declamatory, as if he had been
explaining something, or making some kind of appeal. They certainly hadn’t been
imaginary chord changes.

Martin reached
forward and switched on the tape player, instantly drowning out the car with
jarring rock music. He began to sing along with it, making ajuvv-juvving noise
with his mouth that reminded Charlie of the sound he used to make when he was a
small boy, to simulate a Mack truck laboriously climbing up the lid of his
toybox. It hadn’t occurred to Charlie when he had offered to take Martin around
with him that Martin would constantly require in-car entertainment. Charlie
always drove in silence. He liked to hear the sound of America passing beneath
his car, mile by mile. That, too, was part of the penance.

‘Tom Petty and
the Heartbreakers,’ said Martin, crashing out more imaginary chords.

‘Am I supposed
to have heard of them?’ asked Charlie, and then thought,
What
a hideous middle-aged thing to say. No wonder Martin thinks you’re so damned
old.

Martin didn’t
answer. Charlie carried on driving through the golden mist. He began to feel as
if he were living in another time altogether; as if somehow they had driven
through to the Ninth Dimension, like travellers used to do on The Twilight
Zone. .

He glanced at
Martin surreptitiously. No teenage boy could have looked more normal. He might
be aggressive and sarcastic, but what teenage boy wasn’t? At least he didn’t
wear studs through his ears and make-up. He was nothing more than your average,
skinny, short-haired pale-faced boy, with pre-shrunk 5015 and a big plaid
jacket and sneakers that looked as if they had been borrowed from one of the
Harlem Globetrotters.

Maybe Charlie’s
anxiety at forming a new relationship with his son had made him too suspicious.

Maybe Martin
was telling the truth, and all that he had seen out in the garden had been a
bush.

Yet why he had
said, ‘You won’t let him in Dad, will you?’ Nobody says that about a bush. And
he had been talking to somebody out in the parking lot, Charlie was sure of it,
even though the parking lot had appeared to be empty.

Maybe he had
been talking to himself. Or maybe he had been talking to somebody too small to
be visible behind the car.

T
hey drove into Alien’s Corners just as the bell from the
Georgian-style Congregational Church was beating out three o’clock. Charlie
parked the car right outside the entrance to the First Litchfield Savings Bank,
and climbed out into the sunshine. The air was tangy with woodsmoke and recent
rain.