The Dinner (30 page)

Claire had to laugh – she laughed only briefly, then looked serious again.

‘And you didn’t say anything,’ I said.

‘At first I thought: what’s he up to? But suddenly, I saw my old Paul again. And then I knew: I wanted my old Paul back. Including the Paul who kicks his own desk drawers to bits, and that other time, when that scooter cut you off on the road. When you took off after it …’

And that time you battered Michel’s principal into the hospital, I thought Claire would say then. But she didn’t. She said something else.

‘That was the Paul I loved … that I love. That’s the Paul I love. More than anything or anyone else in the world.’

I saw something glistening in the corners of her eyes, my own eyes were smarting now as well.

‘You, and Michel, of course,’ my wife said. ‘You and Michel, I love you both just as much. Together, you two are what makes me the happiest.’

‘Yeah,’ I said; my voice sounded hoarse, it had a little squeak in it. I cleared my throat.

‘Yeah,’ I said again.

We sat across from each other in silence like that for a while, my wife’s hands still clasping mine.

‘What did you say to Babette?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘In the garden. When the two of you went for a walk. Babette looked so happy when she saw me. “Dear, sweet Paul …” she called me. What did you say to her?’

Claire took a deep breath. ‘I told her you would do something. That you would do something to make sure that press conference didn’t go ahead.’

‘And Babette thought that was okay?’

‘She wants Serge to win the election. But what hurt Babette most was that he only told her about it in the car on the way over here. So that she wouldn’t have enough time to talk him out of his nonsense.’

‘But here at the table, just now, she said—’

‘Babette is smart, Paul. It wouldn’t do for Serge to suspect anything later on. When Babette becomes the First Lady, maybe she’ll hand out soup at a shelter for the homeless. But there is one homeless person about whom she cares as little as you or I do.’

I pulled my hands away. That is to say, I pulled my hands from my wife’s and clasped them in my own.

‘It’s not a good idea,’ I said.

‘Paul—’

‘No, listen. I’m me. I am who I am. I haven’t been taking my pills. Right now, you and I are the only people who know that. But things like that get found out. They’ll dig around and they’ll find out. The school psychologist, my being on non-active, and then that principal at Michel’s school … it would all be out on the table, like an open book. To say nothing of my brother. My brother will be the first to say that something like that, coming from me, doesn’t surprise him at all. Maybe he won’t say it out loud, but his little brother has done things to him before. His little brother who suffers from something he needs medication for. Pills, which he then flushes down the toilet.’

Claire said nothing.

‘He won’t let anything I do change his plans, Claire. It would be the wrong signal.’

I waited a moment, I tried not to blink.

‘It would be the wrong signal if I did it,’ I said.

About five minutes after Claire had left, I heard another beep coming from under Babette’s napkin.

We’d both stood up at the same moment. My wife and I. I put my arms around her and held her against me. I buried my face in her hair. Very slowly, without making a sound, I’d breathed in through my nose.

Then I sat down again. I watched my wife go, until she disappeared from sight somewhere around the lectern.

I picked up Babette’s phone, opened the cover and looked at the screen.

‘Two new messages.’ I pressed Display. The first was a text message from Beau. It contained only one word. One word, without a capital and without a full stop: ‘mama’.

I pressed Delete.

The second message said there was a voicemail message in her inbox.

Babette used a different carrier. I didn’t know which number I needed to use for voicemail. On a hunch I looked in Contacts, and under the ‘V’ I found Voicemail. I couldn’t suppress a smile.

After the voicemail lady’s announcement that there was one new message, I heard Beau’s voice.

I listened. As I listened I closed my eyes briefly once, then opened them again. I closed the cover. I didn’t put Babette’s cell phone back on the table, but stuck it in my pocket.

‘Your son doesn’t like restaurants like this?’

I was so startled that I sat bolt upright in my chair.

‘Oh, excuse me,’ the manager said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you. But I saw you talking to your son in the garden. At least, I assume it was your son.’

At first, for a moment, I had no idea what he was talking about. But then, right away, I knew.

The smoking man. The man smoking outside the restaurant. The manager had seen Michel and me this evening, in the garden.

I felt no panic – to be honest, I felt absolutely nothing.

Only then did I see that the manager was holding a saucer, a saucer containing the bill.

‘Mr Lohman forgot to take the check with him,’ he said. ‘So I thought I’d give it to you. Perhaps you’ll see him again before long.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I saw you standing there like that with your son,’ the manager said, ‘there was something in your posture. In both of your postures, I should say, something identical. Something you’d only see in a father and son, I thought.’

I looked down at the saucer, the saucer with the check on it. What was he waiting for? Why didn’t he go away, instead of hanging around here, blathering about people’s postures?

‘Yes,’ I said again; it was not meant as a confirmation of the manager’s assumptions, only as a polite way to fill the silence. I had nothing else to say to him anyway.

‘I have a son too,’ the manager said. ‘He’s only five. But still, sometimes I’m surprised by how much he looks like me. How he does certain things exactly the way I do. Little gestures. I often touch my hair, for example, twist it between my fingers when I’m bored, or worried about something … I … I also have a daughter. She’s three, she’s the spitting image of her mother. In everything.’

I took the check from the saucer and looked at the total. I won’t go into all the things you could do with a sum of money like that, or about how many days a normal person would have to work to earn it – if they weren’t forced by the tortoise in the white turtleneck to spend weeks washing dishes in the open kitchen. And I won’t mention the figure itself, the kind of sum that would make you burst out laughing. Which was precisely what I did.

‘I hope you had an enjoyable evening,’ the manager said – but still he didn’t go away. He brushed the edge of the empty saucer with his fingertips, slid it a few inches across the tablecloth, picked it up and put it back down.

‘Claire?’

For the second time that evening I opened the door of the ladies’ room and called her name. But there was no answer. From somewhere outside I heard the sound of a police siren.

‘Claire?’ I called again. I took a few steps forward, until I was past the vase of white daffodils, and noted that all the cubicles were empty. I heard the second siren as I walked past the cloakroom and the lectern to the exit, and then outside. Through the trees I could now see the flashing lights in front of the regular-people café.

A normal reaction would have been for me to walk faster, to start running – but I didn’t. True, I felt something dark and heavy at the place where my heart should have been, but the heaviness was a calm heaviness. The dark feeling in my chest, too, had everything to do with a sense of inevitability.

My wife, I thought.

Again I felt a powerful urge to start running. To arrive at the café out of breath – where I would almost certainly not be allowed in.

My wife! I’d pant. My wife is in there!

And it was precisely that scene projected on my mind’s eye that made me slow down. I reached the gravel path that led to the bridge. By the time I got there, I was no longer walking slowly in any natural sense, I could tell that by the sound my soles made on the gravel, by the pauses between my steps – I was walking in slow motion.

I put my hand on the balustrade and stopped. The flashing lights were reflected in the dark surface beneath my feet. Through the opening between the trees on the far side I now had a clear view of the café. Pulled up onto the kerb, in front of the outdoor tables, were three police Volkswagens and an ambulance.

One ambulance. Not two.

It was pleasant to feel such calm, to be able to see all these things in this way – almost independently of each other – and to draw my own conclusions. I felt the way I had before at moments of crisis (Claire’s hospitalization; Serge and Babette’s failed attempt to take away my son; the footage from the security camera): I had felt, and I felt again now, that from within my calmness I could take action. Promptly and efficiently.

I looked back towards the restaurant entrance, where a few waitresses had now gathered, apparently drawn by the sirens and flashing lights. I thought I also saw the manager there, at least I saw a man in a suit lighting a cigarette.

They probably couldn’t see me from there, I thought for a moment, but then realized that a few hours ago I had actually seen Michel come cycling across this very bridge.

I had to move on. I couldn’t stand still any longer. I couldn’t run the risk of having one of the waitresses testify that she had seen a man on the bridge. ‘So weird. He was just standing there. Do you think that might be important?’

I took Babette’s cell phone out of my pocket and held it above the water. At the sound of the splash, a duck came swimming up. Then I stepped away from the railing and began moving. No longer in slow motion, but at the most normal pace I could: not too slowly, not too fast. On the far side of the bridge I crossed the bicycle path, looked to the left, and walked on to the tram stop. Some spectators had already gathered, not really a crowd at this hour, no more than twenty onlookers. To the left of the café was an alley. I made for the alley.

I had barely reached the kerb when the café’s swinging doors flew open, quite literally flew open with two loud bangs. A stretcher came out, a stretcher on wheels, pushed and pulled at each end by two paramedics. One of the paramedics at the back was holding up a plastic IV bag. Behind him came Babette, she wasn’t wearing her glasses any more and was pressing a handkerchief to her eyes.

The head of the person on the stretcher was the only thing sticking out from beneath the green sheet. I’d known it the whole time, in fact, but still I breathed a sigh of relief. The head was covered with compresses and gauze. Blood-stained compresses and gauze.

The paramedics pushed the stretcher through the back of the ambulance, which was already open and waiting. Two of them climbed in front, the other two in the back, along with Babette. The door closed and the ambulance raced away from the kerb and turned right, towards the centre of town.

The siren came on, which was a good sign.

Or not: it depended on how you looked at it.

I didn’t have much time to think about the immediate future, though, because the swinging doors opened again.

Claire walked out between two uniformed officers; she wasn’t handcuffed, in fact they weren’t even holding her. She looked around, she searched the faces in the little crowd, looking for that one familiar face.

Then she found it.

I looked at her and she looked at me. I took a step forward, or at least my body betrayed the fact that I wanted to take a step forward.

It was at that moment that Claire shook her head.

Don’t, she was saying. She was almost at one of the patrol cars already, the back door was being held open by a third policeman. I glanced around to see if anyone in the crowd might have noticed who Claire had shaken her head at, but no one had eyes for anything but the woman being led to the patrol car.

When she arrived at the cruiser, Claire stopped for a moment. She searched for and found my eyes again. She made a movement with her head, to an outsider it might have looked as though she were simply ducking in order not to collide with the door, but to me Claire’s head was unmistakably pointing in a given direction.

To something just behind her and to one side, to the alley, the shortest way to our house.

Home, my wife had said. Go home.

I didn’t wait for the police car to drive away. I turned around and walked off.

What kind of tip are you supposed to leave at a restaurant where the bill makes you burst out laughing? I could remember our talking about that before, quite often, not only with Serge and Babette, but also with other friends with whom we’d eaten in Dutch restaurants. Let’s say that after a dinner with four people you are asked to pay four hundred euros – mind you, I’m not saying our dinner cost four hundred euros – and you count on giving a tip of ten to fifteen per cent. The logical consequence is that you’d be expected to leave behind a sum of no less than forty and no more than sixty euros.