Chapter Thirteen
Back then
The garden at Clarence House was small by palace standards and walled, gone wild at the edges where Caroline had told the gardeners not to bother. Tristan set off across it at a brisk, confident diagonal, wobbled on the third step, righted himself, and carried on.
James followed behind him with one hand hovering at the small of his back. By the sundial Tristan listed hard to port. James caught a fistful of his jumper and set him upright, as Tristan thanked the sundial.
“You all right there, champ?” James asked, in what he privately considered a serviceable American accent.
Tristan drew himself up to his full and unremarkable height and replied, in his plummiest English accent, “Tip top, old bean. Cheerio.”
His accent was atrocious. The vowels arrived from several different counties at once, and James laughed, because the man’s brain might be mush at the moment, but something in it was still landing the joke.
They walked on without talking, which was a mercy. The light had gone long and gold across the brick, and James thought about his morning, his father’s portrait, and what he’d give to have the man back, rather than that simulacrum of him.
Then the word arrived the way the lost ones always did, once he stopped reaching for it.
“Convergence,” James said.
Tristan blinked at him. “What?”
That was it. The enormous word his father had been teaching him in the photograph, the one Caroline had laughed herself off the edge of the desk over. He remembered how his father kept his finger on the page, resting right next to the word.
“Nothing,” James said. “The word just came to me.”
Tristan, however, had seized on it like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life.
“Convergence,” he repeated, savouring every syllable of it. “Convergence. Con. Vergence.” Whatever he heard in it folded him clean in half, until he had his hands braced on his knees, and he was wheezing down at the hydrangeas. “Oh my God. Convergence.”
Tristan listed sideways into him, a hand landing on James’s forearm. When he spoke, he dropped his voice close to James’s ear.
“James.” He was giggling. “James! I was one.”
“You were what?” James asked. He didn’t mean to smile, but Tristan’s mad giggling was a difficult thing to hold out against.
“A con virgin.” Tristan dissolved into full-throated laughter again, his forehead nearly coming to rest on James’s shoulder. “God, I was the worst one. I lost it at sixteen. In my trailer. With my girlfriend. And I still had the ring on the whole time.”
“The ring?”
“My purity ring.” Tristan waggled his bare right ring finger at James.
“It was silver, with a little cross on it, and it was my publicist’s idea.
The Midwest adored it. A big winner with the church mums. You do one interview about saving yourself for marriage and you move another half-million units of a soundtrack.
So there I was, sixteen, going at it with Annie with the ring still on my finger.
” He wheezed. “I was a con virgin. An absolute fraud of a virgin. A lot of the Disney and Nickelodeon kids were the same, let me tell you. We got around.”
James bit down on his bottom lip. He could correct Tristan. But Tristan looked so pleased with himself, and was still chuckling away. “That sounds,” James said, “like a great deal to carry.”
Tristan flapped his hand dismissively. “It got me my first ten mil. And my parents thought it was fucking hilarious. Dad’s a total California hippie — met Mum at a drum circle in Ghana and didn’t marry her till I was nine, mostly for the tax benefits.
So I’m out there selling abstinence to Seventeen, while Dad’s drying out the buds from his pot plants on our kitchen table for his tantric intimacy group. ”
They trudged on. Every so often something surfaced in Tristan and set him laughing to himself. James steered Tristan onto a bench near the south wall and helped him lower himself onto it. The man’s head instantly lolled past the backrest.
James sat beside him and let Tristan tilt into him. “You doing okay there?”
“I had sex on a bench once.”
“Were you still a con virgin then?”
Tristan scowled. “…I can’t remember.”
“Must not have been very good, then,” James joked.
Tristan reared up from his easy sprawl like he’d just been stung. “Okay. No. I need you to understand something about me.” The stoned drifting of his words had burned off. “I am extremely good. I’m a generous and attentive lover, James. I have a reputation.”
“With whom?”
“With people. Women. There’ve been reviews, basically. Verbal ones. Absolutely glowing ones.”
James looked away and held his face under strict control. Tristan, stoned and defending his honour, was very nearly the most ridiculous thing he had seen all year. Laughing would be cruel, and James couldn’t do that to the man turning his day around. “I don’t doubt it,” he said.
“You doubted it ten seconds ago.”
“I withdraw the doubt. You’re clearly a man of sensual range.”
Tristan took that as his due, then circled back to the point. “Good. As long as you understand that I’m a fantastic lover.”
“I’m going to need you to stop talking about yourself as a lover,” James said. “You’re seeing my sister, and there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed.”
“No. No, James. Of course not. I would never do anything to besmirch your sister’s dignity.
” He’d gone earnest, swinging from outrage to sincerity without touching the ground in between.
“I’m gonna be real with you, James. Caroline, she’s a princess.
Like an actual, literal princess. But that’s not even the thing.
The thing is she’s fantastic. Sharp as hell, funny, and I respect her.
I really do. I’d never mess her around.”
“Well,” James said, watching Tristan try to track a wood pigeon along the top of the wall. “This was a better day than I thought it’d be. Thank you for that.”
Tristan rolled his head to look at him. He didn’t quite manage to meet James’s eyes, but the effort was there.
“I went to see a painting this morning,” James said.
“A portrait of my father. I commissioned it eighteen months ago, and I finally got to see it finished today. It’s incredibly good, and I can’t wait for Caroline to see it when I have it brought up to Windsor next week. He’s coming on three years gone.”
James could see the thought gathering behind Tristan’s eyes, building towards his mouth.
“No,” he said, gravely. “I can’t say that.”
“You can say whatever you want.” James wanted to hear it now, no matter what it was. He needed to.
“…Yeah?”
“Give it to me, Tristan.”
“What’s your position on wind turbines, James?” Tristan asked.
“I’m not relitigating the puffins with you.” James waved it off, refusing to engage with whatever fresh conversational hell Tristan was determined to drag them into. But Tristan continued, a smile starting at the corner of his mouth.
“Personally, I’m a big fan,” he said.
James lost it. The laugh came up through him until his eyes watered, and he had to press the heel of his hand against them to block out the sight of Tristan’s smug little face. “That’s fucking awful, Tristan. How the fuck did you manage to attract Caroline when you’re this socially awkward?”
Tristan lifted a hand and waved it slowly down the length of his reclining body. “Look at me,” he said.
The man’s eyes were pink and bloodshot, and his jumper was rucked up just enough to show off his flat abdomen. He looked nothing like the magazine cover boy he’d spent many years being. James laughed again. “I’m looking, Tristan,” he said. “I’m looking.”