Chapter Eight
Beauchamp came in with the coffee and found Vidal hauling a tripod into position in front of the long windows that overlooked the street. The ring light came out of a padded case next, unsheathed with the reverence one might accord a relic from the Louvre.
“Major.” Vidal was in a loose cream linen shirt open three buttons down, the gold crucifix swinging at his throat. His hair was loose around his shoulders and there was a high colour in his cheeks. “A small favour, when you have a moment. The smallest thing.”
Beauchamp picked up the tray. “Of course, sir.”
“My brother Fidel’s wife is eight months gone with their first, and they are in McLean, Virginia, which is a long way from any of us who love her.
She has been…how shall I put it? A little weepy, on the telephone.
The baby is due soon, and the thing of the matter is that none of us can be there for her because my mother cannot fly and my father cannot leave Geneva, while I am — well.
Here.” He gestured vaguely at the flat around him, indicating the wider catastrophe of his circumstances.
“I thought I would record her a message. Cheer her up. Show her Mercè, who is her favourite. I wish to send her my love in a form she can watch on a bad afternoon. But I cannot do the angles myself, Major, I have tried, and every time I attempt it I look as though I am filming a hostage video.”
Beauchamp set the tray down on the console in the hall. “Of course, sir.”
“You are an angel, Major. A saint. Maria will weep. I mean this literally, she weeps at adverts at the moment, it is her condition.”
Vidal fussed with the tripod. He moved Beauchamp an inch to the left, then one inch back again, with both hands on his shoulders.
He connected to a Bluetooth speaker through his mobile and filled the drawing room with the kind of Spanish pop that had haunted Beauchamp’s only experience of a package holiday in Benidorm as a lance corporal on leave in 2012.
After that mistake, he’d dropped his principles against letting his father pay for the better sort of holiday that involved villas in Mykonos and ski lodges in Val d’Isère.
“For Maria,” Vidal explained over his shoulder, rolling his hips into the beat. “She adores this song. We danced to it at her wedding in 2021, Fidel and I were both so drunk that Fidel fell into the fountain.”
“It sounds like it was quite the night, sir.”
“When I nod, you begin. When I do this,” Vidal made a regal flick of his right wrist, “you stop. When I do this…” He did a different flick, from the left, “you change to the other angle, the one with the bookcase behind me. Can you manage that?”
“The nod starts it. Right flick stops. Left flick changes angle.”
“You are a treasure, Major. I shall remember you in my will.”
Vidal returned to his mark in front of the windows, shook out his hair, crossed himself once, and nodded.
Beauchamp pressed record.
Vidal launched into a torrent of Catalan at a volume that would have reached the back row of an opera house.
His arms were everywhere. He pointed at the ceiling, pressed a hand to his heart, and at one point made an elaborate gesture above his upper lip that seemed to involve the miming of a very large moustache.
Beauchamp, whose briefing pack had included basic Catalan terminology from which he had retained a smattering of words, stood behind the tripod and filmed.
He caught Cardona. He caught Ferrer. He caught what sounded very much like bigoti, which he was almost certain meant moustache.
This tracked with the earlier gesture, though not with the stated audience.
The wrist flicked, so he changed angles.
Vidal carried on, pacing now between the bookcase and the window, pausing to deliver what was unmistakably a punchline and throwing his head back in theatrical despair, which struck Beauchamp as a curious thing to do in a message designed to cheer up a pregnant woman.
But then he had not met Maria, and in Beauchamp’s experience of Vidal, every emotional register was pitched three octaves above the one English people would have used for the same content.
Perhaps that rang true for the whole Montcada family.
He filmed the punchline and the despair both.
When Vidal gave him the final flick, he stopped filming.
He handed the mobile back, accepted a kiss on both cheeks, and left for Fortnum’s, where he had been dispatched to collect a specific tin of Portuguese sardines that Vidal had described, at some length, as the only ones fit for human consumption.
? ? ?
The sardines could have constituted a war crime.
Beauchamp had eaten them, because Vidal had set the plate down in front of him at lunch, and a refusal would have been construed as a personal slight against the entire Iberian peninsula.
Then he’d spent the subsequent four hours pretending that the inside of his mouth was fine. It was meant to burn like that.
Vidal had barely surfaced from his mobile all afternoon.
The thing had been pinging away on the arm of the sofa at a rate that struck Beauchamp, when he happened to look over, as unusual even by Vidal’s social standards.
Still, Vidal had a very large and chatty family.
The video message had been shared in the family group chat now, and things were popping off.
He let himself out of the flat at seven, walked the length of Mount Street in the cool dusk, and turned into the Bangladeshi place on the corner.
He ordered a chicken korma, which was the mildest thing on the menu and which the proprietor handed over with a wounded sigh.
Beauchamp accepted the disappointment and added two naan to the order, and then, after a moment’s consideration, a third.
He carried the warm paper bag down into Bond Street station and rode two stops with it balanced on his knees, the smell of the korma making the man next to him glance over with undisguised envy.
When he got to his flat he took a can of Kronenbourg out of the fridge and carried the lot through to the sitting room.
There was a documentary about canal boating on BBC Four. He put it on and ate the korma straight from the foil tray, tearing the naan into pieces with his fingers and cracking the lager open against the edge of the coffee table.
The canals wound their unhurried way through the Midlands. Nobody on the television was shouting in Catalan. Nobody was waving a mobile in his face demanding he film them from a better angle. Nobody had cooked anything with chilli in it.
Beauchamp took a long pull of his lager and let his head fall back against the sofa cushions.
It was, he thought, a perfectly lovely evening.
? ? ?
He woke at six, which was a lie-in by his standards, and padded through to the kitchen in bare feet and the joggers he had owned since Sandhurst. The flat was quiet, the traffic on the Marylebone Road reduced to the occasional taxi and the hiss of a street sweeper somewhere round the corner.
He put the kettle on, cracked four eggs into a bowl, and thumbed the television on for company as he cooked.
BBC Breakfast was doing a segment on the housing market.
He let the host’s patter wash over him as he set the butter melting in the pan.
The presenters handed over to a bit about a goat that had taken up residence on the roof of a bus shelter in Llandudno, then to the weather, and then, as Beauchamp was in the act of tipping the eggs into the pan, the presenter said something about a viral sensation taking the internet by storm overnight, and Vidal’s face filled the screen.
Beauchamp’s wooden spoon stopped moving.
It was the recording from yesterday. Vidal had on the cream linen shirt, the drawing-room windows behind him throwing that coveted nine o’clock light across one side of his face.
Vidal had captioned the thing himself. The words came juddering in one phrase at a time in the red and gold of the Cardonan flag, bouncing, spinning, exploding off the screen in a dizzying TikTok style that made Beauchamp briefly wonder if he was having a stroke.
THE PRESIDENT’S MOUSTACHE
IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A CATERPILLAR
DIES OF SHAME ON A MAN’S FACE
Beauchamp set the spoon down on the spoon rest. The eggs had begun to catch on the bottom of the pan, and he didn’t move to rescue them.
On the screen, Vidal blazed with wounded grandeur. The captions kept coming.
THEY TELL ME MY COUNTRY HAS CHOSEN DEMOCRACY
MY FAMILY HAS BEEN EXILED FROM OUR HOMELAND BECAUSE OF A BAD OPINION POLL
A VOTE IS NOT A VERDICT
AND THE OPINION OF FIFTY-THREE PER CENT OF THE POPULACE SHOULD NOT BE SEEN AS A MANDATE
FOR OVERTHROWING EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS OF TRADITION
I DEMAND ACTION!
The video cut out and the studio came back into view. The woman on the sofa was holding her earpiece with one finger and visibly trying not to laugh.
“Well, Dan, if you’re just joining us this morning, that is His Serene Highness Prince Vidal of Cardona, who relocated to London almost two weeks ago following the referendum in the Principality of Cardona.
Prince Vidal, who holds a British passport through his mother’s family, posted the video at ten o’clock yesterday morning, and it has, as of the last half hour, been viewed forty million times. Now, a wheel of cheese in Hereford —”
Beauchamp lowered his forehead onto the tabletop as behind him, the eggs began to burn.