Chapter Fifteen
Back then
The text came through at ten-thirty at night.
Tristan was lying in the dark of his Kensington flat with the script open on his chest, running through the chemistry read scene in his head for the ninth time.
He’d promised himself that he would be asleep by ten, but he picked up his mobile anyway, expecting a good-luck text from one of his brothers.
Instead he found a message from an unknown number, just a link, no words. He tapped onto it.
A clip from some regional news feed started playing. It showed King James at a lectern in a marquee, hundreds of people ranged in front of him. Before I go on, I want to make my position on wind turbines very clear, he said. I’m an enormous fan.
The crowd laughed, and laughed. Some bigwig on the stage with James actually doubled over, clutching at his stomach.
Tristan watched the video clip twice. His face went hot: he could remember exactly how off his head he’d been when he’d blurted that joke out on a garden bench, trying to lighten the mood between them. By the end of the second run-through he had stopped cringing and started to seethe.
you stole my joke, he typed.
The reply came fast, as though James had been waiting for his response. Brought the house down. They’re calling it a triumph of public engagement, and apparently I give off approachable, man of the people vibes.
they laughed because you’re the KING. you could read out a shopping list and get a standing ovation. that joke was objectively terrible.
Patently untrue. It was all about my delivery.
you’ve never landed a joke on merit in your life. you just have the constitutional authority to make people clap and laugh on cue.
I’ll have you know I possess a robust natural comic instinct.
what’s your next public thing? Tristan demanded.
I have a village flower show tomorrow. I’m to judge the tulips and try to look moved by a rhubarb.
Tristan lay there and thought about this. okay. flower show. you open with: it’s a real privilege to stand among the finest blooms in the county. then you hit them with — and while i understand that i’m here to judge the best in show, i have to admit that i’m rooting for all of you.
Tristan. That is an act of terrorism against the English language and the institution of British humour.
do it. land that, in front of the flowers people, and maybe i’ll concede you’ve got some charismatic pull of your own.
All right. Challenge accepted.
Tristan saved James’s number, then set his mobile face-down on the bedside table. He pulled the duvet up to his chin, and lay there in the dark with the script abandoned on the floor where it had slid down, and fell asleep still smiling.
? ? ?
The casting room was on the fourth floor of a Soho building, small enough that Daniel Birrell took up most of it.
He was bigger than he read on screen, broad enough through the shoulders that the folding chair under him looked borrowed from a doll’s house. He rose when Tristan came in, and kept rising, until Tristan had to tip his chin to hold his eye.
Tristan put out his hand. Birrell took it, closed his grip down far past the pressure a handshake asked for, until Tristan’s knuckles shifted. Then he released him, and the warmth of the contact stayed as an imprint on Tristan’s palm.
The director wanted to run through the morning scene from episode three: Ben dressing Jay before work, and then, he said, he wanted to watch them follow the scene wherever it took them. “Don’t act it at me. Just be Ben and Jay.”
On cue, Tristan smoothed his palms across Birrell’s shoulders, and tugged his collar square. Birrell stood still for all of it, and let himself be tended to without shifting to ease the way for Tristan.
Tristan reached up to set the knot of an invisible tie at Birrell’s throat. “Did you read the schedule I laid out for you last night?” Birrell asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell me what you’re doing today, then.”
“I’ll sort the kitchen first. Then I’ll do a deep clean of the bathroom. I’ll strip the bed and air the room.”
“Good boy. That’s the morning accounted for.
” Birrell lifted his chin so Tristan could keep working at the tie.
“Then at two you’ll stop whatever you’re doing and go up to the bedroom, and you’ll open yourself up on the purple dildo.
You’ll take it as deep as it can go, and you’ll keep at it, on your back with your knees up where I’d want them, until you’re wet through and shaking and you’ve made a mess of yourself without coming.
Then you’ll photograph yourself like that, exactly like that, and you’ll send it to me.
I’ll be in a meeting. You’ll wait to be told whether your photo is good enough.
If it’s not, you’ll put on the nipple clamps and keep them on until I get home.
If I like your photo, you can let yourself come. ”
Tristan stilled his hand on Birrell’s chest. His eyes came up wide and stayed on the man’s face. Underneath the fear, he flushed hot all throughout his body.
“And by six,” Birrell went on, “before I get back, I want the table properly laid out. We’re having the salmon for dinner.
Use the good plates, and make sure the wine is open and breathing.
Once you’ve prepped all that, you lay yourself out on the kitchen counter naked and open.
You’ll have seen to that yourself, so I’m not left waiting, and all that’s left for me to do is to step between your legs and take you. ”
Tristan held the silence the way Ben would have. His breath snagged, and he said, “Okay,” fixing Birrell’s tie one final time with fingers he allowed to shake.
Then he laid down a flurry of kisses along Birrell’s jaw, thanking the person who’d just laid out the shape of his whole day. Because to Ben that exchange would read as care, and he really did find life more manageable with someone else making all his decisions for him.
Birrell, who had been granite through every word of it, softened. His big hand rose to cradle the back of Tristan’s head, fingers spreading into his hair, and he turned into the kisses at last. “There he is,” he murmured. “There’s my sweet baby. Always such a good boy.”
The reaction of their audience gave the outcome away. Tristan had read enough rooms to know this stillness following a reading. He’d felt it maybe three times in his life, and every time it had ended in an offer.
“And, scene.” The director sat back. “Yeah. That’s— Christ. Thank you. Yeah.”
He’d had it from the second Birrell said ‘the purple dildo’ and his body automatically answered with the fawn response, going doe-eyed, and small, rather than sexpot.
? ? ?
The call from Brad came that afternoon. “They want you,” he said. “Birrell himself wanted you. The director had another name in reserve; Birrell killed it in the room. Said you were the only Ben he’d read who actually scared him.”
“Scared him.”
“His word. Said you made him want to keep you,” Brad reported. “Sounds like a bit of a creep, between us. But coming from Birrell, I guess that’s about the highest praise there is.”
He rang his brothers first. Ren whooped down the line and put him on speaker so William could shout congratulations over a blender he didn’t bother to switch off.
Then his dad, who got three words out before his voice went thick and wobbly.
He set the phone down on the floor so Tristan could talk to Darcy, their golden retriever, while he composed himself.
And that was the list: the people who’d just be glad for him and not, somewhere in the second minute, start talking shop.
He had other friends, but they were industry, and every one of them was a competitor too. The call would curdle inside ninety seconds into who repped whom, what Birrell was like to work with, and whether the festival slot was locked. He didn’t want a debrief. He wanted someone to be glad for him.
He scrolled to Caroline’s number and pressed call. She picked up on the second ring.
“Tristan.”
“I got it,” he said. “Ben. I got the part.”
“Oh, you clever, clever man. I knew you would,” she declared.
“And you can settle a standing wager for me. Mary insists the business about large hands is pure folklore. I have twenty pounds on it being gospel, and personal experience to back me, and since Daniel Birrell’s are, by all accounts, not small, you’re about to spend an entire shoot ideally positioned to confirm it. ”
He laughed and slid down to sit on the floor, his back against the cupboard. “They’re massive, Caroline. He crushed my hand to dust in the handshake. On purpose.”
“Of course he did. He’s method. And you’ll notice you did this without me. You walked in and they wanted you. That’s the wonderful part, Tristan. I’m so pleased.”
She was right. He’d got Ben off a tape and a chemistry read, off the work and nothing else. No resorting to the desperate tactics he’d laid out in his notebook.
“There’s a catch,” he said. “We’re scheduled for six-day weeks the second we start rolling, so the production’s going to eat me alive. They’re basing the whole thing out in Berkshire. I won’t have a spare hour to run around being your mysterious American.”
“Mm. Tragic. I’ll just have to yearn for you long-distance. Which is precisely why you should come to Sandringham. This weekend, before you get fully swallowed up by your work.”
“Huh. I figured you’d be more torn up about the end of our great romance, but you don’t sound even slightly sad. I’m hurt, Caroline.”
“Well, darling. This rather solves a problem for me. You bury yourself in Berkshire for the next six months, we drift apart ever so gently in the papers, and I spend the spring being quietly, photogenically heartbroken. James takes one look at his moping sister, decides I’m pining for my unattainable American star, and frets himself sick over it.
He’ll be far too busy soothing my poor wounded feelings to wonder what Benton’s doing with his evenings. ”
“You’ve got this all figured out,” Tristan said, awed by Caroline’s next-level puppeteering.
“I always do. But none of that’s relevant for this weekend, Tristan.
This isn’t about the game. Come up and just be my friend, so we can always have Sandringham.
We’ll have an excellent group. James’s Privy Council will be there, and I’d really rather not be the only hen in a yard full of cockerels. ”
“Caroline, I hate to break it to you, but I’m also a cockerel.”
“I know, darling. But you’re a good one. Lex, Vidal, and my brother treat needling Barnaby as a team sport, which leaves me to do all the soothing. I could use an ally for once.”
He thought of the clip Caroline had sent him weeks ago: James and the rest folded into a loose circle around a campfire. He’d never once imagined himself inside the cosy frame.
He’d schemed his way onto Caroline’s radar to get near that circle, to be photographed in its orbit and borrow some of its shine. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might want it just by virtue of him actually liking Caroline and James.
“I don’t know, Caroline.” He dragged a hand down his face. “Your brother and his whole court, all at once, on their own ground. That’s a lot of in-jokes to walk into cold.”
“Oh, don’t fret. They’re terribly simple men, the lot of them.
You’ll have them sorted by the time the soup’s cleared.
” She began the rundown. “Vidal will say something unforgivable every five minutes. Barnaby will be disapproving. Lex is a darling with the conversational range of a punchbag. Beauchamp will have reorganised the entire weekend by Friday teatime, even as he takes on the monumental task of keeping Vidal alive. And James, well, you’ve survived an entire afternoon with him now.
” Her voice gentled. “He’ll sit in the middle of it, enabling all of them, the great soft-hearted idiot. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
She’d meant it as reassurance: five large personalities cut down to a manageable size. Instead, she’d made them sound irresistible.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to Sandringham.”