The Dinner (25 page)

‘Serge,’ Claire said without looking at him – without even raising her head, ‘sit down.’ She turned to me, ‘Paul.’ Claire had taken my hand; she tugged on it, and it took a moment before I realized what she was saying: she wanted me to get up, so that we could change places and she could sit beside Babette.

We stood up at the same time. While we were shuffling past each other, Claire grabbed my hand again; her fingers wrapped firmly around my wrist and she gave it a little yank. Our faces were no more than a few inches apart, I’m not much taller than my wife, all I would have had to do was bow my head in order to bury my face in her hair – something I felt more of a need to do at that moment than anything else.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ Claire murmured.

I said nothing, only nodded faintly.

‘With your brother,’ Claire said.

I waited to see if she would say anything else, but she seemed to feel that we had been standing beside the table long enough;

she edged past me and sat down in my chair, beside the weeping Babette.

‘How are things here?’

I turned around and looked into the face of the man in the white turtleneck. Tonio! Serge had slid back his chair and was still busy seating himself again, so the restaurant owner had probably decided to address me first. Whatever the case, it was not merely the difference in our heights – he was a whole head shorter than me – that made me feel he was grovelling; he stood slightly bent over, his hands clasped in front of him, head turned to one side, which left him looking at me obliquely and from below: lower than necessary.

‘I heard there were problems with the choice of desserts,’ he said. ‘We’d like to offer you an alternative dessert of your choice.’

‘The dessert of the house?’ I asked.

‘Excuse me?’

The restaurateur was almost bald, the few grey hairs left around his ears had been coiffed with care, his slightly too-tanned head stuck out of the white neck of his sweater like a tortoise from its shell.

It had occurred to me earlier, when Serge and Babette came in, that he reminded me of something or someone, and now I suddenly knew what it was. Years ago, a few doors down from us, there had lived a man with this same servile air. He was perhaps even smaller than ‘Tonio’, and he had no wife. One evening, Michel, who was about eight at the time, had come home with a pile of LPs and asked whether we still had a turntable somewhere.

‘Where did you get the records?’ I asked.

‘From Mr Breedveld,’ Michel had said. ‘He’s got at least five hundred of them, man! And I get to keep these.’

It took a moment before I connected the name ‘Breedveld’ to the little single man living a few doors down. They went to his house all the time, Michel told me, a whole bunch of small boys from the neighbourhood, to listen to Mr Breedveld’s old albums.

I remember quite well how my temples began pounding, first in fear, then in rage. Trying to keep my voice as normal as possible, I asked Michel what Mr Breedveld did while the boys were listening to records.

‘Oh, you know. We sit on the couch. He always has peanuts and chips and cola.’

That evening, after dark, I rang Mr Breedveld’s bell. I didn’t ask whether I could come in, I pushed him aside and walked right through to his living room. The curtains, I noted, were already drawn.

Mr Breedveld moved away a few weeks later. The final picture in my mind from that time is of the neighbourhood children rummaging through boxes of shattered LPs, to see whether there were any left intact. Mr Breedveld had put the boxes out on the kerb in front of his house the day before he moved.

I looked at ‘Tonio’, and clenched the arm of the chair with one hand.

‘Get the fuck out of here, you pervert!’ I said. ‘Fuck off, before things really get out of hand.’

Serge cleared his throat, placed his elbows on either side of his dame blanche, and formed a tent with his fingers.

‘We all know by now what happened,’ he said. ‘All four of us are familiar with the facts.’ He looked at Claire, then at Babette, who had stopped crying but was still pressing a corner of her napkin to her cheek – just below her eye, behind the tinted lens of her glasses. ‘Paul?’ He turned his head and looked at me: his look was one of concern, but I wondered whether it was the concern of the man or the concern of the politician Serge Lohman.

‘Yes, what is it?’ I said.

‘I take it you are also aware of all the facts?’

All the facts. I couldn’t help smiling: then I looked at Claire, and wiped the smile off my face. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Although it depends on what you mean by facts.’

‘I’ll get to that later. What matters is how we deal with this. How we bring it all out into the open.’

At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. I looked back at Claire. We’ve got a problem, that’s what she’d said. This is the problem, her eyes were saying now.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said.

‘Paul.’ Serge laid his hand on my forearm. ‘Give me a chance to finish. Then it will be your turn. When I’m done.’

The diners at the neighbouring tables had gone back to their dining, but things were restless around the open kitchen. I saw three waitresses standing around ‘Tonio’ and the manager, they didn’t look once in our direction, but I would have bet my cheese platter that they were talking about us – about me, I corrected myself.

‘Babette and I spoke with Rick this afternoon,’ Serge said. ‘Our impression is that Rick is suffering badly from all this. He thinks it’s terrible, what the two of them did. It keeps him awake at night, quite literally. He looks distraught. It’s affecting his academic achievements.’

I wanted to say something, but restrained myself. It was something in Serge’s tone: as though, even at this early stage, he was trying to compare his son favourably to ours. Rick couldn’t sleep. Rick looked distraught. Rick thought it was terrible. It felt as though Claire and I had to defend Michel – but what were we supposed to say? That Michel thought it was terrible too? That he slept even less than Rick?

It simply wasn’t true, I realized. Michel had other things on his mind besides the incinerated homeless woman in the ATM cubicle. And what was all this moaning about academic achievements? It was too disgusting for words, if you thought about it.

If Claire said something, I would side with her, I decided. If Claire said that it was inappropriate, in view of what had happened, to be talking about academic achievements, I’d chime in and say that we wanted to leave Michel’s schoolwork out of this.

Was Michel’s schoolwork being affected? I asked myself the next instant. I didn’t have that impression. As far as that went, he had his feet more firmly on the ground than his cousin.

‘What’s more, from the very start I have tried to see this separately from my own political future,’ Serge went on. ‘Which is not to say that I’ve never thought about that.’

From the looks of things, Babette had started crying again. Noiselessly. I got the sneaky feeling that I was present at something at which I would rather not be present. It made me think of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Of Oprah Winfrey.

Was that the way it would go? Was this the dress rehearsal for the press conference at which Serge Lohman would announce that the boy on camera in
Opsporing Verzocht
was his son, but that he hoped nonetheless to retain the trust the voters had showed in him? He couldn’t be that naive, could he?

‘To me, the most important thing is Rick’s future,’ Serge said. ‘Of course, it’s very possible that this whole thing will never be solved. But could you live with that? Can Rick live with that? Can we live with that?’ He looked at Claire first, then at me. ‘Can the two of you live with that?’ he asked. ‘I can’t,’ he added then, without waiting for us to answer. ‘I can just see myself, standing on the palace stairs with the Queen and the cabinet ministers. Knowing that, at any moment, at any old press conference, a journalist might raise his finger and ask: “Mr Lohman, is there any truth to the rumour that your son was involved in the murder of a homeless woman?”’

‘Murder?’ Claire cried out. ‘So it’s murder now, is it? Where did you get that from all of a sudden?’

A brief silence fell; the word ‘murder’ must have been audible four tables away. Serge looked over his shoulder, then back at Claire.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That was too loud. But that’s not the point. To call it “murder”, I find that taking things a step too far. What am I saying? Ten steps too far!’

I looked at my wife in admiration. Anger made her prettier, especially her eyes; it was a look that put men to shame. Other men.

‘So what would you call it, Claire?’ Serge had picked up his dessert spoon and was stirring it around in his melted ice cream. It was one of those spoons with a very long handle, but he still managed to get ice and whipped cream on his fingers.

‘An accident,’ Claire said. ‘An unfortunate series of events. No one in his right mind would even begin to claim that they went out that evening to murder a homeless woman.’

‘But that’s what the security camera shows. That’s what all of Holland saw. I mean, so don’t call it murder, call it manslaughter as far as I’m concerned, but that woman never raises a finger against them. That woman gets a lamp and a chair and finally a jerrycan thrown in her face.’

‘What was she doing in that ATM cubicle?’

‘That doesn’t matter, does it? There are homeless people everywhere. Unfortunately. They sleep wherever they can keep a bit warm. It was probably warm and dry in there.’

‘But she was lying in the way, Serge. I mean, she could have gone and slept in the hall at your house. It’s probably warm and dry there, too.’

‘Let’s try to stick to the point,’ Babette said. ‘I really don’t think that—’

‘This
is
the point, sweetheart.’ Claire had put her hand on Babette’s forearm. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me, but when I hear Serge talking like this, it sounds like we’re dealing with some poor little bird here, a fledgling that has fallen out of its nest. What we’re talking about is a full-grown person. A grown-up woman who, in complete possession of her senses, goes to sleep in an ATM cubicle. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m only trying to put myself in someone else’s shoes. Not the homeless woman’s, but Michel and Rick’s. They’re not drunk, they’re not on drugs. They just want to withdraw some money. But someone is lying in the ATM cubicle, stinking to high heaven. So isn’t your first reaction: oh yuck, fuck off, would you?’

‘But they could have gone somewhere else for their money, right?’

‘Somewhere else?’ Claire started laughing. ‘Somewhere else? Yes, of course. You can always go out of your way to avoid things. I mean, what would you do, Serge? You open the front door of your house and you have to step over a sleeping vagrant. What would you do? Would you just turn around and go back inside? Or suppose someone was standing there pissing against your door. Would you just close the door? Would you pack up and move to another house?’

‘Claire—’ Babette said.

‘Okay, all right,’ Serge said. ‘I see what you’re getting at. That wasn’t what I was trying to say. Of course we shouldn’t walk away from problems or difficult situations. But you can, you have to, try to find solutions to problems. To …’ – here he hesitated for a moment – ‘… take the life of a homeless person doesn’t bring you any closer to the solution.’

‘Jesus, Serge!’ Claire said. ‘I’m not talking about a solution to the problem of the homeless. I’m talking about one homeless person. And more than that one homeless person, I think we should be talking about Rick and Michel. I’m not going to deny what happened. I’m not trying to say there was nothing wrong with it. But we have to keep it in perspective. It’s an incident. An incident that can have a major impact on our children’s lives, on their future.’

Serge sighed and rested his hands on the table, on either side of his dessert; he was trying to make eye contact with Babette, I saw, but she had her purse in her lap and was looking for something – or pretending to.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘That future. That’s precisely what I wanted to talk about. Don’t get me wrong, Claire, I’m just as concerned about our boys’ futures as you are. The only thing is, I don’t believe they can live with it, with a secret like that. In the long run it’s going to tear them apart. Rick, in any case, is being torn apart already’ – he sighed again – ‘it’s tearing me apart.’

Once again, I had the feeling I was witnessing something that only obliquely had anything to do with reality. At least with our reality, the reality of two couples – two brothers and their wives – who had gone out to dinner together to talk about their children’s problems.

‘I’ve made up my own mind about my son’s future,’ Serge said. ‘Later, when this is all behind us, I want him to be able to go on with his life. Let me emphasize that I’ve made this decision on my own. My wife … Babette …’ Babette had fished a pack of Marlboro Lights from her purse, an unopened pack, and was now tearing off the cellophane wrapper. ‘Babette doesn’t agree with me. But my mind is made up. She only heard that this afternoon.’

He took a deep breath. Then he looked at us in turn. Only then did I notice the moist glistening in his eyes.

‘In the best interests of my child, and also in the best interests of this country, I’m going to withdraw my candidacy,’ he said.