“I see that peevish expression of yours, Nicolas,” my father said—using the French word, maussade—turning to me suddenly in that unnerving way of his. Caught out, I swallowed my wine too fast, coughed and felt the bitterness sting my throat. I don’t even particularly like wine. Maybe the odd biodynamic variety—not the heavy, old-world stuff. “Quite incredible,” he went on. “Same look exactly as your sainted dead mother. Nothing ever good enough for her.”
Beside me I felt Antoine twitch. “That’s her fucking wine you’re pouring,” he muttered, under his breath. My mother’s was an old family: old blood, old wine from a grand estate: Château Blondin-Lavigne. The cellar with its thousands of bottles was part of her inheritance, left to my father on her death. And since her death, my brother, who has never forgiven her for leaving us, has been working his way through as many of them as possible.
“What was that, my boy?” Papa said, turning to Antoine. “Something you’d care to share with the rest of us?”
A silence expanded, dangerously. But Ben spoke into it with the exquisite timing of a first violin entering into his solo: “This is delicious, Sophie.” We were eating my father’s favorite (of course): rare fillet, cold, sautéed potatoes, a cucumber salad. “This beef might be the best I’ve ever tasted.”
“I didn’t cook it,” Sophie said. “It came from the restaurant.” No fillet for her, just cucumber salad. And I noticed that she didn’t look at him, but at a point just beyond his right shoulder. Ben hadn’t won her over, it seemed. Not yet. But I noticed how Mimi snatched furtive glances at him when she thought no one was looking at her, almost missing her mouth with her fork. How Dominique, Antoine’s wife, gazed at him with a half-smile on her face, as though she’d prefer him to the meal before her. And all the while Antoine gripped his steak knife like he was planning to ram it between someone’s ribs.
“Now, of course you’ve known Nicolas since you were boys,” my father said to Ben. “Did he ever do any work at that ridiculous place?”
That ridiculous place meaning: Cambridge, one of the top universities in the world. But the great Jacques Meunier hadn’t needed a college education, and look where he’d got himself. A self-made man.
“Or did he just piss away my hard-earned cash?” Papa asked. He turned to me. “You’re pretty good at doing that, aren’t you, my boy?”
That stung. A short while ago I invested some of that “hard-earned cash” in a health start-up in Palo Alto. Anyone who knew anything was buzzed about it: a pin-prick of blood, the future of healthcare. I used most of the money Papa had settled on me when I turned eighteen. Here was a chance to prove my mettle to him; prove my judgment in my own field was just as good as his . . .
“I can’t speak for how hard he worked at uni,” Ben said, with a wry grin in my direction—and it was a relief to have him cut the tension. “We took different courses. But we pretty much ran the student paper together—and a group of us traveled all over one summer. Didn’t we, Nick?”
I nodded. Tried to match his easy smile but I had the feeling, suddenly, of sighting a predator in the long grass.
Ben went on: “Prague, Barcelona. Amsterdam—” I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but our eyes met at that moment. His expression was impossible to read. Suddenly I wanted him to shut the fuck up. With a look I tried to convey this. Stop. That’s enough. This was not the time to be talking about Amsterdam. My father could never find out.
Ben glanced away, breaking eye contact. And that was when I realized how reckless I had been, inviting him here.
Then there was a sound so loud it felt like the building itself might be collapsing under us. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was thunder, and immediately afterward a streak of lightning lit the sky violet. Papa looked furious. He might control everything that happens in this place, but even he couldn’t order the weather what to do. The first fat drops began to fall. The dinner was over.
Thank Christ.
I remembered to breathe again. But something had shifted.
Later that night, Antoine stormed into my room. “Papa and your English pal. Thick as thieves, aren’t they? You know it would be just like him, right? Disinherit us and leave it all to some random fucking stranger?”
“That’s insane,” I said. It was. But even as I said it I could feel the idea taking root. It would be just like Papa. Always telling us, his own sons, how useless we were. How much of a disappointment to him. But would it be like Ben?
What had always made my mate intriguing was his very unknowability. You could spend hours, days, in his company—you could travel across Europe with him—and never be sure you’d got to the real Benjamin Daniels. He was a chameleon, an enigma. I had no idea, really, who I had invited under this roof, into the bosom of my family.
I reach into the cabinet under the sink and grab the bottle of mouthwash, pour it into the little cup. I want to wash away the rank taste of the tobacco. The cabinet door is still open. There are the little pots of pills in their neat row. It would be so easy. So much more effective than the cigarettes. So helpful to feel a little less . . . present right now.
The fact of the matter is that while I’ve been pretending to Jess, I could almost pretend to myself: that I was a normal adult, living on his own, surrounded by the trappings of his own success. An apartment he paid the rent on. Stuff he’d bought with his own hard-earned cash. Because I want to be that guy, I really do. I’ve tried to be that guy. Not a thirty-something loser forced back to his father’s house because he lost the shirt off his back.
Trust me—as much as I’ve tried to kid myself, it doesn’t make a difference having a lock on the front door and a buzzer of your own. I’m still under his roof; I’m still infected by this place. And I regress, being here. It’s why I escaped for a decade to the other side of the world. It’s why I was so happy in Cambridge. It’s why I went straight to meet Ben in that bar when he got in touch, despite Amsterdam. Why I invited him to live here. I thought his presence might make my sentence here more bearable. That his company would help me return to a different time.
So that’s all it was, when I let her think I was someone and something else. A little harmless make-believe, nothing more sinister than that.
Honest.
Jess
The voices are a roar of sound over the top of the music. I can’t believe how many people are packed into the space down here: it must be well over a hundred. Fake cobwebs have been draped from the ceiling and candles placed along the floor, illuminating the rough walls. The scent of the burning wax is strong in the tight, airless space. The reflection of the dancing flames gives the impression that the stone is moving, wriggling like something alive.
I try to blend into the crowd. My costume is by far the worst one I can see. Most of the guests have gone all out. A nun in a white habit drenched in blood is kissing a woman who has painted her entire semi-naked body red and is wearing a pair of twisted devil horns. A plague doctor dressed from head to toe in a black cloak and hat lifts up the long, curved beak of his mask to take a drag from a cigarette and then lets the smoke blow out of the eyeholes. A tall tuxedo-clad figure with a huge wolf’s head sips a cocktail through a straw. Everywhere I look there are mad monks, grim reapers, demons and ghouls. And a strange thing: the surroundings make all these figures seem more sinister than they would up above ground, in proper lighting. Even fake blood somehow looks more real down here.
I’m trying to work out how to insert myself into one of these groups of people and start a conversation about Ben. I also desperately need a drink.