Chapter Thirty-One
The door opened, and the man who came out was not Barnaby.
He was dark-haired, sharp-featured, and wearing a midnight blue velvet blazer that had never been within a mile of a high street.
Beneath it he had on: a white linen shirt, open at the collar, and trousers that tapered to a pair of suede loafers the colour of wet sand.
He eased the door shut behind him and turned to face Lex.
This could only be one person: the Prince of Cardona. Barnaby’s other best friend. Vidal looked at Lex. His dark eyes moved from Lex’s face to his trainers and back up, the assessment unhurried, the verdict already reached.
“Alexander Murphy.” He said the name like a magistrate reading out a charge. “If I had gloves, I would challenge you to a duel.”
Lex blinked. “What?”
“A duel. Not in boxing, obviously. That would be stupid.” Vidal folded his arms across his chest. “Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester is the platonic love of my life, but I would not risk my face for him. That would be a detriment to the world.”
“What would you do with the gloves?”
Vidal’s chin lifted. “Why, throw them in your face, of course! To express my disgust at your behaviour.”
Lex’s shoulders dropped. The fight posture he hadn’t realised he was holding drained out of him, because this man was five foot ten in his loafers and had the upper body strength of someone whose primary exercise was waving his arm around vigorously to emphasise his points, but he’d still come out here ready to go. For Barnaby.
“I deserve worse than that.”
Vidal flung his arms wide. The blazer billowed dramatically.
“Well, yes, obviously! But one must follow tradition. And this, you see, is exactly what has got our Barnaby into trouble.” His voice climbed, gaining momentum and volume, because Vidal clearly wasn’t worried about the neighbours.
“He did not follow the tradition of remaining a repressed English aristocrat. He was supposed to marry a girl called Arabella with a face like a horse and a trust fund and a cottage in the Cotswolds, and instead, you — ” Vidal jabbed a finger at Lex’s chest. “You drew him out. You fed him squid ink crisps and touched his hair, and he opened up like a…like a mussel that has been steamed, you understand? He opened, both emotionally and sensually to you! And then you hurt him.”
Vidal’s arms dropped to his sides. His voice went flat.
“So now he has turtled. He is back inside his shell, and his shell is cashmere, and reads a book he is not really reading. He is being very polite to everyone, and he will never love again. For at least a couple of years, because he is nervy.” Vidal’s jaw tightened.
“This is what you have done. You have taken a man who was brave enough to want something, and you have taught him that wanting things is dangerous.”
The silence after Vidal’s words sat between them on the doorstep. Lex didn’t try to fill it. He’d spent his whole career learning when to throw and when to absorb, and this was an absorbing moment if ever there’d been one.
He held up the shoebox he’d been carrying.
Inside it was everything of Barnaby’s that had accumulated in his flat over the past few months: a mobile charger, a pair of cashmere socks rolled into a tight cylinder, a tortoiseshell comb that Barnaby kept in the bathroom, and Florence’s squeaky pork chop, which had been wedged behind the sofa cushion since her last visit.
“I’m not here to cause trouble,” Lex said. “I’ve got some of his stuff. Thought I’d drop it back.”
Vidal looked at the box. “You could have posted it.”
“Yeah.” Lex’s thumb ran along the edge of the lid. “I could’ve.”
“But you were hoping to see him.”
Lex didn’t answer that. He shifted the box to his other hand and reached inside. The squeaky pork chop was wedged beneath the socks. He pulled it out and held it up.
It was pink rubber, chewed at one end, with a moulded bone sticking out of it at an angle.
He squeezed it once. The squeak cut through the quiet of Chester Square, high and sharp and unmistakable.
From inside the house, Florence barked. A single, joyful detonation of recognition, followed by the scrabble of claws on hardwood as she launched herself at the front door.
Vidal’s head whipped round. He pressed his palm flat against the door behind him. “No. No, no, no. You will not weaponise the dog.”
“I’m not weaponising the dog. I’m returning her toy.”
“You are standing on this doorstep looking like a man who has been left out in the rain, which you have not. It is what you English consider a beautiful day today, and it is overcast at best. You are squeezing a small rubber pork chop to summon the only member of this household who is still pleased to see you. This is manipulation.”
“It’s a squeaky toy, mate.”
“It is emotional manipulation via a squeaky toy, and I will not allow it.” Vidal drew himself up. Behind the door, Florence whined and scratched at the wood. “You will not be given entrance just because you are a sad big man who looks like he has wilted.”
Lex put the pork chop back in the box. Florence’s scratching intensified, and then stopped, replaced by a low, sustained whine that was worse.
He sat down on the front step. The stone was cold through his joggers, and Vidal was still standing over him, arms folded, blazer catching the breeze. A woman walked past on the opposite pavement with a Waitrose bag for life.
“I’ve fucked everything up,” Lex said. He wasn’t looking at Vidal.
He was looking at his hands, the tape marks still visible on both wrists.
“I know I have. I know what I did and I know why it was wrong. I know saying sorry doesn’t undo it all.
” He turned his hands over and pressed them flat on his thighs.
“People who used to cross a restaurant to shake my hand walk the other way now. My agent’s working eighteen-hour days keeping what’s left of my career on life support.
I’ve lost the Lucozade deal, the BOA’s probably done with me, and the King’s Trust haven’t even returned my calls, which is its own kind of verdict.
” He paused. “None of that’s what keeps me up at night. ”
Vidal sat down beside him. He folded his legs beneath him on the cold stone step, arranged his blazer over his knees, and waited.
“What keeps me up,” Lex said, “is that I can’t walk through that door.
I can’t go in there, and put my arms round him, and say I’m sorry.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Everything else, the money, the sponsors, the career…
I built all of that once and I can build it again, or I won’t, and either way I’ll survive.
But I can’t fix this from out here.” His jaw worked.
“I can’t fix it if he won’t let me in the room. ”
Florence whined behind the door. Lex’s chest tightened.
“I deleted that photo,” he said. “I sent it, and I looked at it in the chat, and I deleted it, because I didn’t want them to see him like that.
I wanted to keep what happened in Tokyo ours.
” He stopped. The word sat in the afternoon air, small and true.
“It was ours. It was messy and it didn’t work.
We tried so many times, and it didn’t really work.
I know he thinks I went back to the lads and told them about it, but I didn’t.
I never told them anything about what actually happened between us in that room.
Because it mattered. Even when it was going wrong, it mattered. ”
Vidal was watching him. The judicial sharpness had left his eyes.
“Getting him to trust me,” Lex said. His voice cracked on the word, and he let it crack, because he’d spent two weeks holding himself together, and he was tired.
“Getting Barnaby to open up. To let me touch him. To stop bracing every time I got close…” He pressed his knuckles against his forehead.
“That was the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.
Better than the gold medals. As good as when I got to buy my mum her house.
Better than any of it.” His hands dropped.
“And I know that sounds mental, coming from someone who’s won world titles and fought at the Garden.
But none of that changed me. Barnaby changed me. ”
Lex looked at Vidal. “I don’t want to lose that. Please.” His throat was raw. “Can I see him, please? I’m flying off to Vegas tonight.”
Vidal looked at him for a long time. Then he reached over and patted Lex on the cheek.
Three sharp taps, firm enough to sting, just short of a slap.
A touch that said I could hit you properly, and we both know I won’t, but I want you to remember that the option exists and that I am best friends with the King of this land, and am a royal myself.
“No, big man.” Vidal’s voice was quiet, and final. “You will not see him today.”
Lex’s jaw tightened. “Vidal—”
“Listen to me.” Vidal held up one finger.
“I am going to do you an extremely generous favour, and you are going to sit there and receive it, because you are not in a position to refuse favours from the people who love him.” He lowered the finger.
“I am keeping you away from Barnaby. Not because I am cruel, although I can be, ask anyone. I am doing this because what Barnaby needs right now is to miss you. He needs to feel your absence like a draught under a door. He needs to lie in that bed upstairs, and he needs to notice that the house is too quiet, and that Florence keeps going to the front door and sniffing under it.” Vidal’s hand settled on Lex’s shoulder. “You must let him stew.”
Lex said nothing. His thumbnail was digging into the scabbed knuckle on his right hand hard enough to reopen the wound. Vidal smacked his hand away with a concerned cluck of his tongue.
“You are a big man,” Vidal continued, “with, I am told, a big cock.”
Lex laughed. It came out broken.
“This is not a joke. I have it on excellent authority. Barnaby is not forthcoming about these matters, as you know, but there are things one can deduce from context, and also from the fact that he walked like a man who had been riding a particularly spirited horse for several days after your weekend at Chatham House. He told me this himself.” Vidal waved a hand.
“You must trust that this asset, and perhaps your personality, will be sufficient to draw him out. Eventually. When he is ready. No grand gestures are required today. Barnaby does not like a fuss. There will be no scene where you kick down the door to get to him.” He jerked his chin towards the entrance of number twelve Chester Square.
“That door is solid English oak, reinforced with a Banham deadlock. You will break your shoulder before you break it, and then you will not be able to fight the Russian, and Barnaby will be furious, because he has opinions about that fight, even if he will not admit to them.”
Vidal leaned closer. His dark eyes were steady and warm and utterly serious.
“Today you will think with your big head, not your little head. You will go to Las Vegas and you will win your fight. You will let him be. You will let him come to you, and open himself up to you, just as you have done before. That is the way with the nervy ones, yes? You cannot chase them. You can only stand very still and hold out your hand and wait for them to decide you are safe.” He paused.
“Imagine: he did not even like me when we first met at Eton. Me! I was magnificent. I was thirteen years old and already the best-dressed person in Berkshire, and Barnaby avoided me until I made it so he could not.” Vidal laughed, bright and incredulous, as though the idea of anyone not immediately adoring him remained, after all these years, a source of genuine bewilderment.
“It took him a full term to let me sit next to him at breakfast. A full term, Lex.”
Vidal stood. He brushed the seat of his trousers with both hands and picked up the shoebox from the step. His fingers closed over the lid, and he tucked it under his arm.
“I will give him his things. And the pork chop.” He looked down at Lex, still sitting on the cold stone.
“Go and win your fight, big man. Come back in one piece. And when Barnaby is ready, he will find you. He always does. He found you in a common room in Tokyo at two in the morning, and he will find you again.”
Lex looked up at him. Vidal reached down and patted his cheek again. This one was harder. It landed with a crisp, open-palmed crack that echoed off the white stucco of Chester Square, and Lex’s head rocked sideways a fraction. It was absolutely a slap.
“That one was for me,” Vidal said.
He turned, opened the door just wide enough to slip through, and pulled it shut behind him. The Banham deadlock engaged with a heavy, final click.
Lex pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, breathed out through his nose, and stood up. He had a fight to win.