Chapter Thirty
Barnaby was reading on the sofa at Chester Square with his legs crossed at the ankle and a hardback open on his lap. The house was quiet around him, except for Peregrine banging around in the kitchen on the espresso machine.
The doorbell rang. He heard Mrs Harding’s footsteps cross the hallway. The front door opened, and then a familiar voice that had never, to Barnaby’s knowledge, been modulated in an interior space filled the ground floor of twelve Chester Square.
“Where is he? Don’t tell me he’s in bed. If he’s in bed I will drag him out by the ankles. I have done it before. Ask James.”
Vidal swept into the living room. He was in a camel overcoat thrown open over a white linen shirt, his dark hair pushed back from his face.
He carried a canvas tote in one hand and a bottle of Cava in the other.
He stopped in the doorway and looked at Barnaby on the sofa with his book, and his eyes narrowed.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not. You are not doing this. You are not going to sit there looking like a man in a Jigsaw catalogue and pretend you are fine.”
“I am fine.”
“You are wearing cashmere. You iron your grief, Barnaby. You put it in a nice jumper and you cross your legs and you read a book you are not reading, and you think this means you are coping, and I am telling you now, as someone who loves you, that I am not fooled.”
He threw the tote bag at Barnaby’s chest. Barnaby caught it against his sternum, the weight of it heavier than expected, and glass clinked around inside.
“It is not a Murano glass dildo,” Vidal said. “I am sorry to disappoint.”
Perry appeared in the doorway holding an espresso cup, just in time to catch that statement. The colour left his face.
Vidal turned, seized Perry by both shoulders, and kissed him on each cheek with a firmness that rocked him backward on his heels.
“Peregrine. You are taller. You are also very pale.” Vidal’s lip curled up.
“You are so English, but you may overcome this by eating something with iron in it.” He took the espresso from Perry’s unresisting hand, drained it in one swallow, and handed it back.
“I have brought you Cardona olives. From my grandmother’s estate.
Delicious bitterness to draw out the bitterness of heartbreak.
” He held up the Cava. “And this, of course. Because you cannot eat olives without wine. It would be uncivilised.”
Barnaby opened the tote. Inside was a jar of olives in dark brine, a wedge of Manchego wrapped in waxed paper, and a smaller jar of something amber and viscous that he suspected was quince paste.
Vidal dropped onto the sofa directly beside him, thigh to thigh, and then his arm came around Barnaby’s shoulders and pulled him sideways until Barnaby’s head was resting against his collarbone.
Barnaby went rigid for a full second before his body remembered that this was Vidal, and that Vidal did not observe the same rules about personal space as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
“Now you can be not fine, Bash. I have seen you at your worst. Do you remember that haircut you had when we were sixteen? A travesty. I vowed never to bring it up, but I feel I must do so now, to show you how much you have already overcome.”
Perry stood in the doorway watching them. His expression cycled through alarm, then confusion, finally settling on relief. He backed out of the room without a word and pulled the door shut behind him.
Vidal’s hand found Barnaby’s hair and his fingers carded through it slowly. Barnaby closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of bergamot that Vidal always carried with him.
“I watched the interview,” Vidal said. “He looked terrible.”
Barnaby said nothing.
“He will look even more terrible when I kick him in the balls.”
“Vidal, he’s a heavyweight boxer with a fifteen-million-pound fight in a fortnight.”
“Yes. But I am scrappy.”
Barnaby turned his face into Vidal’s shoulder and pressed closer, his arm coming across Vidal’s chest. Vidal held him without comment, without comedy, his hand warm and steady on the back of Barnaby’s head.
? ? ?
Vidal stayed. He didn’t ask for permission, and Barnaby didn’t offer it. The question of the duration of stay was never raised because Vidal operated on the assumption that he was welcome everywhere.
He was relentless. He filled the house with noise and movement and the persistent smell of whatever he was cooking on Mrs Harding’s hob, which always required ingredients that had to be sourced from three separate delicatessens in Chelsea, because Vidal didn’t recognise Waitrose as a true purveyor of quality cured meats.
On the first morning, he woke Barnaby at seven by opening his bedroom curtains and placing a cortado on the bedside table.
“Up,” he said. “We are walking Florence. The dog needs exercise and you need sunlight. You are developing the complexion of a root vegetable.”
“Florence doesn’t walk until eight.”
“Florence has been reassigned to the Mediterranean schedule. She will adapt. She is more flexible than you.”
Florence, who was already at the bedroom door with her lead in her mouth, had clearly been briefed.
They walked through Belgravia in the weak March light, Vidal in his camel coat and Barnaby in his peacoat, Florence pulling them south towards the river.
Vidal talked. He talked about Cardona, which was undergoing what he described as a “constitutional crisis” involving a disputed olive grove and two elderly aunts who hadn’t spoken since 1997.
He talked about a sculptor in Barcelona who’d been commissioned to produce a bust of his grandmother and had made her look, according to Vidal, “like a Labrador in a tiara.” He talked about a new restaurant in Mayfair that served cuttlefish ink risotto and had a sommelier who’d once made Vidal cry with a Barolo.
Barnaby listened. He didn’t have to contribute, because Vidal didn’t require contributions to his conversations.
He required an audience, and Barnaby’s receptive silence served that purpose.
The stories washed over him in a warm, ceaseless current, and by the time they reached the Embankment he realised he hadn’t thought about the Tokyo Tumble Tally in forty minutes.
This, he understood, was the point.
On the second day, Vidal dragged him to Kensington Palace.
James was in his sitting room with a red box open on the coffee table and Benton stationed at the door.
He stood when Barnaby came in, crossed the room, and pulled him into a hug that lasted long enough for Barnaby to feel the deliberate steadiness of James’s breathing against his own chest.
James didn’t mention Lex or the spreadsheet.
He talked about the King’s Trust schools programme, which was expanding into Manchester, and a state dinner he’d attended with the Norwegian Ambassador who’d spent forty minutes telling James about his fly-fishing technique with a passion that bordered on evangelical.
He poured tea and cut the Victoria sponge himself, because Benton had been dismissed and the three of them were alone in the room for the first time since the crisis had begun.
Vidal sprawled across the sofa with his feet in James’s lap.
“He is eating,” Vidal reported to James, gesturing at Barnaby with a slice of cake.
“But not enough. I made him ropa vieja last night and he left half of it. He claims he was full. I believe he was being dramatic. Through self-deprivation, in the way of the puritanical English.”
“I was full.”
“You were performing fullness to avoid a second helping, which is not the same thing. James, tell him.”
“Barnaby, you need to eat more.”
“This is a constitutional overstep. Much like your ‘get fucked’ command.”
James winced.
They sat together until the grey afternoon light faded from the windows and Benton reappeared to remind James that the Home Secretary was arriving at six.
James walked them to the door himself, which he never did, and his hand settled on the back of Barnaby’s neck in the corridor and stayed there until they reached the entrance.
“Ring me,” James said. “Whenever. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning, or if I’m with the PM. Ring me through Benton.”
Barnaby nodded. His throat was too tight to speak.
The days blurred together. Vidal cooked.
They walked Florence twice a day. They went to Kensington Palace three more times, and on one of those visits, James produced a box of squid ink crisps that he’d had Benton source from a Japanese import shop in Soho.
Barnaby looked at them, and his vision went hot.
He excused himself to the lavatory where he pressed his back against the door and breathed until he could rejoin the room with his face rearranged.
By the time he’d returned, the crisps had been secreted away.
In the evenings, Vidal opened wine and they sat in the Chester Square sitting room while Perry drifted in and out, emboldened by Vidal’s presence to be in the same room as his brother’s grief.
Vidal told stories about people they’d known at school.
He described, in excruciating detail, the time James had tried to sneak out of Eton for a Radiohead concert and been caught by the housemaster wearing a disguise that consisted entirely of a flat cap and a false moustache he’d bought from a joke shop in Windsor.
“He looked like a child’s drawing of a Victorian bank robber,” Vidal said. “The moustache was ginger. He did not understand why this was a problem, and yet your nation trusts him to be head of state.”
Barnaby laughed. The sound surprised him, with its roughness, and Perry’s head came up from his laptop across the room. The look of relief on his brother’s face hurt to see.
On the fourth night, when the wine was finished and Perry had gone to bed, Vidal turned the television off and sat facing Barnaby on the sofa with his legs folded beneath him.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” he said. “But I need to know if you are angry or if you are sad, because they require different interventions, and I have been deploying the anger protocol for four days. I am beginning to suspect I have the diagnosis wrong.”
Barnaby stared at his empty glass. The dregs of the Rioja left a dark crescent at the bottom. “I’m both.”
“Which one is winning?”
The silence held. Florence sighed in her basket by the radiator.
“The sadness,” Barnaby said. He put the glass down.
“The angry bit is easy. I know what he did, and I know why it was wrong. I know I’ve made the right decision, and all of that sits in a neat row that I can look at it without flinching.
The sad bit is everything else. It’s the parts that weren’t the game.
The parts that were real.” He stopped. His jaw ached from clenching.
“Our afternoons walking through the parklands at Chatham House. The way lying next to him made me feel…” His voice dropped.
“Those moments weren’t gameplay. I know they weren’t.
But I want to make myself think they’re not real…
because if they are…then the thing I’ve lost is bigger than the thing I’m angry about. ”
Vidal’s hand found his knee. He didn’t squeeze. He just rested it there.
“You know what James would say,” Vidal said.
“James would say something wise and appropriate.”
“James would say that two things can be true at once. That Lex can have done a terrible thing and also loved you.” Vidal paused. “I, on the other hand, would say that if he comes near you before you are ready, I will hit him over the head with a wine bottle.”
? ? ?
Aweek before the Morozov fight, on a Tuesday afternoon that smelled of the hyacinths Mrs Harding had put on the hallway table, the doorbell rang, and Barnaby’s body knew — before his brain caught up — who exactly this visitor would be.
Florence’s head came up. Her ears swivelled forward, and her tail began a low, fast wag that thumped against the rug.
She knew, too. She was already on her feet and moving toward the hallway.
The enthusiasm of her response told Barnaby everything, because Florence had a hierarchy of greetings calibrated to her affection for each visitor, and this particular velocity of tail wagging was reserved for exactly one person outside of Barnaby himself.
Vidal was already moving towards the door. He’d been meeting every Deliveroo order himself since his arrival, delighted by the anonymity of being a rich nobody in London.
Then Lex’s voice filled the hallway. “Afternoon. Is Barnaby in?”
Barnaby’s mug hit the coffee table, but he managed to keep his posture perfect. The fact that his ribs had contracted around his lungs was a private matter between himself and his skeleton. He heard Vidal’s voice, low and rapid, and then the front door closed.
Florence stood in the doorway of the sitting room, her tail still going, her liquid eyes moving between Barnaby and the front hall. She whined, a single questioning note.
He couldn’t hear the words Vidal was having with Lex. The door and the brick wall between the sitting room and the pavement reduced their voices to low murmurs. He could hear the rhythm of the exchange, though; Vidal, true to character, was doing most of the talking.
Barnaby got to his feet without making a conscious decision about it.
He crossed the room, and then he was at the front door with his hand on the latch, not opening it, just standing there with his palm flat against the brass. Through the door, muffled but audible now that he was closer, Vidal’s voice came through in fragments. So he stayed where he was.