The Dinner (10 page)

And, indeed, my brother began getting up from his chair. Claire laid a hand on his forearm. ‘Let me go to her for a moment, Serge,’ she said, and stood up. She too hurried off past the other tables. By now Babette had disappeared from view, so I couldn’t tell whether she had gone to the toilets or for a breath of fresh air.

My brother and I looked at each other. He made an attempt at a feeble smile, but it didn’t really work. ‘It’s …’ he began. ‘She has …’ He looked around, then brought his head closer to mine. ‘This isn’t what you think,’ he said, so quietly that I could barely understand him.

There was something about his head. About his face. It was still the same head (and the same face), but it was like it was suspended in air, with no clear link to a body, without even a coherent thought. He reminded me of a cartoon character who has just had a chair kicked out from under him. The cartoon character remains hanging in space for a moment before he realizes that the chair is no longer there.

If he wore this face while passing out flyers on the street, I thought, flyers calling upon ordinary, everyday people to be sure and vote for him in the coming elections, no one would give him a second look. The face made you think of a brand-new car, fresh from the showroom, that rounds the first corner, swipes a lamppost and gets a big scratch down the side. No one would want a car like that.

Serge got up and moved to the chair across from me. The chair was Claire’s, it belonged to my wife. Without a doubt, he could now feel her body heat, left behind on the seat, right through the cloth of his trousers. The thought of it made me furious.

‘Okay, that makes it easier for us to talk,’ he said.

I didn’t say a thing. I won’t deny that this was how I liked to see my brother: floundering. I wasn’t about to throw him a lifebuoy.

‘She’s been having a hard time lately with, well, you know, I’ve always hated that word,’ he said. ‘The menopause. It sounds like something that would never happen to our wives.’

He paused. The pause was probably meant for me to say something about Claire. About Claire and the menopause. ‘Our wives’: that’s what he’d said. But it was none of his business. Whatever was wrong or right with Claire, that was private.

‘It’s the hormones,’ he went on. ‘First the room’s too warm and all the windows have to be opened, the next moment she’s suddenly all weepy.’ He turned his head, his still visibly shaken head, towards the restrooms, the door, and then back to me. ‘Maybe it’s good for her to talk about it with another woman. You know what I mean, girl talk. At moments like this I can’t do anything right anyway.’

He grinned. I didn’t grin back. He raised his arms from the tabletop and flapped his wrists. Then he leaned his elbows on the table and pressed his fingertips together. He looked over his shoulder again.

‘There’s something else we should really talk about, though, Paul,’ he said.

I felt something cold and hard inside me – something cold and hard that had been there all evening – grow a little colder and harder.

‘We need to talk about our children,’ said Serge Lohman.

I nodded. I looked across the aisle and nodded again. The man with the beard had already looked our way a few times. For clarity’s sake, I nodded a third time. The man with the beard nodded back.

I saw him put down his knife and fork, lean over to his daughter and whisper something to her. The daughter grabbed her handbag and began rummaging through it. Meanwhile, her father pulled the camera out of his coat pocket and rose from his chair.

‘Grapes,’ said the manager.

His pinkie was hovering less than a quarter of an inch over a minuscule bunch of fruitlets that I thought at first were berries: white currants or something. I didn’t know anything about berries really, except that most types were inedible to humans.

The ‘grapes’ were lying beside a deep purple piece of lettuce, full two inches of empty plate away from the actual main course, ‘fillet of guinea fowl wrapped in paper-thin, sliced German bacon’. Serge’s plate featured the tiny cluster and the shred of lettuce too, but my brother had ordered the tournedos. There’s not a whole lot you can say about a tournedos except that it’s a piece of meat, but because something had to be said, the manager provided a brief account of where the tournedos came from. Of the ‘organic farm’ where the animals ‘lived in freedom’, until they were butchered.

I could see Serge’s impatience; he was hungry in the way only Serge can be hungry. I recognized the symptoms: the tip of his tongue sweeping across his upper lip like the tongue of a ravenous dog in a cartoon, the rubbing together of the hands that an outsider could take for delighted anticipation, but which was absolutely anything but. My brother was not delighting in anticipation; there was a tournedos on his plate and that tournedos had to be wolfed down as quickly as possible: he needed to eat – now!

The only reason I had asked the manager about the grapes was to torment my brother.

Babette and Claire weren’t back yet, but what did he care. ‘They’ll be here any minute now,’ he’d said when no less than four girls in black pinafores had showed up with our main courses, trailing the manager in their wake. The manager asked whether we would like them to wait with this course until our wives had returned, but Serge quashed that immediately. ‘Please, just put it down,’ he said. His tongue was already moving across his upper lip, and the hand-rubbing was beyond his control.

The manager’s little finger pointed first to my guinea-hen fillet rolled in German bacon, and then at the side dishes: a little heap of ‘lasagna slices with eggplant and ricotta’, held together with a toothpick, which reminded me of a miniature club sandwich, and an ear of corn impaled at both ends on a spring. The spring was probably meant to enable you to pick up the corn without getting your fingers greasy, but it had above all something laughable about it: or no, not laughable, more like something intended to be funny, an ironic nod from the chef, something like that. The spring was chrome-plated and stuck out about an inch from either end of the corn cob, which glistened with butter. I’m not particularly fond of corn that way, gnawing at an ear of corn I’ve always found disgusting; you get too little to eat and too much remains stuck between your teeth, while the butter goes dripping down your chin. Besides, I’ve never been able to shake the idea that corn cobs, first and foremost, are pig feed.

After the manager had described the organic conditions on the farm, the farm where Serge’s tournedos had been cut from a cow, and promised that he would come back in a bit to elucidate the contents of our wives’ plates, I pointed to the little bunch of berries. ‘Are those by any chance white currants?’ I asked.

Serge had already plunged his fork into the tournedos. He was poised to cut off a piece, his right hand with the steak knife was hovering over his plate. The manager had already turned to walk away, but now he turned back. As his pinkie approached the bunch of grapelets, I looked at Serge’s face.

That face radiated impatience, that above all. Impatience and irritation at this new delay. He’d had no qualms about starting in on his little fillet of beef in the absence of Babette and Claire, but he couldn’t stand the idea of sinking his teeth into it with a stranger hanging around.

‘What was all that about berries?’ he asked, after the manager had finally walked away and we were alone at last. ‘Since when are you interested in berries?’

He cut off a large chunk of his tournedos and stuck it in his mouth. The chewing took ten seconds, at the very most. After swallowing he stared into space for a few moments; it looked as though he were waiting for the meat to hit his stomach. Then he applied his knife and fork to the plate again.

I got up.

‘What is it now?’ Serge asked.

‘I’m going to see what’s taking them so long,’ I said.

I tried the ladies’ room first. Carefully, so I wouldn’t startle anyone, I pushed the door open a crack.

‘Claire …?’

Except for the absence of a peeing wall, the room was identical to the men’s. Stainless steel, granite and piano music. The only difference was the vase of white daffodils positioned between the two sinks. I thought about the owner of the restaurant, about his white turtleneck.

‘Babette?’ Calling my sister-in-law’s name was only a formality, an excuse for being in the doorway of the ladies’ toilet at all, should anyone actually be in one of the stalls, which didn’t seem to be the case.

I walked to the front door, past the cloakroom and the girls at the lectern. It was pleasantly warm outside; a full moon hung between the treetops and it smelled of herbs, a smell I couldn’t quite place but which seemed almost Mediterranean. A little further along, at the edge of the park, I saw the lights of cars, and a passing tram. And further still, through the bushes, the lighted windows of the café where, at this very moment, the regular people were settling down to their spare-ribs.

I walked down the gravel pathway with its electric torches and turned left along a path that cut around the restaurant. To my right was the footbridge across a ditch, which led to the street with its traffic and the café serving spare-ribs; to my left was a rectangular pool. Further back, where the pool dissolved into darkness, I saw something that I took at first to be a wall, but which on closer inspection turned out to be a head-high hedge.

Turning left again, I walked along the edge of the pool; the light from the restaurant was reflected in the dark water, from here you could see the diners at their tables. I went on a bit, then stopped.

There were no more than thirty feet between us, but I could see my brother sitting at our table and he couldn’t see me. As we had waited for the main dish, I had looked outside any number of times, but with the falling of darkness had been able to see less and less; from where I sat, however, I was able to see almost the entire restaurant reflected in the glass. Serge would have to turn around and press his nose up against the window, and then perhaps he would see me standing here, but even then it wasn’t certain he would see anything more than a dark form across the pool.

I looked around; as far as I could tell in the dark the park was deserted. Not a sign of Claire and Babette. My brother had put down his knife and fork and was wiping his mouth with a napkin. From here I couldn’t see his plate, but I would have bet there was nothing left on it: the eating had been done, the feeling of hunger was a thing of the past. Serge raised his glass to his lips and drank. Just at that moment, the man with the beard and his daughter stood up from their table. On their way to the door they paused beside Serge’s table. I saw the man with the beard raise his hand, the daughter smiled at him and Serge raised his glass by way of greeting.

Undoubtedly, they had wanted to thank him again for the ‘meet and greet’. Serge had indeed been the very picture of courtesy; he had passed seamlessly and in an instant from his role as a diner in need of privacy to that of nationally known face: a nationally known face that had always remained itself, a regular person, a person like you and me, someone you could come up and talk to any time and anywhere, because he never placed himself on a pedestal.

I suppose I was the only one who had noticed the wrinkle of irritation on his brow when the man with the beard had come over to him the first time. ‘Please do excuse me, but your … your … this gentleman assured me that it would be no problem if we …’ The wrinkle was there for no more than a second; after that we were shown the Serge Lohman anyone could feel good about voting for, the prime-ministerial candidate who felt at ease among the common people.

‘Of course! Of course!’ he’d cried jovially when the beard showed him the camera and pointed to his daughter. ‘And what’s your name?’ Serge had asked the girl.

She wasn’t a particularly pretty girl, not the kind who produced that naughty glint in my brother’s eye: not a girl for whom he would try to show off, as he had earlier with the clumsy waitress, the Scarlett-Johansson-lookalike. She did have a nice face, though, an intelligent face, I corrected myself – too intelligent in fact to want to have her picture taken with my brother. ‘Naomi,’ she replied.

‘Come sit next to me, Naomi,’ Serge said, and when the girl had settled down in the empty chair he put his arm around her shoulders. The beard took a few steps back.

‘And now one for the scrapbook,’ he said after the camera had flashed once, and he took another one.

The photo moment had caused a certain amount of commotion. The people at the tables next to ours had, it’s true, acted as though there had been no photo moment, but it was just like with Serge’s entrance earlier that evening: even when you act like nothing is happening, something happens, I don’t know how to put it any more clearly. It’s like walking right past an accident because you don’t like the sight of blood, or no, let’s scale it down a bit: like an animal that’s been hit and is lying dead at the side of the road, you see it, you saw the dead animal from a way back already, but you don’t look at it any more. You don’t feel like seeing the blood and guts spilling out. And so you look at something somewhere else, at the sky, for example, or a flowering bush in the field further along – at anything except the side of the road.

Serge had been awfully jovial, putting his arm around her shoulders like that: he had pulled the girl over a little closer and then leaned his head to one side; leaned his head so far that their heads almost touched. The result was probably a wonderful photo, the beard’s daughter probably couldn’t have asked for a better photo, but I had the distinct impression that Serge wouldn’t have been so jovial if it had been Scarlett Johansson (or a Scarlett-Johansson-lookalike) beside him, instead of that girl.